Review: APO at Auckland Town Hall

The Four Sea Interludes from Britten's Peter Grimes which opened the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's most recent concert revealed an APO in spectacular form ... but we have come to expect this when music director Eckehard Stier is wielding the baton.

Stratospheric violins set the scene for Britten's Dawn, offset in due course by sonorously baleful brass. Violas caught the heart of Sunday Morning, after its Mussorgskian blur of chiming horns.

Stier invested Britten's Moonlight with a sense of emotional reticence, a clever psychological ploy, while the final Storm seemed to harness a blast of nor'wester in its pages, fuelled by the APO's ace percussionists.

Anastasis, our first taste of the APO's resident composer, Chris Adams, proved to be a most attractive score.

Adams knows where and how to uncover unexpected colours in a piece that enjoys jolting us with huge orchestral shouts in among more subdued, almost filigree passages.

The second movement unfolds, with woodwind patterning, from lounge-laden harmonies and Adams nods to all manner of musics throughout the piece, right through to its conga-line finale.

It is an appealing score that deserves a life beyond this single performance.

The partnership of pianist Michael Houstoun and conductor Stier in Beethoven's Fourth Concerto was a memorable one.

Using the APO's own Steinway instead of the Town Hall instrument, Houstoun brought a special incisiveness to the swirling decorations of Beethoven's first movement, turning the composer's own cadenza into a dramatically volatile fantasia.

The partnership was best caught in the Andante con moto, in which Houstoun calmly worked his conciliatory and chordal wiles on a stern orchestra, before joining it in a particularly frisky final movement, its second theme offering premonitions of Copland's lonely landscapes.

The encore was another pairing, totally in keeping with what had gone before, with conductor and pianist sharing the piano stool for a tongue-in-cheek flit through Rachmaninov's Polka Italienne.