Hutt Valley Orchestra Presents

What happens when you mix a talented young conductor, a rising star on the clarinet and a bunch of keen amateur orchestral musicians in Lower Hutt? You get the world's most famous clarinet concerto in a programme designed to please the ear of every fan of classical music.

The Hutt Valley Orchestra will present its first concert for 2011 on Saturday 2 April. Conductor Brent Stewart has arranged a programme that follows a fairly standard format that you would regularly expect at an NZSO or Wellington Vector – a short work followed by a concerto and finishing with a symphony. Such ambitious programming shows how far the orchestra has come under the leadership of this gifted young musician.

The concert will open with the very beautiful and popular Pavane for a Dead Princess by Maurice Ravel. This is one of his early masterpieces written almost 30 years before his most popular work, Bolero.

This will be followed by Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A, almost the last composition that Mozart actually completed. Conductor Brent Stewart has engaged Nicolas Walshe as the clarinet soloist. Nick is currently studying towards a Post Graduate Diploma in Music Performance, under the tuition of Phil Green at the NZSM. He is also working towards a BA in English Literature and teaches clarinet and saxophone in the Wellington area.

Nick has played both clarinet and bass clarinet with the Central Band of the RNZAF and the Wellington Youth Orchestra, with whom he performed the Mozart Clarinet Concerto last year. He is also the bass clarinettist for the National Youth Orchestra.

After the interval the concert will conclude with Symphony No 6 by Franz Schubert. He composed the work in 1818 but it was never performed until 1828 the year of his untimely death, aged 31.

Event listed by JoToon

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