Anthony Ritchie has had a love-hate relationship with the cello over the years due to an over-zealous music teacher as a child.
‘‘I learnt it at school and not very well. I had a very strict teacher. He used to make me cry, you know, the old story.’’
While he has put that aside over the years to write music for individual cellists he has never brought himself to write a cello concerto — until now.
‘‘I decided I would put in a tiny little snippet of the music that I learnt when I was young, just for fun. So it’s got a little quite . . . I won’t say what it is. I’ll let people try and guess when they hear it in the concert.’’
The world premiere of the concerto will be performed this weekend by Victoria University’s cello lecturer Inbal Megiddo as part of the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra’s ongoing 60th celebrations.
Megiddo says she has always been drawn to Ritchie’s music for its humanity, accessibility and ‘‘ability to hold beauty and wit’’.
The concerto is deeply personal and carries traces of Ritchie’s own life within it, she says.
‘‘Preparing it has been a genuine journey of discovery: four movements, each with its own character, from exuberance and humour to moments of profound lyricism, and a cadenza that is thrillingly alive.’’
The premiere is a celebration of the relationship between the DSO in its 60th anniversary programme and Ritchie, which has been ongoing since it first commissioned a work from him in 1989, Hanging Bulb. He was also composer-in-residence in 1993 and 1994 and just recently composed a piece specially for the DSO’s landmark concert with the NZSO.
Looking back he describes that piece as an important milestone in his career, which has included more than 23 years teaching at the University of Otago.
‘‘It was the beginning of a lovely relationship with the orchestra. I’ve done a lot of stuff with them since. But it was also the first piece that I had recorded on CD by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra some years later.’’
The piece also became a school resource for music.
‘‘It was a piece where I felt I was finally starting to find my voice. So that was an important piece for me and I guess the symphony along with that.’’
Becoming a composer came naturally to Ritchie, whose father John was also a composer. Being surrounded by music, Ritchie took up the piano first.
‘‘I just found I enjoyed improvising more than I did practising my pieces. It was a bit naughty. I found I got addicted to doing that.’’
So at age 11 Ritchie was learning to write notes down.
‘‘That was basically it. I’ve always enjoyed being creative, so I loved painting as well when I was a child, and I guess it just transferred into music.’’
Back then his favourite composers were Eastern European such as Shostakovich, Bartok and Stravinsky.
‘‘I initially wanted to write music like them, basically. I did know I wanted to write for orchestra.’’
Writing classical music was a given as he liked the sounds and it excited him.
‘‘I think when you’re creative, you also imagine yourself writing something like a Stravinsky, and how it would be with the orchestra playing your music.’’
It was not until he was studying composition at university that his father began to take notice.
‘‘So I got opportunities that possibly other people might not have, due to being in that musical field. But I had to work quite hard for it, too, I have to say.
‘‘You really have to put a lot of time and energy into it to get to a good standard.’’
He admits to maybe having a more idealist and slightly starry-eyed vision of the world as a young composer, describing himself as a bit of a ‘‘lone wolf’’.
‘‘I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to write music and people have played it, and it’s been listened to and recorded. But you gradually realise that you need to become part of a musical community.’’
‘‘It’s really, really important. I’ve been fortunate to get to know lots of great players, Alexis Still, the flautist, was probably my first and then Sharon Vogan, a pianist from down this way. But lots of others and of course my colleagues at the School of Performing Arts, [cellist] Helene [du Plessis] and [violinist] Tessa Peterson.’’
He believes it is important his works are practical and able to be performed by musicians but also stretch them.
‘‘I’ve gradually realised that I can actually push them a bit more than I do. I think when I was younger, I was a little bit too malleable. So now I try to set a bit more challenge.’’
British-born, US-based conductor and NZSO music director Emeritus James Judd says Ritchie’s works are at the core of New Zealand music while also ‘‘maintaining a significant, and I hope increasing, presence abroad’’.
‘‘Anthony writes music that encourages expressive collaboration with the conductor. All performers can rely on the suitability of the music for their instrument and can thus be confident to fully participate through their own musicianship.’’
Finding your own voice is important, Ritchie used to tell his composition students before his retirement earlier this year, but it takes time to move away from the influences composers can be passionate about.
‘‘It took me until my 30s, I think, until I was starting to develop a voice. So around about the time of my first symphony, maybe.
‘‘You develop certain things that you like doing, what you might call musical fingerprints. And you do them over and over again, and vary them and change them, and they become a sort of, hopefully, a voice.’’
‘‘I think I was quite conscious, almost too conscious maybe, of being a New Zealander and being different to Europe and places where all my musical heroes came from.
‘‘So I did want to try and create something that was distinctive of this part of the world. I think it took me a while though to hit on that because the influences of those European heroes were so strong. But from an early age, I was interested in things Māori.’’
The environment also has a strong influence as he uses bird song a lot.
‘‘I think also there’s a simpler approach to life in New Zealand I find compared to Europe. It extends into sometimes how we express ourselves and I think I’ve somehow tried to maintain that in my music as well.’’
Other significant works to him include Gallipoli to the Somme which was performed in London and Oxford as well as in New Zealand in 2018 to commemorate World War 1 and his CD A Bugle Will Do (1995) with former Dunedin conductor Tecwyn Evans and performed by the NZSO. The title song commemorates the achievements of war hero Sir Charles Upham.
‘‘For me, that was a really big personal milestone. It brought together a bunch of orchestral pieces that were significant for me. The third symphony, a piece called Revelations, which hasn’t been played much, but for me, it was quite an important piece. Developing a slightly more new style, a more modern style.’’
Gallipoli to the Somme was voted New Zealand’s most popular classical music recording in the 2020 RNZ Concert programme Settling the Score — the first time a New Zealand piece has achieved this.
Recognition of his work has continued with a nomination in the Aotearoa Music Awards for 2026 with Melencolia performed by the Jade String Quartet.
During his time in the industry there has been great change mostly brought on by developments in technology. Ritchie started out in the days scores were written by hand and he had to play his music on the piano to hear it.
He was about 30 when he bought his first computer software program to help him compose although that was partly in response to a bad case of overuse syndrome in his hands.
It was a massive labour-saver and as the software got better it could play the music back and judge the proportions and flow of the music.
‘‘It’s been an aid to composing but like anything it comes with its dangers. So you have to remain in control of the machine, basically, so that you’re making the choices that you really want to make, and not making choices based on what the machine is offering.’’
There are obvious learnings in that for the introduction of AI into music today, he says.
‘‘It presents both a challenge and an opportunity, but also has its threats involved. So, again, it’s controlling the machine, making sure that you are still in touch with your own creative choices.’’
Alongside that, music production has become a major player which Ritchie has avoided, but other composers have embraced.
‘‘I’ve resisted that, just because, I guess, I’m old-fashioned. I want to stay in a more acoustic world. I don’t want my aural imagination to be influenced too much by electronic sounds. But I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do that. It’s just the way I am.’’
He is also a strong believer in live performance never being replaced by technology or robots.
‘‘I don’t think people are going to be that fussed about going and watching a bunch of robots play music. It was like when electronic music first came along in the 1960s, people went to concerts with speakers and well, that’s probably not very exciting. You could do that at home. So the live performance is a really important aspect of humanising music for the future.’’
Ritchie has always been keen to get involved in the wider community from arranging the national anthems for the Rugby World Cup in 2011 to writing choral pieces for local choirs.
‘‘I love doing things that are different. Events and unusual instruments and whatever. Again, I like being involved in the community. I’ve just written a little song for All Saints. For a celebration of theirs.’’
Choirs have been another passion of Ritchie’s since his days as a founding member of the National Youth Choir. He helped found the Southern Youth Choir, got a children’s choir going and is involved with the City Choir Dunedin.
‘‘I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on that. But I like to write choral music. And I like to be involved with things like the Big Sing as a judge.’’
He has also written opera with The God Boy a critically acclaimed success at the Otago Festival of the Arts in 2004.
Ritchie, who was The Composers Association of New Zealand president from 2004-07 and was Composer-in-Residence at the Visby International Centre for Composition in 2016, believes New Zealand composition has come of age.
‘‘It’s grown in quality but also its ability to communicate with a wider audience from John Psathas and Gareth Farr’s music from the ’90s to more recently Victoria Kelly, Claire Cowan and Michael Norris, a student of mine.
‘‘I think we are in good health really. I’m particularly pleased about seeing more women recognised.’’
‘‘I think because we’re a long way away physically, it’s hard to get the attention when there’s so much happening.’’
MusicWeb International reviewer and former professional violinist and conductor Nick Barnard says for a contemporary composer Ritchie has a particularly finely tuned ear for orchestral colour which is both effective and engaging.
‘‘Yet at the same time Ritchie avoids the trap of obvious effect which ensures that his scores, while being accessible from the first listen, also reveal more of their secrets with repetition and time.’’
He credits Ritchie’s Symphony No.4, written in response to the Christchurch earthquakes, as being ‘‘deeply personal yet strikingly universal’’.
‘‘Great Art transcends time or place and in my wholly personal opinion this work is Great Art.’’
He believes there is a strong argument for Ritchie’s work to be included in the BBC Proms which claims to be ‘‘the world’s greatest classical music festival’’.
‘‘Simply on the basis of his status as a leading New Zealand composer and that is before considering that music of this power and appeal is exactly the sort that the Proms have always sought to present.’’
In the meantime Ritchie is hoping retirement will quieten down a bit — he has a harpsichord concerto being performed in Christchurch next month — so he can find a week of quiet mornings to get back to what he does best, writing music.
