NZSM Concert of the Year: A Concert of Contrasts

NZSM Concert of the Year: A Concert of Contrasts

The final concert for 2013 from the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra is one of huge contrasts with a programme that includes Elgar’s Cello Concerto, Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony and the world premiere of Noumena, a work by Master's Composition student Jason Post.

The Elgar Cello Concerto is warmly elegiac and yet full of melancholy, with one early reviewer describes it as having ‘a profound wisdom and beauty underlying its simplicity’. The composer wrote it following the tragedies of the First World War and it was one of his last significant works. The soloist is second-year Classical performance student Heather Lewis. She won the NZSM Concerto Competition earlier this year with excerpts from the work in a performance that adjudicator Diedre Irons described as going ‘well beyond an impressive technical display and fine musicianship. She imbued every aspect, every note of the music, with great depth of feeling...’

The Shostakovich Symphony is a wonderfully ironic and subversive work. Joseph Stalin, the Russian dictator, expected a bombastic work that would celebrate the Soviet 1945 victory over the Nazis, with a huge orchestra, chorus and soloists. Shostakovich’s creation, however, was transparent, light-hearted and subtle. Official critics censured the symphony for its ‘ideological weakness’ and its failure to ‘reflect the true spirit of the people of the Soviet Union’ and it was later banned as part of another denunciation of the composer.

Jason Post is completing a master’s degree in Composition at NZSM and has written Noumena as a result of winning the Jenny McLeod Composition Award. “Noumena is a philosophical concept describing the essence of an object or concept that remains inaccessible to us, despite our perception of the object through various means of experience,” Jason explains. “It is related to my thesis topic – the perception of sound and how this relates to our perception of music.”

The NZSM Orchestra will be conducted by Kenneth Young and the performance will be held in the Sacred Heart Catholic Cathedral on Hill Street, Wellington, from 7:30pm on Tuesday 8 October. Tickets are available online through Eventfinder ($19 / $10) or at the door ($25 / $15).
http://www.eventfinder.co.nz/2013/nzsm-orchestra-contrasts/wellington

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