Extravaganza of great note

Michael Houstoun - a delight.

Auckland's first International Piano Festival at the Raye Freedman Arts Centre was a whirlwind tour of the piano repertoire.

Natasha Vlassenko and Oleg Stepanov described their recital as "a concert with one piano, 20 fingers, and many thousands of notes".

During the closing speeches, director Tamas Vesmas gave us even more impressive statistics - 600 works had been played in eight days, with only three pieces being repeated.

Vesmas himself opened the festival on its first Sunday night, playing some persuasively understated Mozart and allowing the younger members of the audience the chance to hear Schumann's Kinderscenen from the concert stage.

A week later, the event closed with Rolf-Peter Wille and Lina Yeh's disappointing evening of two-piano music. Mozart fared less sympathetically here with noisy Liszt transcriptions that showed up instruments and performers.

Of the recitals I attended, Michael Houstoun's was outstanding. Transcriptions ranged from the camp (Rachmaninov lacing a Bach gavotte with scrumptious harmonies) to the compelling (the massive Bach-Busoni chaconne).

The innermost soul of Chopin was laid bare in two brackets of mazurkas, while two Shostakovich preludes and fugues made one eager to hear the remaining 22.

Two nights later, Gao Ping dashed off Shostakovich's Opus 34 Preludes with elan, and mainly focused on music by his father and himself. This included his own eccentric vocalising pieces.

Oh dear, how many, like me, felt that the first of his Two Soviet Love Songs sounded like Tom Waits wrapping his gravelly pipes around Kenny Ball's Midnight in Moscow?

Concert FM's nightly recordings filled in gaps and made me eager to tune in when Natasha Vlassenko and Oleg Stepanov's noble Hummel Sonata is broadcast later this year.

David Guerin's Saturday concert, which unfortunately clashed with the NZSO being in town, offered consummate artistry, built around a subtly responsive performance of Bartok's little-heard Out of Doors.

Daytime masterclasses were fascinating. Guerin tried to coax the audience to sing along heartily ("Be a bit more German!") with a student's Bach fugue so that he might get the right sense of D major exaltation. Oleg Stepanov paid almost manic attention to issues of phrasing in a Scriabin etude.

Michael Houstoun investigated "the line below which the music stops speaking" as he worked with a young woman to bring linear and harmonic definition to three Debussy preludes.

Tamas Vesmas, and all those who participated on and off stage, have every reason to be proud ... and it is not over. Concert FM will be broadcasting its recordings in the near future and a second festival next year is planned.