After some years of opening its new season on the light side — bringing in the Modern Maori Quartet as guests in 2017 and patching together a Music from the Movies concert last year — the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra returned to core repertoire for its Classical Journey.
Roaming from Rossini and Haydn to Prokofiev and Brahms, the evening was very much built around a big-hearted performance of Haydn's final London Symphony.
Despite conductor Hamish McKeich emphasizing this composer's sense of humour in his spoken introduction, it was the compelling earthiness of the work that impressed, especially in its bucolic finale.
McKeich talked about the evening's underlying Haydn connection after the orchestra had caught the wit and sparkle of Rossini's The Italian Girl in Algiers overture, to the last hurtling crescendo and cymbal crash.
The Italian composer was an ardent admirer of Haydn. Why not, instead of presenting a collection of syndicated programme notes for each work by various pens, have just one writer contribute an essay doing justice to a thoughtfully curated selection of music?
