Searching for excellence in AK03

By WILLIAM DART

Was it only two years ago that a flooded Aotea Square hosted a waterlogged spectacle that would have had the sensation-silly courts of the 18th century agog?

Devised to celebrate the upcoming Auckland Festival, the evening was a deliriously silly one. Raymond Hawthorne intoned Lilburn's Landfall in Unknown Seas in front of the Auckland Philharmonia; minutes later the orchestra was backing Che Fu singing Chains while he waded in the murky Aotea pond.

The piece de resistance was So Far, a theatrical work-in-progress by Mike Mizrahi and Gareth Farr, a Jim Baxter goulash that balanced artists like Deborah Wai Kapohe, Linn Lorkin and Elizabeth Hawthorne alongside such accessories as rowboats, wheelbarrows and burning prefabs.

Fate decreed that So Far, and that first disastrous stab at an Auckland Festival, marketed under the cringe-making name Auckland Eh?, would be stillborn, but the dream never went away. And, in just a few weeks, the city will finally have its festival.

There's a new name (AK03) and director (Simon Prast) although Gareth Farr is still heading the musical line-up, providing a commissioned work for opening night, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Auckland Philharmonia's Twin Peaks concert.

I'm still wondering about how one fits both orchestras on the Town Hall stage and how ears will cope with decibel overload, but a bubbling Prast is happy other issues have been avoided.

"There were all sorts of dire warnings that this was going to be a celebrity death match," he says, "but they've just been consummate professionals on both sides."

Ironically, Farr's work may be overshadowed by the twin Everests of Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony and Berlioz' Symphonie funebre at triomphale.

Full marks, too, to the festival for mounting a season of Michael Williams' opera The Prodigal Child. "We know that opera isn't cheap and New Zealand opera isn't really thick on the ground, so this is a perfect project for us," is Prast's response.

It's not quite the cast that triumphed in New Plymouth and Christchurch (New Zealand baritone Paul Whelan has been replaced by Australian John Brunato), but, contrary to what the AK03 programme might have us believe, Alan Riach's libretto has not been replaced by new words by Stuart Hoare.

There are some intriguing events here and there in the festival, ranging from Byung-ki Hwang's Korean gayageum (zither) recital to Off the Wall, a short programme of alt.music with Phil Dadson and friends, but Prast seems most proud of the "truly unique" Ute Lemper and the "fantastic" Barrage from Canada who "ooze talent - they can sing and dance and play violins and fiddles". He says "this is not just Riverdance with violins and fiddles" - but I'm sceptical.

The sad truth is the most substantial classical music events would have played anyway; they have simply been incorporated in the festival.

It's curious, too, how many are nothing particularly special. I suggest to Prast that the Auckland Philharmonia's All Roads Lead to Rome concert, of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov and Respighi, is perhaps one of the least interesting of the orchestra's season. "I don't like to prejudge these things," he counters. "If it brings in a new audience for the Auckland Philharmonia then I've played my part."

At one point in our conversation I begin to wonder whether AK03 has a problem with that most incendiary of three-letter words: "art". Although Prast assures me that "music is one of the art forms" and "an important strand", he's emphatic that "we're not the Auckland Arts Festival and we didn't want to frighten people away by High Art things that made them feel they weren't welcome to come along".

These are words that chill. We live in a world besotted with "Something for Everyone" philosophies, making for mediocrity where focused excellence could and should be our goal.

With proper planning, there could have been lunchtime and early evening concerts that would have been easy on the pocket and the timetable, programmes that could have featured local performers and local music.

Perhaps by AK05 ... but, in the meantime, you might catch some of the most intriguing music where you least expect it, in Matthew Hindson's score for the Sydney Dance Company's Ellipse and in Gillian Whitehead's beautiful soundscape for Briar Grace Smith's Potiki's Memory of Stone.

Herald Feature: Auckland Festival AK03

Auckland Festival website