Allegro Largo Scherzo Finale

Sergei Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 4 Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 “Leningrad” Michael Houstoun (piano) and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Vasily Petrenko at the Michael Fowler Centre My first encounter with Shostakovich’s 7th symphony came with a book about 20th century symphonies which I inherited from my mother. Although not all 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 [...]

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 [...]

I managed to mix up the programmes for the final NZSO tour, which meant that I missed the concert with the premiere of Leif Segerstam’s Symphony No. 191 Presumably it will turn up on RNZ Concert sometime, but right now I can only comment on the attention that the concert has received in the Dominion [...]