New Concert Hall at Lower Hutt

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 921, 5 April 1957, Page 7

New Concert Hall at Lower Hutt

HE new Lower Hutt Town Half €see photograph opposite) will be officially opened on Thursday, April 4, and a Music and Drama Festival is b@ing held to celebrate the event. Organisations taking part in the Festival include the New Zealand Opera Company, the New Zealand Ballet Company, the Hutt Valley Orpheus Choir, the Hutt Repertory Society, and Hutt Valley schools. The inaugural concert will be given by the National Orchestra on Saturday, April 6, when James Robertson will conduct a programme consisting of a fanfare, the Overture to The Magic Flute, and the aria "Mi Tradi" from Don Giovanni, by Mozart; Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, the Piano Concerto in A Minor by Grieg, and Tchaikovski’s "1812 Overture." Sybil Phillipps and Janetta McStay, the soloists, both live in the Hutt Valley, and the band to be heard in the Tchaikovski overture is a combination of the Lower Hutt Civic and the Lower Hutt Municipal Bands (bandmaster, K. G. L. Smith). The first half of this concert will be broadcast on the YC link at 8.0 p.m. this Saturday, April 6, and the second half will be heard on the National Programme on Sunday, April 14, at 2.0 p.m. These will be the first of many broad-

casts from the new Town. Hall, and arrangements have been made for visiting artists to appear there with the National Orchestra. Now that there are two major concert halls in the Wellington area, James Robertson, for one, hopes that there will be a two-way traffic between the two centres. Each will present a different type of programme. Wellington has a reputation for being the most serious audience in the country, and the Lower Hutt programmes will contain many of the established favourites which Wellington, in search of new excitement, does not often hear nowadays. _ The architects of the building, Messrs. King, Cook and Dawson, have paid particular attention to the acoustics of the new Town Hall, a task made more complicated by the varied uses to which the hall will be put, which have required timbered flooring 4nd. movable seating. They have not designed an unusual or complicated building, but have planned a simple form with the main sice walls in a flat chevron pattern of alternate. fibrous plaster and limpet asbestos, with a stepped ceiling. All upper surfaces are designed to reflect the sound downwards to the gallery. Those who have heard the tests so far made in the completed building say that it reveals an amazing evenness of sound diffusion.