Including Colleen McCullough and the Eversons

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 19

Saturday Morning with Kim Hill (Radio New Zealand National, 8.10am). Today, Hill talks to Australian writer Colleen McCullough (whose book The Thorn Birds got parishioners looking twice at their priests) about the autobiography she said she’d never write. Then it’s this year’s winner of the Rutherford Medal. The premier award of the Royal Society of New Zealand recognises an outstanding contribution in science, maths, social science or technology. And Sharon and Neil Finn will have another go at playing favourites after postponing their September appearance. They might even spin a tune from their just-released CD as Pajama Club, with Sean Donnelly and Alana Skyring.

Colleen McCullough, photo Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

The Eversons/Mothers of Darkness Recorded Live at Roundhead Studios (95bFM, 11.00am and Friday, 2.00pm). Indie guitar band the Eversons are four friends from Wellington who have only been a band since the end of last year but have already found a way to get their music heard around the world: they’ve had a song (Creepy) accepted onto Air France’s in-flight radio playlist. Mothers of Darkness are blokes who play “casually uptight” music, according to their Facebook page. Perhaps they are four enemies from Auckland. Oddly, they share their name with a castle in Belgium – so named, apparently, because it was a centre of occult worship … There will be live streaming and podcasts on 95bfm.com, and video on this website after November 19.

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 20

Insight (Radio New Zealand National, 8.12am). Serious stuff for a Sunday morning: make a cuppa and a decision, if you haven’t already. In 2008, Insight looked at the Maori political landscape. Now, three years later, a new party, Mana, has joined the fray. Natalie Mankelow will again speak to the main players and ask Maori how they feel about their options today.

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Composer of the Week (Radio New Zealand Concert, 9.00am today and weekdays and 7.00pm Monday). RNZ Concert focuses on Frederic Mompou (1893-1987) (also known as Federico), the Catalan Spanish composer and pianist who is best remembered for his solo piano music and songs. He initially studied piano at the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu in Barcelona, the city of his birth, before transferring to the Conservatoire de Paris, which was headed by his childhood idol, Gabriel Fauré. There he studied piano and composition, but his extreme shyness meant a career as a pianist was out of the question. However, after World War I his talent as a composer was recognised and his works were being performed regularly. In 1921, the French critic Émile Vuillermoz attended a performance of his Scènes d’Enfants by his former teacher, Ferdinand Motte-Lacroix, and proclaimed Mompou “the only disciple and successor” to Claude Debussy. In spite of this, Mompou didn’t publish any music between 1931 and 1941, when he fled the German occupation of Paris and returned to Catalonia. He produced work steadily through the decades, living quietly in his native country and marrying pianist Carmen Bravo (30 years his junior) at the age of 64. He received numerous awards during his lifetime and died at 94. After the death of his widow in 2007, some 80 unpublished works were discovered in his house and in the National Library of Catalonia, and many went on to be performed in Spain.

The Sunday Feature (Radio New Zealand National, 4.07pm). Because we also have a referendum on our voting system this election, you’ll want to fire up the kettle again for the Electoral Referendum Forum, which was hosted by political scientist Nigel Roberts last month at Te Papa. The panel consisted of Jim Bolger, Michael Cullen, Ruth Richardson, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Sandra Grey (Campaign for MMP) and Jordan Williams (Vote for Change). This programme will be repeated on Tuesday, November 22, at 9.06pm.

MONDAY NOVEMBER 21

Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). Live from the Auckland Town Hall tonight it’s Voices of Aotearoa, a concert from the award-winning Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir and Horomona Horo, conducted by Karen Grylls. Horo plays taonga puoro – the traditional musical instruments of Maori. He has worked with Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns, won the inaugural Taonga Puoro Concerto in 2001 and performs around New Zealand and overseas.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 23

Appointment (Radio New Zealand Concert, 7.00pm). Tonight, the series 13 Days When Music Changed Forever looks at Stalin’s allergic reaction to “modern music”, in an article entitled “Chaos Instead of Music”, which was published in Pravda in January 1936. His “review” of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District includes these comments: “From the first minute, the listener is shocked by deliberate dissonance, by a confused stream of sound. Snatches of melody, the beginnings of a musical phrase, are drowned, emerge again, and disappear in a grinding and squealing roar … The singing on the stage is replaced by shrieks … The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear. Leftist distortion in opera stems from the same source as Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching, and science.” Ouch!

Music Alive (Radio New Zealand Concert, 8.00pm). The Soviet sniping continues immediately after: let’s hope listeners enjoy Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto more than did his colleague at the Moscow Conservatoire, pianist Nicolai Rubinstein, for whom it was written in 1874. Tchaikovsky admits he found the writing hard going, but Rubinstein wasn’t too pleased with the result, calling it “worthless and absolutely unplayable” and “bad, trivial and commonplace”. Tchaikovsky rededicated it to Hans von Bulow; Rubinstein later changed his mind. Tonight’s concert, under the baton of Yakov Kreizburg, features the Monte Carlo Philharmonia, who all play gold-plated instruments and drove their Bentleys to the Auditorium Rainier III, where it was recorded, in November 2010. Russian pianist Nikolai Tokarev takes on the dreaded concerto, as well as works by Rachmaninov and Chopin.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 25

Classic Concert (Radio New Zealand National, 11.06pm). A sad fact: this is the great Roy Orbison’s last concert, recorded in Ohio, on December 4, 1988, two days before he died of a heart attack, aged 52. Orbison’s career was in orbit again with the runaway success of supergroup the Traveling Wilburys, which consisted of Orbison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne.