Performer: Wade Kernot

Director Simon Phillips takes the opportunity to reshape the setting of Rossini's comic opera to modern-day New Zealand. 

In this part-concert and part-lecture, Michael Vinten chronicles the history or New Zealand art song through the lives of the composers and poets featured, stories alternately hilarious and tragic.

Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria is given the Pinchgut treatment, with an abstract staging complementing historically informed music-making under Erin Helyard.