Children Stole The Show At The Adelaide Festival

Press, Issue 31095, 25 June 1966, Page 12

Children Stole The Show At The Adelaide Festival

[By

RONALD McCUAIG,

of the Australian News and Information Bureau]

QNE of the most important of the many conferences held during the 1966 Adelaide Festival of Arts was when representatives of the Adelaide, Perth, Auckland and Christchurch arts festivals met.

After this conference the chairman of the board of governors of the Adelaide Arts Festival (Mr C. J. Glover) said that a recommendation had been carried to establish a secretariat in Adelaide to collaborate in presentations exclusive to the four festivals.

The resolution has still to be confirmed by the managing organisations of the festivals.

One of the great advantages of such collaboration, Mr Glover said, would be the sharing of air fares for companies visiting Australia. The fares were often larger than the fees for performance. The secretariat could also administer a fund enabling representatives to go overseas to book presentations.

Mr Glover said a start had been made in 1965 when the administrator of the Adelaide Festival, Mr Max Lamshed, had visited Perth. As a result of the visit a great many of the 1966 Adelaide Festival presentations had first been seen at the Perth Festival. Later, Mr Lamshed said that the plan involved complex administration since the Perth and Auckland festivals were held yearly, the Adelaide festival every two years and the Christchurch festival every three years. Asked whether the Melbourne Moomba Festival, held early every year, would become part of the circuit, Mr Lamshed said the concepts of the Moomba Festival and of the other festivals were dissimilar. “We must get the best in our own sphere,” he

Acrou I—l’m beaten and put in confinement (9) 8 & 3Dn—-Ministerial Commands? (4, 6) 9—Bare words are enough to

indicate furniture? (9) 11—This title shows that Reno in out of place in South America! (6) 13—Carried out an experiment —brought to court. (5) 15— A cry of woe from Central Asijt, (4) 16— Examine the last of the harvest—it’s far from abundant (5) 17— Capture the oceans, we hear. (5) 18— Put some colouring round a bad spot (5) 19— Fruit-tree to retard, by the sound of it (4) 20— School impositions produce rows. (5) 22—Descriptive of clothes when the students celebrated? (6) 25 Illuminating reason for raising standards in towns! (9) 26 Descriptive of small volume. (4) 27 Would one expect the Scouts to arrange them in rings? (4-5) (Solution

said. He said he could assure the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, the Arts Council of Australia, Australian Musica Viva and other such organisations that the plan would not impinge on their arrangements for bringing artists to Australia. Towards the end of the festival, as a result of criticism by the general-secretary of the London Symphony Orchestra, Ernest Fleischmann, a visiting English actor, Harold Lang, and others, a campaign developed for the appointment of a festival artistic director to take the place of the late Professor John Bishop. Mr Glover, said the board had the matter under consideration.

It was generally conceded

Down 2 Intend to be close-fisted. (4) 3 See 8 Across. 4 A loophole for the executioner? (5) 5 Seers. (4) 6 Transport systems that appeal to the onetrack mind? (9) 7 Say it ends badly for royal families. (9) 10—Understanding the mean.ing! (5) 12—Do some burning—a strange rite within reason. (9)

13— Imitating leaving the airport. (6, 3) 14— Sow a row of seeds for exercise. (5) 17—Street shelter put upmade of this? (5) 19—Decrepit diocese with nothing inside. (6)

21—Drive a mile, maybe, round the capital of Portugal. (5) 23 Kind of line of the palm! (4) 24 Yellow hats will provide the word in question. (4) Page 13)

in the newspapers that an artistic director was necessary to an arts festival, but there was some difference of opinion on what the policy of an artistic director should be. The idea that the festival should be “focused,” for instance, brought the objection that the Adelaide Festival of Arts was a general festival, not a specialised festival like the Mozart festival at Salzburg, and that if the Royal Sydney Show were to be “focused” on Shorthorn bulls, the vast majority of. people who were not inter-; ested in Shorthorn bulls would stay away. A similar objection wasj that the concentration of a festival round an idea often drew in inferior works—as at the 1964 Adelaide Festival Verdi’s early opera “Macbeth” was put in to add to the other pieces played because of the Shakespeare centenary. In this way a festival that looks well on paper can become a series of disappointments in performance.

Better In Practice

Maybe for this reason the 1966 Adelaide Festival seemed much better in practice than on paper. There was little that could be said to be “focused.” The conjunction of the Helpmann ballet “Elektra” with the Athens Drama Company’s "Ipigenla In Aulls” and Lysistrata” and Judith Anderson’s short version of the “Medea” was probably as fortuitous as the conjunction of Chekov’s “Three Sisters" with Yevtushenko’s recitals of Russian poetry. If there was any dominant motif to the 1966 Festival it was Unintelligibility. The statuesque declamation of the “Iphigenia” in modern Greek left the action still Greek to most Australian audiences, and the loudest laughter that greeted the brilliant buffoonery of the “Lysistrata” came from the large regiment of Adelaide Greeks—there, recent immigrants at last had their new countrymen at a disadvantage. Still, in the “Iphigenia” it was interesting to see how the company treated the choruses, as folk songs, or hymns.

The Yevtushenko poetry recitals made an interesting contrast between the English style of verse reading, chaste and pure, of Peter O’Shaughnessey and Dame Judith Anderson, reading from translations, and Yevtushenko’s recitations of the Russian originals.

Had Everything

For Australian audiences and critics the meaning of the poems was not so important as Yevtushenko’s musical style. He had everything: fortissimo, pianissimo, crescendo, diminuendo and, out of quiet passages, the sudden sforzando.

Yet for those who could not understand Russian it was hard to go on listening once they had heard the complete gamut of his performance as sound, and probably because of this, Yevtushenko’s audiences diminished after the first recital to half the capacity of the large Centennial Hall.

Nevertheless, it will not be surprising if a new lyrical energy comes to Australian versification as a result of these recitals, and maybe even, as he humourously hoped himself, Yevtushenko will go down to history as the pioneer of verse-recitation in Australia.

The most successful productions of the 1966 festival were of the Australian Ballet, “The Royal Hunt Of The Sun,” “Porgy and Bess,” "Jemmy Green in Australia,” Chekov’s “Three Sisters,” the Australian puppet players “The Tintookles,” which played morning, noon and night in a North Adelaide picture theatre to ecstatic audiences of children, and the Engel Family of entertainers in the Hindmarsh Town Hall.

The first Australian performance of the ballet “Elektra,” with its swift succession of brilliant inventions expressive of perverse and erotic themes, confirmed Robert Helpmann for Australian audiences as the supreme chorographic poet they had discerned in the Lyrebird ballet “The Display” of the 1964 festival while Kathleen Gorham’s wonderfully expressive dancing made many wonder what the Australian Ballet would do without her when she retires, as is expected at the end of this year. “Elektra,” with Garth Welch’s graceful exercises in grouping in his new ballet “Illyria” and Ray Powell’s revival of “The Lady and the Fool,” made a beautifully balanced night’s entertainment.

“The Royal Hunt Of The Sun” depended almost entirely on the ability of the young Australian producer John Tasker to dress and light the pageant of Pizarro

and the Incas on the narrow stage of the long Bonython Hall At times the scene had glow and serenity; and then there was the bizarrerie of the huge panel opening on the Inca god, and the red cloth that streamed out at the end of the first part to cover the squealing bodies of the murdered Incas. This skill in production was also the quality of Peter O’Shaughnessy’s revival of two 100-year-old plays about Australia, “Jemmy Green in Australia” and "Off To the Diggings,” in which the melodramatic material was reinforced by songs of the times to make two charming period pieces.

Children’s Musical

For an Australian, one of the most interesting productions of the festival was the children’s musical play “The Enchanted Garden,” words and i music by two high-school teachers. It was performed iby a cast of 90 high-school students from 13 to 17, with scenery and costume designed and produced by high-school carpentry, art and sewing classes and with 46 different programme covers, designed as school projects and printed by silk screen and other graphic processes in high-school art departments. The story was not easy to follow, and the diction of the singers not always clear, but the music by an orchestra of 27, all students except the flute player, was charming, the concerted singing, the result of many months of practice, was surprisingly good and the costuming, especially , in grouped scenes, was rich and colourful. The South Ausj tralian Education Department intends the production to be ; the first of more festival pro- , ductions by school students. If the high-school musical : was a promise of things to i come, the Australian Youth Orchestra performances under : John Hopkins, music director : of the Australian Broadcast . ing Commission, were a com- ; plete accomplishment. The : orchestra of 93 young players i from the six Australian states played an overture by Glinka, ; a Mozart symphony, the . “Hary Janos" suite of Kodaly, i the Sibelius violin concerto ■ with the young Australian . violinist Carmel Kaine; and I gave a world premiere of a i suite on a Japanese theme, "Images” written specially for , the 1966 Festival by a young Australian composer Richard Meale.

Inspiring Memorial

It was a varied and exacting concert, and it would be hard to say where, if anywhere, it fell short of a concert of the same works by any Australian orchestra—a tribute to the inspiring conductorship of Mr Hopkins and to the vision of the festival’s artistic director, the late Professor John Bishop, who founded the Youth Orchestra (it gave its first concert in 1957). It was very truly said that the Youth Orchestra performances at the end of the festival were as fine a memorial to Professor Bishop as the two superb performances of the Berlioz “Requiem,” again conducted by John Hopkins, which began it.

As with the 1964 Adelaide Festival, the 1966 festival had many more shows than any one visitor could see. There were the Albert Tucker, Lawrence Daws retrospective, Stanley Spencer, and Hans Heysen art shows, and the exhibition of the Mertz collection of Australian art.

Command Concert

There were the wind quartet performances and the lectures on period music; the crowds that blocked the streets whenever the Queen Mother’s car left Government House; the opening of South Australia’s second university, Flinders, a university straddling high hills, a Flower Day a little damped by the unwelcome weather; the “fringe" revues; the popular and free night entertainments in Elder Park; the Royal garden party where children in little boats with coloured sails brought in from the coast shared the lake with a black gondola brought from Venice: an opening procession whose main brilliance was the contingents of immigrants of some dozen nationalities marching in their former national dress; and a final night of crowds seated closely over acres of Elder Park at the command performance of Australian popular entertainers, where the festival’s farewell fireworks were added to the stars and the tall roman candles flared as high as the poplars along the lake.

Plea For Originality

Even then, one has forgotten the opening of Writers Week by Angus Wilson, with his advice to writers working for advertising or television to rebel against their employers by working their own ideas into their copy; the experiments with sound and light—but it is no use; perhaps the best compliment one can pay the Adeliade Festival of Arts is to say it is indescribable.