The Best of the Week
SUNDAY JULY 1
Opera on Sunday (RNZ Concert, 6.00pm). The San Francisco Opera’s Aïda was a pareddown production, featuring relatively simple costumes and vast graphic backdrops designed by street artist RETNA. It was American soprano Leah Crocetto’s debut in the role of the Ethiopian princess secretly in love with her Egyptian conqueror, Radamès (US tenor Brian Jagde, also singing the role for the first time). If you listen carefully, you might hear New Zealand tenor Pene Pati, from Sol3 Mio, as a messenger.
MONDAY JULY 2
The Reading (RNZ National, 10.45pm weekdays). Adam Dudding’s memoir, My Father’s Island, is read in 10 parts, from today, by the author. Growing up as the youngest child of the eccentric Robin, the publisher and editor who founded literary journal Islands and wrote for this very magazine, was interesting to say the least, and this book is insightful and cathartic.
WEDNESDAY JULY 4
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). A match made in musical heaven in this edition of Carnegie Hall Live: celebrated Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel leads the Vienna Philarmonic Orchestra in an evening of Brahms. The programme features the witty Academic Festival Overture; Variations on a Theme by Haydn, first performed in 1873 by the Vienna Phil under Brahms’ direction; and Symphony No 1, which the composer laboured over for 14 years as he tried to put the giant Beethoven behind him.
THURSDAY JULY 5
Music Alive ( RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). Scintillating Australian pianist Andrea Lam joins the Auckland Philharmonia for this live concert from the Auckland Town Hall. She will perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 17, considered one of his finest, after the orchestra opens with the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie. The final work will be Brahms’ magisterial Symphony No 4.