Saturday Morning with Kim Hill (Radio New Zealand National, 8.10am). Author, reporter and New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman has the creative energy of an insomniac flea: he has already written five best-sellers, including From Beirut to Jerusalem and The World Is Flat, and received three Pulitzer Prizes for his trouble. He’ll no doubt be talking about his new book, written with Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. Even his titles are exhausting. Friedman will be in the capital for the Writers and Readers Week during the NZ International Arts Festival in March. Then it’s our favourite person from Christchurch, ex-Listener writer Bruce Ansley, who has turned out another book – Christchurch Heritage: a Celebration of Lost Buildings and Streetscapes. It’s a Canterbury tale: a timely look at his beloved city before it changed forever, featuring photos from the Press archives. As far as we know, actress Dame Kate Harcourt hasn’t put out a book lately, but she did recently win her first acting award, at the Rhode Island Film Festival for her role in the movie Pacific Dreams. If you’re of a certain age, her rounded vowels will take you back to the preschool radio programme Listen with Mother, which kicked off her professional career in the 1960s. She’s currently in Sex Drive at Wellington’s Circa Theatre, which probably won’t be anything like that.
Tono Recorded Live at Roundhead Studios
Tono and the Finance Company and She’s So Rad Recorded Live at Roundhead Studios (95bFM, 11.00am and Friday, 2.00pm). This bFM blurb sounds as if it was written by someone who drinks too much coffee, but judge for yourself: “Dunedin-raised Tono performs an Auckland-centric set of songs about Herne Bay landlords, K-Rd bar-hopping and writing break-up songs in Grey Lynn … with nods along the way to Hamilton, disagreeing with David Bowie and – of course – a little economic theory. Tono is joined in the studio by Lisa Crawley and Graham Panther.” (PS: Graham Panther is his real name.) Then, it’s She’s So Rad – Sami sister Anji and award-winning producer and songwriter Jeremy Toy (also his real name) who play, writes bFM, “paisleyed shoegaze psychedelia” from their debut album, In Circles. This is their live debut performance as a duo, which means they recorded an album having never played together in public … There will be live streaming and podcasts on 95bfm.com and video on this website after October 22. (The first part of this concert will be repeated on Radio New Zealand National at 4.10pm and on Friday at 8.06pm.)
aimRenderAd(300, 250, '300X250','ContentRect','/POS=POS2'); if(!$.browser.msie){ ContentRect_frame = $("#ContentRect")[0]; ContentRect_frame.src = ContentRect_frame.src; }SUNDAY OCTOBER 23
Composer of the week (Radio New Zealand Concert, 9.00am today and weekdays and 7.00pm Monday). This week, RNZ Concert looks at the music of Brett Dean (b1961), one of Australia’s most internationally successful composers, who is also an accomplished violist and conductor. He studied at the Queensland Conservatorium, where he received a Medal of Excellence, and then moved to Germany, where he was a viola player in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from 1985 to 1999. In 2000, he returned to Australia to make his living as a freelance composer and musician. In 2009, he won the world’s most prestigious prize for composition, the US$200,000 Grawemeyer Award, for The Lost Art of Letter Writing, a large-scale concerto for violin and orchestra in which the violin takes on the letter-writing voices of Johannes Brahms, Vincent van Gogh, Hugo Wolf and Ned Kelly. He conducted the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in a performance of this work in April, as well as the premiere of Ross Harris’s Symphony No 4 (To the Memory of Mahinarangi Tocker). Last year, his first full-length opera, Bliss, co-written with librettist Amanda Holden, was performed in Australia, the UK and Germany. It is based on Peter Carey’s 1981 novel of the same name. Before coming to New Zealand this year, he spoke to the Listener about whether he tried to put an Australian “voice” in his work: “Not consciously, no. There have been Australian composers who have pursued that very specifically as one of their goals. But no, I can’t say that’s necessarily uppermost in my mind. But as a composer I am a sum of my parts and I am who I am. Interestingly, here in Europe [where Dean was when this interview took place], people like to hear something of the wide expanses of Australia in my music and yet in Australia people hear something of my time in Europe. So it’s horses for courses, really.”
Opera on Sunday (Radio New Zealand Concert, 3.00pm). Ha! Today, you can’t use that excuse about not liking opera because you don’t understand it. It’s Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel and it’s in English: no staring up at the surtitles and missing the action onstage or having a sneezing fit and losing track of the whole thing. Today’s performance is a recording from a CD series called Opera in English and features Rebecca Evans, Jennifer Larmore and Jane Henschel with the New London Children’s Choir and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. It’s based on Grimm’s … er … grim story about little lost kids, a gruesome witch and the perils of eating sweeties.
Young New Zealand (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). It’s one of the largest competitive events in this country that doesn’t require ball skills and tonight you can hear the first of nine programmes covering the national finale of The Big Sing 2011, recorded in the Wellington Town Hall. It started with more than 230 choirs from 150 schools; the weeding-out process has already taken place in the regions and the 18 selected choirs are competing for bronze, silver, gold and platinum awards. Tonight’s choirs include Euphony (Kristin School), Barock (Otago Boys’ and Otago Girls’ High Schools), Saint Cecilia Singers (Diocesan School for Girls), Voicemale (Westlake Boys’ High School) and Bel Canto (Burnside High School).
LABOUR DAYMatinee Idle (Radio New Zealand National, 12.12pm). Jim Mora is planting out his tomatoes, so the idiosyncratic musical tastes of those anarchists of the eardrum, Simon Morris and Phil O’Brien, are back on display with a one-off afternoon assault. What topic will they come up with for Labour Day, dare you ask?
FRIDAY OCTOBER 28Classic Concert (Radio New Zealand National, 11.06pm). Singing, songwriting legend Carole King took her comfy chairs all over small venues in the US for The Living Room Tour, and later brought it to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This concert of most of her big hits was recorded in 2004: just King on piano, two backing singers, a bass player and a guitarist.
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