Spirit of Youth effervesces and overflows at Wellington Youth Orchestras’ combined 2026 concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestras present: –

BERLIOZ – “Roman Carnival” Overture
SIBELIUS – Violin Concerti in D Minor Op.47
BORODIN – “Polotsvian Dances” from “Prince Igor”
SAINT-SAENS (arr. Isaac) “Bacchanale” from “Samson et Dalila”
COPLAND – “Hoedown” from “Rodeo”
ARTURO MARQUEZ – Danzon No.2

Ambrose Tarrant-Matthews (violin)
Mark Carter / Chris van der Zee (conductors)
Wellington Youth Orchestra
Wellington Youth Sinfonia

Memorial Hall, Alan Gibbs Centre
Wellington College
Dufferin St., Mt. Victoria, Wellington

Saturday, 17th October 2026

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

“Spirit of Youth” was this concert’s banner heading on the frontispiece of the programme I collected at the Memorial Hall’s entranceway – an illustration worth reproducing, here, as it  conveyed the overall atmosphere, excitement and enthusiastic participation of the young musicians taking part in this event. It also marked instances of notable brilliance. both individual and collective, throughout the concert,  particularly  from the featured soloist, violinist Ambrose Tarrant-Matthews, in his remarkable performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, one of the acknowledged “great” works of the violin repertoire.

As conductor Mark Carter was to point out to us, the achievement rested as much on the orchestral support given their soloist by the young orchestral players throughout the concerto! In a speech of introduction to the work’s performance, the conductor confessed to us that, in the concerto competition which produced today’s “winner” , of the four works nominated by each of the entrants, he had secretly hoped that the winning work WOULDN’T be the Sibelius , simply because the technical difficulties of the orchestral part for the conductor and players were, to put it in a nutshell, proverbial!  That said, the overall resulting achievement of these performers in presenting the work was all the more remarkable ! – and indeed, I was astounded at the performance’s splendid ‘give-and-take” qualities, let alone at the soloist’s enthralling playing!

The programme seemed on paper to tend more towards the “brilliant” than the “lyrical” in the choice of items – with the exception of the slow movement of the concerto, the items promised action and excitement over beauty, lyricism and depth of feeling. But my observation gradually lost ground as the performances proceeded – not only did the playing of this music snap, crackle and sparkle when required to do so, but had in places markedly significant moments of gentleness and lyrical quality.  To begin with, once the opening quicksilver flourishes of Hector Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival” Overture  were negotiated, the whole first episode of the work was taken up by one of the composer’s loveliest inspirations, a melody “sung” firstly by the cor anglais (nobly and securely played, here!), and then taken up by the strings – this was, in fact  the “love duet” from the opera “Benvenuto Cellini”. And again taken from opera, one of the most famous sequences from Alexander Borodin’s “Polotsvian Dances” from his opera “Prince Igor” is the enchanting “Fly on the wings of the Wind” melody sung by the captive slave women towards the end of the Second Act (a melody most famously used in a Broadway musical “Kismet” and popularly known by the title “Stranger in Paradise”) – again, an achingly beautiful sequence in an otherwise lively piece!

These two items shared the concert’s first half with a performance of the aforementioned Sibelius Concerto given by the WYO’s Concerto competition winner, Ambrose Tarrant-Matthews. From the beginning, I was able to feel the work’s distinctive “northern” atmosphere, the soloist’s line pure and intense, the accompanying string ostinati properly haunting, and the wind figurations echoing the soloist’s laying-out of the musical landscapes. The violin’s solo passagework “caught” the lines’ urgencies and were splendidly answered by the orchestra, with the winds beautifully blending  Tarrant-Matthews’ violin addressed both the double-stopped harmonies and the octaves with great aplomb, catching also the tender character of the octave spannings just before the great orchestral allegro, building up to confident and assertive brass-and-timpani statements sending the music on its purposeful forward journey in great style! A couple of stray notes in the following passagework didn’t lessen the player’s command of the recitative-like statements, but highlighted his willingness to take risks inherent in the music-making. A confident bassoon solo brought the soloist back to the work’s recapitulation of the opening theme, colouring the textures in suitably rustic fashion with an oboe solo and beautifully warm clarinets in thirds – we had by this time been taken into the composer’s sound-world firmly and securely by the performance. And the plunge into the ferment of activity over the final pages of the movement was exhilarating in its “thrills and spills” fronting up to the work’s virtuoso demands exerted upon soloist and players!

The second movement’s lovely wind-led introduction brought out some warm-hearted tones from Tarrant-Matthews’ violin, the horns and lower winds intently accompanying the soloist’s meditative tones. Strings and brass spearheaded a powerful challenge, met fearlessly by the solo violin, the movement resolving the heartfelt fervencies of the lines with tenderly-voiced responses, whispered strings and floated crepuscular horn tones adding to the soloist’s almost self-confessional utterances.

The well-known description of the finale as a “polonaise for polar-bears” came into force at its beginning, with riotous rhythmic exchanges criss-crossing the dance, Tarrant-Matthews again throwing himself into the fray, enjoying the interactions of his violin with the orchestra, and eschewing a sense of well-drilled order in favour of an exuberance of energies, the sense of spontaneous pleasure of engagement  to the forefront in the performance, not forgetting touches of dishevelment in places! The soloist was accorded a most deservedly enthusiastic reception at the end, to which he responded in the time-honoured manner with some appropriately-presented Bach, an elegantly-crafted and warmly-voiced performance of the composer’s Fuga/Allegro movement from the Sonata for Violin in G Minor BWV 1021.

The following riotous concluding strains of Borodin’s aforementioned Polotsvian Dances brought an interval to us, after which the orchestral numbers were extended by the addition to the band of the Youth Sinfonia players, as a new conductor, Chris van der Zee, took the podium. His repertoire choice  merrily maintained the excitements and momentums of the concert’s first half, beginning with Camille Saint-Saens’s eponymously-titled Bacchanale from his opera Samson et Delila (in an arrangement by Merle J.Isaac). I liked Chris van der Zee’s approach to the music, not rushing the rhythms off their feet at the outset, but allowing the orchestral trajectories to build up the intensities as the excitement of the dance generated increasing tumult and abandonment. The players gave him snappy rhythms and generous tones, enabling the music’s exotic colours to enhance the ambiences of the revelries – a terrific performance!

A “same-but different “ kind of agglomeration of excitements coloured the next piece, Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown” from his ballet “Rodeo”, a work I knew well at first hand, having myself played in a performance in my local orchestra in Palmerston North a number of years ago  (and I remembered how the syncopations of some of the percussion parts were the very devil to get right at the time!). These young  players seemed to take any such difficulties in their stride, by comparison, and a riotous performance ensued! The gala atmosphere of the occasion was enhanced by the conductor, who turned to us before he had begun the music and rehearsed us in a single corporate audience “Yee-haa!!” to be uttered boisterously by us at a moment in the piece when he would “cue us in!”. Well, we did our best, and it was great fun! – and the players also adroitly managed the composer’s somewhat peculiar hiatus at one point depicting the music “running down” like a machine losing its power and stopping completely, before suddenly springing into life for a few more bars brought a more abrupt and final ending!

Something I didn’t know at all (either work or composer) was the programme’s final item – a piece called Danzón No.2, by a Latin American composer, Arturo Márquez. It began elegantly and sinuously, featuring a beautiful clarinet solo, and other winds and brass joining in, with percussion and piano providing additional sensuous, ambient atmosphere. I enjoyed the crisp attack of the instruments in the sped-up middle section of the music, the strings impressing with spot-on unanimity and the brasses giving the music a tingling raspiness contrasting with a quixotic piccolo solo (and I loved the trombones’ occasional touch of vulgarity – hopefully that’s the right word!!)A piano-led section sensuously slowed the music down, before the strings “leaned” into the rhythmic trajectories, with the help of lively counterpoints from the brasses, including a raunchy trumpet solo!  At the height of the dance the ‘cellos insouciantly “twirled” their instruments as if demonstrating a “new order” of  freedom or nonchalance or self-determination – it  expressed something of the concert’s ease and relaxed enjoyment in between the moments of excitement and exhilaration the musicians had so readily and enjoyably displayed throughout a marvellously-wrought afternoon’s music-making!

 

Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms – music of free and sonorous measure!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RICHARD STRAUSS
Der Rosenkavalier – Suite Op. 59
Four Last Songs Op. posth. (texts by Hermann Hesse and
Joseph von Eichendorff)

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Symphony No. 3 in f Major Op. 90

Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Sir Donald Runnicles (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday, October 2nd, 2026

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

What a glorious concert! – firstly, in the space of less than an hour and across the span of two otherwise unconnected compositions, we were caught up in a contrivance of enchantment, thanks to composer Richard Strauss and his characteristic depictions of life and love in both human and fairy-tale  terms. First was an orchestral suite from his opera “Der Rosenkavalier”, one straightaway drawing candid and sympathetic references to youth and age in the various depictions of the work’s key moments – and then, with the composer’s final composition, his “Four Last Songs”, came the tranquil inevitability of both nature and human life taking their full interactive courses.

We enjoyed, in the concert’s opening, the exuberance of youth in the Prelude to the opera  as the young hero, Octavian, the title’s “Knight of the Rose” makes passionate love to his mistress, the beautiful Marschallin (Mrs. Field-Marshal)  making use of the convenient absence of her husband, while knowing all along that she will in time lose her”knight” to a younger woman. The story quickly addresses this circumstance, as Octavian is sent away by the Marschallin to be the Bearer of the Silver Rose of Betrothal to a young girl, on behalf of the “real” would-be-suitor – but in the process Octavian himself falls deeply in love with the intended bride-to-be, Sophie, who, as per usual in these situations, reciprocates.

Trouble inevitably ensues between the gallant Rose-bearer and the prospective Bridegroom, the boorish Baron Ochs, who’s then wounded in a brief skirmish between the two, after which Octavian himself sets a trap for the profligate suitor (returning to the scene in the disguise he had already affected as the chambermaid whom the Baron had previously ogled on a previous visit to the Marschallin!) Anticipating his “good luck” via a sexy waltz tune the foolish Baron is of course subsequently exposed, disgraced and sent packing, while the remaining  “trio” of would-be-lovers express in a famous three-way exchange the situation’s complications and resolutions. Octavian and Sophie are left together alone to sing a final duet which proclaims their union and ends the opera – though the suite’s conclusion hearkens back to the riotous music accompanying Baron Och’s none-too-graceful withdrawal from the scene.

Despite the opera’s title, the story’s central character is the Marschallin whose story, briefly told, epitomises  a kind of “Frauenliebe und Leben” scenario though one vastly different to Robert Schumann’s famous song-cycle – the Marschallin, in contemplating her affair with her young lover Octavian recalls her own earlier experience as a young girl, with, like Sophie, its arranged marriage, and her eventual turning to affairs for emotional fulfilment.

Following the suite we were then taken to the world of Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” whose opening setting also suggests the trappings of young love, if through the poet’s older eyes, and with the return of the Spring in “Fruhling” used as a symbol of love’s renewal. In the same symbolic fashion the words of September farewell the Summer as Autumn turns the leaves to gold as each one falls from the tree; while the third song, Bein Schlafengehen (Time to Sleep) equates the day with a life’s work, and sleep while obeying life’s “deeper laws” of rest, allowing the soul to be set free. How infinitely touching, therefore, is the final song Im Arbendrot  (At dusk), where a life of shared love is epitomised by pairs of woodwinds imitating the two skylarks taking flight as the music inexorably surrenders to nightfall, and to “Stiller Friede” (Silent peace), with the song’s final line “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (Can this perhaps be death?)

All of this was the course taken by the concert’s first half – exuberant and resplendent at the beginning, as young love has every right to be, and splendidly and quixotically plotting and achieving its course throughout the “Rosenkavailer” music. Conductor Sir Donald Runnicles vigorously and viscerally encouraged the orchestral depictions of the lovers’ extra-marital congress (what wonderful, orgasmically-whooping horns!), even if the  “afterglow” ironically took us abruptly to the scene of the Rose’s Presentation by Octavian to Sophie with all due pomp and ceremony.  This prompted some of the most exquisite writing (winds, harp, celesta and muted violins) ever to be crafted for opera – the playing here was as exquisite and heart-rending in its beauty as any performance I’ve previously heard, those famous “rose chords” variants of the theme first heard played by the strings at the opera’s beginning after the opening horn call!  They of course represented the Marschallin as much as they did Sophie, depicting moments of time that resembled  glimpses of eternity in their “transported” nature, though subject, like everything else,  to time’s passing.

The undoing of the boorish Baron, victim of his own salacious instincts, was unreservedly expressed by his lascivious waltz-tune, outrageously distended with self-satisfaction in places, and, here, spared no indulgence by conductor Runnicles with his players, to our great delight! Then came the opera’s final scenes, firstly the great vocal Trio of self-abnegation whose lines were given heartfelt emotional juice befitting each character’s conflicting emotion and resolution, tender solo violin, oboe and horn lines gradually subsumed by the full orchestral panoply at the climax – but just as moist-eyed for me was the effect of the lovers’ final duet, punctuated by those haunting “rose” chordings once again!  Here, there was just enough closure to allow the music to jump outside the opera’s strict chronology and finish with the ever-imperturbable Baron’s exit music, the character bloodied but nevertheless unbowed, as demonstrated by the animal vigour of the orchestral playing of yet another, more exuberant waltz-tune, conductor and players  pulling out, as the saying goes, all the stops  in a spectacularly brilliant orchestral display.

Love’s youthful dream was then taken on a life-journey, a perspective reaching fulfilment in the aging composer’s “Four Last Songs”, a product of his final, reflective years, and the result of two of his passions, intertwined in his love for his wife, Pauline and for the soprano voice (as Pauline de Ahna, she was herself an accomplished operatic soprano). Written the year before Strauss’s death, and written for the great Kirsten Flagstad, these songs had to wait until 1950 to receive their first performance by Flagstad, with Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in London’s Festival Hall – incidentally, the title of the work and the order of the songs were not the composer’s but contrived by the publisher.

With so many previously-admired performances sounding in my ears I was obviously interested with how I would react to Madeleine Pierard’s singing of such an iconic work (with any much-recorded “classic”, always a fascinating experience!). Suffice it to say that I didn’t wish at any time for a single note or phrase of hers to be delivered otherwise, so much did I “grow into” her voice’s ambient presence, generating colour and tonal responses which for me “went with” each of the songs’ structural and emotional journeyings. As I’ve observed on previous occasions I’d heard and observed Pierard, she “owns” so profoundly the text of anything she sings – as was the case here, across the emotional gamut of the four “same-but-different” songs. Both singer and conductor moulded the energies of the words of “Fruhling” (Spring) with a freshness and clarity that grew with the song’s blossoming, in places like “von deinem Duft und Vogelgesang” (Of your scents and the songs of birds) and then in the radiance of “Wie ein Wunder vor mir” (like a wonder before me). as nature reveals its charms.

The yearning melancholy of the next song, “September”, vied with autumnal beauties, so that one felt the sadness of the singer’s  “Der Garten trauert” (The garden mourns) and also later, at “terbenden Gratentraume” (dying Garden dreams), and, just before the beautiful horn solo at the song’s end, with “müdgewordnen Augen zu” (tired eyes closed). I also enjoyed the gentle, “out of the ether” opening of “Beim Schlafenhegen” (While going to sleep), leading to NZSO leader Vesa-Matti Leppanen’s gorgeous violin solo, and the singer’s rapturous response, beginning with “Und die Seele unbewacht” (And my soul, unobserved), and relishing “…..im Zauberkreis der Nacht” (in the magic circle of the night)…….

As for the final Eichendorff song “Im Abendrot” (At Dusk) (the others were settings of Hermann Hesse), this was a gorgeous, spaciously- delivered “passage into eternity”, from the positive, life-affirming orchestral opening – and the confidently-floated  words “Wir sind durch Not und Freude gegangen Hand” (We have gone through Joys and distress hand in hand),  the music transcendent in its timeless beauty as the voice acclaims “O weiter, stille Friede” (O vast and silent peace!) before both vocal and instrumental tones are magically transmorgrified, it seems, into a timeless state of non-being  the voice becoming “as yesterday’s sev’n thousand years” with the words “Ist dies etwa der Tod?”  (Could this perhaps be death?)– everything so rapturously calm and eventually still as sleep overtakes, and life ebbs away. In the ensuing silence before the applause I suddenly felt that it couldn’t have been played and voiced better than what we heard on this occasion, and that we were blessed by it all.

Strauss’s unequivocal celebration of life and acceptance of death made the music of the concert’s second half sound more than usually enigmatic – this was the Third Symphony of Johannes Brahms, a work I’ve always regarded with a degree of bemusement after each encounter, as I’m invariably left with a disconcertingly different impression of  “what this music might be about!”– this is hardly a revolutionary or jaw-droppingly unique response to music and its performance in general, of course, but in the case of this work it’s an ongoing process of interaction. Here, my encounter with Sir Donald Runnicles’s vitally-urgent performance of the opening movement brought out the piece’s drama more than usually for me, and especially with the first-movement repeat observed for good measure (not always!). I especially enjoyed the dramatic and deep-toned swirling aspects of the music’s central section, led by the horns, whose heroic tones repeatedly put one in mind of Robert Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony (also a “No. 3!”).

The work’s two middle movements emphasised the work’s lyrical qualities, the Andante swiftly and deftly dancing its way through a pastoral setting, with delicious exchanges between the winds and lower strings at the beginning, and moments of full-throated song vying with circumspectly “signalling” notes, as if the music was giving itself directions and go-aheads! – the Poco Allegretto movement which followed  was more serious stuff, a long-breathed theme soulfully intoned firstly by the ‘cellos, and then the rest of the strings, and taken up also by a “wind choir of oboe, flute and horn. These had also a disconsolate-sounding contrasting theme which the strings attempted to “cheer up”, but to no avail – it was  left to the solo horn to try and save the day, returning to the opening long-breathed theme, and emboldening the oboe to ”give it another try”!  More discussion led to the strings’ rendition of the melody (gorgeous-sounding!) – but the movement’s highlight was the concerted, heart-bursting effort of the whole orchestra in giving sonorous, hymn-like voice at the end to the melody’s complete span (climbing from C to B-flat) and returning to its beginning – almost like a solemn act of homage to music itself!

Came the finale, something of a mini-drama in itself, with its sotto-voce opening on strings and bassoon, almost like undercover preparations being made for an oncoming conflict, with a theme which first appeared in the Andante movement, and here used as a kind of “warning” for the heavy brass to sound the alarm before the first shots were fired (or the invaders came over the wall!). The mood was intrepid, but flexible – sharp-edged and syncopated in its minor-key  aspect, and warmly heroic in the major, alternating the moods and energies to what seemed almost like exhaustion point, before quietly drifting back to the symphony’s beginning, with its distinctive F-A-F chord progressions. For the composer those notes represented the words “frei aber froh” (free but happy) – Runnicles’  vividly-characterised performance with the NZSO players readily gave, I thought, the composer’s delight in such feelings, however enigmatic, their full and sonorous measure!

 

 

Wellington’s VU NZ School of Music’s Piano Extravaganza Concert lives up to its name

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series

An NZSM Piano Extravaganza, presented by four of Victoria University School of Music’s advanced piano students –

MICHELLE CORVERA
MOZART – Piano Sonata in G Major KV 283 – Mvts II (Andante) and III  (Presto)
SALINA FISHER – Moths in the Light (2007)
HAILEY ZHOU
MOZART – Piano Sonata No 17 in B-flat Major  KV 570 – Mvt III (Allegretto)
SCHUBERT – Impromptu D 935 Op.142 – Mvt.IV (Allegro scherzando)
JUNWEI CHEN
BEETHOVEN – 6 Variations on “Nel cor piu non mi sento” – Wo0 70
LISZT – Paraphrase de concert sur “Rigoletto” (Giuseppe Verdi)
TAL SHIRI
MOZART – Piano Sonata No, 9 in D Major KV 311 – Mvt.I (Allegro con spirito)
RAVEL – Miroirs No. III – “Une Barque sur L’Ocean”
BRAHMS – Piano Sonata No.1 in C Major Op.1 – Mvt.IV (Allegro con  fuoco – Presto non troppo ed agitato)

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, 30th September, 2026
Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

A stimulating and heart-warming experience – four of the Victoria University School of Music’s most talented and proficient young piano students performing for us in turn, each demonstrating the various aspects of their musicianship in terms of technique, personality, ownership of the work and communication with the audience. What I particularly enjoyed regarding each of these musicians was their individuality – in each case a singularity of response was evident to the different aspects of performance which served each performer in different ways and indicated their strengths, with occasional indications regarding aspects that might benefit from some attention.

We were given no information regarding each performers’ background, and none concerning their status as regards the courses they were pursuing  – whether they were mid-stream, close to finishing, or even post-graduate wasn’t made clear, which actually enabled our receptivities to respond directly and unmitigatingly to what we heard. The students did have the opportunity to talk briefly to us before each presentation, but the microphone facility at St.Andrew’s, almost never in my experience producing a clearly-focused result save for a very few cases (they did manage to introduce themselves), wasn’t up to the task in this instance, leaving us having to rely on what each of the pianists did with their actual music-making rather than with their words – which is how it should be, anyway!

In general I though the repertoire chosen was enterprising and (in a couple of cases) even daunting!  – however, I recall long ago hearing a brilliant young pianist give a recital in which he dispatched a Schumann work of the utmost difficulty with ease in the more virtuosic passages while having less to say about the work’s poetry and thoughtfulness. In complaining about this to an older and wiser friend, I was told to enjoy the performance as that by a “young artist”, expressing something “unique and precious” for the moment, whatever the insights of succeeding years might bring. It was advice that has stayed with me in my listening to the playing of young musicians to this day…..

The concert was begun by Michelle Corvero with Mozart – the Andante movement from Piano Sonata No. 5 in G major – I thought her phrasing at the outset brought out the liquid flow of the music so beloved by the composer, and observed enough ear-catching dynamic variation to show an awareness of the line’s use of different voices. Now and then there was a slight lumpiness in the phrasing as if the music was made slightly unsure of its characterisation – but the player’s overall mode of “discourse” during the music’s exchanges was nicely observed.  She plunged into the Finale’s Presto, bringing out the music’s “Sturm und Drang”aspects with elan, keeping the music’s energies to the fore, and undeterred by the occasional spurious detailing, while working hard at the almost Haydnesque plethora of energies in the music. Mozart’s music is, of course, that which gives the performer nowhere to hide, but the impulsive energies of the playing carried the day. We heard her at her best in the second item, Salina Fisher’s Moths in the Light, bringing into the light an almost surreal piece which contrasted different kinds of delicacies, from the opening’s shimmering  figurations, through the darker suggestiveness of the middle section, and then realising the evanescent texturings of the concluding bars – an enchanting evocation in both conception and performance.

Hailey Zhou was the next pianist, one whose remarks regarding the music she was about to play I couldn’t hear at all, but whose playing interested me as soon as she touched the piano. She also began her segment of the programme with Mozart (good to hear student pianists tackling this seemingly straightforward but deceptively difficult repertoire!) –  the final Allegretto movement of Piano Sonata No.17 in B-flat K.570.  This movement, one of Mozart’s most exploratory, even wayward in places, opened simply and affably, before asserting its more quixotic character with occasional minor-key nudgings and a second-subject group featuring droll chromatic descents that make one wonder where the composer is taking us – all of which was played with a winning combination of great spirit and near-nonchalant ease. Her presentation’s companion piece was one of Schubert’s Impromptus, Op.142 No.4 in F Minor, D.935, also a somewhat characterfully quirky piece, one whose singularities were given a touch of impetuosity in the playing that I instantly responded to. She negotiated the mood-change in the swirling middle section with beautifully-articulated  phrasings, barring an occasional touch of “ahead-of-the-notes’ impatience here and there, but the quixotic lead-back figurations that returned us to the main theme were given with real elan – an absorbing performance!

Next was Junwei Chen, whose opening item varied the presentation with some Beethoven, albeit in a somewhat post-Mozartean mood with his Six Variations on “Nel cor piu non mi sento” WoO 70 , the text of a duet from Giovanni Paisiello’s opera La Molinara (The Miller-Woman). The pianist’s seamless-flow legato still managed to exude plenty of character, with his voicings between the hands – a lovely minor-key episode brought a deftly-etched sense of real personality  to the music-making, helped by the filigree detail (and I really enjoyed the variation with the decorative left hand!) – it was all playing of considerable charm! His other piece chosen couldn’t have been more different in some aspects, save for a comparable strength of personality. This was Liszt’s famous Rigoletto Paraphrase (after Verdi’s opera), playing which unhesitatingly brought out the music’s multifaceted qualities of characterisation, theatrical atmosphere and technical display, giving each of these a requisite energy, refinement and colour. Both the individual character  portraits and the more concerted interactive sequences were beautifully gradated. As was remarked by my aforementioned friend long ago when considering the playing of a brilliant young pianist we both encountered, this was similar piano-playing that joyfully expressed youthful exuberance in keeping with the present, and which will return deeper qualities in times to come – that said, I still registered the refinement of the more reflective section of the music just before the delivery of the tumultuous cadenza-like finish to the work – most impressive!

In some ways the playing of Tal Shiri, the last of the concert’s four pianists, had a similar kind of impact, perhaps even more so than did the Liszt/Verdi piece – the performer’s choice of Brahms’s tumultuous finale to his First Piano Sonata –  was obviously chosen to show off the pianist’s athleticism as much as his more musical responses. Having said this we were still gobsmacked by the playing, though I would have preferred to have hear the first movement of the Brahms rather than the last.  And this was in the wake of two other pieces, the first being Mozart’s opening movement, Allegro con spirito, of the Piano Sonata in D Major K.311, followed (with far too short a pause in between for me) by Ravel’s astonishing Une Barque sur L’Ocean from his Miroirs – this was quite a programme with those two pieces alone! Perhaps the Mozart movement’s  “Allegro con spirito” marking accentuated the sense of “a musician in a hurry”, here, accomplished though the playing was. More seriously, the Ravel piece was disconcertingly upon us before we knew where we were!  Having said that, the playing was compelling in its vivid detailing – a storm-tossed oceanic voyage making for a very exciting, in places, hair-raising a voyage.  The pianist’s descriptive patterning was sharply-etched throughout, though the variety of touch differentiated between structural (clearly-wrought) and colouristic (fascinatingly varied) – when it came to the ostinato-like patternings gradually leading up to the storm, the effect was satisfyingly visceral and inexorable.

IN all, a remarkable display, reminding me all the more of the exuberances of youth and its special and unique qualities!

50th Anniversary tribute to Benjamin Britten (and his heroes)

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Twelfth “Comfy Concert” at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”
(Benefit for Arohanui Strings)

Chamber “Pot-Pourri” Ensemble
Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) / Helene Pohl (violin)
Sophia Acheson (viola) / Robert Orr (oboe)

JS BACH – Suite No. 2 in D MInor, for solo ‘cello
Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

BENJAMIN BRITTEN – Phantasy Quartet for Oboe and Strings
Robert Orr (oboe) / Helene Pohl (violin)
Sophie Acheson (‘viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART –   Quartet for Oboe and Strings in F Major
KV 370 –  Robert Orr (oboe) / Helene Pohl (violin)
Sophia Acheson (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Point Jerningham, Wellington

Saturday, 26th September, 2026

Somehow I had missed out on hearing the previous “The Long Hall” concert in Roseneath, one that had featured a new string quartet ensemble – the “Amada Quartet”, who, on all accounts had played a wonderful programme that  included a composition for String Quartet (“One vision” 2026 – world premiere) by one of the group’s members, violinist Lorna Zhang.  The ensemble also performed an excerpt from Schubert’s monumental C Major String Quintet with cellist Rolf Gjelsten, as well as, for good measure, a complete Mendelssohn string quartet (No.6 in F Minor Op. Posth.80).  So, I was determined to not let this latest concert pass me by, and especially as the “Pot-Pourri Ensemble” was incorporating the services of none less than oboist Robert Orr and violist Sophia Acheson for the occasion, and featuring the music of Benjamin Britten in this, his anniversary year, a fleeting fifty years since his death!

This concert was also part of an ongoing “benefit series” for the Arohanui Strings, whose patron is, of course Helene Pohl – the Arohanui’s representative who warmly welcomed us to the concert made a point of telling us that the Trust had enlarged its tuition options to include woodwind, and including, of course, the oboe, giving an extra kind of “hands-on” relevance to today’s repertoire, which included Britten’s youthful “Phantasy” Oboe Quartet.

Written when he was nineteen and still a student at the Royal College of Music in London, the work’s first appearance was marked by a 1933 BBC broadcast, and played by its dedicatee, oboist Leon Goossens. The interest generated enabled the Quartet to be taken the following year by Goossens to an international contemporary music festival in Florence, where its reception established Britten’s reputation as “an important new voice” both at home and abroad.

In this concert at The Long Hall the work was appropriately framed by music from two other composers whose music had already exerted a profound influence upon Britten, and which would continue throughout his creative life. One was JS Bach whose own Suites for solo ‘cello were a direct inspiration for Britten’s similarly constructed works, for the instrument, all composed for the Russian ‘cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten was also a noted interpreter of Bach’s music as a conductor, having directed and recorded performances of works such as the Brandenburg Concertos, and the St,John Passion.

The other major influence was Mozart, whom Britten considered to be the greatest of all composers, and whose music he performed both as a conductor and a pianist – his own music was steeped in Mozart’s own methodology, keeping the latter’s scores on his own piano, and frequently referring to them for inspiration. His most well-known definition of what he considered the older composer’s genius was his remark that “Mozart showed how to be “new” without destroying what came before” – which accounted for his love for the Mozart operas, especially in the light of the music of a third “genius” revered by Britten, that of Henry Purcell. But it was the elegance and mastery of Mozart’s Oboe Quartet that here bore out Britten’s admiration, and which we were to hear in his own youthful Quartet featuring the same instrument.

Beginning the concert with Bach was cellist Rolf Gjelsten, reminding us in his introduction that the Second Suite was in the “Requiem” key of D Minor, which had given rise to the suggestion that the work as a whole was conceived as a “tombeau” (a musical composition commemorating a person’s death, taken from the French word for “tomb” or “tombstone”) one that paid homage to the composer’s first wife, Maria Barbara, who had unexpectedly died in July of 1720 after thirteen years of the couple’s marriage. A further, for us an unexpectedly “other-worldly” touch then came with the cellist’s disclosure that his beautiful instrument had actually been made in 1705, and therefore predated the music he was about to play!

A sombre and dignified Prelude opened the work, the three-note opening phrase a kind of springboard for the movement’s slow dance, delivered here with incredibly-varied nuance and spontaneity of expression within the framework of the piece’s subdued trajectories, reaching a kind of spaciously-conceived series of triple-stopped chords, each one a deeply-measured breath suggesting a calmness of sorts, relating to a state somewhere between grief and acceptance. The Allemande (from a French word, meaning “German”,)  was next, a livelier, more discursive piece filled with what seemed like entirely unpredictable detours and diversions, and with double-stopped “left hanging” harmonics that teased the ear awaiting resolution – the piece’s “second half” seemed even more exploratory than the first, which added to the fun of listening! Here in the playing was energy, poise, circumspection and abandonment, and all for our pleasure!

As if the Allemande was just a warm-up, the following Courante was even livelier in its fleet-fingeredness in places, and contrasting with the irruptions of emphasis that occasionally “pinned” the line to the greater whole, with a by-product of the irruptions the occasional “rogue” tones flying off the bow strings in sync with the piece’s delight in a certain abandonment! What a difference with the Sarabande, the movement in this work most frequently giving rise to the idea that Bach composed it in his late, beloved Maria Barbara’s memory  – it seemed, at the outset, to express the inexpressible, with whatever emotion being mooted held here in a gentle but firm grip of patience, the playing making reference to sorrow that had been lived with, borne, and accepted.

Thank goodness for the relief of Minuets, one often feels! – this one here kicks up its heels with a modicum of relief, though it’s well-grounded with those triple-stopped chords frequently inviting a more insistent and deliberate accent, making every subsequent note of the line a kind of “reaction”, nothing taken for granted. And how winsome and circumspect the Menuet II sounds in tandem, freer in expression and with a definite “looking on the bright side” kind of air, only to surrender with a shrug to the more assertive twin’s return!  And for anybody who thinks Bach’s music lacks wit, the Gigue would have been a mordant treat! – the droll opening, under Rolf Gjelsten’s fingers, had an initial kind of amiably-suggestive girth which then threw off its weight as it indulged in part-mischievous, part assertive running passages, often with a drone-string-accompaniment which reflected in places an amusing dual-purpose expression, especially in the dance’s second half.

We were thus well-grounded for the Britten work which followed, and which brought violist Sophia Acheson and oboist Robert Orr to the platform to join with our two regular Pot-Pourri Ensemble members, Rolf Gjelsten and violinist Helene Pohl. Robert Orr helpfully set the scene for us, describing, and then with his colleagues’ help, demonstrating a number of what he called “signposts” in the work whose registering could, he suggested, enhance our enjoyment of the piece!  The very opening, a march seemingly approaching from a great distance, begun by the ‘cello, and gradually swinging into full view (hearing?!) was capped by a lyrical oboe melody whose repetitions made us almost want to get up and stroll about with the music! This led to the players’ lines effervescing and excitedly running in all directions, strings arco and and pizzicato, and oboe staccato and enthusiastically playing fanfare-like calls as the strings s gurgled in resonating accord!

There have been numerous instances of composer-genius manifesting itself at an early age – and this work seemed astonishingly confident in its organic, non-formulaic use of its material. One’s ear was constantly led on by Britten’s adventurous detailing recognisably part of a whole but used in adventurous-  sounding ways – the work’s middle sections presented us with an almost Mahlerian variety of treatment of thematic material, much of the mood pastoral in an “outdoor” sense, but subjected to spontaneous mood-changes which could disturb and ruffle the sensibilities. Robert Orr’s plangent oboe tones led me in places later in the piece to think of woodland glades of the kind that abounded in Greek mythology – and I wondered whether the young Britten had already discovered these tales of antiquity long before he thought of writing his better-known Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, for solo oboe. In particular I thought of the story of Pan and Syrinx, and the god’s pursuit of the nymph, only to lose her to the water nymphs who transformed her into a thicket of marsh reeds.  In his later work Britten’s solo oboe depiction bore the title “Pan, who played upon the reed pipe which was Syrinx, his beloved”. Listening to it again afterwards led me to wonder whether its lamenting, long-breathed lines could be said to show a certain kinship with the younger composer’s earlier treatment of the instrument’s gentler, more reflective moments…..

After this we had the inestimable pleasure of listening to a work which surely played an inspirational part in Britten’s writing of his own youthful masterpiece – Mozart’s similarly-scored Oboe Quartet, which Robert Orr characterised as a piece that would have at the time pushed the instrument’s capabilities to the limit. He cited as an example the passage in the finale where the composer simultaneously employed two time signatures – 4/4 for the oboe and 6/8 for the strings! Simply the thought of it sounded precariously daring, as did the players’ brief demonstration!

Mozart wrote this work in Munich, while visiting the city to supervise the production of his first “opera seria”, Idomeneo, somehow finding the time to reacquaint with the virtuoso oboist, Friedrich Ramm, whom he’d previously met in Mannheim in 1777, as well as to write him a concerto! With this new work Ramm was able to display his considerable skills and showcase the “improvements” made to the instrument of the day. From the beginning, the sprightly articulation allied to the “give-and-take” between the instruments gave all of us considerable pleasure,  In places the phrasing,  slightly more insistent than on a much loved recording I’ve owned for years, had the effect of sharpening my reactions to all the more engaging effect! With music one knows well the slightest divergencies from those much-listened-to recorded performances often renews and refurbishes the shapes and nuances of the sounds so remarkably (and more often than not, pleasurably!).

Strings alone began the second movement, the oboe adding its plaintive, long-breathed tones to the fourth bar, the lingering notes making for a somewhat melancholy mood at the outset, and enabling the music to float freely and expressively before gathering in the lines once again – a remarkable sensation. Just as magical was the oboe’s recitative-like solo which similarly made the aural spaces its own without severing the music’s actual flow, one still sensing the other players tacit connection with those same lines……

All the more delightful, then, was the spirited activation of the finale, whose joie de vivre was realised by. firstly, the oboe-led opening, and then the gregarious strings, into which company the former couldn’t help but rejoin! The infectious “schwung” of the trajectories here gave the impression of whole bodies, rather then merely arms, fingers, lungs and breath, all helping to make the music! An exciting moment was the “polyrhythmic/polymetric” sequence , during which the oboe “danced” through the strings’ 6/8  passages in a sprightly 4/4,  reconnecting in time for the much-heralded ascent to a top note, one that, most divertingly, seemed here more “imagined” than taken before the player was nonchalantly riding the recapitulated wave of the main theme once again! (Despite all of this, I feel sure the dedicatee Friedrich Ramm was spared a score  that was decorated with coloured inks and (humorously?) insulting remarks of the composer’s making, as did the hapless horn-player Joseph Leutgeb have to put up with when performing HIS concertos! – perhaps it WAS all in good fun!) Here, the humour was rather more subtly applied, with Robert Orr giving his last three notes of the work (marked forte in the score) a deliciously gentle tone  of voice.  It seemed to sum up the afternoon’s delightful and affectionate  music-making in a nutshell, like worlds seen in grains of sand, and a composer with a handful of simple notes expounding a truth that touches the heart.

Wellington City Orchestra spinning musical tales of adventure, love and vengeance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra at St.Andrew’s

NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV – Antar” Symphony (1875)
ALEXANDER SCRIABIN – Piano Concerto in F-sharp Minor Op.20 (1896-97)
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK – The Golden Spinning-Wheel Op.109 (1896)

William Berry (piano)
Andrew Atkins (conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrews-on-The -Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 19th September, 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

None of these three works are likely to be the ones that the average concertgoer would straightaway think of if asked to name pieces of music associated with each of these three composers – and yet they’re all entirely worthy of performance in their own right, and have things of interest to tell us about their creators. Of these, the work of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) is probably the least widely known, with perhaps the grandiose symphonic poem for orchestra  “Poem of Ecstasy” having achieved a measure of fame (some of it in the form of notoriety at the time of its creation) with its “mystical” associations, representing “escape” from the physical world and union with a “vast cosmos”! In more recent years the composer’s keyboard works, represented most comprehensively by his nine Piano Sonatas, are increasingly being played, along with his single (and eminently approachable) Piano Concerto.

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) is of course the composer of the much- and rightly-loved  orchestral work “Scheherazade”, though he has other “classics” next to his name such as “The Fight of the Bumble Bee”  (and who WOULDN’T take time out to enjoy a spanking performance of “Capriccio Espagnol”? – yet another piece to add to an indispensable list of “Spanish” music NOT written by Spaniards!)  Closer to the composer’s home is a work I would definitely be including, the magnificent “Russian Easter Festival Overture”, which STILL sends shivers down the back of my spine in places, even after listening to it for more than fifty years! And then we come to the music by Rimsky scheduled for today, which bears the title  “Antar” – whether a symphony or, like “Scheherazade”, a “Symphonic Suite”, it’s difficult to decide; and the composer was of little help when it came to actually designating the work, himself fluctuating between both “symphony” and “ symphonic suite” (more when we get to the performance!)

The third of these enterprising concert choices for today was a work by Antonin Dvořák, one of a number of “symphonic poems” the composer completed upon returning to Bohemia from New York, where he had served for three years as Director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. Obviously wanting to “reconnect” with his native land, he straightaway wrote four tone-poems, each one drawn from poet Karel Jaromir Erben’s grisly stories based on Czech folk-lore, with today’s featured work “The Golden Spinning Wheel” among the nastiest content-wise chosen by the composer. This was after his having earned through the better-known symphonies , concertos and chamber music the approbation of no less a critic than Eduard Hanslick, a fierce opponent of the Lisztian school of “programme music”, who had described such works as products of “the swindle of false erudition”. Consequently, Hanslick was not impressed with Dvořák’s sudden forays into tone-poems, writing of “the dangers of this latest tendency” and also that “Dvořák now indulges in ugly, unnatural; and ghastly stories which correspond so little to his amiable character and to the true musician that he is.”

With such an enterprising and interestingly-stocked programme, the concert could scarcely fail to please – and so it proved, with conductor Andrew Aitkins’s infectiously boundless enthusiasm and direct, clearly-delineated gesturings drawing from the players sonorous, detailed and characterful responses, all of which excitingly and satisfyingly “warmed up” as the afternoon’s music unfolded – a case in point was the somewhat tentative beginning of the concert with “Antar” whose tones steadily and patiently transformed themselves into a splendid orchestral panoply, finding full expression in the exuberant Dvorak work with which we began the concert’s second-half!

Rimsky’s 1875 revision of his original version of “Antar”, a work based on a Middle Eastern legend, was presented in today’s concert – conductor Andrew Atkins contributed a commendably cogent programme note summarising the work’s genesis and subsequent “development”.) The composer eventually produced FOUR published versions of “Antar”,  the ”original” 1868 version and its 1875 revision –  then a SECOND revised version in 1897, and (confusingly!) a reworking of the 1875 version! Armed with sufficient scores and recordings (plus a designation-change by the composer) the enthusiast would have an absorbing time coming to grips with the versions and their history!

“Antar” was based on a Middle-Eastern legend concerning an eponymous warrior-cum-philosopher who has renounced humanity and taken refuge in the desert, where he saves a gazelle from a giant bird – the gazelle then reveals its true identity as the beautiful Queen Kul-Nazar, and grants her saviour the “three joys” he most longs for, which, true to form, are vengeance, power and love, and which the music depicts over the remaining movements.  I noted the effectively dark, spacious timbres of the opening from bassoons and horn, the violas’ tender playing of the “Antar” theme’s first appearance, the winds reinforcing of the upper extensions of this theme, with the flute performing evocatively exotic” figuration” , the strings’ steady articulation of the lines in the music’s first agitated tutti, and their lovely Borodin-esque “lilt” in the following dance-tune, with the horns splendid delivery of the “Antar “ theme as an occasional  counterweight – and to cap off the movement, the grand tutti statement of the “Antar” motif at the movement’s end!

The second movement coalesced rather than began, with deep, murmuring beginnings and surges of tone bringing forth a march-like figure, its subject set upon warfare and revenge, as manifested by the occasional “general welter of sound” (to quote Sir Thomas Beecham, who championed the music of the “Russian Five”, of which group Rimsky-Korsakov was a member). The players kept their martial momentums going splendidly, throwing in plenty of suitably combatative exchanges between strings and winds, capped off by rousing percussive crashes and deliciously portentous touches from the heavy brass, the music ending not in triumph, however, but with a melancholy strings-and wind reiteration of the theme. It brought out all the more the “Russian festiveness” of the third movement’s swaggering opening (reminiscent of works like the composer’s own “Tsar Saltan” and Borodin’s “Prince Igor”), with gorgeously lyrical contrasting themes from the strings, and from an evocative wind-decorated solo horn! Such was the excitement that continued and built up over the last couple of pages, that we all broke into spontaneous applause at the movement’s end!

Gorgeous wind-playing from various soloists marked the finale’s opening (from where I was sitting I couldn’t see who was playing what instrument, the players’ music-stands obscuring all but the tops of bobbing heads! – though it all sounded most evocative), in places rivalling “Scheherazade” for atmosphere and allure, with the strings doing so well with their long, sinuous lines. As the story concluded with the hero’s death in his beloved Queen’s arms the finale had no hint of any sort of stirring “grandstand finish” but rather, a kind of gradual expiation, which conductor and players despatched as meaningfully as the composer’s surprisingly prosaic treatment allowed them to do – C’est la vie, c’est la mort!

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) was an almost exact contemporary of Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) studying piano under the same teacher in Moscow, Nikolai Zverev and continuing together at the Moscow Conservatory, each graduating with honours for piano-playing. However, they soon developed along different lines as composers, with, in general terms,  Scriabin the more adventurous, Rachmaninov the more conservative. Scriabin’s music, though largely misunderstood in his day, is enjoying increased interest  and appreciation,  while Rachmaninov’s, more conservative in outlook and enjoying a popularity that has largely endured, is still considered old-fashioned and regressive in some circles.

How interesting that both composed youthful Piano Concertos which shared the same F-sharp Minor key,  Scriabin at the age of twenty-four in 1896 (his first work involving an orchestra) and Rachmaninov much earlier, at the age of eighteen in 1891-2 (the composer’s 1917 revised version does an excellent job of removing the youthful longeurs and tightening up t the piece’s overall trajectories!). Scriabin’s work was written before he had embarked upon quasi-mystical, harmonically-radical explorations of chromaticism and tonality in his later work. Though each was critical of the other’s work Rachmaninov made a point of going out of his way to  promote his colleague’s music after the latter’s untimely death, giving the repeated heresay account of Rachmaninov casting aspersions on his friend’s state of mind difficult to take entirely seriously.

More to the point is that Scriabin’s only Piano Concerto was here given a performance by 22 year-old William Berry of the utmost finesse, control and sparkling brilliance, one accompanied hand-in-glove by conductor and orchestra. The work’s dreamy opening, brought into being by the horn and strings, was answered confidently and then increasingly passionately by the soloist, interacting with the orchestra  both in full-blooded and playfully filigree  exchanges, with a poetically responsive horn obbligato in attendance! – I loved the spacious rolling exchanges between orchestra and piano – and how Rachmaninov-like were the glorious melodic string lines prompting full-blooded responses from the pianist (and vice-versa!), These were activated into fairy-like dancings from the soloist. to the strains of pipers playing, and alternated with surges of Romantic feeling whose continued insistence  eventually drew pianist, players and conductor into a grand summation of arrival – a thrilling place to have been taken, with William Berry graciously acknowledging the audience’s appreciation at the music’s end!

The work’s slow movement drew from me a response similar to that I’ve often experienced with the Chopin Second Piano Concerto’s slow movement – beautifully limpid opening phrases from the strings, repeating the heart-stopping high point of the melody, and then repeating the sequence for the clarinet, and with the piano decorating the moment with a gossamer-like finish – such exquisite beauty! And what fun it suddenly seemed for one’s spirit to jump up up and dance with the piano’s spirited cavortings, then to pause and contemplate the stillnesses as the melody drifted all about its self-created loveliness, the piano joined by the clarinet before the strings returned to further savour the moment.

A swinging ¾ rhythm from the piano began the finale, with one of its measures repeatedly dancing to the top of the keyboard and down again, an exuberant flourish which kept the movement’s momentum alive and unfettered for a flurry of milliseconds!  – interspersded among this was a heart-bursting, burgeoning piano melody whose ascent flung open the vistas and urged the instrumental lines to take the plunge and augment the journey. The piano eventually persuaded the orchestra to abandon all caution and throw open everything widely and fill the spaces with this glorious melody! Having done this and found it good, piano and orchestra reminisced together – both the “open vista” melody and the exuberantly-dancing piano flourish were revisited and treated as old friends, the composer paying homage, consciously or otherwise, to his friend Rachmaninov’s gift of piling up climax upon climax and allowing the emotion full rein right to the forthright conclusion

Our pianist had something special in store for us at the concerto’s end, returning to the platform to give us some music by another composer whose music also deserves to be heard more often – this was a piece by Polish composer Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937), a work whose title I couldn’t hear from where I was sitting as announced by William Berry, though I was able to fully appreciate the music’s quietly rhapsodic opening minor chords, whose wandering, exploratory melody flowered into lusciously-coloured tones, the music exploring both depths and heights on its path towards a monumental climax of sound and feeling – it all unwound slowly and pensively, letting the tensions release their grip and fall away, eventually returning to the piece’s opening, with the journey redeemed at the end by the solace of a major key…..a special conclusion to a memorable overall performance!

After the interval came the Dvořák tone-poem “The Golden Spinning-Wheel” – what a great piece of music it all was, if not perhaps as tone-paintingly graphic in places as  fellow-countryman Smetana’s depictions of events in the latter’s orchestral  work “Ma Vlast” (eg. the pictorial descriptions of Smetana’s “Vltava” and of the brutal events of “Sarka”). Still, Dvořák’s delineations of his story gave enormous pleasure to this listener in what was obviously a characteristically grisly tale of betrayal, murder and revenge – and the extent to which the music could be enjoyed “as music” and away from the story’s specifics was, I thought, remarkable!

The story told of a peasant girl Dornička, whom a king encounters on his travels, falls in love with her, and proposes to make her his Queen – the girl is then murdered by her stepmother who installs her own look-alike daughter as the king’s projected bride, but a magician retrieves the murdered girl’s body in exchange for a golden spinning-wheel whose magic then betrays the stepmother’s crime and restores Dornička to life, so that, in the words of Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism, “the good end happily and the bad unhappily”. Andrew Atkins and the orchestra grasped the mettle firmly and plunged into the music’s glorious opening, strings and percussion establishing the trajectories, with horns and winds sounding the approach of the king, before the strings enable the royal party to sweep onto the scene, and the king to catch sight of and fall in love with the beautiful peasant girl at her spinning wheel, beautifully portrayed by detailings such as the interaction of solo violin and cor anglais, with colourful and atmospheric touches from the harp and percussion. The rest of the story unfolded with readily-evoked energies and panoplies of detail and colour, in many places satisfying as “absolute music” besides serving the narrative – but we particularly enjoyed those characteristic Dvořákian touches, such as the glorious string theme in thirds which heralded the king’s return from the wars to greet his supposed bride, and whose spinning-wheel then unexpectedly “spins out” the grisly tale’s details, resulting in the King’s rightful bride’s reinstatement, and the punishment of her would-be-murderers.

Though much was new to me, and probably to most people in the audience, this afternoon’s music successfully captivated and held our attention with its exotic fascination, colourful orchestration, and here, sturdily and enthusiastically committed performances  – all credit to Andrew Atkins’ enterprise and his players’ dedication and sheer elan in bringing it all so enjoyably to life for our pleasure!

NZ Trio with sonorous help from friends, continues to enchant

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZTrio+ at Old St.Paul’s Cathedral

GARETH FARR – Ahi (for violin, ‘cello and piano) –
Amalia Hall (violin)  / Matthias Balzat (‘cello) / Somi Kim (piano)

CAROLINE SHAW – Thousandth Orange (for violin, viola, ‘cello and piano)
with Alexander McFarlane (viola)

FRANZ SCHUBERT – Piano Quintet in A Major Op.114 D.667 “Trout”
(for violin, viola, ‘cello, double-bass and piano)
with Damien Eckersley (double-bass)

Old St.Paul’s Cathedral, Mulgrave St., Pipitea, Wellington
Thursday, 17th September, 2026

Though obviously pure coincidence, each of two consecutive Thursday concerts which I recently attended at Old St.Paul’s Cathedral in Mulgrave St, was beset by bad weather – the real pity was that the first of them –  Quang Hong Luu’s stupendous Liszt recital a week ago, –  was seriously compromised. with a mere handful of souls braving the torrential rain that would have kept most lunchtime concertgoers away. This more recent chamber music concert featuring the NZTrio and friends drew a much bigger audience for various reasons – it was part of a well-publicised tour, it contained better-known repertoire (including the ever-popular “Trout” Quintet of Schubert’s), and the weather conditions, though not ideal, were nowhere near as dire as for last week’s meteorologically-compromised event.

Having recently attended and enjoyed a trio-only concert given by this ensemble, I found myself here again engrossed by the same players’ remarkable identification with the many and varied “characters” of the music – not a note seemed to be unattended either on its own merits or in tandem with others in a harmony or a rhythmic phrase. I remember in particular loving their Schumann-playing on that occasion, and how well it captured the music’s unique amalgam of resolve and introspection peculiar to its composer. Something of that singularity was brought out here in Gareth Farr’s remarkable Trio “Ahi”, in which the composer’s opening theme was sounded in differing guises throughout the work, from the child-like playfulness of the piano-only opening to its final tug-at-the-heartstrings appearance in the last movement. I was pleased violinist Amalia Hall made reference to the late and much-lamented pianist Katherine Austin, whose association with this work’s performance included a memorable recording, with the heartfelt tones of the music’s principal theme a fitting tribute.

The word “Ahi” literally means “fire” in Te Reo, but is used in several cultural contexts like “the spark of life”, and “belonging to the land”, and “the warmth of hospitality” as well the “heat” that comes with energy, passion, conflict and rebirth.  Farr’s piece explored a number of these over the work’s different movements using a kind of motto theme in places throughout  – after the lyrical simplicity of the opening, we were plunged into a Shostakovich-like confrontation with relentless piano-initiated “slash-and-hammer barrages morphing into string-moanings and lamentings against swirling pianistic vortices! A third movement restored calm temporarily, with ‘cello and violin both intoning interactive recitative-like thoughts and impulses, before the reveries were shattered by wailing, beseeching tremolandi, the piano determinedly persisting with ostinati-like figure as the strings gently reiterated their lamentations. Finally, girding their respective loins violin and ‘cello plunged into a reprise of the work’s signature theme, which sang out defiantly, reawakening what might have represented the idea Te Ahi Kāroa  (the Spark of Life) and to which the piano joyously accorded the rapidly-rotating gamelan-derived carillon-like melody to near-abandoned and almost cathartic effect!

Next, the concert’s mystery object was the enigmatic title for one of the pieces, Thousandth Orange, which straightaway invoked the “all sensibilities opened” kind of response that anything with such a juicily (sorry!) Zen-like title might have had upon the average listener! Just as playfully enigmatic was the programme-note by the composer herself, American Caroline Shaw, at once revealing everything one perhaps needed to know about the piece without letting on about anything we might have wanted to know! – perhaps the NZTrio ‘cellist Mathias Balzat came closest to the mark by telling us that the group was “going to play the piece for us one thousand times”, adding  that “the experience should be as beautiful even after the thousandth playing!”

Violist Alexander Macfarlane (the NZSO’s current Associate Principal Viola) had joined the group for this piece, so that we had pianist Somi Kim and no less than three string players ready to convey to us the music’s many-sided, ostensibly inscrutable qualities. Pianist Somi Kim began the work, a series of four chords on the piano in a constantly-repeated pattern, and interpolated with entirely differently-constituted String Trio harmonies and rhythmic designs – almost Ivesian-like in effect! The strings then surreptitiously “took over” the four-chord pattern, leaving the piano to “extemporise”, and the strings to “play with” the chords and gradually “deconstruct” them, though the four-note “motif” remained discernable while being put under all kinds of strictures! The four-note pattern was arguably “the orange” on its way to its thousandth permutation! I liked the composer’s droll but significant comment regarding the process  – one which accorded “more appreciation of something that most would consider unremarkable”….. to the point where its perception was accompanied by a kind of mystique attitude, a heightened appreciation of ordinary things……the final statement of the “motif” on pizzicato strings at once both  “throwaway” and “significant”…..profound!

Obviously the more-than-usual atmosphere of camaraderie in the cathedral had encouraged people to leave their seats at the interval and engage in fellowship of all kinds, as the concert organisers were forced to make repeated calls to people to resume their places for the second half! This was duly done, and the performers plus yet ANOTHER additional musician, double bassist Damien Eckersley, (also an NZSO Associate Principal!) took up their places on the platform to perform Franz Schubert’s beloved “Trout” Quintet.

This was a splendid performance – I can honestly say I’ve not heard a better one, either “live” or on record! Obviously the “in situ” experience would have brought out whatever qualities there were in the music-making  more vividly than on a sound (or even on a video) recording – and these qualities, such as the technical brilliance, both individual and ensembled, allied to the ever-apparent sense of rapport between the players, and what seemed like an instinctive feeling for the music’s special “character” in these respects, made, I’m certain, this occasion one to readily “gather up” in the memory. For me, nothing seemed to stand in between or distort or dilute the impact made by the music – so, rather than meticulously  (and tiresomely) try and dot and cross all the “I”s and the “t”s of the performance I’d like to highlight a few moments that can serve to speak for the concert as a whole.

I liked the “perfect half-circle” of the string players, with the double-bass especially accorded a front-row place equal to the rest of the strings, instead of being relegated to a more backward position  – and this gave particular delight in the scherzo at some of the phrase ends when the’ cello and double bass had some unison repeated-note exclamations, and made certain each time that they were in accord (especially the final one to which they both amusingly gave some extra “oomph!”). Much earlier, in the first movement, the ensemble were able to achieve an amazingly fluid, nuanced sound which communicated so much expressiveness even when springing forward at a great pace! – as a result the first movement was an extra joy  – as well as making the development section all the more different and exciting.

The Andante second movement opened up vistas of such beauty (beguilingly-voiced lower strings!) making such a gorgeous contrast with the second “layabout” theme that came along later, like a “hands -in-the-pockets” whistling tune! Similar characterful contrasts were delivered in the theme-and-variations “Troutr” movement, during which we were all galvanised by the “helter-skelter” section, carried along by the music’s irresistible energies, then soothed by the ‘cello’s graceful phrasings. And I liked the way that violin and piano began the last variation when reverting to the composer’s “lieder” mode, each player variously giving us a taste of the hapless fish and the cruel fisherman – Amalia Hall and Somi Kim here, to my ears, made their instruments “talk” to one another so deliciously.

What a purposeful journey the ensemble made of the finale – so much energy and schwung in places, with double bassist Damien Eckersley grasping the mettle and giving his instrument plenty of “rumble” with his rapidly-repeated notes. But it was a concerted effort, and a more-than-fitting finish (one thought at this point!) to the concert – except that the ensemble reappeared mid-ovation at the end, and Damien Ecklersley himself had the task of introducing an encore, concerning which he spoke in particular reference to the joy of being a single double bassist playing with wonderful colleagues in chamber music, a change from his usual role as being part of the “bottom end” of a symphony orchestra!

This was a piece written by British composer Judith Weir for the UK’s Schubert Ensemble to commemorate the group’s farewell performance season in 2017, a work fittingly composed for a “Trout Quintet” performance group. Weir wrote the work with Schubert’s famous song Abschied from the song-cycle Schwanengesang in mind, describing the music as containing “goodbye waves in turn from viola, violin, ‘cello, bass and piano” – a perfect way for this evening’s ensemble to finish a truly memorable concert.

 

 

 

Quang Hong Luu (piano) – brilliantly personifying composer and music and their times

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Quang Hong Luu, with Phan Hồng Châu,  at Old St.Paul’s, Wellington

FRANZ  LISZT –  Anneés de pelerinage – Troisieme (Third Year of Pilgrimage) S.163

Angelus – “Prayer to the Guardian Angels”
Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este No.1 & 2
Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este
Sunt Lachrymae Rerum E mode Hongroise
Marche Funebre
Sursum Corda

Quang Hong Luu (piano)

Cathedral of St. Paul (“Old St. Paul’s”), Mulgrave St., Thorndon, Wellington
Thursday, 10th September, 2026

Vietnamese-born pianist Quang Hong Luu made a welcome “return to life” on behalf of Wellington’s concert-goers in an Old St.Paul’s “lunchtime concert” presentation, after an earlier indisposition prevented him from giving a promised recital for Wellington Chamber Music’s Sunday concert series on August 16th. Quang had originally intended to present music by Chopin, Beethoven and Liszt, including in the recital the last-named composer’s rarely-performed set of pieces from his later years, written while in residence in Tivoli, Rome, at the Villa d’Este, famous for its spectacular gardens and fountains. These seven pieces were published as the third book of an extensive collection of works which the composer collectively called “Annees de Pelerinage” (Years of Pilgrimage).

Three of these pieces draw their direct inspiration from the Villa d’Este, two of them meditations evoking feelings concerning the magnificent cypress trees in the villa’s gardens, and one inspired by the inspirational fountains, the latter work resonating in various other composers’ music in the years to come. Liszt’s sojourns at these Tivoli gardens provided solace to a composer feeling himself increasingly at odds with existence in general, and beset by occasional depression and sadness, much of which is expressed in the darker moments of some of these pieces.

The “lunchtime concert” format of this occasion perfectly suited the detachment of these pieces by Liszt from the original recital intended by the pianist, the music’s markedly spiritual, and in places esoteric character finding a fitting ambience in the Old St.Paul’s outstandingly beautiful “old-world” environment. The piano, too, in this case a hundred-plus year-old instrument, seemed to unashamedly proclaim its venerable experience in a way that felt and sounded entirely appropriate to the music and to Quang’s playing. Only the dismal weather outside refused to take note of the significance of the occasion, the rain probably accounting for a smaller-than-usual lunchtime audience.

Opening the collection was Angelus (Prayer to the Guardian Angels), its opening tintinnabulations suggesting the traditional bells – as befitted this piece’s dedication (to Liszt’s grand-daughter Daniela) the music at first seemed innocently child-like in tone and aspect, though gradually taking on deeper, grander tones before again returning to the child-like simplicities of the opening. The ballade-like melody pressed forward with engaging youthful vigour, “playing” inquisitively with the three-note staccato figure and its modulations, and with the melody itself, before gathering itself for a grand presentation of the theme, the pianist raising his hands high as if symbolising the blessings of the return to the repeated figuration passage with which the work began, and  blissfully intoning an “uplifted” meditative repetition of those same notes whose gentle earthward descent returned us to a fleeting reminiscence of the ballade-like melody’s opening strains.

By comparison, the first of the two  Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este  made a big, black-browed, imposing, even  fearful impression – the repeated tolling bells in the bass amplify and brutalise the opening tintinnabulations of the first piece, the music moving forward deliberately and majestically, then reinforcing the music’s forward movement, plunging us headlong into a kind of maelstrom of agitated sound whose tones lift us up and plunge us downwards in the manner of some oceanic wave, leaving us at the mercy of the ambiences surrounding the places to which the music has delivered us – as if we are in awed dialogue with the cypress trees, a kind of confrontation with nature, with creation in a larger sense and with our place in it, one of awed humility at their symbolic permanence and essential “character” (these trees being symbols of death in classical  tradition…..)

Again, the music at the outset of the second Cyprès de la Villa d’Este was gaunt, black-browed and imposing, though not as unremittingly fearful or threatening in aspect as in the previous piece – a repeated downward-leaping fifth rose partially upwards in a gesture of part defiance, part despair, followed by several tersely muttered chords. The exchange wass repeated, and a new theme, determined and rising appeared, followed by a fanfare-like passage that rose and fell with some certainty – the downward-leaping fifth and its partly-upward “balance” reappeared, followed by, firstly, a forward-looking chromatically-harmonised passage, and a luminous-sounding chorale-like major-key section, suddenly sounding like the Liszt of a previous time, as if a melodic resurgence of a idea from  the composer’s 1850 Consolations or from his 1852 Harmonies Poetiques et religieuses had come to mind. It seemed almost as if the composer had penetrated the outwardly forbidding aspect of the cypresses to express deeper, more ambivalent existential truths suggested by their customary associations – working towards a more transcendent expression that shed light upon darkness in unforeseen ways. Certainly, there was as much peaceful resignation in the repetitions of the luminous- sounding chorale as there was an occasional  indication of a troubled spirit elsewhere.

Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, the most famous of the set, came next, introduced by an upwardly-thrusting impulse of light and energy and substance whose joyous outpourings symbolisd what its composer described via his quote from the Gospel of John (4:14) as “a well of water springing up into eternal life”, and which was to prove inspirational for a whole new generation of Impressionist composers such as Debussy and Ravel. I wanted Quang Hong Luu to savour for a few more resonant milliseconds the truly transcendental moments of Liszt’s quoting of Wagner from the opera “Das Rheingold” – here, the alluring Rhinemaidens’ twice-voiced lament was, for me, dispatched a shade too quickly – fortunately, the rest, under Quang’s fingers was sheer magic through his playing’s crystalline brilliance, and, towards the end, his complete and exhilarating physical realisation of the flow of water’s all-engulfing cumulative effect, leaving at the end a deep, richly-intoned summation in the piano tones of  something sacramental and life-changing!

The next piece, Sunt lacrymae rerum – en mode hongrois,  returned to the darkness of the first “Cypress” piece. The title “Sunt lacrymae rerum” means “There are tears for things”, and is a quote from Virgil’s “Aeneid” made in reference to the fall of Troy, though Liszt would have been referring here to the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-49, a theme he had already explored in his piano piece Funerailles, and the symphonic poem “Hungaria”.  The air of mourning was apparent, expressed on both a personal and a national level, Liszt employing all kinds of sonorities to express different levels of sorrow, the piano writing unique in terms of its vision and inventiveness.

No let-up was possible with the following Marche funebre (the earliest piece in the collection, written in 1867), written to mark the death by execution of the unfortunate Maximilian I, the Emperor of Mexico, and containing the inscription on the score “To have wished for great things is an accomplishment in itself “. Perhaps the introduction to this work contained the set’s darkest music – Wagner called this music “an old man’s delirium” – the central section was bleak and ruminative, while the final section was extraordinary, a huge crescendo, atonal harmonies amid tremolandi passages, before a final section which paid homage to the unfortunate monarch in the most fulsome pianistic “clarion call” terms!

Finally came the pianist’s ultimate act of faith, the chorale-like Sursum Corda (Lift up your hearts!) an irresistible and heartfelt statement of faith which the pianist here threw himself into with amazing gusto, at times lifting his whole body from the piano seat in aid of putting every fibre of his being behind the delivery of this music’s message, a performance which fulfilled to a unique, overwhelming degree a “blood-sweat-and-tears” kind of fervour on the part of the composer, so that here, it was as if performer and composer had become one.

We made up for lack of audience numbers at the end with what we hoped were sounds and gesturings of enthusiastic appreciation of the pianist’s superhuman efforts! Quang assured me he would be in Wellington next year for another concert, as yet undisclosed as to content. At such an interpretative level as we had been privileged to experience on this occasion I felt inclined to happily and eagerly undertake with him whatever musical journey he might propose! What a treat to have such an experience to look forward to!

 

Orchestra Wellington’s “Colossal” triumphantly ticks all the descriptive and presentation boxes

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Marc Taddei with Orchestra Wellington and Wellington District Brass Ensemblepresents “Colossal”
JOSHUA PEARSON – Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fau (world premiere)
HECTOR BERLIOZ – Requiem: Grand Messe des Morts
Kyle Stegall (tenor)
Orpheus Choir, Wellington (Brent Stewart, director)
Te Kōkī Orchestra / Wellington Brass Band / Trust Porirua City Brass
Hutt City Brass / Levin and Districts Brass
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, September 12th, 2026

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

With the confidence, surety and irrepressible flair that has characterised his work with Orchestra Wellington over the past few years, conductor Marc Taddei brilliantly succeeded in both masterminding  and spearheading an event which  bounteously fulfilled the ineffably effable title “Colossal” for the concert itself. In every way it was an appropriate description of an event that in my experience has perhaps been recently matched for grandeur here in Wellington only by the performance of Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” in 2010 when Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, together with a team of vocal soloists, the Orpheus Choir and various other choral groups in a similarly unforgettable occasion.

Of course pride of place in respect to the concert’s title was inevitably accorded French composer Hector Berlioz’s intrinsically prodigious “Grand Messe des Morts”, or “Requiem”, and borne out by the extent of musical forces employed by the composer. Such large-scale events were not uncommon in France of the composer’s time and before, being an expression of La Gloire, that source of pride, honour and distinction associated with one’s nation. From the era of Louis XIV (“the Sun King”) French composers would seek to emphasise and reflect in their music the earthly and divinely-appointed virtues of the monarch, bringing to the public spectacular musical depictions by such as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jean-Philippe Rameau – and not forgetting, in more revolutionary times, the famous La Marseillaise of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.

Berlioz’s music was to serve a ceremonial, rather than a liturgical function, a reflection of the changed, post-Revolution place of the Church in French society (as was the use of the composer’s own setting of the words instead of the traditional “Dies Irae” Catholic liturgical setting, in use since the fourteenth century). The Requiem was in fact a commission from the French Government in 1837 for a work of remembrance honouring soldiers who fell in the July 1830 revolution – but due to the disapproval of various anti-revolutionary interests, the dedication was then changed to honour a hero (General Damrémont, the French Army’s commander-in-chief, killed during the country’s recent war efforts aimed at colonising parts of North Africa).

Though Berlioz’s music in general displays occasional touches of La Gloire his Requiem here paid singular attention to a number of varied influences, both musical and social, reflecting his individual feelings towards a “new Romanticism” in art and culture.  The work’s large and diverse forces produced a remarkable range of musical and aural responses, in particular a sensitivity and restraint in certain places, which of course made the almost seismic upheavals of parts of the Dies Irae all the more overwhelming in their effect. The composer described his initial enthusiasm for the text of the work in characteristically excitable tones – “I fell upon it with a kind of fury – my brain felt as though it would explode with the pressure of ideas!” – given these declarations of such creative ferment (here reproduced in the concert’s excellent programme notes), it continued to surprise with how much of the work was so introspective, delicate and ethereal. Here was a composer-sensibility capable of generating intensities at practically every place along such a spectrum, a kind of compendium of emotional response whose spontaneously-wrought effect compelled constant attention.

Along with this “Grande Messe des Morts”  and its historical and cultural associations, the concert brought to us the very great pleasure of an additional work, moreover, one from this part of the globe which nicely balanced things with the Berlioz work – this was the world premiere of a work by young Aotearoa New Zealand-born Samoan composer, Joshua Pearson, one whose title Digital Fenua: Fakatili Te Kiloga Fou concerned the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, and translated from the Tuvaluan language as “Navigating the changing Environment”. The issues facing Tuvalu have been exacerbated by climate change over recent years – they concern rising sea levels, coastal erosion, drinking water shortages and extreme weather patterns. Joshua Pearson’s astonishing and instantly impactful orchestrations plunged all of us into a series of swirling turbulences, with insistent chimes heralding the onset of currents and counter-currents of watery impulses, coloured by megaphonic vocalisations from different parts of the orchestra as strings sounded eerie harmonics and a solo violin floated a stratospheric solo line. Players alternated between conventional instrumental sounds and creative rustlings and crinklings from crumpling cellophane clusters (how onomatopoeic these description words themselves sound!) .

What could be taken on surface value for a magical fairytale sound-world of course had darker, bleaker and more ruinous implications, with Pearson’s evocative instrumentations graphically illustrating both the destabilising action and effects of increasingly confrontational weather-patterns and resulting conditions threatening present living environments with eventually uninhabitable conditions. Hand-in-hand with the ”thriil” of these near-virtuosic orchestrations came, of course, the realisation for us that these spectacular evocations were portents of doom in a sobering, “for whom the bell tolls” kind of way – all the more credit to the composer, therefore, in sounding so graphic a warning to humanity at large. The conclusion of the piece underlined its grim message with the players gradually enveloped in darkness as the sounds faded to silence. As befitted the piece, its presentation and performance, the reception at the end was overwhelming, with the composer making a warmly-acclaimed appearance!

There was no interval, but a kind of changeover process during which the Orpheus choir and brass band personnel filed respectively into their places, while Marc Taddei gave a brief outline of the freshly-published 2027 Orchestra Wellington concert prospectus – an exciting and stimulating season based upon “Dance” and affording all of us many a delightful listening prospect. That done, and a goodly proportion of the composer’s requirements regarding voices and instrumentalists having been brought into the performing arena, the stage was set for the “Requiem” to be set in its “leviathanic” motion.

The work’s mournfully-phrased opening gave notice of its proverbial “depths”, with lower and higher voices in tandem properly emphasising their “polar opposite” tones, the singing,  with variously deep and pure tones combining with strings and winds to make an immense “carpet of sound”,  as the cries of “Requiem” vied with the winds’ piercing, downwardly-cascading  phrases  After the tersely-delivered “Kyrie Eleisons” came the “Dies Irae”, introduced by black-toned double-basses, with Berlioz again using his sopranos, this time in tandem with winds, as a dramatic contrast, before bringing in the other voice-lines. Each group of verses was given its own level of purposeful intensity by agitated string passages, the “Quantus tremor” passages urgent and vigorous, leading up to the first of the work’s truly monumental passages, with brass choir antiphonally following and exchanging phrases with brass choir, two upper groups interacting with two lower groups and leading to the thunderous entrance of the percussion – a scalp-prickling moment, to which the men’s voices then added their stentorian cries of “Tuba mirum” as part of an enormous crescendo of sound, one which resorted to hushed tones for “Mors stupebit” but which then flared up excitingly once more at “Liber scriptus proferetur”. And how pathetic, energy-drained and fearfully wonderful was “Quid sum miser”, with its bleakly forlorn cor-anglais and bassoon accompaniments!

The tumultuous “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” outbursts, followed by the increasingly urgent ‘Recordare, Jesu Pie”, leading into “Confutatis maledictis” made for episodes of great and desperate excitement, the “prayer” becoming a compelling “theatre of supplication” before returning to “Rex Tremendae” amid piteous cries of  “Salva Me”.  The following “Quaerens Me” brought us some of the evening’s loveliest singing, the voices in unaccompanied . lyrical mode, pleading for forgiveness as was accorded Mary Magdalene and the Good Thief at Christ’s crucifixion, and a necessary respite when considering what was to follow.

This was the mighty “Lacrimosa”, the “day of tears”, Berlioz unsparingly giving the verses a harsh, jagged syncopated accompaniment from strings, winds and brass in rugged 9/8 time – two quieter passages gave some respite, but soon returned to the merciless onslaught with additional brass and percussion joining the fray as the choir wass spared nothing!   The prayer rose towards its punishing finality, with every singer and player in the hall, it seemed, hanging onto those final utterances for all they were worth – a transfiguring moment, leaving at the end an exhausted, but still reverberating  silence!

Into this “void left by a maelstrom” came the Offertorium, a deeply-moving  work whose obsessively-repeated and anxiously unresolved vocal lines representing a kind of great anxiety, with the voices seemingly left abandoned in a wilderness, intoning a figure that oscillated between two notes without settlement or deliverance – meanwhile all around these voices the instrumental lines “wandered” as if enchanted or bewildered, the strings and winds aware of and responding to the text’s invocations of the “promise” made by God to “Abraham and his seed” – the beautiful moment at the words “promisisti et semini ejus” was here like balm for our senses, the music moving into the major key and generating a flowering of hope for deliverance into light and warmth – wonderfully and superbly-delivered!   The following “Hostias”, with its hauntingly celestial key-changes  generated by angelic winds (always reminding me of – and, of course, pre-dating – “Lohengrin”!) gave even further hope for salvation (but what creepily sepulchral brass-playing was sounded here at the end, affording scary glimpses into the abyss!).

Then came the equally spell-binding sequence with solo tenor Kyle Stegall, the single voice resplendently furthering Berlioz’s transfiguring fusion of the ordinary and the fabulous, backed up by celestial echoes and resonances from the choir (apart from a brief moment of strain for the sopranos in their “Gloria” utterances) – their “Hosannas” here joyously danced and exalted in response, as did the adjoining brasses at the end!

It was left for the “Agnus Dei” to usher in the drama’s final moments, with magical wind and brass chordings underpinned by strings giving the choir’s heartfelt utterances a kind of enduring luminosity, as did in contrasting ways the succeeding, entirely characteristic exchanges between the lighter strings and winds and the darker, more sinister brasses. More grounding was the return to the work’s opening, with the cries of “Requiem” punctuated once more by those well-remembered descending wind chords, but reaching a finality with the voices’ utterances resolving into “Quia pius es, in aeternum, Domine” (Because thou art forever merciful, Lord) and a series of heart-easing “Amens” with blissfully rising-and-falling string roulades underpinned by gently-throbbing timpani and string pizzicati which together concluded the work.

Such an accolade-exhausting achievement left one grasping vainly for further acclamations! To all the performers, enablers and organisers one needs must bestow very great gratitude at being presented with such a work brought off with all the elan, brilliance depth and variety that it needed to succeed. It takes its honorable place in the growing pantheon of memorable presentations by Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir, here enriched by the stellar contributions of so many local musicians who obviously relished their integral part in the proceedings. Both Marc Taddei’s and Orpheus Choir director Brent Stewart’s stewardship of this historic event will be remembered and appreciated for a long time to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dolfin-Lin Duo – positively tingling with spontaneous re-discovery!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Dolfin-Lin Duo – Balazs Dolfin (‘cello) / Tony Chen Lin (piano)

ZOLTÁN KODÁLY  –  Magyar Rondo (Hungarian Rondo) (1917)
ANTON WEBERN  –  Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano (1914)
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH  –  Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord in D Major  BWV 1028
GAO PING  –  Sonata No. 2 for ‘Cello and Piano “Departure” (2001)
BÉLA BARTÓK – Rhapsody No. 1 for ‘Cello and Piano (1928-9)
NATHANAEL DEJONG – Abandoned Voices (2021)
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Sonata No.1 for ‘Cello and Piano in E Minor Op.38

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday,, 30th August 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

This partnership of ‘cello and piano made a profound impression with the Duo’s strongly-projected, in places “larger-than-life” realisations of the works chosen, with those I’d heard before (the Bartok and Brahms pieces) giving a remarkably singular impression to my ears of hearing the music for the first time! I’d heard Tony Chen Lin’s playing on several occasions previously as well as on recordings, and found myself often remarking upon his boldly-characterised view of both detailings and overall trajectorial and colouristic character, playing which unhesitatingly “addresses” more than merely “coaxes out” the music’s manifold moods. On this occasion, of course, his partner was Hungarian cellist Balazs Dolfin ( their Duo was formed in Italy in 2021) whose similarly arresting and whole-hearted approach to his instrument and its sound-world in general seemed to me to fit like a glove with the pianist’s aforementioned qualities  – so that the music-making throughout the concert positively tingled with spontaneously-generated re-discovery!

First up was Zoltan Kodaly’s Magyar Rondo, written in 1917, and drawn from incidental music the composer had written for a play by Zsigmond Móricz called Pacsirtaszó (Lark’s Song), a folk-style drama but  with “social realism” themes – this version for ‘cello and piano brought out the piece’s soulful folk-character at the outset, before breaking into a dance variation, angular and quixotic! A deeper, more baritonal tone came with the next, slower variation, the piano contrasting the cello’s sombre voice with full, assertive treatment accorded the melody’s refrain, though the music returned to more intimate realms for a wistful, harmonics-like cello passage, almost ghostly in effect! A far more helter-skelter mood overtook the next variation’s minor-key mood-change, the music abandoning itself to a burst of high-spirited display before the cello took us suddenly along a pizzicato-strewn pathway, the piano playing bagpipelike figurations as the dance swirled and swayed up and down – but how wistful and redolent were the dream-like moments of remembrance, compared with the wildness of the duo’s concluding high-spiurited flourishes!

Nothing further from the opening could have been devised than what we next experienced, Anton Webern’s ‘Cello Sonata, a work written in 1914, and intended as a present for his father, who loved the ‘cello! For whatever reason the composer broke off working on the piece and decided he would give his father the “Three Little Pieces for ‘Cello and Piano” Op.11 instead, abandoning the Sonata, which wasn’t rediscovered until 1965, twenty years after t3he composer’s death. Though roughly contemporaneous with the Kodaly piece we heard  at the concert’s beginning, the Sonata seemed to inhabit an entirely different creative sphere,  Though not twelve-tone music. Webern’s Sonata features fractured phrases and angularly-pointed rhythms whose contrasts are often explosive and even disturbing, with “sehr bewegt” (very animated) suddenly giving way to (“zart bewegt”) gently animated, before reverting without warning to the original marking for the piece’s final gesturings.

Not inappropriately, the players then took up, after a moments’s pause, the programme’s next item Johann Sebastian Bach’s  Sonata for Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord in D Minor, with the first-movement Adagio in our minds seeming almost to “sort out” the still-resonating strains of the Webern piece, almost as if giving credence to Webern’s teacher Schoenberg’s dictum that “there are no dissonances in music, just more remote consonances…”. I thought the playing so very exquisitely dovetailed, bringing out as much the character as well as the beauty of the lines’ interactions during the following Allegro. The soulfulness of the minor-key Siciliano rhythm throughout the Andante brought out the expressiveness, the depth of feeling, the grief inherent in this music that awaited release in a finale that danced like thistledown in the wind, joyously freed from earthly constraint as the composer evoked the prospect of life’s fulfilment in expectation of heavenly reward.

Sixth-generation Chinese composer Gao Ping’s music is well-known to New Zealand audiences due to his significant working associations with various educational institutions in this country, such as Christchurch’s University of Canterbury and Te Koki New Zealand School of Music in Wellington. He’s developed long-term relationships with local musicians such as Michael Houstoun  and  the New Zealand String Quartet – the fifteen year-old association with Houstoun has resulted in a recent recording “Outside the Window” of Gao Ping;s music, released on the Rattle label. By way of acknowledging a New Zealand influence upon his own music he is currently planning an opera set in this country, one whose setting (Central Otago) will draw from storytelling traditions present in classic stories from both Chinese and Western cultures. This has been, he has said

Gao Ping’s Cello Sonata No. 2 was written on 2001 – its title, “Departure” was taken from the subject of a Chinese poet of the “Song Dynasty” one writing in times parallel to western medieval times (10TH-13TH century), the Song Dynbasty poet Su Dongpo. The poet relates the work’s title to the cyclical meaning of the Chinese  word shi meaning “departure” which incorporates both an end and a beginning, an idea elaborated upon by Geo Ping’s music which ends the piece with the notes of its beginning. Its sounds also give voice to the composer’s inclination to blend Western and Chinese music, reminding the listener in places of the inclinations of Janacek, Kodaly and Bartok in their similar “seedings” of various pieces with folk-inspired impulses and gestures.

There are five sections to the work  which play continuously, and whose flow emphasise that same “end is my beginning” concept. The cello underlines traditional colours and timbres of traditional Chisese instruments such as the Guqin and Erhu, as well as having recourse to vocal inflections of traditional speech-styles, stemming from an era of personal expression and introspective inclinations. The ‘cello emphasised these associations at the beginning, now and then “bending’ the notes, and employing freely ranging dynamic levels, with eerie, other-worldly harmonics that invited the piano’s first entry. A sustained note slowly developed more elaborate configurations which grew to  allowing ever-increasing freedom of expression – the instrumental sounds could be described as reaching for speech inflections, suggesting the full human range of tones, timbres, colours and dynamics.  Whole episodes then gave themselves over to contrasting depictions of emotion and purpose, often alarmingly confrontational, then reverting to introspective moods, the tones becoming increasingly disembodied as a sense of overriding timelessness crept into the sound-worlds and gradually silenced the remaining impulses and counter-impulses in spell-binding fashion!

An interval of discussion made the time pass quickly before we were off again with the dauntless duo, this time a folk-flavoured work by Bartok, the Rhapsody No.1, originally composed for violin and piano but arranged by the composer for ‘cello and piano – here, ‘cellist and pianist gave a remarkable display, giving full measure to both the physical and lyrical aspects of the Rhapsody, tearing into the well-known contrasted pairing of the traditional Lassú (slow) and Friss  (fast) sections of the Hungarian verbunkos (recruiting) dance with tremendous physicality, precision and plaintive lyricism, the soft-playing as arresting as the excitement generated by the more brilliant sections.

An entirely new name to me was New Zealand composer Nathanael Dejong (b.1988) whose work reflects his training as both a pianist and violinist as well as composition, but directly focuses on his interest as a parent in childhood development relating to teaching and learning in an age he considers overshadowed  by electronic media devices –  the “Abandoned Voices” title reflected this dominance of digital media at the expense of human interaction. Consequently the work we heard presented sombre exchanges between the instruments, deep, serious and heartfelt utterances punctuated by long silences and wide dynamic ranges, both piano and cello employing delicate, winsome sets of gestures representing a plethora of sounds to make sense of, both of their own volition and in responsive contexts to one another – the cello playing unworldly harmonics and the pianist reaching into the body of the piano to dampen notes and chordings. It all makes for a variety of impulse and intent awaiting definition and associated meaning, the “small voices, waiting to be heard” presence embodied in newly-emergent human form.

Though there was nothing “small voiced” about Johannes Brahms, the young composer’s rabid perfectionist nature resulted in his destroying many youthful compositions before allowing his innermost creative thoughts to remain, an inclination which for some years dogged his compositional efforts – indeed, some scholars suggest that probably only one-third of Brahms’s entire compositional input has survived. The earliest “official” works were for solo piano and song collections, the young composer’s meetings with the violinist Joseph Joachim and Robert and Clara Schumann gained him invaluable advice, example and confidence, though he maintained his rigorous self-critical attitudes to his work throughout his compositional career. His two ‘cello sonatas interestingly “reverse” their composer’s expected compositional trajectories, with the earlier First (played today) very much connected to the past, the deep-throated melody that opens the work frequently “changing places” with the piano, so that the harmonic structure of the work is richly varied in texture and tone. The “fusing” of the two leads strengthened the discourse between the two voices, both performers here scarcely holding back in terms of full-blooded expressiveness – I simply loved it!

For whatever reason, Brahms removed an Adagio movement originally composed, leaving the “Allegretto quasi Menuetto”  to fend for itself as a foil to the outer movements, a charming theme, sharing the opening section with a sinuous second theme, also in a minor key – the trio was even more suggestive in intent, with both instruments tying the melodic strands closely together, before returning to the opening dance. The finale  plunged into a whirling dervish-like opening, (commentators cite Bachian influences here relating to “the Art of the Fugue” at the beginning, which took on a more playful aspect in places, and with Brahms broadening the trajectories into momentary illusions of adventurous impulse (shades of the D Minor Piano Concerto’s great “questing” theme at one point!) and disarmingly charming dance-like manoeuverings, all swept away by the return of the opening “whirling” figures, concluding with a furious, cataclysmic stretto leaving us all deliciously dishevelled by the music’s wonderfully conclusive sound and fury!

 

SPACE JUMP – An exhilarating listening leap from NZTrio into firmament-like territories

Posted on by Peter Mechen

FAZIL SAY – Space Jump for Piano Trio (2013)
REENA ESMAIL – Piano Trio (2019)
KEITH MOSS – Field Notes in Autumn (2026 – NZ Trio commisssion)
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Piano Trio No 2 in F Major

NZTrio  (He taonga wairere)
Amalia Hall (violin), Matthias Balzat (cello), Somi Kim (piano)
Wellington Central Library – Te Matapihi te Ao Nui
Sunday 23rd August, 2026

Composers over the course of time have often demonstrated a fondness, and, indeed, a facility, for writing descriptive music representing people, animals, objects or events. As early as the Renaissance, there was a penchant for imitating the sounds and movements of wildlife, with voices mimicking birds and animals, as well as human activity involving both warfare and daily life in large cities. Throughout the Baroque and Classical periods composers such as Vivaldi, Biber, Haydn and Couperin enthusiastically wrote music to tell stories or imitate different sound-worlds in nature and in human society. The Romantic period which followed saw the rise of “programme music” and sparked both debate and conflict between the conservative and progressive elements, each advancing the respective merits of “absolute” and “descriptive” music right into the twentieth century, where modernist techniques further advanced and diversified the music that described all kinds of life-forms and mechanised objects, blurring the absolute/descriptive classifications of music.

With this potted history in mind, it was interesting to encounter in this concert a number of  works by contemporary composers that had been inspired by both modernist and traditional trends and conceived from different physical, national and cultural standpoints, and representing a kind of global interest in and acceptance of regional perspectives of the individual pieces and their respective preoccupations. And binding the whole exploratory process of performing and experiencing these different works was one central to the essences of the instrumental medium – Robert Schumann’s iconic Second Piano Trio of 1847, one representing a kind of apex of joyous expression and fulfilment, and to which each of the preceding works in the concert had aspired in their own ways.

The NZTrio boldly began these intriguing presentations with a remarkably tactile work “Space Jump” written by the Turkish composer/pianist Fazil Say, the result of the composer’s fascination with the daredevil exploits of Felix Baumgartner, the Austrian extreme sports pioneer famed for a record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space after being lifted by a helium balloon to a height of almost 40 km, before free-falling for most of his descent, and breaking the sound barrier in the process! Fazil Say was among the 8 million viewers who watched the Jump on You Tube, his music depicting every aspect of the jump including the safe landing on earth. (Baumgartner, incidentally, was killed last year in a paragliding accident in Italy – he was 56 years old.)

The music was nothing if not vertiginous in places, though the life-threatening nature of the exercise was, for much of the music’s length masked by the situation’s “suspended unrealities” as the adventurer seemed almost to “float” for a lot of the downward journey in relative solitude and loneliness. However, in places towards the end the hazardous nature of the undertaking became more and more apparent in the music, leaving behind the initial violin ostinati (which had been borne along by the ‘cello’s counterpointing figures and the ambient piano chordings) and plunging into a sudden jazzy piano irruption of energies  –  the driving trajectories of the stuntman’s “fall”!  Violin and piano ”hewed” at syncopations attempting to turn the trajectories different ways, the instrumental swirlings and impassioned tones conveying the out-and-out physicalities of the free-faller holding his course steady. Then, a sudden cessation of trenchant movement was ”filled in” by more settled and lyrical figures, with occasional scintillating “swirls” augmented by piano glistenings, and a couple of strange, discordant harmonies which sounded and then drifted into silence. Whew! – exhausting stuff!

Then came a work by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail, her 2019 Piano Trio, sounds which thankfully kept its trajectories a good deal closer to terra firma, though covering vast distances of a different kind. Here, the composer’s music took us to a world of vibrant fusion between Eastern and Western composition, in which European tonal and harmonic systems could interact with her own heritage’s rather more ancient North Indian (Hindustani) traditions. Esmail had studied as a student at the Juilliard and Yale Schools of Music, but then won a scholarship through a Fulbright/Nehru grant to enable her to undertake explorations of Hindustani (north Indian) classical music.

As a student pianist she had become enamoured of the piano trio tradition begun by Josef Haydn and further advanced by figures such as Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Ravel, the latter having a particular influence upon her penchant for colour and texture in her own music. Thus her own 2019 Piano Trio reflects such early Western music influences as well as drawing from the storehouse of musical tradition found in the complex patterns and pitches organised around the ancient patterns and constructions known as raga, or raags found in traditional Hindustani music.

Straightaway, in the Trio’s opening movement, a shimmering, repeated-note pattern appeared, led by the piano and echoed by the violin and ‘cello, echoing the spirit of Ravel in the evocative piano figurations,  the strings later quoting an ancient Monsoon season raag Megh, violin and ‘cello harmonising the melodic lines, then decorating the piano’s reiteration of the melody,  and building the melody’s intensities in canonic fashion. The second movement opened with the strings repeating single-note and slow-trilled gestures against a beautiful choral-like piano melody, violin and ‘cello exchanging dialogue-like phrases, evocatively “bending” the occasional note in sitar-like fashion, as the piano gently and softly voiced a shimmering accompaniment, incorporating a raag Des (the latter word meaning “country” or “land”). For the listener this sounded like a retold or shared reminiscence or description of a particular place, one whose reiterations brought forth a surge of intensity, a deeply-felt sequence of expressive emotion.

The third, Scherzo-movement was all nervous intensity, the strings’s rapidly-exchanged tremolandi passages dancing to an ostinato  piano accompaniment, then building in excitement, with spectacular piano glissandi shooting across the soundscapes like meteorities, before the trio returns to the opening dance, repeating those electrifying piano glissandi to scintillating effect before the energies died down, brought to a droll conclusion by a single piano note!

Beseeching piano chords and lament-like cries from the strings began the finale, the music seeming to be ensnared in its own trance-like evocations, tremolando strings and rhapsodic arpeggiations from the piano leading to a heartfelt, song-like section with a filigree piano accompaniment – beautiful and almost tragic-sounding! The music became almost Rachmaninov-like, with passionate piano chordings and full-voiced string unisons reaching a point where some great thought, emotion or realisation was uncovered or confronted and squared up to – the mood was savoured and elevated to a point of great release and resolution, so that all that were left were haunting piano chords and ever-diminishing string harmonics, fading away to silence. At the end, the departing tones remained an indelible, lingering memory…….

In the wake of such high-impact presentations, South African-born, Wellington-based Keith Moss’s Field Notes in Autumn provided some welcome relief! – we were charmed to find the composer was actually present, and spoke briefly about his work, a piece which was derived from an earlier work for flugelhorn and piano, one presumably written almost exactly a year previously, if the title was to be taken literally!

A fresh, open piano sound began the work, establishing a “New World” kind of ambience, with the ensuing violin solo (repeated by the ‘cello) richly-wrought and nostalgic. The music’s ongoing, almost supercharged nostalgic quality put me in mind of those English pastoral works by Vaughan Williams and Butterworth in feeling, with, as the composer put it, “explorations of place, people and memory”. I sat listening and thinking how gratifying such music would be for performers, giving back such beauties to their efforts, and enjoying, as here, the appreciative audience response both during and at the end of the piece.

In concluding this delightfully singular foray into piano-trio possibilities this gifted ensemble gave us what surely counted as a cornerstone of the repertoire – Robert Schumann’s Second Piano Trio in F Major, for once a work by this composer whose opening would have kept the listener guessing as to its provenance for a few more bars longer than usual, as so much of his output almost immediately does! Here, in contrast to his G Minor Trio whose opening straightway proclaimed its “time of gloomy moods”, was, in the NZTrio’s hands music of joyous and energetic vigour right from the outset, inspired as Schumann was by his love for Clara, and the feelings her devotion to him awakened. It was actually the tenth anniversary of the couple’s secret engagement, which accounts for the music’s frequent allusions to Clara – the first two movements of the work here quoted the song “in the depths of my heart I keep a radiant image of you” from Schumann’s own song-cycle Liederkreis, and the third movement contains a quote from another song-cycle Frauenliebe und Leben, a work influenced by  Schumann’s courtship of Clara at the time.

A sinuous melody shared between the strings began the second movement, which coursed between this and various impulse-driven episodes – soulful recitative-like exchanges given all the room needed for the players to fill out the phrase-turns, and wistful minor-key asides which surprise with impulsive, spontaneous-sounding irruptions that just as suddenly fall back to treasurable moments of exquisite dovetailing of detail – memorable music-making! The third movement was a piquant waltz, violin and piano in canon with the melody, with the cello a dark-browed accompanist, the three players elaborating their lines in the graceful Trio, then returning to the dance, and nudging the harmonies into and out of the major key during the coda.

Nowhere is Schumann more beguiling in this work than in the finale – energetic, whimsical and good-humoured, the music and its performance readily teased and delighted us, building towards the end to what seemed like a near-euphoric state of elation, enabling us all to share in the effervescent-sounding exclamations of pleasure in the playing.  Small wonder that Clara Schumann’s verdict on the work – “(it) delights and warms the depths of my soul from beginning to end” resonated in our responses at the concert’s conclusion!