A partnership of academics and professionals

By WILLIAM DART

We have yet another acronym to cope with: AP~SOM, which represents the new partnership between the Auckland Philharmonia and the University of Auckland's School of Music.

Thursday's launch had an official seal of approval from the Prime Minister, who praised this coupling of the academic and professional that fits in well with the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission (Teac) revisions.

"This moment was bound to be," said Karen Grylls, head of the School of Music. "I don't think there is a better time in terms of the support from Government and Helen Clark and the artistic climate.

"A lot of co-operation has been going on. but now we have the chance to enhance that profile. We have professional musicians who are working in our areas and the School of Music should be forging the same links."

A proposed graduate programme in orchestral studies will "help us to align to the places the students are aiming at working".

AP~SOM has not sprouted overnight. Papers and memos were being exchanged more than 10 years ago and the Philharmonia's general manager, Anne Rodda, has been involved since October when she got together with the university and "put some steam behind it".

The arrangement is most definitely mutually beneficial. "The orchestra can grow vertically or horizontally and by throwing out the buttresses like AP~SOM, we're strengthening our own basic structure," Rodda says.

"We have a major education programme but it's always vulnerable to sponsorship and ticket sales. With the grunt of the university behind it, we've got a real opportunity for more participation and audience."

Rodda sees the partnership as reverberating well beyond the Bombay Hills: "As a nation, I feel we're taught to assume that everything of supreme quality comes out of Wellington.

"It would be a pity to assume there is only one way to do things. Certainly we're sophisticated enough to embrace more than one opera singer, more than one visual artist, more than one orchestra and more than one tertiary institution.

"Assuming there's only one model prototype is dangerous. It narrows our focus in an art form or education that should be much more diverse. AP~SOM is signalling there is excellence being prepared and performed here in Auckland."

We had our own taste of excellence at the launch when some university choristers gave us a lusty choral fanfare that had been written by first-year student composer Sarah McCallum.

Meantime, the orchestra continues to get out in the city - today, BonaNZa, the AP's trombone quartet, performs at noon in Pakuranga's Te Tuhi-The Mark. They're playing a Serocki Suite, a Bach Toccata and Fugue and, on the lighter side, John Clark's 747.

On Saturday, Sunday and the following Monday at noon in Auckland City Art Gallery, Titirangi Community House and Te Tuhi respectively, strings and cor anglais are offering Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and a Sextet by the orchestra's bass player, Daniel Stabler. Admission is free.