The concert opens with a short overture composed by NZ composer David Farquhar in 1959.
Ravel's Piano Concerto opens with a percussionist releasing the wound‑up spring of the slapstick. Surprises continue with hints of the blues permeating the first movement. Hear seventeen-year-old Madeleine Xiao who is studying piano under Rae de Lisle at the University of Auckland.
Shostakovich's 9th Symphony was expected to be a grand, triumphant composition to glorify Stalin’s regime when this was written in 1945, but Shostakovich, who had been terrorised by that regime, risked everything by producing something quite different. He managed to weather this storm politically, but he would not compose another symphony until after Stalin died!
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