Dohr’s horn solo ist wunderbar

Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra had a top-flight soloist in Stefan Dohr, principal horn with the Berlin Philharmonic.

But was I alone in wishing his effortless phrasing and burnished tone had been lavished on Richard Strauss’ more challenging second concerto from 1942, rather than the first, written 60 years earlier?

The APO, under conductor Tadaaki Otaka, was at its sprightliest but musically this was an elegant exercise in channelling Mozart. The real adventures came with Dohr’s encore, the horn solo from Messiaen’s From the Canyons to the Stars, his mammoth salute to the American bicentenary.

Dohr liberated some extraordinary voices from his instrument and initially there were audience murmurings at unexpected colours and effects; but not for long as everyone succumbed to the intoxication of Messiaen’s extra-terrestrial mysticism.

The evening opened with Beethoven’s Creatures of Prometheus overture, travelling from portentous grandeur, nicely caught, to an Allegro that sounded as if we were being primed for a sparkling opera buffa.

After interval, Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony took an hour to bare the composer’s sorrows and passions, with every second to be savoured.

Otaka’s understated style, using expressive hands and fingers rather than baton, served the musicians beautifully as they navigated emotional highs and lows that, in a strange way, were in tune with the title of the Messiaen work already sampled.