Concert Review: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra at Auckland Town Hall

Cellist David Geringas. Photo / Supplied

Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Great Classics concerts have always played favourites and did so again with Thursday's coupling of Dvorak's Cello Concerto and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

Yet what is there to dispute when one sees a well-filled Town Hall and the audience's evident enjoyment of the music?

Choice of repertoire aside, what singled this occasion out were Lithuanian cellist David Geringas in tandem with livewire young Scottish conductor Garry Walker.

Walker may not have been giving us the more contemporary music for which he is known in Britain, but he invested the Dvorak Concerto with all manner of telling inflections, right from the tinge of melancholy launching the first movement.

Geringas proved himself a giant on his instrument, his striding introduction, truly quasi improvisando, in no way compromising the poetry that would come minutes later, molto sostenuto, against silvery woodwind.

It was Geringas' scrupulous lyricism that made the central Adagio so memorable and, although the Finale had no shortage of folksy thrust, both conductor and soloist made the most of those dawn-clear passages in which one might almost hear premonitions of Copland.

While most soloists bring out Bach at encore time, Geringas surprised with an extract from Book, a virtuoso solo by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks, which the cellist dedicated to the people of Christchurch. Borrowing an image from Leonard Cohen, God was alive and magic afoot in this hushed wonder of rustling sonorities. The cellist's unworldly vocalising, chillingly effective, had patrons craning to see just where the singing was coming from.

The storm of applause from an audience which had come to hear familiar fare, made one wonder whether the APO might have found 10 minutes for a more adventurous filling between its two romantic titans.

After interval, Walker ensured that Scheherazade was delivered in full technicolour. With Dimitri Atanassov's violin as storyteller, we were tossed on the waves, safe in Sinbad's Ship, thrilled to the song of a passionate princess and might have imagined Stravinsky's Petrushka flitting around the fringes of the last movement's brilliant Baghdad Festival.