KEY POINTS:
Images in Glass was an imaginative title for the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Thursday concert, presenting as it did Debussy's Images after Amy Dickson's saxophone transcription of Philip Glass's 1987 Violin Concerto.
The three mini-movements of the Overture to Lucio Silla may have seemed the odd workout in the line-up, but conductor Otto Tausk gave us Mozart with vitality and vibrancy. The care lavished on light and shade in the central Andante was particularly commendable.
I had some misgivings about how Glass's Violin Concerto might fare on an instrument I associate with Joni Mitchell's favourite saxman, Wayne Shorter.
While Amy Dickson's transcription of the work was not able to replicate the violin's magisterial double-stops in the first movement, thanks to finely articulated playing, she was able to blend more cunningly into the orchestra around her, creating the illusory textures ideal for minimalist music.
The Australian offered new perspectives on the score, making the second movement register phrase by shapely phrase, whereas on violin, the same line is more of a continuous lyrical outpouring.
The Finale was Glass at his pulverising, pulsating best and, after all the thrilling surges, the reward came in hearing Dickson's sonic gleam in a finely understated Coda.
Debussy's Images has always suffered in the shadow of the composer's La Mer.
The folksy familiarity of his material can invoke smirks when the first movement gets into its Celtic reeling or when the second comes perilously close to quoting Chabrier's Espana.
However, Tausk and the musicians made it clear that Images ranks high in the Debussy canon, as page after sumptuous page swept over us. Woodwind were incisive and brass maintained a potent presence, while strings were not at all fazed by Debussy's exotic demands.
For a moment in its second movement, subtle rhythmic fluctuations reminded us of what we heard in the Glass - precisely the connections that programmes such as this should be making.
The audience was vociferous in its applause, so much so that, before Debussy could return to France in his final Image, clapping burst out - uncondonable, perhaps, but understandable.
