Each year, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra brings together talented young orchestral musicians from around the country to form the National Youth Orchestra. Founded in 1959, the NYO has been giving young musicians the chance to learn from and perform with leading musicians and conductors for over 65 years. Photo: Latitude Creative
In July of 2024 the National Youth Orchestra took to the stage at Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre under the baton of Tianyi Lu, one of New Zealand’s rising star conductors.
The programme, called 'Victory', includes Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, Khachaturian's only Piano Concerto featuring 14-year-old Shan Liu from Auckland, and a commissioned work by Kiwi composer Jessie Leov, called 'Speculations on a Rainbow'.
Jessie Leov was the 2024 National Youth Orchestra's composer-in-residence. She is an award winning composer and musician based in Auckland. Leov writes that collaboration is core to her practice, and she enjoys working with creators from musical theatre, stage, screen and poetry. Her commission for the NYO, 'Speculations on a Rainbow' is inspired by an abstract painting, ‘The Rainbow Loop, by Judy Millar. Leov’s music uses a pulsating, syncopated sound wall from which colourful textures emerge.
Next in this programme celebrating talented young musicians, 14-year-old pianist Shan Liu performs Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto in D-flat with the National Youth Orchestra.
Shan is currently a student at Westlake Boys High School and is studying with one of New Zealand renowned pianist and teacher, Stephen De Pledge. Shan began formal piano lessons at the age of 8, which is remarkable to think it’s only taken him six years to deliver this impressive performance of Khachaturian’s virtuosic and challenging concerto. In fact, Shan been performing with orchestras from the age of 9, including the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the Auckland Philharmonia. He’s performed in renowned venues around the country and the world, including the Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall in New York.
When not performing on the piano, Shan can be heard playing percussion with the Westlake Boys High School concert band, or you might find him partaking in his other interests, from playing chess to badminton, swimming and reading.
Aram Khachaturian was born and raised in Tbilisi, now the capital of Georgia, before moving to Moscow at the age of 18 where he studied at the conservatory there. His early works drew favourable attention from composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich, but it was this piano concerto that launched him into international recognition.
The work is brash and bombastic but also full of lush and beautiful melodies, including one unusual moment in the slow movement where the piano accompanies a bowed saw. Exciting and colourful, Khachaturian’s piano concerto is a show stopper and an excellent way to discover the young New Zealand pianist, Shan Liu.
Acclaimed 13-year-old New Zealand pianist Shan Liu. Photo: NZSO
The audience at the Michael Fowler Center was not going to let Shan Liu leave the stage without an encore, and so he sat back down at the piano to play this Concert Etude Op 40 No 8 by Nikolai Kapustin.
Tianyi Lu felt it was very important to give these young musicians an opportunity to perform a work that represents real struggle in its search for joy, and she believed this is found in this symphony by Prokofiev. It was premiered as guns could be heard from St. Petersburg during the 2nd World War, and has been called the composer’ ‘Hymn to free and happy Man’.
Tianyi Lu herself has had a series of victories as a conductor. She on First Prize the Sir Georg Solti International Conductors’ Competition in Germany, and has been a Dudamel Fellow with the LA Philharmonic where her conducting was called “exquisite calligraphic musical pictorialism” by the LA Times.
The young musicians of the NZSO National Youth Orchestra certainly reveled in the opportunity to work with Tianyi Lu and perform Prokofiev’s Symphony No.5 in B-flat Major, Op 100
New Zealand conductor Tianyi Lu. Photo: NZSO
