Music And The Arts Quarls Plans Three Concerts

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32324, 16 June 1970, Page 12

Music And The Arts Quarls Plans Three Concerts

Works by Beethoven, Dvorak and a contemporary American composer are to be played by the Prague Quartet in the University Hall on Sunday night in the first of a series of three concerts arranged by the University of Canterbury’s department of extension studies and the School of Music. The quartet, now resident at the university, comprises Stephan Czapary (first violin), Rudolf Kalup (violin), Jaroslav Karlovsky (viola) and Zdenek Konicek (cello). The Beethoven work they have chosen for the first concert is the well-known Quartet No. 1 in F major—the first in a group of six dedicated to Prince Josef Lobkowitz, in whose palace they received their first performance in 1801. In the rest of Sunday’s programme, the emphasis will be on the United States. The teaches at the San Francisco Dvorak work is the Quartet in F major, the American Quartet, written in 1893 while Dvorak was spending three years as director of the: National Conservatory of Music in New York: and the I programme will be completed by Kirke Mecham’s String Quartet. Op. 20. Mecham, though a prolific composer widely known in I the United States, is little known in New Zealand. Aged [45, he lives in California,

State College, and has written piano music, songs, anthems, madrigals, cantatas, choral cycles, two symphonies and the string quartet. Music by Schubert, Hindemith and Mozart (for which Frank Gurr will join the quartet as clarinet soloist) will be featured in the quartet’s second concert next month: and the third concert, planned for Wednesday, September 30, will be devoted to the works of Bartok and will serve to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. This concert was tp have been held, like others, on a Sunday night, but was put back three days to avoid a clash with Bartok commemorative broadcasts planned by the N.Z.B.C.