Opus Orchestra celebrates its coming of age with concerts in Hamilton (20 July at 8 pm in the Gallagher Concert Chamebr), Tauranga (21 July, 7.30 pm) and Rotorua (22 July, 3 pm Civic Theatre). Diedre Irons is soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 (“The Emperor”). Peter will conduct Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and a new piece by Andrew Buchanan-Smart, who founded the orchestra in 1991.
From 1 July, HSC (the Health Sponsorship Council) and the Alcohol Advisory Council (ALAC) become absorbed into the larger Health Promotion Agency (HPA), established through the Crown Entities Reform Act. Peter has been on the board of HSC since 2008 and has valued this opportunity to help promote healthy lifestyles in New Zealand. Together with his HSC colleagues, he wishes those at HPA every success in continuing and expanding this important activity.
Peter will be chairing seminars on Wagner’s Die Walkure in Auckland (4 July), Christchurch (6 July) and Wellington (9 July). He will be joined by Aidan Lang, the General Director of NBR New Zealand Opera and by several of the “Val-kiwis” – the New Zealanders performing as Valkyries in the upcoming performances of the opera by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with their Music Director, Pietari Inkinen. The cast includes Simon O’Neill, Edith Heller, Christine Goerke, John Wegner, Jonathan Lemalu and Margaret Medlyn. For details of these performances and the seminars, click here.
Peter will present a talk about Mozart’s Requiem at 6.30 pm on 6 June – immediately before the performance of this masterpiece in Wellington Cathedral by the Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir and the Vector Wellington Orchestra conducted by Karen Grylls.
Peter has just accepted a one-year appointment as a part-time Professorial Teaching Fellow at The New Zealand School of Music (a joint venture between Victoria University of Wellington and Massey University).
The Opus Orchestra concerts in Hamilton (23 March, 8 pm, Gallagher Academy), Rotorua (24 March, 7.30 pm, Civic Theatre) and Tauranga (25 March, 3.30 pm, Graham Young Youth Theatre) were highly successful. The programme, entitled “Landscaapes” began with Douglas Lilburn’s Aotearoa Overture, and featured Opus Concertmaster, Lara Hall, as soloist in Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir d’un Lieu Cher (orchestrated by Glazunov). Ian Parsons was soloist in the Elgar Romance for Bassoon and Orchestra. The programme ends with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in F major (the “Pastoral”). Warwick Braithwaite, nephew of the Warwick Braithwaite who conducted the premiere of the Aotearoa Overture in 1940, reviewed the Tauranga performance for The Bay of Plenty Times, writing, “from Lilburn to Beethoven the orchestra presented a programme of artistry and excellence.”
Some of Opus’s Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival concert in January is captured in a Waikato Times interview with Dame Malvina Major.
Following on from last November’s successful concerts, Peter will be presenting two further “Close Encounters” programmes with the NZSO in October 2012.
Peter is a member of the advisory board of the Francesco Geminiani Opera Omnia, general editor Christopher Hogwood. Peter’s edition of Geminiani’s two “taste” treatises (Rules for Playing in a True Taste and A Treatise of Good Taste in the Art of Musick (Vol. 12 of the Opera Omnia) has just been published. He is currently working on an edition of The Art of Playing on the Violin (Vol. 13 of the Opera Omnia). This edition will present Geminiani’s 1751 English text, the 1752 French text and Toricella’s 1782 German text in parallel.
The Cambridge History of Musical Performance ed. Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell has recently been published with a chapter by Peter on “Instrumental Music in the Long 18th Century”. Publiciation is imminent of CUP’s Mozart’s Chamber Music with Keyboard ed. Martin Harlow. This contains a chapter by Peter entitled “Opus 1, take 2: Mozart’s Mannheim and Paris sonatas for keyboard and violin”.
On 3 May, Peter gave the pre-concert talk for the New Zealand String Quartet’s performance of Beethoven’s first two Razumovsky Quartets. The very next night he gave the first of four pre-concert talks for the NZSO’s concerts with Andrew Grams and Lynn Harrell (soloist in the Elgar Cello Concerto).
Peter comments, “It felt like old times to be on tour with the NZSO and to be able to hear such a superb interpretation of Schumann’s Symphony No. 4 several times. I was delighted that doing these talks meant that I was in Auckland for my old friend, Vicki Jones’s last concert in the NZSO. She has made such an outstanding contribution over 33 years.”