This concert was advertised as part of St Paul’s Lutheran Church’s regular concerts, many of them associated with the church’s normal vespers services, when Bach cantatas, eventually all of them, are performed. But this was different. Peter Walls (in other lives, Professor of Music at Victoria University and now CEO of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) had talked during the week on RNZ Concert’s Upbeat, and in his introduction to the concert, about its nature and aim, offering interesting bits of scholarship about violin practice as well as about the byways of music in 18th century Britain. The great Italian violinist and composer,...  Read More »

No work has inspired more disagreements among both scholars and musicians regarding both its history and performance practice than Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610. The British musicologist Denis Arnold once wrote about the work, "To perform it is to court disaster. To write about it is to alienate some of one's best friends". Happily for Wellington audiences, no such strictures seemed to hang over the head of Musica Sacra concert series director Robert Oliver, who organised and directed two performances of the work in the splendidly atmospheric precincts of St Mary of the Angels Church, marking the 400th anniversary of the...  Read More »

Geoffrey de Lautour: opera singer, teacher of music in schools, private singing teacher, raconteur, was remembered, ten years after his death. Fellow Dunedin-born singer Roger Wilson introduced the concert with a brief biography of de Lautour. The latter’s involvement in opera in New Zealand, following a career in Britain, has been outlined in his autobiography. Wilson emphasised the hands-on work of the old New Zealand Opera Company, where everyone multi-tasked: driving, loading and unloading sets, singing, overcoming emergencies etc. He saw the concert, involving nine young singers, as celebrating both de Lautour’s career, and his teaching at the former Hutt...  Read More »

Over recent weeks Felicity Smith has demonstrated her expertise in several periods of music, in a lunch-hour concert in Lower Hutt and at the Concours de Chanson French-language song competition.  Her clear, flexible voice suited the baroque repertoire particularly well. Accompaniment for the items in the first half was provided by a chamber organ, which made scrumptious sounds under the expert hands of Richard Apperley.  His playing was sublime, and musically supportive. The opening hymn by Purcell, Lord, what is man? was quite lovely, and gave the audience a taste of what would be a treat throughout the concert: the splendid acoustics...  Read More »

Brigitte Heuser arrived on the platform looking elegant and beautiful.  She began her programme with Mahler’s Lieder eine fahrenden gesellen.  These lovely and varied songs were sung very well; the fourth, ‘Die zwei blauen Augen’ particularly, was given a heartfelt rendition.  There was not, perhaps, sufficient variety of tone in the other songs.  One certainly misses the variety and subtlety of the orchestra, but Catherine Norton accompanied superbly. It would have been good to have had printed translations of the songs; we are not all skilled in the German language as is Brigitte.  There is so much in the poems that...  Read More »