Bold Worlds – New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

DIMA SLOBODENIOUK conductor

HÅKAN HARDENBERGER trumpet

Michael Fowler Centre, Friday 10th October

Earlier this year I took advantage of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s  (NZSO) offer for people under the age of 35, which allows them to purchase 3 or more tickets to any of the concerts in the season for $26 per concert. A pretty amazing deal considering you do not pay a booking fee and generally get a ‘B reserve’ seat. The end result was that I ended up purchasing 7 tickets to a range of shows throughout the year, without knowing any of the music, musicians or conductors featured!

The first piece performed was Janáček’s Sinfonietta, which I had read about in Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 but never heard. It started with a fanfare of trumpets and euphoniums from the choir stands, which featured throughout the piece. Janáček, a Czech composer, composed it wanting to express man’s courage to fight for victory and dedicated it to the Czechoslovak Armed Forces. There was a lot of brass instruments and I thought it was fantastic (the woman next to me complained to her husband that it lacked form, but I silently disagreed).

Luckily for me, the NZSO puts on a pre-concert talks, in which, either the musicians discuss what it is like playing the various pieces or someone explains a bit about the background of the pieces. This time the  pre-concert talk featured Håkan Hardenberge, a world-renowned Swedish trumpeter who talked about Dean’s Trumpet Concerto Dramatis Personae (the second piece in the programme and the piece he was the soloist in). Without this background information I may of been a tad lost, especially when in the third movement Hardenberge  walks to the back of the orchestra to join the other trumpeters. However, even for a music amateur like me, I was amazed by the skill of Hardenberge and enjoyed hearing the piccolo trumpet (an instrument I was not aware of, let alone heard) which Hardenberge switched to towards the end of the third movement.

My favourite piece of the evening, Mussorgsky’s (arr. Ravel) Pictures at an Exhibition, was the third and final piece of the evening. The suite is in 10 movements and depicts an imaginary tour of an art exhibition (although I would not of picked this up without doing some research into the piece). I particularly enjoyed hearing the bassoon and saxophone solos (the latter of which I do not normally associate with orchestral pieces) but was fabulous!

All in all a grand evening out!

http://www.nzso.co.nz/concerts/concert/bold-worlds-2014/