Radio
The Best of the Week
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 11
Two Cents Worth (RNZ National, 12.12pm). News you can use: in these tight times, we need it. This new weekly money programme is presented by business journalists Bernard Hickey, Nikki Mandow, Jenée Tibshraeny and RNZ’s business editor Gyles Beckford.
Opera on Sunday (RNZ Concert, 6.00pm). As we commemorate Armistice Day, Spirit of Anzac: Voices from the Field is another chance to hear a special concert from earlier this year. Poetry runs through all the works, beginning with Frederick Septimus Kelly’s
In Memoriam Rupert Brooke and George Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, inspired by the AE Housman poems. Soprano Madeleine Pierard constitutes the opera part of the evening, with a fine performance of Ross Harris’ Symphony No 2. The words are by Vincent O’Sullivan and the work remembers soldiers who were executed for desertion. Harris also features in the following concert at 7.15pm: Face pays tribute to the pioneering work of New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies, who developed radical new plastic surgery techniques to treat World War I soldiers.
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 14
Music Alive (RNZ concert, 7.30pm). Grammy Awardwinning violinist Hilary Hahn wasn’t the only attraction at this LA Philharmonic concert: 25-year-old Jonathon Heyward, drafted in with two days’ notice when Miguel Harth-Bedoya fell ill, stepped up to the podium and led the orchestra “with whirlwind vitality and an exuberant boyish charm that was positively Bernsteinian”, said the LA Times. The concert includes Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila overture, Stravinsky’s Firebird suite and a new LA Phil commission, Tania León’s Ser (Being). Hahn performs Bernstein’s 1954 concerto Serenade.
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15
Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). An evening of lieder from the Auckland Town Hall: German baritone Thomas E Bauer joins the Auckland Philharmonia for Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, the song cycle for unrequited lovers everywhere, and a selection of songs by Schubert, illustrated by Brahms, Reger and Mahler. The evening begins with Schubert’s youthful Symphony No 3 and ends with Mahler’s rarely performed Totenfeier or Funeral Rites.