KEY POINTS:
Next Thursday the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra launches this year's APN News & Media Premier Series with a new music director on the podium. Eckehard Stier is a familiar presence to concertgoers.
The 36-year-old German conductor first came here in 2007, weaving Saint-Saens' first cello concerto around the soulful Raphael Wallfisch, giving us Prokofiev's Classical Symphony with just the right crackle in its crinoline as well as a bracing Beethoven Pastoral.
Last year he presided over a performance of Strauss' Salome that was one of the orchestra's greatest achievements.
When I talked to him, he had just come offstage in his hometown of Gorlitz after conducting his New Lausitz Philharmonic.
Beethoven's Eroica went particularly well, he says. "It's difficult to pick a special moment. What is more interesting is the fantastic success the orchestra has had with its audiences, which have increased by over 300 per cent.
"That is what I am most proud of."
Not surprisingly, Stier has ambitious plans for his new colleagues here on the other side of the world.
"I'm very optimistic that we're in a good position to build a really good orchestra here. Not just for Auckland but for the whole of New Zealand.
"On my last visits, I could feel the musicians were experiencing problems without a music director.
"Now we'll be aiming towards more consistency, while constantly improving the quality of the actual playing."
Ask Stier about his long-term goals and the conductor's new Auckland audience features prominently in them.
"I want to get into contact with these people. I'll be talking to them and I'm keen to know what they want to hear and what music might be interesting enough to bring in some new audiences."
He points out how vital it is to include new music and he is looking forward to the APO's American Songs concert on March 5 which features works by John Adams and John Corigliano alongside Copland and Duke Ellington.
"I'm sure it will be such an exciting evening. It may bring out some new and different feelings in some of the audience but hopefully they will talk about these afterwards and the music will open new doors for some."
And, for those who are taken by the Corigliano Promenade overture on that programme, Stier is determined to find a place for the American composer's 1991 First Symphony in a future APO schedule. This powerful work, a response to the Aids epidemic still with us, earned the composer a Grawemeyer Award.
The mood of next Thursday's concert is dominated by Russian composers with the prelude to Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina and Rachmaninov's monumental Second Symphony.
"I'm a child of the German Democratic Republic," Stier explains. "We grew up learning Russian and it was only later that we realised our Russian friends were not really true friends. But there were no such disillusionments with Russian music. The very moment I heard Rachmaninov's second and third piano concertos I felt I was home.
"This is music that opens the floodgates," he enthuses when I ask him about Thursday's symphony.
"We'll be working on the very special sound needed from the strings - dark red, blood red and very Russian. When the trumpet plays it must not sound like Mahler or Richard Strauss, but something closer to the colour of the earth." Thursday's soloist will be Jennifer Pike, the young English violinist who carried off the BBC Musician of the Year prize seven years ago, at the age of 12.
Pike takes us back to mainland Europe by playing Chausson's Poeme and Ravel's Tzigane.
Stier had not met her when we talked but was looking forward to "making a good human contact from our very first meeting". "Inspiring each other is always the best way."
Performance
What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday Feb 19, 8pm
