It looked as if this would be the first year, in living memory, that none of our choirs had scheduled a Messiah, when news came of a performance by the Kapiti Chamber Choir, one of Peter Godfrey’s former choirs. Conducted by Guy Jansen, it was likely to be as fine a performance as any we have heard, and so it has transpired. There were two performances: the first on Sunday 22 November at Paraparaumu and the second in Wellington on the 29th. Today, it is more common to use rather smaller choral forces than a few decades ago when huge...  Read More »

During the nineteenth century Franz Liszt was the greatest exponent of the transcription - he used the piano to help popularise orchestral and vocal music whose performance would have otherwise been confined to places and venues where there were orchestras and musicians able to present the music as written. Another instrument whose range and flexibility made it an admirable vehicle for transcriptions of all kind of music was the guitar - one that Liszt unfortunately never turned his hand to - and during the nineteenth century people such as Anton Diabelli, the Bohemian virtuoso Johann Casper Mertz, and the Spaniard...  Read More »

These three players have been tantalizing us with Strauss’s youthful, highly coloured violin sonata, with performances of just the first two movements (at Paekakariki) and of the Improvisation movement alone (at the Friends of the NZSO concert a week earlier); I'd heard both. Here at last we heard the whole thing, though it was not without its curiosity even here. As the players prepared to start the second movement (Improvisation), Cristina dashed off to get her mute; she then played her first two notes – alone; Catherine got up from the piano and went out and when she didn’t come...  Read More »

I found myself unusually intrigued by the last concert of Musica Sacra’s 2009 series, dwelling on the music of the Civil War period in England in the mid-17th century; for interest in English music has tended to wane with the death of the composers who were active in Elizabeth’s and James I’s reigns, such as Orlando Gibbons, Peter Philips, Thomas Campion, John Dowland…    Though this concert included music from both before and after those 20 years of strife and the subsequent Commonwealth – the 1640s and 50s (Richard Dering was dead by 1630 and Matthew Locke was born in 1630...  Read More »

This programme of string quartets by New Zealand composers is being recorded by Atoll Records, the enterprise serving as a well-deserved tribute to not only the composers but also the New Zealand String Quartet for their advocacy of home-grown music over the years. And although a number of these works have been recorded before by the same ensemble, it's a splendid idea to bring together the group's updated "take" on pieces that have either already are or else show signs of becoming classic genre works in the ever-burgeoning stockpile of New Zealand compositions. Pieces like John Psathas's Abhisheka have already...  Read More »