MUSIC AND DRAMA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27059, 19 April 1949, Page 5

MUSIC AND DRAMA

EDINBURGH FESTIVAL INCREASED ATTENDANCES EXPECTED Special to the Daily Times EDINBURGH, Apl- 18. The 1949 Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama will offer attractions to a greater number of people than any previous function of its kind in this country. This year's maximum attendances will i;each a total of 240,000, which is an increase of 10 per cent, over last year’s festival and 38 per cent, over the first festival of 1947. The value of capacity ticket sales this year will be £120,000 as compared with £IIO,OOO last year. This increase is accounted for mainly by the fact that this yeac for the first time there will be three weeks of ballet. In the two previous festivals ballet was performed for only two weeks. Some idea of the tremendous demand that exists for tickets for this annual festival may be gauged from the following figures. Last year a total of 237,142 tickets were issued from the offices of the society as follows:—Opera 29.300, drama 53,400, ballet 33.400, musical concerts 8g,542, piping and dancing 31,500. When the Festival Society was formed in 1946 it aimed to provide the world with a centre where, year after year, all that is best in music drama and the visual arts could be seen and heard amid ideal surroundings. How well that aim has been achieved is shown by these figures. During .the three weeks of this year's festival, from August 21 to September 11, patrons will be able to hear and see seven orchestras, four dramas, two operas, 23 ballets (several of which have never before been performed in this country), six recitals by leading world soloists and instrumentalists, and concerts by four chamber music ensembles. In the musical programmes there will be two world premieres—a piano concerto by Ernest Bloch, who will conduct the BBC Scottish Orchestra at this performance with Madame Corinne Lacombe, the noted American pianist, as the soloist; and a 'cello concerto by Martinu. At the Lyceum Theatre there will be two world premieres—T. S. Eliot’s modern comedy "The Cocktail Party” and Dorothy Parker and Ross Evans’s “ Coast of Illyria.”

For the first time at the Edinburgh Festival there will be a foreign ballet company—les Ballets des' Champs Elysees. This company will appeal for three weeks, the first time tha* ballet has run for the full period o the festival.