Review: Manukau Symphony Orchestra at TelstraClear Pacific Events Centre

There was an air of celebration at Manukau Symphony Orchestra's Yellow River concert, so much so that the first half of Saturday night inevitably felt like an appetiser for the main attraction - the New Zealand premiere of Xinghai Xian's Yellow River Cantata.

Yet Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture and Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto are by no means insubstantial fare.

Mendelssohn's evocative seascape surged and swelled as it should, despite the occasional blur in string lines, the orchestra proving remarkably responsive to conductor Uwe Grodd's careful shadings.

Chenyin Li was soloist in Tchaikovsky's B flat minor Piano Concerto, delivering the massive first movement with stamina and stylishness. Li deals out finesse where others find refuge in rhetoric and her Andante semplice had moments of almost Debussian delicacy.

After the interval, the MSO welcomed the hundred-plus voices of the Music Association of Auckland and visiting singers from Tianjin to present Xian's historic Cantata.

The fulsome idiom of the Yellow River Cantata tempts smirks of superiority from those who judge it alongside contemporary Western music of the late 1930s, but this is an important social document, of unflinching sincerity, written at a time when the people and very soul of China were under threat.

When the marvellous narrator Pang Yong Huan sprang into action and asked us, point-blank, Have you seen the Yellow River?, followed by a rousing boatmen's chorus, I was transfixed, thanks to magnificent singing (all from memory) and similarly fervent orchestral support.

While there were quaint moments, such as Antiphonal Duet at the Riverside, for two soloists and prominent woodblocks, a Lament of the Yellow River probed more deeply. Tianjin soprano Zhang Yu Min was a forceful yet tender presence, as she gave political issues a personal face, singing, Soldier why do you rape me and make me want to die, tackling issues not so often broached in Western concert music.

The Cantata ended, with thrilling clangour, to the lines, Sound the struggling siren, to all those who suffer in the world, sentiments which, in 2009, seem more universal than mere doctrinaire Marxism.