Review: Auckland Chamber Orchestra at Auckland Town Hall

Full marks to Peter Scholes for the enticing concept behind Auckland Chamber Orchestra's Chamber Music for Summer concert. Putting the full orchestral contingent on hold until ACO's Music of the Night presentation later this month, Scholes and nine colleagues presented more intimate reflections on the season that will soon be behind us.

The programme opened with some of the city's best woodwind players in Samuel Barber's evocative Summer Music. The score's shifting moods, from languid to sprightly, were well caught; an acute sense of ensemble saw all the composer's tricky cadenza-like outbursts present and accounted for.

Poulenc's Sextet was anchored around Sarah Watkins, a pianist with just the measure of crisp technique and wry humour to do Poulenc justice. The smiling badinage of the first movement was ably sustained until Ben Hoadley's bassoon suavely diverted us into more sentimental surroundings.

Martin Lee's expressive oboe launched a Divertissement, with its playful nods to Mozart, while the ensemble contributed to the music hall high spirits of the Finale.

Whereas Hoadley and Watkins' bonus performance of Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette had just the right touch of whimsy to it, the PDQ Bach Schleptet after interval, with movements like Yehudi Menuetto and Presto hey nonny nonnio, was crude in its musical lampooning.

Would that we had been given as much information on the rest of the programme as Scholes gave us for this, reading out Peter Schickele's interminable, facetious introduction to this bogus Bachian bumbler.

And, after this, Louis Spohr's Opus 31 Nonet was even more disappointing. Spohr's music is lightish in content, sounding at times like drawing-room quadrilles concocted from the lesser melodies of Beethoven and Schubert. Its virtues can only become apparent in a flawless performance.

While intentions and tempi were briskly a propos, Spohr was ill-served by murky string intonation and, in particular, by some severely challenged violin lines. Spohr himself was one of the great violinists of his day, which should have sounded warning bells to be heeded when the programme was in its planning stage.