DUNEDIN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22102, 4 November 1933, Page 9

DUNEDIN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

With seven orchestral works listed, M. de Rose has set the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra a prodigious task for its final concert of the season, to be given in the Concert Chamber of the Town Hall on Wednesday evening next. It is also a programme of much wider variety than its predecessors, a higher level of general interest being maintained by reason of the diversity of styles drawn upon. The chief work will be the second and fourth movements of Berlioz’s famous “ Fantastic Symphony,” which calls for the utmost distinction and virtuosity. It depicts an episode in the life of a drug-poisoned musician, beginning (second movement) with the extravagant gaiety of the dance at which the musician meets his love, and ending with a brilliant and sombre march in which he dreams he is condemned to death and led in a procession to the scaffold. The whole composition has been described as a miracle of orchestration. Conceived in very different vein is the Symphonic Poem, “Vltava,” by the Czechoslovakian composer Smetana. It is music set to the ripple and surge_ of water, Vltava being the great river known to the Germans as the Moldau, and in a sense, though much more epically, it personifies the river, as Tennyson did in his verses “The Brook.” Two compositions that should excite pleasurable anticipations are “ Malaquena ” (Moszkowski) and “Spanish Rhapsody” (iChabrier). Both convey with distinction the warmth and colour of Spain—the former a highly characteristic Spanish dance, the latter a very individual piece of ingenious orchestration in original harmonic style. When the orchestra adds to these contributions the exceedingly brilliant Bizet Fantasie “ L’Arlesienne,” that ardent music story of fatal love: the great Rimsky-Korsakoff overture, “The Russian Easter”; and Boradin’s “Serenade”—it will be admitted that full measure is to be offered to patrons. Since the whole programme makes heavy demands in the way of harp effects, the services have been engaged of Miss Koa Oliver (Mrs Nees) for the piano. The choice of soloists is happy, particularly the re-engage-ment of Signor Lucien Cesaroni, the emitient operatic basso, and hardly less so is the chioce of the popular Miss Anne White.