Adelaide Festival Sorely In Need Of A Hall

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31017, 24 March 1966, Page 18

Adelaide Festival Sorely In Need Of A Hall

Adelaide’s fourth festival of the arts opened with a performance of Berlioz’s “Requiem Mass” which emphasised the strengths and weaknesses of this major international festival, old enough to be judged by the severest critical standards, writes a special correspondent of “The Times.

So firm is the musical tradition of Adelaide that 400 singers from five choirs were readily assembled in Centennial Hall for John Hopkins, who conducted the South Australian Symphony Orchestra and contingents from two local bands. It was a tremendous performance, worthy of the memory of Professor John Bishop, the festival’s first artistic director, who died in London in December, 1964.

No successor has yet been appointed, although the English tenor David Galliver was recently given the university’s vacant chair of music. Three artistic advisers, Mr Robert Campbell (visual arts) Professor Brian Coghlan (drama) and Mr John Homer (music), kept the impetus going admirably for this year’s festival, but they cannot be expected to go on working successfully, without strong artistic direction and support, under the board of 13 governors.

OBVIOUS WEAKNESS Adelaide’s next festival is due in 1968, and the appointment of an artistic director is urgent. Only a strong character with a record of achievement in the arts will be able to overcome the obvious weaknesses in Adelaide’s pos-

ition as the premier festival centre in Australia and New Zealand.

Centennial Hall, for example, is an ungainly structure like a hanger, suitable, no doubt, for agricultural exhibitions, but not for serious concerts. Yet here the London Symphony Orchestra has been giving all its concerts. A Festival Hall will have to be built for this city, as the Governor, Sir Edric Hastyan, insisted at the opening ceremony when he spoke hopefully of a main hall seating 2500 to be completed in the ’6os. A complex of other buildings might come later, but in Adelaide’s present mood, derived perhaps from too much praise for a great beginning since 1960, 1 cannot see much evidence of action even on the main hall. It will need an artistic director to get this project going. FINE PRODUCTION

Meanwhile in the very lovely but quite unsuitable Bonython Hall we had to watch a superb production of Shaffer’s “The Royal Hunt of the Sun.”

The stage was enormous and the setting magnificent, but the acoustics, the heat, and the lines of vision for the audience were all appalling. Black ties wilted and distinguished heads drooped forward. John Tasker, the young Australian producer, and his wholly Australian cast were worth a better place than this. Nearby Dame Judith Anderson in excerpts from “Macbeth” and “Medea” was struggling bravely with the equally impossible Elder Hall.

Of course Adelaide does have a few excellent theatres, notably that of the new teachers’ college, where the Athens Drama Company directed by Costis Mlchaelides presented “Iphigenia in Aulis” in modern Greek, and because of air-conditioning and excellent designs not even the hardiest of festivalgoers went, unwillingly, to sleep. BALLET PREMIERE Another fine theatre is Her Majesty’s where the Australian Ballet, inspired by triumphs overseas, is dancing with great brilliance. We saw the world premiere of “Illyria” by Garth Welch, one of the company’s principal dancers, who designed it for his wife, Marilyn Jones. The ballet, without a story, has the loveliest of dance patterns and some interesting choreographic movement. Adelaide has just, as much natural “festival” character as Edinburgh. All the way down North Terrace, a beautiful tree-lined boulevard emerging from the city centre, are a succession of key buildings surrounded by lawns.

Here you may wander on warm Australian evenings, entering perhaps the magnificent National Gallery to see the Harold Mertz collection of contemporary Australian painting or pausing to hear another collection poets reading their own works, with a fine wild pride. Angus Wilson is here, and so is Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, who is concentrating an electronic feature to the festival, employs a designing unit developed and built by Philips Research Laboratories, Hendon, South Australia, with whose help he has been working on the idea for his “Sound and Image” programme for the last two years.