Experience Fireworks and Fantasy with the NZSO

24 September 2013

Experience Fireworks and Fantasy with the NZSO

This November, experience an explosive evening of fireworks and fantasy in concert venues across the country with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

In this exhilarating performance, brimming with brilliant sound and orchestral colour, the NZSO performs the stunning Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz. Symphonie Fantastique is a descriptive work of passion, obsession, and violence. Berlioz’s programme notes tell the story: An artist is hopelessly in love. Believing his love unrequited, the artist poisons himself with opium and in despair sinks into a world of dark, fantastical dreams. The fourth and fifth movements depict a march to the scaffold (the artist imagines he has killed his beloved and must die) and then a weird and wonderful witches’ Sabbath at the artist’s own funeral. Listen for the exuberance of passion and the thud of the guillotine as Berlioz experiments and pushes the orchestra’s size, sound, and instruments to their absolute limits in this melodramatic work of love and fantasy.

The vibrant, talented Joana Carneiro will conduct Fireworks & Fantasy, our much-anticipated tour. Carneiro debuted in New Zealand almost two years ago, leading the NZSO in a stunning, sell-out performance of Stravinsky’s opera Oedipus Rex on opening night of the 2012 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts. Carneiro continues to captivate audiences and delight critics, and we warmly welcome her back.

Also taking the stage is another gifted international guest artist, Bulgarian pianist Plamena Mangova. Performing Tchaikovsky’s brilliant Piano Concerto No.1 – described as ‘unplayable’ by its first hearers – with fire and passion, Mangova will prove why she is a sought-after artist with orchestras around the world.

Music fans around the world are celebrating the centenary of the birth of pre-eminent composer Benjamin Britten this year, and the NZSO are no different. A central figure of 20th-century classical music, in this tour we acknowledge his wonderful contribution with A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Used prominently in the recent indie hit film Moonrise Kingdom, Director Wes Anderson said this piece “became the musical backbone to our story”. This illuminating work opens with a spectacular theme, goes on to showcase all the different parts of the orchestra in a series of variations, and eventually wraps the theme back up in fugue form to conclude with a tense, truly exciting display of orchestral inventiveness.

Experience this spectacular display of musical power and imagination!

Beginning in Hamilton, the Fireworks & Fantasy tour travels to Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, and Christchurch.

NZSO Fireworks & Fantasy

JOANA CARNEIRO Conductor
PLAMENA MANGOVA Piano

BRITTEN A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
TCHAIKOVSKY Piano Concerto No.1
BERLIOZ Symphonie Fantastique

HAMILTON / Founders Theatre / Thursday 7 November / 7:30 pm
TICKETEK / 0800 842 538 / TICKETEK.CO.NZ

AUCKLAND / Town Hall / Friday 8 November / 7:00 pm
THE EDGE / 0800 289 824/ THE-EDGE.CO.NZ

WELLINGTON / Michael Fowler Centre / Saturday 9 November / 7:30 pm
TICKETEK / 0800 842 538 / TICKETEK.CO.NZ

DUNEDIN / Town Hall / Tuesday 12 November / 6:30 pm
TICKETDIRECT / 0800 484 2538 / TICKETDIRECT.CO.NZ

CHRISTCHURCH / CBS Canterbury Arena / Wednesday 13 November / 7.00 pm
TICKETEK / 0800 842 538 / TICKETEK.CO.NZ

www.nzso.co.nz

ENDS

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