Home for the Winter with Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding

Posted on by Peter Mechen

“Home for the Winter”
Liam Wooding (piano) and Hannah Darroch (flute)
Music by Jasmine Lovell-Smith, Henri Dutilleux, Lachlan Skipworth, Aaron Copland and Lili Boulanger
Bedlam and Squalor – Level 1, 18 Garret St,. Te Aro, Wellington
6:00 pm, Thursday,15th May, 2025

Things were “swinging away” in great end-of-the-day style at “The Rogue and Vagabond”, the watering-place right next to central Wellington’s Glover Park, as I made my way, a little tentatively, just around the corner and further along Garret St, to where there stood, self-assuredly in its own modest way, the entrance to “Bedlam and Squalor” (ah, thought I – a first cousin to “The Rogue and Vagabond!) – but I was straightaway taken by the contrast of the sombre doorway (of the “abandon hope” sort) with the profusion, above and besides this entrance, of coloured-pencil like horizontal stripes one might have correlated to a kind of urban kindergarten or some sort of art-gallery where the Hogarth-like images I’d entertained of “Bedlam and Squalor” were in reality reverse-euphemisms  for “fun and games”, and obviously nothing worse than “madness and merriment”.

Up the stairs I went, leaving those around-the-corner jollities earthbound as I ascended, finding myself in a quiet, comfortable and welcoming space not unlike a bar itself, but with tables and chairs set up in a rounded area at the room’s end, where there was a piano, beside which the two artists, Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding, were discussing aspects of the music they were about to perform, and greeting us (myself included) as we came in. Pleasantries completed I had just settled down, finding a seat next to an acquaintance whom I’d made at previous concerts and always found most agreeable, when I discovered that, in my haste at leaving home I’d snatched up one of my notebooks, but had forgotten to bring a pen! Help was at hand in the shape and form of a bartender, who was greatly amused by the piquancy of the plight of a music critic who had come without a stylus, but who kindly brought my agony to an end by producing one – I was happy to have thus contributed a “storm-in-a-teacup” strand of incident to the proceedings now that things had been resolved!

So! – here were Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding, formally welcoming us (we were a small but appreciative audience in that relatively intimate space) and telling us about what they were going to play for us, beginning with a piece which had give the whole recital its name, “Home for the Winter”, a piece written in 2020 for Hannah by Jasmine Lovell-Smith, and whose title was inspired by the “homeward” move made by many New Zealanders in response to the Covid 19 outbreak. The sounds seemed coaxed from out of the air, firstly for the piano, and then for the flute, the lines having a natural, organic kind of flow as if wrought by impulse, a feeling for the actions of wind and water all around – having been brought into being these elements seemed to take human form in song, which became a sort of minstrelsy, a chorus that rose up as the piano intensified the exchanges, before breaking off and leaving the opening resonances as a memory.

Having proclaimed a kind of “this is where we are” introduction, Hannah and Liam took us next to more peopled terrain, with a work by French composer Henri Dutilleux. Though it was one I’d not heard before, I knew and had already been enchanted with pieces by Poulenc, Francaix and Ropartz, and this proved, to my delight, similar kind of territory. I was almost straightaway disarmed by the opening piquancies (mysterious piano octaves echoed and gracefully “danced all about” by the flute) – and I loved the “Peter and the Wolf” opening dialogues of the second movement between the piano’s predatory wolf and the flute’s frightened but intrepid bird, and the following rhapsodic exchanges between the two, suggesting something of a singular “entente cordiale”.

A sudden escalation of energies (brilliant “molto perpetuo” playing from both musicians) seemed to clear the air of menace, entirely, and give the scenario over entirely to the pleasures of tit-for-tat exchange, our sensibilities being given plenty of air and space in places by some soaring lines before being returned to the dance! Towards the end, a cadenza-like episode from Hannah’s flute took us to a Ravel-like place not unlike Daphnis and Chloe’s enchanted grove, before the pair rejoined forces for an ever-accelerating coda, exhilarating for us all in its shared energies and pleasures.

Next was a recently-composed (2022) sonata by Australian Lachlan Skipworth, introduced by Liam, and described by him as “very refreshing” to play, though adding the proviso that the time signatures in the score with their frequent changes – 20/16, 10/16, 18/16 – certainly posed something a “challenge”. From the beginning I found the work a same-but-different experience to that of the Dutilleux, here an almost Gaelic world of exhilaration, with the opening “chaos of delight” morphing into a folk-dance blend of carefree abandon and strongly-pulsed movement.

The piano breaks off to play a solemn, repeated note-pattern to which the flute adds a lovely, rustic song-like sequence, borne along by its own airiness and spaciousness, hymn-like when the piano intensifies the mood, and seemingly tossed into the play of winds and waves when both instruments dance along the hilltops of the melody’s liberated lines – entrancing! Just as spell-binding is the dialogue of voices sequence which follows, like a pair of birds enacting a defining of territories, or a courtship ritual, one which leads back to the exuberance of the folkdance – if the conclusion isn’t quite of the grand finality one might expect, one might say it has an attractively insouciant “well, there it is!” manner at the end.

Our “food for thought” interval was sufficient to process what we’d heard (delightful!) and clear our decks for the next offering, a “different again” experience promised, which Hannah described for us  as “Americana in music” – this was Aaron Copland’s Duo for Flute and Piano, again something I hadn’t heard (oh, the ignorance of some music critics!), and naturally looked forward to an introduction to the piece. The opening movement, marked as “Freely” by the composer, takes us straight into the world of the latter’s ballet “Appalachian Spring” with the flute playing solo, a “voice in the wilderness”, spacious and nostalgic, with the piano’s entry contributing to the characteristic, almost unmistakably “open” sound. The flute begins the dance, strands of movement varying its trajectories, with the piano amusingly “oom-pah” at one point just before the big flute solo! Another pronounced “echo” for me is the similar ambience to the Third Symphony towards the end, a kind of salute to an idealised past…..but, then, what a quirky kind of conclusion! – those sharply-abrupt chordings are almost amusing in their air of dismissiveness!

“Poetic, somewhat mournful”, says the composer at the head of Mvt.II – piano and flute seem to be either looking for or avoiding one another at the start – most of those open harmonies have closed up, and whatever congress the instruments strike, each seems somewhat nonplussed by the other – there’s a moment of accord in a more animated and heartfelt middle section, but compared to the opening, it’s a bit like the difference between a dream and an awakening (whichever suits which!).The piano returns to its lonely furrow, and the flute raises its head for a heartfelt and sonorous single-note look-around!

Both espy a notice saying “Lively, with bounce!”  – so the piano “bounces” and the flute catches on! And what better than a square dance? – lovely, palms-skyward trajectories, with quirky harmonic comings and goings, with the flute occasionally intoning “Where are you?” as the piano rumbles up and down the stairs! – “Back to the dance!” they both chorus, nostalgically smoothing-over the rhythms here and there, but as quickly resuming their “hide-and-seek” – suddenly Hannah’s flute espies an open window and with Liam’s piano in hot pursuit catapaults right through it! – freedom!

Has this been music I’m writing about or some sort of “anything you can do I can do better” kind of game? It just seems that way, at times – but whatever the case, we in the audience were tickled to pieces by it all – and just to show that life bears SOME resemblance to art, we were invited by our stalwart artists to return to our lives with a kind of encore, a piece by Lili Boulanger appropriately entitled “Nocturne”, the flute singing a lullabic song over piano octaves, the tones soaring and settling over gorgeous keyboard undulations, while the harmonies coalesce slowly and beautifully.

Hannah and Liam, you and your instruments brought about such delight and contentment for all of us present this evening – any thoughts of bedlam and squalor were forgotten as I took my leave of my companion (deftly remembering on the way out to return the borrowed pen!) and descended those stairs and met with the open air once again, trying to recall what day it was, where I was, where I was going and what the music was that was playing in my head as I walked through streets that bore no relation, it seemed, to any of those sounds….and I thought it was definitely all part of something well worth remembering……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cantoris – opera that’s tuneful, rhythmic, magical, exotic, funny, murderous, tragic, pompous, escapist, real – what more could you want?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CANTORIS – A Night at the Opera

Cantoris Choir
Soloists: Barbara Paterson (soprano), William McElwee (baritone)
Music Director: Ingrid Schoenfeld
Piano: Heather Easting

Ruggero LEONCAVALLO – Bell Chorus from I Pagliacci
Giuseppe VERDI – Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore
George Frideric HANDEL – Chorus of Enchanted Islanders from Alcina
Giacomo PUCCINI – Humming Chorus from Madama Butterfly
Georges BIZET – Habanera, with Chorus from Carmen
Toreador Song, with Chorus, from Carmen
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART – “Heil sei euch Geweihten” from The
Magic Flute
Christoph Willibald GLUCK – “Quel est l’audacieux” from Orphée et
Eurydice
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART – Voyagers’ Chorus from Idomeneo
George Frideric HANDEL – “How Strange their Ends” from Theodora
Henry PURCELL – Dido’s Lament and “With Drooping Wings”
from Dido and Aeneas
Giuseppe VERDI – Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco
Brindisi (Drinking Song and Chorus) from La
Traviata
Carl ORFF – Chorus “O Fortuna”  from Carmina Burana

St.Peter’s-on-Willis-Street, Te Aro, Wellington
Saturday, 10th May 2025

What a splendid blockbuster of a way for a choir to begin a season! – and with so many wonderful moments that have actually transcended their “high art” origins and are now “in the culture!” – and none the worse for it! So often certain pieces of music are deemed well-known to the point of cliché, and are therefore passed over, in favour of something more “interesting”. But! – as I fondly remember from my own formative years, it was often one of these very pieces, which would have been regarded by others as “hackneyed”, whose first hearing hit me like a ton of bricks, and to the extent that life was never the same again afterwards!

At school, in the Fourth Form, I had the good fortune to have a teacher who was himself an opera fan – so he would play to us pieces from a recording (of which I now have a prized copy!) of “Opera Choruses”, ALL of which I simply fell in love with on first hearing! – it was partly the way he introduced them to his class of rough-diamond, mostly rugby-playing and pop-music-loving boys who probably didn’t at that stage know Wagner from a Weet-Bix packet, but who listened, spell-bound as he described scenarios to go with the choruses, such as how a rich man, sitting miserably in his house surrounded by his wealth, suddenly heard a crowd of pilgrims passing in the street outside, singing “Alleluiah” at the tops of their voices as they went by the man’s window – and how the man was galvanised by what he heard, and, leaving his house and possessions behind, rushed down the road to join them! – and then, of course, our teacher played us the actual recording of the chorus, and we were “there”, listening to these voices, and imagining how we would have been filled with wonderment at the sounds and jumped up at the end to follow the voices ourselves. This particular chorus (the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Wagner’s “Tannhauser”) wasn’t among Cantoris’s presentations, but the others had an effect this same evening that vividly brought back that memory to me, of my sensibilities being unexpectedly “ignited” by something whose appeal was direct and enduring!

What was especially wonderful at the Cantoris concert was how the choir, with the barest minimum of forces (no orchestra, and no elaborate stage or theatrical trappings with which to fill out the scenarios), was able to generate from their music-making something of this excitement of both discovery and rediscovery amongst their audience. For this they could thank in addition an inspirational music director, Ingrid Schoenfeld, a brilliant pianist, Heather Easting, and two solo singers, soprano Barbara Paterson and baritone William McElwee who threw themselves wholeheartedly into their characterisations of various roles associated with certain of the choruses. Audience reaction to each and every one of the items (even those whose unexpectedly abrupt endings might have taken by surprise people who were just beginning to “groove along” with things – however, opera, as any enthusiast knows, thrives on the unexpected!) was enthusiastic and wholehearted, and the programming with its variety of settings, situations and characterisations meant that one’s interest never flagged.

Within this variety were placed a number of sure-fire favourites with tunes that everybody seems to have heard somewhere or other, those “part of the soundscape” melodies which seem to have always been there – such were two of the Verdi choruses (the “Anvil” Chorus from “Il Trovatore”, and the “Hebrew Slaves” Chorus from “Nabucco”), Bizet’s perennial favourite “Habanera” (solo-and-chorus) from “Carmen”, and the more recent “classic” from Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”, that’s made up for lost time on various television advertisements, “O Fortuna!” Each one had plenty of impact of satisfyingly varying kinds, even if in the “Il Trovatore” excerpt the anvils sounded more “Janissary-like” than whole and ringing, and the gypsy men fudged their first “All’opra! all’opra!”, probably through thinking too much about the gypsy women! Such a distraction wasn’t a problem with Barbara Paterson’s alluringly three-dimensional  portrayal of Carmen in the “Habanera” (the singer using the church’s central aisle to palpable dramatic effect!) – and though baritone William McElwee couldn’t quite match her range of vocal colour and impulse, his confident “presence” as Escamillo in the Toreador’s Song, did ample justice to the bullfighter’s swaggering character, both singers backed to the hilt by the choir’s support and the unfailingly buoyant trajectories of Heather Easting’s accompaniments!

On a different emotional plane were two other solo-and-chorus presentations which resounded afterwards in the memory, firstly Gluck’s chilling “Quel est L’Audacieux” from Orphée et Eurydice, featuring the choir of Furies guarding the Underworld with tones fearsome and implaccable  – and the baritone a tremulous but staunch and persistent supplicant, driven desperately by his love for Eurydice to bring her back from the land of the Dead – the atmosphere generated by the confrontation was properly chilling, with the choir’s tones dark and malevolent before being moved to pity by McElwee’s plaintive pleas – a memorable evocation. Though not cheek-by jowl on the programme, fortunately, we still couldn’t help but register the contrasts in almost every way between the Gluck scenario and Henry Purcell’s famous “Dido’s Lament”, one of opera’s most heart-rending scenes, and given all the space needed for both impulse and stillness to work a powerful spell – Paterson’s singing was beautifully-poised, purer of tone on her second-time-round ascent at “reMEMBER ME” and thoroughly affecting altogether, as was the choir’s following “With Drooping Wings” chorus, its sombre tones and heartbeat-like phrasings seeming to put all of us closer to our tenuous grasp upon life than we might have otherwise wanted.

I don’t intend to scroll through the entire programme in this review, but would like to register some more specific enjoyments, such as the opening “Bell Chorus” from Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci”, which gave us plenty of bright, vibrant bell-sounds and ear-catching dynamic variation. Another was the chorus from Handel’s “Alcina”, well-remembered from an enterprising production I attended some years ago at Day’s’ Bay Opera, and bringing back some lovely evocations of that time. In fact the programme as such had a number of lesser-known choruses from works such as from another Handel work, an oratorio “Theodora” (again, adventurously performed, and heard by me, at Day’s Bay, incidentally, as an opera!). Any memory of the work had by this time gone, so it seemed like a new and wondrous experience for me, a solemn, processional-like journey sustained partly by long-held notes, and at other times closely-worked phrases that seemed to gestate from these same lines like a plant coming into flower, the whole suiting the passage of thought and expression of wonderment – for me, a delightful rediscovery!.

Another came from Mozart, this time his “Idomeneo” (one which gave Barbara Paterson another chance to shine as Elettra, one of the characters in the opera’s story, here expressing hopes with some trepidation for a calm voyage to her homeland with the person she loves) – a kind of Mozartean “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” work, here given with flowing, undulating tones from the choir, taking the treacherous upward leap towards the end in their stride!

Comments in general? These are mere opinions and can be regarded as such – but I have to confess to wishing that the trajectories of just a couple of the items had been allowed to flow more easily and dreamily – Puccini’s “Humming Chorus”, for instance, I prefer to hear sounded as if it’s almost “breathed” rather than sung and that we listeners are eavesdropping on something really private and close to the heart! To an extent I thought also that the “Va, pensiero” Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves could also have been taken as if in a dream at the start, making the “outburst” in the middle more of a kind of the captives’ “awakening” a demonstration of despair and grief at their predicament – “O harp, why do you hang so silently?…rekindle the memories in our hearts!”

Enough! – reviewers of concerts should talk about what and how things were done, played and sung, rather than compile wish-lists of such things as “could-have-beens!”! It will be obvious that I got such a lot of pleasure from out of the concert, a good deal of which was reinforced by the enjoyment of those sitting close to me and of other people I talked with afterwards. Congratulations and thanks are due to all concerned for their part in such a warm-hearted enterprise!

Wellington Youth Orchestra – revels ceremonial and fantastical

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra –  Conductor Mark Carter  congratulates WYO leader Alan Kao at the conclusion of the “Fanfare and Fantasy” concert on Saturday May 3rd, 2025

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – Symphony No. 100 in G Major “Military”
MODEST MUSORGSKY (ed. Rimsky-Korsakov) – Night on a Bare Mountain
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY – Capriccio Italien

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Mark Carter (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 3rd May 2025

Wellington Youth Orchestra’s engagingly-presented opening “salvo” of 2025 appropriately began with one of the most agreeably demonstrative pieces of ceremonial music from the classical era, Josef Haydn’s by turns genial and uproarious “Military” Symphony. This was no less than the composer’s hundredth work in a form he himself had practically reinvented and made his own, setting a remarkable benchmark for future attempts by his successors at reconciling the competing requirements of form and content in symphonic music.

Such was Haydn’s fecundity he had come up with all kinds of different ideas over the years to attract and maintain his audience’s interest. Prior to his final years, during which he had become largely a free-lance composer, he had been employed by the Hungarian Esterhazy family at their Eisenstadt residence on the Austro-Hungarian border, and  – as Haydn himself once famously remarked – had the freedom to be “original”. An example of this was a work called the “Farewell” Symphony, which has a final movement where all the players gradually leave the stage one by one, blowing out their candles as they go – Haydn wanted to give his Prince the message that he and his players badly needed a holiday!

By the time he came to write Symphony No 100 in G Major in 1793 (one of a number which became no less than twelve “London” Symphonies), his old employer had died, and Haydn was enjoying new-found freedom, making two trips to London at the invitation of impresario, Johann Peter Salomon (after whom the set of “London” Symphonies are often named), meeting King George III, and being feted by both the court and high society. Despite such blandishments he preferred Vienna, returning permanently at the end of his second trip in 1795, and becoming music director for his new, more austere Esterhazy Prince who preferred sacred to secular music.

The G Major Symphony we know as the “Military” gets its character partly for the instrumentation Haydn uses – the work makes use of Turkish features known to the Viennese through their various conflicts with the Turkish military over years of conflict – known as “Janissary”, these exotic percussive effects (cymbal, triangle, rute, bass drum) had achieved great popularity, which composers naturally wanted to emulate (both Mozart and Beethoven were to use similar effects in some of their own music.).

Here at St.Andrew’s the cheek-by-jowl relationship of orchestra and audience practically enveloped our sensibilities with the Symphony’s marvellous rhythmic and colouristic effects, though it wasn’t all bang, crash, rumble and tinkle, Haydn cannily reserving his “Janissary” forces for the second and fourth movements. The rest brought enchantment of another kind right from the work’s beginning, with the adagio opening ravishingly awakened by the string-tones, and the supporting winds giving great character to the contrasting minor-key colours. An ensuing allegro added to our delight with the winds cheekily taking up the dance and inviting the rest of the orchestra to join in. It was playing from all which brought out the sheer “joy” of exchange, and the “giving” nature of Haydn’s musical instincts in general, conductor Mark Carter underlining our pleasure with the first-movement repeat!

Deceptively charming and relaxed at its beginning, with lovely al fresco colourings from strings and winds, the Allegretto second movement lurched  suddenly into minor-key drama and conflict with its battery of “Janissary” instruments joining the fray, the bass drummer adroitly compounding the instrument’s window-rattling seismic quality with the use of the rute, a bunch of rods loosely bound, and when striking a surface giving a dry, macabre bone-rattling effect! – with triangle, and “Nefer” crash cymbals and the timpani and brass underlining the overall impact, the general impression was more-than-satisfyingly combatative! A brief return to the major-key opening gave us some brief respite, but the famous passage introduced by the bugle call signalled an ‘all-in” sequence whose  impact gave rise to the well-known story of the premiere causing listeners of the time some angst, described by one reviewer as “the clash of arms, the groans of the wounded, and what may be described as the hellish roar of war increase(d) to a climax of hellish sublimity” (perhaps, alas, not so far from contemporary realities in our planet’s war-torn spots!).

The Minuet took us to a different world, a return to order and semblance of the same after battle, the tempi giving a livelier-than-usual effect – I wanted the wind’s somewhat plaintive “turns” in places to be brought out a bit more! – but the musicians’ graceful curving trajectories of the Trio were a delight, effectively contrasted by the “kick” the players achieved in the minor-key bits!

And so to the finale, bubbling with anticipation at its beginning, Mark Carter’s direction bringing out the players enjoyment of  the dynamics’ interplay, in particular their wry, po-faced insouciance at the “crushed phrase” sequence – and having been brought up on Sir Thomas Beecham’s delightful (if in such places inauthentic) recorded version of the symphony I was also enjoyably startled by the timpanist’s full-on entry with his “let ’er rip” gesture, instead of the crescendo I’d long become accustomed to! Wonderful!

There’s a lot of inspired to-ing and fro-ing elsewhere in this finale (at one point one is even tempted into thinking a fugue might be on the cards!) but Haydn’s judgement at reserving his overtly “martial” forces for certain moments in the work pays off with a vengeance!  Apart from a couple of brief last-minute forays for separate strings and winds, it’s the war machine that returns at the end, this time in triumph! It seems ironic that it’s actually the Janissary which is here sounding the victory, but of course by that time the Turks had been defeated and driven out of Austria, so they were obviously no longer regarded as a threat!

From this point we were taken into a new century, as well as northwards to Russia (though, admittedly, then on holiday with a second Russian composer to Italy!) – life can never be said to be straightforward!  Of these two forays under inspection it might be said that the most startling quantum leap was into the creative world of one Modest Musorgsky (different spellings of the surname abound!). Russian-born, he was tragically short-lived, all the more so for being regarded in some circles as the most naturally gifted of a group of composers (known as “The Mighty Handful”) who had emerged from the land of the Tsars amid the tumult of national feeling that had spread all over Europe in the late nineteenth century.

Steeping himself in his country’s folklore Musorgsky made several attempts at setting to music an old Russian legend whose original title was St.John’s Eve on Bald Mountain which he completed in June 1867. Unfortunately his colleagues, especially his mentor and fellow-composer Mily Balakirev, regarded the work as crude, and lacking in proper technical “finish”. As well, neither of the reworked versions of the story which Musorgsky subsequently attempted, the operas Mlada and Sorochintsy Fair were properly completed. In 1886, five years after the composer’s death from the effects of alcoholism, another of his colleagues, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, decided to “rescue” what could be saved of Musorgsky’s original “Bald Mountain” idea and reworked the piece, using parts of the original material and an instrumental arrangement of an excerpt from the opera Sorochintsy Fair as a kind of “epilogue” to the original tone-poem. This became the version that was used in Walt Disney’s famous “Fantasia” film, and which continues to be played today. Musorgsky’s original 1867 tone-poem composition was forgotten until the 1920s when it was rediscovered (a convoluted story!),  finally published in 1968 and given its first public performance and subsently recorded Whether it will ever become as popular as Rimsky-Korsakov’s revision is a matter of conjecture, though it’s certainly worth a watching listen (see below)…..

First to consider, though, was the performance we heard at St.Andrew’s, taken at a less-than-usual headlong tempo by Mark Carter and his players, and giving the music a more earthy and elemental character, but with the playing’s precision still capturing that “hallucinatory” quality generated by the music. The steady tempo throughout kept the macabre elements bubbling to the fore, with the “mad dance” sequences creating their own excitement, as did the “chattering winds” of the witches’ cackling dialogues, The brass fanfares were spot-on at all times, and especially when returning us to the opening, played with more “bite” than ever as the revelry intensified.

The last onslaught began, slowly on the bassoon and building up to an unnerving pace, gathering up detail in its sweep such as stuttering brass, squealing winds and screeching strings as the brass intoned its final call – with the crash of the tam-tam everything fell silent  except for the tolling bell and the hubbub’s dying reverberation, “warmed” beautifully by the harp, and the lovely string playing (great clarinet and flute solos, as well!)

Here’s the original Musorgsky version –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu1no7hOlSs

And so to the concluding item, ancient and nostalgic listening history for me, as Tchaikovsky’s  Capriccio Italien was on one of the first sets of 78 rpm discs I owned when a student (part of a whole bunch of 78 rpm discs I found in a charity shop! – things like Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony on six discs!). Anyway, I played and played the Capriccio until I accidentally and carelessly cracked one of the two discs! (I think I have the performance on CD, somewhere, now!) But I hadn’t played the work for a while, and the performance this afternoon made me fall in love with the music all over again!

What a sensationally-delivered trumpet solo at the beginning! – obviously inspiring the rest of the brass’s majestic and sonorous efforts! The strings, suitably awe-struck in reply, at first, gripped the attention just as steadily, as the exchanges continued. The oboe entered a shade jerkily but soon recovered, building the ambiences with the strings in support until the brass re-entered, the percussion a tad rushed at first but settling down again. We had a breath-catching transition to the waltz-theme –  the oboes and flutes so beautiful and Italianate-sounding with clarinets and bassoons having their turn as well, before the glorious brass-playing completed the sound-picture, with whirling strings adding to the excitement, and percussion snow-capping the climaxes!

Tchaikovsky doesn’t let up with the melodies (I remember already “knowing” both of the “famous” ones here before I ever encountering this work, as they’d obviously been “pinched” by popular music beforehand!) – the second one nicely introduced by the strings and the horn, and then later by the other brasses in turn (how was this Russian composer able to write such Mediterranean-sounding music?). Gorgeously done, with the horns adding an elegant postlude, before the strings reiterated their mock-serious “opening” with the stuttering brass not missing a beat. A well-managed accelerando later, the tarantella was dancing away from the gloom, and  playing “catch-me-if-you-can” with the instruments in its wake, including the tambourine (what a day for the percussion it had been!). But there was further excitement in store for us which came with the return of the Waltz-tune, with the strings and brass on fire and the tambourine-player in seventh heaven for a few scintillating measures – and if that wasn’t enough I had this feeling the conductor was suddenly daring his players  to imagine they were plunging into something elemental like the coda to the composer’s Fourth Symphony’s finale, a “now or never” moment to which everybody seemed to respond without hesitation and bring off with enormous elan! – a burst of youthful energies and dare-devil execution  which I thought appropriately summed up the  enthusiasm and at times brilliance of the afternoon’s music-making – but also, for this listener a great joy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Trio of International Consequence

Posted on by Anne French

NZ Trio – Magnifique

Schubert – Notturno in E flat major (D897)
Pēteris Vasks – Episodi e canto perpetuo (1985)
Linda Dallimore – Self-portrait (2024)
Saint-Saens – Piano trio No 2 in E minor (Op. 92)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace,
Friday 2 May, 7.30 pm

The night of the concert was cold and wet. The big southerly storm that hit on Wednesday was still in force, so the small audience in St Andrew’s was disappointing but not surprising. This review is dedicated to everyone who let the weather keep them away from a stunning concert. Let me tell you what you missed!

After several years of change, NZ Trio has now reached its new form. Ashley Brown retired from the Trio in February, the last of the founding members to leave. Matthias Balzat was billed as ‘guest cellist’, but the exciting news – announced during the concert – is that he will be taking the position permanently from 2026.

Matthias Balzat is a phenomenal cellist. I first heard him perform as a soloist with Wellington Youth Orchestra when he was 17, just about to head to Germany for advanced study in cello, already with a bachelor’s degree from Waikato and a swag of awards to his name. He was already a commanding musical presence with dazzling technique. Since graduating from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, where he was taught by Pieter Wispelwey, he has been freelancing in Germany. The NZ Trio gig, he told us, gives him an opportunity to return home.

How would he fit in to the Trio? Any fears I may have had were dispelled as soon as the Schubert began. The Nocturne is a familiar work, an exquisite piece that Schubert may have intended as the slow movement for his first piano trio.  The tempo was slow, but never too slow. The effect was of an unfurling of beauty, played with high seriousness. It was as though this was the most important music Schubert ever wrote, and the most poignant. He finished it only months before he died, and never heard it performed. I feel certain he would have loved this performance.

The next work on the programme was a piece by the Latvian composer, Pēteris Vasks, written in 1985. This was its New Zealand première. Vasks trained as a violinist at the Riga Conservatory and played double bass in various Latvian orchestras before moving to Lithuania to study composition with Valentin Utkin. As the son of a Baptist pastor, he wasn’t permitted to do this in Latvia, because Baptists were repressed by the Soviets.

He began to compose after hearing a piano arrangement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, thanks to his piano teacher at the Vilnius Conservatory. His response was immediate: ‘It was like a lightning flash to me – that music can be like this!’ But his works were unknown outside the Baltics until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when fellow Latvian Gidon Kremer started touring his violin concertos in the West.

The Episodi e canto perpetuo is dedicated to Olivier Messiaen. That provided some kind of emotional preparation. This is a powerful and inventive work. The programme notes suggested a battle between light and dark, but that doesn’t do it justice. It requires virtuosic playing from all three instruments, with two frenzied ‘burlesques’ separated by a ‘monologue’. The whole work is a kind of journey from a dark and scary opening movement, with a bleak wash of sound from the strings, moving higher and higher into a kind of frenzy. The Misterioso that followed uses prepared piano and light glissandi on the strings to suggest a ghostly calm. The Unisono began with strong piano chords and a cantabile theme from the strings, building to confidence, then aggression. The effect is loud and humourless, with frightening crescendi. Vasks described the first Burlesque as ‘ironic, almost grotesque’. I thought he must have been listening to Shostakovich, so sardonic was it – or perhaps that was life under the Soviets. The second burlesque, even more frenzied, Vasks called ‘the black culmination of the opus. Road to nowhere.’

After all the terror, in the seventh movement, the first violin sang like a nightingale in a ruin, trilling over blackened stones and empty spaces. Could there be a resolution, my notes asked? The cello, high and sustained, said yes, the plangent violin whispered that there was hope. A shift to the major, like a shaft of sunlight, high and sweet.

This is an important work. If it is his response to Quartet for the End of Time, the man is a genius, because he has transcended it. But there is more. Over the last 40 years Vasks has written three symphonies, other works for orchestra, concerti for violin, viola, cello, and flute, half a dozen string quartets, many choral and chamber works, and several works for violin, cello, and piano. I very much hope that NZ Trio programmes a couple of those. Soon, please.

After the interval, a small, introspective work by New Zealander Linda Dallimore (‘an award-winning composer, flutist, and teacher’) currently based in Los Angeles, where she is completing a DMA at the University of Southern California. It’s a pleasant enough work, ‘inspired by the composer’s first months in LA’, short and rather slight, but full of interesting effects. Unfortunately, coming after the emotional complexity of the Vasks piece, even separated by the interval, it sounded a bit self-absorbed, clever but trivial.

The last work in the programme showed off all three players to good effect, but especially the glorious Somi Kim. Saint-Saens was a remarkable pianist, a prodigy who performed the complete Beethoven sonatas from memory by the age of 10. He wrote this work as a holiday project, in the spring of 1892, 30 years after his first piano trio, to show what the piano is capable of. It is a masterpiece. Somi Kim was in her element, showing us delicacy and powerful pianism, as required. Saint-Saens’ piano writing is demanding and virtuosic, and Kim played like an angel.

The NZ Trio has been regarded as a national treasure for some time now. I have always enjoyed its programming. With Balzat joining the superb Kim and Hall, it has turned into a trio of international consequence. As well as being intellectually adventurous and musically fearless, the players together have the most glorious sound, warm and perfectly unified.  I am truly sorry that their first concert was heard by an audience of only a hundred or so. But take my word for it: you won’t want to miss the other concerts in their 2025 season.  Now would be a good time to book.

A tantalizing 2025 season’s beginning – from Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN PSATHAS – Kartsigar
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 1 in C Major Op.40
EDVARD GRIEG – String Quartet in G Minor Op.27

The New Zealand String Quartet
– Anna van der Zee and Peter Clark (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Callum Hall (‘cello)

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

Sunday, 27th April, 2025

Wellington Chamber Music opened its 2025 season with a characteristic blast of fresh musical air, the musicians obliging with an enticing amalgam of pieces whose composers had familiar names but whose music promised anything but familiar, well-worn sounds – though two of the pieces presented in this concert happened to have historic connections with the Society. In chronological order, Dmitri Shostakovich’s First String Quartet was one of the works featured during the Society’s inaugural year (1945); while John Psathas’ 2005 work Kartsigar was actually commissioned by Wellington Chamber Music for its 60th anniversary.

These associations duly noted and tucked under our belts for ready reference, we welcomed to the stage the current New Zealand String Quartet, an organisation that’s had its reorganisations and upheavals over the last little while, but has bounced its presently reconstituted self back ready for action. So, violist Gillian Ansell (a foundation member of the Quartet) and violinist Peter Clark (who had replaced Monique Lapins last year) were joined today by violinist Anna van der Zee and ‘cellist Callum Hall.

I looked up John Psathas’ Kartsigar on the Middle C website for interest’s sake, and discovered that my former colleague Lindis Taylor had reviewed the inaugural performance of the work at that 2005 Wellington Chamber Music concert by the NZSQ of that time, as well as a later 2011 performance by the same players at St.Mary of the Angels Church, a venue whose ample acoustic gave my colleague what he described as “a more enveloping experience” than he’d found on the players’ CD recording they’d made of the piece for Rattle Records. Such observations reflect on different performances to that of the present one, of course, but they’re interesting in further establishing the work’s history and accrued experience on the part of performers and listeners, all of which can help to enrich further encounters and performances.

Kartsigar is a work for string quartet drawn by its composer from traditional Greek music, primarily taximi or free, improvised instrumental solos used as a prelude or introduction associated with a dance or song. In the first movement what sounds like improvised melody from the instruments is the composer’s own transcription of an improvisation from one of Greece’s greatest musicians, the clarino player Manos Acahlinotopoulos, one which “breathes the Voice of Life into Kartsigar”. The cello begins a pizzicato ostinato pedal note, to which the second violin and viola respond with sombre tones of mourning, then expressively added to by the first violin, at once “folksy” and ritual-like, solo lines alternating with shared lines, and instruments going from arco to pizzicato and back to arco – the whole generates a tremendous sense of “occasion” , gradually becoming more and more elaborate, and even more vigorous, until a point is reached when the process seems to disestablish and recede, with tones and impulses growing fainter and fainter to the point of stillness

The second movement begins with an ethereal-sounding pizzicato/harmonic which forms the basis for the whole movement’s trajectory of a kind of mesmerising transferal of impulse – the material shifts from instrument to instrument, the lines and gestures keep us guessing as to where we are going, as if the piece’s “centre” is constantly relocating. I found myself part deliciously, part uneasily “stranded” in scenarios which brought single-note sequences (from the ‘cello, for example) and then sudden “whirling dervish” ecstasies from Peter Clark’s violin! – one’s sensibility became a “loose fragment” tossed all about an ambience, and then just as suddenly left to ponder eerily-held notes with which one “breathes” with the music’s own slow-rhythmed movements, until left only with silence.

In the wake of these colourful immersions in realms awash with improvisation, one couldn’t help feeling taken to a different, more enclosed world with Shostakovich’s First String Quartet, given that the music shows remarkably  little of the intense angst and disturbing dissonances which his later works in this genre would produce. This, after all, was the composer’s first foray into the medium, and about which he was disarmingly frank, as demonstrated by a brief comment he wrote, concerning the  opening as an “original exercise in the quartet form, not thinking about subsequently completing and releasing it”.  Gradually the idea took hold and he finished the work, though still disavowing any particular significance to the exercise, remarking further – “Don’t expect to find any special depth in this – my first quartet opus, In mood it is joyful, merry, lyrical. I would call it ‘spring-like’ ”. It seems that, after the tumultuous years of the composer’s persecution by Stalin and his lackeys over his opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” with what was termed its “formalist” tendencies, Shostakovich was taking refuge in a private, relatively untroubled world, even though he was not to revisit the string quartet medium for a further six years.

The work was first performed in 1938, by the Glazunov Quartet – the composer hadn’t yet established the rapport he was to find with the renowned Beethoven Quartet, to whom he entrusted the premieres of all of his subsequent string quartets except the Fifteenth and last, due to the sudden death of the Quartet’s cellist while preparing the first performance. Commentators have repeatedly described the early work in emotionally-detached terms, such as “divertimento-like” or “Haydn-esque”, indicating the “neutral” content of the undertaking, and whose ostensible purpose was to, literally, keep its composer out of trouble!

The opening sounds more like Borodin at the outset, a distinctively “Russian” ambience betrayed only by the occasional note suggesting a more acerbic strain – there’s a lovely, singing second subject on the first violin sounded over ‘cello glissandi, one which the ‘cello itself “grabs” for a moment of glory! The interchanges wear an almost self-conscious “carefree” air, the development insouciantly augmenting the harmonies and the recapitulation allowing the second violin and viola a “second-subject” variant, before the music poignantly turns for home, having spied out the land and found it ostensibly non-threatening!

A theme-and-variations slow movement in A minor was next, begun by Gillian Ansell’s smokily-toned  viola with a simple folk-tune, ‘cello pizzicati joining in, and then the violins taking up the melody a daintily-astringent half-a-tone higher – the viola’s “Wot’s all this, then?” return sparked a moment of angst before peace was restored by the violin’s open-hearted switch to an E-major rendition of the theme – I liked the players’ handling of the “same again but different” theme variants, and especially warmed to the limpid pizzicato accompaniments to the viola’s return, rather like meek lambs gathered up by their shepherd! Perhaps they could sense the third-movement arrival of some kind of wolf, though it’s really more spectre than substance, here, a spooky ride in constant motion, in the midst of which comes a kind of “lullaby” trio, followed by a blending of the two trajectories – great fun!

Afterwards, the finale takes us to the fairground for some  hi-jinks, the excitement becoming heady and more trenchant, almost “boys’ own” (oo-er! – very “thirties!”) in the second subject, with the vigorous themes becoming more determinedly expressionist and claustrophobic until problems are sorted out and brouhaha is satisfyingly brought back over the final bars. It seems obvious that, In the treacherous slipstream of Shostakovich’s scarifying experience with Stalin over his opera Lady Macbeth, writing this work had obviously felt like some kind of redemptive balm for the composer’s senses.

The concert’s third and final work brought its own particular distinction of novelty and interest to the proceedings – this was Edvard Grieg’s 1878 String Quartet in G Minor, described variously elsewhere as No.1 and No.2 (in fact the composer’s first attempt at a string quartet was lost, appropriately leaving the G minor in its “pole” position). The popularity achieved by the work encouraged Grieg to attempt a further string quartet in 1891, though he finished only two movements, leaving sketches for the final two, making  a couple of subsequent efforts  to finish the work but seeming to lack the inspiration to complete what he called “that accursed string quartet which constantly lies there unfinished like an old Norwegian cheese.” (A couple of attempts have since been made by other composers to complete Grieg’s sketches.)

Grieg’s inspiration, however, proved constant throughout the composition of practically the whole of the G Minor quartet – commenting after finishing the work that it was “not meat for small minds” and adding that “it aims for breadth, vigour, flight of imagination and , above all, fullness of tone for the instruments for which it is written”. It uses a kind of motto theme taken from the composer’s own song “Spillemaend” (meaning Minstrels or Fiddlers) about a water-spirit, the Hulder, who promises musicians great inspiration in exchange for their happiness, one which recurs throughout the work. Violist Gillian Ansell commented in her introduction on the work’s inspiration for Claude Debussy who wrote his own String Quartet in the same key ten years later.

The work has a big-boned quasi-orchestral sound right from its outset, a grand and imperious opening and a fleet and impetuous allegro to follow, featuring incredibly volatile playing, music that breaks off suddenly from whatever mood it inhabits to effect a contrast with another – Anna van der Zee’s playing and leadership throughout I found astonishing, her sweet, silvery tones readily augmented with energetic trajectories and trenchant attacks excitingly replicated by the other players. The movement’s dramatic ups and downs come to a head with a beautiful ‘cello solo that grows out of a tremolando passage towards the end before leading to an explosively vigorous coda.

Added to this, I thought the musicians gave the second movement simply gorgeous treatment – the opening uses a typically redolent “Grieg” melody (one which couldn’t come from any other composer), sonorously projected by Callum Hall’s ‘cello, before “bouncing” into an extraordinarily playful passage involving both pizzicato and staccato phrasings. Then the opening melody returns, the accompaniment this time investing the hapless tune with full-on “salon” treatment, charming in its almost “tea-shop-like” way. It’s then given a kind of Tchaikovsky-like balletic set of guises, before evoking parts of the latter’s “Serenade for Strings” in its acerbic-sweet final harmonies!

The Intermezzo that followed was a vigorously-swinging waltz-like piece, the players digging into those playfully-eyeballing syncopated chordings before gracefully giving way to more demure legato-phrased interactions. Even more delicious was the Trio section, with Grieg revisiting his “Cowkeeper’s Tune and Country Dance” manner to foot-tapping effect, and further spicing the mood with brief bouts of contrasting mania and introspection! All of this was brought off with relish on the players’ part and proportionally huge enjoyment on ours, further underlined by the sheer fun generated from the scampering coda!

Finales often bring composers trouble and anxiety, and there were places in Grieg’s finale where I felt his inspiration was bolstered more by the trajectories of the saltarello form which he had chosen, than any spontaneous melodic invention. Of course, composers are perfectly entitled to “step outside” their own native trajectorial languages and explore something exotic – one thinks of so many who have done so (Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Ravel and Sibelius, to name a few, the last-named indulging in a “Bolero” complete with castanets in his Op. 25 Scenes Historiques music!) – but I can’t help feeling that Grieg was at his most inspired in the other, more ostensibly Scandinavian-influenced movements of this work, even if he puts up a good show in places! Still, a no-holds-barred kind of performance can be relied upon to do any piece of music the greatest justice, and that was what we got here!

After the high seriousness of the Lento introduction, with its canonic recitatives and great crunching chords, a “ready, steady, go” sequence from the players kick-started the finale in fine style! By turns vigorous and lightfooted, and alternating the dotted rhythms of the vigorous saltarello with more straightforward “running” passages, the playing’s impetus kept our sensibilities agreeably focused, apart from a couple of sequences featuring repeated rhetorical chromatic scale passages which briefly felt to me like “filler” and an ending which seemed to be looking for a grand finishing statement but didn’t quite achieve the sheer magnificence of, for instance, the composer’s Piano Concerto! However, in terms of incredible skill and sheer commitment, the players took us to what seemed like the music’s overall limits of achievability in grand style – and Grieg had already given us more than enough in the work as a whole to satisfy our pleasure at encountering what was a significant and remarkable creative achievement! (From where do I buy the CD, again?)

Hats off (well, hearty thanks, at least!) to Wellington Chamber Music – an inspired beginning to a richly promising 2025 season of music-making!

Delicious, profound and adventurous – an irresistible orchestral feast from the Wellington City Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen


WELLINGTON CITY ORCHESTRA
Justus Rozemond (conductor
with Sophia Acheson (viola )

Nicolai –  Overture “The Merry Wives of Windsor”
Rachmaninov – Tone-Poem “Isle of the Dead”
Berlioz – “Harold in Italy” – Symphony with Viola obbligato

St,Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 5th April 2025

Concert viewed via video – thanks to Nick Baldwin (camera)
and Angus Webb (editing)

Thanks also to Rowena Cullen (Wellington CO President)

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

I’d seen this programme by the Wellington City Orchestra advertised, and was instantly drawn to its boldness, variety and colour, with three works owing nothing to one another but irresistibly drawn together by their very singularity and vividly-wrought panoply of contrasting human emotion. It’s the kind of programming to which orchestras that have a variety of music-directors can bring enterprise and exploration in the form of each maestro’s particular enthusiasms, and whose audiences benefit from such wide-ranging presentations.

So when circumstances conspired against my attending the concert I was delighted to be able to “catch up” with what took place via the kind auspices of Rowena Cullen, the Orchestra committee’s President, through a video of the concert made by Nick Baldwin and Angus Webb, from which I could write a “report” of the proceedings (as I was able to for the orchestra’s final 2024 concert under similar kinds of circumstances). In each case, what I’ve really liked about the results I’ve seen and heard is that along with the judiciously-balanced sound quality the film replicates a single audience member’s view of the concert, rather than the usual “from all-angles” viewpoints, so that one feels like a “bona fide” concertgoer rather than some kind of “voyeur” hovering about the ranks of the players, closely watching them activating their mouthpieces and fingerboards!

Where Otto Nicolai’s exuberant Overture to his opera “The Merry Wives of Windsor” brings together a veritable farrago of characters with engaging personalities and conflicting intentions making for a “spice-of-life” variety of interaction, Sergei Rachmaninov’s darkly-brooding, phantasmagorical tone-poem “Isle of the Dead” presents a bleak scenario of a solitary life’s journey reaching its inevitable conclusion at a forbidding and ultimately pitiless place of interment. No two cheek-by-jowl  presentation scenarios could have been more profoundly different!

In some ways, Hector Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” is even more visionary in its uniqueness – a work for solo viola and orchestra which brings together both compositional ingenuity and idiosyncrasy with little more than quasi-Byronic characterisations by way of portraying the “adventures” of the music’s ostensible hero. In fact the Childe Harold of Byron is largely absent from Berlioz’s depictions of the chief protagonist, the latter being drawn largely from the composer’s own Italian experiences, however much he might have identified with the general traits of the poet’s title character. The work is a collection of scenes through which the traveller passes, bring to each his own, by turns, exuberant, poetic, introspective and downcast set of moods, with Berlioz’s firebrand inspiration setting even the touches of banality in the story alight! -are those indefatigable brigands, for example, perhaps having one round of carousing too many?

Whatever the conjectures regarding any aspect of these presentations, it seemed expectations were simmering when conductor Justus Rozemond stepped up to the rostrum to begin the afternoon’s concert with Nicolai’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. And what a beginning! – such a gorgeous opening paragraph to a work! – here were the first notes so magically “sounded” by the violins, the theme fulsomely so by the lower strings, and all repeated by the violins, staunchly but gently supported by the winds and the horns! It  brought the first signs of mischief afoot, with a perky theme tossed back and forward between the strings and the winds –  a couple of loose notes quickly tucked out of sight! – and then the fun began, with the gossipy exchanges between winds and strings building up a real head of steam – “He wrote what? – Look, it says so here! – the old rogue!” as the two  “Merry Wives” read the fat knight Sir John Falstaff’s fawning letters and resolve to plot his downfall! Some smartly brought-off quick-fire exchanges between instruments – “Are you ready? Here he comes! Quick, hide!” and the famous melody sings out, nicely “nudged” at its top note by the strings, and given plenty of sensuous “sway” by conductor Rozemond. The excitement knew no bounds as brass and percussion joined in, anticipating the fat knight’s downfall – and his entry was delicious, the music suddenly acquiring great girth and pomposity from the heavy brass (though I wish they’d kept those heavy accents going through all the unfortunate miscreant’s music!) as the object of the deception fled in shame when he realised his ruse had been thwarted – the music then repeated the sequences almost as before, though reintroducing the “big tune” (one of the world’s charmers, in my opinion) earlier, and with the brasses and percussion helping to celebrate the triumph of goodness and modesty over self-importance and connivance. All in all, It made a splendid opening for the concert.

To grimmer business, then, with Rachmaninov’s “Isle of the Dead”, his sombre evocation of a painting depicting the carrying of a body over water to its resting-place, the music a dark-toned barcarolle whose “wandering” 5/8 time suggests the steady rowing of the oarsman as the boat with its coffin and robed white figure neared a kind of “burial island”. This was an image which the composer first saw in a black-and-white reproduction in Paris in 1907, composing his “tone poem” two years later.  Rachmaninov himself conducted the work’s premiere in Moscow in 1909, and subsequently recorded the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra in America in 1930. Incidentally, the artist, Arnold Böcklin, actually made several versions of the work, all slightly differently detailed – and it’s fascinating to learn that Rachmaninov, on subsequently viewing one of the original colour copies of the picture, remarked that he would not have composed the work if he had seen the painting in colour!

I thought the performance by the orchestra a remarkably fine achievement – the opening sounds were steadily and remorselessly brought into play, Rozemond and his musicians conveying a proper “heaviness of spirit” and a sense of lamentation, steadily and patiently maintained. What the winds and strings were doing so well, the brass sturdily continued, helping to build up to the first of the work’s vantage-points, where the music briefly paused, muttered, sighed and exclaimed (lovely work by all concerned, strings, wind and brass, with the latter using their mutes superbly) before resignedly accepting that the journey ought to continue.

And so the lower strings rebegan their steady 5/8 rhythms with even more energy and purpose, building the columns of sound up steadily and impressively, with the brasses sturdily holding the top lines. The winds elaborated on the  repeated motifs, the brass moaned, and the strings had a short-lived moment of warmth before the “Dies Irae” melody made a sombre appearance on the cellos, sparking a response through the whole orchestra, the players putting all their energies into the theme, driving it upwards and outwards like an avenging spirit, and propelling the cortege to what seemed like its resting-place on or near the shores of the forbidding island.

The brass sounded the theme (superbly played), weighing down upon us with a kind of finality – but out of sheer desperation came a beseeching strain, a different, more human-sounding plea, led by the strings but coloured by wind and brass, one seeking solace and perhaps salvation from a certain quarter. Such was not to be, as the brass and wind tones rose from out of the orchestral panoply and brutally mocked any such supplications. This brought fabulously full-blooded playing from the strings, and was augmented at the climax by the winds and brass as the harsher realities of death delivered their judgement – one from which it seemed there could be no escape.

Perhaps the most telling sequence in the whole work was the aftermath of this crushing utterance  – a steady pizzicato from the strings, repeating the Dies Irae theme, various solo instruments sounding variants of the theme, and the entry of the solo violin playing an agitated tremolando version before ascending to join the winds – oboe and clarinet then linked to the brass, who sounded a kind of “Requiem” (so reminiscent of the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony here!) – before the strings again took up the “rowing” 5/8 rhythm, decorated by descending winds, and with the lower strings playing a fuller version of the Dies Irae theme, locking its strains in our memory for all time, and leaving its last few notes floating in the fading ambiences of the scene – amazing!

After such an experience one imagined that the actual concert needed an interval for its audience to be properly revived!  Everybody having used the space accordingly, the concert’s second half could proceed…..at this point I need to confess to taking a while as a youthful listener to properly “get” Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy”, the last work on the programme. My first reaction to the work was somewhat akin to Schumann’s famous opinion of Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata, whose movements he described as “four of Chopin’s maddest children”. But a beautiful recording by violist Nobuko Imai with Colin Davis drew me afresh into the work’s magical realm – and so it was here with the playing of the soloist, Sophia Acheson, whose gorgeous tones encompassed sounds ranging from a beautifully-wrought self-communing meditation to places requiring full-throated energy and lyricism. However, the great violinist Paganini’s complaint about the work Berlioz had written for him – that there was too little for the soloist to do – certainly bears scrutiny, especially in the light of other concertante works that appeared at around this time, though the composer had never intended to (and never did) write a concerto in a conventional sense!

The work’s sombre opening found the conductor and orchestral players gently coaxing the music out of the void and into some kind of coalescence, introducing a minor-key variant of the melody in the winds that would come to dominate much of the work , with the lower instruments shepherding the lighter ones (the winds and upper strings) into being from their places, patiently and gradually painting a Mediterranean-like ambience into which the character of the wanderer could be introduced. It all came when the music’s key turned to the major, prompting solo viola and harp to speak together, with violist Sophia Acheson responding poetically to her harpist Anne-Gaele Ausseil’s beatific tones, and drawing out further responses from the orchestra, a sunnily-wrought statement of the theme expressed in heartfelt terms. The music took a quixotic turn, with the orchestra sounding fragments of the allegro theme which would dominate the first movement, and the soloist, hesitatingly at first, taking the same music up, and instigating a fascinating interplay between viola and orchestra – the theme was tossed between the participants with glee and gusto, the players handling Berlioz’s capricious demands with skill and perseverance, and bringing real elan to the build-up of excitement and culmination at the movement’s end.Sophia Acheson, Viola

Of the four movements my out-and-out favourite has always been the second, the “March of the Pilgrims”, music which so impressed Berlioz’s friend Franz Liszt he made a solo piano transcription of this movement alone to perform at his recitals, besides transcribing the whole work for viola and piano! It’s a wondrous soundscape of a kind of processional pilgrimage moving though all kinds of natural and man-made vistas – Berlioz wrote in his memoirs of observing “returning gleaners from fields singing soft litanies to the accompaniment of the sad tinkling of the distant convent bell”, which ties in with the music’s progress here being continually drawn onward by a bell-like sound (in a different key to the music that both the orchestra and the viola are playing – so magical and memorable an effect!). Over this evocative and varied wall of sound the soloist played her first movement melody, and other variants, including a sul ponticello (the bow on the strings close to the bridge) sequence of arpeggiated chords (Berlioz apparently liked to strum his guitar on his mountain walks!), all adding to the overall atmosphere. I would have liked the tempi a notch or two slower and dreamier in this movement, but this pacing brought a kind of “fervour” to the proceedings, which the ending beautifully dissipated as the repeated orchestral notes echoed and re-echoed the bell-like sounds after the pilgrims had disappeared, leaving the viola to make a final arpeggiated comment by way of a farewell.

After this the peasant revelries swung into earshot with the third movement, the winds attractively rustic-sounding at the beginning, with the cor anglais leading the way for the “serenade” section, matched by the oboe’s plaintive tones, as well as the horns, giving golden support.  The winds beautifully framed the soloist’s entry, and continued to decorate her figurations with all kinds of felicitous gestures – though the horns missed their footing momentarily, they made amends a few moments later with a similar passage sonorously negotiated. The dance resuming, a particularly beautifully flute solo towards the end of the movement, left the strings to usher the dancers off (the orchestral violas having a brief moment of quiet glory!), leaving the soloist pondering as to whether it was all a dream.

The finale began with a crash! – the music veered between gloom and frantic excitement as the soloist reprised some of the themes from the previous movements. The orchestra “caressed“ some of these fragments in partnership with the viola as if in a dream-like state (a particularly lovely sequence largely with the clarinets), but seemed unable to escape the “allure” of the brigands’ carousings (and driving the soloist from the platform as they did so!), keeping the incisive whiplash rhythms coming splendidly! It seemed everybody was caught in a kind of vortex of brigandish euphoria and largesse! – musically, everybody covered themselves with glory in embracing these bacchanale-like excesses, and especially during the over-the-top repeated passage for strings against snarling brass –  fabulous stuff!

Just when the brigands’ excesses had begun to boil over for a third time a deathly hush suddenly overtook the scenario – in the distance could be heard a reminiscence of the Pilgrim’s March (two offstage players) and at the back of the orchestra reappeared the viola soloist, appearing to join in with these sounds, but gradually overcome by the orchestra’s somewhat rogue inclination to rejoin the brigands!  Which they did, to brilliant and conclusive effect, the players giving out as if their lives depended on the outcome!

Kudos aplenty to all those people who played a part in both performing and bringing this concert into being – even on film I found it a totally involving and astonishment-provoking experience!  The thrill of witnessing a group of musicians literally playing their hearts out in tandem with one another has been a pleasure and, indeed, something of a privilege to witness. Again, congrats to the conductor and the players, to the sterling group of organisers and enablers, and, of course, the supporters, who gave well-deserved acclaim to these performances – by turns, delicious, profound and adventurous!

 

Shostakovich and Mozart – different kinds of intensities and delights at Roseneath’s Long Hall in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SHOSTAKOVICH AND MOZART

Helene Pohl and Anna van der Zee (violins), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) and Nicholas Hancox (viola) play Shostakovich

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartets – No. 11 in F Minor Op,122
No. 13 in B-flat minor Op,138
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – String Quintet in D Major K.593

The Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble

Helene Pohl, Anna van der Zee (violins)
Nicholas Hancox, Julia Joyce (violas)
Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

SHOSTAKOVICH -String Quartet No. 11 (1966) – in memory of Vasily Pyotrovich Shririnsky
Introduction, Scherzo, Recitative, Etude, Humoresque, Elegy, Finale

String Quartet No. 13 (1970) – dedicated to Vadim Vasilievitch Borisovsky
(Quartet in One Movement)
Adagio, Doppio movimento, Adagio

MOZART – String Quintet in D Major K.593  (with Julia Joyce – viola)

The Long Hall,
Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday 19th April, 2025

This was the second 2025 “Comfy Concert’ at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”, part of a benefit series to assist various charities, on this occasion spotlighting the inspirational Arohanui Strings (of which violinist Helene Pohl is the Patron), a visionary Sistema-inspired music-teaching organisation and registered charity based in Lower Hutt. Founded in 2010 by professional musician and El Sistema advocate Alison Eldridge in the belief that all children have a right to a music education, this programme has offered musical instruction to more than 4000 children in some of Wellington and Hutt Valley’s most economically challenged communities.

Though the concert may have been relatively short in performance-time, it surely made amends for any brevity-related aspersions in terms of “moments per minute”. Each of the three works displayed a distinctively wrought sound-world whose singular qualities nonetheless found common cause in their surety of utterance and burgeoning character. And what we heard throughout the afternoon was an “every note counts” quality for which musicians such as Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten have earned unstinted renown over their quartet-playing careers to date, and which their colleagues, Anna van der Zee, Nicholas Hancox and Julia Joyce were readily able to replicate in partnership over the concert’s duration.

In an earlier “Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble” presentation in this same venue a month previously, we’d heard another Shostakovich String Quartet, the Ninth, along with a new work by Chinese composer Gao Ping which was dedicated to Shostakovich’s memory to mark this 50th anniversary year of his death. On that occasion, the second violinist was Monique Lapins, and the violist Chris van der Zee. Given the remarkable variety of the quartets given thus far in this survey, it might be that Helene’s and Rolf’s necessarily pragmatic choices of colleagues for each occasion could arguably add to the music’s appeal, piquantly suiting the “living dangerously” aura around Shostakovich’s own creative efforts in general. Of course, by the time he had come to writing quartets the composer had ostensibly survived his most hazardous brush with the tyrannical Soviet leader Josef Stalin (specifically over the latter’s reaction to the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”), and had since embarked on a series of works which he hoped would give rise to less scrutiny than his more “public” works.

By the time he came to write the aforementioned Ninth Quartet it was 1964, and the composer had appeared to have largely “broken free” from the constraints of a system that had told its creative artists how they should make their art. A Tenth Quartet was written in the same year, and the Eleventh was begun the following year. The latter was the first of a group named the “Quartet of Quartets”, and written for  the violinist Vasili Pyotrovich Shirinsky, a member of the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble  to whom the composer came to entrust the premieres of all of these works right up to the Fourteenth Quartet. Shirinsky actually died before the work’s completion and the remaining players had seriously considered disbanding the quartet – however Shostakovich had argued for the group to continue, as he maintained the group had “acquired the status of a national institution”.

Rolf Gjelsten introduced this work, commenting most tellingly that it was “great string quartet music which created powerful effects”. The work consisted of seven closely-connected (all marked attacca) miniature movements, beginning Andantino with a short, rhapsodic violin solo, here, beautifully-focused throughout all its appearances by Helene Pohl – answered and echoed by her colleagues, largely expressing a kind of calm acceptance, briefly spliced by a “wrench of agitation” but returning to an integrated kind of poise. The first violin moved things along with the Scherzo – a repeated-note theme, played more legato than pointed and playful, followed by the viola and ‘cello, “dug in”, and with occasional stinging upward glissandi! Together, the violins gave the motif a sinister element by beginning the phrases in fourths, “worrying” the notes insistently – after this all died away, the players suddenly “attacked” the Recitative, with stinging opening sounds, and dissonant resoundings, briefly playing some uncannily ambient “Vaughan Williams-like” contrasting harmonies before returning to the opening, though letting the “stinging” attacks gradually disperse.

Again, the mood suddenly changed with the “Etude”, the solo violin embarking on a sinuous whirling-dervish episode, to which the other players reacted  almost dreamily at first, but then almost grotesquely as the solo violin intensified its flailing attack, the others enacting a kind of drunken sailors’ dance, before anarchy broke out, with the ‘cello joining the fray, as if possessed of its own accord! Out of nowhere, it almost seemed, came  the Humoresque, with an urgent, warning-like two-note ostinato-like figure from Anna van der Zee’s violin, to which both violin and viola took fright (Nicholas Hancox’s viola matching Helene Pohl’s violin in sheer ghoulishness of tone) – such transfixing sonorities made it seem as if we had taken a brief but scarifying turn into a Little Shop of Horrors!).

The Elegy brought sense and feeling to the proceedings in spadefuls – ‘cello and viola first dark and sombre, but still sonorous  and affecting, then the second and afterwards the first violin returning us to daylight, their sounds emoting like prisoners from dark places espying light. And so the Finale was on us, with the players teasing out by turns the work’s past themes, the process filled with conflicting emotions as the memories returned on the various instruments, and ending with Helene Pohl’s violin reaching the work’s final high C with a variously pre-constituted sense of fulfilment….

Aptly chosen as a companion-work for this concert was the similar-but-different Thirteenth Quartet, of roughly an approximate length though differently constituted, having a single movement, albeit with contrasting episodes – an ABA structure similar to Bartok’s Third Quartet. It’s dedicated to the Beethoven Quartet’s violist Vadim Vasilyevich Borisovsky, who had just retired, leaving his replacement Fyodor Druzhinin to take part in the premiere in December 1970. Shostakovich was by then a sick man, having suffered a heart attack shortly after the Eleventh Quartet’s premiere in 1966, and was receiving treatment throughout 1970 at an orthopaedic clinic – the new work’s largely pessimistic outlook stems from his awareness of approaching his life’s end. It’s reinforced here by a late inclusion in the outer movements of some of the composer’s music for Grigori Kozintsev’s film “King Lear”, originally conceived as “Lamentations” for a string quartet.

In introducing the work Helene Pohl made mention of the remarkable “jazzy” elements in the second part, quoting the composer as saying  to somebody “I’ve written a short little quartet – with a “joke” middle!” – a sequence which another commentator had, I read, characterised as “a jam session from Hell”, and which came across as a grim “dance of death”, the composer joining forces with his great predecessor, Musorgsky, in regard to the latter’s “Songs and Dances of Death”.

Appropriately, it was the viola which began the work, a sorrowful solo with others joining in– bare, astringent sounds  with occasional dissonant note combinations. The players took their time, with the violin taking the lead working up to a “crying  out” sequence with the second violin, and encouraging the viola and ‘cello to join in. When the meditative tone resumed I caught a further reminder of a bleak “Vaughan Williams” voice in the harmony, along with the unsettling half-tone dissonances.

Helene had demonstrated to us the repeated-note phrase that began the more volatile middle section, emphasising for us its mournful rather than playful character with more legato-like phrasing. The murmuring lines from the others developed into harsh, stabbing chords set against an angular descending seventh figure from Nicholas Hancox’s viola – which in turn lead into a wonderful, once-repeated “augmenting” chord, the instruments joining in stepwise, punctuated by the repeated-note figure, and the viola’s falling-seventh declamations!  – jaw-dropping stuff!

What developed next seemed to me almost Dada-like! – a viola tremolando, pizzicato figures from the others, and rapid-fire exchanges of the same activated the ‘cello with Rolf Gjelsten giving us a “grooving-along” kind of running jazz pizzicato, prompting the violins into a “cool” dotted- rhythmed note pattern to which the players occasionally beat the wood of their instruments with their bows in syncopated strokes! – these jazzy, syncopated rhythms proceeded to “fight” against mournful, downwardly-sighing  lines from the viola, which grew to resembling a kind of all-out aerial attack on the scurrying inhabitants below! – all so visceral and palpable!

Violin pizzicati provoked a full-blooded response from the cello, whose  mournful lines eventually prevailed against the jazzy rhythms,  with murmuring lines gathering to subdue the ground zero activities and establish an uneasy, ghostly, tremolando-like calm – a couple of  bleak pizzicato repeated-note whimperings from the violin stimulated another startling, though short-lived  outbreak of the repeated note pattern before it too gave up the ghost. All of this was thrill-a-minute stuff, brought into being with an immediacy that, especially in such unprepossessing settings, simply took the listener’s breath away!

Out of the thicket emerged sighing violin lines and trenchant ‘cello responses, with the violin ascending heavenwards in search of some form of redemption/oblivion, its companions resonating in support, the exchanges again briefly sounding that distinctive “Vaughan Williams” ambience that brought to my mind the latter’s Sixth Symphony – most affecting! Then came the viola’s solo, augmented by cadaverous tappings from the second violin – after which the viola continued, joined by the first and second violins in an extended B-flat which slowly burgeoned towards a piercing climax.

Julia Joyce (viola) and the Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble play Mozart

The intrinsic greatness of Mozart’s music would, of course, have easily survived a cheek-by-jowl placement with these twentieth-century goings-on intact, but the interval break was nevertheless appreciated at that point! It did give one the chance to ponder what we had heard in relative isolation, and especially apposite given the cultural “head start”  enjoyed by an eighteenth-century classic work when pitted against a later “arrival”. I had enjoyed my own particular “first encounter” with Mozart’s K.593 many years ago, courtesy of a fellow bus-driver I befriended during my “mis-spent youth” period of exploration! This particular individual was a Rastafarian-like figure, complete with dreadlocks! – one who completely belied his appearance by frequently conversing with me about art, literature and music, and ultimately making a present for me of a recording of two of the Mozart Quintets in question, one of which was K.593 (and which he himself adored!).

It was a “head-start” of sorts for me with this work, of course, which I grew to love all the more – and on a later, box-set pressing of the same recording (the stereo Amadeus with Cecil Aronowitz)  I also got to know the “alternate version” of the finale’s opening, the phrase written chromatically, rather than in stepwise fashion, and which is now recognised as the “authentic” opening – Helene Pohl pointed this out, playing both versions for our delight, though stopping short of proposing an “audience vote” on the matter!

It was one of a number of delights associated with this performance, another being Rolf Gjelsten’s engagingly individual way with the ‘cello phrase that began the work, repeated in different keys in ways that made the player on my Amadeus recording sound relatively po-faced and non-commital! Also, I’d never before properly “connected” this episode with the music of Haydn, despite owning recordings of things like the “Drum Roll” and “London” Symphonies for years and years, works with similar kinds of slow introductions, and with the same returning at the end of the opening movements! And finally, the presence of the NZSO’s principal violist, Julia Joyce, in the ensemble gave the performance a wonderfully “burnished” glory of exchange, particularly evident in the slow movement, with its frequent conversational violin/viola passages – all very theatrical, as well, I thought, with the tuttis bursting almost to full with expression.

A quickly-flowing Menuetto followed, less about “beats” and more about emotion ”flowing like oil”, as the composer would have said, and, with the Trio, a showcase of ascending arpeggios, a veritable welter of them on at least two occasions, both collegial and celebratory. As, of course, were the wry interlockings of the finale’s workings, where the sheer contrapuntal elan of the writing becomes an “Anything you can do” kind of musical feast with an “Of course!” series of  rejoinings, the exhilaration of matching knife-edged impulses and resplendent tones a glorious display, and one for all of us to savour and remember for a long while to come.

Good Friday 2025 – music of sorrow and resolve, from the Tudor Consort

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MEDIA VITA – Music by BYRD, GIBBONS, SHEPPARD, TALLIS and WEELKES
The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

                                                                                                                                                                                               Michael Steward and the Tudor Consort at Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul  (photo: Cassandra Wang)

ORLANDO GIBBONS – O Lord, in Thy wrath
THOMAS WEELKES – Laboravi in gemitu meo
THOMAS TALLIS – Lamentations of Jeremiah I & II
WILLIAM BYRD – Plorans plorabit
JOHN SHEPPARD – Media vita in morte sumus

The Tudor Consort
Sopranos:  Geneviève Gates-Panneton, Lydia Joyce, Erin King, Jane McKinlay, Rebecca Stanton,
Chelsea Whitfield
Altos:  Christine Argyle, Andrea Cochrane, Alexandra Granville, Helene Page, Kassandra Wang,
Alex Woodhouse-Appleby
Tenors:  Joshua Long, Philip Roderick, Richard Taylor, Axel Tie
Basses:  Brian Hesketh, Joshua Jamieson, Frazer MacDiarmid, Matthew Painter, Keith Small,
Thomas Whaley

Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul, Molesworth Street
Friday 18th April (Good Friday) 2025

What a joy to experience in the here-and-now music written hundreds of years previously with spacious acoustics and worshipful ambiences in mind as spectacularly presented by Wellington’s Cathedral of St. Paul, in Molesworth Street! In fact, the capital boasts a number of churches whose qualities would present a similar-but-different interplay between atmosphere and clarity of sound to that which we enjoyed on this occasion – but for sheer ambient beauty, the sounds made on this occasion by the Tudor Consort voices here in Wellington Cathedral would be hard to beat.

Tudor Consort Music Director Michael Stewart welcomed us to what he obviously considered something of a time-honoured ritual for all concerned, an Easter Concert, with repertoire chosen from the incredible storehouse of music written over the centuries for this particular occasion in the liturgical year – a tradition begun by a previous Consort Music Director, Alastair Carey in 2002, and continued by Stewart since his appointment in the role in 2007.

The two “flagship” works in the concert, Thomas Tallis’s two-part Lamentations of Jeremiah, and John Sheppard’s Media vita in morte sumus obviously gave each of the “halves” a singular kind of distinction and dominance through their sheer physical scale. Though the accompanying works by Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes and William Byrd were obviously of more modest dimensions their qualities unerringly took us into the ambient performance arena and suitably honed our receptivities for dealing with the more extended and complex works that followed.

Orlando Gibbons’ anthem “O Lord in thy wrath” opened the programme exquisitely, the tones beautifully balanced and the lines effortlessly shaped, with telling layerings in places like “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am weak”, and “My soul is also sore troubled”. The final two lines further illustrate the singers’ control of emphases, the line “how long wilt thou punish me?” insistent, and the following “O save me for thy mercy’s sake” expiating the tones with heartfelt sensitivity. By comparison, Thomas Weelkes’ setting of different words from the same Psalm 6 seemed more insistent in its sorrowful reflection on the human condition. It seemed like a lament without solace, tapestried with constant lamentings, snow-capped by a gorgeous but insistent soprano line which drew others upwards to empathise and fall back again, the undulations wrapping around one another, simpatico, and taking some comfort in blending together and sharing sorrows in this vale of tears.

I’d heard both of the following pieces by Thomas Tallis and John Sheppard on recordings beforehand so I knew something of what to expect, taking particular comfort in the visceral collegiality of voices expressing (particularly in the Tallis work) remarkably apposite observations and feelings in a world that’s presently echoing in so many places and ways the strife and accompanying distress of the prophet’s visions. And of course, amid the consolations afforded by music of such beauty in places comes the agonising thought of the suffering being more present-day than prophetic, and the extent to which we can sublimate in art such agonies while people in places like Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine most ostensibly have no such recourse. The horrors of history are difficult enough to bear without having to witness and cope with wilful re-enactments of the same taunting and defiling any such attempts to stimulate awareness, resolve and resistance to such forces through art’s most heartfelt efforts.

Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah are in two parts, and demonstrate with disarming directness an extraordinary range of contrasts of mood and feeling, the settings incorporating titles and headings of different verses of the texts, the latter using the Hebraic names for letters and weaving these names into the otherwise Latin text. So we hear the Hebrew letters “Aleph” and “Beth” in Part One, each given an ornate but emotionally neutral ambience before “easing” or else “plunging” into the actual texts, releasing the listener from the intensities of each verse setting with whole breaths of relative space and re-alignment.

As with the transition from the overall tranquility of the “Aleph” settings to the obvious surge of tone from the tenors at Quomodo sedet sola civitas,  these progressions into text can happen seamlessly, or be underlined by pauses, such as that separating the following “Beth” from Plorans ploravit in nocte.  Amidst the beauty of the singing I wondered whether phrases such as Omnes amici ejus spreverunt eam (all her friends have dealt treacherously with her), here delivered more in sorrow than in anger, were as forceful as what Tallis might have intended – certainly, the concluding Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum (Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God) expressed here to numbing perfection a quietly beseeching tone!

I was struck all over again by the sheer storytelling capacities of the sounds created by the ensemble when Part II of the Lamentations began – having completed two “chapters” of the text we were about to be regaled with no less than three more, with the beauty of utterance putting a listener like myself in mind of a further “unlocking” of a precious casket of treasures. After the splendid “Ghimel” opening, there seemed more insistence and urgency in the interlocking parts, the sopranos arching their phrases heavenwards with plenty of expressive purpose (and especially in the final nec invenit requiem.) The brief “Daleth” introduction to the central verses brings the ear-catching variant of fewer voices for the opening Omnes persecutores emus which builds into an impressive ensemble; and in the following “Omnes porta eius destructae” follows an even more dire scenario with repetitions of the words oppressa amaritudine (bitter anguish) at the end.

The exquisitely architectural “Heth”  preluded the grimmest of the prophet’s foretellings, the tenors forthright with the opening Facti sunt hostes ejus in capite (Her foes have become her masters) and the other voices following suit, obsessively so with the words multitudinem iniquitatum ejus (the multitude of her transgressions). And how affecting did the voices make, firstly, the phrase Parvuli ejus ducti sunt (The children were led away), and then the final, quietly and almost desperately penitential murmurings of the same “Jerusalem” entreaty which had concluded Part I, and here returning with deeper finality.

A smaller ensemble tackled William Byrd’s Plorans plorabit, (incidentally, extending the phenomenon of political subversion in music) with its sombre message to the King of the time (James 1) that the “crown of (your) glory” was under threat! Otherwise its relatively tighter and more integrated sound-picture was to make all the more stimulating and telling a contrast with what followed afterwards. In fact Michael Stewart could scarcely contain his excitement at the prospect of performing this, the concert’s “signature” work – John Sheppard’s antiphon Media Vita in Morte Sumus, regarded as “supreme” in the composer’s output by scholars and performers.

A good deal of discussion has accompanied the work’s more recent history, which Stewart made a passing reference to before leaving it up to us to make our own researches due to the complexities of different editions and attitudes towards the work, though commenting that its impact and magnificence would be self-evident for the listener.

For the work’s certainly become something of an icon in its own singular world of choral music as a result of several factors – its unclear raison d’etre (thought by some to be a memorial for the composer’s first wife), its equally mysterious genesis (no copy exists of the composer’s own score, its survival due to the partbooks used to reconstruct the original in the late 1570s), and its inordinate length in early versions which sought to perform all the polyphonic repeats, a practice which certain newer editions have sought to modify, not by shedding any actual music but limiting the number of repeats of material in performance, as well as changing the order of some of the sections – the place of the canticle, the Nunc Dimittis, for example.  Applying such an approach to extremes would halve the time  some earlier performances might have taken, though Stewart had suggested to us in his pre-concert talk that the Consort’s approach would not be of such a radical order.

At a tempo which readily suggested the celestial movement of unearthly bodies orbiting some distant star, this music’s performance, with its breathtakingly stratospheric soprano line, transported our sensibilities to realms of awareness and imagination far removed from our accustomed realms of being, contemplating an eternal vision which inspires as much fear as longing – Media vita in morte sumus – (In the midst of life we be in death) and contemplating our helplessness at such a prospect at Amarae morti ne tradas nos (- the bitter pains of eternal death) – how readily, to my ears, amid the melismatic Sancte Deus and Sancte fortis, did the soprano lines evoke a distant echo of the yet-to-be-composed Miserere of Grigorio Allegri!

Into this void came the plainchant, given the theatrical treatment of alternating one voice, one section of the voices for the first part of the chant, and then including in the response at the Gloria Patri, the whole choir – if a “time stood still” moment was what was required, then the timing, tonings and placement of the voices was well-nigh perfect in its effect. The resuming of the antiphon maintained the darkness and solemnity of the Nunc Dimittis throughout the following Ne projicias nos (Do not cast us away), during which the radiance of the sopranos was absent with telling sombre effect, and having all the more radiance and candlepower on their return with a repetition of the Sancte Deus/Sancte fortis sequences.

Again the sopranos withdrew at Noli claudere aures tuas (Do not close your ears), with the earthier tones of the lower voices stressing the penitential tones of the suppliants – the more celestial tones take up the text Sancte et misericordis Salvator (O holy and most merciful Saviour) – but even more enchanting was the beautiful, Qui cognoscis occulta corda (You who know the secrets of the heart)  begun by those wonderful stratospheric voices which had given the work so much of its essential character – and together with the altos were what my ears seemed to tell me were the men joining in towards the piece’s end. By this time my sensibilities were drunk with the beauties and intensities of what I’d heard and my notes had begun to resembled mere scribblings of transported emotion, well-nigh indecipherable, as all transported emotion should be! Thankfully, wherever I’d been taken by this piece I did manage to reconstitute my senses sufficiently to get home, since which time it’s all been playing in my head demanding a semblance of order and continuity which has taken time to fall into a kind of coherence! Apart from the supercharged transcendentalism of the ending, I can vouch for my presence of mind during some of it. and thus hope enough of my reminiscing  of the journey makes sense!

 

 

Dazzlehands – a book that dances – from RNZ Ballet

Posted on by Jennifer Shennan

 

    Dazzlehands                                                                                                                                                                                 
    Royal New Zealand Ballet
    St.James Theatre, Wellington
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Photo credits: Stephen A’Court

It’s school holidays, so take the book Dazzlehands by local children’s writer Sacha Cotter and illustrator Josh Morgan then adapt it for performance. The protagonist is a dancing pig, so you’re halfway there already.

Choreography by RNZB company dancer, Joshua Guillemot-Rodgerson,is cheeky and his use of repeated action motifs cleverly echoes the rhythms in the text. The sassy dancers at RNZB step up to develop the characters in the farmyard and they relish the chance to play the silly card. Most of the animals conform to expectations, but Pig is the exception.

The work is set to music by local composer William Philipson, with narration stitched in. Costumes designed by Victoria Gridley are up and over the top. Fill the theatre with little ones and their older significant  others, and you can’t really go wrong.

In saying that it’s worth acknowledging how much work goes into theadaptation of any work from one genre to another, then co-ordinating all the elements of such a project in a way that still honours the original. Just because the book is for children doesn’t mean it’s childish work. The theatre can work for all ages but you have to know how to play that.

There are sold out seasons of Dazzlehands in various venues, with a te reo narration, a deaf-signed and relaxed performances included. Huia are the country’s leading publishers of bi-lingual books for children, and both editions of this work, in English, Dazzlehands and in te reo, Ringakõrero — are on sale in the foyer.

The story and moral of Dazzlehands allows a non-conformist character to play it his way. The farmer wants Pig to behave normally, like all the other animals do — Sheep goes Baa-aa, Cow goes Moo-oo, Hen goes Cluck and Flamingo makes a remarkable sound (a surprise to meet a flamingo on a farm anyway but why not?) The lady farmer grows increasingly frustrated when Pig keeps producing glitzy gloves and turning to disco dancing instead of obliging with an “Oink” as requested.

We’re reminded of the free-thinking family’s mantra – “Sit down wheneveryone else is standing up, stand up when everyone else is sitting down”.

Anthropomorphism is the spine of so many animal tales for children of all ages, from Aesop’s Fables, Three Little Pigs, Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, Alison Uttley … not to mention the crazy romp of Norwegian rock group Ylvis in What Does the Fox Say? and the closer-to-home works by Margaret Mahy (The Lion in the Meadow would be a bobby-dazzler of a ballet), and Paul Jenden who choreographed Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary tribe. It’s just two more bookshelves away to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the metaphors at work when those farm animals unite to fight off oppression and find freedom. (Note itspublication date 1945).

All the Dazzlehands animals come to want a bit of the glitz so they learn the jazzy dancing — but Pig doesn’t really want to be like anyone else, so as they come across to follow his lead, Pig scores the last line in the play, just one word, and you don’t need me to tell you what that word is. Cotter and Morgan have produced a number of children’s book titles with Huia, including the award-winning The Bomb (that’s the swimming pool variety). It’s worth a few moments to listen to the online version of that being read and accompanied by Claire Cowan’s luminous composition for members of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

There’s also a fabulous lineage of children’s story ballets within the history of RNZB’s own repertoire, all of them worth re-visiting at some stage. Russell Kerr’s productions of Carnival of the Animals, Peter and the Wolf, Alice in Wonderland and his fabulous Peter Pan are all classics. But then who could forget works Kerr made from tales by New Zealand’s stellar children’s book illustrator, Gavin Bishop. Te Maia and the Sea Devil called for a wonderful underwater setting — but at the top table is the legendary Terrible Tom which thrilled so many audiences of children who lifted the roof with delight.

I recently watched a video of this winner from 1980s, with music by Philip Norman, and was thrilled to see my memory had not exaggerated the genius of Russell Kerr, choreographer. Usually it’s a book that then becomes a ballet, but in this instance it would be a ballet that became a book. Now wouldn’t that be fun?

Musical Prodigy Night for Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents “PRODIGY”

Georges BIZET – Symphony No. 1 in C Major
Felix MENDELSSOHN – Violin Concerto in E Minor Op.64
Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 1 in F Minor Op.10

Amalia Hall (violin)
Marc Taddei (Music Director)
Orchestra Wellington  (Peter Clark – acting Concertmaster)

Saturday 12th April, 2025
Michael Fowler Centre
Wellington

(pictured at right – Georges Bizet, Felix Mendelssohn-Barthody, Dmitri Shostakovich)

Orchestra Wellington spectacularly lived up to its long-established reputation for innovative concert programming with the first presentation in its latest series “The Dictator’s Shadow”, one doing rich justice to the youthful creative achievements of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose fiftieth anniversary is being celebrated world-wide this year. This opening concert showcases Shostakovich’s remarkable First Symphony, written during 1925 while still a teenaged student at the Leningrad Music Conservatory, and achieving a sensational success, both at home with its Leningrad premiere (May 1926)  and abroad, with the work receiving performances as far afield as Berlin and the United States the following year.

As a concert in itself, the scheme based on the idea of “Prodigy” could hardly have done better, even if any of the last three of the teenaged Mozart’s Violin Concerti could just as easily (and appositely) have been substituted for Mendelssohn’s famous E Minor Op.64 work as a vehicle for the gifted Amalia Hall to play – I must sneakily admit that I, for one, would have relished even more the opportunity to hear her play any of those last three Mozart masterpieces!). Still, the idea of using the Mendelssohn work (apart from the happy availability of such an accomplished soloist) was to bring to notice the composer’s own prodigious creativities with earlier works such as the Octet and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both of which were completed during Mendelssohn’s teens.

To complete the picture there was no happier way of demonstrating a young composer’s talent, inspiration and versatile technique than presenting the youthful (1855) Symphony of Georges Bizet – and though there were only the merest touches of greatness approaching the order of “Carmen” or “Les pêcheurs de perles” in this seventeen year-old’s enthusiastic concoctions of youthful endeavour, the overall impression of the music is that of a nature by turns vivacious and dreamily melancholic, equally at home in the town or the country, as portrayed by turns, in the various movements.

Marc Taddei’s spirited direction appropriately bounced the opening along, the high-spirited trajectories providing a lovely foil for the plangent beauty of the oboe’s floating second-subject lines soaring above the strings undulating patterns, then playing with the fanfare-like figures which frame the more lyrical sections, and the horn calls that both introduce and bid farewell to the movement’s development. After this, the slow movement’s dreamy, somewhat quasi-oriental meanderings were hauntingly voiced by the oboe after the most enchanting of openings (where did the young genius conjure up this mood from?) had been brought in by the strings. Just as engrossing was the ensuing string fugato with which the oboe then adroitly wove a reprise of the opening melody – had Robert Schumann been alive to hear this sequence, he might have uttered a judgement to rival his famous appraisal of one of Chopin’s youthful words many years before –  “Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!”.

I’ve always loved the Trio section of the charmingly rustic Menuetto-Scherzo which follows, not least because of what I’ve always thought was Bizet’s “gently poking fun in a Beethoven-like way” gesture at the wind players who have the Trio’s melody and repeat it a fourth higher at Fig.8 (in my score). Oboe and clarinet on all the recordings I’ve heard except for one play a delightfully astringent-sounding B-natural in that phrase instead of a B-flat, perhaps to indicate (as Beethoven did with his village band music in the “Pastoral” Symphony), that the players might not be fully up to the music’s demands! Here, I seemed to hear (if my ears were serving me correctly), that the wind-players were playing a B-flat, which of course sounded a lot more mellifluous, but not nearly so tangy and rustic! I have, as I’ve said, recorded evidence for both versions being acceptable, but I do wonder what the composer ACTUALLY wrote!

The finale was an exhilarating, momentum-plus performance, Taddei and his players bringing out the music’s fleet-fingered energies in a toe-tapping way, but giving attention to the shapes and trajectories of the melodies as well, contrasting the “perpetuum mobile” of the opening with the grander, more ceremonial second theme, and a more sinuous refrain, a more vulnerably human, song-like tune with which to “people” the soundscape (the “melodic gift” already strongly in evidence in the young composer!)

Oddly enough Bizet seemed to never give the work another thought as an entity, confining his interest to “cherry-picking” bits of it for use in more “serious” works, such as the opera Les pêcheurs de perles and his music for the play LArlesienne. Thanks to the French musicologist Jean Chantavoine who in 1933 published an article regarding the work’s existence, the symphony came to the attention of the conductor Felix Weingartner, who gave the work its belated premiere performance in 1935, earning for it a “wunderkind” status in league with the efforts of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Rossini and Shostakovich.

But next was Mendelssohn – and if the work chosen this evening was definitely not a “wunderkind” work in terms of years, it still evoked memories of hearing for oneself at another time those two outrageously precocious pieces which have for all time identified their then teenaged composer as one of nature’s creative marvels, the Octet for Strings and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. This was the E Minor Violin Concerto, for many listeners the work that epitomises the romantic instrumental concerto with its manifest qualities, and one for which tonight’s soloist. Amalia Hall (the orchestra’s regular Concertmaster), seemed a near-ideal choice as its performer.

I’ve certainly not heard a more silvery-toned performance, one whose gossamer finish seemed in places almost unearthly, especially so in the rapid figurations when the notes seemed to “spill out” from the instrument like stardust from a comet arching across a firmament, with the couple of minor intonation stresses deserving the description (coined by a similarly entranced commentator in another, different context) “spots on the sun”. One might also occasionally have wanted a shade more tonal projection in places from the soloist; but to look for something different would be to besmirch the magic we were fortunate to find ourselves caught up in on this occasion  – and so we contented ourselves with the integral state of things as part of the excitement and wonder from both soloist and orchestra.

The music itself is too well-known to annotate at length – enough to say that the musicians here aptly probed the “character” of each of the work’s movements,  filling the ambient spaces with appropriately vibrant tones and gesturings across the instrumental spectrum, More of a dialogue than a contest throughout, the interaction between Hall and her conductor and players transmuted the first movement’s questings, proposings and              bargainings into concordance with the enticing sweetness of the slow movement’s exchanges before giving the exuberance of the finale its head,  violinist, conductor and orchestra revelling in the freely-shared elation of the work’s full expression.

Our readily-wrought appreciation of Amelia Hall’s playing was further enhanced by an encore item she performed with Peter Clark, her stand-in this evening as Concertmaster. This was a duo written by the Polish composer-virtuoso Henryk Wieniawski, his Etude-Caprice Op.18 No,4, in which the playing of both musicians was as remarkable for its delicacy and finesse as for its brilliance – a true sweetmeat of a bonus!

Casting about for ways to characterise the very “two different worlds”  kind of ambience which grew straightaway from the sounds of Dmitri Shostakovich’s singularly remarkable First Symphony, one has to find words for a “new era” of expression – and in this case, one with something of an almost hallucinatory quality in its music’s rapid-fire contrasts of atmosphere, outlook and motivation. One learns with no surprise that the composer spent much of this time earning a living as a cinema pianist, developing in the process a kind of penchant in his music for rapid movement and change, the introduction of disparate elements, and an almost expressionist delight in their surprising interactions.

These thoughts summed up something of the story of the Symphony’s first movement, presented here by Marc Taddei and his players with, in the wake of the concert’s first-half respectabilities, almost mind-boggling aplomb. It’s all superbly etched in, with the changes of pace and mood here nonchalantly and there explosively registered (though clearly articulated, whatever the voice), and the overall energies of the transitions driving one’s sensibilities on until reaching the droll  “did we dream you or you us?” fragments of out-and-out wonderment at the end that had previously tumbled past us all through the plethora of incident carried by the music.

By contrast, the second movement was here kept constantly and brilliantly on the move, either in a helter-skelter or a trance-like, sleepwalking kind of trajectory, each of which abruptly changed as if Shostakovich was  following a private movie-showing (here, Rachel Thomson relishing her occasional “cinema-pianist” role with gusto!). Or, perhaps, we were being asked to reimagine something grimmer – sequences of flight and agitation followed by funereal processions over desolate battlefields still resonating with crushing piano-chord hammerblows……

The music’s Lento mood darkened and deepened, with Taddei drawing from his players a remarkable soundscape of sorrow, with beautiful oboe and ‘cello-playing, taken up by the horns and strings, the repeated portentous brass call heightening the mood of tragedy – the performance brought out the music’s potent “funeral oration” character, moments of harshly unfettered despairing alternated with bleak, desolate voices, anticipating the Shostakovich of the great and harrowing symphonic adagios to come!

And so to the fourth movement, begun with a snare-drum crescendo which seemed at first an isolated, even fatuous gesture of promise, but which planted a rebellious seed in the Lento that returned, bearing its brass, wind and cello musings – suddenly, trumpets and lower strings were igniting the clarinets and upper strings, and whirling us away on a kaleidoscopic journey of contrasts too numerous and varied to fully describe,  but remarkable to experience in a single span of time! There seemed nothing which daunted these players and their valorous maestro – we were transported from the music’s deep recesses of gloom to its near-frenetic expression of exhilaration as the composer’s “end-game” imaginings were given their head in this engrossingly unpredictable but ultimately edifying ride!

If Orchestra Wellington continues to delight us with anything like the same adventurous spirit, emotional engagement and instrumental brilliance as we heard in this first “The Dictator’s Shadow” concert, the remainder of the series will, for me, be well-nigh unmissable! Full marks to all involved for such intelligent and innovative programming and for the sheer elan of execution (oops! – that word just slipped out, Comrade! – sorry!) of some glorious music!!