Word must have got around after the Auckland Philharmonia's last concert, as there was a capacious audience for Christian Knapp's second appearance with the orchestra on Thursday night.
The American conductor's description of John Adams' The Chairman Dances was wonderfully evocative, and this so-called foxtrot for orchestra tingled with colour,
shot through with subtle shimmers of tone and mood.
The percussion propelled the music along until its last dance moment, played out on piano, drum kit and sandpaper blocks.
Mozart's Clarinet Concerto is one of the composer's most familiar scores, certainly on the cinema screen. In the recent In Search of Mozart we heard it behind a Salzburg winterscape; 20 years ago its slow movement wafted over the Kenyan plains in Out of Africa.
In the Town Hall, with the Australian Francesco Celata as soloist, we were focused sharply on the work itself. Celata's immaculate phrasing, his feeling for the weight of every note in the instrument's expressive lower register and his manner of insinuating his line into an orchestral texture, were fascinating.
Knapp also ensured that the orchestra did justice to Mozart's intentions, apart from too many wayward moments from the horn section. The strings were particularly well-groomed, crisp in detail and encouraging a Beethovian power-surge in the tutti sections.
Beethoven's turn came after interval.
As might be expected after Knapp's Tchaikovsky Fifth a fortnight ago, Beethoven's Seventh was a theatrical affair. The conductor had barely acknowledged the audience's initial applause when he literally jumped around 180 degrees and set the orchestra on its way.
If Wagner held that this work was the apotheosis of the dance, then the opening Vivace was as diabolic a saltarello as one could wish for. Knapp's individuality came through in the more expansive sections of the second movement, and the way in which his swooning presentation of the Scherzo's contrasting theme seemed as much Gershwin as Beethoven.
The Finale, albeit with curiously reticent horns, was all that it should be: a relentless, breathing, rhythmic organism with a backbeat that any Memphis drummer would envy, and would have had Beethoven's pulse racing.
