Section
22 reviews
(Friday 3 rd December, 2021) Michael Vinten’s intention in presenting these programmes was to draw attention to the art song as a creative form produced by New Zealand composers prior to 1950 (essentially the pre-Douglas Lilburn years for…
Camus’s novel La Peste : the production in Oran, Algeria, of Gluck’s Orphée. A metaphor for the static, morbid condition of opera … and of our civilisation?
The following is an article from the February-March issue of New Zealand Opera News The Plight and Future of RNZ Concert A report and comment on what were the proposed changes to this important Public Service Radio Broadcast Medium
Why Quebec composer Claude Vivier was ahead of his time In the absence of real concerts that Middle C can review, why not publish things of musical interest that might in small part make up for the deprivations we all suffer at present?
A massed choir and orchestra, conducted by Wellington’s Brent Stewart, have chosen RNZ Concert’s 87th birthday, Monday 24th February, to voice their support, with a performance of the classical hit Carmina Burana by Carl Orff.
Crisis in our intellectual and cultural life! We reproduce below a report on Stuff website about the unbelievably barbaric plans of Radio New Zealand to sack all RNZ Concert staff, broadcast music without presenters, either live or…
Offenbach turns 200 today, Thursday 20 June. If you look hard enough, interesting anniversaries generally show up every year. But few recent years have been as interesting as this, especially for one who ranks the two best-known, French…
Rebranding strikes academia In a radical break from the knitting pattern that Middle C usually follows, I am driven to raise my voice to protest about the planned rebranding of my alma-mater, Victoria University of Wellington, or simply…
This bit of pointless research began as an appendix to my review of Supertonic’s concert on Sunday 20 May in the Pipitea Marae. It was prompted in that review by the death in 1918 of Lili Boulanger, one of whose songs was performed there.
Sunday 4 May, 2014 On Sunday friends of the piano were invited to see and hear the new Steinway that had been bought for the Lower Hutt Little Theatre. Replacing the earlier Steinway which had been used in the Little Theatre since the…
Book review One has waited quite a while for this brilliant little series of monographs to find a writer able to deal with what the media likes to suggest is about the most intractable (and irrelevant) of artistic fields: classical music.
Earlier in the year we threatened to publish a list of significant musical anniversaries that deserved to be celebrated in 2012. It’s not too late.
Metropolis – silent film by Fritz Lang, accompanied by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra playing the reconstructed score by Gottfried Huppertz, conducted by Frank Strobel
In New Zealand we got three of the Proms concert – the first and last nights, plus one from the middle of the season that featured Emanuel Ax playing Brahms’s Second Piano Concert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under Bernard Haitink…
On 15 December 2010 we published an article about the Arts Council of New Zealand (Creative New Zealand)’s proposals to introduce changes to the criteria and the pattern of ‘multi-year’ funding provided to arts organizations. On 1…
But the New Zealand Herald didn’t see eye to eye with the Dominion Post’s Linda Burgess who reviewed it as television on Monday 1 August.
As producer and front man, Jeremy Wells (I reveal my avoidance of television: I’d never heard of him) exhibited the worst kind of ‘Kiwi’ arrogance-cum-inferiority complex, all made the more offensive by his narcissism, his inability to…
The year 2011 is not quite as rich in musical anniversaries as was 2010, but delving a little deeper and more obscurely, there are a number of interesting ones.
The Royal New Zealand Ballet is presenting a triple bill of Stravinsky ballets in their May/June season which opens in Wellington on the week-end 20-22 May. It then progresses through Auckland, Napier, finishing in Invercargill on 9 June.…
We have recently been loading into our ‘Coming Events’ details of all concert series and individual concerts being presented in the Wellington region in 2011.
This week has been a very exciting one for me. Last Sunday I saw a performance of Wushu martial arts by twenty-four Chinese visiting experts. This was spectacular, colourful and beautifully choreographed and performed in front of an…
The concert during the Festival by the New Zealand String Quartet entitled TEN (music composed in 1810, 1910 and 2010) prompts us (rather given to dates and things) to look at all the other anniversaries this year.