Auckland Philharmonia

By WILLIAM DART

Auckland Town Hall (Thursday)
Holy Trinity Cathedral (Sunday)

A dashing Three-Cornered Hat proved the perfect entree before the Auckland Philharmonia's major commission for 2002.

With the Dalewool Auckland Brass clustered centre-stage and the orchestra stretched out to the wings, John Rimmer's Europa promised a veritable wall of sound. But when Miguel Harth-Bedoya lowered his baton, we were given a whisper - orchestral statements punctuated by mysterious, breathed chords from the brass band.

More decibels would come later, but it was often the delicate writing that revealed the special skills of composer and performers: Justine Cormack's violin floating over gamelan-like percussion and brass band underlay was just one such instance.

A tightly constructed score, Europa has always made one aware of the thought processes behind the sound. Much of the piece comes from those opening notes, including the sprightly march of the first Allegro, which this time cunningly showcased the snap and precision of the Dalewools.

There are echoes of mid-20th-century music, acknowledgments of composers such as Bartok and Schoenberg.

The work's title, Europa, may have been explained as a reference to one of Jupiter's moons, but perhaps this concerto is also a reaffirmation of just how much the much-maligned European musical tradition still has to offer us.

And a concerto it was, with a bevy of cadenzas. Some were accompanied (Andrew Large's cornet boldly winding its way among banks of strings or Matthew Norwell's euphonium in playful dialogue with Ashley Brown's cello) and, later, there were spluttering free-for-alls which admitted the orchestral brass into the fray.

With talk of a possible South Island performance next year, it's reassuring to know that this might not be the last we hear of this fine work.

Europa provided a challenging act to follow but, after interval, Harth-Bedoya penetrated right into the soul of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony and took the orchestra with him, apart from an Allegretto con grazia that, alas, wasn't.

Sunday afternoon saw the first of the APO's Arnott's Midwinter Masterpieces series, with the Holy Trinity Cathedral proving rather uncharitable to the energetic lines of Bach's C major Suite.

It was also unsettling to have Bach as the bread in a Gabrieli club sandwich, with the Venetian composer's brass canzonas firing back and forth across the audience in between Bach's bourrees and gavottes.

Although soloist Justine Cormack had a few harassed moments in Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Harth-Bedoya kept tempi well-measured and many of the orchestral players asserted themselves as real characters in this seasonal frolic.

In Spring, Miranda Adams duetted with Cormack in the sweetest birdsong, with Owen Gordon's viola later giving us the most dogged of dogs.

There was patrician refinement in Stephanie Giesajtis' autumnal harpsichord solo, but perhaps the most enjoyment came from those boisterous pages in which the players surrendered to utter rusticity of it all.