The Red Pen is a two-act operetta and early radio opera composed by Geoffrey Toye to a libretto by A. P. Herbert. The piece, described by its creators as "a sort of opera" was written for the BBC, following Herbert's successful Riverside Nights, and had a running time of about 90 minutes. [1] It was first broadcast on the radio on 24 March 1925. [2] It was broadcast again in 1927. [1]
Role | Voice type | Premiere Cast, 24 March 1925 [3] (Conductor: I. Stanton Jefferies ) |
---|---|---|
Sir Robert Quint, a cabinet minister | Bertram Ayrton | |
The Hon. Michael Gray, a private secretary | Edward Lear | |
Henry Wordsworth, a general secretary | Stuart Robertson | |
Samuel Slate, a pressman, and Captain Danby, a military officer | John Buckley | |
Mary Jane Blake, assistant private secretary | Gladys Palmer | |
Mary Palmer, leader of the Consumers' Deputation | Geoffrey Stanton | |
Daffodil Smith, assistant general secretary | Vivienne Chatterton | |
The performers for the second broadcast were Gladys Palmer, Vivienne Chatterton, John Buckley, Harold Kimberley, John Tanner, and Sydney Granville. The composer conducted the Wireless Orchestra. [1]
The first act is set in Hyde Park and the second in the Ministry of Verse at St. James's Park. The story is set "in the near future" (the late 1920s), and opens with the whimsical premise that the "General Federation of Poets and Writers", a trade-union for authors, is agitating for the nationalisation of their industry. "The Red Pen", from which the play takes its title, is their march, a play on The Red Flag . In Act II, set six months later, the newly established Ministry of Verse is run in a comically bureaucratic civil service style.
Richard Bernard Murdoch was an English actor and entertainer.
Sir Alan Patrick HerbertCH, was an English humorist, novelist, playwright, law reformist, and, from 1935 to 1950, an independent Member of Parliament for Oxford University.
It is generally recognized that the first radio transmission was made from a temporary station set up by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895 on the Isle of Wight. This followed on from pioneering work in the field by a number of people including Alessandro Volta, André-Marie Ampère, Georg Ohm and James Clerk Maxwell.
KHJ is a commercial AM radio station that is licensed to Los Angeles, California. Owned and operated by Relevant Radio, Inc., the station broadcasts Roman Catholic religious programming as an affiliate of the Relevant Radio network.
KJR is an all-sports AM radio station owned by iHeartMedia in Seattle, Washington. KJR is the Puget Sound region's home of Fox Sports Radio and CBS Sports Radio, mostly carrying their national programming, while co-owned 93.3 KJR-FM has local sports talk shows during the day and evening. KJR-AM-FM are the flagship stations for Seattle Kraken hockey. During the Seattle Seahawks season, the stations use the slogan "Home of the 12th Man". The studios are in Seattle's Belltown neighborhood northwest of downtown.
KSTP is a commercial AM radio station licensed to Saint Paul, Minnesota. It is the flagship AM radio station of Hubbard Broadcasting, which also owns several other television and radio stations across the United States. KSTP has a sports radio format and is the ESPN Radio Network affiliate for Minneapolis-St. Paul. The radio studios are on University Avenue in Minneapolis, shared with sister stations KSTP-FM, KSTP-TV, KTMY, and KSTC-TV. On weekdays, KSTP airs local sports shows from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and carries ESPN programming weekday mornings, late nights and weekends. Some KSTP shows are simulcast on other sports radio stations in the region.
The Radio Act of 1912, formally known as "An Act to Regulate Radio Communication", is a United States federal law which was the first legislation to require licenses for radio stations. It was enacted before the introduction of broadcasting to the general public, and was eventually found to contain insufficient authority to effectively control this new service, so the Act was replaced and the government's regulatory powers increased by the passage of the Radio Act of 1927.
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The Blue Network was the on-air name of a now defunct American radio network, which broadcast from 1927 through 1945.
Bertha Amy Lewis was an English opera singer and actress primarily known for her work as principal contralto in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Sydney Granville was an English singer and actor, best known for his performances in the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Rupert D'Oyly Carte was an English hotelier, theatre owner and impresario, best known as proprietor of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and Savoy Hotel from 1913 to 1948.
Eugene Benson is a Canadian professor of English and a prolific writer, novelist, playwright and librettist.
WRNY was a New York City AM radio station that began operating in 1925. It was started by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company to promote his radio and science magazines. Starting in August 1928, WRNY was one of the first stations to make regularly scheduled experimental television broadcasts. Experimenter Publishing went bankrupt in early 1929 and the station was purchased by the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company to promote aviation. WRNY was deleted in 1934, as part of a consolidation on its shared frequency by surviving station WHN.
Edward Geoffrey Toye, known as Geoffrey Toye, was an English conductor, composer and opera producer.
Major League Baseball on the radio has been a tradition for over 100 years, and still exists today. Baseball was one of the first sports to be broadcast in the United States. Every team in Major League Baseball has a flagship station, and baseball is also broadcast on national radio.
John Shepard III was an American radio executive and merchant. Among his many achievements, he was one of the original board members of the National Association of Broadcasters, having been elected the group's first Vice President in 1923. Shepard co-founded a New England radio network, known as the Yankee Network, along with his brother Robert, in 1929–1930. Shepard was also an early proponent of frequency modulation or FM broadcasting: he established the first FM network, when he linked his station in Massachusetts with one in New Hampshire in early 1941. He also was an early experimenter with home shopping, creating perhaps the first all-female radio station, WASN, in early 1927; the station broadcast some music, but mostly focused on shopping news and information about merchandise that listeners could purchase. Additionally, he created a local news network to serve New England, the Yankee News Service, and was instrumental in getting radio journalists the same credentials as print journalists.
John Francis Toye was an English music critic, teacher, writer and educational administrator. After early efforts as a composer and novelist, and service in naval intelligence in World War I, he became music critic of The Morning Post from 1925 to 1937, which he combined with teaching singing and working as managing director of the Restaurant Boulestin in London.
Radio opera is a genre of opera. It refers to operas which were specifically composed to be performed on the radio and is not to be confused with broadcasts of operas which were originally written for the stage. Radio operas were generally shorter than staged operas and some occupied less than fifteen minutes. Plots were usually more straightforward than those of stage operas.
This is a summary of 1927 in music in the United Kingdom.