Performance: Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Concert Chamber

Review: Tara Werner


The Auckland Chamber Orchestra under musical director Peter Scholes has embarked on a musical travelogue for its International Series 2000, and for this concert on Sunday night it was the turn of Spain.

Most of the scores had a direct link with that country but for others the tie was rather tenuous. However, the thematic concept worked because the music focused clearly on the highly colourful flavours associated with Hispanic culture.

Music by de Falla, Rodrigo and Surinach had in common a strong rhythmic sense combined with pungent harmonies.

The works have an immediacy that makes them attractive and the musicians appeared to thoroughly enjoy themselves.

The group impressed with its sense of ensemble by starting with a taut performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni overture. Apart from slight intonation problems in the strings near the start of de Falla's Three Cornered Hat Suite it was a disciplined performance, the woodwind and brass in particular well coordinated.

Then the two soloists, violinist Lara Hall and harpist Jing Yi highlighted some sensitive musicianship, although as a vehicle for Hall the Sarasate Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs) may have been virtuosic but nonetheless shallow.

The same could be said for her encore by Kreisler.

Rodrigo's bitter-sweet adagio from Concierto de Aranjuez presented Jing Yi with few technical difficulties, although she could have been a little more confident.

Anthony Richie's The Hanging Bulb was totally convincing with its highly emotional sense of despair clearly communicated by the orchestra.

The poignant hint of a child's nursery rhyme in the slow sections as well as the Bartok-like spiky rhythms in the fast parts made this a powerful experience.

In comparison the flamenco suite Ritmo Jondo by Carlos Surinach was an anti-climax because, apart from its novel use of hand clapping by the percussionists, the music was very much a clone of de Falla.