PAST CONCERTS
REVIEW OF JULY 2023 CONCERT
Oboe Brilliance
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A highly successful concert, featuring a SMCO-commissioned work by Louise Webster, played with brilliance by NZ oboist Thomas Hutchinson. Conducted by Michael Joel, the orchestra also played a lively early Mozart symphony, and Mendelssohn's jubilant Italian symphony.
REVIEW OF JUNE 2023 CONCERT
Classical Grace and Elegance
St Matthew’s Chamber Orchestra’s previous concert saw its audience and players well entrenched in 20th century jazz idioms. In this, their latest performance, we were back in the late-eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Michael Joel, the orchestra’s musical director, is a great favourite with musicians and audience, and brought all the grace and charm of Fanny Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Schubert to a very appreciative audience.
REVIEW OF MAY 2023 CONCERT
Rhapsody in Blue
SMCO’s most recent concert, Rhapsody in Blue saw the orchestra and audience catapulted into the 1920s. While SMCO has often dipped a foot into the twentieth and even 21st century repertoire, here they were fully submerged and revelling in the bold and brassy world of Weimar Germany, American Jazz of the 1920s and Duke Ellington’s big band music of the 1970s. Justus Rozemond has conducted St Matthew’s before and made an exciting team with Daniel Hayles, a jazz pianist of staggering talent.
REVIEW OF MARCH 2023Â CONCERT
Violin Brilliance from Andrew Beer
The first concert of the 2023 season, fluently conducted by Brent Stewart,and confidently led by Simon Ansell, had more than a hint of the exotic with Saint Saens’ Havanaise Op 80 and Henryk Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No 2, played with impeccable brilliance by Andrew Beer.