Performed at the Auckland Philharmonia's Kia Kaha! concert without audience during Covid-19 Level 2 restrictions.
Douglas Lilburn’s ‘Allegro for Strings’ was completed in 1942 and premiered by the Auckland 1YA Studio Orchestra. Lilburn’s biographer Philip Norman says the work is one of the composer’s most powerful earlier pieces and reveals that, privately, Lilburn suggested to his lover Rita Angus that the soul of their miscarried child lived in the work. Publicly, Lilburn attributed the work’s inspiration to both paintings of Angus and Denis Glover’s poem ‘Holiday Piece’.
Recorded by RNZ Concert, Auckland Town Hall, 12 June 2020
Producer: Tim Dodd; Engineer: Adrian Hollay
