Mozart meeting planned in Otago

Press, 21 August 1989, Page 10

Mozart meeting planned in Otago

PA Dunedin Otago University’s music department will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death in 1991, by hosting the most high-powered gathering of international music scholars in New Zealand history. Fifteen overseas scholars and performers are expected to attend “Mozart 91,” the largest group of overseas music scholars to gather in New Zealand, the organisers said.

The week-long event combines a majors’ scholarly symposium on the celebrated composer, with a music festival featuring performances by the New Zealand String Quartet and the Dunedin Sinfonia. It was the first musical gathering in New Zealand to be recognised as an official symposium of the prestigious Swiss-based International Musicological Society, Professor John Drummond, chairman of the Otago department, said. The symposium and festival in September would be “a very important international event” which would enhance Dunedin’s reputation as a centre of education excellence, he said. Scholars from Austria, Germany, England and the United States have already expressed interest in attending the symposium, which has as its theme, “Mozart and his Audience.”