An enthusiastic audience gathered at St Matthews in the City on Sunday 18th August for what proved to be a unique experience for many. The opening item was Douglas Lilburn’s Drysdale Overture written in 1937 when he was a student at the Royal College of Music, London. The overture was composed in response to a challenge from his professor, Ralph Vaughan-Williams. The work was dedicated to the composer’s father Robert Lilburn and celebrates the family farm and estate north of Hunterville. The music is evocative of New Zealand rural landscape and in fact I felt that the musical style had “Vaughan-Williams” stamped all over it. Clearly his teacher had a definite influence on his early compositional style.

This is music that is easy to listen to despite the occasional dissonance and I could identify with Lilburn’s observation that composing the overture left him with the “image of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn drifting dreamily down the Mississippi and wondering if the Stars above them had been made or only just happened”. Lilburn’s overture has been performed a number of times by the APO and the NZSO and a recording of it is available conducted by James Judd. It mostly features a pulsing melody that drives onwards building up to a very satisfying climax. The orchestral colour often suggests elysian fields and a pastoral setting. Throbbing strings provide a backdrop for solos from both the brass and the woodwind sections. The cello section features in an eloquent solo with lush sweeping melody that moves on to a fitting climax.

Next up was the very talented Japanese marimbist Yoshiko Tsuruta, who along with the conductor Justus Rozemond was making her debut with the St Matthews Chamber orchestra. The marimba is a very large solo instrument (longer than a concert grand piano) with a 5.5 octave range. It has rosewood keys of varying length and thickness with the sound of each key having natural amplification through individual hollow tubes of varying lengths and diameter. The player uses mallets of varying degrees of hardness or density to strike the keys and produce the music notes.

The soloist holding two mallets in each hand gave us a wonderful demonstration of her virtuosic skills, in the performance of Emmanuel Sejourne’s Concerto for Marimba and strings. Sejourne a French composer and percussionist was born in 1961 and is now the Head of the Percussion Department of Strasbourg Conservatory of Music, and composed this concerto in 2005. For a modern work it is very tuneful and easy listening for the first hearing. The String orchestra opens the work with a gentle and rather plaintive introduction and then leaves the soloist to open up with a fiery cadenza that features a brilliant display of keyboard skills which range from the bottom notes to the very top, and also demonstrate the wide variation in volume that is possible for the player. The cellos introduce the main theme and the soloist breaks into dance mode weaving a playful dance theme, with string accompaniment.

For the first movement the soloist used softer mallets which produced a sweeter tone. She alternated with the strings at times playing the melody, and at other times the accompaniment. This worked well throughout the work and at all times we were given a wonderful demonstration of what this unique instrument is able to accomplish in the hands of a brilliant exponent. The conductor in this work gave meticulous attention to the co-ordination of the orchestral score with the soloist, not made easy by the fact that she was directly behind him and not alongside (as is usually the case with a marimba concerto) Using harder mallets for the second movement, Yoshiko was able to produce louder and even more percussive notes from the instrument and, at all times, totally dominate the tonal harmony produced from the string ensemble. There was a return to the theme introduced in the first movement which ended in a spectacular flourish. She got a well deserved round of applause from an appreciative audience.

Following the interval, we were treated to a fine reading of Brahms Symphony No 2 in D Major. Initially this work was given the nickname of “Pastorale” though this is now rarely used. It might be more fitting to label it “Viennese” because it was so well received by the citizens of that musical city and in the first movement Brahms gives something of a tribute to Johann Strauss and the Viennese waltz. History tells us that Brahms proclaimed this work to be “a sorrowful and melancholy” work that merited the publisher Simrock printing a black mourning band around the score. However the symphony in performance is so buoyant and full of melodic incursions and mellifluous harmony that it could never be considered mournful or melancholic.

Justus Rozemond’s conducting of this symphony was energetic and he used his whole body to impart his wishes on the orchestra. With precise direction he was able to eloquently shape orchestral phrases to perfection and one sensed that members of the orchestra were very much at home with the tempi he adopted. The second movement written in sonata form introduces two themes, one played by the bassoons and the other by the cello section. Both themes remain in contact but developed and varied in different ways ending in a fugato. In the scherzo the landler theme is played by the oboe in an elegant melody accompanied by cello pizzicato, almost Schubertian in style. In this Symphony Brahms added a tuba to the trombones, and in the final movement marked allegro con spirito the brass features prominently in a robust movement that moves quickly to its dramatic conclusion. In acknowledging the applause, the Conductor paid tribute in turn to each section of the orchestra who were asked to stand to accept their rightful accolades. This was a fitting end to a polished performance. Reviewed by Bob O’Hara