Review: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, Auckland Town Hall

NZ Herald·

9 Oct, 2015 04:00 PM2 mins to read

Photo / File

As I surveyed Thursday's well-filled town hall, it seemed that Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra had conquered the much-feared Schoenberg kiss of death.

Tonight's Virtuoso Violin programme opened with Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene - hardcore Schoenberg, in terms of its unflinching use of his cerebral 12-tone technique.

Giordano Bellincampi and his players navigated the changing moods of danger and fear through to the composer's final "catastrophe", in music that could have underscored a Fritz Lang movie. The ebbing beauties of the final bars, combined with earlier lyrical outbursts for lower strings and oboe, revealed that this composer was, deep down, a Brahms man.

Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud injected the well-worn grooves of Bruch's G minor Concerto with the freshness of an early morning on the fjords.

Prodigiously confident and exuberant in tone, thanks to his 1744 Guarneri del Gesu instrument, his utter brilliance still allowed for gripping dialogue and interaction with the orchestra in the opening Allegro.

After the perfectly poised gemutlichkeit of Bruch's Adagio, a fire-filled finale made a convincing case for it being so much more than poor-man's Brahms.

Kraggerud's encores were generous and personal; an original Postlude, cushioned in comfortable sequences, and his own tribute to the legendary Ole Bull, coming across as romanticised Nordic Bach.

Anticipation had been running high for Mahler's First Symphony, the first major symphonic venture for this orchestra and its newly-appointed music director.

Bellincampi's hands-on, no-baton approach made it seem as if he was moulding the musical clay in Mahler's opening movement, from mysterious strings and far-off trumpet fanfares to a climactic end, with whooping horns and an exciting stutter-phrase close.

The joyous brawl of Mahler's second movement was brought into convincing cohesion and, after that, the magical shift from funereal Frere Jacques to sinuous klezmer took the breath away, as it should.

The great finale might have contained a whole Mahlerian world of its own, its transcendent, finely sustained slow section signed off with a heart-stopping cathartic roar.

The great conductor Bruno Walter once likened this work to Goethe's tragic Werther; if so, then Mahler clearly intended his young hero to survive and spectacularly so.