An encounter with Vladimir Ashkenazy

Assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times, Simon Cunliffe, describes a musical interlude.

Bear with me while I retreat this week from more worldly matters. Until last Saturday, for me Vladimir Ashkenazy was a name of repute on the covers of classical music records and CDs.

Apart from occasional encounters in the intervening years, I recall him mainly from London days some 30 years ago - a sculptor friend had a tape of a recording, Ashkenazy Plays Liszt - a fleeting meeting with a pianist and conductor to whom a particular allure attached itself and has never quite been erased.

In that footloose era of romance and discovery, he became a startling tutor on a voyage into hitherto uncharted territory.

A fashionable accessory, but, as it proved, a musical inclination soon subverted by the familiar and the "hip": Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Van Morrison.

A general, possibly lazy, preference for this pantheon's angsty, hormonal guitar-strung racket reduced my relationship with the Russian virtuoso and his ilk to dilettantish affectation.

So it wasn't without a twinge of guilt - the tickets were as rare as hens' teeth and there were surely punters more dedicated - that I took my place in the stalls last Saturday at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington for an encounter with the great man himself.

And with Vladimir Ashkenazy, it is an encounter.

A small, wiry man with a warm, generous smile and a humble presence, on the podium he transforms into a compelling dynamo: coiled, angular, urgent, the score wired through his entire physique, now feinting, now rolling shoulders, now pressing his suit - float like a butterfly, sting like a bee - his jabbing left and glancing right as mesmerising in their precision as the resultant symphony of sound they command.

Mr Ashkenazy had his work cut out.

It was the opening night of the New Zealand International Arts Festival.

He was conducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and massed choirs in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No 8.

Sometimes known as the "Symphony of a Thousand", this ambitious work was composed by Mahler in what must have been something of a creative frenzy during eight weeks in 1906.

Yet its first performance did not take place until 1910, when the composer himself conducted the work in the Neue Musikfesthalle in the Munich Exhibition Grounds.

Then, as the helpful programme notes reveal, there were 858 singers and 171 instrumentalists.

The Wellington concert marked the 100th anniversary of that occasion and in addition to the maestro mustered the combined talents of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, several choirs - the Voice New Zealand Chamber Choir, the New Zealand Youth Choir, the Orpheus Choir of Wellington, the Christchurch City Choir, the Knabenchor - off-stage brass, organ and eight vocal soloists band, including tenor Simon O'Neill and, from Dunedin, bass Martin Snell.

When Mahler composed it, it was the first completely choral symphony and soon after finishing it, evidently elated, he wrote to conductor Willem Mengelberg: "I have just completed my Eighth - it is my greatest work to date . . .