Tonight’s The Resolute concert was an ambitious, courageous launch for Manukau Symphony Orchestra’s 2025 season.
Rossini’s Barber of Seville overture brought a sense of genuine anticipation for what might follow.
And although the musicians were challenged by its Rossinian precision, particularly in the violin ranks, conductorUwe Grodd maintained a measured momentum peppered with a frisky sense of humour.
The star turn was inevitably Shan Liu in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.
The 14-year-old came up with a crowd-pleasing combination of sangfroid and flamboyance, showing some individuality in the first movement’s tempo fluctuations. Only in Tchaikovsky’s more soul-baring ruminations did one feel the limitations of his youth.
Yet generally Liu’s teenage impulsiveness proved infectious, with his deliciously articulated interactions with the players around him, marred only by some orchestral asperities.
The slow movement suffered from the limited resonance of MSO’s full strings in pizzicato mode, yet there were telling moments of orchestral weave and an expressive cello solo from Lisa Chung.
Shan Liu in the last moments of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with Manukau Symphony Orchestra.
Our reward after a high-flying finale, balletic in its fury, was Liu’s encore of Schumann’s Traumerei, a dream-laden few minutes of pin-drop simplicity.
MSO is proud to have commissioned a new Kiwi symphony, with Adrien de Croy’s The Resolute giving its title to tonight’s concert.
De Croy writes in an idiom heavily influenced by 19th-century romantic composers, Russian in particular, charting his response to the invasion of Ukraine in four movements from Murmurs of a Gathering Storm through Heart of Fire, Heart of Steel and Shattered Dreams to a final, resilient The Resolute.
Conductor Uwe Grodd and composer Adrien de Croy are acknowledged after the premiere of de Croy's Symphony.
Although delivered with gusto and the pride of ownership, one felt a lack of real symphonic engagement with the material through recurring atmospherics of foreboding brass, primal tonal harmonies, and constant thunderings of percussion.
The melodic promises of its second movement didn’t bloom as one might have hoped. Perhaps de Croy might have more successfully registered his timely political response in a single movement, as he did, two years ago, when he remembered Christchurch’s mosque murders in his poignant, moody Waltz Nostalgia.
What: Symphony Orchestra
Where: Due Drop Events Centre
When: Saturday
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