We were, I think, all imbued with gladness at Wellington’s Cathedral of St.Paul on Saturday evening at the splendours of the music-making by the Orpheus Choir in partnership with the instrumentalists throughout most of the concert and with the vocal soloists in the concluding  Szymanowski work, the whole directed to lustrous effect by conductor Brent Stewart. It was an occasion whose intensities and excitements seemed, throughout the evening, to escalate... read more

For as long as I can remember, Wellington Chamber Orchestra has been a player-run orchestra which engages conductors by the concert.  This, I suppose, has some advantages. It gives the orchestra maximum freedom and minimum financial commitments. But it also tries to provide solo opportunities for young musicians, and given the inevitable coming and going of people from one concert to the next, the result must be a certain... read more

It was a drear Wellington night. A cold drizzle was falling. I expected to see a tiny dedicated audience huddling in the cavernous cathedral. I was wrong. The church was a good two-thirds full, and the enthusiastic audience seemed pretty familiar with Supertonic. The choir was founded in 2014, and by my estimation is one of the youngest choirs in Wellington, as well as one of the larger choirs, with... read more

Encountering a work in concert every now and then that has somehow “slipped through the net” of my musical experience sometimes results in a bit of a “juggle” of contrasting feelings, and especially when one is a reviewer – I get enormous pleasure in the discovery of something new, but also feel a degree of guilt at not having come across the “something” earlier, and especially if it’s a... read more

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Orchestra Reuben Brown (conductor – “Haffner” Symphony) Cantoris Choir Georgia Jamieson Emms, Michaela Cadwgan (sopranos) Jamie Young (tenor), William King (bass) Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Orchestra Thomas Nikora (Music Director, Cantoris Choir – “The Great” Mass) St.Peter’s-on-Willis, Wellington

Saturday, 24^th April, 2021

“The devil take organisations that programme concerts for Saturday nights” I muttered repeatedly to myself, driving around Wellington’s busy streets, and looking for a car-park with... read more

I had momentarily forgotten that my Middle C colleague of the time, Lindis Taylor, had reviewed a performance of this work in Paraparaumu as recently as 2018, a circumstance which effectively stymied any thoughts I might have had of extravagantly proclaiming it a “neglected masterpiece”! However, as I didn’t attend this earlier performance and thus came new to the work as a “live” experience on Saturday at Queen Margaret... read more

As it has happened the three concerts I have reviewed so far this year have taken place in various splendid Wellington churches, each contributing to the atmosphere, ambience and impact of the music and its making, spectacularly so in the case of the third occasion at St Mary of the Angels Church in Boulcott St., where a programme entitled “Gloria” was given by the Nota Bene Choir with the... read more

I can’t remember a Wellington audience leaping to its collective feet at the conclusion of a recent “Messiah” with quite such unbridled enthusiasm as we all found ourselves doing this evening, caught up in what suddenly felt like, from where I had been sitting, a near-tsunami of acclamation for the musicians and the music at the end of the performance’s final “Amen” chorus.  Certainly, our sensibilities had been “stoked”... read more

The introduction to the programme by the chairperson of the Choir, Frances Manwaring, remarks that this was the choir’s first ‘self-presented’ concert in 2020 – the only other public appearance was with Orchestra Wellington’s 3 October concert in Rachmaninov’s The Bells and Fauré’s Requiem. And I might as well use her background notes to refer to the task of preparing for the concert under review. “Thanks to the tech-savvyness and... read more

Under the circumstances of Covid-19 and its world-wide strictures, I’m truly grateful, along with so many others, to be living in a place where activities such as concerts of the quality of that which I attended in the Michael Fowler Centre on Saturday evening could even happen, let alone be enjoyed so freely and readily. Given in the same week as the NZSO’s inspiring “Eroica” concert conducted by Miguel... read more