William Dart: Auckland Chamber Orchestra review

Auckland Chamber Orchestra founding director Peter Scholes. Photo / Supplied

Thanks to the unswerving faith of its founding director Peter Scholes, Auckland Chamber Orchestra has earned a special place in the collective heart of our city's music-lovers. It was little surprise, then, that its Sunday Dixtuor concert drew a full and enthusiastic house.

A vigorous bill of fare ranged from a sprightly Ken Wilson Duo for clarinet and bassoon, dispensed with cool panache by Scholes and Ben Hoadley, to an under-appreciated classic, Schoenberg's 1906 Chamber Symphony.

Wilson was not the sole New Zealand composer tonight. Sarah Ballard's felsic mafic was an evocative piece with geological inspirations, exploring the implications of lava in musical terms.

Eight musicians conveyed Ballard's volatile textures very well indeed. Streaks of irregular scales shifted between wind and string sonorities and, once again, in chordal passages, the composer revealed her special talent for grappling with issues of harmonic density.

After the interval, Luca Manghi directed the same intense focus to a celebrated twentieth-century flute solo, Edgard Varese's Density 21.5. Playing from memory, his superb tonal control and articulation lent the sound an almost physical presence.

A Dixtuor by Frenchman Jean Francaix was the first of two works drawing on a larger ensemble, with ten musicians treating it with appropriate grace and urbanity.

For one who has sometimes dismissed this composer as a fourth pressing of Poulenc, I was bewitched by its effortless fluency and cantering bonhomie.

Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony is not an easy work, for either players or listeners. The composer's demand for 15 soloists had been accommodated by some of the city's finest instrumentalists, yet they were occasionally tested in conductor Scholes' high voltage tempi and the venue's dry acoustic.

Written when the composer was increasingly frustrated with the limitations of 19th-century musical language, this forceful score not only rails against the status quo in brisk march time but, especially tonight, allows nostalgic moments of luscious serenity, during which one might almost glimpse the fleeting phantom of Wagner's Tristan.

What: Auckland Chamber Orchestra

Where: Raye Freedman Arts Centre

When: Sunday