Orchestra's diamond jubilee heralds bumper season

Trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger livens his September appearances with works by H.K. Gruber and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

The wait is over and the Big Three have finally announced their 2007 programmes. Music-lovers can check diaries and decide how concert-going dollars will be allotted.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Diamond Jubilee means a particularly classy, 46-page brochure.

There is no more James Judd balancing his baton by its tip, or double-bass players surfing on their instruments; instead, a collection of historic photographs by Tom Shanahan makes it well worthwhile searching out this handsome publication.

You can see players, patient and travel-worn, on a train in the 1960s, Stravinsky in post-performance chat mode and composer Ross Harris celebrating the orchestra's new Wagner tubas with the horn section in a Wellington cemetery.

The orchestra's CEO Peter Walls talks of a superstar line-up, and full-page glam-shots of Freddy Kempf and Leila Josefowicz would make you queue for tickets, if their solid record hadn't made you book early anyway.

Auckland's programmes are a mite conservative - as usual, we miss out on May's Made in New Zealand concert that will allow Wellingtonians to experience Nathan Haines playing John Psathas.

It is nice that Eve de Castro-Robinson's new Bill Manhire collaboration, These Arms to Hold You, will be taken around the country after its Wellington premiere.

In contemporary programming, soloists seem to be powerbrokers - trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger livens his September appearances with works by H.K. Gruber and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Once again, it is the orchestra's principals who give us the sound of today, with three more short commissions from New Zealand composers; John Psathas gives Laurence Resse the chance to work out on his timpani, Lyell Cresswell does the same for trumpeter Michael Kirgan, while Anthony Ritchie's Whale Song, for double-bassist Dale Gold, has the niftiest concert partners in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Josefowicz playing Shostakovich.

The Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra has come up trumps, putting its entire programme up for perusal.

It includes a magnificent line-up of soloists from Raphael Wallfisch in February, through a trio of fine fiddlers - Ilya Gringolts in March, Mark Kaplan in May and the Michael Hill and now Premio Paganini winner, Feng Ning a month later.

In April, a transtasman feast features Australian composer Brett Dean playing his Viola Concerto alongside Colin Bright's Oceania, an orchestral extract from his opera The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.

The main APN News & Media series also features a few rarities, including Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead in June and Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem in October. A month earlier, conductor Paul Mann and the orchestra rescue Elijah from the suburban choral circuit, with Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Mendelssohn's patriarch.

The Vero series is lighter fare, although it will be curious to see what Ross Harris, the APO's last resident composer, does with an unsuspecting Shostakovich Prelude and Fugue.

This year, Gareth Farr is in the resident composer's chair. So, apart from a new commission in June, we are slated to hear Farr's Triple Concerto in August.

It has always been a matter of "wait and see" for the orchestra's mid-year and end-of-year concerts. No longer. Now we know that the Midwinter Masterpieces will offer little-heard Mendelssohn (his First Symphony), Holst (St Paul's Suite) and Vaughan Williams (Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus).

In November, the orchestra goes for Baroque, with Roy Goodman of the Hanover Band, with Italian, French and German composers having a night each.

Most commendable is the chance to hear chamber music. In February, cellist Wallfisch plays some solid sonatas with Michael Houstoun, and in May, Patricia Wright and Diedre Irons give us the lieder recital the city has been waiting for.

And, while we await the NBR New Zealand Opera and AK07 schedules, the APO is promising a concert Fidelio in August with Simon O'Neill and hidden away at the back of its brochure, two AK07 gems: John Adams' Harmonielehre and a film collaboration with the British DJ and composer Nitin Sawhney.

Chamber Music New Zealand does not disappoint either with Jonathan Lemalu and Malcolm Martineau as its star turn in May.

Local composers are generously represented. The New Zealand Trio take Psathas and James Gardner around the country, while the Kungsbacka Trio cross the Tasman with Farr squeezed between Schubert and Smetana.

The New Zealand String Quartet enlist percussionist Pedro Carneiro in works by Psathas and selections from other composers around the globe.

Aficionados will have to travel to Hamilton in October to catch Julia McCarthy and John Chen playing a new work by young Aucklander Robin Toan.

Next year, CMNZ goes global. A new series, Encompass, will present traditional Korean music in February and Soweto's Buskaid musicians in December. In between, geographically and calendar-wise, June's Tuhonohono features bicultural compositions by Gillian Whitehead.