Review: NZ Symphony Orchestra at Auckland Town Hall

Even before a note is sounded, Mahler can command the audience's complete attention, with the stage packed from footlights to choir stalls, and a hundred plus musicians poised to take us into the composer's symphonic world.

So it was on Friday in the Auckland Town Hall, when the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of its music director, Pietari Inkinen, gave us the composer's Third Symphony.

One might have expected it to have been a fiery affair in the hands of a young conductor. It wasn't particularly, although Inkinen's deliberate tempi throughout the sprawling first movement detracted not one iota from its vigour. It was launched imposingly by a line-up of nine horns and, throughout, there were moments of filigree delicacy alongside endlessly inventive variations on march-time.

Trombonist David Bremner was the first of many impressive soloists of the evening, clearly enjoying the twists and turns of the lines Mahler had allotted him.

Any vestiges of a minuet in the spirit of the second movement were soon swept into a languorous waltz. Inkinen ensured that the shift was masterly, with finely-drawn rubato and heady moments of thrall, only slightly marred by some tarnished tuning on the violins.

Inkinen also defined the duality of the third movement with its dreamy, faraway flugelhorn framed by more extrovert stylings, marked in the score to be rude or coarse in mood. Alas, some bars of reverie were intruded upon by unwanted roughness in the horns.

The mezzo-soprano's role in this work is small but vital and the velvet-toned Ekaterina Semenchuk effortlessly dispensed Nietzsche's verses of foreboding, supported by subtle string textures and undistracted by a few too many questionable brass entries.

The perfect contrast came when the bright-voiced choirs of NBR New Zealand Opera's Chapman Tripp Chorus and a group of children invested the fifth movement with just the right degree of Wunderhorn-inspired angelic joy.

Earlier in the week Inkinen had spoken of the challenge sustaining the momentum in this vast score. This he achieved, right through to the final movement which was the emotional apotheosis it should be, progressing from the clearest of D majors, through chromatic passions and torment to a final thrilling return home.