Auckland Philharmonia at Aotea Centre

Bernstein's Candide Overture must be the overture to end all overtures, a tongue-in-cheek canter from Rossini to Shostakovich, positively brazen in its bonhomie.

It was all that and more when it opened the Auckland Philharmonia's Thursday concert.

Werner Andreas Albert's expertise with film music served him well for locking into the nostalgia at the core of Edwin Carr's The End of the Golden Weather.

Carr's orchestral wizardry was evoked once more by the orchestra's luxuriant string playing, vibrant woodwind and stirring brass.

The composer called it a seascape, but Golden Weather could well have been subtitled dreamscape, especially when a jaunty foxtrot and bittersweet tango pass by in ghostly flash-back.

Joseph Lin had Korngold's Violin Concerto summed up in its first soaring phrase. Leaning backwards like a limber art deco beau, he brought us all the romance and thrills of the silver screen neatly wrought in concerto form.

There was more magic in the second movement Romance and, when the music went poco misterioso, Lin moved sleekly. There seemed to be no threat to his silvery tone, even in the most stratospheric registers. In the Finale, Korngold mickey-moused away with his Irish reel and Lin energetically led the gallivanting.

The young violinist gave us a Bach encore but, as his elegant Andante drifted across the auditorium, I was pondering what a major role Albert had played in the Korngold, inspiring all the musicians to work with such precision in a particularly volatile score.

After interval we had Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, one of those works which sometimes seems like a movie score waiting for a film to be built around it.

Albert underplayed the melodrama of its sprawling first movement. He aimed at substance, not Slavic abandon, taking care to balance the deceptively complex textures.

Martin Lee's poignant oboe set the pace for the second movement, its piu mosso section seeming a mite weightier than usual.

If the Aotea acoustics dampened the pizzicato frolics of the scherzo, nothing could dampen the visceral surge of the Finale and the concert ended in such a blaze that I was half expecting credit titles to scroll down the back wall.

Review

*What: Auckland Philharmonia
*Where: Aotea Centre