To some, Ferdinand Ries is best known as a minor planet spinning around the sun that was Beethoven.

Dozens of events all over Auckland will be shining brightly and busily tonight for Auckland Arts Festival's White Night, which stretches from the CBD to all corners of the city.

One of Auckland's best-known streets, Dominion Rd, will be sharing some of its history in a unique way this weekend.

The Scottish National Theatre makes an exuberant return to ale-house culture with a riotously funny and at times tenderly lyrical tribute to Scottish narrative ballads.

One of the subjects of a remarkable new Maori TV series on the descendants of those painted by Gottfried Lindauer is businessman, Treaty negotiator and new chief of Auckland Council's Southern Initiative John McEnteer.

This rich 1999 experimental classic from China is stylish, hip, humorous, streetwise - and hopelessly romantic: under youth's swagger are youth's desperate illusions.

We had come to the Civic Theatre to hear Haydn and Mozart from Kronos Quartet; in partnership with pipa virtuoso Wu Man, the Americans were offering a rare mingling of music and magic.

Micahel Hurst dons the Fool costume for King Lear, three decades after first tackling the role. By Barney McDonald.

The cover of Max Emanuel Cencic's Venezia says it all. The Croatian countertenor is all elegance, in dinner jacket and cravat, in front of an ornate wallpaper that might adorn the walls of a Venetian palazzo.

Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines leaves next week for Queensland after 17 years of working towards the gallery’s expansion and rejuvenation. But he’ll be back one day, he tells Linda Herrick.

British author Deborah Moggach returns to the rickety hotel setting that earned her big box-office success, writes Stephen Jewell

Pictures from the opening night of the Auckland Arts Festival performance by French pyrotechnical wizards Groupe F

Just go see this. French pyrotechnical wizards Groupe F offer a superlative, splendiferous, explosive extravaganza. Artistic director Christophe Berthonneau and his team, and Red Leap Theatre, are to be congratulated.

Walking tours - especially those guided by a remote, apparently all-seeing, all-knowing central HQ - are full of tantalising possibilities: where will I be going? How will I know how to get there?

Cantina opens with a velvety voiced crooner promising to "shoot the moon right out of the sky" and honours that with an exhilarating acrobatics display set in the seductive ambience of a 1920s speak-easy.

Pacific Les Mis musical hugely leavened by romance, humour and funky 70s style

A Dunedin artist has been invited to show his work at one of the world's most prestigious art exhibitions.