Fiona Rae

The Best of the Week

TUESDAY OCTOBER 30

Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). The evocative sounds of taonga pūoro echo around St Mary of the Angels in this recording from the NZ Festival, in which Western strings meet Māori singing treasures. Leading taonga pūoro player Rob Thorne joins the New Zealand String Quartet for a programme that includes

Gillian Whitehead’s Poroporoaki; Gareth Farr’s He Poroporoaki; Selina Fisher’s award-winning Tōrino; and the premiere of a work by Thorne,

Tomokanga.

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 31

The Wednesday Drama (RNZ National, 9.06pm). HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds wasn’t the only literary work that Orson Welles produced for radio, but it has become the most famous, reportedly causing a panic when it was broadcast on October 30, 1938. Afterwards, some newspapers did “feign fury”, as Welles put it, and there were calls for federal regulation, but it was a boon for Welles, cementing his fame as a dramatist. Here’s the original broadcast, marking 70 years since it went to air. If you’d like to hear more episodes of Mercury Theatre on the Air, there are eight episodes on the Indiana University Bloomington website, including Sherlock Holmes, Heart of Darkness and Julius Caesar. Many are adapted by Howard Koch, who co-wrote Casablanca: tinyurl.com/ NZLWelles.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 1

Music Alive (RNZ Concert, 7.30pm). The APO unleashes its Free Spirit in tonight’s live broadcast from the Auckland Town Hall that features the APO’s Robert Ashworth performing Anthony Ritchie’s Viola Concerto. The composer says it is “a personal work, in which the viola takes on various characters”, something that is also true of the orchestra in Strauss’ saucy Don Juan, while Dvořák’s Symphony No 8 revels in the outdoors.