• 26 February 8pm: Mahler Symphony No. 8. Will be awesome. There is a free live broadcast in Civic Square, tickets for the real thing range from $46 to $176. I suspect that the $46 tickets will be really, really bad, probably a worse option than the broadcast, but probably that’s where I’ll end up.
• 5 March 8pm: Simon O’Neill sings a selection of Wagner. The Festival describes this as a “banquet of delights for opera-lovers”, but on the whole I’d rather have an actual opera, or at least a proper orchestral concert featuring contemporary music. In any case, didn’t essentially the same concert happen in Wellington fairly recently? Thanks are due to everybody who didn’t turn up at Resonances at the last festival – you’re the reason we can’t have nice things. $40-$125. Don’t throw your money away.
• 6-7 March between events: Breath of Wind, featuring the Levin Brass Band. I’ve no idea what this will actually sound/look like, but it’s free!
• 6 March 12pm: organ recital by John Wells. Free!
• 6 March 2pm: Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet. Or, at least, a film of it, rather than the actual thing. Free.
• 6 March 4pm: the NZTrio perform a variety of movements from various string trios. The highlight will probably be a new work by David Downes, if only for the fact that it won’t have its integrity compromised by the Greatest Hits concept. Why is this happening at 4pm? $45 (one class of seating).
• 6 March 7.30pm: The Borodin Quartet play string quartets by Borodin, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky. Not an astonishingly exciting programme, but it has Shostakovich 8th and there will supposedly be $15 student rush tickets available.
• 7 March 12pm: organ recital by Douglas Mews. Free!
• 7 March 2pm: a (mostly) children’s concert of music inspired by Tolkein and Dahl with the Zephyr Wind Quintet. Tickets are $36, kids $18.
• 7 March 4pm: the NZSQ perform Schubert, Alban Berg, Ross Harris and Beethoven (with Jenny Wollerman). The Alban Berg String Quartet really turned me on to 20th century music. It’s an absolute masterpiece, and definitely worth hearing. The Ross Harris should be interesting as well, although the Schubert is rather dull. $45 (one class of seating).
• 7 March 7.30pm: Keith Lewis in recital accompanied by Michael Houstoun. This is a total waste of Houstoun and of the festival’s money – a professional accompanist would do an equally good job. On the programme are Purcell, Britten, Barber and the inestimable Jenny McLeod. Probably the best programme on offer at the festival. $58 B reserve, $68 A reserve.
• 12 March 8pm: Ravi Shankar is 90 years old. This is the probably the last chance to see him play (I hope so, he certainly deserves a rest at that age) – and he certainly is a great musician – but there is quite a possibility that – as with Pavarotti’s tour a couple of years ago, he’s simply past it. Tickets range from $73 to $120.
• 17 March 7.30pm: The Freiburg Baroque orchestra performs Haydn and Mozart. Although the festival claims they are interpreters of “Classical Romantic and even contemporary music”, their two programmes belie this. It would be a fair bet that these two concerts will sound exactly the same, but if you must go to one, make it this first one, featuring the fourth Mozart Horn Concerto. $46-$98. You’ll need to spend $88 to be in a half-reasonable position.
• 18 March 7.30pm: The FBO snore their way through their second concert of Haydn and Mozart. $46-$98

The world will never, unfortunately, receive a full performance of Stockhausen’s Klang; Stockhausen had completed 21 of the 24 component works when he died in 2007; Havona one of the last of these, and did not receive a performance until the beginning of the year. Nicholas Isherwood is well-known for his championing of both early and contemporary vocal music,, and performed the role of Lucifer in several of the operas from the Licht cycle. Klang is the thematic heir of Licht, both in its concern for providing music for the hours (as opposed to Licht’s days) and in drawing inspiration from the Urantia Book. According to Urantian cosmology, Havona is the last galaxy before Paradise, consisting of a billion planets. Stockhausen’s text takes the form of a ritual chant depicting the journey to Paradise, in the process also referring to other elements of Urantian theology, such as humans “black, white, green, yellow, red, brown and blue”, which Isherwood described in his pre-concert talk as a joke, but which is, in fact, key to a Urantian conception of evolution.

Havona is constructed from two elements; one is a double tone-row, the other is the lower elements of the electronic work Cosmic Pulses, also an hour of Klang, which forms  a backing track. Havona is split into 24 one minute sections, each of which has a section of music attached to it. The music for each section may be sung freely, the performer judges the lengths of notes and rests, as well as timbre and dynamics, although this must necessarily fit into the framework of Cosmic Pulses. Isherwood appeared to be concentrating largely upon the strength of his performance, singing with unwavering conviction. Combined with the costume of a white robe and orange scarf, this was an imposing performance.

If Stockhausen is always fascinating, Christian Wolz was certainly an unknown quantity. Wolz also used electronics in his performance – a largely understated backing track and electronic echoes, shifting quickly between his two microphones to produce slightly different sounds. Wolz’s oeuvre is semi-improvisational, using unfamiliar timbres. In particular, he has an interest in Middle Eastern singing and other unusual vibrato techniques, which he employed throughout Atropa-Bella-Donna. He describes the work as ‘”an acoustic performance in 3 stages”, but these are really undetectable, for in fact  it has far more divisions than this, switching to a different technique every minute and a half or so, an irritating feature which prevents the work from evolving beyond a too-long (50 minutes!) showcase of Wolz’s abilities. After half an hour, I was frustrated and exhausted. The other twenty minutes were fairly torturous. (To be fair, I was fairly tired beforehand; it would probably have been easier in a better state of mind, but this problem certainly didn’t exist for the Stockhausen – twenty four minutes felt like ten)