On Thursday, the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's The Age of Chivalry concert offered the chance to sink into some of the lushest music ever written.
With 88 musicians on the stage, playing Wagner, Rachmaninov and Richard Strauss, the late romantic
spirit was alive, well and positively throbbing with life
on the stage of the Town Hall.
Wagner's Prelude to Die Meistersinger had a suitably chivalric sweep to it. Conductor Marko Letonja let the brass provide an imposing framework for the grander moments, the strings yearned espressivo when asked to do so, and the woodwind excelled in their moment of chirpy satire.
Rachmaninov's The Isle of the Dead is hardly run-of-the-mill concert fare, but one of the APO's strengths has always been searching out the unfamiliar.
Letonja acknowledged the veiled mysteries from which the music emerges and eventually retreats back to, perfectly gauging the intensity as other orchestral colours penetrate through the almost minimalist patternings.
But, when passion was called for in the central section, the music fairly pulsated with it.
Strauss' Don Quixote can be an overpowering experience, such is the concentration of this 40-minute score. Letonja had an enviable grasp of its sprawling form, holding back nothing for the bigger splashes of the Straussian palette but attending to every detail in its more lightly scored moments.
Certainly, the opening bars were exquisitely turned, with two strands of violins in perfect harmony.
Exposed moments such as the violas' first entry were rare.
Letonja did not shirk at the picture-postcard stuff, from the baas of the sheep to a ride on an airborne steed that almost had one clutching the arms of the seat.
However, he also had a keen ear for the many subtle dialogues than inform the score, especially those between the deluded knight and his jog-trotting servant.
English cellist Richard Harwood was a first-rate soloist, sometimes working hard to come through the orchestral surroundings, but revealing a rare poetry in moments like the final variation.
And he was in fine company with violinist Dimitri Atanassov and violist Robert Ashworth, whose bustling rusticity in Variation 3 would have brought a smile to the face of its composer.
REVIEW
What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
Reviewer: William Dart
