Review: Karlheinz Company at Auckland University Music Theatre

Karlheinz Company can always be relied on for the unexpected and its second Autumn Festival concert ran the gamut from avant-Pacifica to a taste of Sunday night horrors.

Andrew McMillan's Rutu P'au filtered the rhythms of Rarotonga through a pretty cool jazzish trio.

While McMillan's programme note outlined the formal scaffolding involved, the musicians wooed us with the sheer sound of it all.

Finn Scholes' trumpet channelled the mood of late-night Miles Davis against Cameron Allen's free-blowing baritone sax, while Tua Meti and Jacob Unuia trumpeted imposing chords on their conches. Most beguiling crossover of all was Unuia's sharp ukulele strums finding an uncanny echo in John Bell's vibes.

Eve de Castro-Robinson's Ring true has waited eight years for an Auckland performance and this meshing of bells and birds, its three movements headed by phrases from Emily Dickinson and Shelley, makes fascinating connections with more recent works by this composer.

While the first piece was visually diverting as Deng Liang shaded in his piano lines with handbell and tam tam, the second, a wild dissolving bliss, called for piano alone to tether ringaway bells into a sometimes pensive toccata, graced with pulsating cross-rhythms and alluringly familiar chords.

After interval, Stockhausen's 1962 Klavierstuck IX, a veritable study in resonance and reverberation, saw Liang liberating the secret spaces both in and between the chords.

Alex Taylor's ghosts for solo viola, offered a Denise Levertov poem in lieu of a programme note, and the American's images of muted frustration seemed to fuel both feathery-bowed slow movements and faster ones that sounded like Bartok put through a middle-fiddle thresher. Soloist and dedicatee Alex MacDonald took impressive ownership of the work, revelling in the joy to be had morphing from double stop to harmonics.

Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror had Jonathan Mandeno taking a YouTube-friendly byte from the classic Murnau silent movie and adding a sonic shiverfest around it. Judy Lee and Lorelle McNaughton evoked a swirling, Gothic world on their two Steinways, stroking strings, thundering away with chords and making fast and loose with Dies irae quotes.

The only problem? Now I want Mandeno to score the whole movie.