Orchestra will play for all

Press, 7 March 1978, Page 14

Orchestra will play for all

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra will make its contribution to the Christchurch Arts Festival next' week, in five concerts from Wednesday to Sunday. That will feature music for all tastes, ranging in period from Beethoven to Shostakovich. The major feature will be two performances (the first in New Zealand) of Stravinsky’s opera-ora-torio, “Oedipus Rex.” This will be part of the subscription concert on March 15, and will be repeated on the afternoon of March 19. Regarded as one of Stravinsky’s masterpieces, the work lends itself to concert performance as it is very much a tableauopera, with very little movement by principals and choir. The performers sing a Latin text —translated from the French version of Sophocles prepared by Jean Cocteau — while the action is interpreted in English by a narrator. The principals in these performances are among the best New Zealand singers — Anthea Moller, Anthony Benfell, Kenneth Cornish, Bruce Carson and Maurice Taylor, with a Wellington actor, Ray Henwood, as narrator. The men of the Royal Christchurch Musical Society will provide the chorus. Stravinsky’s version of the “horror-story” of “Oedipus Rex” concentrates on the final scenes of this terrible tale. Pestilence and plague are ravaging the city of Thebes. The king, Oedipus, who has come to the city as a stranger and married the widowed Queen Jocasta, decides to find the cause.The history of abandoned

children, parricide, incest, suicide and self-blinding 1 then unfolds. Luckily for the sensitivities of Christchurch audiences, the opera is being presented in a concert version, but the strength of the story is told in Stravinsky’s magnificent music. The original staging was in tableaux form with little movement, all the most dreadful events taking place off-stage, so the work loses little impact in concert performance. Frederick Page, New Zealand’s most prominent advocate of Stravinsky’s music, describes this work as “bold and stark,” but he says that it “has a classical calm and is extraordinarily moving.” Another commentator says the work teems with melodies, with the soloists frequently singing florid passages. Professor Page sums it up by saying, “The work is austere, with everything superfluous whittled away. There is nothing here of the elemental savagery of “The Rite of Spring,” the charm of ‘The Firebird,’ the gaiety of ‘Petrouchka.’ Stravinsky has moved on. One thinks of the monumental calm, the purity of line in Picasso’s drawings of this period.” The work was first performed in Paris in 1927. Other highlights of the N.Z.S.O. festival concerts will include Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C, which will open the

March 16 concert to mark the one-hundredth and fiftieth anniversary of Schubert’s death; Symphony No. 10 by Shostakovich in the Saturday concert; and performances by two soloists, the violinist, Maurice Hasson, and the painist, Earl Wild.

Earl Wild is the special guest of the Christchurch Arts Festival this year, and will play with the N.Z.S.O. in two concerts, on March 16 and 18. Maurice Hasson is touring New Zealand - for the second time. In the March 15 concert he will play the Saint-Saens Violin Concerto, and in the lunch-time concert on the Friday he will be heard in the popular Scottish Fantasia by Max Bruch. Maurice Hasson will return to Christchurch on April 3, when he will be accompanied by Maurice Till in a recital in the James Hay Theatre. The N.Z.S.O.’s conductor for the 1978 festival concerts is the 50-year-old Israeli, Elyakum Shapirra, who is becoming a big name in international music. Fie has been chief conductor of the Adelaide Symphony for the last few , years, and has a high reputation also as a conductor of opera. He is noted for his fiery and dynamic interpretations. The N.Z.S.O. will also present the organist, Gillian Weir, in a recital in the Christchurch Cathedral at 5.30 p.m. on March 16. This famous New Zealander is now regarded as one of the best organists in the world, and she was included in the “Great Performers” series last year at Lincoln Centre, New York.