Japan Music Fair with five fine musicians

Chamber music from east and west, Music Fair of Japan

Ilott Theatre, Saturday 11 July 2009

This was the fourth Japanese Festival which has included a concert by Japanese musicians. These are the result of collaboration between the Embassy, the Asia-New Zealand and the Japan Foundations and the Wellington City Council. Where the previous ones have featured only a couple of musicians, this time there were five, including, almost as the star turn, the principal double bass of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Hiroshi Ikematsu.

Those who saw him performing at a concert at St Mary of the Angels last year will have vivid memories of both his extraordinary skill and musical gifts and his virtuosity as comedian and musical acrobat. Here he took an early Italian soprano aria that has recently become popular – Caccini’s Ave Maria (my first encounter on Inessa Galante’s debut CD a decade or so ago); it merely displayed the way he refuses to be limited by the bass’s low register, competing with the violin’s range by playing beautiful legato lines.

What delighted and astonished the full house even more was his transformation of Monti’s famous Csardas from the normally impossible violin showpiece to the same on bass, with a few surprise comic stunts thrown in: some involving pianist Susumu Aoyagi as fall-guy.

Yet the rest were not merely excellent musicians. Violinist Ayoko Ishikawa, who graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium, acted as MC with a delightful playful manner and a joyous way with her phrase endings as she introduced colleagues and pieces of music.

As well as playing a couple of charming Japanese pieces, she played the Meditation from Thaïs, Saint-Saëns’s Dance Macabre and Libertango by Piazzola, with quite a swagger.

The concert had opened atmospherically – the lights went gently down and from the back the sound of the Japanese flute (shinobue) arose, playing the well-known piece from the Japanese highlands, Amazing Grace and it was taken up by the koto which was ready in the front and played by Lisa Kataoka in a beautiful kimono. She continued at the koto, singing charmingly, and was joined by the other instrumentalists in two other pieces. 

We saw the flute player, Takako Hagiwara, in the second half, also kimono-clad, again emerge from behind us and continue playing as she walked slowly down the right aisle. She played a composition of her own on the shinobue and with pianist Susumu Aoyagi played her arrangement from Carmen which was a most impressive virtuosic display.

Finally, the pianist. As well as accompanying many pieces, a model of discretion and sensitivity to the music’s character, he had opened the concert with two Nocturnes (Op Post. and Op 27 No 2) and an Etude (Op 25, No 11) of Chopin. Somewhat angular without much subtlety in the left hand, but his Japanese pieces sounded idiomatic and he left the audience somewhat overwhelmed by his tumultuous playing of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. 

The concert was free and while the style of music was essentially for popular consumption, we had a line up of superb or at least excellent musicians to demonstrate how a non-European nation with deep traditions of its own, can achieve world class standards and build up very large audiences for classical music.

A lesson that may be pertinent for New Zealand.

Chris Greenslade at St Andrew’s with Schumann, Janáček and Beethoven

St Andrew’s on The Terrace – free lunchtime concert

Chris Greenslade (piano). Romances Nos 1 and 2, Op 28 (Schumann), In the Mists (Janáček), Piano sonata in E, Op 109 (Beethoven)

Wednesday 8 July 2009

An interesting programme which I’d thought might have attracted more people. When did we last hear Janáček’s piano music? And I’d have thought Schumann would have brought them in too. But I reveal my prejudices.

There are three Romances in Schumann’s little Op 28 set. Only the second is familiar: a very charming piece that I probably encountered in a piano album when I was young. Chris Greenslade, who studied with Richard Mapp at the Massey University Conservatorium of Music and later at the Royal Northern College of Music and is now based at Waikato, opened his recital with the second Romance, handling it with an intimacy and warmth that raised it above the level of a salon piece; confirmed by the attention he gave to the series of disturbing bass chords in its latter stages. No 1, in B flat minor, is a turbulent piece, of relentless arpeggios that spoke in Schumann’s other voice, and which the pianist captured convincingly.

In the Mists was written during the long, dispiriting years, when Janáček was hardly known outside of Moravia, as he waited for Jenufa to be performed. Greenslade understood the frustration that permeates the four movement suite, explored its personal revelations carefully and he also grasped the sense of the uneasy little chord sequence in the right hand. The second movement is perhaps the most affecting and memorable, and Greenslade shaped its narrow-ranging motif to suggest mystery, interrupted by a passage of clattering confusion. In the next movement there was more openness as the pianist gently drew back the blinds to enjoy the sight of the outside world.

Though marked Presto, Greenslade withheld any precipitate rush to grasp what might merely be a spectre, but dramatized the pauses and hesitations that finally gave way to propulsive bass octaves that seemed difficult to stop.

Beethoven’s sonata No 30 has two short movements, and a third movement, somewhat longer, Theme and Variations, that explores the inexpressible. In scale it seems a world away from the immediately preceding sonata – the mighty Hammerklavier.

Just because these late works are held in such veneration, it is common to suggest that it is only the Brendels, Schnabels, Richters and Kempffs who can do them justice; but normally capable pianists who steep themselves in the music’s spirit can produce satisfying performances.

Greenslade’s performance, marred a little by lapses in the last movement, was a credit to him. The first movement was not too hasty, allowing space for the drama to develop. It also provided contrast with the much faster second movement, where fast treble passages lost some clarity. The Theme and Variations – Molto cantabile ed espressivo – opened calmly and there were subtle gestures such as a touch of elasticity in the turning of the main, achingly beautiful melody.

Audiences seem to be increasing for this long-standing concert series. Performances of this calibre will help numbers to grow.

Violin Sonatas at Old St Paul’s: Elgar and Franck

Old Saint Paul’s: Free lunchtime concert

Violin Sonatas by Elgar (E minor, Op 82) and Franck (A major)

Olya Curtis (violin) and David Vine (piano)

Tuesday 7 July 2009

The sphere of classical music seems more populated by immigrants than any other area, whether of the arts in general, education, or the public and business sectors. That was understandable in earlier times when no tertiary institutions offered musical performance teaching. But since around 1970, one would have imagined that the supply of New Zealand-born and trained musicians would have filled the demand. But note, I am applauding, not lamenting, the often more cultivated character of our immigrant populations.

I wonder if there have been any studies to discover whether the apparently high proportion of musicians from other countries in the industry is the result of positions that cannot be properly filled by New Zealanders, or whether the proportion of musically trained and inclined people is simply higher among those who seek to migrate here.

Violinist Olya Curtis was born and educated in Russia and now divides her time between teaching privately and at Wellington East Girls’ College, and playing in the Wellington Orchestra. She makes a valued contribution to our musical life.

The pairing of these two sonatas ought to have been a success. They have characteristics in common, but one is simply much more popular and loved than the other. The programme note pointed to the very marked difference which has led to the comparative neglect of Elgar’s somewhat sombre piece, but it omits the real reason – a reason which it is not fashionable to account for the essential popularity or neglect of music – the presence or not of beautiful, memorable melody.

It was cold in the church and it was tough to open with the Elgar. Olya Curtis tackled it with care and delivered a sincere account, but clearly she had not been won over by it and she simply did not display great affinity with it, its phrasing, not gauging well how to vary dynamics and tempi, or to find a legato expressiveness to make the most of its (limited) lyrical qualities. Those qualities were rather more evident in David Vine’s accompaniment.

César Franck’s sonata found her much more comfortable with its style and with the emotional content of the music and both players managed the technically testing score well until the last movement when there were a couple of slight mishaps.

But generally, Curtis’s intonation, which was a little wayward in the Elgar sonata, was more accurate and the very tone of her violin seemed to have become warmer and more musical in Franck’s beautiful sonata.

Nevertheless, the regular, free, Tuesday lunchtime concerts at Old St Paul’s are a happy feature of Wellington’s varied musical life offering a charming visual setting for music that is always worthwhile and well played.

Diedre Irons and Zephyr blow through Wellington Town Hall

Quintet in E flat, Op 16 (Beethoven), Wind Quintet, Op 142 (Ritchie), Opus Number Zoo (Berio), Sextet for piano and winds (Poulenc)

Chamber Music New Zealand: Zephyr (Bridget Douglas – flute, Philip Green – clarinet, Robert Orr – oboe, Robert Weeks – bassoon, Edward Allen – horn) and Diedre Irons – piano.

Wellington Town Hall, Monday 6 July 2009

New Zealand audiences still seem paralysed, when it comes to the arts, by an inferiority complex towards foreign performers; and additionally, for chamber music aficionados, by a fixation with the string quartet as the only form worth troubling with.

 

Despite this double handicap, there was a good audience in the Town Hall for a group of world-class NZSO principals plus one of our finest pianists, a group effectively indistinguishable from a number of world-famous chamber ensembles.

The unhappy few who stayed away missed a delightful, entertaining concert.

The Beethoven quintet for piano and winds, modeled closely on the work that Mozart considered his finest creation to date, may not be the equal of his late quartets or piano sonatas, but the scrupulous care with which pianist Diedre Irons and clarinettist Philip Green pronounced the first notes, exquisitely slowly, demonstrated their own reverence for the music. This beautifully paced introduction led to the Allegro which they also took at a pace that allowed its beguiling simplicity to be heard as the small masterpiece it is.

The second movement is one of those pieces that seems playable by a young Grade II student, but whose beauties are only fully revealed by a pianist of this accomplishment, and later by the others, in particular a long episode by Robert Weeks on the bassoon. It was a performance whose understated, gently paced character fully exposed this lovely work’s warmth and poetry.

Zephyr commissioned Anthony Ritchie to write the wind quintet which this tour, starting in Invercargill, premiered. Year by year Ritchie’s music has gained in self-confidence, in its handling of familiar forms, patterns and harmonic means, and he invariably writes music that is individual, arresting and beautiful. Attention to the visual or narrative origins of music can be misleading as an approach to ‘understanding’, but Ritchie’s own rather detailed programme reflecting both New Zealand poems and landscapes was there to read. I took care not to read it before listening, but these were indeed the sort of images that arose in my mind, though the folk song, By the Dry Cardrona, had escaped me. Ritchie’s notes were interesting only in an abstract way; for me Copland was glimpsed through the trees and flute sounds suggested Debussy; but these were not influences, let alone borrowings. Though the sounds were complex in themselves, expressed in interestingly shifting tonalities, they made music that was his own and sounded as if it had been conceived as a coherent whole

Opus Number Zoo by Luciano Berio was one of those pieces perhaps inspired by the likes of Peter and the Wolf andBabar the Elephant; each player took turns speaking the little animal fables – and Bridget Douglas’s and Robert Orr’s lines were particularly effective. The words were sardonic and cautionary, momentarily amusing (if I’d been able to catch the words), set to music that suggested Stravinsky – The Soldier’s Tale perhaps – which was mocking and often a clever continuation of the words just uttered; the players extracted all the wit and irreverence to be found in the music which in the end, I have to confess, lacked the substance of a work such as Prokofiev’s.

Poulenc’s Sextet, from the 1930s, was an entirely different matter. A splendid start demands: ‘Look here!’ and the instruments then enter as if the room suddenly fills with a crown of lively chattering party-goers. But the variously sober or sentimental phases are just as entertaining, as Poulenc shows how happy music – written in the depths of the 1930s depression – still has a place in the modern world. It is light music in a sense (like the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro), but cast in unconventional shapes; full of wit, character, colour and brilliantly scored for the instruments, particularly the piano part which Diedre Irons played with such strength and insouciance. The audience clapped long enough to win a repeat of a section of the Poulenc second movement.

(A revision and expansion of the abbreviated review in The Dominion Post)

Mulled wine with Mozart and Strauss at Paekakariki

Trio in E flat, K 498 (Mozart), Four pieces from Eight Pieces for violin, viola and piano, Op 83 (Bruch), Violin Sonata in E flat, Op 18 – first and second movements (Strauss), Three Russian Songs for violin, viola and piano (Glinka)

Cristina Vaszilcsin (violin), Peter Garrity (viola), Catherine McKay (piano)

Paekakariki Memorial Hall, Sunday 5 July 2009

There’s not a large repertoire for a piano trio that involves viola instead of cello: though there ought to be. For along with the viola’s delicious C string that provides an opulent, legato bass line, the piano can, after all, supply most of the bass quality below that. 

The violin version of Mozart’s Clarinet Trio (Kegelstatt) provides one fine example; unfortunately, the eight pieces that Bruch wrote late in life for the combination, while agreeable, are not in the same class at all; the unpretentious Glinka pieces were at least their equal in simple musical charm.

Though I remember clearly my first hearing of the enchanting Mozart piece, in the record department of a Wellington department store in the 1970s, I have always been disappointed with the premature ending of the first movement whose richness of inspiration seems to me to be worth at least ten minutes. Nothing could have been more ravishing that the warmth of these three instruments in the lively acoustic of the Paekakariki hall, with its very acceptable piano. One of the benefits of the violin transcription is the prominence of the viola, given at least equal status with the clarinet in the original version; Peter Garrity took full advantage of the beautiful writing in the second movement, relishing the extensive passages in its low register.

For the clarinet part, Mozart seeks to demonstrate its tonal beauty as much as the skill of the player – his friend Stadler – and Cristina Vaszilcsin’s violin simply matched the viola’s voice: the two were so at one.

The piano was in equally happy accord, and Catherine McKay’s bell-like contributions in the Finale created such a joyous experience.

Four of Max Bruch’s Eight Pieces for these instruments (Nos 1, 2, 4 and 5), filled out the first half: pleasant, well-made but, apart from the characteristic No 5, Romanian melody, hardly memorable.

The last piece in the concert was another somewhat slight work – Glinka’s transcriptions of three Russian songs – tastefully crafted transcriptions, to which the trio brought the same idiomatic care that they had to the other pieces in the programme. 

The second half had opened with Richard Strauss’s Violin Sonata, a somewhat discursive, richly decorative work, but convincing evidence of Strauss’s ability to create and sustain interest in an extended form.  Violinist and pianist moved readily to Strauss’s late romantic opulence – two thirds of it anyway, as Cristina Vaszilcsin begged the audience’s forgiveness for omitting the sonata’s last movement, suggesting a visit to Greytown where she and Catherine McKay would play it all.

Such a cut would only have been a problem for those who knew it well enough for the sound of the tantalizing start of the Finale to come into their heads at the end of the Andante cantabile. Nevertheless, all would have been grateful for the romantically seductive performance of the two movements, so much at home with the yearning arpeggiated motifs of the Allegro and the seductive Andante with its pretty, Zerbinetta (Ariadne auf Naxos)-like little tune, and ending on a quiet note. The odd blemish in the piano passed almost unnoticed, such was the charm and rapport shown by the two. Nevertheless, it did leave the little question, as we were left rather wanting more Strauss, why its last movement was cut and the little Glinka pieces put in its place.

 

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 50th Anniversary

NZSO NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA

50th Anniversary Tour, July 2009

Paul Daniel (conductor)

John Chen (piano)

NZSO National Youth Orchestra

NATALIE HUNT – Only to the Highest Mountain

RAVEL – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

MAHLER – Symphony No.7

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,  Saturday 4th July (also Christchurch, Wednesday 8th July, and Auckland Friday 19th July)

This concert marked an historic occasion for the NZSO Youth Orchestra, 2009 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Youth Orchestra’s conception, thanks to the vision, energy, skill and commitment of the newly-appointed Principal Conductor of the National Orchestra, John Hopkins, who put his dream of forming a nation-wide orchestra for promising young players into action in 1959 with concerts in Lower Hutt and Wellington, in September of that year. Their programme included a Handel Overture, Delius’s “Walk to the Paradise Garden”, the Beethoven First Symphony, Mendelssohn’s ubiquitous Violin Concerto, and Glinka’s Polonaise from “A Life for the Czar”. Fifty years later, the same orchestra was programming the Mahler Seventh Symphony, an indication of the enormous technical and interpretative advances made in the interim by the country’s young musicians, such an undertaking being of an order that would have daunted the National Orchestra of half-a-century ago, let alone their newly-formed youthful counterparts.

Before the concert began, a former member of the orchestra, violinist Wilma Smith, talked with the audience, and to everybody’s delight introduced the same John Hopkins, over from Australia for the anniversary, now in his eighties, but with the same boyish grin and bright piercing eyes, ascending the podium and waving to the audience, acknowledging the plaudits pouring in from all sides – a pity that the flowers arrived so quickly that he didn’t get the chance to have the microphone put into his hands for a few words (he managed a “Thank you very much!” as he left the stage, again to great applause, shaking hands with a few of the youthful musicians who were now coming onto the platform to begin the concert). I would imagine that he had plenty of other opportunities to speak at the various functions planned for the celebrations, but I still would have liked to hear a couple of his verbatim thoughts at the occasion of the concert.

Paul Daniel, the latest of a series of NYO guest conductors with an impressive performing pedigree, took the podium, and with little further ado set in motion the first item, composer-in-residence Natalie Hunt’s “Only to the Highest Mountain”. At a mere five minutes’ duration, the composer set herself very little time to make an impression and get the salient points of her work across to the listeners; but from the beginning the arresting, bird-like calls of the antiphonally-placed oboe and cor anglais were able to coax our sensibilities towards and into a kind of nature-ambience suggesting maritime influences, subaqueous rumblings and light-shafts of wind and brass tone interacting with string ostinati whose oceanic figurations played a part in defining the music’s origins. I was able to talk briefly with the composer after the concert and she confirmed the references to the sea, with the weaving of undulating rhythms and textures into the music, in a way that occasionally reminded me of Sibelius’s music for “The Tempest”. What the music lacked in breadth it made up for in sheer atmosphere and focus, with occasionally daring effects such as the shaking by string players of sheets of their music to create a rustling effect. And there’s something proverbial about that kind of circumstance, about saying what one has to say, succinctly and to the point and then stopping, to telling effect…..

Somebody who had a similar penchant for economy was Ravel, whose Piano Concerto for the Left Hand was also featured in the concert, the solo part played with a stunning amalgam of élan and sensitivity by John Chen, supported to the hilt by the orchestra under Paul Daniel. The performance brought out all the music’s unities and contrasts, from the very opening’s “slumbering giant” orchestral ambiences to the pianist’s absolutely electrifying entry, capped off by a gravity-defying upward flourish, again setting the tumultuous orchestral tutti that followed in bold relief. Some marvellous moments – the limpid beauty of the pianist’s playing, and soulful bassoon and cor anglais solos, characteristic of the orchestra’s individual instrumental contributions work – testified to the all-round excellence of the performers, even if the build-up to the swaggering march mid-work lacked the sheer weight that professional players would have been able to summon at that point. No reservations about the wealth of detailing from individual players and sections during the march itself, or the energy and incisiveness of John Chen’s marvellous playing (scintillating repeated-note cascades from soloist and orchestra at one point, and complete control over the music’s character-changes to filigree scamperings, wind solos following suit). In between these episodes, the march gathered terrific momentum of an almost barbaric splendour, again with colourful detailing from the winds, beginning with the bassoon, and building up to the full orchestra most resplendently. The grandly ritualized final few pages of the work again go back to what seem like primordial beginnings with the piano musing in its lowest registers,  reawakening those same instruments that began the work, and eventually goading them into shouts of triumph towards an emphatic, non-nonsense ending of a colourful concerto.

Thus far in the concert the focus had been on either the composer (Natalie Hunt with her work “Only to the Highest Mountain”), or the soloist (John Chen in the Ravel Left-Hand Concerto). Now, with the major work of the evening, the Mahler Seventh Symphony, it was the turn of conductor Paul Daniel and the orchestra to take centre-stage, which they did with a vengeance. The Symphony is Mahler’s second-longest, one of those works which, after you’ve experiences a performance you can’t remember what the world was really like when you began it. It’s an extraordinary work, with two long and demanding outer movements, flanking three “character” pieces, two of which are called “Nachtmusik” by the composer, in between which is a spooky Scherzo.

Right from the beginning, orchestra and conductor showed their mettle, everybody digging into the grim opening utterances with gusto, the tenor horn solo played with extraordinary virtuosity and characterful point by Luke Christiansen.  Paul Daniel encouraged string playing of the utmost conviction and commitment at a pace that allowed a sense of something gathering momentum and purpose, the allegro creating the necessary “flailing” effect without rushing. In fact all through the first movement the tempi seemed beautifully judged, allowing the players technical and expressive room in which to pour their very beings in what sounded and felt like a most satisfying way. Though the orchestra lacked tonal weight in places, the “lean and hungry” impression this created actually worked to the music’s advantage, as the textures never sounded overblown and bloated, always realizing the composer’s tremendous variety of timbral incident, and registering the character of each mood-change, such as the typically “far from the madding crowd” episode in the first movement, nostalgic brass fanfares helping to bring about what seemed like a transformed world for a few moments, the abyss temporarily forgotten (though not very far away), the chamber-like scoring for winds and brass (including the four-note-quote from the Dvorak ‘Cello Concerto, which I always enjoy) leading via a sweeping harp glissando to the big string tune which, for a short while, allows the music to wear its heart on its sleeve. The return of the “grim reaper” opening featured a scalp-prickling confrontation between trombone and tenor horn, creating a great, black sound, the brass like stone-giants confronting one another across glacial valleys. The players gave the dotted-rhythm motive extra juice, aided by the timpani, as the music gathered momentum, through a brief backward-looking hiatus and into the movement’s final pages, the excitement generated being too much for the conductor’s baton which escaped its owner’s grip and flew spectacularly through the air a few bars before the end, landing among the brasses, who never missed a beat, driving home the music’s abrupt conclusion, and only then relaying the errant stick back to its owner (to the delight and amusement of the audience).

Mahler’s scheme for this symphony comprised an epic first movement, followed by three “mood-pieces” two of which the composer named “Nachtmusik” (though he could well have given the middle Scherzo the same title), and a concluding finale which is as festive, energetic and joyous as the first movement is grim, dark and wild. Nachtmusik I is a purple-hued processional through evocative gloamings, containing both naturalistic and stylized elements, the rhythms mostly slow-march, but with occasionally dance-like episodes, pastoral allusions (cowbells and hunting-horns) and irruptions like the timpani’s sudden forceful reiteration of the basic rhythm near the beginning. The young players made the most of their opportunities throughout, though the swift tempo adopted by Daniels meant that some detail (for example the eerie bouncing of bows on strings) for me flowed too quickly to properly register, and a couple of the rhythmic dovetailings towards the movement’s end became scrambled as the players strove to keep up instead of deliciously fitting their voices in with the others – still, if a bit breathless in places, the phantasmagorical processional aspect was vividly conveyed by all concerned. And one really must put in a special word for the horns in this movement, their call-and echo sequences at the beginning, and in other places, beautifully played.

The scherzo that followed is probably Mahler’s most “haunted” symphonic movement, with the fantastic element very much to the fore in an ironically-expressed manner. The strings have a great deal to do throughout, and the NYO players gave it everything they had, with plenty of “schwung” to the phrasing, their lurching aspect perfectly matched by the tuba’s elephantine comments and the solo viola’s personal “danse macabre”. Despite somebody in the orchestra dropping something noisily in the middle of a “tuba dreams” sequence, the ambience was maintained unbroken, with the brass anticipating the composer’s Ninth Symphony Scherzo at one point, joining in with the waltz-tempo towards the end in a suitably riotous fashion. Great though the playing was throughout the movement, I thought the second “Nachtmusik” which followed even more special, with Ben Morrison’s juicy opening violin solo and the tender voicings of guitar and mandolin setting the scene for some lovely things to follow – a gorgeous horn solo making the most of the first appearance of the movement’s “big tune”, then matched by the violins, Paul Daniel encouraging them to give the melody all the juices they could muster, with goosebump-making results.

If the finale wasn’t quite at this level of execution, it was partly due to the music’s sheer difficulty , and partly because Paul Daniel’s interpretation was so volatile, an approach which took no prisoners and “fronted up large” to the score’s every variation of tempo, dynamics, colour and nuance – you could say, to the point where the music’s through-line felt obscured by detail. I would imagine the conductor wouldn’t have wanted such a large musical structure to “sag” at any point, with tempi that may have given the players more time to breathe, but could have easily resulted in plodding. It was certainly a vividly-conceived viewpoint, and undoubtedly a challenge for the orchestra but even so, it seemed to me to put the emphasis for these young players overtly on the music’s technical demands at the expense of the work’s overall coherence as a symphony. The brass, who’d played so well throughout, were under real pressure in places, and had a few uncharacteristically uncomfortable moments with their gleaming fanfare-like statements that pop up along the music’s course, though they did really well in other places, for instance over the top of the strings’ fugato-like scamperings (so reminiscent of the Fifth Symphony’s finale), while front-desk strings and wind beautifully pointed their chamber-like sequences a little later, underlining Mahler’s skill at creating diaphanous textures from such large forces. This is to perhaps cavil unnecessarily – generally, the challenges that Daniel’s approach set for the young players were triumphantly met, with the thrills matching and eventually supplanting the spills, the symphony’s last few pages raising the roof and the temperatures of all concerned.

The pecuniary appetite for contemporary music

Recently the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra thought of a brave idea to get a big audience to a work they expected to be rather cold-shouldered, on account of the reputation of its composer.
The orchestra had programmed Schoenberg’s huge Gurrelieder, which
Wellingtonians will recall in a wonderful performance at a festival ten years or so ago. They offered a money-back guarantee. Sceptics wondered whether there wouldn’t be a lot of people who would claim a refund, regardless, to get a freebie. But the promoters asserted that their audiences were not like that.
A commentator in a British music magazine wrote that his heart sank when he heard the remark “I know what I like and I like what I know”, as it suggests a premature death-wish, “Death is nature’s way of telling you to stop exploring music” [or anything else], he says. “Why pull up the draw-bridge and block out the new?”
Richard Morrison went on the suggest that, in these risky times when many musical bodies are walking a tightrope between the red and the black, let there be reciprocity to the money-back deal: “If a concert sends us out into the night with our spirits exhilarated, as hundreds of concerts do, why not whiz back to the box office and buy 10 tickets for the next five concerts?”

National Youth Orchestra principals in chamber music

Serenade No 10, Op 79 (Persichetti), three movements of String Quartet in E minor, Op 44 No 2 (Mendelssohn), Introduction and Allegro (Ravel)

NZSO National Youth Orchestra principals

St Andrew’s on The Terrace, lunchtime Wednesday 1st July

The long-standing, free lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s on The Terrace, most Wednesdays, present a great variety of music: jazz, brass and military bands, student groups, ethnic ensembles, as well as conventional, classical music – solo singers, piano, chamber groups, choirs.

This was the week that the National Youth Orchestra gathered for rehearsals in preparation for their major concert at the weekend; eight section principals took time out to play chamber music.

The result was a most rewarding concert.

A few years ago a composer like Vincent Persichetti would have been slightly disparaged, for music that was rather traditional in form and tonal character, failing to exploit the latest academic fashions. Happily, his music can now be enjoyed without apology; in any case, no one could mistake its idiom as anything but of the past 40 years. It employed Lucy Anderson on flute and Ingrid Bauer on harp who played it with sensitivity and alacrity. It consisted of eight very short movements, starting with an Andante prelude that involved some pitchless strumming by the harp. The following sections alternated between allegros and slow pieces, in clearly delineated moods, rhythms. The third section – Andante Grazioso – giving the flute some charming, diatonic, legato music, was nevertheless keen-edged and pithy, and the fourth section, even slower, was more warm-toned, with subtle flute vibrato, echoing Debussy and Ravel.

In the penultimate movement – Adagietto – flute and harp randomly dropped languid notes with tact and musicality.

The Mendelssohn string quartet was without its short Scherzo, second movement; we heard the best of it, one of his finest, deeply felt chamber works. The playing by these four young musicians made me think of the way many a famous string quartet has begun, with four gifted conservatorium students finding an affinity and a determination to devote themselves to the most refined and sophisticated of musical genres.

Leader Amalia Hall has been in the eye of the musical public for some years and Ben Morrison, second violin, has already gained something of a soloist’s reputation: their playing respectively subdued or emphatically vivid or dynamically subtle. Violist Nicholas Hancox was heard in beautifully calm, meandering passages in the Andante, while one was always aware of cellist Edward King’s attentive underpinning of the textures and musical lines as well as on his own.

The performance held the attention throughout.

A rare chance to hear, live, Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro was, for me, the main draw of this concert. (I indulge myself remembering my first hearing with an Air Force friend, musically more educated than I, during a Sunday off during CMT at Taieri Air Base in 1956).

It involved, in addition to the string quartet, flutist Hannah Darroch, clarinettist Hayden Sinclair and again, Ingrid Bauer. The placing of woodwinds to the left and the harp to the right of the four string players contributed to the sonic interest of the piece which danced and shimmered – echoes of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau of a few years before. Flute and clarinet listened to each other to find a beguiling tonal blend.

As explained in the interesting programme note, it was intended as a demonstration of the powers of the pedal harp, commissioned by the leading Paris piano house, Érard, in reaction to competition from Pleyel’s new chromatic harp for which Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane had been commissioned.

So it was to be expected that the harpist should make the most of her quasi-soloist role and there was no denying the arresting character of her cadenza with its perhaps exaggerated dynamic contrasts between her right and left hands.

The gathering of such a combination of instruments, permitting less familiar and often very beautiful chamber works to be played, is rare and the result, especially from such sensitive players, should never be missed.