All the excitement of a 'grand finale'

Baldur Bronnimann. Photo / Supplied

Conductor Baldur Bronnimann has come to be a familiar and valued presence in front of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. This week, between his two APO concerts, he has been taking a new conducting development workshop with five young Australians - a scheme which, next year, will see New Zealanders crossing the Tasman to train with Australian orchestras.

The man certainly gets around, with a schedule this year that has taken him from Stockholm and Seoul to Hobart and London, where he recently conducted Ligeti's extraordinary opera, Le Grand Macabre, "one of the best operas written in the last 50 years, a compendium of all Ligeti's styles, with all those grotesque elements used to theatrical effect."

The production, by the Catalan theatre troupe, La Fura dels Baus, which incidentally is one of the top attractions at next year's Adelaide Festival, was "crazy, but not in an intellectual way. It was just completely over the top and totally in keeping with the spirit of the work."

Another career move for Bronnimann has been his new Musical Directorship of the Colombian National Symphony Orchestra. He will spend 15 weeks in Bogota next year and has been moved by the way the Colombians are using culture to get beyond their past.

"They have such a violent history as a country but there is a real hunger for culture and music. Music is not just entertainment; it serves a social purpose. The players have an average age of 32 and bring something to their music that we've lost a little bit in Europe," Bronnimann reflects.

"They simply can't sit still when they're playing Beethoven; they feel this music as they would if they were in a salsa band.

"People come up after the concert and sometimes they're crying. They don't only clap between movements, they might applaud a solo in the middle. That's nice. They really live with it.

"The European classical music scene is somehow a little bit sanitised and it wasn't always so. When you read about audience reactions in the 19th century, you can see they were far more directly affected by the music."

There was certainly a palpable sense of excitement in our own town hall 10 days ago, when Bronnimann led the APO through Berlioz' Harold in Italy, with two of the movements receiving enthusiastic applause.

The conductor says next Thursday's concert will be just as spectacular. He is thrilled to be presenting Weber's First Clarinet Concerto, with English soloist Michael Collins. Bronnimann, who trained as a clarinettist, used to play this concerto himself. "It plays to Weber's strengths as composer because he had a real feeling for the instrument. He was able to create moods with it, as he did in his operas Der Freischutz and Oberon and it appealed to his experimental side, as the clarinet was fairly uncharted territory at the time."

Bronnimann also defends Respighi's The Pines of Rome against those who might dismiss the Italian composer as a perpetrator of picture-postcard music.

"Some of his music tried too hard," the conductor admits, "but this one comes from the heart. There's also a certain naive, childlike quality behind the best Respighi. A lot of his pieces have children's scenes or something about children in them. In The Pines of Rome there are the children playing in the first movement."

With a programme that also includes the Suite from Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges ("Prokofiev at his best," according to Bronnimann) and the first sequence of Waltzes from Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, Thursday's concert would seem to deserve its "Grand Finale" title.

The good news, though, is that this is not quite the last APO concert for the year, with Last Night at the Proms and the annual Christmas concert still to come - and the dynamic Bronnimann will be returning for next year's season.