Reviewer's rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Violinist Julian Rachlin.

Played with lush colour and expressive rhythmic freedom ... violinist Julian Rachlin. Photo: Neil Newitt

Reviewer rating:

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Reader rating:

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars (56 votes)

Sydney Opera House, June 22

THE two works on this program charted opposite journeys, like a trip to the depths and back again.

Berg's Violin Concerto (1935), written after the death of 18-year-old Manon, daughter of Mahler's widow, Alma, and her second husband, Walter Gropius, moves from bittersweet memories of youth to catastrophe and numbed acceptance.

Bruckner's Eighth Symphony (played here in the 1890 version) starts by tussling with fate and ''the annunciation of death'' (the composer's words), moving to a sense of radiant affirmation at the close.

Violinist Julian Rachlin played Berg's concerto with sinewy sound, lush colour and expressive rhythmic freedom. It is a work that always reaches out to things just beyond its grasp. The opening, starting from first principles with the pitches of violin's unstopped strings, aspires to serenity which is soon disturbed. The first movement proper seeks shapes that dissolve as they are grasped, notably a Carinthian folksong that keeps moving out of reach and which Berg associated with Manon.

The second movement struggles convulsively with catastrophe, represented by a recurring implacable rhythm, before finding repose in Bach's chorale ''Es ist genug''.

Berg, in the midst of grief, seems to reach towards a type of music he had always wanted to write, and Rachlin's performance, emphasising Romantic yearning, revealed an intensely human element.

This approach combined with the work's elusiveness sometimes gave the impression that the orchestral part hadn't quite settled and the second movement could sometimes have tolerated more incisive rhythmic definition.

However, conductor Lothar Koenigs (stepping in at short notice) led a magisterial performance through the expansive span of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony.

With the grand themes and repetitive sequences with which the music is spun, Koenigs created waves of evolving development which avoided any sense of the mechanical.

Bruckner's string writing is demanding, with an almost incessant demand for warmth and intensity, and the players responded valiantly.

As well, the wind sound - notably the cavernous glow of the horns and Wagner tubas, the decisive trombone theme in finale, and the intricate ethereal woodwind colours - made this 80-odd minute span open out into something memorable and magnificent.