OCEANS

Amalia Hall is the NZTrio’s violinist as well as Orchestra Wellington’s concertmaster and frequent soloist. The orchestra’s regular audience will be delighted to learn that she’s playing Ravel’s fiery and beguiling Tzigane.

An Australian Stage review certainly agreed with our local admiration for her playing: “What chocolatey low-string playing! What gossamer lightness up high! And such a compelling sense of rhythm. Even in the galaxy of stellar performers assembled for this festival, she stood tall.”

Beethoven’s Triple Concerto is a great opportunity for a larger collaboration involving a beloved New Zealand chamber music group, the NZTrio. Beethoven wrote this cheerfully original work for his patron and piano-student, the Archduke Rudolph, and tailored the parts to suit the Archduke and his court musicians. It’s chamber music on an expansive scale, with each member of the trio presenting their own theme which is developed in Beethoven’s inimitable fashion.

Some different connections are explored in Ocean, a work-in-progress by Orchestra Wellington’s 2026 Composer-in-Residence, Victoria Kelly. Kelly made a transformative journey to the Antarctic as part of Antarctica New Zealand’s Community Engagement Programme. She was moved by the experience of living in an unimaginably beautiful and mysterious place, within a community of people who collaborate peacefully to better understand the world.

The result is an opera adapted from the 1961 novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. Ocean explores the limits of human knowledge as a group of scientists try to understand the nature of a vast, sentient ocean on the surface of an alien planet. In Lem’s novel, the ocean of Solaris holds up an indifferent mirror to the people who are studying it – and they struggle to cope with what is reflected back to them.

Keep an eye on our website, emails, and social media for announcements during our season about opportunities to hear parts of the work and discover who our soloists will be for this exciting new work.

We welcome the NZTrio to perform.