Cheers and whistles aplenty for NZSO’s Bernstein/Copland combo

REVIEW: The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s “American” season – which started with West Side Story back in February and continued with the Gershwin/Marsalis combo last month – reached its latest milestone in a concert featuring Stateside musical titans Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland.

There was an American link, too, with the opening work, Eve de Castro-Robinson’s Len Dances, a tribute to the famous New Zealand kinetic sculptor and artist Len Lye, who lived – and enjoyed great success – in New York, among other places. Pleasantly geometric, the piece sparkled with energy but also had balance and proportion, while its sliding dance rhythms paid tribute to Lye’s love of movement. It was a work full of “zizz”, to use Lye’s favourite term of approbation, and the laughter provoked by its sheet-metal finale felt equally life-giving.

The evening’s last, and longest, work was Copland’s Symphony No.3, and to these ears it suffered a little in comparison to the rest of the programme, lacking the warmth and humour of Len Dances and the narrative energy of the Bernstein.

This wasn’t for lack of trying by guest conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, who worked like a man possessed, dancing on the podium and sweeping his arms around as if trying to carve sound right out of the air. And there was no denying the power and intensity he extracted from the orchestra.

There was drama, too, in the sudden diminuendos, and great mountains of sound, huge slabs of it, were conjured up. But it felt at times like we were being bludgeoned with the music; even the soft parts were played hard, and the narrative arc of the work wasn’t always clear. Not that the audience seemed to mind: the applause, studded with cheers and whistles, was enthusiastic.

There was no doubting the success, meanwhile, of Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, its title – The Age of Anxiety – a reminder that societal despair is hardly exclusive to the current age, whatever some Millennials may think.

From the outset Guerrero’s conducting was marked by a sense of carefully sketched-out space, a sonic architecture of crystalline clarity. And such characteristics were equally evident in the playing of star Korean pianist Joyce Yang. She imbued Bernstein’s piano writing, which in the wrong hands can sound almost schmaltzy, with a terse, nervous energy and perfectly subdued colouring.

Each note had an immense weight, as if borne down by the anxiety that the work references. Interspersed with splashes of warmth and grace, and even at times the dangerous energy of the dance, this was fabulous, captivating pianism.