Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (APO) offers audiences the rare opportunity to attend a world premiere on 3 May when it performs Ross Harris’s new Cello Concerto in the fifth of this year’s APN News & Media Premiere Series concerts, entitled ‘Into the Light’.

One of New Zealand’s most distinguished composers, Harris is a former APO Composer-in-Residence and the orchestra has debuted many of his works. Additionally, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra has just released a compact disc of Harris’s Symphonies Nos.2 and 3 on the world’s largest classical music label, Naxos. Like those symphonies, Harris’s Cello Concerto was commissioned by the APO.

Harris says his new work reflects the personality of the cello, which gives the concerto a wide range of moods and characterisations. “It’s largely tonal and melodic, more so than anything else I’ve done,” he says. “I’m very pleased with the way it’s turned out.”

Playing the cello on 3 May is the musician for whom the work was written, Li-Wei Qin, described by one of The Strad magazine’s critics as “the most gifted young artist I have heard”. Harris was inspired to write the concerto after hearing Li-Wei perform Haydn’s Cello Concerto No.1.

“He had incredible speed and clarity of articulation, and I knew he had chops to burn,” Ross Harris says. “Li-Wei's playing is the perfect combination of flawless technique and beautifully controlled expressivity.”

Conductor for the evening is Garry Walker, a regular and hugely popular visitor with the APO and a cellist himself.

“Ross is a New Zealand taonga,” says APO Chief Executive Barbara Glaser. “We cherish our long association with him and are proud to have given Auckland audiences the chance to hear many of Ross’s most important works. We’re privileged to continue that tradition with this new concerto.”

Quick Facts
- Harris’s concerto was made possible by funding from arts philanthropist Christopher Marshall.
- The APO’s CD of Harris’s Symphonies Nos.2 and 3 (Naxos 8.572574) received a 5-star review from The New Zealand Herald’s William Dart, with Dr Dart saying, “One senses the pride of the APO players in every phrase…”
- Scottish conductor Garry Walker is a keen mountain climber – he’s climbed every mountain in Scotland higher than 3000 feet. There are 283 of those (or 284, depending on which source you use – you think they’d know for sure, wouldn’t you?).