Performance: Auckland Philharmonia (September 2)

Bruce Mason Centre

Review: Tara Werner

As Raymond Hawthorne said so mellifluously in his reading from the prologue of Romeo and Juliet, the play runs "two hours' traffick of our stage."

In comparison, this final Band and the Bard concert only contained roughly 63 minutes of music.

No wonder the audience felt short-changed on Saturday night.

Yet the idea of mixing words with music is an excellent one, especially when presented as convincingly as Hawthorne's all-too-brief introduction.

Ironically, his original reading had little to do with setting the scene for Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, being Mercutio's fanciful speech beginning "O! then, I see, Queen Mab hath been with you."

By nipping in the prologue beforehand, the actor provided a more relevant preface to Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture.

Still, some of the musicians must have felt they were playing in a living nightmare straight from Queen Mab's nocturnal reveries during the programme.

Members of the woodwind in particular seemed to be having an off night. A note breaking in the clarinet's opening theme in Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia nearly ruined the atmosphere of that work entirely.

Fortunately equilibrium was achieved, and the strength of the composer's superb orchestration soon revealed itself.

Likewise, Tchaikovsky's dramatic musical interpretation of Romeo and Juliet's tragic love affair was threatened by some suspect intonation in the woodwind section.

Conductor Vladimir Verbitsky may have tried his hardest but despite all the hiss and fire, this was not exactly the orchestra's best effort.

Fortunately, the two works beforehand contained the most satisfying playing in an otherwise highly variable performance.

Schubert's youthful (some would say precocious) Symphony No 1 may have been a Haydn and Mozart clone, with a bit of early Beethoven thrown in for good measure, but it was played well and with zest.

And Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Flutes and Strings RV533 saw sisters-in law Christine Mori and Jennifer Seddon-Mori play with equal mellowness, the music's light and shade given careful consideration through contrasting dynamics.