Auckland Philharmonia at the Aotea Centre

By WILLIAM DART

The Auckland Philharmonia Thursday concert's programme was strange; a collection of farewells, as conductor Steven Smith described it and certainly the most problematic offering of the orchestra's season.

It started modestly with Haydn's Farewell Symphony, setting off with some incisive string playing. If the Adagio occasionally drifted in and out of focus, then this was balanced by a boisterous Minuet. The inevitable exiting of musicians during the Finale incited laughter that was out of keeping with what Mendelssohn once described as a curiously melancholy little piece.

Smith had brought Charles Ives' Three Places in New England with him and the American introduced it persuasively, illuminating the spaces beyond and around the notes. While the Aotea Centre acoustics made the second movement more cacophonous than necessary, Smith and his players created a ghostly allure in the first movement, and an aura of suspended expectancy in the third.

After interval, Patricia Wright was transcendent in Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs. Although the venue made projection a cruel challenge, soprano and orchestra were in top form. Singing from memory, Wright was at ease with Strauss' treacherous lines; by vocal timbre alone she made us feel the trembling body in the first song, the equivocal smile of summer in the second, the brave weariness of the third. Isn't it time that we heard her in Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915?

The Kiwi component for the evening was Helen Bowaters' Urwachst, its title taken from a neologism coined by Australian wag Percy Grainger to describe our unspoilt virgin forest. Bowater made it clear that there was something dark and mysterious in this undergrowth, hidden from those swooping, diving birds. So vivid was the orchestration, so brilliant the playing, sounds almost became tangible, from mournful brass chords and divisi strings to the ever-present birdlife.

The final item was an orchestral version of Wotan's Farewell and Loge's Magic Fire music from Wagner's Die Walkure. Despite a no-holds-barred performance, and some noble trombone deputations for Wotan, the man himself was sorely missed.