The politics of the bigger world

Eckehard Stier isn't affraid to make bold musical choices. Photo / Supplied

Eckehard Stier is very happy to be back in New Zealand with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, after a busy but rewarding winter in Europe.

From the 40 or more performances the APO's music director recently conducted on the other side of the world, he singles out his involvement in a production of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Tsar Sultan ("great music, a piece for the whole family and not so often played in Europe") and John Corigliano's powerful First Symphony.

Far removed from the flashy, nudging humour of the American composer's The Mannheim Rocket, which the orchestra performed last week, Corigliano's 1991 Symphony was a deeply-felt response to the Aids crisis.

"The reactions that the Symphony got were profound," says Eckehard, visibly moved. "I received a lot of emails, texts and phone calls. Even German audiences who are accustomed to contemporary music hadn't known what to expect."

Stier is the sort of conductor who takes much care with the music he puts before his audiences and a good deal of thought went into the APO's coupling of Haydn's Farewell Symphony and the great Shostakovich Eighth in its next concert.

The main issue was finding another work that would fit with the Russian composer's searing symphonic response to the brutalities of World War II.

"It may seem a bit strange to put a Farewell Symphony and a War Symphony together," says Stier. "Maybe there's a touch of black humour there."

Stier's first experience of Haydn's music dates back to his own choirboy days, singing in The Creation and, even then, "being struck by the almost romantic feeling in the work".

Now he even dares to draw invidious comparisons between Haydn and the younger Mozart, coming out firmly on the side of the older composer and says Haydn "was much more of a full-blooded musician in terms of his musical expression".

Stier first experienced Shostakovich in 1985. The 13-year-old chorister was singing in Riga on a tour that would take him and his choirmates to Russia. On a television screen in the Latvian capital was a broadcast of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. He pauses as he remembers that point in his life. "From this time I have always had the strongest possible feeling for this composer."

Even though Thursday's Eighth Symphony was composed soon after the mighty Leningrad Symphony, the earlier score is quite different. "The Seventh is full of direct pain, direct emotions and a direct solution," Stier says. "There is a very positive ending."

Not so with the Eighth. The conductor talks of the intensely emotional string writing in its first movement and a Finale which "doesn't have a happy ending". His eyes light up when he talks of the third movement which is "almost ugly, like the machinery of war. There's no stopping, no break from the noise like bombing aircraft. And behind it all you hear the people crying, the screams."

This is more than a vivid slice of history. He is quick to relate this 1943 Shostakovich composition to the times in which we live. "I hadn't been aware that New Zealand had sent all those soldiers over to Europe and North Africa during the Second World War," he says. "In fact 12,000 Kiwis died over there. And now there are also New Zealanders in Afghanistan. This country is very much involved in the politics of the bigger world. Shostakovich's Symphony

is a mirror to the times in which it was written, enabling us to understand how people thought and behaved but it also tells us about what is happening in the world around us today."

Performance

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra

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