POPULAR SEPTET

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30469, 17 June 1964, Page 10

POPULAR SEPTET

The lunch-hour concert to be given in the University Hall at 1.10 p.m. on Thursday, will feature one work, Beethoven’s Septet in E flat major. When Beethoven’s C major Symphony received its first performance in 1800. the programme included this Septet. In succeeding years, the Septet became enormously popular, so much so that Beethoven complained about its ob-

The Auckland guitarist, Peter Posa, who is making a concert tour of New Zealand with his own show, backed by overseas artists, before taking up a 2000-dol-. Lars-a-week job in the “capital of the American pop record industry,” Nashville, Tennessee. The show will play in Christchurch on June 20.

scurlng the fact that be had also written other works. The Septet marks possibly the first successful attempt to write so skilfully and in such size for a mixed instrumental group in chamber music. This work is a composite of several styles. Its six movements, including an adagio, an andante with variations, a minuet, the theme of which Beethoven was to use in a later piano sonata, and a scherzo, point to a revival of the divertimento. Slow, dignified Introductions to first and last movements are reminiscent of Mozart. But the Septet Is no mere resurrection and expansion of the divertimento: it is a composition embodying everything Beethoven had learned up to his thirtieth year.

The performance will be given by the Chamber Players of Wellington, a society whose aim is to promote performances of chamber music, especially wind works unknown in New Zealand, or seldom heard. The artists in this concert, all members of the N.Z.B.C. Symphony Orchestra, are: Vincent Aspey (violin), Glynne Adams (viola), Peter Langer (’cello), Henry Botham (bass), Guy Gibbs (horn), Alan Gold (clarinet), John Crockett (bassoon).