SYNTHONY

Conceived in 2015, sold in 2018

SYNTHONY began as a question rather than a business. In July 2015 a New Zealand pilot, David Elmsly, and a DJ, producer and accountant, Erika Amoore, watched a BBC Proms broadcast and wondered what the dance records they had grown up on would sound like played by a full orchestra. The answer arrived at Auckland Town Hall in 2017: one show, a budget under $20,000, about 2,500 people in the room, and a concept neither founder had the infrastructure to scale.

David Higgins, who runs Duco Events, bought it within months of that debut, in 2018. He has described paying the founders a fair price and a bit of an earn out, and has been candid that an accountant valuing the venture at the time would have called it worthless. What he bought was a format: the arrangements, the name, and the premise that the orchestra was the act.

Under Duco the rooms kept getting bigger. The Town Hall gave way to Spark Arena, then to the Auckland Domain, the public park where roughly 40,000 people now attend a single day — the largest one-day music festival in New Zealand. The same period took the show around the country, into Australia, and then into markets where nobody involved had any history at all.

A catalogue of numbers rather than albums

Instead of records, SYNTHONY's body of work is a numbered series of productions. Each edition, No.1 through to No.7, is a distinct set of orchestral arrangements that then tours. The current European run is billed as SYNTHONY No.2, No.5 played Perth's RAC Arena, and No.7 had its global premiere at the Auckland Domain in March 2026 with a set list built for that night, including tracks never performed at a SYNTHONY show in its first eight years.

The recorded output follows the stage rather than leading it. Live albums have appeared through Duco IP, credited to SYNTHONY with the conductor Sarah-Grace Williams and the Auckland Philharmonia, among them SYNTHONY (Live Vol. 1), released in 2025.

The personnel are deliberately interchangeable. Higgins has said the show is brand-driven rather than built around any one person, and the operating model reflects that: local orchestras and local vocalists in each market, with the arrangements and the production design travelling. Orchestras that have played it include the Auckland Philharmonia, Orchestra Wellington, Brisbane Philharmonic and The Metropolitan Orchestra; conductors have included Williams, Brent Stewart and Emma Featherstone. That approach also explains how a New Zealand production began fielding booking enquiries from abroad — the filmed Domain shows on YouTube did the selling.

Out of New Zealand

Expansion ran through one-offs before it ran through tours. The show played Mexico in 2024, the Formula One race weekend in Las Vegas, and the opening of a Greek resort — bookings that paid for the orchestral logistics while the name meant nothing outside Australasia. Australia came earlier and has become a second home market, with arena dates and an outdoor show in Melbourne.

Europe arrived in 2025 with a first continental tour, and North America followed in January 2026, when the American debut played the Walt Disney Theater at Orlando's Dr Phillips Center on 16 January. New York came on 5 June 2026 at Terminal 5, billed from 9pm to 10.30pm — a club-sized room by the standard of what the show was simultaneously selling in Europe, and a sign the United States is being built city by city rather than announced as a national campaign.

Every market gets the same division of labour: Duco ships the scores, the visuals and the touring DJs, while the orchestra and most of the singers are hired where the show lands. Without that split, a thirteen-city arena tour with a full orchestra on stage would not clear its costs.

Forty thousand people in a park

The anchor event is still the Auckland one. The 2026 edition, at the Auckland Domain on Saturday 21 March under Mānuka Phuel sponsorship, drew about 40,000. Sarah-Grace Williams conducted the Auckland Philharmonia through the premiere of No.7, with guest vocals from Jenny Skulander of Devilskin and Cassie Henderson, and a score the orchestra had to play through pyrotechnics.

It is no longer only an orchestral show. The 2026 main stage carried Faithless, performing as a full live band, alongside Peking Duk, Shapeshifter, Hot Dub Time Machine, Kaylee Bell, Made You Look, Nice 'n' Urlich, The Black Seeds and The Exponents, with a separate DJ stage running Dick Johnson, Flamingo Pier, Beccie B and Tim Phin among others. The festival is the commercial engine that funds the arrangements the arena tours then carry abroad. The 2027 edition is already dated for 20 March at the Domain.

The nostalgia argument

The sharpest recent criticism came out of that festival. Writing in The Spinoff after the Domain show, a reviewer called the day at once joyous and a bit depressing, described an elevated version of a 90s school disco, and noted that at least 70% of the crowd appeared to be over 40. The objection was structural rather than snobbish: nostalgia is a finite resource, and eventually something new has to be made. The same review named Williams and the Auckland Philharmonia as the creative anchor, handling a technical score cleanly, and picked Faithless — the one act playing its own material as a band — as the stand-out.

The setlist record supports the complaint about repertoire. Across 2026 performances the most-played numbers were Sandstorm, Children, Right Here, Right Now and Kernkraft 400, records between 25 and 30 years old. The counter-argument is No.7 itself, written to retire some of that material, and the practice of commissioning fresh arrangements each cycle instead of touring one fixed score.

Where it stands, October 2026

The current position is a thirteen-date European arena tour running from 6 October to 1 November 2026: Barclays Arena in Hamburg, Budapest Aréna, the Volkswagen Arena in Istanbul, Berlin's Uber Arena on 11 October, Tauron Arena Kraków, COS Torwar in Warsaw, Malmö Arena, Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Palacio Vistalegre in Madrid, Rome's Palazzo dello Sport, Allianz Cloud in Milan, Munich's Olympiahalle, and the OVO Arena Wembley on Sunday 1 November. A Dubai date follows on 21 November.

Immediately before that run the show played AFAS Live in Amsterdam on 2 October 2026 and the Lanxess Arena in Cologne on 29 September. Next year is already partly on sale — Uber Arena again on 11 October 2027 and AFAS Live on 16 October 2027 — which is the clearest available evidence that the European market has held rather than spiked.

Duco has also begun cloning the format. Full Metal Orchestra, the same orchestral treatment applied to rock and metal, launched at Spark Arena in July 2025 and had sold most of the room before opening night.