Arts & Minds: Two Emperors exhibition a triumph

Auckland City Gallery's Two Emperors exhibition, which closed on Sunday, was a triumph. Senior gallery guide Richard Wormley says 1771 people flocked to the show on the last day, the biggest attendance on record since the 1998 Orientalism exhibition. The general admission figure for the day - including visitors to other areas of the gallery - was 2772. In all, 4334 people visited over last weekend, most to see the magnificent Two Emperors, which attracted 27,000 visitors over its two-month tenure - "on a per-day ratio, the biggest exhibition in the gallery's recent history," says Wormley. The Chinese New Year late-night weekend alone got around 5000 through the doors. The next big thing: Colin McCahon's A Question of Faith, which opens on March 29.

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The gallery's redesigned website went online on Tuesday, offering the facilities to search and browse its collection of 12,500 works, the first time a New Zealand public gallery has provided such a service. It's the culmination of two years of work by the gallery team, and offers many more educational and search options. See www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz

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The Auckland Philharmonia wants to provide an alternative Friday night apres-work activity. Tomorrow, at 6pm, the orchestra launches the first of its "Happy Hour" concerts in the Auckland Town Hall, offering two tickets for the price of one ($30). TV3 presenter Sarah Bradley will MC, with Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducting and gifted cellist Li-Wei the soloist. The programme includes Sibelius' Symphony No 5, excerpts from Schumann's Cello Overture, and Lissa Meridan's Blast! - a top way to start the weekend.

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New Zealander Jack Body is in San Francisco as a featured guest in the "Other Minds" new music festival, which has been running for 10 years as a global showcase for innovative music. Body, whose CD Pulse won last year's Classical Album of the Year at the NZ Music Awards, is described by Other Minds publicity as "the world's greatest undiscovered composer [who] hides out in his hometown of Wellington". Other guests in this year's lineup are percussionist Evelyn Glennie, jazz bassist William Parker and vocalist Amy X. Neuberg. Previous guests have included Tan Dun, who scored Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and the perennial Philip Glass.

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Recommended: VAhine, by Lily Laita, Niki Hastings McFall and Loni Hutchinson. This exhibition by three important Pacific Island women artists is notable for the way Lily Laita with a struggle, has brought her Expressionist painterly attack, multi-layered imagery, Samoan culture and sense of brooding presence triumphantly together after the bold but confused work that has marked her previous shows. Lane Gallery until March 21.

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The Opera Factory's double-bill of comic opera. The programme opens with Gluck's The Cadi Outwitted (1761), the tale of a bored harem housewife, a pair of young lovers and a philanderer. The cast features Opera Factory intermediate and senior singers. After the interval there's a "recording studio" re-creation of Menotti's The Old Maid & the Thief, first broadcast as a radio opera in 1939. Performances at 18 Eden St, Newmarket; tomorrow and Saturday, then March 19-22, at 7.30pm.

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