Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

Bela Bartok: 44 Duos (excerpts) Katherine Hoover: Kokopeli Tigran Mansurjan: Lachrymae Ludwig van Beethoven: Serenade for Flute, Violin and Viola Karen Batten (flutes), Martin Jaenecke (violin, soprano saxophone) and Victoria Jaenecke, (viola) at the Adam Concert Room The Elios Ensemble’s Friday Lunchtime concert at the NZSM provided a delightful mix of sounds, in terms of [...]

The now-elderly German composer Hans Werner Henze is, somewhat inexplicably and distressingly, not a name regularly heard in New Zealand. Henze is the composer of a number of quite-popular (at least amongst those with slight modernist tendencies) symphonies and several opera, alongside a range of other assorted works. Generally speaking, Henze’s symphonies take one of [...]

So I think I’ve definitely got my favourite method of playing harp harmonics now. I’m sure I can’t be the only person using these, but they don’t seem to be a "conventional" part of the harping technique. The problem: dull, stale harmonic onsets The solution: press the string with the fleshy part of the left-hand [...]

NBR New Zealand Opera at the St. James Theatre, 16 March (further performances 18 and 19 March) There are any number of reasons for people to go see Handel’s Xerxes before its Wellington run finishes. For a start, there’s Xerxes himself, sung breathtakingly well by countertenor Tobias Cole. In the more familiar Classical and Romantic [...]

SMP Ensemble at the Adam Concert Room, Friday 11 March Chris Watson:  about nothing… really Chris Gendall: Eigene Gestalt Rachael Morgan: Unfold Dylan Lardelli: Music Box No. 2 Salvatore Sciarrino: Esplorazione del blanco II Samuel Holloway: Sillage The second of the SMP Ensemble’s Interiors series featured a programme almost exclusively by some of New Zealand’s [...]