The American Connexion at the Auckland University Music Theatre

By WILLIAM DART

It's always a pleasure to feel a firm curatorial hand behind a programme, something that was much in evidence during this Karlheinz Company concert.

Annea Lockwood's Red Mesa tuned our ears for what was to follow. Pianist Andrew Cochrane released the poetry from gentle reiterated nuances, finding a new song in the timbre of finger-stopped strings and waxing rhapsodically on the keyboard when the score sanctioned it.

The landforms evoked may come from the other side of the Pacific, but Lockwood's reverence for them is something with which most New Zealanders can identity.

Last year Juliet Palmer supplied the wacky soundtrack for Douglas Wright's Inland and the Karlheinz Company gave us her 1995 boneflower. The curious mix of sounds - vibes, accordion, viola, bass clarinet and timpani complementing the soaring soprano of Woo Young Choi - proved the score's strength, thanks to Anthony Young's able conducting.

Phil Dadson took us to interval with his nundrum, a sculptural sound kit built around a modified bass drum. Working solo, without his From Scratch colleagues, Dadson is endlessly resourceful, at one point delegating to a hand-fan the task of keeping up a riff, while he created a wibbly-wobbly toccata on his spiky drum.

After interval, the concert was dominated by American pianist Thomas Hecht, whose two contributions were separated by Andrew Uren's virtuoso rendering of Donald Martino's Strata.

Introducing the music in that friendly, beckoning way that Americans seem to have a patent on, Hecht gave us Copland's 1941 Piano Sonata, acknowledging the great William Kapell and, with a twinkle in his eye, describing its slow movement as "rough tough American guys dancing in ballet slippers".

It was a knockout performance. In the first movement, Hecht's very physical approach rendered human what can too easily become dry and stoic. Later on, his ploy was to let the spaces speak, especially in the utter simplicity of the final movement, and they did so eloquently.

New Zealander Ross Harris wrote Chant for Hecht. It was the perfect envoi, moving from athletic scurries and Coplandish chords to a point of resolution where pianissimo major and minor chords broke through the violent skirmishes.