NZSO July Newsletter

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Music

In the build up to the European Tour, the NZSO is performing Sibelius' Symphony No 2 in our July subscription concerts - a work that they will perform at the BBC Proms on 18 August and the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam on 19 August 2005. Listen to this musical excerpt and hear it Live in Auckland on Friday 29th July and Wellington on Friday 5 August.

Sibelius Symphony No 2

Issue 7 - July - 2005

WHAT'S IN THIS ISSUE

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra enters July welcoming back NZSO Music Director, James Judd for his final 2005 tour in New Zealand and with it, YOUR last chance to see the orchestra before they set off on their tour to Europe and Japan. We are offering our E-club members a special discount offer for these July concerts. Also in this newsletter; find out about upcoming July soloist Diana Doherty, read about composer Tan Dun's connections with New Zealand and meet the NZSO Hamilton and Christchurch reps; Lorraine Sutherland and Christine Hainstock.

Events

Elgar- The Lion of British Music
Heard enough about the Lions Tour? Then come to a special Composer Focus concert commemorating the music of Edward Elgar who remains one of the most celebrated of British composers. Conducted by Music Director James Judd, the NZSO will perform some of the most recognizable music by this popular composer, including the beautiful Sea Pictures featuring Helen Medlyn, and the memorable Enigma Variations.

Earth, Wind and Fire - the music of Tan Dun and Mahler
The NZSO is offering all E-club members a special one-off 15% discount for these concerts.

A highlight of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Season 2005 will be performances of Oscar winning composer, Tan Dun's primal Death & Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee, this is contrasted by the exquisiteness of Mahler's insightful Das Lied von der Erde featuring New Zealand singers, Mezzo-soprano Helen Medlyn and tenor Keith Lewis and conducted by NZSO Music Director James Judd.

STOP PRESS - European Tour
Concert FM has announced that they will be recording the orchestra's Snape Proms and BBC Proms concerts for later broadcast.

NZSO National Youth Orchestra
The count down to the National Youth Orchestra ten days of rehearsals and concerts begins, the final orchestra list is being collated and we can exclusively announce to you that the Co-Concertmasters this year are; Malavika Gopal, 21 from Wellington and Alwyn Westbrooke, 22 from Christchurch who will lead the orchestra in concerts in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland on 23rd, 25th and 27th August respectively.

Feature

Tan Dun - Death & Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee (1992) As part of the July Subscription Series, the NZSO will perform Tan Dun's primal Death & Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee . Composer Tan Dun came to international recognition when he won an Oscar for the music of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but in his home country of China he had already achieved celebrity status through a history of awards and controversy. Follow this link to find out about his ties to New Zealand.

Competitions and Special Offers

We have 5 copies of Nathan Haines new Lifetime CD with the NZSO to give away to E-Club members.

Royal New Zealand Ballet -Dracula
SPECIAL 15 % OFFER for DRACULA
Drac is back! Count Dracula returns to stake his claim on New Zealand audiences with this hugely popular retelling of Bram Stoker's horror classic.

Attend the Royal New Zealand Ballet's Meridian Season of Dracula at a special 15% discount for NZSO E-Club members!

Telecom 37th Auckland International Film Festival
July 8 - 24
Perennially famous but rarely seen these days, Battleship Potemkin has consistently ranked amongst the greatest films of all time. Not bad for the 80-year-old tour de force of Soviet propaganda. Commissioned to arouse revolutionary ardour, the film glorifies those who died when a 1905 mutiny onboard the Potemkin was brutally quashed by the Czarist navy.

Latest CD Release

NAXOS Yasushi AKUTAGAWA Ellora Symphony, Trinita Sinfonica and Rapsodia

Soloist Profile

Brisbane born, Diana Doherty is aclaimed for her recitals and performances all over Europe. Currently Principal Oboe of the Sydney Symphony. Diana will be performing the Strauss Oboe Concerto with the NZSO in July. Click here to read about various aspects of her life as an orchestral musician and soloist, including her most terrifying moment on stage.

Sponsor Spotlight

Metro Magazine

Metro Magazine is proud to sponsor the NZSO's second violin section and is delighted to make the following special offer to all NZSO supporters

General

The NZSO's Marketing team, including Client Services, is based at Head Office in Wellington - however it is always important to have people on the ground in the regions that we visit often who have local knowledge of music and other entertainment events, and who are accessible to local people who are interested in NZSO activities. In Hamilton and Christchurch our representatives are Lorraine Sutherland and Christine Hainstock. To find out more about Lorraine and Christine and how to contact them about our concerts in these regions...

Events

Earth, Wind and Fire - the music of Tan Dun and Mahler

To take advantage of this fantastic 15% discount offer, please mention the ‘Tan Dun' discount when booking tickets for these concerts at your local ticketek outlet. This concert is being performed in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch

Programme
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Thursday 21 July at 8:00pm TOWN HALL CHRISTCHURCH
Saturday 23 July at 8:00pm MICHAEL FOWLER CENTRE WELLINGTON
Thursday 28 July at 8:00pm FOUNDERS THEATRE HAMILTON
Saturday 30 July at 8:00pm TOWN HALL AUCKLAND

Mahler's beautiful Late Romantic song/symphony, based on settings of six Chinese poems, expresses the poignancy of life's brevity but also man's joy in earth's beauty and spring's return. In contrast is the mesmerising sound palette of Tan Dun, acclaimed composer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Scored for large orchestra, Death and Fire is based on the paintings of Paul Klee and is a major highlight in the year's programme

James Judd - Conductor
Helen Medlyn - Mezzo soprano
Keith Lewis - Tenor

Tan Dun: Death and Fire - Dialogue with Paul Klee
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde

STOP PRESS - European Tour

Concert FM will broadcast the Snape Proms concert in New Zealand on 22nd August and the BBC Proms concert will be broadcast on 29th August. Charlotte Wilson, Upbeat presenter (12-2pm weekdays) will also be talking to Bridget Douglas, NZSO Principal Flute, while she is on the European Tour around her experiences of the UK and Amsterdam.

Feature

Tan Dun - Death & Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee (1992)
By Joy Aberdein

"…We might have had to wait until the final night but those present will surely remember the 2004 New Zealand International Arts Festival for this extraordinary concert… The sounds [Tan Dun] creates are astonishing in their freshness, the effect he achieves from common place sources are challenging and revealing.

The Water Concerto revealed wit and an astonishing variety from the ways water sounds - amplified - can work within a formal framework . . . The Map was a homage to Tan Dun's musical beginnings, seen and amplified by his sophisticated understanding of Chinese and Western musical forms and tradition. Yet what could have been trite and uncomfortable was here beautifully in harmony.” The Dominion Post, 22 March 2004.

The Chinese composer Tan Dun swept into public consciousness when he won an Oscar for his score to Ang Lee's movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But this conceptual and multifaceted composer had already made his mark on the world's music scene as a composer who has found his own voice and language, bringing together Eastern, Western, classical and multimedia elements with maximum impact, and for the delight of audiences. He was the youngest winner of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for his opera Marco Polo, and has been Musical America's ‘Composer of the Year'.

Born in the province of Hunan in 1957, Tan Dun belongs to the generation who grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Wellington composer Jack Body knows him well. "I discovered him before I discovered his music,” he says. "I went to China in the late 80s and met some Chinese composers. At that time I was reducing my teaching [at Victoria University's School of Music], which allowed us to invite a guest composer to Victoria. I met Tan Dun in New York where he was studying at Columbia University. He played me some of his music, we got on very well and I was able to invite him to New Zealand as our first Composer-in-Residence. He was, at that stage, still a student in a sense, so I discovered him before anybody else,” smiles Jack.

"He has an immense talent, an immense facility. Even his name helps - it rolls off the tongue. Also he was fortunate that during the late 80s and early 90s there was an opening up of China and the discovery by the West of Chinese talent. Their composers were much in fashion. They were very original, very strong. I think one would say it's a very spectacular school and Tan Dun was the leader of that group. He is immensely charming,” Jack says. "He has charisma, charm and charisma. Not the charisma that stops people dead - his has a charisma that is seductive. It's not authoritarian.”

Early on, Tan Dun established some striking fingerprints in his music, easily identifiable, and these can be connected with Chinese folk music traditions. "Not the usual associations one might have with Chinese music,” Jack says. "These grew out of his experiences during the Cultural Revolution when he and the composers of his generation went into the countryside and heard genuine folk traditions.”

Jack refers back to the early 90s. "It's very interesting, very attractive but also very witty, when Tan Dun was exploring things, rather like a child in a toyshop, but drawing out of them something very personal and unique. It's those works which impressed the musical world. More recent works are perhaps more populist - that's the pressure of having so many commissions and also his experience as a conductor, as a performer and wanting to make maximum impact. He wants to touch as many people as possible.”

The NZSO, conducted by Music Director James Judd, will perform a Tan Dun work from the early 90s this July. Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee (1992) is scored for a large orchestra. The last word is Jack Body's: "It's full of fantastic aural imagination and shows Tan Dun to be witty and with a marvellous sense of humour. The music is concise, it never outstays is welcome.”
This article first appeared in Notes, issue No 9 March 2005

Competitions and Special Offers

CD Competition - Nathan Haines - Lifetime

We have 5 copies of Nathan Haines new Lifetime CD with the NZSO* to give away to E-Club members.

To go in the draw click here to e-mail your answer to the following question with your address and telephone number.

Question: When and as part of what series did Nathan Haines record this CD?

Following on from the BMW Finale Series in December 2004 with Nathan Haines, Festival Mushroom Records has released a new album: Nathan Haines ‘Lifetime' featuring tracks like The Look of Life, Its Raining Today, and Joel Haines' Live at Wembley recorded while Nathan Haines, his quintet and the NZSO were performing together last December.

To read more about the NZSO's latest CD of music by Yasushi Akutagawa see the Latest CD Release section below.

The winners of last months Elgar CD giveaways were:
•
Jill and Ross Forbes Keri Keri
•
Brenda Wilson Hawke's Bay

Congratulations!

Royal New Zealand Ballet - Dracula

The offer is valid for 15% off Adult ticket prices on off-peak performances (excluding premium and inner circle seating) for up to four tickets per booking. Book tickets at the venue or contact Ticketek by phone and mention the "Fangs” discount.

Dracula is touring to Wellington, Christchurch, Invercargill, Hastings, Auckland and Palmerston North 15th July to 28th August. Visit www.nzballet.org.nz for more information.

Telecom 37th Auckland International Film Festival

Ironically it was in Germany, not the USSR, that Battleship Potemkin became an enormous hit. In 1925 the German distributor commissioned the Austrian-born Edmund Meisel to write a score for theatre orchestra. By the time Eisenstein turned up in Berlin, Meisel had reached the last reel, in which the battleship, with the mutinous sailors on board, goes out to confront the navy, tension mounting as the ships approach one another.

Eisenstein's advice to the composer was "the music for this reel should be rhythm, rhythm and, before all else, rhythm.” Long considered lost, Meisel's brilliant, pulsating score has been rediscovered and restored by German composer/conductor Helmut Imig. Its premiere at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival in February was a sensation.

We're delighted that Helmut Imig has accepted our invitation to conduct the Auckland Philharmonia in the first performance outside Europe of this astounding score. In a Live Cinema presentation of a handsome new print from the Bundes film archive in Berlin, restored to its fullest known length with the assistance of the British Film Institute, it becomes clear why the movie has so often been considered dangerous.

It's been banned at various times in the United States, France and the UK and in the Soviet Union too when mutiny was no longer considered glorious. There are those who believe the Film Society movement sprang into existence simply to disseminate this suppressed film..

BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
Russia 1925, 75 min
Director: Sergei Eisenstein

The film will screen in Auckland only.

Latest CD Release

NAXOS Yasushi AKUTAGAWA Ellora Symphony, Trinita Sinfonica and Rapsodia per Orchestra

cat:8.557273
NEW ZEALAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
TAKUO YUASA conductor

Recorded at the Lower Hutt Town Hall, Wellington, 29th - 31st January 2002

Yasushi Akutagawa was a leading figure not only in Japanese music but general culture, whose compositions embraced many genres and fields. The 1948 Trinita Sinfonica, characterized by catchy melodies and light-footed ostinatos, was composed during his ‘Sino-Soviet' period (1947 - 1957) when cultural exchanges with the USSR and China brought him into contact with the music of Shostakovich and Kabalevsky, among others.

In the 1971 Rapsodia, Akutagawa returns to his compositional starting point of ostinato, lyricism and dynamism, only occasionally using avant-garde techniques. The composer himself describes the work as music in which a witch waves a short wand, transforming a Japanese-style Adagio into a fierce Allegro.

Soloist Profile - Diana Doherty

Diana Doherty is performing as soloist for the Strauss Oboe Concerto as part of the NZSO concerts in Auckland on 29th July and Wellington on 5th August.

When did music first come into your life?

Before I can remember

What was it that made you decide to make music your life?

Playing Vaughan Williams' concerto with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra when I was 16.

If you could invite five people from any period in history to dinner, who would you choose and why?

Definitely Mozart, to see him improvise, and because I'm sure he was great at parties; Leornard Bernstein, for much the same reasons, and also because I was so sad to have missed the opportunity to ever see him live or work with him. Astor Piazzolla, to play for us, teach me to tango, to get together and improvise with the first two and finally Edina and Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, to even up the numbers and fit in with the general spirit.

What would you serve them?

I'd just fill the table with fabulous cheeses, pates, bread and Australian wine, and sit back and enjoy myself. Better have some champagne for Patsy too.

What are you enjoying listening to at the moment?

Pogorelich playing Chopin, and Miles Davies

How would you describe the experience of performing live?

Like watching a great concert but a million times better

What has been your most embarrassing moment on stage?

Once, in Switzerland, when I used to have long hair, I was playing a recital for direct national broadcast, and I took a quick breath in and breathed in some of my hair. It got straight into the reed, and no sound would come out. The problem was extreme dryness - my hair was sticking to my face because of static electricity, so any amount of pushing it away was useless. After it happened three of four times, I had broken out in such a sweat that it created enough humidity on my face to combat the problem. My hair has been getting shorter ever since.

What piece of music would you play to convince someone of the power of music?

Beethoven's Violin Concerto.

What is the most supreme musical moment you have ever experienced?

Seeing Heinz Hollinger playing the Strauss Concerto, with Mariss Jansons conducting the London Symphony.

Sponsor Spotlight

Metro magazine is a multi-award winning metropolitan monthly magazine, containing current affairs and investigative journalism, travel, urban issues, profiles, business, sport, urban living, restaurant reviews, the arts, fashion and a range of columns. Metro lavishes its attention on Auckland, with outstanding photography and graphic design and a commitment to fine writing, investigative journalism, authoritative comment and independent opinion. And while it's primarily an Auckland magazine, its range of topics has something of interest for all New Zealanders.

Metro Magazine is proud to sponsor of the NZSO 2nd Violin Section and as a special offer to NZSO supporters this month, Metro is delighted to offer a generous subscription discount -- 12 issues of Metro magazine for $5.50 an issue (a substantial saving on the normal newsstand price of $7.50).

To take up this offer, call 0800 MAGSHOP or on-line at www.magshop.co.nz and quote "D507MET NZSO special offer”.

Interested in becoming an NZSO sponsor?

If you are interested in finding out more about the NZSO's sponsorship programme and how you might become involved, please contact chrisd@nzso.co.nz

General

Lorraine Sutherland - NZSO Hamilton Representative

Lorraine has had a long association with music having learned the violin and piano from the age of seven and played in various regional New Zealand orchestras over the years.

No longer playing, her musical appreciation is nurtured through her work as Manager of the Waikato Youth Music Association Inc. where she is responsible for the daily running of the five groups which make up the association: the Youth Symphonic Band and the Symphony Orchestra, the Schools Symphonic Band and the Schools Symphony Orchestra and the Youth Choir. Lorraine is responsible for funding, organizing workshops, concerts and general day to day operations.

Lorraine is married to Richard - the Manager of Hamilton Theatre Services having met through theatre in Cambridge where Lorraine directed several shows for the Gaslight Theatre. Two beautiful daughters in their twenties complement this duo.

Lorraine is employed full time as the Academic Administrator for the Sir George Seymour College of Tourism and Travel, a somewhat different role from teaching in the primary and secondary areas of education.

Lorraine's great love is orchestral music, opera and easy listening - in fact any form of music and delights in promoting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra whenever she can.

Christine Hainstock - NZSO Christchurch Representative

Having moved to Christchurch from Invercargill last year, Christine now takes care of on the ground promotion and whatever is needed for Christchurch and south, excluding Dunedin, for the NZSO. Over the past twenty years she has helped with visits to Invercargill by encouraging full houses and welcoming the NZSO south with open arms.

Christine's love of the arts and people, makes for a full life with current involvements including Arts Canterbury, Civic Theatre $15.5 million upgrade, co-ordinating corporate entertainment for internationals visiting Queenstown, arranging schools performances for the Society for Music Education and organising the Graduation and Orientation for the Southern Institute of Technology.

Time out sees Christine driving an MG (wind in her hair and bees up her nose), gardening, entertaining or being a grandmother to her two-year old grand twins. Enjoying life and making others happy is what life is all about for Christine.

Now sixty years old, retirement is definitely not an option!

ENDS

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