Gourlay and the orchestra held nothing back in eight colourful extracts from Khachaturian's ballet Gayaneh; the Sabre Dance was a slashing success and the conductor presented the bonus of a tumultuous Gopak to inspire, as he put it, our "post-concert festivities".
In 2015, however, to those who know the music of Schnittke and Gubaidulina, the poster-paint splash of Khachaturian seems exotic more as a relic of the garish "populism" fostered by a fascist state.
The towering Australian William Barton, walking from aisle to stage playing his didgeridoo, could not avoid being exotic; yet the work for which he was engaged, Peter Sculthorpe's Earth Cry, deals with universal issues of cultural identity and environmental wellbeing.
Barton layered an eloquent cloak of sound over and around Sculthorpe's often raw utterances; this was bicultural osmosis on the highest level.
His own Bird Song at Dusk, pitting Barton's voice and instrument against a quartet of strings, was a moving encore.
How bracing it was once more to hear Jack Body's Melodies, written in 1983 to celebrate the centenary of the University of Auckland.
The unfettered vitality of this score is typical of the magpie-like composer, gleefully searching out the exotic, in a treasure-hunt that would take him from the streets of Indonesia to the lounge music of Bert Kaempfert.
This was high voltage music-making, from Andrew Beer and Xin Jin's duelling Aegean violins and the woodwind lumiosities of West Sumatra to an exhilarating if slightly brash Bollywood finale.
What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Thursday, August 27
