Brahms Double Concerto shines in Auckland Philharmonia’s Best of Brahms - William Dart

Auckland Philharmonia fills the Town Hall for their 2026 Classics series. Photo / Sav Schulman

Six years ago, Auckland Philharmonia’s music director Giordano Bellincampi explained to me that the music of Brahms was essential in the development of an orchestra’s core sound.

Since then, the composer has received many memorable performances from the AP and its indefatigable maestro. Who could forget 2020’s Symphony No.2, with its effortless play of grace and joy, or last year’s Violin Concerto, in which the radiance of Canadian soloist James Ehnes was set against an orchestral glow true to its composer?

Now, Best of Brahms has launched the AP’s 2026 Classics series with the composer’s irrepressibly jolly Academic Festival Overture.

Giordano Bellincampi leads Auckland Philharmonia in Best of Brahms. Photo / Sav Schulman

This medley of student songs is fetchingly laced with the composer’s subtlest rhythmic and orchestral touches; stirring brass chorales and sprightly woodwind goings-on sit alongside soaring string lines that might have slipped from a Brahms symphony.

Predictably, the final Gaudeamus Igitur was a sonic spectacular.

My two previous Auckland encounters with Brahms’ Double Concerto were performances by husband-and-wife teams. This latest was centred around a close collegial relationship, with AP concertmaster Andrew Beer and principal cello Ashley Brown giving their considerable all to the personal and emotional richness of the composer’s final orchestral work.

Andrew Beer and Ashley Brown perform the Brahms Double Concerto. Photo / Sav Schulman

The two men were a remarkably engaged duo, as the ever-alert Bellincampi seemingly sculpted the orchestra around them. Brown made his entrance dramatically, with lingering rubato; Beer seemed to emerge more mysteriously from the background, with shapely Viennese sighs.

The romantic sweep of the central Andante was irresistible, the soloists’ dialogue delivering the intimacy of chamber music, with details only occasionally compromised by the scale of the venue.

The two men’s encore was pure and calculated charm school – Brahms’ Lullaby magically transformed into satiny nocturne.

After the interval, Brahms’ Symphony No.4 saw Bellincampi brilliantly sustaining symphonic momentum and logic through the first movement’s many shifts of mood. In the Andante moderato that followed, textural complexities dissolved into the purest lyricism with commendable naturalness.

The work’s monumental finale inexorably pursued the triumphal around a delicate interlude, illuminated by Melanie Lancon’s espressivo flute.

This Thursday, Auckland Philharmonia and Giordano Bellincampi return in a concert titled Mendelssohn & Dvorak, with New Zealand composer Maria Grenfell’s Hinemoa as a local starter.