The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra: at the Bruce Mason Centre

By WILLIAM DART

The marketing of the NZSO's Heartland series may have been a few notches above last month's images of the orchestra's bass-player Malcolm Struthers as a gumbooted farmer, but the poster for the Heartland season, with its image of Edward Allen, deserted in a field, horn in hand, did invite a multitude of sometimes hilarious readings.

Allen made it to the Bruce Mason Centre for the final concert tour, as did the rest of his colleagues, giving us a nicely proportioned programme of music that was indeed, in the words of the press release, "full of melody and rich orchestral colour".

Australian conductor Kynan Johns did a little chatting from the podium, starting off, alas, with a slight to poor old Rossini - this was a concert of the "Big 3 plus 1", the one being the Italian composer, we were told.

Once the orchestra's zesty rendition of the Overture to The Italian Girl in Algiers had managed to drown out the belligerent air conditioning, one realised that Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky might not have been ashamed to put their names to this piece.

Mozart's Divertimento K136 was less satisfactory. We were promised "a chamber music feel with width of tone" but the speedometer was uncomfortably in the red during the outer movements, while the Andante was colourless, with none of the grace and subtlety of line it needed.

Cellist Alexander Neustroyev won the Adam International Cello Competition back in 2001 and the young Russian beamed his way through Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme. Apart from one flurried page early on and some strain in the upper register later in the piece, this was a solid and characterful performance. His passionate handling of the same composer's Pezzo capriccioso wrenched the work from the wilting atmosphere of the salon.

The concert ended with Beethoven's First Symphony and it was here the proportions of the orchestra and the intimacy of the venue scored. The second movement seemed to perk up in buoyancy with every entry and the humour of the Finale was infectious - Heartland in every possible interpretation of the word.