Review: NZSO at Auckland Town Hall

There was boldness afoot with the programme-planning for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's most recent visit.

Both Friday and Saturday's concerts were built around Finnish clarinetist Kari Kriikku playing concertos from his homeland, preceded by frankly populist fare.

It is not the fault of Rossini's William Tell Overture that the Lone Ranger and Silver once galloped to its final pages. There is real poetry here and it was poetically rendered by David Chickering and his cellos while those notorious closing pages would have made grand riding music.

The following night, conductor Pietari Inkinen achieved wonders with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture; from sonorous string anthem to jubilant Finale, played out against a bevy of bells and cannons, one could well have been in the middle of a Red Square victory celebration.

Weightier scores revealed the orchestra's stamina and class.

Perhaps the melange of witchery and funeral chants that closes Symphonie Fantastique did not have quite enough brash abandon, but Inkinen imposed a sense of structure on Berlioz' sprawling first movement with cool, Nordic precision.

The country scene of the third movement was brilliantly evoked in the many hues of the orchestra's woodwind. However, an unwelcome percussion part was added through the shuffling and seat squeaking from the auditorium.

On Saturday, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade was a trombone-charged thrill from the start.

Kari Kriikku introduced himself with Magnus Lindberg's Concerto, crammed with inventive play between soloist and orchestra, immaculately marshalled by Inkinen.

After Lindberg, expectations ran high for Saturday's Puro by Jukka Tiensuu. Pithy ideas streamed back and forth, some enticingly slippery, sliding cagily around the gravitational pull of friendly chords. As things progressed, one became aware that the orchestra was playing the lithest of cobras to Kriikku, the irresistible charmer.

He charmed us too with the encore, a piece of uber-klezmer from his new Bizarre Bazaar CD, with the NZSO as a generously-proportioned klezmer band.