NZSO concert tour ends

The NZSO and Pietari Inkinen will present a programme featuring violinist Mikhail Ovrutsky. Photo/Supplied

The final concerts by the NZSO in 2013 showed the orchestra in top form, playing as well as ever they have done previously in the opinion of this writer. There should be plenty to look forward to in the four concerts scheduled for this year.

First up on Tuesday, April 1, NZSO music director Pietari Inkinen conducts the orchestra in Visions of Happiness, a programme featuring violinist Mikhail Ovrutsky playing Erich Korngold's lush Violin Concerto, together with Wagner's famous Siegfried Idyll, written as a present for his wife, Cosima, and first played on the staircase leading to her room on the morning of her birthday. Completing the concert will be Symphony No 4 by Tchaikovsky, famous for the splendour of the sound of the brass instruments at the opening of the first movement.

Russian music is prominent also in the second concert for the year, Russian Fire, on Friday, May 23, opening with Caprice Bohemien by Rachmaninov and ending with the flamboyant Symphony No 15 by Shostakovich. In between will be a non-Russian work, the famous 19th century masterpiece Piano Concerto in A Minor by German composer Robert Schumann. The conductor and soloist are both Russian, maestro Alexander Lazarev and pianist Alexander Melnikov.

The concert, Wounded Hearts, on Wednesday, July 2, will be directed by Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare and will feature cellist Alisa Weilerstein as soloist in Prokofiev's Sinfonia Concertante. The programme will begin with Schumann's Manfred Overture and conclude with perhaps Tchaikovsky's greatest symphony, the Pathetique No 6, hence the title of the concert.

The final concert for the year, Tuscan Summer, on Friday, November 21, directed by Japanese conductor Junichi Hirokami, will include two famous works by Mendelssohn, the Violin Concerto in E Minor with soloist Stefan Jackiw, whose talent has been described as "off the scale", and will end with one of the composer's sunniest works, Symphony No 4 in A Italian. The programme will open with the glittering Barber of Seville Overture and also include Benjamin Britten's Soirees Musicales.

All four concerts are in the Napier Municipal Theatre and each will be introduced by a pre-concert talk.

There is a change of starting time for all the concerts, now at 7pm.

Ticket prices range from $25 to $72 for a single concert and from $20 to $57 per concert if attending all four concerts.

There is an extra which some patrons will find worth a trip to either Wellington from June 12-15, or Auckland from June 19-22, for four concerts in each venue with performances of all nine of the Beethoven symphonies, offering a rare opportunity to hear all these masterpieces in succession.

The first orchestra concert for the year is from the NZSO National Youth Orchestra with a not-to-be-missed performance in the Napier Municipal Theatre at 7pm on Saturday, February 8; always an exciting music occasion hearing the cream of the country's young musicians with their infectious enthusiasm adding an extra dimension to their musical expertise.

Directed by Ben Northey and with violin soloist, NZSO concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppanen, the programme will feature Douglas Lilburn's famous Aotearoa Overture, Homage to Metallica by Hindson and Scheherezadeby Rimsky Korsakov.

Single ticket price $30. Free to NZSO subscription season ticket holders.