New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

With some players travelling direct from Auckland airport to the Town Hall stage, after delays caused by Wellington weather, one has to marvel at the consummate professionalism of the NZSO.

And perhaps the meteorological drama created a sense of a special occasion as the orchestra previewed the programme they will be playing in Osaka today.

While some might see Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin, an expressionist take on vice and violence in old Chinatown, as a strange choice for the Osaka venture, it certainly kept the Auckland audience on the edge of their seats.

James Judd had his players primed and giving their best.

Patrick Barry's sinuous clarinet solo set the standards required and his colleagues honoured them, while conductor and orchestra revelled in the wild decadence of it all.

At the other end of the concert a selection from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, opening with the familiar striding and feuding families, and signing off with the death of Juliet, seemed overlong.

On the plus side were lashings of magnificent sound and stereo violins, with firsts and seconds on either side of the conductor.

On the minus, were moments of fragile ensemble and bouts of under-nourished tone from the first violins.

Douglas Lilburn's Aotearoa will seem conservative in Japan (especially with Korea's Suwan Philharmonic offering Isang Yun), and I suspect that Judd's hyperenergetic reading of the Lilburn classic won't hide this deficiency.

Little of the familiar pastoral survived in what sounded like a whirlwind and a half.

Each orchestra at Osaka has been asked to feature a work with a soloist, and the NZSO had chosen Helen Medlyn to represent us with Elgar's Sea Pictures. In Auckland, this most elusive of the composer's scores did not register as it should have.

Medlyn, a fine Mahlerian, soared gloriously to the occasion (as in her top A in The Swimmer), but did not always penetrate through the lush orchestral textures.

While the floating rubato of Where Corals Lie was mostly convincing, elsewhere tempi were too forthright, making the difficult opening lines of The Swimmer sound as if Katisha had strayed in from The Mikado.