The Tower New Zealand Youth Choir : St Joseph's Parish Church, Otahuhu

By WILLIAM DART

It was a bracingly dramatic opener. The Tower New Zealand Youth Choir, after surrounding the audience on three sides, let forth with Antonio Lotti's Crucifixus. The Italian composer's dissonances piled thrillingly on top of one another; we were willingly captured and captivated.

Conductor Karen Grylls has an ace team in these 64 choristers, who cover the country from Bluff to the Bay of Islands, and there were many similar moments when youthful lungs revelled in the sound they could make. At the end of the evening, Richard Puanaki's Ka Waiata ki a Maria was even more spectacularly presented "in the round".

One can hear the intense bonding of this group in the music they make. The men, so often a choral liability, were gloriously irrepressible in O Magnum Mysterium by the Basque composer Javier Busto, which did indeed, as Grylls had warned us, turn into "a jolly good party when the alleluias come".

On their own, the men made robust, soaring glees of three numbers from Elgar's Songs from the Greek Anthology. And, if Elgar remained very much rooted in his period, Praetorius' Ecce Mari, conducted by James Tibbles, seemed more volatile. This was so persuasively sung by the women that at times it seemed to jump forward from the 17th to the 20th century, hinting at more exotic styles to come.

This was a concert with an international focus, reaching a peak in Einojuhani Rautavaara's Suite de Lorca. Here Grylls and her choir drew on the full battery of expressive effects to illuminate Lorca's dark Spanish visions, from sliding wails and jagged, urgent textures to whispering sibilants, and were utterly convincing throughout.

The local composer was not ignored either with David Child's elegant Salve Regina and Anna Griffiths' evocative setting of James K. Baxter's Naseby. Griffiths' piece received critical kudos on the choir's 2001 American tour, and was particularly bewitching in its closing lines when pinpoint solos emerged from the choral textures.

On the lighter side, some folk-song arrangements were pretty ho-hum, although Bob Chilcott's slick take on Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen was redeemed by tenor Albert Mata'afa's soulful performance.