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Max Rashbrooke
Journalist
Max Rashbrooke is a journalist and author working in Wellington, New Zealand, where he writes about politics, finance and social issues.
Max Rashbrooke - Latest News [Page 4]
Max Rashbrooke Review: The Young Person's Future of Music
Tuesday, 18 July 2017, 10:36 am | Max Rashbrooke
The future of classical music is in safe hands, judging by Friday's night concert from the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, the country's most talented young players. They had the advantage in this concert, of course, of working with the highly talented ... More >>
The NZSO goes to the Proms
Saturday, 1 July 2017, 2:58 pm | Max Rashbrooke
It was a good idea, a concert bringing together music from New Zealand and the British Isles in honour of the Lions tour. Did it work? At times, absolutely. At other times it felt a bit like a panto grafted onto unwilling stock. More >>
Review: Carmen get it, by Max Rashbrooke
Friday, 2 June 2017, 12:44 pm | Max Rashbrooke
In the programme for this production, director Lindy Hume notes that her first, controversial version of this opera, some 25 years ago, was labelled "the feminist Carmen". And it's an apt label: this is a production that is as much about power as it is ... More >>
Review: Plenty Pathetique
Sunday, 21 May 2017, 8:31 pm | Max Rashbrooke
Saturday night's concert kicked off with Embiosis, a delightful short piece by a talented young New Zealand composer, David Grahame Taylor. Right from its shimmering opening it managed to be both edgy, hovering on the edge of different tonalities, ... More >>
Review: Max Rashbrooke - Farr's extraordinary path
Monday, 8 May 2017, 10:02 am | Max Rashbrooke
I’m not usually someone for whom classical music summons up specific images, even in overtly programmatic pieces, but last Friday night’s concert was awash with them. The concert kicked off with a short, delicate piece from Pierre Boulez, Memoriale ... More >>
Review: The NZSO and Nature - By Max Rashbrooke
Tuesday, 28 March 2017, 10:16 am | Max Rashbrooke
There was a great moment at the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's concert on Saturday night when the announcer suggested to the audience that they might want to take photos and share them on social media, and there was an audible roll of laughter in response. ... More >>
The NZSO at 70: promise and puzzles
Friday, 10 March 2017, 9:47 am | Max Rashbrooke
It was the NZSO's birthday this week – it turned 70 – and so it threw a big party, in the form of a free concert featuring a kind of 'greatest hits' snippets of the last seven decades. So is our national orchestra in good shape, now that it's a septuagenarian? More >>
Max Rashbrooke Review: The Mikado, NZ Opera
Monday, 27 February 2017, 1:10 pm | Max Rashbrooke
Politics and art are a little bit like politics and rugby: as the Springbok tour showed, you can't entirely separate the two. And there are certainly plenty of politics around the Mikado, a show that is notionally set in a highly stereotyped, Orientalist ... More >>
Review: Messiah
Monday, 12 December 2016, 11:04 am | Max Rashbrooke
The Messiah is one of those pieces of music familiar even to people who don't like, or think they don't like, classical music; and the version that most people have in mind is the big, boom-crash, full-forces one, with a cast of hundreds shouting, ... More >>
Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa NZ
Friday, 2 December 2016, 12:20 pm | Max Rashbrooke
When I was coming to the end of my six-year stint in London, British people would often say to me, ‘I quite understand why you’d go back to New Zealand – I mean, the landscape, it’s so beautiful, why wouldn’t you?’ Because they were often ... More >>
Review: Mozart and Elgar
Monday, 31 October 2016, 10:48 am | Max Rashbrooke
In previous NZSO concerts this year I’ve felt the orchestra’s playing, under new music director Edo de Waart, has been slightly on the conservative side. But this was an evening where the musical judgements felt spot on. Mozart’s piano concerto ... More >>
Last chance to see: LEGACY
Friday, 21 October 2016, 11:56 am | Max Rashbrooke
The next ten days are Wellington’s last chance to see one of the most interesting, complex and important art shows of the year, LEGACY: The Art of Rangi Hetet and Erenora Puketapu-Hetet, at the Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt. More >>
Bold Worlds: New Frontiers
Sunday, 9 October 2016, 9:41 pm | Max Rashbrooke
Sometimes classical music programming is so transparent as to be amusing. Looking at the programme for Friday night’s Bold Worlds concert, with Dvorak’s ‘From the New World’ Symphony lodged in the second half after two modernist pieces before ... More >>
Review: Eat the Rich
Sunday, 2 October 2016, 1:56 pm | Max Rashbrooke
Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street NZ Opera In Wellington until 4 October, then Christchurch 12-15 October Reviewer: Max Rashbrooke More >>
Review: A Shakespeare for Brexit times
Monday, 22 August 2016, 1:37 pm | Max Rashbrooke
If Richard II were a person, it’d be an older brother too often upstaged by its showy younger sibling, Richard III. But Sceptre Theatre’s production proves that there’s as much – if not more – matter in the older work. More >>
Strauss, sweetness and steel
Monday, 8 August 2016, 10:52 am | Max Rashbrooke
There was a diminished audience for this New Zealand Symphony Orchestra performance, a fact probably explicable by its clash with the Super Rugby final that evening, which was being played just down the road and which featured the (ultimately victorious) ... More >>
Why the new British Conservative PM is talking inequality
Tuesday, 12 July 2016, 11:12 am | Max Rashbrooke
Theresa May will soon be Britain’s second female prime minister, the first having been, of course, Margaret Thatcher. But if promises mean anything, May’s rule will strike a very different note to that of the Iron Lady. More >>
Review: Messiaen shimmers
Tuesday, 12 July 2016, 10:22 am | Max Rashbrooke
So far this year I’ve been slightly underwhelmed by some of the NZSO’s programmes – but not last Friday night, when they turned in a triumphant performance of Olivier Messiaen’s colossal Eclairs sur l’au-dela (Illuminations of the Beyond). More >>
Review: Scheherazade sparkles … but Lalo?
Monday, 20 June 2016, 4:06 pm | Max Rashbrooke
It’s a curiosity of artistic discourse that Orientalism is viewed with suspicion in many disciplines, but not in classical music. A European painter or fashion designer appropriating imagery from, say, China, might be taken to task, but no-one thinks ... More >>
Review: Magic Moments
Tuesday, 31 May 2016, 10:30 am | Max Rashbrooke
Mozart’s The Magic Flute is an extraordinary tale, blending a story of great solemnity, of elegant music and Masonic virtue overcoming hatred and discord, with elements of extreme silliness and pure fantasy. But New Zealand Opera’s latest version, ... More >>
