Extreme Lands

Frances Moore (voice), Anna McGregor (clarinet), Ben Hoadley (bassoon), Pia Palme (contrabass recorder), Dylan Lardelli (guitar), Nell Thomas (accordion), Takumi Motokawa (percussion), Charlotte Fetherston (viola), King Pan Ng (erhu).
CAROL MICALLEF: “Cigarettes for Ping Pong”;
HERMIONE JOHNSON: “The Deep Blue Sky”;
ALEXANDRA HAY: “Moon Song”;
KING PAN NG: “ExtremeLand”.

Massey University Theatrette, 21-22 August 2009

“Extreme Lands” was an event incorporating sound (live and recorded), words, and images, imaginatively curated by Wellington composer Alexandra Hay.

There were four items on the programme, beginning with “Cigarettes for Ping Pong” by experimental singer-songwriter Carol Micallef, which she sang in her attractive voice, accompanying herself on a tiny retro synth, with the aid of erstwhile guitarist Dylan Lardelli on viola.

Alexandra Hay’s own work, “Moon Song”, utilized a text by Branwen Millar, ingeniously presented as an interplay between words projected onto a screen, and words vocalized by Frances Moore. Each section was associated with a different aspect of water, for instance The Harbour, Ice, Tap, and Open Bodies. Hay’s use of electroacoustic sound files, such as the warm enveloping introduction, and the undulating filtered white noise underlying the voice in “The Harbour”, were reminiscent of the use of electronics in her atmospheric “White Rain” for amplified flute (which won the Victoria University composition competition in 2006). On the other hand, the exploitation of extended techniques on the live instruments (down to transferring the conventional western violin tremolando onto Ng’s traditional Chinese erhu), reminded me of her daring demands on the NZSO in the quietly powerful “Bellum Nocturnis” (winner of the 2008 NZSO/Todd Corporation Award).

Hay’s fellow graduate from the Victoria University NZ School of Music, Hermione Johnson, has been interested in very low sounds, and very high sounds. In “The Deep Blue Sky”, she joined Hay in exploring very soft sounds, and non-standard ways of playing instruments. Intense concentration on the barely audible world of the bellows-breath of Nell Thomas’s accordion, the bowed bridge of Dylan Lardelli’s guitar, and the key clicks of Ben Hoadley’s bassoon, drew the listener in, until the first tentative notes of definite pitch began to emerge towards the end of the piece.

King Pan Ng’s “ExtremeLand” relied mainly on projected images and recorded sound files to carry its message (encompassing the ends of a geographic spectrum, from Burmese refugees to icy landscapes). The performers seemed to have little to play: for them, it might have been “avant karaoke”. The images, however, stayed on in the mind, particularly those of the victims of the Myanmar junta.

Pia Palme – Austrian Connections from Caprice Arts

Pia Palme (contrabass recorder), Dylan Lardelli (guitar), Bridget Douglas (piccolo), Ben Hoadley (bassoon), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Donald Nicolson (piano), Philip Brownlee (synthesizer), Niky Clegg (vocalist).
SOREN EICHBERG: “4 Pieces for Bassoon and Piano”;
PIA PALME: “AXE.WHO.TREE”, “Noneuclidian Playgrounds”;
DANIEL DE LA CUESTA: “Fachwerk”;
PHILIP BROWNLEE: “The Length of a Breath”, “As if to Catch the Fleeting Tail of Time”;
MICHAEL NORRIS: “Amato”;
JACK BODY: “Aeolian Harp”;
THIERRY BLONDEAU: “Non-Lieu”.

Salvation Army Citadel, Friday 14 August 2009

This concert organized by the enterprising Caprice Arts Trust featured an adventurous array of contemporary music.

At the more conservative, conscientiously-constructed end of the spectrum, Denmark’s Soren Nils Eichberg’s “4 Pieces for Bassoon and Piano” effectively showcased the artistry of their commissioner, New Zealander Ben Hoadley. Much of the first piece involved the bassoon in a dialogue with itself across its different registers, from deep and mellow to high and plaintive. The second was a lively unison dance for both instruments. In the third, the piano set up a stalking funeral march beneath the bassoon’s lugubrious lament, while the fourth was rather like a busy “Bumblebee” for bassoon.

Towards the opposite extreme, Austrian Pia Palme’s “AXE.WHO.TREE” employed almost all the available resources to create a complex, changing sonic environment which included water-like electronic sounds, minimalistic piano chords, and the vocal agility of Niky Clegg. The result had something of the feel of free improvisation (a little too much so for my taste).

Palme is not only a composer: the Viennese virtuoso also plays the contrabass recorder. Her Swiss-made Kueng instrument, standing at over two metres tall, resembles nothing so much as an orphan organ pipe (and the organ is, after all, basically just a consort of recorders with delusions of grandeur). This modern adaptation of a medieval prototype is perhaps the most recent addition to the woodwind sub-bass range, joining some (less common) members of the saxophone family, the more established contrabassoon and contrabass clarinet, and (from the 1980s) the contrabass flute. The soft sound of the instrument benefits from discreet amplification, which makes it ideal for use with electronics. Palme’s other composition (a premiere), “Noneuclidian Playgrounds”, included guitar and electronic transformation of the giant recorder, and progressed to hatch a surprising drum-beat rhythm at the end.

The contrabass recorder was heard to good effect in the solo “Fachwerk”, from the Mexican-Austrian Daniel De la Cuesta. A strict palindrome, it began (and, of course, ended) with the “pizzicato” effects of tonguing, developing into a high-register melody with a low pitched accompaniment, and on to a pivotal core of multiphonics and organ-like depth.

Wellingtonian Philip Brownlee’s 2009 “The Length of a Breath” showed another side of the contrabass recorder, challenging Palme to produce exquisitely soft, mellow notes over the wide range of the instrument. Along with his other premiere in this concert, “The Length of a Breath” marked a welcome return to composition for Brownlee. Also written this year was the even more impressive “As if to Catch the Fleeting Tail of Time” for an ensemble of piccolo, bassoon, viola, guitar and piano. Here Brownlee’s timeless world of carefully placed gestures, unsuspected colour blends, and delicate Webernian klangfarbenmelodie distributed among the players, was enough (just) to sustain one’s interest, despite any perceivable thrust of forward momentum. (One intriguing technique was a microtonal scale achieved by successively plucking a guitar string while simultaneously pitch-bending it.)

Another premiere from another Wellingtonian was Michael Norris’s 2008 “Amato”. As sensitively rendered by pianist Donald Nicolson, this proved one of Norris’s most immediately attractive works to date, as it evolved from its rarefied opening to gradually fill the keyboard space out to its extremities, on towards a fortissimo explosion, and then to a mysterious close.

Jack Body’s “Aeolian Harp” from 1979 is almost a classic, in its versions for violin or cello. Somewhat rarer was the recension for solo viola performed by Nicholas Hancox. A study in harmonics, this piece evoked a wind-harp playing the most primordial of all scales.

“Non-Lieu” by French composer Thierry Blondeau also began as an essay in harmonics, expertly elicited (in rapid-fire staccato) from the guitar, by Dylan Lardelli. Further techniques introduced within this ingenious (if overlong) composition included live detuning with the tuning pegs, closely-beating intervals, and, during Lardelli’s theatrical exit (reflecting the interest in the use of space found also in Blondeau’s piece for a “moving chamber orchestra”), swinging the guitar to produce Doppler-effected pitch changes.

Ensemble Selisih – making the difference

ENSEMBLE SELISIH

Elizabeth Farrell (flute), Mathias Trapp (piano), Daniela Wahler and Markus Rombach (saxophones)
DIETER MACK: “Selisih”, “Trio III”;
CHANG-SOON RYU: “Quartett”;
DYLAN LARDELLI: “Two Bells”;
ROBIN TOAN: “Twitter”;
MICHAEL NORRIS: “BADB”;
GILLIAN WHITEHEAD: “Taurangi”.

NZ School of Music Adam Concert Room, 12 August 2009

“Selisih”, an Indonesian word meaning “argumentative discussion”, was the name given by German composer Dieter Mack to his duo for alto and baritone saxophones. Mack, now on his third visit to New Zealand in a professional capacity, has lived in Indonesia studying gamelan performance practice, and (partly inspired by this) has made the interactions between players, one of the fundamental principles of his music. The name was subsequently adopted by this ensemble of four individualists – two saxophonists, a flautist and a pianist.

Mack’s 2003 composition “Selisih” itself formed part of the programme. The duo began with Wahler’s querulous alto sax answered by Rombach’s staid baritone, which in turn was to respond with increased nervous energy. The conversation turned to treat a serious topic with mysterious multiphonics, before they joined together in rapid unisono figures and a perfectly united vibrato.

The 2005 “Trio III” reflected Mack’s more recent concern with creating new timbres using multiphonics, incidental microtones and, especially, by blending together instrumental sounds (analogous to an organ’s mixture stop, and sharing some similar concerns with the French Spectralists). Flute (and sometimes piccolo) melded with alto sax to produce unison lines in novel, Messiaen-like colours, while the discreetly prepared piano added a quietly dark commentary.

Korean-born Chang-soon Ryu has studied with Dieter Mack in Lubeck. His 2007 “Quartett” for the Ensemble Selisih showed some of Mack’s interest in timbre-building, and also a feeling of stasis that those of us who have grown up with the thematic development, metrical pulse and harmonic motion of the western tradition, tend to associate with East Asian music.

Wellingtonian Dylan Lardelli’s 2009 “Two Bells” displayed a similar sense of static time, and for good reason: it was inspired in part by the stately unfolding of classical Japanese Noh drama. As with his 2008 “four scenes” for Stroma, and more successfully than in his earlier “Sent into Silence” at the 2007 Asia Pacific Festival, Lardelli here suspended any need for forward direction or climax. The poised, spare texture incorporated judicious special effects: muffled prepared-piano notes illumined by a halo of resonance; throbbing close-interval sustains; slap-tonguing and key clicks on the baritone sax.

“Two Bells” was commissioned by Selisih (with Creative NZ) to increase the repertoire for this unconventional ensemble. So too was Aucklander Robin Toan’s 2009 “Twitter”, a set of three short character-pieces “about” birds (not micro-blogging). The first – perky, cheeky, syncopated – was reminiscent of the “Aquarium” and “Puppets” movements from her 2005 “Barcelona Postcards”. The second was pensive, with a plangent melody on the soprano sax, some contrapuntal complexity and cadenza passages. The third was motoric (rather than syncopated like the first), featuring rapid ostinati on the baritone sax and chirping runs and trills on the piccolo, building up to an sudden end.

Michael Norris’ “BADB” was named after a shape-shifting Celtic goddess. It opened with Farrell singing into her flute, with crystalline high piano runs from Trapp. However, the goddess’s fearsome side was soon made evident with fortissimo crow-calls.

Gillian Whitehead’s “Taurangi” was premiered by Bridget Douglas and Rachel Thomson during the 2000 International Festival of the Arts. It made my list of highlights in the retrospective of that year that I wrote for the “NZ Listener”. This was a most elegant rendition from New Zealand-born flautist Elizabeth Farrell and pianist Mathias Trapp: the flute’s subtle pitch-bends and the closing, barely audible inside-piano glissandi still had the magic to send tingles up the spine.

Contemporary Rites – Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer

PESTOVA/MEYER PIANO DUO
Xenia Pestova, piano; Pascal Meyer, piano
STRAVINSKY: “The Rite of Spring”;
DUGAL MCKINNON: “Diktat, Ditty Half-Life”;
CHRIS WATSON: “Coffee Table Book”.

**STOCKHAUSEN: “Mantra”

NZ School of Music Adam Concert Room, 17 July 2009

**VUW Hunter Council Chamber, 19 July 2009

Is ballet music programme music when performed without the ballet? If it is, then is it “about” the dance action onstage, or is it, instead, more “about” the story and images that inspired the ballet’s  scenario in the first place? If so, then Stravinsky (famous for the dictum that music expresses only itself) may, paradoxically, have written one of the greatest tone poems of the twentieth century.

These were some of the thoughts going through my mind as I listened to duo pianists Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer playing “The Rite of Spring”. Their two-piano version provided more resonance and weight than the composer’s own arrangement for one-piano-four-hands, edging just a little closer to the power of the orchestra. At times Pestova and Meyer evoked familiar instrumental timbres (the opening bassoon, the dialogues of muted trumpets): at others they created something fresh and new – from washes of piano arpeggios, to sinister stalking rhythms.

Unexpectedly, rhythm also emerged as a crucial element in Stockhausen’s “Mantra”. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised: after all, “Piano Piece IX” began with a premonitory dose of pre-minimalist minimalism. However, in the 1956/61 piece, the regularly repeated chords were readily deconstructed into irregular flourishes at the extremes of the keyboard. In the 1969/70 “Mantra”, by contrast, a measured pulse recurred many times during the work – at one point with acerbic wit, as when Pestova’s peremptorily iterated high pitch “corrected” a “wrong” note written for Meyer’s part.

Pestova and Meyer’s intimate engagement with the piece enabled them to highlight episodes of lush romanticism and snatches of melody. Despite these, and the extended periods of metre, the 70-minute “Mantra” proved an epic marathon demanding concentration, commitment and stamina – and that was just for the listeners. The duo pianists themselves needed all these, plus exquisite coordination – especially in such instances as when Pestova’s microsecond woodblock had to coincide with Meyer’s attack. For the performers not only had the pianos, but also an array of small percussion instruments (woodblocks, tuned crotales), as well as dials to initiate ring-modulation (an electronic effect equivalent to Cage’s prepared piano, bringing the tone colour closer to that of the crotales).

Expertly controlled by sound projectionist Philip Brownlee, the ring modulation also offered an escape from the prison of twelve-equal temperament, notably in the form of arresting (all the more so for being sparingly deployed) sliding portamenti on piano sustains. With “Mantra”, Stockhausen had returned to more rigorously formulated composition after a period of experimentation with improvisation and chance: had he followed the precedent set by Markevitch, Ives and Wyschnegradsky and tuned one of the pianos a quarter-tone apart, he would have had even more scope for his procedure of expanding and contracting his intervallic material (a process pioneered in the 1920s by Mexican microtonalist Julian Carrillo).

After having been percussionists and vocalizing actors, Pestova and Meyer further heightened the excitement towards the end with a tour-de-force of rushing fugato passages.

Echoes of Stockhausen’s uncompromising modernism were present in Chris Watson’s “Coffee Table Book” in the earlier recital. Intended as the musical analogue of a pictorial volume (as opposed to the structured narrative of literary fiction), the piece was duly episodic, but retained Watson’s characteristic control of the flow of tension.

Xenia Pestova, a graduate of the Victoria University School of Music and pupil of Judith Clark, has always shown a commitment to contemporary (and New Zealand) music. With Luxembourg pianist Pascal Meyer, this seems set to continue with compositions for two pianos. Dugal McKinnon’s “Diktat, Ditty Half-Life”, with its neatly encapsulating concluding gesture, was the first of a series of miniatures for the duo. I look forward to hearing more.