Radio Fiona Rae
The Best of the Week
SATURDAY MARCH 10
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). In Curtain Raiser, Roger Smith explores Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the
End of Time, which will be performed by the NZTrio and British clarinet prodigy Julian Bliss in the following concert, recorded in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre. The innovative work, in which Messiaen eschews traditional concepts of musical time (although the quartet was inspired by the Book of Revelation and the literal end of time), was famously composed in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany and first performed in a hut for a group of 400 prisoners and guards.
SUNDAY MARCH 11
Opera on Sunday (RNZ Concert, 6.00pm). Georgian mezzosoprano Anita Rachvelishvili fair steals the show as the gypsy Azucena in the Met’s production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore, according to the New
York Times. She “brings back the role’s nuances, its range of colours, its emotional gradations”, although there was also praise for South Korean tenor Yonghoon Lee as Manrico and Americans Quinn Kelsey and Jennifer Rowley as the Count di Luna and Leonora.
FRIDAY MARCH 16
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). The sounds of New Orleans, courtesy of the 2015 Wellington Jazz Festival and the amazing Dee Dee Bridgewater, still going strong at 67. Trumpeter Irvin Mayfield leads the 18-piece New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and began the night with God Defend New Zealand. They went on to perform such classics as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans, I’ve Got the World on a String and What a Wonderful World. Bridgewater’s scat singing “was simply amazing”, said one local critic.