Including the Vietnam War and the APO’s Russian Fire

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 5

Saturday Morning with Kim Hill (Radio New Zealand National, 8.10am). American English professor-turned-novelist Charles Frazier shot to fame when his award-winning novel Cold Mountain was turned into a movie in 2003. He has just released his third novel, Nightwoods, and is one of Hill’s guests today. She’s also talking to two Kiwi academics: University of Auckland psychology professor and brain expert Michael Corballis and University of Canterbury associate professor Annie Potts. Described by Hill’s producer as a “chicken panegyrist”, Potts is a co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies and is writing a book on the natural and cultural history of Gallus gallus domesticus – the common chook.

The Vietnam War, photo/Ariana Gillrie

The Vietnam War/F in Math Recorded Live at Roundhead Studios (95bFM, 11.00am and Friday, 2.00pm). Don’t bands have funny names these days? Today’s first bunch are Auckland-based five-piece “country/psychedelic/doo wop” combo the Vietnam War, who someone rather cruelly called “a Kiwi version of Jack Johnson”. If they can overcome this slur on their originality, their Grey Lynn slacker sounds could be the next big thing. Then it’s F in Math, a solo project for ex-Mint Chicks bass player Michael Logie, which shows what one music geek can do with a bass guitar, a laptop and a collection of effects pedals. He manages to sound like an entire band but avoids the creative differences that beset so many creative folk. There will be live streaming and podcasts on 95bfm.com and video on the Listener website.

Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). Tonight’s concert from last year’s New Zealand International Arts Festival should whet the appetite for next year’s event – and possibly send you in the direction of Womad, too. It’s a performance by Djan Djan, a nation-straddling collaboration between Malian kora player Mamadou Diabaté, Australian blues guitarist and singer-songwriter Jeff Lang and Indian tabla whiz Bobby Singh. Together they pool their considerable talents to offer music from their respective countries and cultures.

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 6

Insight (Radio New Zealand National, 8.12am). As the election draws nearer and the rugby hysteria dies down, politicians must at last stop kissing babies and start talking about policies. In Poverty in New Zealand, RNZ’s political editor Brent Edwards finds out what our political parties intend to do about it.

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Composer of the Week (Radio New Zealand Concert, 9.00am today and weekdays and 7.00pm Monday). RNZ Concert concentrates on Jenny McLeod (b1941), who was born in Wellington but grew up in Timaru and Levin. She showed remarkable musical ability from an early age and could read music when she was five. She was immersed in music during her childhood and adolescence – she played the piano at school, was a church organist and an accompanist and played at dances in a band with her brothers – but was essentially self-taught until she enrolled at Victoria University in 1961. She studied with Frederick Page, David Farquhar and Douglas Lilburn and graduated in 1964, travelling to Europe that year to study with four enormously influential composers: Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio. She returned home in 1967 and took up lecturing at Victoria University, becoming a professor of music in 1971 and retiring from academia five years later. McLeod is best known for Earth and Sky and Under the Sun, both music-theatre works for performance by school children, but she is equally comfortable composing “serious” music, popular music and music for the church and for Maori communities. In 1997 McLeod was awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to music.

Spectrum (Radio New Zealand National, 12.15pm). Turns out you do need to be a rocket scientist for this job. Well, it helps, anyway. Pyrotechnics profiles Anthony Lealand, who had an unhealthy obsession with blowing things up as a kid. He and his buddy Steve Krenek (whose Nasa engineering skills are now applied to our wool industry – exploding sheep?) loved to hold wild student parties in the 1970s. The fireworks were amaaaaazzzzing, or perhaps that was just the drugs. Nowadays, Lealand is a fine upstanding Cantabrian whose fireworks company is now a world leader in its field (you should always operate explosives in open spaces). But he’s also providing a vital service in Christchurch and its environs, rock blasting in the Port Hills to minimise danger in areas made unstable by earthquakes.

Opera on Sunday (Radio New Zealand Concert, 3.00pm). Today it’s a return to the mainstream, one of the most performed works in the opera repertoire – Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. This production is a 2003 CD recording, which was named one of the 250 best classical recordings by Gramophone magazine last year. It stars Simon Keenlyside (Count Almaviva), Véronique Gens (Countess Almaviva), Patrizia Ciofi (Susanna), Lorenzo Regazzo (Figaro) and Angelika Kirchschlager (Cherubino), with Concerto Köln, conducted by René Jacobs.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 10

Appointment (Radio New Zealand Concert, 7.00pm). Peter Mechen looks at Douglas Lilburn’s song cycle Elegy, talking to singers and pianists who have performed the work. It was composed in 1951 and is a setting of poems by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, written as a memorial to Roy Dickson, who died in an accident in the Southern Alps in 1947.

Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). Direct from the Auckland Town Hall, tonight’s concert, Russian Fire, is the APO’s tribute to three giants of the Russian scene, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich and Stravinsky, featuring Russian-born violinist Alina Ibragimova. The programme includes Sadko Op 5 by Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto and Stravinsky’s ever-popular Firebird Suite. Conductor Eckehard Stier will have to work hard to contain so much Russian passion.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 11

Classic Concert (Radio New Zealand National, 11.06pm). Tonight it’s those famously unharmonious folkies Simon and Garfunkel, who sang songs of peace and love but couldn’t co-exist on a stage without wanting to shriek at each other. This concert, Live 1969, is from their final North American tour before the release of the mega-selling Bridge Over Troubled Water album – and splitsville.