Auckland Philharmonia at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

The first concert of the Auckland Philharmonia's Royal & SunAlliance series had everything going for it - the return of star conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Karin Adam as a familiar soloist, and the premiere of a New Zealand work - and the reward was a full house.

Harth-Bedoya went to town with the opening Tchaikovsky - the galvanic "Strife" theme from Romeo and Juliet made one wonder whether both the Montagues and the Capulets were about to storm the Town Hall. Yet every small detail was illuminated in the more reflective passages, the only serious disappointment being some rough-and-ready scales from the violins.

At the other end of the programme, the conductor penetrated through to the ultra-Romantic heart of Elgar's Enigma Variations. He stormed through the strutting Fourth Variation, engineered an eloquent reconciliation of strings and woodwind in the Fifth and revelled in the rumbustious Finale, with John Wells adding the weight of the Town Hall organ for appropriate Victorian splendour.

On the delicate side, there were shapely solos from violist Christine Bowie and cellist Ashley Brown.

The blurs were minimal, including one miscalculated triple piano and some ensemble problems in the Nimrod Variation (put right when the piece was replayed as an encore).

When Karin Adam gave us Sibelius' Violin Concerto a few years back I felt her performance lacked a certain earthiness. This time round, you could smell the Nordic firs in her gutsy tone, although there was a price to pay with some edgy tunings, especially in octave work, along with some unwelcome rhythmic licences in the second movement.

Every item received rapturous applause, including Eve de Castro-Robinson's Len Dances. This was a frank party piece, complete with outrageous loops of major chords and a bluesy rumba in C minor, although perhaps those trombones could have tweaked rather than crooned their Charleston.

Like Jack Body's Carmen Dances, this miniature cries out to be heard in the context of the yet-to-be-completed stage work. May we not wait too long.