The title of Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra’s RACH2 concert had an agreeably hip insouciance to it, boldly appropriating a familiar nickname for Rachmaninov’s uber-popular Second Piano Concerto. And it was this work that doubtlessly filled the town hall.
Before Rachmaninov’s audience-magnet could work its wiles, we were welcomed withan overture in the grand Hollywood style — a suite from Erich Korngold’s score for the 1940 swashbuckling epic, The Sea Hawk.
Rachmaninov’s work proved to be an audience-magnet . Photo / Adrian Malloch Photography
Conductor Carlos Kalmar gave his players a spectacular workout in this bracingly lush soundscape. Brilliant brass fanfaring with crashing cymbals and soaring strings evoked surging waves and salty sea breezes, not to mention the lithe Errol Flynn, scaling the rigging, sword in hand.
There was more lushness to come, tinted with Slavic melancholy, when Lise de la Salle joined the orchestra for Rachmaninov’s concerto, a piece much featured on film soundtracks, as well as suffering the indignity of having its Adagio purloined by Tin Pan Alley.
To some this middle movement would have rightly been the highlight of the evening; the sentimental was kept well at bay, as de la Salle dealt out the purest poetry alongside lyrical woodwind and passionate strings.
Soloist Lise de la Salle. Photo / Adrian Malloch Photography.
Elsewhere, pianist and conductor pursued more dramatic confrontations, and excitingly so, only momentarily marred by the soloist’s panicked passage work.
Her encore was the soul of simplicity and topicality; an almost reverent transcription of Schubert’s To Music, dedicated to the hope for world peace.
Schumann’s symphonies are strange beasts, in which one feels a radical romantic spirit struggling within a restrictive, symphonic straitjacket. Nevertheless, visionary moments still outnumber the awkward.
In the Spring Symphony, Kalmar did not quite make one overlook the repetitive dotted rhythms and four-bar phrases of its first movement, although he did inject a much-appreciated sense of the fanciful elsewhere. The Larghetto was the epitome of wistful longing and Schumann’s eccentric touches in the scherzo registered with an inarguable rightness.
The Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra filled the Auckland Town Hall. Photo / Adrian Malloch Photography
