Big, bleak, beautiful Central Otago is the star of Top of the Lake, the new Jane Campion-driven television series, which began here on UKTV last night.

There was more than one tale to be told in NZTrio's Convergence concert on Sunday, particularly by the featured New Zealand composers.

Substantial classical music has been meagre in this Auckland Arts Festival.

It was difficult to resist the world of Whaka-Aria Mai: Opera in Te Reo.

Few of the 1000-plus who packed the house for the final show of Paul Kelly's main-centre tour would have been familiar with his latest album, Spring and Fall.

Prepare to do some serious thinking during Jane Campion's series, writes Nick Grant.

First steps to autonomy are chaotic, reports Sarah Lang.

Choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet take the biblical story of the Tower of Babel with its smiting of the human race into painful divisions of nationality and language.

Neil Young refused to play a greatest hits set, but his concert was crazy and confounding, exciting and exhausting, writes Russell Baillie.

There were a few bumps leading up to Auckland Arts Festival's first-centenary tribute to Benjamin Britten.

It may have been a little early for English high tea, but the cabaret-style seating in the concert chamber aimed to recreate the spirit of an 18th century German coffee-house.

At 70, his eye sight is failing, and he looked fragile as he was escorted on and off the stage by his roadie and members of his recently assembled all-Kiwi band.

Although no one doubted the need for rain ... did it have to come on the final day of Womad? And two days after a drought had been declared?

The festival offering from playwright Mitch Tawhi Thomas is a taut study of family dysfunction that finds plenty of life and laughter in the explosive quarrelling of estranged brothers.

The New Normal caused controversy before it even aired. Sarah Lang finds out why

Album No4 is a huge change for Aussie indie band, hears Paula Yeoman.

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