Auckland Live / Arvustused

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Immerse 2023 festival certainly lived up to its title for those who managed all three concerts. Friday night offered a taste of the radical — an entree of an imaginatively-lit percussion trio malleting Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree to tremulous life, followed by a main of John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. We blissed out in a darkened hall as conductor Andre de Ridder delivered hardcore Pulitzer Prize-winning minimalism with an environmentalist message, the oceanic forces of the NZSO engulfing us for 42 minutes. Alas, this genuinely immersive experience deserved a much larger audience. Saturday night’s programme took its title from Wynton Marsalis’ seven-movement Blues Symphony.

Salina Fisher and Jerome Kavanagh Poutama’s Papatūānuku was the glowing centrepiece of Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra’s In the Elements concert. Yet, how eloquently Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis prepared us for the brilliance ahead. Conductor Vincent Hardaker balanced resonance and delicacy in the APO strings for a 1910 score that recontextualised a Tudor tunefor contemporary English audiences. Papatūānuku treads a parallel path, sensitively combining centuries-old taonga puoro with a modern symphony orchestra. In a pre-concert talk, soloist Kavanagh Poutama sampled sounds and talked of the importance of nurturing and mothering, represented in the new work’s title.

The Trusts Community Foundation Opera in Concert, a guaranteed highlight of the musical year, excelled itself on Saturday night with the New Zealand premiere of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 1920 Die tote Stadt. Set in a dark world of psychological obsession and dreams, The Dead City is a remarkable achievement for a composer in his early 20s. Its music, heavily indebted to Wagner and Strauss, and occasionally hinting at Korngold’s later Hollywood career, was brilliantly unfurled by Giordano Bellincampi and his 94-strong Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, along with a handpicked cast of singers, and a full-voiced New Zealand Opera Chorus.