Review: Bach Musica, Auckland Town Hall

Soloist Patricia Wright.

Bach Musica launched its 2015 season with an unexpected pairing of Brahms' German Requiem and more worldly offerings from Canteloube's Songs of the Auvergne.

For just a moment one wondered whether director Rita Paczian had heeded George Bernard Shaw's ill-considered quip, slating the Brahms as "so exceedingly dull and ponderous that the very flattest of funerals would seem like a ballet, or at least a danse macabre after it."

As it happened, the power and conviction of the Brahms score in her hands made Shaw's invective seem wilfully silly.

In the meantime, seven popular Canteloube settings proved a welcome bonus, especially when delivered with such panache and authority by Patricia Wright.

Wright is an accomplished actor, and was well able to catch the often mercurial mood-shifts from song to song, especially offset by incisively brilliant woodwind playing.

In two of them, the soprano also had the vocal warmth to come up with the Puccinian lustre at which Canteloube's lush introductions seem to hint.

When Bach Musica tackled the German Requiem eight years ago, Paczian talked to me of the humanistic nature of this great choral work, occasioned by the death of Brahms' mother.

She singled out one of the score's massive crescendos as a guarantor of goosebumps.

They were tonight, too, on more than one occasion. Conducting without a score, Paczian kept Shavian sarcasm at bay through a keen understanding of the crucial pacing of this 70-minute work.

The first two choral movements were impressive. A moment of almost abandoned rejoicing in the first was exhilarating; the measured inevitability of the second still retained its essential lilt.

Although there were tinges of tiredness permeating the choir towards the end, fugal writing was crisply encountered, with choristers and orchestra bringing the work to a spine-tingled conclusion.

The soloists were memorable, with Wright bringing her own radiance to her solo.

Young baritone Edward Laurenson was on this very stage last year in the Lexus Song Quest finals. Tonight, he brought off his lines in the third movement with assured phrasing and a security of tone in keeping with what is the spiritual core of this Brahms masterpiece.