Concert Review: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra at Auckland Town Hall

The enthusiastic audience thrills to music's power. Photo / Steven McNicholl

The music of Wagner, Walton and Prokofiev may not have had the surefire appeal of last week's Vivaldi, but it drew an enthusiastic audience to Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Thursday concert.

Dutch conductor Otto Tausk has visited us before. Two years ago, he was the man who sustained the gleam through Philip Glass's Saxophone Concerto and came up with an account of Debussy's Images so vivid that applause could not be held back until the set had ended.

Starting on Thursday with the overture to Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, Tausk made one realise just why this composer's music originally had the power to make some women - and possibly the occasional man - faint in the aisles.

He coaxed thrilling walls of sound from the brass while the strings, in furious tremolo with vertiginous chromatic scales, did their best to rouse a storm at sea in the Town Hall.

We had waited two years for Canadian violinist James Ehnes to present us with his Grammy-winning interpretation of the Walton Concerto and it was superb.

This is one of the great 20th century concertos. Gnarly moments recall the Walton who had made his reputation as an enfant terrible in the 1920s, but much of the work offers a lean lyricism not so far removed from the neo-Romantic world of Erich Korngold.

Ehnes brought song to the fore in Walton's work. He also gave us whimsy in waltz-time, sizzling virtuosity and, in the final lento, double-stopping that the Concerto's original dedicatee, Jascha Heifetz, would have cheered. Thanks to Tausk, the to-and-fro between soloist and a well-primed orchestra kept the drama flowing.

By way of an encore, Ehnes gave us the Largo from Bach's C major Sonata as one long, arching melody of impeccable beauty.

After interval, the full forces of the orchestra gave Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony a mighty performance.

The wartime symphony is a piece with various ideas that keep coming around in cycles, making for a powerful cumulative effect.