Festival Time in Auckland

New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 622, 1 June 1951, Page 9

Festival Time in Auckland

sphere of a true festival of the arts will be experienced in Auckland during the third annual Music Festival organised by the Auckland Music Council in collaboration with’ the NZBS. This year the Festival has been planned in conjunction with the 8lst Annual Exhibition of the Auckland Society of Arts and with the co-operation of Auckland members of the British Drama League. Music designed to appeal to a wide variety of tastes, poetry, lectures, painting and drama have all been provided for in a 10-day programme opening officiaily on Thursday, June 7. "By widening the scope of the Festival in this way the Council is effectively carrying out its constitution which provides for co-operation with any other society or body interested in the promotion of the arts," W. Laird Thomson, Festival Manager, told The _ Listener. "We are not setting ourselves any hard and fast policy, however. Music is our primary interest, but if this gesture to associated arts proves successful it will doubtless be repeated." An innovation for Auckland, he added, would be two lunch hour recitals by Eric Waters (piano) and Felix Millar (violin), to be held in the Art Gallery on Tuesday, June 5, and Thursday, June 7, as a preliminary to the festival proper. "They will be an experiment for both the Society of Arts and the Music Council, but we are following an excellent pre-cedent-that of the National Gallery in London." To help further in making the art exhibition an integral part of the festival, a lunch-hour lecture, Art and john Citizen, will be given in the art gallery by W. A. G. Penlington on Wednesday, June 13, and on the following day between 12.20 and 1.20 p.m., there will be conducted tours of the St of the atmo-

exhibition with an incidental commentary by Pascoe Redwood, president of the Society of Arts. E Drama’s contribution to the programme wiil be an evening of one-act plays on Friday, June 8, including an item by the Hertz School of Creative Dance, and on the following Friday, June 15, at 5.15 p.m., there will be a recital of spoken poetry’ by Elizabeth Loe, Christine Laird and John N, Thomson. One of their offerings will be a New Zealand poem by M. K. Joseph, lecturer in English at Auckland University College. A special Festival Lecture on Music and Modern Life will be delivered by Stanley Oliver, conductor of the Wellington Schola Cantorum, on Friday, June 8, and on the following afternoon a light lecture by Owen Jensen, Popular Music of the Victorian Age, will precede an appropriate programme to which over 50 men and women who were pioneers of musical endeavour in Auckland will be invited as guests of honour. Several are over 90, and among them will be J. J. Woods, composer of the music for God Defend New Zealand. " A comprehensive broadcast coverage, of which specific details will be found in the programme pages this week and next week, has been arranged by the NZBS. Altogether, Auckland stations will relay thirteen of the eighteen festival events, while the Festival Lecture, the lecture by Mr. Penlington and the talk by Owen Jensen, with its subsequent concert of popular Victorian music, will be recorded for future use. The preliminary lunch-hour concerts, the drama, poetry, and the tours of the art exhibition will not be broadcast. In addition, 1YA will broadcast at 4.30 p.m. on Sunday, June 10, a preview of the National Orchestra Concerts prepared by Bessie Pollard. The official opening at a ceremony in the Town Hall Concert Chamber, will begin at 8.30 p.m, on June 7, and will be heard from 1YC. A fanfare composed specially for the occasion by Dr. Charles Nalden and Thomas Rive, and played by the Auckland Watersiders’ Silver Band, will both open and close the Festival. Immediately it has sounded the inaugural concert by the Auckland String Players conducted by Georg Tintner will begin. It will consist of 20th Century English works, including

the first New Zealand performance (so far as is known) of Music for Strings, by Arthur Bliss, a composition which has been described as the most significant of its kind since Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for the same medium. The National Orchestra with Sir Bernard Heinze as guest conductor will give three evening concerts: on Monday, June 11, Wednesday, June 13, and on Friday, June 15, when Richard Farrell will be the soloist in the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor. Soloists on June 13 will be Phyllis Mander (soprano), Sybil Phillipps (soprano), and Stewart Harvey (baritone). They will present arias and duos from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. There will be a lunch-hour concert on Tuesday, June 12, and special schools’ concerts on Thursday, June 14. In addition, members of the orchestra will assist at concerts by the Schola Cantorum, conducted by Stanley Oliver, the Auckland Dorian Singers and the Auckland Choral Society. The Schola Cantorum will give a secular concert in the Town Hall-at 8.0 p.m. on Saturday, June 9, and a sacred concert in St. Matthew’s Church at 2.45 p.m. on Sunday, June 10. Major items in the former will be Dirge for Two Veterans, a movement from Vaughan Williams’s cantata Dona Nobis Pacem, said to be the most impressive and the most individual of all his choral works; Ode on a Grecian Urn, by Gustav Holst; Donald Caird, a short cantata by Gordon Jacob, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott; and the Finale from ‘the Arthur Bliss pastoral, Lie Strewn the White Flocks. Two extracts from Michael Bowles’s Missa Maria Assumpta, the Kyrie and the Gloria, are included in the sacred concert, as wel! as excerpts from the Western Wynde Mass, by Taverner. A varied programme will be provided by the Dorian Singers conducted by Harry Luscombe at 8.0 p.m. on Tuesday, June 12, while on Thursday, June 14, the Auckland Choral Society conducted by Georg Tintner will present The Seasons, an oratorio by Haydn. Soloists will be Phyllis Mander (soprano), Raymon Opie (tenor) and James Hoskins (baritone). Richard Farrell will be the featured artist at a matinee concert in the Town Hall at 3.0 p.m. on Saturday, June 16. This programme will also include a re-cently-formed Auckland group which is appearing in public for only the second. time-the George Hopkins Clarinet Quartet. They will play Reverie, by Magnani, and a recent work by Laurence Powell, an Englishman who is now Professor of Music at an American university. Other artists will be Sybil Phillipps, with Lionel Harris, of Wellington, as accompanist; and Ronald Maconaghie (baritone). Lovers of choral music and _ those whose special delight is band music should both enjoy the final event of the festival. It will be a combined concert in the Town Hall by the Royal Auckland Choir conducted by Arthur Reid, St. Mary’s. College Choir conducted by Innes Lovett, and the Auckland Watersiders’ Silver Band under the baton of Reg. Farrington. Solo recitals will be given by Phyllis Mander and Raymon Opie, and Alan Pow will be at the piano. Items by the band will include solos by the New Zealand champion trombonist and cornettists respectively, J. P. Clague and Graham Downes. SN rig a