<img src='' title='Event Category: Masterworks' alt='' id='templ_icon_' width='' height='' /> Event Category: Masterworks

The BBC Singers join forces with one of the finest choirs of the southern hemisphere, Voices New Zealand, for a concert celebrating choral music from Australia and New Zealand with European influences.

As part of the programme both choirs perform the world premiere of a new work by the young New Zealand composer Takerei Komene. At the heart of the programme is Robert Wiremu’s Reimagined Requiem: Mozart Erebus, which “commemorates the Air New Zealand Flight TE901 disaster, which crashed into Mount Erebus in Antarctica in November 1979.

Wiremu weaves a narrative around the event by imagining that fragments of Mozart’s unfinished Requiem, perhaps carried on a personal cassette player, are scattered by the wind across the Antarctic landscape at the moment of impact.

The piece incorporates elements of the original Requiem but presents them in a fragmented and altered way, reflecting the tragedy of the air disaster.

“One charming night gives more delight than a hundred lucky days…” Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & Players present Purcell’s The Fairy Queen.

The spells are undone, the lovers are united. Now Oberon weaves a new enchantment – an entertainment without parallel beneath the starlit canopy of a summer night. Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but not remotely as you know it – there’s no Shakespeare, for a start! – and Paul McCreesh adores its wit, its magic and its sensuality. “I can’t think of anyone who could give a better rendition of this Restoration ‘feel-good’ masterpiece” says Presto Classical, but hear for yourself, in this exuberant concert performance. “A thousand ways we’ll find / To entertain the hours…”