New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the Auckland Town Hall

The NZSO may not have given us any local fare for New Zealand Music Month but, apart from this missed opportunity, the orchestra was in exemplary form on Friday and Saturday.

From the opening burst of Mozart's Prague Symphony, conductor Michael Halasz rang the changes. The triplets were toast-crisp, the chords cut the air like a sabre; later on the development section bristled with purpose.

It was all an intensely rhythmic experience and, to my ears, the buoyant Andante of the second movement seemed more than determined to atone for the symphony's missing minuet.

Halasz would astonish us more on Saturday. This man could have reeled off Smetana's Bartered Bride with a hand tied behind his back; now he was using both hands to punch out the opera's Overture and three boisterous dances. Could strings scurry faster this side of Ruslan and Ludmilla?

Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was presented as if Halasz took Wagner's "Apotheosis of the Dance" description very, very seriously. Tempos were spruce; a physical gesture found for each sound. The Allegretto, upon us within seconds of the first movement, dealt in Mahlerian irony, the trios of the third movement were mesmerising colour washes between tarantella-like frenzy.

Halasz' finest hour had been in Dvorak's Sixth Symphony the previous night. The first movement showcased the brass at their grandioso best; the orchestra pulsated with life during the more open textures. The Adagio, for those who enjoy Slavic lyricism without Tchaikovskian anguish, was just that and a lesson in effortless legato.

Orchestra and conductor revelled in the crunching dissonances that dot the Furiant and the Finale moved from placid to exhilarating in some tumultuous crescendos.

On Friday, Monika Leskovar launched into Saint-Saen's First Concerto on a swirling wave of sound. The Croatian cellist floated cadenza and passagework like feathers in the breeze while the central Minuet was all Gallic precision and grace. Unruffled when Saint-Saens demanded octave work and hurtling semiquavers, Leskovar never lost her stylish cool.

On Saturday she offered sterner stuff in Shostakovich's Second Concerto. The shadow of Stalin may have been lurking behind the phrases of the Russian composer's First Concerto, but that earlier work is an afternoon at the circus compared to this 1966 score.

The soloist dominates and Leskovar's take was a poignant one, although she did alert us, with a sly smile, to the humour of the Allegretto. There were long outpourings of elegiac line, with the orchestra at its concertante best, as well as a piece of history when two Bachian cadences reminded us that the younger Schnittke was waiting to take to assume Shostakovich's mantle.