What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Saturday
Reviewer: William Dart
Distinguished conductor Sir Donald Runnicles provided an invaluable key to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Four Last Songs concert.
The title work by Richard Strauss was the composer’s songs of farewell, he told us, as it offers an obvious metaphor for our mortality as we listen and reflect on our own lives.
Yet the opening Der Rosenkavalier Suite was far more substantial than his facetiously described “Reader’s Digest version of some of the glorious music from a four-hour opera”. Inextricably drawn into its gorgeousness, it was easy to succumb to those wild horns, swooning strings and tingling chromatic harmonies.
Strauss signs off with a Viennese waltz to end all Viennese waltzes, but not until many delicious tastes of those goosebump-inducing chords associated with the presentation of the rose, with the wry, witty waltz of the boorish Baron Ochs and the utter serenity of the opera’s celebrated trio.
Madeleine Pierard must know the Four Last Songs better than many sopranos, having re-joined the English National Ballet last year to sing them alongside David Dawson’s choreographing of this music — a performance that, in the words of one critic, eclipsed the seamless dance, and one that she has repeated more than 30 times.
Tonight, in a magnificent Venetian red gown, she took us through Strauss’ Liedergarten or Garden of Songs, moving from Spring through September on to the irrevocable dusk-time reckonings of death.
Pierard effortlessly unfurled some of the longest and most luscious lines in song, floating buoyantly over Runnicles’ orchestral richness. She contemplated the charm of nature with a stunning top B, with heavenly phrased wonderment at the fall of autumnal leaves.
Stealing into the third song, over the dark, mysterious weave of strings, she found an eloquent musical partner in concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppanen, whose violin would return to share those hushed resignations locked into the final song’s shifting metres.
Runnicles had already alerted us to Brahms’ radiant Symphony No 3 being the ideal programme partner for Strauss.
After interval, its first movement was scrupulously defined by the chiselled stride of its opening pages, the second offering an opportunity to appreciate the cool precision of the orchestra’s woodwind.
Following this, the meticulously nuanced sway of its Poco Allegretto seemed to share some of the spirit already heard in Strauss’s Viennese waltzes.