Music review: NZSO’s Bernstein & Copland: Til Time Shall End

Joyce Yang playing with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO) at the Auckland Town Hall.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Bernstein & Copland: Til Time Shall End was a sharp piece of programming, featuring rarely heard music by two great American composers of the last century.

Leonard Bernstein’s 1949 second symphony, The Age of Anxiety, is often likened to a concerto due to its taxing solo piano part. The indefatigable Joyce Yang, who in recent years has delivered memorable Rachmaninov and Brahms concertos on this stage, brilliantly pursued the somewhat discursive and demanding path laid out for her.

This piece was inspired by W.H. Auden’s book-length poem The Age of Anxiety, in which four characters drink, dance and discover what life’s all about in wartime New York; a scenario captured instrumentally with gee-whiz virtuosity by Bernstein.

Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, with the passion of true advocacy, brought it all to pulsating life through an intricate trail of deft variations to the ebullient optimism of its final pages.

After the interval, Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony came across as a more consistently assured work, written in 1944 when its creator was worried that he was too often pigeon-holed as a composer of jazzy and folk-influenced music.

For all its serious symphonic intent — and Guerrero was especially alert to the finely structured fourth movement — there were certainly echoes of clear Appalachian air in its first movement, and Copland’s then-recent Fanfare for the Common Man provided the core of the finale.

Throughout, it was the expansiveness of Guerrero’s vision that caught the ear, aided by players who were aware of every detail and nuance.

The evening had opened with Eve de Castro-Robinson’s Len Dances, a short romp set in 1920s New York, but written in Auckland in 2002. Catching a manic evening of nightclubbing with artist Len Lye, it was a zany and zesty amuse-bouche. Woozy trombones, cheeky swanee whistle, and a final duel between two percussionists, shaking their shimmering sheets of steel, made it an overture to remember.