Aficionados of Russian music may well have experienced their concert of the year last Thursday, when Oleg Caetani conducted the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in a programme of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich.
Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto has a chequered history and it is only in comparatively recent times that we
are guaranteed of hearing it complete, as its composer intended.
While it is more stolid fare musically than its more famous predecessor, its demands on the pianist are unsparing, and John Chen was an appropriately dynamic and almost unerring soloist.
He introduced himself with magnificence and mega-chords, even if his second theme seemed a little cooler in tone than what Caetani had just drawn from the orchestra. When a virtuoso line was called for, as in the final cadenza, Chen responded with torrential brilliance.
The Andante non troppo set off with suggestions of tension, but once Dimitri Atanassov's violin entered, followed by David Garner's equally eloquent cello, it proved a chamber music haven, with Chen showing his sensitivity as the third member of the trio.
The Finale flashed like quicksilver before us, as remarkable for its precision as for glittering keyboard colours that owed as much to Prokofiev as Tchaikovsky.
An encore, Tchaikovsky's Chant Elegiaque, lovingly played, reminded me of Chen's affection for, and prowess in, the music of Liszt.
After interval, Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony proved to be a massive symphonic saga.
Caetani, an acknowledged master with this composer, having recorded the complete symphonies with his Milan orchestra, revealed just how acutely he understands the pacing of the score's drama.
The ominous stillness of the first movement chilled, marred only slightly by some eccentric trumpet tone. The second movement emerged through stabs of swirling dark sound, building up irrevocably to the slaughter of the peasants in page after page of utter terror.
A particularly strong viola section led the subdued, mournful march of the third movement, while in the Finale, the political message of the piece became explicit. Caetani took the orchestra fearlessly into the tumult, the only respite a moment of elegiac reminiscence from Madeline Sakofsky's cor anglais.
