Late-afternoon Bach and Shostakovich – worlds and times apart sounding together….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JS BACH – Suite No. 3 in C Major for Solo Violincello BWV 1009
Rolf Gjelsten  (‘cello)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartets: No 5  in B-flat (1952) / No. 2  in A Major Op. 68 (1944)
The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble:
Helene Pohl, Simeon Broom (violins), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (’cello)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday, 18th November, 2025

“Wuthering Heights” might have been an apter name for Roseneath’s “The Long Hall” on Saturday afternoon, when Wellington’s Point Jerningham resoundingly lived up to its reputation as the windiest spot in the capital during a concert given by the Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble, one in which the wind played at pedal points, drones, and vigorous ostinati as constant accompaniments to the music-making.  The latter, of course, persisted and eventually triumphed, with the players’ all-pervading focus on the music happily relegating such disruptions, however tumultuous, to an incidental, scarcely noticeable in situ degree.

The Ensemble’s quartet personnel has undergone fascinating and fruitful variation over the year, in particular regarding a second violinist, and featuring luminaries such as Monique Lapins, Anna van der Zee and Peter Gjelsten in the position. For this concert the player was Simeon Broom, currently an NZSO member with a number of years’ valuable experience spent in various orchestras overseas. Each of the quartet performances in this concert demonstrated both the group’s flexibility and individual members’ skills at adaptation to fresh combinations, auguring well for continuance of presentation by the ensemble of one of chamber music’s core repertoire resources.

As well they might for the purposes of such an exploration of what is becoming increasingly apparent to me as one of the great cornerstones of musical expression of its time and its relevance for other times – Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets. Though Beethoven’s acclaimed cycle of quartets would seem like an obvious inspiration to any aspiring composer tackling the same genre of works, Shostakovich’s relationship with the form took a different path over time, with the young composer, mindful of his experience with the 1936 “Lady Macbeth affair”,  all too aware of those repressive conditions foisted upon creative artists within his homeland, and thus taking care with his first string quartet venture (1938) to avoid any undue excess. It was six years before he returned to the medium in 1944, confident then of giving an impression of a loyal Russian’s patriotic response to the war effort via his references in the work to Russian folk music, though the ethnic elements in this second quartet included definite references to Jewish “Klezmer” music, perhaps more for aesthetic reasons than political ones. The Third, Fourth and Fifth Quartets were less fortunate, with the composer’s increasingly dysfunctional relationship with Stalin and his cohorts resulting in his regarding the works as “for the drawer” – the Third Quartet (1946) received one performance before being withdrawn), while the other two (the 1949 Fourth and the 1952 Fifth)  languished unperformed until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Of longer-term interest is Shostakovich’s love of the music of JS Bach – he headed a Soviet delegation in 1950  to attend in Leipzig events marking the bicentennial commemoration of Bach’s death , where he was quoted as saying “For us Bach’s legacy is an embodiment of flaming emotion, soulful humanity and true humanism, which stands in contrast to the dark world of raw evil and contempt for humanity.” Shostakovich knew the Well-Tempered Clavier intimately (he had been playing it from the age of twelve), when he encountered the 26 year-old Tatiana Nikolaeva playing selections from the work at the International Bach Competition which was one of the Leipzig bicentennial events. Her playing (which won her the competition’s first prize) inspired Shostakovich to compose his own set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, and dedicate the set to Nikolaeva, who premiered them in December of 1952 (she subsequently recorded them no less than three times!).

These Op.87 Preludes and Fugues provide a thoroughly refreshing look at musical examples of the art we readily associate with Bach – counterpoint, fugue and texture, a dynamic collection of captivating opportunities for what one commentator has described as “musical ecstasy and reflection”. And, as ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten pointed out in his pre-concert talk today prior to playing for us Bach’s heart-warming ‘Cello Suite No.3 in C Major,  the work’s confidence, ebullience and mastery of form is a representation of the effect on Shostakovich’s own use of counterpoint and fugue in certain of his quartets, especially evident in the 1944 Fifth Quartet which we were to hear immediately after this work.

I’d recently been enjoying former Wellingtonian cellist Miranda Wilson’s “The Well-Tempered ‘Cello” (published 2022, Fairhaven Press) , describing her own saga of getting to know, working on, and eventually performing these ‘Cello Suites – so the section of the book devoted to this Third Suite occasioned some required (re)reading and (re)relishing!  She emphasises the work’s in-built resonances, being in the C-major key, and Rolf Gjelsten seemed to confirm this with his verdict regarding the work’s general affability and out-going nature – music with plenty to say and with the resonances created that supported this kind of character.

Right from that opening “downward plunge” into Bach’s flow of notes I felt a wonderful sense of well-being – the journey at first was mostly scalic, but with some wider steps and a couple of quirky jumps, and a voice which grows in variety of expression, passing through single notes, phrases, lines and episodes, and with an engagingly droll drone-sequence around the note of G, before a few moments of recitative bring us to the end.  The Allemande contrasts with the bright-and-bushy-tailed Prelude in being so gorgeously relaxed in its graceful trajectory, the sudden chain of double-stopped notes in the piece’s first half, a brief frisson of tension that resolves with a nudge of extra warmth. Rolf had told us about the Courante with its “crazy dance” aspect (Miranda Wilson refers to the piece’s “frantic-up-and-down arpeggios”!) – and to my untutored ear it seemed to possess and swap between two kinds of rhythmic trajectories at will, with beat-stresses changing as if playing a kind of game with my sensibilities!

The Sarabande, my attendant author’s “powerfully moving” rhythm, is similarly characterised by my in situ player as having “a unique kind of intensity” – I didn’t know before this concert that it’s a dance form that was banned in the 17th Century as eliciting “too erotic” a response from its participants! I’ve now been dangerously over-sensitised to its allure, and will have to watch myself over that second note in each bar, in future!  I catch myself savouring it during the performance, here, and thinking that it must be a case of “once heard, etc….!”

The Bourees plucked me our of any such fantasy world I might have ventured into. They’re wonderful, “two-sides to the coin” dances, suggesting different physical, psychological or emotional views of the same location, feeling, or situation. Here the difference seemed like a masculine/feminine distinction, a somewhat conventional response, I know, but one which a lifetime of observation has ingrained for good or ill! And I loved the Gigue, here, with its almost lazily loping stride, and especially the bariolage sections (one note repeatedly sounded in the midst of a whirl of others) which have always had a pleasantly astringent “ring”, and which were followed with a reassuring “that’s enough of that” rejoiner!

So, onto the first of the Shostakovich offerings of the afternoon we went, with the wind just as fulsomely attendant as ever! The Fifth String Quartet appropriately back-ended the Bach Suite performance, allowing the former’s compositional proximity to the composer’s own 24 Preludes and Fugues to resonate more readily, the earlier Second String Quartet having a rather different, and more removed kind of genesis. I was intrigued by other references I’d found to this later quartet’s influences, among them the music of one Galina Ustvolskaya, a former pupil of the composer’s and one he apparently harboured deeper feelings for, following the death of his first wife – Shostakovich quotes a four-note motif from Ustvolskaya’s B-flat Clarinet Trio, played by the first violin in the quartet’s first movement coda (the composer’s feelings, incidentally, were never returned, adding to the poignancy of the quote).

In his introduction to the work for us Rolf Gjelsten emphasised the composer’s predicament at having to indefinitely defer some of his music’s performances, such as this Quartet (along with his two previous quartets, one of which did get a “premiere” but was then withdrawn!). Stalin’s death in 1953 meant that this Quartet could at last come in from the cold, along with a number of other important works “awaiting their time”. It was the first of the composer’s Quartets which joined the movements together in a single sweep, and it contained a number of unusually “personal” references – elements which would come to increasingly characterise the quartets still to come.

The work’s striking opening contained a “walking” theme whose determined trajectories were set upon by trenchant figures whose intensities assailed the music until the second violin’s introduction of a more lyrical subject tossed about between the players. Gradually the mood intensified further, with both the walking and lyrical themes returning but under siege, the lines buzzing like fierce insects, out for blood, but then gradually receding as, firstly, the lyrical theme made an impassioned return, and then, from nowhere, came the aforementioned Ustvolskaya quote on the first violin, disappearing after a second, higher, more ethereal statement as the instrument took the music via a single note and accompanied by pizzicati, to the next movement.

Here, the lines portrayed a kind of stillness, a post-rampage desolation, in places a kind of austere beauty, with eerie unisons and soulful phrases clasping the ambiences and holding them fast, until the viola, obeying a lonely impulse stepped forwards with an engaging phrase in hand to begin the dance, a tart little waltz whose good-humoured gesturings gradually turned once more into the furies that beset the opening movement. And just as unexpectedly as in the opening movement, the tumult ceased, and first the violin, and then the viola impassionedly sounded the Ustvolskaya theme once again, punctuated by emphatic pizzicati from the others. As with its first appearance the theme gave little solace, more a sense of something out-of-reach, emphasised by the subsequent “walking away” of the music, the jog-trot of the finale’s opening leading to a bleaker, much reiterated theme which then dissolved into silence.

After giving us such a “living and breathing from within” response to this work’s emotionally searching sound-saga, the players allowed us an interval’s space before launching into the  stunningly contrasted physicality of the opening “Overture” to the composer’s Second String Quartet , written in 1944 – music sounding for the moment relatively free from the constraints of politics or dogmas, its folkishness serving both as Shostakovich’s loyal citizen-response to the “Great Patriotic War”, and in particular his fondness for Jewish klezmer-like idioms in the exuberant opening theme, here suggestive of a folk-celebration.

Though this remained an ensemble performance overall, throughout the work’s second movement I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the charismatic violin-playing of Helene Pohl in her delivery of the piece’s klezmer-like solo, mournfully expressive soliloquies over drone-like accompaniments, and with the occasional notes ambiently “bent” in what one presumes is an authentic style. At one point the ‘cello sounded a brief solo before the violin began a slow waltz, one into which melody the other instruments gradually climbed, their notes rising to agitatedly “connect” with the violin’s before falling away once more – for most of this movement the violin is played as if it has joined with its player at prayer…..

A nocturnal scherzo/waltz followed, swift, ghostly and chromatic, a real danse macabre, alternating between substance and shadow before taking its “do I wake or sleep?” leave.  In its enigmatic wake was left the finale, an astonishing theme-and-variations movement, recitative-like at the beginning between the instruments , settling down to expound and extract every ounce, strand and tone of the folk-tune introduced by the viola, and then refracted through what seemed like all possible combinations, and every single conceivable characteristic one might ascribe to the composer’s experience. All the players here – violinist Simeon Broom, violist Nicholas Hancox and cellist Rolf Gjelsten – brought into play intensities and virtuosities echoing those of Helene Pohl’s brought over from the previous movement, carrying the music through its tumultuous journey to a monumental conclusion.

I managed a few grateful words of breathless appreciation to Rolf Gjelsten at the end – and then, afterwards, the still-insistent winds were good company as I walked home, drawing out the music’s tumultuous resonances from my memory and setting them dancing in the open air, art and nature joining hands in an unexpected post-concert bonus!

NOYE’S FLUDDE – Delitable in alle wise and a ful gret joie!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul presents:
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – Noye’s Fludde  – Opera in One Act (based on the 15th-Century Chester “Mystery” Play)

Stage Director: Jacqueline Coats
Musical Director: Michael Stewart
Production Manager: George O’Donnell
Stage Manager: Boo Pantoja-Frost
Stage Hands: April and Cara Tan

Cast: Robert Tucker – Noye
Maaike Christie-Beekman – Mrs Noye
Joshua Jamieson – Voice of God
Alexander Stewart – Sem
William Edgecombe – Ham
Blythe Dennison – Jaffett
Eleanor Stanton – Mrs Sem
Zoe Stewart – Mrs Ham
Fiona Liu – Mrs Jaffett
Gossips – Margaux Astrid Detera, Alice Carter, Varsha Ranganathan.
Mischa Thomson. Shenaya Pieries
Phoebe Cassin  – Raven
Ruby Millen-Ingram  – Dove

Orchestra: Solo String Quintet: Christine Wang, Emma Barron (violins),
Sophia Acheson (viola), Eleanor Carter (‘cello)
Malcolm Struthers (double-bass)
Piano Duet:  Kathryn Mosley, Max Toth
Solo Recorder: Kamala Bain
Principal Trumpet: Mark Carter
Organ:  Tom Chatterton
Principal Percussion: Laurence Reese

Handbell Choir of Samuel Marsden Collegiate School (director: Marian Campbell)

Children’s chorus and instrumentalists

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul,
Molesworth St, Thorndon, Wellington
Friday 17th October 2025

“Delightful in every way” was the unsolicited comment made to me straightaway by a fellow-audience member after we’d finished enthusiastically applauding the efforts of the singers and instrumentalists at Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul earlier this evening in a performance of Benjamin Britten’s one-act opera “Noye’s Fludde”.

My first long-ago encounter with this work “live” was as a performer – as a percussionist in the orchestra in a Palmerston North church – and for me there have been a handful of occasions since, though always as an audience member.  One of these  took place in the actual heart of Benjamin Britten country, when I attended the Aldeburgh Festival of 1994! – and how disappointing amid all that excitement then, when the festival organisers that year chose for whatever reason not to follow the composer’s directive that Noye’s Fludde be always performed in a church, by staging the opera in the Maltings concert-hall, famed for its acoustic, but as untheatrical a venue as one could get, certainly to the work’s disadvantage!

The much earlier excitement of taking part in that first performance has never left me; but this evening’s most recent encounter had a similar kind of participatory joy which seemed to include everybody , one which has pushed sleep for the moment  into the background while I savour once again the sheer, undiluted engagement of it all, singers and players inhabiting and filling up the shared physical spaces with gloriously  tangible sounds. And, of course the Cathedral’s generous acoustic responded readily to our own audience efforts vis-à-vis the composer’s directive that we raise our own voices in three of the hymns whose exhortations became part and parcel of the famous story.

Along with the acoustic, the cathedral’s spacious physical surroundings helped define the epic nature of Noye’s and his intrepid companions’ undertaking, via a spectacular backdrop screen depicting aspects of the “Fludde”, adding a truly visceral component to the proceedings, a “window” of the devastation wrought upon the outside world that those in the “shippe” had been spared – Matthew Lawrence’s animations were in places splendidly palpable!  Umbrellas and tarpaulins added to the flavour of director Jacqueline Coats’s choreographing of the perils of the voyage,  aptly emphasising both the physical stresses and anxieties of the shippe’s company, as did our joining in with the singing of “For Those in Peril on the Sea” throughout the weather’s most threatening moments!

Earlier in the story we had relished the gathering of all the “Beastes” wearing all kinds of masks, and summoned from all different parts of the Cathedral by bugle calls, running up to fill the vessel whilst singing their “Kyrie eleisons” – delightful! Though the venue’s spaciousness told against the clarity of the younger voices’ various solos at times, all fronted up and delivered with committed expressions and gesturings – and we had in our generously-appointed programmes practically all of the words (an inspired touch, and with enough available light for us to be able to read and keep track of the essential message!)

As diverting in a completely different way was the interaction between Noye and his recalcitrant wife, who refused to board the boat despite the entreaties of her family members, preferring the company of her “gossips”, and their fondness for carousing together, a situation solved when the “gossips” were graphically swept away by the floodwaters and the sons manoeuvred their mother on board just in time! Robert Tucker as Noye and Maiike Christie-Beekman as Mrs Noye were each superbly dramatic and sonorous-voiced in conflict, Noye endless pleading, and his wife finally capitulating after delivering a resounding slap to her husband’s face!

Right at the work’s very beginning one’s sensibilities were galvanised, with reverberating orchestral chords magnificently bolstered by the percussion – we ourselves felt almost fearful amid such an onslaught while singing “Lord Jesus think on me”! – one which then led to the voice of God magnificently rolling about the vistas, impressively intoned by Joshua Jamieson (not visible from where I was sitting, but an all-pervading presence), his utterances strongly underpinned by timpanist Larry Reese and his percussive cohorts! Then, at the work’s other end were the manifold beauties of a newly-redeemed world, coloured by memorable orchestral contributions, lump-in-throat delicacies of colour and texture for us to sit and wonder at – and how resonant the characterisations of the two birds sent by Noah to spy out the land! –  Phoebe Cassin’s Raven with deliciously slinky ‘cello tones from Eleanor Carter’s ‘cello, and Ruby Millen-Ingram’s dove voiced and danced by Kamala Bain’s dulcet recorder-chirpings, each one supported by Kathryn Mosley’s and Max Toth’s nimble piano-playing.

It all came together with the emergence from the shippe of the intrepid survivors, and the appearance of the rainbow on the screen – the breaking out of repeated “Alleluias” amongst the singers, accompanied by the Samuel Marsden Collegiate Handbell Choir’s instruments, along with those aforementioned redemptive orchestral sounds from the entire company, was simply transformational, as the composer would have intended, the spaces alive with hope for a better world, which, of course couldn’t be more apt in humanity’s presently parlous state around the globe, and to which we were all able to give tongue with our final bugle-accompanied hymn verses.

Special mentions, of course, are due to director Jacqueline Coats for bringing out so effectively and tellingly those essential inclusive elements of the presentation that treated its audience as true participants rather than mere spectators (something I felt manifestly lacking all those years ago at Aldeburgh itself!). And instrumental in the application of these goals was the musical direction of Michael Stewart, both as a kind of affable Master of Ceremonies and as a committed director of the musical and dramatic flow of the presentation. Both of these people brought out what I thought were the most positive aspects of the venue, enabling the work itself to speak well-nigh unimpeded and enhance its relevance for today. Goodness knows our humanity needs such things now as much as it ever did, both for our sustenance and positive continuation.

 

 

Impactful Shostakovich unpacked -The New Zealand String Quartet and the Ghost Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SHOSTAKOVICH UNPACKED
New Zealand String Quartet  / Ghost Trio

String Quartet No. 4 in D Major Op.83 (1949)
New Zealand String Quartet ; Peter Clark (violin) / Arna Morton (guest violinist)
Gillian Ansell (Viola) / Callum Hall (guest ‘cellist)

Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano (arr. Lev Atovmian, 1955)
Peter Clark and Monique Lapins (violins) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor Op 67 (1943-44)
Ghost Trio: Monique Lapins (violin) / Ken Ichinose (‘cello) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

With: ROBERT BURCH (1929-2007) – Essay to the Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich for
‘cello and piano (1975)  Callum Hall (‘cello) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Wellington
Wednesday, Ist October 2025

Part of a welcome (and essential) commemoration here in Wellington of the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has been “Shostakovich Unpacked”, a four-part series of concerts exploring some of the composer’s chamber music masterpieces. This was the third concert in the New Zealand String Quartet’s series which presents five of the composer’s fifteen string quartets along with various other chamber works from similar periods in Shostakovich’s creative life, much of which met by official disapproval, and for a time in the form of censure from no less threatening a figure than the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

I couldn’t make it to the two earlier concerts in the series; and after listening to the ensemble’s superbly-wrought reading of Shostakovich’s Fourth Quartet found myself wishing I had moved more sizeable portions of heaven and earth to try and do so! Still, gratitude for what one has and can do is a marvellous thing on its own terms – and the music-making in this evening’s concert was of an order that one was left to marvel at in astonishment! And, it was little short of luxury casting to have TWO ensembles of such quality performing in the same programme, with the added bonus of items featuring members of each group displaying as much enjoyment in the collaborations as the skills required to successfully bring them off.

I particularly enjoyed the contributions made by the two “guest” players in the NZSQ, each notable for their “blending into” the overall textures as for their individual voices, always alive to the potentialities of each phrase they articulated. Arna Morton’s violin sturdily and ambiently partnered leader Peter Clark’s instrument throughout the folksy first movement, while taking her instrument’s mosaic-like opportunities throughout the rest of the work with great surety. Callum Hall’s ‘cello had more opportunities for its solo voice to shine, repeatedly catching the ear with both rhythmic and lyrical enactments of resounding character. Both players seemed for the occasion a glove-like fit into the ensemble’s realisation of a work from a composer whose personal expressions of ideological belief frequently collided with censorious officialdom at the highest (and potentially deadliest) level.

Shostakovich wrote this quartet on a “high” after having attended as an official Soviet spokesman (amazingly, at the directive of Stalin himself) the “Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace” held in New York in March of 1949. Stalin also revoked a previous (1948) ban on the music of “formalist composers” in order to cast the visit of his “representative” to the US in a more positive light. Obviously emboldened by this, Shostakovich had straightaway begun work on the quartet on returning home in April, and finished it before the year was out. Five months later, after intense rehearsals and soul-searchings, the work was privately performed by the composer’s favourite Quartet, the Beethoven Quartet, to an invited audience, whose members immediately expressed alarm at the new work’s ostensible use of Jewish musical idioms. The upshot was that Shostakovich was persuaded to withhold the first public performance and wait “for better times” – which came with the death of Stalin in 1953, and the work’s premiere in December of that year. By this time, the composer’s cynicism at the “new era” was apparent, writing to a friend, “The times are new, but the informers are old”.

All of this history seemed of little concern as the work’s heartwarming introductory sounds were initially launched by the players – a lovely lyrical ambience whose trajectories first suggested something exotically folkish, almost bagpipe-like, with the droning lines of viola and ‘cello underpinning the rhapsodical outpourings of the two violins – tensions arose between the increasingly insistent, sometimes dissonant voices, before shifting harmonies brought viola and ‘cello into the discourse – a more sombre minor-key shift brings meanderings, a hint of a dance and a brief  return to drone-accompanied lyricism at the movement’s end. The Andantino’s first 4-note phrase on the violin straightaway had me thinking “Tchaikovsky”, but not the rest, an intensely-wrought waltz with the ‘cello silent until the player reintroduced the same “Tchaikovsky” theme  – the intensities rose and fell, with Peter Clark’s violin sounding a beautifully “covered” tone replicated by his companions, and  falling gradually away to echoed remembrances of what had gone before.

A gorgeously “chugging” figure introduced the Allegretto, Callum Hall’s ‘cello leading off with a workmanlike theme repeated by the violin, followed by a whimsical unison “trio” of violin viola and ‘cello, the ambience being of a ghostly kind of “night ride” that was then cranked up by the violin’s Jog-trot rhythms (Shostakovich paid a visit by Rossini?) and with wind-blown chromatic figurations introducing an eerie aspect to the journey. Where it eventually took us was to somewhere akin to Robert Schumann’s renowned “other realms” description of worlds of hitherto unexplored experience, a state of being often requiring courage and steadfastness for both performer and listener. Here Gillian Ansell’s viola was the ideal fulcrum for such action, a voice in the midst of the void inviting others to plunge with her into the throes of one of the composer’s most challenging, and in the circumstances, reckless undertakings.

With several audaciously delivered pizzicato chords the introduction to the finale revealed its creator’s raison d’etre for the work, which gradually built up from its robust, truculent beginnings into a kind of danse macabre drawn from Jewish-sounding dance motifs, an unbridled and unashamedly grotesque outpouring of lament in a similar vein to that sounded by the composer’s Second Piano Trio finale. It was no wonder that the work’s first private audience was disturbed at Shostakovich’s apparent insensibility to potential strife and condemnation with this music – its scale was almost orchestral in places, with powerful unisons, sharp accents, and massive chordings, all of which eventually unravelled to leave mere vestiges of desolation for us to marvel over at the music’s end.

Not in the above written order, the programme’s next item was, appropriately enough, a work written in 1975 by a little-known but still significant New Zealand composer, Robert Burch, as “An Essay to the Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich, for ‘cello and piano”, performed by Callum Hall and Gabriela Glapska, one introduced and preluded by Peter Clark, who read an additional posthumous word-tribute by Burch to his illustrious fellow-composer.

Much of the work was not inappropriately sombre, beginning with heavy introductory unison notes from both instruments, stern exchanges, either in unison between piano and ‘cello or in counterpoint with one another. The mood remained serious and studious at first, occasionally highlighting a particular rhythmic five-single-note figure on both instruments – a passage with the cello played pizzicato followed, as did afterwards an almost ad lib section, the cellist bouncing the bow on the instrument’s strings by way of advancing the theme in a different form. The piano suddenly embarked on a convoluted, rhythmically rugged expansion of the thematic material before taking up a fugue-like passage which the cello interrupted, again with the abrupt five-note passage. After a series of forceful chords from the piano, the instruments seem to enter into some kind of collusion, the ‘cello sounding long-breathed lines and Elgar-like pizzicato chordings, to which the piano replied with gently luminous harmonies in the higher registers, the cello continuing to draw out the five-note patternings in more contentedly-expressed terms of acceptance of the piano’s celestial-sounding representations.

In view of Shostakovich’s well-documented sense of somewhat ironic humour, it was appropriate to have some musical representation of his facility in this respect, with ample proof furnished by a performance of several pieces arranged for two violins and piano drawn from the composer’s various suites of “lighter” music for film and other “incidental music” activities. One of his composer-friends, Lev Atovmian, was frequently assigned by Shostakovich to produce arrangements from several of his stage and film scores, one of which was the collection Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano. I must admit to enjoying looking further into the individual pieces’ genesis (at the risk of further elongating this review!) – the opening Prelude was from the 1955 film score The Gadfly, a mixture of tenderness and ebullience which the players designated with considerable relish. Then came the Gavotte, lovely and “bouncy”, from incidental music to The Human Comedy (1934), and followed by a poignant Elegy from the same work, a sequence originally titled The Panorama of Paris. The succeeding Waltz, supposedly from music for a cartoon film The Tale of the Priest and his servant Balda moved by turns through tense, insinuating and buoyant sequences involving a pompous priest, his beautiful daughter and a resourceful servant – however, the concluding Polka certainly added to its interest with further clarification as to the source –  taken from the Ballet The Limpid Stream, its full title was Dance of the Milkmaid and the Tractor Driver.  (Surely no commentator would pass on an opportunity for such a colourful mention!)

It almost goes without saying that violinists Peter Clark and Monique Lapins, together with pianist Gabriela Glapska, all readily brought out the fun, the quirkiness and the tongue-in-cheek sentimentality of these pieces, making the presentations as much fun to watch as to listen to. Other qualities far removed from such innocent enjoyments, and ironically involving two of the same performers here, then took over the final part of the programme. This marked the appearance of the “other” ensemble, the Ghost Trio, in which Monique Lapins and Gabriela Glapska were joined by ‘cellist Ken Ichinose for a performance of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, one of the composer’s defining statements concerning, in Gabriela Glapska’s own moving notes about the music, “both intimate grief and the collective trauma of a war-torn nation”.

It was my privilege to have heard the same Ghost Trio play this work less than six weeks ago, at a concert at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, to simply overwhelming effect on that occasion  – https://middle-c.org/2025/08/ghost-trios-st-andrews-concert-haunts-the-memory/ –  I don’t propose to try and describe the music all over again, merely to report on the effect I thought the work and its performance had on a different audience. When experiencing the work alongside other music by Shostakovich I felt it made a different kind of impact for me, its “shock effect”  no longer as marked, but when performed in the wake of something like the Quartet, having a deeper, more lasting sense of unease at the enormity and insidious  power of the forces that were obviously arrayed all about the composer’s world in order to keep in place a status quo of power and control – in this case characterised by fear and terror enacted upon any refusing to co-operate. I thought the St.Andrew’s acoustic more responsive to the music as well, where every sliver of impulse seemed to send shock waves in all directions – the ambiences of the Prefab Hall made, I thought, the work’s impact a tad more diffuse, though a second hearing can easily produce variants, musicians being human beings. Though, in short, less of a “knockout” performance for me this time round, the Trio further intensified my awe and respect for the composer in this music and for the people who put themselves “on the line” to bring these works off with such searing commitment!

As did the rest of the programme – a great success for all concerned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beauty, grace, wit, adventure and excitement – the Aroha String Quartet and friends

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Aroha String Quartet and friends                                                                         Photo: Zhongxian Jin              Back row: Nick Walshe (clarinet), Justin Sun (bassoon), Alexander Hambleton (horn),  Oleksandr Gunchenko (double bass)
Front Row: Robert Ibell (‘cello), Haihong Liu (violin) Konstanze Artmann (violin), Zhongxian Jin (viola)

MOZART – String Quartet No.22 in B-flat K.589
NIELSEN – Serenata in Vano FS 68, for Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, ‘Cello and Double-Bass
SCHUBERT – Octet in F Major D.803. for String Quartet, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn and Double-Bass

The Aroha Quartet: Haihong Liu (leader) and Konstanze Artmann, violins,  Zhongxian Jin, viola, Robert Ibell, ‘cello
– with Nick Walshe, clarinet / Justin Sun, bassoon / Alexander Hambleton, horn / Oleksandr Gunchenko, double-bass

St.Peter’s Church, Willis St., Wellington
Sunday, 28th September, 2025

Is there a venue in Wellington for chamber music that surpasses in ambient warmth and atmosphere the gorgeously-appointed “St. Peter’s-on-Willis” (to use the name aligned with that long-given to the well-known “St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace” church in the same city)?  From the moment the players of the Aroha Quartet put their bows on the strings of their instruments to begin Mozart’s adorable String Quartet in B-flat K.589, I immediately felt I was being drawn into a kind of seventh-heaven of existential bliss, one which continued for me right through the work.

As much as it was the music itself, I was particularly taken with the sound-quality of both the individual strands and the concerted blends emanating from the players. Perhaps it was at least due in equal parts to a chemistry of delight in encountering a work by Mozart that I’d never before heard (yes, really! – for some reason all my attention had been “snaffled” by the composer’s string quintets up to this point in time!) – If this was indeed a baptism of sorts, it couldn’t have taken place in an environment more conducive to enchantment of the kind that overtakes its listeners in situ, and in most instances for some time afterwards.

The other two works of the programme generated delights of a different order – in the case of the Nielsen Serenade I had already made the acquaintance of the composer’s obvious delight in wind instruments through his wondrous Wind Quintet, a work replete with the energies, drolleries and wry acceptances of life that were  on show in the brief but totally engaging “Serenata in vano”. After this, nothing could have surpassed the “all brought together” perfection of the programme with Schubert’s chamber masterpiece, the mighty Octet, casting its spell over all and sundry.

It was the Mozart work which worked the first magic of the afternoon, however –  such effortless lyricism, and with so many beautiful exchanges generating what seemed like cascades of joyously lyrical enjoyment amongst those voices, all performed with the lightest and deftest of touches by the players. The pairings of violin and ‘cello, of viola and ‘cello and then of the two violins throughout the exposition brought near-endless delight, the plunge into the development section underlining the minor-key change of atmosphere and the recapitulation enriching the interactions with tendrils of phrasing shared between the instruments, the ‘cello often playing higher than the others and the viola getting significant “running” lines to emphasise the music’s “shared” character.

The larghetto slow movement began with the ‘cello taking the theme, sensitively voiced by Robert Ibell, and winsomely replied to by the first violinist Haihong Liu, though all the players had the chance to shine with individually elaborated series of alternated downward runs throughout the movement.  Again, the passagework was exquisitely decorated and interactive, a quality noticed by the publisher Artaria, who in 1791 referred to these particular works as “concertante quartets”).

Many commentators have remarked upon the Minuet and Trio as being the most vital and progressive part of the work – its “Moderato” marking gives the music room for a decorative aspect which the players here relished to the full, the Quartet leader Haihong Liu in particular exhibiting passages of exquisitely-finished fingerwork. The Trio seemed even more “possessed” by a faery spirit bent upon evoking mischievous endeavours, the players taken to extended realms by the music’s whims of fancy, with fingers, bowing arms and sensibilities all put through their paces!

A carefree spirit as well informed the finale’s 6/8 allegro assai, rather more in the typically Mozartean manner, though with a few twists and turns along the way, some stop-start  harmonic recalibrations, and a few manic trajectoried variants, just for the fun of doing encouraging players to do them! But I thought the nicest touch was at the end where the music shaped up to a conventional tonic/dominant couple of concluding chords, before completely disarming all expectations with a sudden, gently terra firma-engaging concluding phrase!  The general sigh of pleasure at that point, both inward and outward, was palpable!

What a treat to get a (for me!) hitherto unknown piece by the irrepressible Carl Nielsen! While not all of his music is “comfortable” to listen to (some works, like the Fifth Symphony and the Wind Quintet, are glorious, and others, such as the Clarinet Concerto, are just plain irascible!), this little “Serenata in Vano” quintet brings out what the composer’s great contemporary, Jean Sibelius, described in a posthumous tribute to Nielsen as having “head and heart….in the highest degree”. It’s the humanity of this droll portrait that one essentially responds to – that of a group of musicians attempting to serenade a lady, to “lure the fair one out onto the balcony” (in Nielsen’s own words), but without success! – (“in Vano” – in Vain!) – and their subsequent “Oh, well….” kind of reaction, in which they “shuffle off home” is a particularly treasurable moment! It’s worth noting that, included in the ensemble was Robert Ibell’s ‘cello and Aleksandr Gunchenko’s double-bass, each of whom still managed to vividly convey a sense of “to-ing and-fro-ing” despite their barely transportable instruments!

And so we came to the raison d’etre of the concert, Schubert’s justly-famous Octet, the St.Peter’s acoustic as readily amenable to the sounds as it had been to that of the string quartet’s glorious outpourings  I wondered, as the players took their places, whether the strings’ balance of texture in the whole might be affected for us by their facing sideways in the ensemble rather than outward, but the sound, from where I was sitting, seemed in accord with what one expected to hear – from my seat I couldn’t see either Konstanze Artmann’s violin or Zhongxian Jin’s viola being played, but I could hear and appreciate both of their contributions clearly.

Along with the thriil of that first, arresting chord is the great moment when the allegro begins with an upward-thrusting unison, one which really sets the adventure on its path. Tempi are swift, here, with that same “gossamer” effect in the playing I noticed in the Mozart, the work varying between these diaphanous interactions and powerful unison statements to hold the movement’s “thrust” together. The solos were invariably superbly-turned, with Haihong Liu’s violin and Nick Walshe’s clarinet centre-stage for much of the time (in the latter’s case unsurprisingly as it was a clarinettist, Count Ferdinand von Troyer, who commissioned the work and played in its first performance).

The voices took both their concerted and solo opportunities – there was a lovely becalmed “trio” effect from clarinet, bassoon and horn in tandem just before the movement’s recapitulation, and both Justin Sun’s bassoon and Zhongxian Jin’s viola were heard by turns relishing their advancement of the theme as the trajectories took up again and flowed swiftly onwards. Alexander Hambleton’s horn’s brief “bloop” at one point was worth the expression on the player’s face in the aftermath, especially in light of the terrific playing elsewhere, the same player, for example making much of the “hunting-call” theme in the affecting solo just before the movement’s conclusion.

Clarinet and violin acted as “empathetic companions”  for much of the slow movement, such as in a beautiful unison passage leading back to the main theme’s return, after which numerous other solo “turns” played their part in the movement’s beauty of utterance. And then, what a contrast with the ebullient Scherzo! – the players here relished the dynamic contrasts of the exchanges, and brought out the insouciant character of the “whistling tune”  to suitably carefree effect. delivered even more insouciantly, more characterfully carefree. I liked the Trio’s determinedly po-faced  response, Robert Ibell’s cello bringing out the quasi-academic lines with plenty of “keep up” nudgings and encouragings.

The Andante variation movement at first seemed like a series of charming interludes until Schubert suddenly took the music into unrelated, more stratospheric realms, courtesy of strings playing in their upper registers and the winds  floating their lines as if beholding hitherto undiscovered territories! – fascinating! The music seemed then to almost regretfully retreat from these hints of an Elysium somewhere above, lingering for a few seconds before settling back down to more earthy pleasures, with versions of scamperings, gurglings and gentle rumbustifications, ready for the Menuetto. Here, the players make it “swing” and dance in a properly homecoming kind of way (with a very “gemachlicht” kind of Trio to reinforce the mood!).

All the more extraordinary the finale’s opening, then, replete with disturbing tremolandi and baleful chords – so theatrical in effect, yet suggesting  a personal darkness that’s somehow escaped its composer’s inner realms and made its presence felt. It leaves the following Allegro by-and-large cheerful, but with moments of anxiety (manic triplet passages from both violin and clarinet here and later), and eventually drawing us back into proximity with the movement’s opening Void-like darkness, breaking through once again  thrown into prominence at the movement’s beginning. Schubert’s response is to give voice to words he himself had written in a letter, and finish the work with joyful energies, vibrantly expressed by this performance – “When I would sing of love it turned to pain. And again when I would sing of pain it turned to love.”

O FORTUNA – a sacred and profane Wellington/Auckland choral spectacular!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

LEONARD  BERNSTEIN – Chichester Psalms
CARL ORFF – Carmina Burana
Emma Pearson (soprano), Coco Diaz (counter-tenor), James Harrison (baritone)
Jian Liu, Diedre Irons (pianos)
Auckland Choral (Uwe Grodd, Music Director)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington (Brent Stewart, Music Director)
Wellington Brass Band (David Bremner (Music Director)
Brent Stewart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 27th September 2025

Palpable excitement was in the air regarding the Orpheus Choir’s September 2025 concert at Wellington’s  Michael Fowler Centre, featuring as it did the ever-popular choral classic by Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, and coupled with a lesser-known but up-and-coming classic from the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. What gave the concert even more added interest was the double novelty of the Orpheus Choir  being joined by a second choir, Auckland Choral, and being accompanied in Carmina Burana by a brass band instead of the usual symphony orchestra. Together these ingredients gave the prospect of attending such a concert the kind of aura and excitement one recalled from festival events in previous years, an atmosphere palpably alive from the evening’s beginning in both the foyer and auditorium.

Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms  was composed as the result of a commission from the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, the Rev. Walter Hussey, who over the years successfully commissioned no less than eleven significant works from various well-known composers, failing only in his attempts to procure a work from Igor Stravinsky in 1968! Hussey had actually suggested to Bernstein that a Psalm setting  with “more than a hint of “West Side Story” about the music” would be more than welcome; and after some initial misgivings Bernstein became inspired by the Psalm-setting idea, producing in 1965 a work in three movements, to be sung in Hebrew. Its first performance was in New York in July of that year, with the composer conducting, after which came the Chichester Festival’s opening later that month. Bernstein did come to Chichester for the opening but declined to conduct, saying he wanted to hear it “as an audience member”. The success of that occasion was instrumental in inspiring  several more commissions by Walter Hussey for future Chichester festivals, from composers  William Walton, Lennox Berkeley and the American William Albright.

Here in Wellington the combination of the two choirs galvanised the openings of each of the works programmed in a manner each composer surely intended. The Hebrew words of the Chichester Psalms were translated for us in English surtitles, beginning with the declamatory “Awake, Psaltery and Harp” and with percussion and  piano adding to the clamour and excitement of the words. The composer, heedful of his commissioner’s comments referring to “West Side Story” set the following words from Psalm 100 “Make a joyful noise unto the world all ye lands” in a catchy, and in places percussive 7/4 metre, the angularities pointed by the voices and pianists with gusto!

Though I had heard the work only once before, I remembered well the plaintive solo contribution to the second movement with its distinctively “bluesy” flattened note in the melody line – suddenly there it was, in the guise of a memory awakened! From Psalm 23  “The Lord is my Shepherd – I shall not want”, with Coco Diaz’s haunting voice then joined by the choir’s female voices. The choir’s male voices then broke in with sharply-accented cries – “Why do the nations rage?” – similarly sharp, heavy accents rhythms underpinned the women’s voices, until the tenor soloist re-entered singing the words “Surely goodness and mercy”, and with the same  affecting “flattened note line” at the words “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord” – so lovely!

At this point something went awry with one of the lower platforms near the players, as if someone had dropped something percussive, making what seemed like an unscheduled entry!  – but all continued, with composure only briefly shaken and then restored – the pianists played an extraordinarily anxious and fretful sequence – by turns lamenting, brooding, fretting, and sorrowing – until the men’s voices entered with a gently lullabic  Psalm 131  – “Lord, my head is not haughty, nor my eye lofty”, , which the women’s voices joined in semi-canonic fashion, the groups approximating rather than replicating each other’s  utterances, until, joining together, the voices sang the same melody wordlessly (all of this was done in a deliciously improvisatory-sounding 10/4 rocking metre).

In conclusion, the voices turned to Psalm 133  – “Behold, how good and how pleasant it for people to dwell together in unity” unaccompanied, except for the concluding “Amen” – sentiments which, in view of the language used by the work would have resonated in a multitude of ways with many present, mindful of the present day-and-age goings on of the outside world.

Plenty of sober reflection then, to take into the interval and then, upon returning, worlds of difference to encounter!  –  this was Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”, representative of a long-since departed age’s outrageously expressed declarations of defiance and disdain in the face of the supposed spiritual and social hegemony of the church at that time, here in the form of verses written by the more dissident and dissolute representatives of the era, for our edification, centuries later! Oh, yes, and composer Carl Orff also had a hand (or two) in the latter parts of the process!

Having been familiar with the “traditional” choir and symphony orchestra mix in performances of this work for the last fifty years, I was ineffably curious as to how it would all turn out with the Wellington Brass Band in attendance instead!  The opening “O Fortuna” was predictably magnificent, as was the following “Fortune plango vulnera”, both of which had plenty of full orchestra accompaniment in the originals. With the ‘Springtime’ songs the various individual instruments showed what they could do in imitation of normally-heard winds and strings, the first “Veris leta facies” beautifully sung and accompanied. Especially lovely was the second, “slow dance” from Part One, with beautifully “covered” brass notes and gorgeously deep trajectories, seductive in their way. And the beautiful “Chume, Chum, geselle min” featured a gorgeous flute-like solo as well as exquisite singing. Of course the final “Spring movement” Were din werlt alle min” with the “made-to-order” brass fanfares were dispatched by this ensemble and the voices with great pizzazz!

“In Taberna”   began with a clarion call and crash, the instruments pushing the dotted rhythms excitingly along in support of the singer, creating a striking contrast with the fantastic “Olim Iacus colueram”, the grotesque “roasted-swan” song for counter-tenor solo – the scene’s eeriness palpably wrought by the singing and playing as the singer was “turned on the spit” and “basted” by serving-wenches!

The band revelled in the other “tavern” scenarios, particularly the percussive interjections during the Abbott’s plaintive lament “Ego sum abbas”, and the exciting running trajectories in the “In Taberna quando sumus” – it was “Oompah!” with a vengeance, in places!

Among the enchantments of this performance were the brass instruments sounding almost like the winds they were replacing, particularly so in “Amor volat undique” (Love flies everywhere) supporting the children’s choir and the soprano, particularly in the latter’s enchanting “Siqua sine socio” – and the accompaniment of the soprano’s beautiful “Stetit puella” (There stood a young girl) – Emma Pearson everything one could wish for vocally, here! – gave us aural ambiences that were almost unworldly in terms of their beauty.

As for the pianists. Diedre Irons and Jian Liu,  along with the various other percussionists, they were heroes in terms of rhythmic precision, thematic networking and colouristic variety, picking up on each of the score’s different parts its special character, and adapting according to the season, the time of day, the locale and the different emotions in the music which flash or float by, linger or depart, proclaim or insinuate. Together with the band, and at the varied and persuasive instigations of their conductor Brent Stewart they marvellously realised the patchwork of qualities which make up this ever-fascinating work.

All of the solo singers gave what seemed  their utmost to their different roles – James Harrison’s baritone seemed to “fill out” as the work progressed, at his best in the “Ego sum abbas”, (where he enjoyed his touch of play-acting, collapsing on his chair) and at “Dies nox et omnia” (Day, night, and all the World), making a feature of the “falsetto” parts of his recitative and answering in his lower register with real authority. Countertenor Coco Diaz’s “Roasted swan” scene was almost a showstopper in its blend of picturesque timbral ambience and theatricality – a brilliant idea to have him being turned on a kind of “spit” as he lamented his fate! As for Emma Pearson, she enchanted from the moment of her entrance, at “Siqua sine socio” (If a girl lacks a partner”), and came into her own in terms of sheer vocal beauty at “In Trutina mentis dubia” (In the scales of my wavering indecision). The highest notes of the following “Dulcissimi” were effortful compared with the rest, but nevertheless conveyed a kind of “emotion in extremis” pinnacle to which everything had inevitably been brought.

As for the choirs themselves, the Children’s Choir, comprised of singers from  Samuel Marsden Collegiate School and Scots College enchanted from its first utterance in “The Courts of Love” sequence, and enjoyed the innocent rumbustifications of “Tempus est iocundum” (Pleasant is the season). The rest was a truly concerted delivery of vocally sonic delight from two recognised bodies of singers performing as one, and galvanising an audience in doing so. Brent Stewart’s direction of all of this was unerringly focused on bringing out in his singers the work’s obvious strengths of articulation, tonal variety and human interest, so that we were satisfied in all aspects of audience experience. As any listener might, I “heard” some things differently at times, most obviously the faster-than-accustomed-to speeds of some of the concerted passages  challenging and at times even seeming to blur articulation of words – but such observations merely confirm this performance’s desire to challenge and stimulate those who attended to react and resound what was heard and experienced in the memory. Judging from the reactions of people I spoke with afterwards the occasion was a triumph – and it augurs well for the Orpheus’s return visit to Auckland for a further performance, as guests rather than as hosts. For the moment, in the wake of this initial performance, one raises one’s hands in salute of and acclamation for a mighty and most memorable presentation.

 

 

 

Orchestra Wellington – Secrets spectacularly revealed

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington –  Photo: Andrew Best

Orchestra Wellington presents:
SECRETS
WILLIAM PHILIPSON – House of the Faun
with Arohanui Strings
Lior Balachness – conductor
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major K. 364
with Benjamin Baker – violin
Yura Lee – viola
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony  No. 4 in C Minor Op.43
Marc Taddei – Music Director
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre,
Wellington

Saturday, 20th September, 2025

This, the fourth concert in Orchestra Wellington’s 2025 season will go down in my memory as one of the most remarkable! Everything about it seemed from the outside like a collection of  interestingly vivid but disparate ideas. These had chronological “through-lines” of their own, but however “connected” with previous and future happenings they seemed almost totally unrelated to one another as part of a single evening’s music-making. And yet, despite such seeming “randomness” there was, from the opening item onwards, some over-riding synergising force , coded liasoning routine or archetypally-understood aspect which either dissolved or flowed over, through or around all impediments, and, against all odds, sculpted out from the music an impression that nothing was impossible, ill-fitting, awkward or cross-purposed which couldn’t be put to rights or made to work if the spirit was willing, resourceful and determined!

Classical music concerts have in the more recent past been mostly streamlined, well-organised, uninterrupted, stylised, moderated, time-honoured events whose success nearly always depended on a certain degree of homogeneity in terms of presentation relating to style, content, repertoire and performance standard. All of these things have been features of Marc Taddei’s successful tenure as Music Director of Orchestra Wellington, but his ever-increasing readiness to interact with his orchestra’s “community”, has established and enabled a wider homogeneity with local musicians, composers and music educators who make up the fabric of musical life in the capital.

An ongoing relationship with such a group has been with the ever-delighting and tantalising Arohanui Strings’ group, whose students of all ages have often participated in the Orchestra’s concerts, as was the case this evening. The programme prioritised the group’s involvement by beginning with a work from William Philipson, a 2025 SOUNZ commission for Orchestra and Sistema Youth Orchestra, “House of the Faun”, one inspired by Philipson’s visit to the ruins of Pompeii, Italy,  where remnants of a famed “House” were excavated, many centuries after the Mt Vesuvius eruption. Distracted as I was  by talking with various people nearby and watching the stage comings-and-goings, I didn’t get to read the composer’s descriptive programme notes, before the Arohanui Strings’ conductor Lior Balachness was on the podium, and, with the older Arohanui students sitting in front of the Orchestra, ready to begin the piece!

Opening impressively. with arresting percussion-primed introductory chords, firstly with strings and then winds and brass, the music set us amongst ambiently rolled-out sound-pictures featuring languid winds, gradually nourished by strings and then reinforced by the brass and percussion – osmotic scenes of slow, but momentous waves breaking and washing over gorgeously-sculpted beachscapes. It all seemed to unfold of its own accord, thus suggesting an ancient, even timeless kind of process, though with the subsequent crescendi levels approaching the seismic in both volume and monumentability – occasionally a solo instrument characterised an individual detail (I noted a solo cello at one point and a solo violin at another) – but though the human element was briefly represented, it was the music’s Ozymandias-like implacability that stayed in the memory, tending to dwarf such detailings as faun statues, mosaic floorings and Doric columns, all muted in the face of nature’s disdain for these past glories.

All the while I thought the playing a well-nigh indissoluble match for the music – but once “The House of Faun” had  sounded and then relinquished its spell, we were then given a  demonstration of the group’s abilities with a “classic”  –  in this case a strings-dominated version of Tchaikovsky’s “Russian Dance” from the evergreen “Nutcracker” Suite,  bringing forth more of the same appreciative audience response.

Next, we were charmed by the entrance of the even younger Arohanui players, mostly with their violins, though I noticed a single horn-player, not much bigger than the instrument she (I think) carried, but possessing rhythmic skills proving of inestimable value to the proceedings!  I actually didn’t know the first tune the group presented, but the horn-player kept the piece’s trajectories on the rails with penetrative notes inserted in the right places each time round. I knew “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?”, which bounced along in fine style, but the best came with “Tutira mai nga iwi”, with which we were encouraged to join in ( with all those years of “Music in Schools” doing the trick here, nicely! – I even heard the occasional “Aue!” from some of the audience!).

During the performance stage’s rearrangement after the youngsters’ departure, Marc Taddei introduced the orchestra’a 2026 programme, “Collaborations”, giving nothing away except a general idea involving partnership “with  (to quote the maestro himself) as many extraordinary individuals, ensembles, choirs, dancers and composers as we can”!  So, with that tantalising glimpse into the oncoming musical year with Orchestra Wellington, we were then able to settle down to enjoy the next item on this evening’s multifaceted programme – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s adorable Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat, for violin, viola and orchestra, K.364.

I had seen and heard Kiwi Ben Baker play before, but Yura Lee was a name new to me. Korean-born, and currently Los Angeles-based, she had begun her musical career as a violinist but was attracted to the viola because of the instrument’s frequent exploration of a deeper range of internal harmonies and sonorities than the violin afforded – so she’s now a virtuoso on both instruments, here taking the viola’s part. The rapport between the two musicians made tonight’s performance one I shan’t leave behind for a long time!

From the beginning, the soloists played with the orchestra, creating a kind of visually “integrated” feeling about what the players were doing with this music, advancing musical rather than display-centred attitudes about the work, and, of course, giving that opening tutti an enhanced richness and sonority, especially the “Mannheim crescendo-like” buildup to those wonderfully “tone-drenched” repeated notes at its climax – a simply marvellous moment! Then, when the soloists came in, their sounds simply grew out of the textures in a most naturally-evolving fashion.

Together Baker and Lee as much “danced” as “conversed”  their exchanges, in places with almost “Astaire and Rogers” accord, their interactions feeding the growing excitement which then broke out so joyously at the first big orchestral tutti in terms of pleasure and delight, underlining the minor-key seriousness of the development all the more, as well as the relief of the lines being able to come together again for the opening’s brief recapitulation. The same infectious orchestral energies highlighted the playfulness of the cadenza’s “anything you can do” exchanges and the satisfactions evinced by the orchestra’s concluding measures.

We could hear from this work’s slow movement something of the composer’s grief at his mother’s unexpected death the previous year , all poignantly shaped by conductor and orchestra at the beginning, with the occasional emphasis on certain notes tugging at the heartstrings. Baker and Lee intertwined their utterances mellifluously, giving an impression of one voice “listening” to another before replying, with perhaps the most heart-stopping moments to be found in the shared cadenza, where the two voices mirrored each other’s tones at once in accord and yet so distinctively.

After this the finale was pure release! – light and quick and playful, with characterful interchange suggesting ongoing rather than conclusive utterances! Baker and Lee make it all music of response and interaction rather than anything striving for effect – each player’s concluding flourish feels like an invitation to the other to share rather than a declaration of independence! It all produced a great and demonstrative ovation at the end for all concerned.

And so to the Shostakovich Symphony, the work which had to wait for twenty-five years after its completion before being performed. The composer had finished the work in 1936 for its premiere with the Leningrad Philharmonic, and rehearsals were actually under way, when suddenly the scheduled performance was abandoned. Accounts differ as to why this actually happened, but the consensus has adjudged the work was withdrawn because of pressure exerted by the authorities in the wake of the “Muddle instead of Music” attack on Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” made by Stalin and his Pravda minions earlier that year.

Orchestra Wellington Strings play Shostakovich – Photo: Andrew Best

Though the full score of the abandoned symphony was lost during the war a complete set of orchestral parts were found and the score was reconstructed. But though this was some time after Stalin’s death it was not until December of 1961 that the Fourth Symphony received its actual premiere  in Moscow, with Kyril Kondrashin conducting. When the composer was later asked whether his later work would have been more like the abandoned symphony had the latter been played and accepted in the 1930s, he replied, “I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage; I would have written more pure music….” And then he added, “But I am not ashamed of what I have written – I like all my compositions.”

Though not a New Zealand premiere, the work by dint of its rarity in performance still generated some interest and excitement akin to a landmark event in Wellington’s musical life. It might be apposite to mention here that, tenuous though the connection might have been, the composer himself was not unaware of interest in his music in this part of the world – when in 2008 I interviewed the wonderful Invercargill-born pianist Janetta McStay towards the end of her long and fruitful life she told me that, late in 1957, upon hearing about a particular new work of Shostakovich’s and making an enquiry she was eventually sent a copy of the score of his recently-written Second Piano Concerto from the Russian firm who published his music – and included in the package was a little note of thanks from Shostakovich himself concerning her interest in his music – she soon afterwards gave the New Zealand premiere of the work!

Though its own premiere took place shortly after the new Piano Concerto’s composition the Fourth Symphony’s music, written fifteen years earlier, couldn’t be more different – by turns epic and ironic, grandiose and volatile, harrowing and playful, desolate and garrulous. Its size (over an hour), its instrumental proportions (normally over a hundred players, with more strings than Orchestra Wellington could muster on this occasion) its gargantuan formal structurings (sonata forms of outsize proportions) and its incredible profusion of thematic ideas (both outer movements are mini-epics in themselves!) seemed to ally Shostakovich with Mahler as a symphonist, as did ear-tickling moments like the cuckoo calls in the first movement, the ironic second movement’s dance-like rhythms, recalling the scherzo from the older composer’s “Resurrection” Symphony, and the funeral march that begins the third movement, drawing from  the older composer’s own death-marches from his First and Fifth Symphonies.

Orchestra Wellington winds – Photo: Andrew Best

I need to state unequivocally that, in giving this music its best possible chance to “speak”, Marc Taddei and his Orchestra Wellington players sensationally performed miracles! I wrote some observations down as best I could while things unfolded in spectacular fashion! – to begin with, the opening had incredible impact, with winds and brasses striding out firmly and purposefully, followed by the strings’ and winds’ suggestively furtive handling of their subsequent polyphonies, then coming together with the brasses to create a textural panoply that astonished as much with its vigour and confidence as in its sense of knowing  where it was going! The winds did brilliantly with their triplet overlays and warning-sounding chorales, but the ensuing orchestral crescendi that grew out of the string murmurings were not to be denied! To the rescue came the bassoon, as it would do repeatedly throughout the work, with empathetic support from the harps (such a feast of texture, timbre and colour! – and wot larks were enacted between perky strings and poisonous sounding brasses at one point!) Sterling tuba and trombone warnings were ignored by similarly vociferous winds, who simply wanted a good romp, despite the brass raspberries that came their way. And then the strings once again!  – playing well above their weight, at Marc Taddei’s bidding they dashed into the insanely frenetic fugato that rippled through the ranks – incredible stuff! The brasses couldn’t resist, and neither could the percussion! What a furore! The strings stepped away and into a nebulous realm out of which timpani and orchestra came swinging with huge roars – away went the winds, climbing onto the backs of the double basses and swinging away down the symphonic road, but coming suddenly to three wise sages, a cor anglais, a solo violin and a bassoon (with a double!), each of whom gave his/her own version of “sensible advice” of the “take a break” variety – so they/we did, and so it proved, the cor anglais double-checking with us, just to make sure!

Came the middle movement – moderato con moto – a droll four-note theme was our companion, first with the strings, then the winds and then the brass and timpani – a wistful second theme (strings again) was augmented by lovely horn-playing, before the winds decided to have some raucous fun until being told off by the timpani. The strings just couldn’t resist some fugal play, capricious but easy on the ear – “we can do that too!” intoned the winds, then deliberately playing atonal lines just to annoy others, until the brass brought things back into line by interrupting with the second theme, more martial than wistful, which fired everybody up! – suddenly, it was if as if a skeletal apparition had appeared, dancing to the tune, grinning spectrally and – vanishing!

Orchestra Wellington horns and percussion – Photo: Andrew Best

There was something undeniably Mahlerian about the finale’s opening, the portentous tread of footsteps and the plaintive cries of the winds all combining to produce a funereal atmosphere which some icy string chords helped along – the textures piled up splendidly as the brass and percussion joined the march – some echt-Shostakovich string textures were evocatively floated, and the winds contributed a mournful cantilena – as the winds intensified the line the strings jumped in with two-note phrases that suddenly became urgent and thrustful with the brass’s help – suddenly all was turmoil with wailing winds seemingly trapped with the strings in a kind of sound-vortex, becoming a vigorous tattoo with brass and timpani joining in, then subsiding – but what was this? Was the circus coming to town? Who were these knockabout figures? Extraordinary! What was happening to this music? Shostakovich suddenly introduced a kind of commedia dell’arte scene into which all kinds of characters made an appearance – whimsical playing from the many solo instrumentalists all of whom covered themselves with glory – such lovely swooning string-playing at one point, immediately followed by some kind of comic-turn, the instruments contributing all kinds of show-time star-turns! – and then it seemed, almost without warning, to melt into thin air, as if it never was – until out of the silences strode the timpani, repeatedly leading a tumultuous orchestral onslaught capped by the brasses and percussion. (Was it something Shostakovich obviously needed to get out of his system?) – Here in the Michael Fowler Centre I had never before heard quite such an orchestral tumult! – the aftermath was as if the cosmos had been somehow cleft in twain and left in tatters with only a few pitiless wind chords, a lone trumpeter-sentinel of the watch, and a gently weeping celeste left, the latter leaving us with a single, if equivocally ascending note.

To have made this symphonic journey anywhere would have been a profound experience – but to have been taken on such a one with such music brought to life by conducting and playing as we experienced here was to have been given something well-nigh unforgettable in cherish! Resounding kudos to Marc Taddei and his intrepid players for what I shall long continue to call a “sensational’ musical experience.

 

Handel, Ysaÿe, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn – courses and causes at Roseneath’s Long Hall.

Posted on by Peter Mechen
Helene, Rolf and Peter Gjelsten perform Handel at The Long Hall

The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble presents:
GEORG FRIEDRIC HANDEL – Trio Sonata in B Minor
EUGENE YSAŸE – Ballade for Solo Violin Op. 27 No 3*
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor
FELIX MENDELSSOHN – String Quartet No.2 in A Minor Op.13

Helene Pohl and Peter Gjelsten* (violins)
Nicholas Hancox (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday, 20th September
(A Concert to Benefit Kaibosh Food Rescue)

Violinist Helene Pohl’s and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten’s ever-resourceful Pot-Pourri Ensemble was joined today at the Long Hall by Peter Gjelsten on second violin as well as violist Nicholas Hancox. I’d previously encountered the latter’s excellent contributions to this series on a couple of occasions, but this was my first encounter with violinist Peter Gjelsten (Helene’s and Rolf’s son) in these concerts.

This was a programme which offered interest and delight through music from different eras, containing contrasts and connections of different kinds. Though not presented in chronological order, the pieces’ remarkably varied intensities could be said to form a sequence begun by Handel’s B Minor Trio Sonata No, 1 with its “boldly inventive variety and expressive range” (to quote from another review I happened to read of a recent recording of this work), and continuing throughout Eugène Ysaÿe’s brilliant demonstration of virtuosic violin-playing capabilities in one of his solo Violin Sonatas. With Dmitri Shostakovich’s dark and iconically dissident Eighth String Quartet from 1960 the intensities reached levels of extremity which the extraordinarily accomplished Mendelssohn Quartet that concluded the programme both defused and yet echoed in the music’s youthful impetuosities with considerable confidence and elan.

The opening item required just three players for two violins and a ‘cello, the ensuing combination bringing forth a delightful rendition of Handel’s delectable work, one that straightaway brought to my mind the composer’s wonderful Op.6 Concerti Grossi, and from whose manifold thematic treasury there may have even been some cribbings, as was the composer’s wont in certain instances elsewhere. Exquisite phrasings and ear-catching tonal variations brought gorgeous duetting between the two violins in the opening Andante, and a particularly fetching lead-in to the allegro ma non troppo, with the two violin lines playfully nudging one another, and the ‘cello dancing in attendance – we especially enjoyed, towards the movement’s end, the spicy discord, beautifully resolved.

The Largo which followed, gracefully and ceremonially, brought an opening sequence that was “echoed” in a subtle and more intimate way by the players, before the rather “hunky” finale made its unashamed entrance with its rustic kind of rhythmic  charm. Altogether, it was a perfect “ear-opener” with which to experience both the music’s subtleties and more forceful characterisations of mood in preparation for what was to follow.

Peter Gjelsten then introduced a solo violin item, the Sonata for Solo Violin in D minor ‘Ballade’, Op. 27, No. 3  by Eugène Ysaÿe. a one-movement work from 1923, and the third in a set of six sonatas for solo violin. Each of these works, we were told, was intended as a tribute to a famous contemporary violinist, the first being dedicated to Josef Szigeti, whose performance of one of Bach’s solo violin sonatas was Ysaÿe’s direct inspiration for the set as a whole. Today’s work was dedicated to the Roumanian violinist and composer Georges Enescu.

Ysaÿe begins the work with a rhapsodically ascending, double-stopped figure – an arresting gesture and here compellingly played! Having captured our attention, the music brought us in closer with a musing line, in places partnered by a similarly-inclined harmonising voice. Secure and definite chording joined with the long-breathed lines, the double-stopping assuming a heroic character in places, the young player giving his all to these strongly-chiselled statements, whether lyrically or heroically-stated. An almost furtive, will-o-the wisp character suddenly took over the lines, the music materialising and dematerialising as the notes from the strings responded to a more mercurial touch, out of which the heroic manner emerged even more strongly, and with a more purposeful sense of direction.

As the piece pushed excitingly onwards I got the feeling that the music and player were actually driving one another, sharing in the exhilaration of the quest approaching its raison d’etre, the completion of a uniquely-characterised journey, and one resonantly demonstrated with a resolute ascending double-stopped figure falling onto a single concluding note  –  a splendid “That’s it” gesture! Since the concert, I’ve found a sentence in an article about this music that has enhanced the enjoyment of my memory of Peter Gjelsten’s splendid performance, something which Ysaÿe himself wrote about it: “I have let my imagination wander at will – the memory of my friendship and admiration for George Enescu and the performances we gave together…..have done the rest”.

The musical discourse seemed on a roll by now, having generated sufficient interest and momentum for our sensibilities to be exposed to what seemed would be the afternoon’s most demanding and mind-stretching experience – a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s well-known Eighth Quartet, a work that’s haunted me for most of my music-listening life ever since hearing a famous 1960s recording (probably the first!) by the Borodin Quartet (though I wasn’t as “close to the cutting edge” as that remark sounds, as I didn’t encounter the recording until the 1970s!).

The work itself has invited plenty of animated discussion regarding what it actually signifies – there are the composer’s own words inscribed on the score – “In memory of victims of fascism and war” and his remarkable completion of the work in three days while on a visit during 1960 to Dresden, the city almost completely destroyed by Allied firebombing in 1945. Set against all of this is conjecture arising from the composer’s liberal use of the notes D-E-flat-C-B, which, in German notation is an abbreviation of his own name, DSCH (the composer had used it before in his Tenth Symphony), a motif which appears right at the work’s beginning, It proceeds to dominate the whole work, appearing in tandem with fragments of other works by Shostakovich – the First, Fifth and Eleventh Symphonies, the Second Piano Trio and the First ‘Cello Concerto – and there’s a significant quotation from the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, So why all this self-quotation in a work dedicated to “victims of fascism and war?”

For those who ascribe to the composer’s posthumously-published (and widely-disputed) memoirs, Testimony, edited by Solomon Volkov, the Quartet’s subject is instead autobiographical, the music directly referring to Shostakovich’s own personal sufferings and sorrow. This view was reinforced by events of that time, of his despair and feelings of guilt having to join the Communist Party when promoted as Head of the Union of Composers of the Soviet Federation – even contemplating the option of suicide (in a letter to a friend Shostakovich wrote re the finished work, “You could write on the cover – “Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this Quartet”).

From the beginning it all feels too self-obsessed and deeply stricken to be anything but an undilutedly personal utterance – the Largo opened with the solo cello voicing the DSCH theme and the other instruments giving the same theme slow canonic treatment. The violin played eerie chromatic lines, echoed later in the movement by the ‘cello, as the accompanying instruments “held the lines”, their implacability creating all kinds of tensions and expectations, with viola and cello steadfastly continuing as the two violins counterpointed their themes – what a wonderful “mini-crescendo” mid-movement with a reiteration of the DSCH theme! – and while the ‘cello played its chromatic figures I could almost “hear” strands of Russian church chanting, before the DSCH theme gathered the strands together for a bit of pre-onslaught bolstering up…..

Almost without warning the Allegro burst upon us, assailing us with the first movement themes presented as vehemently and viciously as possible, and alongside the DSCH motiv, throwing in things like the “massacre” music figurations from the Eleventh Symphony in the lead-up to the Jewish folk-theme – all so heart-rending in this context, the players immersing themselves, body and soul, in the music’s agony! – and with the composer refusing to spare them or us when he reintroduces the DSCH as its own accompaniment before returning to the Jewish tune! – such macabre moments, with the climax followed by a wrenching split-second of silence!

One wondered during that split second whether anything else could be as shocking as what we’d just heard – the answer, when it came with just as much force and similar intent was the black humour of the third movement Allegretto, Helene Pohl’s violin throwing the DSCH motif into the air with spiteful Mephistophelean glee before beginning a waltz whose crude trajectories and mocking tones were further underlined by Peter Gjelsten’s wonderfully eerie violin trills decorating the dance’s obsessive “waltzification” of the DSCH theme. A second theme was even more pitiless in its crudity and brutality, a mood relieved only by the music suddenly switching trajectories and quoting the composer’s First ‘Cello Concerto (but with the ‘cello theme played by the violin). Then while the violins played a strangely wind-blown chromatic sequence, Rolf Gjelsten’s cello in its high register gave us a stunningly eerie-sounding passage, the music seeming as though it had lost its way – after a few more desultory waltz-measures, and another ‘Cello Concerto quote, the violin then retreated into a self-communing world, leaving the remaining instruments to rap out an ominous three-note tattoo, by way of signalling the Largo fourth movement’s arrival, a motif that recurred at various stages.

This movement’s rather more Janus-faced character was evident in its alternation  between the sobering appearances of both the DSCH quotation and the hammering three-note motif’ and what proved to be the work’s most poignant expressions of human emotion – firstly came a lament-like quote from the Eleventh Symphony, and then a moving sequence from a revolutionary song “Exhausted by the hardships of prison”, with the melody played on the violin. However the most beautiful of these was an excerpt from an aria sung by the principal character, Katarina, from the composer’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, here played most affectingly on the ‘cello’s high register by Rolf Gjelsten. And even though the sequence’s last word (continuing into the final movement) was the lately ubiquitous “hammering” motif, the presence of these glimmerings of a universal kind of human spirit testified to the power of hope in the most outwardly unpromising circumstances.

No easy solution, then, was forthcoming – and the finale’s music simply deepened the work’s enigmatic profile, reinforcing the idea of the Quartet as “autobiographical”  – We heard the DSCH motive introduce the finale, lightened by a kind of counter-melody, but offering little actual redemption, leading to a dark and final reprise of those ineffably enigmatic notes before they disappeared into the silences. We sat at the end, stunned by the immediacy of it all, uncomfortably mindful of the music’s delineations of an individual’s tragedy which continues to speak for countless numbers of people – there, but for fortune awaits the world’s sorrow for any of us.

What a relief, then, after the interval, to journey into a different world, that of a young and gifted composer who’d encountered love for the first time and bravely borne its loss, both in life and in his music! Felix Mendelssohn was a child prodigy comparable to Mozart (Robert Schumann called him “the Mozart of the 19th Century), and at the time of writing the A Minor String Quartet we were about to hear, the 18 year-old had already produced 12 String symphonies, a String Quintet, the first of his five “mature” symphonies, the Overture “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and his renowned “Octet” for strings, not to mention a number of unpublished earlier string quartets. The Quartet showed the influence of Beethoven’s late quartets, especially the latter’s inclinations towards cyclic form which many later nineteenth-century composers were to fully exploit – here, one of Mendelssohn’s own songs, Frage (“Question”) Op.9, No. 1 haunted each of the movements (the composer actually had the song published in tandem with the quartet to emphasise the connection).

Such a romantic and lyrical opening! – one that immediately bore out what cellist Rolf Gjelsten said in his introduction about music one readily imagines as having words being sung  – I loved, for instance, the loaded three-note phrase practically speaking the words “Is es wahr?” (Is it true?), just before the music swept into the Allegro vivace in the key of A Minor, aptly suggesting a telling degree of angst in the notes’ expression – (how often were composers from Beethoven onwards to use that same three note-progression for various expressive purposes, with both Liszt and Brahms immediately coming to mind!).

Being new to this work I couldn’t help but be astonished by its sheer facility, with interaction between all the players worked into a seamless flow, and no part seemingly relegated to that of a mere accompanist – no wonder that a contemporary listener to one of the young Mendelssohn’s similar efforts was overheard to say to a companion – “Which quartet of Beethoven’s is this?”

Similarly, in the Adagio non lento movement which followed, the fugato section, deliciously played, captivated with its feeling of integration of all the voices, the young composer then daring to insert a kind of dancing fugal holiday for the players, with the theme an enthusiastic, if sometimes inverted, and in places, even wayward and rumbustious fellow-traveller. By way of helping to restore order, the players then gave the return of the opening a gentle, jewelled-like rite of passage to the finish.

The Intermezzo was next, dancing its somewhat circumspect way along, when it was more-or-less “ambushed” by allegro di molto fairy-music with at first wonderfully-confusing rhythmic patternings for this hapless listener (I was eventually “sorted”, here, even without being rich!), and with lyrical lines deftly floating over the scamperings! – having run out of “puff”, the music slowed and regained its composure (with a brief but delightful whimsical coda!) – then, suddenly, from our fairyland-like observation-platforms we were assailed with fierce tremolandi from the lower strings and an anguished recitative from the first violin, the strings tumbling down a slope towards a second-tier onslaught (not quite as fierce!) of more tremolandi, this time gathering up the voices and proceeding with the finale’s agitations – dramatic stuff!

We heard fast-moving passages revisiting the first-movement’s agitations, interspersed with recitative-like sequences, and another fugal-like sequence launched, as in the second movement, by Nicholas Hancox’s sonorous, ever-steady viola – the reappearance of the tremolandi that began the movement’s precipitate beginning still carried some of the young composer’s “hurt”, but after further agitations and deliberations, a third and final recitative-like series of more circumspect tremolandi-like gestures indicated a softening of resolve, as did a poignant return of the quartet’s opening. A final sounding of the three-note “Is es wahr” phrase and the dream of love was put to rest – perhaps the youthful Mendelssohn’s most candid outpouring of emotion in music, and done rich and sensitive justice here by these players.

Lights which keep us from darkness – CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610

The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

Sopranos: Anna Sedcole, Erin King, Jane McKinlay, Lydia Joyce, Pepe Becker,
Rebecca Stanton   Altos: Andrea Cochrane, Alexandra Granville, Helene Page,
Alexandra Woodhouse-Appleby, Kassandra Wang, Maaike Christie-Beekman
Tenors: Axel Tie, John Beaglehole, Josh Long, Phillip Collins, Philip Roderick,
Richard Taylor   Basses: Brian Hesketh, David Houston, Frazer MacDiarmid,
Joshua Jamieson. Keith Small, Matthew Painter

Violins: Greg Squire, Anne Loeser   Violas:  Sophia Acheson, Lynsey Mountford
‘Cello: Jane Young    Viola da gamba: Imogen Granwal   Violone: Joan Perarnau Garriga
Cornetti: Danny Lucin, Matthew Manchester, Peter Reid   Recorders: Kamala Bain,
Katrin Eickhorst  Sackbuts: Peter Maunder, Byron Newton, Jon Harker
Dulcian: Ben Hoadley   Lute; Jonathan Le Cocq   Organ: Bethany Angus

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Boulcott St., Wellington
Saturday, 13th September 2025

Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin) could well lay claim to be the composer’s equivalent “signature work”  to that of Georg Frideric Handel’s  Messiah. Of course the latter’s popularity has never been in doubt,  triumphantly surviving even its somewhat grotesquely-inflated periods of presentation throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and continuing (in more “authentic” formats) to be widely-performed today. Monteverdi’s work, on the other hand, written well over a century earlier, has by comparison both a mystery-shrouded genesis and early performance history.  The work’s 1610 publication was in the form of eight partbooks rather than as a single, complete score, of which it seems only one has survived – and no performance of the Vespers in the composer’s lifetime has been documented. It wasn’t until 1932 when the first “complete” edition of Monteverdi’s works appeared that the work as a whole began to receive attention from scholars and performers, attention which has since come to represent almost iconic status!

Today with the help of both recordings and (happily, here in Wellington) “once-in-a-blue-moon” stellar live performances, we can be freshly astonished at the grandeur and splendour wrought by such an opulently resonant sound-window as that thrown open by the present performance. My own introduction to the work was in 2010 at the same venue through St Mary of the Angels’ then music director Robert Oliver’s magnificent celebration of the work’s 400-year existence with local singers (Baroque Voices) and instrumentalists (Academia Sanctae Mariae) – see the review at https://middle-c.org/2010/08/resplendent-monteverdi-at-st-mary-of-the-angels/  A quote from that review equally applies to what I heard just the previous evening (incidentally, with a few of the same singers and instrumentalists who performed the work in 2010) – one that remarked upon “virtuoso singers and players with a brilliant command of all the instruments and techniques”.

Tudor Consort director Michael Stewart chose not to use the Antiphons included by Oliver in his performance  (antiphons are texts, sung or spoken, used in conjunction with Psalms (quotations from the Old Testament) to rejuvenate the meanings of the latter in a more “Christian” sense). Monteverdi pairs each Psalm with a Motet, the latter termed  “sacred concertos” intended more as a contrast to, rather than an expansion of the Psalms – the wonderful verses Nigra sum and Pulchra est, for example, both being texts from the Biblical “Song of Solomon” – though the Psalm Lauda Jerusalem, is followed by a Sonata sopra Sancta Maria. Such differences between performances serve to indicate (here, admittedly, in a relatively minor way) how arguments might have developed regarding what ought/ought not to be included in the Vespers, and which have continued over the years since the work’s new-found world-wide popularity. Like all great music, it remains a work in progress rather than a museum piece!!

Long before the first note of the work was sounded, the atmosphere in the church was burgeoning and vibrant, the venue having almost filled up half-an-hour before the starting-time – amazing! If ever one wanted an indication that the city’s receptiveness towards and appetite for the performing arts was demonstrative and urgent, this all seemed as propitious a sign as any. To enthusiastic applause the musicians at last appeared to take their positions, the work beginning with tenor John Beaglehole’s ringing entreaty of the Almighty  – the opening of Psalm 70, with the words  “Deus, in adjutorium,meum intende” ( O God, make haste to deliver me!)  – followed immediately by the choir’s equally sonorous “Domine,  adadjuvandum me festina”!  (O Lord, make haste to help me!) accompanied by a fanfare-like orchestral panoply that its composer had previously used to begin his opera La favola d’Orfeo, a melody whose impact holds fast to its theatrical and emotional glory here as much as elsewhere.

What an amazing roller-coaster ride Monteverdi gives both his musicians and his listeners! Time and space obviously precludes a detailed description of the entire performance, so a modicum of description will serve to illustrate – suffice to say that Michael Stewart’s consistently vital direction infused his singers and instrumentalists with an infectious sense of joy and purpose throughout even the most complex figurations and deeply-felt sonorities realised by the presentation. And, as much to the work’s sense of the momentous and ceremonial, we were drawn into its rather more personal and intimate moments by the singing’s and playing’s beauties, evident in particular during those various “sacred concerto”  motets.

Beginning with that solo-voiced declamation, and those answering fanfares and choral entreaties came the first psalm setting, “Dixit Dominus”,  with its six-part choir combining steady sonorities in places (Sede a dextris meis – “Sit at my right hand”) with exciting rapid-note and -phrase emphases (Donec ponam inimicos – “Until I make  your enemies your footstool”). Sopranos Anna Sedcole and Erin King  voiced beautiful exchanges and adroit teamwork (Virgam virtutis tua emittet Dominus ex Sion – “The Lord shall send out the rod of thy strength from Zion”), while the choir’s different voice strands created great excitement with Dominus a dextris tuis confregit in die ira sua reges (“The Lord at thy right hand shall destroy kings in the day of his wrath”), the whole, with its interspersed contrasts between tonal beauty and physical excitement enticingly preparing us for what was to follow further.

An unfortunate audience sneeze briefly interrupted (but fortunately didn’t impede) the beginning of the beauteous Nigra Sum one of two excerpts from the “Song of Solomon” – texts used here in both cases for motets intended to be “antiphon substitutes” in a Vespers Service.  Here, tenor soloist Richard Taylor Taylor relished the delicious word-painting describing a black woman’s beauty, and the music’s animation at the King’s response to her charms, concluding with a gracefully-delivered final Tempus putationes advenit (“The hour of pruning is at hand”).Though the texts of this and Pulchra Es seem almost to border on the erotic, there was at this time in certain quasi-sacred works something of a sensual view of the soul of the Mother of God in line with being a spiritual kind of “Bride for the Church” – a similar attitude voicing this somewhat elevated kind of eroticism in relation to Mary appears also in the Psalm Audi Coelum later in the Vespers.

The ensuing Psalm Laudate Pueri Dominum was suitably adorned by warm and fluid texturings from the outset, individual voices  introducing separate strands beautifully cohering into descriptions of “the rising and the setting of the sun” (A solis ortu usque ad occasum) and of transformations of peoples lives – the men’s voices proclaiming Suscians a terra inopem (“He raises the simple from the dust”) and joining with the women’s voices to simply proclaim Ut collocet cum cum principibus (“That he may set him with princes”) – so beautiful! I enjoyed also (as did the singers) the “happy ending” of the phrase concerning the “barren woman” as becoming  matrem filiorum latantem  (“A joyful mother of children!”).

While not effacing my memory of Pepe Becker’s and Jayne Tankersley’s voices in 2010 with the erotic charge of their “Pulchra Es”, sopranos Anna Sedcole and Erin King here blended and intertwined their voices with echoes of the same, if with a notch or two’s gentler suggestiveness. In “Duo Seraphim”  it was the turn of the “Three Tenors” to shine, with Phillip Collins’ and Richard Taylor’s voices both floating their individual lines and negotiating their repeated-note phrases with confidence, joined by Philip Roderick at Tres sunt, qui testimonium  (“There are three who bear witness”) to reaffirm the Trinity. The ten-part double-choir forces of the succeeding “Nisi Dominus” gave us great, rolling sound- trajectories at the beginning, with energies aplenty enlivening both  Vanum est vobis ante lucem surgere (“It is vain for you to rise before dawn”)  and the rapid-fire triplet passages at Sicut sagitta in manu potentis (“As arrows in the hands of the mighty”), followed by a grand and rolling “Gloria” with a blazoned “Amen”.

The second half brought us an exquisite setting of the Psalm Audi Caelum, tenor Phillip Collins  pouring  whole draughts of feeling into the opening words Audi verba mea plena desidero et perfuse gaudio (“Hear my words full of longing and pervaded by joy”) – and straightaway beginning a paean of fulsome praise of the Virgin Mary as a woman, again enthusiastically blurring any boundaries dividing secular worship from  sacred devotion, the text somewhat coming to its senses as the declamations continued! Throughout, the echoed responses of the distantly-placed Philip Roderick seemed to exert a charged, “time-standing still” effect on the scene giving rise to a kind of magical wonderment of being.

“Lauda Jerusalem” which followed was guaranteed to break such a spell with gusto! – the singers seemingly to “melt” the bar-lines and fuse the irresistible trajectories of the  music into a kind of unstoppable flow! A stately and solemn Gloria at the end brought us to an equally conclusive and undisputed “Amen”, From these unbridled energies we were able to rest on what seemed like the immutable structures of the hymn “Sancta Maria”, the sopranos resembling snow-capped mountain peaks rising from the plethora of forests, ravines and plateaus suggested by the variegated instrumentql forces in their tireless, priestlike task of constant accompaniments of the “same-but-different” choral repetitions of the prayer.

In what seemed like no time at all we had left the mountaintops and were gazing at a star whose light spanned a vast ocean – Monteverdi’s first three verses of the hymn Ave Maris Stella (Hail, Star of the Sea) praise the Mother of God, rename Eve, the first woman, with the word “Ave”, and petition her with putting wrongs to right, light to darkness and bad to good. Each verse was followed by a different instrumental scoring with the aforementioned three choral (all delightful), the next three with solo voices (all characterful – soprano Rebecca Stanton, alto Maaike Christie-Beekman and bass Frazer MacDiarmid) and with a return to the choir for the last one. And with that we came to the Magnificat, the equivalent of a skyful of stars!

Monteverdi included two setting of the Magnificat in the 1610 Vespers publication, the first seven-voice part one being that used here. The twelve sections each feature a vocal line, either solo or with other voices, sometimes silent and at other times joining the instruments in the elaborations – the clear, long tones of the chants are thus festooned with what must have seemed like “music of the spheres” to Monteverdi’s musicians and listeners – as one critic put it, “dazzling variety married to simple unity” – as if it were the “Maris Stella” of the piece,  the steady light to which all else seems drawn. I enjoyed the vigour of Matthew Painter’s and Joshua Jamieson’s  Quia fecit (“For he that is mighty”), as I did the evocative echo-play between Phillip Collins and Philip Roderick against the women’s beautiful “Gloria”  – but found myself equally touched by two well-remembered voices from that 2010 Vespers, soprano Pepe Becker’s and alto Andrea Cochrane’s blending beautifully and indeed appropriately at Esurientes implevit bonis (“He hath filled the hungry with good things”).It was an apt metaphor for the musical feast to which we were being treated.

Such works as these Vespers stay in the memory as do lights which keep us from darkness  – what can one say, except to express boundless gratitude to the composer and his work’s devoted performers!

 

The Monster in the Maze – putting community on the stage

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Ipu Laga’aia as Theseus, Sarah Castle as his Mother, and Joel Amosa as Daedalus with some of the community chorus participants   –   photo, Emma Brittenden

New Zealand Opera presents:
The Monster in the Maze by Jonathan Dove, libretto by Alasdair Middleton.
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, community singers and musicians
Cast: Maaka Pohatu – King Minos of Crete
Ipu Laga’aia – Theseus
Sarah Castle – Theseus’s Mother
Joel Amosa – Dadaelus
Conductor: Brent Stewart,
Director: Anapela Polata’ivao ONZM
Creative Producer: Stacey Leilua
Choreographer: Petmal Petelo
Production and Lighting Design:
Filament Eleven II – Rachel Marlow / Bradley Gledhill

Friday 12th September, St James Theatre (Wellington)
Until September 19 and 20 (Auckland).

Review by Peter Mechen (Middle C)

I took my six-year-old nephew to the St James Theatre in Wellington to see “The Monster in the Maze” – his first-ever opera experience! Of course, I was as excited as he was, expecting something completely and fascinatingly different to the usual operatic experience afforded by works such as “Carmen”, “The Magic Flute”, or “La Traviata”. For one thing, this production places as much importance upon its own unique style of presentation as it does on the story and its characters – the people on the stage ranged from opera “professionals” (a few members of the New Zealand Opera Company) to amateur singers, mostly young people who make up most of the 150-plus chorus members.

For another, the story is a simple, basic version of the age-old and well-known myth about the Greek hero Theseus and his plan to kill the terrible half-man, half-bull Minotaur who lived in a fearful maze called “The Labyrinth” on the island of Crete. And for a third, the situation which the opening of this production presents has resonances which are anything but distant mythological tales confined to the never-never land of fantasy – the cruel and barbarous regime of the King of Crete and his murderous plan to subjugate the Athenians he has just conquered bears an almost sickening likeness to the present genocidal situation  in the Middle East being inflicted upon the Palestinians in Gaza by their remorseless Israeli oppressors.

Maaka Pohatu as Minos, King of Crete    –   photo, Emma Brittenden

In fact the opening scene of the production had enormous theatrical weight and dramatic menace, thanks to the spine-chillingly forceful energies of Maaka Pohatu (King Minos of Crete) who totally dominated the stage with his delivery of the words (clearly spoken rather than sung) and his brutally boastful presence. He was actually given surtitles of a kind inscribed on the archways, somewhat ironically, as he was the one character least in need of them for his intentions to be conveyed to his riveted audience! For this reason I found a good deal of what the other main characters sang hard to decipher – always a problem with opera, even when  in English! I thought surtitles should have been continued throughout (though certainly NOT on cell-phones, as was suggested at one point – why would we go to opera only to have to read things on our cell-phones?)

Such was the power of Pohatu’s delivery of the pitiless proclamation we were stunned, almost as if we ourselves were under the King’s sway along with the Athenians. Certainly, the scenes involving the Athenian children required by Minos to be sacrificed (either every seven or nine years, depending on which version of the myth one reads!) by being put on a ship to Crete bound for the labyrinth in which they will be fed to the Minotaur had enormous poignancy – the children’s youth, beauty and innocence touching on feelings of pity, dread and horror, all exacerbated by a sense throughout the theatre of all-pervading “involvement”.

We were, of course, all buoyed up by the arrival of Theseus (variously lyrical and heroic of voice, and clear of diction) wanting to know what was “up”, and after being told the situation, determinedly announces that he will go with the children and with his machete put an end to the Monster! His mother (Sarah Castle) was, of course aghast at losing her son but Theseus was adamant – he will save Athens and its people from this oppression!

The set design was wonderful, broad-brush-stroke stuff, beginning with dark, starkly-lit pillars evoking King Minos’s forbidding palace as the king issued his proclamation from its depths, then withdrawing the pillars in favour of horizontal beams which rose and fell as requiring opening or more constricted spaces, then criss-crossing with the pillars when the children accompanied by Theseus entered the boat to take them to Crete.  The ship’s progress was then effectively and atmospherically “plotted” on a series of horizontals along which the image “sailed”, slowly diminishing in size, the watchers sadly dispersing, led by the Mother, after the ship leaves.

As the ship approached Crete, we saw some of the inhabitants waiting, cast here as a quasi- oppressed group of people, darkly, almost militaristically dressed in near-combat attire, moving about a dim and dismal scenario, enacting a kind of reception-party. The children and Theseus disembarked, the set forming a kind of criss-cross matrix of imprisonment with a small entrance, through which the visitors passed – despite the walls, portals and columns being stylised, straight-sided matrices they more-than- readily invited the audience’s individual imaginations to flesh out their dramatic reality as the  beginnings of the labyrinth. Unexpectedly, the intended victims then encountered a fellow captive, Daedalus (Joel Amosa), the actual designer of the Labyrinth (in some versions of the legend, was himself lost in the intricacies of the maze) – whatever the mythic detail, the character he was no friend of King Minos, and so helped the story’s hero to find his way to the Minotaur, a manifestation, incidentally, whose appearance was not quite what one might have expected….

As his fearful companions hid behind various outcrops or in secluded configurations, Theseus probed deeper – the colours became increasingly lurid (the lighting scenarios were magical in their evocative power) and the appearance on the stage of what seemed like an infernal band of brass musicians was a masterstroke of theatre, especially as the tension was mounting with the viscerally-frightening prospect of the Minotaur’s arrival! – to a blaze of rasping tones from the musicians the hero was confronted with his invisible but incredibly “present” enemy, on whom he fixed his gaze, while slashing and jabbing with his machete! – we were terrorised and fearful, convinced that Theseus was fighting for his life against an enemy we couldn’t actually see but KNEW was there! Theseus companions sang and shouted encouragement as the hero gave his utmost to the fray. By this time the lighting had soaked the setting’s textures in blood from which Theseus arose, machete aloft and triumphant! The devil might be in the detailing, but this unseen devil was now no more, and the way was now open to freedom, release and continuation of life! How more cathartic a feeling could have been conveyed than this one? It remained only for the sadistic Cretan King Minos to express his anger, grief and despair at the destruction of his plan for total subjugation of the Athenian people, thanks to the heroism of Theseus, who was triumphantly reunited with his family and his people!

Community chorus participants in “Monster in the Maze”  –    photo, Emma Brittenden

More, much more, than a splendid depiction of heroism overcoming tyranny, this production spoke for a kind of power of involvement obviously leading up to and throughout the story which, by the end seemed to have resonated with every single person in the theatre. For those of us who were regular opera-goers the unbridled exuberance we found ourselves witnessing on the stage among performers and enablers of the production seemed no less than intoxicating! And people on either side of me in the audience whom I spoke with immediately afterwards (none regular opera-goers) seemed overwhelmed by what they had just seen and been themselves caught up with! As for my six-year-old nephew – he was most gratifyingly entranced by the whole show!

It made memorable the moment when everybody involved with the production, from director Anapela Polata’ivao, creative producer Stacey Leilua, choreographer Petmal Petelo, and the Filament Eleven II design team of Rachel Marlow and Bradley Glkedhill,  together with conductor Brent Stewart and his onstage/offstage musicians, gathered together on the stage at the end to unite with the audience to enjoy the fruition of those expressions of mutual appreciation and communal achievement which in the words of NZ Opera General Director Brad Cohen, come from experiencing storytelling through the power of the human singing voice.

 

 

“The Phantasmagoria is constant!” – Ravel approves his magical new 1925 opera!

Posted on by Peter Mechen
Charlotte Secker as the Child. and Francesca Fagan as the Mother (shadow)

MAURICE RAVEL  –  Opera in One Act – “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges”
(libretto by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)
Students and staff of Te Kōkī / New Zealand School Of Music
Victoria University of Wellington / Te Herenga Waka
– in association with Toi Whakaari / NZ Drama School

Sara Brodie – Director
Therese Hanaray – Assistant Director –
Martin Riseley – Conductor and Head of Strings
Kathryn Mosley – Chorusmaster and Head of Collaborative Piano
Grace O’Brien – Set and Costume Design
Alex Fisher – Lighting Design
Brooklyn Saunders – Production Manager\

Cast and Musicians
Charlotte Secker  –  The Child
Francesca Fagan  –  The Mother, the Cup
Charle Rainey –  The Armchair, the Male Cat
Greer McCarthy – The Bergère Chair
Joseph Clinton – The Grandfather Clock, a Tree
Elias Nguyen – The Teapot, the Arithmetic Teacher, the Tree Frog
Chu My Duyen – The Fire, the Nightingale
Cadence Chung – A Shepherd, the Dragonfly
Eve Parker-Groves – A Shepherdess, the Bat
Emilia Gray – The Princess
Eunice Ng – the Female Cat, an Owl
Tiaki McArdle – the Squirrel

Members of Te Kōkī Orchestra, New Zealand School of Music

The Hannah, Hannah Playhouse, Cambridge Terrace, Wellington
Saturday 6th September, 2025

Maurice Ravel’s only operatic ventures during his remarkable compositional career were two smaller-scale works, written and performed a number of years apart – firstly, in 1911, came the brilliant, tongue-in-cheek satire “L’Heure espagnole” (The Spanish Hour), and then (in the wake of the Great War) succeeded by an ostensibly less “adult” but more deeply-felt creation, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges” (The Child and the Magic). The latter is a work whose explorations of a child’s world don’t spare the listener occasional moments of cruelty, darkness and sorrow touched upon in places by the story. The original idea for the scenario came from the author Colette, whose first intention was for the story to be told in the form of a ballet. Ravel, however, had been persuaded that an operatic successor to “L’Heure espagnole” was needed, and had meantime been stimulated by the “new wave” of musicals and revues with new dance-forms by composers such as Gershwin. As the new work took shape so too did the composer’s enthusiasm for these “operetta-style” features take wing, to the point where Ravel could enthusiastically describe preparations for the first performance in Monte Carlo in March 1925  with the words “…an extraordinary production – the roles are numerous and the phantasmagoria is constant!”

This 2025 realisation was co-ordinated by Jenny Wollerman, Head of Classical Voice at Wellington’s Te Koki School of Music, bringing together students and staff members from both the Music School and Toi Whakaari (NZ Drama School). It joins a number of memorable productions by the Music School over the years, with, to my mind  Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Verdi’s rarely-performed “Il Corsaro” readily resonating in my memory still, as I write this.

Director Sara Brodie’s production at “The Hannah” most appropriately celebrated the work’s one-hundredth birth-year, echoing triumphantly the composer’s enthusiastic description of the original event with its “continually and intimately-mingled” dancing on the part of the singers. She made splendid use of the venue’s multi-levelled and -entranced features, encapsulating the audience within bevies of singer/actors on two sides and musicians on the remaining two, so that we felt at times as much participants in as observers of the story’s by turns dream-like, quixotic, unpredictable and heart-warming expositions.

Straightaway, Ravel’s innocently sinuous Prelude drew us into the dream, a kind of twilit world of light and shadow, suggesting the “old-fashioned Normandy country home” of Colette’s setting, complete with armchair, fireplace and Grandfather clock – even the shadow cast by the offstage character of the Mother effectively reinforced the “old-world” atmosphere and its sense of well-established order.

These things were, of course then shattered, literally, to pieces, firstly by the disobedient Child’s tantrums in destroying or disabling almost everything she could find in the room, then by the fantastic “coming to life” of many of these same objects, each bent on demonstrating to the Child her wilfulness, selfishness and even cruelty in carrying out her unthinking acts of destruction and unkindness to both creatures and objects that co-existed in her world.

Even when escaping to the garden, the Child’s relief was short-lived, as the trees themselves confronted her with the “wounds” she had subjected them to, her guilt intensified further by a dragonfly whose mate she had killed so as to pin to a wall, and also a squirrel she had enclosed in a cage. Overcome by shame, she called out for her Mother, infuriating the creatures, who then attacked her – in the subsequent melee, a squirrel was wounded, and the remorseful Child confounded the creatures present by dressing the squirrel’s wounded paw. Moved by this change of heart on the part of their previous tormenter, the animals and trees then sang “Il est bon, l’enfant, il est sage” (The Child is good and wise”), at the end of which she was reunited with her (still offstage) Mother.

The power of emotion in Ravel’s music never ceases to amaze me, as here – above all else, it’s the depth of sadness in the music, including that expressed by the Child for her much-loved but now-forsaken “Princess” which indicated the composer’s capacity for depth of feeling behind the accustomed “coolness” of the mask. But more bleakly and tragically we shared the Child’s confrontation with her part in the dragonfly’s loss of its mate and the squirrel’s equally heart-rending loss of its freedom, moments which cumulatively “seeded” the animals’ final forgiving chorus to produce a lump-in-the-throat effect which for me flooded those concluding ambiences, and was here achingly, almost cathartically realised by the singers and players.

The set’s atmospheric qualities buoyed up every scene, sometimes amusingly, sometimes poignantly  and sometimes startlingly, invariably making the point to the Child that each irruption was the consequence of her doings. As the Child in the Blue (Second) Cast whose performancce I attended, Charlotte Secker was superb in both her singing and acting delineations of her character’s situation, and in her reactions to her accusers, taking us on a kind of journey through her various stages of realisation. In each instance she demonstrated fear, guilt and remorse in appropriate and ever-changing proportions as the encounters clicked over, her voice eloquent both in exclamation and song (particularly so in her serenade to the Princess).

As for her various accusers, every scene had a particular flavour of characterisation brought out either in voice, in demeanour or in both, by each of the single protagonists or groups. In every case the physical characterisations were admirable, the olde-world aspect of the pair of chairs, “LeFauteuil” and “La Bergere”, the petulant Grandfather Clock, the quixotic Teapot and Cup, the excitingly fearsome Fire, the pastoral charms of the Shepherds and Shepherdesses, and the beautiful Fairy Princess (for me, shades of the “Fairy” in the “Pinocchio” story I often read as a romantically-inclined child!), not to mention the manic, attention-grabbing  Arithmetic teacher and his well-drilled coterie of numbers! – such brilliant singing, movement and staging!

Two wonderfully-characterised Cats then made the most of their delightful “rubber ball” scene, managing to be suggestive together (without resorting to Andrew Lloyd-Webber-like vulgarity!) – before the story took the Child outside to the Garden. Of course there was no respite there, with everything, trees, insects and animals, testifying to the by-now remorseful Child’s cruel and insensitive treatment of Nature, with even the group of bats’ beautifully-lit movements and the frog group’s lilypad cavortings suggesting flight and escape as much as play, and the dragonfly’s and squirrel’s vocal contributions in particular so very tragic and touching and beautiful.

This was a classic “ensemble” affair, in which everybody – singers, musicians, directors, designers, stage-managers, technicians, and enablers of all kinds – gave of their best to bring to fruition something which should resonate in memory for a long time to come! – very great credit to Sara Brodie whose direction of it all made possible such a captivating operatic experience.