You'd be hard put to devise a more celebratory conclusion to a season of orchestral concerts than this one, with both Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto and Respighi's sonic blockbuster "The Pines of Rome" in the programme. Of course, Michael Houstoun's performance of the Beethoven was the last in his presentation of the complete series of the piano concerti, giving the occasion a kind of "double-whammy" effect, and at the concert's conclusion leaving us quite exhilarated with the energy and vitality of it all. I admit to enjoying the Duke Ellington work "The River", even if it seemed to me to be...  Read More »

Cantoris concluded a rich and satisfying musical year working with current musical director Rachel Hyde by giving us a programme entitled "American Journey". All but one of the works on the programme were composed during the twentieth century, the exception being Charles Ives's setting of Tennyson's "Crossing the bar" (1891). If one was looking for some kind of unifying spirit with which to tie the constituent parts of the concert together, it would be a sense I felt of the music having in almost every case been written to reach out to ordinary people. The exception was the Samuel Barber...  Read More »

Jared Holt won the Mobil Song Quest in 2000, proceeded to the Royal College of Music in London and through the mid 2000s sang roles at Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and Opera Australia. In September/October he sang Papageno in Southern Opera’s The Magic Flute. At Canterbury University he took a law degree and has now returned to pursue that as his principal livelihood, in Wellington. Happily, he still sings, in opera and in song recital. The recital began with the pianist alone, playing Scriabin’s Second Piano Sonata, whose first movement is markedly Lisztian, of the more romantic of the Années de...  Read More »

The Friends of the NZSO exists partly to give themselves musical entertainment and background, and partly to raise money for the orchestra.  To help promote those aims around twenty NZSO players plus guest pianists and mezzo soprano Annabel Cheetham took part in a highly entertaining potpourri of mainly chamber music before a full Ilott Theatre. The concert began with Carolyn Mills on the platform, alone with her harp, to play Autumn Arabesque by her former colleague Kenneth Young, achieving music beautifully adapted to the harp; at first ethereal, later adorned with arpeggios that no harp piece could be without, moving...  Read More »

It was hard to know what to make of this programme as an assemblage of music - I thought of it as a concert of two diverse halves, the first an exploration of cool, bracing sounds and ambiences from both the planet's hemispheres, and the second an exposition of one of the greatest of all romantic symphonies. I would have preferred to have heard Leif Segerstam conduct more Scandinavian or perhaps some Russian music, following his and the orchestra's magically-wrought first-half evocations of music associated with Arctic and Antarctic regions. It's not that I wasn't interested in how he would...  Read More »