New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at the Auckland Town Hall

By WILLIAM DART

We were led to believe that glamorous Valentina Lisitsa would be a star of the NZSO's 2004 season.

Not stellar enough, it seems, to bring out the House Full signs when the orchestra visited last weekend.

Of Lisitsa's two concertos, Ravel's G major was the winner. The Ukrainian pianist allied herself with its brittle dizziness, luxuriated in the Gershwinesque surges and pranced through the elegant circus of the third movement.

The orchestra razzle-dazzled too, down to the last whipcrack and raunchy trombone slide, while conductor James Judd brought an almost feral tenacity to the Finale.

On Friday, Bartok's Third Concerto had left one wanting. More than technical aplomb is needed for this often melancholic work.

Passages were forthright when they needed a suggestion of the intangible; Lisitsa's positive glee in attacking the final movement indicated a crucial misunderstanding of what the composer is saying to us.

Encores can be revealing. On Friday, Lisitsa gave us Chopin's Minute Waltz dished up with vulgar, nudging trickeries. On Saturday, after a La Campanella that should have stopped before its final page, Chopin was dished up once again.

The other Saturday soloist was tuba player Andrew Jarvis in Ross Harris' Labyrinth, which opened in bracing style, before Harris drew us into his musical maze.

Was this cryptic composer, rather fond of inserting a sly quote or two into his scores, reminding us of his own At the Edge of Silence when Bridget Douglas' flute came out of the orchestral texture?

Did an extended passage for strings have something vaguely Viennese and fin-de-siecle in its veins?

This was 10 minutes teeming with incident, and incredibly beautiful when Jarvis went off on his lyrical searches over repeated string chords or wandering violins, making his F tuba sing like the most romantically inclined of horns.

Apart from a rowdy Il Seraglio Overture in which Turkish colouring rather drowned out the strings, the orchestra's contributions over the weekend were two symphonic behemoths.

On Friday, Judd was his usual energetic force on the podium for Liszt's Faust Symphony although a lack of cohesion made Liszt's sprawling work sprawl even more. There were some unforgivable roughnesses, the worst being in the second movement when four solo violins remembered Gretchen, with intonation that was inappropriately Mephistophelian.

The following evening, Elgar's First Symphony balanced the books.

A muscular first movement, toying as it does with our preconceptions of the Elgarian nobilmente, found contrast in the mercurial colours of the Allegro molto and, as the final chord of the symphony died away, we realised that these musicians had pinned down what Elgar once described as the phases of pride, despair, anger, peace and the thousand and one things that occur between the first page and the last.

Bravo!