2022 Subscriptions are now open.

Subscriptions to our 2022 season are available until 31 January 2022. Please see our 2022 season page and subscription for details. 

Please note that there is an error in the brochure. The NZTrio concert is on Thursday 21 April.
COVID-19 and the 2022 Season

From 2022, The Piano will require all patrons, staff and performers to be fully vaccinated. Subject to government approval, patrons who have an exemption from vaccination may attend concerts while wearing a face mask.
Upbeat Interview

On Friday 15 October Tony Ryan was interviewed on RNZ Concert's Upbeat programme. He was reviewing our 2022 season. To hear this interview please click on the button,
Christopher’s Classics 2022 – Series XXVII
Reviewer Tony Ryan looks forward to the expanded programme for the 2022 season.

With a few modifications of date, programme and personnel, Christopher’s Classics in 2020 and 2021 have been a life-saver for Christchurch concert-goers. For 2022, an ambitious ten-concert schedule with top-line New Zealand musicians and even more affordable ticket prices comes as a much-needed booster dose of musical excellence after the uncertainties of these last two years.

2022’s CHRISTOPHER MARSHALL CONCERT (which proved to be a highlight of the 2021 series) this time features baritone Will King in a recital of English and French songs accompanied by David Codd. The programme includes Britten’s wonderful Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, which I’m especially looking forward to. Will King has already made a notably favourable impression on those who have heard him recently so, apart from this welcome opportunity of having a singer in the 2022 season, I’m very much looking forward to hearing this rising star in the Christopher’s Classics opening concert in March.

PIANO TRIO ENSEMBLES are quite a thematic thread running through the 2022 series. Three such groups can be heard in April, June and July; four if you count the welcome return of the Morton Trio, also in July, with French horn replacing the cello of the other ensembles. The very wide range of repertoire that these trios are scheduled to play easily justifies their inclusion in this expanded season, and it will make for some fascinating comparisons as the different personalities bring their individual insights to the music-making. All three of the standard ensembles will include works by New Zealand composers: in July the Levansa Trio will play Ultraviolet by Claire Cowan, while both the NZ Chamber Soloists and the NZTrio will première new commissions whose details are yet to be announced. The NZ Chamber Soloists’ programme is a very innovative mix of New Zealand-Chinese-American works along with Shostakovich’s rarely heard First Piano Trio, and I’m rather excited to see that NZTrio’s programme also includes a work by Nikolai Kapustin, who died just last year at the age of 82, and whose music has been receiving increasing attention in recent years. Another interesting feature of these concerts is that NZTrio and Levansa Trio will each include a Beethoven Piano Trio, which just happen to be the same two that the Argyle Trio played in the 2021 series – so this will make another fascinating comparison; it’s always intriguing to hear the diversity of approaches as different musicians bring their own individual vision to the music, especially the great Archduke Trio which is always a favourite. 

PIANIST LIAM WOODING, who appears in July with the Morton Trio, returns in September with an enticing solo programme of Mozart, Bach-Busoni, Prokofiev (the quirky and inventive Vision Fugitives) and a Sonata by Australian composer Carl Vine. The inclusion of the occasional solo musician in the Christopher’s Classics series is always a welcome feature.

TWO STRING ENSEMBLES are scheduled for August and September. The Aroha String Quartet have an appealing programme of Mendelssohn, Brahms and John Psathas, along with a real favourite of mine – Shostakovich’s Tenth String Quartet. Strings Amore is the other string group, which comprises five of New Zealand’s finest players in a programme of baroque works by Vivaldi, Graupner, Telemann and Bach. This concert features Donald Maurice on viola d’amore, one of the baroque era’s most exquisitely beautiful and favourite instruments.

TWO DUOS complete the 2022 line-up. In May the Darroch Cowan Duo bring a collection of pieces for flute and guitar by composers from both North and South America, while the 2022 series ends in October with a programme of songs arranged for cello and piano from originals by Schubert, Glazunov, Dvořák,
Schumann and Brahms. For this concert Andrew Joyce and Rae de Lisle will no doubt be reprising some of the tracks that we often hear on RNZ Concert from their album Morgen released in 2020, although that disc doesn’t include Glazunov. Personally, such arrangements of well-known vocal gems have the effect of making me wish for the originals with all the textual expression and tension that only the human voice can deliver. However, the cello is far more suitable for such instrumental alternatives than the interminable flute or clarinet arrangements that seem prevalent and, depending what the year throws at us, I may well be ready for some good easy-to-listen-to tunes, so I do look forward to this opportunity to hear two such fine musicians as the icing on the cake in what looks like a series of enormous variety and tantalising repertoire.
Christopher's Classics 9 November 2021
New Zealand String Quartet
Helene Pohl & Monique Lapins (violins), Gillian Angel (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (cello).

Reviewed by Tony Ryan.

The New Zealand String Quartet is an annual visitor to the Christopher’s Classics series. In this final concert of the 2021 season these four superb musicians brought their usual refinement and insight to works by Purcell, Britten, Gao Ping and Smetana.

The association of Britten with the music of Purcell is well documented, especially in several of the later composer’s works based on Purcell originals, notably The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and ‘realisations’ of various hymns and songs. So, pairing these two English masters on the programme was an astute idea. In both cases I was struck by the modernism of the music. Although Henry Purcell died when both Bach and Handel had barely turned ten years old, the harmonic daring and passing dissonances of his contrapuntal writing in the Three Fantasias on this programme were quite striking for their boldness and in the occasional element of shock that they projected. But the NZ String Quartet kept these moments of surprise perhaps a little too much in check with their refined and carefully controlled style of performance. While the players conveyed a clear sense of their commitment to these pieces, their almost Romantic phrasing with its legato elegance somehow lessened the impact of Purcell’s invention.

String Quartet No. 2 in C is my personal favourite of Britten’s three works in the genre, and it was very satisfying, at last, to encounter a live performance of it. And, if it didn’t have quite the same headlong fluidity that I’m used to from some recorded versions, it remained an enjoyable and engaging performance. The cadenzas in Chacony were played with flair and vitality and, overall, I was surprised by the ‘modernness’ of the music in a way that hadn’t previously struck me. 

But, for me, the most successful performance on this programme was Gao Ping’s Prayer Songs. Here, all four players made the most of the composer’s special brand of appealing originality, taking the lead by turns and contributing to the myriad variety of colourful textures when required. In the first two of these four short pieces, Gao Ping’s Chinese heritage was noticeably to the fore in a way that easily connected with Western ears; something that is becoming increasingly evident in an age of artistic attempts to break down borders. The light-heartedness of the final piece was also a welcome aspect of both the music and the performance, when new ‘classical’ music can often take itself too seriously. The live performances of Gao Ping’s music that I’ve encountered over the last two or three years are evidence of a very original creative mind that seems easily able to engage the listener, as was evident from this audience’s response, and the NZ String Quartet certainly projected these qualities in a way that would surely have pleased the composer greatly.

​I have long been a fan of both of Smetana’s two string quartets. If the second is slightly less well-known than the first, it remains a gloriously expressive and emotionally charged work. But in this performance I found something awkward, although difficult to put a finger on, about the playing. There was plenty of stylish phrasing, committed vitality and genuine engagement, but somehow an element of Smetana’s particular Bohemian idiom was missing, and the music seemed to lack some degree of an overarching shape. It’s hard to define but, in such a familiar work, I was puzzled by the inability of the music to fully make its mark in the way that I’m used to, especially when, outwardly, the playing was so fervent and committed. Hints of common ground with the quartets of Dvořák and Janáček were sporadically evident, and the music’s inherent tuneful nature made it a heart-warming end to this colourful and well-devised programme, and the end of another hugely successful season of Christopher’s Classics.
Acknowledgements:
  We thank The Rata Foundation, The Elizabeth Ball Charitable Trust,
Gloria Streat, Antonio Strings, Chamber Music New Zealand and private donors, ​whose patronage and sponsorship grants make these concerts possible.