Brett Dean’s Fire Music was the centre piece of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra concert last night conducted by the composer. The dynamic work inspired by new life after tragedy was performed alongside Sibelius’ Scene with Cranes and Brahms' Piano Concerto No.2 featuring Piers Lane. Peter Hoar was in the audience for the powerful concert.
Brett Dean Photo: Supplied
The concert began with Sibelius’s poignant Scene with Cranes. A short piece of incidental music he wrote for a play, this was a tranquil opening for strings with clarinet interjections invoking the cries of the cranes. The APO with Australian composer Brett Dean ably conducting gave a haunting and gently melancholic performance.
They went straight into Dean’s Fire Music, a powerful and sometimes terrifying one movement work inspired by the deadly Australian bush fires of 2009. A large orchestra was on stage and subsidiary groups were also stationed around the hall. The spatial effects brought out different sonorities and created a claustrophobic sense of entrapment. The fire is all around. The varied instrumentation involved a lot of percussion and unusual sounds including bottles, bowed thunder sheets, electric guitar, synthesisers, and extended instrumental techniques.
This powerful and varied music is colourful and artfully constructed with each section finely balanced against the others and organically building, flowing, and ebbing. Moments of great beauty, such as the interaction between the electric guitar and the flutes, contrast with moments of sheer terror as the music created a sense of inexorable destructiveness of the fires it was inspired by. But as Dean noted at the start of the concert, regeneration and new growth are part of the fires as well and the music also suggested this at some moments. Visceral, sometimes frightening, sometimes, lyrical and always attention grabbing, Fire Music was seamlessly delivered by the APO who negotiated its dynamic and rhythmic difficulties with style and aplomb.
After the interval, Piers Lane gave use the Brahms 2nd Piano concerto which is the longest in the standard repertoire. A fine performance that held our attention across the concerto’s massive span. Lane’s playing was fiery and powerful in the turbulent second movement and delicate and lyrical in the tranquil third which also featured fine cello playing. The fourth movement is a barnstormer and both soloist and orchestra delivered it with gusto and energy. It rounded off a night of powerful music on a triumphant note and Lane gave us a short and energetic Brahms intermezzo as an encore.
