Young musicians ease concert drought

NZ composer Salina Fisher.

Classical music-lovers have always suffered from their very own brand of summertime blues. Why should a mid-December Messiah mark the end of the city's classical music season - a cultural drought that, for many, holds sway until the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra takes the Town Hall stage three weeks into February?

Are the strains of the three musical Bs (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) necessarily incompatible with the three Bs of a Kiwi summer - bach, beach and barbecue?

Some feel otherwise, providing oases of musical sustenance through this enforced dry season.

Brecon Carter has once again set the year off with his annual Auckland String Quartet Summer School, including three public concerts, held in St Cuthbert's College auditorium.

Offerings ranged from Jade Quartet playing Haydn and Prokofiev to the prize-winning young Trinity Trio, acknowledging the home-grown by slipping Gareth Farr in between Ravel and Mendelssohn.

Next week the APO moves to the same premises for its Lion Foundation Summer Music School. This annual event gives enthusiastic young musicians the opportunity to play alongside and be mentored by some of the orchestra's most experienced personnel.

At the end of the week, working under Dunedin conductor Peter Adams, there is a public concert, titled A Place for Music, with works from Sibelius' Finlandia to a Vaughan Williams Folk Song Suite.

The emphasis may be on youth but, remembering the shattering Beethoven sonata that won Delvan Lin last year's Wallace National Junior Piano Competition, the 15-year-old could be sensational in Grieg's Piano Concerto.

Best of all, this Friday afternoon concert is a showcase for the APO's current rising star, Salina Fisher, a 21-year-old Wellington composer who last month won the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Todd Corporation Young Composers Award. Her short APO work, Galaxy, is an arrangement of a piano piece dating from six years ago.

"I'd been asked to write at a Grade 3-6 level," she says. "But I couldn't reconcile this with what I wanted to say musically. I didn't want to dumb it down so I looked back at what I was into at that age."

Galaxy is based on "a moment at the Akaroa Summer Festival when I was 15," she continues. "A night when the stars were really beautiful, and nothing like what you see in the city."

Nature is important to Fisher. I first heard her music last April at a Devonport concert, one of Alex Taylor's Intrepid Music Projects. She and percussionist Sam Rich delivered her Komorebi, a fragile duet for violin and vibraphone. Today, she explains how the Japanese word expresses the concept of sunlight passing through leaves of a tree.

Her prize-winning Blushing Skies, which secured her the Todd Award, had similar inspiration, after standing on Auckland's Orakei Wharf at the end of the day.

"The sky was glowing with everchanging pinks, reds, oranges and notable hints of gold on a cloud canvas of endless textural variety," she explains in a programme note.

Musically, this means "exploring combinations of warm and luminous timbres, while slowly merging and moving between these harmonic colours and warm romantic clusters of sound".

Fisher takes care to credit the influence of Olivier Messiaen in this particular score, and she admits to a fondness for French music that dates back to "falling in love with Debussy when I was 13 or 14".

Aucklanders can hear Blushing Skies when it is included in an APO Discovery concert on May 27. Mark it in your diary, along with Friday's Summer School Finale.

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra: A Place for Music
Where and when: Clouston Hall, St Cuthbert's College, 122 Market Rd, Remuera, Friday at 2.30pm