WELLINGTON YOUTH CONCERT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 9

WELLINGTON YOUTH CONCERT

HE second National Orchestra Youth '" Concert of the season, to be held at Wellington on Wednesday, September 25, has a programme of interest and variety for mature as well as youthful concertgoers. Besides the first public performance in this country of Antill’s Corroboree, the programme includes an Alfred Hill work not hitherto performed here, and a work by the New Zealander Larry Pruden. The soloist for the evening will be Ken Smith, who will play the Trumpet- Concerto of the young English composer John Addison. The Alfred Hill composition, Overture of Welcome, has had quite a vogue overseas, having been performed a number of times both in the U.S. and on the Continent. This Overture, the composer says, portrays his conception of "the orchestral concert in, say, 2000 A.D." The obsession of people with TV will by then have made conventional concerts a thing of the past, and at the same time orchestral players will be so much in demand for other work that little time will be left for public performances. If, however, a concert is attempted, then, according to Alfred Hill: "Old fashioned and simple~ works like this, which need no rehearsal, are

arranged so that, if mecessary, one player can begin alone. When the less busy players take their places and begin playing, the more exclusive players appear-the leader last of all. Conductors have become so precious and costly that they can direct only the last few

bars of the one work which makes up the programme." During the series of broadcast concerts by the Alex Lindsay Orchestra last year, Larry Pruden was invited to provide an item for the last of the programmes. "Some time before," he told The Listener, "I had been looking at a set of Breton popular ‘songs and dances collected and arranged for violin by André Mangeo, and had_ thought that some of the tunes could stand fuller treatment. When this chance came I decided to base the piece on three of these tunes, using at the same time, however, some tunes of my own in the French idiom." The second and third movements of the resulting Dances of Brittany received their first performance last October, the remaining movement has: been written since, and this performance will be the first performance. of the completed work, as well as its frst performance in public. Dances of Brittany, conducted by the composer, will be heard in the second part of the Youth Concert to be broadcast from the Wellin Town Hall at 9.0 p.m. on Wednesday, tember 25 (all YCs). The other works in this part of the programme are the Strauss Symphonic’ Poem Till Eulenspiegel and- ‘the Ballet Suite, Corroboree. The first rt of the concert, with Hill’s Overture of elcome, Trumpet Concerto, by Addison, and Tchaikovski’s Nutcracker Suite, will be heard from YAs, 3YZ and 4YZ at 2.0 p.m, on Sunday, September 29.