Day: 8 September 2009

Guitars at Old St Paul’s Lunchtime concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Guitar music by Andrew York, Radames Gnatali, Brahms, Piazzolla, Paulo Bellinati

Wellington Guitar Duo (Christopher Hill and Owen Moriarty)

Old St Paul’s, Tuesday 8 September 2009

The guitar is not, perhaps, an instrument that you think of as devotional, adapted to what you do in a church. In fact, however, the delicacy and subtlety of this string instrument sits very comfortably in a fairly small church, especially one with such architectural and historic beauty as Old St Paul’s. The guitar, after all is a close relative of the lute and its keyed descendants such as the clavichord, harpsichord or spinet.

To its disadvantage is the relatively small repertoire of music of more than a century old, and the dominance of much of its recent repertoire by Hispanic dance music, not to mention the universe of popular music. We are not used to thinking about guitar music as being as important or as valuable as that of instruments more central to western European music tradition.

So it is common to fortify programmes with arrangements of acknowledged classical pieces: on this occasion the candidate was the Andante, Theme and Variations movement from Brahms’s String Sextet, Op 18, one of his best loved works, and music that, through John Williams’s arrangement, sounded extremely well on two guitars, overlooking those parts in which your mind’s ear longs for the low sonorities of a viola and cello. Its gently shifting harmonies seemed to be just what a sensitive guitarist would choose, though a repeated accompanying figure became monotonous in the fourth variation.

The programme of Christopher Hill and Owen Moriarty began with a piece by United States composer and guitarist Andrew York. His Sanzen-in was inspired by the ancient temple and garden in Kyoto which, with gently syncopated rhythms in common time, evoked a past but not perhaps a Japanese past; the flavour was generalized Latin rather than Asian.

The rest of the programme was of South American music: by two Brazilian composers, Radames Gnatali (two pieces from his Suite Retratos) and Paulo Bellinati. Gnatali was born in 1906 in Porto Alegre (get out your atlas) and his four movement Retratos was composed in 1956 and arranged by the composer for many different solo instruments and ensmbles . The beguiling waltz, Ernesto Nazareth, recalled music like Granados’s Valses poeticos, with its attractive rubato and dreamy character; the second, Chiquinha Gonzaga, presumably named for a musician friend, exercised the two players’ rhythmic dexterity.

Bellinati’s Jongo ended the recital. Written in 1978, using one of the many Brazilian dance rhythms, it has become a standard in the guitar repertoire, and the duo’s performance was highly accomplished.

There were two very contrasted pieces by the famous Argentinian, Astor Piazzolla (which Christopher Hill explained he had transcribed from a recording because of difficulty in obtaining scores – one hopes, not just to avoid paying royalties). One, Zita, was one of his characteristically elaborate and complex tangos where one admired the players’ ensemble through the spiky, unpredictable rhythms; the second was Whisky, and indeed created a feeling of happy disorientation.

A programme of this kind made me aware both of the riches that the past half century have brought to the guitar repertoire and the depths of (at least my) ignorance of the world of Latin American music, apart from the few obvious names. Would it have been a good idea to have used a recital like this to elevate this music, by its presentation, to the status of a comparable recital of European classical music, with documentation in the shape of informative programme notes about the composers and the music?

It seems a shame to perpetuate the impression of guitar music, and Latin American music generally, as light-weight and not worthy of musicological attention, by not offering background material of interest to a (let us assume) musically cultivated audience such as comes to these concerts.

　

Keeping the piano recital alive – Stephen De Pledge

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stephen de Pledge – Piano Recital at the Town Hall

Music by Beethoven, Debussy, Mayerl, Brahms,
Psathas, McLeod, Harris, Prokofiev

Wellington Town Hall, 8th September 2009

It had to happen, sooner or later – a piano recital at a major Wellington venue, the Town Hall, no less (the event graduating from the Ilott Theatre presumably by dint of weight of public interest, even though the Town Hall galleries were closed to the public). The artist was Stephen De Pledge, one of New Zealand’s finest pianists, presently on a nation-wide Chamber Music New Zealand tour. There’s an opinion afoot that piano recitals don’t attract as much public interest as do other musical events, a disturbingly blinkered sentiment which, if given enough currency, could do a lot of harm in the wrong quarters. Imagine a situation where concertgoers were thus deprived of regular opportunities to hear “live” a sizeable body of the Western world’s greatest and most significant music!

Some of this music was presented with admirable aplomb and considerable sensitivity at Stephen De Pledge’s Town Hall recital on Tuesday evening. The very cosmopolitan programme spanned a number of centuries and covered a variety of styles, attitudes and emotions – if Stephen De Pledge seemed more at home with some of the pieces than with others, his presentations were always expertly crafted and constantly thought-provoking.

I thought his Beethoven classically restrained and elegantly gradated, perhaps a bit too mellifluously delivered to convey the “Pathetique” Sonata’s full revolutionary force – his sinuous keyboard sheen gave the fiery allegros in the outer movements more of a Mendelssohnian feel, though in the first movement he scored points with his “back to the very beginning” repeat (which I had never heard done before), and the charged quality with which he invested the dramatic pauses and silences that abound in the music. His sensitivity brought an almost coy reticence to the slow movement’s great theme, less a case of “strong men wiping away silent tears” than an inwardly-expressed delight. The minor-key middle section was lightly etched, again sensitive and intimate almost to a fault, never singing full-throatedly, but content to delineate the delights of order and serenity. Again, the finale, though it had moments of almost Lisztian brilliance such as just before the main theme’s recapitulation, was notable here for its order and restraint, reminding us that the composer, for all his revolutionary impulses, still lived in an aristocratic age.

Before continuing with the Debussy Stephen De Pledge spoke to the audience, as he continued to do throughout the recital, in this case offering some thoughts regarding the contrasts between Beethoven and the music he was about to play.  He had only to touch the first few notes of Reflects dans l’eau from Debussy’s Book One of Images to convey to us his absolute identification with the composer’s sound-world – all the limpid textures and colours of the music were captured in an enchanting sound-web of suggestion. The Hommage à Rameau which followed was a beautifully wrought fusion of antiquity and timelessness, while the final Mouvement tripped the light fantastic with bell-like cascades of light at once singing and shimmering, the music’s extraordinary “layered “quality realised to the full for our delight. The two Billy Mayerl pieces which followed brought to our attention the work of a classically-trained composer and performer who sought fame playing the popular “syncopated” music of the age, but whose music is informed with all kinds of “serious” influences. Stephen De Pledge charmed and lulled us with the graceful melodic elasticity of Shallow Waters, before whirling us along a madcap Railroad Rhythm faster than any British Rail passenger would have expected to go, complete with raucous whistles and clattering point-changes, the disappearing juggernaut saluting the exhilarated traveller with a farewell whistle at the end.

The second half was launched with Brahms’ two Op.79 Rhapsodies, played at times with almost elfin textures, more sinuous and lean than is often the case with performances of this composer’s music. If I occasionally wanted more girth and melodic glint in the big moments, I appreciated the playing’s remarkable poise and control, with many new things brought out in the accompanying figurations. The pianist then “placed” the three Landscape Preludes (taken from a set commissioned by De Pledge from a number of New Zealand composers) as a central oasis of calm between the storms and stresses of the Brahms and Prokofiev items. I loved John Psathas’ Lisztian explorations of harmony and texture in the first Prelude “Sleeper”, and felt that De Pledge similarly brought out both the detail and drama of Jenny McLeod’s West Coast evocation, and the essential solitariness of Ross Harris’s A landscape with too few lovers, a meditation on worlds which have only remembrances.

Concluding the recital as scheduled was Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, one of the “War Trilogy” works, and sounding suitably confrontational in Stephen De Pledge’s hands. His treatment of the first movement I thought more anxiety-ridden than savage, bringing out the music’s intermittent dark lyricism in between the fiercer episodes, and articulating the contrasts with great command of detail. The slow movement’s sombre beauty nicely flowered, the pianist bringing out the orchestral quality of the writing in the impassioned middle section, before drawing the remains together for reassuring words of comfort at the conclusion. The finale took no prisoners, its three-note motto hammering the toccata-like argument home, De Pledge moving from elfin lightness through sinuous strength and steely brutality towards a breathlessly cataclysmic climax. Despite his exertions the pianist then gave us a palate-cleansing encore, appropriately another piece of Debussy, The Little Shepherd from Children’s Corner, by turns animated and wistful, and as with the Book One Images, magically recreated.