Auckland Philharmonia at the Aotea Centre

By WILLIAM DART

The final concert in the Auckland Philharmonia's Royal & SunAlliance series sees Carlos Kalmar making his debut with the orchestra.

In the United States, where the Uruguayan-born conductor directs Chicago's Grant Park Music Festival, he is known for his vociferous support of adventurous and contemporary repertoire.

Ironically, in Auckland, he has been allotted one of the AP's more conservative programmes.

Once on stage, Kalmar introduces himself and defends Dvorak's Othello overture as being unfairly neglected; perhaps it's even a New Zealand premiere, he suggests.

In performance, the work is high-tensile drama, with rushes of sound and precipitous crescendos; we're offered sleek woodwind sonorities, stentorian brass and some eerie pages that hint at Stravinskian Firebirds to come.

The strings, finely measured in the opening chords, are severely tested by some of the composer's later demands.

English pianist Piers Lane seems to approach the Tchaikovsky First Concerto with a fair amount of attitude, and it works.

The leisurely pace certainly allows the spirit of the dance to come through, although at times the pianist seems to be a solitary swan in a lake of his own.

This makes for a certain tension when the orchestra is required to follow his lead.

A few fuzzy octaves aside, and some nasty clangorous moments in the lower register of the instrument itself, this is a thoughtful and occasionally provocative interpretation.

Orchestrally, things are not so happy.

Even allowing for the horns not being in agreement on the very first note of the work, the ensemble is too loose. There was also an alarming tendency among the strings to use the first note of a phrase for focusing intonation.

With Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Kalmar appears determined to bring out the brilliant side of Ravel's orchestration, although one of the most effective moments proves to be Mark Storey's wistful saxophone solo in The Old Castle.

The Gnome dashes by in an amphetamine blur and there is no shortage of visceral thrills in the wild primitivism of Baba-Yaga or the rough-hewn Great Gate of Kiev.

The brass is more telling in the subtle gloom of the catacombs than when promenading in the open.