DUNEDIN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22100, 2 November 1933, Page 2

DUNEDIN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

The pattern of the next concert by the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra—the last of this year’s series—will be more loosely woven than usual, and yet it will provide a fabric of music that should greatly intrigue the audience when it is presented at the Concert Chamber of the Town Hall on Wednesday evening next. In all, seven compositions will be presented by the orchestra in a programme drawn from such diverse composers as Berlioz, Smetana, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borokin, Moszkpwski, Chabrier, and Bizet. The chief offering will be the second and fourth movements of Berlioz’s “Fantastic Symphony," an extraordinary

study of the poppy dreams of an oversensitive artist culminating, after a ravishingly gay ballroom scene, in a finale, sombre and bizarre, depicting his imaginary participation in the chief role at an execution scene. This, the fourth movement, is labelled “ March to the Scaffold,” and is generally admitted to be a masterpiece of ingenious orchestration. Bizet’s “ L’Arlesienne,” which perhaps ranks next in importance, is a vividly realistic music drama of fatal passion; while in striking eontras’t to these works, and to each other, are a Smetana’s symphonic poem, “Vltava,” an epic on the Czechoslovakian river of that name, and Rimsky-Korsakoff’s strikingly individual “ The Russian Easter,” Borodin’s “ Serenade,” Chabrier’s “ Spanish Rhapsody,” and Moszkowski’e “Malaguena,” the last two carrying the warmth and colour of their Spanish themes. The services have been secured as soloist of Signor Lucien Cesaroni, the noted operatic basso; the other soloist being Miss Anne White.