New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

"Sorcery, Sensuality and Subversion" was the NZSO's salespitch for the orchestra's latest visit, a tantalising combination if ever there was.

In fact, there was sorcery and subversion in Mussorgsky's Night on the Bare Mountain, especially when Rimsky-Korsakov's laundered version of the score was chosen. It may have been a shivering display of orchestral witchery, but this is tame stuff alongside Mussorgsky's original.

The real subversion was to come with the orchestra's towering performance of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony.

This is the War and Peace of symphonies, cinematic in its scope. After the chilling anticipation of its first movement is the brutal and sustained violence of the second.

Following on from the Mahlerian contemplation of the third, with just a touch of Tchaikovskian waltz in its veins, is that mighty Finale, so tumultuous that, under Yoel Levi's baton, you could almost feel the heels of jackboots in the physical attack of bows on strings.

From tremulous brass fanfares and implacable strings to that final wall of percussion, not overlooking Rixon Thomas' poignant cor anglais solo, this must go down as one of the great orchestral performances of the season, if not the decade.

But where was the evening's sensuality? Surely not in Mendelssohn's G minor Piano Concerto, flitting away without a sensual thought in its tizzy head, as soloist Diedre Irons seemed more determined than ever to make a serious piece of it.

Mozart's Haffner Symphony opened Saturday's concert. It was beautifully paced and tailored by Levi, with welcome touches of humour, particularly in its first movement.

Stephen Kovacevich also brought fresh revelations in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto.

The pianist's celebrated precision creates the shapeliest of lines, with a sense of playfulness; Kovacevich has a way of leaning into the mood swings of the first movement that is sometimes almost flirtatious.

The simplest chord progressions are measured and meted out with the care of a musical apothecary, just as Levi unerringly finds the precise tone for the melodic wisps that are passed around the orchestra. By the end of the bracing Finale, we had experienced a rare coming together of masters.

After the unexpected few minutes of Ibert's Homage to Mozart, accurately described by Levi as a French dessert, we had our solid German main with Schumann's Spring Symphony.

There was more lightness and air in Schumann's first movement than I have ever heard in the concert hall and the expressive waves of melody in the Larghetto would have had the composer's alter ego, Eusebius, writhing in pleasure.

Levi, an expert in the romantic repertoire, knows how to shape phrases like few others do. Indeed, perhaps this was the sensuality that had been promised all along.