Classical review: NZSO, Auckland Town Hall

Anthony Marwood has had a long association with Britten's Violin Concerto.

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's pairing of Britten and Sibelius in Friday's Into the Storm concert was an astute piece of programming.

In fact, the storm started with a moving tribute to the recently deceased Jack Body, as rushing strings and snapping bass lines caught passion's terrifying grip in the fifth of the New Zealand composer's Michelangelo Meditations.

Danish conductor Thomas Sondergard then infused Britten's Four Sea Interludes with such drama that one could well imagine the opera Peter Grimes staged around them.

On the podium, this Dane is a dynamo, one moment drawing the resonance from a tamtam with outstretched arms and then hurling a chord cue at the cellos the next.

One enjoyed the orchestral weight of the NZSO at its most magnificent, without any sacrifice of line or nuance, particularly in the great string sobbings of the Moonlight movement.

Anthony Marwood has had a long association with Britten's Violin Concerto. We were taken on the journey that the English violinist had promised just last week, when he described the composer's Spanish colourings graduating from genial to militaristic, working through to a last scream of protest from the soloist.

Marwood brought his own sinewy poetry to this anti-war music, written in 1939. With support from the orchestra under Sondergard, shifting emotions coursed through the piece, sometimes fluctuating from page to page and, in the cadenza, within a few lines.

Sondergard's new CD of Sibelius' Second Symphony may have garnered mixed press but on Friday night, his blistering account of the work needed no apologies.

The all-important detail of the opening allegretto was carefully worked through, from powerhouse pizzicato to primal brass fanfares.

Sondergard's flexibility in the andante invested it with a gestural sweep, with the hints of Tchaikovsky in its low woodwind and string writing blooming in the following vivacissimo.

Some years ago I commented on the ability of this work's popular finale to jolt the complacent listener. On this night there were times when the Richter scale could have been invoked.