Radio Fiona Rae
The Best of the Week
SUNDAY OCTOBER 30
Opera on Sunday (RNZ Concert, 6.00pm). Arrigo Boito may be principally known as Verdi’s librettist, but he got his 15 minutes – and more – with his single opera Mefistofele, his version of Goethe’s great work. In this performance from the San Francisco Opera’s 201314 season, Russian bassbaritone Ildar Abdrazakov donned red trousers and sported horns to play Mefistofele to Ramón Vargas’ Faust. American soprano Patricia Racette is the tragic Margherita.
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 3
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 8.00pm). A new work, Mainspring, from the Auckland Philharmonia’s composer in residence, Karlo Margetić, opens tonight’s live broadcast from the Auckland Town Hall, but in a concert called Soul of the Cello, the star is German cellist Julian Steckel, who performs Dvorák’s beloved Cello Concerto, a work composed in the US and suffused with homesickness. The APO also tackles Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s idiosyncratic Symphony No 2, The Four Temperaments, which explores personality types from Melancholic to Phlegmatic.
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 4
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.00pm). Dutch pianist Ronald Brautigam is known as a leading exponent of the fortepiano and a Mozart specialist and it is in the latter capacity that he joins the NZSO for the final of its Masterworks series. Live from the Auckland Town Hall, Edo de Waart guides the orchestra through Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 24, one of the maestro’s few minor-key works, intriguingly composed at the same time as his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro. Elgar’s beautiful and stormy Symphony No 1 is the other masterwork of the evening.