The advertising around the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Fireworks & Fantasy concert is frenetic. The poster features a stubbled face baring teeth; the press release talks of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique chopping off its head with music.
Yet conductor Julian Kuerti is the epitome of cool graciousness.
Growing up with a pianist father (Anton Kuerti) and cellist mother (the late Kristine Bogyo), music was inevitable. "I don't know what it might have been like to have grown up without it," he says. "It wasn't until I was 5 or 6 that I realised that not everybody's parents were musicians and not everyone had a piano in the living room."
The young Kuerti went to sleep listening to chamber music rehearsals and wonders whether his mother performing the Elgar Cello Concerto just a few months before he was born had any effect on his musical leanings. He now looks back with resignation at "a misspent period at university collecting a degree in engineering physics. Music was what kept me going and what I always came back to with affection and fervour."
Initially a violinist, he only picked up a baton when he had to conduct a film score he had written. "Up until that point I looked on conducting as either a necessary evil or something that anyone could do. I was wrong on both counts."
