Orchestra's Festival Programmes

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 929, 31 May 1957, Page 4

Orchestra's Festival Programmes

;| WY concerts Dy the National *" Orchestra at the Auckland Festival will be the events of the coming week in the field of music. Douglas Lilburn’s "Birthday Offering,’ slightly revised since its first performance in Wellington, opens the first of the National Orches+ tra’s programmes, in which Jascha Spivakovsky will play the Beethoven Fourth Piano Concerto and the Orchestra give the complete ballet music of Stravinksky’s Petrouchka. One of the most colourful and successful of all ballets, Petrouchka never fails to stir an audience. Soon after the end of the last war in a shabby and listless London, the equivalent of a bombshell burst when the Ballet Theatre of New York came to Covent Garden. This was the first visit of an overseas Ballet Company for many years, and although their modern American ballets aroused interest it was the vitality of Petrouchka that came as a revelation to a tired city. As a concert piece the work is no less enthralling, but it is helpful to look up the story before listening to the performance (YCs, 8.0 p.m., Thursday, June 6). The second orchestral concert from Auckland introduces Richard Lewis (see cover), principal tenor of Glyndebourne Opera and Covent Garden, in Les Illuminations, Benjamin Britten’s set-

ting of nine prose poems by Arthur Rimbaud. These poems, some of them written in a state of hallucination, stimulated the young composer’s imagination to produce an orchestral song cycle of an unusual kind. Britten from his earliest days had been interested in the human voice, and a feature of this cycle is that although each song is separate in itself, he manages to give the work unity. Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a literary phenomenon who, after several years of friendship with the older poet Verlaine, abandoned poetry and _ drifted around various parts of the world before he became a merchant in AbysSinia. After his early death Verlaine published Les Illuminations, which, with their symbolic free associations, are the brilliant commentaries, "partly autobiographical, partly imaginative, of a wandering outcast (YCs, 8.0 p.m., Saturday, June 8). Richard Lewis is at the height of his fame in Britain and Europe and has come to specialise in contemporary works. Among his most successful roles have been those of the commentator in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, the title role in Peter Grimes, as Mark in Tippet’s The Midsummer Marriage, and as Troilus in Walton’s Troilus and Cressida. After his performance in The

Rake’s Progress at Edinburgh in 1953 Stravinsky invited him to sing "Penelope" in Turin. At the same time he is accomplished in the classical roles, in oratorio and as a recitalist. He will be singing in varied roles while in New Zealand-in the Verdi Requiem at Wellington and Christchurch, in operatic arias at Dunedin, and in Lower Hutt on June 26, in a concert for the Chamber Music Society, he will sing the masterly songcycle by Janacek, The Diary of a Young Man Who Disappeared, as well as songs by Dowland, Bartlett, Bach, Handel and Duparc. Stravinsky's Cantata (1952) After composing the three famous ballets, Stravinsky’s music changed, but though later works have never caused the same furore as The Rite of Spring, they have continued to divide listeners into friends and enemies. A recent work which at its first hearing caused some bewilderment and dismay is the Cantata (1952) (2YC, 10.30 pm., Monday, June 3). In it Stravinsky set four anonymous 15th and 16th century English lyrics. "I was persuaded by a strong desire to compose another work in which the problems of setting English words to music would reappear, but this time in a purer, non-dramatic form," wrote the composer, who had just completed his opera The Rake’s Progress. "I selected four popular anonymous lyrics which attracted me not only for their great beauty and their compelling syllabification, but for their construction, which suggested musical construction." They are written for solo soprano, solo tenor, female chorus and an instrumental quintet of two flutes, two oboes and cello. The theme of the Cantata is the various forms of love and the words of the poems are of more than usual importance. In "Lyke-Wake Dirge," the virtues

of charity are opposed to the terror of the punishment awaiting the uncharitable. "The Maidens Came" is a wedding song about the love of a bride. "Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day" seems at first to be a wedding song, but becomes instead a religious lyric depicting the love of Christ. The last poem, "Westron Wind," shows a young ‘man defying the west wind in the strength of his longing for a girl. Here the dashing, intermittent rain is suggested by the rhythm and instrumentation. At the end the listener is startled with the direct cry, "Crist, if my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again." Preview for July During the last few years the National Orchestra has added Youth Concerts, Radio Operas and Composer’s Workshops to its round of activities. In July of this year yet another type of concert will be presented, for on the evenings of July 12 and 13 in the Concert Chamber of the Wellington Town Hall the National Orchestra will play the six Brandenburg Concertos of Bach. Guest artist for these concerts will be the ‘well-known English pianist and harpsichord player Valda Aveling. Be- sides playing the continuo parts on the Goff harpsichord and appearing as solo-

ist in the fith Brancenburg, Valda Aveling will play a work by Bach each evening, the Italian Concerto and one of the French or English Suites. The other soloists will be drawn from the Orchestra except for Ken Smith, from Dunedin, who will be playing the high Bach trumpet. Public appearances of the harpsichord are still something of an occasion, and the NZBS has been fortunate to find soloists who were well acquainted with Goff’s instruments. Valda Aveling has played on Goff’s harpsichords frequently, and she also possesses a Goff instrument of her own-a clavichord. Other soloists in these concerts will be Vincent Aspey, Eric Lawson, Alex Lindsay, Francis Rosner (violins); James Hopkinson and Cyril Ainsworth (flutes); Norman Booth (oboe) and Ken Smith (Bach trumpet). The concerts are being arranged under the auspices of the N.Z. Federation of Chamber Music Societies, but 100 seats will be on sale to the general public each night. Both concerts will be broadcast in full,