Music and Theater at the Hopkins Center
Alumni who plan to be in the Hanover area in the coming weeks would do well to consider the kaleidoscope of theater and music offered by Hopkins Center, now in its second decade.
Soprano Jessye Norman will be in concert Thursday, October 18 when one can compare her performance with one which The New YorkTimes' Alan Rich adjudged "superb from first note to last ... What she did that night was a kind of a miracle."
October 20 and 21 will see the return of the Pilobolus modern dance troupe, founded several years ago by Dartmouth students. This year they again bring back impressive laurels as the result of acclaimed performances in New London in this country and abroad at the Edinburgh Festival, and in London and Tel Aviv. Their schedule for the coming season also includes performances at the Brooklyn Academy.
Music from Iran is to be featured on October 22. Performing will be five vocalists and musicians who appeared before the Shah and his royal guests on the 2,500th anniversary of the monarchy of Iran. Sponsored by the Performing Arts Program of the Asia Society, the group plays music derived from that of ancient Persia which influenced the present music of India and the Arabic world, and that of ancient Greece.
Switzerland's folk art will be presented by the Swiss Mime-Mask (Mummenschanz) on October 25. These masked ceremonies trace their roots to the success-conjuring magic hunting rituals of early man. Andre Bossard and Bernie Schurch, who perform them, won acclaim at last year's International Festival of Pantomime in Prague, where the leading newspaper dubbed them "indisputably the biggest success of the whole festival."
On the following Sunday evening, October 28, The Guarneri String and the Vermeer Quartets will join to play Mendelssohn's Octet. The first half of the program will feature the Guarneris performing the Mozart B-flat Quartet, K. 458, and the Beethoven Quartet in E-flat, Opus 74. Both groups played at the Center last year, although upon different occasions, and both apparently enjoyed Hanover to the point where they were easily persuaded to return and join in playing the Octet.
Also listed in the coming attractions category, should Hanover visitors further care to mix football and culture, are Yvonne Loriod and Olivier Messiaen on November 1. They will play his "Visions de L'Amen," adjudged when they gave it here four years ago to be "without question one of the most profound and moving musical experiences in recent years at the Hop." Madame Loriod will also give the first performance in the United States of a new work by husband Messiaen, "La Fauvette des Jardins."
For a change of pace the following evening, Stan Kenton, whose worldwide reputation precludes further identification, will present his innovations in modern jazz.
Jazz singer Cleo Laine, backed up by composer John Dankworth, her husband, sings November 3. Her reputation has grown fast, thanks to laudatory reviews in national publications, notable most recently in Newsweek.
Then on November 13, the Hanover audience has a chance to hear Composer Philip Glass who, again to quote Alan Rich, is a composer of a particular kind of music, "slow-moving, hypnotically monotonous music in which the rate of new events is extremely slow and spaced out."
Beginning this month Dartmouth's popular lunchtime program of short plays will again present three series of experimental productions in the Warner Bentley Theater. The winter season begins in mid-January, and the spring, in Mid-April. "12:30 Rep" productions include members of the Freshman Class, Acting II and Directing II courses, and the presentation of both the Interfraternity Play Contest and the 47th Eleanor Frost Play Competition.
Further information about these late-October early November events including ticket prices and exact hours of performances are available from the Hopkins Center Box Office (Tel. 603-646--2422), Hanover, N.H. 03755.
During the same time period the Center will house exhibits by Fritz Scholder, artist-inresidence, whose paintings deal with the American Indian, in both traditional and contemporary themes; paintings, prints and drawings by Polish lithographer Alexandre Orlowski; master drawings from New England private collections and "Movie Palace Modern," drawings and photographs of interiors of great movie theaters of the '20s and '30s.
Appearing later in the Center's yeartypresentations than those chronicled obovewill be "Les Mestriers" and the BostonMusica Vova.
