William Dart: NZSO serves up three-course feast for the senses

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra rehearsing for the Immerse 2023 Festival with conductor Andre de Ridder. Photo / Latitude Creative

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Immerse 2023 festival certainly lived up to its title for those who managed all three concerts.

Friday night offered a taste of the radical — an entree of an imaginatively-lit percussion trio malleting Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree to tremulous life, followed by a main of John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean.

We blissed out in a darkened hall as conductor Andre de Ridder delivered hardcore Pulitzer Prize-winning minimalism with an environmentalist message, the oceanic forces of the NZSO engulfing us for 42 minutes. Alas, this genuinely immersive experience deserved a much larger audience.

Saturday night’s programme took its title from Wynton Marsalis’ seven-movement Blues Symphony.

First up, Bryce Dessner’s Mari presented a forested landscape with familiar music by Dvorak and Mahler hovering in the foliage, a voyage which, despite a picturesque palette and well-primed performance, was a little on the long side at 22 minutes.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue proved the reliable crowd-pleaser, with virtuoso and hip Australian pianist Simon Tedeschi taking on the biggest big band in the land as it relished every jazzy swoop and whoop.

Wynton Marsalis’ Blues Symphony is an ambitious attempt to place a potted history of blues and jazz into a symphonic setting. This, too, did not sustain focus for just over an hour, despite its brilliant and exotic colours. While I enjoyed hints of Charles Ives in the scrambled tunes of the opening movement, others cried out for the snappy conciseness of a gleaming “Big City Breaks” or Marsalis’ whirlwind final scherzo. What a pleasure, however, to hear NZSO principals Patrick Barry, Michael Kirgan and David Bremner being let loose in Jazzville.

Our immersion ended on Sunday afternoon, with high-octane blasts of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Fifth Symphony, separated by a wry, witty and dissonant love letter to the master from contemporary Korean composer Unsuk Chin.

At one point, de Ridder asked the audience how many had been to all three concerts. There should have been more hands raised.

What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Where: Auckland Town Hall.