The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra will present one of Stravinsky's greatest works, The Firebird, as a followup to their brilliant interpretation of the composer's Symphony of Psalms at the NZ International Arts Festival.
The Audi Concert Tour
New Zealand Symphony
Wellington, Auckland and Hamilton
April 14-28
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra will present one of Stravinsky’s greatest works, The Firebird, as a followup to their brilliant interpretation of the composer’s Symphony of Psalms at the NZ International Arts Festival.
It will be played in the second concert of the Audi Concert Series, titled L’Oiseau de Feu and La Mer
In the Firebird, Stravinsky brings together a dramatic mix of folk melodies and impulsive rhythms to create ballet music which still seems innovative and electric.
Stravinsky visited New Zealand in 1961 to conduct the National Orchestra (now the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) through selections of the Firebird Ballet, 51 years after its premiere.
More than 100 years later, audiences are still enchanted by the orchestral music of this exotic ballet and this special concert features the original 1910 version, which turned the previously little known composer, then only 28 years old, into an overnight success.
Opening the concert will be the celebrated New Zealand composers, Douglas Lilburn’s with his Symphony No 3, which was described by the composer as “a harsh, didactic, personalised piece of searching rhetoric”, the ideal curtainraiser to the passionate Firebird concert.
For the first time, American mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke will be singing with the orchestra, her expressive vocals taking on one of the great pieces of late 19th-century song cycles, Gustav Mahler’s heartbreaking Songs of a Wayfarer, composed when Mahler was tormented by unrequited love.
In the second concert of the Audi Series, Sasha Cooke will sing the tragic love story, vividly portrayed in Ernest Chausson’s Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer with its yearning melodies.
Composed shortly after attending a performance of Parsifal in 1882, Chausson’s work has strong connections with the work of both Wagner and Franck.
Cooke’s New Zealand performance is a rare treat, made more exciting by the precision and luminous depth of her stunning voice.
She caused a sensation as Kitty Oppenheimer in the Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic and was praised in The New Yorker for her “fresh, vital portrayal, bringing a luminous tone, a generously supported musical line, a keen sense of verbal nuance, and a flair for seduction”.
The second concert opens with Benjamin Britten’s disquieting Four Sea Interludes, which traverse different images of the sea in each: Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and the tumbling Spirited Storm, taken from Britten’s popular opera Peter Grimes - an immediate success following its release in 1945.
Similarly, the premiere of Jean Sibelius’ tone poem The Oceanides, on June 4, 1914, was highly praised.
A review in the Boston Post declared it to be “the finest evocation of the sea that has ever been produced in music”, with a score that shifts from a sense of tranquillity towards tempestuous rages.
The final work is Debussy’s La Mer. These symphonic sketches are a luxurious depiction of his sentiment that “music is the expression of the movement of the waves”, with tonal colours that heave and sigh like the ocean before being washed to shore by one final triumphant wave of sound.
Pietari Inkinen, conductor
Sasha Cooke, mezzo-soprano
DOUGLAS LILBURN, Symphony No 3
GUSTAV MAHLER, Songs of a Wayfarer
IGOR STRAVINSKY, The Firebird (complete 1910 ballet)
WELLINGTON / Michael Fowler Centre / Saturday, April 14 / 8pm
AUCKLAND / Town Hall / Saturday, April 28 / 8pm
BENJAMIN BRITTEN, Peter Grimes: Four Sea Interludes Op. 33a
ERNEST CHAUSSON, Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer
JEAN SIBELIUS, The Oceanides Op. 73
CLAUDE DEBUSSY, La Mer
WELLINGTON / Michael Fowler Centre / Friday, April 20 / 6.30pm
HAMILTON / Founders Theatre / Thursday, April 26 / 7.30pm
AUCKLAND / Town Hall / Friday, April 27 / 7pm
