Time for a spring clean

By WILLIAM DART


I've always admired the diversity of the music-making that happens outside the Auckland Philharmonia's main Vero series.

These people have never ceased to search out ways to embrace their audience and root out potential punters. Some events, like Baby Proms and the Kiwi Kapers school concerts have very focused audiences, and the Telecom Pop series, featuring class acts like Natalie Cole and Goldenhorse, tempts ticket-buyers from as far away as Sydney.

Other events, such as the regular workshops for composers and conductors, are more in-house affairs, although a recent composers' workshop had the best attendance I've ever experienced at such an event and we were rewarded with an instalment from a symphony for turntablist and orchestra by young Hamilton composer Jeremy Mayall.

Last week I found the orchestra's music director, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, immersed in a conductors' workshop, giving critiques of two would-be Toscaninis who had been asked to negotiate the rhythmic tangles of Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale.

"It's not only the young conductors who are learning," Harth-Bedoya says. "The orchestra is as well."

The AP is in full rehearsal at the moment for the first concert of its spring season, with works from Europe.

With the Italian instalment coming up on Friday, Harth-Bedoya says: "If we had to choose an Italian concerto it had to be something with voice." Hence a concert performance of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. The conductor is proud of "the added element of a narrative to take you through it. It almost becomes as if you were listening to a radio show".

Casting is ideal, with Simon O'Neill as Canio, Deborah Wai Kapohe as Nedda and two Americans - Blake Davidson and Brian Mulligan - filling out the roster. Harth-Bedoya says everyone is singing their roles for first time, "which always brings good dynamics to a cast".

At the other end of the season a Russian night has John Chen playing Prokofiev Piano Concerto No 1, which is custom-made for a young virtuoso, Harth-Bedoya says. "Prokofiev wrote it for a piano competition when he was still at the conservatory."

The other curiosity on the Russian night is the first arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition by a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, Michael Touschmaloff.

The middle concert of the three is problematic. Along with a Walton march, some short pieces by Elgar, and Vaughan Williams' A Lark Ascending, with Eugene Lee as soloist, we have a rehash of Holst's The Planets, in which a couple of the heavenly bodies seem to drifted into a black hole.

When I ask Harth-Bedoya what has been left out, the first response is, "Oh gosh, I can't remember."

One by one, he works through the movements we will hear, carefully rounding off the list with Uranus.

This Readers' Digest Holst will sign off in a mood of enforced jollity with the Jupiter movement - Saturn and Neptune have been relegated to another universe.

Logistics, timing and budget are among the explanations Harth-Bedoya offers for the omission of Neptune, with its female chorus, but Saturn seems to have been conscripted to keep the banished planet company.

"If you take one out it is even worse," Harth-Bedoya says. "You might as well balance it differently and take out two."

I remain unconvinced and, when the interview is over, I look through the AP 2005 programme hoping that all the symphonies and concertos have their movements complete and accounted for.

Performance

What: Auckland Philharmonia

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Friday 8pm