Review: NZSO at Auckland Town Hall

Webern's Passacaglia was an inspired if very serious overture for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Friday concert. Coyly described by the composer's teacher, Schoenberg, as "not quite so dangerous", Passacaglia is a weighty score yet there are moments of ineffable lightness and silvery magic.

Matthias Bamert caught it all. A conductor with a scrupulous ear for detail, he ensured cohesion and momentum in what could have been a musical patchwork.

Saturday's opener was not so distinguished - a mediocre Symphony by Antonio Salieri. Twenty minutes of empty flourishes and prosaic string writing, along with a flaccid slow movement were given a right royal treatment, but was this justified for a feeble footnote from the 18th-century?

After interval, lustier blood coursed in the veins of Anthony Watson's Prelude and Allegro for Strings. Bamert and his musicians caught the visceral thrust of this 1960 Kiwi classic, especially in moments where upper and lower strings seemed to wrestle like battling titans.

Bamert's legendary precision came to the fore in the weekend's symphonic offerings.

On Friday, every repeat in Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was observed and cherished, even in the third movement which can, under the wrong baton, wear out its welcome. Bamert highlighted the radical textures of the first movement which mark it as progenitor of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique; the Finale was fired with one of the mightiest backbeats this side of a K Rd dance-floor.

On Saturday, the afternoon was rounded off with Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. In Bamert's hands, this was an impetuous, sun-saturated Ode to Joy. The first movement bordered on the frisky, palpitating with breezy bonhomie; at the other end of the work, its Saltarello almost thundered with exultation.

Scottish pianist Steven Osborne may cut a slight, modest figure, but he can deliver thunderbolts when required. Such are called for in the sawdust-and-vodka Finale of Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto and were duly meted out, but Osborne also caught the understated poetry of the work's Lento, complemented by Michael Kirgan's exemplary trumpet.

Saturday afternoon saw Osborne proving himself a Mozart man par excellence in the last of the composer's concertos. On Friday an Oscar Peterson blues had a chiselled perfection that the late Canadian pianist would have appreciated; on Saturday, a brusque Beethoven Bagatelle made clever connections with the barnstorming Shostakovich Finale of the previous evening.