Giancarlo Guerrero is an inveterate showman. Conducting the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra on Thursday night, he entered and exited at a canter, leaping onto the podium. For two hours, he fascinated us with the range and ingenuity of his body language, inspiring the musicians to one of their finest performances.
Gershwin's
An American in Paris was the infectious Jazz Age symphonic poem it should be, from rowdy car horns to bluesy swagger. It's a melting pot of the catchy rhythms and breezy idioms of the time, wrapped up with a dazzlingly orchestrated bow - a bow that Guerrero and his musicians knew just how to untie.
If rousing tunes were the order of the evening in the Gershwin, there were many more to come.
Barber's Violin Concerto sings its heart out for two movements, and turns diabolic for its final few minutes. Singaporean soloist Min Lee caught this shift - the palpitations of its Finale posed no problems - although she hadn't quite the tonal lustre for the second movement.
Despite a few momentary lapses in concentration, the orchestra was magnificent, unstinting in its lyrical support.
Lee's encore was a miscalculation. Ernst's Last Rose of Summer, a severely shortened extract from one of the composer's Polyphonic Etudes, lacked the unerring security that such showpieces need.
The dying Rachmaninov called his Symphonic Dances his "latest and best work" and Guerrero proved the composer's judgment well justified.
This was no empty display of orchestral virtuosity, although the APO was in brilliant form, but an interpretation that made the required symphonic connections. (As it happens Rachmaninov added the epithet, fearing that if he simply named the work "Dances" audiences might confuse these with the dancehall fare of jazz bands.)
The second movement, a French-hued vision of a quintessentially Russian world-weariness, occasioned the most refined playing of the concert and nothing was spared in any orchestral quarter for the spectacular closing dance.
The printed programme ended here, but Guerrero returned with a gift, a transcription of Rachmaninov's Vocalise, much appreciated at the end of such a highly charged evening.
