Giving airs to the Bard

Wyn Davies believes the new treatment will liven up the concert.

Wyn Davies is best known as the recently appointed Director of Music for NBR New Zealand Opera. His baton has livened many a production for the company, but the most the audience sees of him, until the final curtain call, is a head acknowledging applause from the pit.

Tomorrow night, Davies is on stage for the entire evening, conducting the Auckland Philharmonia in the first concert of its Vero series.

The concert has a title Bard to the Bone and a concept behind it. It is selection of music inspired by the works of Shakespeare.

The idea emerged from a discussion with Antony Ernst, the orchestra's artistic administrator.

"We are musicians who are seduced by the theatre. We started to think about how we could make a dramatic concert, including an actor, and the ideas began to spurt."

Among the composers to be featured are Berlioz (his Beatrice and Benedict Overture, the Funeral March from Hamlet), Prokofiev (an extract from Romeo and Juliet) and film music from Shostakovich (the 1964 Hamlet) and William Walton (Henry V).

The Thursday programme also gives us the chance to hear a sampling from a New Zealand opera yet to receive a staging, Ross Harris' King Lear.

"This duet between Lear and Cordelia is very dramatically written," Davies says. "It is one of Lear's mad scenes and there is a very wide range of music styles. It is certainly a diverting five minutes."

The two singers involved are up-and-coming Australian soprano Jessica Pratt and the more established baritone Grant Doyle, whom Davies likens to "a Demetrius type in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He is a young, dashing, good-looking light baritone."

As well as the Harris, Doyle will sing the drinking song from Thomas' Hamlet, "a baritone show-stopper and a real party piece in that repertoire," Davies confides, not to mention "I've come to wive it wealthily in Padua" from Kiss Me Kate.

"I'm an absolute devotee of Cole Porter, and Broadway musical in general," Davies confesses. Porter did such a brilliant line on The Taming of the Shrew in Kiss me Kate that it seemed an obvious thing to put in.

"Maybe some concert-goers will think it comes out of left field, but if you're interested in treatments of Shakespeare it doesn't."

Pursuing the idea of Broadway-style Shakespeare, we talk about Rodgers and Hart's The Boys from Syracuse and Galt McDermott's Two Gentlemen of Verona.

"I really wouldn't mind spending the rest of my life doing that sort of music, but one doesn't get the chance," Davies says.

Another unusual component is the participation of actor Stuart Devenie, who "in a way is going to be the main character," Davies says. "Stuart's role will be to homogenise the whole thing into a theatrical evening.

"It's a great opportunity for an actor and I don't know one who would turn down the chance to do a lot of Shakespearian monologues, perfectly set up by the music we're going to play."

This concert is an experiment for the Auckland Philharmonia, a departure from its usual overture-concerto-symphony format, and Davies isn't too perturbed.

"It is too easy for an audience to get lulled into the traditional concert set-up. I'm all for any way in which their interest might be livened by a new kind of concert. And we feel that the Shakespearian link will keep a thread going from beginning to end."

* Auckland Philharmonia, Bard to the Bone, Aotea Centre, tomorrow 8pm