Power and passion delivered in spades

NZ Herald·

19 Jul, 2015 05:00 PM2 mins to read

Conductor Vasily Petrenko seemed to enjoy drawing individual players out of the mix.

NZSO's visceral energy ensures programme lives up to promise.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra drew a bumper audience to its Power and Passion concert. With the shrewd pairing of pianist Simon Trpceski and conductor Vasily Petrenko, the promises of the programme's title were easily kept.

Liszt's Second Piano Concerto can be problematic if you don't care for sweet, sentimental melodies dished up as rip-roaring marches. However, on Friday night, the sheer visceral energy invested these moments with a diabolic glint that Liszt himself would have applauded.

Trpceski is a peerless virtuoso, with the confidence almost to flaunt it.

He is a master colourist, and his fingers floated over the keys, unlocking pure iridescence. Poetry came too, when he accompanied the lyrical cello of Andrew Joyce in intimate chamber music mode.

Two full minutes of applause had Trpceski returning with a cheery "Kia Ora", followed by his own cultural exchange, playing a dizzying dance number from his native Macedonia.

Leonard Bernstein, writing in 1967, pointed out that all of Mahler's music is about Mahler, which means, the American stressed, that it is all about conflict.

On Friday night, tackling the Austrian composer's Fifth Symphony, Petrenko seemed in agreement, transporting us from the chilling despair of its opening funeral march to the ecstatic celebration of its Finale in one long, incident-filled arc.

Here is a conductor able to register the subtlest inflections in the broadest of Shostakovich; with Mahler, his attention to detail was admirable.

Motifs and thematic fragments came forward and recessed back into the texture, sometimes for barely a second. One felt one was hearing the score anew.

The orchestra was in superb form, and Petrenko enjoyed drawing individual players out, especially in the third movement. This was a veritable dance on the edge; the conductor sometimes stood on tip-toe as if to catch the deceptive lightness of it all, until Mahler's triumphant ending brought forth a spontaneous burst of unwanted applause.

To some, the celebrated Adagietto, running at 11 minutes, may have been on the slow side. But there was also the expansiveness of a Bernstein here, making every note felt as an important link in an unforgettable Mahlerian narrative.