NZSO Podium Series | Firebird (Wellington)

Additional performances:

April 10th (Tauranga)
April 17th (Napier)
April 24th (Auckland)

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Hamish McKeich | conductor
Diedre Irons | piano

Juliet Palmer | Buzzard
WA Mozart | Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major
Stravinsky (orch. Jonathan McPhee) | The Firebird

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Fifty years after Igor Stravinsky’s passing, his music continues to excite, provoke and entertain. This is nowhere more evident than in The Firebird. Originally composed in 1910, it has profoundly stirred the hearts of listeners ever since.

The Firebird has also inspired generations of later composers, including New Zealand-born Canadian composer Juliet Palmer. Her piece Buzzard, explicitly inspired by two famous musical birds (Stravinsky’s Firebird and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake) bears the thumbprint of her interdisciplinary, “postmodernist-with-a-conscience” style.

Diedre Irons will perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23. Like Palmer, she has spent considerable time in both NZ and North America, studying first in Canada, then both studying and then teaching at the Curtis Institute. Her long and illustrious career as soloist, chamber musician and educator has seen her record all five Beethoven Concerti with Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, collaborate with the New Zealand, Kodaly and Latin American String Quartets, and receive an MBE and ONZM for services to music.

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