Anticipation ran high at the first of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's concerts when the audience walked in on an almost sculptural installation of percussion instruments set up on the edge of the stage.This ungainly cluster of metal sprang to vibrant life when Bruce McKinnon launched Peter Scholes' Bonk with a ripple of glockenspiel.The expert McKinnon coolly dealt out an array of intriguing colours in this mini-concerto. Bonk proved the ideal overture for the evening, recalling its composer's proven ingenuity in the evocative world of theatre music.This was also a toccata to be shared, with conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky and his musicians deftly darting in and around McKinnon's sorties.On Friday, Baiba Skride balanced passion with magisterial sweep in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto; its surging climaxes highlighted the Latvian's 1725 Wilhemj Stradivarius, with its tone that she had described to me as having a touch of Guanerius darkness. The Concerto's elegiac Canzonetta was almost unbearably poignant.
The following evening, Britten's Violin Concerto came with its own mini-overture - an account of Arvo Part's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten in which time itself seemed to stand still - but not still enough for a few audience members to refrain from sullying Part's final reverberations with applause.The Concerto is as unsettling as it is underrated. Written in 1939, it seems to move between the worlds of Korngold and Shostakovich; wiry Spanish rhythms vie with luxuriant melodies floating on volatile harmonies.The great Heifetz may have pronounced it unplayable, but Skride, in collegial partnership with conductor and orchestra, easily proved him wrong, firing off Prokofiev-like motor rhythms and giving shape to Britten's bewitching melodic lines.Both of these demanding concertos were followed by unaccompanied Bach as encores, delivered with a rare sense of intimacy.On the symphonic side, Sitkovetsky's take on the Brahms First was an unexpected one.Initially, the weight and authority given to Brahms' opening pages was persuasive, such was the vigour of its delivery. As the work progressed, however, the Russian seemed to be straining this German music through a Tchaikovskian filter.Even so, there were welcome touches - the Un poco allegretto could well have been written for such a treatment. Less happy, alas, were the sobbing strings in the slow movement, or the angst-laden Adagio and revved-up tempos in the Finale.On Saturday, within minutes of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony setting off, one asked how such a mighty piece could register with such complacency, burdened by melodramatic dynamics and some ill-balanced textures. Only in the funeral march of the second movement did Sitkovetsky's approach make the revelations intended, reminding one of a Mahler yet to appear on the musical horizon.
