Around the World in 80 Minutes at Michael Fowler Centr

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2. Around the World in 80 Minutes

Journey around the world with the NZSO.

Setting forth with a work from Christchurch composer Anthony Ritchie, his Diary of a Madman: Dedication to Shostakovich draws on the Russian composer’s youthful works.

Camille Saints-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5 Egyptian is filled with allusions to rocking boats, croaking frogs and Nubian love songs. With filigree figures pouring forth from the soloist, Saints-Saëns’s music could be in no finer hands than those of pianist Stephen Hough. Stephen’s talents have been described as the ‘most perfect piano playing conceivable'.

Shostakovich’s epic Fifth Symphony, ‘A Soviet Artist's Practical, Creative Response to Just Criticism’, juxtaposes the naïve and the sardonic, triumph and despair, barbarism and elegiac beauty. His music declares an apparent patriotism while revealing sinister undercurrents.