Australian Paul O’Neill and our own Eliza Boom made their entrance with a bracket of arias from Tosca, which soon revealed a disturbingly hard edge to the tenor’s voice.
At its most distracting in Des Grieux’s passionate first act aria from Manon Lescaut, it rather took the bloom off his Nessun Dorma finale.
A relaxed Eliza Boom let her warm and luscious soprano sing for itself, particularly in a transcendent Vissi d’Arte and later in Butterfly’s poignant aria, waiting for the return of her American husband.
The soloists appeared uncomfortably locked into their few square metres of stage space; the freedom to move around might have resulted in more relaxed singing and increased theatrical impact.
On the instrumental side, two intermezzi from Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci might have been impeccably played but came across as passing punctuations, without the dramatic truth of their original context.
Verdi’s noisy overture to Nabucco may have been a crowd-pleaser, with great splashes of spectacular brass, but it was a jarring prelude to the delicate emotions of Puccini’s La Boheme.
In the meantime, I’ll be looking out for that missing Concerto for Orchestra, especially with the decreased local content in both the NZSO and Auckland Philharmonia’s 2025 programmes.
What: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Where: Auckland Town Hall
When: Saturday
