Tag
24 reviews
Wednesday 1 May, 12:15 pm For several years Wanderlust Opera has been on the road doing what our professional opera company should be doing (did do for a couple of years in the 2000s): taking cut-down versions of opera to the provincial…
Sunday 11 September, 2:30 pm (earlier performances on 9 and 10 September) The school of music’s once annual opera productions have in recent years fallen back to biennial events. In the between years, students create a series of scenes…
Jonathan Abernethy (tenor), Anna Dowsley (mezzo-soprano), Katherine McIndoe (soprano), Jarvis Dams (baritone), Terence Dennis (piano)
Saturday, 12 September 2015, 7.30pm What a generous singer is Renée Fleming, performing so many items for us! Yet she seemed as relaxed at the end as she was at the beginning, and in just as good voice. Although much of what she sang could…
Thursday 6 August, 7:30 pm Once upon a time, the Wellington Branch of the New Zealand Opera Society used to stage almost monthly recitals of mainly opera arias and ensembles. As performances of the real thing increased in the 80s and 90s,…
Kristin Darragh (contralto), Barbara Graham (soprano), Kate Lineham (soprano) Warwick Fyfe (baritone), Bruce Greenfield (piano)
Friday 19th September 2014 Earlier last week I had the good fortune to catch Radio NZ Concert’s “Upbeat” interview with Margaret Medlyn, one of the tutors of Classical Voice at the NZ School of Music in Wellington. She spoke about the then…
The Kapiti Chorale, Marie Brown (conductor), Elisabeth Harris (mezzo), Christian Thurston (baritone), Salina Fisher (violin), Peter Averi (organ), Rafaella Garlick-Grice and Ellen Barrett (pianos)
Brio: Janey MacKenzie (soprano), Catherine Leining (soprano), Jody Orgias (mezzo-soprano), Mark Bobb (tenor), Justin Pearce (bass)
Tuesday 28th May, 2013 I remember recently reading a “rant” (oops! – pardon my alliteration!) from a columnist in some record magazine (which I don’t have enough money to subscribe to and therefore don’t have to hand, having probably…
Margaret Medlyn (soprano), Daniela-Rosa Cepeda (soprano), Oliver Sewell (tenor), Elisabeth Harris (soprano), Christian Thurston (baritone), Christina Orgias (soprano, Fredi Jones (baritone), Isabella Moore (soprano), NZSM Orchestra…
Friday, 3 May 2013, 6.30pm One wonders if all the words that can be said about Bryn Terfel have already been said: his magnificent voice, his control of dynamics and vocal nuance, his infinite variety of vocal colour, his resonance, his…
Sunday 10 February 2013, 2.30 pm What an interesting programme this was, with a nice mixture of songs and operatic arias! The known and the less-well-known.
New Zealand School of Music: Vocal students of Richard Greager, Jenny Wollerman, Margaret Medlyn and Lisa Harper-Brown, with Mark Dorrell (piano)
Friday 28 and Saturday 29 September at 7.30pm This was a concert of opera scenes, arias and ensembles, a stand-in for the traditional opera production that the school of music has been mounting, with few exceptions, since the 1970s. In…
Janey MacKenzie (soprano), Jody Orgias (mezzo soprano), Jamie Young (tenor), Justin Pearce (baritone) and Robyn Jaquiery (piano)
Sunday, 19 August 2012, 7.30pm Eight singers selected from earlier rounds sang an aria in each of the two halves of the concert, and were judged by Roger Wilson, to decide the winner of the Dame Malvina Major Foundation Prize of $4,000,…
Excerpts from operas by Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, Gounod, Humperdinck and Johann Strauss; items by Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss, Sibelius and Saint-Saëns
Wednesday, 4 April 2012, 12.15pm Perhaps it was an excess of riches, or simply that people are ‘programmed’ to attend a lunchtime concert at St. Andrew’s on a Wednesday, but not on another day. Whatever the reason, the Tuesday concert was…
Friday 13 January, 7.30pm The 18th New Zealand Opera School at Whanganui has most of the things going for it that make some of the great music festival of Europe such lasting attractions: all it needs is a real festival to give it context.…
Martin Snell opened the evening’s opera excerpts; his resonant speaking voice made a memorable introduction to the first aria, ‘Sorge infausta una procella’, sung by Zoroastro in Handel’s Orlando of 1733. Hearing the singer in this…
Sunday 6th March, 2011 As comedian Michael Flanders, of “At the Drop of a Hat” fame, might have said, “If the gods had intended us to listen to music outdoors, they would never have given us weather!”. Such was the case on the weekend,…
Wednesday 2 March, 12.15pm This was my first lunchtime concert for the year. It was a good start with a moderate sized audience. The performances were well presented and conveyed their dramatic qualities as well as is possible in a…
Wednesday 14 th January 2009 Trying to write about such a joyous affair as the first 2009 Aratoi Art and History Museum concert in Masterton seems to produce such a prosaic effect compared with the sheer pleasure savoured in the…