New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO)

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra is the country’s leading professional orchestra. Founded in 1946, it has an establishment of 90 players and performs over 100 concerts each year. Touring within New Zealand looms large in the orchestra’s activities. All its main symphonic programmes are presented in Auckland and Wellington and, as well as this, the orchestra visits some 30 New Zealand towns and cities annually.

Pietari Inkinen was appointed the NZSO’s Music Director from January 2008. He succeeds James Judd, who held the position from 1999 to 2007 and is now Music Director Emeritus. Other conductors who have worked with the NZSO during his tenure include Alexander Lazarev, Dimitry Sitkovetsky, David Atherton, Yan Pascal Tortelier and Edo de Waart. Soloists who have worked with the orchestra include Pinchas Zukerman, Sa Chen, Lynn Harrell, Cho-Liang Lin, Hilary Hahn, Vadim Repin, Yefim Bronfman, Simon O’Neill, Steven Isserlis, Freddy Kempf, Colin Currie, Jonathan Lemalu and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

In October 2010, the NZSO prepares to embark on the most prestigious international tour of its history, performing by invitation in some of Europe's greatest concert halls in Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia and Austria, where it will perform at Vienna's hallowed Musikverein. The NZSO will open the tour at the World Trade Expo in Shanghai.

The Orchestra earlier travelled to China in 2008 to take part in the Beijing Olympic Cultural Festival. During this prestigious tour the NZSO performed at the Forbidden City and the National Centre for the Performing Arts. A subsequent NZ Listener article described this as New Zealand’s “other gold”.

In 2005 the NZSO undertook a highly successful tour that included performances at the BBC Proms, the Concertgebouw, Snape Maltings and the World Expo at Aichi in Japan. London's Evening Standard reported “Triumph for Kiwis”. “…In Sibelius’ great Second Symphony, Judd … seemed determined to inspire his orchestra to play out of their skins. And play out of their skins they certainly did in a magnificent, beautifully shaped performance that really set the spine tingling.”

The NZSO has an extensive catalogue of CD recordings. Over one million of these CDs have been sold internationally in the last decade and they have received critical acclaim.

In June 2010, BBC Music Magazine awarded a rare double-five-star review Father and Son (EMI Classics), a recording of Wagnerian arias by New Zealand tenor Simon O'Neill and the NZSO.

Gramophone magazine earlier welcomed the NZSO’s first recording with Pietari Inkinen (of Sibelius tone poems) with “perceptive and engaging Sibelius from this promising young Finnish conductor: Not only does he draw some high-quality, notably zestful playing from his new charges [the NZSO], he directs … with such keen temperament, abundant character and sensitivity to texture and nuance that they come up sounding strikingly new-minted”.

The orchestra has a strong relationship with Naxos, recording repertoire as diverse as Elgar (three disc), Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven, Bernstein, Copland, Lilburn, Sculthorpe, Frank Bridge, Akutagawa, Mendelssohn, Honegger, Liszt, and Vaughan Williams.