Auckland Philharmonia goes multinational

By TARA WERNER

TOWN HALL, Auckland - Last Thursday's Royal and SunAlliance concert turned out to be a musical league of nations, with a Chinese soloist, an African-American conductor, and works by a New Zealander, an American and a Czech.

The multinational aspect gave a certain frisson to the programme, especially when cellist Liwei Qin played the Barber Cello Concerto.

A work notable for its understated elegance, it has been criticised by composer Virgil Thomson as having a lack of conflict.

Thomson may well be wrong. There is plenty of pent-up emotion in the concerto, from the elegiac opening allegro, the melancholic andante with its canon between orchestra and cellist, and finally the angry outbursts in the molto allegro.

Liwei Qin played the music with total sympathy and while he communicated the more introspective qualities of the score, he was always heard as an individual and strong voice, especially in the difficult cadenzas.

The musicians unfortunately did not back him as adequately as they could.

For instance, while oboist Stanley Jackson provided a melodic accompaniment in the andante, the rest of the woodwind were not entirely accurate. At times the orchestral sections also sounded disjointed and unbalanced.

These aspects were also evident in Dvorak's Symphony No 7 - somewhat surprisingly, given how familiar this autumnal music must be to the orchestra.

Sadly, Andre Raphel Smith's expressive conducting seemed to have little effect.

The opening allegro was taut, but the brass dominated too much. The woodwind had a good sense of ensemble in the slow movement, with its famous opening passage, and the horns acquitted themselves well.

But the speedy clip at which Smith took the scherzo highlighted a real disjointedness between brass and strings especially, with the lilting waltz sounding even more lop-sided than the Dvorak must have intended.

Meantime Eve de Castro-Robinson's Pendulums of Blue came across as a sombre, highly personal work containing more than passing homage to Bruckner, especially in her writing for brass.

There was more tension than repose throughout the score, with brutal-sounding percussion and robust blocks of orchestration leaving an uncompromising, even violent, aftermath.