Splendid concert of sharp contrasts
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gemma New with Jacob Nissly (percussion). Music by Salina Fisher, Adam Schoenberg and Mahler. Michael Fowler Centre, April 5.
Virtually all classical music juxtaposes light and dark: but these contrasts were heightened in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s first big standalone concert of the year.
The opening work, New Zealand composer Salina Fisher’s Kintsugi, took its name from the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer; in this tradition, the repaired item is seen not as damaged but as bearing a different kind of beauty, one that pays homage to the passage of time.
This lovely piece had all of Fisher’s hallmarks: a natural grace and poise, a slow-moving fluidity, and a calm and measured pulse, never stressed but nonetheless present. Playing with ideas of connection and severance, the work ended in a spellbinding silence.
This stood in sharp contrast to Losing Earth, the New Zealand premiere of a work by American composer Adam Schoenberg that channels his anguish about runaway climate change. Beginning with stark salvos from drummers perched above the back exits, and Gemma New’s edgy, geometric conducting, this was a work of wild extremes.
The soloist, San Francisco Symphony principal percussionist Jacob Nissly, had passages of glowing, ethereal beauty juxtaposed against the orchestra’s apocalyptic crescendos. At times it was invigorating, and the audience greeted it with rapturous applause – hooting and hollering, even – but it was also bombastic and disjointed in places, a piece that was slightly less than the sum of its parts.
This is not, of course, something that could be said of the concert’s centrepiece, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, surely one of the most cohesive works in the repertoire, as well as one of the most moving. Embodying the concert’s wider theme, it deals with stark juxtapositions, setting funeral marches against evocations of romantic love. From the outset, New radiated a coiled energy, her baton quivering as she sculpted a sharp and tautly outlined first movement. Whereas the two main themes can sometimes seem to have come from different planets, here New ensured consistency of texture, the colours and tones of one theme always reflected in the other.
The fortissimo passages could have been a touch more anguished; just occasionally it felt like things were being played safe. But the second movement had glorious sunbursts of celebration, while the third could boast a hushed sincerity in the slow passages and, elsewhere, an almost rustic humour.
The famous fourth movement had everything one could want, as New captured that vital sense of tremulous joy, that impression of being lifted – suspended, even – in love. A bright, scurrying finale, full of a sense of hardwon happiness, brought a concert of sharp contrasts to a splendid close.