Bach Musica NZ opened its 2026 season with a concert at Auckland Town Hall. Photo / Supplied
Bach Musica NZ opened its 2026 season with a concert at Auckland Town Hall. Photo / Supplied
What: Bach Musica NZ
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Sunday
Reviewer: William Dart
Sunday’s concert was an adventurous launch to Bach Musica NZ’s 2026 season, featuring works that traverse both the centuries and the globe. Bach’s Easter Oratorio tells a familiar story through remarkably dramatic (and non-liturgical) texts, while ReenaEsmail’s 2017 This Love Between Us sees the American composer calling on Baroque and Indian musical forces to create an absorbing prayer for peace.
Taking the podium, Jono Palmer revealed the benefits of his own considerable choral experience, inspiring choristers to tackle Bach with appropriate joyousness and rhythmic buoyancy.
A zesty Sinfonia, with three trumpets blazing, was followed by an Adagio, which lingered in the best baroque tradition. Alison Dunlop stood for her shapely oboe solo, wafting over the delicate sigh of strings.
The programme featured Easter Oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach and This Love Between Us (2017) by Reena Esmail. Photo / Supplied
Four fine soloists – Alanah Jones, Jack Doyle, Iain Tetley and Blake Scanlen – were disappointingly placed behind the orchestra, limiting the impact of those short, punchy recitatives, in which they propel the narrative between them, as Mary Magdalena and two disciples.
Bach’s extensive and demanding arias were given to soloists who knew how to mould and sustain his treacherous lines. They also blended superbly with the instruments in front of them: Jones with the lilting flute of Christine Kim, Tetley against the murmuring recorders of Jessica Shaw and Kevin Kim, while Doyle, a talented young countertenor with remarkable vocal composure, was offset by Dunlop’s oboe d’amore.
After the interval, Esmail’s ambitious 40-minute work opened with a bracing and fervently syncopated salute to Buddhism.
Within a movement, deeper strengths became apparent, as Sikhism was tributed by alto Daljeet Kaur, her forthright and pungent voice enmeshing with the women of the choir – a cross-cultural meeting already encountered in Dunlop’s oboe d’amore and Shalu Garg’s sitar.
Bach Musica NZ. Photo / Supplied
Such comings-together unleashed the considerable power of both the work and its performance, reaching a peak in the fourth movement. Here, Blake Scanlen sang for Zoroastrianism, with consummate ease and suitable non-Western subtlety, against the impressive vocal swell of male choristers and Manjit Singh’s elegant tabla.
There may not be such multicultural stimulation in Auckland Philharmonia’s Midsummer Night’s Dream concert this Thursday, but there are other drawcards. In between Weber and Mendelssohn’s visits to Fairyland, and a premiere from local composer Brigid Ursula Bisley, you can expect some jaunty sparring between pianist Sylvia Jiang and trumpeter Huw Dann in Shostakovich’s spiky first piano concerto.
