Where no orchestra has gone before... | Canterbury News | Local News in Canterbury

It will be a night of firsts for the Christchurch Symphony on Saturday, February 26.

The CS will perform its first concert in the 2005 Masterworks Series at the Christchurch Town Hall.

The concert will include Beethoven's 5th Symphony, Vaughan-Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica and the New Zealand premiere of John Psathas' View from Olympus for percussion, piano and orchestra.

The perfomance of this work is so new, the orchestra had has to have percussion instruments made for the performance. Psathas was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in the New Year's Honours.

In another first for the orchestra, the performance of Sinfonia Antarctica will be video-cast direct to Scott Base and McMurdo Base, making the CS the first orchestra in the world to programme live to Antarctica.

The performance will be accompanied by a new video, specially commissioned for the event, featuring imagery of Robert Falcon Scott's expedition from the archives of the Canterbury Museum, and contemporary imagery from the archives of Antarctica New Zealand and the Surveyor-General.