The Korimako Trio – culmination of a miraculous weekend in the capital!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Concerts presentsHelene Pohl, Michael Endres, Rolf Gjelsten

KORIMAKO TRIO – bringing cheer and hope to a beleagued city!

JOSEPH HAYDN  (1732-1809)  Piano Trio No.44 in E-flat Major Hob.XV:28  (1797)
REBECCA CLARKE  (1886-1979)  Duo for Viola (or Violin) and ‘Cello (1918)
ROSS HARRIS (1945 -) Duo for Violin and ‘Cello (2000)
AARON COPLAND (1900-90)  Vitebsk, for Piano Trio  (1929)
FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797 -1828) – Trio in E-flat Major Op.100 (1827)

Korimako Trio – Helene Pohl (violin) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) / Michael Endres (piano)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington
Sunday, May 24th  2026

I’ve already acclaimed the occasion of this concert given by the Korimako Trio in Middle C’s previous review  (https://middle-c.org/2026/05/nztrios-sensational-dreamscape-concert-sweet-relief-for-wellington/), regarding it as one of an otherwise unconnected “twin” event – together they made for me an affirmation of  immense moment for the citizens of a city whose public service fraternity is currently under a savage “siege” of decimation enacted by Aotearoa New Zealand’s present Coalition Government.  There was, in fact, a THIRD stellar musical happenings over this weekend of wonderment in Wellington, with the  NZSO’s “Titan” concert on Friday evening featuring Canadian violinist James Ehnes with the orchestra’s principal conductor Gemma New, an event which I couldn’t attend, but whose significance at this particular punitive time added to the poignancy of the city’s bounteous musical offerings (also reviewed in Middle C – https://middle-c.org/2026/05/nzso-reaches-for-mahlers-titan-via-ades-and-korngold/), These three happenings flew in the face of the travails experienced by thousands of workers as a result of proposals concocted by those forces doing their utmost to emasculate the capital’s significance as a living, breathing functionary of essential democratic activity.

Many people attest to the vital importance of the arts as an indication of any country’s social and intellectual “health”, even though such matters have been paid scant attention by our current elected representatives, whose principal motivations seem only to concern themselves and their functionings with (in the words of Oscar Wilde) “knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.”  One laments afresh the irony (one of many such wrought by 2026 and its scenario of “government by deprivation”) of people like myself able to enjoy stellar performances by our musicians such as those featured in these concerts, as we simultaneously witness the ongoing enfeeblement and debilitation of democratic processes and human rights by others whose priorities are power and control!  Let’s hope that music-making of this strength and purpose will help bolster our fresh determination to hold onto and cherish what is being threatened – and which I suddenly realised in today’s concert composer Franz Schubert was alluding to in the final moments of his magnificent E-flat Major Trio we heard this afternoon, illustrating, to my mind, the indescribable beauty through expression of basic human dignity in the face of insuperable difficulties.

So then to today’s concert, and the Korimako Trio – a newly-formed (November 2025) ensemble, though two of its players have of course been mainstays of the country’s classical music scene for decades – violinist Helene Pohl and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten were members of the New Zealand String Quartet for thirty years, as, respectively, leader and ‘cellist of the group, until events brought about  their decision to resign from the quartet towards the end of 2024. Enough ink has been spilled and bandwidths stretched to breaking-point over the ins-and-outs of that occurrence – suffice to say that the pair, however bloodied have remained unbowed, to the great relief of legions of their supporters, myself among them! They have already  instigated various concert activities for charitable purposes, such as the well-known Arohanui Strings, the Sistema-like Charitable Trust which provides musical tuition for young children (and of which Helene Pohl is a patron), and which they continue to support. With the help of various “guest” players over 2025, the two have also continued their quartet-playing activities, specifically concentrating on a number of the quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich during what was the composer’s fiftieth death anniversary year – how fortunate we were to have such advocacy in these remarkable works, and how wonderful if it could all continue (besides the Korimako Trio activities, of course!)

A piano trio needs, by definition, a pianist – and I had heard sufficient of Michael Endres’s playing as a soloist over the years for my excitement to be considerably quickened by the news of his collaboration with the two aforementioned players. His qualities as a virtuoso soloist had been more than evident, so I was fascinated by the prospect of hearing how his solo brilliance would adapt to ensemble playing. With this in mind, I was absolutely delighted that two of the works scheduled to be performed by the Korimako ensemble were “standard classics” of the Piano Trio repertoire – one of Josef Haydn’s Piano Trios he wrote while in London, No.44 in E- Major (1797), and the second of Franz Schubert’s great Piano Trios, in E-flat Major D,929 (1827).

The third work for Piano Trio on the programme was one that has achieved a different kind of “classic” status as a representative work of the “modern” era  – Aaron Copland’s challenging “Vitebsk”, written in 1929 – a work with a somewhat different, more earthy, dissonant and insistently combatative sound to that heard in the two other trios, the three instruments seemingly in places in the Copland work as much as, if not more than, at odds as in accord with one another! The remaining works on the programme, the two Duos for Violin and ‘Cello had their own singular personalities which held up fascinatingly in such diverse company – Rebecca Clarke’s two-movement work from 1938 quixotically explored two contrasting worlds of sound and feeling, while local composer Ross Harris’s eponymously-titled Duo (2000) was a set of variations on a theme which undergoes a kind of conversational change through spontaneous-sounding interplay between the two instruments.

The Haydn work which opened the concert couldn’t help but straightaway suggest the interactive nature of the afternoon’s music-making, including as it did various delightful quirks and contrasts of expression typical of the composer.  Here, an engaging piano-led song-like opening was buoyed along by the strings’ impish pizzicato tones, before the music burst into rippling energies , the instruments exchanging modes for a beautifully-delivered modulating second subject theme on sighing arco strings with the piano’s sparkling decorations a delight! After the repeat came a simply gorgeous A major section, delivered here in a way which warmed our insides before a return to the movement’s opening, Haydn playing with our perceptions of what went before with insouciant wit and charm and a sense of fun! The second movement’s sombre unison opening suggested a moment of mourning or regret before the piano took it upon itself to instigate a “buck-up, Charles!” kind of solo which had a hint of the Baroque about it! I thought the finale, with its three-note descending motif, had a kind of “something’s up” aspect about its cheerfulness – and, sure enough, a sudden dramatic darkening of the mood had its say, the strings sharing the earnestly-striving new theme with the piano. “How does Haydn do it? “ I asked myself as the three-note motif returned triumphantly, despatched in a no-nonsense manner by two similarly no-nonsense chords? – no time for further wonderment, as delighted applause was in order!

Our positive mood was furthered by the next two pieces, both duos for violin  and ‘cello – the first, by English-born but American-domiciled composer Rebecca Clarke, was originally written for herself, a violist, to play with her frequent pianist collaborator, May Muckle (the pair gave the first public performance of the work in New York in 1918), with the viola part able to be also played on the violin, as here. The piece’s lovely, song-like opening “Lullaby” featured a singing violin supported by the cello’s gently mesmeric ”rocking” quality, then contrasting its focus with the ‘cello’s deeper toned-voice. Both instruments reached towards a touch of Tchaikovskian fervour in places, before returning to lullabic mode and concluding the episode with more exquisitely-voiced modulations.

The “Grotesque” movement that followed might well be described as a description of dreams which decry the serenity of the sleep-inducing  “lullaby”!  The music’s antics straightaway engaged and delighted – quirkily acerbic up-and-down passages were flecked with sforzando-like punctuations, and contrasting elfin-like caperings vied with heavy-footed folk-dance-ish rumbustions. And, at the  conclusion of this plethora of incessant interplay of “furtive” impulse and full-blooded exuberance, we got a gorgeously rib-tickling, throwaway ending!

Ross Harris’s Duo (2000) was actually written for today’s performers of the work, Helene and Rolf, adding a richly-flavoured potential to the music’s integral substance (not, incidentally, the first piece of music the composer has written for the couple, with a previous work “Wayleggo” having been gifted to them as a wedding present!). Here, the musicians’ near-impeccable credentials produced an intensity of identification at the beginning, the lines and phrasings sombre and tightly-wrought, not unlike Part Two of Stravinsky’s ‘Le Sacre du Printemps”, similarly tightly-bound, and with occasionally flecks of impulse from within suggesting impending activation. The piece’s double-stopped figurations in both the players’ parts gave the music a textural intensity and richness that suggested a string quartet, not a duo, was playing, the music moving meanwhile into playfulness (“bounced” tremolando phrasings, pizzicato irruptions and quixotic “ninth” interval-jumps!) and back to solemnity. A sudden crescendo brought agitations, quick-fire and varied, arco and pizzicato, until the players seemed to suddenly realise they were actually baton-passing rather than in conflict! In this way a Parnassus of sorts had meanwhile been ascended, with contentions drawn into a mystical kind of union of purpose, inextricably entwined! All that remained at the end was a satisfyingly-wrought resonance of accord and silence!

We welcomed back the full Korimako Trio for the final and somewhat tumultuous work of the concert’s first half. This was Vitebsk, a work brimming with youthful exuberance and zeal, written by an American composer, the young Aaron Copland, in response to a play he had seen performed in New York during the period 1925-1927. The play was The Dybbuk, written by Russian-Jewish author Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863-1920), best known by his pen-name, S.An-sky. Though originally written in Russian the play was translated into Yiddish by An’sky himself for its first performance in Warsaw in 1920. The story depicts a young woman possessed by the malicious spirit (known as dybbuk in Jewish folklore) of her dead lover. Though the play subsequently became a massive success, An-sky himself died before the Warsaw production could be staged that same year.

English versions of The Dybbuk were performed in New York in 1925 and 1927, but it’s not clear which of these Copland attended – however, each production used the same incidental score, written by Russian composer, teacher and promoter of nationalist Jewish music, Joel Engel (1868-1927), which included a folk melody the latter had discovered, originally a wordless Hassidic melody (a niggun), but which became known as Mipnei ma (Why/wherefore/because of what (“has the soul fallen…”). It was this melody that made a profound impression on Copland (he called it a “noble theme”), one which he used as the basis for his trio, as for him it reflected “the harshness and drama of Jewish life in White Russia (Belarus”).

Copland called his trio after Vitebsk (a city that was the birthplace of both S.An-Sky’s and painter Marc Chagall – though Copland’s own characterisation of part of his Trio as having “a Chagall-like grotesquerie” has drawn criticism from some commentators who reject the Chagall association in the music in favour of more “klezmorim” characteristics (they point out, for example that Vitebsk as a city was a cosmopolitean one, not the type of provincial village that Chagall’s paintings depicted and that Copland himself referred to). Perhaps the main criticism of association is that Copland’s music ought to be thought of as driven not by sentimental ideas of rustic village life, but by the power of the actual legend and the resonance of such beliefs in certain communities lasting some way into the twentieth century!

Right from its tumultuous beginning this music seemed as if “owned” by the the Korimako Trio players, encompassing the work’s power, energy and extremes of emotion with astonishing immediacy and candour. It unfolded in three parts, two slower sections surrounding a central more agitated sequence. The harshly intoned opening – impassioned strings punctuated by hammered piano chords – was a repeated two-note theme representing the shofar, the ceremonial ram’s horn sounded in Jewish services. Violin  and cello elaborated on these calls, their notes often resounding in discord with one another, wrenching phrases from the aforementioned folk melody Mipnei ma, before re-echoing the shofar calls. The cello’s playing of the beseeching Mipnei ma melody was taken up wholeheartedly by the violin, and with piano accompaniments lead the way back to the all-pervading shofar motifs.

This sparked off a frenetic outburst by the piano, which plunged into a headlong dance joined by the strings, a madcap frenzy of high-speed canonic-like imitation representing  some kind of “possessed” agitation, at once exhilarating and disturbing, and eventually bringing forth impassioned outbursts of the Mipnei ma theme, With the return of the shofar calls, the energies seemed all but expended, with the mood quietening and a resigned and subdued version of the folk-theme dominating the final moments before being subsumed itself  into the silences…..what an extraordinary journey! – and one whose themes and gestures have stayed with me to the point where I find myself writing this amid those same themes and their lasting resonances still in my head…..

After this, we all felt grateful for the luftpause of an interval – people I spoke with were transported by the drama and dynamism of the Copland in the wake of the rest of the first half’s interest and variety. I thought it was a good thing to allow some space to separate what we’d just heard from what was to come, music of almost a century earlier, albeit with its own set of existential profundities heart-warmingly maintaining their relevance for our time. This was the second of Franz Schubert’s two great Piano Trios, (in E-flat D.929) and has always been considered the one with the most gravitas for a number of cited reasons, chiefly that (a) it was the larger of the two trios and (b) it was the one of the few of Schubert’s late works that he actually heard performed in public (how bizarre and tragic that the composer never actually heard his miraculous D.956 String Quintet performed!)

Right from the beginning of the work the music in the Korimako Trio’s hands sparkled and glittered, with Michael Endres’s playing a particular joy, making the most of the ever-sparkling piano writing, be they the flourishes contributing to the work’s opening paragraph, or the flowing tones accompanying the concluding measures of the movement’s second theme . As for Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten, I loved the forthright but still warmly-toned timbres of their lines both here and in the development’s rich explorations, mercifully free of the tendencies of some more recent recordings I’ve heard to try and “authenticise” (authenticate?) the string-playing, the latter, almost vibrato-less, practice to my ears starving the string lines of warmth and flexibility – both players here constantly gave us pulsating, well-nourished string sounds however strenuous the physical effort or tenuous the dynamic markings, the music-making emerging as a living, spontaneous-sounding entity. I was disappointed we didn’t get the first movement repeat, but the players obviously didn’t want to send us home TOO late that afternoon!

The famous Andante con moto second movement (based on a Swedish folk-song “See the sun go down” which Schubert had heard sung in Vienna) was here “sounded” by Rolf Gjelsten and Michael Endres with a kind of simple tenderness, the ‘cello and piano seeming to make the most profound impact with the simplest, and most direct means, and, despite its popularity, giving it a “heard for the first time” feeling that was profoundly moving, as was the instrumental combination with Helene Pohl’s violin in the major-key melody which followed. The players really made something of the central section’s series of climaxes, especially the concluding one, whose cumulative effect left me exhausted, having “held” to the music’s series of crescendoed surges of emotion right to the end! The major-to-minor sequence towards the end was also close to heartbreaking!

I’m always amazed by Schubert’s seemingly boundless capacities for renewal in his music – with the presence, for example, of two more movements after the Andante con moto’s cathartic conclusion! Having suffered heartbreak and hopelessness in the previous movement, what better and braver way could a composer reconstitute the present order than with a juicily canonic dance-routine! Piano and strings alternated in follow-the-leader sequences, and the trio was a kind of play-acting gem – a hide-and-seek sequence at the centre of things before the instruments found one another and retraced their adventurous footsteps – all charm and warm resolution!

Beautiful, expectant playing flowed from Michael Endres’ piano at the finale’s Allegro moderato beginning, deliciously answered by Helene and Rolf – together the trio adroitly contrasted the relaxed gait of the music with the boisterous crescendi that bubbled from out of the textures in places, then adding more urgency to the plaintive repeated-note melody, which meant they had to slow down for the “whirling” figurations of the piano part. Nothing was left to chance – each episode was richly characterised sharply so that nothing seemed superfluous or unnecessary, The change of mood to a minor key brought back a reminiscence of the slow movement’s theme on the ‘cello, and much agitation, before the repeated sequences brought what seemed like a full circle of acknowledgement and acceptance into play, enabling the players to spectacularly realise the composer’s wondrous embrace of his slow movement theme for the last time, and with a stunning modulation to the E-flat major key,  transforming its darkness into all-embracing light – a moment of transfiguration which left us gobsmacked at the bravery of the gesture, and its enduring feeling of a kind of redemption against all odds!

What a performance!  and what a blessing for all of us present to have experienced such a moment! Long may the Korimako Trio prosper amongst us and everywhere they go!

NZTrio’s sensational Dreamscape Concert sweet relief for Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

NZTrio He Taonga Wairere performing at Nga Pou Ruahine – Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui, Wellington

NZTrio He Taonga Wairere – Dreamscape
ROXANNA PANUFNIK – Around Three Corners (1995)
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Piano Trio No.1 in D Minor Op.63 (1847)
CLAIRE COWAN – wood: strings: hammers: flesh (2008)
CHARLES IVES – Piano Trio (1911-15)

NZTrio He Taonga Wairere – Amalia Hall (violin) / Matthias Balzat (‘cello) / Jian Liu (piano)

Nga Pou Ruahine – Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui (Wellington Public Library)
Saturday, May 23rd, 2026

Oh, to be in Wellington! – annus mirabilis 2026! How ironic that, when we’re in the throes of  an unprecedentedly savage institutionalised attack by the Coalition Government on our city’s lifeblood of productive public employment activity, we’re still able, in almost Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion, to continue to enjoy, courtesy of our classical music organisations, a wondrous – under the circumstances, little short of escapist! – level of artistic excellence in concerts given by our (mostly locally-based) performers.

I write this, having experienced over the course of two consecutive weekend days a pair of chamber music presentations of performances which, quite literally, bowled me over, Both ensembles were piano trios, whose players demonstrated a breathtaking mastery of intent, understanding and execution throughout each of the concerts – as well, we heard not only established masterpieces recognised worldwide as such, but a couple of uniquely treasurable instances of homegrown composition which would have graced any such programme anywhere

These concerts came with a number of attendant pleasures relating to factors such as venue and personnel – enough for me to give each occasion sufficient “raison d’etre” to warrant a separate review. However, their combined pleasures and inspirations certainly gave extra hope and strength to my feeling that (as has happened in the past) humanity both in this part of the world and at large will actively respond to these resonating artistic expressions with sufficient will and determination to overcome aforememtioned troubles and go on.

As outlined above, the superb NZTrio He Taonga Wairere, performing at the capital’s magnificently refurbished Public Library (Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui) began for me this memorable two-staged feast, and with the “other” newly-formed Korimako Trio continuing the weekend’s pleasures at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, also in Wellington, the following day – the two events were not “linked” as such in any way except in terms of their remarkable “shared”  qualities. A particular feature of the earlier NZ Trio concert was the presence of guest pianist Dr.Jian Liu, Associate Professor of Piano from Te Koki/New Zealand School of Music in Wellington, who has been at the keyboard for the Trio’s “Dreamscape” series of concerts, along with regulars violinist Amalia Hall and ‘cellist Matthias Balzat.

Besides the music we were able to enjoy the surroundings of the Library’s new music-performing space, Nga Pou Ruahine, spectacularly appointed with various artworks depicting most prominently a rawa by Darcy Nicholas of the Feminine Pillars of Life,  Earth Mothers HIneahuone, Hinetitama and Hinenuitepo, one whose resonances stretch right across the ceiling, and which cast vivid impressions of the goddesses’ all-pervading influence. Earlier today I glanced through writer Elizabeth Kerr’s useful thoughts upon performance spaces for music available in Wellington and their acoustical suitability for music, a compendium to which this striking environment can be added with enthusiasm, even though I wondered about the effect of having significant walled areas on each side of glass surfaces upon the acoustics. Every venue has its own particular sound-character, and in this case I did initially prefer, I must admit, the slightly crisper St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace “sound” the following day for the Korimako Trio. Still, the ear does adjust quickly to all but the most intractable of acoustics at most concerts I’ve attended, though I have to say I agree with my colleague’s views over the distinct “lack of bloom” in the ever-problematic Michael Fowler Centre, awaiting as I am the return of the near-matchless sweetness of the sounds of music in the city’s Town Hall auditorium (a building mercifully spared the wrecker’s ball!).

One characteristic that Nga Pou Ruahine readily allowed us to enjoy was the “shared” aspect of the listening-space, mercifully freed from any restrictive boundary between performers and listeners (several other local venues also have this warmly-communicative quality, making music-listening such a joy!) – so it was when Amalia Hall, Matthias Balzat and Jian Liu appeared, with any initial aural “opaqueness” I’ve hinted at soon relegated to normality as the concert proceeded.

NZTrio “Dreamscape” members – Amalia Hall (violin), Jian Liu (piano), Matthias Balzat (cello)

What a programme it was!  beginning with Roxanna Panufnik’s haunting “Around Three Corners” a palindromic-like piece with a theme as its centrepiece flanked by variations on either side! I thought the piece a real “adventure” one framed by opening and closing sequences with the strings repetitively “decorating” the piano’s beautifully meditative, fanciful line, and with the sounds at the end returning to the mists out of which everything had first emerged. Along the journey were adventures aplenty – sequences of true, breath-catching wonderment from both piano and violin, each living “for the moment” and the ‘cello seemingly earth-bound while looking upwards in mild bemusement – and Jian Liu directly “activating” the piano strings by reaching into the instrument’s body, bringing into play what could only be described as “interior” worlds, as the violin and ‘cello voiced pleasure/concern with “dying fall” phrases and equivocal moments of note-bending. I loved the “harrumphing” piano rumbustifications and the scintillatingly “shivery” tremolandi from both strings as the trajectories rumbled along (“Are we dreaming you or are you dreaming us?” I could imagine as thoughts were made into words!) – with a “held” violin note echoed by the ‘cello, I imagined the dream beckoning to its participants that its hour had passed for the moment, with beautiful violin tones drawing empathetic responses from the ‘cello, and deferring once more to the piano, a kind of envoi as the sounds took their leave….

It seemed a perfect scenario into which to introduce the music of Robert Schumann, surely the most instantly recognisable of any composer’s music, with its “poetically serious” energies constantly striving to break through and into the light. The players here instantly “got” the restless ebb-and-flow of emotion, its evanescent quality which spontaneously varied in intensity mid-phrase, or even sometimes, mid-note! Were they playing harmonics in the ethereal middle section of the first movement? – such an other-worldly, almost visionary aspect to the music! I loved how Jian’s playing was so attuned to the strings, as if the piano was often at times another stringed instrument! A lovely lead-back to the opening teased our expectations right to the moment of re-recognition – and a beautifully-voiced coda underlined Schumann’s reluctance to let the music go!

Schumann’s mania for near-endless rhythmic repetition in his scherzo movements (surely having an influence upon Bruckner?) generated tremendous momentums here, like “a galloping horse” in places – breathlessly exhilarating! The Trio was, in contrast, like a kind of “wafting” over the same ground, but with an entirely different kind of trajectory! The contrastingly deep piano chords which began the  “Slowly, with intensity” third movement had a beautiful austerity here, which the ‘cello’s entry softened as the dialogue came beautifully together – the increased flow was nicely paced, with the piano joining the thematic ranks – how spellbinding these players then made the introduction to the finale, whose initial sighs of relief were here given an ebb-and-flow kind of physicality, in places quixotic, in others full-blooded – it had a feeling of joyous culmination, even abandonment, reminding me of the finale to the Piano Concerto!

I mean no disrespect to anybody or anything, composer, music, or performer, by declaring that the concert seemed to get even better as it went along – and not due to anything in particular, but the result of a cumulative effect of a constant stream of wonderful music and its astonishing execution! The concert’s final two items were, in a sense, incomparable with both the rest and with each other – each was a kind of idiosyncratic singularity of creativity, conceived in its own isolated surroundings, and brimming with its own time-and-place energies and purposes! First we were drawn into Auckland composer Claire Cowan’s work, wood: strings: hammers: flesh (2008) – one which the composer herself described at the time in a Schumannesque kind of poem –
and you will wear my heart on your bow
you will speak my words
music like flowers will blossom from your fingertips
and they will see right through me
Violinist Amalia Hall told us, by way of introducing the work, that she played in the ensemble which gave  the first performance of Cowan’s piece. I loved its sense of shared discovery  – the opening emphasised the sheer physicality of music-making, with the composer’s performers here using knuckles knocking, fingertips drumming and tapping, and hand-palms slapping and resonating upon the wood, fibres and metal objects and surfaces normally employed as conduits for conventional musical expression. Here the dimensions were enlarged, resonated and given basic, instinct-like impulse, spotlighting the frameworks and interactive relationships between performers and their instruments in an almost primitive, state-of-origin way. From this plethora of sounds came ideas using basic processes to “grow” music before our very eyes, combinations of timbres, rhythms and tones as the players and their instruments interacted, creating moments of magic (the piano strings directly activated by the pianist) and rhapsodic expression (violin and cello strings bowed and plucked) with, by turns, both startling and haunting results. As the unfolding soundscape took us through the various episodes everything became more physical and almost epic in its imaginative reach, to the point where my senses seemed overwhelmed by a kind of ferment of discovery! A final, decisive “clunk” from the players at the end broke the spell, from which I awoke to a kind of silence that hummed with a memory of having shared something of a composer’s journey, or at the very least, a brief immersion into realms (Schumann, again!) of infinite possibilities.

The evening’s final work approached the idea of music-making from the other end of the process – American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) believed that life itself was the source for music, reflecting as many kinds of creative activities as could be discovered, and disdaining any kind of “hierarchy” that put “art-music” at the top of the pyramid and more populist styles below. An excellent programme note for the concert written by Charlotte Wilson underlined the debt owed by Ives to his father, George, himself a bandleader, and “clearly a force of nature, like his son, innately inquisitive and enquiring” and who bequeathed to Charles his own fascination for music, its essences and its different sources.

Ives’s Trio for Violin, ’Cello and Piano, completed in 1911and revised in 1915, drew much of its inspiration from his student days at Yale University, from where he graduated in 1898. Pianist Jian Liu remarked on the work’s in places riotous nature, drawing our attention to the second movement’s “TSIAJ” title (This scherzo is a joke”), and referring to its somewhat chaotic amalgam of tunes therein, emphasising that we were thus warned! Ives himself made reference to his inspirations for the work, citing a “short but serious talk” by “an old philosophy professor” as the first movement’s source of origin, then characterising the somewhat chaotic second movement as “the games and antics by the students on a holiday afternoon” – he then described the final movement as “a remembrance of a Sunday service on the campus”.

I’d heard a recording of the piece before going to the concert, so was “prepared” better than I would have been had I encountered the music as a novice listener – nevertheless I couldn’t believe the extent that the NZ Trio’s playing “made sense” of what had seemed almost like total chaos during my first listen! Here, the first movement distinctly characterised the different dialogues between, firstly, the ‘cello, and then the violin, with the piano – the first measured and circumspect, the second, more animated and even quixotic in places, as if real personalities! The second movement’s “onslaught” of themes also seemed less “randomly disorganised” here, more purposeful and driven, enabling one to really “swing along” as a listener, rather than feeling as if endlessly floundering in a sea of random ditties! Not that spontaneity was lacking – one felt driven less by desperation here and more by “good-old” riotous remembrance!

As for the finale, Moderato con moto, the musicians sounded the “perfect fifths” sequence fanfare-style, before  performing (and repeating) what seemed increasingly like various enigmatic “nostalgia-rituals” – duetting soulful sequences, surviving near-dissonant encounters, tripping through brief, syncopated dance-sequences whose trajectories allowed moments of skitterish excitement, before returning to the soulfulness of the opening “duet” and revisitng the other sequences theme – until, almost out of nowhere came (incredibly moving!) the “Rock of Ages” theme, firstly on the ‘cello then the violin, and lastly (minus its concluding note) on the cello once again, the piano continuing to muse broke off before sounding the phrase’s final B-flat! Enigmatic to the end though it all seemed, the Trio allowed us to drift back into our recognisable lives by playing part of a Brahms Trio – the Andante grazioso from Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor. – before sending us all home!

NZSO reaches for Mahler’s “Titan” via Ades and Korngold

Posted on by Peter Mechen

James Ehnes (violin) and  Gemma New (conductor)  play Korngold’s Violin Concerto

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents “Titan”

THOMAS ADES –  The Origin of the Harp (NZ Premiere)
ERICH KORNGOLD – Violin Concerto in D Major
GUSTAV MAHLER – Symphony No. 1 “Titan”
James Ehnes (violin)
Gemma New (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday 22nd May 2026

Reviewed by Leila Lois
for Middle C

The evening opened with promise, with a bright and warm introduction from Gemma New, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s conductor and Artistic Advisor. As the first woman to hold the post of principal conductor at NZSO, New never fails to show charm and voracity. She beamingly announced the programme for the evening, which included the New Zealand premiere of Thomas Adès’ The Origin Of The Harp, Korngold’s Violin Concerto and Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, the “Titan”.

The night’s selection was delightfully whimsical, the first piece following the tale – a Celtic water nymph (of Ondine proportions) who falls in love with a mortal and tragically struggles to leave behind the ocean. One might have expected something dark and turgid but instead, the piece shimmered with phrases that at first lapped like gentle waves, then writhed and tumbled. In this tone-poem, composed in four short parts, the harp itself was not featured but suggested, appearing at the start of the fourth and final section, as a surprise, melting into the symphony as an epic denouement.

For this piece, the programme notes told us Adès implies the harp by damping the strings of a piano with BluTack, a perfectly innovative and slightly off-kilter complement to Mahler’s inventiveness in the symphony to come. A short, soothing piece that opened the evening perfectly.

Next came the Violin Concerto in D Major by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Famous for creating Romantic style film scores, Korngold fled Nazi Germany for the Hollywood Hills in1934. The concerto found the perfect receptor in soloist James Ehnes, who realised the piece with rare care and attention, such that it was mesmeric to watch and hear. He is truly virtuoso in violin, his tone regal yet sweet – honeyed yet clean. His playing is also remarkably expressive. Beyond this, the connection between New and Ehnes was so compelling that it felt like they were the only two in the concert hall. New’s whole frame was tenderly tilted towards Ehnes, almost lovingly leaning into the melody. A synergistic moment. The piece ended with an encore where Ehnes played with feverish brilliance.

The focal piece of the night came last in the billing, Mahler’s First Symphony, also known as the “Titan”. The piece famously starts in a flood-lit forest, and the woodwind section spiralled through this deliciously on the night. Allegedly the inspiration for this first movement in the symphony came from Gustav Mahler’s childhood memory, where his father took and left him in the forest, and he spent the whole day immersed in the woodland world, enraptured.

In the second part of the opening this really shone through in the gorgeous wooden structure of the inside of the Michael Fowler Centre and exuded a sense of warmth, and calm, despite the notorious volume of Mahler’s scores. The next movement was more energetic, with the rustic party and raucous feel of the cheerful ‘ländler’ (a kind of folkloric waltz), somersaulting through the hall. The warmth of the strings and heartiness of the percussion in this section was led well – special kudos to those string players and percussionists respectively!

Onto the third movement – the emotional heart and most unnerving part of the symphony. The famous distorted solo double bass solo led expertly by Joan Perarnau Garriga played “Frère Jacques” in a minor key, giving it a grotesque, dirge-like quality. My friend, who went in “cold” to the symphony quickly picked up the unsettling familiarity of the melody, and so Mahler’s way of playing with our expectations was evident. The sardonic funeral march quality was well executed, with the famed drunken-sounding trumpets guided by section
principal, Michael Kirgan.

The final movement broke the strangeness of this with an anguished stormy brass-heavy sound, that roiled over the audience like a tempest. Again, the percussion was precise and impassioned, full of the unmistakable spirit of Mahler.

Overall a wonderfully curated night that left audiences inspired, with the Mahlerian counterpoints, tinges of the unexpected and whimsical, folkloric shades.

Trio Obscura – singular tones and timbres bringing to life old and new music with verve and sensitivity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

TRIO OBSCURA
Bede Hanley (oboe), Robert Ashworth (viola), Sarah Watkins (piano)

AUGUST KLUGHARDT (1849-1902)
“Schilflieder” (Songs of the Reeds) – Five Fantasy Pieces   (1872)

ALYSSA MORRIS (1984- )
“The Big Questions” (2024)
1. Who am I?  2. What is this Crazy Thing called Life? 3. How is it Possible?  4. What Comes Next?

CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER (1861-1935)
Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano (1901)
1. Lento (un poco andante ) – L’etang (“The Pool”)
2, Un poco maestoso  (Andante) – La Cornemuse (“The Bagpipe”)

JANET JENNINGS  (1957- )
Five Emotional States (2025)
1.Anxiety   2.Melancholy   3.Anger  4.Relief  5.Exhilaration

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday 10th May, 2026

Trio Obscura’s name reminded me somewhat of TS Eliot’s wonderfully idiosyncratic poem “The Naming of Cats”, in which the poet describes a cat’s reverie when contemplating “…his ineffable, effable, effanineffable, deep and inscrutable, singular name”.  Of course, there’s no such comparable mystery regarding “The Naming of The Trio” (its title is sufficiently and resonantly suggestive!), but there’s certainly a kind of singularity in the actual combination of “sounds” here, one which was sported blithely and cheerily by this combination of musicians!

I’d not heard of two of the four composers on today’s programme, the first of whom was August Klughardt, born in Köthen, Germany, in 1849, and who grew up during a time of turmoil in music between conservatives who held to classicism and its traditions and the progressives who wanted to explore new modes of expression. From an early age he worked at developing his performing as well as composing skills, first as a pianist and then as a conductor, in which capacity when working at the Ducal Court in Weimar he encountered Franz Liszt, who exerted a profound impression upon him, introducing him to Richard Wagner and the “New German School” of creativity (Klughardt was to conduct Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the court in Dessau in later years). His own compositions, however, reflected a kind of eclectic attitude to the music of the times, taking elements from both traditional and progressive influences. Today his music – symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal and chamber music – is hardly known, though his chamber music is beginning to receive increased attention –  an obvious influence in his work we heard today was that of Schumann  (as it was in Klughardt’s own 1884 Piano Quintet, the appearance of which suggested an act of homage made by one composer to another!)

Today’s work “Schilflieder” (Song of the Reeds) took the form of five “Fantasy Pieces”, inspired by the poetry of Nikolaus Lenau (1802-50), whose work also inspired music by Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. This particular set of verses devotes a separate stanza to the different moods of a wanderer’s day and evening in a forest and by a pond.  “Schilflkieder” was written in 1872 and dedicated by Klughardt to Liszt himself – and actually achieved well-deserved attention for the remainder of the composer’s lifetime.  Interestingly, Klughardt noted in the score that the oboe part could be played if necessary by the violin, a starkly practical, if somewhat radical-sounding adjustment to a sound-world!

The first piece, titled “The sun is sinking over there”, was begun by Sarah Watkins’ piano solo as a sombre preparatory.  The music continued its melancholy course on Bede Hanley’s oboe, until Robert Ashworth’s viola’s entry brought a contrastingly flowing, more expressive character to the mood, seeming to have cheered the oboe up considerably when it re-entered. In this mood of appeasement the instruments ended the piece quietly together. With the following “Darkness falls, the clouds are flying”, I was straightaway taken into what seemed a Schumannesque world = the music had that same earnestly-toned sense of striving (the music marked “impassioned”), with, of course the viola’s sombre tones adding to that so-distinctive ambience! With the following, and so delectably, in places, Brahmsian  “Along a secret path”  I found myself straining to hear the viola at first, against the piano, (the composer’s rather than the player’s fault, here!) wanting more body of tone to make the lines sing. The oboe had no difficulty in this regard, even despite the florid nature of the piano writing, but the viola’s line I thought too subdued in places for the material.,

As for the fiery “Sunset” which followed, it sounded as if we were on board Wagner’s Dutchman’s ship battling the tempests – Sarah Watkins’ piano-playing conjured up a veritable storm through which the oboe piped strenuously and heroically, except that the viola was for the most part, to my ears, lost, swamped in the torrents of sound! Most thankfully, with the “sehr ruhig” of the final piece “On the pond, the motionless one”, we heard both exquisite solo lines and beautiful duetting between oboe and viola, suggesting perhaps moonlight on the tranquil waters after the storm, the viola spaciously raising its voice and singing its melodic traceries. The piano still generated energies aplenty with triumphant-sounding chords in places, but was content to accompany its companions over the work’s serenely lyrical close.

Another name new to me was Alyssa Morris (b.1984), an American composer whose style was described in the programme as “approachable, flashy and beautiful” – the title of her 2024 work “The Big Questions” poses the idea of confronting our very existence, pondering imponderables such as “Who am I?” / “What is this crazy thing called Life?”/ “How is it Possible?” / “What comes next?”.  Reasoning that there are as many potentialities and possibilities as there are humans on this planet capable of flooding one’s sensibilities with uniquely-conceived minutae potentially delivering as much confusion as enlightenment (that sentence will do for a starter!), I strained forwards in my seat hoping to discern via the infintinesimal/infinite action of sound-impulses upon my primed sensibilities a true sense of awareness illuminating my inner being. I wasn’t sure whether the result would be any different to my listening to a favourite piece of music at any given moment of out-of-the-ordinary receptivity – but I counted myself at that particular moment as “ready for anything”.

It struck me that the composer was indulging in a kind of “sleight-of-hand” in giving us the existential titles I’ve already quoted, their “idea” actually containing the seeds of execution more than the actual sounds that followed. “Who am I?”, for example, began with a viola’s single note over which oboe and piano elaborated, recitative-style in a series of “statements” – the piano floridly invited the oboe and viola to similarly elaborate their lines. The music became very “Big American Musical” or “Big Screen”,r even “Big Country”, encouraged by fulsome instrumental tones. A by-product of these fulsome amplifications was that I felt “engaged “ with ideas while losing any specific sense of any uniquely distinctive and definitive state – was it me in this “Who am I?” moment, or was I actually experiencing with this “the craziness of the thing called Life?”

There were “clues” as to what was happening – conversational exchanges between the three instruments punctuated by crazily sassy detailings such as the viola’s sudden downward-plunging glissando, followed by pizzicato-like excuses for such off-the-wall spontaneities! Then there’s a waltz-rhythm, with the three players “bending the trajectories” in Salvador-Dali-like ways, until the famously flaccid structures raised themselves up with an effort and brought off a surprisingly “cutsie” gesture of farewell!

By this time, the question of “What comes next?” that we felt “ready for” had been gazumphed in itself so many times by the music itself we felt ready for anything! A piano solo, gesturing and ruminative, answered by the viola and echoed by the oboe (where he/she goes, we go! was almost sentimentally refrained by the ensemble) – until there was definitely a sense of something impending – was this, perhaps “The Next?” – the piano plunged into  a running, surging accompaniment-like figure which had left its soloists at the starting post by accident! – but which oboe and viola catch up hurriedly! The music became a full-scale song, almost Negro-spiritual-like in manner! The instruments fulsomely decorated their lines as if approaching a kind of climax! Suddenly, everything stopped! – could this be “an end”?  Was there actually such a thing?  I remember when a small boy thinking “When the spaceship reaches the so-called “end of space”, what’s behind that end-wall? – there’s still more space!” Similarly, was this an ending? – or was there simply no end? Was this “What comes Next?” – will there be “no end” of “What comes next?”… except continued (and gorgeous!) soft playing?  The music drifts into space – the oboe and violin hold their notes……the piano softly elaborates…..and finishes!

We needed a half-time! – the sense of “Where am I?” needed some familiar, reassuring sign-posting  – also, I was uncomfortably aware of having perhaps too readily indulged in fancy throughout Alyssa Morris’s essentially “escapist” piece. I needed something more earthily “real” once again, upon which to plant my feet. Interestingly,  the composer Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) whose music was next on the programme  was to supply me with a soupcon of empathy in this respect – Loeffler was described by violist Robert Ashworth in his introduction as “a German man trying to be French”! This was a reference to the composer’s reluctance to acknowledge his actual birthplace (Schonëberg, Berlin), and his somewhat “displaced” sense of upbringing, as he spent most of his life claiming his birthplace was in the Alsace region, which famously borders France, Germany and Switzerland! – (in fact a number of references I checked continue to maintain his claim that he was born in the French Alsacs region!)

Embarking on a career that took him from his birthplace in Germany to the United States via France, Russia, Hungary and Switzerland, the young Loeffler studied the violin in Berlin with Joseph Joachim and then composition with Ernest Giuiraud in Paris, playing in various French orchestras. After his move to the United States in 1881 he joined the Boston Symphony, with whom he performed as assistant concertmaster until resigning from the orchestra to devote his energies to composition. He’s known today as a skilled, highly fastidious and self-critical composer, belonging to no “school”, but combining his earlier French influences and sensibilities with his later “New World” experiences . In February 1931 Olin Downes, Music Critic of the New York Times, wrote in a seventieth birthday tribute to the composer, that Loeffler was “one of the representative musicians of an age”, but concluded that “his expression of that age has come from within, and not, as an imitation of fads and shibboleths of the hour, from outside.”

This work was originally planned as a set of Three Rhapsodies in 1898, but was extensively revised by Loeffler after the tragic death of the dedicatee – one of the pieces was shelved, and the two remaining works were rescored during 1901 for oboe, with viola and piano The first of these Rhapsodies became a memorial for the composer’s deceased colleague. Consequently, the piece began darkly, with the viola answering the piano’s first sombre notes strongly and whole-heartedly, more than matching the oboe’s plaintive tones, the viola here far more assertively-voiced than was the case with the Klughardt work. The style recalled the late-Romanticism of Ernest Chausson, evident in the “longing” nature of the phrases for all of the instruments, the oboe delivering a particularly beautiful solo episode at one point over the piano’s rippling phrases. A darker passage for both instruments resulted in recitative-like passages suddenly seeming to break into a dance , almost like the “friss” which follows a “lassu” in the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, the music readily ebbing and flowing across the instrumental timbres, until the sombre mood suddenly returned, the viola again richly-and darkly-toned against the plaintive oboe and  piano, with the music hauntingly drifting between minor and major harmonies as the voices died away.

The Second Rhapsody (subtitled “The Bagpipe”) actually began as if it were a Liszt Rhapsody, with a florid piano passage, but then wistfully morphed into a kind of plaintive Bartokian folk-song – perhaps the bagpiper’s tune? Its repetition was suitably lump-in-the throat in its wistfulness – oboe and viola responded most rhapsodically, the “bagpipe” theme by turns lively and ruminative, either goading its listeners into dancing-mode or regaling listeners with a story. We felt regaled by story-telling tones and gestures from each of the instruments, feeling as if the listeners had “heard this tale before” and were reliving its characterisations and narrative lines! And what a particular joy it was to hear the viola sing so sonorously, next to its companions!  After oboe and viola had finished their near-operatic “duet” with the piano’s sterling guidance, the three instruments engaged in a brief, gestural “are we all here, still?” exchange before letting the tones of the discursive tales find their rest.

For those who felt that the Loeffler work was much too earnest a response to those “Big Questions” posed by Alyssa Morris earlier in the afternoon, an alternative, “thistledown-on-the-wind”-like  rejoiner to “Life And Its Problems” was posed by Waikato composer Janet Jennings (whose work “Voices of Women” I’ve previously reviewed on “Middle C” – see https://middle-c.org/2020/09/16161/ )  This work – “Five Emotional States”  – is described in a programme note by its composer as “not to be taken seriously”, a comment that on a certain level of engagement makes plenty of good sense, but may simultaneously “beg the question” of emotional health in general for those who look beyond the work’s wondrously rollicking capacities for entertainment and into the real world of 2026 New Zealand, where people of all ages and circumstances are often forced against their will into situations where these states are all too palpably experienced. I’m not saying the work shouldn’t have been written – rather the opposite! Perhaps, though, it needs, in my opinion, not to be trivialised.

Having gotten that concern “off my chest”, may I say that the experience itself was for me an absolute riot, a palpable and resonating amalgam of delight and disturbance whose sequences I could all too readily recognise as having a degree of self-ownership of feelings generated by both inward and outer tensions – it also made me aware of the vital role that hope has to play amidst such experiences, given expression here in the section called “Relief”, and without which for me would have been akin to a horrifying, inwardly Faustian prospect of eternal damnation! Am I myself thus guilty of doing what the composer urged her audiences not to do?  I was, all above concerns considered, ultimately delighted by the experience – and, to the performers, Sarah Watkins, Robert Ashworth and Bede Hanley, I dips my lid in boundless appreciation!

Tales of the New Zealand String Quartet 2026

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet presents
“STORYTELLERS”  – the 2026 Season

Part One: ORIGINS

MIKA CORNELIUS – Universal Veil
FRANZ SCHUBERT – String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat Major D.87
GARETH FARR – String Quartet No. 2 “Mondo Rondo”
MISSY MAZZOLI – Death Valley Junction
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Op.25

New Zealand String Quartet
Peter  Clark, Manu Berkeljon, violins
Gillian Ansell, viola
Lavinia Rae, ‘cello

Prefab Hall, Jessie St, Mt Cook, Wellington
Wednesday 6th May, 2026

Concerts never cease to amaze! – even when the music is familiar, performers can illuminate what one thought was familiar territory and revitalise one’s responses with freshly-wrought approaches and energies. But there’s nothing like hearing live performances of unfamiliar or completely “new” music to one’s own ears, which was my experience at the New Zealand String Quartet’s first “Storytellers” Concert of 2026.  It was one that would have given a heart-warming dollop of interest and pleasure to a wide range of concert-going people in Wellington, pushing out the boundaries and widening the vistas normally associated with chamber music and string-quartet-playing to revelatory degrees while still remaining recognisably familiar and viable as an art-form.

I thought it was a pity that Auckland-born and Melbourne-based composer Mika Cornelius could not be with us tonight, here in Wellington, for their work which opened the Quartet’s season of concerts -this was a journey we were taken upon through an absorbing, almost William-Blake-like world of delineation involving the osmotic growth of fungi! – in a phrase, a single mushroom! The exercise of re-enactment of this singular “force-of-nature” process had itself a fascinating kind of multi-media identity in terms of expression and conveyance – beginning with our receptivities as an audience having been appropriately engaged and stimulated by the actual words of the composer about the piece, here spoken by the NZSQ’s General Manager Aslinn Ryan who had welcomed us to the concert, and then introduced the musicians and their four stringed acoustic instruments. It was, in general terms, a scenario whose inescapably “public” ambience seemed, most fascinatingly, to be somewhat at odds initially with what seemed like the essentially miniature, almost microscopic processes required to bring about fruition!

Mika’s words succinctly characterised their work’s depictions, descriptions and delineations of the subject’s components and the latters’ processes for us, movement by movement – firstly there were the “hyphae” – these were “delicate threads that form the foundation of fungi”. How distant, primitive, primordial and raw seemed the sounds made by the players’ instruments, singular and insubstantial, spontaneous by default in their existence, unresponsive to the presence or movement of others. Whatever the scale of things, microscopic, nanoscopic and sub-atomic, or of magnitudes thicker, longer, wider, taller and deeper than one could imagine, these “hyphae” at some point were stimulated by bearers of stimulus which could be described as magical, and given here the universal symbol of “autumn rain”.

The sounds made by the players began to coalesce in almost spontaneous and seemingly random ways – some of the interactions were rhythmic, while others were slow and linear; some connected readily to neighbours, while others were more independent – all rather like a process of adolescence, with  variously-growing foci, but somehow these impregnated, coalescent organisms couldn’t help but express a destiny, expressed here by a burst of rhythmic unanimity, a shock to systems whether active or passive! – they became products, results, outcomes!

This newness of identity began to coalesce as spores! – they appeared, whether randomely or purposefully, and with enough self awareness to perform a graceful dance! Tending to pizzicato at first, the sounds gradually “grew into” arco, instrument by instrument, entering a realm of what the composer called “silent eruptions of energy”, with spiralling tones whirling as they took flight!  “Is this world our oyster?” became a “Tower-of-Babel-catch-cry”, a buzzing, chattering, babbling refrain as the energies sought their destiny.

A heartfelt, winsome, sighing kind of dance slowly crystallised as the “mycellum”, the “Mecca” of the world of fungi, formed an intricate web – more recitative than melody, and interweaving the individual lines of expression, tremulously draping its sounds all about the textures  as the mycellum infiltrated all around and over the earth, forming what the composer called “a Universal Veil”, and validifying at one and the same time the idea of individuality having a collective essence – we ourselves are, like ants, or termites – or, ultimately, fungi! – connected!  The music’s lines ended quietly and reflectively, its course showing the way for its infinite progeny to follow….

After this musical version of our somewhat “Magic Schoolbus” adventure we were able to resize, and refocus our existential parameters on a youthful Franz  Schubert’s Quartet No.10 in E-flat Major, written when just sixteen years old, and intended for performance by members of the composer’s family – consequently, the work’s become known in some quarters as the “Haushaltung”,  (“Household” or “Family”  Quartet). The many hours the young musician spent in the “family” quartet gave him a working insight into what each instrument could do. While the individual parts in this quartet (which has the date “1813” on the autograph manuscript) certainly don’t match the excellence or difficulty found in the composer’s later, “great” masterpieces, they are by no means negligible – Schubert would probably have conceived these early works less as aspects of a “personal testament” and more as “things to be effectively performed” – with several notable touches immediately apparent in the NZSQ’s fresh-sounding reading.

The warm initial tones of the work’s opening phrase, with its three conclusive staccato notes brought out, in a single phrase a sense of both balance and humour, with lovely lines and deftly-touched impulses, a young composer’s sense of equilibrium at work, here and in the interplay between lyricism and playfulness as the exposition unfolded. The development and recapitulation sections followed traditional sonata-form practice, maintaining the E-flat major key this time in the latter right through to the movement’s concluding chords – conventional but still impressive!

I straightaway recognised from a previous encounter the perky, leaping-octave opening of the scherzo with its dancing reply – here put second, instead of third, as on my recording  (optional?) which followed with its leaping octave briefly taking on the clamour of a concerted chorus at one point, and also cheekily inserting a “false start” grace note on occasions! – and what a beautiful and redolently flowing minor-key“ trio interlude the players delighted us with!

The slow movement’s opening began with forte/piano phrases, here, beautifully and simply delivered, the songful themes then continuing, here-and-there further decorated by repeated-note sequences both together and separately – all serene and unclouded and lullabic. As for the finale, I loved the music’s opening  Keystone Cops-like scampering rhythmic trajectories, the players hardly missing a beat when reverting to triplets, and, then, even more cheekily, to the insouciant walking rhythms of the second subject – with  Schubert all the while indulging in his already-burgeoning melodic gift of producing hummable tunes!  Naturally, with unalloyed glee the players again “pounced” on the “running” rhythms at the reprise of the opening, whirling us through the trajectories to the work’s coda!  The final ensembled gestures of the piece here had all the conviviality of a family occasion with a burst of devil-may-care energy just to round things off at the end – so very enjoyable!

I was looking forward immensely to the programme’s next scheduled item, Gareth Farr’s String Quartet No. 2 Mondo Rondo, which I’d heard once before in concert but had much earlier (1999, in fact!) reviewed the work’s first recording by the NZSQ of that time for the Morrison Music Trust. We were amused greatly when the players this evening told us of an occasion somewhere when they’d asked audience members to record and send to the group their reactions to Gareth Farr’s music! – subsequent responses included  reports of “accelerated heart rates” and images of “disturbed ants’ nests” – though the zaniest was of “sped-up scenes of a New York train station interspersed with images from a sausage factory!”….whether any further such hallucinatory impressions would emanate from this evening’s audience as a result of tonight’s performance will remain to be seen!

I found myself sufficiently “challenged” by the players’ invitation to audience members to contribute their own impressions of what thoughts and images the music generated, though I remembered at the end of the first movement (subtitled “Mondo Rondo”) that I was supposed to be reviewing the Quartet’s performance, rather than my own recreative reactions to it!  Nevertheless, by that movement’s end I had firmly fixed in my mind the pathetic struggles of a puppet on a stage in a half-dressed state trying at once to pull the rest of its clothes on properly while acting out and dancing a story, and getting in a terrible tangle as a result!

It just wouldn’t have done to continue in this vein – so I returned to my “critic” guise for the rest of the work, registering the second “Mumbo Jumbo” movement as a kind of rhythmic-texture loop-cycle, sounds ensnared in the workings of a machine, the tones and timbres characterised by dry pizzicati and instrument-tapping which almost without warning changes completely in character to arco-bowed cries of distress and despair, as if the sounds had suddenly acquired a distinguishable “voice” and were crying to be heard, saved, released, helped to escape – arco, pizzicato and “struck” timbres jostled and tumbled together until the voices gradually relinquished their tones and were distantly silenced, leaving what seemed like a kind of void of impulse and emotion – a feeling no longer able to feel……

Like a kick-started machine bursting into life after a few vain attempts, the rhythm of the third movement “Mambo Rambo” got under way, the ostinato rhythms supporting an exotic, Middle-eastern-like theme with both languid and more energised forms alternated by violin and viola over the incessant trajectories of the second violin and ‘cello, in places rhythmically “crunchy”, in others beset by syncopated “groans” and eerily wandering lines, before the exotic melody returned, enjoying a full throated reprise on all the instruments and then abruptly flung to the winds and disappearing! I couldn’t remember enjoying the piece more than I did here – all so engaging and persuasive, even my very own half-dressed pathetic puppet at the beginning!

After an interval enabled us to get our breath back, we were enjoined to steel ourselves for a visit to “Death Valley Junction”, which was the name of a piece by the American composer Missy Mazzoli, a ten-minute work for string quartet which recreates the ambiences of one of the most renowned places of desolation on Earth – Death Valley, in California’s Mojave Desert. The Junction was “discovered” by Mazzoli on a road trip with her husband in 2004, finding a building that, almost forty years before, in 1967, had been converted from some kind of recreation hall into a hotel-cum-opera house through the efforts of Marta Becket, a former ballet dancer who, inspired by the location of the building developed the idea of establishing a performing arts centre – she herself presented weekly one-woman shows there as well! Mazzoli was, in turn, inspired by the whole concept of what Marta Becket had done, and in  2010 wrote her piece Death Valley Junction, dedicated to Marta Becket herself (the latter died in 2017, aged 92, but her spirit lives on in this music).

In her programme note for the work the composer described the piece as beginning “with a sparse, edgy texture – the harsh desert landscape” and then transforming the ambiences with “a wild and buoyant dance”. From the outset we were made aware of the environment’s notorious heat and aridity by the bleakness and dryness of the instruments sostenuto lines, augmented by the viola’s vivid, and almost in places sinister glissandi, as if representing swooping birds of prey. Gradually the tones took on increased movement and rhythm, glissandi and note-patternings coming together, as if life was signalling its presence, and with movement and energies even suggesting the spirit of song and dance. We were borne, dream-like, through a soundscape suggesting a fusion of co-existence, not through heavy-handed subjugation, but more by determined adaptation of the human spirit to what seemed like a particularly intractable instance of the natural world’s harsh environment. This was particularly characterised by the ‘cello’s on-going dynamic activity, its “human” component in the soundscapes achieving the sense of a small but nevertheless significant instance of survival and achievement.

The programme’s final work was Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No.1, part of the NZSQ’s tribute to the composer to mark his fiftieth anniversary year. Whether purposed or merely coincidental, the work gave me the impression of seeming to naturally “grow out of” the various soundscapes the NZSQ had already presented us with in the concert –  Britten’s writing had elements of the microcosmic growth impulses of Mika Cornelius’s vision, the youthful exuberances of Schubert’s quartet, the madcap energies in places of Gareth Farr’s pulsations and the distinctive feeling for particular “ambiences” demonstrated by Missy Mazzoli’s work. It was the first of his three numbered String Quartets (Britten had written various others as student efforts), and written in 1941 in the United States, the composer and his partner Peter Pears, both pacifists and conscientious objectors, having fled the strictures of the war in Europe. The work was the direct result of a commission by arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and received its premiere in Los Angeles from the Coolidge Quartet, to grateful acclaim from the composer.

In four movements Britten combines elements of classic forms and instances of freer, more spontaneous expression, with marked contrasts of mood both between and in the course of some of the movements. The first movement began quite wondrously with unearthly, top-of-the-range, sostenuto tone-clusters from the upper strings, leaving the ‘cello as if earthbound, looking up and succinctly commenting upon the wonders all about what seemed like the upper reaches of the music’s firmament. Halfway through the movement these sounds died away and the stillness of the visionary mood was suddenly set upon by all the instruments, playing a vigorously-racing, exhilarating, almost “disturbed” kind of triplet-rhythmed, “flailing -in-all-directions” episode, before the pace of things slowed and the music seemed to want to climb back up to the stratospheric heights from whence it began. This process echoed in varied guises until a final “star-cluster, like glow-worms suddenly disturbed in a dark cavern, peremptorily extinguished their light-lines! – superbly-managed musical theatricalities here from the players!

The second movement was a cheekily rhythmic Allegretto, punctuated by abrupt triplet exclamations, and running passages, the mood spontaneous and volatile, almost a kind of danse macabre featuring spasms of energy which dissipated as quickly as they appeared. Not so with the third Andante calmo movement, here as good as its word, with the music seeming in places almost to anticipate the “Moonlight” orchestral interlude in Britten’s yet-to-be-written opera “Peter Grimes”. This was the sequence that ostensibly impressed the American critics who attended the premiere most profoundly, one likening the movement to a kind of “Memorial for a lost world” – the steadily played-out 5/4 rhythms enabled individual instruments to gently rhapsodise in different keys through moments reflecting quiet intensities of both stillness and motion.

The first of a series of scampering arch-like gestures began the final movement, individually and haltingly at first, and then coalescing into partnership in a kind of joyous ferment! Again, the upper string and the ‘cello undertook different pathways through the same scenarios, interchanging turns at intoning soaring lines set next to vigorously dancing figurations, the players achieving exquisite balancings of different themes and counter-rhythms, and delighting us with the tonal, textural and rhythmic differences! And, what a wonderful concerted declamation the ensemble achieved at the end, with trajectories spiralling downwards so heart-stoppingly and spectacularly into the gestures leading to the final chord! Tremendous and resonating stuff for me, as it was also for a number of people I talked with afterwards – a new leaf of exploration turned over for me regarding the fascinating compositional world of Benjamin Britten, but a definite feather in the collective cap of the New Zealand  String Quartet!

Wellington Youth Orchestra with Mark Carter serves up an orchestral feast.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra with Mark Carter at St.Andrews-on-The-Terrace  –  photo credit:  Cindy Young Waldron

SIBELIUS – Finlandia
ELGAR – Suite No. 2 from “The Wand of Youth”
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – A London Symphony

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Mark Carter, conductor

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, May 3rd, 2026

“Pines to Pastures” was the Wellington Youth Orchestra’s programme-title for its first 2026 concert – it succinctly described the book-ends containing the action-packed musical journey we were taken upon by the orchestra and its inspirational conductor Marc Carter throughout an eventful Sunday afternoon. The programme featured the music of three composers whose names often appear on the lists of “master orchestrators” –  Sibelius, Elgar and Vaughan Williams – with each of the pieces’ very different evocations bringing its own particular technical and interpretative set of challenges for the players to grapple with. The end result was a triumph – throughout the concert the playing regaled us with wall-to-wall instances of ear-catching detailings, characterfully-wrought vignettes and larger scale scenarios of beauty, drama and excitement. Every note sounded was accorded, to my ears, a kind of living, pulsating quality, with the players’ concentration seeming never to flag  nor the energies falter.

Opening with Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia”, the big, dark-browed brasses at the start straightaway  focused our attention, contrasting sharply with the plangent pastoral sounds of the winds, and then the passionately insistent strings, and with the winds and strings building the urgencies towards the brass’s sharp-edged calls – the wonderfully “grinding” lower strings conveyed a sense of a force about to be unleashed as the rest of the strings and the brass traded outbursts of pent-up energies. All of this led into the precipitous allegro, with tumultuous percussion heralding the driving orchestral forces, joyously and vigorously responding to the great horn calls, and surging excitingly into and through the climaxes! That done, and the exhausted forces having given their all, the way was open for, firstly the winds, and then the strings to sonorously intone the famous ”tune” that has subsequently found its way into all kinds of celebratory and worshipful scenarios world-wide. It was fitting that, having regained their composure, the more combatative sections of the orchestra were then able to rouse themselves for a return to the allegro in its most celebratory tones, capped off by a splendidly conclusive, and full-blooded “Amen-like” coup de grace!

Stirring though the Sibelius performance was, I subsequently felt that it was during the playing of the various dances comprising the next item (an adorable suite of dances by Edward Elgar called “The Wand of Youth”), that the orchestra seemed more relaxed and assured, having “played themselves in” during the Sibelius for the concert’s remainder.  While “Finlandia” was exciting, it felt very “tightly-wound” throughout – with the Elgar, however, conductor and players seemed to “expand” further, and fill parts of the music up with a different kind of relaxed exuberance. I particularly noticed how both “The Little Bells” and “The Wild Bears” pieces exuded such great warmth, whole-heartedness and unbuttoned “swagger” in places. While “The Little Bells” has always been a favourite of mine, due to its heart-wrenching echt-Elgarian “second” theme (such a beautiful counter-theme on the lower strings the second time through! – and I was especially taken by the excellent playing of the glockenspiel by a nimble, if unsighted percussionist), I did so enjoy the orchestra’s spectacularly exuberant playing of “The Wild Bears” –  it was wonderful stuff (though I had to strain to make out that very first and well-remembered triangle “ping!”)!  These dances were from two orchestral suites based on some of the composer’s childhood musical sketches he had made when aged eleven, for a kind of “fantasy play” which he and his siblings were to perform, and which were miraculously relocated much later, and reworked for our pleasure!).  A small point here – I realised after the concert that I had NO memory of the orchestra playing the enchanting “Fountain Dance” listed in the programme – was the spell cast by the music so great that I actually took leave of my senses for a few minutes during the proceedings? – or did Mark Carter and the orchestra simply omit the dance?

No matter – there were even greater landmarks looming on the musical horizon for the players, in the form of a four-movement symphony that’s become almost as iconic as anything written by Elgar – this was his younger English contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A London Symphony”, first completed and then extensively revised by its composer after its first performance in 1914 (this ‘original version” still exists, found nowadays in a revelatory Chandos recording made by the late, lamented conductor Richard Hickox).  The symphony continued to be revised (and even occasionally performed in “newer” manifestations) until a final authorized performing version appeared, published in 1936 (Wikipedia has an absorbing account of the genesis and various appearances of different versions of this work!). Richard Hickox’s fascinating reading of the “original” gives the work’s supporters cause for both lamentation (that so many passages in the original were removed) and relief (that the work displays increased coherence and stature with those same passages excised)!

One doubts whether the “original” 1914 version will ever outstrip the 1936 “finished” work in popularity, but it certainly adds to the fascination of the work in particular and the trajectories of the composing process in general. Vaughan Williams was certainly no Bruckner regarding the latter’s woeful lack of confidence in his own, composing abilities, but he did listen to advice from friends, including interpreters of his music who occasionally might suggest the occasional change or an edit here or there. He certainly retained a great affection for this work, and is on record as declaring, later in life, that it was perhaps still “the favourite” of all his symphonic offspring!

The work gives a confident impression from the outset as indeed being a “Symphony by a Londoner” (as the composer later mused over what he thought should perhaps have been the work’s “proper title”). The opening Lento, here. with lower strings and murmuring winds sounding atmospheric chords and lines was an evocation of a city before dawn magically emerging from the darkness, the instruments gradually opening up the vistas as the ambiences lightened and everything gradually came alive – the Westminster chimes sounded, and amid fanfare calls the sun’s rays seemed to suddenly break through and reveal the pulsating heartbeat of a city! We got plenty of activity from the strings in response to the joyously percussive fanfares, and the jaunty “walking movement”, firstly from the winds, then the strings, and then the brass carried the exuberant rhythms onwards towards a return of the great introductory fanfare of the city’s awakening! The  players enjoyed the folk-dance-like ditties and the exuberant shouts alike as the city boisterously flexed its human muscles, then took us to quieter, more subdued vistas where the melancholy strains from the cor anglais initiated moments of reflection, leading then to a ‘cello solo joined by other strings – a poignant episode, practically chamber-music! – and beautifully sounded by the players, obviously revelling in such gorgeous string-writing!  The fanfares sounded again in the distance and the energies reawakened, gradually rebuilding and redoubling the previous excitements and working up to a last, protracted fanfare resonating through to the end of a long-held final chord.

“Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon” was the composer’s description of the slow movement’s opening – a beautiful solo from the cor anglais rose out of quiet string passages, the strings repeating the melody and extending the tranquil mood – a gentle horn and trumpet passages, and the strings returned more impassioned than before – altogether a heartfelt evocation – a solo viola fluently began a series of atmospheric street-call-like phrases, answered by other instruments and punctuated by the percussion’s gentle jingling of cab harnesses passing by, and drawing forth a rapturous burst of nostalgic tones from the whole orchestra – it was scalp-pricking stuff! – all beautifully evoked! It was left to the cor anglais, horn and solo cello to re-establish the prevailing atmospheres, giving the movement’s last few sounds to the solo viola once again.

The scherzo was a lively nocturne, with specific instructions from the composer to the listener, to “imagine himself standing on Westminster Embankment at night, surrounded by the distant sounds of the Strand….with its crowded streets and flaring lights….” Conductor Mark Carter encouraged a delightfully insoucient swagger from his players throughout this engaging music relying on accent and nuance rather than speed to invest the music with plenty of characterful “bounce” – this music always reminds me of certain books I read when young about English childhood adventures, such as “The Otterbury Incident” and “Stig of the Dump”, with their somewhat rollicking, devil-may-care attitudes adopted by the protagonists! I particularly enjoyed the orchestra’s detailing throughout, (including an especially spectacular piece of horn-playing of the main theme at one point!) – and the winds and percussion also had great fun with the trio-like interlude featuring the sounds of a busker’s wheezing accordion! And conductor and players “coaxed” the dying strains of the day from out of the movement’s end so very sensitively.

Every time I hear this work’s finale, with its “cry of pain” at the very opening, I find myself wondering just what Vaughan Williams was meaning – it’s almost Mahlerian in its unexpected angst and darkness of aspect! Not unlike Mahler’s Fifth Symphony’s opening, it has an explosive beginning, then settles into a march-like episode of grim, dark-browed intent! – was this REALLY VW’s view of London? I remember reading somewhere very early on that VW was here expressing the city’s darker, more tragic side – the march-like rhythms hinting at the misery of those down on their luck, hungry, unemployed, and even homeless. Other commentators have referred to the city’s traditional pomp and ceremonial gravitas over centuries, which are expressed here in tones of sombre grandeur. Typically, the composer kept his thoughts largely to himself regarding much of his music, though in this particular movement’s case he famously referred to H.G. Wells’s 1908 novel Tono-Bungay, which contains a passage describing the novel’s narrator sailing down the River Thames and seeming “to be passing all England in review”, as influencing the work’s elegiac closing pages, beginning with a reiteration of the first movement’s “Westminster Chimes” and then simply drifting unhurriedly to a close……the concluding words in the novel are – “The river passes…..London passes….England passes.”

I hope I’m forgiven for dwelling on this aspect of the music besides writing about its performance – these references to aspects of the composer’s inspiration for the work can’t help but further inform my opinion of the excellence of the Youth Orchestra’s performance and the surety of the guiding hand of conductor Mark Carter throughout. It’s precisely that tragic and  lament-like aspect that hovers over this music which was what these players brought out so movingly – the silence at the piece’s end in this performance was indicative of the effect it all had on its audience – we had been witness to something extraordinary, something that deserved its moment of contemplation as well as acclaim at the very end. I’ve refrained from describing anything specific at this point in the work – it all seemed integrated and inevitable, just as night follows day, with the players’ energies and concentration seemingly unflagging! And afterwards, who could blame them for wanting to conclude the afternoon with something a bit more festive and rousing! – especially since it was the return of  “The Wild Bears” which came to the rescue of the symphony’s “stricken” conclusion with even more panache than in the first-half performance – and THIS time I definitely and unequivocally heard that wonderful, nostalgic tintinnabulation of the triangle first time round! I went home after hearing all of that as happily as any concertgoer had a right to be – no affirmation could be more appropriate or deserved!

 

 

 

Echoes of woodland scenes rubbing shoulders with companionable coffee-houses! – an echt-Viennese musical lunchtime experience for Wellingtonians at St. Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Christine Wang (violin), Beth Chen (piano), and Sebastian Dunn (horn)

EUGÈNE BOZZA (1905-1991) – En Forêt (In the Forest) Op.40
Sebastian Dunn (horn), Beth Chen (piano)

FRITZ KREISLER (1875-1962) – Schön Rosmarin (Old Viennese Dance No. 3)
Christine Wang (violin), Beth Chen (piano)

JOHANNES BRAHMS  (1833-1897) – Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano in E-flat Major Op.40
Christine Wang (violin), Sebastian Dunn (horn), Beth Chen (piano)

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

Every now and then in a concert one encounters music one has never before heard, or even heard of, and sometimes even whose composer has a name one doesn’t know. On certain occasions audiences sit primly and attentively and at the end applaud, congratulating the composer(s) and the musicians, and of course, one another upon according the piece or pieces due attention. But on once-in-a-blue-moon occasions such hitherto unknown music can unexpectedly generate an instant impact akin to a real frisson of excitement, one which lingers on in the memory for ages afterwards. It’s happened to me a few times over my years of concert-going experience – the latest being my attendance at a recent St Andrew’s-on-The Terrace concert featuring three outstanding musicians – Sebastian Dunn, horn, Christine Wang, violin, and Beth Chen, piano.

To be accurate, the truly “instant combustion” fireworks took place most markedly during the concert’s first item, featuring horn player Sebastian Dunn and pianist Beth Chen in a vivid presentation of an ear-opening horn-and-piano piece by French composer, Eugène Bozza (1905-1991). This was En forêt  (In the Forest), a piece written in 1941 as an entrance exam piece for the Conservatoire de Paris, and one regarded ever since as embodying the entire technical and expressive capabilities of the French horn. The piece depicted a hunting party in a forest, the writing combining different horn-playing techniques with an impressionistic piano accompaniment. Both  Sebastian Dunn and Beth Chen revelled in their concerted evocations of the hunt and their individual depictions of various scenes and moods throughout – a particularly atmospheric feature was the horn’s magical use of call and distanced (or muted) respondings. The visceral impact of the piece and its performance almost literally “brought the house down” at the conclusion, so evocative was the playing of both musicians throughout in terms of recreating presence and distance, activity and reflection.

After these somewhat “larger-than-life” exertions, violinist Christine Wang next took the platform with Beth Chen to give us “something completely different” – a most charming and nostalgia-soaked piece titled Schön Rosemarin – Old Viennese Dance No.3, by Fritz Kreisler. Before the piece was even halfway though, the winsome charm and delicacy of the players’ violin and piano strains had taken us far away from the forests and the hunters, and was instead enabling us to “drink in” the ambience of the Viennese coffee-house with its traditional “Atmosphäre von Gemütlichkeit”. Fritz Kreisler, besides having been, of course, a renowned virtuoso violinist, was also a composer, but he preferred to publish some of his music under an assumed name so as to give the pieces the chance to be judged by their own merits and not by his “virtuoso violinist’s” reputation. By comparison with Sebastian Dunn’s riveting display of “virtuoso roar” with HIS instrument, violinist Christine Wang seemed to me to catch the completely different kind of “olde-worldly” ambience of the Kreisler piece perfectly, as did Beth Chen’s equally delightful pianistic identification with the spirit of the music.

These seemingly far-flung performing aureoles and contrasts in delivery then magically came together for the programme’s third item, Johannes Brahms’s Horn Trio in E-flat Major. In his introduction to the piece Sebastian Dunn talked about the composer’s preference for the “natural” (i.e. “valveless) horn over the more modern version.  Obviously the “Waldhorn” as it was known, had nostalgic connections for Brahms (his father had taught him as a child to play the instrument) besides what the composer specifically referred to as the horn’s more “natural” characteristics, its intrinsic tonal shadings and generally “softer” sound. Dunn assured us that he would do his best in this performance to compensate for his own “modern” instrument’s relative “brashness”!

This work was written in 1865, and probably inspired chiefly by the death of the composer’s mother earlier that same year. As with Brahms, its genesis wasn’t perhaps entirely straightforward, as befitted his generally enigmatic response to various influences regarding his music.  The Trio’s somewhat changeable moods across its four-movement span have prompted various other conjectures regarding sources of inspiration – besides recalling his mother singing the folksong “Dort in den Weide steht ein Haus” (There among the willows stands a house) as influencing part of the Adagio Mesto slow movement, Brahms hinted at another, more mischievous song in the work’s finale, “Es soll sich ja keiner mit der Liebe abgeben” (No-one should have anything to do with love), one which ably suited his ongoing “confirmed bachelor” status. As with any piece of music its creative motivations, whether conscious or otherwise, invariably reflect a veritable jigsaw of influences.

Brahms’s combination of violin, piano and horn was innovative at the time, but has since inspired a number of other works, most obviously (and perhaps, surprisingly) György Ligeti’s 1982 work Hommage à Brahms. Here, the performance of the “original” generously brought out all of the work’s inherent qualities, the opening Andante movement enjoying its relative freedom as the only “sonata-ish” work of Brahms’ to pay little heed to sonata form! – this was more of a rondo-patterned melancholy main theme with a livelier contrasting sequence, the two sections alternating and  subtly blending gestures from one another’s material into a beautiful coda.

The second movement was a dancing Scherzo begun by the piano, and juxtaposing a leaping opening theme with occasional syncopated shouts of consenting glee, catapaulting the trajectories through to the resonantly sombre Trio, after which the Scherzo’s return restored the music’s high spirits. Came the Adagio mesto slow movement, a funereal introduction by the piano heralding a scenario of sorrowful lament, violin and horn almost weeping, it seemed, as the piano moved the cortege forwards – there appeared no respite until the movement’s end, despite an occasional “lifting up” of the melodic line, only to be brought down to earth again under the weight of emotion and gradually dissolving into the mists of gloom….

What a transformation the music then underwent with the finale’s delicious bubbling-up of energies from within!  – with rompings and frolickings spreading like wildfire through the music’s textures! Christine Wang’s violinistic brilliance, by now fully come into its own, and Beth Chen’s vigorous “foundation-rock” piano-tones were the constant “movers and shakers” of the music throughout. Interestingly, (and ironically), I’ve always felt Brahms’ writing for the horn never fully conveyed the out-and-out exhilarations of the “Waldhorn” world, one made so manifest by the Bozza piece we heard at the concert’s beginning – though, of course Sebastian Dunn’s skilfully-reproduced rumbustions during the Brahms work were sufficiently ebullient in certain places to make the instrument’s presence felt, and especially towards the piece’s end!

A group of us, amid plenty of excited babble, managed to make our way across the Terrace to a coffee-shop afterwards, where we were able to reflect anew (and not by any means for the first time!) upon our good fortune at having a lunchtime concert series in the city to attend which featured such resoundingly memorable musical treasures delivered via absolutely first-class performances!

 

 

 

 

 

Bright, Capricious and Colourful – Arohanui Strings’ Benefit Concert at Roseneath, Wellington ’s “Long Hall”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MORITZ MOSZKOWSKI – Allegro Energico (from “Suite in C Minor Op. 71)
The Treble-Makers – Whitney Wu  and Izabela Ibanez, violins, (Arohanui Strings)
Amelia Liu, piano, (Queen Margaret College, Wellington)
JS BACH – Three Dances (Bouree – Loure – Courante) from French Suite in G Major BWV 816
(arr. Pohl/Gjelsten)
Helene Pohl, violin, Rolf Gjelsten, ’cello
ALBERT ROUSSEL – Trio for Flute, Viola and ‘Cello (1929)
Bridget Douglas, flute, NIcholas Hancox, viola, Rolf Gjelsten ‘cello
WOLFGANG MOZART – Quartet for Flute, Violin, Viola and ‘Cello K.298
Bridget Douglas, flute, Helene Pohl, violin, Nicholas Hancox, viola, Rolf Gjelsten, ‘cello

The Long Hall, Point Jerningham, Roseneath. Wellington
Saturday 25th April, 2026

One of the more delightful aspects of concert-going is the singular pleasure of encountering “new music” on the programme – by “new”, I mean in this instance music that one has never before encountered, rather than something “contemporary”. –  from this twenty-first century viewpoint the latter term has for many of us seen works thus described undergo the inevitable ageing process!

Not that I can remember the music of Polish/German pianist and composer Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) ever sounding “contemporary”, though what we heard today from the output of French composer Albert Roussel (1869-1937) was certainly rather more acerbic and  “modern-sounding ” than that of either Moszkowski or the music of Russian composer Reinhold Glière (1875-1956), the third of the trio of nineteenth/twentieth-century names accompanying that of JS Bach’s and Mozart’s on the programme I heard today at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”.

Helene Pohl’s and Rolf Gjelsten’s continued espousal of their Pot-Pourri Chamber Ensemble activities brought together a brilliant and wholehearted array of talents for today’s concert, featuring flutist Bridget Douglas and violist Nicholas Hancox, as well as an inspiring trio of young musicians, two of whom, violinists  Whitney Wu and Izabella Ibanez play in the inspirational group Arohanui Strings, and a third, pianist Amelia Liu, a competition winner from Queen Margaret College in Wellington. The last-named occasioned the bringing out of an upright piano for the Moszkowski work, which was a “first” for this listener at the Long Hall – a rare treat! (I loved the name this Trio had concocted and made reference to in the programme, for our pleasure! – “The Treble-Makers”!)

I came to this concert largely uninitiated as far as the music by the three aforementioned era-spanning composers was concerned – in fact, the only music by Moszkowski I had previously heard was a set of “Spanish Dances Op.12” beloved by audiophiles due to a justly-famous early stereo (late 1950s) recording of the same, sporting the title “Espana”. (Elsewhere, as well, there’s definitely a highly-regarded piano concerto I’ve yet to catch up with!) Though only the first movement, Allegro  energico, of a “Suite in G Minor Op. 71” was played by the Trio, the group caught the “striving melancholy” of the violins’ firmly-centred descending phrases, in both minor and major keys, deftly supported by the piano when alternating heartfelt descending melodic lines with tumbling rhythmic surges, and creating infectious excitement by building the intensities leading to a spiritedly accelerated coda – what fun! – and what a joy to experience such youthful exuberance in triplicate!

Next came three dances taken from one of JS Bach’s keyboard works, a French Suite in G Major, and transcribed here for violin and ‘cello – Helene Pohl described the transcription of this music in the progrqmme as “working beautifully for string duo”, with counterpoints “to be savoured”! First came a spirited and joyous Boureé, the violin singing the melody and the ‘cello keeping things moving with a running counterpoint, the latter seemingly tempted at various cadences to follow the violin canonically, but after a few imitative notes skipping back into dance-mode! After this came the Loure (a languid, waltz-like dance) with its opening phrase imitative between the instruments before the ‘cello took up the rhythmic trajectories, enjoying, in the second sequence, some deliciously insouciant accompanying gestures. Finally, we heard the Courante, the music again imitative between the instruments at first, before the second part featured the ‘cello dancing in attendance of the violin, the latter picking up the cello’s figurations in response – gorgeously interactive!

We then got what was for me another rarity, four pieces from Reinhold Glière’s Eight Duets for Violin and ‘Cello, Op. 39. I’d actually heard more of Glière’s music than of Moszkowski’s or of Roussel’s, having encountered probably his most well-known piece from a Soviet-style ballet, “The Red Poppy”, a boisterous, crowd-pleasing romp called  the “Russian Sailors’ Dance”.  I’d also heard, more momentously, the most famous of his three symphonies –  an epic 80-minute work subtitled “Ilya Muromets” celebrating the adventures and death of a mythological Russian “Bogatyr” hero based on the lives of several such personae from different epochs of Russian history – strong stuff for a beginner-listener to encounter, back in my College years, but with startling sequences that still resonate in the memory, however dimly. Another notable claim to fame of Gliere’s was his tutorship of the youthful Serge Prokofiev, beginning lessons in 1902 when the latter was just ten years old and continuing until Prokofiev was accepted into the St.Petersburg Conservatory as a student at the age of thirteen.

Much of Glière’s output is unexplored, including a not inconsiderable amount of chamber and instrumental works (though he caused a posthumous ripple of interest in his music when soprano Joan Sutherland enterprisingly recorded in the 1970s a “Concerto for coloratura soprano and orchestra”). The Four Duets we heard were taken from his Op.39, written in 1909. The Prelude, beginning the set, was practically a “tuning-up” exercise, with the violin holding a single note and the ‘cello intoning a wistful, repeated phrase, before the instruments “swopped” roles – a simple, sombre, but resonantly effective piece. The Berceuse which followed featured a gorgeous violin melody in tandem with the cello’s  attendant repeated rising phrase – simply enchanting!   Then came the Intermezzo, a melancholy Schumannesque melody with a “rocking” motion, reminiscent of parts of Schumann’s Kinderscenen. Interestingly, the Gavotte that followed seemed to jump into a harmonically different dance-floor world altogether, with an engaging middle section, very “pesante” themes from the violin and drone-sounds from the ‘cello, then taking us back for something of an abrupt farewell to the dance and its mercurial world.

Our two aforementioned additional players joined the ensemble after a short break – one of them, violist Nicholas Hancox, was of course a stalwart of the ensemble at many of last year’s concerts at the hall and was thus welcomed like an old friend! But we felt especially honoured to have with us for the second half flutist Bridget Douglas, well-known for her participation in many memorable NZSO concerts as a principal section leader, and also in numerous chamber performances in the Wellington region. These players brought with them more (for me)  relatively unfamiliar music, a Trio for flute, viola and ‘cello by Albert Roussel, a name I knew only through a recording I’d purchased  long ago of a ballet of his with the name Le Festin de l’araignée (“The Spider’s Feast”), a work filled with gorgeous impressionistic sounds buoyed along by insinuating rhythms and extremely wry characterisations.

This Trio, written in 1929, I thought an extraordinary piece! – it promised something similar to the ballet at its outset, the Allegro featuring  buoyant rhythms dancing through open-air ambiences, and suggesting all nature at play, despite the occasional tinges of melancholy. The flute enjoined its companions more readily to share its bright-and-breezy manner, and viola and ‘cello did occasionally “buck themselves up”  with spirited surges of march-rhythm merriment and even a patch of  “triplet-flavoured bonhomie” towards the movement’s end that helped keep us all smiling!

But “O, mon Dieu!”  – the Andante was introduced by a sombre viola melody with an equally rueful arpeggiated ‘cello accompaniment, to which the flute added a kind of would-be-but-on-another-day-consoling melody – that done the viola and ‘cello had an exceedingly gloomy duet sequence (“those poor dears!”), one which the ‘cello tried next to “cheer up”, without success! The flute also persisted but without much joy (“What on earth could be the matter?” I wanted to ask the composer’s shade……). A sustained note seemed to be the only floating Pooh-stick the players could find to grasp and hold onto, and wait for the end!  Goodness! – the silence was golden!

And then, wonder of wonders, the music’s first-movement cheerfulness returned for the finale! The ‘cello had stepwise pizzicati, the viola a dancing figure and the flute a perky, bright-faced tune! Such was the camaraderie, the players sped up the trajectories as the blood started to flow more quickly, bringing our listeners’ hearts into our mouths with the relief of it all! – we even had a bit of unbridled stamping sailors’ dance excitement at one point! The movement’s opening returned with even more insouciance, bringing back the sailors for a bit more hi-jinks stamping – and then we heard an eerie passage featuring extraordinary harmonics-like texturings from the strings and near-lullabic tones from the flute.  However, the players seemed to then pick up on the composer’s “homeward bound” urgings, as they responded stepwise to the music’s ever-growing trajectories,  some helter-skelter, almost “silent movie’  soundtrack-scamperings with more “sailors’ dance” roisterings, leading to a concerted “knees-up-like” final flourish! Golly! – Did we dream him? –  or did Roussel dream us? – I ask myself as I write these wry remembrances of what we heard!

With the Mozart Flute Quartet K.298 (a later work than the K-number suggests) which followed, we were presented with a different kind of wryness, firstly in the form of the widespread supposition that the composer didn’t really CARE for the flute despite writing various works for the instrument, one set against a counter-argument that it was actually the person who COMMISSIONED the works for the instrument that Mozart really abhorred! This having been said, we then learned that Mozart had possibly written this particular work for himself, purely for pleasure!

Whatever the case, the music was simply divine – a lovely opening, half-hymn, half popular ditty, featured the flute carrying the melody. This was actually a ”theme and variations” movement, with Bridget Douglas “dancing”  her instrument through the ensuing moments of sheer contrapuntal enjoyment, and ringing the changes in the other variations, the second a running counterpoint for the violin against long-held flute notes, the third a florid version of the theme from the viola (just superb!) with “ambient” comments from the others, and the last a return by the flute to the theme with the ‘cello supplying the knowingly droll trajectories!

The second movement, Menuetto, jumped into D Major, with the flute leading a sprightly, upwardly  soaring opening harmonised phrase striding out confidently, then impishly dancing about in a single variation of the theme in a middle section. Back came the opening key for the last movement with gentle finality, the melody tossed about the instruments with an art-that-conceals-art kind of spontaneity, so that we got the composer’s intention of a group of friends making music for the sheer pleasure of doing so, a pleasure we in the audience felt, in such company, pleased and privileged to share and similarly enjoy.

Scriabin and Rachmaninov from Tony Lee – a piano-fancier’s ultimate dream concert?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ALEXANDER SCRIABIN – Preludes –  Op.11 No.1 in C Major
Op.17 No.5 in F Minor
Op.16 No.1 in B Major
Etude – Op. 2 No. 1 in C-sharp Minor

SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Piano Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 28

Tony Lee (piano)
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, 22nd April, 2026

Perhaps the use of the word “ultimate” in the heading unfairly inflates the overall impact of what was, in anybody’s language, a sensational recent display of piano-playing in all aspects of the art-form.  This was delivered by Australian pianist Tony Lee at one of St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace’s free and absolute “mana-from-heaven” lunchtime concerts regularly enjoyed by the capital’s music-lovers. The “ultimate” description would of course be contested hotly by lovers of piano-playing over the choice of repertoire – and even in regard to technical wizardry opinions would differ as to which pieces might be accorded the most elevatedly demanding places in the pianistic pantheon.

Enough to say, the repertoire chosen by Tony Lee amply demonstrated the pianist’s extraordinary mastery of the keyboard challenges posed by the music of two composers, Sergei Rachmaninov and Alexander Scriabin. Each were themselves virtuoso pianists, Rachmaninov gaining the higher honours from the Moscow Conservatory with the “Great Gold Medal” for piano-playing, and Scriabin a close second with the “Small Gold Medal”. Their own music took markedly different paths  though each was greatly influenced by Chopin at the beginning, with Rachmaninov evolving a rather more conventional kind of individuality, and Scriabin being more the “innovator”, increasingly exploring chromaticism and tonality to almost mystical degrees in his later music.

Their different directions gave rise to contentious moments between them  – Scriabin was critical of  Rachmaninov both regarding his music and plano-playing, at one point even deriding the latter’s music as “earthbound”. And he famously told Rachmaninov at one point that a passage in the latter’s music (the opera “The Miserly Knight) perfectly accorded with his, Scriabin’s “colour-theories” relating to musical keys – when Rachmaninov expressed his disagreement, Scriabin replied, “…Your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny!…..”

Despite all of this, Rachmaninov was determined, after Scriabin’s unexpected death, to promote his colleague’s music, performing it almost exclusively on a tour of Russia, and donating the proceeds to Scriabin’s family. Since those times, the two composers’ musical reputations have continued on different courses, each being in separate ways somewhat misunderstood – rather like with Liszt’s music, much of Rachmaninov’s output has enjoyed a near-instant popularity to this day, though parallelled by strains of outright critical contempt in certain quarters, whereas Scriabin’s music has gradually risen in stature from initial bewilderment and neglect to increased fascination and acceptance on the part of the listening public.

Today’s concert underlined significant aspects of each composer’s creative achievement in terms of the piano, though surprisingly, not in relation to larger forms – Scriabin actually wrote no less than nine piano sonatas, though none were offered here as a comparison to the first of Rachmaninov’s two efforts in the genre. Instead we were given examples of the former’s music in a kind of miniaturist guise, the pieces being from larger collections, though each beautifully self-contained in effect. These exquisitely-crafted morceaux  while obviously derivative, still conveyed enough of their composer’s individuality, though It would have been interesting to have compared the two composers’ individual way with sonata form. Here, I couldn’t help but note my responses to some of the music regarding what I felt were influences, and, surprisingly, more so in Scriabin’s case than in Rachmaninov’s.

First came Prelude Op. 11 No. 1 in C Major, based on a lyrically floated phrase repeatedly used, here, with great sensitivity and imagination, both poetic and passionate in utterance, and reminiscent for me of Debussy’s early music Then we heard Prelude Op 17 No 5 in F Minor, a work with stormy cascadings, impulsive gallopings and unbridled agitations, the pianist splendidly maintaining the wildness and passions of the opening throughout until the sounds came exhaustedly to rest at the very end – it all had something of the energy and drive of Chopin’s very first Op. 28 Prelude, but seemed uncannily to me as if the music might just as well have been Rachmaninov’s.

The following Prelude Op.16 No. 1 in B major recalled for me  firstly Grieg and then Schumann, with sounds resembling  the former’s piquant harmonic explorations venturing into and mingling with the latter’s poetic evening semblances – though as with all of these there was a feeling of a growingly independent spirit already taking flight and pushing out its own capabilities.

And then, the opening of the last of the Scriabin pieces,, the Etude Op. 2 No, 1 in C-sharp Minor, strangely reminded me of Rachmaninov once again – not the stormy C-sharp Minor manner of the latter’s most famous of his Preludes, but of a similar kind of obsessiveness with the opening rising melodic motif, used by him in other pieces, such as the well-known B Minor Prelude’s constant reiteration of its opening. It was all such vividly concentrated playing! – It left me feeling that Lee’s performances would have readily won Scriabin’s music some new friends on this extraordinary showing.

After a short break there came a different kind of “extraordinary”! I had heard Rachmaninov’s two piano sonatas played many years ago on a recording by the legendary John Ogdon, and remembered how “overwhelmed” my then relatively jejune ears felt after listening to what seemed cascades and cascades of notes! Today, those same cascades seemed, in Tony Lee’s hands, to sound-sculpt a magnificently “alive” and spontaneously driven plethora of musical impulses, instantly proclaiming a sense of beginning an epic journey, and exhibiting the means by which this would happen – the portentous themes, the flashes of brilliance and the ever-burgeoning sense of expectation which drew us further into the music’s world. It couldn’t help but recall for me the opening of the Liszt Sonata, though with themes that were even more expansive, taking more time and space to coalesce.

The big repeated-note theme was allowed to sing and resound, majestically suggesting a Faustian kind of spirit, both tremulous and eager in regard to any impending journey. It was irresistibly drawn by a rolling, agitated triplet theme  elaborated here by the pianist with great “presence” and remarkable poise and control but then giving way to a rising. arpeggiated idea that suggested aspiration to a “higher goal”, a Faust-like evocation!  We were made to feel the conflict between competing urges and impulses, between passions and ideals, all building up to a majestic climax – how does Rachmaninov do it?  Then, dramatically, it all seemed to, for the moment, expiate itself – and at that point I heard the unmistakeable echoes of the Third Piano Concerto, the two-note major-key repetitions whose minor-key transition produced an inwardly rising lump-in-the-throat effect as the movement came to its close.

Rachmaninov had reputedly began this work with Goethe’s “Faust” in mind, with each of the movements inspired by the main characters in the  latter’s version of the legend – though the composer was to later downplay the specifics of his inspiration, the movements certainly fitted the “Faust/Gretchen/Mephisofeles” programmatic order, with the second movement’s tenderness and lyricism readily suggesting the innocence and beauty of Gretchen – a perfect foil for the dark turbulence and brooding self-doubt portrayed in the opening movement. Here, Lee allowed  the music to drift, dream-like out of the silences, the oscillating figures framing a gentle song whose sinuous and mesmeric trajectories could ensnare any adventurer, its spell gradually growing in insistence, resembling a flow of openhearted longing and unfulfilled desire, and reaching a point where it cascaded over and down, again fleetingly sounding those echoed reminiscences of the Concerto! Lee then gently and patiently revisited the composer’s lines of the opening dream, this time building gradually towards a kind of effervescent frisson, whose almost-visionary moment glowed and then sank into what some listeners might have described as a post-orgasmic reverie at the end.

Came the finale – a “wild-horse-ride”, tremendously exciting, and a performance which seemed to us in the audience to give every tone, every impulse, every NOTE its due place in the music’s texture, impregnating everything with its particular significance, so that we were caught up in the music’s realms of wonderment and vividly-wrought realisation! The Dies Irae theme, one of the composer’s trademarks, leapt into the fray, its trajectories defiant and remorseless under Lee’s fingers, before its Mephistofelean spirit suddenly wavered at the appearance of a plaintive descending theme, a wholehearted counterweight to the Spirit of Denial and his combatative roisterings! A war of sorts was then waged by the music with the various elements brought into play by Lee’s near superhuman resources until the opening theme of the work was again sounded as if peace had been restored – but almost as if Heaven was shutting its doors, the Dies Irae theme came roaring back and laid all to waste with a series of coruscating descending chords! We were agog as our pianist’s energies hurled the final chords at us with stupendous irrevocability!

Wow! – what a work and what a performance! As I’ve had occasion to mention a few times previously in relation to other St.Andrew’s concerts, considerations such as appetite and hunger seemed well-nigh dwarfed by what we had all experienced this time round, with Rachmaninov and Tony Lee!  At the very least, it was, certainly, a lunchtime to remember!!

Gary Wilby – To those who dwell in realms of day…….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REFLECTIONS, MINIATURES, AND SOUNDSCAPES  by Gary Wilby – FUTUNA CHAPEL 2026
Gary Wilby – electric piano
Petrina Wu, Tina Wilby (‘cellos)
Natasha McMillan (violin)
Julie Coulson (narrator)
Futuna Chapel, Friend St., Karori, Wellington
Sunday, 19th April, 2026

Gary Wilby himself regards his sound-creations as “miniatures and intimate”, echoing in a real sense something of poet William Blake’s respect for small things, with the latter’s  words “a world in a grain of sand”, reflecting Wilby’s own reflection of the worth that can be found, as he himself says, “…..sometimes in a small cell….”.

At Futuna Chapel in Karori we were invited to join In Gary’s “looking back” presentation of his own soundscapes and miniatures, often in interactive tandem with well-known works by some of the “greats” in cases when there’s been particular empathies with certain of these pieces – to the point where cross-fertilisation delightfully bubbles over like a babbling fountain. He actually used the music of JS Bach both to introduce and “round off” his concert, playing for us on an electric piano the theme from the “Goldberg Variations” and some impulsive “variants” which any Baroque composer transported to the twenty-first century would have surely recogtnised as viable connective musical tissue!.

Futuna Chapel, of course, needs no introduction to many Wellington concertgoers since its “induction” into the process of becoming a music-performing venue. Its wonderfully-vaulted ceiling acoustic gives the sound a “bloom”, and its striking stained-glass window configurations a visual ambience which together beautifully enhance the atmospheres generated by the efforts of modestly-numbered groups of musicians, both instrumental and vocal. Wilby cherishes a particular connection to the venue as a great and singular honour, in the form of his previous association with sculptor Jim Allen whose work in the chapel brilliantly enhanced the designs of the original architect John Scott.

After the Bachian introduction to the concert we next head a recording made by two string instrument players from Aotearoa New Zealand when visiting another far-off part of the world, the Monastery of Santa Maria in Sobrado dos Monxes. I’m guessing that one of these string players was a ‘cellist, but am unsure whether the other was a violist or violinist, or even another ‘cellist! Whatever the case Gary Wilby’s ensuing “Chant Futuna Connections” composition was given its first hearing in this country via the recording, haunting sounds putting something of a girdle about the earth!

Wilby then played a piece which he had come to associate with the Erebus Air New Zealand disaster, as the first music that came to his mind after hearing news of the tragedy – a teaching colleague from the UK whom he had got to know while at the same school during her time in New Zealand was among those killed in the disaster. The piece played was Chopin’s C Minor Prelude Op.28 No.20 – the lively and energetic variation was intended as a reprise which reflected Wilby’s recollection of somebody replete with an abundance of life and energy.

He then dashed into a kind of medley which he had given the title “Mashup” and which featured pieces with a similarly recurring harmonic pattern  – I didn’t list the pieces whose transmorgrifications  I still recognised, but the exercise seemed as much fun to play as to listen to! The following piece by Darius Milhaud then gave us one of the dances “Sorocaba”, from a Suite of the Saudades do Brazil Op.67 – this was the first of the dances which hearkened back to Latin American dance rhythms, though more wry and nostalgic than I was expecting from the composer.

I did enjoy Richard Rodney Bennett’s “A Week of Birthdays” characterising the famous nursery rhyme describing different “birthday” attributes, stimulating and picturesque little “character-sketches”, one for each day of the week. Footnote: – I remember once checking out my own actual birth week-day and vaguely remembering it might have been Wednesday – oo-er!!  – still, Bennett’s “Wednesday’ piece is not unlike in character and mood a couple of Dmitri Shostakovich’s more “moody” Preludes from the Op. 87 set, so I’m perhaps in good company!  I had not previously heard the Ravel piece, to my shame (and I thought I knew all of the composer’s keyboard works!) – Wilby’s description of this brief piece mentions its “notational ambiguity and surprising dissonance” which seemed to sum up what we heard most enchantingly and disconcertingly.

True to instinct, his next piece was very much a concerted effort on the part of some fellow-musicians – it was named “Compassion Chant” resulting in a spontaneously-composed outpouring of feeling in response to the Island Bay Home of Compassion ‘s Sisterhood making a ‘millenium gift” oi a substantioal lease owed the Home by the adjoining Marae, Taput e Ranga, for the purchase of land some years earlier. The piece was first performed for the ceremonial Millenium handover which took place late in December 1999.

The occasion’s “reimagined” piece featured violinist Natasha McMillan playing a “prelude” to Julie Coulson’s spoken introduction to the work, followed by cellist Petrina Wu, whose instrument sounded the “chant proper”, before being joined in duet by the second  ‘cellist, Tina Wilby – the recitative-like line became animated, even agitated in places, but then returned to a more peaceful and considered tone, imparting an awareness for us of the emotional range and scope of the situation.

Next, Gary Wilby reiterated William Blake’s idea of “a World in a grain of sand” with his “Three Contrasts”, pieces by turns whimsical, wry, deft, off-beat and abrupt, and then followed by a more extended collection of shortish characterisations, one which he had called “Simple Simon”, and based on a series of three descending notes.  Two of the seven  pieces (I think they were the last two) continued to resonate afterwards, each reminding me of Russian music –  the bass resonances of one of the pieces brought Mussorgsky’s more reflective parts of his “Pictures” to mind, while the following piece featured a wayward-sounding Russian song with off-beat accompaniments, like a Tchaikovsky “Troika” gone slightly awry!

Perhaps the most esoteric of the presentations was ‘Water, Voice, Pulse”, three separate sound-bytes brought together on a pre-recorded “take” whose repeated character certainly garnered a mesmeric kind of effect, and with the rhythms gradually slowed down, leaving at the end a kind of “lost in space” effect – the chords resonate as the voice murmurs indistinctly until only single sounds are left, in the original repeated note form, followed by silence.

All that was left was the return of the “Goldberg Variations” theme,  itself having now been “seasoned” or “grounded” by the concert’s multifarious influences one realised upon hearing the results of such exposure that things for the relatively straightforward theme could never be quite the same again, as the player’s musings and impulses demonstrated. Sincere appreciation to Gary Wilby and his candidly-expressed musical revelations, the afternoon’s peregrinations giving us all something to think about, and think about again……..