Bach Musica NZ's music director Rita Paczian concluded her 32-year tenure with a final performance showcasing Bach and Handel. Photo / Peter Jennings
Bach Musica NZ's music director Rita Paczian concluded her 32-year tenure with a final performance showcasing Bach and Handel. Photo / Peter Jennings
When I started reviewing for this paper in 2002, Bach Musica NZ was celebrating its quarter-century anniversary, culminating in an appropriately jubilant performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
On Sunday night, another milestone was marked, this being the final appearance of its indefatigable music director Rita Paczian, after 32 years atthe helm.
Under her stewardship, Bach Music NZ has become one of our city’s most treasured cultural resources; it offers employment to musicians, gives audiences live classical music at moderate cost and has built up an enviable catalogue of CDs.
Paczian has extended her repertoire over the years from Rachmaninov’s Vespers to Luis Bacalov’s Tango Mass, but she farewelled us on Sunday with familiar favourites: Bach and Handel at their ceremonial best.
Bach’s Orchestral Suite no 3 laid out some thrilling high baroque splendour, oboes and trumpets spiking the palette in its dashing Overture. The graceful dialogue of strings against David Kelly’s chamber organ in the piece’s well-known Air was followed by three dances of unquenchable ebullience.
After interval, Bach’s Christmas cantata, Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, revisited the same unmitigated joy in its opening chorus, punchy choral cross-rhythms vying with flecks of brilliant orchestral colour.
Four fine soloists then took over, with tenor Iain Tetley unerringly fluent in his shapely aria, while Christie Cook’s rich alto voice illuminated darker images against Alison Dunlop’s effortlessly expressive oboe d’amore.
The four soloists, Iain Tetley (left), Andrew Conley, Christie Cook and Elizabeth Mandeno. Photo / Peter Jennings
If a subsequent duet for Tetley and the highly accomplished Elizabeth Mandeno did not quite uncover the lyrical flow locked into Bach’s complex contrapuntal weave, bass Andrew Conley was in prime form for a more extrovert aria with full orchestral dressing.
Bach was complemented by two of Handel’s coronation anthems.
Paczian skilfully gauged the shifting moods of The King Shall Rejoice, closing with a bevy of Alleluias fit for the crowning of any monarch.
The iconic Zadok the Priest suffered from some orchestral fragility in its inexorable build-up, but the choir’s vociferous entry took the evening to a rousing close.
There is more singing in the town hall on Sunday and Monday with Auckland Choral’s annual Messiah, featuring Samuel Mataele, the teenage Tongan countertenor and prizewinner in this year’s Nicholas Tarling Aria Competition.
