Classics and commemoratives from the splendid Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents the Aroha String Quartet

The Aroha Quartet: Eli Vincent (viola), Konstanze Artmann (violin), Haihong Liu (leader), Robert Ibell (‘cello)  – photo, Wellington Chamber Music

HAYDN – String Quartet Op. 64 No,6
BARBER – String Quartet Op.11
ROSS CAREY – Toccatina (Elegy – 2010)
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet No. 10 “Harp” Op.74

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday 2nd August

This was a beautiful and revelatory concert from the Aroha String Quartet,as near to a “something for everybody” presentation as one might reasonably wish for!

First of all, there was a String Quartet by Josef Haydn, as delightfully self-explanatory and satisfying as any work from the string quartet repertoire could be to as wide a range of tastes as might be imagined. Following this we heard a work by American composer Samuel Barber, his single most well-known piece of music, popularly known as Barber’s Adagio for Strings, but here brought to us in its original context as part of a three-movement string quartet.

After the interval the focus was shifted to some “closer to home” music, not as indigenous in origin as might have been possible, but whose human interest connection resonated sufficiently for us to register its proximity and relevance to our part of the world.   This was music by Lower-Hutt-born Ross Carey, written in 2010 to commemorate the death of Ruby Hunter (1955-2010), the indigenous Australian singer-songwriter, Carey having been inspired by what he considered as “the profound personal struggles and triumphs of the dedicatee”, one of Australia’s “Stolen Generation” who was taken from her birth family and placed in foster care from the age of eight. She became the first indigenous Australian woman to record and release a solo rock album. Carey in his  work Toccatina – Elegy wanted to reflect something of that eventful journey.

A different and no less eventful kind of life-journey was that of the composer of the concert’s concluding work, Ludwig van Beethoven, whose String Quartet No.10 in E-flat Major, Op.74.has long become identified with its nickname, “The Harp” (given not by the composer, incidentally, but by a publisher!), and earning the sobriquet through its opening movement’s passages of plucked arpeggiated notes .Beethoven dedicated this work to the Archduke Rudolf, one of his most loyal supporters in Vienna. Written against the background of battles in and all around Vienna between the Austrian and French armies, the quartet was able to be premiered towards the end of 1809 after the French had left!

So to the music and its performance – and, to begin, we heard the last of Haydn’s six Quartets Op, 64, in E-flat , a group dedicated to Johann Tost, a virtuoso violinist of the composer’s acquaintance. What a glorious E-flat opening of the work we enjoyed! – with the refulgent warmth of the tones spreading through the ambient spaces of St.Andrew’s, a combination of elegance and playfulness with the sonorous opening set against those filigree impulses of playfulness. The development was treated as a kind of “fantasia” on the opening, before the second violinist presided over a kind of “triologue” between the other three players, a delightful sequence of conversational exchanges, each with a personable kind of opinionated quality, and seeming to come to concerted agreement before returning to the opening – the revisitations added enrichments and feelings of increased satisfaction to the exchanges in their sense of a shared, and obviously relished experience. The slow movement had its own surprise in store – after a serenely lullabic, beautifully “arching-over” melodic opening, the  music\.s central section abruptly changes, depicting what the programme note calls a ”tantrum” from the first violinist (terrific playing from Haihong Liu, here!) – one wonders how “personal” an utterance this episode depicted, as the composer’s marriage was reputedly not a happy one! On the other hand, its volatility could be nothing more than an instance of “gypsy-like” character Haydn had frequent recourse to in his music.

I adored the Menuet’s performance – here, lively and somewhat pesante in character, with the aristocracy depicted as “kicking up its heels” in places, stepping outside the traditionally “courtly” nature of such interactions. The Trio is a gentler “landler” which employs occasional glissandi figurations – a mannerism deemed too “vulgar” by nineteenth-century editors, “smoothing out” the scoops in the lines, but here restored, giving the music an engaging folkish character! And what a joy was the finale! – real “Keystone Cops” stuff which a later composer given also to such headlong dashings, Dmitri Shostakovich, would have relished all the more had he been a violinist!  The whirling, almost vertiginous figurations enacted a stop/start manner whose theatricality added to the pleasures of the entertainment, complete with teasing tempo variants towards the end, and capped off with a furious presto finish that had us on the edges of our seats for the final flourish.

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has long been the American equivalent of Elgar’s “Nimrod”, taken from the latter’s “Enigma Variations”, music whose strands in both cases readily conjure up a sense of shared emotion involving either commemoration or loss on the part of a whole nation and in many cases across boundaries. Both pieces are parts of larger works, in Barber’s case a string quartet Op.11 from 1936, one whose second movement Adagio the composer quickly made into an arrangement for string orchestra, one which has virtually gone around the world, leaving the remainder of the hapless parent work languishing in the wings of largely unheralded appreciation!

Now was our chance to hear the actual “source” from which the work was drawn. It was the first time I had heard the string quartet version of the work, and, in fact, my first experience of the complete quartet! Barber was content with completing three movements, the familiar Adagio here flanked by an opening  “molto allegro e appassionato” movement, and a concluding “molto allegro (come prima)” sequence, He began work on the piece in 1935 while living in Austria with his partner, Gian Carlo Menotti, intending to have the work finished for performance by the Curtis Quartet – however, the finale gave Barber a good deal of trouble, and after the first, delayed, performance of the work, Berber rewrote the movement several times, eventually settling for a kind of reprise of the beginning movement, music of spiky textures featuring colourful contrasts of mood, much shorter than the two movements preceeding it.

The first movement  opened intensely and passionately – music that seemed in a hurry to take us somewhere. A dramatic pause introduced a more lyrical second theme, refreshingly open and song-like, until the tempo was impulsively switched back to the opening urgencies, though retreating again for a gorgeous violin solo, prompting the ensemble to take up the lyrical lines, the cello enjoying a moment of rapturous expression as well – the players then remembered their allegiances to the opening urgencies once again, but couldn’t resist the nostalgic beauties of the more lyrical sequences, which they returned to most affectingly – the music seemed to want to have its cake and eat it too, reminding the players of the music’s need for further fervent gesturings before enigmatically concluding the movement with a few abruptly dismissive shrugs.

The Adagio which followed needed no detailed description, except that its long lines of expression engulfed our  sensibilities in a timeless world, seemingly endless “stretches of sound” which created their own breathing-patterns and impulses, out of normal time, and reminiscent of something like an ancient chant drawing inexhaustible energies from some kind of life-force, and prompting those listening to attune their own biorhythms accordingly – the viola in the ensemble held what seemed like a central note, while the surrounding instruments both stratospherically and metamorphically harmonised to mesmerising effect.  in the midst of the silences that followed, the heartfelt epilogue brought violin and viola together to sound the opening theme’s concluding voice – a superb, deeply affecting performance!

Was a finale necessary after such an utterance? I think so – some kind of “closure” was actually welcomed after the rawness of the Adagio’s conclusion, and the sense of continuation from the first movement brought us back to a world from which we had escaped, and perhaps needed to be re-reminded of, however enriched by the revelations of the Adagio’s other-worldliness. The famous stand-alone Adagio wasn’t at all diminished by its quartet companions, but its impact was sharpened and  made more  multi-dimensional in its original context.

The interval’s breathing-space prepared us for something different, a work whose composer was present in the audience! This was New Zealand-born Ross Carey’s work Toccatina (Elegy), though its subject was more Trans-Tasman than home-grown, and was written while Carey was in Australia. The composer talked with us briefly about the work’s subject-matter before we got down to grips with the actual music – here in three sections, the first an energetically restless “perpetuum mobile” with the lower strings providing rock-steady “hocket” accompaniment to the violins’ soaring and swooping overhead lines, the first violin at first taking the lead with some heart-stopping stratospheric lines, but increasingly joined by the second violin, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint!  In the second section the ‘cello took the lead with a poignant-sounding repeatedly descending figure (lovely voicings from the ‘cello!), supported by a tapestried networking of triplet-like lines from the other instruments, handing over to the violin in places, with the figurations from both instruments seeming to dance to their own music in places….before we knew what was happening the first movement’s ostinato-like movement had crept back, this time with more resolve in the music’s sights, the rhythms giving way gradually to what became increasingly self-affirming statements of quiet fruition at the end – in its way, profound and moving.

And so we reached the concert’s last item – I remember the distinctive first-movement concluding “motif” of Beethoven’s “Harp” string quartet being used as the theme of a televised programme series about famous works of art, long before I started getting to know the quartets properly. Having been television-less now for nigh-on forty years, the aural spaces that were created in my life by such a blessed liberation left room for music of all kinds, and inevitably brought those remarkable works swimming into my ken – so that the reappearance of the aforementioned motif, with its genesis long since identified, continued to give special pleasure!

So it was, naturally, that the Aroha’s voyage through this quartet’s opening, truly venturesome movement enabled me to enjoy that sense of returning from afar all over again, though of course the intermittent journeyings between the aural milestones were as rewarding in their own way, and especially in this intensely committed performance – the opening poco adagio took us into a world of wonderment with those occasional sforzandi chordings reminding us not to tarry overmuch amid incidental beauties, but to keep our intents and purposes on the journey! With the allegro came those delicately-placed pizzicati notes which earned the quartet the sobriquet of “Harp”, along with amazing will-o-the-wisp figurations whose vertiginous quality (here, brilliantly executed) whirled through our sensibilities up to the moment of my “great works of art” revisitation passage, forever fresh and nostalgic at one and the same time! The work’s middle section varied between amazingly “busy’ variants of  the movement’s first allegro subject, and rapid-fire pizzicato exchanges, taking us on a whirlwind kind of ride to the recapitulation, in which all the movement’s elements returned in “same-but-different” guises, and an extended kind of “coda” which managed to integrate those same elements in a spirited confrontation-like summation AND re-echo my “motif” of  cherished memory!

The programme note mentioned the second movement’s ”tender love aria” description, which the performance straightaway brought out, possibly a reflection of an “amour” of the composer’s, though one which perhaps didn’t work as planned due to the near-despair of the minor key mood that suddenly clouded the music, and the almost palpable “hesitancy” which takes over the exchanges! The violin determinedly took the initiative, supported by the cello, before the mood darkened once again (and with the violin dropping into a register that resembled a viola or even a ’cello while its violin partner took the higher ground! Again the instruments mused between hope and despair, though one sensed as much a feeling of resignation in the softly-whispered concluding chords.

What a startling difference wrought by the vigorously-propelled Scherzo, here! Bitingly-precise ensembled attack depicted a fierce kind of exultation, the playing part exhilarating, part fearsome in its physicality, quite overwhelming in its impact, its four-note repetitive phrase modelled on the opening of the Fifth Symphony, premiered just a few months before. The “Trio” sections didn’t let up, but whirled like dervishes around and about chant-like figures, ostensibly used by the composer as counterpoint exercises for his pupils. The scherzo’s “third-time round” was then delivered in increasingly whispered tones, coming to an unresolved halt, and allowing the first strains of the finale to sound from the exhausted silences – an engagingly repeated three-note Allegretto theme!

The first of the variations on this theme, a dancing, canonic celebration of gaiety providing further welcome relief from the scherzo’s punishingly relentless drive. was led by the ‘cello, as was the following graceful triplet variation. Then came a contrasting running variant of the theme, followed variously by a slower, wistful sequence, a sprightlier violin-led dance, and a chugging ’cello triplet accompaniment a cross-rhythmed song – this grew in intensity and pace until it changed to an allegro stretto with all the instruments excitingly in unison, and racing towards the work’s end, finishing, somewhat disconcertingly, on two soft chords!

What a finish, and what a performance, as evidenced by warm appreciation from all parts of the auditorium!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Manon – an operatic journey of turmoil and struggle for survival

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Opera presents:
JULES MASSENET’s  MANON – Opera in Five Acts
libretto by Henri Meilhac

Cast:  Manon Lescaut (soprano) – Amina Edris
Le Chevalier des Grieux (tenor) – Pene Pati
Lescaut, Manon’s cousin (baritone) – Phillip Rhodes
Le Comte des Grieux, the Chevalier’s father (bass) – Wade Kernot
Guillot de Morfontaine ( tenor) – Patrick Power
Monsieur de Brétigny ( baritone) – Kieran Rayner
Poussette, an actress (soprano) – Sarah Mileham
Javotte, an actress (mezzo-soprano) – Jasmine Jessen
Rosette, an actress (mezzo-soprano) – Charlotte Secker
L’Hotelier (bass) – Brent Allcock
Guardsmen – Matt Landreth/Joshua Jamieson

Wellington Opera Chorus – director, Michael Vinten
Orchestra Wellington – conductor, Romain Dumas

Director – Sara Brodie
Set Design – Michael Zaragoza
Costume Design – Rebecca Bethan-Jones
Lighting Design – Paul O’Brien

St.James’ Theatre, Wellington
Saturday, Ist August, 2026
(until 9th August 2026)

Reviewed by Peter Mechen for “Middle C” and “Opera” (UK)

Manon is probably composer Jules Massenet’s most famous work, a five-act opera comique which premiered in Paris in 1884, and which has been a staple of the opera repertory ever since. My first encounter with this work’s name (and that of its composer!) was through a most diverting book I read during my musically formative musical years, a collection of anecdotes and quotations attributed to the legendary conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, well known as a wit and raconteur. Beecham adored French music and was famously quoted in the book as declaring – “I would give the whole of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos for Massenet’s Manon and would think that I had profited by the exchange.”

Though I’ve now fallen under the opera’s spell (my feelings affirmed by this heart-rending production), it took a long while for my explorations to reach the character of Manon (and I’ve still not heard Puccini’s near-eponymously-named Manon Lescaut, nor have I read the original Abbé Prévost novel). I wasn’t at first attracted to the character of Manon herself, an attitude coloured by the less-than-flattering judgements of various (invariably male) commentators – of course the story of Manon is told all along from a male perspective (that of her ill-fated lover, the Chevalier des Grieux), which in my youthful eyes skewed the story against her favour – she’s portrayed as beautiful and charming, but also addicted to wealth and pleasure, and aware of the effects of her beauty and sexuality as tools in manipulating others for her own ends.

Getting to know and think about Massenet’s and his librettist Henri Meilhac’s work more closely, one develops increased sympathy for her character and her actions – her instincts as a “survivalist” necessarily inform what she does throughout, but ultimately take her beyond the point of return on the road to Le Havre in the drama’s heartrending final scene. I found myself less inclined or even able to sit in judgement on her character as merely “shallow”, and by the end of this performance found myself in a kind of wholeheartedly “born-again” agreement with the production’s director Sara Brodie, who expressed in a programme note the character’s determination to “survive” in a man’s world, and realise her “truths” beyond those of the conventional “male gaze”. That final scene opened within me a watershed of sympathy for both her and the luckless des Grieux having to endure their own shared-but-divided fates on that desolate road – Manon meeting her death and des Grieux left to endless darkness and despair. I thought of poet Dylan Thomas’s words regarding the toll exacted by the life-force in one of his poems – “that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer”.

Naturally I was looking forward to the Wellington Opera production, relishing among other things the thought of witnessing in situ two much-acclaimed voices bringing these aforementioned characters to life – soprano Amina Edris as Manon Lescaut and Pene Pati as Chevalier des Grieux – luxury casting indeed! All seemed well at the beginning, with conductor Romain Dumas getting from the Orchestra Wellington band some superbly energetic introductory flourishes, garnished by heartfelt wind-and-string tones, setting in motion and colouring the ambiences of the story. Through what seemed a distinctive setting of old-world portals of public places, in this case a hotel next to a railway station, came a group of people, vociferously demanding the attentions of the hotelier and impatiently awaiting signs of a response!

Here we met certain of the story’s significant characters – firstly the aged roue Guillot de Morfontaine  (Patrick Power) with an entourage consisting of three young actresses, Pousette (Sarah Mileham), Javotte (Jasmine Jessen) and Rosette (Charlotte Secker), plus a friend, Monsieur de Bretigny  (Kieran Rayner), all seconding the urgent demands of Guillot for service, to which the long-suffering hotelier  (Brent Alcock) eventually and good-naturedly responds. All splendidly acquitted themselves, with Patrick Power’s Guillot pompous and self-important in his utterances, and Kieran Rayner’s elegantly self-contained but purposeful de Bretigny a kind of “foil”, as well as the three actresses’ voices both mellifluously blending, and coquettishly keeping their escorts’ attentions. This, of course, like the original “Carmen” of Bizet’s, is an “opera comique”, featuring passages of spoken dialogue in between recitatives and set-piece arias and ensembles – though not a “French speaker” I was amply assisted by the surtitles in being able to relish the theatrical cut and thrust of the characters’ soliloquies and sung/spoken exchanges throughout.

Lescaut (Phillip Rhodes), Manon’s cousin (here, sturdily officious and fatherly of manner) appeared with two of his associates (Matt Landreth and Joshua Jamieson), ostensibly to meet Manon and escort her to the convent as previously arranged, but also to enjoy a shared game of dice with his companions. The train arrived (complete with atmospheric puffs of smoke and steam – an update from Massenet’s original coach!), and after several passengers had disembarked with a fine degree of confused to-do, the stage was set for Manon’s arrival.

I must admit to feeling somewhat confused by my initial view of Amina Edris as Manon in this production  – though her singing and acting as a suitably overawed “provincial miss” new to the city, was convincingly “young-girlish”, with shyness and exuberance set in delightful interplay, (with her opening aria Je suis encore tout étourdie (“I can’t conceal all my confusion!”) winsome and  delightful!), I found it difficult to reconcile myself to the “gawky-schoolgirl” look of her unflattering attire, which for me compromised whatever feminine charm and allure she possessed, thus reducing (or recasting) the verisimilitudes of the composer’s intended “smitten” responses of the various men to her appearance – we heard, firstly, her cousin Lescaut describing her as  Une belle fille (“A lovely creature”),  and Charmante (“Quite enchanting!”), aa we did the old roue Guillot, who professed to be totally smitten by her appearance, asking her for Obtenir de vous un seul mot d’amour  (“A single word of love from your lips!”) – he was quickly brought back into line by his three attendant actresses, who chided him for his foolishness!

Lescaut reappeared, warned Manon regarding unwanted male attention with the cautionary  Soyez gentille! (“Be on your guard!”) and told her to wait for him to return from his card-games – but again, then, with Pene Pati’s appearance as des Grieux, and his fulsome response to his first sighting of Manon, I couldn’t help feeling that his words of utter besottedness  – O ciel!  Est-ce un rêve? (“O, heavens! – Am I dreaming?”) – didn’t accord with the “picture” I was presented  from upon the stage….(as previously stated, I confess to being, at the time, nonplussed by all of this! – the fault must surely have been entirely of my own sensibility, perhaps bringing to bear a convoluted memory of my own jejune “falling in love” experiences – and as such, which I am unreservedly “owning up” to!!). Maybe, as a friend said afterwards to me, for the people together on stage their proximities would obviously overcome any untoward “concealment of beauty” and those utterances I’ve quoted had no sign of any ‘forced pretence” or artificiality by either singer concerning the acting or vocalising – the emotions were as heartfeltly expressed as one could wish for!

Nor, thankfully, were there any reservations in this regard from the beginning of Act Two onwards! In fact, it seemed as if I had woken from a dream and was regaling the appearance of the “true” Manon, as the “enchanteresse” composer and librettist had intended all along! From here, and right up until  the opera’s piteous final scene Edris’s Manon for me simply blossomed in terms of her appearance, with designer Rebecca Bethan Jones’s series of stunning costumes for the heroine readily and effervescently complemented the latter’s disarmingly self-assured beauty, further buoyed along by her determination to succeed in the world of the men seeking to “possess” her – whether in Act Two with des Grieux, reading his letter On L’apelle Manon (“Her name is Manon”), or, later in the same Act, her touching, if somewhat ambivalently coloured, Adieu, notre petite table (“Farewell, our little table”) salute to the couple’s apartment, with de Brétigny in the famous Act Three Gavotte  Obéissons quand leur voix appelle  (“Let us obey when their voices are calling”) on the promenade of Cours-la-Reine at festival-time, or, with des Grieux in the solemn precincts of St. Sulpice Church where she persuades him to forgive her faithlessness and give up his desire to “escape” into the world of prayer and service to others, and return to their past love, in her touching N’est-ce plus ma main? (“Is this not my hand?”). Edris’s Manon “grew” her character in voice and deportment along this journey, as singularly as did other doomed operatic heroines such as Carmen, or Katerina in Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” at their respective journeys’ ends –  Manon’s final moments with des Grieux were at once wretched and yet noble, coming to “own” her self-truths as well as expressing her love for him before expiring, her character portrayal a transfixing and compelling “moment” of radiant intensity, just as would a brilliant shooting-star flash briefly across the heavens towards oblivion.

Pene Pati, as Manon’s paramour, des Grieux, also grew his character from a degree of theatrical awkwardness at the couple’s meeting to a full-blooded, if somewhat over-wrought passion for his “enchanteresse”, one which the events of the story pushed to extremes of delight and despair, as the couple’s fortunes waxed and waned. The tenor’s complete absorption in the role was palpable at all times, both in vocal and on-stage terms – his singing of En ferment les yeux (“When I close my eyes”) to Manon  when together in the lovers’ apartment in Act Two, had that quality of “living value”, of converting the tones into genuine feeling – a mark of greatness! – then, at a different stage of the story, and with a rawer, more vulnerable quality, his aria in the St Sulpice Church – Je suis seule (“I am alone”) – in which he strove to free himself from thoughts of Manon  and devote himself to a life of service to others. As well, there was a treasurable fluency of physical interaction between Pati and his stage-partner (who happens to be his real-life partner as well, of course!) In an interview Pati amusingly – and touchingly – made reference to his and Armina Edris’s real-life relationship, commenting that it had its pros and cons on stage, though an advantage was that they “didn’t have to rehearse the romantic scenes!”  Nevertheless, the partnership seemed to draw from a kind of mutually-generated spontaneity, a naturalness of expression for both Pati and Edris, evident in what came across from both as a no-holds-barred musical and dramatic assumption, with the occasionally strained higher note indicative of the voices’ utter commitment to their roles. We were thus made to feel the singularity of the pair’s achievement in no uncertain terms throughout.

By no means, however, was our delectation confined to the efforts of the story’s leading characters – while not, perhaps an “ensemble” opera in the sense of Mozart’s “Figaro” which I had heard splendidly presented earlier this year in Wellington, Manon nevertheless requires a number of engaging and capable soloists to bring to life various other significant characters in the drama – and here, an entirely home-grown cast gave its audience a good deal of pleasure with its array of individual talents. As mentioned, beginning the stage action was one of New Zealand opera’s most distinguished and experience singers, tenor Patrick Power, as Guillot de Morfontaine, a roue (a French term for “a debauched, lecherous or immoral man”, usually of advanced years), one accustomed to announcing his presence (and his “entitlements”) from a position of wealth, here a robustly-voiced and double-sided figure of both comic fun and more insidious, vengeful intent, one whose rebuffal by Manon on various occasions in the story eventually brought about her downfall at Guillot’s instigation.

Bringing elegance, beauty and good humour to Guillot’s entourage were three of his consorts, elegantly-attired young actresses, probably in his pay for various kinds of amusements, Poussette (soprano Sarah Mileham), Javotte (mezzo-soprano Jasmine Jesson) and Rosette (mezzo-soprano Charlotte Secker) – the three voices alternated between individual observations and concerted comments relating to whatever was happening in the story, the effect at first delightful and amusing when the three chide Guillot for attempting to solicit the young Manon’s favours at his first meeting with her!  Manon envies them their beauty and elegance at first – but comes to share in their world of luxury and pleasure during subsequent scenes in the festival promenade on the Cours-la-Reine, and at the Hotel Transylvania’s gambling tables, until Guillot’s revenge on Manon and des Grieux puts a brutal and unforgiving end to their aspirations.

A further character makes a significant appearance in the Third Act and in various subsequent scenes – this was des Grieux’s father Le Comte des Grieux, who Manon obliquely questions regarding his son’s state of mind after their separation and who answers her with respectful forbearance. The Comte’s later exchanges with his son were given all the parental and societal authority one expected by Wade Kermot’s solemnly sonorous portrayal, doubly-vexed by his son’s reckless affair with Manon, and his subsequent “volte-face” desire to enter the Church. Each of the scenes directly involving father-and-son has a splendidly archetypal sense of timeless confrontation reproduced in all art-forms across the ages – and here, the ecclesiastical solemnity of the renowned Parisian church of Saint-Sulpice was the paradigmatic opposite of the gambling rooms of the Hotel Transylvania, where, in both instances the son was censured by the father – ruefully and philosophically in the privacy of the church, and then trenchantly and censoriously in the tumultuous latter scene in which Guillot wrought his revenge on both Manon and des Grieux, accusing them both of cheating and having them arrested by the police.

Throughout the course of this passionately exuberant and ominously fateful play of events and circumstances the Wellington Opera Chorus brought to the story’s unfolding a vigorously concentrated, chameleon-like series of tableaux, both dynamic, and in places wonderfully frozen in dream-like mise-en-scene “onlooker” stasis amid the vibrant energies, as if choosing to amalgamate momentarily in a “snapshot” with our own audience’s view. Whether on the vibrant promenade of Paris’s Cours-La-Reine or within the inner sanctum of St Sulpice’s church, the voices resoundingly conveyed the singular ambiences of each location, as did the ensemble’s purposefully focused choreographed movements. And while Guillot’s dancers in the Act Three “Ballet from the Opera” made (to the latter’s intense chagrin!) little or no impression upon the by then distracted Manon, their graceful performance suitably charmed the rest of us!

The opera’s final scene depicted the hero and heroine in the grip of Guillot’s revenge – des Grieux has been released from prison at the instigation of his father, but Manon has been sentenced to deportation as befalls “women of her kind”. Des Grieux plans to rescue Manon  and bribes a prison guard to free her, but it is too late, as, sick and exhausted, she dies in des Grieux’s arms on the road. Here, it transcended a popular view of opera  “a show in which the heroine dies at the end…”…. a powerful “across-the-board” commitment embodied by the conviction of the performance scene seemed for me to tap into a feeling of personal loss, of genuine grief, and even of a certain heroism regarding what people did and aspired towards on stage during the telling of Manon’s story. The moment’s power and capacity to convey genuine emotion spoke volumes, reflecting the quality of production in every sense, bringing to fruition something positive about every aspect of what took place both on and around about that stage over the evening.

It was a process which began with the very first orchestral note sounded from the pit, the music springing into warm, pulsating life from Orchestra Wellington, in the hands of conductor Romain Dumas, featuring both ensemble brilliance and energy along with the warmth and character of the numerous instrumental solos depicting or supporting the characters in the story. Set designer Michael Zaragoza’s distinctive stage sets from the beginning evoked both hints of the glories of the ancien regime, symbolic “archways” (the portals) through which characters such as Manon boldly, even recklessly, strode, but also an expression of what was termed “jouissance”, with its titular character in particular searching for a singular manifestation of delight beyond everyday pleasure. And lighting designer Paul O’Brien’s evocatively-lit scenarios reproduced the essences of the characters’ different surroundings and circumstances, none more enduring in the memory than the bleakness of the road to Le Havre, on which the luckless couple met their respective fates.

At the opera’s end there occurred a momentous standing ovation, a fitting tribute to the efforts of everybody concerned, and not simply to the “star duo” achievement of the two leads – this was a solidly-rounded acclamation of a performance which satisfied on so many levels , not the least of which how it “grew into” the drama as the evening went on. It was one definitely for the ages, then, and affirmed as such with ever-renewing confidence, energy and understanding throughout by this production – a presentation for Wellington Opera to be justly proud of.

Ozan Biner-McGrath at St.Andrew’s – a piano recital of music to delight in and savour

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MUZIO CLEMENTI (1752-1832) – Piano Sonata in B Minor Op.40 No.2
SERGEI RACHMANINOV (1873-1943) Prelude in B Minor  Op.32 No.10
Etude-Tableau in F-sharp Minor  Op.39 No.3
CESAR FRANCK  (1822-1890) Prelude, Choral et Fugue FWV 21

Ozan Biner-McGrath (piano)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday 29th July 2026

The St. Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert series in Wellington has consistently delighted us this year with a number of extraordinarily exciting concerts, both performance- and repertory-wise – and this week the series came up with yet another absolute winner! This was a piano recital presented for us by a young pianist from Dunedin, Ozan Biner-McGrath, who’s currently a year-13 student at the city’s Logan Park High School while undertaking piano studies, both with his father, Tom McGrath, and  Professor Terence Dennis at the University of Otago, with whom he’s taking a piano performance paper.

He’s already achieved a number of milestones as a young musician – in 2025 he received First Prize at the Dunedin Concerto Competition,as well as being selected as an NZSO Emerging Artist the same year, having been a semifinalist the previous year in the National Piano Competition and a finalist in the Lewis Eady National Junior Piano Competition in 2023. Earlier this year he participated in and was a semi-finalist in the Lev Vlassenko  Piano Competition in Brisbane. Other biographical details I’ve gleaned are his veneration for two particularly outstanding piano virtuosi, Martha Argerich, and Grigory Solokov, and a love for chamber music as well as solo playing. He also takes part as a percussionist in performances by the Dunedin Youth Orchestra.

What particularly attracted me to Ozan’s recital here was the repertoire he chose, in particular a Piano Sonata by the unjustly-neglected composer Muzio Clementi, who wrote over one hundred such sonatas, and was a virtuoso whose reputation as a performer vied for a short time with that of Mozart. A famous piano-playing confrontation between the two in the presence of the Emperor Joseph II was considered a “draw” though each side’s supporters claimed their favourite’s triumph!

Mozart was, of course, almost congenitally ungenerous to any would-be competitors and their achievements – Beethoven, on the other hand, was quoted as being a great admirer of Clementi’s music!  – in fact when listening to a work like the latter’s B Minor Sonata Op. 40 No. 2 (which Ozan  Biner-McGrath played today), I couldn’t help but join so many of the dots with Beethoven’s  rather more  well-known  “Pathetique” Sonata, with its similar slow introduction to the work. The great Vladimir Horowitz was a noted exponent of Clementi, and more recently, the American pianist Lamar Crowson made two LPs containing a number of the sonatas – however these works remain rarities in piano recitals, so I was grateful for Ozan’s advocacy (and his absolutely splendid playing!).

Right from the beginning, the solemn Molto adagio e sostenuto opening of the B Minor Sonata was beautifully “voiced” , filled with inflexion and communicative impulse – every phrase was given by the pianist a “living value”, it seemed, with Beethoven’s similarly “striving” quality and gift for eloquence a seemingly obvious act of homage to the older composer, the music’s  poise and suggestive spaciousness similarly followed by a fiery allegro. In places I found myself thinking even of the great Sviatoslav Richter’s ability to harness waves of energy and build them unerringly into cataclysmic gesturings at the music’s conclusion – wow!

The second movement Largo, Mesto e patetico brought a questioning opening ambience, as if the player was musing on certain ideas or conundrums, returning them at the end into the whimsicality from which they emerged – all very remarkably transparent a creative process! The Allegro gave rise to dark, urgent passages alternating with more fanciful sequences, the pianist adroitly giving the structure an appealing air of spontaneous unpredictability – and there was a marvellously-wrought “developmental” section that made use of an initial descending figure then given ascending chromatic treatment – simply mesmerising! The return of the opening revisits the “riddle” of the work’s introduction before a presto Coda whirled us away on a barrage of triplets – what a splendidly-wrought roller-coaster ride!

Biner-McGrath’s next offering was the magnificent B Minor Prelude Op.32 No.10 by Sergei Rachmaninov, inspired by Arnold Bocklin’s painting “The Return” (Rachmaninov’s close friend, fellow-pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch left an affecting account of his “discovery” via the composer himself, of this particular Prelude’s “meaning”). This was a remarkable performance by Biner-McGrath, one whose focus and sense of  timing seemed to embody a vivid representation of the artist’s subject in the painting – the return home of a soldier,  plagued by doubts as to what he might encounter and by the unpredictability of how he might react to whatever circumstance he finds. Biner-McGrath built the tensions unerringly throughout the “dark night of the soul” experienced by the prodigal regarding his struggle, and gave appropriate tragic voice to the “major-to-minor” phrase which brought the work to a close.

After this came the spectacularly virtuosic Ètude-Tableau Op.39 No. 3 in F-sharp minor –  a veritable torrent of pianistic pursuance on Biner-McGrath’s part, which, however, didn’t for me seem to have quite enough light-and-shade or specific characterisation (it was the one item I couldn’t quite “connect” with, as much as I appreciated the technical achievement of the player realising the notes!).  Coming after the B Minor Prelude especially, it was more sound and fury than anything else, and gave something of an impression in places of a work still in progress as an interpretation, (maybe the preceding Prelude’s “completeness” in performance needed some time for me to escape the spell and jump into the Etude’s very different world) – still, for whatever reason I remained on the “outside” of the music, and have continued since then to wonder exactly why….

No such problems accompanied the concert’s final item, Cesar Franck’s Prelude Chorale et Fugue, a work written in 1884, long  after the composer had left his piano virtuoso years behind him, but still reflecting his formidable keyboard skills. He completed the Prelude and Fugue before adding the Chorale, paying homage in the first instance to Bach, and, perhaps as a kind of afterthought, wanting to express something of his own religious mysticism in the manner of another of the composer’s heroes, Franz Liszxt, who had befriended the young Franck and encouraged his career at various times, both as a pianist and as an organist.

The work’s opening in Biner-McGrath’s hands was filled with Romantic feeling, a sense of constant yearning for life’s meaning, the flowing, exploratory opening expressing the tensions associated such feelings, both in the restlessness of the harmonic explorations and the freely-recited declamatory passages, repeating  the opening agitated figures and their answering recitations – the pianist freely immersed himself in the music’s explorations, maintaining a “questing” aspect through variants of the agitated passagework which took us further into what seemed a kind of “charged” state of being, leading to agitated passages which fell away as quickly as they had risen.

Biner-McGrath then took us in to the world of the Chorale, calmly and purposefully evolving a “structured” kind of sound one would associate with some sort of ritual, a more “inward” kind of experience – this was further illuminated by a melody played by the left hand repeatedly passing over the right, as if some inward spirit was guiding the hands towards expressing something unearthly, the pianist adroitly bringing out the varying intensities of each of this theme’s appearances as the music progressed, becoming almost orchestral in effect in places, as if unseen voices were joining in the resonances of this noble melody.

Gradually the voices died away, and the pianist took up a very Lisztian repeated three-note descending theme which could have come from that composer’s Third Annees de Pelerinage (published as a set of pieces in 1883, a year before Franck wrote this present work) – sombre in mood at first, it gradually developed in presence and power up and down the keyboard, until the same three-note theme was announced as the beginning of the fugue! – its outwardly contained, slightly capricious aspect was beautifully controlled at first by Biner-McGrath, exploring the motif’s manifold possibilities both declamatory and poetic, until briefly subsiding and re-emerging as a more agitated figure resembling the left-over-right hand-crossing of the Chorale, all so enthrallingly exciting and cataclysmic!

With the turmoil dramatically broken off, a repeated-note figure then seemed to almost “summons” the celestial-sounding return of the chorale theme, one whose growing radiance then majestically shares the sound stage with the fugal theme in a ritual-like rapprochement of sorts, a transformation into what one indubitably feels like a kind of ecstatic resolution of previous troubles and conflicts into eventual triumph!

Of course, it was the kind of music and performance that sent us all babbling out into the streets afterwards – extraordinary! Ozan Biner-McGrath will certainly be a musician to watch for in the near future, and a name to conjure with!

 

 

 

NSZO’S Let There Be Light illuminates Saariaho, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Shan Liu (piano) with Jaime Martín and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – photo, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

KALJA SAARIAHO (1952-2023) – Lumiere et Pesanteur
SERGE PROKOFIEV (1891-1953 – Piano Concerto No. 3 In C Major Op.26
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY (1840-1893 – Symphony No. 4 in F Minor Op.36

Shan Liu (piano)
Jaime Martín (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington (Te Whanganui-a-Tara)
Friday, 24th July 2026

Review by Peter Mechen (Middle C / Seen and Heard International)

This concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra was given the title “Let There Be Light”, a quotation from Genesis 1:3 in the Bible, depicting the creation of light upon the earth and its division from darkness – a theme which took different manifestations in the three works given in this evening’s concert by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and its guest conductor Jaime Martín, along with a major contribution in one of the items from the remarkable sixteen year-old New Zealand pianist Shan Liu, here making his mainstage debut with the orchestra.

Beginning the concert was a piece by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Lumière et Pesanteur  (Light and Gravity) – the composer’s own notes regarding this work referred to it as a ”gift” from her to fellow Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen to honour his advocacy as an interpreter of an earlier work by Saariaho, the oratorio La Passion de Simone, which was inspired by the works of 20th Century philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943). The music of Lumière et Pesanteur  was reworked by the composer from part of that same oratorio, the “Eighth Station”, described by one commentator as the piece’s “most orchestral and least-defined“ section.

Saariaho’s work here  began with the merest murmur of a percussion twinkle from celeste and strings, an evocation of space into which joined a lone trumpeter, sounding a fantastical line with the utmost freedom – this gave way to various wind instruments whose floating tones spontaneously interacted, forming delightfully speculative colouristic and textural ambiences, with brasses playing ever so softly! Over the top of these iridescences piped a piccolo, a foil for the occasional subterranean growlings welling up from beneath, but countered by the continued effusions of wind tone supported by the harp and the softest and most mysterious of brass sonorities.

One could have supposed some kind of narrative at work – my feeling, being new to this music,  was a fairytale-like scenario, one in what seemed in a constant state of sublime and seamless coalescence.  It felt for me as if existence itself here was portrayed in the act of emitting hugely all-embracing sighs of pleasure from the various instrumental groups, occasionally led or spearheaded by specific lines.

Throughout, these tones seemed poly-harmonic, giving us hardly any consciousness of specific keys or modes – instead, opening our imaginations to scenarios of sonorities, textures and timbres engaged in some kind of cosmic interaction, and at which we were spectators mesmerised by the phenomenon’s inception, its growing to various stages of fruition and its equally enigmatic departure! – one in which the sounds didn’t cease as such but seemed to play on at the end beyond what we could actually hear……

After this came the Prokofiev Concerto, a different kind of journey, with its volatility and “take-it-as-it-comes” attitudes towards darkness and light, bestowing insights upon both players and listeners via an experience akin to something of a roller-coaster ride! Such a process seemed all the more Herculean a scenario here through the work in question being undertaken in our presence by such a youthful soloist! Of course Shan Liu had by this time demonstrated his exceptional qualities as a pianist on both the home and international pianistic arenas, even though he was here tackling repertoire that one would think was the preserve of the super-virtuosi (I had, for instance, seen none other than Martha Argerich play this concerto – so I was hedging my bets as to how this young man would in my mind fare against that memory!)…..

Anyway, what a concerto! The opening Andante featured  firstly a clarinet, and a second soon joining in, with the strings then sounding that characteristic sweet-and-sour quality of Prokofiev’s in the opening melody – then in came the strings again with the Allegro – such terrific energy and momentum announcing the pianist’s first entry – could Shan Liu do it? My goodness, could he what! – straightaway, such sparkling, clear and brilliantly fluent fingerwork – and then he really opened up the pianistic throttle for the toccata-like exchanges with swirling winds and slashing strings and tremendous orchestral support in general!  And so it went on – the military-like dotted march rhythms shared between the piano and mischievous instrumental detailing brought out humour aplenty – the march rhythms turned to scampering ones, with each upward-thrusting  gesture eliciting cataclysmic cries from the orchestra, the last of which featured  a return of the opening theme as a full-throated kind of “hymn-tune” – Shan Liu took up the cantabile mood, interacting with the waves of orchestral sound and producing a kind of ethereal, almost mystical sea-change in the music, until the return of the urgent allegro rhythms which recommenced the argument.  And so it went on, through various succeeding episodes too numerous to describe, except to say that the last sortie set the seal on the movement, with the pianist’s running two handed unisons gathering up the orchestral forces in the tremendous and excitingly irresistible propulsions that took the music to a triumphal final chord – at which point the Michael Fowler audience simply exploded with delight and pent-up exhilaration, deservedly giving the musicians their due!

The slow movement was all wistfulness and charm at the outset, the soloist completely at one with conductor and orchestra in the music’s bitter-sweet lyricism, until a sudden outburst brought a wild dance, which the cellos and basses helped along, giving plenty of “hoof to the swing” – as they also did with the succeeding triplet rhythms. By contrast a sequence of pure magic then meandered into and over the sound-vistas, everybody in a kind of drifting dream -a moment of fantastic, other-worldly music-making!  And how spontaneously the rhythmic impulses seemed to come to life again, with dancing impulses sprouting from all about the orchestra – those amazingly jaunty passages then fused their energies with the return of the wistful melody that began the movement – what seemed like opposites enjoying a perfect partnership!

The winds had done a superb job of introducing most of this work’s themes thus far – and the finale was no exception, with the bassoon setting a wry, insouciant opening tone for the movement’s beginning, the piano joining in the fun with big-boned dance measures and playful competition with the orchestra via several glissandi-like skirling phrases added to the “quick-march” exchanges.  There was so much to enjoy, with the winds (again) initiating a plaintive, bitter-sweet melody,  the piano nonchalantly replying with a “walking” theme, taken up by the winds, and a full-blooded return to the bitter-sweet theme on the strings – this was both voiced and embellished until the theme here got the gloriously “full Rachmaninov” treatment from soloist and orchestra (though I’m certain that neither composer would thank me for THAT heartfelt observation!). Those ubiquitous winds then bumptiously reintroduced the opening theme – by now sounding positively turbo-charged! – and with soloist, conductor and players working up to full stretch in alternating the music’s heightened momentums, the concerto by the end had simply overwhelmed us with its power and brilliance!

We couldn’t let Shan Liu go for a while after this! – not until conductor Jaime Martín visibly INSISTED the young pianist play an encore! – most appropriately we were given Schumann’s Traumerei from Kinderszenen, an appropriate antidote to the concerto performance’s intoxication in its simplicity and naturalness of utterance – even though it inhibited not a whit of animated discussion throughout the interval regarding what we’d heard!

Surprisingly, and as it turned out, delightfully, conductor Jaime Martín made a gracious and entertaining “guest’s speech” for us at the second half’s beginning, firstly praising Shan Liu’s remarkable performance, and then properly introducing himself, by way of amusingly recounting his first interactions upon his arrival with various New Zealanders who, upon learning that he was Spanish, acceded, to his utter amazement, fulsome congratulations upon him in relation to the recent Football World Cup Spanish victory!  –  “..almost as if” he said “I myself had played in the final!”. He then talked about his own impressions of the Tchaikovsky Symphony he and the orchestra were about to play,  actually getting the players to sound a few of the work’s themes and motifs by way of highlighting them for us – all this was done in a perfectly straightforward and unpatronising way – a further amusing moment was when the conductor mentioned the word “fate” in his description of the symphony’s main recurring motif, and paused for dramatic effect – in the silence one of the cellists dropped their bow on the floor!

All such byplays done with, Martín began the symphony, getting truly spine-tingling brass-playing and dramatic whiplash-chordings from the full orchestra in the work’s introduction. The strings expressively and plaintively took up their own “first subject”, handing over to the winds and helping to further build up the tensions which became a kind of “pitched battle’ between the “fate” theme and the orchestra’s lamentations! It was a properly dramatic and sonorous journey throughout, the eloquent orchestral detailing in every section by turns confronting (the “fate” music and its insistent accompanying theme) and consoling (the folksy second subject theme and its major-key variant) right to the tumultuous conclusion of the first movement.)

Martín had asked his strings beforehand to play the accompaniments alone to the long oboe solo that distinguishes the second movement, encouraging his audience to “register” the simplicity and loneliness of these pizzicato passages, adding to the beauty of oboist Robert Orr’s actual performance – listening to this movement I was freshly taken aback by the qppeql of Tchaikovsky’s orchestrations, especially the many interactions between strings and winds so gorgeously and heartfeltly realised in this performance. Likewise in the famous pizzicato-led third movement the impact of the instrumental contrasts between strings, winds and brass were positively flavoursome (Johanna Gruskin’s piccolo in particular picturing a superbly loquacious “beastie”!).

Martín then introduced the finale almost as attacca (not marked in the score), conveying the music’s tremendous urgency, the playing marked by fierce exchanges and great brilliance – similarly, the conductor brought the contrasting “Birch tree” melody in almost in tempo. maintaining the music’s delicacy but enhancing the excitement! Later in the movement this melody led with increasing intensity to the final, tumultuous statement of the “fate” motif, momentarily halting the music’s headlong flow, but leading to a quiet reiteration of the festive-like music which represented the composer’s words “If you cannot discover the reasons for happiness in yourself, look to others…” The orchestral frenzy unleashed for us at the conclusion of this movement tonight embodied that fatalism with the utmost euphoria and excitement. Since then, my memory has been wandering back to my first encounter with this work via the legendary Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, whom I saw give what seemed like a cataclysmic-sounding performance with the then NZBC Symphony Orchestra here in Wellington in 1973 – his shade would, I think, have relished tonight’s equally memorable presentation.

 

 

 

Music of celebration and of mourning, from the Aroha String Quartet International Music Academy

Posted on by Peter Mechen

AROHA STRING QUARTET – International Music Academy Tutors Concert

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (1921-1992) – Tango Ballet (1956) – arrangement for string quartet by Jose Bragato
RICHARD STRAUSS (1864-1949) – Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings (1945)
– arrangement for 7 solo strings by Rudolf Leopold (1996)

Members of the Aroha String Quartet International Music Academy Tutors –
Haihong Liu, Donald Armstrong (violins) / Eli Vincent, Konstanze Artmann (violas)
Robert Ibell, David Chickering (‘cellos) / Oleksandr Gunchenko (double-bass)

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington – Lunchtime Concert
Wednesday, 15th July, 2026

The Aroha String Quartet’s International Music Academy meets every year in Wellington for six days of intensive music-making, involving workshops, coaching and rehearsals, an event organised and run by the Quartet members themselves and the Academy Administrator Cathie McCallum. This year close to forty non-professional string players from around New Zealand and Australia were brought together for workshops, coaching and rehearsals, which result in various concerts involving the players and the guest tutors, and featuring works for both chamber and orchestral forces.

One of these concerts, featuring firstly the Aroha Quartet players themselves, and then in partnership with several of the Academy’s tutor-musicians brought a large lunchtime-concert audience to St.Andrews’ for what promised to be a special event – we were given repertoire out of the usual “run” of things for a string quartet – a “Tango Ballet” by the Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla (written originally for his own ensemble, the  “Octeto Buenos Aires” in 1955 – a string quartet version of this work was made by Jose Bragato, the composer’s regular “collaborator”), and then followed by a work from Richard Strauss written in 1945, originally for seven players but then recast as the “Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings” version we normally hear (this performance was of a 1996 reconstruction of the “original” by Rudolf Leopold).

Consequently, it was very much a concert of two halves, beginning with the Piazzolla work which delighted on all fronts from the outset –  Piazzolla’s “Tango Ballet” sought to “expand” the traditional associations of the dance into various adaptations of mood and situation, using a narrative not dissimilar in technique to George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”, namely, a series of impressions of city life (in Piazzolla’s music’s case, Buenos Aires, of course!).  The work’s introduction features the solo violin vertically effervescing with energy, the accompanying strings at first taciturn in response, but then rolling into a swinging rhythm, the impulses sufficiently and enticingly “held back” by way of suggesting greater excitements to come…..the following “The Street” gets the rhythms walking with ever-growing excitement, the upper strings dancing over the cello’s ever-jaunty strides and eventually rushing up and down in a ferment of exhilaration, which then unexpectedly quivers to a halt, as if transfixed by a sight, a feeling, a happening – what could it be?…

The score bears the title “Encounter”, suggesting a meeting, bringing bewilderment, perhaps bashfulness, or beguilement, an awkwardly romantic moment (Eli Vincent’s viola here contributes a wonderfully-played and smokily suggestive moment of discombobulation towards the end) – when suddenly the music breaks into the mood with “Cabaret” , with the rhythms bouncing all around and about, the energies having an almost animalistic “impulse without thought”, but which then drain disconcertingly to a near-silence. It’s the work’s most profound moment, and one which the composer’s favoured instrument, the bandoneon is almost certainly suggested in this movement’s introspectiveness, as befits its title of “Solitude”. The music drifts downwards, the lower strings’ despairing tones icily accompanied by violin tremolandi, the latter then taking up a heart-wrenching melody, very harmonically “free’ and played with heartfelt focus by Haihong Liu.

And so, life goes on, as the music returns to the mood of the opening, heralding the concluding “galop” with lots of fanfare-like gesturings, and bringing the work to a close with a few flavoursome “tough” harmonies leaping off the bowstrings and into the excited resonances of the conclusion.

One couldn’t have asked for a more contrasted ambience than from the work by Richard Strauss which followed – this was a piece given here by seven string players which the composer had first sketched out in response to a commission from the famous Swiss conductor Paul Sacher in 1944. The conductor had wanted a work for string orchestra, so the sketch was amplified to a work for 23 solo strings, and given the name “Metamorphosen” by the composer, inspired by the writings of Johann Wolfgand von Goethe whose ideas had expressed, over a century beforehand a metamorphosis of living things through constant transformation and renewal.

By this time the ageing German composer had become sickened by the war’s gradual destruction of so many hallowed locations throughout Germany and Austria which he had held sacred as representative of Germany’s art and culture. He was to write in his diary, after finishing “Metamorphosen” in May 1945,  “The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom” . Though the despair Strauss felt at the loss of so many cherished symbols of his country’s art and culture was palpable, his choice of a title for the piece seemed, however subconsciously (and at that time remotely), a gesture akin to planting a Goethe-like seed of renewal in the face of such destruction.

In fact Strauss’s fellow-composer Gustav Mahler had similarly expressed in his own music many years before something of the same dark despair in the concluding pages of the latter’s Sixth Symphony – and, of course, both composers were to emerge from their separate “dark nights of the soul” and go on to compose subsequent works of searing beauty, Mahler with his “Das Lied von der Erde” and his Ninth Symphony, and Strauss with his equally glorious “Four Last Songs”.

The themes Strauss crafted for “Metamorphosen” are partly his own and partly those of his idol Beethoven, directly evoking memories of the latter’s “Funeral March” from the “Eroica” Symphony. In this performance of the composer’s original septet version (reconstructed by Rudolf Leopold in 1996) the themes inevitably stand out more clearly than in the full, 23-instrument version, though the ambiences are inevitably different, and in some ways more intense for listeners, who are perhaps encouraged to “move more closely” to a smaller group, rather than settle back and revel in the lusher, fuller sound of the bigger ensemble.

I had not heard this “chamber version” before, and, not unexpectedly, found it revelatory, in as much as that “moving closer” sensation brought upon by greater intimacy with the sounds, enabled the music to “strike home” even  more tellingly (ironic though it might seem when one thinks of the sonic impact of a large group of strings!), Of course there have been many great recorded performances of the work in its “full strings” version – and I also recall a superb performance from as distant a time as 2010 from the NZSO strings with Pietari Inkinen here in Wellington, all but the ‘cellos standing, and everybody playing their hearts out!

With the Aroha Quartet players and three others whose names are indelibly associated with the NZSO, Donald Armstrong (violin), David Chickering (‘cello) and Oleksandr Gunchenko (double bass), there was no question regarding the brilliance, fluency and commitment of the playing of these musicians in this work, which was thrilling! What I came to realise, shortly after the work began, was the extent to which this music quickly overflowed its expressive parameters as I listened, transcending its composer’s original intention of commemorating the destruction of a culture at a specific time and in a specific place, and prompting – no, in fact, URGING me to bring to mind the world’s present-day happenings of destruction and desecration of whole peoples and their cultures by forces whose originators and proponents one might well accuse in turn of “bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture” and as our own era’s “greatest criminals”! Strauss himself might have been obsessed with his own personalised despairings via this work, but his brilliant stroke of introducing motifs from the music of one of the world’s most oft-acknowledged sympathisers towards and spokespersons for mankind in general, here completely and utterly transcended any boundaries of time, place and circumstance relating to the original 1945 work.

Certain concerts take it upon themselves to be enshrined in the memory, especially those whose performances are enabled by the players to speak with an eloquence that transcends the ordinary –  sometimes even to the point where the music-making reminds us, however uncomfortably, that we live in a world in which “Humankind cannot bear very much reality”…….this concert took me into the sobering, on-going  realities of those words and the resultant sufferings of people, then and now, and everywhere…..

 

Elouan Quartet and Bridget Douglas – stellar performance and partnership

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music  2026 presents:

ELOUAN QUARTET with BRIDGET DOUGLAS (flute)

AMY BEACH _Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet
SALINA FISHER – Mata-Au (2021)
ARTHUR FOOTE –  A Night Piece for Flute and String Quartet (1918)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in B-flat major Op. 18 No. 6
ALBERTO GINASTERA – Impresiones de la Puna for Flute and Strings (1934)

Elouan Quartet: Jessica Oddie (leader), Anna Van Der Zee (violin), Alexander MacFarlane (viola), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 12th July, 2026

I’d not heard the Elouan String Quartet play together before (and they were formed in 2024, so goodness knows where I had been!) However, I was familiar with three of the quartet members in different performing contexts, violinists Jessica Oddie, and Anna van der Zee, and ‘cellist Ken Ichinose, all of whom I’d thought were exceptional in what I’d heard them play. And though the name of the violist, Alexander MacFarlane, was new to me, his presence in such august company couldn’t, I reasoned, help but be self-recommending even before I heard a note of his playing! Furthermore, the concert was graced by the presence of Bridget Douglas, principal flutist with the NZSO, and a much-loved favourite of Wellington audiences. Adding to the mix was a programme whose composer-names were in most cases more familiar to me that was their actual music, so on various counts I felt the concert promised to be something of a treat.

Of course, the “something old/something new” kind of presentation invariably works well with audiences, though the “something old” can by dint of sheer force of personality make just as much of an impact upon audience sensibilities in a well-wrought performance as a newly-encountered work. Having said that I’m aware that the music of this afternoon’s first composer hasn’t exactly been entirely neglected of late in the city’s concert and recital programmes. American-born Amy Cheney Beach achieved fame both as a performer and a composer during her lifetime (1867-1944) – she was the first American woman to have a full-scale symphony (her 1896 “Gaelic” Symphony)  performed (by the Boston Symphony Orchesra) and published – and she was also the soloist at the 1900 premiere of her own Piano Concerto, with the same orchestra. Altogether she composed more than 300 works, including chamber music, choral works, songs both with orchestra and piano, and solo piano pieces.

After her death Beach’s music suffered a decline for several decades, but interest in her creative achievements has gradually renewed, as has recognition of her pioneering efforts on behalf of both American music and women composers. A comment by one of her contemporaries after the first performance of her “Gaelic” Symphony suggested the ambivalence women composers had and would continue for a while to face on the part of the “establishment”, with fellow American composer George Chadwick congratulating Beach on her efforts, by way of  welcoming her (the only woman) into membership of the New England composer-group, known as the “Boston Six”, proclaiming her as  “one of the boys”.

Wellington has recently head this same “Gaelic” Symphony given by our City Orchestra – see review at https://middle-c.org/2026/06/a-world-encircling-winter-solstice-concert-compendium-from-the-wellington-city-orchestra/ : and another memorable concert in the region took place at Waikanae in 2023, featuring the New Zealand String Quartet of that time, playing Beach’s 1907 Piano Quintet, and joined by pianist Diedre Irons giving what seemed like an “in the manner born” performance of the piano part – here’s another review at https://middle-c.org/2023/10/the-new-zealand-string-quartet-discusses-emperors-dictators-and-husbands-at-waikanae/

Another chamber piece by Amy Beach was featured in today’s concert, “Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet”  a work from 1916 and one of three presented today featuring a partnership between solo flute and string quartet. Here, the music demonstrated Amy Beach’s desire to reflect a kind of  “American” quality in her music, something very much an “issue” in Beach’s lifetime, and which led to discussion and argument which at times became acrimonious. This was the question regarding exactly what was “American” in music – was it from native American Indian sources, Afro-American cultures or from “the great majority” of American peoples who were neither American Indian nor Afro-American, but had vastly different cultural heritages brought from various other parts of the world?  The discussion had originally been sparked by none other than Antonin Dvorak, at that time resident in the United States during his directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Dvorak famously stated that proper “American” music should embrace the diversities of the country’s multicultural elements, such as with what the composer called “indigenous” folk tunes, and sought to present a kind of “demonstration” of this influence in his well-known  “New World” Symphony.

Of course, this review has nothing like the space needed to convey the various arguments and counter-arguments in full, but they brought to the fore issues of class, race and ethnicity in ways that still resonate today – see further commentaries in the following article – https://classical-scene.com/2025/05/24/a-tale-of-two-cities/  Amy Beach was theoretically on the side of the “great majority” influences, the various heritages brought to the United States by the new settlers – in her own compositions she chose to highlight her own Anglo-Celtic folk-tunes, and particularly in her “Gaelic” Symphony. It’s ironic that the principal theme of this work, derived from one of Beach’s own songs, is one with the title “An Indian Lullaby”, though the melody is entirely Beach’s own.

The strings alone began the work, the theme, wistful and melancholy, the lines having an almost silken contrapuntal aspect with their intermingling, before allowing the flute to enter with elaborations that decoratively “clothe” the original theme, the players again observing the minor-to-major key change towards the end which the theme had incorporated. The next variation has an insoucient tripping trajectory into which the strings invite the flute to join, having tested the contrapuntal waters and found them agreeable – though the ensuing waltz promised a darker, more sinister kind of experience, chromatic harmonic shifts adding to the music’s effable, ineffable mystery, and making a gorgeously seductive sound under  these players’ fingers…..the fourth variation seems like a shadowy kind of entr’acte, as mysterious in its culmination as its entrance. Then followed a gorgeously passionate outpouring of tones from the ‘cello introducing the fifth variation, taken over by the flute, long-breathed and languorous, before the theme was generously shared by the instruments in turn, a true confluence of ensembled sound-personalities!. A gloriously rhapsodic flute solo later, the ‘cello began an impish fugue, which proceeded with ingenious distractions, such as a classic watchmaker’s “winding down” to the fugue’s strains  – a quick, scampering reprise of the same by the cellist and violist brought everybody back to a rerise of the work’s opening, and whose final notes I can still imagine somewhere continuing to echo….

Salina Fisher’s String Trio Mata-Au followed (the name of the Clutha River in Te Reo. meaning “to meet again”). I can’t do better than quote the composer’s own note in the programme, describing just what I heard….”The water dances and swirls as it connects places and people – It flows and gushes with forward momentum and anticipation…” I heard what I imagined to be a bubbling spring-like infusion of liquid energy, with strongly-projected harmonic colours, often in “seconds” intervals, and volatile in rhythmic character, the instruments taking single-line “turns” before moving inexorably into transcendent realms, the sounds lifted upwards, with the solo cello having the last word. I wish Douglas Lilburn could have heard this work, as it seemed to me to explore those rhythmic realms, both spontaneously gestural and longer-term trajectorial that he spoke about composers here “finding” as a genuine “language” of our own……

A near-contemporary of Amy Beach (and a fellow-member of the aforementioned “Boston Six”) was Arthur Foote (1853-1937) born in Salem, Massachusetts. He had a couple of “firsts” to add distinction to his career as a composer, teacher and organist – he was the first prominent American-born composer to be entirely trained in the U.S. and the first to receive an American university’s Masters degree in music. In his day he was a well-known figure in music circles – like Amy Beach he had orchestral works premiered by the Boston Symphony, in his case suites, serenades and a cello concerto, There was also chamber music, choral works and numerous piano pieces, with one critic characterising  Foote’s output as belonging to “the cult of restrained in art”, and citing his “A Night Piece for Flute and String Quartet” as representative of a creative culture running parallel to more “unrestrained” expressions of creativity.

This piece attained popularity in a later version for flute and string orchestra, but here we heard the original and more introspective chamber version. Beginning wistfully and romantically, the music is often likened to Faure’s – nothing is excessive, with passionate moments for the solo flute in constant balance with more subdued passages, in the manner of a rhapsodic fantasy-piece. All of the instruments were here allowed to speak with characteristic voices, and “realise” the composer’s beautifully-crafted evocations.

“Anchoring” this enterprising concert was a presentation by the Elouan players of the last of Beethoven’s Op.18 Quartets, No, 6 in B-flat Major, my favourite from the set. Beginning with an irresistibly “bouncy” Allegro con brio, the players packed the trajectories with momentums that picked us up by our ears and took us places, replete with phrasings which questioned as well as answered, and relied as much on contrast as flowing discourse. The development section was an absorbing, slightly “off the path” series of ear-catching modulations whose exchanges delighted us with their “made up on the spot” character, with dialogues that never faltered, and at the end, double-duetted their way to a recapitulation that chose a “same but different” homeward path, as sharp-etched here in places as it was convivial. The slow movement, part heartfelt song-like, part-processional at the beginning, took us through a series of exquisitely-voiced major/minor key sequences which kept us guessing in places as to what the music would do next!

As for the whirlwind Scherzo, we were deliciously bewitched, and bothered, if not entirely bewildered by the composer’s utter delight in syncopation (“an explosion of rhythmic eccentricity” was how one commentator described it)  and which the players  threw off without seemingly turning a hair, all to our pleasurable delight! Not only this but the Trio was despatched in similarly split-second fashion, the whole giving us surgings of near-breathless exhilaration. Came the famously “ghostly” introduction to the  finale, with its Haydnesque opening bars and its gradual agglomerations of “La Malinconia”, here darkly, ambiently and (as the composer wished) delicately coloured by the players as the music seemed to take us still further into those seemingly malignant, almost Shakespearean realms – before Beethoven suddenly whipped off the mask of dread and brought to the fore a charming 3/8 Allegretto (quasi Allegro!) dance!  We were in due course returned, suddenly, to the opening, which again inclined towards darker regions, but alternated between this and the dance, and afterwards returned to a slower, more dreamy statement of the dance theme, before Jessica Oddie’s violin led the “up-and-at’-em” charge of a few barnstorming bars towards the finish! What a journey!

We then reconnected with Bridget Douglas for the concert’s final item, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s  Impresiones de la Puna for Flute and Strings (1934). Reckoned to be Latin America’s foremost composer after the death of Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos in 1959,  Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) began his composing career as a nationalist, using folk and popular elements in his music. One of his earliest compositions was “Impressions of the Puna” (the name refers to the bleak rocky wasteland high in the northern Andes, the heart of the old Inca empire). In three movements, the first, Quena, refers to the cane flute, an instrument developed by Inca civilisation and used for solo improvisation and song accompaniments – here, the performance brought out the music’s “solitary player” aspect, a melancholy song with harmonic support from the strings. Hardly less melancholy, though with livelier trajectories, was the second piece, Canción (song), not surprisingly referring to lost love, the music comparatively restrained and lyrical at first, before gathering momentum towards the end with a steady, dotted string-rhythm. The third and final Danza refreshed our sensibilities with something different – strongly pulsating pizzicato rhythms accompanying a flute-and-violin dialogue, interrupted by recitative-like utterances from flute and strings before returning to the dance, and concluding with concerted flourishes from all the instruments together. A minor work, perhaps, but great fun to play and to listen to, and allowing us the pleasure of returning to our homes afterwards with smiles and warm hearts.

Deliciously unfamiliar/eminently listenable music from little-known French composer Michel Corrette

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MICHEL CORRETTE (1707-1795) France
LES DELICES DE LA SOLITUDE – Sonatas Op. 20 Nos.1-6

Michelle Kesler –  ‘Cello I Sonatas 2, 4 & 6  / Cello II
Miranda Wilson – ‘Cello I Sonatas 1, 3 & 5  / Cello II

MSR Classics MS 1832

Recorded November 2024 in the Recital Hall at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA

“In the spirit of friendship between ‘cellists, we hope listeners will enjoy this lively conversation between instruments” writes ‘cellist Miranda Wilson in her notes accompanying a delightful recording that has come my way, of music by a composer whose name I did not know, one Michel Corrette, born in Rouen, France in 1707. In this case, it’s amusing to associate the ready camaraderie between the two musicians featured on this recording with a work whose six sonatas have the collective subtitle  Les délices de la solitude (The Delights of Solitude) – however, although it would seem that Corrette’s set of six sonatas were originally for solo ‘cello plus basso continuo, they’re here assigned to two ‘cellos, whose demonstrably equal share of the lines makes for great satisfaction, as much obviously in performing as in our listening!

Cellists Michelle Kesler and Miranda Wilson are the players on this recording, made in November 2024 at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah – at the time both were Professors of ‘Cello at their respective teaching places, Kesler at the aforementioned Brigham Young University, and Wilson in the neighbouring state of Idaho at the eponymously-named State University in Moscow, Idaho. We’re given detailed guidance as to which player is “Cello I” in each of the sonatas, Kesler conveniently taking the “lead” in Sonatas 2, 4, and 6, and Wilson in the other three. The presentation nicely completes the collaborative nature of the whole by presenting the works in numerical order.

My first listening impression (Sonata No. 1 in F Major) was of a slightly more spacious acoustic for the two instruments that I thought I was going to fully enjoy, but, as with any concert or recording one encounters, one’s ears can take a little while to, in Michael Flanders’ immortal words on his and Donald Swann’s “At the Drop of A Hat” live recording, “get the pitch of the hall” – and by the first movement’s end the sounds had found and “inhabited” their places for me with music which had by this time amiably teased, cajoled and enlivened my spirits!

Miranda Wilson entertainingly draws attention to Corrette’s music corresponding with the rise of the ‘cello as a solo instrument at the expense of the viola da gamba in popularity at this time, one taken advantage of by, firstly, the publication of these sonatas at around 1739, and the composer’s 1741 treatise Theoretical and Practical Method for Learning the ‘Cello to Perfection in a Short Time. Something of the ferment of the controversy is excitingly suggested by a pamphlet circulated in 1740 by a French lawyer and amateur viola da gamba player Hubert Le Blanc, one which bore the contentious title Defence of the Bass Viol against the Enterprises of the Violin and the Pretensions of the ‘Cello! – wot larks! Le Blanc’s somewhat intemperate rationale regarding his instrument’s superiority has since seen its consignment to the realm of the specialist, by no means obliterated, but put in its place by history!

Here, we are invited to indulge in the composer’s obvious enthusiasm for the then still new-fangled instrument (Corrette’s aforementioned treatise was the first French publication of “a theoretical and practical method” for aspiring cellists) – and the sonatas as recorded here feature a kind of “coming together” of solitudinous delights, with each ‘cellist by turns blending their instruments’ solo lines with their partners’ roles as contrapuntal voices, the modes somewhat antithetical in these pairings but, in situ, delightful.

Sonata No. 1 straightaway dances into a Fuga, marked Allegro, the counterpoints unselfconsciously switching from first to second voice in non-hierarchical exchange, its composer obviously allowing his originally-wrought basso continuo a satisfyingly comparable response to the soloist here, and also in the Affetuoso Aria that followed – and the Allegro finale makes for as “companionable” a solitude as could be imagined!

The D Minor Sonata No. 2 begins with a more driving Allegro, with lots of “fizz” to some of the exchanges, and the ensuing Affetuoso, with its contrasting Arias I and II underlining a poignant operatic-like interaction, not unexpectedly calling for some resolution – a CPE Bach-like Allegro staccato did the trick, those brusque, attention-grabbing initial notes making for a splendid “what’s all this, then!” kind of denoument!

I loved the easy, loping stride of the C Major No 3’s Allemande – a kind of relaxed “bustle” of an Allegro, and then with both this and the equally bucolic concluding Fuga da capella third movement enclosing an unexpectedly concentrated middle-movement Sarabande. More concentrated intensities came with both players’ deep-diving into the following E-flat Major Fourth Sonata’s opening Adagio, one that conveyed a more-than-usual sense of solitude on the music’s part. This dramatically tipped over and into a Corrente, an exhilarating running-sequence leaving one breathless but energised enough to take on board the music’s almost hymn-like Aria which followed – little did we realise we were being primed for a “call-to-arms” with the succeeding “Brut de chasse” here rousing and enthralling our sensibilities with sounds and sensations of an army on the march!

Further excitement came with the galvanic Presto Prelude to the Fifth Sonata in G Major, in which one imagined our two cellists enjoying an “Anything you can do” exchange, with hair and resin flying! The following Allemande, though more leisurely an Allegro took us on a reasonably aerobic stroll, a mood which was at once echoed and calmed by a graceful Sarabande – here, a winsome and exploratory partnership that brought peace to one’s soul. As well for such respite, with the sharply-etched Presto finale that followed mischievously breaking the mood, snapping playfully at dancers’ heels.

Glorious and celebratory were the Handelian flourishes which opened the final sonata of the set, the 6th in a joyous D Major. Here, strangely, it seems the MSR Classics booklet prints the incorrect names and tempi for the movements – the opening Preludio has a grand, ritualistic character which should be Allegro Moderato, not Presto. And this suits the solemn, ceremonial gait of the second movement Aria, not Allemande – Allegro as listed here. Finally, the players skip merrily into a concluding Gigue (not in the least bit like a Sarabande!). It all made for a bit pf a puzzle on a first listen, but one well worth solving, and which Michel Corrette himself might possibly have regarded with amusement rather than annoyance  – after all, among his prodigious output were no less than twenty-five “Concerti Comiques”, pieces for vocal and instrumental ensembles which were often “fun” settings of popular tunes and well-known opera themes, and written largely to be used as “entractes” during performances of comic theatre.

This was revelatory stuff for me – listening to the disc right through was like being taken on some kind of “tour” of a specific time and place in European musical history – though he lived in the same era as his fellow countrymen Rameau, Leclair, Boismortier and Mondonville, and at the same time as Handel, CPE Bach, Gluck and Pergolesi,  Corrette’s music survives comparison with these more famous figures due to its craftsmanship and its composer’s penchant for capturing elements of different styles and blending them in singular ways. The voices of his influences are in places unmistakable but he manages to make the results of their synthesis his own. The only comment I wanted to make of a questioning nature concerned repeats in the various movements, so many of which seemed to finish before I wanted them to! –  and moments such as those made me wonder what the scores of these works indicated were the options for the players who perform this music. I would be interested to find out more regarding this subject. For the rest, to the composer and performers, simply “Bravo! C’est magnifique!”

Music that unfurls the Colours of Karori’s splendid Futuna Chapel

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

“Something old, something new…”  – the Elementi Trio at Futuna Chapel, July 2026Monica Verburg, Nicholas Hancox and Pepe Becker

ELEMENTI TRIO –
Monica Verburg – flute, alto flute
Nicholas Hancox – viola
Pepe Becker – soprano, thumb piano (mbira)

Futuna Chapel, Karori, Wellington
Sunday, 5th July 2026

Sitting in Futuna Chapel, in Karori, on a recent Sunday afternoon, listening to a concert of music given by a trio of extremely talented performers (flutist, violist and soprano vocalist), I found myself thinking at various stages of the concert about the sheer beauty of the sounds being brought forth by these musicians. I’m sure that, given the singular beauty of the venue’s overall atmosphere, ambience and amalgam of design and colour, I was allowing those qualities to infuse the music’s impact beyond the realms of a simple auditory response and into a kind of totality of experience that transcended “normal” listening. Be that as it may, the effect of these different factors conspired to produce a level of enjoyment of this concert’s music-making that has stayed with me right up to this moment.

Interestingly, the very first item of the concert seemed to me as much a “test run” by the performers, almost a “getting the pitch of the hall” kind of run-through with an audience present for the musicians to be able to sound out things like the balances between the instruments and the voice, and the degree to which the sounds “come back” from the peopled ambient spaces. I did find this first item (Thomas Morley’s madrigal “Arise, get up, my dear” a trifle chaotic in its full-blooded amalgam of sounds – and yet the music is actually about incidental chaos, being Morley’s musical description of the hustle and bustle of a new bride’s wedding day. More spacious and wide-ranging was Pepe Becker’s singing of Hildegarde of Bingen’s “O Euchari” which followed, the singer enabling her voice to “ring down the ages” from Hildegard’s time, with Nicholas Hancox’s viola steadily recreating the age-old drone accompaniment. A third item completed an opening “triumvirate” of the concert’s range and scope, featuring a home-grown work, Pepe Becker’s own setting of a sixteenth-century poem “T’amo mia vita” (I love you, my life) by Giovanni Battista Guarini, originally written for three voices and mbira “thumb piano” but here recast by Becker for soprano, viola and mbira – the latter is an African instrument and was played here by Becker herself, its sound creating a kind of timeless, tonally transcendent “voice”. The words of the poem have a universality which here seemed to fit the composer’s revised setting as much as it must have her all-vocal original!

We heard three more of Pepe Becker’s by turns playful, declamatory and darkly visionary pieces placed separately throughout the concert, the delightful “Two Tui” a work for flute premiered by Bridget Douglas in 2010, and essayed here most viscerally by Monica Verburg, the music based on two separate calls associated with different places in Wellington, and brought together as a kind of dialogue, with a petulant dismissive squawk of one bird at the other’s expense at the end! Becker’s more expansive, almost ritualistic piece, “Scorpio II – From the far point of the Rising Sun” featured her soprano voice enacting a kind of ritual exchange with the solo flute. Long, sonorous lines alternating with stately roulade-like flourishes before the dialogues become intricate and earnest (though no words were provided – I presumed the singer’s phrases were in Latin), the lines occasionally mirroring one another before concluding the piece with some brief mirror-image shared phrasings. Most suggestive for me was her darkly resonant tribute to Sagittarius, a setting of William Blake’s “The Tyger” a work Becker dedicated to her father, along with her “many Sagittarius friends” – something of a “Do not go gentle into that good night” work of darkness and angst, the sombre tone set by Nicholas Hancox’s opening viola chord, though the trio fetched up more incisive and trenchant tones for the poem’s “fearful symmetries” (it was a work composed for this concert, in fact!).

Bringing her own creative talents to this cornucopian assemblage was flutist Monica Verburg, who contributed no less than two recently-completed pieces for premiering at this concert, the first one a heartwarming and environmentally topical work titled “To the Hills” (Ki ngā puke), being inspired by a recent campaign of conservation of Otago’s Dunstan Mountains. Verburg drew our attention to the piece’s influences, a certain “Celtic flavour” in accord with early European settlement of this area, and which the trio of musicians made much of in performance throughout the piece’s three sections, The other recent work of Verburg’s was  “In the Slipstream” a delight for the ear in its interplay between two instruments, flute and viola (the flutist often swapping between flute and alto flute in her performances, which variation, to my shame, I seem to have neglected to draw any attention to in my notes – mea culpa!) Here, the two instrumental  lines  imitated, shadowed and mimicked one another constantly, with (I thought) occasionally bluesy inflections spicing the sounds ever so slightly, as the music, by turns teased and blended its two strands before drifting into a pensive ending.

Monica Verburg was as well responsible in full or in part for four other items, two of them original works and two arrangements, the first original work “Turn Your Eyes”, originally composed in 2024 for soprano and alto recorder, and then rewritten for soprano, flute and viola – the words were based on the text from Proverbs 4:25 “Let your eyes look straight ahead….” Though the combination of tones made it impossible for me to decipher any of the actual text, the sounds in tandem, though brief, were themselves glorious! We then heard a song “Ocean Breeze” (aha! – in my notes is a mention of the ALTO flute!) – here, Pepe Becker’s soprano and Monica Verburg’s instrument were wistful companions at the song’s opening, one whose melody readily caught the ear in balladic fashion! The two arrangements made by Verburg were for larger-scale forces as one might have expected in her grand setting of Giovanni Gabrieli’s “Jubilate Deo” with its splendidly ceremonial trappings, not to mention the fulsomeness of the text – “Shout joyfully to God, all of the earth!” – what attention-grabbing gesturings (suggesting, of course, antiphonal voices) and declamatory utterances, complete with brief, wistful occasional minor-key harmonic turns, just for variety! Great stuff!

Before I mention in conclusion the concert’s final item (Verburg’s second “arrangement”) I need to recap with still more “gems” which came up in passing  – one was non-vocal, Jack Body’s “Aeolian Harp”, here most evocatively realised by Nicholas Hancox’s viola, capturing the piece’s extraordinary and irresistible frisson of intensities gleaned from nature’s random impulses. Then there were three medieval “pop” numbers from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the earliest of which was Guillaume de Machaut’s “Douce Dame Jolie”  (Sweet. Lovely lady)  – performed here with the viola as the drone instrument and the flute as a companion for the voice – what an uncanny sense of time and place, here, with music making its way to us centuries later! Of the two other later works, one (“Quel fronte signorille” (That noble brow) by Guillaume Dufay) had a similar “courtly love” sentiment no less resonant and focused than de Machaut’s, while the other (a motet “Quam pulchra es” by John Dunstable) was by contrast an unashamedly erotic setting of words from the Biblical “Song of Songs”, its performance here suggesting a parallel musical “enchantment by beauty”.

By the time we reached the programme’s final item everything seemed suffused with a spirit of complete capitulation towards the music and its making, one suitably enhanced by Monica Verburg’s inspired arrangement of this concluding music. Flute and viola began the “thistledown on the wind” introduction, the former extempore and the latter holding a firm foundation line. The scene having been set, the voice then entered with the famous melody “Hine e Hine”, one written famously by Princess Te Rangi Pai (the stage-name of Fanny Rose Poata – b.1868 d.1916), composed in or around 1907. It felt like a kind of “homecoming”, one returning to something deeper than the present, and with enveloping tendrils of belonging, easier to “feel” than to explain. But in tandem with the glories of the venue in which we had enjoyed these sounds it “rounded off” for me (and for others I spoke to at the time) a most agreeable afternoon’s music-listening!

Papaioea Piano Trio offers exotic out-of-town flavourings for St.Andrew’s lunchtime fare

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Papaioea Trio – Elizabeth Patchett (violin), Guy Donaldson (piano), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – Piano Trio No.45 in E-flat Major Hob.XV;29
PYOTR  TCHAIKOVSKY (arr. Alexander Goedicke) Six pieces from “The Seasons” Op.37a
ELENA KATZ-CHERNIN – Calliope Dreaming (2009)

The Papaioea Trio
Elizabeth Patchett (violin), Robert Ibell (‘cello), Guy Donaldson (piano)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday Ist July 2026

For those Wellingtonians and others who may not know, the name Papaioea refers to a particular location in the city of Palmerston North – in fact I grew up there being told that it was a Maori name for the city’s once-beautiful but now sadly-besmirched Square, situated right in the centre of things. Translated, the name was popularly rendered as  “How beautiful it is”, and I was given to understand at first that it was the name for a clearing in the original bush which had covered the area. Later, my understanding of the situation’s history had evolved to relocating the name Papaioea as a description of a lagoon-like lake in the Hokowhitu area of the city, a long way from the actual Square, and that same name bringing with it colourful and even sightly macabre associations with warlike activities of the local Rangitane people. Whatever the actuality of the case – and who can resist a good story?! – the name itself obviously resounded sufficiently in its own right to be considered an appropriate title for a trio of Palmerston North-associated musicians, who have thereupon proudly called themselves “The Papaioea Trio”.

Hearing that this ensemble was Wellington-bound I eagerly took myself to St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace on the appointed day for what promised to be yet another from a series of remarkable lunchtime concerts whose quality has reaped musical riches and fostered agreeable companionship for countless people. And given that the venue is regularly used by local music groups for their own prestigious concert series (often involving fully professional musicians), there’s obviously no diminution in the quality of the sonics enjoyed by these lunchtime performers.

Of the three musicians who made up the Trio, I’d most frequently heard ‘cellist Robert Ibell as a member variously of the NZSO and of the Aroha String Quartet. While I had encountered Guy Donaldson as a collaborative pianist on several occasions I’d had as much experience of him as a conductor while I played for a few precious and enjoyable  seasons some years ago in the Manawatu Sinfonia. And, as well, I can recall hearing violinist Elizabeth Patchett on a number of occasions as a member of the vibrant Nevine String Quartet. Buoyed by such previous encounters I was greatly looking forward to the group’s coming together, and to the delights of the proposed programme.

While Haydn was perhaps an obvious choice in this repertoire I’d long since been converted to the inexhaustible pleasures given by the composer’s inventiveness in this music, every moment warmly relished by the Trio in this performance – though commentators tend to emphasise the dominance of the piano in these works, there was plenty of stimulating interaction in evidence today, as witness the violin and ‘cello counterpoints to the piano’s lines, often in Svengali-like hide-and-seek guises colouring the mood in the first movement’s development. After this one couldn’t help feeling the recapitulation had an almost Beechamesque amalgam of “regret and safisfaction” evident in the playing, with those determinedly characterful variants in the themes – but the subsequent Beethoven-like plunge into “other realms” leading to the coda was especially evocative and delightful.

The Andante opened for us a different harmonic world, almost Schumannesque in its whimsy – again the players deftly fashioned whole orbits out of simple gesturings, sudden dynamic contrasts, marvellously deep pedal points  and, after a couple of “expect the unexpected” modulations, fresh-as-daisies returnings to the sunshine, with the trajectories of the finale’s entry whirling our spirits aloft, with stimulating touches of trenchant phrasing vying with delicacies of impish delight! A minor-key development sequence again pre-echoed Haydn’s pupil Beethoven with great gusto, all three instruments  bending their backs to the task as the music vaulted all around and over the vistas, the composer seemingly enjoying the improvisatory-like helter-skelter before returning us to recognisable harmonic territories via a coda whose exhilarating upward rush lifted our spirits skyward at the end.

Having enjoyed various of Tchaikovsky’s pieces for solo piano, written for each separate month of the year, I was intrigued to learn of the existence of a version of the work arranged for Piano Trio by a later Russian composer, Alexander Goedicke (born, incidentally AFTER Tchaikovsky had written his original solo pieces!) – I found myself wondering while listening to these beautiful arrangements why it was that Tchaikovsky hadn’t used the Piano Trio format himself for this absolutely charming music as presented here – I soon discovered that the composer actually had a strong early dislike for the trio combination, telling his patroness, Nadezhda Von Meck, that it had “no tonal blend” as the instruments were “incompatible”; and yet when his friend Nikolai Rubinstein died the following year in 1881 his tribute to his late friend was a spectacularly-wrought Piano Trio! (As well, of course, he had already tried his hand at the combination with the celebrated “piano trio” section of his Second Piano Concerto, written the year before! – curiouser and curiouser!)

Still. all of this seemed beside the point at the time of listening – the Papaioea Trio presented six of Goedicke’s arrangements, publishing for our edification a translation of the poetic epigraphs that had accompanied the original solo piano versions. The opening April Snowdrop was a bitter-sweet waltz earnestly expressing a longing for the spring, while the June Barcarolle, a well-known melody, brought out the string players’ different characteristics, with Elizabeth Pachett’s violin’s phrasings precise and contained, compared with Robert Ibell’s ‘cello’s, more flowing and expansive gestures, and with pianist Guy Donaldson the fulcrum around which the different personalities interacted, making for ear-catching results! The October Autumn song was a more melancholy affair, violin and ‘cello by turns quietly expressive and eloquent, while the pianist made every note resonate with purpose in a beautiful solo reprise, echoed by the strings in both imitation and descant, and in a way which compelled us to await every turn of phrase with warm expectation.

The November Troika, a favourite recital item of pianist Sergei Rachmaninov’s, gave us the piece’s heart-warming melody at the start, at first simply, then flowing more expansively and descriptively, followed by a central section brimful with mischief and gaiety, and combining song and dance as the fun and laughter faded into the distance. The December Christmas sequence was a suave waltz, more Viennese drawing-room than Russian, though with moments of longing, almost aching rubato in between the Tempo I dance sequences. For the final February Carnival, all the festive stops were pulled out for the opening with not a moment’s gaiety wasted! – a rather more quixotic middle section could have depicted some kind of party game, one which spilled back over and into the return of the opening music – at the end, after a brief moment of reflection, of inwardness, the Carnival itself delivered the final “Come on!” gesture.  I remember wondering at that point how I would feel about going back to the solo piano version for a listen after such an enjoyable ensembled musical experience!

The programme’s final item was new to me ,and probably to most other people in the hall – its composer, Elena Katz-Chernin  was Uzbekistan-born (1957) and Moscow-educated, but, when still a teenager emigrated to Australia, continuing her musical studies at the Sydney Conservatorium. After her graduation, she moved to Germany for further study before returning to Australia in 1994, since then pursuing an active and successful composing career.  Her 2009 piece presented today, Calliope Dreaming, was written as part of a D2H (dedicated to Haydn) festival marking the latter’s death bicentenary – she was one of eighteen composers worldwide commissioned to write a work for the festival, and which was accordingly premiered that same year in Eisenstadt, Austria, by the Haydn Esterhazy Trio.

The concert’s informative programme notes told us some of the story – Katz-Chernin was inspired by a biographical detail concerning Haydn’s own reported wish that the slow movement of his own Symphony No. 44 (“Trauer”) be played at his funeral, though she was compelled by the symphony’s overall beauty to draw from other parts of the work as well when composing her own tribute. And, in a kind of Haydnesque way, she conceived the idea of giving the piece more of an “upbeat” than a mournful flavour, by writing the music as if it were to be played by a Calliope, a keyboard instrument constructed to activate the sounds of steam whistles! (truly, how more Haydnesque could you get?) – the fact that Calliope was also one of the Nine Muses in Greek mythology, whose credentials included  being “the Muse of epic poetry and eloquence, and the mother of Orpheus” to boot seemed naturally to somewhat mitigate the “circus” aspect of the actual instrument and give the “Haydn connection” irrefutable status.

After we in situ listeners-to-be had digested these delightfully incontrovertible vagaries of detail (admittedly with a few added afterthoughts!), the Trio plunged into “Calliope Dreaming”, Katz-Chernin’s wondrous caprice-fantasy upon themes by a composer given himself to such occasional flights of fancy! – the “dreaming” aspect of the title was given ample notice by what the composer called “calmer moments” amid the more “edgy rhythmic material”, though, as  Katz-Chernin herself acknowledged, the end result of her own fantasisings seemed “more in line with the finale of the symphony”. Which was fair enough, as it was HER piece, really, and not actually Haydn’s!

The end result was invigorating, the sleeve note suggesting for listeners an experience similar to that of “a rapidly-moving steam train”, with moments of calm, but also with singing lines in places soaring over the motoric rhythms. I confess that, as an out-and-out train-buff, the “ride” was for me something of an escapist joy! – though of course every listener would have had their own story to tell, after the “exhilarating downhill ride” of the concluding sequence of “Calliope Dreaming” had brought us all home!

Perhaps a local composer – from anywhere along the way! – might enlist the services of these engaging musicians to be the flagbearers of a work celebrating our own present “Capital Connection” rail-link between Papaioea  (Palmerston North) and  Pōneke (Wellington). It would be by way of strengthening and properly institutionalising what has been a somewhat haphazard recent history of a much-loved and -needed connection for people – one  showing the way between the two cities!  Having already set “Calliope Dreaming” in motion, the Papaioea Trio has demonstrated it can truly go places!

 

 

Virtuosi – Orchestra Wellington’s celebration of the capital’s individual and interactive instrumental brilliance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

VIRTUOSI – Orchestra Wellington

ELGAR – Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra Op.47
ELGAR – Concerto for ‘Cello and Orchestra in E Minor Op.85
BARTÓK – Concerto for Orchestra Sz116

New Zealand String Quartet : Peter Clark, Martin Riseley (guest player), violins;
Gillian Ansell, viola; Martin Smith, ‘cello
Inbal Megiddo, ‘cello
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei, conductor

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 27th June 2026

This concert was replete with memories of formative music-listening experiences which have sung and danced throughout my musical life for almost fifty years – so the reader must forgive what seems like a self-indulgent bias regarding these works, and especially in the wake of such committed, heart-warming performances!

Originally a borrowed word from the Italian virtuoso (referring to both “virtue” and “skill”) the term “virtuosi” has “taken flight” in common usage, and is regularly used to denote skill and proficiency of the highest order in practically any human activity, and not just the performing arts. Here, it’s less fulsomely and more appositely applied to both individual and group distinction in musical performance, happily and resoundingly borne out by tonight’s stellar presentations.

One could go further and suggest that the term applied as readily to the creative and technical skills of each of the two “similar-but-different” composers whose music featured in tonight’s concert – on the face of things the “Englishness” of Edward Elgar (1857-1934) and the Hungarian “folkishness” of Béla Bartók (1881-1945) would seem to have little in common, even if their lifetimes partly coincided. Unlike his younger native contemporaries Holst and Vaughan Williams, Elgar showed little interest in ethnomusicology, whereas Bartók eagerly immersed himself in the folk-music of his native soil, both in his studies of comparative musical folklore in Hungary and his fusion of these elements with his own personal style of expression. Both composers were “countrymen” in their inclinations towards the “great outdoors” but it would seem the Malvern Hills near Worcester, beloved of Elgar, were probably somewhat removed in spirit from the isolated Carpathian Mountains of Hungary which Bartók explored, finding his most “authentic” Magyar folk music amongst those isolated communities.

Where Elgar and Bartók meet, I feel, is in the uniqueness and strength of each composer’s distinctive musical “character” – most of Elgar’s work has that instantly recognisable combination of nobility and introspectiveness which looks simultaneously outwards and inwards, in the manner of an artist at once confident and insecure, forthright and nostalgic, expressing a dichotomy that would reach its peak in the composer’s  ‘Cello Concerto played this evening. By contrast, Bartók’s music is characterised by asymmetrical themes and rhythms, modal scales, drones, and energetic folk-dance trajectories – as with Elgar, there are opposites at work, the “classical” structures expressed by “folk” music, the tonalities that contain dissonances, and the polarities of emotion which frequent the musical journey.

Coincidentally,  both Elgar pieces in tonight’s programme, though far-removed from one another in time,  began with similarly vigorous and trenchant opening  minor-key chords. First up was the composer’s earlier “Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra”, its opening straightaway proclaiming an almost Baroque-like splendour and severity of utterance, one that meant business right from the outset! How appropriate, then, that kicking off the evening’s “virtuosi” scenario in this music were members of the New Zealand String Quartet, taking the concertante role of the music’s solo quartet of strings. This ensemble has steadfastly continued  its activities with various guest players, following the departure early in 2025 of two of its long-time members – happily, one of the vacancies has been filled by recently-appointed  ‘cellist Martin Smith, while the second violinist role for this concert featured a distinguished guest, Martin Riseley, a member of the celebrated Te Koki Trio. Violinist Peter Clark did the honours as leader this evening, while, happily, the mainstay of the ensemble, violist Gillian Ansell continued as the rock-like fulcrum around which the group’s comings and goings have been deftly managed over the past two years.

Both the quartet and the accompanying Orchestra Wellington strings under conductor Marc Taddei brought off the  resonantly muscular opening of the work with great elan, leading into tantalising interchanges, baroque style, between solo strings and the ripieno (larger ensemble), with pre-echoes of the themes given ear-catching contrasts of emphasis and colour. Then came the famous “Welsh tune” (the composer reported as hearing this sung by a distant voice while on holiday in Wales) played here firstly by Gillian Ansell’s viola – so tenderly and heart-stoppingly – before being given the full-blooded ensemble treatment.

This sense of wonderment continued right up to the beginning of the Allegro (at Fig.7 in my Novello score), with a quietly-stated, flowing version of the theme first heard hinted at by the solo quartet just after the opening flourish – here, begun as simply and as straightforwardly as the first few steps of a momentous journey. This took us most excitingly to the work’s resplendent major-key all-together central statement of the opening theme, marked with Elgar’s favourite “Nobilmente” direction, and given plenty of ceremonial swagger, and vigorous energy.

After a tremulous reappearance of the “Welsh tune”  Marc Taddei took the players into what Elgar famously described as “a devil of a fugue”, one whose initial composure seemed to suddenly take fright halfway through its course and “spook” its own trajectories – fantastic playing, here, from the band, with hair, gut and resin given no quarter!  The eventual recapitulation of the Allegro led this time to a full-throated version of the “Welsh tune”, with solo strings and ripieno tossing parts of the reprised themes back and forth, before the coda bound up all the players in a compulsive concerted dash towards a resounding final pizzicato chord – great excitement!

The 1919 ‘Cello Concerto which followed inhabited a different world, the older Elgar having to lay bare his feelings regarding the ravages of the Great War (1914-18), while at the same time tormented with growing self-doubts as a composer as his music was gradually and increasingly regarded by critics as “old-fashioned”. As a consequence, the concerto took a long time to establish itself in the repertoire, especially after a disastrous premiere helped put paid to any of Elgar’s own hopes for the work as giving an impression of being “good and alive”. It turned out to be the last major work he created – a direct and honest statement of feelings regarding his place in a world forever changed, both in a public and private sense.

‘Cellist Inbal Megiddo had the measure of the work’s sombre mood right from the outset, her tones and phrasings circumspectly coloured, enough to convey the emotion without excess throughout the movement, though the orchestral tones in the first tutti were lovely, as was the soloist’s rhapsodic response. She allowed herself  greater warmth in the major key exchanges that followed, and rose to match the intensities of the orchestra’s subsequent climax, though falling away as quickly back into introspection for the pizzicato chords that heralded her accompanied recitative – here her ‘cello even cajoled the orchestra in places before initiating the scampering scherzo with its wry “catch me if you can” exchanges exhibiting a droll kind of mischief. With her all the way was Marc Taddei’s suitably reactive echoing of the solo instruments’s quixotic moods in the myriad orchestral detailings, earnest and intense in the opening movement and playful in the second (the slightly untidy final chord at the latter’s conclusion of little consequence….)

The third movement seemed at first almost reverential – here, from Megiddo and her fellow-participants, it was a superbly-controlled outpouring of nostalgic beauty, capturing both the music’s audible rapture and its central stillness – so much so, that I was surprised by the performers’ “bookending” this exquisite movement rather than letting its open-ended conclusion drift into ineffable space at the end and “give rise” to the finale as a matter of course – there’s no “attacca” instruction in the score, but we could have done without all the “next movement” rustling and re-adjusting (my only misgiving regarding the performance!)

The finale’s “swing” soon restored all through-lines, real or imagined, with this performance’s rumbustious girth, playful “hide-and-seek” routines and wry interchanges between the soloist and the groups putting  me in mind in places of the composer’s “Falstaff” to a never-before extent – particularly so in the almost tavern-like scene of inebriated jollity when the soloist joins the orchestral cellos for a mock-serious choral-like unison sequence, brief, but good-humoured! All the more heart-rending, then, was the “drifting -away” of this mood, as the composer emulated his Shakespearean alter ego, lamenting the passing of the “good times” with upward-thrusting phrases that descended, weeping unashamedly, on both ‘cello and strings….

A brief episode re-evoked a distant memory of the Adagio’s loveliness, before the soloist seized the mettle and, after the work’s heartbreak accepted the inevitable with a stirring and courageous gesture of grim acceptance! A sterling performance!

A different world awaited us after the interval, with Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, written by the composer in 1943 in the United States at the invitation of the renowned conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky. Bartok was seriously ill by this time, and in exile from his homeland due to the Nazi threat throughout Europe, so the commission came as a much needed boost to his waning creative energies – he was able to write several other works  as well as the Concerto (its title referring to the “concerto grosso” aspect of the music, similar to Elgar’s work, but much larger in scale and across the whole orchestral spectrum.)

My introduction to this work was through Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, who was actually a pupil of Bartók’s in Budapest, and who recorded the Concerto several times, besides coming to New Zealand in 1973 and conducting the work with the NZSO in Wellington (for me an unforgettable concert experience!). Still, in line with my memory of Orchestra Wellington’s outstanding Shostakovich series from last year I was eager to hear what Marc Taddei would inspire his players to achieve with Bartók’s masterpiece – and I wasn’t disappointed. Again, as with the Elgar works of the first half, the most compelling quality of the music-making was the bringing out of the character of the work’s sound-world right from the beginning – the mysterious opening proclaimed kinship to the composer’s characteristic “night” pieces, the lower strings enunciating a series of fourths in response to which the upper strings and winds sounded similarly atmospheric undulating figures. Throughout the first movement these leaping fourths and their immediate inversions played an important thematic role, both in exciting fugal sequences for strings and stirring brass passages, as did gentler moments like the oboe’s lullabic mid-movement figure which echoed throughout the more lyrical sections. Everything was given the space it needed to proclaim its significance to the moment as well as to the whole.

The Concerto’s two Allegretto movements are the best-known to audiences and most readily remembered. Both were spectacularly presented here, the second being the famous Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Couples) with its sequence of folk-oriented melodies for pairs of instruments, each playing in finely-wrought parallel with its partner at different intervals; and the fourth a somewhat notorious Intermezzo interotto, whose fame rests on Bartok’s “lampooning” of a theme of Dmitri Shostakovich’s in his wartime “Leningrad” Symphony, a simple marching tune drawing forth cackling trills from woodwinds and vulgar sliding raspberries from the brass (on this occasion, from the trombones, easily the most gloriously blatant and visceral spoofings I’ve ever heard in concert or on record!), before being sent packing, with little more than a whimper!

The work’s two remaining movements were no less spell-binding – and I was simply and truly blown away by the orchestral response Taddei got from his players in the central palindromic Elegia, right from the ”night-music” ambiences of the opening (in which we seemed lifted up through the darkness and into extra-terrestrial regions), and through a coruscating series of searing cries from a string section playing well above its weight  and reinforced by full-blooded wind-descents  and biting brass chords with timpani – incredibly intense string-playing along with extraordinary timbral ambiences (and with lovely work from the violas at one point). But the intensities summoned up by the string-playing here in particular brought back to me something of what Dorati got from his NZSO players all those years ago – as then, with an extraordinary amalgam of incisiveness and eloquence!

After all of this, the finale represented something of a release, with plenty of ebullience from all the players, Taddei creating a veritable ferment of excitement  from all sections, the winds also enjoying their fugato-like passage before introducing a new theme which went like wildfire through the rest of the orchestra – such an infectious mood of exhilaration with the brass and timpani capping it off splendidly! The tongue-in-cheek string fugato got a querulous response from the winds, who took the argument into subaqueous regions, until what sounded like an orchestral dishwasher on rinse-cycle was suddenly thrown open and everything and everybody tumbled out, picked themselves up and skedaddled towards something of a well-deserved grandstand finish – a younger audience would have perhaps leapt to its feet after such a comprehensive orchestral display, but the ovation was still suitably warm-hearted and appreciative. I had a feeling that, in the midst of all the excitement Marc Taddei might have forgotten to acknowledge his horn section at the end – or perhaps its members simply missed their cue! Whatever the case, all the musicians were heroes – and my previous cheek-by-jowl memories of hearing this work performed will now have to be updated in the most positive and enduring way!