Assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times, Simon Cunliffe, describes a musical interlude.
Bear with me while I retreat this week from more worldly matters. Until last Saturday, for me Vladimir Ashkenazy was a name of repute on the covers of classical music records and CDs.
Apart from occasional encounters in the intervening years, I recall him mainly from London days some 30 years ago - a sculptor friend had a tape of a recording, Ashkenazy Plays Liszt - a fleeting meeting with a pianist and conductor to whom a particular allure attached itself and has never quite been erased.
In that footloose era of romance and discovery, he became a startling tutor on a voyage into hitherto uncharted territory.
A fashionable accessory, but, as it proved, a musical inclination soon subverted by the familiar and the "hip": Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Van Morrison.
A general, possibly lazy, preference for this pantheon's angsty, hormonal guitar-strung racket reduced my relationship with the Russian virtuoso and his ilk to dilettantish affectation.
So it wasn't without a twinge of guilt - the tickets were as rare as hens' teeth and there were surely punters more dedicated - that I took my place in the stalls last Saturday at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington for an encounter with the great man himself.
And with Vladimir Ashkenazy, it is an encounter.
A small, wiry man with a warm, generous smile and a humble presence, on the podium he transforms into a compelling dynamo: coiled, angular, urgent, the score wired through his entire physique, now feinting, now rolling shoulders, now pressing his suit - float like a butterfly, sting like a bee - his jabbing left and glancing right as mesmerising in their precision as the resultant symphony of sound they command.
Mr Ashkenazy had his work cut out.
It was the opening night of the New Zealand International Arts Festival.
He was conducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and massed choirs in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No 8.
Sometimes known as the "Symphony of a Thousand", this ambitious work was composed by Mahler in what must have been something of a creative frenzy during eight weeks in 1906.
Yet its first performance did not take place until 1910, when the composer himself conducted the work in the Neue Musikfesthalle in the Munich Exhibition Grounds.
Then, as the helpful programme notes reveal, there were 858 singers and 171 instrumentalists.
The Wellington concert marked the 100th anniversary of that occasion and in addition to the maestro mustered the combined talents of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, several choirs - the Voice New Zealand Chamber Choir, the New Zealand Youth Choir, the Orpheus Choir of Wellington, the Christchurch City Choir, the Knabenchor - off-stage brass, organ and eight vocal soloists band, including tenor Simon O'Neill and, from Dunedin, bass Martin Snell.
When Mahler composed it, it was the first completely choral symphony and soon after finishing it, evidently elated, he wrote to conductor Willem Mengelberg: "I have just completed my Eighth - it is my greatest work to date . . .
"Imagine the whole universe beginning to sing and resound.
"There are no longer human voices, but coursing planets and suns."
A remarkable array of our own talented "planets and suns" revolved last weekend round the thrilling presence of Vladimir Ashkenazy.
Russian-born, the conductor left his homeland in the 1960s, a time of upheaval and change.
One of the ways in which the pervasive influence of the decade penetrated the Iron Curtain was through music.
It is a subject that has been dealt with in dramatic or literary form before, notably by Tom Stoppard in Rock'n'Roll, his meditation on Czech politics and rock music; and in, for example, the jazz-infused fiction of Czech dissident-cum-Canadian author Josef Skvorecky.
The night following the Mahler triumph, truly a hard act to follow, we went to the New Riga Theatre's production Sound of Silence.
Here, the music of Simon and Garfunkel, circa 1968, is the lens through which those anarchic, liberating years are refracted in a Latvia dreaming "of peace and freedom".
There is no dialogue; just a cast of 14, a set of rooms on a stage, sound effects, and the aforementioned music - cut-up, juxtaposed, muted, or at full volume.
At just over three hours, it is by turns surreal, ironic, playful and, occasionally, banal.
But, critically, it is challenging - to received notions of history, culture and aesthetics.
In 1968, I, too, had just discovered Simon and Garfunkel.
One of my favourites was The Dangling Conversation, which director Alvis Hermanis employs here to punctuating effect with his own terse cut to silence:
Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theatre really dead?"
Helpful to be reminded that 40 years ago they were tearing at the corpse provocateurs today habitually fall upon as if it is fresh prey.
Happily, there is ample in the festival's theatre programme for punters to make up their own minds.
