William Dart review: Beethoven 7 performed for Auckland Philharmonia’s Bayleys Great Classics

Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son was equally captivating through lighter and darker terrain. Photo / Adrian Malloch

REVIEW

Thursday’s Beethoven 7 concert, the first of Auckland Philharmonia’s Bayleys Great Classics series, drew a welcome full house, the audience overflowing into the choir stalls behind the orchestra.

Rossini’s Barber of Seville overture was the ideal launchpad. Conductor Giordano Bellincampi was absolutely hip to its elegant playfulness, as tune after tune danced past, in between mock dramatic trills and thunderclap chords. Delicious woodwind contributions hinted at Mozartian bonuses to come.

Visiting us in 2022, Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son invested her Chopin with winning poetry; tonight, she effortlessly did the same for Mozart’s great C minor concerto.

This is a remarkable score, of an emotional intensity that looks forward to Beethoven.

You can hear it in the first movement’s sighing chromaticisms or when the AP’s persuasive woodwind players sweep us from major to minor injus luscious Larghetto.

Conductor Giordano Bellincampi was absolutely hip to Rossini's elegant playfulness. Photo / Adrian Malloch

Yeol Eum Son was all unruffled coolness, yet how beautifully she detoured her pearl-like passage work into darker terrain, or, using Andras Schiff’s first movement cadenza, modified it to sharpen its dramatic focus.

Her encore, the first movement of Mozart’s most famous piano sonata, was imbued with all the musical virtues we had already enjoyed, along with some telling and immaculately articulated ornamentation.

After interval, there was no resisting Bellincampi’s tumultuous take on the most visceral of all Beethoven’s symphonies, the work which had provided this concert with its title.

This maestro has an instinctive feeling for Beethoven’s dramatic architecture, building up a sense of almost unbearable anticipation in its leisurely introduction, until the frenzied Vivace breaks forth.

Bellincampi’s shaping and nuancing in the Allegretto brought out the chamber music finesse of the musicians while the hearty humour of the Scherzo was irresistible, right down to its slap-in-the-face final bars.

What can one say about the finale, with its pummelled backbeats all but drowning out the scurrying strings? If Wagner once hailed this symphony as the “Apotheosis of the Dance”, then here we’re taken well beyond the boundaries and restrictions of any dance floor.