TOURING BEGINS IN MARCH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 556, 17 February 1950, Page 9

TOURING BEGINS IN MARCH

E 1950 Orchestral Season will open with concerts in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington during March, and at Christchurch and Dunedin during April, under the conductorship of Dr. Edgar Bainton. At Dunedin the National Orchestra will give several performances at the Dunedin Music Festival, and in June it will return to Auckland for the Music Festival there. Solo artists who will appear at these festival performances include Ljnda Parker, the Australian soprano, who will sing at Dunedin, and Colin Horsley, the New Zealand pianist, who will be heard in Auckland. An outstanding feature of the early Auckland concerts will be a performance at one of*them of Vaughan ~ Williams’s Sixth Symphony, which was composed in 1948 and has received the highest praise in England. It will be the first New Zealand performance of this work. ‘ The opening concert of the season will be held in the Auckland Town Hall on Saturday, March 4, when the major works played will be Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 and Elgar’s Enigma Variations. On the following Friday (March 10) a lunch-hour concert will be given in the Town Hall, and on Saturday, March 11, a second evening concert, at which Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 6 will be played, and at which the Wellington pianist Cara Hall will play with the orchestra Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 in G Major. Works by Wagner, Delius and Debussy will also be played at these concerts. One evening concert will be given in Hamilton, on Wednesday, March 15, and a schools concert will be given there on the following afternoon. Details of these programmes have not yet been announced. The Wellington season will open with a concert in the Town Hall on Tuesday, March 21, followed by two schools concerts on Thursday, March 23. A second evening concert will be given on Saturday, March 25. The Orchestra will travel to Christchurch to give a concert in the Civic Theatre on April 4, and then move on to Dunedin for the Music Festival, at which a series of concerts will be given. The Orchestra will play. on April 13, 15, 18, and 20, taking part in orchestral and choral works, including the first New Zealand performance of Brahms’s A German Requiem, Linda Parker and the Auckland tenor Raymon Opie will be the soloists. Linda Parker was born in Australia and originally set out on a career as a pianist. She played the piano from the age of three, and after winning competitions and scholarships in Australia she studied in Paris with Motte-Lacroix. Until then singing had been her second study, but one day the late Albert Roussel heard her sing, and prophesied that a time would come when a ‘choice would have to be made between voice

and piano, and so_ it proved. For three years she studied lieder in Leipzig with Elena Gerhardt, and in 1942 she joined the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company to’ sing Mimi in a new production of La Boheme. Since then she has sung the principal soprano role in over 300 performances of opera, adding to her repertoire such parts as Pamina in The Magic Flute, Gilda in Rigoletto, Gretel in Hansel and Gretel, and Marenka in The Bartered Bride. She has also sung in concerts and oratorios throughout

Australia, and taken part in many broadcasts. She toured Germany with the Covent Garden Opera Company in 1945. The Sixth Symphony of Vaughan Williams was first performed in 1948, and recordings made by the BBC Symphony Orchestra have already been broadcast here. It is» considered by many critics to be his greatest work, although there is some doubt about the intrinsic interest of its thematic material. It is in four movements, played without a break, the first three brassy, tuneful, and sometimes stridently dissonant, the last softly played, with muted strings and woodwinds. The finale has a strongly introspective and mystical quality, which is characteristic of much of the composer’s work,