The first day of a new job is always fraught, but when Benjamin Northey turned up in Christchurch, the company he’d just joined didn’t even have a proper building. “We were in an industrial warehouse in the outskirts of the city and performing in the Wigram Air Force Museum,” recalls Northey, who is celebrating his 10th year as Christchurch Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor.
Those were the post-quake years. These days, the group has a permanent home, the CSO Centre in Christchurch Town Hall, and plays in the refurbished Douglas Lilburn Auditorium, a hall named in honour of our most important classical composer.
“There was a need to come together and connect with something like music,” Northey says. “I think that made us respond to the needs of our audience and we worked out that performing great music that was familiar was one of those needs. "
The evidence of that is clear in the CSO’s excellent 2024 season, which has something unusual or unheard in every concert. The orchestra’s June 15 show offers a mouth-watering example, with Sibelius snuggling up to our own Gillian Whitehead and a violin concerto by Jaakko Kuusisto.
Kuusisto’s piece – lushly orchestrated, often beautiful, speckled with Finnish austerity but, in the third movement, pulsing with forward momentum – was suggested to Northey by the concerto’s soloist, Andrew Haveron. Haveron and Kuusisto met in the 1990s as competitors at the Queen Elisabeth Competition for violinists and remained friends until Kuusisto’s death from a brain tumour in 2022, aged 48.
“It’s that kind of personal connection and advocacy that makes you excited about a project and think, ‘This is going to be something deeper than just the music,’” says Northey.
Northey, an Aussie, has been an advocate for New Zealand music, too. He credits former CEO Gretchen La Roche with helping him get his head around the local scene, but his connection to our composers goes back further.
His first conducting teacher was John Hopkins, who in the 1950s and 60s led what is now the NZSO. Hopkins gave the premiere of Lilburn’s Symphony No 3 and the first public performance of the composer’s second. When on September 7 Northey conducts the CSO in Lilburn’s Symphony No 1 – in the Douglas Lilburn Auditorium – he’ll be reading from his teacher’s score, gifted to him when Hopkins died in 2013.
“I feel like you’ve got to have New Zealand voices [at concerts],” Northey says, when he’s commended for the amount of local music the CSO plays. “It’s not hard to do and people love it; surely that’s just how it should be.”
CSO Lamb & Hayward Masterworks Series: Whitehead, Kuusisto, Sibelius, June 15, Douglas Lilburn Auditorium, Christchurch.
