Birthday girl runs the full emotional gamut

Eve de Castro-Robinson loves 'thinking into the detail rather than making a vast utterance'. Picture / Dean Purcell

This Sunday finds the Karlheinz Company in celebratory mode. It's the 50th birthday of composer Eve de Castro-Robinson; a late afternoon concert with a new commission flanked by older works and musical tributes from friends and colleagues.

De Castro-Robinson has one of the most distinctive of our musical voices, with a rare blend of intelligence and whimsical humour. Sample her second CD, other echoes, for the wacky Noah's Ark sharing the line-up with weightier orchestral scores.

De Castro-Robinson was a finalist for the Sounz Contemporary Award at last week's Silver Scrolls. The vote came for Releasing the Angel, an elegiac outpouring for cellist David Chickering and the NZSO, a piece which surprised its composer as much as it captivated its Auckland audience.

"When I first heard it," De Castro-Robinson remembers, "I didn't know I had written such a sad piece."

Emotions will run the gamut.

Tumbling Strains, a fierce, unrelenting duet for violin and cello, was the product of post-natal depression. "It was a harrowing piece to get out and it still sounds like that," she says.

Some scores came into this world under happier circumstances. One was the piano solo this liquid drift of light. "I more or less put my hands on the piano and it flowed out. I don't know whether to be suspicious or feel liberated."

There is also the chance to hear Three Thumbnails for Rock Band, "a piece of frippery from the early 90s".

Claire Nash will bring the words of Satie, Stravinsky and Cage into the realm of music theatre, while Peter Scholes - "a veteran of many of my pieces, serious and tongue in cheek," De Castro-Robinson adds - plays kazoo, recorder and thumb piano in the band.

Karen Grylls conducts a choir of women's voices in Chaos of Delight III, the chirrupfest that won its composer the Sounz Contemporary Award in 1998. And a premiere reflects De Castro-Robinson's continuing engagement with the work of the late Len Lye.

Knife Apple Sheer Brush was written for flautist Mette Leroy who will both play and speak/sing three of Lye's pithy, evocative poems.

"These are very satisfying miniatures. It's a bit like Webern, when you've got a few notes, each has to be a tiny microcosm in itself. I love thinking into the detail rather than making a vast utterance."

She muses for a few seconds over what she describes "as the inner life of a sound".

"Composing at the computer takes away that, the very thing the composer should be thinking about. Our task is to know what the flute does from the moment the sound sets off a chain of events, not writing a pitch into the computer and pressing "flute" and being satisfied with that as the sound. In the computer age we are losing sight of that a bit."

Her last NZSO commission was commended at the Silver Scrolls and now she has been given another, a setting of Bill Manhire poetry for children's voices and orchestra, which will be premiered next year.

She sighs and looks back wistfully to when her 1987 Peregrinations, revived by the NZSO for this year's Made in New Zealand concert, gave her the chance to spread her wings a little.

"I would love the chance to write a 30-minute piece," she says, pointing to Christopher Blake's wonderful Violin Concerto earlier this year, in which he has "the luxury of expansiveness".

"It's like being treated like a sprinter when you are really a marathon runner at heart."

* What: The Karlheinz Company

* Where and when: University Music Theatre, Sunday 5pm