Orchestra Wellington – heroically fulfilling the need for music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
A MODERN HERO

EVE de CASTRO-ROBINSON – Hour of Lead
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – War Requiem

Morag Atchison (soprano)
Daniel Szesiong Todd (tenor)
Benson Wilson (baritone)

Orpheus Choir, Wellington
Wellington Young Voices

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (music director)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 7th December, 2024

What could possibly preface in concert a work such as Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem?  Here, on Saturday, at Orchestra Wellington’s epic presentation “A Modern Hero”, that challenge was taken up by Auckland composer Eve de Castro Robinson with her brief but searingly concentrated orchestral composition “Hour of Lead”, a sonorous meditation on a similarly-titled poem by Emily Dickinson.

The poet’s words explore the consciousness of pain in a variety of forms and processings, its progressions variously rapier-like, systematic and torpid, with responses paralleling thought, reflex and movement, as do the different characters of the four movements of de Castro Robinson’s work, with each outwardly signing inner turmoil. The first, Searing, takes just milliseconds to live up to its name, with an opening ostinato suddenly pierced by screams. The rhythms trundle jazzily onwards, set upon by punch-drunk szforzandi, whose assaults bring forth raucous clamourings, and building to a tutti for the tumultuous ages. After this comes music of the air, Bittersweet, a vertiginous scenario whose incessant movement quixotically dissolves into a juicily-flavoured hymnal, and reaching zany volume levels with a single, tumultuously constituted chord that eventually self-destructs!

Next is Leaden, with its “quartz contentment”, deeply-wrought sounds with richly-purposeful rumblings, its darkness countering the previous movement’s scintillations. A flowing viola/cello melody sings above the rhythms as winds and brass emit birdlike sighs and cries, which brass turn into gargantuan earth-groans – how wonderful to hear the  strings playing an Orpheus-like role here, their sounds taming the beasts’ convulsions, raising their spirits, and suggesting an ecstasy on the other side of the darkness which reclaims the last few bars.

“Remembered, if outlived” says the poem; and the beginning of the final Chilling scintillates on percussion, winds and high-register-strings before becoming almost extra-terrestrial, freed from gravity and atmosphere! –  all impulses are drawn towards a super-galactic kind of rendition of “Abide with Me”, a kind of invitation for sensibilities frozen in the manner of “centuries before” . Perhaps the “stupor – then the letting go” is the reawakening of human consciousness via the bringing into being a gloriously aleatoric-like pitchless chord which grows to fullness before being “taken up” by the same players’ stamping,, clattering, and then gradually receding footsteps – whether “taken up”, or “being taken”, one is not quite sure, but what an enigmatically human way to end the piece! After such colourful coruscations, the appearance of the piece’s composer, Eve de Castro Robinson, called to the platform at the end, seemed like some kind of angelic or otherwise blessed visitant, come to lift the spell by which her work had held us all in thrall.

And so, to the Britten – after the extra players and singers and their conductor had all made their entrances and set themselves up to begin, conductor Marc Taddei raised his baton and the first sounds of the War Requiem were made by the strings, awkwardly-pulsating figures gradually brought to life. For some reason I felt a proper sense of “atmosphere” lacking, without being able to put my finger on just what was missing – and only right at the work’s ending did I experience what could have made an enormous difference at the beginning. Accompanying the final exchanges between the children’s choir at the words Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis, and the main chorus’s Requiescant in pace, Amen  was the stunning effect of gradual dimming  the stage lighting to near-darkness, the voices’ diminuendo contriving the sounds to disappear as if by magic. How wonderful, I thought, if the work had begun this way, and the lights gradually brought up as the music threaded its way towards its first climax at the choir’s first full-blooded Et lux perpetua luceat eis joined by full-throated bells and percussion!

Britten’s use of the tritone, the interval C-F-sharp, in medieval times known as “diabolus in musica” (the devil in music) dominates these opening exchanges, here brought off tellingly by both voices and orchestra, the composer seeking to suitably “haunt” the text’s idea of “eternal rest”,  usually, in conventional requiems, given the most consoling music possible.  Increased tensions crackled and blistered with the tenor’s first solo entry intoning the first of poet Wilfred Owen’s bitterly challenging verses “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?” – though I found Daniel Szesiong Todd’s enunciation of the words less than clear, he still conveyed the words’ terrible ironies, along with the sounds depicting the battlefield slaughter and the “tenderness of silent minds”. All of the forebodings were then given full vent in the brutal contrasts which followed, the rapt “Kyrie/Christe eleisons” and the great onslaught of instrumental and vocal sounds of “Dies Irae”. Just as awe-inspiring and pitying were the poet’s words in the at once tranquil and fearful, “Bugles sang” which followed,  redolent with echoes of the “Dies Irae” in baritone Benson Wilson ’s hushed but growingly apprehensive conveyance of the bugles’ tones, sounding their sorrowful calls and catching the portentous mood.

Though Morag Atchison’s soprano tones “spread” when put under pressure in the “Liber Scriptus”, she effectively and sonorously “nailed” the text’s message that nothing would remain unjudged or unavenged, sentiments echoed by the chorus’s troubled utterances at “Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?” and by the soprano’s stentorian “Rex tremendae majestatis!” Then, the poet’s supremely ironic “Out there” verses came bounding in, the two soldiers teasing death as a playfellow, an “old chum” , and never as an “enemy of ours”. (we could have done with surtitles for the poetry as the auditorium was too dark to be able to properly follow the words in the programme)!

The chorus splendidly contrasted the women’s prayerful “Recordare Jesu pie” with the men’s later, jagged-edged “Confutatis maledictis”, halted by the timpani’s introduction to the baritone’s saluting of the great gun – “thou long black arm” – ironically addressing its malevolence before uttering a curse upon its being (though the words were not clear the tone of voice was unmistakeable! – great timpani and brass playing, here!). Its brazen function then became clear as the music burst once again into ”Dies Irae”, again magnificently  delivered, but then dramatically slowing, and holding everything in cosmic thrall for the “Lacrimosa” to make its heart-wrenching appearance  – Morag Atchison’s singing was to die for, here!  Britten brilliantly uses the “Lacrimosa” in tandem with what are perhaps Wilfred Owen’s most moving verses in the entire work – “Move him gently into the sun” – no matter that the words were not entirely clear in places, as the overall sense of grief was here palpable beyond description. I think we needed to have been told, somewhere, that there was an interval at this point, because we were uncertain as to what to do at first, after the choir had breathed its concluding “Dona eis requiem” – still, our somewhat mesmerised state wasn’t inappropriate!

As with every note these angelic voices sang this evening, the Wellington Young Voices’ Choir covered itself in glory  with the Offertorium that began the work’s second half – and, not to be outdone, the Orpheus voices then launched into the text with sterling orchestral support, firstly at Sed signifier sanctus Michael, and then giving us a deliciously-crafted fugal romp through Quam olim Abrahae promisisti, one whose conclusion then tossed the momentums into the introduction to another of  Owen’s poems. This one was a setting based on part of the composer’s earlier canticle, “Abraham and Isaac”, but this time with a different and brutal ending to the story. Both soloists here projected their texts more clearly, combining their voices particularly beautifully when describing the “Ram of Pride” sent by God for sacrifice –  glorious singing again from the Young Voices here, in heart-breaking response to the story’s murderous end, in which we were told Abraham “slew his son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one!”, the soloists obsessively repeating the final phrase of the poem. Afterwards, the choir and orchestra then returned to the “Quam olim Abrahae” fugal passage to complete the savage irony of the tale.

Came the Sanctus, resplendent in its glory and especially so in the wake of the Parable’s bitterness – a plethora of shimmering instrumental tintinnabulations and with ecstatic acclamations from the soprano, after which the choir divided into eight parts for Pleni sunt Caeli in terra (the choir stood up section by section, which created great visual excitement!), using the rapidly-repeated words to create an excitable babble of ever-burgeoning voices to the accompaniment of a great instrumental crescendo!  A pause, and then brasses and voices began firstly, the Hosanna in excelsis and then, led by the soprano, the gentler, more processional  Benedictus, the interactive flow here kept alive with great presence by Morag Atchison interacting with voices and orchestra under Marc Taddei’s expert control.

A final Hosanna from chorus and orchestra produced a concluding flourish, and the baritone began Owen’s thoughtful meditation, The End, the poem questioning  the Earth’s capacities for forgiveness of humankind for the carnage, with the beautiful instrumental colourings accorded the words’ images emphasising the bleakness of  the previous music’s religious exaltation. Again, the solo singer’s words were difficult to make out, but the sense of desolation held fast.  The tenor’s rendition of the following verses from At a Calvary Near the Ancre intersected here with the choir’s sing of “Agnus Dei” from the Requiem Mass, the words again highlighting the poet’s angst and anger with war – here, Owen castigates the institutionalisation of  Christian faith and patriotism  by clergy and polilticians. with Britten’s own pacifism never more unequivocally articulated than in this part of the work.

The Libera me, as with Verdi’s setting in his famous Requiem Mass, contains some of the most searing and heartfelt writing, with again, in Britten’s work the universal plea for deliverance and mercy extended to include the “pity of war”.  The opening here was as portentous as anything by Berlioz or Verdi, with the writing filled with vertiginously fearsome chromatic shifts of harmony and colour, gathering momentum and fervour, and brought into sharp focus for us by the soprano’s sudden entry (“Tremens! – Factus sum ergo!”) when she spits out her words, bring the choir’s voices with her, and realising with the orchestra a cataclysmic ferment of energies and strengths –  a truly apocalyptic threshold through which we were taken and left gasping as the sounds gradually died away, leaving the  two soldiers about whom this work has told us such a lot, and, of course, very much on our behalf!

Which left the poet’s last text, a poem called “Strange Meeting”, bringing to us a dream-like sequence  in which Owen describes an encounter involving two soldiers who had been on opposing sides in a battle, one of whom had killed the other in combat – “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”…. exchanging as well “the undone years, the hopelessness” along with “the pity of war, the pity war distilled”, and bringing to bear the desire to cleanse the human spirit with water from the “sweet wells we sunk too deep for war”. And it was difficult to remain dry-eyed throughout the music of reconciliation, with the two men sharing the line “Let us sleep now” in a sequence magically wrought all about its perimeters by the choir’s intoning the Latin hymn In Paradisum – “Into Paradise may the Angels lead thee”, but with Britten again disturbing the conventional idea of “eternal rest” of such commemorations by using the tri-tone interval for the Children’s Chorus’s final utterances of “Requiem Aeternam….” as a kind of “warning” for mankind.

Then came a stunningly evocative ambient withdrawal from the work’s world, achieved by the slowest of diminuendi throughout the work’s final chord sequence, allowing the performers and their sounds to magically and memorably dissolve into the darkness. It was only then I found myself wishing that the musicians had brought the work’s beginning out of the same darkness at its beginning – a work that everybody had so brilliantly recreated for our on behalf of the genius who wrote this music…..

Luu Hong Quang’s Liszt recording proclaims its lustre on Rattle Records

Posted on by Peter Mechen

FRANZ LISZT –  Etudes d’execution transcendante S.139 (Transcendental Etudes)

Luu Hong Quang (piano)

Rattle Records RAT-D152 2024

Reviewed  “Middle C” November 2024

Vietnamese pianist Luu Hong Quang is currently (2024) in Wellington while studying for his Doctorate of Music with Professor Jian Liu at Victoria University’s School of Music. It’s a far-flung location from which to throw down the gauntlet to the wider world of pianism at large – but Quang has done this with a new release from Rattle Records which presents one of the piano repertoire’s most formidably challenging works, Franz Liszt’s “Etudes d’execution transcendante”. The recording was actually one that Quang made, appropriately enough, in the concert hall built next to Liszt’s actual birthplace in Raiding, Austria (formerly known as Doborján when part of Hungary at the time of the composer’s birth). No precise recording dates are given, though the pianist recounts in a booklet note a sense of the pilgrimage undertaken over a period of eighteen months to learn and master the work, which culminated in his first public performance in December 2022 at the Vietnam National Academy of Music in Hanoi. (I have since contacted Luu Hong Quang and learned that the recording took place in July, 2023.)

The genesis of Liszt’s Etudes is well-known, having their origins in twelve studies (Étude en douze exercices) he first wrote in 1826 when barely sixteen, then majorly elaborating on them in 1837 (Douze Grandes Études), after having fallen under the performing spell of Paganini and determined to emulate on the piano what the already legendary fiddler was achieving on the violin. By the 1850s, and having long given up the life of the virtuoso, Liszt then resolved to bring some of his youthful technical excesses to heel and “simplify” the studies (only one, “Mazeppa”, is considered even more difficult in its 1852 revision), emphasising the pieces’ poetry and grandeur and generally “playing down” their overtly prestidigitatorial qualities. And while the lighter Erard pianos of the 1830s made those earlier versions less awkward to manage, the heavier “action” of the newer pianos from Russia and Vienna which were gaining in popularity made passages from the 1837 Etudes impossible for all but the fingers of a Liszt!

Even so, for years these works were regarded as the preserve of “super-virtuosi”, having to wait until February 1903 to received their first documented premiere performance as a complete set from the legendary Ferruccio Busoni at the Berlin Beethoven-Saal. Traversals of the entire set remained rare both in concert and on record in the intervening years up to the 1960s – notables such as Egon Petri (1927), Jose Iturbi (1930), Jean Doyen (1943) and Earl Wild (1957) gave concert performances – but the first complete recording wasn’t set down until 1956, when Russian/American pianist Alexander Borovsky recorded the work for Vox, followed then by Gyorgy Cziffra in 1958 and Lazar Berman in 1959. Incidentally (and surprisingly), I can find only a single concert performance of the cycle thus far documented in New Zealand, that by visiting American pianist Kyrill Gerstein performed in Auckland in 2015.

Flash forward to 2024 and it seems as if a “virtuoso revolution” has taken place in world pianism since the Millenium, with almost fifty versions of the Transcendental Etudes I counted as currently available on recordings listed on the prestigious “Presto Classical” website. And now adding to that number will be Luu Hong Quang’s brilliantly-played disc, produced and sonorously recorded and mixed by Paul Carasco, and elegantly presented by Steve Garden’s Rattle Records in association with the support of Professor Jack Richards.

I decided I wouldn’t here set Quang’s recording against any other of today’s “super-virtuosi” for direct comparison, but rather allow my responses to resonate within my own sound-world of accumulated memory and feeling from experiences of first getting to know these works well. This took place through what have since become classic recordings of the complete 1852 set made by Louis Kentner, Lazar Berman and Claudio Arrau (I also heard a recital disc of Vladimir Ashkenazy’s at this time, though, sadly, only of excerpts).  These were the performances which I’d first encountered and which had, from my first hearing of “Harmonies du soir” on that single Ashkenazy disc, drawn me irretrievably into the sound-world of what I came to regard as one of the composer’s most astounding creative achievements. In the light of those three stellar, though vastly different performances quoted above, Quang’s performances are as much redolent of my youthful impressions of this music as they seem freshly-minted to my ears – on a superficial level they most resemble Louis Kentner’s in that they seem primarily concerned with each piece’s “inner being” rather than its external display of whatever. Which is not to say that Lazar Berman, Claudio Arrau or Vladimir Ashkenazy all put virtuoso display ahead of poetic feeling in their readings, but rather that Quang, like Kentner, seemed to unselfconsciously intertwine the music’s “wow” element inextricably with its poetry, so as to constantly draw attention to the view rather than merely to an interpreter’s presentation of it.

Thus the opening “Preludio”, intended to arrest the listener’s attention right from the outset, does so with a true Lisztian combination of brilliance, quixotic wit and suggestive harmonic sleight-of-hand, Quang announcing the composer’s and his music’s credentials in an action-packed nutshell. Though most of the studies have descriptive titles, we’re then plunged straight into one of the two for whom Liszt named merely by their key, in this case A Minor, whose opening rhythmically resembles Beethoven’s famous C Minor Symphony’s opening, but whose restless, quixotic character suggests a more compulsively whimsical spirit – Quang’s playing brings to mind his own reference in the notes to Paganini himself.

Things settle down with the beautiful “Paysage”, a landscape conceived here, it seems from “out of the air’, such is the spontaneity of phrasing and colour that Quang conjures from the notes, with the wonderfully dramatic midway modulation taking us into a differently-hued world for a few precious moments before the tranquility returns. This is all precipitately detonated by the opening drama of “Mazeppa”, with its arresting opening chords and portentous stirrings of agitation leading to the remorseless drama of a wild and torturous captive horseback ride, Quang’s strength and agility ably suggesting by turns the hero’s desperate plight, his longing for release, and eventually, his triumphal redemption. And, in the wake of these heady heroics comes the alchemic magic of the following “Feux Follets” (Will-o’the Wisps), one of Liszt’s absolute masterpieces, famous for its demands on the player regarding velocity, tonal shading, finger-control and poetic evocation, all of which Quang achieves with meticulous differentiation and bewildering evanescent manifestation.

How different is the dark, mysteriously-voiced “Vision” which follows, a grim and black-toned G minor presence whose aspect takes on a proud glow from within under Quang’s fingers as the music’s heroic spirit is awakened and enlivened. Perhaps he isn’t as intensely visionary as Kentner or as granite-toned as Arrau in this music but, as in the following “Eroica”, he conveys in places as telling an awareness of the music’s poetry as its physical forcefulness – he grows the latter piece through its strong-willed opening flourishes, treating us to an intrepid journey from whimsical beginnings through a vainglorious display of valour, before circumspection proclaims that honour is satisfied. No such hint of heedfulness attends the next piece, however – the tumultuous “Wilde Jagd” beloved of German folklore as “Wild Hunt”, here given a tremendous, frenetic opening by Quang before settling to the chase in an almost carnival spirit, complete with a “hunting song”! The subsequent building-up of the music’s sheer physicality and strenuous vigour reaches cataclysmic levels in the pianist’s hands before it all seems to collapse in sheer exhaustion!

All of this leads to what seem to me the disc’s most remarkable performances, beginning with the heart-warming poetry of Quang’s playing of “Ricordanza” (Memories), a piece haunted by ghosts of memory depicted in the music’s piquant figurations and flourishes, shades of the past “filled out” with exquisitely-wrought manifestations – Busoni’s famous and incomparable “discovery of old love-letters” description of the piece is referred to by the pianist in his notes. As befits one of the great musical love-poems, Quang’s playing touches the heart of this listener for one, with its spontaneous-sounding evocations of remembrances couched in terms of a slow-moving, emotion-laden “dance” framed by frequent impulses denoting poignantly-suggestive things whose nature remains indefinite.

The following F Minor Study follows on its predecessor’s heels almost attacca – as well might a piece marked allegro agitato molto!  Quang gives the oft-repeated opening figure more urgency than does Kentner, who keeps the figurations in trajectorial step with their overall context (by contrast Lazar Berman almost eviscerates the figures’ notes themselves with his rapid-fire delivery!). But how deftly Quang manages the midway transition back to the piece’s beginning, splendidly reiterating both the angst-laden declamatory theme and the return to the opening agitations, with those exciting  running syncopations leading to the piece’s coup de grace!

I’ve written of the indelible impression made on me by this work as one wrought by “Harmonies du soir” – and so it’s fitting that Quang here brings the listener to a kind of apex of achievement with this study and its “mirror image” that follows, the equally remarkable “Chasse Neige”. But even now, fifty years after first hearing those opening notes of “Harmonies” sound their opening embrace that enfolds those impulses they give rise to, I still find myself wreathed in that same wonderment as nature’s bells are softly set ringing and then enjoined by a second theme to give full tongue in praise of creation’s beauteous manifestations – and here, nothing is forced or strained but wholeheartedly ‘’released” through the pianist’s obvious love of his subject and his palpable skills and sensibilities.

How prescient of Liszt to give the cycle’s last word to nature, leaving the listener with a sense of worldly impermanence, almost a “Sic transit gloria mundi” observation as the remorseless snows of “Chasse Neige” cover over all trace of the lives made so manifest throughout the rest of the pieces – Quang is totally at one with the composer, here, revelling in the overlapping surges of tone in the piece’s middle section and bringing off the concluding “claw-like” gesture of farewell at the end with suitable gravitas and finality.

Luu Hong Quang would do well to be proud of his response to this “marathon” challenge  with, in his own words  – “a true milestone in (an) artistic journey” – may we hope he might, before too long, undertake to put a proper girdle about the earth by enabling this astonishing work to live and breathe in concert for only a second time within these far-flung spaces of our own hemisphere!

 

Orchestra Wellington’s “The Jazz Age” – innovative, big-boned and fulsome!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
“The Jazz Age”

KEITH MOSS – A Kalahari Eclogue
Arohanui Strings and Orchestra Wellington

GEORGE GERSHWIN (arr. RUSS GARCIA) – Porgy and Bess
Deborah Wai Kapohe (soprano)
Eddie Muliaumaseali’i (bass)
Siliga Sani Muliaumaseali’i (tenor)
Signature Choir,
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei – Music Director

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 9th November 2024

Orchestra Wellington, under the directorship of Marc Taddei, continues to bring off presentations whose initiative, innovation and execution continue to engage, astonish and delight audiences, as with the band’s latest endeavour “The Jazz Age”. This concert’s showpiece was obviously George Gershwin’s groundbreaking 1935 folk-opera “Porgy and Bess”, but here done with a difference – a shortened concert performance featuring iconic Hollywood arranger Russell Garcia’s innovative reorchestration of the work for jazz performers, and served up within a framework of a “live” 1930s radio broadcast, complete with announcer, and commercial breaks!

Arohanui Strings perform with Orchestra Wellington and Music Director Marc Taddei at the Orchestra’s latest concert “The Jazz Age”

Included on the programme as an introduction were two other items whose performances featured the recent activities of the Sistema-inspired “Arohanui Strings” trainee pupils, with the older students taking part in the concert’s opening work “A Kalahari Eclogue” by South African composer Keith Moss (currently resident in New Zealand), and then being more-or-less “upstaged” by what music director Marc Taddei aptly called “cuteness” in the form of the Strings’ youngest members coming onto the performing platform, to the audience’s delight!

Taddei’s introduction for the Arohanui Ensemble included a comment concerning the SECOND instance I’ve recently learned of a music educational group in Aotearoa having its funding cut for 2025 by Creative New Zealand (the other being the Wellington Youth Orchestra), continuing what another commentator described as a “baffling” withdrawal of investment in the region’s future artistic development. Not, of course, a priority for our present Government to investigate, one would expect……but on an administrative and supportive level it’s a particularly unhelpful response to the Arohanui Strings Trust’s recent extension of activities in adding brass and woodwind classes for children.

Keith Moss’s “A Kalahari Eclogue” (commissioned by SOUNZ for Orchestra Wellington and Arohanui Strings) suitably evoked a “landscape” here, with the lower strings right at the beginning setting the scene and awakening consciousness from other parts of the orchestra, with ruminatory themes provoking impulses of colour from winds and percussion before developing and voicing their own intensities. A string “chant” was answered by a horn solo, joined by brass ostinato whose insistence brought forth song-like string textures and colourful washes of brass. The figures then interplayed and built to a tremendous climax, capped off and silenced by percussion – having thus encompassed the vastness of the territories, the piece allowed the winds a kind of “and so it goes” comment, an appropriate conclusion to this engaging and evocative piece, and most suitably given a warm reception.

By way of further encouragement for the youthful “Arohanui Strings” players, the orchestra launched into an unnamed Astor Piazzola Tango, before bringing onto the platform the aforementioned junior members of the group – undaunted, they gave us, by turns, spirited and lyrical renditions of “Frere Jacques’ and the classic Maori melody “Hine, e Hine”, before bringing the house down with Offenbach’s famous “Can-can”, firstly at a moderate tempi, and then at Taddei’s insistence, at a far more exhilarating clip! What an experience for those youngsters and for their tutors, to be thus involved in Orchestra Wellington’s inspired presentation!

Came the interval, and while the audience enjoyed its customary walkabout interlude the performing platform was a fascinating hive of activity, with the various groups of musicians’ and technicians’ coming-and-going, accompanied by snatches of jazz-like music, simulating a kind of event set-up and building a kind of anticipatory excitement. It soon became clear that this was a kind of radio-station-broadcast scenario featuring Gershwin’s famous folk-opera – and, being radio, the emphasis was firmly on the music rather than any kind of stage production.

The programme notes told us that we were to hear an award-winning “jazz arrangement” of the work first conceived in 1956 by the legendary composer and arranger Russell Garcia, and made famous world-wide in a recording the following year featuring performers Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong in the opera’s title roles, and conducted by Garcia. It was one of a number of varying presentations of Gershwin’s original folk-opera at that time, which would have been many people’s first experience of hearing those famous “numbers” as belonging to a “whole”, however far removed from the composer’s original.

Clearly, tonight’s performance was a “knockout”, with singing and playing and overall presentation that completely “owned” the idea and its execution – that this was a period-style radio broadcast, all atmospherically set-up with a compere introducing the show and singers who even performed commercials on behalf of a sponsor, along the way! Though there was no “stage action” as such, the show’s compere, tenor Siliga Sani Muliaumaseali’i, adroitly “telescoped” parts of the story’s unfolding with quick-fire narrations in places, and the other singers, soprano Deborah Wai Kapohe and bass Eddie Muliaumaseali’i, took various parts besides the title-roles, all of which they brought off with considerable aplomb. The resourceful “Signature Choir” plotted its course sonorously through various functions, among them a gorgeous vocal quartet’s delightful “commercial breaks”, and several well-focused solo voices contributing to the opera’s roles (the “Honey Man”, the “Strawberry Woman” and the “Devil Crab Man”) besides the group’s heartfelt “Doctor Jesus” prayers, pleas and laments during the storm and its sequel.

Right with the singers all the way was the magnificent Orchestra Wellington, whose playing was, in a number of ways, incredible! The energy, the enthusiasm, the deftness, the timing, the accuracy, and the sheer sound of the orchestra in all its parts was a tribute to the skills of each player, to the ensemble at large and to its indefatigable maestro, Marc Taddei. Shut your eyes and you could have been in any great concert-hall in the world, or so it seemed, in terms of the sound of a crack orchestra seeming to play its insides out. My reaction is, I must admit, tempered by my familiarity with Gershwin’s original “folk-opera” score via recordings I’ve been listening to a lot, lately, and which has left me somewhat disconcerted by the fabled Russ Garcia’s “arrangements” of Gershwin, much of which, to my ears, seemed excessively heavy and in places contrary to the spirit of the original (alternatively, I can’t recall ever having heard any of the “jazz versions” of Gershwin’s work on record, which, I suppose, accounts for my reaction to these things).

So, while I thought what the singers, players and their conductor achieved was stupendous on one level, I came away from the experience with less of the great “love” that I was expecting for some of what I heard – I thought all of the singers suffered in places from accompaniments that were too loud, “laden” in places by brass and percussion sonorities unnecessarily “piled up” by the arranger – as, for example, with Porgy’s touching “When God made cripple he mean him to be lonely” which wasn’t allowed to convey the pathos that I was accustomed to – fortunately Eddie Muliaumaseali’i’s impressively sonorous voice saw him through, as it did with the famous “I got plenty o’ nuttin”. Deborah Wai Kapohe, who was absolutely splendid in the equally well-known “Summertime” had to struggle against the orchestra in places in the great duet with Porgy, “Bess, yo’ is my woman now”, and to my disappointment that wonderful sequence with the words “mornin’ time and evenin’ time”  lost some of its beauty and poignancy, with both singers having to “push” their tones through the orchestral opaqueness that the arranger couldn’t seem to resist. And I can’t imagine why Garcia watered-down what should have been one of tenor Siliga Sani Muliaumaseali’i’s great moments in the work as the rapscallion Sportin’ Life, in removing all of those deliciously zany interpolations (“Wah, doo! – zim bam boodle-oo!” etc…) echoed by the chorus, from the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So”……..

I’m straying into superfluity, now, by highlighting things the performance didn’t do, which for a critic should be beside the point – getting back to what was done, my critical incredulity returns, reflecting upon an achievement of evocation which, if not entirely Gershwin’s, impressed on so many counts, to the point where singers, players and conductor seemed transfixed by their own efforts as the work leapt from the page and into the spaces where we sat, mesmerised by it all – that in itself made for an experience which will resound in the memory for a long time to come.

Wellington’s Youth Orchestras show the way through is together!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

“SYMPHONIC FUSION”
Wellington Youth Orchestra and Wellington Youth Sinfonietta
Mark Carter (WYO) and Christiaan van der Zee (WYS) – conductors
Xavier Ngaro (violin)

SUPPE – Overture “Poet and Peasant”
BRUCH – Violin Concerto No. 1 Op.26
WALTON – Suite from “Henry V”
PONCHIELLI – “Dance of the Hours” (from “La Gioconda”)
SHOSTAKOVICH – Waltz No. 2 (from “Jazz Suite”)
BIZET – “L’Arlesienne – Suite No. 2”

Alan Gibbs Centre, Wellington College, Dufferin St., Wellington

Saturday, 19th October, 2024

At a time that could be regarded as reaching an apex of dissatisfaction in a turbulent year for the capital, Wellington’s youthful orchestral musicians who make up both the Wellington Youth Orchestra and the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta came together triumphantly for a concert on Saturday afternoon at Wellington College’s Alan Gibbs Centre. The young players and their music directors demonstrated the kind of unity, strength and brilliance of purpose and achievement that comes with close co-operation and mutual understanding  –  a kind of example well worth emulating for those in public life! The  efforts of these young musicians at once highlighted and freely gave quantities of joy and motivation and fulfilment, to the enjoyment of all present.

Wellington Youth Orchestra is the major orchestra in the region for young musicians of Grade Eight and above status, the players working with Music Director Mark Carter on a number of projects each year including a concerto award for an orchestra member who excels at a particular instrument – this year the Concerto Award was won by Xavier Ngaro, who today performed the Bruch First Violin Concerto. The orchestra’s membership is “fed” by players whose training takes place with the “other” youth ensemble in the capital, the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta, whose members have achieved a Grade Five-plus level of proficiency, and whose conductor is Christiaan Van der Zee. Both groups encourage opportunities for soloists and composers and would-be conductors to develop their skills, with the Sinfonietta occasionally collaborating with other youth ensembles from other regions in valuable combined training weekends.

A “manifestation” of all of this was Saturday’s concert, a concentrated youth-fest of artistic expression during which the musicians’ committed energies and efforts seemed to thrill its audience to pieces! – a gathering which, what was more, included people like myself who were there for the music alone, and not “connected” through any ostensible on-stage representation – in fact after the concert I walked down to the road to my car alongside a young man whom I happened to ask “how he had enjoyed the concert and whether a family member was participating” to which he replied that he had no such connection with the event but merely an interest in the programme that was being played, which, he told me, he had seen advertised, and had, upon attending, enjoyed immensely!

The older “Youth Orchestra” under Mark Carter’s direction took the stage for the first half, which opened with an item promising plenty of excitement and variety – the colourful evergreen favourite by Franz von Suppé, the Overture “Poet and Peasant”. Such a beautifully-nuanced, velvet-like brass sound at the music’s very beginning, we got here! – and answered with gorgeously-hushed strings. The orchestral tutti, as was the case all through the concert, sounded somewhat muffled due to the stage’s curtained surroundings, but it didn’t lessen the excitement of the playing, and allowed the beauty of the cello-and-harp passage which followed to make its effect,  with the winds adding a gracefully-shaped melody along the way, the cellist’s awkward ascending phrase midway a shade unconfident-sounding but still resolute and determined! And what a great start there was to the allegro, with furiously buzzing strings and thunderous brass and percussion, and plenty of “snap” to the brass chording – Carter didn’t rush the players through the orchestral turmoil, but allowed it all plenty of weight and tremendous momentum, after which the famous waltz-theme glided in most beguilingly, with properly winsome textures, and with the phrasings allowing the “Viennese” charm of the music its proper effect. The closing passages of the work were no less impressively done, the strings’ “swirling figurations” leading to a scalp-tingling acceleration into the coda, and a “bringing the house down” effect at the end – great stuff!

A space then had to be cleared on the platform for a soloist for today’s concerto, which was Max Bruch’s G Minor Violin Concerto No. 1, here performed by the winner of the orchestra’s 2024 Concerto Competition, 17 year-old Xavier Ngaro from Lower Hutt, Wellington, an orchestra member and a pupil of ex-NZSQ violinist Douglas Beilman. The work is, of course one of the most popular works in the violin concerto repertoire, and (judging by the number of performances I’ve heard from young violinists over the years) obviously a popular choice for budding virtuosi wishing to demonstrate their skills, Xavier Ngaro on this showing certainly being no exception.

The work’s famous “laden” opening atmosphere properly set the scene for the violinist’s first entry – Ngaro’s opening notes were richly sounded and filled with properly burgeoning intent, inspiring a full-blooded response from the orchestra, and a forceful series of further “challenges” from the soloist. The latter sounded completely in command of his passagework before dropping into a beautiful cantabile tone for the second subject material, all sensitively and resolutely accompanied, as were the feathery sinuous solo passages which followed, leading up to a great and vigorous orchestra “tutti” with the conductor getting trenchant playing from his strings, the stuff romantic concerti are made of!

The soloist’s cadenza-like flourishes which followed then led to the orchestra’s great and luxurious announcement of the slow movement’s introduction (beautiful playing!), which the violinist joined via both hushed and forthright passages, a performance which here had plenty of emotional give-and-take (I could imagine the young man over time finding even more “heartbreak” in this music, more “hushed” tones than we got here – but these will doubtless develop naturally in due course…) Though his tone was “swallowed up” by the orchestra’s counter-themes in the movement’s climax, where there appeared some awkwardness when trying to reassert his lines, his re-entry just after the ‘tutti” was suitably big-hearted – and he managed a wonderful “soft-to-loud” transition passage which brought the movement to a close.

A well-rounded tutti was built up at the finale’s beginning, with Ngaro’s solo passages nimble and confident, if perhaps needing to develop a surer touch on the once-repeated three-note ascent of the opening theme, which seemed very slightly “skipped” (an interpretative choice, perhaps?) – elsewhere, there was confidently-essayed passagework leading up to the “big tune” of the movement, gloriously played by the orchestra and nicely “varied” by the soloist on repetition. He then confidently attacked the reprise of the finale’s opening, though I thought perhaps a degree of fatigue at this stage might have momentarily slowed his responses to some of the trenchant passagework which followed – however, towards the end I thought he pulled off that treacherous double stopped ascending hand-position that precedes the final orchestral tutti really well, which then in turn led to the coda – soloist, conductor and players gave these final bars plenty of excitement, earning everybody concerned a great ovation! It was appropriate that the young soloist was then presented with the Tom Gott Cup by none other than the award’s donor, in honour of the player’s Concerto Competition success – a memorable occasion!

An occasion of a different kind then followed – a performance of William Walton’s Suite for the film Henry V, with each of the movements preceded by speakers/actors reading lines from the play associated with the music. Two speakers were used, both giving their readings plenty of pleasing “oomph”, though I preferred having their faces and expressions visible at the front of the hall instead of (as one did) having them wandering down the aisle out of sight and to an extent out of earshot! But the added theatricality of it all was splendid, and certainly added to the impact of the music!

The famous “Prologue”, the “O for a muse of fire….” set the scene, paving the way for the music’s evocative beginning with gorgeous strings and a ravishing flute solo, followed by suitably ceremonial gesturings from brass and percussion, and stirringly martial expressions of intent. These were followed by a description of the death of Falstaff, King Henry’s spurned friend, the words in the play spoken by Mistress Quickly, but here by the second speaker regarding the Knight’s demise – “…all was cold as stone” – the music, a Passacaglia, touchingly capturing the mood of the scene.

Next came Henry’s “Once more into the breach, dear friends!….” from the first speaker, then augmented by the second with “On, on, you noble English!…..”, and concluding with the famous statement, “Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!”. Walton’s music was here wonderfully “pregnant” with foreboding and portent, the players capturing the scene’s growing excitement as the warlike gestures grew in intensity before breaking into action, the brass signalling the charge and the orchestra building the trajectories towards a grand tattoo of drums – fantastic playing from all concerned!

A subsidence to a contrasting sweetness was ushered in by lovely wind-playing, leading to a quote by Walton from Canteloube’s “Songs of the Auvergne”, the lovely Bailiero melody – perhaps a third female actor/reader was again needed as the object of Pistol’s Act 2 Scene 3 farewell to his wife, Mistress Quickly “My love, give me thy lips…..” (its generality here provoked some amusement!), and his comrade Nym’s abashed refusal to do the same, with  “I cannot kiss – but that’s the humour of’t!…..Adieu!” – however, these words were the prelude to some of the score’s most beautiful music “Touch her sweet lips and part”, with the envoy-like strains most poignantly sounded by the players.

The work concluded with perhaps the most rousing of all of Shakespeare’s speeches, the famous “St.Crispin’s Day” exhortation made by Henry V at Agincourt to his soldiers, here  rather more thoughtfully proclaimed by the speaker than was perhaps usual, though still with its own resounding effect! Great ceremonial roulades then surrounded and threaded through the melody, all very festive and redolent of celebrations with accompanying  bell-like cascades of bells, brought off with true splendour by Carter and his musicians! This performance was actually my introduction to this music, due to my long-misplaced lack of regard for film music in general – and the occasion certainly shook my prejudices from off their foundations in this case, thanks largely to the playing’s vitality and atmosphere.

The interval saw the stage almost transmorgrified with the appearance of a different orchestra and conductor – this was the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta, with their director, Christiaan van der Zee, a group exuding a similar “aura” of animated anticipation of a kind that one relishes so readily with youth performers! The group’s programme featured two “Sinfonietta-only” items, and a combined performance with the older orchestra to conclude the concert, a most enticing prospect for all concerned.

First came Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli’s justly famous “Dance of the Hours”, an orchestral interlude from his one-operatic-hit stage-work “La Gioconda”, something of a concert-hall classic, and made popularly famous some years ago when its principal melody was parodied by American comedian Allan Sherman in a hit song “Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda” – one that has seemed to have, these days, mercifully sunk almost without a trace! this was a slightly “smoothed out” arrangement of the one I knew from the opera, missing out a whole middle section but finishing with the original’s fast-and-furious galop! Despite the simplifications it still all caught the original piquancy of the opening and the hell-for-leather excitement of the chase in the finale! After this, it was a great idea to feature Shostakovich’s wonderfully tongue-in-cheek “Waltz” from his “Jazz Suite No. 2” – I didn’t know the piece well enough to compare the performance with an “original”, but it all sounded “echt-Shostakovich” to my ears, with a sense of lurking unease, something almost sinister, about it – and, of course, the ironies of these “sweet young things” playing such music were almost palpable!

Came the finale of the concert – and we were warmly enjoined to “bear with us” by the organisers as they undertook the task of fitting two complete orchestras onto the concert platform (there was some inevitable “spillage” onto the auditorium floor in front, which neither mattered nor deterred the palpable excitement of it all!)  Christian van der Zee took the podium when all was ready, and the players plunged into the opening movement of Bizet’s “L’Arlesienne Suite No.2”. This set had become a sequel to the composer’s own selection of pieces from his incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet after the original production was a failure. Bizet’s first “Suite” of pieces proved entirely successful, but the composer died before he could make a second selection from the music – his friend Ernest Giuraud chose three more movements and added a Minuet from other music Bizet had composed, making a four-movement “L’Arlesienne – Suite No. 2”.

The opening Pastorale began grandly and somewhat unexpectedly, given its rustic title! – a big, rolling ball of orchestral texture, relieved somewhat by a charming  wind version of the opening and piquant changes between the winds and a saxophone – the two orchestras together made a splendid sound at the opening’s reprise – again the music detoured to more pastoral realms with a trio-like dance for winds  over “chugging” string rhythms almost resembling a polonaise, before the music modulated imposingly back to the opening!

The second movement sounded no less formidable at its a solemn full-orchestra unison beginning, eventually giving way to a lilting melody for the saxophone (a relatively “new” instrument to orchestras at that time), all very “nostalgic-sounding” in a slightly disturbing way, and even more so when the great orchestral “unison” reappeared! The young players, however, sailed through the piece’s emotional ambivalences, giving it all they had! The beautiful Minuet which followed featured the harp and flute, both enchantingly sounded, and then joined by the ubiquitous saxophone. As for the final riotous Farandole, introduced by an excerpt from the composer’s own Prelude from the First L’Arlesienne Suite, it began quietly, gathered inexorable momentum throughout the sequences and finally burst out with both the Prelude and Farandole themes combined, to prodigiously festive effect! Such was its impact that at the conclusion the players spontaneously took up their instruments and repeated the piece, creating a “second wave” of energy and exuberance that rocked the auditorium with delight at its conclusion. A better advertisement for the general, all-round efficacy of youthful music-making could never have been devised!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Body’s 80th birthday concert – music and creativity of enduring worth

Posted on by Peter Mechen

                                                                                                                                                                                      Jack Body (1944-2015)

“Jack!@80” at St.Andrew’s
(an 80th birthday concert of Jack Body’s music)

Concert organisers: Pepe Becker, Judith Exley, Robert Oliver,
Dan Poynton, Jennifer Shennan, Yono Soekarno

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington
Saturday, 12th October, 2024

A concert devoted to the work of a single composer by its very nature promises to be a singular occasion no matter where in the world such an event takes place. In the past we in Aotearoa, New Zealand have had a number of concerts to celebrate anniversaries of some of our composers, alive or dead, with Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar being the first to come to my mind. And certainly many others have produced sufficient volumes of work that would fill out plenty of single-composer concert programmes – so there have probably been other instances of such single-composer events that I simply haven’t heard of.

Anniversaries do provide welcome excuses to “celebrate” a particular composer’s work – and such a chance presented itself this year with the eightieth birthday anniversary of Wellington composer Jack Body, who died in 2015. A group of the city’s prominent musicians and associates set about bringing together various performers who were associated with Jack Body as students, colleagues or simply contemporaries of his, all drawn to the manifold creative energies and significances emanating from his music – strands of influence that were brought together to wondrous and colourful effect last Saturday evening at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church in Wellington.

Aptly described in the programme for the event as “a selection of Jack’s smaller-scale solo and ensemble works” the concert nevertheless clearly demonstrated something of the range of his interests and preoccupations as a composer. Especially prominent was evidence of his activities regarding the establishment of cultural links with Indonesia, China, Cambodia, and other places throughout Asia besides his awareness of western traditions of song, dance and literature. Though Jack’s seemingly boundless energies in organising larger-scale events featuring his music were only hinted at here – one thinks of his opera Alley (based on the life of Rewi Alley, and performed at the1998 International Festival of the Arts), the multi-event “Sonic Circuses” of the 1970s, the promotion of Asian music and musicians both here and in various Asia-Pacific Festivals and Conferences of which he was the artistic director, and on numerous other festival occasions often the “featured composer”, in addition to his work as “Composer-in-Residence” with the Auckland Philharmonia in 2012-13 – there was no doubt as to the range and scope of his creative imagination evidenced by the works we heard, even if in some cases the “snippets” from complete works left one wanting to have one’s cake and eat more than a mere tantalising slice or two!


The First Smile Gamelan Group – Jennifer Shennan and Gerard Crewson (right) assisted by Chris Francis and Rosalind Jiko

At the outset prospective concert attendees were charmed upon entering the church by the sounds of a gamelan group of four called The First Smile performing on their instruments at the rear of the church nave, playing pieces composed by two of the actual group members, Gerard Crewdson and Jennifer Shennan, assisted by two others, Chris Francis and Rosalind Jiko. Also, remarkably, as if apropos of the cornucopia of achievement on the part of the concert’s subject about to be presented, each person upon entering and contributing a koha was offered a free copy of “Jack – celebrating Jack Body – Composer” – a gorgeously lavish book which had been published by Steele Roberts in 2015, a collection of tributes and recollections penned by Jack’s many friends, colleagues and contemporaries from over the years, all beautifully appointed and illustrated.

Once inside and all gathered we were welcomed to the concert by Robert Oliver, former director of music at St.Mary of the Angels Church in Wellington, and well-known as an instrumentalist and conductor with a number of ensembles in the capital over the years. In thanking the audience for coming to pay tribute to Jack Body’s memory and legacy, he remarked on the need for the latter’s remarkable qualities and creative achievements to be remembered and given their due and “not to be interr’d with his bones”.

And so began a veritable feast of musical sounds for our pleasure, enjoyment and wonderment, beginning characteristically with the composer’s 2006 work Rainforest, originally for flute and harp, but here adapted for flute and piano. We heard four of the work’s six movements, played by Monica Verburg (flutes) and Dan Poynton (piano), each one preceded by a “field recording” of music performed by the Aka and Ba-Benzele Pygmies of the Central African Republic, and recorded by the French/Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha Arom. The first, Hunting Song, featured some brief vocalisings whose repetitive pattern was elaborated into ostinato from the piano and accompanying decorative flute phrasings. No.3 was the first of two Lullabies, a chant accompanied by percussion, and here developed into a folk-dance-ish pattern, with the flute exploring a “bluesy” counterpoint, the two working up to a jazzy, riff-like response. A second Lullaby sounded like a wordless vocalised meditation, to which the piano and flute responded with what seemed like ecstatic wonderment akin to “loving” exchanges, with the piano reaching downwards as if “earth-breathing” in between each melodic flowering – lovely. The final movement, Children’s Games, brought three singers to the platform with the instrumentalists, reproducing the tape’s brief but racy chanting, with the flutist joining in with the singers’ energetic vocalisings in places while the piano played off-beat syncopations , all to exhilarating effect, and finishing with a flourish as the singers scampered off the stage at the piece’s end!

One of Body’s most-travelled works is the “Five Melodies for Piano”, a work written for and premiered by Margaret Nielsen in Europe (she also recorded the work for Kiwi-Pacific Records). Dan Poynton told us of his introduction to the work while a student of Jack’s, and being given each of the pieces separately to “try” out! Tonight’s version had the added interest of incorporating a solo electric guitar transcription, here played by Gunter Herbig (in what I presumed was his own reworking) of two of the pieces. The piano led off with the well-known opening 3-note repetitive figures, the composer’s “melody within a melody” idea borne out by the performer using the left hand to “mute” some of the played notes, varying the mutes and their intervals and incorporated “extra” notes as the piece proceeds. Gunter Herbig’s guitar took the second and third melodies, the second melody delivered in a breath-holding sequence of beautifully-suspended notes occasionally punctuated by near-toneless “strummings” as the melodic line climbed into its own near-stratospheric space to be swallowed by the silences.

Even more intense was the third piece’s plaintive three-note call with its achingly sharpened second note, the sounds entering their own kind of “nirvana”, the composer inspired by the sound-world of the ancient Chinese zither, Gu Qin, and here transporting our sensibilities most affectingly. Dan Poynton’s piano returned for the fourth melody, beginning with a similarly “lost” figure, the mood then “cleft in twain” by a Saint-Saens-like cock-crow from “Danse Macabre”! The interaction continued, with the cock-crow distended over the keyboard’s whole range! – pulled every which way, hammered, screwed, stretched and flattened, before being allowed to quietly recompose itself and slink away, its “squawk” whimperingly pulled out to a “ninth” in a pathetic gesture of submission! A more seemly envoi came with the final melody (piano again), a gentle ostinato, with notes that established their own patterns before pushing exploratory feelers gradually into different realms, transforming themselves almost effortlessly into impulses which expressed at one and the same time wide-eared amazement and calm acceptance – here, something of a Zen Buddhist attitude when contrasted with the tortured journey of the previous melody.

Exploring a vein of nostalgia can, of course, put one’s sensibilities in touch with unexpected surges of feeling, something which Body felt compelled to explore when recalling his parents’ and grandparents’ fondness for “old songs” – hence his fascinating, almost Brittenesque settings of four such songs, three of which were performed here in different parts of the concert. First up was the ever-popular “Daisy Bell”, performed with suitably sonorous sentiment and gusto by baritone Roger Wilson with pianist Michele Binnie’s sure-fingered accompaniment (we were adjured as an audience to “join in” with the chorus, with what I thought was a creditable response!) – then variously during the concert’s second half we heard another baritone, Chris Berenson (again with Michele Binnie’s piano) in the lesser-known and thus more audience-shy “Sweet Genevieve”, followed later by the hymn-like “All Through The Night” with Pepe Becker’s heavenly soprano and Michele Binnie’s gorgeous piano chordings leading the way through the verses and leaving us to chorus the song’s one-liner refrain!

Back to the first half now for another vocal work, one I’d previously seen performed in full – Body’s 1982 work ”Love Sonnets of Michelangelo”, of which a single one, No.5 “Non posso altra figura immaginarmi” was presented. Originally written for the dancer, Michael Parmenter, and two female voices, this concert version featured Pepe Becker’s soprano with a viola played by Nicholas Hancox taking the lower-voiced part of the duet, an interaction which I found extraordinarily moving,  the artist/poet’s words being given “voice” within yet another kind of medium, a different abstraction…..both singer and player brought out the poem’s “ecstasy of despair”, as it were, underlined by the occasional foot-stampings of both musicians and the obsessive quality of the actual notes…..

There followed an electroacoustic work “Musik Dari Jalan” (Music from the Street), a soundscape which drew for its composition from field recordings made in Indonesia by the ethnomusicologist Allan Thomas of the sounds of Jakarta street hawkers. Interestingly, this work won prizes at a major electroacoustic music festival in Bourges France both in the 1970s and 1990s. Further similar interest was garnered by the item which closed the concert’s first half – here, a quartet of string players (Edward Clarkson, Eros Li (violins), Nicholas Hancox (viola) and Jamie Beardslee (‘cello) performed two separate pieces from a 2008 work called “Yunnan”, a collection of transcriptions and arrangements of Chinese minority nationalities in the South-West China province of Yunnan. The first , Bouyi 1, actually NOT from Yunnan (as Body admitted in a performance note) was a kind of “fantasia” for string quartet, the players interacting with the taped singing voices of two Bouyi women, and drawing forth sounds of a particularly haunting quality, with some episodes reminiscent of modal-like passages in English string music by Elgar and Vaughan Williams.

A second piece entitled Bai Sanxian was more dance-like and didn’t appear to feature taped sounds, but simply “live”, dance-like music-making which put one in mind of some kind of exotic-sounding lute, in this case a “sanxian”, its singularities ably suggested by the players.

So much was there to talk about during the interval that it seemed no time at all before we were being refocused upon the platform and the second half’s intriguing beginning – a kind of “Tour of a Neighbourhood” item which emanated from pianist Stephen De Pledge’s commissioning a set of “Landscape Preludes” from New Zealand composers – Body’s characteristically singular contribution to the idea was this 2007 portrait in words and music of his own neighbourhood “The Street Where I live”.  Dan Poynton here “teamed up” with the voice of the composer (as pianist Henry Wong Doe had done on the piece’s first recording) to realise the “counterpoint” of  speech and its “musical analogue”. Here I thought the voice in places insufficiently projected, with the piano notes occasionally blurring the spoken message; and the abrupt start first time up seemed to leave pianist Dan Poynton in his starting-blocks! – but a re-run righted the balance, and all thereafter was well!

Body’s constantly inventive creative urge brought out many unorthodox touches to his compositions, one of which was the use of “invented language”, vocalising sounds “with no semantic meaning”. His 1989 work “Five Lullabies” was first performed by the Tudor Consort, conducted by its founder, Simon Ravens, and this evening featured three singers, Pepe Becker, Jane McKinley and Andrea Cochrane, from that first performance, here joined by Samuel Berkahn for the second of the two selected lullabies.

                                                                                                                                                        Singers Jane McKinlay, Pepe Becker, and Andrea Cochrane, with Robert Oliver

The first, No. 3, uses what the composer called the “wonderful vocal polyphonies” of China’s minority cultures, with the so-called “dissonant” interval of a second often held to resonate instead as “consonant” , Pepe Becker and Jane McKinley steadfastedly “holding their lines” with these almost Schoenbergian “more distant” consonances! It was No.5 which worked its magic almost unreservedly for me, however – such hauntingly long and sinuous lines, with Samuel Berkahn’s and Andrea Cochrane’s tones seeming by turns to meld into and drift alongside Pepe Becker’s unswerving lines, the voices’ creating amazing resonances, partly lullabic, and partly lament-like, with the intensities maintained until the cortege of sounds seemed to pass enigmatically into the night.

Yet another glimpse of Body’s seemingly unquenchable search for expression through means that disregard convention was given by pianist Dan Poynton with two excerpts from a work written for and dedicated to him, called “14 Stations”. It’s a title which straightaway suggests to anyone familiar with Christian beliefs a kind of representation of Jesus Christ’s torturous journey towards his crucifixion and death, though Body has proposed the term might as well apply to any journey involving “stations”, such as one by rail. Also, the composer had as well suggested the title might refer to the many different travails undergone by pianists who have to practice at a keyboard for hours each day to “perfect” their art. Certainly each excerpt from this work which Poynton presented here illustrated a specific area of physical effort which, as Body remarked in his programme note subject the body “to stress and discomfort which can extend to physical pain”.

I’d seen one of Dan Poynton’s concert performances of this work not long after the premiere, so was able to relate each of the excerpts’ titles to that memory – each one concentrated on its title’s subject, the first one, “Shoulders” (No.10), moving from an intensely thoughtful aspect to vigorous jabbing motions and a kind of “kneadling” counter-movement, the pianist sighing with the effort at its conclusion. By contrast, “Stiffness” (No.14) presented a hyperactive figure stretching in different directions, percussively beating the instrument’s different surfaces, with moanings and gruntings, then feeling all about both the instrument and his own person to see if there was still life in (a) the instrument and (b) the pianist! We were left hungry for more…..though after such hyperactivity the following 1979 work “Aeolian Harp” resembled a journey from chaos to order, with Nicholas Hancox’s instrument conjuring up harmonic sounds of such unworldliness we felt somewhat disoriented, even “haunted” in ourselves by the readily-imagined passing of air-borne spirits and the resonating earth-echoings left in their wake – stunning!

Such resultant ambiences seemed to spontaneously generate an unprogrammed but entirely apposite item from Dan Poynton on one of the electric keyboards to hand, in bringing to life a precious relic of a bygone age – Jack Body’s own theme music from the television series of what seemed like so many lifetimes hence, “Close to Home”, with the years for a few brief moments peeling off so many listeners’ shoulders (mine among them) like spring blossom from a tree. However redolent for many of us, the composer’s shade was having none of such things as a “farewell”, instead making his “exit” with a somewhat anarchic cocking of a snoot in the face of convention – this was his setting of Auckland writer Russell Haley’s quirky verses which made up “Turtle Time”, a matching of composer and poet whose interaction in itself imbued the piece with singular character.

                                                                                                                                        “Turtle Time” with speaker Jonathan O’Drowsky, and conductor Robert Oliver.

Poet Ian Wedde vividly characterised Russell Haley’s work in a written tribute after his death in 2016 as “subversive deadpan comic surrealism, where even the most factual and banal components of it, such as the names of people and places, are stretched thinly over layers of alternative reality and identity.” The script of “Turtle Time” revels in such subversions and their separate realities, though this evening’s performance needed, I thought, clearer and perhaps more “Brechtian” poise from its engagingly energetic, if rather too over-excitable speaker/actor Jonathan O’Drowsky, from whose utterances, however zestfully zany, I would have liked a bit more spaciousness and clarity in places  (I must add, to be fair, that the St. Andrew’s acoustic has never seemed to me especially kind to ventures featuring the spoken voice sans microphone!). Still, conductor Robert Oliver unfalteringly marshalled his instrumental forces throughout both the trajectories of freely-non-metrical impulse and the spontaneous clusterings of colour and stasis here served up by his expert players, Monica Verburg (harp), Jonathan Berkahn (harpsichord), David Treefrog Sanders (organ) and Dan Poynton (piano).

The concert’s last strains were those of “Auld Lang Syne” in a version very probably wrought by Body himself, and rendered by Dan Poynton on one of the keyboards as a very much “in keeping” gesture. At the end it very much seemed we had spent a most successful evening in the company of a remarkable creative spirit – Jack Body’s is undoubtedly one of those whose legacy will not be forgotten.

                                                                                   Some of the performers at the conclusion of “Jack@80” at St. Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church,  Saturday 12th October, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.  Had Quang begun the recital with the earliest of the three works, Robert Schumann’s enchanting Kinderscenen (in itself an attractive prospect),  the arrangement would have then 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….”

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

Quang Hong Luu

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!