THE PRESS’’ PREVIEW OF THE FESTIVAL (4)

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30681, 22 February 1965, Page 15

THE PRESS’’ PREVIEW OF THE FESTIVAL (4)

Aork plays York comes to Canterbury in the medieval market place plays presented by the combined drama societies of the city. The 21 scenes were selected from 48 plays originally acted by town guilds whose trade, or mysteries, gave their name to the cycle. They belong to the dawn of English drama which began with religious themes and as religious drama stand with the Passion play of Oberammagau. They were performed in the streets of York every year for two centuries from 1340 and the plain, vigorous and rhetorically effective lines of the original Fourteenth Century text are preserved in the translation into modern idiom. The great scale of the cycle, based on the bible from the Creation to the Second Coming demands out-door performance. Each episode was contributed by the guild, (the harbours, lokk smyths, cappemakers, cutlers). The drama societies have assembled a cast of 170. To ensure the audibility of the performance, the entire production has been recorded for amplification from the riverbank stage in front of the Provincial Council Chamber. This Gothic setting matches the period of the mysteries. The cycle has always been played by amateurs and the, religious character of these plays from the headwaters of the stream of English drama made them an ideal choice for the Christchurch festival. Students’ show Sketch Club members at the university’s fine arts school are reviving, after a lapse of five summers, the 40-year-old custom of a riverside exhibition—left bank, of course—of some of their best paintings. Fourteen students will be showing about 50 pictures selected from the examination submissions by last year’s honours, second and third-year classes. They will be shown from February 22 on the Avon riverbank lawn opposite the Y.M.C.A. headquarters. The paintings will be for sale. They range from pure abstract to realistic, representational work and include pictures from several students who are already highly thought of by critics and galleries. One is Philip Trustum, who has paintings in the Auckland Art Gallery and was included among the New Zealand painters whose work was shown in Tokyo last year at the time of the Olympic Games. Other paintings

in this exhibition are by Tom Kreisler, whose work has been noted.

A distinguishing feature of this display is that almost all the students have used acrylic paint instead of conventional oils. This is an innovation in New Zealand and not yet adopted by older painters. It is a water-base, plastic paint, fast-drying, and with more permanent colour than oils, though visually it is indistinguishable. Its drying quality, however, gives greater freedom of working to the painter who can concern himself less with the behaviour of the paint and more with translating his ideas or image to the canvas. The exhibition will continue throughout the festival. “Porgy and Bess” “Nothing good in music ever really dies,” George Gershwin once said. His last serious work, the opera “Porgy and Bess,” was a financial failure, but when revived after the composer’s death was acclaimed as a masterpiece. When introduced to Europe a decade ago its reception was “near hysterical.” This opera, which draws from Negro culture, jazz, the popular song, the Broadway musical and the operacomique, will be presented by the New Zealand Opera Company from March 1. As many of its audience will have memories of Sam Goldwyn’s lavish film of the opera, the company has embarked on a large-scale production for the festival with a mixed Maori and Negro cast, some American principals, and American producer (Ella Gerber) and musical director (Dobbs Frank). Leading roles will be taken by Martha Flowers (Bess), Inia te Wiata (Porgy), John McCurry (Crown), and Toni Williams (Sportin’ Life). School orchestra An orchestra of more than 500 players from the Christchurch School of Instrumental Music will give a lunch-hour concert in the Festival Hall on Friday. The choir will be conducted by Mr R. E. Perks. Its programme will include. “Melody from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto,” “Mattachins” by Peter Warlock, the inarch “Colonel Bogey, ’’the finale of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony “From the New World,” “Alla Marcia” from Sibelius’s “Karelia” suite, and the overture to Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld.”

Denver, Dutch Jazz Two different schools of jazz will be represented at the Arts Festival. From the United States under State Department sponsorship will come the University of Denver Jazz Band, a modern big band (Festival Hall, March 2 and 3). From Europe comes a more traditional-styled Dixieland jazz group, the Dutch Swing College Band (Civic Theatre, March 6). The Dutch Swing Band, founded in 1945, has six members and has toured many countries since 1960. It has long been one of the most popular in the genre. The Denver band has 19 players touring under the auspices of the United States State Department cultural relations programme. Its leader, Tasso Harris (trombone), played in the Dorsey and Shaw bands and his Denver team won the best big band award in the 1963 University of Notre Dame collegiate jazz festival. Berkshire quartet The Berkshire String Quartet, which plays each summer at the Festival of Music Mountain in Connecticut, the oldest, chamber-music season in the United States, is conducting a fourweek master class in its instruments. During the festival, the quartet will give two concerts in the Civic Theatre and these will each include two traditional works and one modern work. On Saturday, at 8 p.m., the quartet will play Haydn’s Quartet No. 38 in E flat, Op, 33/2, Beethoven’s Quartet No. 16 in F, Op. 33, and a work written in 1939 which the quartet no longer regards as modern because it is now part of the standard quartet literature, Bartok’s Quartet No. 6 in D. On Sunday afternoon, the quartet will play Beethoven’s Quartet No. 6 in B

flat, Op. 18/6, Brahms’s Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 51/2, and Priaul Rainier’s Quartet No. 1. The last work is by a South African composer who is a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, London. The Berkshire Quartet had played the work for a year before it learned the composer was a woman, a fact which surprised them.

Choirs from 53 schools

Two lunch-hour concerts of massed choral items will be sung by two different children’s choirs, each of 1000 children, on Tuesday, March 2, and Wednesday, March 3. The children, brought from their 53 schools to the Festival Hall without charge by the Transport Board, will be conducted by

Mr Keith R. Newson, who has been visiting schools this week rehearsing. The programme commences at 12.30 and includes “Jerusalem,” “Chiapanecas,” “Down where the kowhai is growing,” “The rich farmer,” “Come to Bethlehem,” “The golden vanity,” “The fisher's song,” “Marie’s wedding,” “The song of the Jolly Roger,” “Peter Go Ring Dem Bells,” “Oh! Dem golden slippers," “On wdngs of song,” and “Crimond.” Between the brackets of songs, a school band will play: on Tuesday, the Christchurch Boy’s High School Band; and on Wednesday, the Cashmere High School Band. The bands will accompany the massed choirs in the anthems and “Crimond,” and other items will be accompanied by Mr Charles Martin on the piano.

Pan Tasman The McDougall Art Gallery has two shows for the price of one: 109 paintings by Australian artists from colonial times to the present day, arranged by the Commonwealth Art Advisory Council and the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council; and paintings by 100 New Zealand artists sought from the Dominion’s 26 art societies and hung by the Canterbury Society of Arts. Admission to both, 2s 6d. Open from February 22 for a month. Five films on painters and painting produced for Qantas will be shown on successive evenings at the gallery to embellish the Australian show. They review the work of Russell Drysdale, winner of the Henry Lawson Festival award for the year’s most outstanding contribution to the arts in Australia in 1961, William Dobell and Sidney Nolan. All are represented in the exhibition. The paintings explored in the films are in collections and galleries in many parts of the world. Drysdale’s baking outback pictures, Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, Dobell's protraits and landscapes are accompanied by a brilliantly evocative musical score and orchestrated sound effects. The other films are on Aboriginal rock and bark paintings and aim to give a wider understanding of aboriginal beliefs. The exhibition is the first comprehensive sample of Australian painting to tour New Zealand and is divided into colonial, impressionist, middle and contemporary periods.

One hundred New Zealand painters have been selected from the 139 paintings supplied. Ait societies were invited to submit a quota of pictures , and the Canterbury society hopes that this unprecedented assembly of all styles from artists who are considered the best in their areas will inspire a touring exhibition of this kind in the future. The pictures will be for sale. The painters are both professionals and amateurs. Early N.Z. prints Some 80 prints, charts, lithographs, hand coloured engravings and watercolours of early New Zealand have come from an Australian collection for display in the Canterbury Museum. They are from a total collection of about 200 by two Adelaide collectors. This show, of historical as well as art value, will be open for a month from February 22. Admission, free. It has been arranged by Qantas. Many of the prints are from rare books illustrating New Zealand a century ago and the voyages of the early navigators who visited these shores. Some are by L. le Breton and de Sainson, artists on Dumont d’Urville’s expeditions; others by James Cleveley, a carpenter who sketched in the South Seas from Cook’s “Endeavour.” Charles Barraud. of Wellington, was the artist for a book, “New Zealand; Graphic and Descriptive,” published in England in 1877, from which a group of the prints are taken.