Guilty pleasures in attractive package

By WILLIAM DART


The cover is a riot of flowers and butterflies, and the NZSO, conductor James Judd and violinist Takako Nishizaki certainly give Chen Gang and He Zhanhao's Butterfly Lovers Concerto a dazzling workout on their new Naxos CD.

This kitschy score now seems a period piece, to be filed under "guilty pleasures". It comprises pretty-pretty Chinoiserie, penned in pentatonic overdrive, in the conviction this was the music that would combat the bourgeois decadence of Beethoven and his ilk.

Coupled with Peter Breiner's Songs and Dances of the Silk Road, in which the Slovakian composer creates his own Oriental concoction, this CD is an attractive package.

Nishizaki performs with sincerity and delicacy although, here and there, one does wonder how the Breiner might have come across with the sumptuous tone of a Stern at its service.

Another NZSO-Naxos collaboration seems to have been languishing in the vaults for some time. Recorded in January 2002, a collection of orchestral music by the French composer Arthur Honegger, conducted by the Japanese maestro Takuo Yuasa, has just been released.

This is solid and serious mainstream 20th-century repertoire, making Honegger seem much the odd man out among the more frivolous members of Les Six.

The centrepiece is the finest of his four symphonies, the Liturgique, a 1941 work which, in the midst of troubled times, called for peace, working through some roaring, angry music to make that call.

The orchestra is in top form, and Yuasa, a conductor with major European credentials, shows much sympathy for Honegger's music, particularly in his handling of the composer's sweeping lines.

The recording is all one could wish for, at its most striking in the shifting tonal gradations of the second movement, caught on a knife-edge by producer Andrew Walton, the man behind Marin Alsop's recording of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

A number of shorter, though equally substantial, works complete the disc, including the once-popular symphonic poems Pacific 231 and Rugby (more to do with musical issues than scrums and tackles, I hasten to add).

So evocative is the orchestra's account of the 1920 Pastorale d'Ete that the listener becomes impatient for December.

* The Butterfly Lovers Concerto (Naxos 8.557348); Honegger, Orchestral Works (Naxos 8.555974)