Auckland Philharmonia at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

The Auckland Philharmonia are advertising their spring season as three concerts to put a spring in your step and there was certainly no shortage of Seguidillas, Jotas, Malaguenas and Fandangos in their Viva Espana! concert.

Miguel Harth-Bedoya was tour guide as well as conductor, promising a fully spiced-up programme, peppering his spiel with words such as "upbeat" and "reality music". And what could be more upbeat than Chabrier's Espana for an opener?

The French composer once claimed that his rhythms would lift audiences to a feverish pitch of excitement and cause everyone to embrace their neighbour madly. If this didn't eventuate in the Town Hall, it wasn't the fault of the orchestra, who did enthusiastic justice to the score's vitality.

Spanish pianist Alba Ventura was an elegant soloist in Falla's shimmering piano concerto, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, and although she underlined the mercurial mood shifts and had an obvious rapport with the players, it was a performance that at times needed more projection. Playing solo in Albeniz's Triana, there were no such concerns as Ventura responded to the infectious rhythms of the piece.

Although Harth-Bedoya tried to justify Joaquin Turina's Danzas Fantasticas as symphony music without being a symphony, the mind boggles at why the Spanish composer would have opened this 1918 work with a rewrite of Chabrier's Espana - postmodernism is not a viable explanation. Despite some effective pieces of scoring, such as Justine Cormack's understated wisps of solo violin in the second movement, Turina's music came across as a sad set of cliches.

The concert ended with both sets of dances from Falla's The Three Cornered Hat, and all the many colours of the Spanish composer's canvas burst to life, from the opening pages with their rowdy brass, whirring castanets and vocalising musicians to the earth-shattering power of the final Jota.

Encores were unavoidable, predictable and immensely enjoyable. First came Falla's Ritual Fire Dance (which had, after all, been subtly previewed in the Three Cornered Hat), then a rip-roaring repeat of the Jota, seemingly faster than ever.