Concert Review: APO at Auckland Town Hall

Eckehard Stier. Photo / Adrian Malloch

Eckehard Stier welcomed us to Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Stier and Shostakovich concert by explaining that this was his absolute favourite among this season's programmes. All the pieces were breathtaking, the conductor told us, sharing a common link in their imagination and truth.

Lukas Foss' Elegy for Anne Frank revealed how much the APO likes to surprise its audience. The recently deceased American composer was something of a style chameleon, and this short piece proved to be more than the neo-romantic ballade for piano and orchestra that its opening pages suggested.

Sarah Watkins and the strings set this mood beautifully, but Foss's (and Stier's) coup came when the rest of the orchestra intruded on the scene in belligerent march mode, with an immediacy that was almost cinematic.

Peter Bruns was soloist in Ernest Bloch's Schelomo, a deeply symbolic score, exploring the songful Solomon against the horrors of World War I.

The German cellist was relaxed with Bloch's ever-shifting moods, effortlessly virtuosic when cadenzas were called for, soaring with heartfelt passion when demands were more lyrical.

Around him, Stier guided his players through myriad changes of metre and evocative orchestral colourings.

Earlier in the evening, Stier suggested that Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony was something of a diary, inspired by the eight years that passed since the composer last tackled the symphonic form.

You certainly felt the weight of Stalinist oppression in the massive first movement, with the APO strings at their most rich and telling. And yet this fuelled such unexpected beauties as Bridget Miles' fragile, lilting clarinet melody, the first of many outstanding woodwind contributions through the work.

After the hell-bent fury of the second movement, with a possessed Stier leaping into the air at one point, the caution of the third was marvellously caught, both in its toying with triple metre and its persuasive instrumental blendings.

There was more musical intrigue in the great Finale, brilliantly handled, until conductor and orchestra took us to the sort of coruscating close that made one feel E major might never be the same again.

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.

Where: Auckland Town Hall.