On one side, a concert piano. On the other, Māori instruments of stone, bone, shell and wood. For one hour later this month, Rob Thorne and Liam Wooding will bring the two together in Invercargill.
Their concert, Convergence – Te Pūtahitanga, comes to the Waiau Room at the Ascot Park Hotel on Friday 27 November at 7pm. The Eventfinda listing calls it "A mesmerising one hour concert of Piano and Taonga Pūoro music", setting classical piano alongside the sound worlds of taonga pūoro, the traditional instruments of Māori. It is billed as suitable for all ages, and the city gets a single night: "One performance only in Invercargill as part of a national tour."
That matters for a southern audience because national tours do not always make the trip this far south, and this one stops in the city for a single evening. The price helps too. Child and youth tickets are listed at no charge, so a family can take young people to hear taonga pūoro played live, a short walk from Tay Street, without paying for them.
Thorne, who is Ngāti Tumutumu, describes himself as a composer, anthropologist and musician. His label, Rattle Records, says he has spent more than a quarter of a century working in collaborations and as a solo artist on the alternative edges of music, from free noise to improvised sound art, and that he blends taonga pūoro with modern looping technology. He holds an MA in social anthropology, and his postgraduate diploma research, Kōauau: The Music Within, toured regional New Zealand for five years. He travels the country studying museum collections, teaching and lecturing, and has worked alongside Richard Nunns and Phil Dadson. His debut album for Rattle was Whāia Te Māramatanga.
Wooding comes to the keyboard from Whanganui, and affiliates to Ngāti Hinearo, Ngāti Tuera and Te Ati Haunui-a-Pāpārangi. According to Fulbright New Zealand, which named him a 2022 grantee, he earned a performance degree from the University of Auckland in 2013, a first-class master's at Waikato in 2017, and in 2019 completed the Australian National Academy of Music's professional performance programme. The Fulbright award took his research in music performance to the University of California San Diego, and he is working towards a doctorate of musical arts at Waikato.
The tour is presented by PACT, the Performing Arts Community Trust. Its Hamilton date is on Wednesday 18 November at the Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, Te Whare Tāpere Iti, where tickets are listed at $25 to $40.
Rattle describes Thorne's debut album as a dialogue between past and present, old and new. In the Waiau Room on 27 November, that dialogue gets a grand piano for a partner.
Convergence – Te Pūtahitanga is at the Ascot Park Hotel, corner of Tay Street and Racecourse Road, Invercargill, on Friday 27 November from 7pm to 8pm. Adult tickets are $40, accessibility tickets $25 (plus booking fees), and child and youth tickets are free, through Eventfinda.
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