■ Arts Reflections with Sam Edwards
Mentioned in Despatches:
February 19 to March 1:
The Hamilton Gardens Festival is upon us!
Programmes are available, and stunning performances are available for pretty much everyone.
There will be food for the body and food for the soul.
A festival is a feasting and much loved by everyone except our misanthrope so much booking needs to be done.
Prices may seem a little higher, but the quality is there.
Seating is limited at our venues, and we need to book to make sure we get the entertaining nourishment we want.
CMNZ Returns:
This year’s Chamber Music programme opens right in the middle of the Gardens Festival, on Thursday February 27.
Juilliard 415 opens at the Gallagher Centre with a baroque programme by Historical Performance students from the Juilliard School in New York, and includes chamber music highlights as diverse as Handel’s Overture to Agrippina and Vivaldi’s flute concerto La Notte.
Reserve the following dates for the remainder of the year: Saturday May 2, Thursday June 11, Friday July 31, and Wednesday October 7.
Browser’s Literary Salons:
Success brings its own novel delights. Instead of a slipper comfy intimacy of 15 or 20 minds, more than 60 thioesters after literary enlightenment, or even just enlivening entertainment, turned up to enjoy discussion of and readings from the works of that literary star of the main 20th century, Georgette Heyer.
Clearly the word, and a love of the word, is alive and well after all.
Celeste Warner, a Heyer scholar, and her sister Kimberly, delivered the scholarly word, and excerpts from the novels were performed by Kirstine Moffat and Dr Mark Houlahan, and it was a superb evening.
You won’t find them in the HGAF programme, but as a lead in to the annual Hamilton arts festival, they are the works. Singing, and or playing music together, is one of life’s true treasures, and Nukes and Resonators delivered.
This performance, was another feather in the cap of The Meteor Theatre. The Meteor is not only making it possible for the Waikato to experience year round variety of the kind one only gets at major festivals, but delivers a performance space that is at once intimate, adaptable, and perfect for performances like tonight’s double billing.
The Nukes, the tightest trio with the loosest sound – because they are seriously good musicians – know exactly what three ukuleles can do. Vocals so clear a deaf man could forget his hearing aids and still have a ball, the four tiny strings on the ukes producing the familiar strum before morphing into foot tapping riffs and accompanying moody, comic, engaging vocals, this full house of listeners was as engaged and enthusiastic as it gets.
Mike Burrows, percussion, vocals, uke, even turned up with a pate – that wee Island foot long canoe one beats with a stick, to come up with an unique individual performance on the night. Frontman for Harmonic Resonators, Jeremy Hantler, introduced the trio with the same enthusiasm he brought to his own group, the family affair called Harmonic Resonators, which, like a certain prime minister, comes from
Morrinsville.
And then they sang, and played, and offered such an enjoyment packed performance, by the final moments the entire audience was on its feet cheering, and singing and adding this one to the memory boxes. There were yodelling C&W moments which harked back to the best of post WWII talent quests, and there were unique harmonic settings of traditional and modern waiata, in te reo, (as was much of Hantler’s fluent introduction for both halves).
The waiata, with the pakeha guitar slinging quintet at full tilt, was like nothing I have ever heard, and Maori in the audience responded with unqualified enthusiasm and song themselves as did the rest of us.
From sheer musicianship, through dramatic, moody, exciting, nostalgic singing, to audience involvement which was complete, this was a night to savour. Kia ora Resonators and Nukes. Ka kite ano.