New arts review

Press, 29 July 1976, Page 15

New arts review

A late night weekly arts programme "Kaleidoscope", featuring the best available material from overseas and New Zealand, will begin on TV2 next Friday.

The programme will concentrate mainly on the visual arts. But it will embrace all types, including literature. For example a film entitled “Meet Charles Dickens" will feature readings from the author's work. Documentaries and films on music, ballet and art will be compiled and introduced by Jeremy Payne, a former current affairs man in Auckland who recently presented “Telethon” in Hamilton and “Sunday Best” in the North. It will be directed by Jan Wharekawa, at present directing “News at Six.”

Payne has plans for a considerable amount of New Zealand content in “Kaleidoscope.”

“We’ll be giving news of what’s happening in the visual arts here,” he. said. “We’ll keep viewers informed of what exhibitions are showing at galI leries and show film of I them. Sometimes we’ll ' have artists with us in the I studio.”

Because of Olympic coverage in “News at Ten” on July 30, “Kaleidoscope" will begin at 10.45 p.m. In following weeks it will begin at 10.30 p.m. and run through until approximately midnight. It will continue each week for an indefinite period. Programme one features

both music and art It will begin with the first of five of Beethoven’s "Late Quartets", which will all be played in coming weeks by the Aeolian Quartet, one of Britain’s leading ensembles. Next Friday they perform "Quartet in E Flat Opus 127," in the entrance hall, library and dining room of Heveningham Hall in Suffolk, one of the the finest Georgian mansions in England.

Beethoven's Late Quartets were his last compositions and remain unsurpassed in quality. So advanced was Beethoven that much of his later music was not fully understood or adequately performed until long after his death.

After 40 minutes of Beethoven comes "Impressionism and Neo-lmpres-sionism,” a programme explaining the transition between traditional painting and impressionism which took place last century.

It shows how the ves tiges of change are revealed in the paintings of Turner, and how Manet

gave the movement its first major impetus. The effects of light and shade are studied as in Courbet and Millet, and the individual styles of Sisley and Pissarro are discussed. Finally the programme turns to the new impressionism of Cezanne and the prophetic style of Seurat.