Auckland Philharmonia at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

It's been tough getting away from Sir Ed over the past week. The Hillary voice was booming over the airwaves, from Nepal, greeting an NZSO audience in Wellington; 24 hours later, those iconic tones were blessing us in the Auckland Town Hall, as he wished his home town orchestra the best.

And the Auckland Philharmonia certainly came up with an Everest of a concert: Mahler as the main bill of fare, preceded by the elegant Pierre Amoyal in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.

This is repertoire the French violinist knows intimately - and the man is an exhilarating showman.

It was not without blemishes; if you see this concerto as having as much classical as romantic blood in its veins, then the nerviness of the outer movements might be a concern, and intonation occasionally wavered.

But Amoyal is a star, especially when the silvery tone of his Kochanski Stradivarius carries through the orchestra in the Andante, revealing those ravishing, fluttering beauties of its A minor section.

The encore was a favourite of Amoyal's - the Sarabande from the Bach D minor Partita - and it showed in his silky, unruffled delivery.

The rest of the evening was Mahler's - the great Fifth Symphony, with conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya firmly at the helm.

The first movement had all the required weight and presence. Tempi were perfectly judged; so, too, were those vital slivers of silence.

Occasional and accidental diversions from Mahler's given notes did not hinder its inevitable procession.

The second movement frightened with its intensity, a fury that had already been hinted at in the stormier moments of the preceding Funeral March.

Harth-Bedoya caught the volatility, that Mahlerian melding of menace and misery. And he did the same in the Scherzo, where the contrasts are even more shattering, with Helen Burr's horn solos miraculously reconciling the bucolic and the graceful.

The poetry of the Adagietto sang out in some of the best string playing of the evening and the symphony ended in unequivocal triumph with its chorale blazing to the high heavens.

I'm sure I'm not alone in my impatience to hear the next instalment of Harth-Bedoya's Mahler cycle.