Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

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 [...]

My review of the recent Gloria Coates album on Classicsonline was chosen as one of the “best customer reviews”. Which is nice, given that I only talked  about one of the works on the album (the Lyric Suite). This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the other works, merely that I find the Lyric [...]

NZSO with Collin Currie (percussion), conducted by Alexander Shelley at the Michael Fowler Centre Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring Suite Jennifer Higdon: Percussion Concerto Lyell Cresswell: Landscapes of the Soul Ludwig van Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 “Pastoral” First of all, I have not yet forgotten about the NYO. At some point I’ll hopefully write something about [...]

Schumann: Piano Concerto in A Minor Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 “The Year 1905” New Zealand School of Music Orchestra at St. Andrew’s on the Terrace conducted by Ken Young with Diedre Irons, piano There are two other concerts I had planned on writing about before getting to this one – but that was before actually [...]