College Plans April Music Festival
The Program
THURSDAY, APRIL 24
8:30 p.m. Preliminary Concert by Rudolf Firkusny, pianist. Webster Hall. Program: Works by Czech 18th Century composers, Mozart, Beethoven, and Charles Jones. (Only Festival event for which admission is charged. Tickets $2.40 and $1.20.)
FRIDAY, APRIL 25
3:45 p.m. Panel: "The Study, Composition, and Performance of the Classic Style." Webster Hall. Chairman: Paul Henry Lang. Speakers include Charles Jones and Carleton Sprague Smith.
5:15 p.m. Informal reception for visitors and residents to meet Festival participants.
8:30 p.m. Chamber Music Concert. Webster Hall. Saidenberg String Quartet and visiting wind instrument players, assisted by Lydia Hoffmann-Behrendt, pianist.
SATURDAY, APRIL 26
10:30 a.m. Seminar: "Aspects of the Creation of Musical Classicism in the 18th Century." Chairman: Charles Jones. Speakers: Joseph Kerman, "The Revolution in Musical Form"; Karl Geiringer, "On the Track of Haydn's Church Music"; and Carleton Sprague Smith, "18th Century Classic Composers in America."
2:00 p.m. Laboratory Concert by The Handel Society Orchestra of Dartmouth College, Donald W. Wendlandt, conductor. Webster Hall. Guest Conductor: Daniel Saidenberg. Program: Stamitz, "Trio for Orchestra"; Sammartini, "Sinfonia"; John Christian Bach, "Symphony"; Haydn, "Divertimento for Wind Instruments" (Members of the Dartmouth College Concert Band).
3:00 p.m. Lecture: Paul Henry Lang, "Classicism, The Shaping of an Era."
6:00 p.m. Dinner, Hanover Inn. (Reservations necessary. Price $3.00.)
8:30 p.m. Chamber Orchestra Concert. Webster Hall. Daniel Saidenberg conducting visiting players assisted by resident professional players of the Hanover area. Program: John Christian Bach, "Sinfonia Concertante"; Gluck, "L'lvrogne incorrigé"; Charles Jones, Suite on Leopold Mozart Themes (as yet unitled); Mozart, "Symphony, A major (K. 201)."
SUNDAY, APRIL 27
11:00 a.m. Union Service, Rollins Chapel
3:30 p.m. Chorus and Orchestra Concert. Program: Mozart, "Litaniae Lauretanae," sung by the Handel Society Chorus of Dartmouth College, James Sykes, conductor, with instrumentalists; Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, Die Kindheit Jesu," and Joseph Haydn, Mass, Rorate Coeli," both sung by the Dartmouth College Glee Club, Paul Zeller director, and the Colby Junior College Choir, Margaret Cawley director, with instrumentalists.
Music lovers who gather on the Dartmouth campus for the April 25-27 Music Festival, "The Birth of Classic Style," will hear two works played for the first time in the United States.
One, a Mass by Franz Joseph Haydn, was written about 1750; the other, a work specially commissioned for the festival, has just been completed by Charles Jones.
The festival will bring together music scholars, critics and performers for three days of talking and listening to music of the 18th Century. An anonymous alumnus, who plans to subsidize similar festivals in 1959 and 1960, donated funds to finance the affair. Charles E. Griffith '15, retired music editor of Silver Burdett Company, is honorary chairman of this year's festival.
According to Prof. James Sykes, head of the Music Department and festival chairman, the Haydn Mass was discovered only last year. Soviet soldiers had removed it from an abbey near Vienna but tossed it by the roadside as worthless. An Austrian forester found the old manuscript and returned it to the abbey.
There an American musicologist, H. Robbins Landon, saw it, recognized Haydn's handwriting, and identified it as the long-missing Haydn Mass.
The special work commissioned for the festival is being written by Charles Jones, Canadian-American composer, who will participate in the festival discussions. It contains melodies Leopold Mozart wrote for his prodigy son, Wolfgang. Jones, a neo-classicist, is putting these 18th Century melodies into a 20th Century style suitable for a chamber orchestra performance.
Among other festival highlights will be chamber music, chamber orchestra and choral concerts, a panel discussion dealing with the 18th Century classical and 20th Century neo-classical music, a seminar period stressing the broadly humanistic aspects of 18th Century music, and a lecture tracing the origins of the high classical style of Haydn and Mozart to the early years of the century.
Other participants will include Paul Henry Lang, music critic of the NewYork Herald Tribune; Daniel Saidenberg, conductor; Carleton Sprague Smith, head of the Music Division of the New York Public Library; Karl Geiringer, author and Haydn authority; and Joseph Kerman of the University of California music faculty, currently Hodder Fellow in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. In addition, the Colby Junior College Choir and professional musicians from Boston, New York, and the Dartmouth faculty will perform.
Dartmouth alumni, students, and other music lovers from the eastern United States are all welcome at the festival. No admission will be charged.
Guest Conductor Daniel Saidenberg, who will participate in Dartmouth's Music Festival.
An 18th Century Musical Exhibit in BakerLibrary will be on display during the Festi.
Alumni Invited Dartmouth alumni and wives are cordially invited to attend the Music Festival on the Dartmouth campus, April 24 to 27. Those interested may obtain information about accommodations and an official reservation blank by writing to Prof. James A. Sykes, the Festival chairman, at 103 Bartlett Hall, Hanover, N.H.
