KEY POINTS:
PERFORMANCE
What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tonight at 8pm.
A few weeks ago, Gareth Farr was at Gallipoli, performing an elegiac take on Now is the Hour with Richard Nunns on taonga puoro for an audience of 30,000.
This week, he is in Auckland as the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra prepares the major commission of his composer's residency, Ex Stasis, which will be performed for the first time tonight.
He seems little short of ecstatic himself when he talks of working with these musicians who gave him his first professional performance, as a student composer, when his Music from a High Altitude was played at one of the APO's New Music Preludes.
"They are fantastically friendly," he enthuses. "And orchestras can be so brutal."
He remembers how, in 2000, after the first performance of his ultra-demanding Beowulf which he describes as "a little like watching the APO go to the gym", he feared accusations of inducing mass RSI.
When the orchestra made contact, it was to offer him yet another chance to work with them.
Farr's music goes down easily. He is coy about defining his style - "if you contrive it, you never get there," he shrugs - but admits that rhythm often has something to do with it.
"There's a moment in the new piece when the log drums come up," he explains.
"I haven't used log drums with APO before and they're a really Gareth thing. The strings aren't playing here - it's an all-of-the-people-up-the-back moment, so Rarotongan. I looked at the string players during the rehearsal and they were tapping their feet and smiling. I really liked that."
The title of this "song-cycle for four voices" that one day might become the three-hour opera that Farr and his librettist Paul Horan dream of, deals in states of blissfulness.
"While Paul was fascinated by the whole concept of ecstasy in the religious sense, I see it in a musical way," the pragmatic composer confesses.
Farr prefers the concrete example to the airy theoretical; his moment of ecstasy came when he heard the London Symphony Orchestra in concert playing Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
"I almost had an out-of-body experience. I was there in the music and, for me, it's moments like that which are ecstatic."
Tonight's performance has the luxury of a quartet of soloists. Only one, Australian James Egglestone, is not a close friend of the composer, although Farr is more than happy with a tenor "who does Nessun Dorma like you would not believe".
Soprano Deborah Wai Kapohe is a trusted colleague who thinks nothing of popping around to help out with a few vocal tracks and George Henare babysat Farr and his sister when they were toddlers in the 70s.
As for the prodigiously talented mezzo Mere Boynton, Farr feels it is significant that "this is the first time I have written anything for her in English. The fact that she was an amazing actress in Once Were Warriors, is a trained opera singer, a trained kapa haka artist and a fantastic comedienne says it all".
I feel immensely privileged that, seven years ago, I was able to experience what is now the closing section of Ex Stasis when it was presented as a sample aria from a projected opera that Farr and Horan put forward in a Wellington show-and-tell presentation titled Wild Opera.
Farr's contribution stood out for its theatrical tingles and flamboyant flair - after all, the two men had boldly allotted a substantial proportion of their budget to a lavishly printed programme.
A noble Wai Kapohe, with only piano accompaniment, sang a moving aria about a young woman jumping off Grafton Bridge to "drop into the soft green arms of trees".
Fully dressed up for orchestra tonight, with lulling strings and vocal refrains, this same music promises to be a finale that spins a special ecstasy and enchantment.
