Concert Preview: APO at Auckland Town Hall

Auckland Philharmonia conductor Eckehard Stier. Photo / Supplied

With last week's titanic Mahler behind him, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's music director Eckehard Stier takes his players across the Atlantic next Thursday. With Bernstein and Gershwin lined up, one might expect a jazz-tinged turn or two, but the evening opens with one of the jazziest of all orchestral works - Milhaud's La Creation du Monde.

Stier shrugs when Milhaud's name comes up. It turns out that he's not among the French composer's undying fans. There are even Milhaud works that he positively dislikes. The popular, hook-laden Le Boeuf sur le Toit, for instance, with its Latin American bubble and bounce, "is just a fun piece for a New Year concert. After 15 minutes, though, I've had enough". But the 1923 Creation, with its crooning saxophones and tongue-in-cheek fugue, has meat on its bones, Stier says. At the other end of the concert is another of the conductor's favourites, Gershwin's An American in Paris. This almost cinematic symphonic poem digs more deeply than its perky car horns might suggest, he points out. "Wait until you get to the big blues - that's where the magic is. Like his opera Porgy and Bess, this is the sort of music that appeals to the most general of concertgoers. And sometimes it should be our business to cater for this part of our audience."

Stier is happy to enthuse over Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Suite, On the Waterfront.

"This is not like the usual Lenny. It's jazzy one moment and then there are these magnificent dramatic outbursts, with touches of the sentimental. Yet it really hangs together; it is what Bernstein describes it as - a symphonic suite."

Stier, who was a young East German student of 17 when Bernstein famously conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on the fall of the Berlin Wall, has some reservations about the man. "This was a great historic event and we were so excited about the new era and its possibilities," he remembers. "However, Bernstein was so old at this point of his career, with none of his earlier fire."

Pointing out how Bernstein changed the word "freude" [joy] to "freiheit" [freedom] in the symphony's choral finale, Stier shakes his head. "It was a typical Lenny promotion act."

There are other Bernstein memories. Stier recalls, as a student, experiencing Bernstein live, conducting the Brahms First. "I was just 16, sitting in front of this great maestro, but he was empty. The old American horsedriver took everything too slow, without life or spirit. My heart was telling me this was a great moment but my brain was telling me that there are better."

For many, Thursday's star turn will be Polish pianist Ewa Kupiec playing Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This may not be jazz but Stier makes a Stateside connection.

Rachmaninov, depressed with the unfavourable reception accorded to his Fourth Piano Concerto, poured his heart out in the 1934 Rhapsody, although Stier would have welcomed "more of the Russian lion who has you crying out 'more, more'. Perhaps this is more of an American piece."

Stier points to the glitter of its orchestral colours and the "kilotons" of notes the pianist has to cope with in the final pages. "But Rachmaninov is very easy to listen to and I get such an emotional charge from this music."


Performance

What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday at 8pm