KEY POINTS:
This Saturday night Peter Watts picks up his baton for the last time as Auckland Choral's music director.
The quietly-spoken Englishman weighs words carefully when he looks back over 20 years at the helm of an organisation that has been providing Auckland with music for 153 years.
Watts settled here in 1973 and was coaxed into the Dorian Singers by his soprano wife, Katharine.
"It was exciting to come to the other end of the world and find something so special," he says.
"We were discovering the repertoire and everything seemed new."
Watts has always been drawn to the unusual, giving us Prokofiev and Honegger alongside the perennial Messiahs.
Auckland Choral has always encouraged New Zealand composers, commissioning David Hamilton's Missa Pacifica for its 150th celebrations.
He admires Hamilton's "ability to write something that is specific for a particular occasion but not so much so that it can't be used elsewhere".
Hamilton's The Dragons are Singing Tonight, which the choir revived last June, was a welcome change from the standard sacred repertoire.
"You can't be doing Carmina Burana all the time when you want to do something secular."
The music of today matters.
"If we don't programme contemporary music, what is there going to be?"Watts asks.
"Back in the 18th century, most of the music performed was contemporary but, since then, the whole historical perspective of music has worked against the contemporary composer."
Looking back over his two decades, the choir's 2001 performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius is a highlight. Back in England, as a student, Watts had sung in the oratorio, conducted by Benjamin Britten, with Peter Pears singing Gerontius.
"It was a dream come true," he says. "I can still hear Pears singing, 'Take me away"' - vocalising the Elgarian phrase in an uncanny imitation of Pears' slightly strangulated tenor.
"I was fortunate in Auckland because the Sheffield Choral Union had done Gerontius here in 1911 as part of a world tour. A grandson of one of the Sheffield choir members was singing with us and his grandfather's diary recalled all the performances and the adventures that were to be had in Auckland. To make that connection for the choir while we were preparing it was really thrilling."
With a number of smaller choirs established in the city, what role does he see the 140-150 voices of Auckland Choral playing?
"We have got past the feeling that the big choir is a geriatric thing of the past," he says.
"A lot of larger choirs are trying to sing in a more chamber choir style, going for focused sound and good articulation - things that give real life to the singing ... the act of singing itself goes very deep, to the whole use of our breath.
"Breath is a symbol of creation," he continues.
"God breathed on the water. And breathing together in that sense is something amazing. The co-operation that it demands must be good for society."
On Saturday, flanked by Andrew Carter's Benedicite, which the English composer, Watts points out, "considers is one of his best works" and The Ring of Words, specially written settings of Robert Louis Stevenson and Siegfried Sassoon by David Hamilton to celebrate the occasion, is Beethoven's great C major Mass.
"The choir hasn't done this Mass since 1867. It's manageable in the Haydn sense, but it has a new feel. It's got the drama, Beethoven's rushing crescendos.
"There are four soloists but no arias; it is team work and I've chosen it because I like working with teams."
PERFORMANCE
What: Auckland Choral
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Sat 7.30pm
