Next stop London's Royal Academy...

By Heath Lees

Of the young musicians chosen to perform with the New Zealand National Youth Orchestra at the Apec leaders' dinner, more than a third of them live in Auckland.

Some of them are from the same family. There are the Halls, for example, including Lara (associate concertmaster), Elroy (viola) and the remarkable, 10-year-old violin prodigy, Amalia.

Up front in the leader's chair is Joe Harrop, from Mt Albert. Joe is the only Harrop in the orchestra this time round, but he is a member of a family of five musical high achievers.

At 21, Joe is pretty young to be the leader of a 90-strong orchestra, but he loves the job, and he knows he's good at it.

Part of his confidence comes from a wide background of music that knows few barriers and was born first out of the Irish folk tradition. Joe's dad played in one of New Zealand's premier Irish ceili bands of the 1960s, which broadcast and performed under the title "The Pride of Erin."

"It was Charlie Montgomerey who dazzled me first," says Joe. He was the doyen of Irish fiddlers in New Zealand at the time. As a kid I would sit almost right under his fiddle, watching his fingers fly up and down hell for leather. I must have asked for a violin soon after, because one turned up at Christmas, and it all just went from there."

After half a dozen years with Mary O'Brien at Auckland University, Joe applied to study at a specialist string school in the German town of Lubeck. Money was a problem, "but I just went about applying to trusts here, funds there, borrowing of course, sometimes giving benefit concerts. Scrimping and saving all the time, I found that gradually there was enough money to make it happen."

But luck ran out when the school went bankrupt a mere six months after Joe's arrival, and suddenly he was back in New Zealand again.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra found a seat for him at the back of the second fiddles, and he stayed with them for five months, saving every dollar of his regular salary so as to have another crack at overseas study the next time round.

"Playing under conductor Franz-Paul Decker was fabulous experience for me," he recalls.

"In rehearsal he once stopped the whole orchestra in full flight because I got one bowing pattern wrong. I went up instead of down in one tiny, four-bar passage. Decker notices everything. He stopped, looked at me, and everyone played the passage again. I got it right this time and he just nodded, satisfied, and said, 'Good.' But believe me, I will be able to play that four bars from memory for the rest of my life now."

When the Youth Orchestra engagements finish, Joe goes back to London, where he was accepted this year in the Royal Academy of Music's new post-graduate performance course run jointly with the University of London.

After that, he wants to keep learning, maybe do a doctorate in musical arts and then, well, he'll take it as it comes.

One thing he is sure of: with his German-Samoan roots and his passionately keen sense of being a straight-down-the-line New Zealander, he knows he'll be back here sooner or later, working, playing and contributing as a musician in the country he loves.