Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (APO) is pairing up with the New Zealand AIDS Quilt to pay tribute to the victims of AIDS at the second of APO’s Splendour Series concerts: 2012: American to the Core.

One of the pieces played in the show – John Corigliano’s “Symphony No.1” – has never been played in New Zealand, but APO audiences are no strangers to Corigliano’s music, which has been championed by the orchestra in recent years. And although the concert marks the New Zealand debut of the symphony, it is a work APO Music Director Eckehard Stier has performed in Europe.

“The reaction from the audience after hearing this piece was the strongest I’ve ever experienced on the podium,” Maestro Stier explains. That’s little surprise; it is a powerful work, written to commemorate victims of AIDS. Corigliano was inspired to write the symphony after seeing one of the famed AIDS Memorial Quilts and structured his work accordingly. In the same way that each panel on a quilt represents a person claimed by the disease, so each of the first three movements of the symphony represents a friend Corigliano lost to AIDS.

“I was extremely moved when I first saw ‘The Quilt’,” the composer wrote at the time of the symphony’s 1990 premiere. “[It was] an ambitious interweaving of several thousand fabric panels, each memorialising a person who had died of AIDS, and, most importantly, each designed and constructed by his or her loved ones. This made me want to memorialize in music those I have lost and reflect on those I am losing.”

In that spirit, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra is honoured to display sections of the New Zealand AIDS Memorial Quilt at the concert. A national taonga, three New Zealand AIDS Memorial Quilts were handed to representatives of Te Papa on 29 April 2012.The panels displayed by the APO have been specially assembled for the evening.

The APO thanks The New Zealand Quilt Project for making panels from the New Zealand quilt available. For more information on the AIDS Quilt Project, visit www.aidsquilt.org.nz.

“The symphony is a compelling piece of music,” says APO chief executive Barbara Glaser. “Hearing it while panels from the AIDS Memorial Quilt hang in the Town Hall can only heighten what already promised to be a moving experience.”

The AIDS Quilt will be on display with the APO on Thursday 26 July at Auckland Town Hall.