Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa
24 May - 12:25 am NZ
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La Mer
Starts at 8:00 pm on Monday, 30 April 2012
La Mer: Debussy, Britten, Chausson, Sibelius
Sasha Cooke (mezzo), New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen
A broadcast of Friday night’s live concert “La Mer” given by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Sasha Cooke (mezzo), in Auckland.
Be swept away in the luxurious waters of the Mediterranean by Debussy’s iridescent symphonic sketches, La Mer. Debussy’s music evokes sunlight as it skips across the sea at dawn. With great waves of sound, the orchestra heaves like an ocean teeming with vibrant life in a work as exhilarating today as ever.
Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes begins the concert. Taken from his opera Peter Grimes, this is a more sinister sea, full of achingly beautiful music undone by despair as deep as the ocean itself.
Ernest Chausson’s intoxicating Poème de l’amour et de la Mer is a rare treat made more exciting by the cut-glass precision and luminous depth of the voice of Sasha Cooke. The radiant American mezzo-soprano caused a sensation as Kitty Oppenheimer in the Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic.
She was praised in The New Yorker for her ‘fresh, vital portrayal, bringing a luminous tone, a generously supported musical line, a keen sense of verbal nuance, and a flair for seduction.’
Finished while making his first voyage across the Atlantic, Jean Sibelius’ tone poem The Oceanides celebrates the Ocean King and his three thousand daughters with music as haunting and as ever-changing as the sea itself.
(Source: NZSO)
This concert was recorded live last Friday night in the Auckland Town Hall
