Auckland Philharmonia at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

Gypsy Fire, as a title, has a campy ambience to it. Think early 60s coffee lounge decor and Carmencitas with flashing eyes, tambourine in one hand and knife in the other.

Carmen did make an appearance in the Auckland Philharmonia's Gypsy Fire concert, although not in person, when Tatiana Samouil gave us Sarasate's wild and fantastical Fantasy on the Bizet opera.

This was the Russian violinist's second visit. Last year she was runner-up in the Michael Hill International Violin Competition and, a few months ago she was third in Moscow's Tchaikovsky International Competition.

When Samouil was on stage, she delivered virtuosity of the sort that we don't often hear in our concert halls.

It was only in the first moments of the Carmen Fantasy that there was even the murmur of nervousness, and the Romany revelry of the same composer's Zigeunerweisen and Ravel's Tzigane was breathtaking.

In Ravel's passionate opening solo, Samouil had us hanging on the merest flicker of sound and, after all the finger-numbing pyrotechnics, the final accelerando was a spiral of exhilaration.

Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya and the orchestra obtained such evident pleasure playing the dances and rhapsodies that made up the programme. Even those Slavonic and Hungarian warhorses by Dvorak and Brahms sparkled at the end of the concert, in an encore of Brahms' Sixth Dance, the strings had just the right degree of resonant and resilient rubato.

It wasn't all Proms fare. A crisp account of Bartok's Romanian Dances would have been an asset in a main series concert, as would Kodaly's Dances of Galanta.

The success of this series, bringing in a new audience, without compromising quality, is a credit to the AP's marketing team, and a testament to an orchestra that has always had a civic conscience.