Il Giardino Armonico at the Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

It is rare that one finds oneself literally on the edge of one's seat during a concert, but I spent a good deal of time in that invidious position, enchanted in the magical sound garden that Il Giardino Armonico laid out for us when they played at the Town Hall.

Biber's Battaglia, with its ra-ta-tat chords, Ivesian jumble of tonalities and whispered final lament, took me captive.

There were delights for the eye, too, with the trio of first violins grooving away as if part of a Tamla-Motown line-up.

Giovanni Antonini also swayed away to his graceful lines in a Sammartini recorder concerto and proved a persuasive spokesman for this minor talent of the 18th century. A cadenza in the second movement could have passed for the most lyrical of birdsong.

From the start, Handel's B flat Concerto Grosso Op 6 no 7 was a dramatic, full-blooded presentation, with the rests in the introductory Largo making their presence felt forcefully.

The ensuing Allegro managed to be firm, florid and flexible in its lines and, later, the group brought an almost brooding Romanticism to the work.

Ottavio Datone was a nimble soloist in Bach's D minor Harpsichord Concerto, creating a fairly subdued sound, which served to make the audience listen more acutely to what was being played.

Lutenist Luca Piancas had the stage to himself in C.P.E. Bach's La Sautscheck sonata. This man has a prodigious technical facility and exploited it to the full - one moment striking chords with a flamenco-like flamboyance, the next making the most of those ambient sonorities the lute can create with its "sympathetic" strings.

Vivaldi's Flautino Concerto introduced us to another songbird from Giovanni Antonioni's aviary. His flautino chirruped away in good-humoured harmony with the strings, occasionally sounding uncannily like our own koauau, and the encore, a Passacaglia by Samuel Scheidt, was an exhilarating ramble on a handful of chords, letting two of the violinists give us a spot of 17th-century duelling fiddles.

Chamber Music New Zealand is to be congratulated. Let's hope that is not the last time we are admitted into this garden of enchantment.