NZ Opera’s bums-on-seats production for 2025 is Puccini’s La Bohème. There’s a reason it’s a perennial favourite, though NZO last performed it as recently as 2018. Is it a little soon for a return or is that just me quibbling? There’s an even hastier revival for Jonathan Dove’s chamber opera Mansfield Park. After successful North Island concerts in 2024, Dove’s spin on Jane Austen heads to Christchurch and Dunedin in April. More interesting is another Dove opera, The Monster in the Maze, a community piece based on the ancient Greek story of the Minotaur. It appears in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland (September). Excitingly, the director is Anapela Polataivao, whose staging of Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (written by David Seymour’s favourite poet, Tusiata Avia) was sensational.
Chamber Music New Zealand’s 2024 was notable for its paucity of actual chamber music. It was a bold move that didn’t always work, and the organisation has responded with its best season for years. For the traditionalists, pianist Piers Lane tours Chopin’s Nocturnes from February 28, and Daniel Müller-Schott offers all six of Bach’s solo Cello Suites (November). There’s also a nationwide tour for percussion combo From Scratch (September). The series that catches my eye, though, is Four Last Songs (October), which features Richard Strauss’s titular masterpiece arranged for piano trio and soprano by Salina Fisher. Fisher’s wonderful trio Kintsugi gets a deserved airing, too.
CMNZ also collaborates with the New Zealand String Quartet and New Zealand Dance Company for American minimalist works from Glass and Reich, choreographed by Moss Te Ururangi Patterson (March and April). Yes please. Additionally, NZSQ is rumoured to be taking Shostakovich’s mighty quartets on tour. However, the unexpected departures of first violin Helene Pohl and cellist Rolf Gjelsten late last year mean that the group’s website has big “details to be announced soon” energy.
Similarly, with founding cellist Ashley Brown indicating he is leaving the group to concentrate on his other gig with Auckland Philharmonia, NZTrio is still to launch its 2025 season. However, Brown’s final trio concert takes place on Waiheke Island on February 22, with a typically adventurous programme of Aussies Elena Kats-Chernin and Matthew Hindson flanking our own Gareth Farr. A fitting way to farewell a musician who has contributed so much to New Zealand chamber music.
Finally, props Wellington’s excellent Tudor Consort, whose Good Friday concert boasts Thomas Tallis’s Lamentations and John Sheppard’s epic Media vita in morte sumus. Then, in May, the group joins forces with period instrument orchestra The Queen’s Closet and director Jacqueline Coates to perform Purcell’s tragi-comic semi-opera Dioclesian. For me, it’s the tastiest-looking concert of 2025.
