Auckland Philharmonia

Built from a collapse

The Auckland Philharmonia exists because its predecessor went bust. In 1980 the Symphonia of Auckland folded, and nineteen of its musicians set up a replacement as a cooperatively run incorporated society, the Auckland Philharmonia Society. A local businessman, Olly Newland, took on the financial risk of holding the failed orchestra's remaining assets and organised public rallies to gather support. The new band began life as the Auckland Regional Orchestra with 33 players.

From 1985 it traded as the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, the APO, and that name stuck for nearly four decades. The society looked after the artistic side and delegated money matters to a board of advisors until a 2005 reorganisation split the organisation into a charitable trust and the society. The word Orchestra was dropped from the branding in 2023. Today it is a registered charity whose core funding comes from Auckland Council, Creative New Zealand and Foundation North.

Its music directors have included John Hopkins, who held the post for eight years, Miguel Harth-Bedoya from 1998 to 2003 and Eckehard Stier from 2009 to 2015. A composer-in-residence scheme ran from 1990 until it was discontinued in 2018. Alongside its own concerts the orchestra has long been the pit band for New Zealand Opera and the Royal New Zealand Ballet in Auckland, and it keeps standing partnerships with the Auckland Festival and the Michael Hill International Violin Competition.

The Bellincampi years

Giordano Bellincampi took over as Music Director in 2016. Born in Italy and raised in Copenhagen, he started out as a trombonist in the Royal Danish Orchestra, made his professional conducting debut in 1994, and went on to run the Copenhagen Philharmonic, the Danish National Opera in Aarhus and the Duisburg Philharmonic, with earlier posts at the Kristiansand Symphony and Milan's I Pomeriggi Musicali. Denmark knighted him in the Order of the Dannebrog in 2010. His Auckland contract has been extended three times, most recently to the end of 2027, which will make it twelve years and the longest tenure of any music director in the orchestra's history.

What that partnership sounds like was on show in November 2025, when he closed the Premier Series with Mahler's Third Symphony played uncut at 132 minutes, with the Australian mezzo Deborah Humble, two choirs and eighteen young instrumentalists from the Australian National Academy of Music folded into the ranks. William Dart in the New Zealand Herald wrote that Bellincampi commanded the score with magisterial control and precision. A season preview on The Stuart Review that same month credited him with an instinct for the dramatic architecture the big Romantic scores demand and a welcome lack of interpretive fussiness.

A season of first visits

The 2026 season was announced on 14 October 2025 as Bellincampi's eleventh. Chief executive Diana Weir framed it around soloists coming to New Zealand for the first time: the violinist Gil Shaham in Beethoven, the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason in Elgar, the pianist Eva Gevorgyan, the cellist Anastasia Kobekina and the conductors Nodoka Okisawa, Tomáš Netopil and Stéphane Denève. James Ehnes, Benjamin Beilman, Ning Feng and Alexander Gavrylyuk were booked to return. The core is the twelve-concert New Zealand Herald Premier Series plus a five-concert Classic Series, and the year runs from 12 February to 19 December across Auckland Town Hall, the Bruce Mason Centre and the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre.

The season opened on 12 February with Gavrylyuk in Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto and, on 26 February, a Classic Series opener billed as Best of Brahms. On 1 March the orchestra gave Maria Grenfell's Hinemoa its long-delayed New Zealand concert debut, and on 5 April Michael Norris's twenty-minute violin concerto Sama was reported to have stolen a Ravel programme in front of a packed Town Hall. In May Ehnes and the conductor Samy Rachid turned a Mozart evening into an unplanned double act, in June Shaham played the Beethoven concerto and the 25th Michael Hill competition final, accompanied by the orchestra, was won by Beatrice Colombis. Beilman played Nielsen's Violin Concerto in early August as an Australasian exclusive.

On 13 August Elena Schwarz conducted Kanneh-Mason's debut in a programme of Ligeti's Melodien, Sibelius's Fifth and the Elgar concerto to a full house. Dart wrote that the 27-year-old put his personal seal on the piece, moving from an emotionally powerful opening into a beautifully sprung Allegro, and that the reading made the pomp of Elgar's earlier days sound hollow and irrelevant. Three weeks later, on 3 September, Okisawa led the Southern Hemisphere premiere of Guillaume Connesson's 45-minute Cosmic Trilogy before Saint-Saëns's Organ Symphony with Nicholas Forbes at the Town Hall's Klais organ. Dart called it one of his most compulsively entertaining evenings of the year and noted a full and vociferously appreciative house. Still to come is a 15 October Premier Series concert in which the seventeen-year-old pianist Sophia Liu plays Beethoven's Fourth Concerto.

Opera without a set, films with one

The orchestra's annual Opera in Concert has become one of its biggest nights. In July 2026 it was Puccini's Madama Butterfly, conducted by Bellincampi with the soprano Erika Grimaldi as Cio-Cio-San, the tenor Gaston Rivero making his New Zealand debut as Pinkerton, Richard Šveda as Sharpless, Elisabeth Jansson as Suzuki and the New Zealand Opera Chorus. Antony Ernst's minimal staging put the singers on a platform above and behind the orchestra, used three shoji screens as focal points and ended with a silhouetted final scene. Dart's review of 26 July called the capacity-house performance triumphant, praised the orchestra's lush strings and exotic percussion, and found Grimaldi memorable, though he noted that singing from the heights caused audibility problems whenever the orchestra surged beneath.

Beyond the subscription series the orchestra gives more than sixty performances a year. In 2026 that has included The Wizard of Oz screened with live score on 8 and 9 May, a John Williams evening under Denève, a Matariki collaboration with the Waiata Anthems project of te reo Māori songs, which Dame Hinewehi Mohi described in March as a beautiful tribute, and an 80s pop night in arrangements by Jeff Tyzik. The family strand takes in Kiri and Lou in Concert, a joint project with Orchestra Wellington and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, and the Tunes 4 Tamariki concerts, while the In Your Neighbourhood and Community Classics series send principals and the full band into the suburbs. The education programme reaches more than 20,000 young people and adults a year.

What a night at the Town Hall is like

The standard Premier Series concert starts at 7.30pm on a Thursday in the Great Hall of Auckland Town Hall, usually as a concerto and a symphony with an overture or a new work in front, though single long scores such as the Mahler Third or the Connesson-plus-Saint-Saëns pairing get an evening to themselves. The Stuart Review's 2025 season preview singled out the pre-concert talks, revitalised by the departing assistant conductor Reuben Brown with humour and an easy conversational style that had drawn noticeably larger audiences. Subscribers save at least ten per cent and pay no booking fees; single tickets go through Ticketmaster, and the community concerts are sold separately.

The throughline of the 2026 reviews is attendance. Dart reported a packed hall for the Norris premiere in April, a full house for a farewells-and-firsts programme in June, a capacity Town Hall for Butterfly in July, a full house for Kanneh-Mason in August and again for Okisawa in September. The Stuart Review's assessment of the ensemble was professionally accomplished and artistically ambitious within realistic constraints, with two reservations: some programme listings were vague about which excerpts of Prokofiev's Cinderella and Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream would be played, and the November scheduling looked like programming by instinct rather than grand design.