Month: February 2011

Kugeltov Klezmer music lends a joyous note to the festival

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival: Kugeltov Klezmer Quartet (NZSO players – Robin Perks (violin) and Malcolm Struthers (double bass); Tui Clark (clarinet) and Ross Harris (piano accordion)


St John’s Church, Nelson. Thursday 10 February 1pm

I first heard the Kugeltov Quartet in the Festival concerts at St Andrew’s on the Terrace last March, though they had been around for a while before that, and I was immediately enraptured by the music. There’s no barrier to its access, as it lies beneath so much European classical music; furthermore I’d come to love the popular music of all the Balkan countries when I lived in Greece in the 60s.


It is probably true that the success of the concert lies even more in the energy and idiomatic grasp of the various styles by the musicians themselves. It would be hard to imagine more spirited and brilliant players, especially those in the leading melodic roles, Robin Perks on the violin and Tui Clark of the clarinet. Both slipped easily into the boisterous manner characterised by slides between notes, shrill, squealing clarinet forays that seemed to eliminate the sound of a reed altogether, and rhythms that made it hard to stay in the seat.


There were about 25 pieces on the programme some grouped together and played as if they were parts of a larger piece. Ross Harris had written many of them.


So close are many of these tunes to the traditional music of various Ethnic groups of Eastern Europe that I have always wondered whether this Jewish music derived from the music of the Slav and Magyar – Christian or Muslim – people who surrounded them. Or the other way round.


Typically the music varied between fast and riotous dances that seemed to call for very fast foot-work, jumping and spinning, such as Der Heyser Bulgar and Freyt Aykh Yidelekh, and slow and soulful ones like Kale Bazetsn or Harris’s Vuhin gaitzu. And there were a few pieces that called up a distinct tradition like Greber and Dobriden, both in triple time.


They ended the concert with one of the most popular tunes from Ukraine, Hava Naglia, which brought the audience to stamping feet and clapping hands.


In the early festivals the trad jazz band Nairobi Trio was a popular highlight, playing in the Boathouse on Rocks Road. It’s good that the festival still imports such music that is in spirited contrast to most of the music and also offers such a strong antidote to ubiquitous pop and rock music.

Lewis and Houstoun with Winterreise: a highlight in Nelson

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival


Winterreise by Schubert sung by Keith Lewis (tenor) with Michael Houstoun at the piano.


Nelson School of Music, Wednesday 9 February 7.30pm

Another highlight of the festival (there were almost daily) was the presence of Keith Lewis and Michael Houstoun to perform Schubert’s Winterreise. They performed to a not quite full auditorium; many, after hearing reports from friends who had heard them, would have regretted not being there.


It’s a pity, nevertheless that some of the competition on this evening came from the festival itself, with a sold-out concert at Motueka featuring the Hermitage String Trio in music that was not played in Nelson (by Schubert, Tanyeyev and Mozart – though the Divertimento K 563 had been played in Nelson on Saturday).


This cycle of 24 songs takes about an hour and a quarter; there was a break of a few minutes in the middle, but the audience sat quiet and transfixed by this consummate, moving performance by both musicians, who have to rank among the finest New Zealand musicians working at the present time.


First, I should note an innovation that sets an admirable precedent for voice recitals: the projection of surtitles. Occasional whines are still heard about them in the opera house though I have been a wholehearted supporter from their first appearance in the late 80s. If there are plausible objections to their use in opera, however, there can be none in the recital. The decision was made to not include the words or translations in the programme, to avoid the interrupting rustle of collective page turning and the dispiriting vision, for the artists, of audience heads down during the performance. In recital, eyes do not need to be constantly on the stage watching movements, gestures, expressions; nothing is lost by raising the eyes to read the words. And the surtitle screen was of ideal size, allowing easy reading of full translations in images that were very clear.

At the end of the concert booklets containing full German and English texts were distributed. The whole process was handled with great care and thoughtfulness.


My expectations had been high, but the reality left me considerably more overwhelmed that I had been prepared for. Lewis’s voice is probably not everyone’s cup of tea, but by any objective measure it is a beautifully polished instrument, with a distinctive timbre; it has a quite wide compass, with a variety of colours that change with the tessitura; he also makes good use of colour changes in the same tessitura. His voice is still very firm and clear, not at all afflicted by excessive vibrato.


Right at the beginning of the cycle, with ‘Gute Nacht’, the poet at once confronts us with heart-break, and the anguish is plain in the music and in Lewis’s voice. The poet Wilhelm Müller then employs a variety of imagery and metaphor to describe his emotions and the ways in which he attempts to deal with, or to succumb to, his grief. Lewis varied his voice to reflect these feelings with great finesse, for example, with a penetrating chill in his low notes in ‘Gefrorne Träne’; and the rushing piano chords filled with terror as he flees the town that now symbolises betrayal for him. In ‘Rast’ he seems to find consolation only for it to turn to anguish again in the last line, which Lewis captured so keenly. A similar, strange terror invades his voice in a song like ‘Die Krähe’.


Houstoun’s piano is of course omnipresent, of almost equal importance, presaging a mood or event, and supporting the vocal line with infinite sympathy. A moment like the beginning of ‘Im Dorfe’ was striking, with its tremolo piano chords and then again the racing scales that describe the passing storm in ‘Der stürmishe Morgen’.


There are the moments of calm, and consolation, like ‘Der LIndenbaum’ and ‘Frühlingstraum’ in which a cheerful triple time allows the singer to lighten his voice, only to collapse in despair as the cocks crow towards the end. A 6/8 rhythm again represents fleeting hope in ‘Täuschung’ (Delusion).


One of the most profound and moving songs is ‘Der Wegweiser’ with its repeated notes that rise forlornly at the end of the phrase. But in spite of the surfeit of grief and misery in all preceding 23 songs that accumulates unbearably in the last group, nothing can diminish the sheer despair, or eclipse the musical genius that has created ‘Der Leiermann’, which Lewis sang with an emotion as profound as I have ever heard.


Perhaps just one matter to remark – his use of the score throughout. Many singers of his stature would have such a work securely by heart. There is a good case for using a score, however, for there is no connection between musical gifts and a thorough command of a work, and the confidence to do away altogether with the safety net of printed pages. And his very infrequent glances at the audience through scarcely opened eyes seemed a little disconcerting, affecting in some way the contact with the audience. If it matters to the audience, and I think for most it does, he should school himself to make that contact.


But what really mattered was what the voice uttered and the piano delivered as equal partners: a performance of one of the greatest masterpieces in all music that was utterly memorable.

‘A-Mews-ment’ in Nelson with classical pieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Real classical music, as it should be

Douglas Mews (fortepiano), Douglas Beilman (violin), Euan Murdoch (cello)

 

Haydn: Piano Trio No 40 in F sharp minor, Hob. 15/26; C P E Bach: Fantasia and Rondo in C; Mozart: Piano Trio in  B flat, K 502

 

St John’s Church, Wednesday 9 February, 1pm

 

The remarks by both Euan Murdoch and Douglas Mews on the tuning, instrument characteristics and performance techniques in the late 18th century were very illuminating for the audience, both those with some familiarity with and knowledge of the issues, and others. It emerged here that three keyboard instruments had made the journey from Wellington to equip performers for several of the concerts involving pre-1800 music: a chamber organ and harpsichord used in the Bach concert, and the fortepiano at this one. They were all loaned by the New Zealand School of Music. 

 

Those who had heard the Haydn played on modern instruments may initially have been disconcerted by the small, but very clear sound generated by the keyboard, the size of the sound being very similar to the contemporary harpsichord, given the smaller case, lower tension on the strings and wooden instead of iron frame. So it took little time for it to start to sound normal. The most conspicuous continuing difference is the rapid dying of the sound of the vibrating strings, which gave an altogether different meaning to those elements of the piece that might have been called ‘Sturm und Drang’,  that extreme aspect of the baroque that presaged the Romantic era.

 

From the same decade was Mozart’s Piano Trio in B flat. Because Mozart’s music generally seems slightly more modern than Haydn’, this trio, in ‘authentic’ clothes was perhaps more surprising than the Haydn. It emerged with short breaths, brilliant, brittle; there is nothing showy in the writing, as the piano trio was aimed more at the domestic market than at professional performance. The string players used very little vibrato, though it was not entirely absent, at the end of a long-held note. Melody is slight though agreeable, with more attention devoted to the style of ornamentation, which presumably entertained the amateur pianist more than it might today.

 

Between the two trios Mews played a rather extraordinary piece by Bach’s second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, who was more esteemed than his father in the late 18th century. Melody came in very abbreviated scraps, and any sort of development was abruptly denied, as another quite different idea was thrown into the progress, or an unexpected key-change into a distant key, perhaps after a strident foreign bass note, or simply a short silence.  It was an entertaining episode though I confess to having remained moderately unmoved by most of CPE’s music.  

 

The playing of both string players, with instruments of the era – Beilman’s a genuine antique though of confused provenance, and Murdoch’s a modern replica, had all the hall-marks of thoroughly practised musicians in the special field of historically-informed performance.

 

Roscoe celebrates Liszt’s 200th birthday in Nelson

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Adam Chamber Music Festival. Martin Roscoe (piano)

Liszt: Ballade No 2 in B minor, Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude, Schlaflos, Frage und Antwort, La lugubre Gondola, Tarantella (Venezia e Napoli), Sonata in B minor; encore – Transcription of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde.


Nelson School of Music. Tuesday 8 February 7.30pm

This was a recital, I had thought, that would have been considered one of the real highlights of the festival and would accordingly have been sold out. It was not; perhaps three-quarters full. It may have been the lingering notion that Liszt’s extraordinary pianism excludes the possibility of producing good music, or that Roscoe’s name was not sufficiently exciting to bring people out regardless of the music.

Roscoe spoke before most of the pieces making clear his own view of Liszt’s importance in the history of music and the greatness of much of his music. For me the only problem was the combined effect of a piano with a somewhat unruly bass resonance, encouraged by the very responsive acoustic of the auditorium, and further exploited by Roscoe’s somewhat formidable treatment of passages above mezzo-forte.


The second Ballade used to be fairly familar when I was young, but it’s one of the many pieces that’s been dismissed by critics who focus on the orthodox forms and structures that they can see in the printed score, not daring to trust a response to the simple impact of the performed music. Roscoe brought its drama vividly to life, while also allowing the quiet, reflective passages to suggest a metaphysical state. Though the double octaves were a bit too much, the music’s subsidence to a poetic ending forgave everything. The Bénédiction is one of the many remarkable pieces in the collection, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, and while there are a few passages that don’t wear well, seeming overblown, and Roscoe’s left hand left the accompanying figures rather mechanical, the totality remains a thing of romantic splendour.


Then came two of Liszt’s late piano pieces: Schlaflos, and La lugubre Gondola. Again, the opening of Schlaflos was too loud, far louder than was needed to wake the corpse being carried along the Grand Canal in the next piece. The two performances were valuable in reminding the doubters that Liszt was a subtle, inward creative spirit, particularly in his last years; they were arresting. To return to the central Liszt, Roscoe then played the Tarantella from Venezia e Napoli, a supplement to the Second Year of the Années de Pèlerinage, Book II. One of his most flamboyant pieces, Roscoe played it as fast as possible.

All this was a prelude to the Sonata in B minor. Roscoe does not perhaps have the gift of thoroughly disguising the work and effort that lies behind a performance of a piece of this kind; he does not make it look easy. Nevertheless, along with the expected quota of blurred moments, it was an impressive performance that seemed driven by a towering sense of purpose and an awareness from the first suggestive notes of the momentous spiritual journey that lay ahead. Such a performance should have allowed the pianist to close the fall-board which remained on the long stick.


An encore after such a challenging journey was hardly to be expected So it was a surprise when, as an encore, he took on the transcription of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde with undiminished romantic power.


Roscoe had put together, in a very short space, a representative selection of Liszt’s huge output of piano music, from the flamboyant early pieces to the spare spiritual pieces of his last years.

Hermitage String Trio on their home territory for the Nelson festival

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‘Hermitage Serenade’

Dohnanyi: Serenade in C, Op 10; Beethoven: Serenade in D, Op 8

 

Hermitage String Trio

 

St John’s Church, Nelson. Tuesday 8 February, 1pm

 

This was really the first display of the visiting trio of Russian players in the festival, though they had been very conspicuous as individuals in most of the earlier concerts.

 

Dohnanyi’s trio is a favourite piece in a repertoire that has not been much enlarged during the past century. There are five fairly brief movements, very distinct and dressed in attractive melody and compositional treatments. The players’ ever-changing and ear-catching articulation contributed, perhaps not really necessarily, to the entertainment.

 

The second movement began with a lovely viola tune against pizzicato violin and cello, unpretentious yet masterly and it was followed by a Scherzo that began as a sort of furious fugue with jazzy chromatic descents. It was a delightful performance of a work filled with the confidence that it was still possible for a composer to evince in the first decade of the 20th century. And it was a splendid example of the impact of players of the top rank with absolutely secure intonation and unity of purpose.

 

Beethoven’s Op 8 Serenade is a work deriving from a similar period of optimism and self-confidence – the period of the French revoution when much of Europe was optimistic about its promise to bring freedom to the peoples of many repressive and absolutist states in Europe – Beethoven, like most thinkers and artists, had great hopes of political progress during the first years of Napoleon’s rule; furthermore, it was before the onset of his deafness.

 

This piece sounds little like the Beethoven of a few years later; in fact Boccherini is a composer that might come to mind if you were hearing it unannounced, though it is more colourful, energetic, filled with better tunes than most of Boccherini. The next guess would be Haydn, for the many curious turns of phrase, sudden changes of pace, of key, of false starts and stops. There are seven shortish movements, like the serenades of his predecessors, Haydn and Mozart. In the last movement, Marcia da capo, there’s quite a long pause at an unexpected point, and then its resumption as if nothing had happened, only to end with an unresolved cadence.

 

The two delightful works made for an ideal lunchtime concert on a sunny Nelson day.

 

Bach by Candlelight in Nelson Cathedral

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Violin Sonata No 1, BWV 1014; Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248/4: aria – ‘Ich will nur dir zu Ehren leben’; Cantata No 41: aria – ‘Woferne Du den edlen Frieden’; Cello Suite No 5, BWV 1011; Organ Prelude and Fugue in G, BWV 541; Four pieces from the Anna Magdalene Notebook; Cantata No 85: recitative and aria – ‘Seht, was die Liebe tut … Ich bin ein guter Hirt’; Violin Concerto in E, BWV 1042

Keith Lewis (tenor), Douglas Mews (harpsichord), Denis Goldfeld and Douglas Beilman (violins), Rolf Gjelsten and Leonid Gorokhov (cellos), Hiroshi Ikematsu (double bass), Mary Ayre (piano), the New Zealand String Quartet

Nelson Cathedral, Monday 7 February, 7.30pm

It has been traditional to use the cathedral’s lighting possibilities as dusk falls to capture a special atmosphere, usually in a concert involving a voice or voices.

For the first time I was sitting on the side, from which the stage was largely obscured by one of the massive romanesque pillars. Keith Lewis was not visible during any of his four arias. It was not so important since in the first aria, from the Christmas Oratorio, I enjoyed his singing which was unstressed and well focused; Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman played the obbligato parts while Rolf Gjelsten and Douglas Mews delivered the continuo.

The second aria was from Cantata No 41, with obbligato parts from Hiroshi Ikematsu and Gjelsten (whose part was particularly interesting), with Mews on a chamber organ. Again Lewis’s voice was mellow and sat comfortably in the music even though at the top it tended to thin: that often matched the emotion of the words, sometimes it didn’t. Though there were moments when the rhythms of voice and instruments came apart, that is no surprise given the hidden traps in Bach’s music.

There were two further Bach arias in the second half. The recitative and aria from Cantata 85, accompanied by Gillian Ansell on the viola, presented more difficulties for Lewis with its awkward, wide intervals. In the aria from Cantata 97 which offered an interesting obbligato role for Helene Pohl, Lewis’s voice traversed the music quite beautifully.

A wide range of instrumental music filled the rest of the programme. The performance of the Violin Sonata No 1 with Douglas Beilman and Douglas Mews showed some lack of pliability and tonal variety, perhaps as the first item on the programme.

The fifth solo cello suite was played by Leonid Gorokhov. It drew a wide variety of reactions as a result of its several unorthodox aspects. The A string is lowered to G; and recent research has showed that the Allemande might be played at twice the usual speed, with the result that it flowed graciously, and the counterpoint that might not be so highlighted was vividly revealed in the fast playing of the remarkable cross-string passages. The curious effect was the relatively slow pace of the Courante, which Gorokhov decorated elaborately. The Sarabande, one of the most striking sections of all the suites, was so highly ornamented that its rhythm became even more difficult to feel than it usually is in a sarabande, The gavotte was very far removed from its peasant origins, so rich was the cello’s tone and the Gigue became an headlong rhythmic gallop, as if there were no bar-lines. The impression was of a very different piece of music from what most cellists have made familiar. My reaction fell somewhere between the extremes, fascinated by the surprises and the extent of the tonal and dynamic nuances but at times feeling they were not there to serve the music as much as to make his interpretation strikingly different.

The first item after the interval was one of the more straight-forward organ Preludes and Fugues, BWV 541. Douglas Mews played it on the main organ with great confidence, creating a thoroughly main-stream organ performance, hardly of the baroque era.

A surprising interlude arrived at that point. Pianist Mary Ayre played four small pieces from the Anna Magdalena Notebook (written for Bach’s second wife) cleanly and unaffectedly.

And finally the Violin Concert in E, BWV 1042, probably the best-known and most popular. Violinist Denis Goldfelt from the Hermitage Trio played the solo part while other members of both ensembles accompanied with the ripieno. It was an exuberant performance, the soloist revealing again his great sensitivity to the music’s character and investing it with deliciously varied dynamics with a tone that was endlessly subtle, warm and brilliant.

Campbell’s clarinet in music from his home

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‘Three Faces of Ebony’

Brahms: Clarinet Sonata in F minor, Op 120 No 1; Timothy Corlis: Raven and the First Man; Allan Gilliland: Suite from the Sound – ‘Parry’s Ground’; David Baker: Dance (1989); Copland: At the River; Srul Glick: The Klezmer’s Wedding (1996)


James Campbell (clarinet), Richard Mapp (piano), New Zealand String Quartet


Nelson School of Music, Monday 7 February 1pm


This lunchtime concert was a showcase for clarinettist James Campbell. In contrast with his problematic work in a Mozart Quintet on Sunday, this was an unmitigated triumph. Apart from the opening sonata by Brahms, and the folk-song arrangement by Copland, the music was unknown, yet it was all approachable and highly entertaining. Not only was it a showcase for Campbell the performer, but it was also a tribute to some of his composer friends in North America and a mark of mutual esteem.


First, the Brahms: one of his last works, written after being inspired by the beautiful playing of the principal clarinettist in the Meiningen Orchestra, Richard Mühlfeld. James Campbell called it one of the greatest clarinet sonatas (the other being Brahms’s second sonata), and he and pianist Richard Mapp offered convincing proof through their wonderful partnership, both demonstrating the same approach to the music. They responded assuredly to the music and to each other, emerging as sturdy and refined Brahms interpreters. The third movement, in slow triple time, is a gorgeous piece, and they played it as if life would go on for ever, and we wished that the music would do just that. And the last movement, sanguine and contented, proved a perfect vehicle to demonstrate the two players’ accord and their sense of scale.


The rest of the concert was given to compositions by Campbell’s friends and colleagues. If the character of the music was any guide, he has acquired friends of rare congeniality and humour. Timothy Corlis’s Raven and the First Men, written last year, was a clarinet quintet, with which the New Zealand String Quartet joined. His piece takes its name from a sculpture in the Vancouver Museum of Anthropology, echoing a legend that describes how a raven opened a clam shell to find little men hiding inside – the first human beings. There was no need to seek detailed connections between music and legend for the music stood on its own firm and adroit feet, employing the clarinet against pizzicato strings with great rhythmic interest, later an agitated section with tremolo strings; sun-lit, lyrical, human; and then an engaging accumulation sounds over in John Adams-like ostinati. I thought it was surprisng music from a country with much more severe weather than New Zealand experiences.


Allan Gilliland wrote a Suite from the Sound (the Parry Sound Festival) for James Campbell and the St Lawrence String Quartet; the quintet played the first movement of it, ‘Parry’s Ground’. It was jazzy, and sunny, with writing for clarinet that recalled the jazz styles of the 50s and 60s. And it offered the chance to hear the NZSQ in a happy, relaxed, idiomatic jazz mode, in delightful accord with the clarinettist.

Dance was a piece for clarinet and piano, the last movement of a sonata that the programme notes said had become a staple of the clarinet repertoire in the United States. I can well believe that, judging by its ebullient, happy nature with its mix of Latin and various jazz styles, from Scott Joplin on. Mapp proved a natural as the partner.


Aaron Copland’s piece from one of his sets of folk song arrangements began in a calm mood with an unclichéd accompaniment, providing a warmly comforting interlude. The recital ended with a piece by Srul Glick, The Klezmer’s wedding: gypsyish, popular, with an improvised feeling, boisterous, with Campbell delighting in the opportunity to use a wide variety of devices that would be impolite in ‘classical’ society.


I never discovered what the title of the concert meant, unless it was that three of the composers Campbell played were African-Americans. The programme notes did not reveal it.


A delightful start to the week’s concerts.

Distinguished guests share Nelson concert of masterpieces

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‘Memories’
Mozart: String Quintet in C minor, K 406, with James Campbell in place of first violin; Shostakovich: String Quartet No 8; Schumann: Kinderszenen, Op 15; Beethoven: Sonata No 32 in C minor, Op 111

Nelson School of Music, Sunday 6 February 2011

The evening concert offered no further obeissance to the national day. Instead, it was given over to two rather contrasting parts, returning the the universal instead of the parochial. In the first part strings were in the spotlight, together with clarinettist James Campbell; in the second British pianist Martin Roscoe played.

Campbell explained his adaptation of Mozart’s String Quintet K 406, for clarinet and strings. Since there were few chamber music pieces involving the clarinet, he said, and the fact that Mozart’s string quintet had started life as one of his wind serenades, the octet K 388, he believed it gave licence for a partial revision of the quintet to include the clarinet in the place of the first violin. In principle, not a bad idea; but in the event, it was unsatisfactory. I have not studied the changes made to Mozart’s allocation of parts as he transformed eight brass parts to five strings, but it seemed to me that slightly more radical rescoring might have been needed to give the clarinet the kind of solo place more akin to a concerto. As it was, it was at once too close, and not sufficiently distinguished from  the violin or the strings as a whole.

The players in the ‘clarinet quintet’ were Campbell, Douglas Beilman playing violin, the viola players from both ensembles, and Leonid Gorokhov on the cello. Perhaps because of the way it had been arranged, the clarinet was sometimes out of balance with the strings; often, Campbell simply played too loudly. The net result was a performance that did not quite meet the expectations of an audience whose appetite had been so whetted by the Gran Partita, for another marvellous Mozart serenade-style piece. The performance as a whole however, left no doubt about Mozart’s achievement in the creation of another masterpiece in the serenade/big ensemble genre.

The second piece in the programme was Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet. Interestingly, it had been played at a ‘Pro-Am’ concert in the late afternoon in Fairfield House, a charming old mansion set in spacious grounds on the hills south of the city. The Pro-Am tradition exists to give amateur players the chance to be tutored by and ultimately play alongside professionals. This time hardly any of the amateurs were young people, which was the original intent. The professionals were violinists Justine Cormack and Rebecca Struthers, violist Victoria Jaenecke and cellist Euan Murdoch and each played alongside two or three amateurs. It meant playing the quartet with four players to a part, which would not have been inappropriate, for there’s a strong orchestra arrangement of the quartet by Rudolph Barshai as a prototype. Players of limited skill delivered a very different experience but it somehow sharpened my receptivity for the extremely fine performance a couple of hours later by the New Zealand String Quartet. Here was the first chance to hear the New Zealand players on their own, in music that they have thoroughly commanded. It was a powerful, finely nuanced performance doing complete justice to Shostakovich’s biting and angry masterpiece.

The second half of the concert belonged to pianist Martin Roscoe, making his first appearance at the festival. He claimed that he was about to play two of his favourite pieces of music, Schumann’s guileless but challenging Scenes of Childhood and Beethoven’s last, spiritually complex sonata.

Most of the Schumann pieces are familiar though it is rare for them to be played together: I’m sure I’ve never heard all 13 played live before. Roscoe proved a Schumann pianist of both subtlety and strength who succeeded in linking them persuasively into a sequence that enhanced them individually. There was unaffected magic in many of the pieces, burnished with a warm piano tone; his performances were never too retiring or diffident though; occasionally the piano’s heavy bass resonance was overbearing.

Beethoven’s last sonata was another matter. Roscoe’s playing captured the quietness and repose of the lyrical and legato parts; but subtlety in the forte and fortissimo passages seemed more difficult to achieve, an effect of the piano’s characteristics and the auditorium’s lively acoustic. Nevertheless, the dramatic narrative and feeling for shape and structure emerged powerfully, with great conviction.

New Zealand wind music to mark Waitangi Day at Nelson

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Waitangi Winds. ‘To be announced’ (Sketches towards imagining the musical encounter between Tasman and Maori at Golden Bay); Philip Brownlee: Te Hau o Tawhirimatea for flute; Ken Wilson: Wind Quintet; Lilburn: Wind quintet (1957); Harris: Jazz Suite for Wind Quintet (2005)

Zephyr Wind Quintet (Bridget Douglas – flute, Robert Orr – oboe, Philip Green – clarinet, Edward Allen – horn, Robert Weeks – bassoon) and Richard Nunns – nga taonga puoro)

Nelson School of Music, Sunday 6 February, 1pm

A concert to mark Waitangi Day in appropriate fashion took place at lunchtime in the Nelson School of Music. It was given over to wind instruments, driven no doubt by the decision to feature Maori instruments, taonga puoro, largely wind.

The first piece for taonga puoro had been commissioned by Richard Nunns from Martin Lodge, but illness had stopped Martin from getting past a few sketches. Recent studies by Nunns with the late Allan Thomas and others has succeeded in throwing some light on the contribution that music might have made to the tragic outcome of the arrival of Tasman on these shores. Nunns described the scene that has been recreated from what paltry documentary sources there are, ignored by all the Dutch accounts of Tasman’s voyage.

The tribe would have delivered a challenge to the ships that had appeared in their bay and he proposed the long, recorder-like instrument, the pukaea, and the putatara, a small conch-shell instrument. Tasman would have looked for some way of responding. It so happened that some time earlier, Nunns had come across an old Dutch horn known as the mid-winter horn which Ed Allen, NZSO principal French horn, volunteered to manipulate. The exchange between these two fairly primitive horns was an uneasy one, and it was not hard to understand the scope for misunderstanding: a serious challenge had been responded to by sounds that the Maori perhaps interpreted as offensive or insulting: a classic case of people speaking past each other, so that when Tasman’s men set off next morning in the boats everything went wrong.

Culture contact in its most risky form, still to be seen in the phenomena of religion-fuelled strife today. The music’s further development and performance should awaken new interest in the unhappy events of 1642. For now the music which, Nunns remarked, might remain with the name ‘To be announced’, was very incomplete, but Nunns and flutist Bridget Douglas made a brave attempt to realise what the musical exchange between ship and shore might have been.

The following piece written by Philip Brownlee, Te Hau o Tawhitimatea (the breath of the wind god), employed three further instruments; the putorino, another long, recorder-like pipe that has a variety of playing techniques and five distinct functions; the koauau, a small piece carved from a dog bone, though I suppose bones of other mammals would have been used before Europeans arrived; and lastly the small white pumotomoto, used in birth rites, and played into the baby’s fontanella. While Nunns played these, Bridget Douglas played a modern flute and a piccolo.

The rest of the concert was devoted to three wind quintets by New Zealand composers.

The earliest was Lilburn’s of 1966 which has been resurrected in recent years by Ross Harris. Its character was retiring, and suggested a certain diffidence in its musical inspiration that was reflected in tentative weaving among the instruments with musical ideas that bore the familiar LIlburn stamp in their rhythmic shapes and melodic gestures.

Ken Wilson, a former NZSO clarinettist, wrote one of the early, classic New Zealand wind quintets. His idiom is strongly influenced, to no disadvantage at all, by French early 20th century wind compositions such as Poulenc’s; this is a piece that deserves to be heard more often.

The most likable of the three wind quintets was Ross Harris’s Jazz Suite for Wind Quintet., a set of short – mostly very short – pieces that captured a variety of traditional or 1950s jazz, swing, blues, all displaying Harris’s melodic confidence and his feeling for scale and shape.

The Zephyr Quintet gave all three pieces colourful and lively readings.

Ensembles combine in magnificent Nelson concert

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Mozart: Divertimento in E flat, K 563; Brigid Bisley: Unbound for String Quartet; Strauss: Metamorphosen for string septet

Hermitage String Trio, New Zealand String Quartet, Hiroshi Ikematsu (double bass)

Nelson Cathedral, Saturday 5 February, 5pm

At several points during the festival the question what was the essence of chamber music arose through the pieces played. Given thaat the essential ingredient of chamber music is music with one player to a part, the rearranging of music from orchestral to chamber music, and vice-versa, raises interesting questions; and there’s the related question, the effect of arrangements for other instruments or for more or fewer instruments that originally conceived, either by the composer or by another.

The Saturday evening concert presented a case of the latter.

Strauss wrote his Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, surely one of the largest pieces of genuine chamber music, though we still await the instrumental equivalent of Tallis’s 40-part motet. It was later rescored for string septet by Rudolph Leopold, after Strauss’s sketches were found in 1990 showing that his original intention was for a septet. This could well have been a mistake, an artistic travesty, which is what I feel about some of the contractions of Romantic orchestral music for chamber ensembles by Schoenberg and Webern. But I was delighted by this, by the greater clarity and purity of expression produced by the seven instruments (the three members of the Hermitage Trio, and three of the New Zealand String Quartet – not Helene Pohl – plus Hiroshi Ikematsu, bass). It seemed to be a better vehicle for the expression of emotion, of grief at the destruction of so much of Germany’s cultural substance. Oddly, I have always hoped to feel a more powerful emotion listening to the usual version of the piece, and have felt that it is too dense and thickly textured for that to find its expression.

Here it was however.

Obviously some of its rich harmony has been dispensed with, but what is left struck me as achieving more effectively what I suppose Strauss had wanted. The programme notes recorded that it was Swiss music philanthropist and conductor Paul Sacher who had asked Strauss for the big ensemble.

This was one of two masterpieces played at the 5pm concert in the Cathedral.

The concert had started with another of Mozart’s pieces given names that suggest light, occasional music. Just as the big wind serenade is no doubt the most powerful and delightful piece of music in its genre, so the Divertimento in E flat stands above any formally named String Trio in existence.

Not only did we hear this all-too-rarely played work, but it was played by a trio which had invested it with enormous attention, detailed study and reflection. There are times when excessive layering of nuances and ever-changing colour and dynamics can become ridiculous. It all depends on the musical intelligence and instinct of the players; the Hermitage Trio had done all that and had sacrificed none of its compositional inventiveness, compromised none of its essential greatness. Their leaning into phrases, their subtle tempo changes – rubato, changes of colour and timbre within a note, were a matter of constant delight. It was often cellist Leonid Gorokhov who seemed to lead the most acute dynamic shifts, while violinist Denis Goldfelt relished tensile, high-lying flights; the violist, Alexander Zemtsov, sustained the centre, offering more steady dynamics and contributing to but not extending the cellist’s gestures.

The six-movement work is quite long, but this performance was such that one hoped it will never end.

Lying between these two great works was a new string quartet by New Zealand composer Brigid Ursula Bisley, called Unbound. I am not known for unbounded and uncritical enthusiasm for every new piece by our composers. This one felt like music that might have had a slow gestation, but had nevertheless derived from musical inspiration that came from within. It did not sound as if the composer had sat looking at each bar wondering what to write next. It felt as if it was there and only needed refinement and arranging.

It certainly helped that the composer spoke to us and asked the players to illustrate certain elements. And it was a relief that she concluded by saying “I hope you enjoy the music”, instead of the fatuous injunction “Enjoy!” which has become almost universal. “Thanks, but would you mind if I remain responsible for my own feelings?”

It opened quietly, each instrument contributing intriguingly to a pattern of disharmony till a melody emerged and after a while viola and cello laid down some bass support. Influences? Yes, Bartók quite distinctly, but more important was an impression of music that was beholden to no school or musical ideology, but simply sounded alive to today’s environment, whatever that means, and aimed at engaging with the listener. Lots happened; there was a beguiling, dreamy phase, a yearning spirit as Doug Beilman’s second violin cried while Helene Pohl’s first violin sang a high descant over the cello’s pedal support.

There were so many elements that appeared distinct but ultimately created a coherant musical story; and it ended without flourish or rhetoric.