Camerata Quartet to tour

Press, 11 August 1979, Page 5

Camerata Quartet to tour

The Music Federation has asked the Camerata Quartet to undertake a North Island tour in September and October.

Preliminary discussions for concerts in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States with the guitarist, Antonio Losada, in 1980 are also under way.

The quartet made its first tour for the Music Federation, two years ago but the North Island tour

next month is bigger, involving 10 concerts in 14 days.

On August 15, it will give a concert in the State Trinity Centre, Christchurch, with the pianist, lola Shelley, and double bass player, Tom Rogers.

On its North Island tour the quartet will play works by Haydn, Kodaiy, and Borodin. This is the first year the Christchurch allfemale quartet, which was founded six years ago, has done so many concerts outside Christchurch, according to its leader, the violinist, Paulene Smith.

This year it has given concerts at Auckland, Lower Hutt and Oamaru; and at Invercargill, Comalco sponsored a week of concerts to schools and the public. Including orchestral

concerts (all four women are members of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra), the quartet will have given 80 concerts between February and November this year. The members also teach. Assisted by lola Shelley, they have 150 pupils at the Christchurch Con-

servatorie at the Arts Centre, which they started 18 months ago. The quartet was resident at Canterbury University for the first three years after its establishment. Three members are still part-time instrumental teachers there. Since moving to the Arts Centre, two student string orchestras have been established, and several chamber groups. Internal concerts have also been organised to give the students performing experience.

“We are dividing ourselves in many ways,” said Frances de Goldi, the quartet’s cellist. “But our first love is chamber music. We all love teaching, but the stimulus for us is to be performers.”

“I do not think there is any quartet in the world which does not teach, even the Smetana Quartet, which was here recently. There just are not the audiences in New Zealand to justify a concert every week.”

The quartet rehearses three mornings a week during the year and builds up the hours of practice as a concert approaches. “It is not as if we just get

together and have a few practices before a concert — we are playing together all the time*” said Mrs De Goldi.

The members of the quartet feel that they are not being taken seriously as a professional quartet by the New Zealand public. Mrs de Goldi said it seemed that if musicians did not come from overseas, nobody took them very seriously. “It is a little like the biblical quotation, ‘A prophet has no calling in his own land’,” she said. Some local sponsorship would also be of some assistance. Mrs Smith, whose husband manages the quartet, said that most quartets in the world came under some sort of patronage and that commerce and industry in the United Kingdom had helped in this respect. She gave as an example the D’Oyly Carte opera company from Britain which was recently in Christchurch. The Arts Council in Britain could not afford to keep the company, she said, and so Barclay’s Bank stepped into the breach, otherwise it would have been forced to disband.