Review: Mozart-Mahler mix NZSO winner

US-based Dutch conductor Edo de Waart. Photo / Mark Mitchell

What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall, Saturday night

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra launched its main concert series with the first instalment of Edo de Waart's 2018 Masterworks series.

A pairing of Mozart and Mahler worked well, the unruffled classicism of the older composer's Concerto for Two Pianos being an effective foil for the full-on emotions of Mahler's Fifth Symphony.

The Mozart score, wittily dismissed by one expert as being permeated with a kind of staid happiness, never delivers the transcendent poetry of the solo concertos. Yet such was the sparkle and style of soloists Christina and Michelle Naughton that such shortcomings were easily overlooked.

The American sisters relished the lively to-and-fro of dual keyboards, which is the work's principal delight, even if they didn't always match the elegant Mozartian sighs that de Waart drew from his orchestra.

The Naughtons' unbridled scamper through Milhaud's infectious Scaramouche was a lively encore.

De Waart had stressed in the programme that Mahler's Fifth Symphony is overall a happy piece, which certainly informed his spellbinding Adagietto, clocking in at just under nine minutes, when some conductors draw it out to 12 or 13.

His podium manner is reserved to the point of phlegmatic. Nevertheless, a superb NZSO charted the implacable narrative of Mahler's opening movement with blistering fanfares, edgy funeral marches and pining, pleading lyricism.

The sometimes-problematic scherzo was totally gripping. As for the welter of contrasts that comprise the second movement, few could have illuminated the Mahlerian mix of the stormy and vehement with such authority.