Fantastique In Assocation With Ryman Healthcare

The NZSO presents a programme of dreams, with music inspired by love, memory and mythology.

Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu frequently drew influences from outside classical music. Dreamtime is inspired by the Australian Aborigine concept of a mythical time before humans when Ancestral Spirits walked the earth. Likewise, NZ composer Dorothy Ker explores primordial dreams in The Third Dream, the work "build[ing] organically from delicate stirrings to a physicality of volcanic intensity."

Hector Berlioz's fertile imagination bursts forth in his epic Symphonie Fantastique. Famously depicting the fevered dreams of an opium-eating artist, the work takes you on a hallucinatory journey through passionate fantasies, a wild masked ball, and at last to the artist’s descent into the hell of a witches’ Sabbath.

Dunedin-born conductor Holly Mathieson returns to Aotearoa for her debut performance with the NZSO. Mathieson worked as conducting assistant to Christoph von Dohnanyi, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Marin Alsop, before gaining the assistant conductor position of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Most recently she was appointed as Music Director of Symphony Nova Scotia.

Holly Mathieson, Conductor

Toru Takemitsu, Dreamtime (Yume no toki)
Dorothy Ker, The Third Dream
Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique