One sensed that the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Pathetique concert had been designed as a blockbuster and conductor Darrell Ang certainly unleashed a panorama of emotions in Tchaikovsky's final symphony.
Mysterious, brooding beginnings led to lashings of fury in the first movement; 10 cellos made a sonorous, off-kilter waltz of its Allegro con grazia and the scherzo's whiplash scales suggested that Stravinsky may well have heeded Tchaikovsky just as much as Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov.
Narek Hakhnazaryan is the second of three personable young cellists that the NZSO is presenting back to back this season. Little surprise that one sensed Armenian ardour in his Dvorak concerto, from the stabbing vehemence of its opening theme. In the Adagio, Dvorak's folkish innocence was darkened by the arresting intensity of Hakhnazaryan's solo.
Wellington had enjoyed an Armenian folksong as encore; we had Antonio Sollima's Lamentatio, a dramatic baring of the soul in which Hakhnazaryan sang to his own cello, between bouts of virtuoso fire that threatened to scorch his 1707 Guarneri.
Earlier on, young New Zealand composer David Grahame Taylor had the unenviable task of introducing this Night of the Romantic Giants. He did so beautifully, making five minutes seem as substantial as 50, as he inhabited and unfolded the shifting orchestral sonorities of his Embiosis.
