Review: Auckland Choral at Holy Trinity Cathedral

Opening up its annual "subscribers' bonus concert" to the general community was a shrewd ploy on the part of Auckland Choral. The result was as predictable as it was deserved with musicians playing to a packed Holy Trinity Cathedral.

Setting off with a taste of Kiwi, David Hamilton conducted Helen Fisher's Pounamu, a fragrant meld of European and Maori sensibilities.

Uwe Grodd's flute spun its own mystical rhapsodies and then wove and flickered through Fisher's often sumptuous choral textures.

With an eloquent soloist in Kate Spence, this was a performance that captured the calm, glisten and shimmer that the score's central waiata sings of.

Hamilton's own Orpheus, a tribute for the Haydn bicentenary, was based on a poem by the American William Jay Smith.

After a robust start, with a bracingly confident choir against John Wells' sometimes tumultuous organ toccata, Hamilton carefully drew out specific words and images through his music. Spence's shapely melodic line was beautifully turned, especially when the poem transported us to places extra-terrestrial.

There were passing moments of choral thinness, but the final combination of vibrant vocalising and instrumental splendour were the perfect celebration of both Haydn and the composer's singing colleagues.

Talking splendour, Vivaldi's Gloria is a prime specimen of the Baroque variety, born of the same spirit as Handel's Zadok the Priest. Taking over the baton, Uwe Grodd ensured that Vivaldi's work lived up to its name.

Kate Spence and soprano Lilia Carpinelli duetted well, Carpinelli impressing with a clear, unaffected soprano voice and Spence using her lustrous tone to advantage in numerous solos.

The drive and thrust of the opening chorus was not to be resisted and nor were the conviction and resonant singing of Qui tollis peccata mundi and the mighty fugue of the final Cum sancto spiritu.

Grodd also inspired some of the best playing that I have ever heard from Pipers Sinfonia, with outstanding contributions from oboist Alison Dunlop along with the untiringly ingenious harpsichord stylings of John Wells.