This concert may have taken its title from Schubert's Great C major Symphony, but we didn't have to wait until after the interval to experience monumental music-making from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under Edo
Classical review: NZSO plays Schubert
Koh's encore was a Bach sarabande which unfolded with the naturalness of an improvisation, complete with one inadvertent pizzicato.
After interval maestro de Waart was extremely judicious in observing repeats with Schubert's Great Symphony, meaning that the score's "heavenly length", as fellow composer Schumann later praised it, ran at just over 52 minutes.
This work is a curiosity with its shameless repetitions, brutal alternations of orchestral colours and a slow movement which passes over Adagio profundity for a perky, toe-tapping march.
Yet these factors that disturbed so many in the past now, in 2019, when delivered with the panache we heard, have a defiance and a boldness to them that seem very modern; making Schubert, in his way, just as confrontational and provocative as Salonen in one of the finest concerts of the season.
What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
Reviewer: William Dart