Classical review: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, Auckland Town Hall

Australian musician William Barton.

Some of us have become cynical about the lure of the exotic, thanks to the loose and fatuous language of the advertising industry.

Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Inspired by Exotica concert, however, offered a fascinating glimpse of four composers from around the globe, either venturing beyond their home patch or looking anew at what lay around them.

There is much of the salon in the picture-postcard dances of Carl Nielsen's Aladdin, but the vigour and finesse of Andrew Gourlay's baton, even in the rice-paper-thin Chinese Dance, lent them substance without sacrificing charm.

How many were astonished, I wonder, at the bustle and hubbub of a Persian marketplace being caught by using the same piling-up of tunes that we associate with the maverick Charles Ives?

Closing the evening, there was poignant irony in hearing Soviet party-liner Aram Khachaturian evoke the spirit of his native Armenia.

Gourlay and the orchestra held nothing back in eight colourful extracts from Khachaturian's ballet Gayaneh; the Sabre Dance was a slashing success and the conductor presented the bonus of a tumultuous Gopak to inspire, as he put it, our "post-concert festivities".

In 2015, however, to those who know the music of Schnittke and Gubaidulina, the poster-paint splash of Khachaturian seems exotic more as a relic of the garish "populism" fostered by a fascist state.

The towering Australian William Barton, walking from aisle to stage playing his didgeridoo, could not avoid being exotic; yet the work for which he was engaged, Peter Sculthorpe's Earth Cry, deals with universal issues of cultural identity and environmental wellbeing.

Barton layered an eloquent cloak of sound over and around Sculthorpe's often raw utterances; this was bicultural osmosis on the highest level.

His own Bird Song at Dusk, pitting Barton's voice and instrument against a quartet of strings, was a moving encore.

How bracing it was once more to hear Jack Body's Melodies, written in 1983 to celebrate the centenary of the University of Auckland.

The unfettered vitality of this score is typical of the magpie-like composer, gleefully searching out the exotic, in a treasure-hunt that would take him from the streets of Indonesia to the lounge music of Bert Kaempfert.

This was high voltage music-making, from Andrew Beer and Xin Jin's duelling Aegean violins and the woodwind lumiosities of West Sumatra to an exhilarating if slightly brash Bollywood finale.

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Thursday, August 27