KEY POINTS:
There was much to admire in Auckland Chamber Orchestra's generous portrait concert honouring Wellington composer Ross Harris.
Peter Scholes, the ACO's musical director, opened the evening with words on mini-residencies and getting inside composers' minds.
Then the self-effacing Harris took over and guided us through the programme.
Reminding us how Lilburn had likened his 1957 Wind Quintet to a piece of driftwood you might find on Paekakariki Beach, Harris introduced this and his own Jazz Suite for Wind Quintet.
Both were crisp delights, the Lilburn for its Stravinskian remonstrations and immense good humour, Harris' more recent work for its ingenious explorations of the possibilities of triple time. The five players, grouped around Scholes' clarinet, caught the intricate play of colour and line that runs through both.
The strings' contribution to the concert was not so happy and both Te Moanapouri and Music for Jonny suffered from patchy intonation, a serious liability for works which depend on the immediate emotional response they can draw from an audience.
There were some compensations with Te Moanapouri, as one was caught up in Martin Lee's vibrant cor anglais dialogue with the strings or the liquid tones of Rebecca Harris' harp, but Music for Jonny, which many know through the NZSO's recording, was terminally thwarted.
After interval, the 1973 electro-acoustic piece To a Child was a shrewd change of pace; the human mingled with the electronic and, as the work progressed, we were hypnotised by its unexpected harmonic play.
Finally, Harris' prize-winning 1998 theatrepiece, To the Memory of I.S. Totska, unfolded its haunting Holocaust tragedy, sung by Claire Nash in front of a circle of nine musicians. Nash, a magnetic performer, inhabited her character to the last flickering sigh. For half an hour, Ilsa Sonya Totska was with us once more.
Occasionally, text got obscured in vocal outburst and spoken passages lacked an actor's insinuating flair but this is a difficult, singular work, and Nash brought it to life.
Scholes and his band clearly enjoyed doing the same for Harris' kaleidoscopic instrumental writing, a virtuoso collage of marches, dances and shivery tone painting.
