Varied Programme For 1960 Auckland Festival

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29178, 12 April 1960, Page 13

Varied Programme For 1960 Auckland Festival

The Auckland Festival for 1960 promises to be the most comprehensive to datfe AU the arts are represented and in the en-

tertainment offered there will be something to suit all tastes. New Zealand talent will be well to the foreagain.

As has been the custom in previous years, the Festival will begin with an official lucheon in the Town Hall on May 26. The speaker will be the United States Ambassador (Mr Francis H. Russell) and among the many festival artists invited will be a compatriot of Mr Russell, the world-famous pianist, Julius Katcben.

> Katchen will give two solo recitals during the festival, on Thursday May 26 and an afternoon one. on Sunday June 5. The pianist is no stranger to the New Zealand concert stage He has made two previous tours, the last in 1957. Since then he has been almost continuously on tour. He is one of the most widely travelled and unanimously acclaimed artists of the day. Since he was here last, Katchen has played more than 200 concerts and, in addition to annual apprearances in England, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, has toured Indonesia, Hong Kong, Ethiopia, Poland and Rumania.

< The National Orchestra has always been the musical mainstay in the Auckland Festival and this year will be no exception. Under John Hopkins’s baton it will give six concerts, including two for schools, and several of the programmes include works by New Zealand composers. In the first concert on Tuesday, May 31, Larry Pruden’s suite “Dances of Brittany”, will be played and in the last concert on Saturday, Jane 4, Douglas Lilburn’s “Aotearoa Overture” will be presented. Of special interest to Aucklanders will be the lunch-hour concert on Friday, June 3, when Harry Euscombe’s “Variations on on a Child’s Name” will have its first public performance, conducted by the composer himself. Recitals will be given during the festival by the Russian baritone, Dmitry Gnatyuk, by the New Zealand singers Mary

O’Brien (soprano), Donald Munro (baritone) and Joy Parkin (soprano), by Stanley Jackson (organ), the New Zealand Wind Quintet, and the Gorden Webb Chamber Brass Ensemble. There will also be a jazz concert and choral concerts.

The New Zealand Opera Company will present Puccini’s "Madame. Butterfly” and Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” both in English. Soloists who will appear with the orchestra include the pianist Frederick-Page, who is professor of music at Victoria University, (May 31); the Czechoslovakian violinist Ladislav Jasek (June 2) and the Wellington duo pianists, Judith McDonald and Shirley Power (June 4). Drama will have its share of the limelight during the Auckland Festival and one of the plays comes from Christchurch —from the Canterbury Repertory Theatre Society. The play chosen is the American comedy “The Rainmaker.’* This was produced with great success earlier this year in Christchurch and the Festival presentation will have the same cast, with John and Christine Batstone taking the leading roles of Lizzie and Starbuck. There will also be several poetry recitals and Bruce Mason will present a one-man show. The first exhibition at the City Art Gallery which will open just before the festival, is of contemporary Australian paintings. It has been arranged by the Macquarie Galleries of Sydney and includes many prominent Australian printers. It Is strongly representative of the younger painters and illustrates the force and verve of Australian painting today. Mr Peter Tomory, director of the art gallery, hopes that the exhibition will be takqn up by galleries in other centres. The second exhibition comes from the Monrad collection of etchings now housed in the National Gallery, Wellington. These have been selected by Mr Tomory himself and will feature works by Rembrandt, Durer, van Dyck, and many lesser-known artists of the 16th and 17th centuries.

This will be the first time the etchings have been seen outside Wellington and they have only been exhibited twice there —. once in 1937 and again in 1956. The exhibition will open on Friday, May 27.