Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra's concert was launched by the familiar marine swell of Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture.
It was familiar, but also a little sedate in the hands of conductor Bundit Ungrangsee, who seemed determined to turn the composer's classic watercolour into a solid oil.
The soloist was Feng Ning, returning after
his victory in last year's Michael Hill International Violin Competition.
Remembering his charismatic Brahms Concerto last June, Bruch's Scottish Fantasy at first seemed a let-down and certainly not a piece from the top-drawer of the genre.
However, within minutes, the young violinist had almost convinced me otherwise. After all, hadn't George Bernard Shaw praised Bruch for catching the beauty and dignity of Scottish folk music?
There was certainly beauty, dignity and unending gorgeous tone throughout, delivered against an imposing orchestral back-drop which benefited from Ungrangsee's sense of the grandiloquent.
Ning was not afraid to wax sentimental, nor did he ignore Bruch's direction of dance in the Allegro. He was unswervingly virtuosic in the treacherous "fast and warlike" finale.
The encore was Paganini's fiendish variations on God Save the Queen, with its battery of sonic effects, including scattergun left-hand pizzicato.
After interval, Ross Harris' Second Symphony consolidated on the considerable achievements of Harris' symphonic debut last year, both formally and emotionally. A true symphony of song built around Vincent O'Sullivan's poems, this was Auckland's first opportunity to hear Madeleine Pierard in full flight.
The mezzo illuminated O'Sullivan's often chilling critique of the senselessness of war. Unfazed by tumultuous orchestral shifts around her, she held the audience in thrall until her final top C from off-stage.
The work may be perfectly moulded to its text, but it also has a taut formal structure which gives it a symphonic strength. The orchestra gave a consummate performance, no doubt proud of the part that it was playing in the genesis of a major New Zealand score.
The concert ended with a rip-roaring account of Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini but such a melodramatic vision of hell was no match for the horror and terrible sadness of the man-made hell that Harris and O'Sullivan had already revealed.
