Review: Karlheinz Company at Auckland University Music Theatre

Melody Lin opened Karlheinz Company's weekend concert with a rendering of Toru Takemitsu's Voice for solo flute that swept one out of the here and now.

Here was a piece drawing on and fusing so many cultural diversities, from the tremor of Japanese shakuhachi and elements of Noh theatre to an array of expressive techniques familiar in contemporary Western music.

Such was Lin's skill in reconciling all these that, at times, there was almost the illusion of an invisible ensemble around her.

Karlheinz Company is now into its fourth decade, very much aware of the tradition it has created and which it upholds. It was entirely appropriate, then, that two commissions from 12 years ago should be included in the programme.

David Farquhar's Concerto for Six was light, spiky and a tad on the dry side. Although the performance was not quite as cohesive as it might have been, the score itself has problems, including a need for more momentum and consistency of texture in its first movement.

John Young's Mobiles 3 brought with it a severity that seemed to come from another time with its unconvincing cerebral exchange of lines from a quartet placed at various stations on the stage. What persuasion the piece had came from the piano, as John Elmsly gleefully and theatrically swiped, bashed, elbowed, glissed and pounded the keys to create sonic gusts that would bounce off the top of the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.

In his Domestic Architecture, Samuel Holloway has four string players blur, in infinitesimal detail, the edges of the unison D that opens the piece. It was a hushed gem, fashioned and performed with a jeweller's attention to detail and, like the earlier Takemitsu, created an exquisite small world, the gravitational force of which was difficult to resist.

Finally, John Elmsly's Hall of Mirrors set bassoonist Ben Hoadley against a wash of electronics, fashioned from the sounds of the soloist's instrument mixed live by the composer.

The pleasure here lay in the shifting relationships between the bassoon and its techno-doppelgangers until Hoadley eloquently took his leave with fragile multiphonics against fading electronic whisperings.