Review: ACO in Blue at Auckland Town Hall Concert Chamber

The title was right on target. And doubtless it was the jazz-tinged musical menu of Auckland Chamber Orchestra's ACO in Blue concert that drew a larger-than-usual audience to the concert chamber.

First up, Leonard Bernstein's Prelude, Fugue and Riffs positively sizzled, stirred along by conductor Peter Scholes on solo clarinet. Half the stage was packed with the gleaming ranks of a jazz band for a rowdy, bluesy feast.

Bernstein pitches his score halfway between Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale and a yet unwritten West Side Story. Its central section revealed unexpected talents, suggesting that pianist Sarah Watkins might have cut a pretty wild rug with Count Basie and his band.

Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto is less overtly jazz-driven and, on this occasion, not as precisely chiselled as it might have been. However, by the third movement, there was an eruption of boisterousness, with trombones uproariously sliding around behind the unperturbed reeds.

Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue came not with orchestral overload but in the original 1924 arrangement first heard at Paul Whiteman's historic Aeolian Hall concert. A small band of violins added the sort of trimmings that went along with Whiteman's desire to make a lady out of jazz, but Paul McIver's resolute banjo reminded us of its plantation roots.

Called to action by the magnificent wail of Donald Nicholls' clarinet, the musicians let loose in the best of all possible ways. In the midst, piano man Read Gainsford's stylings made Oscar Levant's description of the work as a "febrile tornado" seem an understatement.

After interval, the musicians were crammed around two Steinways for John Adams' Grand Pianola Music. Scholes made quite a road-trip of it, ranging from delicacies worthy of Debussy to the no-holds-barred hyperventilated Finale that the composer has described as "a smirking truant with a dirty face, in need of a severe spanking".

Scholes and his band invested it all with the almost physical sweep of California's Interstate Route 5 where the work found its initial inspiration.

What a shame that Gainsford's solo recital, two nights later, in the Raye Freedman Arts Centre, did not attract as many as it should have, for the Florida-based pianist is an exceptional musician, extremely skilled in the art of communication.

Gainsford opened with an enticing bracket of water pieces, flowing effortlessly from Wasserklavier, Luciano Berio's nostalgic cocktail of Schubert and Brahms to the dancing fountains of Ravel's Jeux d'eaux.

We were provided with just the right amount of navigational mapping, along with illustrations from the keyboard, to stay firmly on route for his magisterial account of Liszt's B minor Sonata.

Shostakovich's pretty, unpretentious Dances of the Dolls left virtuoso roars well behind while a pair of flamboyant and expertly-delivered Sonatas, two centuries apart, had C.P.E. Bach's muscular flourishes outshining the toccata tactics of contemporary Australian Carl Vine.

After all this, the yearning romanticism of Scriabin's first C sharp minor Prelude was the perfect encore.