Myth and Ritual in everyday life – from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RICHARD STRAUSS – “Dance of the Seven Veils” from “Salome”
ARJUNA OAKES – “Safe Way to Fall”
JOHN PSATHAS – Zahara
BELA BARTOK – “The Miraculous Mandarin”  Ballet

Orchestra Wellington
with……..
Arjuna Oakes (singer)
John Psathas (piano)
Valentina Michaud (saxophone)
Orpheus Choir, Wellington
BalletCollective Aotearoa
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei  (conductor)
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday June 3rd, 2023

“Myth and Ritual” was something of a concept-bending title, to my initial way of thinking, as a description of the programme Marc Taddei and his musicians put together on Saturday evening (June 3rd). Myth brings to mind legendary figures and events, while ritual suggests some kind of rite to do with religion or culture.

However, with the boundaries pushed out wider, as here, we saw that the concert’s range and scope took in both individual and societal aspects of the human condition, involving both transgressors and victims.

Bookending the evening’s presentation were portrayals of obsession matching that of any mythical hero – while the two central items presented conflict of diametrically opposed kinds, one in terms of individual resolution, and the other in epic, broad brush-stroke happenings putting groups of people at risk.

Not only was the evening‘s content far-flung, but the means by which the performances worked their magic were varied, which was part of sustaining our interest through spectacular orchestral, solo vocal, instrumental, choral and theatrical means.  Perhaps it wasn’t everybody’s “cup of tea” in toto, but it did have a readily-welcomed “different strokes for different folks” sense.

Things began spectacular with the famous “Dance of the Seven Veils” written by Richard Strauss for an episode in his opera “Salome”, which was a setting of Oscar Wilde’s play (written in French) whose subject was the eponymous Biblical character, the beautiful step-daughter of Herod, the Judean king of around the time of Jesus Christ.  Strauss’s set both French and German texts of Oscar Wilde’s play “Salome” which makes mention for the first time of the “Seven Veils” (in Matthew 14 she merely “danced for the guests”).

Wilde designated for Salome a kind of growing sexual obsession with John the Baptist (Jokaanan, in the opera), one which, along with the erotic nature of the Dance Strauss readily took on for the entirety of the character, presenting her as no less an obsessive figure than any mythical hero or heroine bent upon achieving great deeds.

An extraordinary tour de force of composition, the Dance brought forth from Marc Taddei and his players a brilliant response in both corporate orchestral and individual soloistic terms. From the frenetic opening, through the most languid sequences and right up to the final whiplash chords, the playing caught every mood, superbly voicing the chameleon-like progressions with that unique combination of sensuousness and “edge” to themes, rhythms and textures.

What particularly held my attention was the spaciousness of the phrasings in the early stages of the dance by both solo players and sections,  Taddei and his musicians enabling the music’s essential bitter-sweet character to emerge, setting the strings’ almost decadent voluptuousness against the winds’ piquant flavourings, the latter pungently activating the dancer’s growing excitement and urgencies, leading to the unbridled excitement of the concluding section’s abandoned flourishes, the knife-edge wind arabesques, and the cataclysmic whiplash chords at the end – stunning!

Nothing could have been further from these excesses than the concert’s second item, a song for voice, piano and orchestra called “Safe Way To Fall”. Written as a collaboration between singer/songwriter Arjuna Oakes and composer/performer John Psathas, the work grew from a “springboard” award from the NZ Arts Foundation which enabled Oakes to choose Psathas as a mentor, and led to a creative partnership between the two. The pair shared a desire to explore ideas that would “make musical ideas hit home emotionally”, and the song was one of four tracks that emerged from this initial collaboration.

With Psathas himself as the pianist (his debut as a performing pianist in public, he told us afterwards) and the orchestra providing backing of what seemed a “filmic” kind of orchestral texture, Oakes delivered his song via a microphone, words expressing the idea of feelings of vulnerability giving rise to strength in relationships. Psathas’s most telling comment afterwards. I thought, was that collaboration seemed a way for an individual to grow stronger, or in other words, a “Safe Way to Fall”, considering that any creative journey will involve occasional failings and fallings. What I got from the item and its presentation was an insight into creative process that’s outside popular perception of that process, but nevertheless produces a result, whatever one might think of the same as heard here.

John Psathas’s other (somewhat more substantial) contribution to the concert was in a more traditional “inspired by various stimuli” kind of mode, in this case a two-part synthesis of other people’s literary and musical skills. The composer was entranced by author Dean King’s “Skeletons on the Zahara” outlining the historical shipwreck of a group of American sailors off the western coast of Africa in 1815, and their subsequent travails in a hostile desert landscape and at the hands of nomadic tribesmen – so when saxophonist Federico Mondelci, who in turn had been inspired by an earlier concerto for the instrument by Psathas, approached him to write another concerto, it was Zahara which came into being.

Saxophone soloist for the concerto’s performance Valentine Michaud provided considerable visual as well as musical stimulus, appearing on the platform in a stunningly voluminous (social-distancing-style?) orange-crimson dress whose undulating folds seemed to become as desert sands as she launched into the first of the concerto’s four movements,  her instrument straightaway “possessing” the ambience created by the long lines of the ambient orchestral accompaniments, denoting rituals of both physical and spiritual identification.

The concerto moved through these exotic realms with considerable variety, a second movement establishing ostinato-like rhythms as the soloist’s playing gradually “enlivened” the music, the exchanges massively and dramatically irrupting and falling away almost to nothing in attention-riveting ways; and a third movement prayerful and ethereal, the music’s haunting aspect enhanced by the soloist’s playing of multiphonics (two notes played at once) above what seemed to me like enormous blocks of air, as if one was a bird soaring over a landscape far below, before the ostinato rhythm was re-engaged and the soloist rhapsodised with the orchestral winds, oboe, bassoon, and clarinet.

The final movement straightaway re-invoked the whole scenario, creating in my mind a desert environment through winds and brass, over which the strings soared as the sky and beneath which the percussion rumbled as of the deep earth. Valentine Michaud used a soprano sax to scintillate through the movement’s first part, then returned to her tenor instrument to deepen the “earth-connection”, the orchestra keeping the ostinato thread going throughout, and lifting the ambiences into a “cheek-by-jowl” fusion of excitement and oneness with the soloist, all scintillation and coalescence to finish!

Michaud returned us to our lives at Zahara’s conclusion with an encore, playing a fun work which she told us was called “cuku” (a chicken), and further demonstrating her virtuosity with multiphonics, as if two birds were simultaneously calling to one another – a very “rustic farmyard” piece which entertained us most delightfully!

And so, after the interval, we entered the very different world of Bela Bartok’s ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin”, having, incidentally, been warned at the beginning by a “voice-over” announcement that the work we were about to hear contained scenes of rape and sexual violence (one might imagine the present-day general cultural entertainment scene well-versed in such antics, though of course government health warnings are still bandied about, and “live” performances might still shock the unsuspecting with the unexpected!)

Musically, I found the performance as enthralling and satisfying as was the Strauss work in the concert’s first half. The opening vortex of bedlam-like sounds – “humanity’s mad, inhuman noise” (as Alan Jay Lerner wrote in “My Fair Lady” in a somewhat different context) – was superbly and sonorously delivered, though it was disconcerting how, for me, the advent of the dancers (members of “Ballet Collective Aotearoa”) radically changed the focus of my attention to the visual drama (the result of having previously “immersed” myself in the music via recordings).

Each of the clarinet solos depicting the girl’s “luring” of prospective clients to be robbed by her cohorts was superbly wrought as was the orchestral support, given that the visual aspect constantly took one’s focus away from what one was “hearing” to that which was being “watched”. Bartok’s evocation of relative “innocence” in the case of the young boy was touching, as was the girl’s response to him, a situation brusquely ended by the ruffians (who, at one stage seemed to morph as a group into a quartet rather than the original trio).

The dancers conveyed what they could of the different scenarios, hampered as they were by the lack of space which a proper stage would have otherwise afforded. Dramatically, the most effective moment  was the appearance of the Mandarin, who emerged from a trapdoor centre-stage, dressed in a red robe and bathed in bright light. That, and the impact of  the sickly green light which illuminated the Mandarin’s transfixed form after his stabbing by the ruffians were theatrical highlights of the presentation – I only wish someone had thought of deploying an additional light upon the mandarin after he had “embraced” the girl and “satisfied” his desires, at which point his wounds begin to bleed, and he dies – a blood-red spotlight would have provided an apt contrast to the colours that had been previously used.

In all, I thought the presentation was a great success, and especially from the orchestral point of view, in which the flow of the story, the drama and the tension never let up. The Orpheus Choir, too, sonorously and atmospherically played its part, beautifully accompanied by the orchestral violas as the voices gathered intensity, helping to breathe life back into the Mandarin so as to fulfil his destiny with the girl – musically, a scalp-pricking moment, even if hardly the visual embodiment of erotic consummation of desire we had been “threatened with” at the outset.

A definite “feather in the cap” of Orchestra Wellington, then – and the success of “The Miraculous Mandarin” left me longing for the point at which Marc Taddei and his players might again enlist some dancers and give us Ravel’s complete “Daphnis et Chloe” – just a thought, but meant as a compliment for all concerned.

 

 

Tribute to Souvenirs, Sovereigns and Soulmates from the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents
“EMPEROR”

Paul Lewis (piano)
Eduardo Strausser (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

ROSS HARRIS – Cento (2005)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto in E-flat Op. 73 “Emperor”
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Symphony No. 2 in C Minor Op.61

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday 11th May 2023

“The work is an abomination” declared fellow-composer Jenny McLeod upon hearing Ross Harris’s “Cento”, commissioned and performed by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra for its 25th Anniversary in 2005. According to the excellent – in fact, indispensable! – SOUNZ website (containing ‘most anything one wishes to know regarding Kiwi music and its composers!), Harris was given the brief of using “pieces that the orchestra has made its own over the last 25 years”. His response was the musical equivalent of a poetry “cento” (a work made up from brief quotes taken from other verses), deftly constructing a musical tapestry of excerpts which takes the listener on a whirlwind orchestral ride of far-flung compositional variety and drawing from at least three hundred years of musical provenances in doing so.

It was all a kind of “first cousin” of antics familiar to those who could recall the zany Hoffnung concerts (which seem to have fallen out of fashion in recent times), with the composer tacitly inviting us to “tease out” from the kaleidoscopic array of sounds any references we detected to works from the standard classical repertoire. Depending on their respective tastes and sensibilities, some listeners might well have sided with Jenny McLeod’s reproachful  reaction to such a farrargo, while others, like myself would have taken the opposite viewpoint and admired both the skill and daring of the accomplished collage of tones, marvelling at the frequent fusing of contrasting sound-colours and rhythmic impulses, here with predictably volatile, and there with surprisingly harmonious results.

I wrote down as many references as my memory could muster during the piece’s eleven minutes, delighted at greeting old friends, abashed by some I knew but couldn’t name, and puzzled by a couple of strangers whose tones rang no bells! To give just a few examples, I noticed the recurring preponderance of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” vying with Beethoven’s Seventh, Mahler’s Third and Brahms’ Second Symphonies, along with several “Ivesian” touches of combinations of opposites that “worked” despite diametrically-opposed essences – the most outlandish of these for me being Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony finale being jostled along by F.J.Ricketts’ cheerful “Colonel Bogey” march-rhythms! Conductor Eduardo Strausser’s and his players’ juggling of such determinedly whimsical snippets out for mischief and mayhem was itself, I thought, sheer delight, exhibiting both control and panache in abundance.

After such a work-out the musicians must have been more than ready for whatever challenge was next – and it came with the music of Beethoven, in the form of the “Emperor” Piano Concerto (hence the concert’s title), no less. The orchestra was joined by the English pianist Paul Lewis. making his first-ever appearance in Wellington, following a previous visit during 2022 to Auckland, where he’d already performed a complete cycle of the concertos to  critical acclaim.

Following in the wake of the Harris work, Beethoven’s music was always going to give a more-than-usually purposeful and cogent impression, something that the grand opening exchanges between orchestra and piano further emphasised, proclaiming a kind of “sovereignty” which obviously fuelled the idea in some quarters of the piece having imperial associations, and resulted in its nickname (though whatever its provenance the title “Emperor” had nothing whatever to do with the composer!)

The opening gestures done, the orchestra straightaway took up the “swing” of the music, with conductor Eduardo Strausser encouraging magnificent tutti passages that contrasted memorably with the beautiful “voicings” from the different groups. The strings brought both strength and sensitivity to the journey via eloquent shadings and colourings, as did the winds with phrasings as individually ear-catching as were their various ensembles. The horns sounded wonderful with their duetting lines, while the trumpets and timpani were excitingly impactful! All of this preceded the soloist’s re-entry in which the piano seemed at first very much part of the ensemble’s musical fabric, before building to a more substantial and authoritative soloist’s voice.

I must say Paul Lewis’s playing surprised me at first with what I felt was an amiable quality, having previously listened to various of his piano recital recordings and thinking at the time that he was a very serious musician indeed! Throughout the concerto’s first movement his playing readily exuded both poetry and vivacity by turns, never “barnstorming” the line, even when delivering the great, hammered chords exchanged with the orchestra towards the end of the development section of the music. This was a quality underlined by his sitting still at the instrument, and letting his hands and fingers do the work in relation to the rest of his body. It all suggested what seemed to me something of a “victory beyond the battle” kind of approach to the work, more so than I’d been used to in my previous listening experiences of it – definitely a “musician’s” more than a “virtuoso’s” performance, and one that resulted in my finding myself continually leaning forward in my seat to take in the detail, instead of sitting back and letting the grandeur of it all wash over me….

With the slow movement’s opening the orchestral playing again enchanted the ear, Strausser drawing from his strings a rapt quality of utterance which the pianist’s first notes illuminated like early evening stars, the opening notes of each entry “placing” the sounds to a most disarming effect. Lewis’s subsequent fuller-toned chordal ascent then glowed as if moonbeams were issuing forth from behind a cloud, suggesting warmth more than out-and-out grandeur. After the pianist and the winds had resounded in turn the rapt opening theme, a moment of hushed wonderment led eventually to a joyous explosion of pianistic energy into which the orchestra unreservedly threw itself also. We were aroused, galvanised and charmed in our turn, with Lewis again playful of pianistic aspect rather than scintillating or trenchant, and thoroughly enjoying, along with his conductor and cohorts, the various adventures throughout the finale, right up to that moment of poignant rapport with Larry Reese, the timpanist, at the end of the work! A sudden pianistic irruption of energy goaded the orchestra into doing the same, into which exuberant valediction Lewis actually joined with the players – a final, heart-warming gesture of solidarity!

The interval’s leg-stretching ritual having been undertaken, I was back for the second half, eagerly anticipating the Schumann Second Symphony, the first of the composer’s four I’d gotten to know while still a student. I recall having read over the years various commentaries professing to explain why it was Schumann couldn’t REALLY write for the orchestra and had to be “helped”, a process which certain conductors had gone along with and apparently edited the scoring to order, while others had declared the practice “an abomination” (where HAVE I heard that word before?). As I had not too long ago bought a couple of CD sets of the complete Schumann symphonies conducted by a new generation of maestri who HADN’T thus interfered with the composer’s scoring of his music in any way, I felt heartened that Maestro Strausser, tonight’s conductor, might be of a similar bent in such matters. And so it thankfully proved.

From the outset, the sounds of the brass rang forth clearly and atmospherically over the Bach-like contourings of strings and winds that made up much of the character of this beautiful work. Nowhere was there heard any kind of obfuscation of detail, the lines beautifully balanced and the trajectories nobly advanced. The allegro, when it came perhaps felt at first a bit tense under Strausser’s beat, with the dotted rhythms slightly clipped, as if a shade TOO eager; but the development section of the movement, with its beautiful “sighing” motif enchanted the ear, as did the syncopated wind chatterings and undulating timpani rolls which lead back to the allegro’s beginning. This time, all was suitably heroic and energetic, with repeated-note fanfare figures adding to the excitement and giving the lie to any thought of technical ineptitude on the composer’s part.

The Scherzo, a splendid creation, here bristled with near-obsessive energies, conductor and players making the most of each of the two contrasting Trio interludes, the first featuring quixotic, even garrulous exchanges between the winds and strings, and the second a throwback to the Symphony’s polyphonic opening (Schumann’s homage to the spirit of Bach), again with winds and strings here gorgeously blending lyrical and cerebral lines in masterly fashion. I loved it all, apart from what I thought a somewhat vulgar presto-like tempo adopted by Strausser for the movement’s coda, one certainly not indicated at all in my score – my favourite versions on record (conducted by Kubelik, Sawallisch, Karajan, Schuricht, etc.) all bring out the timpani and the brass to thrilling effect without unduly speeding up the tempo!

Of course the effect here was as momentary as it was subjective, as Strausser and his players then proceeded to give a reading of the slow movement that was as enchanting as any I’d previously encountered! – the opening strings imparted a quiet, deeply-felt beauty to the melody similarly taken up by the solo oboe and counterpointed by the bassoon. The horns, joined by the other winds, with clarinet and flute taking their turn, all made their own magic and paved the way for the strings to return to claim the melody as their own – or so it seemed to our entranced ears, amid all the re-echoings bringing us to the movement’s end.

Strausser took the final at a goodly lick, enough to emphasise the music’s girth and energy in the playing from all the sections, festive brass fanfares alternating with vertiginously swirling string textures and babbling winds at the beginning, before the music got down to an equally vigorous “working out” interaction, the winds calling attention to a kind of redemptive theme which other instruments swirled around and about , as if encouraging it to “flower”. Of course, in tandem with the return of the work’s opening fanfares it eventually blossomed, bringing about a most vibrant conclusion, a sense of recognition and concourse between creative souls, sonorously celebrated on this occasion by superb playing from the entire orchestra.

Rather than the proverbial “darkness to light” journey of the kind beloved by the Romantics, what came across to me seemed like a coming together of different energies – the opening movement’s fanfares posed the question, and then, throughout the course of the work interacted with similar kind of questing impulses, until, step-by-step, the music was able to reach a true synthesis in the work’s final movement. It was, I felt, conductor Eduardo Strausser’s and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s real achievement with this performance that these elements came together so magnificently at this concert

Les Voisins – delicious distortions, with swing

Posted on by Anne French

Les Voisins

Justine Cormack, violin
James Bush, cello
Simon Martyn-Ellis, theorbo and guitar

Works by Robert de Visée, Jean Marie Leclair, and Marin Marais

Alex Taylor, Onwhatgrounds (for violin, cello, and theorbo)
Maurice Ravel, Sonata for violin and cello
Stephane Grappelli and the Hot Club de France, Nuages, SweetGeorgiaBrown, MinorSwing

St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 7 May, 3 pm

This was the first concert of Wellington Chamber Music’s 2023 season, and it promises a great season to come. Les Voisins were scheduled to play this concert two years ago, but the performance was interrupted by a Covid-19 lockdown, which prevented the talented Australian theorbo player Simon Martyn-Ellis from travelling to New Zealand.

The theorbo is a kind of giant lute and is plucked or strummed. It was invented in the 1580s when players wanted an extra bass instrument for accompanying singers in the first operas, so they took a bass lute and extended the neck, adding seven additional strings to extend the bass register. Its bottom note is lower than that of the cello. Whereas the seven higher strings  are fretted and tuned like a guitar, the lower ones are tuned diatonically, like a harp. The low strings are deep and resonant, and the instrument is said to have been much in demand as a continuo instrument. As for a harpsichord, the theorbo player reads the bass line and improvises over the top.

The first work on the programme was by Robert de Visée (1650-1725), a prelude and passacaglia in D minor for solo theorbo. The composer was a musician in the court of Louis XIV, and his works for guitar, lute, and theorbo were written down by others. The prelude sounded tentative, but the passacaglia more assured. Still, it took me a few minutes to get used to its restrained sound.

Next, a sonata for violin and continuo in E minor by Jean-Marie Leclair (1697-1764), a work which my companion plays often. Leclair is well known to violinists as the founder of the French school of violin playing, and is still a popular composer for violin. This work had both theorbo and cello on continuo, which helpfully reinforced the theorbo against the brilliance of Justine Cormack’s mid-nineteenth century French violin. The first and third movements had their heart in the dance (Leclair was also known as a dancing master), with lively and rhythmic playing, while the middle movement was a sarabande, played gently by theorbo with violin. It is easy to see why so many of Leclair’s compositions have survived.

The second work by de Visée was a suite in C minor for solo theorbo, comprising a prelude, an allemande, and a ‘plainte au tombeau des Mesdemoiselles de Visée, filles de l’Auteur’. This beautiful and melancholy work was written for the souls of the composer’s two daughters. It was followed by a work by Marin Marais (1656-1728) played by all three instruments. The Bells of St Geneviève is much better known than the works that preceded it  in the programme (I’m sure I have heard it on RNZ Concert more than once) and is lively and jazzy, with exciting fortes and idiomatic playing by the excellent Justine Cormack.

Finally, the last work of the first half of the concert: Alex Taylor’s On what grounds. This was commissioned by Les Voisins for this tour, with support from Creative NZ, who certainly got value for their money. It is a set of six movements in the style of a Baroque suite. Justine Cormack introduced the work by quoting the composer, who described it as ‘a series of musical games with an emotional core’ in the chaconne. Taylor wanted to explore the potential of the fretted theorbo alongside the flexibility of the violin and cello, which can glissando between notes via the quartertones between them (whereas the theorbo can only play semitones).

Cormack mentioned the distortions created as the intervals are sometimes stretched or compressed. Taylor, she said, saw the work in terms of patterns of stress and release, with the tension of the quartertones built up in the chaconne section and released in the epilogue. The programme note said that the work explores the notion of a ground: literally, in the case of the ground bass in the chaconne, but also in the sense of ‘returning to a fixed point, collections of harmonies derived from a single pitch, or variations on a specific musical interval’.

This was a delicious work to listen to in the context of the pieces that went before. It was ear candy, with unexpected and interesting sonorities one after another. The chaconne was my favourite movement. (My notes say ‘weird – but very interesting’.) The composer had responded intelligently to the Baroque works in the programme and his work sounded as poised and stylish as they did, evoking Baroque forms within a completely contemporary soundworld. We were disappointed not to hear it twice.

After the interval, the theorbist took a break whilst Cormack and Bush played Ravel’s less well-known sonata for violin and cello in A minor. The players grew up living next door to each other as children, and performed with each other from an early age. Cellist James Bush often performs with some of Europe’s best Baroque musicians, such as the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, and Concerto Köln, and that Baroque flexibility was on show.

The Ravel work was written between 1920 and 1922 and is dedicated to Debussy, who had recently died. This work follows Ravel’s principal composition of the First World War, Le Tombeau de Couperin, and was written at about the same time as his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Ravel had recently heard Kodaly’s sonata for violin and cello, and the second and fourth movements are said to be influenced by it (though my Hungarian companion heard more Bartók than Kodaly in them). I enjoyed the rustic, lively dances, but my favourite movement was the third movement, a slow and beautiful chorale. The first movement had that characteristic Ravel quality of always moving and never quite arriving.  Irrespective of what influenced whom, this is a gorgeous work and deserves to be heard more often.

Finally, since we were almost at the point when Ravel discovered jazz, we were treated to three transcriptions of Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt at the Hot Club de France: Reinhardt’s versions of Sweet Georgia Brown, Nuages, and Minor Swing. Simon the Theorbist was revealed to be an excellent guitarist as well, and Cormack did a lovely Grappelli. These were terrific (although it always sounds a bit odd to my ears when classically trained musicians faithfully reproduce a transcription of a work that would have had considerable improvisation). A swinging end to a delightful concert, and a great start to WCM’s 2023 season.

 

Wellington Youth Orchestra take on Verdi, Grieg and Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Peter Mechen

A GLORIOUSLY UNINHIBITED CONCERT EXPERIENCE

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Music by Verdi, Grieg and Tchaikovsky

VERDI – Overture “Nabucco”
GRIEG – 4 Norwegian Dances
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.5 in E Minor

Mark Carter (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra

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

Sunday, 30th April, 2023

St. Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace was positively burgeoning with people on this holiday afternoon, all bent on celebrating what was the final day of April. The auditorium was jam-packed full, and bristling with excitement and expectation as well as sporting what seemed like a forest of violin bows brandished by seated uniformed platoons of fresh-faced youngsters, affiliated with similarly attired groups sporting wooden and metal whistles, and backed up by others carrying  gleaming brass bells with tubes attached or standing next to pairs and trios of sizeable rounded objects that straightaway invited banging and crashing together.

In fact the orchestra (which was what this assemblage was) seemed to take up at least half the auditorium’s floor-space, a prospect which seemed very likely to involve at some particular stage a right royal welter of assorted sound! One presumed that attendance at such a farrago would certainly not be for the faint-hearted!

Such was the bustling scene that any Sunday afternoon passer-by would have encountered. who might have  looked into the church to see what was going on!  Posters displayed on the street outside would  have given people in the “know” more clues as to what was brewing within, and especially as the name “Tchaikovsky” dominated what seemed a tantalisingly lurid seascape image which most excitingly took up the whole of the display. And once tempted through the doors of St.Andrew’s the casual visitor would have then been irresistibly drawn into the  ferment, with no possible chance of having second thoughts regarding the adventure, or of resisting the ready blandishments  and associated excitements being primed for tumultuous action!

Of course, for me it was at first simply another concert to add to the cache of my own musical experiences – and with all the things I’d seen and heard since arriving at that oft-visited church on Wellington’s The Terrace, part of the by-now-familiar fabric of preparation for music-making. And yet, from the time I’d ascended the church steps and eased my way through the entrance portals and into the auditorium, I’d again caught that whiff of excitement in my nostrils that can still, even on the ultra-umpteenth concert occasion, stimulate one’s interest – and the hubbub of the things I’ve already described upon arriving certainly did it for me again this time round.

Although the name of Tchaikovsky dominated the bill of fare, no less interest was generated by the supporting items from the equally illustrious pens of Verdi and Grieg – each as well being striking examples of orchestra virtuosity and of sounds characteristic of its respective composer. I hadn’t actually heard Verdi’s “Nabucco” Overture for some time, never having seen the opera on the stage, though the music brought back many recollections of my youthful tourings as a beginner actor in a children’s theatre troupe, our play using a recording of the very same overture! – excellently vivid, impactful sounds which, thanks to the composer’s irrepressible native theatrical instincts, have stayed vividly in my memory.

So it was, from the first solemn utterances of the brass chorale that opened the work, an evocation of magic from trombones and tuba, the sounds beautifully-rounded and splendidly-finished – and the characteristic, theatrical Verdian outburst from the entire orchestra that followed, stunning in its impact and setting the theatrical tone for the rest of the work. I was impressed with the response of  the players to their conductor Mark Carter’s insistence upon razor-sharp orchestral attack and beautifully graded dynamics, bringing out the composer’s native theatrical instincts, and preparing the way for our first taste of the famous melody “Va pensiero”, which was to bring the composer such lasting fame in its choral version from later in the opera. Time and again throughout the piece a particular orchestral detail in the playing from these youthful musicians made me prick my ears, such as the delightfully insouciant wind episode which lightened the wound-up tensions of the martial-sounding allegro, the nail-biting crescendo which then followed, and the “caution-thrown-to-the-winds” coda of the work, which left us all breathless with exhilaration at its conclusion.

Where Verdi’s music was innately theatrical and dramatic, Grieg’s was, by contrast, redolent with folkish charm and out-of-doors exhilaration, the Four Norwegian Dances positively exuding a bracing northern outlook – by turns each one bewitches and invigorates the senses with its specific evocation of time and place. Yet Grieg in his own music was never content to merely copy his country’s traditional melodies and rhythms, wanting to convey to a wider world these characteristics by echoing them in his own music. Though these Dances are all derived from Norwegian folk-tunes, he invested them with his very own harmonic brands (whose strains were to subsequently inspire Debussy, Ravel and Delius in their music) and similarly flavoured the native dance rhythms the composer so loved with the same piquancies and contrasts of mood and atmosphere. Written in 1881 first of all for piano four-hands by Grieg, the set of Dances has become more widely-known through their orchestral version, made in 1888 by the distinguished Czech violinist, Hans Sitt, and presumably used here.

Surprisingly, the players sounded to my ears at first slightly less comfortable with Grieg’s more bucolic measures than they had done with Verdi’s tight-as-a-drum rhythmic patterns, the opening of the first Dance seeming a shade “drunken” rather than spot-on with the rhythms, as if the dancers had helped themselves too freely to the Aquivit before the band struck up – but all seemed well by the time the music’s gorgeous trio section was reached, some beautiful oboe playing alternating with heart-on-sleeve string responses. And I had no reservations whatever with the Second Dance, utterly entranced as I was by the performance here of one of the world’s most charming melodies, again on the oboe (principal David Liu thoroughly deserving a mention!) and then just as beguilingly on the strings. I wasn’t prepared for the extent to which conductor Mark Carter put his foot down for the Trio section, but the fast and furious response by the players was brilliantly achieved! – making, of course, the reprise of the opening all the more “lump-in-throat” than before!

After which the Third Dance might well have made many people like myself get up and actually begin dancing, with the winds right on form and the strings and brasses even having a friendly rhythmic “tussle” at one point during their replies. In this Dance’s Trio, too,  I could hear instances of Grieg’s chromatic harmonisings of the kind that Delius obviously admired and would “echo” in his own music. The Fourth Dance seemed, at the outset, as it was going to pre-date its more sophisticated cousin-to-be, the Fourth Symphonic Dance in the later Op.64 set of Dances – more portentous than any so far at the outset, and threatening to maintain the ominous mood throughout (with even Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’s introduction briefly echoed) – but then, with a few enlivening gestures, the dance spirit was reactivated and the music “ready!-steadied” into life once more, though the accompaniments here were interestingly enough the “darkest” of any throughout the set. On this occasion, too,  the Trio sounded especially melancholy, becoming a kind of miniature tone-poem of contrasting mood, with strings and brasses darkly accompanying first the oboe and then the flute, before further intensifying the melancholy mood (wonderfully black-browed brass and timpani here, almost Wagnerian in effect!) – then, suddenly, the dance broke in again, as before. This time, there was a gorgeous “We’ll see you again sometime” kind of coda, with flutes and horn making “farewell” exchanges, before the music suddenly erupted with energy and stormed to a brilliantly abrupt finish!

A short interval later and we were ready for the Tchaikovsky, his Fifth Symphony being the most classically-conceived of the composer’s three numbered later symphonies, though still imbued with plenty of characteristic late-romantic feeling – as this performance was to demonstrate with considerable elan. The orchestral masses having suitably regrouped, we were off, straightaway plunged into melancholy with superbly delivered clarinet phrases underpinned by dark-toned strings, intoning the work’s hauntingly sombre “motto theme”.

Conductor Mark Carter gave his players enough room to maintain a portentous march-tread for the Allegro con anima  opening theme while  keeping the music’s energies active in the rippling wind counterpoints to the theme, and to all of its various adaptations, such as the strings’ and then the winds’ beautiful rising variant, followed by the winds’ perky repeated fanfare call. The only difficulty for the strings came with the equally gorgeous but trickily syncopated second subject, whose rhythm pattern the players repeatedly anticipated, pushing it ahead of the accompaniments – however, the repeated fanfare figures on full orchestra fortunately restored order, with the horns and winds reliable in their turn.

Carter had obviously worked the players meticulously through the tricky rhythmic dovetailings of the development, so that the few strands that unravelled were easily pulled into place once more, the players achieving a fine cataclysmic ferment of interaction at the climax before the sounds gradually wound themselves back into the recapitulated allegro con anima, the winds doing the honours at first with distinction before the strings strode into the picture once again. The same problem of the strings’ syncopated melody recurred, but things were again righted by that same repeated fanfare figure of yore, which then led excitingly and defiantly to the movement’s coda – at the ferment’s zenith-point Carter gave his players extra elbow-room to hurl out the phrases expansively, before allowing the music to subside into a kind of brooding silence.

One of Tchaikovsky’s greatest symphonic slow movements followed, on its own terms a lyrical drama with a central episode leading to a magnificent motto-theme-led climax (that same motto theme makes an unscheduled return towards the movement’s end as well, which gives the drama extra “clout”) – but all the greater as a central part of an overall symphonic plan with each of its unifying strands fully activated. The scope of this review doesn’t permit a full description, but allows tribute to be paid to the conductor and players in this case who breathed life into every aspect of the structure – the darkly ample strings at the beginning, the magnificently-realised horn solo (played by principal Isabelle Faulkner) featuring the first of the themes that unify this movement, the oboe/horn duet that sounds the second and most-repeated theme, and the clarinet theme (played by Joseph Craggs, and backed up by Maya Elmes’ bassoon) that dominates the movement’s central episode until the motto theme’s reappearance blows it all out of the water. I felt in general that we got the best playing in the whole work from this movement, both with the soloists involved in the different themes and with the orchestra as a whole superbly committed towards expressing the different character of each of the sections.

Another concerted effort from the players was in the ballet-like Waltz movement which followed, one demanding particularly adroit instrumental counterpointing from both the different string sections and  a number of soloists, particularly the winds, all of whom performed like heroes, including the flute principal, Keeson Perkins-Treacher, and, as well, the trumpet principal, Lewis Grey, whose notes I clearly and cleanly heard at salient points.

Having already remarked that I thought the Symphony’s second movement contained the work’s best playing on the part of the WYO, I must confess that I can’t anywhere in my notes find reference to any mishap, failing or inadequacy in the orchestra’s full-blooded tackling of the work’s finale. Beginning with the words – “Finale – attacca!” I proceeded to nail my critical colours to my private mast (my notebook), and generally wax lyrical! – viz. “Splendid at the outset – brass forthright and confident, and winds the same! – the climax to the Intro is worked up well! The brass subsequently sonorous and oracular in their pronouncements!” That, of course, was the slow introduction….

Then came the allegro vivace (alla breve) – “Strings and chattering winds and brass do excellently well through the allegro’s opening charge! Winds are lovely and sonorous….strings also keep the melody buoyant! Brass resound the Motto splendidly! Winds give us plenty of swirling detail – the stamping theme is magnificent, underpinned by the timpani! Brass calls really nail the essential tumult, Winds and strings lean into the “Russian Dance: episode – the music gradually becalms, conductor holding the players nicely in check until the explosion restarts the conflagration….”

So far, so good! – the reprise of part of the finale elicited a comment, “Again the orchestra handles it all well – as before,  strings are fantastic! The brass and winds support the tumult! – the music rushes airborne towards the motto theme!”

Then came the Apotheosis – “Triumphal homecoming, great and heartwarming! Everybody playing their hearts out! What a coda! Mark is keeping it splendidly on the rails! Majestic right at the end!” And that was it! – a glorious and celebratory occasion! (I obviously knowed no more that afternoon!)

With those final in situ comments I rest my case! Well played, WYO!!

 

Orpheus Choir tackles JS Bach’s Mass for the Ages

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JS BACH – Mass in B Minor BWV 232

Brent Stewart (conductor)
Anna Leese (soprano)
Jenny Wollerman (soprano)
Maaike Christie-Beekman (alto)
Benjamin Madden (tenor)
Simon Christie (bass)
David Morriss (bass)

Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Jonathan Berkahn (harpsichord)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 29th April 2023

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor is one of those works that has taken on a life of its own largely independent of the intentions of its composer. The work was composed in separate sections at different times, the two opening sequences (Kyrie and Gloria) appearing as early as 1733, so that the composer could at that time demonstrate his credentials for a job as Court Composer in Dresden – unfortunately, it was a position he failed to secure. Fifteen years later he returned to these sequences and completed the work with the Credo, Sanctus, and the remaining movements – Osanna, Benedictus, Agnus Dei and Dona Nobis Pacem. No-one knows exactly what his intentions were, and there’s no evidence that the whole work was ever performed in Bach’s lifetime.

Musicologists however tend to the view that Bach wanted to set down a kind of compendium of his skills as a composer, an overview of his life’s work. Adding credence to this view is the extent to which the composer employs practically every church music style ranging from austere counterpoint to dance and operatic styles which he’d used in previous works, the result a compilation of matchless variety. However, probably because of Bach’s localised and therefore limited reputation during his lifetime, the work did not find favour in general terms until some way through the 19th century – the music wasn’t printed until 1845, and the first documented performance didn’t occur until 1859.

Of course the actual performance sound-world of Bach’s music in itself has undergone radically change in relatively recent times, spearheaded by a desire of musicians to attempt to reconstruct something akin to what the composer himself might have heard in his own performances of his music.  Consequently, at the present time no two scholars’, conductors’ or musicians’ interpretations of practically any baroque work will sound alike as current ideas concerning just what earlier eras DID hear can markedly differ. Available recordings today offer a fascinating range of practices,  from the still-conventionally-sized choral groups and orchestral ensembles to certain new-age minimalist one-to-a-part performances that stress clarity ahead of sheer visceral vocal impact as a prime concern.

The programme accompanying the Orpheus Choir’s and Orchestra Wellington’s performance here in Wellington at the MFC contained a note (uncredited, but almost certainly from conductor Brent Stewart) on certain performance practices followed in the music on this occasion. Probably the most radical in terms of frequency this evening was to reallocate certain sections of the chorus’s music to the soloists as well as enabling those soloists to join in with the sections of the choir that correspond with their particular voices. This very probably accords with Bach’s own practice of using small ensembles of 12-16 voices, and sometimes only solo voices, in certain of his cantatas. In such instances the reduced number of voices can highlight changes of mood and/or atmosphere in the pieces, and underline the clarity of the polyphonic lines.

The ensuing variety of vocal colours, textures and tones from the soloists in their freshly-allocated concerted roles certainly made for interesting results, even in the somewhat ungiving Michael Fowler Centre acoustic (which has never to my ears particularly favoured solo voice lines when compared with those heard in the warmer and more generous ambiences of the Town Hall). Generally the trio of female solo voices coped better, I thought, with the prevailing MFC conditions than did the males, though each of the latter had their moments in either their solo or duet numbers.

Tenor Benjamin Madden most ably partnered soprano Anna Leese in the enchantingly “give-and-take” lines of the  “Domine Deus” duet from the Gloria, though I thought he found the high tessitura of his later solo “Benedictus” aria  somewhat effortful in places. Bass David Morriss negotiated his runs in the “Quoniam tu solus sanctus” with growing certainty as the voice and Logan Bryck’s solo horn-playing gradually asserted a shared confidence. And fellow-bass Simon Christie made, I opinioned, a generally good fist (if just ahead of the beat, I thought, in places) of his demanding traversal of the difficult “Et in Spiritum Sanctum” from the “Credo”. As previously indicated, I did tend towards hearing the women’s solo voices more easily in these various choral “cribbings”  throughout.

Of the women’s voices it was as much a case of “vive la difference” as of varying amplitude of tones between them. In one or two instances I found myself lost in admiration for how well the singer was coping with the various melismatic demands as much as for the sheer vocal quality, a particular example  being Jenny Wollerman’s stirring duet performance with violinist Martin Riseley of the beautiful “Laudamus te”,  even at a tempo that set the pulses racing faster than I had been used to hearing, and having an exhilaration all of its own!

Maaike Christie-Beekman gave particular pleasure with her alto voice throughout, specifically in both her partnering of Alison Dunlop’s gorgeously-played oboe d’amore  in “Qui sedes a dextram Patris”, and even more feelingly in the “Agnus Dei”, her finely-chiselled tones beautifully augmented by the strings throughout. And the somewhat dry acoustic seemed to hold no terrors for soprano Anna Leese, whose tones set even the MFC precincts dancing in places, such as in each of the two sensuous duets within the work’s Part One, the “Christe eleison”, with an equally responsive Jenny Wollerman, and my out-and-out favourite duet, the “Domine Deus” from the Gloria, in which her deliciously insouciant, sinuous lines were matched by Karen Batten’s radiant flute-playing and Benjamin Hodder’s reliably responsive vocal partnering. Yet another duet, “Et in Unum Dominum” , featured Leese’s and Christie-Beekman’s voices spectacularly playing off against one another’s, their teamwork exemplary.

The Orpheus Choir’s numbers perhaps didn’t on this occasion accord size-wise with the resources Bach himself used, but one would have had to possess a heart of stone to remain unmoved by certain moments in the work whose resounding impact couldn’t have been achieved with fewer voices – the very opening Kyrie, for instance, and in the Gloria, the climaxes of “Gratias agimus tibi” with its steady, scalp-pricking accumulation of vocal tone at the end, and similarly with the  celestial jubilations at the beginning and the conclusion of “Cum Sancto Spiritu” , an effect also replicated by those cascading vocal triplets throughout the “Sanctus”, drenching us in all-enveloping tonal torrents!

Not that our enjoyment of the choir’s efforts was confined merely to the “spectacular moments” – Bach’s aforementioned penchant for exploring a plethora of musical styles brought to us such varied vocal expression as that characterising the deeply-concentrated and awe-struck “Et incarnatus est” , followed by a subtle change of mood and tone to one of sorrow and grief  for the ‘’Crucifixus”, with the ensuing “Et Resurrexit” giving, of course, the voices the chance to demonstrate their versatility with the change from desolate feeling to unbridled joy. And what better way to conclude the whole work than with the majesty of the “Dona Nobis Pacem”, Brent Stewart’s visionary direction of his forces inspiring the Orpheus’s utmost commitment towards and (as throughout the work) admirable technical finish in this valedictory expression of the composer’s faith and confidence in his Maker.

Up there with the chorus’ sterling efforts deserving of the highest praise were those of the Orchestra Wellington players, who in both solo and ensemble terms had under conductor Stewart’s direction a burnished brilliance which fitted Bach’s music like a glove. The numerous instrumental solos were delivered in full accordance with the music’s character in each case, ranging from the elan of Martin Riseley’s violin solo in “Laudamus te”, piquant elegance in the case of Karen Batten’s flute solos in both “Domine Deus”, and “Benedictus (the latter supported additionally by Brenton Veitch’s ‘cello), and heroic energies from Logan Bryck‘s horn in “Quoniam”, to Alison Dunlop’s  heartfelt oboe d’amore solo in “Agnus Dei”, and her mellifluous partnership with fellow-oboist Alison Jepson and bassoonist Jessica Goldbaum in “Et in Spiritum Sanctum”.  But as with the voices, the corporate energies of the players formed the bedrock on which this performance proved such a great success, to which Jonathan Berkahn’s harpsichord continuo provided unfailing sustenance. Whether it was a hushed ambience, a playful energy or a monumental magnificence required, the players in so many instances spectacularly delivered, the strings endlessly providing lyrical and rhythmic support, the winds beautifully colouring the different textures, and the brass and timpani frequently capping off the big moments with plenty of requisite tonal splendour and impact.

Having touched upon many of the exemplary features of the performance from those concerned, it seems appropriate to underline the fact of the event’s circumstances having had various teething problems – included was a kind of “historical” aspect to the undertaking, relating to postponements of the event due to COVID restrictions going back as far as 2020, recurring in both 2021 and 2022, and then finally easing sufficiently to allow this 2023 performance! To add to these difficulties came a clutch of more recent glitches involving indisposition of scheduled singers and players, resulting in belated replacements for the original bass singer and horn-player (and very nearly for one of the female soloists as well! In recounting these mishaps, director Brent Stewart did, he told me, wonder whether some “higher power” really didn’t want this performance to go ahead, almost right up to the scheduled starting time on the day, when what he termed “apocalyptic traffic” added to the stress and strain (and caused a ten-minute delay to the concert’s actual “kickoff”!)

When thinking back to the performance, with its memory continuing to churn and resound in my head, what remains for me is a sense of the music being propelled by its many committed performers with boundless energies and in beguiling varieties of ways.  All of these qualities arguably lead the work’s listeners to realms which encourage singular manifestations of purpose in human existence, as many as there are different people. All of it left me with a profuse gratitude to Brent Stewart and his forces at so readily bringing their abundant skills to bear on this enthralling  music.

Magnificent Endurance

Posted on by Anne French

NZSO – Enduring Spirit: Bloch and Shostakovich

Aaron Jay KERNIS (1960–), Musica Celestis
Ernest BLOCH – Schelomo
Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony NO 10 in E Minor, Op. 93

Nicolas Altstaedt, cello
Sir Donald Runnicles, Conductor
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 28 April 2023

This was always going to be a big concert, with Shostakovich 10 programmed alongside Bloch’s remarkable work Schelomo. It was also contrabassoonist David Angus’s last concert with the NZSO, after 42 years with the orchestra, so it was fortunate that he had plenty to do.

The Kernis work was unknown to me. The affable Runnicles, who spent several minutes briefing us in, was surprised that Kernis and his music were unknown to most of us.  Musica Celestis means ‘music of heaven’, and the programme notes made references to the music of the mystical Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and to Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Runnicles described it as ‘mystical, medieval, magical, and modern’. It’s an attractive work, which began life as the slow second movement of Kernis’s String Quartet (1990), and was later re-scored for string orchestra. We got the full-fruit string orchestra version (eight desks of first violins, including Co-Concertmaster Giulia Brinckmeier, who took Vesa-Matti Leppanen’s chair for the first half of the programme).

Having sung some of Hildegard’s works, I’d have to say that, despite its grace, it did not remind me of her or her soundworld. It opened with the faintest hint of modal tonality and long, slow chords with a rather glittering tone, but apart from a very slow start that builds to a passionate, flowing crescendo, with a full-throated, warm orchestral sound, I failed to spot Hildegard or indeed anything remotely medieval. The next section was based on a single low note from the basses (‘almost RVW’, say my notes), via tremolo strings, and then silence, from which ultimately emerges a beautiful melody on the viola. The melody is passed to the first violin to complete, and the work draws to a graceful close.

The second work on the programme was Bloch’s remarkable Schelomo, for solo cello and orchestra. Before the concert started, Runnicles passed the microphone to the cello soloist, Nicolas Altstaedt, who told us something about the circumstances of composition of the work, the last movement of Bloch’s Jewish Cycle. He originally conceived the work as a setting of texts from Ecclesiastes for voice, but after meeting the cellist Alexandre Barjansky, Bloch decided to use the cello to represent the voice of King Solomon. Barjansky’s cello, Alstaedt told us with some excitement, was now in the possession of a local musician, Rolf Gjelsten, from the New Zealand String Quartet – something he had learned only the day before. (I understand that Gjelster and Altstaedt met backstage during the interval, so that the soloist could make the acquaintance of the very instrument that had inspired the composer.)

The work is scored for a large orchestra: three flutes, two oboes, cor anglais, two B flat clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, tambourine, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, tam tam, celesta, two harps, and full strings. In this case, there were 8 desks of first violins, 7 desks of seconds, 6 desks of violas (including Guest Section Principal Caroline Henbest), 5 desks of cellos (led by Pei-Jee Ng, Guest Section Principal and an old friend of the cello soloist, and Pei-Sian Ng, Guest Associate Principal), and no fewer than 8 basses. Bloch would have been delighted with these forces.

I have heard the Bloch work before, and it is always deeply moving, but I have never heard it played as Nicolas Altstaedt played it. It was as though he had a direct connection to the composer. There was no sense of ‘performing’; rather, it was as though these painful, moving passages of music were being drawn directly from Bloch, through the cello, directly to our ears.  Bloch said that in composing it he ‘listened to an inner voice, deep, secret, insistent, ardent…’, and that is exactly how we received it.  It was a privilege to listen to such a powerful work so well played.

And after all the applause, there was an encore. I am no lover of encores. I would rather hold the work in my heart for a little longer than have it over-written by some short crowd-pleaser. In this case, I wasn’t too perturbed. Nicolas Altstaedt decided to give us a movement from a sonata by Jean-Baptiste Barrière (1707-1747), a renowned French Baroque cellist, which he played as a duet with Pei-Jee Ng, the Guest First Chair of the cello section. It was delightful.

The last work on the programme was Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. After the emotional depth of the Bloch, I hardly felt fit enough to listen to it. It is a monumental work at 52 minutes. There is a huge first movement; a terrifying second movement (the demonic portrait of Stalin, who had died only months before it was premièred); the beautiful and hopeful third movement, featuring the D-E flat-C-B motif that indicates Shostakovich’s name (D  SCH, in German notation), a waltz, and a beautiful horn motif; and the dancing and ultimately triumphant final movement.

The orchestra rose magnificently to the challenge of the music. At times Runnicles stopped conducting, simply allowing the solos to unfold. There were wonderful solos from Robert Orr (oboe), Michael Austin (cor anglais), Sam Jacobs (horn), Bridget Douglas (flute), Johanna Gruskin (piccolo), Rachel Vernon (bass clarinet) – and, of course, the estimable David Angus on contrabassoon.  This was the perfect repertoire to round off his NZSO career.  The percussionists were terrific, notably the sinister side drum, which adds such menace to the mirthless Stalin music, and there was some truly memorable tam tam playing. At other times, especially in the 3/4 passages, the conductor nearly jumped off the podium as he danced along with the music.

I had the feeling that the orchestra was enjoying working with Sir Donald Runnicles. He is an understated conductor (compared with, say, Gemma New, who has directions to give for every bar, and gives them in a very expressive manner). But he achieved some wonderful effects.  This was a magnificent and very moving concert.

As a footnote, there is a charming interview with David Angus on RNZ Concert. Bryan Crump (the Afternoons presenter) visits him in the workshop in which he machines parts for his motorcycles as well as fettling various bassoons and contrabassoons. The interview ends with Angus riding off into the sunset. It can be found here: https://www.rnz.co.nz/concert/programmes/three-to-seven/audio/2018887086/the-lowdown-on-dave-angus

 

The Bach Choir of Wellington – ambitious and imaginative ANZAC concert

Posted on by Roger Wilson

DURUFLE –  Requiem
– and  music for ANZAC Day.

The Bach Choir of Wellington
Directed by Shawn Michael Condon

Sinéad Keane – mezzo soprano
William McElwee -baritone
Lucas Baker – violin|
Eleanor Carter – cello
Douglas Mews – piano & organ

Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Saturday 22 April 2023

(Guest reviewer – Roger Wilson)

The Bach Choir, an important component of Wellington’s musical life for the past 55 years, is in good heart. Under the astute direction of Shawn Michael Condon the overall sound made by 50-odd voices is well integrated, intonation and the balance  between the parts good. It was easy to see that the choir has been well rehearsed with considerable attention to detail, but it has to be said that in the notoriously cavernous acoustic of Wellington Cathedral of St Paul it was sometimes more a matter of seeing people doing all the right things rather than always hearing the benefits. A pity, because this was an enterprising and interesting programme. Were it not for needing the organ close by it might have been worth turning the pews round and placing the choir in the gallery against the west wall.

The first half of the concert comprised a selection of pieces selected with themes appropriate for ANZAC Day, remembrance of the fallen, contrition, a longing to escape the horrors of war, praise of the saviour, grief for the separation from a beloved, a reflection on mortality and jubilation at the vision of a better world post-War. Some of these works  were very  familiar, especially Elgar’s We will remember them, a setting of Binyon’s For the Fallen, and Parry’s account of Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, others new to most listeners. None was more effective than contemporary composer Thomas LaVoy’s The Last Letter, a poignant  farewell written by an American Civil War soldier to his dearly loved wife. The performance was much enhanced by the addition of a baritone soloist, William McElwee, which ensured that the all-important text was declaimed with a clarity difficult for the choir to achieve  in the circumstances. Another highlight of the half – even occasioning spontaneous applause – was the fifth movement, Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus,  of Messiaen’s visionary Quartet for the End of Time, composed and first performed in a German prison camp. The duet for cello and piano was beautifully played by Eleanor Carter and Douglas Mews who observed the difficult instruction ‘Infiniment lent, extatique’ scrupulously. In the  preceding Parry work Lucas Baker’s solo violin also sounded beautifully in the space.

Perhaps less successful, despite the choir’s best efforts, was Tallis’ motet O sacrum convivium, anglified to I call and Cry to thee, where the clarity of the musical lines was harder to distinguish. Another living American composer, Craig Carnahan, supplied a wonderfully exuberant Armistice 1918, War poet Siegfried Sassoon’s Everyone suddenly burst out singing,  to end the first half with enthusiasm.

The second half of the concert was Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem, really the only work for which the French composer is remembered. It was commissioned by the collaborationist Vichy régime in 1941 and completed in 1947 so it is also very much wartime music. The original commission was for a symphonic poem but Duruflé decided instead on a requiem, eventually dedicated to the memory of his father, but it might well also be for the fallen in World War II. A church musician all his life, Duruflé used a great deal of thematic material from the Gregorian chant of the Mass for the Dead, skilfully interwoven with his own harmonies. The ghost of Fauré and his Requiem with the whiff of incense are never far away. Both composers deliberately avoid the terrors of the Day of Judgment, such a feature of other Requiems, stressing rather tranquillity and rest, and the configurations of both French Requiems, for all their differences, are also similar, even to the apportioning of solo voices (Offertorium, Pie Jesu and Libera Me). Duruflé’s work, conceived for a large church, lent itself  to Wellington Cathedral’s particular properties and such is his skill as an organist that one does not miss the full orchestral version. With its sinuous Gregorian lines, the choral singing of the Requiem, underpinned by the masterful Douglas Mews on the organ, worked convincingly in this cathedral, and the Bach Choir did composer and conductor proud. William McElwee took the baritone solos tidily and Sinéad Keane sang the Pie Jesu with stylish commitment.

This was an ambitious and imaginative concert, despite some reservations about the building, well conceived and executed to a good-sized audience.

Fundamentally thrilling – Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Anne French

Orchestra Wellington – Fundamental Forces

Carl Philipp Emanuel BACH – Symphony in E Minor
Igor STRAVINSKY – Violin Concerto in D
Josef HAYDN – Symphony No 39 in G Minor, ‘Tempesta di Mare’
Sergei PROKOFIEV – Scythian Suite

Natalia Lomeiko, Violin
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei, Music Director
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 15th April, 2023

The concert was billed as ‘Fundamental Forces’, but the disparate collection of works confused me. What could a symphony by CPE Bach possibly have to do with an early work based on a ballet by Prokofiev?

Having missed the pre-concert talk, I was none the wiser by the time the small orchestra (2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 horns, plus strings, with Jonathan Berkahn on harpsichord) took the stage. The stage had already been set for a much larger work, with percussion stations at the back of the orchestra for 8 percussionists, and three sets of cymbals at the front of the choir stalls.  The little orchestra was surrounded by many empty chairs. That kindled a feeling of anticipation.

My companion (who had attended the talk) helpfully whispered in my ear that the programme was ‘all about the beginning of emotionalism in music’.

The CPE Bach symphony was a delightful work, stylishly played. On the basis of his work with Wellington Youth Orchestra (2002-2007), I had always considered Marc Taddei a late Romantic specialist, preferring Mahler to pretty much everyone else. His work with Orchestra Wellington has made me review that opinion.

Although the orchestra used modern instruments at concert pitch, Taddei had his head in the period, the last days of the Baroque, when new ideas were exerting their influence. Taddei’s programme notes quoted Mozart: ‘Bach is the father; we are the children’, and explained that Mozart was not referring to the great JS Bach, but his second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714-1788). The symphony was written in 1759, nearly a decade after the death of Bach père, and already you could hear ideas and approaches that the three-year old Mozart would later make his own. The symphony is in three movements, lasting 12 minutes, which simply made me wish it had been longer. According to Taddei’s notes, Bach fils used to say, ‘Play and compose from the soul!’ His aesthetic approach came to be known as the ‘Sensitive Style’. This symphony has plenty of musical ideas and is full of terrific effects, such as abrupt changes of dynamic within a big dynamic range, and the most alluring hesitations, when everyone stops playing, then suddenly resumes with the next set of brilliant notions.

The second work in the first half was Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in D of 1931, with a big orchestra and the Russian violinist Natalia Lomeiko as soloist.  Born in Novosibirsk, Lomeiko made her debut with the Novosibirsk Philharmonic Orchestra at the age of seven, and was appointed Professor of Violin at the Royal College of Music in London in 2010 (surely whilst still a child, as she looks about 25). She won the Michael Hill International Violin Competition in 2003 and the Premio Paganini in 2000. The Paganini is one of the most important violin competitions in the world. My high expectations climbed higher when my violinist companion whispered that Stravinsky was not a violinist, and didn’t realise that the opening chords of the concerto were unplayable. ‘Watch her left hand!’ he said.

I watched her left hand, but even knowing that Stravinsky had created a remarkably tricky chord, stretching two and a half octaves, from D4 to E5 and (yikes) up to A6 did not detract from its effect. Stravinsky had been commissioned to write the concerto for the Polish violinist Samuel Dushkin. Dushkin, so the story goes, recoiled in horror at the sight of the chord when Stravinsky wrote it on a napkin over lunch but found, once he tried it at home, that it wasn’t quite as hard as he thought. Just as well: Stravinsky called the chord the ‘passport to the concerto’, and used it to start each of the four movements.

The concerto is scored for full wind (piccolo, 2 flutes, 3 clarinets, 2 oboes, cor anglais) and brass sections (3 bassoons plus contrabassoon; 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, and tuba), as well as timpani and bass drum. Not surprisingly, it was noisy at times, and the gorgeous sound of the solo violin was a bit overwhelmed. (Indeed, I overheard a confident remark on the stairs on my way out that it was ‘under-powered and unimpressive’.)  I disagree – the orchestral texture was at times as lush as you’d expect from that line-up, but was mostly kept thin so that the violin’s presence was heard. That thinness, together with the rhythms, gave it a wonderful vitality. There was some stunning bassoon playing from principal Jessica Goldbaum and colleagues, and lovely clarinet solos from Nick Walshe and team on B flat, A, and E flat clarinets. The work is full of surprises: rhythmic; harmonic; textural. I especially enjoyed the audience’s reaction of surprise at the end of the second movement: a collective, involuntary ‘Oh!’ Once again, at 22 minutes, it was all too short. I could have listened to it all over again. But no. Instead the soloist played a movement from a Bach partita as an encore, as emotionally rich a reading as anyone could wish. What a player!

After the interval, a second pair of works. This time, an early Prokofiev work was paired with (or introduced by) Haydn’s Symphony 39, ‘Tempesta di Mare’. The Esterhazy orchestra, for whom it was written in 1765 (a couple of years after the CPE Bach symphony), was big enough to run to two oboes and four horns, which made the tempestuous first and fourth movements lots of fun. This was one of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang (‘storm and stress’) symphonies, a precursor of Romanticism. Again, interesting and unexpected harmonies, clean rhythms, and a wide dynamic range. The opening movement was busy and energetic, but with odd silences – as though the wind was building, but with sudden lulls. The Andante second movement, E flat minor and in 3/8, was delightful. No horns or oboes, but full of expressive pauses. The Menuet and Trio were in contrasting minor and major keys, with gorgeous accents from the horns and lower strings. and charming duets in the Trio between horns and oboes. Back to a 4/4 allegro molto for the Finale – fun and fast and all too short at 16 minutes.

Finally, the moment the percussionists had been waiting for: the Prokofiev Scythian Suite. The work was commissioned in 1914 as a ballet ‘on prehistoric Russian themes’ by the impresario Diaghilev from the 23-year-old Prokofiev, fresh out of the St Petersburg Conservatory. Prokofiev was then known for his dissonant works for piano, impossible to play by anyone but him.  But Diaghilev didn’t like what Prokofiev wrote, so he turned it into a suite instead, retaining the blood lust, demonism, and ritual sacrifice.

The scoring for this work included 8 horns, as well as the aforementioned 8 percussionists, contrabassoon, bass trombone, tuba, lots of trombones and trumpets, and two harps. It must cost a fortune in extra players which accounts, perhaps, for its not being performed very often. That is a huge pity. I’d rather hear the Scythian Suite again than another Rite of Spring or even another Firebird.

The work opens at an electrifying fff (it has to be said that Taddei literally ran to the podium, as though he needed to catch the orchestra before they took off, which added to the drama), and doesn’t let up until all the cymbals and every other bit of percussion kit have been played, very loudly. That’s not to say it lacks beauty. The third movement, ‘Night’, featured shimmering muted strings, tuned percussion, and ravishing harp chords. But if (as I do) you like loud, rhythmically exciting music with lots of unexpected effects, then this work is for you. It’s only 20 minutes long, which meant that it stopped all too soon.

So there you have it. A fantastic concert made up of unusual works tied together by an interesting idea. The audience applauded with gusto. The subscribers do love Taddei and his extraordinary programming. I walked out into the night with a big grin on my face , as did – I noticed – most of the performers.

Mirror of the World – Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Gustav MAHLER – Symphony No. 3 in D Minor
Robert WIREMU – Waiata “Tahuri koe ki te maunga teitei”

Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano)
Wellington Young Voices & Choristers of Wellington Cathedral of St Paul Children’s Choir
Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
Karen Grylls and Robert Wiremu (chorus directors)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Gemma New (conductor)
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 31st March 2023

“Symphony is like the world – it should contain everything!” – words spoken by Gustav Mahler during a famous encounter in Helsinki in 1907 with his near-contemporary, the Finnish symphonist Jean Sibelius. The idea of what constituted a “symphony” had brought forth vastly different responses from both men, Sibelius having declared his attraction to the “severity” and “profound logic” of symphonic writing (though he had, in fact, only just freed himself from a Tchaikovskian kind of romantic utterance evident throughout his first two symphonies). Mahler, by comparison, had hit the ground running as a symphonist with his idea of the form representing an expansionist, all-encompassing kind of aesthetic expression.

This “world view” of Mahler’s had been evident in each one of the eight symphonies he had thus far completed – and it was the massive Third Symphony of 1896 which to this day seems to be the most unequivocal expression of this philosophy (averaging about 1hr. 45m. in performance, it’s the longest in duration of all Mahler’s symphonies). While working on this piece twelve years before his conversation with Sibelius, Mahler had remarked to a friend that “to call it a symphony is really incorrect, as it does not follow the usual form – to me,  the term “symphony” means creating a world with all the technical means available”.

The composer had originally attached a programme giving each of the six movements separate titles underlining the work’s ultra-pantheist vision, the details of which he eventually suppressed before the work’s first performance, but which still appear in various subsequent programme notes (as was the case here)  – Mahler tended to draw back from his frequent initial euphoria regarding any such programme attached to a work, commenting in a note to a critic on this occasion, that “no music is worth anything if you first have to tell the listener what lies behind it…….what he is supposed to experience in it – you just have to bring along ears and a heart and – not least – willingly surrender to the rhapsodist!”. While I heartily agree in general terms, I still can’t in this instance resist the fascination of reproducing (again!) the composer’s underlying thoughts regarding the music…….

Mvt. 1  Pan Awakes, Summer Marches In
Mvt. 2  What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me
Mvt. 3  What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me
Mvt. 4  What Man Tells Me
Mvt. 5  What the Angels Tell Me
Mvt. 6. What Love Tells Me

Mahler in fact at first planned a seventh movement (“What the Child Tells Me”), but instead reworked the material as the finale of his Fourth Symphony, further underlining the connections and cross-references that especially abound in his first Four Symphonies, particularly with his use of either words or melodic settings of the same taken from the German folk-poem collection Das Knaben Wunderhorn which had appeared in the early 1800s. The work’s fifth movement “What the Angels Tell Me” uses one of these Das Knaben Wunderhorn poems ,”Es sungen drei Engel” (Three Angels sang), while the previous movement “What Man Tells Me” uses a text from  Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Also sprach Zarathustra, ”O Mensch! Gib Acht!” (O Man! – take heed!).

Interestingly, we were treated on this occasion to a similar kind of “seventh movement” as a prelude to the symphony, a waiata, written by Voices NZ Artistic Advisor Robert Wiremu especially for this particular concert, and performed by the different choirs, conducted by Karen Grylls. The waiata’s melodic lines drew from different impulses and resonances in Mahler’s work, a fast rhythmic  counterpoint set against a floating choral, the words delineating whakapapa –  maunga, awa, moana – and equating with the latter composer’s salutations via the symphony’s opening theme to the famous flowing melody of Brahms’ finale to his First Symphony.

It now seems a far cry from the days when Mahler’s music was generally not regarded favourably, and needed the advocacy of people like John Hopkins here in this country, who in 1959 had to put up with opposition (“this boring music”) from the Broadcasting Service Directorship to what was the first National Orchestra performance of a Mahler Symphony (No.4 in G). Hopkins staunchly persisted and Mahler’s music came through, with others such as Uri Segal, Franz-Paul Decker, and more recently Pietari Inkinen and Edo de Waart securely establishing the NZSO’s credentials across all of the composer’s completed symphonies as a “Mahler orchestra”.

Having witnessed some of these earlier ventures (my list by no means an exhaustive one!) and being able to readily recall the impact made by a number of these performances, I was delighted that Gemma New chose such a quintessential work in the orchestra’s recent history with which to mark her concert tenure’s beginning as the NZSO Principal Conductor. Franz-Paul Decker’s was, I think, the first Mahler Sixth I heard live, underlining for me the ironic twist of New’s stunning achievement here with the same orchestra and music when set against the memory of Decker’s by now historic comment that he found women conductors “aesthetically unpleasing”!

All part of the on-going ebb and waft of impression, opinion and reaction among people, a process to which New herself has appeared more than equable in the interviews with her I’ve read. Her concern seems, first and foremost, the music – and here she’s certainly at one with the composer, who, in one of my all-time favourite anecdotes concerning his aforementioned all-embracing world vision, once went as far as admonishing the young Bruno Walter, who was visiting him at Steinbach, Upper Austria at the time of the symphony’s composition, for looking around at the alpine scenery! – with the words, “Don’t bother looking up there – it’s already all been composed by me!”

For Mahler at the time of writing, it had “almost ceased to be music…..hardly anything but the sounds of nature”. New and the orchestra wholeheartedly plunged themselves into this awe-inspiring world right from the work’s beginning, with the silences as baleful as the upheavals of sound. I was particularly taken here with the ferocity of the ‘cellos’ attack in their upward-rushing figures, seeming to burst out of the louring gloom created by the brass’s and percussions’ elemental tread (with David Bremner’s sonorous trombone playing simply a voice for the ages!).Throughout the epic of the opening movement’s unfolding came these incredible releases of energy, by turns soulful, playful, jaunty and menacing – a world that “contains everything”, as Mahler told Sibelius that day – before driving inevitably towards a joyfully unbuttoned, almost savage frenzy of exhilaration at the movement’s end – no wonder the MFC audience were, despite convention, transported to spontaneous applause in response!

After the orgiastic energies of the Symphony’s First Part we enjoyed the relatively limpid lyricism of the second movement’s opening, oboe and strings here creating a “woods-and-fields” world of dream-like  interaction, whimsically enlivened by rhythmic and dynamic contrasts which brought the nature-world to pulsating life, all most evocatively shaped by New and her players. The third movement was begun just as innocently, though in a more playfully evocative way at the outset with  impulses and gestures associated with the animal kingdom characterised most bewitchingly by the musicians, winds and muted trumpets leading to various rumbustious activities.  How diverting and magical, then, was the “posthorn” sound ringing out from the distance (trumpeter Michael Kirgan doing his thing evocatively and near-faultlessly off-stage) – perhaps a fateful impinging by man on the natural world? A second posthorn call was followed by a sudden “cry of anguish” (humankind identified by nature as a threat?) before a kind of desperate rumbustication brought the movement’s curtain down.

Almost as enigmatic as the materialisation of the Earth-Mother Erda in Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” was mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke’s appearance ( strikingly clad in silver) during those last few precipitate bars of the previous movement,  ready to intone Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Midnight Song” from Also Sprach Zarathustra – one felt completely “drawn into” the mystical beauty of it all, as singer and players unerringly placed their tones into the firmament of those strangely vast spaces. What an array of sounds! Such distilled beauty in places such as with “Die Welt ist tief” (The world is deep”) from both voice and instruments, in particular the horns (led by Sam Jacobs) and the winds (led by Robert Orr) – and then, for me, a “lump-in-throat” archway of vocal loveliness from Sasha Cooke, at the words “Doch all’ Lust will Ewigkeit…” (But all joy sings eternity…) – a glorious moment!

If such beauties weren’t disarming enough, the subsequent movement “What the Angels Tell Me” featuring both soloist and the different choirs put the music’s enchantment beyond all doubt, as the sounds from those voices drew our listeners’ sensibilities skywards and into the celestial regions – the teamwork between the different groups of voices, the soloist and the orchestra was exemplary, and those “bimm!-bomm!s” with which the work finished kept resounding in this listener’s mind’s ear long after the concert was concluded.

How perfectly natural and unassuming it was for the singers, soloist included, to quietly sit down even while Gemma New was signalling to the orchestra to begin the great adagio movement which concluded the work (Decker had, I remembered, kept the choir members standing right to the symphony’s end,  to their,  and the audience’s discomfiture!).  The transition made, we settled back to take in the splendours of this much-lauded piece, regarded in some circles as the greatest slow movement written since the time of Beethoven! Subscribing to such a view is beyond the scope of this article, my notes focusing instead on the rapt purity of the playing of the opening string paragraphs, and the cohesion between the sections, each “voice” seeming to be in complete rapport with the others. As the movement unfolded and its purposes by turns placed accord, confrontation and/or conflict to the forefront, the playing in all sections moved surely between serenity and incandescence – horns and strings, for example, in the movement’s first confrontational passage six or so minutes into the movement, the flute, oboe and horn lines stimulating the richest of responses from the strings a few minutes later, to be followed by  the movement’s great midway watershed of tonal outpourings as the strings dare the brasses to match their full-blooded exhortions – there were no holds barred, either here, or as the symphony built up to its final climax – this was Mahler,  after all, where there are no half-measures, and in which New and her players fully understood and expressed that understanding nobly and sonorously.

A truly notable leadership debut for Gemma New, then, and the beginnings of a partnership which on this showing promises much for the orchestra and for its supporters – best wishes to all regarding its on-going success!

Lucia di Lammermoor – desperate people do desperate things……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Opera presents:
Gaetano DONIZETTI – Lucia di Lammermoor (1835)
(Libretto by Salvadore Canmmarano after Sir Walter Scott’s “The Bride of Lammermoor”

Conductor: Tobias Ringborg
Wellington Opera Chorus
Orchestra Wellington
Director: Sara Brodie
Cast: Normanno (Jordan Fonoti-Fulmaono)
Enrico (Phillip Rhodes)
Raimondo (Samson Setu)
Lucia (Emma Pearson)
Alisa (Hannah Ashford-Beck)
Edgardo (Oliver Sewell)
Arturo (Emmanuel Fonoti-Fulmaono
Assistant Director: Waitahi Aniwaniwa McGee
Set Design: Marc McIntyre
Costume Design: Tony DeGoldi
Lighting Design: Rowan McShane
Chorusmaster: Michael Vinten
Bridget Carpenter – Stage Director
Theresa May Adams – Production Director

St.James Theatre, Wellington,
Saturday, 25th March, 2023

Gaetano Donizetti’s opera “Lucia di Lammermoor” is one of the most famous of all musical stage creations on account of a single sequence in the work, the memorable “Mad Scene” which takes place midway through Act Three. It’s an on-stage happening whose haunting, chilling impact can’t help but dominate the average audience member’s memory and overall impression of the entire opera. On this count alone, Wellington Opera’s latest production at the capital’s resplendent St.James Theatre over a week of performances would have almost certainly satisfied and thrilled every audience member, from the wide-eyed opera-beginner to the most avid opera-goer alike.

The scene depicts in effect the aftermath of an enforced marriage, that of the opera’s heroine, Lucia (Emma Pearson), to a man she does not love, Arturo (Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono) – at the height of the post-nuptial celebrations among the wedding-guests, the new bride appears at the doorway of the banqueting hall covered with the blood of the husband she has just murdered in their chamber with a knife. She is in a delirium, imagining that she can see the man she really loves waiting for her, so she can join him at the altar, before reliving her rejection by him and her feelings of imminent death, and finally telling him she will wait for him in Heaven. The onlookers are awe-struck, while those directly responsible for enforcing the marriage are overcome with grief and guilt. No operatic scene in the entire repertoire surpasses this one in depth of feeling; and this performance certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of its sheer impact, visual, aural and emotional.

Part of what gives the scene such poignancy is the near-visceral involvement of everybody else in the story with Lucia’s situation – in fact even her lover, Edgardo (Oliver Sewell), who so brutally rejected her in a previous scene is a “presence” here, foremost in her delirium and to the exclusion of everybody else in her mind, apart from a brief reference to the ghostly fountain-phantom of the story’s Act One and the “cruel brother” of Act Two. Director Sara Brodie had obviously marshalled her forces here to a nicety, a kind of acme of dramatic potency, the peak of which was expressed by soprano Emma Pearson’s masterly performance as the deranged Lucia (I still remember the latter’s similarly heart-rending, if differently constituted “Gilda” from a “Rigoletto” some years ago at the St.James with NZ Opera). Her “Lucia” was one whose overall focus and care for detail across the spectrum of characterisation was near-impeccable (as was the orchestral playing which via conductor Thomas Ringborg’s direction and Karen Batten’s flute-playing gave us constant pleasure) – and if Pearson’s most stratospheric top notes lacked the ultimate amplitude, the sense of a character abandoning all caution and reaching for the heights was nevertheless thrilling.

Though I thought nowhere else in the production so surely reached those same heights, a certain determined unanimity of purpose played its part in the stage action scaling those lower slopes that led up to the opera’s aforementioned climax.  I noted a mention in one of the programme’s foreword presentations that this production was set in “our own country’s Scottish-influenced Southland”, but couldn’t for the life of me equate any on-stage happening with such a location. And the set struck me as being a fairly utilitarian affair, a quality which straddled various of the story locations – castle grounds, a fountain, various rooms, a great hall, ruins, a graveyard – and with different lighting providing various contrasts, though again, hardly evoking any kinds of specific proximity to places such as Gore, Winton or Balclutha.

The supporting characters fit all the more readily into these all-purpose scenarios, with both the already-mentioned Oliver Sewell’s Edgardo, and the character of his chief adversary, Lucy’s brother Enrico (Philip Rhodes) creating suitably strong and purposeful figures central to the storyline. I thought Sewell brought an appealing tenderness to his character’s love for Lucia, making an effective contrast with his hostility towards the latter’s family, in particular Enrico, and adding the extra ballast of his fury at believing that Lucia had spurned him for another! Central to this Machiavellian plot is, of course, Enrico, with Philip Rhodes brilliantly amalgamating his character’s desperation at the state of the family fortunes with his hatred of Edgardo and his marriage-designs upon Lucia! What fertile soil in which to sow the musical seeds of an operatic plot!

Just occasionally I found both of their characters’ stage movements a trifle unmotivated, wanting them to move less at times and let their voices go more with the music to express their emotions and motivations and their faces “engage” the audience more readily –  there wasn’t much menace between Sewell’s Edgardo and Philip Rhodes’ Enrico in the marriage contract confrontation scene, just noise and bluster, though the first Act Three scene in the Wolf‘s Crag ruins generated rather more deadly intent. As with all the characters, their individual focus seemed to sharpen more noticeably as the evening proceeded.

The singers in smaller roles fulfilled their functions more than adequately, seeming to me to “fill out” their personas as the drama evolved – I came to really like Samson Setu’s Raimondo, especially his stirring warning to the guests in the Banquet Hall concerning the imminent and shocking arrival of Lucia. Because I wasn’t sitting especially close to the action I confused the two brothers Jordan (Normanno) and Emmanuel (Arturo) Fonoti Fuimaono when the latter arrived on stage as Lucia’s prospective husband in the opera’s second act! Each brother sang so splendidly in his role, I doubt whether either would be offended at this mix-up on my part. Another reliable vocal presence throughout, and an imposing figure in the drama was Hannah Ashford-Beck who sang the role of Alisa, Lucia’s nurse.

The chorus was another group whose contribution for me “grew” in intensity throughout the evening – they survived a moment of shaky ensemble early on, getting ahead of the conductor’s beat for a measure or two, at “Come vinti da stanchezza” (during their “reporting back” to Enrico on catching sight of an intruder in the grounds, in the opening scene). Easily their best singing and stage presence was during the famous “Mad Scene”, where their support of the singer and their contribution to the situation couldn’t be faulted.

I wasn’t at all surprised at the excellence of Orchestra Wellington’s response to the music of the drama throughout the evening, with conductor Tobias Ringborg getting playing of a high class, throughout, by turns dramatic, lyrical and atmospheric (I’ve already mentioned Karen Batten’s flute solos) – however, I was pleasantly surprised to see NZ String Quartet violinist Monique Lapins’s name as the orchestra leader on this occasion (what one might term luxury substitution – with, of course, no reflection upon the equally wonderful Amalia Hall, I hasten to emphasise!)….

In conclusion, congratulations to director Sara Brodie, in particular for being the presiding genius in enabling us opera-goers such a gripping first-hand experience of that unforgettable Act Three scene, the description of which I began this review with – a precious recollection!