Review: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Bold Worlds

The programme for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Bold Worlds concert promised "orchestral music stretched in exciting new ways". Photo / Mable Wong

The programme for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Bold Worlds concert promised "orchestral music stretched in exciting new ways".

Stretched it certainly was, but not always in exciting new ways.

The bracing tingle of dissonance launching Jimmy Lopez's Peru Negro was promising, but all too soon the piece diffused into a 16-minute flashy showpiece.

Much bolder and more engrossing music can be found in the 14'45" of the NZSO's most recent recording of Douglas Lilburn's 1961 Third Symphony.

The centrepiece in Friday's international selection was a 40-minute Clarinet Concerto by the Finn, Kimmo Hakola, delivered by countryman Kari Kriikku, one of the stars of this orchestra's 2012 season.

Hakola likes sprawling narratives and bucolic humour, with an output ranging from a cartoon opera to an oratorio inspired by the arthouse cinema of Tarkovsky.

This 2001 concerto was a postmodernist grab-bag. Kriikku was a stunningly virtuosic soloist, diverting the audience with some gung-ho dancing and a finger-wagging admonishment to us to be patient while he turned the page during a hellfire cadenza.

The finale, a frenzied klezmer hoedown, almost set the audience alight, but the real substance for me had come in the second movement. Here, "hidden songs", described by Hakola as having been "left to mature in the cellars of the mind", were laid out in tantalisingly unpredictable harmonic settings, justifying the quiet irony of the composer's directive - adagio amoroso.

After interval, conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya had the chance to reveal the focus and precision he brought to the NZSO's 2014 premiere of Golijov's opera Ainadamar.

One could question why Lutoslawski's 1954 Concerto for Orchestra might be considered bold by today's concertgoers.

Nevertheless, Harth-Bedoya and his players dazzled us throughout the score's crisp 29 minutes, from the menace of its opening drums 'n' strings to that final burst of post-Bartokian splendour.

This performance alone is well worth checking out in RNZ Concert's broadcast of the event on Friday, Nov-ember 20, as part of its Sound Lounge.

What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Friday, November 6