Wellington City Orchestra’s mix of enchantment and exoticism at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Overture “Cosi fan tutte” K.588
MOZART – Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major K.299
RIMSKY-KORSAKOV – Symphony No. 3 in C Major Op.32

Karen Batten (flute)
Michelle Velvin (harp)

Wellington City Orchestra
Andrew Atkins (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 22nd September. 2024

To the title of this review I was tempted to add the word “enterprising”, in referring to the inclusion in Wellington City Orchestra’s programme of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s little-known and until recently rarely locally-performed Third Symphony (“You mean there are two others?” someone quipped to me at the concert during the interval!). I was therefore amazed when a search of on-line recording catalogues revealed no less than five recordings featuring the work, and in most cases as part of a set of all three symphonies – until recently only “Antar”, the Second Symphony, had any kind of recorded history. So, while not exactly a neglected and forgotten work per se, the Third Symphony had been something of a rarity in Aotearoa’s concert halls up to the present, and certainly deserved its airing on this occasion, thanks to the advocacy of conductor Andrew Atkins.

The concert’s other two works needed no such special pleading, though of Mozart’s instrumental concertos perhaps K.299, the Flute and Harp Concerto has a special place because of its attractive instrumental combination. It obviously needs a harp, an instrument less prolific than others in the composer’s “concerti canon”, but somehow its “specialness” seems an extra drawcard, adding to the beauty of the sounds generated by both the instrumental combination and the composer’s music.

As for the concert’s opening item, another work by Mozart, the Overture to “Cosi fan tutte” perhaps is the least “known” in concert-hall performance of the composer’s “big four” operatic overtures (it was the one of the four that didn’t make the “cut” in a recent Classic FM list of “Ten greatest Opera Overtures”) though it’s still a work of immense distinction, and one that has its own challenges. I liked conductor Andrew Atkins’ overall projection of the music, the introductory fanfare chords snappy and alert and the flowing oboe solo characterfully shaped (both gestures are repeated), before the whole orchestra stated the opera’s “signature phrase” emphatically sung by the male principals at a later stage in the opera – “Co-si-fan-tu-tte!” – and the mischievous allegro theme skips in, alternating with emphatic syncopated chordings and repeated perky phrases from the various solo woodwinds, which continue throughout the overture until the return of the “signature phrase” and a coda whose ending signals the “opera proper” to begin. While keeping the trajectories alive and bubbling, Atkins still gave the strings plenty of space in which to articulate their phrases with those tricky, syncopated opening entries, something that was less troublesome for the wind-players, whose chattering solos invariably began ON the beat!  It all set the ambiences tingling for the delightful Flute and Harp concerto to follow.

A bright, freshly-voiced opening paved the way for the soloists’ unison entry, scintillations of colour and energy whose interplay gave as much active stimulation as more passive enjoyment, thanks to both the composer’s inexhaustible invention and his soloists’ spontaneous-sounding relishing of so many details, whether in individual exchange, or in tandem with the orchestra – the sense of delight at times over-rode my duties as a reviewer, so that I had to often break the spell and remember to write a comment regarding this and that felicity! I particularly enjoyed the first-movement cadenza which began slowly an almost suggestively and teasingly wrought between the players – Karen Batten’s flute was well-nigh vocal at times with her turns of phrase, and Michelle Velvin’s harp sparkled and glistened in response, her concluding flourish before the orchestra re-entered a wonderful irruption of tongue-in-cheek temperament!

Conductor Atkins got a most charmingly poised and gracious opening tutti from the players at the slow movement’s beginning, to which the soloists brought episode after episode of enchantment, after which the finale danced in, the sprightly opening getting even livelier as the figurations took on even greater excitement! The harp took the lead, showing the flute the way, with both soloists then relishing Mozart’s unfailingly ear-catching invention in their exchanges. A lovely “where have we got to?” shared cadenza concluded with another spectacular harp flourish and the final tutti an “all-in” affair with the soloists at the forefront of the “payoff” chords – splendid! I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it so much!

An interval allowed time and space for the resplendent harp to be spirited over to one side, and for musicians and audience alike to prepare for the second half, and the eagerly-anticipated Rimsky-Korsakov Symphony. The work got off to an atmospheric start with horns calling across the orchestra soundscape to firstly winds and then strings, everything lovely and rhapsodic, with Atkins then encouraging plenty of momentum and muscle for a well-managed accelerando into the allegro  – this was classic “Russian festival” stuff with the reprise of the big, prancing tune especially invigorating. Some beautiful wind-playing then introduced a second subject, begun by the clarinet and forwarded by the oboe and strings, then a solo violin and flute, all poignantly sounded before Atkins danced everybody into the  development section, with firstly the strings and then the winds having a lot of fun with all kind of variants of both of the themes we’d so far heard. The brass and timpani then  called things together resplendently for a massive return of the allegro’s main tune – stirring stuff, here! – after which the winds, led by the clarinet, brought back (for our pleasure) the lovely second subject, commented on by various other winds and the solo violin. And then, Instead of the “great peroration” method of finishing a movement, conductor and players wound it all down quietly and poetically, concluding with gentle, po-faced pizzicato-and-wind notes.

Something of a challenge was posed by the composer’s 5/4 rhythms in the quixotic scherzo (marked “vivo”) which followed – unlike the stately step-wise processional of Tchaikovsky’s Allegro con grazia 5/4 movement in his “Pathetique” Symphony, these rhythms conjured up a positively mercurial momentum, whose trajectories I thought the players did a fantastic job of maintaining. I did wonder while listening whether it was out of mischievous intent towards or something akin to dislike of  orchestral players that led Rimsky-Korsakov to set them such a task, but on this occasion, to the WCO’s credit (and their conductor’s), the players kept those handfuls of semiquavers simmering for our delight – and at least the Trio’s contrastingly languorous melody gave all and sundry a bit of a rhythmic breather!

I thought the Andante  movement lovely, with horns and winds creating a gorgeous introduction here, from which the strings elaborated the melody, repeating its opening in different keys (a “soaring aloft” set of phrases made a particularly fetching impression) – the theme continued to draw in responses from all sides, alternating more excitable moments with the previous “soaring” mode – though largely monothematic, the mood had an enchantment of its own which held one’s interest to the point where the pulse quickened more purposefully and drove the sounds into a celebratory finale. Though the opening martial melody was perhaps over-worked, it all certainly demonstrated the composer’s skill as an orchestrator, and managed to weave in fragments of counter-themes by way of contrast, with playing sufficiently committed and colourful from all sections of the band keeping us mightily entertained right to the end. In all, I felt it was definitely worth a listen, and may well even be tempted into further symphonic investigations, having been reminded earlier that “there are two others!” So, definite kudos to Andrew Atkins, his soloists and supporting players for an absorbing and rewarding afternoon’s listening!

Poetry and drama at the keyboard from pianist Quang Hong Luu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Quang Hong Luu

St.Andrew’s 2024 Lunchtime Concert Series presents:

QUANG HONG LUU (piano)
– a programme of 19th Century Romantic Piano Music

FRANZ LISZT – “Funérailles” from Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses S.173
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Kinderscenen (Scenes from Childhood) Op.15
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Minor Op.5

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Thursday, 19th September, 2024

Vietnamese-born Quang Hong Luu began his early music studies in 1997 at the Vietnam National Academy of music in Ha Noi before completing a Bachelor of Music with Professor Kyunghee Lee at the Australian Academy of Music and Performing Arts, and going on to study his Masters degree at Montreal University in Canada with the great Đặng Thái Sơn, winner of the 1980 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.  He’s now in Wellington at Te Kōkī School of Music at Victoria University, pursuing his Doctorate of Music under the guidance of Dr. Jian Liu.

I unfortunately missed an earlier recital given by Quang at St. Andrew’s in June this year, at which he played the music of Debussy and Liszt, the latter a composer whose work Annees de Pelerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”)  is the research topic of Quang’s doctoral thesis. On that occasion he played the first of the work’s three “years” – the Premiere Annee: Suisse (“First Year: Switzerland”). This time round we were given a single-movement work of Liszt’s, Funérailles, taken from a different set of pieces, the Harmonies Poétiques et Religeuses. Quang’s recital was in fact a kind of “19thCentury Romantics” collection, which included works by Schumann and Brahms, all of which were connected with one another by subject, circumstance and personality.

In this programme’s case, however, the “chronology” of the individual pieces had to give way to temperament and circumstance.  Beginning the recital with the earliest of the three works, Robert Schumann’s enchanting Kinderscenen, though an attractive prospect in itself, would have pitted two “heavyweight” pieces in a cheek-by-jowl confrontation, works moreover whose respective creators were fated, it seemed, to be at odds with each other right from the beginning of their short-lived association! Schumann’s work seemed, therefore, the perfect “rainbow bridge” by which both Quang Hong Luu and his audience could traverse the yawning gap between the worlds of Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms.

So, the recital began with Liszt’s Funeráilles (“Funeral”) – a piece dated October 1849, though it related as much to the events of 1848 in Hungary, an uprising against Hapsburg rule that failed and resulted in the deaths or banishment of three of Liszt’s friends involved in the proceedings (one of these being the former Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Lajos Batthyány, executed in October 1849). No blacker nor more fraught and dread-laden sounds could have been conceived at the outset as Quang’s remorselessly-delivered opening bell-tones intensified the music’s menacing tread and gradually tightened its grip in an upward vortex of attenuated alarm. The sombre funeral-march that followed eventually emerged in the pianist’s hands as a tender, upwardly beseeching lagrimoso, before reaching a brief climax which prompted a passage as distinctive as that of Liszt’s great contemporary, Frederic Chopin in his famous Op.53 A-flat Polonaise’s depiction of “the thunderous hooves of the Polish Cavalry”, here as powerful, heroic and cataclysmic in itself up to its fortissimo peak.

Quang Hong Luu

A furious flourish led to an angry restatement of part of the funeral march, Quang allowing a broken, haunted rendition of parts of the lagrimoso theme and a defiant restatement of the climax of the “thunderous hooves” section to at once “reawaken” and unify one’s sensibilities, a “wringing-out” of the emotions to devastating effect at the stark, muted end of the piece.

After such travails, how even more appropriate the insertion of Schumann’s “Kinderscenen” now seemed in the scheme of things! And its opening, with the perfectly suitable title Von fremden Ländern und Menschen (Of Foreign Lands and Peoples) seemed in itself to help reframe the experience of the Liszt work we had just heard to a kind of profound “imagining” – of course Schumann was at pains to emphasise that his pieces were impressions of an adult looing back on childhood, summed up at the end by the piece Der Dichter spricht (The Poet Speaks).

Quang’s playing was simple and unaffected at the outset, giving the brief hesitation of wonderment at each “rounding off” of the second subject its due without exaggeration. An eager and bright-eyed Curiose Geschichte (A curious story) tumbled into a vigorous Hasche-Mann (Catch me if you can), while the beautifully “echoed” phrasings of Bittendes Kind (Pleading child) found an almost Dickensian contrast in the following Glückes genug (happy enough). Quang maintained the pomp and ceremony of Wichtige Begebenheit (An Important Event) right through to the end, rather than observing a diminuendo leading towards the final chord, as some interpreters do, anticipating the onset of the contemplative (and justly-famous) Traumerei (Dreaming), its reprise here under Quang’s fingers especially tender.

A gentle awakening “at the Fireside” (Am Kamin) was followed by a roisterous Ritter vom Steckenpferd (Knight of the Hobbyhorse), whose exertions may have been too much of  a good thing, leading as they did to the world of wonderment and anxiety in itself that Fast zu Ernst (Almost too serious) so touchingly portrayed, and even went on to suggest the presence of  phantom-like shadows in the following Fürchtenmachen (Frightening). Quang allowed the first few measures of the following Kind im Einschlummern (Child falling asleep) to melt the E minor anxieties into a central major-key section of ravishing beauty, a magical transformation of time and consciousness becoming music. And magical, too, was the full-circle epilogue Der Dichter spricht (The poet speaks), the voice warm, dreamy, confiding, philosophical, at once confidential and candid, Quang sensitively evoking the composer’s voice recognising and paying retrospective homage to his own world.

Appropriately, the pianist left the platform for a moment, but was soon back with us, ready to once again “reimagine” with us the territory about to be explored via the last, and most epic of Johannes Brahms’s three sonatas for piano, the mighty Op. 5 in F Minor, a work amazingly wrought by a twenty year-old (surely among the most prodigious compositional feats of musical history!). Brahms took the work to Düsseldorf when first meeting Robert and Clara Schumann and presented it to the by-then-ailing Schumann, who nevertheless roused himself sufficiently to pen his famous “New Paths” article (his last) in his influential periodical “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik”, in which he heaped effusive praise on the embarrassed younger composer, writing of one who was “fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner, who would achieve mastery, not step by step, but at once, springing like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove. And now, here he is, a young fellow at whose cradle graces and heroes stood watch…..his name is Johannes Brahms….”

After briefly leaving the platform in the wake of the Schuman Quang Hong Luu came back in galvanised for action. His attack at the Sonata’s beginning had everything, strength, power, focus and vigour, the music flung towards us unapologetically, with both ends of the keyboard activated in the manner born, and with the opening flourish countered by a louring, grimly-voiced theme underpinned by reminiscences of Beethoven’s “Fate” motive from his C Minor Symphony, and later a grandly lyrical theme whose extended variant climbed gloriously up the keyboard and proclaimed its majesty, before Quang reiterated the challenge and plunged the music into as combatative a development as one could imagine, the four-note Beethoven theme insistently underpinning the reiteration of the work’s opening. It was as visceral an encounter between elements of the classical sonata as could be imagined, evoking the same kind of titanic forces as those of Beethoven’s in his “Hammerklavier” Sonata.

Having spent his energies battling the forces of fate in this first movement, Brahms then evoked a different world of poetry and recaptured sentiment in a second movement, Andante expressivo, which pianist Claudio Arrau once described as “the most beautiful love music after Tristan”. Quang’s playing was gorgeously poetic and gently-flowing, the second episode in particular here made absolutely enchanting, with beautiful timing of those Schumannesque bass notes that seemed to conversely “float” the music in celestial waters, eventually reaching a magnificent climax whose depth of tone and variety of colour seemed positively orchestral in its impact. It was no Quang Hong Luu

wonder that Brahms seemed at the piece’s end to have difficulty in relinquishing his hold on such a spellbinding mood.

Quang then tore into the Waltz-Scherzo movement with unbridled energies, more muscular and rapier-like in its cut-and-thrust than various heartier, more bucolic renditions I’ve heard. How beautiful and hymn-like, by contrast, was the Trio, still with an occasional Beethoven-motif presence, but stressing the song aspect over the dance for a few fleeting moments, even if the return of the scherzo’s main theme brought with it something more of a wild ride in Quang’s hands than a waltz-dance!

The Beethoven motif all but dominated the next movement, an Intermezzo with the title Rückblick (“Looking back”) something which obviously recalled the first movement’s Beethoven quote, though Quang’s voicing of it brought to my mind a reminiscence from another work, the slow movement of the “Tempest” Sonata, which Brahms would surely have known. And the frequent repetition of the opening ‘descending’ motif engendered something almost Faustian, its evocation of solitude and wandering from Part Two of Goethe’s work, a kind of “passage” towards a truly heroic final-movement scenario.

That’s what this last movement built up to from a series of brusque-sounding statements at its beginning, which Quang then contrasted with a beautifully-flowing-in-tempo major key sequence, before returning to the brusque opening, and ANOTHER beautifully contrasted rejoiner – this time, an even richer and nobler contrast, with characteristic Germanic woodland harmonic touches at the end – so nostalgic for all their fleeting quality. Quang then took up the composer’s invitation to pick up handfuls of the notes and run with them, whirling us through the excitement of, firstly an accelerando, and then a vertiginous coda which, after a few breathtaking moments solidly and heroically proclaimed the piece’s conclusion – what a work, and what a pianist!

 

A “Tosca” to be relished – Wellington Opera in full cry

Posted on by Peter Mechen
PUCCINI – Tosca  Act One:  Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Baron Scarpia                                                                                        Photo credit: Stephen A’Court.

Wellington Opera presents:
GIACOMO PUCCINI – Tosca (opera in three acts)
Libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa & Luigi Illica

Cast
Cesare Angelotti – Samson Setu (bass)
Sacristan – Wade Kernot (bass)
Mario Cavaradossi – Jared Holt (tenor)
Floria Tosca – Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Baron Scarpia – Teddy Tahu Rhodes (baritone)
Spoletta – Manase Latu (tenor)
Sciarrone – Morgan-Andrew King (bass)
Jailor – Brent Allcock
Boy – Ivan Reid

Wellington Opera Chorus
Chorusmaster – Michael Vinten
Orchestra Wellington
Conductor – Brian Castles-Onion
Director – Jacqueline Coats
Set Design – Michael Zaragoza
Costume Design – Rebecca Bethan Jones
Lighting Design – Rowan McShane

St,James Theatre, Courtenay Place, Wellington

Wednesday, 11th September 2024
(also September 13th, 14th, 15th)

This was, I thought, a “Tosca” from Wellington Opera to be relished. Giacomo Puccini’s three-act melodrama, has since its appearance fronted up to and triumphed over certain critical attitudes struck towards it that were, to say the least, less-than-positive. Critics both contemporary and retrospective have castigated the work with phrases like “three hours of noise”, “disconcerting vulgarities” and with a “tiresome, silly and gullible” heroine – and Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich once replied to being asked about “Tosca” with the words “A great opera, but terrible music!”  The invective surely reached its peak more than thirty years after the composer’s death via musicologist Joseph Kerman’s 1956 publication “Opera as Drama”, in which Tosca is summarily dismissed by the author as “A shabby little shocker”!

However, singers, conductors, directors and the general opera-going public have regularly defied and confounded such judgements, with the work recently ranked as the fifth most-performed opera in the world by the global opera data-site Operabase. Even if popular opinion and response hasn’t always necessarily reflected critical opinion, Tosca has flourished with flying colours thanks to its plot’s readily melodramatic scenarios, its vividly-wrought characterisations of the three main protagonists, and the enduring emotional “tug” of its two great arias, “Vissi d’arte” for the soprano and “E lucevan le stelle” for the tenor.

Director of this production, Jacqueline Coats, described the work as essentially a love story with a tragic outcome, one determined by outward forces which ultimately over-ride the personal concerns and aspirations of the protagonists. And on a wider political level one of those forces exerts his power to maintain a status quo of tyranny while simultaneously seeking to manipulate the fate of the two lovers for his own ultimate gratification. It’s an interplay of situation that feels both Homeric and Shakespearean, not to mention more recent contemporary resonances.

The joy of Coats’ direction was, for me, its unswerving focus on the interplay of these ruinously conflicting circumstances, in which the conflicting strands of the drama were allowed their full-blooded resonances. Everything was amply voiced and energised by the focused commitment of the singers, conductor and orchestral forces, and (particularly in the first two acts) the powerful simplicity of the stage settings, beautifully and atmospherically placed and lit for maximum effect. Nothing was allowed to distract from the essential fatalism of the work’s unfolding, even if I was initially nonplussed by the mysterious corpse who appeared at the Third Act’s beginning, thinking it belonging perhaps to a prisoner who’d fallen from the tower of the Castel Sant’Angelo while unsuccessfully attempting to escape (my sharper-eyed companion whispered the name “Angelotti” in response to my inquiring sideways look!). I was also surprised by the unexpectedly onstage “shepherd-boy” singing his folksong (admittedly rather beautifully) before being led away by his companions, and by groups of what seemed like various prisoners either in transit or allowed the freedom of a few minutes of fresh air before being reconfined.

The production maintained the story’s “Roman” setting throughout, from Act One’s traditional church interior scenario through Act Two’s depiction of the iconic image of a wolf feeding the twins Romulus and Remus surmounting the scene. This image presided over a more twentieth-century “look” to the headquarters of Baron Scarpia, the Chief of Police, its walls alternating iron-grey and blood-red pillars with menacing intent. Costumes reinforced a more contemporary, if non-specific sense of time, with Floria Tosca’s suitably beautiful and florid, her lover, Mario Cavaradossi’s casual and workman-like, and Baron Scarpia’s austere and business-like, with the latter’s minions (Spoletta and Sciarroni) suitably institutional.

The opening church interior scene with its “ecclesiastical” lighting amply engendered a kind of timelessness, reinforced by the contrasts with a near-contemporary-art Madonna statue, and the modern dress of the congregation who came to enact the concluding Te Deum. Here, the interplay between voices, bells and intermittent cannon-fire made by turns a splendidly celebratory and disturbingly remorseless impression – at once a kind of reminiscence of and antithesis to the exuberant energies of the conclusion to the Second Act of the composer’s “La Boheme”. In this very different résumé, it was all brought off superbly!

Vocally and dramatically, the work got an appropriately atmospheric start with the wonderfully black-voiced Samson Setu as the recently-escaped prisoner Angelotti seeking concealment in the church, the orchestra properly conveying his “flight” with urgent, desperately-voiced impulses. The subsequent appearance of the Sacristan, Wade Kernot, provided much comic relief in complaining of having to run around after his charge, the painter, Cavaradossi (currently at work in the church) and keep his brushes clean and his paints in order – a lovely, amusingly “holier-than-thou” cameo portrayal.

As Mario Cavaradossi, Jared Holt “warmed” and filled out his voice as the evening progressed – his early “Recondita armonia” I found precise and accurate but a touch effortful, as he seemed in places throughout this first scene when duetting with Tosca. What a change, however, had come over his delivery by the time he reached his second-act “Vittoria! Vittoria!” outburst of defiance of Scarpia – he was like a man possessed, completely inhabiting his energized person – a terrific performance! And he then realised with equal force the spectrum’s opposite and despairing end with a heartfelt “E lucevan le stelle” in the third act, when facing his execution and the loss of Tosca. It all made his tender “Amaro sol per te m’era il morire” to his beautiful would-be rescuer all the more poignant.

Tosca : Act Two:   Teddy Tahu Rhodes (Scarpia) and Madeleine Pierard (Tosca) Photo Credit: Stephen A’Court

No greater contrast could be imagined than with the Baron Scarpia of Teddy Tahu Rhodes, a portrayal which sated all of his scenes with the character’s essential brutality. I could have imaged a suaver, more vocally charming (and perhaps, therefore, even more dangerous) Scarpia –  but his was a character obviously accustomed to getting what he wanted, and the unrelenting coruscating quality in the voice purely and simply gave tongue to that same quality In his character. Those wonderful soliloquies in both the First and Second Acts which revealed to us his remorseless drive and his insatiable desire for the thrill of sexual conquest made their mark with absolutely no doubt or misgiving, no skerrick of a qualm.

Against this rock, this seemingly immovable object, was cast the irresistible force of his adversary-cum-object-of-desire, Floria Tosca. I have to say that, in experiencing Madeleine Pierard’s astonishing portrayal, I was so taken up with the whole-heartedness of her characterisation I never once gave a thought of any other Tosca I’d seen or heard – from her very first entrance after her off-stage cries of “Mario! Mario!” when seeking her lover, Cavaradossi in the church, she gave to us as intense and all-encompassing a character as was her adversary-to-be, but in her case one filled with so much light-and-shade that one found oneself revelling in her sheer presence – her humour, her quixotic changes of mood, her passionate utterances, her tenderness and her moments of both desperation and resolve.

To pinpoint everything she did to bring the manifold aspects of the character to life would require an essay for which there would be no time or space here, and, certainly, in places produce a “words fail me” result. Suffice to say that for me it was an utterly memorable performance, one whose heart-melting “Visi d’arte” represented for a few precious moments a kind of entering into the apex of the dramatic soprano’s art. But also, it was an undertaking which in itself paid tribute to the quality of interaction between her and her two principal onstage partners. As much as did any of the individual performances discussed above, it was a give-and-take quality which helped make this “Tosca” such a special musical, theatrical and dramatic experience.

Tosca:  Act Three:  Madeleine Pierard (Tosca) and Jared Holt (Mario Cavaradossi)  –  Photo Credit : Stephen A’Court

I hadn’t encountered the well-rounded voice of the Sciarrone, Morgan-Andrew King, before, but I had of course, previously heard the Spoletto, tenor Manase Latu, in a completely different operatic world, that of Rossini’s “Le Comte Ory”, the juxtapositioning of the two roles in my head alone giving me a kind of refracted pleasure in having such a different experience from a voice this time round! I’ve already mentioned the “shepherd boy” and his lovely folk-song at the beginning of Act Three – a young man, Ivan Reid, whose beautiful tones could well take him places. The choruses played their impactful parts in the awe-inspiring “Te Deum” that closes the opera’s first Act, as well as mellifluously underpinning the first part of Cavaradossi’s fateful interview with Scarpia in Act Two.

Heroes of a similar “cut” were conductor Brian Castles-Onion and his players, Orchestra Wellington, supporting all the singers up to the hilt, and responsible for some equally stirring and heart-melting sequences throughout the evening – what springs to mind are, of course, the “Scarpia” moments, delivered by the brass with the utmost vehemence, and the contrasting episodes of tenderness from strings and winds – playing in my head at the moment is the clarinet theme which introduces Cavaradossi’s third-act “E lucevan le stelle”, for instance – and alternating with the ominously-cheerful early-morning strains of winds and bells heralding the new day, which begin the same third act. All was part of that overall impression of an embodiment of something special.

I dips me lid in gratitude to Jacqueline Coats – her sensitive overall direction resulted in a production which seemed to me to enable the work to speak its own innate character (which is increasingly rare in an operatic world bedevilled by, in the words of Michael Flanders of “At The Drop Of A Hat” fame, the impulse of “Anything to stop it being done straight!”). Her team of Michael Zaragoza (set design), Rebecca Bethan Jones (costume design) and Rowan McShane (lighting design) were all obviously on the same wavelength, with a result that, as I’ve indicated above, gave us what seemed like “the real thing”.

All the more reason to rail against the news, contained in a note in the programme, that Creative New Zealand has declined funding for Wellington Opera for 2025. It will be no surprise, of course, to the politically aware who read this, considering that the arts in general seem more-than-usually under siege via the present Coalition Government’s current strictures. Creative New Zealand will, of course have its priorities within the framework of its own limited resources – the problem is a much bigger picture which poses the question in (and towards) our society of “What’s important?” Let’s hope we can convince more of those who need convincing that among what constitutes the right answers to that question are the arts! – and Wellington Opera’s Tosca has just furnished palpable proof that such is very much the case!

“A feather on the Breath of God” transports us all… Baroque Voices’ 30-year anniversary concert September 2024

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Baroque Voices – From Hildegarde to JS Bach –
Sacred German Music for one to eight voices spanning seven centuries
Music by Hildegarde of Bingen, “The Tannhauser”, Wizlau von Rügen, Caspar Othmayer, Johannes Walther, Johannes Eccard, Heinrich Schütz, Johann Michael Bach, Johann Ludwig Bach, Johann Sebastien Bach, Pepe Becker

Baroque Voices: Pepe Becker (director), Kate Lineham, Jane McKinlay, Andrea Cochrane, Katherine Hodge, Toby Gee, Samuel Berkahn, Simon Christie, David Morriss
Additional BV singers: Jo Hodgson, Milla Dickens, Nigel Collins, Herbert Zielinski, Roger Wilson – Nota Bene Choir: Katie Chalmers, Tina Carter, Vicki Mabin, Lindsay Groves – The Bach Choir: Jonathan Lane

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington
Sunday, 1st September 2024

One had only to close one’s eyes at the beginning and one was back in an imagined, but definitely different time – the Middle Ages. Such was the power of evocation generated by singer Pepe Becker with her voice, the musical instrument she was playing while singing, and the actual words and music created nine hundred years before by the renowned composer Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179). The sound itself, too, had a transcendental, other-worldly quality, the interior of the newly refurbished Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Hill St providing a properly spacious ecclesiastical setting which “gave back” a feeling of a distant source being tapped and revitalised both regarding the performer and all who were present at those unique sounds’ inception.

This conjuration began a presentation by Wellington’s Baroque Voices directed by soprano Pepe Becker, which featured aspects of the previous thirty years’ activity by the group, and included a reappearance (where possible) of past members of the group to present a final item. The range of repertoire included pieces featuring from one to eight voices, and spanning seven centuries, reflecting a number of styles associated with different eras of composition.

A glance at the programme’s history of Baroque Voices’ activities detailed the range and scope of the group’s repertoire in some depth, bringing to mind a number of highlights people would readily remember by dint of the bold adventurousness, committed zeal and remarkable excellence, both technical and musical, of these undertakings. Everybody will have favourite memories of certain occasions, mine being of the Monteverdi projects, the delightful explorations of the Books of Madrigals over the years and the absolutely stunning 2010 (can it be so long ago?) performance of the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 at St. Mary of the Angels Church whose sound’s burnished splendour still stays in my memory!

Whether one chose to close one’s eyes and experience the intrinsic exquisiteness of the sounds alone, or gaze about the visual splendours of the building to augment the music’s “time-and-place” experience it was a feast from the very first aforementioned moment of presentation, in this case Pepe Becker’s performance of Hildegarde’s O Euchari, complete with the singer’s own shruti box drone accompaniment, not, as one might at first think, a musical glorification of the Eucharist, the celebration of bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Jesus Christ during the Mass, but a tribute to a 3rd-Century missionary Eucharius who became the bishop of the city of Trier. The second of two single-voice pieces was a Spruchdichtung (song/poem) sonorously sung by bass Simon Christie, a moralistic piece emphasising freedom from sin and guilt with God’s help and grace. The contrast between the two solo items nicely encapsulated the intrinsic variety of mood, moralistic tone and spirituality throughout the remainder of the concert, as the presentation moved through a sequence which gradually increased the number of voices, and with one or two exceptions during the first half preserved a chronological composer order.

This had the effect of frequently enticing one’s ear with variation – it was, in fact, a beautifully worked-out programme in all respects, with even the instances of leap-frogging chronologies giving pleasure rather than confusion, as with the later Caspar Othmayer (1515-1553), his 2-part songs rightly taking their place with the other 2-part pieces, ahead of three- and four-part polyphonic hymns of Nikolaus Apel (1475-1537).

Inevitably there were pieces which especially charmed my ear, even though another person’s reaction could well single out different things for different reasons. For instance I particularly relished the somewhat “didactic” atmosphere created by the interval between the two voices (Pepe Becker and Jane McKinlay) in Wizlaw von Rügen’s “Ich warne dich” (I warn you), and also the following “Kyrie magne Deus potentie” (Lord, great God of power) from the two “vocal heavyweights” (Simon Christie and David Morriss). And a little later I found myself particularly drawn to, firstly a two-sectioned hymn (“A solis ortus”) whose first unison part featured five voices, and then a polyphonic reworking of the theme by Nikolaus Apel for three voices (Pepe Becker, Samuel Berkahn and David Morriss) the words beautifully describing something of the visible physical boundaries of creation, with Christ as ruler of all.

The leadup to the interval had something of an irresistible “rolling” quality as well, beginning with the beautiful four-voiced hymn “Nova veniens” describing the city of Jerusalem, from a melody collected by Nikolaus Apel in 1494, and the buoyantly irresistible five-voiced motet by Johannes Walther beseeching the protection of the Holy Ghost “Nu bitten wir”, which I found so invigorating! While it might have seemed strange to then flip-flop back to Hildegarde, Pepe Becker obviously wanted something a bit out of the ordinary for a “first-half closer”, which she was able to organise by pairing the famous Hildegarde solo-voiced “O ignis spiritus” (the sound-world similar to that for “O Euchari” which opened the concert) with a new composition-cum-arrangement by her drawing from the “spiritual fire” of the solo-voiced sequence, and “re-orchestrating” the piece for eight voices and hand-held rock percussion effects – all of which worked sensationally well! (Pepe’s idea was that the theme of “life, light and wonderment” of the original text could be augmented by extra voices and percussion to push the “blissful pleasure” of the text into more extreme realms “verging on pain”) – it all indubitably typefied the questing spirit of its instigator to what seemed to this listener as remarkably appropriate effect!

Baroque Voices 2024
Left to right: Jane McKinlay, Andrea Cochrane, Katherine Hodge, Pepe Becker (director), Toby Gee, Simon Christie, Kate Lineham, Samuel Berkahn, David Morriss

Interval gave us a time of shared discussion and delight before we were returned to what was for the presentation venturing into a new era, the Baroque, beginning with the beautiful motet by Johannes Eccard “Christ ist erstanden” (Christ is risen) for five voices (including soprano Kate Lineham and alto Andrea Cochrane, whose work for Baroque Voices  I’ve not mentioned until now, and whose contributions helped to enhance the work’s delight.) The two Schütz motets which followed gave us by turns beauty (“So fahr ich hin”)  and strength (the more declamatory “Herr, auf dich treue ich”), though I was particularly  “taken” by the six-voice work of the next composer, Johann Michael Bach (whom I’d never really heard of beforehand!), and whose more vigorously homophonic style produced an engaging and decorative “bubbly” effect in places in his motet “Sei Lieber Tag willkommen!”

Two more motets by Heinrich Schütz, both for seven voices, brought more singers into play, alto Katherine Hodge in both and counter-tenor Toby Gee in the second of the two (both had of course previously contributed at various stage of the concert) – in the case of the first motet with the well-known text “Ich Weiss, das mein Erlöser lebt” (I know that my Redeemer liveth), and an Advent text for the second, “Der Engel sprach zu den Hirten”, the first an urgently expressive statement of belief familiar, of course, to Messiah-buffs, using the contrasts between lower and higher voices to both lyrical and dynamic effect. No less celebratory was the second, with (again precursing “Messiah”) all those resonant descriptions of the newborn baby Jesus announced to the shepherds in the fields resoundingly bringing forth “Alleluiahs” at the piece’s end.

Appropriately, the great Johann Sebastien Bach’s music was part of the “closing ceremony” at the concert, being the last item but one, and certainly the most challenging to bring off – this was the eight-voiced double-choir motet “Komm Jesu, komm”, requiring all of the virtues on display throughout the afternoon rolled into one! I found the music intense and “exposed”, the one-to-a part giving each voice nowhere to hide, and making the journey by turns enchanting and tremulous, exhilarating and daunting, and playful and harrowing, all of which characteristics came and went in this incredible performance – there were beautiful, heart-warming and stirring moments, with just the occasional sense of strain, all defining the journey in both individual and collegial ways. The sense of pilgrimage was palpable, and the feeling of arrival at the journey’s conclusion treasurable. Bach had obviously conceived and crafted it as an experience for performers and listeners alike, and here, the achievement of those ends was tangible and well wrought.

Having completed its “Odyssey” the group deemed it time for a celebration, with past BV members still within coo-ee, and ready and able to revisit what director Pepe Becker described in the programme as “the memories of joyous times singing together”. Tributes were also paid to singing colleagues who have since died, and to whom the presentation’s final item, a motet by JS Bach’s uncle, Johann Ludwig Bach’s “Das ist meine Freude” was specifically dedicated. Both the declamatory opening and the swirling, melismatic responses were tossed backwards and forwards with terrific elan, before a “duelling banjos” contrapuntal exchange and a final declamation concluded the joyous work.

Little more need be added to the above, save for expressions of pleasure and gratitude towards Pepe Becker and Baroque Voices for this “coming together” of history with the present in such a richly-wrought and life-enhancing manner for us all to enjoy.

 

 

 

The Ghost Trio presents a fitting finale to Wellington Chamber Music’s 2024 series

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
THE GHOST TRIO  –  SCHUMANN, HOLMES, SAARIAHO. RAVEL

ROBERT SCHUMANN – Piano Trio No. 1 Op.63
LEONIE HOLMES – Dance of the Wintersmith (2017)
KAIJA SAARIAHO – Calices (2009)
MAURICE RAVEL – Piano Trio in A Minor (1914)

The Ghost Trio – Monique Lapins (violin). Andrew Joyce (‘cello), Gabriela Glapska (piano)

(Andrew Joyce replaces ‘cellist Ken Ichinose for this concert)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 25th August, 2024

Review by Peter Mechen for “Middle C”

“New Zealand has so many great musicians that we have decided to have eight concerts” proclaimed the Wellington Chamber Music’s 2024 series website at the year’s beginning. Having been fortunate enough to attend (and review) six of these concerts, I’m finding myself at the conclusion of this, the final one in the series, overcome with gratitude at being able to enjoy so much great music in the company of these – yes, truly! – great musicians! And glancing at the society’s prospectus for 2025 has already whetted my appetite for more….

But, to the business at hand, this final concert! – and to The Ghost Trio’s remarkable metamorphosis via a replacement ‘cellist, Andrew Joyce, stepping into the role for the temporarily unavailable Ken Ichinose, and bringing his own remarkable qualities to bear upon the concert’s two major works by Schumann and Ravel without any discernable hiccups! The composer-lineup remained the same as before, except that violinist Monique Lapins and pianist Gabriela Glapska adroitly substituted two not insubstantial violin-and-piano works by Leonie Holmes and Kaija Saariaho respectively for the original “all-piano-trio” lineup.

First up was Robert Schumann’s adorable D Minor Piano Trio Op. 63, a work which showed how much the composer’s recent absorption of JS Bach’s works (particularly the “Well-Tempered Clavier”) had influenced his thinking, evident in a new kind of expression marked by contrapuntal entwinings and polyphonic voicings well beyond the scope of his other chamber music up to then. The players here responded right from the outset with sombre, forward-thrusting gestures, vibrant lines and strong but always flexible trajectories, continually catching our ears with the music’s on-going subtleties of dynamics and intensities. Monique Lapins had demonstrated for us on her instrument Schumann’s innovative use at one point in the movement’s development section of ghostly sul ponticello bowing accompanied by the piano in its highest registers – when it came in the performance it sounded extraordinary! – it brought to my mind the composer’s well-known penchant for the expression “different realms”, which he himself obviously cherished.

After a couple of “Ready, steady” chords, the players “galloped in” the dotted-rhythm scherzo, the oft-repeated ascending theme cheekily combining whole- and half-note intervals, with the contrastingly graceful Trio a series of ascending and descending figures, almost like the scherzo itself in a more languid, even sleepwalking mode. A different world awaited us with the Langsam mit inniger Empfindung slow movement, the opening violin solo solemn and focused with near-vibratoless tones – the ‘cello encouraging more warmth from the notes, even seeming for a while to “lighten” the violin’s emotional load. The gravitas then returned, here, so exquisitely “voiced” by both players, and with the piano giving discreet and sure-footed support, the instruments gradually reducing their tones to near-silence, and leaving us with only our beating hearts for company for a semi-second of silence…… Schumann then decided to give us as a finale one of his warmest and great-hearted of melodies by way of leading us back into domains of light and joyousness, a mood not unlike that of his Piano Concerto’s finale, albeit here in 4/4 trajectory rather than the Concerto’s 3/4!

Teamwork between the players pinged, clicked and hummed as the theme flowed, skipped, sang and declaimed its way through sequences conveying by turns energy, contentment, mischief and exaltation, each with its particular deftness of touch or vigorous exuberance – I admired things like the will-o’-the-wisp exchanges between Monique Lapins’ violin and Andrew Joyce’s ‘cello, as well as the latter’s beautiful intonation in a high-lying rendition of the movement’s second theme, and (perhaps most especially) pianist Gabriela Glapska’s brilliant dexterity and unflagging strength in holding together and maintaining the flow of the finale’s seemingly boundless energies.

Monique Lapins, who’d introduced the concert’s first item, then added something of a performer’s perspective for us to the programme note written by the composer regarding the concert’s next item. This was a work, Dance of the Wintersmith, by Auckland composer Leonie Holmes, inspired by a Terry Pratchett book for children called ‘Wintersmith”, a fantasy-tale of a young witch whose dabbling in “dark arts” causes worldwide climate disruption that puts humankind in jeopardy.We were alerted to the composer’s requirement that the violinist additionally “vocalises” some of the music, and were told not to be alarmed at the inclusion of such sounds at some point!

The work began with an almost Gypsy-like solo gesture, one with eerily-spaced intervals and chromatic descents, and alternating near-frenetic bowings with mysteriously disembodied harmonics – all beautifully realised! The piano’s entry echoed the atmospheric character of the sound-picture, though the players soon “struck out” with some impactful gesturings – strong pizzicato, followed by scherzando interchanges between the instruments, with the scenario marked in places by a vivid sense of grotesquerie, the “dance” angular and fantastic, its projection almost visceral! – a silence created a moment of mystery which the piano embellished at first, the violinist then quietly humming a melody, and accompanying the vocalising on the violin – the effect was of a kind of lament, a “lost song” looking for some kind of answer or redemption – all very moving, as everything drifted into silence.

Monique Lapins (who on this showing would, I feel, get a PR presenter’s job in any sphere of activity with no difficulty) then told us briefly about the composer of the next item, Kaija Saariaho, and the music we were about to hear – again a work for violin and piano, its title Calices (2009) means ‘calyxes’ in French, and refers to the protective layer surrounding a flower in bud, so that one could here  imagine the violin as representing a spring flower bursting into life. Calices is actually derived from material in Saariaho’s own violin concerto Graal théâtre (1994).

I found this extraordinary quote from the composer regarding the concerto which could well have a bearing on the shape, form and syntax of Calices:

‘I had a kind of vertigo, a fear of high places, when I started this concerto. I played the violin as a child and I loved many violin concertos passionately – and I was afraid to step into this domain.’

The programme note enlarged on this with a further comment by Saariaho herself relating to  this particular time, one involving “frustrated illusions, longing and love”.  Monique Lapins’ and Gabriela Glapska’s remarkable performance reinforced the character of the writer’s description “ the piece ebbs and flows through different moods, from calm and contemplative to violent, with a good deal of tempo fluctuation, and with recurring notes acting as reference points within each section, like a magnet to which the music returns….”

The work was in three sections, opening with a gesture that suggested folk-like, almost oriental influences, which at first belied the violinist’s description of the work as “icy”, but soon established its severities, demanding both percussive exchanges between the instruments and contrastingly isolated single notes from both – we experienced incredibly unworldly-sounding harmonics from the violin in places, and  the pianist occasionally reaching into her instrument’s body to hauntingly activate the strings.

Part Two began with a “falling” set of sequences from the piano as the violin delivered cadenza-like flourishes, the piano creating what one description called “cloud-formations ”as the violin mused throughout repetitive meditations – my notes at this point read  “we are in a fantastic world of improvised fantasy”.  The third part of the work began in agitato fashion, tersely dynamic gestures exchanged but then coming together in a part conciliatory, part “distanced” mood, leaving this listener with feelings more enigmatic than resolved – in that sense similar to the ending of the Fourth Symphony of another Finn, Jean Sibelius.

With the concert’s final item ‘cellist Andrew Joyce provided for us a “from-the-heart” introduction to the work, Ravel’s 1914 Piano Trio, echoing the programme note’s associating the work’s genesis with the outbreak of war in Europe, and Ravel’s desire to be involved despite his poor health and his mother’s anxieties regarding her son’s safety. I particularly enjoyed his reference to the composer’s attested “sobbing over (my) sharps and flats” (in a letter to a friend at the time), commenting that Ravel should have spared a thought for the generations of musicians left “sobbing over those same sharps and flats” when preparing performances of the work! Perhaps the nearest Ravel got to this kind of admission was with the piano writing, which he confessed was ‘too difficult for its composer to play!”

As with Ravel’s great contemporary, Debussy, in his String Quartet, this A Minor Piano Trio demonstrates mastery of classical form but with many individual touches – Gabriela Glapska’s beautiful piano-only opening of the work suggested the composer’s attraction towards the music of the Basque region, the melody at once dreamy and restless, able to express at once great longing and anxiety. The violin and ‘cello octave-doubled string-writing carried this mood onwards until its growing angst irrupted as the instrumental exchanges intensified. Such relief, then, as these energies quickly dissipated to allow the achingly beautiful second subject to appear on the violin, then on the cello and be echoed by the piano – we so relished such a gorgeous dialogue for the strings here, together with such limpid piano notes! And what passions we were then plunged into by the return of the opening theme revisiting its volatile tendencies, the sounds here flung even more energetically across the soundscape by the players, and quelled only by the second theme’s “laying on of hands” return. We were relieved by the violin and ‘cello’s wanting to make peace and, finally, prevailing over the piano’s brooding aspect! Peace, when it finally came, was like balm for the senses.

Obviously I’d got carried away with this first Ravel movement in the Ghost Trio’s hands, but their “characterisation” of the music’s chameleon-like moods was so absorbing and well-rounded, it seemed to squeeze words out of me like toothpaste! The second movement is a scherzo headed Pantoum: Assez vif , and takes its title from a Pantoum, a Malay-sourced poetic form popular with French poets such as Baudelaire, one which repeats and overlaps words and lines in much the same way as Ravel alternates the movement’s first two themes – though I’ve always thought the highlight of this movement is the Trio, during which Ravel cleverly combines fragments of the strings’ scherzo themes (in 3/4) with the slower, more lyrical Trio theme (4/2) on the piano, and all without the music’s heartbeat seeming to falter, the players skilfully maintaining the different time-signatures’ happy co-existence!

The third movement Passacaille: Très large is of course a Passacaglia based on the piano’s opening eight-bar bass line – when played on a string instrument the melody straightaway sounded “folky”, and its return on the piano in a higher register had the same heartfelt effect. Moment then followed breathcatching moment, such as the duetting between violin and ‘cello, the succeeding ‘cello solo, and the rapt concentration of the piano’s final utterances.

Then, not unlike the effect Schumann had achieved earlier in the concert during his G Minor Piano Trio with his strings’ sul ponticello playing and high-registered piano figurations, Ravel’s violinist and cellist respectively played arpeggio harmonics and double-stopped high-fingerboard trills at the finale’s beginning, a melody whose exotic decorative aspect gave it something of an oriental fairytale  character, but then whose irregular time signatures of 5/4 and 7/4 in places added a vertiginous quality to the music’s vigorous and ever-burgeoning sonorities, the players giving their all and achieving an exuberance and euphoria right up to the piece’s no-holds-barred ending.

What an introduction to this work for a first-time listener this was! Nothing much further needs to be said, but “Roll on, 2025” – Wellington Chamber Music can justly feel pride and satisfaction with this year’s efforts on behalf of a grateful public!

 

 

 

The Ghost Trio completes a great 2024 for Wellington Chamber Music Concert Series

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
THE GHOST TRIO  –  SCHUMANN, HOLMES, SAARIAHO. RAVEL

ROBERT SCHUMANN – Piano Trio No. 1 Op.63
LEONIE HOLMES – Dance of the Wintersmith (2017)
KAIJA SAARIAHO – Calices (2009)
MAURICE RAVEL – Piano Trio in A Minor (1914)

The Ghost Trio – Monique Lapins (violin). Andrew Joyce (‘cello), Gabriela Glapska (piano)

(Andrew Joyce replaces ‘cellist Ken Ichinose for this concert)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 25th August, 2024

“New Zealand has so many great musicians that we have decided to have eight concerts” proclaimed the Wellington Chamber Music’s 2024 series website at the year’s beginning. Having been fortunate enough to attend (and review) six of these concerts, I’m finding myself at the conclusion of this, the final one in the series, overcome with gratitude at being able to enjoy so much great music in the company of these – yes, truly! – great musicians! And glancing at the society’s prospectus for 2025 has already whetted my appetite for more….

But, to the business at hand, this final concert! – and to The Ghost Trio’s remarkable metamorphosis via a replacement ‘cellist, Andrew Joyce, stepping into the role for the temporarily unavailable Ken Ichinose, and bringing his own remarkable qualities to bear upon the concert’s two major works by Schumann and Ravel without any discernable hiccups! The composer-lineup remained the same as before, except that violinist Monique Lapins and pianist Gabriela Glapska adroitly substituted two not insubstantial violin-and-piano works by Leonie Holmes and Kaija Saariaho respectively for the original “all-piano-trio” lineup.

First up was Robert Schumann’s adorable D Minor Piano Trio Op. 63, a work which shows how much the composer’s recent absorption of JS Bach’s works (particularly the “Well-Tempered Clavier”) had influenced his thinking, evident in a new kind of expression marked by contrapuntal entwinings and polyphonic voicings well beyond the scope of his other chamber music up to then. The players here responded with sombre, forward-thrusting gestures at the outset with vibrant lines and strong but always flexible trajectories, continually catching our ears with the music’s on-going subtleties of dynamics and intensities. Monique Lapins had demonstrated for us on her instrument Schumann’s innovative use at one point in the movement’s development section of ghostly sul ponticello bowing accompanied by the piano in its highest registers – when it came in the performance it sounded extraordinary! – it brought to my mind the composer’s well-known penchant for the expression “different realms”, which he himself obviously cherished.

After a couple of “Ready, steady” chords, the players “galloped in” the dotted-rhythm scherzo, the oft-repeated ascending theme cheekily combining whole- and half-note intervals, with the contrastingly graceful Trio a series of ascending and descending figures, almost like the scherzo itself in a more languid, even sleepwalking mode. A different world awaited us with the Langsam mit inniger Empfindung slow movement, the opening violin solo solemn and focused with near-vibratoless tones – the ‘cello encouraging more warmth from the notes, and seeming for a while to “lighten” the violin’s emotional load. The gravitas then returned, so exquisitely “voiced” here by both players, and with the piano giving discreet and sure-footed support, the instruments gradually reducing their tones to near-silence, and leaving us with only our beating hearts for company for a semi-second of silence…… Schumann then decided to give us as a finale one of his warmest and great-hearted of melodies by way of leading us back into domains of light and joyousness, a mood not unlike that of his Piano Concerto’s finale, albeit here in 4/4 trajectory rather than the Concerto’s 3/4!

Teamwork between the players pinged, clicked and hummed as the theme flowed, skipped, sang and declaimed its way through sequences conveying by turns energy, contentment, mischief and exaltation, each with its particular deftness of touch or vigorous exuberance – I admired things like the will-o’-the-wisp exchanges between Monique Lapins’ violin and Andrew Joyce’s ‘cello, as well as the latter’s beautiful intonation in a high-lying rendition of the movement’s second theme, and (perhaps most especially) pianist Gabriela Glapska’s brilliant dexterity and unflagging strength in holding together and maintaining the flow of the finale’s seemingly boundless energies.

Monique Lapins, who’d introduced the concert’s first item, then added something of a performer’s perspective for us to the programme note written by the composer regarding the concert’s next item. This was a work, Dance of the Wintersmith, by Auckland composer Leonie Holmes, inspired by a Terry Pratchett book for children called ‘Wintersmith”, a fantasy-tale of a young witch whose dabbling in “dark arts” causes worldwide climate disruption that puts humankind in jeopardy.We were alerted to the composer’s requirement that the violinist additionally “vocalises” some of the music, and were told not to be alarmed at the inclusion of such sounds at some point!

The work began with an almost Gypsy-like solo gesture, one with eerily-spaced intervals and chromatic descents, and alternating near-frenetic bowings with mysteriously disembodied harmonics – all beautifully realised by the player! The piano’s entry echoed the atmospheric character of the sound-picture, though the players soon “struck out” with some impactful gesturings – strong pizzicato, followed by scherzando interchanges between the instruments, with the scenario marked in places by a vivid sense of grotesquerie, the “dance” angular and fantastic, its projection almost visceral! – a silence created a moment of mystery which the piano embellished at first, the violinist then quietly humming a melody, and accompanying the vocalising on the violin – the effect was of a kind of lament, a “lost song” looking for some kind of answer or redemption – all very moving, as everything drifted into silence.

Monique Lapins (who on this showing would, I feel, get a PR presenter’s job in any sphere of activity with no difficulty) then told us briefly about the composer, Kaija Saariaho, of the next item and the music we were about to hear – again a work for violin and piano, its title Calices (2009) means ‘calyxes’ in French, and refers to the protective layer surrounding a flower in bud; one could imagine the violin as representing a spring flower bursting into life. Calices is actually derived from Saariaho’s own violin concerto Graal théâtre (1994).

I found this extraordinary quote from the composer regarding the concerto which could well have a bearing on the shape, form and syntax of Calices:

‘I had a kind of vertigo, a fear of high places, when I started this concerto. I played the violin as a child and I loved many violin concertos passionately – and I was afraid to step into this domain.’

The programme note enlarges on this with a further comment by Saariaho herself relating to  this particular time, one involving “frustrated illusions, longing and love”. The article went on to emphasise that Calices is noteworthy for its intimate familiarity with violin technique, wrought from those experiences of the composer. Monique Lapins’ and Gabriela Glapska’s remarkable performance reinforced the character of the writer’s description “ the piece ebbs and flows through different moods, from calm and contemplative to violent, with a good deal of tempo fluctuation, and with recurring notes acting as reference points within each section, like a magnet to which the music returns….”

The work was in three sections, opening with a gesture that suggested folk-like, almost oriental influences, which at first belied the violinist’s description of the work as “icy”, but soon established its severities, demanding both percussive exchanges between the instruments and contrastingly isolated single notes from both – we experienced incredibly unworldly-sounding harmonics from the violin in places, and  the pianist occasionally reaching into her instrument’s body to hauntingly activate the strings.

Part Two began with a “falling” set of sequences from the piano as the violin delivered cadenza-like flourishes, the piano creating what one description called “cloud-formations ”as the violin mused throughout repetitive meditations – my notes at this point read  “we are in a fantastic world of improvised fantasy”.  The third part of the work began in agitato fashion, tersely dynamic gestures exchanged but then coming together in a part conciliatory, part “distanced” mood, leaving this listener with feelings more enigmatic than resolved – in that sense similar to the ending of the Fourth Symphony of another Finn, Jean Sibelius.

With the concert’s final item ‘cellist Andrew Joyce provided for us a “from-the-heart” introduction to the work, Ravel’s 1914 Piano Trio, echoing the programme note’s associating the work’s genesis with the outbreak of war in Europe, and Ravel’s desire to be involved despite his poor health and his mother’s anxieties regarding her son’s decision. I particularly enjoyed his remark regarding the composer’s attested “sobbing over (my) sharps and flats” (in a letter to a friend at the time), commenting that Ravel should have spared a thought for the generations of musicians left “sobbing over those same sharps and flats” when preparing performances of the work! Perhaps the nearest Ravel got to this kind of admission was with the piano writing, which he confessed was ‘too difficult for its composer to play!”

As with Ravel’s great contemporary, Debussy, in his String Quartet, this A Minor Piano Trio demonstrates mastery of classical form but with many individual touches – Gabriela Glapska’s beautiful piano-only opening of the work suggested the composer’s attraction towards the music of the Basque region, the melody at once dreamy and restless, able to express at once great longing and anxiety. The violin and ‘cello octave-doubled string-writing carried this mood onwards until its growing angst irrupted as the instrumental exchanges intensified. What relief, then, as these energies quickly dissipated to allow the achingly beautiful second subject to appear on the violin, then on the cello and be echoed by the piano – we so relished such a gorgeous dialogue for the strings here, together with such limpid piano notes! And what passions we were then plunged into by the return of the opening theme revisiting its volatile tendencies, the sounds here flung even more energetically across the soundscape by the players, and quelled only by the second theme’s “laying on of hands” return. We were relieved by the violin and ‘cello’s wanting to make peace and, finally, prevailing over the piano’s brooding aspect! Peace, when it finally came, was like balm for the senses.

I’d obviously got carried away with this first Ravel movement in The Ghost Trio’s hands, but their “characterisation” of the music’s chameleon-like moods was so absorbing and well-rounded, it seemed to squeeze words out of me like toothpaste! The second movement is a scherzo headed Pantoum: Assez vif , and takes its title from a Pantoum, a Malay-sourced poetic form popular with French poets such as Baudelaire, one which repeats and overlaps words and lines in much the same way as Ravel alternates the movement’s first two themes – though I’ve always thought the highlight of this movement is the Trio, during which Ravel cleverly combines fragments of the strings’ scherzo themes (in 3/4) with the slower, more lyrical Trio theme (4/2) on the piano, and all without the music’s heartbeat seeming to falter, the players skilfully maintaining the different time-signatures’ happy co-existence!

The third movement Passacaille: Très large is of course a Passacaglia based on the piano’s opening eight-bar bass line – when played on a string instrument the melody straightaway sounded “folky”, and its return on the piano in a higher register had the same heartfelt effect. Moment then followed breathcatching moment, such as the duetting between violin and ‘cello, the succeeding ‘cello solo, and the rapt concentration of the piano’s final utterances.

Then, not unlike the effect Schumann had achieved earlier in the concert during his G Minor Piano Trio with his strings’ sul ponticello playing and high-registered piano figurations, Ravel’s violinist and cellist respectively played arpeggio harmonics and double-stopped high-fingerboard trills at the finale’s beginning, a melody whose exotic decorative aspect gave it something of an oriental fairytale  character, but then whose irregular time signatures of 5/4 and 7/4 in places added a vertiginous quality to the music’s vigorous and ever-burgeoning sonorities, the players giving their all and achieving an exuberance and euphoria right up to the piece’s no-holds-barred ending.

Nothing much further needs to be said, but “Roll on, 2025” – Wellington Chamber Music can justly feel pride and satisfaction with this year’s efforts on behalf of a grateful public!

 

 

“Achieved is the Glorious work!” – Orpheus Choir with Orchestra Wellington recreate Haydn’s “The Creation”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOSEPH HAYDN – The Creation
Anna Leese (soprano), Frederick Jones (tenor), Joel Amosa (bass-baritone)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Brent Stewart (conductor)
with Airu Matsuda/Jemima Smith (dancers)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 24th August, 2024

Haydn’s “The Creation” seems to be on the “short list” of anybody’s compendium of great choral music experiences, but it was something that had, purely by accident, evaded me over the years. This of course necessitated on my part some urgently-driven and intensely-constituted preparatory experience of the work prior to my attending the Orpheus Choir’s and Orchestra Wellington’s eagerly-awaited Wellington performance.

My plan was to listen to several highly-regarded recordings, thinking I would get a well-rounded view of it all, though I confess to taking little notice of the circumstance that all of these performances presented the work in German even though I do remember reading about the fascinating peregrinations of the original anonymously-written English libretto that came into Haydn’s hands while in England.  He then took it back to Austria and turned it over to Gottfried van Swieten, who translated it into German for Haydn to set to music, van Swieten also recasting the English words to “fit” with the composer’s work. It was one of the first works up to that time published with a libretto in two languages.

Having digested all of this, and feeling by the end of my listening that my surroundings and person-prototype had been suitably, not to say systematically reconstructed by the composer with the aid of an anonymous libretto drawn from Genesis, the Book of Psalms and John Milton, I felt more than ready for some ”live action”, as popular advertising would have it! And I was, of course, further intrigued by the publicity accompanying the Orpheus Choir’s 2024 presentation, with its promise of “stunning special effects” including a cinematic LED screen adding sight to sound, and dancers from Footnote New Zealand choreographing parts of the music-making! Obviously something special was afoot!

Adding “special effects” to live music-making in general is nothing new of late, and not even in the case of the classics, where, in performances of music traditionally presenting the notes of the score alone, there’s been a world-wide interest in augmenting such activities with just the kinds of things we were given this evening. Even certain works whose essential gravitas seemed to require a pure and unadorned approach have been given extra “componentry” in that it’s more than just the “sound” of the music that’s presented – Bach’s St.John Passion has , for example, been presented with dance choreography at this year’s prestigious Salzburg Festival.

These initiatives of course come with the best of intentions, with purposes most persuasively put – to quote the words of one entrepreneur: “Interractive concert technologies have introduced exciting ways to engage audiences during live performances. From synchronised light shows and projection mapping to mobile apps that enable audience participation, these technologies create a multisensory experience, blurring the boundaries between performers and spectators and fostering a deeper connection between the music and the audience.” A frequently recurring theme in these philosophies is the perceived “conservatism” and “exclusivity” of classical music as a barrier that needs to be broken down – as one event director put it, “….trying to make the music less intimidating and exclusive to people who can’t identify with the conservative, exclusionary image that classical music often has.”

Something that routinely divides audiences at performances with these “special effects” is the difference in attitude between age-groups. Those I talked with on Saturday night after the “Creation” performance included younger people who in general enjoyed the screened images and the dancers, and older people who mostly found them distracting and even annoying. For myself (these days a paid-up member of the grey-haired brigade!) I found parts of the screened imagery appropriately theatrical and dramatic (the contrast between the opening “void” with its convoluted and claustrophobic imagery and its sudden, dramatic, near-blinding light at the choir’s words “and there was LIGHT!!!” was stunning in its effect, for example, as was the ”sunrise/moonrise” imagery accompanying some of the beautiful concluding music of Part One).  However as scene followed subsequent scene I found myself wondering what we were expected to be most engaged with – was it the music or the accompanying images?  Under such circumstances I felt the most important consideration was a question of a proper synthesis between the two – and for me there seemed a significant proportion of the visual throughout the evening whose “busyness” was more of a distraction than the interactive motivation which the music surely deserved. The “extra” detailing I enjoyed as much as the more focused visual depictions was the presence in Part Three of the two dancers, Airu Matsuda representing Adam and Jemima Smith depicting Eve, their movements always in what seemed like properly organic synchronisation with both the words and the music, and earning them well-deserved plaudits of their own at the end.

Turning to the music and its performance by the singers and orchestra is to encounter what I thought were the occasion’s most resplendent qualities – right from the dark-browed, brooding instrumental opening of the work followed by bass-baritone Joel Amosa’s entrance as the Archangel Raphael and his splendidly-weighted voice (making me catch my breath momentarily at the realisation that he was singing in English!), the sounds held us in a grip of wonderment and expectation! It made that moment of release of both the choir’s and orchestra’s tumultuous torrent of sound at the word “Light” all the more elemental in its power and joyous in its liberation!  What better a beginning, I thought, to such a cosmic event!

If tenor Frederick Jones sounded at first slightly tentative during the opening of his aria “Now vanish before the holy beams”,  his voice “broke through” with the description of Satan’s host’s defeat and consignment to “endless night”, with the Orpheus voices revelling in the writing’s energy and determination with their cries of “Despairing, cursing rage attends their rapid fall”. And his ringing tones splendidly capped off the orchestra’s depiction of the majestic sun and the beauteous moon to great effect. Even better was his performance in Part Two of the great aria “In native worth and honour clad”, one describing the creation of man and woman (the sequence appropriately accompanied by the famous Michelangelo Sistine Chapel depiction of God creating Adam – however clichéd the image, it had for me that interactive “rightness” that made its proper mark).

Soprano Anna Leese’s brightly-focused voice made the perfect contrast to Joel Amosa’s splendid recitative “And God made the Firmament” when she undertook the celebratory “The marvellous work” with the choir again matching the soloist’s exuberant mood, Leese returning in more lyrical fashion for a bewitching “With verdue clad”, to which the orchestral winds added evocative detail that heightened the “ravish’d sense” of the beholder. As befitted the extra dynamism of living creatures, the soprano’s “On mighty pens” paid both sprightly and lyrical homage to the birds of the air, specifically the eagle, lark, dove and nightingale, the visuals “treating us” however vicariously and distractedly, to a simulated ride on the back of an eagle during this section! – though Anna Leese’s voice did manage to refocus our attentions on the music for some of the time, and garner sufficient appreciation for a lovely performance!

Of course the duet sequences of Part Three between the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, are always a highlight of this work – and here we were charmed by the interaction between the pair, firstly by the aforementioned dancers’ sequences which I thought of a piece with the whole in terms their simply-adorned and dream-like quality of expression; and then with the re-entrance of Anna Leese as Eve and Joel Amosa as Adam dressed almost as if for a wedding, which of course their union symbolizes in an archetypal sense. Even the tenor took part in the ritual’s beginning, introducing the pair in the most mellifluous of tones “In rosy mantle now appears”, a lovely piece of singing by Frederick Jones! It’s the precursor of a series of duets and declamations heart-warming in their effect, be it the pair’s alternating praise of and delight in the newly-created world (“Of stars the fairest”) or each one’s heartfelt declaration of love for the other during the course of “Our duty we have now performed”, both singers conveying a real sense of wonderment at their “coming into being” in a new world and sharing their rapturous excitement.

In attendance with all of this, and in places leading the way was the wonderful Orpheus Choir – music director Brent Stewart must have been well-and-truly stoked with his voices’ response to the composer’s every storytelling excitement, rhapsodic description and grandly resplendent moment,  through all of which the choir never faltered. To single out any particularly memorable moment (which I’ve done already!) would be to underplay the totality of the Orpheus’s achievement in conveying Haydn’s sheer inventiveness and flexibility. Right with the choir for every demisemiquaver of the journey was Orchestra Wellington, whose recent appearances in a punishing schedule of concerts had already confirmed its reputation as a brilliant and formidable ensemble – here, enhanced even further.

While the effectiveness of much of the “reimagined” aspect of the presentation will remain a matter of taste and opinion, there can be no doubt as to the stellar musical qualities of the occasion thanks to all concerned, conductor, soloists, choir and orchestra! To quote wholeheartedly from the libretto itself – “Achieved is the glorious work!”

 

Revisiting Romance with Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Romantic Generation – Orchestra Wellington – August 2024

STRAVINSKY – The Fairy’s Kiss
KORNGOLD – Violin Concerto (1945)
HINDEMITH – Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria Von Weber

Amalia Hall (violin)
Marc Taddei (Music Director)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 17th August 2024

With its latest concert presentation, “The Romantic Generation”, Orchestra Wellington has reached the halfway stage of what could justly be called its “richly inventive” 2024 season, with nary a foot put wrong in bringing to its audiences a repertoire which at once constantly challenges and almost invariably delights those who are drawn into the compulsive convictions of both its vision and brilliance of performance. Music Director Marc Taddei excels in this kind of exploratory undertaking, knowing just how far to push the boundaries of interest in and tolerance of the unfamiliar, and how to integrate such daring explorations into more familiar contexts.

The previous concert “The Classical Style” adroitly illustrated this idea, pairing the relatively unknown Piano Concerto by the “Les Six” French composer Germaine Tailleferre with standard classical repertory symphonies by Prokofiev and Beethoven. And the year’s opening concert “The Grand Gesture” even more daringly included a recently contemporary composer Lukas Foss’s responses to baroque masterpieces by JS Bach and Handel, as well as including some more consciously neo-baroque entertainment in the form of Igor Stravinsky’s 1920 “Pulcinella” Ballet Suite.

Now, here, with “The Romantic Generation” Taddei and his Orchestra turned the spotlight on romanticism by highlighting certain of its characteristics – its strains of exoticism, its cult of performance and its overtly heroic and emotional focus – from the perspectives of a later era. In a sense the evening’s presentation took our own ears simultaneously backwards and forwards in time, as the viewpoints we heard all came not directly from the Romantic era itself but from various twentieth-century composers applying their own interpretative styles to these already bygone romantic sensibilities. And, of course we ourselves have since moved into a new century, forming our own circumspect (and further enriched by experience) reactions to these processes.

The music of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky made a second appearance in the orchestra’s 2024 series tonight with the composer’s complete ballet “Le Baiser de la Fee” (The Fairy’s Kiss), a work inspired in this case by Stravinsky’s hero, Tchaikovsky. The story was based on Hans Christian Anderson’s dark tale of a child who is “marked” at birth by the kiss of a mysterious Fairy, one who returns later in life to claim him for her own. Stravinsky adapted a number of lesser-known piano and vocal works by the older composer (the best-known being the song “None but the Lonely Heart”) producing an attractively ambient continuum of danceable numbers, some of which conjure up Petrushka-like scenarios (much of the ballet’s Second Tableau “A Village Fete”), and some which go towards suggesting the high drama of Swan Lake (the conclusion of the Third Tableau “At the Mill”, when the Fairy returns to claim the by now young man for her own).

Mark Taddei and his players seemed to my ears to catch the music’s every mood at the performance, whether echt-Stravinsky or faux-Tchaikovsky – I must confess that the music “grew” on me the more I returned to it by way of preparing myself for the actual concert, overcoming my initial feeling that Stravinsky had “emasculated” much of Tchaikovsky’s overtly-expressed emotion with relatively dry, intellectually-conceived reconstructions. In fact I baulked at one writer’s assertion that ”Tchaikovsky’s faults – his banalities and vulgarities and routine procedures – are composed out of the music and Stravinsky’s virtues are composed into it”….my first reaction was that I preferred Tchaikovsky’s whole-hearted “banalities” to Stravinsky’s dry-as-dust tidy-ups! However, repeated hearings have softened this view, and I warmed to Marc Taddei’s direction and Orchestra Wellington’s superbly-articulated playing – too many stellar instrumental solos to list, and moment after moment of radiantly-voiced or scintillatingly-wrought ensemble. Particularly memorable was the return of the Fairy towards the end disguised as the young man’s fiancée (accompanied by the “None but the Lonely Heart” theme in various instrumental guises), with the tensions building up to the moment of the young man realising that he is, in fact, in the Fairy’s power and cannot escape – at that point not even Stravinsky could deny Tchaikovsky’s music its full emotional thrust, as the music takes the Fairy and her captive to “a land beyond time and place”.

A different world of sensibility was brought to view by Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto, a work which brought into play both its composer’s richly-endowed sense of romantic and heroic adventure in his scores written for a number of legendary Hollywood films during the 1930s, and his ability to replicate a spectacularly virtuosic level of musical expression in a romantic concerto reaching back to the nineteenth century tradition begun by violinist Nicolo Paganini. We’ve become accustomed to Amalia Hall relinquishing her orchestral concertmaster’s role to tackle as soloist some of the world’s greatest violin concertos in the past – her performance of the Britten Violin Concerto last year remains a hauntingly resonant memory – and with fellow violinist Justine Cormack again substituting for her, we got another masterly display of virtuosity and sensibility from Hall which brought out all the work’s brilliance and lyricism. I loved that feeling of nothing being “forced” by the musicians, of everything instead unfolding as naturally and spontaneously as seemed to be required.

Amalia Hall with Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington playing the Korngold Violin Concerto – photo by  R.Bruce.Scott

Korngold used several themes from his film music for the work’s material throughout each of the three movements, the slow movement in its middle section having the kind of suggestible magic I associate with a certain episode in a work by Korngold’s greatest contemporary, Richard Strauss, his opera “Der Rosenkavalier” – the haunting wind chords that accompany the famous “Presentation of the Rose” scene in that work – even if Korngold’s work has a darker, more volatile quality. The rollicking finale which followed began with a kind of staccato jig whose trajectories delightedly seemed in places almost MC Escher-like in simultaneously ascending and descending, with soloist and orchestra never missing a beat, besides including episodes featuring beautiful lyrical variants of mood and colour before the work concluded with helter-skelter passages punctuated by exuberant horn calls.

Amalia Hall then treated us to an encore whose in situ identity was a mystery to everybody I spoke with afterwards, but was revealed in due course – this was Fritz Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo-Caprice Op.6, obviously something of a virtuoso violinist’s calling-card, with ample variation of mood and detail – apparently it’s the famed violinist’s only extant opus for solo violin, and was something of a surprise for people like myself who know of Kreisler’s compositions only through his Viennese-salon and imitation-Baroque pieces. This was a full-blooded rhapsody-with-fireworks display which under Hall’s expert fingers brought the house down at the end!

Further ravishment of a slightly different kind awaited us before the concert’s final scheduled item, a work by Paul Hindemith with a title which one might think describes something impossibly turgid or dreary – Symphonic Metamorphoses on themes by Carl Maria von Weber. In fact we were given a glimpse of the piece’s true character by the appearance of a strange, dulcimer-like instrument brought to the front of the stage, and the subsequent entry of a beautiful young Chinese woman who proceeded to play for us one of the “themes” used by Hindemith in his work. This was a melody that composer Carl Maria von Weber had “borrowed” from philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionaire de Musique of 1767 (Rousseau considered music to be an ideal manifestation of different human cultures) to use as part of the former’s incidental music for Schiller’s adaptation of Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandot (Puccini used the same source for the story of his 1926 opera).

The instrument was a guzheng, on which the player, Jia Ling, beautifully realised the melody that Weber had got from Rousseau (who had procured it from an unnamed Sinologist), and which Hindemith made as the basis of the second movement of his “Symphonic Metamorphoses”. It all seemed to me entirely characteristic of Orchestra Wellington’s and Marc Taddei’s going that “extra mile” to illuminate and enrich our experience as an audience at these concerts. Certainly Jia Ling’s and her guzheng created an enchantment which resonated for me long after the orchestra had played the entire Hindemith work.

The rest of the “Symphonic Metamorphoses” work used material from a volume of Weber’s piano duets, whose themes remain recognisable (like Rousseau’s “Turandot” theme) but with radical changes made to the harmony and in places the addition of countermelodies. The opening movement brazenly announced its presence, Taddei getting an infectious “swinging” rhythm from the players, and giving the music ample space to round out its phrases and flex its muscles, with a piquant oboe solo, augmented by flute, piccolo and bassoon, and joined by some deliciously “off the beat” percussive action from the players. And, by contrast, I loved the utmost delicacy with which the opening of the slow movement, with its “Turandot” theme, was delivered, Taddei keeping the ever-burgeoning detailings on the leash throughout the plethora of irreverent instrumental trillings towards the mid-movement explosion from which grew that gorgeously tongue-in cheek fugue, the players covering themselves in glory, not least of all the percussion section, relishing their interactive “moment” along with all the other gradually-liberated impulses across the orchestral spectrum whose turn it was to have their say until overtaken by the silences.

The following Andantino saw clarinet, and then bassoon soberly restore some of the music’s dignity, with the accompanying orchestral colours sounding so “right” in sympathy, and the strings and then the winds then giving us a “balm for the soul” subsidiary melody that would here have unruffled the most troubled sensibilities. After that came the joyous “hold onto your seats” shout from the brass introducing the finale, the sounds swinging around the corner, as it were, and bearing down upon us with intent, the lower strings rolling the rhythms along with gusto! With the winds tonguing like crazy the horns then brought in the triumphal home-coming theme to which everybody added their voice, building the excitement in almost “circus-coming-to-town” fashion and leaving us at the end breathless but exhilarated by the sheer orchestral energies of joyful music-making!

 

 

Where Fairburn Walked – worlds of home-grown sounds

Posted on by Peter Mechen

WHERE FAIRBURN WALKED
– an exploration of New Zealand Piano Music

Jian Liu (piano)

Rattle RAT – D149 2024 (3 CD set)

In 1987 Kiwi songwriter Ross Mullins wrote a song “Where Fairburn Walked” for an album “Passing Shots”, a song subsequently taken up by singer Caitlin Smith in her 2004 album “Aurere”. Various commentators whose opinions I’ve read have since expressed regret that the song never quite achieved what was deemed “classic status”, though the appearance of its title on a new set of recordings on the Rattle label suggests that It hasn’t entirely been forgotten – in fact I was able to ”connect the dots” in making the discovery that the Steve Garden who currently runs Rattle Records was also the producer of Ross Mullins’ “Passing Shots” album on which the “Fairburn” song itself first appeared.

The “Fairburn” of the song is of course poet A.R.D. Fairburn (1904-57), who, at the time of his premature death was considered one of the country’s most important poets – his work has since survived a something of a post-mortem dip in status and regard, with his contribution continuing to undergo a revitalised appraisal. So, when I first saw this new Rattle compilation of twentieth (and twenty-first) century New Zealand piano music bearing the title “Where Fairburn walked” my first thoughts were of some of the poet’s laconic verses from “Walking on my Feet” (Fairburn was an inveterate walker for practically all of his life) –

I know where I’m going
where I’ll lie down
nice quiet place
Long way from town

long way to go
I’ll sleep all alone
fingers round the earth
earth round the bone…

The simple directness of such writing is disarming, though not characteristic, as readers of Fairburn’s other poetry will know – but the willingness to engage with the isolation and earthiness of the land heightens the appropriateness of the new recording’s use of the poet’s name, as it does with much of the music we hear.


                                                                                                                                                            A.R.D (Rex) Fairburn

Rather more poetically evocative in terms of imagery and feeling (and according more readily with some of the music found on these recordings) are these lines from a later poem “Estuary” –

The wind has died, no motion now
in the summer’s sleepy breath. Silver the sea-grass
the shells and the driftwood,
fixed in the moon’s vast crystal.

The lynch-pin of this latest undertaking has been pianist Dr. Jian Liu who’s currently both the Head of Piano Studies at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington, and the Acting Head of School at the NZSM, and is widely celebrated both as a performer and music educator. The recording was in fact produced by Dr.Liu in conjunction with sound engineer Graham Kennedy at the New Zealand School of Music’s Adam Concert Room, with help from the New Zealand Music Trust and Rattle Records. Funding for the project came from Creative New Zealand in conjunction with Victoria University of Wellington and SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, and from the New Zealand Music Trust itself. The recordings complement an earlier undertaking involving the publication in China of two volumes containing these same piano works by the Shanghai Music Publishing House, the largest classical music publisher in Asia.

                                                                                                  Dr. Jian Liu

I did express some surprise to Jian Liu at the omission of any of Douglas Lilburn’s piano music from the set – however, because of difficulties in securing copyright from the Lilburn Estate to publish any of the composer’s pieces in China, it was decided to maintain the accord between the publication of the music and these recordings. Of course Lilburn’s spirit is still a “presence” far beyond the single actual reference to him found in Jenny McLeod’s Tone Clock Piece X – “for Douglas on his 80th birthday”. It’s Interesting that Fairburn himself was well aware of Lilburn as a composer, and in fact they corresponded regarding the possibility of Lilburn setting some of Fairburn’s poetry, with the composer suggesting that the “shorter, simpler poems” (such as the aforementioned “Walking on my Feet”) would be best for such a purpose (Denys Trussell “Fairburn” Auckland University Press 1984 Pg.212) – alas that it was an idea that never bore fruit.

Still, these might-have-been conjectures have their own separate life; and Lilburn’s piano music has certainly received its due on disc already through the stellar efforts of interpreters like Margaret Nielsen, Dan Poynton and Michael Houstoun over the years. It’s entirely appropriate that this new set of recordings should be a world unto itself, one in which the compelling uniqueness of the music’s character is honed by the incredibly-focused commitment towards and identification with the music on the part of Jian Liu. And completing the picture is the brilliance, clarity and atmosphere of sound engineer Graham Kennedy’s recording. The three discs together constitute an overall programme whose structure sustains listening interest through both consistency and contrast. Jian Liu himself indicates in the booklet notes that each disc represents “increasing levels of technical difficulty and musical complexity”, providing new and interesting repertoire choices for pianists in different spheres of activity.

Disc One reflects the possibilities for pianists wishing to begin such a journey – and there ‘s a kind of chronology present as well in the process which adds to the flavour of things with names like Warwick Braithwaite, Thomas Haig, Gordon McBeth, Harry Hiscocks, Ernest Jenner, and Paul Schramm, all of whom were born in the nineteenth century. There’s a definite period charm about Warwick Braithwaite’s Fragment, Gordon McBeth’s An Idyll,  Harry Hiscocks’ Nocturne, and Ernest Jenner’s Foxglove Bells – and both Thomas Haigh’s deliciously glutinous-sounding Rotorua (Boiling Mud Pools) with its accompanying touches of gothic atmosphere, and Paul Schramm’s What a Silly Joke with its knockabout comedy routine are all evocatively presented by Liu’s ever-prevailing sense of time, place and character in the music.

On the same disc one finds contemporary composers exploring these same charming, fragrant, atmospheric, and pictorial evocations – though there’s insufficient space to comment on every individual piece one still responds to Ronald Tremain’s artlessly attractive Sleigh Ride, and Claire Cowan’s more exploratory Paper Dragonfly, and with extension of the rich variety of keyboard textures provided by David Hamilton’s Clouds over Aoraki and Gillian Whitehead’s Outlines Through Rising Mists. Gareth Farr’s Love Songs and Anthony Ritchie’s Caroline Bay Suite set simple but satisfying rhythmic challenges of ostinato and syncopation.

The remainder of pieces on the disc take the player to more demanding levels of achievement both technically and interpretatively with Jenny McLeod’s Mysterious Whirly Square Dance providing a stimulating test for any beginning player, and Paul Schramm’s already-mentioned What a Silly Joke even more so.  Gillian Whitehead’s Lullaby for Matthew and Craig Utting’s Covenant have more reachable notes but inhabit worlds which require an advanced synthesis of hands head and heart. And so to John Elmsly’s Six Little Preludes which conclude the first disc and which in Jian Liu’s hands definitely represents a kind of technical and aesthetic gateway through which a player needs to pass to tackle the demands of the “next level” of keyboard accomplishment.

Straight away one senses a more elevated world of expression with the beginning of Disc Two, and one to which the pianist instantly responds, firstly with Kenneth Young’s Elusive Dream, a series of spontaneously-wrought roulades becoming increasingly interactive as their explorations flirt with both expectation and illusion – a kind of “growing-up” metaphor, an awakening to a new reality. Liu adroitly enables David Farquar’s Three Inventions to playfully lock horns with one another before coming to a kind of “rubbed-off-edges” terms with themselves, while Ross Harris’s utterly charming Nga Manu delineates by numbers the birth processes of birds from incubation, through hatching and feeding and pushing out fledglings, including a somewhat pitiful “runt of the litter”.  Leonie Holmes’s Nocturne comes with a poem describing the flight of a moth, the sounds, Liu perfectly realising Holmes’s fine detailing expressing the creature’s “Midnight Empress” status and her “unchallenged” sweep into and through her “hushed domain”. And just as majestic in a different, “other time and place” manner is Michael Williams’s Arteria Meridionali, whose ritualistic, almost Respighi-like gestures seem to evoke something of their European origins.

It was simply my way of thinking about things, but Anthony Ritchie’s grandly-conceived Olveston Suite, a tribute to an historic Dunedin stately home, seems to mark the end of the set’s “coming of age” evocations, the “grand gesture-like” sounds nostalgically reawakening my youthful impressions of such places with their faded glories and echoes of old times. Everything here seemed like a newly-minted dream with lots of rumbustion (The Kitchen and Scullery – as well as, surprisingly, the Billiard Room!), proper old-world etiquette (the Dining Room) and some genteel tranquility (the Writing Room), all part of the fairy-tale-like fantasy of a lost age.

After this, I felt the remaining works on the disc, Jenny McLeod’s Four Tone Clock pieces and Anthony Ritchie’s selection of PIano Preludes, possessed a gravitas which lifted them away from the other pieces, more akin to the collection of works on Disc Three. All of the pieces had that depth of content, either focused or discursive, which required the kind of responses to technical difficulty and/or musical complexity as outlined by Jian Liu in his introduction to the set.

McLeod’s Tone Clock pieces were inspired by Dutch composer Peter Schat’s theories regarding equal-temperament tonal and chromatic approaches, expanding Schat’s basic idea to incorporate what she called a “Grand Unified Theory” far beyond the idea’s original source. Liu plays four of McLeod’s twenty-four pieces, two of which are each dedicated to previous composer-colleagues of Mcleod – Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar – both of whom had preceded her as Professors of Music Studies at Victoria University. I imagined I could “hear” certain characteristics of each of the older composers in the pieces McLeod had inscribed to them.

While more conventionally named as “Preludes”, Anthony Ritchie’s survey for solo piano encompasses the accepted spectrum of all twenty-four keys from the chromatic scale. Jian Liu recorded five of these for this recording, covering a wide range of differing “character” pieces, influenced to some extent by other composers’ efforts in this form but remaining true to the composer’s own “sound and musical expression”. Each has a particular distinctive character which Liu brings out with splendid-sounding surety – I particularly enjoyed the contrasts in his playing of No. 15, with its agitated, excitingly “dangerous-sounding” figurations vying with bell-like treble sounds, dismissed mockingly and derisively, when compared with No. 24 (subtitled “For my Mother”), a time-aged memory of mother and child at the keyboard perhaps? – something at first charming and nostalgic, though at the end, sounding a strangely forlorn note…..

True to Jian Liu’s previously-quoted overview, the two previous pieces and those occupying Disc Three all seemed ineluctably “ingrained” in terms of conveying a character, environment, situation, emotion or any other such viewpoint relating to this part of the world with requisite skill and conviction. Two of the third disc’s pieces were by composers whose music was appearing for the first time in this set – interestingly one was the oldest in the group (Edwin Carr 1928-2003) and the other was the youngest (Selina Fisher (b.1993) – beside which we heard further works by David Hamilton, John Psathas, Gareth Farr, Gillian Whitehead, Claire Cowan and John Elmsly.

Whether it was the juxtaposition of youth and age, or the “newness” of the two composers’ music on this disc, I found myself unexpectedly, but more resoundingly, drawn to both Edwin Carr’s and Salina Fisher’s very different sounding works. Carr composed prolifically in most forms, including a number of works for solo piano, among them this attractively-varied set of four sharply-characterised pieces requiring from the player, by turns, both a lyrical touch and brilliant virtuosity. By contrast Selina Fisher’s world is more readily ambient and impressionistic, though capable of sharply-etched incident and irruption, however micro-cosmic. Both of these pieces would certainly encourage me to seek out further explorations and expressions of the world of sound, light and ambience through which we all move and deign to share with others. It‘s a kind of overall unifying quality which all of the pieces on these three discs so brilliantly and evocatively presented here by Jian Liu have a share in defining and characterising as our very own distinctive living-space.

Henry Wong Doe, and a paean in praise of piano recitals…….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

      Wellington Chamber Music presents :
HENRY WONG DOE – Piano Recital

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – Sonata in E Minor Hob.XVI:34 (1784)
LEONIE HOLMES – Time Rustling for piano and fixed media electronics (2023)
ALBERTO GINASTERA – Piano Sonata No. 1 Op.22 (1952)
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN – Nocturne in D flat Major Op.27 No.2 (1836)
MODEST MUSORGSKY – Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)

Sunday 21st July 2024
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Welliongton

Consider, reader, if you will, the piano recital – a presentation involving a single musician playing on an instrument which has inspired some of the greatest, most profound and far-reaching musical compositions ever devised by human beings within the framework of Western civilisation.

The classical repertoire alone for pianists seems boundless, including sounds associated with early keyboards and gradually evolving over centuries to the majestic tones wrought by today’s concert grands – instruments capable of reproducing near-orchestral swathes of tones and timbres which give multifarious tongue to all kinds of compositions, both original and transcribed from any era or alternative sound-source. And the music written for a single player and instrument alone is itself so richly-extensive as to commandeer a lifetime’s attention and satisfaction.

Which leads me to pose the question – WHY is it that the piano recital itself has seemed of recent times to have lost some of its former frequency, or currency, or status, or allure, or more to the point, NECESSITY in the music programmes of various organisations?

Time was in Wellington, for example, when every international piano soloist (or guest instrumentalist or singer) who appeared with the NZSO gave a solo recital as well. Quite apart from the stellar line-up which I “missed out” on seeing over the years (including luminaries like Claudio Arrau, Annie Fisher, John Ogdon and Tamas Vasary), I WAS fortunate enough to hear in the 1970s and 80s artists such as Alfred Brendel (an all-Beethoven programme), Vladimir Ashkenazy (Mozart and Chopin), Alicia de Larrocha (an extraordinary all-Spanish recital), Peter Frankl (Chopin),  Jorge Bolet (Schumann, Grieg and Liszt) and Stephen Hough (Schubert), in recital in the Town Hall playing music that seemed their “meat-and-drink” when compared with the fast-food popularity of the “standard” piano concerto repertoire they also performed with the orchestra.

Now I love piano concertos – don’t get me wrong, here! – who wouldn’t want to hear those works by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Saint-Saens, and Ravel, played by a world-class pianist? – It’s just that piano concertos represent a one-sided aspect of pianism when set against the solo repertoire that’s just as much their and our heritage. And it’s a heritage we concertgoers in t  his part of the world are being deprived of.

Such a loss was underlined in spectacular fashion last weekend at a Wellington Chamber Music Concert which featured a magnificently-played solo recital by Auckland-born pianist Henry Wong Doe, who’s back home in New Zealand to visit family and take some time out from his current duties as Professor of Piano at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I had not long ago reviewed Wong Doe’s most recent recording for Rattle Records of one of today’s recital’s “jewels”,  Musorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” –  https://middle-c.org/2018/02/two-resounding-recordings-from-rattle-classics-and-a-feisty-newcomer/ – so I was interested to have the chance to compare my impressions of the two readings.

While the CD enterprisingly linked the Musorgsky with another work inspired by pieces of art, New Zealand composer Eve de Castro Robinson’s, fantastically-wrought “A zigzagged gaze”, Wong Doe included at today’s St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace recital, a work by Aucklander Leonie Holmes, Time Rustling, for piano and fixed media electronics. This had been one of six works commissioned by the pianist from different Kiwi composers living both in New Zealand and in places around the world in 2022, Wong Doe inviting them to write pieces illustrating their experiences and perspectives during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Otherwise the programme was a kind of compendium of the recitalist’s art, with works from the classical, romantic and twentieth-century eras, one which could be simplistically described as a “something for everybody” presentation, but whose essence expressed much more than any such glib kind of prospectus – each piece had its own “attitude” and special character in its own right.

Take the Haydn E Minor Sonata Hob.XVI:34 which opened the recital, for instance – the first movement so intriguingly equivocal at the beginning, the pianist’s upward arpeggios quizzical and questioning, and with “full stops” at the ends of some of the sequences – what might Haydn have been thinking? – Wong Doe generates moments of volatility to the discourse, contrasting dynamic levels and places where the horse seems to be momentarily given its head before being reined in,  sounding in places not unlike a young Beethoven, but ultimately with more circumspection than certainty, especially at the movement’s end.

The slow movement sounded vocal-like from the outset, the line florid and decorative. The middle section explored both minor and major key changes before returning to the opening, Wong Doe’s agile fingers making the lines seem like embellishments of themselves, steering the music towards the final movement’s darker territories without a break. He then spurted into the finale’s Vivace molto with a will, presenting incredibly quicksilvery fingerwork, relying on velocity and brilliance for effect and playing down the opportunities for variety of touch and droll humour that a slightly more varied  tempo would have given – still, the effect was undeniably exhilarating!

After this came the Leonie Holmes work, part of the pianist’s “Perspectives 2022” project referred to above, and which Wong Doe recorded for Rattle Records on RAT D147 2023  (see this review’s heading). This was one of two pieces from the set whose composers used electronic sounds in their work (Leila Adu-Gilmore’s work “Home” was the other), the remainder being entirely for acoustic solo piano and player.

I’ve always liked the unvarnished honesty of Leonie Holmes’s work, the most recent one I’ve heard being an orchestral piece “I watched a shadow” premiered by the NZSO on consecutive nights (May 17/18th) in Auckland and Wellington. I thought Holmes’s work on that occasion easily out-grew its inspiration, a friend’s somewhat homespun poem, the resulting orchestral rhapsody convincingly conveying an austere soundscape undergoing what seemed as much oceanic as tectonic forces at work, enlivened by ebb-and-flow wind-and-brass irruptions.

Here, by comparison, the stimulus originated more from within, a meditation upon time characterised strongly by the isolation of the Covid-19 era. Holmes wanted to “grow the piece” via the “strange ways” of time by refracting her initial sketches of memories of the sounds of wind rustling through the branches of trees through an electronic media, then mixing the later piano timbres with these earlier memories.

Beginning with electronics whose sounds resembled a chord which burgeoned and refracted, the piano responded with gently-voiced melancholic tones., the combination sometimes augmenting or taking turns with one another – a tolling-bell sequence mirrored, then drifted apart, while the tape’s rumbling, sighing ambiences prompted low, murmuring chordal utterances from the piano, Bartokian chords growing into scherzando-like animations. As the intensities faded, gentler Debussian piano sounds took over– gentle pin-pricks of sound-light gradually bade those beautifully ambient chords a farewell.

Next we heard a starkly contrasting piece, Alberto Ginastera’s First Piano Sonata, a tribute by the composer to the folk rhythms of his native country, Argentina, and producing a coruscating display of keyboard physicality from the pianist. As well as their South American flavour, the themes had a Prokofiev-like energy and piquancy with the music’s more lyrical moments of the music framed in toccata-like trajectories which kept the listener’s blood pulsating right up to the coruscating repeated-note onslaughts of the movement’s final flourishes.

This was followed by a presto misterioso second movement, setting sinister “whirling dervish” textures against breathlessly-repeated toccata-like sequences. Wong Doe’s feathery brilliance conjured up something of a nightmarish soundscape traversal which disappeared at the end as eerily and wraith-like as it had begun. What a contrast with the slow movement’s building from the silences a series of quietly expressive “figures” their immobility imbued with portentous mute intention, before opening up and giving tongue in agitated tones. After a climax the sounds seemed to withdraw into themselves once again as mysteriously as before.

Suddenly the finale’s “ruvido ed ostinato” erupted, joyously and frenetically under Wong Doe’s fingers, the dance-like rhythms whirling all of us along on a growing tide of energy and exuberance,  animating those infectious-sounding folk-melodies beloved of the composer  – the whole movement represented an irresistible bubbling-up of exhilaration towards a final, volcanic surge of energy from the pianist up and down the keyboard. It was Incredible stuff, bringing some people to their feet, and leaving others like myself too gobsmacked to do little more that applaud as if in a daze!

After some of us had “talked among ourselves” over the interval and calmed down, we were ready for the second half, beginning with a Chopin Nocturne, and concluding with Musorgsky’s famous “Pictures”. The Chopin work, in D-flat major Op.27 No. 2, was one of a “pair”, which the composer was fond of crafting with these works. This one, in contrast with the more turbulent No. 1, was more consistently song-like throughout, a mini-crescendo of excitement apart in the middle section of the work (very operatic-like, and betraying the composer’s fondness for the voice.)

Wong Doe charmed us with this, beautifully demonstrating to us the well-known description of  “Chopin rubato” – the leaves of the tree are being blown every which way by the wind, but the trunks remain solid and keep strictly in time.

I hadn’t heard Wong Doe’s recording of the Musorgsky for a while, and thought I’d prefer to encounter it afresh, in any case – at the start I thought the gestures suitably invigorating and virile, presenting a composer who, rather than bowed by grief at the loss of his artist friend, Victor Hartmann, seemed determined to do his memory justice via the inspiration given to him by the artist’s pictures.

While making the most of the contrast the cycle afforded, Wong Doe didn’t go into “Horowitz territory” in terms of over-orchestrating the different subjects – The Gnome, for instance he played hard-and-fast, carrying over some of the opening promenade energies without a pause or break,  and emphasising the creature’s malevolence. The Old Castle evoked the Troubadour, but not so much his song as his playing, as also with the caprice and playfulness of the children in Tuileries. But Bydlo (The Ox Cart) was here superb, massive and relentless at the climax, and with its decrescendo given all kinds of variants of tone and colour. The Ballet Of Unhatched Chicks then properly enchanted, while the two Jews, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle were brilliantly operatic in their interactions.

I enjoyed the delightful garrulity of the Marketplace at Limoges, here contrasted stunningly with the eerie Catacombs – suddenly we could scarcely dare to breathe in between those massive chords and their silences! I also remember the almost Lisztian transcendence of the Cum Linguis in Lingua Mortua (Musorgsky’s own schoolboy Latin!) and the lump-in-throat effect Wong Doe’s playing had, both here and in his recording.

Baba Yaga was simply breathtakingly done with almost blindingly brilliant finger-work, with the central part’s eeriness and menace strongly drawn! Some pianists hold back with the introduction of the Great Gate of Kiev theme, as if hearing it from a distance the first time (which I quite like), but Wong Doe gave it his all straight away! Both the succeeding priest’s hymn and the massive bell strokes were begun softly, but the re-entry of the Promenade theme caught us up in its growing excitement until it all seemed nothing but great festive bell sounds, a ceremony as all-embracingly spacious and reverberant as one could want at the end.

I wish I’d taken more notice of the Gareth Farr encore, whose name I don’t even remember, such were the resonances still playing in my head from the Musorgsky! I remember soft, tolling bell sounds, with rhythms beginning to bubble and shimmer, while underpinned by deeper, richer sounds, until the shimmering textures reached a bubbling-over point, after which everything gradually receded, and calm was restored again. Someone who had kept his or her head better at this point might well be able to add to this somewhat distracted account of mine with more information – I was still wandering in my head, lost somewhere in Kiev, in thrall to those sounds that had made the afternoon’s piano recital such an enthralling experience……