None of the many revisitings of The Four Seasons has been as extreme as Max Richter's.
English composer Max Richter guiding Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra through two hours of his music was a less immersive and more physically comfortable experience than the eight hours of camp-stretcher lullaby offered in his mammoth Sleep two nights previously.
The work that drew a good-sized crowd was doubtless his Vivaldi Recomposed,
a clever and provocative take on The Four Seasons. This iconic score has survived everything from electronic takeovers to exotic instrumental bands but no revisiting has been anywhere near as radical as Richter's.
While the burr of electronics became an irritant very quickly, cheeky musical pleasures offered some compensation, such as Summer coming to an end by riffing away on a tune picked from the middle of its finale, bubbling over chintzy harmonies. Another was the chop and change of time signatures that announced Autumn, energetically led by soloist Mari Samuelsen.
But it's tough competing with the original state-of-the-art Deutsche Grammophon recording of the piece. Samuelsen's violin sometimes slipped under the mix at crucial moments and kitschy add-on melodies didn't always soar as they should have.
Richter's more ambitious Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works gave us 70 long minutes of music drawn from a ballet based on Virginia Woolf novels.
