NZSO Firebird in association with Ryman Healthcare - Napier

The NZSO presents Firebird in association with Ryman Healthcare.

Join your NZSO for a night of soul-stirring music featuring Stravinsky’s The Firebird, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major and more.

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.

Tickets from $25. Book now!

Hamish McKeich, Conductor
Diedre Irons, Piano

Juliet Palmer, Buzzard
WA Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major
Stravinsky orch. Stravinsky/McPhee, The Firebird