Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra

The Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra is the city's leading performing arts organisation, and Auckland’s only resident full-time professional symphony orchestra. In more than 70 performances annually, the orchestra presents a full season of symphonic work and supports both the New Zealand Opera and the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

Renowned for its innovation, passion and versatility, the APO collaborates with some of New Zealand’s most inventive artists, and is the orchestra of choice for visiting international classical musicians and popular acts alike.

The APO promotes a vibrant arts culture by providing leadership and support. Through its numerous education programmes the orchestra offers opportunities to 25,000 young people and adults nationwide to participate in music, ranging from hip-hop and rock to contemporary and classical.

More than 100,000 people hear the orchestra live each year, with many thousands more reached through special events, other media and recordings on the APO Live and Naxos music labels. Many concerts are broadcast live nationally and streamed online, allowing everyone the chance to share the excitement of a world-class performance.

Eckehard Stier (conductor)

Eckehard Stier is the Music Director of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Theater Görlitz in Germany, and is a leading figure in the new generation of conductors.

As a boy was a member of Dresden's world famous choir, the Kreuzchor, and started conducting lessons at the age of 14. While still at the conservatorium in Dresden, he had already started conducting professionally and was an assistant to Harmut Haenchen at the Netherlands Opera.

At the age of 23, he became a staff conductor with the Opera Theatre of Chemnitz conducting opera and ballet productions. His opera repertoire includes nearly 80 works from 300 years of opera history. He also guest conducted with the Komische Oper Berlin, the Nuremberg Opera, State Opera of Hanover and the Opéra du Rhin in Strasbourg.

Eckehard Stier has also established a strong reputation as a symphonic conductor, and has conducted concerts with the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Dresdner Philharmonic Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Middle German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig's famous Gewandhaus, the Munich Symphony Orchestra and Chemnitz's Robert Schumann Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 2003 he was named Chief Conductor of the New Lausitz Philharmonic Orchestra. In addition to his conducting activities, his enormous affinity for jazz has led to successful collaborations, including conducting the German premiere of Howard Brubeck's Dialogues for Jazz-Combo and Orchestra in Dessau.

Pictures at an Exhibition

Promenade
I. The Gnome
II. The Old Castle
III. Tuileries (Dispute between children at play)
IV. Cattle
V. Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks
VI. Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle
VII. The Market at Limoges (The Big News)
VIII. The Catacombs (Roman Sepulchre) and "Cum mortuis in lingua mortua"
IX. Baba-Yaga
X. The Great Gate of Kiev

In 1870 most likely, Modest Mussorgsky became friends with the brilliant renaissance man and artist Viktor Hartmann, and shared with him a philosophical bent towards pursuit of a genuinely Russian art, free from Western European influences.

Hartmann's untimely death from an aneurysm at the age of 39 threw the composer into a deep depression until at least the following year, when an exhibition was mounted in St Petersburg of more than 400 of Hartmann's works. This moved Mussorgsky to create a musical monument to his friend: a suite of pieces originally for piano.

A suite of ten pictures with some promenade music inbetween, Pictures at an Exhibition remained relatively unknown for years until Russian conductor Serge Koussevitsky commissioned an orchestral version from the French composer Maurice Ravel. Koussevitsky premièred this himself at the Paris Opéra in 1922, and the rest - as they say - is history.