Radio Fiona Rae
The Best of the Week
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 17
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.00pm). A concert originally performed to mark a Chinese Moon Festival, but here it’s celebrating Chinese New Year on February 16. One of the world’s top guzheng (Chinese zither) players, Xia Jing, is captured in performance with the NZ Trio in a programme of new works by New Zealand and Chinese composers. They include Dorothy Ker’s String Taxonomy, in which the musicians use objects such as ping-pong balls, string and chopsticks to play their instruments, and Dylan Lardelli’s Shells, in which he tries to capture the tension between large and small sounds. Xia Jing also performs Hui-Ran Wang’s rippling Yi Dance.
SUNDAY FEBRUARY 18
The Sunday Feature (RNZ Concert, 2.00pm). In this week’s Art, Life, Music, Charlotte Wilson is in the studio with Karl Maughan, the Wellington painter who is well known here and around the world for his giant, hyperreal gardenscapes.
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 21
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.00pm). The Bachfest Leipzig traditionally begins with organ music, and in this recording from last year, Ullrich Böhme starts proceedings with Bach’s Toccata in F. The festival takes place in St Thomas’s Church, where JS Bach is buried, and last year paid homage to Martin Luther 500 years after the Reformation. Bach’s adaptation of a hymn by Luther is also on the programme, as are works by Mendelssohn, who revived Bach’s music 100 years after his death.
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 23
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.00pm). The Harold López-Nussa Trio brought the sounds of Cuba at the close the 2017 Wellington Jazz Festival: pianist López-Nussa, with his brother Ruy on percussion and Julio César Gonzalez on guitar, performs reworked tunes from the golden era of Cuban jazz as well as tracks with an Afrofusion vibe from his latest album, El Viaje.