Couple with strings

Press, 1 November 1977, Page 26

Couple with strings

The Canterbury Orchestra will present its new principal cellist, Michael Haber, and his wife, Nancy Haber, a harpist, in a public concert at the Centre Gallery in the Christchurch Arts Centre at 2.45 p.m. on Sunday.

The Haber Duo is an unusual concert ensemble. The Habers have spent a great deal of time and effort researching possible repertoire for this combination, and have done all the arrangements themselves.

On Sunday the Habers will play music by Vivaldi, Haydn, Spohr, Faure and Bartok. When Michael Haber was a student at Brandis University he received the highest academic honour accorded to an undergraduate in the United States, election to the Society of Phi Beta Kappa. After graduate work at Harvard University, he studied the cello with Richard Kapuscinski, Janos Starker and Gregor Piatigorsky, and received his master of music degree from Indiana University. He was a member of the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell when it visited Christchurch in 1972, was also a member of the Casals Festival Orchestra under Pablo Casals, and has been on the cello and chamber music faculties of Columbia University, the Aspen Music School, the Univer-

sity of Connecticutt, and the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Mr Haber has performed at the Marlboro Music Festival and in solo and chamber concerts in major cities and universities throughout the United States. As the cellist of the Composers String Quartet, he toured throughout Europe, performing in Florence, Zurich, Lausanne, Stuttgart,

Cologne, Oslo, at the Berlin Festival and in a series of four concerts at the Purcell Room in London. Nancy Haber studied with three of the twentieth century’s outstanding harpists, Alice Chalifoux, Marcel Grandjany and Carlos Salzedo. She is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, the California Institute of the Arts and the Juilliard School.