Concert ‘Stars’ In Festival

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31828, 5 November 1968, Page 10

Concert ‘Stars ’ In Festival

The Prague Quartet, David Ward, the Covent Garden basso, and the international concert pianist, Shura Cherkassky (who has toured New Zealand previously), will be the principal visitors in the Auckland Festival in March.

The Prague Quartet will be touring for the Chamber Music Federation. It may also spend time in Canterbury—the University of Canterbury is negotiating with it to be quartet:in-resi-dence at the university next year. As it has been since the inception of the festival as a music week in 1949, music remains the keystone, with the N.Z.B.C. Symphony Orchestra providing a major part of the programme.

Ranged alongside the orchestra will be an impressive list of New Zealand attractions—a double bill of opera, numerous soloists and recitalists. David Ward, who is Scottish, has followed a path parallel to that of Donald McIntyre, an Aucklander of Scottish extraction, a few seasons later. Ward's first engagements of note were with Sadler’s Wells Opera,

from which he moved to Covent Garden and Continental engagements. The seal was set on his career when he was chosen for leading roles in the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth —an honour recently accorded to Mclntyre—and since then he has been one of the world's leading bass operatic and concert singers. He will give two solo recitals during the Festival. Shura Cherkassky is a fine interpreter of the Romantics.

He has visited New Zealand twice in the course of his long concert career, the first time for the Auckland Festival of 1955 and the second for the N.Z.B.C. a few years ago. Three orchestral concerts will feature soloists and the Orpheus Choir from Wellington.

The first, on March 26, will include Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Cherkassky as soloist, and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, in which the soprano soloist will be Emily Mair. In real festival spirit, the middle concert will feature a "Hoffnung Festival” in the style of the original conceived by Gerrard Hoffnung —inventor of the “Grand Grand Opera,” concerto for vacuum cleaner, dustbin lids and whatnot, and other musical oddities. There will also be a light first half. The Orpheus Choir, whose

regular conductor is Malcolm Rickard, will sing both the Verdi and Berlioz Te Deums in the final orchestral concert on March 29, with Schubert’s Symphony No. 3 preceding them. The soloist for the Berlioz has not yet been announced.

The Prague Quartet will give one concert in association with the Auckland Chamber ' Music Society for the festival on March 17. It has visited New Zealand twice previously, and on the latter occasion, two years ago, spent several months as quar-tet-in-residence nt Canterbury University. There will be two new faces in the quartet next year—both violinists. However, Jaroslav Karlovsky (the viola player), and Zdenek Konicek (the cellist), both members of the quartet when it was here in 1966, will return. Mozart’s “11 Seraglio” will be seen in Auckland for the first time in the New Zealand Opera Company’s production with Inia Te Wiata in the role of Osmin. Other members of the cast include the sopranos. Elisabeth Hellawell and Emily Mair. The double bill at the St James Theatre (which has been made available for the season by Sir Robert Kerridge) will be completed by the first fully staged presentation in Auckland of Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio.”

Again the soloists will include Miss Hellawell, with the tenor, Ramon Opie, the mezzo, Corinne Bridge, and the basso, Grant Dickson.