Review: APO at Auckland Town Hall

The coupling of Vaughan Williams with Falla and Rodrigo may have seemed a little left-field when the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra announced its 2009 programme but when the Anglo-Hispanic programme came up on Thursday, under dynamo music director Eckehard Stier, it proved an inspired combination.

Guitarist Slava Grigoryan cut straight to the flamenco heart of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez and mightily effective it was, even if an insensitive sound system compromised some of the liquid tone one usually associates with the instrument.

Stier and his orchestra played their part too, particularly in the finessed textures around elegiac guitar lines in the famous Adagio.

The Australian's encore, with brother Leonard on second guitar, perhaps a little too "new age" for some tastes, received thunderous applause.

Grigoryan and his concerto may have been responsible for the swell in audience numbers, but a Spanish mood had already been set with the orchestra's vibrant account of Manuel de Falla's El Amor Brujo.

Falla himself described the work as "eminently gypsy" and Stier took the composer at his word in the flash and fury of the Ritual Fire Dance. Yet quieter moments, such as the Fisherman's Story, dealt out a cool poetry that reminded one of the Russian, Stravinsky.

Alas, Spanish soprano Anna Cors struggled to make herself heard above some fairly heated orchestrations in a part originally written for mezzo. She was more at ease after the interval, providing the mystical wordless vocals in the last movement of Vaughan Williams' Pastoral Symphony.

On the surface, this 1922 score may seem like a dream-laden affair of euphonious, wafting textures. Stier certainly coaxed a rich blanket of sound from his players. But within Vaughan Williams' reassuring sonic folds, the dissonance of gentle but insistently colliding harmonies reminded us that this work grew out of the same world war that inspired Elgar's Cello Concerto.