Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

Keith Lewis (Tenor) and Michael Houstoun (Piano) at the Wellington Town Hall Henry Purcell: So when the glittering Queen of night; Not all my torments; Cold Song; Evening Hymn Jenny McLeod: Peaks of Cloud Benjamin Britten: On this Island Samuel Barber: Three songs from Ten Early Songs; Three songs from Collected Songs; Two songs from [...]

I haven’t exactly been thrilled with the way that the art music side of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts has been handled (which was probably fairly evident from my post about the lineup). Of course, I really have no idea about the kind of pressures involved in a running an event like this, [...]

Actually, that’s a bit harsh. After all, Nelson ostensibly has an orchestra (or did that finish up with that thieving conductor?), and yet I was still astonished early last month to discover that Winnipeg not only has an orchestra, but that orchestra is running a new music festival (which started on the 6th of this [...]

Well, my hopes/predictions really could not have been further off the mark. The elephant in the room is the absence of any opera (unless you count Simon O’Neill’s Wagner recital). There is a reasonable amount of chamber music on hand – almost all on the weekend of the 6th-7th of March’, but nothing really outside [...]

It’s now been some time since the ‘sneak preview’ for the 2010 Festival was announced, so it’s about time for speculation about what else is scheduled for next year. From a music perspective – and I really have no other perspective – the key announcement in the preview was the Mahler ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ – and I suspect [...]