News

A stunning multi-artform event, combining images from the world's beautiful and remote places and the music of one of New Zealand's most highly regarded television score composers, performed by southern New Zealand's top orchestra will be a highlight of the inaugural Dunedin Heritage Festival. The Southern Sinfonia's Brooker United Travel Southern Pride Concert on 24 March, will be a concert of two halves.

The first half features Soprano Anna Leese following her show-stopping performance début at Covent Garden in 2006. Anna's performance as Musetta in La Boheme earned her high praise from the notoriously critical London reviewers who claimed "Leese is one potential star in the making".

Since then her career has been meteoric She has secured a recording contract with EMI, and further engagements with the prestigious Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, Canadian Opera, a recital at Wigmore Hall, and a performance at the America's Cup in Valencia. Dunedin audiences will be able to judge for themselves as Anna will be singing Musetta's most well-known aria in the concert.

Anna will also sing other popular arias and she will be joined on stage by the 100 voice City of Dunedin Choir which perform popular operatic choruses. The programme also includes excerpts from From the Southern Marches which was such a hit in Otago's 1998 celebrations. The conductor for this spectacular concert is the acclaimed Peter Adams and MC will be Dougal Stevenson.

The concert's second half contains just one work: Equator - Circle of Life, a new symphonic suite by Emmy award nominated composer Trevor Coleman. The work is an adaptation of Coleman's original score for NHNZ's spectacular wildlife series Equator.

Equator - Circle of Life will be the first natural history documentary score to be performed by a live orchestra in New Zealand and Managing Director of NHNZ Michael Stedman describes the concert as a "coming of age" for the company.

"Equator is the finest work NHNZ has ever produced. The series has been screened in every territory in the world and has been much celebrated by the international television industry. To have images from the series, and Trevor's breath-taking music showcased in this wonderful event is an honour and a thrill for us. For so long the talent and creativity nurtured in Dunedin has delighted the world; now it's time to bring some of that talent home."

The accompanying images from the Equator series will give local audiences their first opportunity to experience the exhilaration of the High Definition (HD) format on a large scale.

Providing an incredible level of visual clarity, HD is rapidly becoming the international television standard. A Panasonic HD projector is being imported especially for the event and Panasonic's Head of Engineering from Japan will be a special guest at the concert.

Equator - Circle of Life continues Southern Sinfonia/NHNZ innovative collaborations in the genre of Southern Journeys, Sinfonia Antartica, and Timeless Land, and will be held in the Dunedin Town Hall under the baton of Peter Adams and with Master of Ceremonies Dougal Stevenson, on Saturday March 24 at 8:00pm.

Download the full press release in PDF format (91KB).