Auckland Chamber Orchestra at Town Hall Concert Chamber

Closing a challenging season that has embraced everything from Schoenberg's Wind Quintet to Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony, the Auckland Chamber Orchestra goes seaside for its final concert this week.

Gone to the Beach may seem optimistic in a decidedly drab spring but ACO director Peter Scholes put more store on the significance of the beach as "a place you go for a moment of quiet reflection and solitude".

"It seemed like an open-ended topic leaving a lot of space for creative input."

Creativity is guaranteed with Scholes at the helm, alongside ex-Mutton Bird Don McGlashan, the irrepressible Jonathan Besser and the unclassifiable Ivan Zagni.

For McGlashan, the beach idea is "in line with the kind of abandonment and fun that is a thread going through everybody's work".

All four men agree that the key word here is adventure.

There will be unexpected collaborations.

McGlashan talks tantalisingly of "pieces which are more like maps or games. "We all start and stop together but in the middle the orchestra will be improvising and so will we."

Zagni, as a preliminary to a work that takes some liberties with classical favourites, is "joining together hundreds of little four-bar phrases from composers like Bach, Barber and Tchaikovsky, and tying them all together, upside down and inside out".

Besser is most eager to tackle McGlashan's poem on the ACO website.

It's a clever strip of images which brings together concert titles and composers' names in a surreal narrative.

"Claire Nash will sing/speak the poem while I improvise around it on the piano and the orchestra offers excerpts that are more specific to the poem. It's pretty amazingly spontaneous," he says.

While the collaborations are still in progress as I write, individual contributions are ready to run.

McGlashan will sing "a couple of Mutton Birds songs that should be slightly recognisable after I've over-arranged them for orchestra".

False modesty this, as he is carefully trimming them for smaller forces, wishing that he'd paid more attention in orchestration class at university - "but I was only 17 and sex was more important than the correct range of the oboe".

Even more intriguing is McGlashan's piece based on "a stereo recording of the insane, wonderfully apocalyptic rhythms of a bottle-making machine, that trundles on in 12/8 rhythm while the orchestra plays around it".

Scholes will be revisiting a piece from his score for Michael Thorp's 1999 movie The Lunatics' Ball, in which he will improvise on clarinet over the orchestral strings. The composer is still drawn to its "haunting melodies, very evocative of distant memories for me".

Zagni has kept closest to the concert's theme with Pakiri Beach, a tribute to a recently deceased friend.

"It's not to do with dying," Zagni asserts, "but with how you feel when you walk along the beach and what goes through your mind at certain stages of that walk."

Besser, a New Yorker who has made New Zealand his home for the past 30 years, is offering a series of Hudson River pieces that proved popular when his band Bravura took them on its recent national tour. "Most importantly they're melodic and not in four-four time." Heartfelt words from a composer who admits he's "fed up with four-four".

"It's been such a cool way to put a concert together," is Scholes' final thought, a whimsical one.

"None of us knows how it will work out but the Muse, the Grand Master of Music does. Up there in the ether it's very clear what this concert will be like, but we'll have to wait until Sunday."

With a full house, one hopes, there to support Auckland's pluckiest orchestra and experience what must be one of the most innovative concert hall events of the year.

What: Auckland Chamber Orchestra,
Where and when: Town Hall Concert Chamber, Sunday, 6pm