Concert Preview: NZSO: Enchanted Islands

Kirsten Morrell, who will sing sonnet settings by Gareth Farr. Photo / Supplied

Aucklanders have long envied Wellington its annual celebration of local music, courtesy of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Tonight, at last, we finally make the loop when the Town Hall hosts this year's Made in New Zealand concert.

The programme's branding, Enchanted Islands, hints at things Shakespearean and Anthony Ritchie's Shakespeare overture certainly fits the bill, with Douglas Lilburn's Four Canzonas.

Two of these lyrical pieces were written as incidental music for Ngaio Marsh's celebrated Shakespearean productions in the 1940s.

Microphones come out for Tama Waipara and Kirsten Morrell to sing a cycle of Shakespearean sonnet settings by Gareth Farr.

For cutting-edge contemporary, without any referencing of the Bard, Gravitas is the latest from the high-flying Chris Gendall, who won the 2008 Sounz Contemporary Award and is resident composer at the New Zealand School of Music.

Gendall says he has been keeping an ear open backstage. "This is the first Made in New Zealand concert where there's been a lot of chatter among the orchestra about what they like and don't like. The great thing is that everyone sees a different angle on my piece."

He feels this score has "pushed some boundaries by emphasising the more enigmatic aspects of my work" and is taken by the paradox that "things can be wild but also delicate. I've been savouring that".

There is a lot of whisper-level goings-on in Gendall's Gravitas. "When things get softer and softer there's more room for smaller gradation of dynamics," he explains, adding that it does not work in reverse. "Once you get up to a certain point then loud is just loud."

Now back in New Zealand after some years in the United States, the young composer is impressed with tonight's conductor Hamish McKeich as well as the musicians themselves.

"I've been really tough on the strings and the woodwind," he adds, "but the players I've spoken to have relished what they acknowledge is a challenge." The main offering of the evening is Lyell Cresswell's new Piano Concerto, with soloist Stephen De Pledge, whose introduction to contemporary music came when he played Cresswell's Salm as part of the viola section in the National Youth Orchestra in the late 1980s.

On Radio New Zealand Concert's Upbeat, De Pledge likened the quicksilver changes of the new concerto to "an abstract expressionist painting with colour, colour, colour, and little time in between. Colour is as important as pitch or rhythm in all my work."

Cresswell explains how he always conceives his often complex music straight to full orchestral score rather than going through a piano reduction.

In this concerto, he continues, "there are moments when the orchestra becomes an extension of the piano's colours, by taking them to places where the piano can't go".

Dedicated to his Scottish composer friend Edward Harper, who died in 2009, the new work is no facile showpiece. But then Cresswell is a composer with a heart.

"I've always been interested in expressing emotion in my music," he says. "But only through ways that are controlled and thought through, avoiding sentimentality but looking deeper."

Cresswell feels there is not enough emotion in contemporary music. He chooses not to "name names" when it comes to errant colleagues, but worries that "it's too easy to have music built entirely out of intellectual processes".

Performance

What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra: Enchanted Islands

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tonight at 8pm