Listening

Press, 7 June 1980, Page 13

Listening

Stoppard play The play, “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” for actors and orchestra by Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn being broadcast on the Concert programme this evening direct from the Wellington Town Hall is something new in cultural events. For the first time the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra is involved in a joint production with a theatre group. Downstage Theatre and the Orchestra will present the play, for which Downstage’s resident designer, Raymond Boyce, has designed a special set for the Town Hall stage on which the orchestra and actors can all be accommodated. The concert/play, with John Hopkins back from Australia as conductor, opens conventionally enough with a first half performance of the ' Shostakovich Symphony No 11 and a 8.8. C. interval talk about Shostakovich follows. Mozart At the age of six he was touring Europe with his father. As a childprodigy harpsichordist at fourteen he was knighted by the Pope. By the time he was 26 he was established as a composer, notably of operas, and had achieved a wide public reputation. At 36 he died in poverty in Vienna, of typhus. This is the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Concert programme’s “composer of the week.” This morning John Drummond discusses Mozart and his many operas.