John Rimmer is one of our senior composers, as happy to write operas and major orchestral commissions as he is penning smaller pieces, with aptness and affection, for young performers.
His 80th birthday was marked by a special concert from the University of Auckland's Karlheinz Company, an ensemble founded by Rimmer in 1978. It was a warm, generous celebration, skilfully put together by composer and erstwhile student, Eve de Castro-Robinson.
Rimmer's own music well revealed his individual and influential voice. It was rewarding to hear the 1983 quintet, De Aestibus Rerum, an international prize-winner in its time, with the composer himself playing French horn.
Uwe Grodd proved a spirited soloist in Rimmer's 1972 Composition 4 for flute and electronic sounds, one of the composer's pioneering works that humanised electronic music by putting live musicians alongside tapes.
The electroacoustic Fleeting Images, with its more sophisticated mid-80s digital sound, cast contrapuntal pyrotechnics around the music theatre's proliferation of speakers, a consciousness-expanding experience that would have been even more so if house lights had been lowered.
