Auckland Philharmonia at the Auckland Town Hall

By HEATH LEES

This year's Royal and SunAlliance concert series has been distinguished by its imaginative programming. Last Thursday's concert contained one of the boldest combinations ever: a work by Ravel - the Mother Goose suite - written early in the 20th century, and Chain 2 by the Polish composer Lutoslawski, written only 15 years before the century closed.

With these two works, the Auckland Philharmonia neatly framed the challenge that their audiences face today.

Less than 100 years ago, composers brought the large, multi-coloured instrument of the symphony orchestra to its most brilliant stage of development. By about mid-century, people were beginning to realise that there might be nowhere left for it to go.

Ravel's brilliant orchestral arrangement of his 1908 piano music was enjoyably given and received.

Apart from some rigid movement and an unwillingness to gear down into the chamber-music sections, the orchestra breathed instant charm and originality through radiant string hues, sinuous solo lines (especially from Miranda Adams in the leader's chair) and humorous, juicy wind sounds that Ravel's childlike imagination had conjured up.

But you could tell that Lutoslawski's following "dialogue" for violin and orchestra left many of the audience cold - despite the lengthy introductions of soloist Justine Cormack and conductor Werner Andreas Albert, who protested that the audience should be "open" to the music and enjoy it.

Well, the music was new, intriguing, and different in its alternation of strict and free sections. Everyone listened hard. Whether they enjoyed it or not is another matter, one that aroused heated debate during the interval.

Would it be better for the limited contemporary music that orchestras provide nowadays to come from New Zealand rather than Poland?

Whatever the answer, good old Brahms came out well in the second half, following a disastrous start from the fiddles and a call to arms from four fabulous horns who positively triumphed in this fourth symphony, a delightfully horn-heavy work, even for Brahms.