New Zealand Symphony Orchestra at Auckland Town Hall

It was a weekend of the stars when the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra paid its first visit of the season, bringing French conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier and Irish pianist Barry Douglas.

Friday's concert offered another instalment of the Vaughan Williams symphonic revival. We were prepared by the familiar Tallis Fantasia in a version that was assertive and lyrical. Tortelier drew a full, generous sound from the strings, neatly underlining the work's rhythmic shifts.

Later in the evening, the composer's Fourth Symphony blazed forth, and the Frenchman had his band striding fearlessly through an orchestral battlefield.

This angry work was delivered with fury and precision. Pizzicati in the second movement bordered on Bartokian, and the brass shone in some grim fugue work.

In between, Tchaikovsky's First Concerto was a celebration. Barry Douglas brought a winning personality to the work, giving it light and shade, wit and drama.

In a memorable moment during the Andantino, Tortelier had the strings cluster around the soloist, while the rhythmic tautness of the Finale made it emphatically "con fuoco".

One might have heard a leaf fall during Douglas' encore. Tchaikovsky's Autumn had mists and mellow fruitfulness, Russian-style, with soul-searching Slavic melodies.

Douglas opened Saturday with a nobly chiselled Emperor Concerto. The sheer energy of Beethoven's first movement swept all before it, while the Adagio was distinguished by the pianist's articulation, mapping out a territory between song and recitative.

The Finale, subtly ushered by piano, had a real brio that could be sensed as much from Tortelier's podium movements as from Douglas' keyboard pyrotechnics.

The third and fourth stars of the evening were John Rimmer and Edward Allen, the composer and soloist responsible for Hidden Treasures, the latest of the orchestra's ongoing commissions.

This versatile work could be read as a postmodernist treasure hunt for famous horn themes but it was more rewarding to savour Rimmer's textural skill, laying an almost Straussian weave around his poised soloist.

The orchestra's visit ended with every audience member's dream; a noted French conductor handling that most quintessentially Gallic of scores, Debussy's La Mer.

Its first bars had an organic flow, and Tortelier inspired a magnificent chorus of the cellos at one point, even though there weren't quite the 16 that Debussy stipulates.

The waves in the second movement pulsated to a mighty climax, while the Finale, as much a confrontation as a dialogue between wind and sea, erupted in a storm of virtuosity.

The NZSO has left town but tonight, on Concert FM at 8.20, you can hear its Vaughan Williams and Tchaikovsky concert, recorded in Wellington. Don't miss it.