I was in a state of high anticipation for the Enduring Spirit concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. The Friday broadcast of the programme from Wellington featured conductor Donald Runnicles telling the audience that theywould be hearing works of deep and personal communication and not just great composers writing great music.
And so it was, from the first few bars of Aaron Jay Kernis’ 1990 Musica Celestis, in which the orchestra’s strings luxuriated in the American’s sumptuous textures and harmonies. Here was a composer not afraid of radiant major chords to evoke a choir of singing angels, even if passing flecks of dissonance hinted at some darkness on the margins.
Ernest Bloch’s 1916 Schelomo is a cello concerto in all but name, 20 minutes in which the composer salutes his Jewish heritage. Nicolas Altstaedt was an exceptional soloist here, his eloquent cadenzas shifting almost within a bow-stroke from the beseechingly melancholic to deeply passionate.
The orchestra, under Runnicles, clearly enjoyed Bloch’s vivid palette in an idiom that, while nodding to Richard Strauss and Debussy, preserves its own individuality.
Encore time was very special. On his last visit, Altstaedt enlisted an orchestral player to duet with him; tonight, cellist Pei-Jee Ng joined him in a fluttering butterfly of an Adagio by the 18th-century French composer, Jean-Baptiste Barriere.
Runnicles is known for his visionary interpretations of monumental Wagner and Richard Strauss and so, when he hailed Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony as the Russian’s finest, one expected the earth to move.
And it did, almost sonically choreographed through the ebb and flow of the long opening movement, evoking the Stalinist oppression from which the composer had suffered.
The savagely satirical and rumbustious second movement had Runnicles leaping on his podium a few times. However, the closing Allegro suggested a hard-earned optimism, after a thought-provoking third movement that revealed edgy times in Soviet Russia, scored in bittersweet waltz time.
