Conductor from Indonesia
N Indonesia the clash of east and west is as noticeable in music as it is in other aspects of the life of those lately unsettled islands. Willen Komlos, who arrived in New Zealand the other day from Jacarta to take up a position as conductor of the New Plymouth Choral Society, said that Indonesian music, with its seven-tone system, had not yet been greatly influenced by Western musical techniquer and modes. But as a number
of the Indonesian and Chinese inhabitants were being educated at Dutch universities it might be hoped that in another decade or so some native composer would arise who would collect folk-music in the way Bartok and Kodaly had in Hungary, and use it as a basis for compositions which merged the two musical treditions. Mr. Komlos is a Hungarian himself. He came to Java from Budapest in 1936, and became leader of the Jacarta Philharmonic Orchestra, In Budapest he had been a violin teacher at the Royal Academy and had also conducted choirs, In Indonesia he was also a member of the Kunstkring, or Circle of the Arts, a cultural organisation which sponsored a chamber music ensemble with which he played. He has performed and broadcast many works for violin, including Bach’s E Minor Concerto and Vivaldi’s Concerto, and recently made a concert tour with the Kunstkring, visiting Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and Bali by plane and performing to audiences of adults and school children. It was the Kunstkring, he said, which had brought out to Indonesia before the war such celebrated artists as Lili Kraus and Szymon Goldberg. Mr. Komlos has brought his family with him to New Zealand, his wife, a son aged 13 and a daughter aged 8.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 632, 10 August 1951, Page 21
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289Conductor from Indonesia New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 632, 10 August 1951, Page 21
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