557697bk USA 4/7/06 10:28 pm Page 4

repertoire as diverse as Elgar (three discs), Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven, Bernstein, Copland, Lilburn, Sculthorpe, Frank Bridge, Akutagawa, Mendelssohn, Honegger, Liszt, and Vaughan Williams. Over half a million of these CDs have been sold internationally in the last decade and they have received critical acclaim. NZSO discs Douglas (Hummel, Elgar and Bernstein) were chosen for the Editor’s Choice section of The Gramophone in 2004. For further information visit www.nzso.co.nz LILBURN James Judd Music Director of the Symphony Orchestra, the British-born conductor James Judd is also the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille in France. Within a period of seven years as Music Director in New Zealand, he has embarked on an unprecedented number of recordings with the orchestra for the A Song of Islands Naxos label, including works by Copland, Bernstein, Vaughan Williams, Gershwin and many others. He has brought the orchestra to a new level of visibility and international acclaim through appearances at the 2000 Summer Sydney Olympic Arts Festival, the 2003 Auckland International Arts Festival, the Osaka Festival of International Overture • Forest Orchestras as well as a specially televised Millennium Concert with as soloist. He will lead the orchestra on its first ever tour of the major concert halls of Europe culminating with a début appearance at the BBC Proms in the summer of 2005. A graduate of London’s Trinity College of Music, James Judd came to international New Zealand Symphony Orchestra attention as the Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, a post he accepted at the invitation of Lorin Maazel. Four years later he returned to Europe after being appointed Associate Music Director of the European Community Youth Orchestra by Claudio Abbado, an ensemble with which he continues to serve as an honorary James Judd Artistic Director. Since that time he has directed the Berlin Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic, conducted in the great concert halls of Europe, including the Salzburg Mozarteum and Vienna’s Musikverein, and made guest appearances with such prestigious ensembles as the Vienna Symphony, the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, the Prague Symphony, Orchestre National de France, L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Monte Carlo Symphony Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Flemish Radio Orchestra, and the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg. As an opera conductor, he has appeared with the English National Opera conducting productions of Il trovatore, La traviata, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rigoletto, and Le nozze di Figaro, and at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival in Rossini’s La Cenerentola. He continues to conduct all the major British ensembles, and was co-founder of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which he has led on tours throughout the United States, the Far East and Europe. In North and South America he is a frequent and much-admired guest conductor, having appeared with the orchestras of St Louis, Montreal, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Indianapolis, Utah, Vancouver and Ottawa, and for fourteen years served as Music Director of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, one of America’s orchestral success stories.

8.557697 4 557697bk USA 4/7/06 10:28 pm Page 2

Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001): Orchestral Works murmurings to create an infinite sense of space and Lilburn himself accepted an Honorary Doctorate from thereby mediating the music into revelation; a resonant the in 1969 and the Order of New This comprehensive collection of Lilburn’s orchestral days in London were Festival Overture (1939) and brass version gravitates the work to its close. Music Zealand in 1988. music includes Aotearoa, regarded as a New Zealand Overture: ‘Aotearoa’ (1940); the first of these works had associated with the ocean and with the mountains Lilburn wrote A Birthday Offering (1956) for the classic, A Song of Islands, a tone poem which finds its its première at the Royal College of Music under Sir dominates the geographical imagery of the score, serving tenth anniversary of the National Orchestra (now the parallel in New Zealand regional paintings, and A George Dyson and the second at His Majesty’s Theatre, as metaphors for transformation and elevation, to forge a New Zealand Symphony Orchestra); the work employs Birthday Offering which emphasizes the composer’s London, as part of the New Zealand Centennial Matinée. link between the observable with the inner world and to full orchestral resources, triple woodwind, saxophone, interest in colourful sonorities. Festival Overture speaks of the consolidation of New connect the powers of the human mind with those of the piano, and a battery of percussion. The composer tells us grew up on ‘Drysdale’, an isolated Zealand nationality and character amidst the mounting physical universe. Lilburn associated A Song of Islands that he devised the work in Baroque concertante style hill country farm leading to the mountain plateau at the tensions of war. It begins with a fanfare, marked at its with ’s painting Central Otago (1940), which with the opening horn motto, derived from the ‘dawn’ centre of New Zealand’s North Island. He often peak by reverberating trills, from which emerges a depicts a pioneer church, cottage, barn and furrowed music of Copland’s Appalachian Spring (1954), serving described his home as ‘paradise’ and his first major propulsive idea generated by the cellos. If the general fields against the backdrop of a jewel-like sea and snowy as a generative melodic and harmonic device. The work orchestral work, the Drysdale Overture (1937), written thrust of the overture is held in the thrall of the fanfare, peaks. also includes a self quotation from the song cycle Sings whilst a student under the aegis of Ralph Vaughan then a secondary folk-like theme, introduced in a clarinet In 1947 Lilburn joined the staff at Victoria College Harry (1954) set to poems by . Lilburn has Williams at the Royal College of Music in London, sets solo over a drone bass, turns the psychological direction (now University) in , where, from 1970, he a strong affinity to Harry, the ‘old timer’, who abides an archetypal scene of summer days on the farm. The to an abiding home ground, a remembrance of things past held a personal professorial chair in music. Processional with the smell of gorse fires, the sparkle of mountain music begins with an introduction depicting in upward and the experience of nature. Fanfare (1961/1985), a setting of the student song tarns and the reality of farmhouse dung. Behind the mask gestures the sharp-edged vertical contour of the Drysdale Aotearoa, meaning ‘Land of the long white cloud’, is Gaudeamus igitur (So let us rejoice while we are young) of Harry and the pioneering American landscape, A hills. An exposition section follows presenting two ideas, the indigenous name for New Zealand. The music opens in the mode of a Purcellian trumpet tune blended with Birthday Offering turns out to be a personal declaration one portraying the linear motion of a valley stream and with flutes floating at hawk-height over strings depicting Lilburn’s stringy harmonies, was originally written for of independence, an orchestral experiment, and a voyage the other, beautifully sounded as an oboe solo, recalling the outlines of the hills below. The bird’s eye view allows three trumpets and organ for the final congregation of the of spiritual discovery. the folk lullabies sung by the composer’s mother. The Lilburn to play with the sculptural shapes of the New University of New Zealand. It was subsequently arranged central section, described by Lilburn as a ‘sunlit rondo’ Zealand landscape: orchestral undulations, capped by for three trumpets and small orchestra for the use of the nevertheless shivers with momentary excitement. This brass, accentuate the mountainous terrain portrayed. The Victoria University orchestra at capping ceremonies. Robert Hoskins leads to a hymnal presentation of ‘mother’s tune’, aurally clarity of the successive ideas of the exposition are set off close to Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a theme by by the thick anthem-like gestures into which they flow. Thomas Tallis, to express those special moments of Lilburn uses these anthem-like signals not only to focus New Zealand Symphony Orchestra vision sometimes experienced amongst the home hills. on the curvature of the landscape but as a device to The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1946, is the country’s premier professional orchestra. ‘I’m left,’ said Lilburn, recalling the impression of convey a sense of human attachment to the place. Administered by Radio New Zealand until 1989, it now functions as a government-owned Crown Entity. It has an Drysdale, ‘with that lovely Mark Twain image of Jim Furthermore, a Sibelian central episode suggests an establishment of ninety players and performs over a hundred concerts annually. Touring within New Zealand looms and Huckleberry drifting their barge down the great river, uneasy atmosphere which pervades southern climes large in the orchestra’s activities. All its main symphonic programmes are presented in Auckland and Wellington, looking up at the stars and wondering “whether they was when cool change is imminent. but the orchestra visits some thirty New Zealand towns and cities annually. Given New Zealand’s geographical made, or only just happened.”’ Returning to New Zealand, Lilburn settled in isolation, overseas tours are relatively infrequent. In 2005 the orchestra undertook a highly successful tour that The restorative power of the natural world is also the where he had previously studied. Here he included performances at the BBC Proms, the Concertgebouw, Snape Maltings and the World Expo at Aichi in theme of Forest (1936), an apprentice work for orchestra. banded together with an innovative group of painters, Japan. Prior to this, the orchestra was last in Europe in 1992 to play at the World Expo in Seville. It has appeared in In the music – a tone poem depicting autumn at Mount poets, publishers and theatre directors who were to prove Australia, New Caledonia, and Osaka in Japan where, in 2003, it opened the second Asia Orchestral Week. James Peel in South Canterbury – we hear Lilburn tracking vastly influential. He now set about composing A Song of Judd was appointed Music Director in 1999. Other conductors who have worked with the NZSO during his tenure Sibelius through the shadowy woods, keeping his own Islands (1946), an extended orchestral tone poem which include Alexander Lazarev, Dimitri Sitkovetsky, David Atherton, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Edo de Waart, and Matthias distance, but measuring his own hesitancy until he takes prepared the way for writing the first two symphonies. Bamert. Soloists who have worked with the orchestra recently include Lynn Harrell, Lang Lang, Hilary Hahn, his own road. Forest won a competition initiated by Shaped in organic arch form, A Song of Islands pivots on Vadim Repin, Peter Donohoe, Steven Isserlis, Stephen Hough, Jonathan Lemalu and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. The Percy Grainger for an orchestral piece projecting ‘New the opening hymnal statement (not too distant from the NZSO has an extensive catalogue of CD recordings. It makes one CD of New Zealand music annually, as part of a Zealand cultural and emotional characteristics.’ ‘Holy Grail’ motive in Wagner’s Parsifal) which recurs commitment to promote and encourage music by New Zealand composers. A notable recent release features Other prize-winning works resulting from his student at the heart of the work plaited with woodwind Jonathan Lemalu in a range of operatic repertoire. The orchestra has a strong relationship with Naxos, recording

8.557697 2 3 8.557697 557697bk USA 4/7/06 10:28 pm Page 2

Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001): Orchestral Works murmurings to create an infinite sense of space and Lilburn himself accepted an Honorary Doctorate from thereby mediating the music into revelation; a resonant the University of Otago in 1969 and the Order of New This comprehensive collection of Lilburn’s orchestral days in London were Festival Overture (1939) and brass version gravitates the work to its close. Music Zealand in 1988. music includes Aotearoa, regarded as a New Zealand Overture: ‘Aotearoa’ (1940); the first of these works had associated with the ocean and with the mountains Lilburn wrote A Birthday Offering (1956) for the classic, A Song of Islands, a tone poem which finds its its première at the Royal College of Music under Sir dominates the geographical imagery of the score, serving tenth anniversary of the National Orchestra (now the parallel in New Zealand regional paintings, and A George Dyson and the second at His Majesty’s Theatre, as metaphors for transformation and elevation, to forge a New Zealand Symphony Orchestra); the work employs Birthday Offering which emphasizes the composer’s London, as part of the New Zealand Centennial Matinée. link between the observable with the inner world and to full orchestral resources, triple woodwind, saxophone, interest in colourful sonorities. Festival Overture speaks of the consolidation of New connect the powers of the human mind with those of the piano, and a battery of percussion. The composer tells us Douglas Lilburn grew up on ‘Drysdale’, an isolated Zealand nationality and character amidst the mounting physical universe. Lilburn associated A Song of Islands that he devised the work in Baroque concertante style hill country farm leading to the mountain plateau at the tensions of war. It begins with a fanfare, marked at its with Rita Angus’s painting Central Otago (1940), which with the opening horn motto, derived from the ‘dawn’ centre of New Zealand’s North Island. He often peak by reverberating trills, from which emerges a depicts a pioneer church, cottage, barn and furrowed music of Copland’s Appalachian Spring (1954), serving described his home as ‘paradise’ and his first major propulsive idea generated by the cellos. If the general fields against the backdrop of a jewel-like sea and snowy as a generative melodic and harmonic device. The work orchestral work, the Drysdale Overture (1937), written thrust of the overture is held in the thrall of the fanfare, peaks. also includes a self quotation from the song cycle Sings whilst a student under the aegis of Ralph Vaughan then a secondary folk-like theme, introduced in a clarinet In 1947 Lilburn joined the staff at Victoria College Harry (1954) set to poems by Denis Glover. Lilburn has Williams at the Royal College of Music in London, sets solo over a drone bass, turns the psychological direction (now University) in Wellington, where, from 1970, he a strong affinity to Harry, the ‘old timer’, who abides an archetypal scene of summer days on the farm. The to an abiding home ground, a remembrance of things past held a personal professorial chair in music. Processional with the smell of gorse fires, the sparkle of mountain music begins with an introduction depicting in upward and the experience of nature. Fanfare (1961/1985), a setting of the student song tarns and the reality of farmhouse dung. Behind the mask gestures the sharp-edged vertical contour of the Drysdale Aotearoa, meaning ‘Land of the long white cloud’, is Gaudeamus igitur (So let us rejoice while we are young) of Harry and the pioneering American landscape, A hills. An exposition section follows presenting two ideas, the indigenous name for New Zealand. The music opens in the mode of a Purcellian trumpet tune blended with Birthday Offering turns out to be a personal declaration one portraying the linear motion of a valley stream and with flutes floating at hawk-height over strings depicting Lilburn’s stringy harmonies, was originally written for of independence, an orchestral experiment, and a voyage the other, beautifully sounded as an oboe solo, recalling the outlines of the hills below. The bird’s eye view allows three trumpets and organ for the final congregation of the of spiritual discovery. the folk lullabies sung by the composer’s mother. The Lilburn to play with the sculptural shapes of the New University of New Zealand. It was subsequently arranged central section, described by Lilburn as a ‘sunlit rondo’ Zealand landscape: orchestral undulations, capped by for three trumpets and small orchestra for the use of the nevertheless shivers with momentary excitement. This brass, accentuate the mountainous terrain portrayed. The Victoria University orchestra at capping ceremonies. Robert Hoskins leads to a hymnal presentation of ‘mother’s tune’, aurally clarity of the successive ideas of the exposition are set off close to Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a theme by by the thick anthem-like gestures into which they flow. Thomas Tallis, to express those special moments of Lilburn uses these anthem-like signals not only to focus New Zealand Symphony Orchestra vision sometimes experienced amongst the home hills. on the curvature of the landscape but as a device to The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1946, is the country’s premier professional orchestra. ‘I’m left,’ said Lilburn, recalling the impression of convey a sense of human attachment to the place. Administered by Radio New Zealand until 1989, it now functions as a government-owned Crown Entity. It has an Drysdale, ‘with that lovely Mark Twain image of Jim Furthermore, a Sibelian central episode suggests an establishment of ninety players and performs over a hundred concerts annually. Touring within New Zealand looms and Huckleberry drifting their barge down the great river, uneasy atmosphere which pervades southern climes large in the orchestra’s activities. All its main symphonic programmes are presented in Auckland and Wellington, looking up at the stars and wondering “whether they was when cool change is imminent. but the orchestra visits some thirty New Zealand towns and cities annually. Given New Zealand’s geographical made, or only just happened.”’ Returning to New Zealand, Lilburn settled in isolation, overseas tours are relatively infrequent. In 2005 the orchestra undertook a highly successful tour that The restorative power of the natural world is also the Christchurch where he had previously studied. Here he included performances at the BBC Proms, the Concertgebouw, Snape Maltings and the World Expo at Aichi in theme of Forest (1936), an apprentice work for orchestra. banded together with an innovative group of painters, Japan. Prior to this, the orchestra was last in Europe in 1992 to play at the World Expo in Seville. It has appeared in In the music – a tone poem depicting autumn at Mount poets, publishers and theatre directors who were to prove Australia, New Caledonia, and Osaka in Japan where, in 2003, it opened the second Asia Orchestral Week. James Peel in South Canterbury – we hear Lilburn tracking vastly influential. He now set about composing A Song of Judd was appointed Music Director in 1999. Other conductors who have worked with the NZSO during his tenure Sibelius through the shadowy woods, keeping his own Islands (1946), an extended orchestral tone poem which include Alexander Lazarev, Dimitri Sitkovetsky, David Atherton, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Edo de Waart, and Matthias distance, but measuring his own hesitancy until he takes prepared the way for writing the first two symphonies. Bamert. Soloists who have worked with the orchestra recently include Lynn Harrell, Lang Lang, Hilary Hahn, his own road. Forest won a competition initiated by Shaped in organic arch form, A Song of Islands pivots on Vadim Repin, Peter Donohoe, Steven Isserlis, Stephen Hough, Jonathan Lemalu and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. The Percy Grainger for an orchestral piece projecting ‘New the opening hymnal statement (not too distant from the NZSO has an extensive catalogue of CD recordings. It makes one CD of New Zealand music annually, as part of a Zealand cultural and emotional characteristics.’ ‘Holy Grail’ motive in Wagner’s Parsifal) which recurs commitment to promote and encourage music by New Zealand composers. A notable recent release features Other prize-winning works resulting from his student at the heart of the work plaited with woodwind Jonathan Lemalu in a range of operatic repertoire. The orchestra has a strong relationship with Naxos, recording

8.557697 2 3 8.557697 557697bk USA 4/7/06 10:28 pm Page 4

repertoire as diverse as Elgar (three discs), Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven, Bernstein, Copland, Lilburn, Sculthorpe, Frank Bridge, Akutagawa, Mendelssohn, Honegger, Liszt, and Vaughan Williams. Over half a million of these CDs have been sold internationally in the last decade and they have received critical acclaim. NZSO discs Douglas (Hummel, Elgar and Bernstein) were chosen for the Editor’s Choice section of The Gramophone in 2004. For further information visit www.nzso.co.nz LILBURN James Judd Music Director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the British-born conductor James Judd is also the Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille in France. Within a period of seven years as Music Director in New Zealand, he has embarked on an unprecedented number of recordings with the orchestra for the A Song of Islands Naxos label, including works by Copland, Bernstein, Vaughan Williams, Gershwin and many others. He has brought the orchestra to a new level of visibility and international acclaim through appearances at the 2000 Summer Sydney Olympic Arts Festival, the 2003 Auckland International Arts Festival, the Osaka Festival of International Aotearoa Overture • Forest Orchestras as well as a specially televised Millennium Concert with Kiri Te Kanawa as soloist. He will lead the orchestra on its first ever tour of the major concert halls of Europe culminating with a début appearance at the BBC Proms in the summer of 2005. A graduate of London’s Trinity College of Music, James Judd came to international New Zealand Symphony Orchestra attention as the Assistant Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, a post he accepted at the invitation of Lorin Maazel. Four years later he returned to Europe after being appointed Associate Music Director of the European Community Youth Orchestra by Claudio Abbado, an ensemble with which he continues to serve as an honorary James Judd Artistic Director. Since that time he has directed the Berlin Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic, conducted in the great concert halls of Europe, including the Salzburg Mozarteum and Vienna’s Musikverein, and made guest appearances with such prestigious ensembles as the Vienna Symphony, the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, the Prague Symphony, Orchestre National de France, L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Monte Carlo Symphony Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Flemish Radio Orchestra, and the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg. As an opera conductor, he has appeared with the English National Opera conducting productions of Il trovatore, La traviata, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Rigoletto, and Le nozze di Figaro, and at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival in Rossini’s La Cenerentola. He continues to conduct all the major British ensembles, and was co-founder of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, which he has led on tours throughout the United States, the Far East and Europe. In North and South America he is a frequent and much-admired guest conductor, having appeared with the orchestras of St Louis, Montreal, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Indianapolis, Utah, Vancouver and Ottawa, and for fourteen years served as Music Director of the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, one of America’s orchestral success stories.

8.557697 4 557697 Inlay USA 4/7/06 10:36 pm Page 1 NAXOS NAXOS Known as ‘the elder statesman of New Zealand classical music’, Douglas Lilburn was instrumental in establishing a genuinely vernacular voice. All the works on this recording portray New Zealand’s culture through an idiom instantly recognisable to listeners familiar with the music of Sibelius and Vaughan Williams (one of Lilburn’s teachers). Amongst the best known are Aotearoa (Land of the long white cloud), A Song of Islands, a tone poem which finds its parallel in New 8.557697

Douglas LILBURN: Zealand regional paintings, and Lilburn’s first major orchestral work, the Drysdale Overture, a Douglas LILBURN: beautifully evocative depiction of the isolated hill country farm where the composer spent his DDD childhood. Lilburn’s Three Symphonies can be heard on Naxos 8.555862. Playing Time Douglas 75:15 LILBURN 7

(1915-2001) 47313 Orchestral Works 26972 1

Orchestral Works Aotearoa – Overture (1940) 8:09 Orchestral Works 2 A Birthday Offering (1956) 11:38 3 Drysdale Overture (1937, rev. 1986) 10:34 4 Forest (Tone Poem) (1936) 15:54 3 www.naxos.com Made in Canada Booklet notes in English Naxos Rights International Ltd. 5 A Song of Islands (Tone Poem) (1946) 16:40 &

6 Festival Overture (1939) 8:20

7 Processional Fanfare (1961, rev. 1985) 4:01 2006

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra • James Judd

THE SCOTTWOOD SERIES Publishers: Price Milburn Music Ltd. (track 1), Waiteata Press (track 2), Alexander Turnbull Library (track 4), Massey University Music (track 5) Recorded at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, New Zealand, from 9th to 11th November, 2004 8.557697

8.557697 Producer: Wayne Laird • Engineer: Paul McGlashan • Booklet Notes: Robert Hoskins Cover Photo: Taupo Sunset (Dreamstime.com) NAXOS RADIO Over 70 Channels of Classical Music • Jazz, Folk/World, Nostalgia www.naxosradio.com Accessible Anywhere, Anytime • Near-CD Quality