Quintets at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

If there were any justice in the world, there would have been scalpers outside the Town Hall on Sunday for this concert, offering pianist David Guerin and four wind colleagues in chamber works by Mozart and Beethoven, with Lilburn's Wind Quintet as a centrepiece.

This event deserved more than a half-filled concert chamber. After the problems of the projected 2003 Auckland Festival, it is distressing to see a musical initiative such as this not attracting more people.

It reflects on us as a city. More specifically, I ask myself, where are the many enthusiastic woodwind players who should have been lined up to hear such a programme, or the local music aficionados eager for the chance to hear the Lilburn?

But enough griping; those who came were magnificently rewarded.

Mozart felt, after its first performance, that his E flat Quintet of K 452 was the best thing he had written, and the Auckland musicians treated it as such. The beautifully honed ensemble balanced mock ceremony and pearly cascades of scales around Guerin's limpid piano playing.

Mozart's affection for the work must have remained, as the theme of the Larghetto is close to that of the first movement of the later Clarinet Concerto.

Beethoven's Opus 16 offered more technical challenges and all the players made their presence felt, right from the imposing slow introduction. Particularly memorable was Jennifer Hsu, whose short horn solo in the Andante was an impressive bloom.

Flautist Elizabeth Farrell joined the group for Lilburn's 1957 Wind Quintet, a work far from being as harsh or didactic as a rather confusing programme implied it was.

A smidgen of nervous articulation marred the opening pages, but otherwise the Allegro was a bracing, plein-air adventure.

A rather testy dialogue between Peter Scholes and Martin Lee opened the Andante, its feisty spirit filtering through to the other players, and the Quintet ended with a dancing Allegro featuring some rhythmic turns that would not have been amiss in a rumba.

There was no encore, but after interval, Scholes and Guerin delivered a masterly performance of John Elmsly's Dialogue 2, an appropriate and welcome offering in the wake of the Lilburn.