The final concerts by the NZSO in 2013 showed the orchestra in top form, playing as well as ever they have done previously in the opinion of this writer. There should be plenty to look forward to in the four concerts scheduled for this year.
First up on Tuesday, April 1, NZSO music director Pietari Inkinen conducts the orchestra in Visions of Happiness, a programme featuring violinist Mikhail Ovrutsky playing Erich Korngold's lush Violin Concerto, together with Wagner's famous Siegfried Idyll, written as a present for his wife, Cosima, and first played on the staircase leading to her room on the morning of her birthday. Completing the concert will be Symphony No 4 by Tchaikovsky, famous for the splendour of the sound of the brass instruments at the opening of the first movement.
Russian music is prominent also in the second concert for the year, Russian Fire, on Friday, May 23, opening with Caprice Bohemien by Rachmaninov and ending with the flamboyant Symphony No 15 by Shostakovich. In between will be a non-Russian work, the famous 19th century masterpiece Piano Concerto in A Minor by German composer Robert Schumann. The conductor and soloist are both Russian, maestro Alexander Lazarev and pianist Alexander Melnikov.
The concert, Wounded Hearts, on Wednesday, July 2, will be directed by Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare and will feature cellist Alisa Weilerstein as soloist in Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante. The programme will begin with Schumann's Manfred Overture and conclude with perhaps Tchaikovsky's greatest symphony, the Pathetique No 6, hence the title of the concert.
The final concert for the year, Tuscan Summer, on Friday, November 21, directed by Japanese conductor Junichi Hirokami, will include two famous works by Mendelssohn, the Violin Concerto in E Minor with soloist Stefan Jackiw, whose talent has been described as "off the scale", and will end with one of the composer's sunniest works, Symphony No 4 in A Italian. The programme will open with the glittering Barber of Seville Overture and also include Benjamin Britten's Soirees Musicales.
