New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Anthony Legge  with Simon O'Neill (tenor) (New Zealand International Arts Festival) Michael Fowler Centre Friday 5 March 2010 It is interesting and perhaps almost a defining characteristic of New Zealand art, to devote attention to perceived weaknesses in an artist once the rest of the world has acclaimed them, and give perfunctory credit to an artist who has excited everyone else. Simon O’Neill is being subjected to this a little, though happily, he is able to ignore it in the light of the more positive appreciation from those here and overseas who focus on the...  Read More »

Family ties involving both composers and performers were brought into play through this concert - firstly, on the strictly compositional front, works by both Antonin Dvorak and his son-in-law Joseph Suk featured on the programme; while Wellingtonian composer Tabea Squire's commissioned work "The Suneater - for Recorders and Strings" received skilled and committed advocacy from musicians whose ranks included both of her parents, conductor Gregory Squire and leader of the Recorders and Early Music Union, Katrin Eickhorst-Squire. I was interested in the conductor's (and, presumably, the orchestra committee's) decision to play Tabea Squire's new work TWICE on the programme -...  Read More »

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 »

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 »

It’s 20 years since I heard Leif Segerstam conducting the NZSO, and the memory is of a highly gifted musician blessed with an eccentric’s sense of humour, enlivened with an intelligence and vivacity that sets him apart in his profession. His notes to his 191st symphony also reveal a fascination with numerology which he applies playfully to several strands of his life. Not that a whimsical delight in numbers is altogether foreign to musicians: Bach was similarly absorbed, at least according a lot of his commentators, and so was Schoenberg. Segerstam’s own notes about the symphony and certain other matters...  Read More »