The Best of the Week
SUNDAY APRIL 8
Opera on Sunday (RNZ Concert, 6.00pm). It’s Puccini’s Madama Butterfly this week, with Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho in the lead role. She has been singing it around the world and “took Covent Garden by storm”, according to the Independent. At the Met, she’s joined by Italian tenor Roberto Aronica as Pinkerton and American mezzo-soprano Maria Zifchak as Suzuki, a role she has sung many times and made her own.
MONDAY APRIL 9
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). Renowned Spanish conductor, composer and scholar Jordi Savall draws a line between the music of medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the music of conquistador Spain and the folk traditions of Latin America in this concert recorded at the New Zealand Festival in February. He leads members of his own ensemble, Hespèrion XXI, and South American/
Mexican chamber music group Tembembe Ensamble Continuo, who play a range of ancient instruments, including the lutelike theorbo, harps, a number of guitars (among them a tiny mosquito guitar and a fat one called a lion) and a variety of viols (stringed instruments somewhere between a guitar and a violin that are played with a bow).
TUESDAY APRIL 10
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). Piano duo Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe are known for sexing up the classical repertoire and juxtaposing Mozart with Michael Jackson. They can quite easily go from Radiohead to Rachmaninoff, and in the week’s second concert from the New Zealand Festival, they perform their own arrangements of Bizet’s Carmen Fantasy, Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and the Lennon-McCartney standard Let It Be. “This is the way classical music existed a couple of hundred years ago,” Anderson told the NZ Herald in March. “Liszt literally took pop tunes and wrote pieces based on them.”