Bamert the master of modern music

By WILLIAM DART

I catch up with conductor Matthias Bamert just after he's finished a rehearsal of Ligeti's Lontano with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra - the piece that will be opening Saturday's concert in Auckland.

It's not often we get the chance to hear Stanley Kubrick's favourite composer in the flesh (Ligeti turns up on the soundtracks of 2001, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut) and Bamert asserts that "major pieces like this must have a place on our programmes".

In the two years since he was appointed principal guest conductor with the orchestra, Bamert has been a champion of contemporary music. He's tackled local composers, including a blistering premiere of Eve de Castro-Robinson's Pendulums of Blue a few years back, and was closely involved with the orchestra's Music 2000 Competition. His justification? "Music is a living art and orchestras need to play the music that is being composed today."

This conductor has shared the stage with some of the world's most celebrated soloists and among those fondly remembered are Radu Lupu, Alfred Brendel and Frank Peter Zimmerman. "With artists like these the music flows - it's a real partnership and it's not a matter of just accompanying."

And pianist Dmitri Alexeev should be on home territory at the concerts with Rachmaninov and Prokofiev - works that "as a Russian pianist, he does so well", adds Bamert.

Bamert's enthusiasm fires when we turn to Schoenberg's arrangement of the Brahms G minor Piano Quartet, which we hear on Friday night.

"Not orchestrated in the style of Brahms," he says, "but as Brahms might have orchestrated it had he been living in 1938."

Here's a man who knows his transcriptions, as can be heard on his five splendid CDs of Stokowski arrangements. In his younger days, he was an assistant to the great man and "although Stokowski was very old, his imagination and his feeling for sound and colour make for music in real technicolour".

Music seems to be very much a quest for Bamert, especially with his London Mozart Players, who recorded enough minor contemporaries of the Salzburg master to fill several CD bins. But lately the Players have been feeling the pinch with the recent cancellation of a German tour that had been set up five years ago.

Bamert speaks of the parlous state of affairs on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in North America. "Toronto and St Louis have orchestras that are in very bad shape. Things were good during the 90s when the stockmarket was up, but in the past two years, money has been lost and, with it, audiences."

It's cheering then to know our own NZSO has come out in the black this year, meaning we can look forward to at least two more seasons with Maestro Bamert.

* The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Matthias Bamert with soloist Dmitri Alexeev, Auckland Town Hall, Friday at 6.30pm and Saturday at 8pm.