BBC Symphony Tours Continent

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 421, 18 July 1947, Page 30

BBC Symphony Tours Continent

HE BBC Symphony Orchestra ‘has just finished a 10-day tour of the Continent. This is the second .time. it has toured outside Britain since its formation in 1936 and as on the 1936 tour all the concerts were conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. The Orchestra gave a series of concerts in Paris, © Brussels, Amsterdam, and Scheveningen. : The tour opened with a public concert in Paris at the Theatre des Champs Elysées on June 18. When the programme ended the audience rose to its feet with an enthusiasm rare for a sophisticated Parisian audience and _rfrecalled Sir Adrian Boult again and again until he gave an encore. On the following day the whole Orchestra was invited to a civic reception at which the Vice-President of the Paris Municipal Council, Jean Marin, who was’ through- | out the war a commentator in the BBC’s French Service, gave’ a toast ‘to the Orchestra-"To the fact that’ we are all in Paris ‘im Spring instead of in

Maida Vale in the blitz’ (in the early days of the war the BBC French Service operated from studios in Maida Vale, London). In Brussels the Orchestra opened with. a studio concert followed by a public concert at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. The final’ stage of the tour was a visit to Holland, where the Orchestra gave a public concert at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, before finishing its.tour at Scheveningen.with a concert at the Kurzaal attended by Queen Wilhelmina, In addition to the familiar classics, the programmes included representative British works as well as music by composers of the countries visited. It was a point of special interest to members of the Orchestra that they were visiting countries to whose tortured and oppressed peoples they had broadcast so often during the war. Music-lovers on the Continent were equally ‘interested to meet the Orchestra’ that had heartened them’in the dark days. ‘