Review by Terence Dennis, Blair Professor of Music
It was heartening to see such a generous complement of players filling the stage of the University of Otago’s Castle 1 Theatre for the Dunedin Youth Orchestra’s 2025 “War and Peace” concert. The chosen theme of the evening allowed for a wide spectrum of programme choices to develop the orchestra’s sections and highlight its current strengths.
The unflinching terseness of Beethoven’s Coriolan overture opened the evening with a purposeful momentum, and the full climaxes of this famous work gave the orchestra an early opportunity to display impressive sonority.
The players’ response to the demands of shifting moods, instrument textures and rhythmic interplay was especially evident in Anthony Ritchie’s Remember Parehaka, and the intensity of the string section was commendable.
Two young city musicians, performer and composer, were profiled in the first half of the concert.
Oboist Callum Fotheringham was the featured soloist in Hummel’s Introduction, Theme and Variations, an attractive work of early 19 th century Romanticism. Callum performed with much aplomb, expressive in the plaintive melodic arcs of the work’s introduction, affording the main theme a buoyant, characteristic lilt, and neatly articulating the bravura variations.
Composer James Hurley (bassoonist in the DYO) was the recipient of this year’s Anthony Ritchie Young Composer’s Award and his winning entry, Wasteland Overture, was appropriately placed after the Ritchie work. James Hurley’s Overture explored a gamut of orchestral colours and combinations with an evident enthusiasm, while maintaining a good musical coherence. The duo between harp and horn was particularly effective.
The impressive brass and percussion sections of the current DYO were especially highlighted in the powerful Mars movement from Holst’s The Planets, always an audience favourite, and in the effective suite drawn from the Lord of the Rings film score. The haunting Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia, from Khatchaturian’s ballet Spartacus took a little time to cohere, but all was well for the famous climax: and the warmth of that sonority then passed to the celebrated Nimrod movement of Elgar’s Enigma Variations: the orchestra responded well to its essential nobility.
Conductors Emily Sterk and Maddy Parkins-Craig need special commendation and gratitude for their preparation and stewardship of the DYO’s programme.
The orchestra’s two Walkers (not related) Ben, trombonist and Dan, violinist, were announced as the recipients of the 2026 DYO Young Musicians Awards, and the evening was also enhanced by the visual counterpoints of back projections.