Posts tagged: 2010 Arts Festival
Ravi Shankar – a living legend in Wellington
To convey something of the atmosphere and flavour of a remarkable concert at the Michael Fowler Centre, one of the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts series of concerts, I can do no better than quote the words of the musician around whom this same concert was centred: " Music can be a spiritual discipline on the path to self realisation, for we follow the traditional teaching that sound...Organics for free at the International Arts Festival in Wellington
Each one of these recitals was given for free at the Wellington Town Hall, both showing off the resplendent grandeur and variety of tones of the Town Hall's recently refurbished organ. Of the two recitals I enjoyed John Wells' as a whole better, largely because of the programming, though both his and Douglas Mews's recitals had some very fine and interesting things in them. Each featured some resplendent Bach...DIRTY BEASTS and other stories
Music, theatre and story together provided diverting entertainment for an enthusiastic audience of children of all ages at the Town Hall, with something for everybody, young and old and somewhere in between. These settings of different generations of cautionary tales for children by contemporary composers were brought to life by narrator Nigel Collins, with vivid and colourful support from some of Wellington's finest musicians, some of whom were, at...New Zealand Trio in excerpts for the Festival
(With a contribution from Peter Mechen)
The juxtaposition of single movements from orthodox piano trios and two New Zealand pieces that set music against images was an unusual idea, and one that ran a serious risk of puzzling many of the audience.
A truly festive “Symphony of a Thousand”
No, it wasn't opera, but it was in its own way as spectacular, and as an occasion did give a "festive" kind of thrill for all concerned, which was exactly what was wanted. This most flamboyant of all of Mahler's works (its nickname "Symphony of a Thousand" stemming from the first public performance in Munich in 1910, conducted by the composer, in which 858 singers and 171 instrumentalists took...‘Home’, a musical play of New Zealand and World War I
The New Zealand war, so advertised in the production’s publicity, turns out to be not the land wars of the 19th century, but World War I, specifically the Gallipoli experience to which it has become fashionable to attribute the emergence of some sort of national New Zealand soul and identity.