April Music Festival
AN international music festival featuring Canadian, English and American music will be held at Dartmouth College April 23-26, under the direction of Prof. James Sykes, chairman of the festival. The four-day event includes an evening of folk songs from the three countries, panel discussions and films, and performances of instrumental and choral works of the 16th and 17th centuries. Supported by a gift from an anonymous alumnus, the festival events are open to the public without charge.
Specially commissioned works by Canadian, English and American composers will be performed by the Festival Orchestra, assisted by visiting professional musicians.
Folk singers performing in the opening concert of the festival include Alan Mills from Canada, and a Dartmouth senior, Robert Coltman III of Perkasie, Pa., who has made a specialty of American folk music.
On Friday, April 24, a chamber music concert of 16th and 17 th century English music will be presented by professional artists invited for the festival. Featured soloist for the concert is Helen Boatwright, soprano. The accompanying ensemble, performing on baroque instruments, includes Howard Boatwright on the viol and viol d'amore, Joseph Iadone, professor of music at Yale, on the lute, and Carleton Sprague Smith, head of the music division of the New York Public Library, on the recorder.
The Friday evening program also includes a specially commissioned work for piano and clarinet by Canadian composer Serge Garant, to be performed by Mrs. Lydia Hoffman-Behrendt and Prof. Donald W. Wendlandt of the Dartmouth Music Department.
Also scheduled for Friday is a panel discussion on "The Roles of Composer and Public in England, Canada and the U.S." by representative professionals.
The Handel Society Orchestra, assisted by professional New York players and conducted by Mario di Bonaventura of the Dartmouth music faculty, will perform works of Henry Purcell and contemporary English music of the late Ralph Vaughan Williams. The Dartmouth College Band is also scheduled to perform.
On Saturday evening, April 25, the Festival Orchestra will present performances of two specially commissioned works, one an instrumental composition based on an English mediaeval carol, "To Many a Well," by British composer Peter Maxwell Davies, and the other by Mario di Bonaventura. The latter, who will also conduct the orchestra, recently joined the Dartmouth music faculty. He studied composition under Mile. Nadia Boulanger in Paris, later becoming official accompanist for the Conservatoire Nationale. Di Bonaventura also studied conducting with Igor Markevitch at the Mozarteum in Salzburg in 1954, and participated in several Salzburg Festival concerts.
Other events scheduled for the festival include a seminar on "Aspects of Musical Expression in England, Canada and the U.S.," and a choral concert Sunday afternoon, April 26, presented by the Skidmore College Chorus, the Dartmouth Glee Club and Handel Society Chorus, and the Dartmouth Madrigal Singers, in a program of English baroque and contemporary music.
An exhibition of paintings from England, Canada and the United States will be presented at the Carpenter Galleries during the festival.
Last year, in April, the College conducted a similar music festival, devoted to the theme of "The Birth of the Classic Style." That first annual festival was also made possible by a gift from the anonymous alumnus.
