Concert Review: NZ Symphony Orchestra, Auckland Town Hall

Cellist Li-Wei Qin. Photo / Supplied

In April, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Pietari Inkinen treated us to a magisterial Bruckner Seventh and last weekend the Finnish conductor inspired the players in a mighty Mahler Fifth.

Inkinen is known for taking his time and, at 11 minutes, Mahler's Adagietto was certainly the "sehr langsam" stipulated. Every note, from lifeforce surge to the slightest bow-stroke, made its point.

After a spectacular setting off, the dramatic opening movement charted the subtle transformations of that bittersweet march tune. In the second, Inkinen revelled in the muscular, Ivesian mix of the score.

The Scherzo, benefiting from deliberation, saw country dance vying with Straussian waltz - one delicious moment with plucked string band sounded as if it had come straight from the fields - until the Finale swept us irrevocably to its mighty chorale.

On Friday night, Inkinen cast Schoenberg's Transfigured Night as the ultimate soul-searching journey from angst to redemption, drawing intense passions and dark shimmerings from his strings.

Schoenberg's 1937 orchestration of the Brahms G minor Piano Quartet is a strange beast. Sober for the most part, its third movement suddenly shifts to beer-garden oom-pa-pa and the Finale turns to Hungarian rough-and-tumble, fuelled by Shostakovich-style xylophone.

The inspirational Li-Wei Qin rewarded us by searching out the song in Schumann's Cello Concerto. So much so that Schumann's brutal orchestral interjections took on an almost theatrical dimension.

On Saturday, Qin launched Haydn's C major Concerto with gutsy chords and noble melodies. He stole into the orchestral cluster for an Adagio as poignant as any by Mozart, and dealt out Vivaldian bedazzlement in its lighter-than-air finale.

For an encore he brought in principal bass Hiroshi Ikematsu to spread fun and jollity with a Rossini Duo.

Ross Harris's Three Pieces for Orchestra were apt soulmates for most of the weekend's music, each paying tribute to an Austro-German composer connected with cities that the NZSO will visit later this year.

Vienna extended the Mahlerian issue of landler-versus-waltz, catching sometimes colliding forces with ineffable coolness. Schumann was presented in Dusseldorf with the composer's Prophet Bird of Opus 82 fluttering on the harp.

In between, Lucerne offered Wagnerian atmospherics, with bells, mist-evoking strings and Rheingold horns. Headed by Michael Austin's peerless cor anglais and benefiting from no discernible irony, this short piece achieved the same powerful emotional engagement that distinguished Harris's 2006 Second Symphony.