Nearly forty years ago John McAlpine
and I gave a recital in New Zealand House. During the heatwave of 1976 I visited Koeln to rehearse with
John. We got very hot rehearsing in his attic.
There were no personal computers and sophisticated publishing software in those days of course,
and I spent hours applying Letraset to prepare the ticket and posters for printing.
Somebody recorded the concert onto 6-inch reel-to-reel tape. It languished in a box for the
next 25 years until I unearthed it when a friend was transferring old tapes to CD.
Click the poster to hear the sonata (1950)
by Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001), one of New Zealand's foremost and most respected composers.
It's totally unedited, warts and all. I can still see my dear violin teacher, Sascha Lasserson, sitting halfway back, who,
at the age af 87, had taken the trouble to come all the way from Shepherd's Bush.
You could open the sound file in a different tab and look at a few
photos of New Zealand
that I took in February 2006 and November 2007.
