New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the Auckland Town Hall

By William Dart

In a different setting, Jack Body's Carmen Dances might well have had audiences bopping in the aisles. But, as played by the NZSO in the Town Hall, it had to be content with providing a suitably festive launch for the orchestra's final visit this year.

Carmen is picture-postcard music for post-modernists as Body guides his players through a succession of dazzling showpieces that would have Martin Denny hurling his marimba mallets into the deepest Maui pool.

It was a colourfest: staggered entries created dizzying waterfalls of strings in the Hawaiian Hula, and in African Snake Dance one might have sworn that George Shearing was on those ivories somewhere behind the fourth vine on the left.

Body made demands above and beyond the merely instrumental. The musicians clapped, shared their stage with Slava Grigoryan's sometimes patchily amped guitar and ululated jungle style, with primal zest. In the final bars, all is vanquished by a bleating mobile phone.

There are very many musical coups, such as the breathtaking transition from the rapacious Salome to Honolulu Hulatime, but its difficult to judge a work that is so evidently part of a larger conception.

A theatrical context would render the dances more secure in their irony, and Body should be encouraged to complete the whole piece.

The other highlight was pianist Stephen Kovacevich who, after a beautifully turned Mozart K 491 on Friday night, stunned us with Beethoven's C major Concerto on Saturday.

In an interview, a week before, he was speaking of Beethoven's deeply subversive personality and playfully describing him as "not a completely grownup composer". All this came out in a performance that ranged from the impish to the furious, particularly in the work's two cataclysmic cadenzas.

The Largo was a revelation, with a lively tempo showcasing some shapely woodwind playing and heart-stopping rubato from the smiling Kovacevich.

On Friday, Judd kept his footing on the post-Stalinist tightrope of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, fearlessly opting for extremes in this magnificent score.

The sheer weight and power of the first movement made the second seem like a terrifying sprint across a minefield, from which the players escaped unscathed and triumphant.

But Judd remained unrelenting: after the whirlwind of the third movement, with barely a pause, we were dashed through the Finale.

The following evening, Sibelius' Second Symphony received a resplendent workout.

Apart from a sliver of nervousness in the scherzo, the whole score progressed inexorably towards its bold, glorious Finale.

In fact, so bold and so glorious that one almost forgave the fact that, earlier in the programme, Living Toys, by the young English composer Thomas Ades, had been replaced by that tired old potboiler Finlandia.