Some things in life are reassuringly predictable. Every year seems to pass more quickly than the last, Christmas arrives before we are ready, and summer is later than we hope. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Messiah comes round every year too but, as this performance showed, familiar does not always mean as predictable as we might expect. The story, the music, solo voices, choir, and orchestra combine in a glorious whole. It’s magnificent, with so much scope for musical interpretation that this year’s concert was only predictable in its scheduling.

The Tudor Consort specialises in performing early music and their enduring reputation for excellence and meticulous attention to period detail were surely behind the very high bar Thomas Blunt set for his musicians. In what is generally thought of as a choral work, Blunt was not afraid to use his small orchestra of only 32 performers and lift them from liturgical accompaniment to equals in the storytelling. Surges in dynamics, unexpected accents, lyrical phrasing, shifting tone and tempo, and specific placement of performers on the stage gave this Messiah a refreshing and enjoyably different sound.

The four distinct styles of the soloists contrasted well with each other. Filipe Manu’s rich tenor soared operatically through Comfort Ye in a way that perhaps shouldn’t have worked but did. Anna Pierard’s He Was Despised was heavy with grief and sorrow without overly dramatic emotion. Madison Nonoa’s soprano voice has a surprising, delicate purity that lent more variety to this extraordinary performance. Hero of the hour, bass-baritone Samuel McKeever, did a remarkable job coming into this production at short notice to cover for the unwell Benson Wilson.

The NZSO was absolutely excellent and the star of the show was The Tudor Consort. Their precision, clarity, perfect diction (an essential part of the storytelling), and a flawlessly balanced and controlled sound produced too many perfect moments to name but many to remember. A glorious end to the year.

Orchestra Wellington crowned its year with Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, a towering work of the 20^th century, deeply felt by the pacifist Britten and full of emotional impact for contemporary audiences in the current global conflicts. It is an inspired, spine-tingling, heart-wrenching work and the assembled musicians did it proud.

The work uses massive resources. A large choir, soprano soloist, and orchestra perform the Latin mass for the dead. A smaller orchestra accompanies two further soloists – baritone and tenor – who thread through the mass the disillusioned and bitter words of the First World War poet and soldier Wilfred Owen. The contrast between the sentiments of each component could hardly be more stark. And adding to this dramatic contrast is a smaller choir of children’s voices suggesting the innocence so harmed by war.

The music was variously reverential, mournful, beseeching, and consoling. But the dramatic and terrifying sense of war and disillusionment were omnipresent. The opening Requiem Aeternam, for example, started with a soft choir joined by ghostly children’s voices. But then, suddenly, an angry tenor voice was injected asking “What passing bells for these that die as cattle?” That dramatic juxtaposition continued throughout the work.

The soloists were soprano Morag Atchison, tenor Daniel Szesiong Todd, and baritone Benson Wilson. Atchison’s voice was dramatic and soaring, while Todd’s and Wilson’s were more intimate and restrained. The Orpheus Choir, marvellously prepared as usual by their director Brent Stewart, sang infinitely softly when needed and elsewhere thundered angrily.

Orchestra Wellington’s current composer-in-residence, Eve de Castro-Robinson’s impressive Hour of Lead preceded the requiem. She said that she thought of the piece as a prelude to Britten’s work. It reflected Britten very well, contrasting warlike instrumentation (including the orchestra’s tramping feet) with two exquisitely sweet well-known hymns.

Thank you Orchestra Wellington and Orpheus Choir for a very memorable concert.

The long-awaited screen adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway musical Wicked trades the Yellow Brick Road for a trip down memory lane, whizzing through the story of how the green-skinned woman Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Ozian it-girl Glinda (Ariana Grande) came to be known as the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the North. An adventurous tale that celebrates female friendship and champions standing up for what’s right, this magical musical is as whimsical as it is wondrous, as outrageous as it is off-kilter.

Like its Broadway predecessor, the film version is also presented in two acts, with Defying Gravity serving as a show-stopping ending to part one. In many ways, the screen adaptation remains faithful to the stage play, which in turn was based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel that reimagines the characters from The Wizard of Oz books. Like the stage musical, Stephen Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics, while Winnie Holzman wrote the book, but the director’s seat is occupied by Jon M. Chu, who crafts a multicoloured, maximalist dreamscape alongside production designer Nathan Crowley and costume designer Paul Tazewell. Arm in arm with these wonderful world-building wizards, cinematographer Alice Brooks adds the icing on the emerald cake with her bold colour choices and sweeping shots. I just wish Myron Kerstein’s editing had featured slower cuts so we could take it all in better.

The story is an archetypal myth where good is pitted against evil, the comfort of the status quo juxtaposing the freedom of changing the world. Wicked does not reinvent the wheel in its saga of misunderstanding and alienation – even with its subplot of animal persecution. But the wheel isn’t broken, and with Erivo and Grande behind the reins it trots along nicely. Their excellent chemistry is made all the more enjoyable by their opposite vibes, while appearances from Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible and Jeff Goldblum as Oz add an extra layer of grandiosity. What begins as loathing between Elphaba and Glinda blossoms into love and mutual respect, and there is always room for more interactions that pass the Bechdel Test in Hollywood.

Fun and fantastical with more than a few Easter eggs for fans, Wicked is wickedociously, whimsifyingly wonderful.

A new, locally written adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, this musical is a massive feat and obviously a labour of love. It features original music composed by Katie Morton, an 11-person strong orchestra (musical direction by Saar Cohen-Ronen), and over 20 committed performers.

Gryphon Theatre has been rotated so that the audience sits lengthways down the auditorium, allowing for a wide stage space. The band is visible behind the action on one side, while the other has been built up for a raised acting area. This orientation creates some challenges, as the acting space becomes thin, limiting the depth for the blocking of action and making it difficult to hear the dialogue over the lively large band when the performers are in one corner of the stage.

Dickens’ Great Expectations has a complex, drawn-out plot, which poses another challenge in adapting it to the stage. The show is close to three hours long, with much of the dialogue and lyrics leaning more into exposition than character development. Many technical elements are employed to tell the story, including sound effects (sound design by director Tanya Piejus), projections (AV design by Emma Maguire), smoke, and even a puppet. As the lighting (design by Jamie Byas and Brian Byas) uses colour creatively to set location and mood, the projections – which are tricky to see – feel superfluous to me. Wardrobe design by Wendy Howard assisted by Hayley Knight excellently captures the characters and time period. I would love to see more focus on the emotion in the acting and blocking over the use of technology, which I feel would help to lift the story (and music) off the page.

While an adaptation of this scale faces many challenges, when the full ensemble sings in harmony there is a fantastic sound and vibrancy. I hope to see future productions of Pip and commend Wellington Repertory Theatre for going all out on this ambitious project, dedicated to the memory of John Golder and his wife Alison.

The MILK canon is rightly capitalised because it is very loud (like a canon, wow) and chaotic. “It’s like Wipeout but inside!”, creator Sean Burnett Dugdale-Martin yells in a press release, proving my point. MILK is long-form improv meets water balloons, whereby a group of players – in this case Salomé Grace Neely, Anna Barker, Sarah Penny, Adriana Dana Vasinca, and Ezra Prattley – create a story out of suggestions from the audience, who pelt them with projectiles whenever they want something onstage to change.

This could be as simple as a performer going from happy to sad, stoked about a hegg (hairy egg, of course) to grossed out by it, or it could be as dire and consequential as a death in the MILK family. This happens when a seemingly ordinary, secretly legendairy water balloon explodes, revealing its creamy contents and changing the course of the show forever.

In The MILKYVERSE, which MC Dugdale-Martin introduces in a fittingly hilarious and hectic manner (in fact, they even forget to tell us what to do with the water balloons) (all good, it’s pretty self-explanatory), our protagonist (Dana Vasinca) has moved out of Mum/Grandma’s (Grace Neely) home into a flat with an exceedingly hairy roommate (Prattley) whose mum (Barker) has a hernia, according to a doctor moonlighting as Chappell Roan (Penny). Tasked with clearing the hair out of the flat lest the Milkyverse combust, the protagonist travels to a different dimension where people (especially whoever Barker is playing at the time) can open doors with their minds! Only doors in their line of vision though! Still, impressive!

Special shoutout to design lead and technician Anne Larcom for a brilliant insertion of Enya’s Only Time in The MILKYVERSE, the third out of six milky seasons that I’ve seen. I love these fun and funny, silly and soggy shows and lean into each one harder than the last. In fact, as a fresher for 2022’s MILKOWEEN!, I threw no balloons! For my second encounter, Milly Monka’s MILK Factory (2023), I threw one! And for The MILKYVERSE, I threw 2(%)! Get it, like two-percent milk!

I will now officially sign off and leave the puns to the experts: Ruff as Gutz, who have churned out yet another udderly fantastic show. Whey to go! 

After a busy international season, principal conductor Gemma New is at home on the podium with the NZSO and it was a pleasure to see her expressive, expansive style again.

We know a lot about what the universe looks like, but the resonances of space have to be enormously augmented by technology before we can hear a sound wave in a vacuum. Music often settles in this absence of sound and Kaija Saariaho’s Asteroid 4170: Toutatis is unquestionably what my contemporary experience tells me space sounds like. Wonderful orchestration of slow and eerie sounds of strings and harps punctuated with blasts of brass and percussion left us in no doubt there is a lot to listen to in that vacuum.

Christian Tetzlaff tackled Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B Minor with absolute mastery. His rich, confident, emotional tone contrasted with technical excellence where the combination of speed, double stopping, and huge shifts with the bow didn’t faze him at all. After Toutatis, this was musically more Earth bound but also sky high.

Gustav Holst’s The Planets is epic, evocative, and vivid. New’s sense of drama is well suited to bringing these astrological characters to life. The quality of the interpretation between conductor and orchestra was absolutely on point. Holst’s composition, rhythm, and orchestration is of course critical and brings the characters to the stage – Mars, the Bringer of War; Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age; Neptune, the Mystic and so on – but the conductor and musicians must make them real. Musical excellence gave each of the planets their individual nature, the section principals were brilliant as usual, and the tone and volume of the Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir were flawless. There was also something extra going on in this performance. New somehow linked the heartbeats of the planetary cousins to create connection and an awe-inspiring sense of the whole universe.

Celebrating 20 years of the Circa pantomime, this year’s offering was always going to be special. It’s fitting, then, that this edition of the panto has a Dr Who-inspired, time-travelling twist with Anita Minute (Jthan Morgan) dressed in a sparkly third-Doctor-themed tailcoat and necktie (costume design by Sheila Horton) and a Portal-Oo in place of the TARDIS. It’s great to see Jackson Burling back in a full role, rather than playing swing, as Justin Time, Anita’s companion. There’s even a nerdalicious nod to Jurassic Park in Natasha McAllister’s velociraptor minion and the occasional callback to previous pantos, including Lyndee-Jane Rutherford’s Goosey with her nasal “Hoooooonk!” for those of us old enough to remember Mother Goose 11 years ago.

Writers Gavin Rutherford and Simon Leary have created another wonderfully entertaining, homegrown adaptation of a classic fairytale with all the Wellington-themed and political jokes we’ve come to expect. The digs at David Seymour, Winston Peters, and Shane Jones elicited laughs from the largely adult opening-night audience and Bronwyn Turei tearing in half a sheet of paper and performing a haka with Morgan received the biggest roar of applause for acknowledging current political events.

The cast of experienced performers work beautifully and energetically together and lean into the gender-fluid and inclusive nature of the panto. No one does a villain like Bronwyn Turei as evil fairy Dusk, and Simon Leary and Kathleen Burns are charming as Dawn and Day, fairy dads to the delightful Aurora Australis (Rachel McSweeney) and her stunning singing voice.

As ever, Michael Nicholas Williams comes up trumps with his musical arrangements of pop hits by stars ranging from The Beach Boys to Cher and Ed Sheeran and even sneaks in a homage to the Dr Who theme.

Ian Harman’s set design, including a stunning painted cobblestone floor, and Marcus McShane’s lighting create a lush and vibrant stage for yet another fabulous, funny, and flirty pantomime. Oh, no they didn’t! Oh, yes they did!

The huge, urgent string opening was the surge of adrenaline and excitement Icarus might have felt when he took flight on the wings his father made for him. Lera Auerbach’s Icarus flew through the orchestral gamut, exploring melody, dissonance, rhythm, movement, tone, and some superb instrumental arrangements. The flute might often represent flight but Auerbach somehow did the same with just the brass and reed woodwind.

Alexander Gavrylyuk brought his virtuosic piano talent to the work of another virtuoso and proved himself more than equal to the task. With 24 variations to play with, conductor Vasily Petrenko held the orchestra perfectly in its complex supporting role. Sergei Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini must cover every key the piano has. Gavrylyuk’s touch is equally wide ranging. In a slower, perhaps even mournful variation, he conveyed an incredible weight of emotion through the piano keys with enormous sensitivity. In the showpiece cadenzas and livelier movements, he proved he could combine great technical skill with that same sensitivity to give each variation on the theme its own distinct character and style.

Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra lived up to its somewhat confusing title as the orchestra stepped into the limelight for its own solo performances. In five movements Bartók gave every section of the orchestra their 15 seconds of fame. The strings had us captured from their slowly building start, Petrenko drew an impressively delicate and transparent sound from the brass section, the clarinet solo was prominent, the piccolo had lots of perfectly executed exposure, and my favourite, the violas, did a superb job of their solo passage. The final movement built to fever pitch before its sudden but joyous end. Earlier in the evening Petrenko had told us this was “funky, and fun to play” and the NZSO always seem to add an extra something when they’re clearly having fun.

Simultaneously an ode to Italy and a denunciation, Caro Diario (1993) is a far cry from the mainstream media who idealise the European lifestyle. If that’s the world you’re dreaming of watch this first, because this is how it truly feels, what it actually looks like, and how it really is.

Caro Diario, which is both written and directed by Italy’s contemporary auteur filmmaker Nanni Moretti (who also stars in the film), is autobiographical in style with a touch of magical realism. It’s an open diary that doesn’t follow the narrative form we are accustomed to. Rather, it ambles through moments and emotions, thoughts and events, capturing the essence of a time, place, or feeling instead of prioritising story. That said, it’s not without structure.

Segmented into three chapters, On My Vespa pays homage to Moretti’s beloved Roma, but the back alleys and suburbs that are deserted and desolate during the summer holiday of Ferragosto – an occurrence ingrained in the culture and intrinsic to the country. The centrepiece Islands is a Ulyssean journey to the Aeolian Islands to find inspiration for his next film, but without success, Moretti tells us as we sit in the cinema watching his antics. The final chapter Doctors is a slice of life with actual footage of medical notes, appointments, and treatments – the disdain for Italian bureaucracy is palpable.

Caro Diario is intimate, in part due to Moretti’s narration, which feels like he’s talking to a friend, paired with Mirco Garrone’s slow editing that allows Giuseppe Lanci’s poetic cinematography to wash over us. Marta Maffucci’s authentic and unpretentious production design completes the trifecta, creating a world that you are firmly a part of. In what is reminiscent of a Roman epic or a classic saga, Caro Diario is rooted in philosophical musings, but it doesn’t forgo lightness, charm, and humour. Much like in life itself, moments simply happen, good and bad waltz arm in arm, and the little things are the most special.

Screening as part of the Italian Film Festival, Caro Diario may not depict the Italy you’re dreaming of, but it distils the visceral, infuriating, poetic, and magical place it really is.