KEY POINTS:
Ross Harris celebrated his two years of residency with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra symphonically.
The Second Symphony, in 2006, with mezzo Madeleine Pierard singing the words of Vincent O'Sullivan, earned the composer his third SOUNZ Contemporary Award.
Next Thursday, the APO premieres his Third Symphony and Harris sees it as a new departure. "I thought it was time to stretch my wings and see how far I could fly.
"Making it a single movement of around 40 minutes' duration was one of the early challenges. It's the next level, I suppose.'
Harris is a composer who wants to engage his audiences symphonically. "There's an awful lot of easy listening around. I've tried to go down another path.'
Still, he dreams that "someone who knows nothing about classical music will find a way into my work', pointing out the shifting colours and pulses might provide a gateway into the new score for some.
He laughs when I ask whether the constantly changing time signatures of the last section doff the cap to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. But then perhaps the whole score has been moving irrevocably towards this visceral eruption? "The symphony sets off in a very disparate way and becomes more rhythmically focused as time goes by.'
The percussion have a lot to do with this journey, he says, but equally important is Dimitri Atanassov's solo violin "floating across the top of it all in those first pages', a concept taken directly from the images of Marc Chagall.
Last year, Harris' chamber work The Sleep of Reason took its title and dark implications from a Goya print. Now it is Chagall's life-affirming paintings of Jewish klezmer musicians that lend a certain lightness to this new, complex symphonic score.
The composer admires this painter who famously stipulated that "colour is vibration like music'. For Harris, Chagall's appeal lies in his "bright, sparkling palette - kind of surreal but not too abstract'.
That staple instrument of the klezmer band, the accordion, has been prominent in Harris' scores from his In Memory of I. S. Totska, which earned him his first SOUNZ prize in 2000.
"I am very taken with the accordion and love mixing it up with other sounds.
"I like the way it breathes, a sort of cranky breathing. It adds a splash of something else from another world, kicking around in the wings.'
This man knows his instruments. Harris can blow a mean jazz sax, he has taken his place among the illustrious French horns of the NZSO and trumpeted alongside Mahinarangi Tocker. These days, he plays accordion with a Wellington klezmer band.
He is fond of the klezmer tunes he has written for the group, melodies which turn up in his symphony, "treated as if they were found objects, quotations from other worlds'.
"I sense these tunes have a personality,' he explains. "What happens to that personality in the context of the music is slightly programmatic.'
These catchy little ditties are threaded through the orchestral score. "Sometimes the world turns in on them, literally swamping them. One tune gets gradually eaten up by the percussion; others simply self-destruct.
"It's almost like a saga unfolding. You don't quite know where it is going to go; sometimes it's crazy, sometimes it's tragic.'
All will be revealed on Thursday with Harris' pre-concert talk providing a useful road map for the symphonic journey to come.
PERFORMANCE
What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday August 14 at 8pm
