Review: APO at Auckland Town Hall

Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture is a score of irrepressible freshness, with surging phrases that can have you wiping imaginary seaspray from your face - something that didn't eventuate when it opened the final concert of Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Vero Great Classics series.

Mendelssohn's lines could have sometimes had more bloom to them, but the main problem was balance.

Conductor Tecwyn Evans, making his debut with the orchestra, needed to keep a firmer hand on booming brass.

Schumann's piano concerto was a happier affair, with the assured Noriko Ogawa at the keyboard.

Just a week before, in recital, the Japanese pianist ranged from whisper (a contemporary Japanese piece for Nambu bell and piano) to sonic deluge (Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition).

Schumann might not have offered Ogawa quite that scope, but she assiduously followed all the leads given.

One felt a real bond between soloist and orchestra, strikingly so in the central Intermezzo. But, even before that, first movement exchanges between Ogawa and the woodwind seemed like snatches of conversation from the chamber music salon.

If there were some disappointing smudges in the first movement cadenza, the sparkling Finale had pianist and orchestra skittishly flitting around one another in the composer's catch-me-if-you-can games.

They deftly navigated through the many shifting rhythms and found a burst of new energy in the curvaceous waltzing of the final pages.

After the interval, Debussy's two transcriptions of Satie's Gymnopedies lacked the sense of unruffled stillness needed, although the meld of Catherine Bowie's flute and Bede Hanley's oboe was a diverting compensation.

The rest of the evening belonged to the composer who gave the world Carmen. Bizet's Symphony, like Shostakovich's First, is a student piece, and Evans nailed its youthful zest, especially in the outer movements.

In the opening Allegro, one could hear the 17-year-old Bizet flexing his musical muscles.

The infectious Farandole from Bizet's L'Arlesienne was a lively and popular encore.