From the New World

This season-opening concert brings together a programme built around big musical gestures and well-loved favourites. It largely succeeds in its aim: to warm the audience, reintroduce familiar musical touchstones, and set the tone for what’s to come.

The evening opens with Eve de Castro‑Robinson’s Aurora, a brief but arresting work that lives up to its reputation for momentum and bite. There is something Bauhaus-like about its aesthetic: angular, electrified, and deliberately anarchic. It has the sensibility of a tūī, that highly skilled and eclectic songbird. Bursts of birdsong collide with metallic textures and sudden shifts of energy. It is instantly engaging, though its restless intensity proves to be a challenging lead-in to what follows.

Beethoven’s Violin Concerto strains unmistakably towards Romantic expression, and its radical emotional expansiveness can feel slightly pedestrian when placed immediately after de Castro‑Robinson’s brash modernism. That said, soloist María Dueñas is more than equal to the task. Dueñas plays with astonishing technical control, but it is her phrasing that leaves the deepest impression. Long lines swell naturally, inner voices are drawn out with care. The result is a performance that reclaims the concerto’s lyric dignity, earning an audible upswelling of delighted appreciation from the audience at its close.

After the interval, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World reminds us why it remains so deeply loved. This is music that seems to enact its own curiosity, forever exploring and reinventing itself. You can feel in it the germ of countless cinematic and musical theatre traditions yet to come. Conducted with warmth and clarity by Rodolfo Barráez in his Aotearoa debut, the symphony unfolds generously, balancing nostalgia with forward momentum.

As the nights get longer, this NZSO season opener does exactly what it needs to do: rolling out fan favourites, showcasing brilliance, and inviting audiences back into the shared ritual of listening. It is a confident, generous start.