Music

Review: Orchestra Wellington’s ‘Rapture’ reflects bumps of disrupted year

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Orchestra Wellington conductor Marc Taddei opted for a clear, direct interpretation of Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings.

ORCHESTRA WELLINGTON

Orchestra Wellington conductor Marc Taddei opted for a clear, direct interpretation of Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings.

Rachmaninoff 1: Rapture. Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei with Amalia Hall (violin). Music by Dvorak, Higdon and Rachmaninov. Michael Fowler Centre, November 15. Reviewed by Max Rashbrooke

It’s a sure sign of a disrupted year when a concert originally planned for May is rescheduled into November. Fittingly, it was a slightly uneven performance, a few weaknesses sitting alongside its genuine strong points.

These contrasts were embodied in Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings, where conductor Marc Taddei opted for a clear, direct interpretation. This avoided a descent into chocolate-box prettiness, but – in the first movement in particular – left the first violins with too sharp-edged a sound; I’d have preferred something a little more burnished.

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Soloist Amalia Hall’s interplay with the orchestra was unsurprisingly excellent, Taddei’s conducting always alive to the rhythmic complexities. (File photo)

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Soloist Amalia Hall’s interplay with the orchestra was unsurprisingly excellent, Taddei’s conducting always alive to the rhythmic complexities. (File photo)

Elsewhere in the Dvorak there were real highlights: a light, graceful touch in the famous Menuetto; a sensitively handled slow movement; and overall a good, brisk tempo. But not all of the cross-rhythms were sufficiently precise, and the orchestra struggled to maintain its beauty of tone in the quieter passages.

It was a similar story in the second-half piece, Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 1, a beautifully rich work tarnished by the odd bombastic gesture. In the first movement there were some tentative entries from the woodwinds and occasional failures to perfectly interweave the different sections. The second movement, meanwhile, was lacking in lightness.

But things got better as the piece progressed. The third movement was especially fine, its rising and falling swells of nostalgia beautifully captured, while the final movement was a majestic capstone to the work, the playing strong, punchy, even noble at times.

In between the Dvorak and the Rachmaninov, we were transported to an unmistakably different sound world, that of American composer Jennifer Higdon’s 2008 Violin Concerto, with Amalia Hall the soloist. I’m not an unequivocal fan of this work: every movement has at least one over-long, overly dense passage. But its interpretation here was probably the concert highlight.

Hall’s assured technique was the equal to the great demands the work places on the soloist, and she was especially good in the eerily quiet opening passages, suggestive of the backstreets of a semi-abandoned city. Indeed the concerto has an explicitly architectural feel, its bare lines deliberately exposed, and this was beautifully brought out in Taddei’s precise conducting.

In the second movement, the tone – cool but not cold – was spot-on. And throughout, Hall’s interplay with the orchestra was unsurprisingly excellent, Taddei’s conducting always alive to the rhythmic complexities.

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