Auckland Philharmonia blends Baroque and modern in Water Music performance

Andrew Beer directs the Auckland Philharmonia in a refined musical conversation. Photo / Adrian Malloch

• The Auckland Philharmonia’s Water Music featured Handel and Michael Tippett, highlighting Andrew Beer’s musical direction.
• Handel’s Water Music was performed with lively horns and timpani, echoing its 1717 premiere.
• Tippett’s Time Past, Time Present, Time Future showcased powerful emotionalism with soaring violins and subtle metre changes.

In his welcoming introduction to the Auckland Philharmonia’s performance of Water Music, concertmaster Andrew Beer was quick to credit Gale Mahood, the orchestra’s director of artistic planning, for the underlying concept of the Philharmonia’s Baroque & Beyond series – putting 17th-century repertoire alongside the contemporary.

The night’s pairing of Handel with Michael Tippett was also a showcase for Beer’s inspired and inspirational musical direction, as well as his colleagues’ palpable enjoyment in undertaking this venture of musical time travelling.

Handel’s iconic Water Music is not so often heard live and, in many respects, this boisterous, rhythmically charged performance may well have echoed the work’s al fresco premiere in 1717, with the composer’s musicians on a barge, floating along the River Thames.

The lustily bucolic horns and Dominic Jacquemard’s forceful timpani would certainly have carried well in London’s fluvial breezes.

In Handel’s more subdued moments, there was admirably lithe and well-sprung ensemble playing; a sprightly woodwind trio was often highlighted against the larger body of strings, as if in a concerto grosso.

The Auckland Philharmonia perform amid grandeur in a luminous Baroque setting. Photo / Adrian Malloch

Taking Handel’s original notes as a starting point, Bede Hanley unfurled a rapturous oboe improvisation in an early Adagio; later, Andrew Beer’s elegant violin, like a 17th-century lark ascending, ushered in the final hoe-down of a hornpipe.

Michael Tippett’s Time Past, Time Present, Time Future consists of the slow movements from his first three string quartets, imaginatively arranged for string orchestra by Peter Manning.

Beer had alerted us that these were contemplative, even sombre in tone, but their rich emotionalism proved mightily powerful.

Was I the only one to be transfixed by the soaring violins and subtle metre changes of the first, the stealthy fugal crescendos of the second or the ethereal textures, with magical strummed cellos, of the third?

These had been placed as punctuations between sets of Handelian robustness – an effective touch that would have been more so had Beer asked the audience to hold its applause until the end, rather than clap “whenever it feels right”.