Toru Takemitsu's Dreamtime, spinning its predictable magic courtesy of Debussy and Ravel, was a showpiece for the orchestra. Mathieson fulfilled her promise in her short podium address to deliver music that would show just what our dreams do to time, logic and space.
The lush soundworld of this piece, with its swooning banks of strings, was a far cry from the more tense and nervy terrain of Dorothy Ker's The Third Dream.
Portraying the dreams of Earth itself, remembering its primordial past, the New Zealand composer calls on a sharper spectrum of colours; volcanic climaxes, making the most of the orchestra's percussion section, rumbled alongside intricate detailing, and a fine mesh of texture and tint.
Although I'm not sure that the narrative of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique quite warrants Mathieson's description of it as "very silly, slightly strange and at times a little bit creepy", she unleashed just the virtuoso performance this iconic score demands.
Having experienced two contemporary works in the first half of the concert, one could imagine how radical Berlioz must have sounded in 1830 and Mathieson was a particularly skilful guide through the discursive 15 minutes of its first movement.
And so we followed the work's Byronic hero (or perhaps anti-hero) from glittering ballroom and bleak countryside to the guillotine and, finally, Hell itself, where Mathieson and her players took great pleasure in conjuring up fire, damnation and demons aplenty.
What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
Where: Auckland Town Hall.
When: Thursday.
