Holly Mathieson Conductor

Tōru Takemitsu Dreamtime
Dorothy Ker The Third Dream
Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique

Dunedin-born conductor Holly Mathieson returns to Aotearoa New Zealand 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 at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Most recently she was appointed music director of Symphony Nova Scotia. 

Mathieson presents a programme of dreams. Japanese composer Tōru 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.

Individual tickets on sale 10am, 11 March 2021.