Echoes of Home: Bartók & Dvořák

It doesn’t matter how long you have been away or where you have been, returning home is one of those emotions you feel more deeply than you can easily describe. Douglas Lilburn’s Aotearoa Overture has fleeting influences of his composition teacher, Ralph Vaughan Williams, but there is something distinctive in the tone which evokes the Aotearoa Lilburn was returning to. The violins led the drama, crisp with the jagged theme introducing the building sound of the orchestra. We are a laconic lot – sometimes it’s better to let our great musical interpreters tell the world how we feel about coming home.

Béla Bartók, and violinist Amalia Hall, wrenched at the heartstrings in Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Bartók incorporated folk music and classical traditions into his compositions and the concerto features great harmonic variety and demanding work for the soloist. Hall took it all in her stride and the cadenza was an excellent showcase for her skill, musicality, and energy. The orchestra, under the expert baton of Gábor Káli, swelled and flowed and burst through the violin to great effect.

Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D Minor is dramatic, majestic, and intense. Káli led the orchestra brilliantly, finding every opportunity to bring melodies to the fore, guiding perfect execution of complex rhythms, changes in mood, dynamics, tempo, and tone. He managed an exceptional equilibrium, so the solos, pairs, and sections of the orchestra were perfectly clear and balanced and not in competition with each other. Some of this is down to Dvorák’s great composition but a conductor’s interpretation is what shapes the performance and the way the players follow the lead is what makes the experience on the night. By the end Káli had given his all and, utterly exhausted, supported himself on the podium for the final, deliberate, quickening, foot-stamping, big embrace of a homecoming in the closing bars.