Performance: Auckland Philharmonia

Town Hall

Reviewer: Heath Lees


Not many people have heard of Arturo Marquez, the Mexican composer whose music opened this Royal SunAlliance concert, and whose greatest gift seems to be in transposing lots of foot-tapping, hip-swaying Latin-American dance music on to the symphony orchestra.

His Danzon No. 2 (the follow-up to an earlier hit Danzon No.1?) was patchy but bouncy and tuneful, which was nice.

After the interval, the conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya asked us whether we had liked the work, like a host asking whether we had enjoyed the soup.

We politely said yes,thank you, but had no idea that we'd get the piece all over again at the end as an encore - and neither did the players, who had to scurry around for the music and try to re-capture, at short notice, some of the opening excitement.

Extending a meal with re-heated soup is not a good idea, but Harth-Bedoya was probably trying to make up for the brief and somewhat bland fare of Prokofiev's Seventh Symphony, the composer's last work in the genre, full of graceful influences from the ballet, but bearing little that is original or challenging - hardly meat enough for a complete second half.

So the concert's main course turned out to be Ravel's marvellous Piano Concerto in G. Here the soloist Deidre Irons decided to dispense with the usual, edgy brilliance in favour of an understated but nevertheless Romantic warmth, which worked well at the start.

Regrettably, the second movement gradually lost its calm centre of gravity, with some insecure intonation and pedestrian solos from the lower woodwinds, often at crucial moments.

Still, the final, helter-skelter energy of the third movement was buoyant, and carried all before it into an exciting ending.