Soloist Somi Kim was a star from the start. Photo / JXLive - APO Livestream Partners
Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's Rediscovery concert was something of a curiosity corner.
In her breezy pre-concert talk, conductor Holly Mathieson entertained us with biographical background on lesser-known composers Joseph Bologne and Louise Farrenc. She pointed out the irony of George Gershwin, in his time, being more of an outsider than them in the classical music community.
Yet, on Thursday, his 1925 Concerto was a substantial main course, between their musique minceur.
The life of Bologne, the son of a Guadeloupe slave who became Marie Antoinette's music master, blazed with colour and incident. Yet his First Symphony proved to be a bland affair, certainly compared with what Haydn was writing in the 1770s.
Nevertheless, Mathieson ensured this amuse-bouche bubbled away stylishly, with only its awkwardly composed Andante wanting a mite more lustre in its serenading.
After this, Gershwin's Piano Concerto was a revelation, launched by Mathieson and her orchestra with a gusto that never gave up, revelling in its jazz band whoops, jiving rhythms and banjo-style fiddle strumming.
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Soloist Somi Kim was a star from the start, in a glamorous Trelise Cooper creation, evoking Matariki in a constellation of sequinned stars on diaphanous black.
Kim has already revealed a talent for swinging a tune, playing with NZTrio; this night she ran the gamut from soulful blues and glittering cadenza to hip musical repartee.
Her encore revisited the moody ambience of the slow movement in a languorous Gershwin Prelude.
However sympathetic one feels for Louise Farrenc being sidelined as a woman composer, her 1847 Third Symphony is an alarmingly conservative work, alongside Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, written 17 years earlier.
The charm and easy flow of her chamber music does not transfer to a symphonic context, despite Thursday's engaged and engaging performance.
Echoes of Beethoven's Eroica and wisps of Schubertian modulation passed gracefully by in a score that, for me, only really fired in its spritzig scherzo, spiked with tasty rhythmic tricks.
What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Thursday
