Youth ruled on the Town Hall stage at Saturday night's New Zealand Symphony Orchestra concert, when violinist Leila Josefowicz and conductor Pietari Inkinen shared their insights into Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto.
Finely contoured orchestral lines converged and dispersed around Josefowicz as she explored the searching melodies of Shostakovich's
opening nocturne.
In the headlong scherzo, she seemed slightly restrained in the teasing counterpoint, making its closing galop even more effective.
The third movement opens with Shostakovich at his most stern, yet this Passacaglia also shows he can deliver a fine line in bitter-sweet romanticism. Josefowicz had the full soaring measure of it, taking it through to the work's brilliant and lengthy cadenza.
This was a big journey, unflinchingly undertaken, transporting us to the high-spirited burlesque of the finale.
The Canadian's encore was the closing section from Esa-Pekka Salonen's Lachen Verlernt. This was a palpitating, frenzied rush of a piece, with scattering scales and spinning tremolos that dazzled the senses.
After the interval, it seemed as if Inkinen had thought Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring anew. Was it an accident that its iconic bassoon solo seemed to have a special vernal bloom? Certainly one could imagine all manner of primal awakening going on in the opening woodwind passages.
Brass soon splashed and streaked across the horizons; later, in a rather bluesy Spring Rounds, they contributed fauvist wails against powerhouse strings.
There was also grace in quieter moments, with a darker, unsettling menace in the sinuous ancestor dance, until the final Sacrificial Dance, more deliberated than usual, with spine-tingling trombones, took the tableau to a chilling close.
This 1913 Stravinsky classic is a tough act for any contemporary composer to share a bill with, and Anthony Ritchie's Whalesong, which opened the programme, did seem rather literal in its anti-whaling message.
Ritchie soundscaped effectively in the opening pages, with bass soloist Dale Gold slipping around against a back-drop of atmospheric strings but, after the harpoon struck, and the piece moved into unrelenting 2/4, an opportunity seemed to have been lost.
