AK03:Twin Peaks at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

On Queen St there was all the desperate merriment of a fairground, while inside the Town Hall, AK03 was launching its classical music component with a funeral march - the opening movement of Berlioz' Symphonie funebre et triomphale, played by NZSO and Auckland Philharmonia musicians under James Judd.

Triumph would eventually have its day and the patient strings would join in the work's splendiferous Finale, but a quarter-of-an-hour of the dogged Funeral March did pall rather.

Gareth Farr's Stone and Ice, a tribute to the "Twin Peaks" of Aoraki and Taranaki, commissioned for the occasion, would have made a more stirring curtain-raiser.

Much of Stone and Ice was loud and visceral. Duelling timpani, standing in for the composer's favoured Cook Island drums, rumbled away under a lot of it.

Farr knows what to give to a line-up of eager trombonists and, without a blush, he had the boys strut their stuff in colours that were bolder than bold. But when he relaxed from creating a soundtrack in search of a biblical epic, we were given spine-tingling interludes in which tantalising flecks of colour glinted through seams in the granite.

Richard Strauss' monumental Alpine Symphony catches us a day in the Alps with 50 minutes of musical mists, sunrises, storms, vegetation and near-mishaps.

After a bumpy start, Judd and his players proved able musical mountaineers. There were tell-tale signs, particularly in the blend of strings and woodwind, that this was two orchestras rather than one, but the spirit and energy were spendidly sustained even through the most vertiginous of transitions.

Such a rarity deserved more than a medium-sized audience it attracted. While the festival's publicity assaults us with assurances for those who feel threatened by "high-brow" art, Strauss' alpine wonderland might well have blown a few minds among the devotees of the DJ world.

Herald Feature: Auckland Festival AK03

Auckland Festival website