NZ Youth Choir Heading To European Choir Games In Denmark
Tour marks the last for director David Squire – 'It's been my great honour'
The world's longest running national youth choir, NZ Youth Choir (NZYC), is getting ready for its 14th international tour: to Singapore and Europe. The traditional 'farewell' concert will take place at Auckland's Holy Trinity Cathedral, Friday 27th June, with tickets selling fast. The following day, NZYC will head to Singapore for concerts before flying to Europe to compete in the 6th European Choir Games and Grand Prix of Nations in Aarhus, Denmark. The choir will then return to the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod in Wales where they previously won ' Choir of the World ' in 1999.
This is the New Zealand Youth Choir's first European tour since before COVID-19. The choir gathers New Zealand's finest young voices aged 18–25 and offers a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn from our top conductor and vocal coaches, with the three-year membership culminating in an international tour. Director David Squire will end his time with the choir at the completion of the tour. David has directed NZYC since 2011 and was himself a member from 1985–1991 before becoming a founding member of Voices NZ and going onto an illustrious career in music education.
' It's been my great honour to direct the New Zealand Youth Choir for the past 15 years,' David says, ' As an NZYC alumnus, I've always considered this role bigger than any person who has the opportunity to conduct it and, with that in mind, 2025 is the time for my tenure with the choir to come to an end '.
The Holy Trinity Cathedral concert on Friday 27th June will be David's last New Zealand concert as New Zealand Youth Choir director.
' David is one of New Zealand's most prominent conductors, and his extraordinary legacy with New Zealand Youth Choir will be cherished and celebrated,' says Arne Hermann, Choirs Aotearoa NZ's CE, ' While David's tenure with NZYC will come to an end, his mahi with CANZ will continue. We will announce the new Music Director closer to the commencement of their start date in early 2026 – and once the recruitment process is complete '.
While overseas, NZYC will also sing in Singapore and the UK: Oxford, Barnsley and a concert at Sinfonia Smith's Square, London – where NZYC in 2016, the last time they were in Europe led by David, recorded their 'Live in London' DVD and won the Grand Prix at the 2016 IFAS in the Czech Republic in 2016. NZYC has a Give-a-little page to support their 2025 tour.
NZ Youth Choir Farewell Concert at Holy Trinity Cathedral, Parnell, Auckland 7:30pm, Friday 27 June, 2025
MORE ABOUT DAVID SQUIRE
David has taught music in schools for 35 years and in 2011 won a New Zealander of the Year Local Heroes Medal for services to music education. His ensembles have won many awards at local and international music festivals, such as the NZCF Big Sing. His Rangitoto College mixed-voice chamber choir, The Fundamentals, won the platinum award at the 2008 NZCF Big Sing Finale in Wellington – the first time for a mixed-voice choir. David's upper-voice choir from Kristin School, Euphony, was third in the open female choir competition at the International Musical Eisteddfod in Llangollen, Wales, in 2013. In 2019, Euphony represented New Zealand at the Budapest International Choral Festival, winning the Youth Choirs of Equal Voices category, coming 3rd in the open Musica Sacra category and was invited to compete for the Grand Prix. David's Westlake Boys High School lower-voice choir, Voicemale, won the Grand Prix at the 2nd Leonardo da Vinci International Choral Festival in Florence in 2018, and David won the award for best conductor at this event. David has been music director of the Westlake Symphony Orchestra for 25 years, and it has won more gold awards at the KBB Music Festival than any other ensemble. In 2014 the orchestra was placed first equal at the Summa Cum Laude International Youth Music Festival in Vienna.
David is also the director of the Auckland Youth Choir, Vice-Chair of the New Zealand Association of Choral Directors, is a national conducting advisor and tutor and was a governance board member of the New Zealand Choral Federation for 9-years. He completed his undergraduate study at the University of Auckland, with an emphasis on conducting and composition, later graduating with a Master of Music degree with first class honours in choral conducting. He studied singing with Isabel Cunningham, Glenese Blake and Beatrice Webster, and conducting with Karen Grylls and Juan Matteucci. He has sung with many top choirs in New Zealand, including the Auckland Dorian Choir, University of Auckland Chamber Choir and the New Zealand Youth Choir. He was a founding member of Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir and the V8 Vocal Ensemble.
David has previously led the New Zealand Youth Choir on four international tours, including the USA and Canada in 2013, which featured performances of the War Requiem by Britten in the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, as well as concerts in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Boston, New York and Washington DC. In 2016 the choir gave concerts in Singapore, the Czech Republic, France and the UK. Tour highlights included singing high mass at Notre-Dame in Paris, a lunchtime concert at Windsor Castle, and producing a live DVD recording of a well-received concert at St Johns Smith Square in London. The choir also participated in the Festival of Academic Choirs in Pardubice, Czech Republic, winning every category it entered, as well as the prize for outstanding vocal culture, and then going on to win the Grand Prix. At the end of 2019 the choir embarked on a Pacific tour aboard the cruise ship MS Maasdam, taking in Tonga, Niue, Fiji, New Caledonia and Sydney. In 2022 the choir toured Australia, presenting performances in Tasmania, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and at the Sydney Opera House.
As a freelance musician, David has conducted several local ensembles, including the Auckland Philharmonia and the St Matthews Chamber Orchestra. He was the assistant musical director of the New Zealand Secondary Students' Choir, founding musical director of the Auckland Youth Big Band, chairman and administrator of the KBB Music Festival, and a live performance reviewer for Radio NZ Concert. David is often involved in session and recording work, particularly as a conductor, adjudicator, clinician and singer and was choir director on the recent New Zealand film, Tinā. He has also served as the choir director for Synthony, and is the chorus master for the International Schools Choral Music Society based in China.
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The Spinoff
a day ago
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The bridge builder: my mother Margaret Mahy
Bridget Mahy reflects on what it was like to grow up with the beloved writer and witness the construction of her stories. 'Imagination is the creative use of reality' My mother once described herself as a 'slave to fiction'. From a very young age, her parents would find her 'conducting unseen orchestras of stories, stories remembered, recreated and invented'. She would incessantly verbalise her ideas until she was old enough to write them down. And because of this powerful, intrinsic drive to respond to the world through narrative, she never stopped conducting. Margaret looked to build bridges between the constructive truths of fact and reality, and the transformative truths found in the imaginative world. She wanted to peer through the looking glass, to take the riddles of a paradoxical reality and give them meaning in an alternative world. This led her down paths of wordplay and absurdity: a tone akin to Lewis Carroll but infused with her own particular humour. In part, her job was to entertain herself as much as her readers – both child and adult. A powerful influence on Margaret were the European folk and fairy tales she devoured as a child. They continued to shape her imagination, offering conduits between the real and the imagined. Margaret felt they gave her a kind of 'code by which to decipher experience'. Drawn to the ebb and flow of high drama, their struggles of good vs evil, magical reality and gothic romanticism, she fell in love with the spectacular imagery, archetypal figures and the rhythmic patterns of their structure. The language of mystery and the magic of fairy tales are interwoven into her stories. One example is a picture book called The Railway Engine and the Hairy Brigands. The hardback edition, illustrated by the fabulous Brian Froud, was published in 1973, and I was fascinated to turn its pages for the first time and discover that the heroines of the story were 'Penny and little Bridget'. My mother had placed my older sister and myself at the heart of a tale in which we ran the cheerful (but annoying) hairy brigands out of town. With no effort at all on our part, we had been cast as heroes. I can readily imagine Margaret deliberately inserting her daughters into the story as a gift to us. We officially existed within both her storytelling codes and her day-to-day world. It was a potent reminder that our mother had one foot firmly placed in the life of a working solo parent, yet could escape that tough reality through creative endeavour. The House is a character Over time, Margaret built a house around herself. Here was a structure that was both tangible and strong, offering shelter to a small family and a menagerie of pets. Our house became something of a sanctuary, a sometimes-successful hiding place where solitude and silence could flourish in the face of too much intrusion. Bookshelves crept up and out like vines from ceiling to floor. The librarian wanted to live in a library, and the writer enjoyed the semi-organised jostling of other people's ideas. The house itself took on a role in her stories. For 40 years, the writer and the house went hand in hand, utterly inseparable. I can only imagine Margaret's relief at the end of the working day as a librarian, after putting her young children to bed, to claim some hours for herself. Reading or writing into the early hours in her small bedroom must have been its own form of escapism, freedom from the repetitive slog of processing daily life. While Margaret could do a lot, she couldn't do it all. So she hired a neighbour to clean the house twice a week, in an effort to stem the inevitable entropy of a home with one adult juggling two jobs, two children, any number of muddy pet paws – the chickens were particularly painful when they elected to try and move in. However, Margaret would bemusedly tell friends how, too embarrassed to let anyone see a trail of domestic detritus, she would cajole the children into helping tidy the house for the cleaner. This episode formed the basis of a picture book called The Housekeeper. 'The house Lizzie Firkin, the songwriter, lived in was particularly untidy. It was a rough and tumble house, unwashed, undusted and topsy turvy. When she opened the cupboard doors, a thousand things with sharp corners fell out on top of her. So she nailed the cupboards shut.' I'm rather fond of this story, not only because Margaret uses reality to her creative advantage, but also because she and Lizzie share a moment of comic solidarity over their need for help. While Lizzie's rescuer, Robin Puckertucker the 'Wonder Housekeeper', is deeply disappointed, I suspect Margaret's cleaner was quietly relieved. Part of the the flotsam and jetsam that covered Margaret's large study desk, and spilled into its drawers, were small notebooks: a couple of very elderly ones still hanging on; one chewed by the dog; one falling apart; one given to her at a conference; one with a leftover primary school spelling list; and one marked with the ubiquitous coffee stain. None were to be thrown away. Yet when I randomly opened them, they all showed the same thing: the raw mechanics of piecing together poetry. Inside were small lists of rhyming words, the 26 letters of the alphabet, quotes, snatches of half-finished sentences, varying rhyme schemes, wordplay experiments and collections of words chosen for their sound. A poem of hers comes to mind: Through my house in sunny weather Flies the Dictionary Bird, Clear to see on every feather Is some outlandish word. 'Hugger Mugger,' 'gimcrack,' 'guava,' 'Waggish,' 'mizzle,' 'swashing rain' — Bird, fly back into my kitchen, Let me read those words again. When Margaret had a light-hearted poem well underway, the performer and conductor within would emerge. It was charming to hear her confidently reciting sections, editing as she went, entertaining herself with the search for successful rhythm and rhyme. She would sound out extended poems to family members as though she couldn't believe her good fortune that the selected words were not only alliterative, but were also dutifully conforming to her version of anapestic tetrameter. 'Little Mabel blew a bubble and it caused a lot of trouble… Such a lot of bubble trouble in a bibble-bobble way. For it broke away from Mabel as it bobbed across the table, Where it bobbled over Baby, and it wafted him away.' Nineteen stanzas later, the baby in the bubble is safely returned home. Margaret would go on to regularly, cheerfully, heroically recite this epic poem to thousands of children. A quieter version of my mother was revealed in the way she murmured to herself while fine-tuning ideas for a novel. As chief instigator, director and actor, Margaret could often be found role-playing an ensemble of quite distinct characters: mothers, fathers, precocious children, 14 year olds, an elderly woman with Alzheimer's and menacing tricksters. Her boundless curiosity fed a complex interior world, and on occasion, that world had to be made real, by chasing her ideas into the open and speaking them out loud. Away from the keyboard and the drafted word, she murmured as she stirred a wholesome soup, inspected the burnt edges of a grilled cheese toastie, or walked the dog down the long jetty. I could hear her softly, experimentally expressing her characters' shifting tones of voice, trying to capture the tempo of nuanced dialogue and giving voice to their private thoughts. T he bridge builder I sometimes hesitate to open the pages of my mother's teenage novels. And yet, when I return to The Haunting, The Changeover, Catalogue of the Universe, or The Tricksters, the words resound with her voice, incredibly immediate and incredibly distinct. Time collapses. These novels explore the intricacies of family life. Her characters are tightly bound by strong familial relationships that shift and evolve as the adolescents are transformed by mysterious or supernatural experiences, and ultimately see themselves in a new light. My great privilege was to hear these stories take shape with manuscripts repeatedly refined and road-tested on a willing volunteer as they inched forward in creation. Like any writer, Margaret wrestled with her novels, looking for a delicate balance in an unwieldy creation. Not so much control, as dabbing detail into all the available spaces. When she read aloud from her handwritten volumes or typewritten pages, I sat beside her knitting a scarf that, like the story, didn't know how it would end. 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Margaret introduces two sisters – the mysterious Troy, described as 'stormy in her black cloud of hair', and the effervescent, talkative Tabitha. Tabitha says that she is writing 'the world's greatest novel but that no one could read it yet. However, she talked about it all the time.' By the end of the story, Troy, once silent and watchful, has become the indomitable talker, and by contrast, Tabitha feels defeated by being overtaken by her sister. 'Everyone else can be a magician or haunted, and that leaves me stuck with ordinariness, though I was the one who didn't want that in the first place…' Margaret later reflected that she saw in these characters a duality of her own life and an early love of romanticism. As a child, she had longed to be dark and mysterious, made powerful and magical through silence, but was confronted with more prosaic truths. 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The Spinoff
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Our first reactions to Virgin, Lorde's brand new album
The Spinoff writers share their thoughts on Lorde's fourth album. After returning from her typical four-year hiatus with a series of thrilling pop-ups, including one in the YMCA bathrooms in central Tāmaki Makaurau, New Zealand pop star Lorde released her fourth album Virgin at midnight last night. With an icy blue cover depicting an X-ray of the singer's own pelvis, the album has brought with it much fan speculation. Will it be even more revealing than her verse in 'girl, so confusing'? Will it be a return to the Melodrama era? And why, oh why, is there a Baby Bash credit? We took a long, hard listen overnight to bring you these findings. Lyric Waiwiri-Smith My virgin Virgin listen was exactly as God intended: alone in my bedroom with the lights off waiting for the midnight release. 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I also encountered some technical difficulties [ads interrupting the flow] due to recently having cancelled my Spotify subscription. I am still trying to figure out an alternative, recommendations welcome. It was during the third song, 'Shapeshifter', that I thought 'ahhhh I know what this is' – bedroom pop, albeit made by one of the biggest pop stars in the world and certainly not lo-fi. These songs, entirely constructed of Ella Yelich-O'Connor's voice and electronic melodies and instruments, are introspective, intimate, nostalgic and sometimes dreamy. Though they're a million miles off Solar Power, they don't hit those party highs of Melodrama. There were moments, particularly in 'Clearblue', when I was reminded of Kody Nielson's Silicon project, and other moments where I thought of Pickle Darling. This is a perfect winter album, something to curl up with on a cold night alone. The lyrics are easy to relate to [it's a break up album too] and it's nice to have some pop for introverts. Alex Casey As Lorde has established herself, this album is probably best enjoyed in a subterranean carpark or a grimy toilet block, alas my first Virgin listen was while doing the damn dishes and making myself a damn omelette before work this morning (as a wise woman once said: vine hanging over the door, dog who comes when I call etc etc etc). Nonetheless, the first three tracks lifted me out of chilly Christchurch suburbia to a place much more thrilling, sweaty, and industrial. She doesn't want us to take our time and bliss out in the sun anymore, but absolutely ping out with urgency under the blue lights. I saw Lorde say in an interview recently that she was put here to make bangers, but that doesn't mean that these songs are all feel-good euphoria. 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She had control of the aux cord (rightly so) and I bellowed 'play Baby Bash!!!!' at her in a sav-fuelled fugue state. The look on her face has haunted me ever since, but hearing this lyric on Virgin makes me think that maybe she didn't hate the suggestion as much as I have assumed she did for the last near-decade. That's healing, that's growth… that's Virgin.
RNZ News
3 days ago
- RNZ News
David Squire's farewell NZ Youth Choir tour
David Squire directing the NZ Youth Choir at the Sydney Opera House in December 2022. Photo: Robert Catto Photography When David Squire joined New Zealand's National Youth Choir as a singer, it never occurred to him he might one day direct it. But direct it he has, for 15 years. That time, which has included some "really amazing experiences", is coming to an end, as Squire is stepping down as the New Zealand Youth Choir 's music director once it has completed its latest overseas tour to Singapore, Denmark and the UK. Squire and choir tenor Ivan Zhang joined RNZ Concert host Bryan Crump ahead of the choir's departure. This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions. David Squire and the New Zealand Youth Choir Photo: Jo Highlights of the tour will include taking part in the European Choir Games in Denmark before representing New Zealand at the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod in Wales. The latter is a celebration of and competition for performing arts groups from around the world. It's not the first time the Youth Choir has taken part in the Eisteddfod, which all happens in a giant tent in a field not far from the small north Wales town of Llangollen. The last time Squire took the choir there, everyone was sweltering in a heatwave (and there's not much in the way of air conditioning inside the tent). The year before, it rained and the venue turned into a swamp. Not that those extremes put the musicians off. New Zealand Youth Choir 2025 member Ivan Zhang Photo: Supplied / New Zealand Youth Choir The tour also marks the end of Ivan Zhang's current stint with the choir. As well as studying music, Zhang is also reading law at Auckland University. He was thinking law would be his longer term career choice, but he is beginning to wonder if music is where his heart is. Luckily, he's young enough to audition for another stint with the NZ Youth Choir. As for Squire, he's not sure what his longer term plans will be. His focus is on the Youth Choir's tour, and once that's over, taking part in the Big Sing where Euphony and Voicemale - two Auckland secondary school choirs he directs - have made it through to the Finale in Dunedin this August.
