Music review: NZSO, Auckland Town Hall

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With the classic Viennese triumvirate of Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms on offer, one might have hoped for a full house at the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Saturday concert.

Alas, it was not to be, which meant that too many music-lovers missed out on pianist Garrick Ohlsson's Brahms D minor Concerto.

First up, conductor Jaime Martin explored the dramatic tensions of Beethoven's Leonora No3 Overture.

Its stark opening scale descended with measured stealth, creating an expectancy that was eventually resolved in an orchestral roar, over thundering timpani.

The allegro almost infiltrated itself into the drama, creating its own storms in due course, fuelled by the Spanish conductor's often fiery dynamics.

After all this, Mozart's Haffner Symphony might have seemed like an elegant tea-party but tonight it was imbued, by a largish orchestra, with a surprising power and expressivity.

While one doesn't expect the monumentality of Beethoven in these opening pages, Martin laced Mozart's pomp and ceremony with an almost Latin fire.

Its second movement, which has always struck me as more serenade than symphony, registered more substantially, thanks to infallibly exquisite phrasing, down to the last woodwind sigh.

Tonight, all these years after his fine 1979 recording of the Brahms First Concerto with Klaus Tennestedt, the towering Ohlsson was on the town hall stage; sitting at the Steinway as Martin unleashed the stormiest Maesoto in memory, propelled by timpani of seismic proportions. The American subtly slipped into the fray, effortlessly unlocking textures that ranged from the grandiloquent to the diaphanous.

When gladiatorial games began, he was more than equipped, with a strain of virtuosity that not only took the breath away, but always considered the structural and musical context around it.

The adagio explored the songful ambience of a Brahms Intermezzo, while the final allegro ma non troppo proved to be the carthartic journey from darkness to light that we had been promised.

Classical review
What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Saturday.