William Dart review: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra - Bayleys Great Classics

Maestro Giordano Bellincampi. Photo / Adrian Malloch

The charismatic Alexander Gavrylyuk proved more than ample compensation for Khatia Buniatishvili’s withdrawal from the final of Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra’s (APO) Bayleys Great Classics concerts.

A regular and popular APO soloist since 2012, the Ukrainian-Australian pianist might have taken on a special mission — to transport the warhorse-weary of us to Boston’s Music Hall in 1875, so that we could experience the thrill of the premiere performance of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

And thrill we did, from the very start, as Gavrylyuk and maestro Giordano Bellincampi injected new and irresistible vitality into this uber-familiar score.

Languorous emotional outpourings along with an almost balletic sprightliness were the order of the evening, both of which were brilliantly reflected in the pianist’s cadenzas.

Giordano Bellincampi. Photo / Adrian Malloch

After a slow movement of breathtaking delicacy and wit, the finale saw Gavrylyuk achieve his avowed aim of realising its “unstoppable blood-boiling spirit”.

Once Tchaikovskian fury had been replaced by ecstatic applause, calm descended with Gavrylyuk’s encore, an immaculately voiced and nuanced Vocalise by Rachmaninoff, in its Zoltan Kocsis arrangement.

Alexander Gavrylyuk, a Ukrainian-Australian pianist.

After interval, one quickly suspected that Bellincampi might have a special place in his heart for Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano and its graceful evocations of three paintings by the iconic Renaissance artist. The first, Spring, had the sheen of Vivaldi in its musical veins; the third, The Birth of Venus, was a shimmering, almost impressionistic take on Botticelli’s seashell beauty.

It was refreshing to hear a Haydn symphony, with his penultimate 103rd opus, Drumroll, being announced with quite a flourish by timpanist Steven Logan. Here, it was the detail that registered most vividly, as Bellincampi caught the inevitability of the composer’s adagio, the endless inventiveness of the slow movement’s variations, and one of Haydn’s most playful and occasionally pungent minuets.

Yet, in all honesty, with the smaller orchestral forces involved, might these two works have been even more effective in the first half, promoting Gavrylyuk’s star turn into a true grand finale?