Emmanuel Joel-Hornack was a major catalyst in the success of NBR New Zealand Opera's Faust last year. Little surprise then that on Thursday, with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, the French conductor brought a welcome dash of Gallic style to the evening.
Satie's Parade transported us to the circus
of our dreams through the composer's delicious chorales, cafe waltzes and cakewalks. Jeremy Fitzsimons presided over the eccentric percussion, from roulette wheel to bouteillophone, coping well with a stubborn starting-pistol determined to keep its final crotchet to itself.
Around all this, the orchestra effortlessly laid the sort of music that, as Virgil Thomson so aptly put it, is as simple as a friendly conversation and in its better moments exactly as poetic and profound.
Earlier in the week, Joel-Hornack had praised Saint-Saens' B minor Violin Concerto as a prime example of the French tzigane concerto, and the superb Feng Ning cut straight to the gypsy in all of our souls, with fiery rhapsody and beguiling lyricism.
This was a performance that swept all before it. It was impossible not to be won over by the Andantino barcarolle, especially when Ning's airy harmonics shadowed the clarinet so immaculately. There was little point in resisting a Finale that catapulted us from tzigane passion to Wagnerian ecstasy.
An elegant Gareth Farr warned us not to expect drums in his new piece, This Last Pace. In truth, they may have been appreciated, as this was a lacklustre over-the-closing-credits affair, stretched to an unwieldy 15 minutes.
Schumann's symphonies can be a trial and a trudge under the wrong baton but Joel-Hornack gave the Spring Symphony plenty of vernal zing. In the first movement he made every tremolo and timpani stroke count, the Larghetto brought us Schumann the eternal dreamer, the shifting colours of the Scherzo made us realise why the composer remained such a wildcard to his contemporary audiences. Best of all, and perhaps another Gallic bonus, the grazioso in the final Allegro was not overlooked.
