• 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

I’m actually quite flabbergasted by the dullness of the NZSO’s subscription programme for next year. There is very little New Zealand music on display – and less that I really want to hear. Of course, if you’re the kind of person looking out exclusively for repertoire symphonies, then you’re in luck,, but there’s precious little contemporary music on display, and it’s hardly flatteringly programmed. Many of the ‘stars’ who would previously have played/conducted two concerts are next year only doing one.

1. Smetana: Sharka; Sibelius: Violin Concerto; Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 “Pathetique”.

Why would anybody bother to show up? Really? The NZSO plays the -brilliant- Sibelius concerto nearly every year; the Tchaikovsky is stupefyingly dull. The purpose of this concert is to show off the ‘glamourous’ Hillary Hahn, who will doubtless get some kind of turgid writeup beforehand in the Dominion Post. Tellingly, the programme doesn’t even mention the Ma Vlast excerpt, the only creative moment in this programme – and in terms of programming Smetana, ‘creative’ means ‘not Die Moldau’. Inkinen conducts.

2. Strauss: Metamorphosen; Bruckner: Symphony No. 7.

Alright, I’ll admit it. I would dearly love to go and see the Strauss, but there’s a problem. There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Bruckner is far and away the worst symphonic composer to be spat into this world, and Symphony No. 7 just loses out to No. 4 in being the most terrifyingly bad symphony ever written. Inkinen conducts.

3. Ritchie: French Overture; Gounod: “Ah, Je ris de me voir”; Bellini: “Costa Diva”; Puccini: “Un bel di vedremo”, “Vissi d’arte”, “O mio babbino caro”; Elgar: Symphony No. 1.

Yes. That’s right. An Elgar symphony alongside a bunch of populist ‘high’ opera. I’m sure that Malvina Major will sing perfectly finely, even with such familiar material to work with, but I’m just not sure what exactly there is that’s really worth hearing. Tecwyn Evans conducts.

4. Mozart: Symphony No. 41; Strauss: Overture from Die Fledermaus; Lehar: “Meine Lippen, sie kuessen so heiss”, “Liebe, du Himmel auf Erden”, “Vilja”; Dvorak: Czech Suite Finale; Rusalka: Song to the Moon; Strauss: Thunder and Lightning Polka.

While the first of these Malvina Major concerts is designed to show her off as a dramatic soprano, this takes the other tack, delving through the murky legacy of singspiel to produce a concert that Hitler would really have loved. There is precious little music in this concert of any originality, although I would be somewhat curious to hear the Rusalka in any other context. Tecwyn Evans conducts.

5. Glinka: Overture from Ruslan and Ludmilla; Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 3; Glazunov: The Seasons.

The first subscription concert I’d seriously consider paying to hear features an all-Russian line-up thankfully missing Tchaikovsky. Well, not really, because Glazunov was Tchaikovsky in a frock, but the Rachmaninov, played by Freddy Kempf, might just make up for it. Oh, and Alexander Lazarev, who last time I saw him was nigh on falling off the podium in excitement.

6. Dvorak: The Noon Witch; Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1; Prokofiev Symphony No. 7.

Ahhhh… Prokofiev, and some unfamiliar Dvorak. This will be a good concert, despite the Tchaikovsky, and would be pretty much perfect for Lazarev with some Shostakovich in there also. Alas,, ’tis not to be.

Soloist: Ben Morrison (violin); Conductor: Ken Young

This New Zealand School of Music concert at St Andrews on the Terrace opened with a piece by NZSM graduate student Simon Dickson, written for the Jenny McLeod Composition Award (or something along those lines). With this work, Dickson aimed to capture two of his compositional styles – that with which he wrote earlier in his studies at the NZSM, and that with which he writes today. Although conceptually interesting, this does rather run the risk of disguising the composer’s talents, by forcing him to write using an abandoned – and presumably, to the composer’s mind, inferior – style, to say nothing of the difficulties in marrying the two styles.

As it happened, Dickson did largely succeed in creating a largely unified work. While the structural joints were audible, the atmospheres of the sections were quite similar. The functional atonality of the opening and closing sections was vaguely disquieting but unchallenging, perhaps because there were few individual lines to follow. Here and there were some deft touches, particularly with what was probably intended to be the piece’s climax, where after an initial violent surge the orchestral bass dropped out, leaving exposed notes hanging in the air, as well as Dickson’s reveal toward the end of some of thhe inner workings of the piece, putting the pedal instruments on display. Unfortunately, as usual with such young composers’ orchestral awards, the work really could have done with a much larger span of time to justify the structural decisions made. maybe someday music administrators will work out that student composers’ work is more important than the repertoire works on the programme. Obviously, this wasn’t Shostakovich 1 – but if it had been, nobody would have known.

Ben Morrison, concert-master of the NZSO NYO, is an extremely accomplished violinist, and the Tchaikovsky concerto is certainly one of the most important Romantic violin concertos, so it was no surprise that this performance was, overall, a success. The NZSM orchestra’s playing felt a little stodgy in the opening, but rapidly improved, as they traversed the tutti sections with admirable energy. Morrison’s playing was refined and strong throughout, and there was a remarkable sense of cohesion between orchestra and soloist, during the first movement’s oscillations in and out of quasi-cadenza passages. The chief fault of the work itself lies in these sections, which give the first movement a sense of completion on its own merits, which disrupts the balance of the work as a whole, but this was handled convincingly enough.

The Vaughan Williams, which was on the whole played spectacularly well, is a curious artefact. It seems perverse that such a work, blatantly a ‘war symphony’ of the most brutal variety, could get a free pass from the same English critics who savaged the war symphonies of Shostakovich – and how foolish they look now, with the vast depths of expression and meaning of those works exposed alongside their blatant musical genius! Vaughan Williams’ Sixth is a splendidly constructed work – if only in its central movements. The first movement strives toward violence and spontaneity, but really only succeeds in incoherence, with the relationships between the varied ideas never being satisfyingly explored. While the movement has energy in spades, much of it is wasted.

The next movements share the same violent approach as the first, but are much more directed. The second movement is particularly notable for its climax, in which, after brutally working its way to a sustained level of raw power, there is a sudden drop in dynamic that leaves energy humming through the air. The final movement is in complete contrast to the rest of the work, especially the first movement. It uses a single, gentle theme throughout, at an unflinchingly soft dynamic, obviously – though Mr. Vaughan Williams apparently enjoyed denying this – intending to cause audiences to reflect upon the destructiveness of war. Unfortunately, the soft dynamic leaves very little space for actual expression – or at least this was how the orchestra performed it – so it served largely to leave phrases unshaped.