There is much ground covered in the new NZSO collection of Douglas Lilburn's orchestral music.
Opening with the iconic Aotearoa: Overture and signing off with a gleaming fanfare on Gaudeamus igitur, the seven works balance the familiar and the less known.
Three Lilburn overtures sound anew. Aotearoa seems gentler and
more reflective, each orchestral strand making its point. With the Drysdale Overture, conductor James Judd finds the darkness at the heart of the piece, emphasising evasive harmonies and startling dynamic turns.
The Festival Overture, chosen for the then National Orchestra's first commercial recording in 1959, is engagingly cocky, as the young composer flaunts new skills from his London studies.
Judd is not afraid to give Lilburn's music the space it needs. This is apparent in all three overtures and the opening pages of A Song of Islands. Producer Wayne Laird brings a real sheen and transparency to the strings here, allowing other crucial orchestral sonorities to pierce the texture.
The 1956 A Birthday Offering, a miniature Concerto for Orchestra in its way, is caught with similar precision.
The major work on the disc is Forest, the tone poem which carried off the Percy Grainger Prize back in 1936.
Forest is a spacious, lovely score. Whether or not one hears the composer "tracking Sibelius through shadowy woods" as Robert Hoskins' programme notes poetically put it, this is a remarkable achievement for a 21-year-old composer to have written in post-colonial isolation.
The performance is finely realised, and the recording achieves some heart-stopping effects with pizzicato strings. Robert Orr's oboe is just one of many solo instruments to make its presence impressively felt.
All in all, this is a fine companion to the NZSO's CD of the composer's symphonies. The only blur, alas, is the cheapskate cover image, a generic photograph of Taupo Sunset by Australian Kevin de Lacy, taken from a stock photography site.
When some of the Lilburn works on the disc have strong associations with both paintings (Rita Angus' Central Otago in the case of Islands) and places (Forest was written after a tramping trip in South Canterbury's Peel Forest), an opportunity has been lost.
* Douglas Lilburn, Orchestral Works (Naxos 8.557697)
