Review: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra at Auckland Town Hall

Within a week of Josef Spacek's spectacular Michael Hill victory, Bella Hristova, the competition's 2007 winner, was playing Bruch with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.

Last year, the American violinist did not always seem at ease with more recent repertoire. Bruch's 1867 Concerto might have been penned for her and her full-blooded reading easily shook off any cynical snickering that this work is little more than Reader's Digest Brahms.

The first movement was livened by telling touches of the gypsy and her Adagio achieved a tender rapport with the players around her. The unfettered Finale was distinguished by a rare balance between soloist and orchestra, thanks to conductor Radoslaw Szulc, a violinist himself.

Many in the large and enthusiastic audience must have been expecting an encore, which did not eventuate.

A pity that, as Hristova's fine new Beriot CD offers a storehouse of possibilities.

This was the second of the APO's Vero Great Classics series, so the rest of the programme revisited familiar and shortish scores. Sibelius' Finlandia had been the stirring overture to the evening and marched into the audience's collective heart.

Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnole was a classy clutch of musical picture-postcards, even if its Alborada movement sometimes sounded more Swiss than Spanish.

Mundane geographical considerations aside, Szulc and orchestra revelled in this imaginative piece. Every orchestral section was on its best behaviour, with Dimitri Atanassov firing off solos that would have tested the great Sarasate himself.

Szulc had warned us to expect a strange party with wild music in Mussorgsky's Night on Bare Mountain. While nothing was held back in the desire to make good the conductor's promises, it would have been considerably wilder and more exciting if Mussorgsky's original version had been used, instead of Rimsky-Korsakov's curiously four-square orchestration.

A spirited dash through three of Brahms' Hungarian Dances suggested that encore time might already be upon us but an "extra" did come in the form of a Strauss polka. With folks around me slapping thighs and beaming beatifically, the APO might well consider scheduling a musical trip to Vienna in a coming season.