Auckland Philharmonia pauses Baroque & Beyond concert series after 2024 – William Dart
THE FACTS
- Auckland Philharmonia’s Baroque & Beyond concerts are on hold next year, making tonight’s event special.
- Jonathan Le Cocq and David Kelly featured, with Le Cocq on theorbo and Kelly on harpsichord.
- The evening ended with Biber’s Battalia a 10, featuring Bartok-style pizzicatos and programmatic elements.
The Auckland Philharmonia’s Baroque & Beyond concerts have earned a special place in the city’s musical calendar.
This series is being put on hold next year, making the evening’s Airs & Dancesa doubly appreciated musical journey through time.
The focus was on orchestral strings, with two stylish guests.
Jonathan Le Cocq’s theorbo, wittily introduced by music director Andrew Beer as a baroque guitar with a giraffe’s neck, laced the older music with plucked and strummed poetry; David Kelly’s harpsichord elegantly illuminated a Corelli Adagio.
Corelli’s Sinfonia in D minor once more revealed Beer’s spirited direction, inspiring his musicians to knife-edge shifts in dynamics and, in its Adagio, to luxuriate in luscious dissonance.
The two 20th-century offerings – Bloch’s Concerto Grosso No 2 and Respighi’s third set of Ancient Airs and Dances – were a tad conservative, but terrific showcases for the ensemble.
Bloch was well-served by the vigour of Beer’s approach, from sighing chordal swells in its opening Maestoso to the full-on fury of its final Allegro. This was music with an immediacy to be expected from a composer who claimed that he had no time for the icy demonstration of imposed mathematical principles.
I suspect that Ottorino Respighi would have agreed with Bloch, and the third set of his Ancient Airs and Dances is beautifully laid out for strings, its first movement virtually floating in on pizzicato cellos. More than once, the richly toned violas instigated proceedings, while the massive Passacaglia signed off rousingly with flying scurries and big, big chords.
The evening ended with Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s Battalia a 10, a 1673 piece of flagrant programmatic music with all the fun of a circus. Beer had alerted us to expect Bartok-style pizzicatos along with tunes piled on top of one another in an uncanny premonition of Charles Ives.
All this was mightily effective, along with the stomping of the players’ feet and a mournful Adagio that may have had some reflecting on today’s horrific warzones.
Looking ahead, more cheerfully, one hopes that 2027 sees the return of the Auckland Philharmonia’sBaroque & Beyond – in appropriately baroque splendour.