Bach Musica NZ's Songs of Destiny featured works by Wagner, Falla and Brahms at Auckland Town Hall. Photo / Peter Jennings
Bach Musica NZ's Songs of Destiny featured works by Wagner, Falla and Brahms at Auckland Town Hall. Photo / Peter Jennings
What: Bach Musica NZ
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Sunday
Reviewer: William Dart
Bach Musica NZ’s Songs of Destiny offered the sort of repertoire that any concert-giving organisation could well envy, eloquently introduced in a generous programme booklet by conductor Jose Aparicio.
Conductor Jose Aparicio in rehearsal with Bach Musica NZ. Photo / Peter Jennings
Siegfried Idyll presentsWagner at his most personal and human, a chamber orchestra serenade, lovingly drawn from one of his monumental music dramas, occasioned by the birth of his son, Siegfried.
The opening strains stole upon us as they should, with concertmaster Yanghe Yu heading a quartet of string players — an effective ploy to be heard again in due course.
If, just occasionally, full strings were tested in outbursts of Wagnerian passion, crisp woodwind sonorities were a constant joy.
When Auckland Philharmonia gave us Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo in 2016, there was no mezzo-soprano soloist, an omission that was gloriously put right tonight.
Anna Pierard singing Manuel de Falla's El Amor Brujo with Bach Musica NZ. Photo / Peter Jennings
Listening to and watching Anna Pierard as she communicated the spirit and vigour of Falla’s songs, it was difficult to believe this mezzo had given us Rossinian bel canto on this very stage just last year.
From the angry plaints as a scorned lover to a resilient celebration of a new dawn, against pealing bells and Falla’s scurrying orchestral backdrop, Pierard revealed the same, deep cultural immersion that made her Spanish contribution to Jack Body’s 2015 Songs of Death & Desire so memorable.
The orchestra responded brilliantly to Falla’s ballet of many colours — not only in an exhilarating Ritual Fire Dance but in myriad details such as Alison Dunlop’s beguilingly sinuous oboe solos.
Yanghe Yu, Bach Musica NZ concertmaster. Photo / Peter Jennings
Hearing three substantial Brahms choral and orchestral works in one concert — his 1881 Nanie, 1882’s Gesang der Parzen and 1871’s Schicksalslied — is a rare luxury. Full texts in the printed programme made it a profoundly rewarding experience.
Jose Aparicio conducts Bach Musica NZ. Photo Peter / Jennings
In Nanie, Brahms takes Schiller’s words on the loss of beauty to tribute the flamboyant younger painter Anselm Feuerbach, and the moving performance may have increased in tenderness if an optional harp had been brought into the middle section.
In all three works, Aparicio unlocked a full and impressive body of sound from his choristers, the result of his decades of choral experience in Hawke’s Bay; only here and there in the closing Schicksalslied did tiredness take a small toll.
