Auckland Philharmonia at the Aotea Centre, Holy Trinity Cathedral

By WILLIAM DART

To experience the Auckland Philharmonia at three days' distance, offering two completely different programmes, is to realise the solid contribution that the orchestra makes to the city's cultural life.

Thursday night's Royal & SunAlliance concert showed the more formal side - Aotea Centre, international soloist, full-scale symphony. Sunday afternoon's instalment of the Arnott's Midwinter Masterpieces was comparatively modest - Holy Trinity Cathedral, orchestral musicians as soloists, and smaller-scale works.

Last Thursday's concert could have been a mite grander. I was fully expecting the heavens to burst asunder when Stokowski's high camp transcription of Bach's D minor Toccata and Fugue opened proceedings. They didn't, and it was as much the fault of the venue as the players who did their darnedest under Jonathan Grieves-Smith to inject it with the necessary pizzazz.

Violinist Michael Dauth was a disappointment. Locked behind a music stand, Dauth gave a read-through of Bruch's Scottish Fantasia, and failed to illuminate a score that needs all the advocacy it can get. And, alas, the golden-toned Stradivarius that he had been extolling on the radio earlier that evening did little to help. The orchestra offered valiant and patient support.

By Dvorak's New World Symphony, Grieves-Smith's conducting was becoming a worry, with flamboyant gestures seeming unrelated to what was expected of the players. In the third movement (Dvorak's witty aside on that explosive scherzo from Beethoven's Ninth) one was crying out for more definition - phrases and not just notes.

Still, all was not lost. As Virgil Thomson famously pointed out, this hackneyed score can still sound fresh and I invariably marvel at the subtle way in which those famous themes steal upon the ear.

On Sunday, the strings opened with Tchaikovsky's Serenade, and there was a feeling of some nervousness with Grieves-Smith again at the helm. By the third movement, suddenly there was an engagement and a sense of dialogue happening, a dialogue that was energetically continued by violinist Miranda Adams and oboist Martin Lee in Bach's C minor concerto.

This was a sprightly, well-sprung performance, played sans conductor and dominated by the inspirational Lee, who poured out streams of gorgeous sound with the nonchalance of a jazzman.

After the interval, Gareth Farr's Le Temps est a la Pluie proved that there is indeed a lot of fine music to be written in E minor with Bizet's frothy Symphony proving the perfect compensation to all those in the audience who were caught unaware by Farr's onslaught of percussion towards the end of his piece.