Performance: Just a smidge too Farr

New Zealand Chamber Orchestra

Town Hall

Review: Tara Werner


Has Gareth gone too Farr? This concert must surely win a host of Oscars for being the strangest in the classical scene for quite some time, with the composer in danger of upstaging his own scores.

Dressed in a sizzling silver lame top and slinky black pants the Warrior Queen from Pluto strode onto the stage with members of her Queendom - four of the planet's best percussive players.

Accompanied by the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra these amazons tackled the world premiere of Warriors from Pluto in perfect coordination.

Never mind that the music sounded exactly like an extremely bad-taste 1950s television score depicting outer space. Nor did it matter that it didn't seem to be going anywhere, despite its clear three-part structure. Zena's glamorous lookalike was having a ball with members of her high-energy percussion group Strike. And later the encore saw the composer (aka Lilith) mincing onto the stage in magnificent Carmen red with castanets stitched conveniently onto her chest.

All these goings-on made the rest of the programme seem rather tame, really.

The New Zealand Chamber Orchestra tried valiantly, but struggled with some equally unreal repertoire, playing a long-winded arrangement of Carmen by the Russian composer Shchedrin.

The same could be said for a string arrangement of Piazzolla's Four for Tango, which should have been left as the composer intended - for a string quartet.

Given that the soloists Strike and Gareth Farr are percussionists, it was the rhythmic element that dominated. Farr's opening work, Volume Pig, lived up to its name of being music of an unusually loud nature. Japanese influences were obvious, with due deference paid to taiko drumming, with Strike in careful synchronicity.

But in among all the noise the real find turned out to be David Downes' innovative Painting with Breath, using six long bamboo stakes to create a sensitive sound-world accompanied by increasingly hard human breathing.

It almost achieved the impossible - upstaging Lilith herself by its quiet originality.