Conductor tames raw nature

By WILLIAM DART

The title Wild Music is an unfortunate choice for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's most recent CD.

Those expecting 70 minutes of unbridled sonic savagery will be dismayed, although the project's deep involvement with the Department of Conservation gives away its intentions.

Apart from Falla's Ritual Fire Dance, which crackles with incendiary purpose, Hamish MacCunn's broad-shouldered The Land of the Mountain and the Flood and the most sumptuous account yet recorded of Lilburn's A Song of Islands, this is comparatively gentle fare.

Conductor Hamish McKeich allows the seagulls a more leisurely flight in Christopher Marshall's Hikurangi Sunrise than James Judd gave them when the work won the audience's commendation in the NZSO's Music 2000 Prize.

Although Marshall's palette is given full rein in this recording, the work is at its most effective when it deals out mysterious minimalism.

There are some unusual works here, such as Dvorak's The Wood Dove. The gothic trappings key-in grimly with the booklet's paragraphs on threatened bird species and Michael Parekowhai's cover painting of a tui on target.

More nature revels feature on the NZSO's Naxos disc of Frank Bridge's music, although here it focuses on landscapes rather than the creatures which inhabit them.

Bridge, who for a while was best known as Benjamin Britten's teacher, is one of the great English composers of his generation, writing music that infused Sibelian grandeur with lyrical sensitivity and scores that injected muscle into Delian rhapsody.

This is music that might have been written for the dynamic James Judd. Opening with the CD's most adventurous piece, Bridge's 1927 Enter Spring, the conductor makes vibrant work of it. A particularly winning moment occurs early, when sprite-like woodwind surrounds eloquent solo violin.

When EMI released the first LP recording of The Sea in 1976, it was quadraphonic-compatible, and this is such a resounding oil painting of a work that it could well justify the four-channel treatment.

Such is the fervour of the NZSO performance and the richness of the Michael Fowler Centre recording it would be hard to imagine a quartet of speakers could improve matters.

* New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Wild Music (Trust Records MMT 2059); New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Frank Bridge (Naxos 8.557167)