We’re all coast dwellers in this country and hearing the rhythm of the waves and the sea must be part of our aural consciousness

In this Cultural Icons programme Denys Trussell interviews Eve de Castro Robinson on her love of music and her vocation as a musician and composer.

Music at intro and full piece at end of interview: Eve de Castro Robinson, At water’s birth (NZTrio commission) / Text for voice: Denys Trussell – excerpt from Archipelago.

Eve de Castro-Robinson has been commissioned and performed by a wide variety of performers, including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Philharmonia, with whom she was Composer-in-Residence in 1991, Chamber Music New Zealand, the New Zealand String Quartet, CadeNZa, NZ Trio, the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra, Hebrides Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble of London and many soloists including Alexander Ivashkin, Jane Manning, Dan Poynton, Helen Medlyn and Stephen De Pledge.

Her Triple Clarinet Concerto was the 1992 NZ entry in the International Rostrum of Composers, Paris; she is twice winner of the Philip Neill Memorial Prize in Music from the University of Otago and twice winner of NZ’s most prestigious composition award, the SOUNZ Contemporary Award (1998 and 2007).

In 2003 she received a major grant from Creative New Zealand to complete her chamber opera on Len Lye with librettist Roger Horrocks. LEN LYE the opera will be mounted at the Maidment Theatre in September 2012. In 2004 she was awarded a ‘de Castro-Robinson Portrait’ concert in the NZ International Festival of the Arts in Wellington. 2006 saw a special 50th birthday concert mounted in her honour by the Karlheinz Company, University of Auckland and 2009 a portrait concert from the Auckland Chamber Orchestra. She has three solo CDS on the Atoll label, including the latest: Releasing the angel, music for orchestra – five works performed and recorded by the NZSO, released June 2011.

Eve de Castro Robinson music and video: Click here for a video of ‘Breathe’ and here for ‘This liquid drift of light’.