The best label for this year’s announcement by Bill English might be the ‘Bare Minimum Budget’. It does the bare minimum to defuse potential political damage in a range of areas – homelessness and ...

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 ...

A Festival performance is often a great impetus for innovation, and so it was for New Zealand pianist Stephen De Pledge in his reworking of Bach's Partita No. 3 in A minor. De Pledge commissioned ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Lisa Owen: A new book called ‘Government for the Public Good’ is posing the question, ‘Who does it better — the free market or the government?’ Journalist and author Max Rashbrooke makes the argument ...