BUSY DAYS AHEAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 512, 14 April 1949, Page 17

BUSY DAYS AHEAD

Heavy Programme for Orchestral Concert Season

IS year’s orchestral season, which is starting later than usual to fit in with the opera season, will open with a symphony concert in the Wellington Town Hall on Wednesday, June 29, when ‘the , re-assembled National Orchestra be heard again under the baton of Andersen Tyrer. From then until November the Orchestra will be fully occupied with a tight schedule of performances jn the main and provincial centres. Plans for this year anticipate that the Orchestra will go much further afield than it has done in the past, and the projected itinerary includes visits to North Auckland, the East Coast. and Westland. Performances in

these areas will be given in as many as possible of those towns which have suitable halls and accommodation. * The Orchestra’s North Island tour has been arranged so that performances will be given in Auckland next August during the Music Festival which the Auckland Music Council has planned on the lines of that held in 1940. The Orchestra will give two symphony concerts during the week August 15 to 20, and it will take part in: a performance of Elgar’s cantata Caractacus. In October the Orchestra will be in Christchurch to perform Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius with the Christchurch Harmonic Society. Arrangements are also being made for two prominent overseas artists to take part in concerts with the National Orchestra during the latter part of the season. They are the baritone Harold Williams and the pianist Alexander Hellmann. The most outstanding. of the new works which the orchestra will perform in’ the course of the season will be Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 6. This work was finished only last year, in the, composer’s 75th year, and its initial performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by _ Sir Adrian Boult aroused great enthusiasm among all who heard it, It has not yet been heard in this country.

Other works which it is believed, will receive their first public performances in New Zealand during the coming season are Kalinnikovy’s Symphony No. 2 and Prokofieff’s Classical Symphony. The tone poem Death and Transfiguration, by Richard Strauss, the First Norfolk Rhapsody, by Vaughan Williams, Delius’s Norwegian rhapsody Eventyr, William Walton’s Passacaglia on the Death of Falstaff, and Touch Her Soft Lips and Part, two pieces from the film music he wrote for Henry V, will also be performed for the first time by the Orchestra this year. Other new works for the Orchestra include a suite from Handel’s_ ballet Terpsicore, Walton’s Facade Suite No. 2, the Brahms Rubbra Variations on a Theme by Handel, and Benjamin Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell, Soirées Musicales (entitled "five movementg from Rossini"), and Matinée Musicale, Symphonies from the Orchestra’s present repertoire which will be played again during the 1949 season include the Beethoven Third and Fifth, Mozart’s Nos. 35 and 39, Schubert’s Fifth, Brahms’s First, Second, and Fourth, Cesar Franck’s Second, Tchaikovski’s Fifth, Borodin’s Second, Kabalevsky’s Second and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. nen EE EEREnEEEnenne