The Best of the Week
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 9
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). Bella Hristova and Michael Houstoun’s Beethoven mini-festival continues live from the Auckland Town Hall: this afternoon they perform violin sonatas Nos 5, 6 and 10 ( Afternoon Concert, 3.00pm), and tonight they finish with Nos 1, 4 and the demanding No 9, known as the Kreutzer Sonata after violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer and popularised through Leo Tolstoy’s novella of the same name.
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 10
Opera on Sunday (RNZ Concert, 6.00pm). The Royal Opera House’s Barber of Seville was “tremendous fun”, according to one UK critic. Mexican tenor Javier Camarena, who has already caused a stir in New York, proved a show-stopper as Count Almaviva (“his high notes go on forever,” said the Guardian). Argentinian mezzo Daniela Mack was also on debut as Rosina; Italian tenor Vito Priante proved to be a “twinkly-eyed, knowing Figaro”; and our own Madeleine Pierard is the housekeeper, Berta.
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 11
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.00pm). It’s a pianists’ sort of week at the Proms, starting with Norwegian ivory-tinkler Leif Ove Andsnes performing Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto. In the year of the centenary of the Russian Revolution, acclaimed Shostakovich interpreter Vasily Petrenko conducts the Oslo Philharmonic’s performance of Symphony No 12, The Year 1917. The commemorations continue on Wednesday ( Music Alive, 7.00pm), when Denis Matsuev performs Tchaikovsky’s final work, Piano Concerto No 3, and Russia’s foremost opera orchestra and chorus, the Mariinsky, perform Prokofiev’s epic Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution. Valery Gergiev conducts. The focus shifts to Hungary on Friday ( Music Alive, 7.00pm), when American pianist Jeremy Denk takes on Béla Bartók’s ferociously difficult Second Piano Concerto. His countrywoman Karina Canellakis also conducts Dvořák’s romantic and lyrical Symphony No 8.