The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra celebrated both the terrestrial and the celestial in its Heavenly concert, marking the welcome return of conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya.
Tumblebird Contrails, a visionary blast from American composer and environmentalist Gabriella Smith,was a high-energy overture, physically immersive in its spectacular wash of sound.
This 2014 score, the work of a 23-year-old, was a pulsating sonic tumble, in which the strings did their darnedest to take on the percussion at their own game.
The percussionists responded with suitable thunder, also evoking the roaring of wind and crashing of waves.
In between, baleful brass and woodwind birdsong suggested our climatically challenged earth.
Smith is of a generation that speaks of grooves as much as of melodies. Here she lays out a compulsive 12-minute trail with an inevitability that is the hallmark of absolute formal mastery.
Harth-Bedoya gave us much memorable Mahler in his time as Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra’s music director, signing off in 2005 with a fine Fourth Symphony.
Revisiting this work in the same hall, I recalled him telling us, 17 years ago, that there would be no tragedy ahead in what we were about to hear.
And nor was there, once the first movement’s sleigh bells set us on our way.
There was also no suggestion of the sentimental in its opening violin melody.
The order of the night was for absolute clarity, as in the pellucid textures of the second movement, with Vesa-Matti Leppanen an impeccable soloist.
Emotional restraint and sumptuous strings enriched Mahler’s own favourite slow movement, dramatically highlighting its waltzing interlude and magnificent triple forte climax.
This symphony is defined by its finale, in which a soprano offers a glimpse of Heaven through a child’s eyes.
New Zealand soprano, Madeleine Pierard. Photo / Supplied
Madeleine Pierard, in splendid voice, with her signature mezzo burnish to her lower register, gave a beautifully considered characterisation — a child of wide-eyed wonder who also, in more impish moments, might be quite a handful.
