From one extreme to the other

Jaime Martin is putting a tick on his wishlist - pairing up with Swedish cellist Jakob Koranyi.

Jaime Martin is very happy to be making his debut with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and anyone who experienced last Saturday's concert will agree it was one of the highlights of the season. "It's wonderful to work with an orchestra that's willing to play pianissimos very, very soft," the Spanish conductor enthuses. "It's not always easy to get that."

Martin was principal flautist with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields when he first worked with pianist Garrick Ohlsson 20 years ago. Saturday night's Brahms Concerto in Auckland reminded him of just why this man is a top-class pianist. "He can play the most delicate pianissimos and yet, when a weightier sound is needed, it's never aggressive, but big and resonant."

With the news of the recent Parisian horrors coming through just hours before the performance, it was a very special evening.

"During the slow movement of the Brahms I was almost in tears," Martin confesses. "I couldn't stop thinking about what had just happened on the other side of the world and once again life itself made an impact on the way we express ourselves through our art."

As a conductor, Martin favours bold colours and contrasts, an approach influenced by his 12 years playing flute in the Chamber Orchestra of Europe under the charismatic Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

"I learnt such a lot from him. His approach to a composer like Beethoven may not have been to everyone's taste, but he was always so determined to find something different and unique in the music. Harnoncourt felt that extremes should be completely extreme. Loud passages were not just a dynamic enhancement; he wanted the feeling of terror, of provocation. He thought that you needed to explore these extremes to find the things that lie in-between."

Working under Italian maestro Claudio Abbado was a different experience. "He always aimed for a completely different sound, elegant and poetic. When Abbado did the Schubert Ninth with us, in a year when we had already played it with another conductor, we sounded like a completely different orchestra. This has always fascinated me. I've always wanted to explore the specific input of different conductors into the actual sound of the orchestra."

This Friday, Martin and the orchestra return for the NZSO's final visit, with music by Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky and William Walton. "It would be hard to imagine two more contrasting works than The Lark Ascending and The Rite of Spring," he says. "The Vaughan Williams was composed in 1914, just a year after the Stravinsky, even if it sounds like it was written 100 years before."

However, Martin is quick to remind me that the Williams piece "is in fact a very poetic meditation on a poem by George Meredith that no one remembers".

The Rite of Spring cannot be anything but "a supreme event, with 109 musicians bringing this amazingly complex score to life".

Yet he is not so sure whether the Stravinsky ballet is quite the "revolutionary piece that launched a new style of music". "Stravinsky completely changed his style right after composing it. It was almost like a mighty explosion that could not go anywhere."

Martin looks forward to pairing up with the Swedish cellist Jakob Koranyi in the Walton Concerto, a score "the composer felt was his very best, even if the Viola Concerto is more popular".

The young Koranyi has been on his "wishlist" for some time and he is hoping for "one of those magic experiences, like last week's Brahms, when everything comes together and we create a very special musical truth".