Echoes of Home
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen with Daniel Muller-Schott (cello)
Music by Pruden, Dvorak and Rachmaninov
April 13, Michael Fowler Centre
This was the sixth time the NZSO had played this programme and it showed in the playing.
The players were completely inside each of the three works that made up of works loosely based on homesickness, and conductor Inkinen revealed his growth as a conductor.
Everywhere rhythms were firmly established, entries were precise and real care seemed to have been taken in the matter of dynamics.
Some might have thought the orchestra too loud in the concerto, but I think the balance between cellist and orchestra was just right – just not like what one hears on a CD, of course.
And, at last, Inkinen seems to have grasped both the importance of the brass, and the quality of the players at his disposal; something that made Rachmaninov’s final orchestral work – the Symphonic Dances – come fully to life, particularly in the final dance where the Dies Iraes blazed irresistibly.
And the brass also made a real impact in the Dvorak Cello Concerto, but then so did the strings and wind in this marvellous example of orchestral mastery.
The German cellist Daniel Muller-Schott is a wonderful player blessed with silky skills, something accentuated by the mellow beauty of his Goffriller instrument, and if his contribution to this classic work was less extrovert than we have heard from the likes of Mstislav Rostropovich those many years ago, it was probably closer to what Dvorak intended.
The concert opened with the late Larry Prudens’ Soliloquy for Strings which, like his Harbour Nocturne, owes a lot to the world of Samuel Barber, and its warm, late romantic, glow was well caught by the strings.
A splendid, fiery, concert.
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