Auckland Philharmonia at Auckland Town Hall

The first concert of the Auckland APN News & Media Premier Series welcomes the season with the return of a popular soloist, a new conductor and a programme that combines the familiar with at least one major surprise.

Ravel's Alborada del Gracioso is Iberian quicksilver.

Conductor Vittorio Parisi ensures sweep and exhilaration, wind and brass are unfailingly crisp, while Jane Kircher's lyrical bassoon presides over the slow section.

And, in these days when CDs have become the touchstone of success, what a pleasure it is to register individual percussion colours direct from the concert stage, timbres too easily homogenised in a studio mix.

Ferrucio Busoni is a composer new to the orchestra; his Sarabande and Cortege betrays Faustian intent in its shifting metres, Straussian melodic turns and moments of impending Mahlerian doom.

However, Parisi leavens what could have been a brooding, Teutonic experience with some Mediterranean sunshine.

On the whole, the orchestra does Busoni musical and dramatic justice.

Cellist Li Wei enjoys the rich melodic storehouse of the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto, navigating mood-shifts from elegiac to belligerent with full collegial support from the AP players.

Austin Hitchcock, principal horn, joins in with bravado, underlining the special relationship between horn and cello soloist. Their brief duet in the Moderato is a portent of Li Wei's magnificent Cadenza to come.

Parisi draws some of the best string playing of the evening in the second movement.

The soloist, not afraid of portamenti for effect, pursues a subtle partnership with the musicians around him, particularly so when violas announce the return of the main theme.

An enraptured audience is rewarded with an encore; Li Wei plays a Bach Prelude, with spring and grace in every phrase.

Dvorak's New World Symphony has its ensemble problems, but only the terminally hard of heart could remain immune to a performance in which the first movement swings so confidently into action and the Scherzo is as good as a breath of country air.

Best of all, the famous slow movement is no self-indulgent Largo, but delivered at a pace that keeps solo work to the fore, and sentimentality well at bay.