Month: March 2012

Jenny McLeod’s “Peter Pan” music on Naxos

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Music by JENNY McLEOD

The Emperor and the Nightingale (narrator and orchestra) / Rock Concerto / Three Celebrations for Orchestra

The Emperor and the Nightingale: Helen Medlyn (narrator) / Kirstin Eade (solo flute)

Rock Concerto: Eugene Albulescu (piano) / Bridget Douglas (flute)

Conductor: Uwe Grodd

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

 NAXOS 8.572671

After the splendid concert given by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra featuring Jenny McLeod’s The Emperor and the Nightingale as part of the NZ International Festival of the Arts Series, it was interesting re-adjusting one’s thoughts towards an audio-only presentation of the work, included on this splendid recent CD. In fact, coming back to it in the wake of the concert enhanced my enjoyment of both experiences, and stimulated a lot of thinking regarding the respective merits of sound and vision as communication tools in themselves.

Jenny McLeod has herself been a nightingale of sorts, one whose song has taken a variety of tones, characters and intentions over a compositional career which has seen her delve into and work through a number of stylistic preoccupations. Formative studies in Europe with Olivier Messiaen and Karlheinz Stockhausen advanced her early avant-garde impulses, alongside of which she was able to identify and explore aspects of this country’s bicultural heritage with music-theatre works like Earth and Sky (1968) and Under the Sun (1970).

She concerned herself for a while with attempting to integrate popular styles of music into classical forms (e.g. her Rock Sonatas for piano), but then became interested in an innovative harmonic theory propounded by Dutch composer Peter Schat, the “Tone Clock” Theory. McLeod based a number of her compositions on this method. More recently she has become involved with writing church music for use by Maori groups, an involvement which led her to being asked to write a piece about an historical event involving an ancestor of Whanganui Maori, Hohepa Te Umuroa (the result being the recent NZ International Arts Festival opera Hohepa).

Here on this new CD, it’s McLeod’s “popular neoclassical” period that we’re largely concerned with, music whose approachability would surprise anybody whose experience of the composer’s work hadn’t included her “pop-influenced” output. As McLeod herself put it in her program notes, “this is the music of a composer who for a time refused “grow up”, declaring that writing and performing music should be “enjoyable”…”

That enjoyment comes across in spadefuls throughout McLeod’s setting for narrator and orchestra of Hans Christian Anderson’s famous story The Emperor and the Nightingale. The Arts Festival concert referred to above paired the work with perhaps the most well-known of “narrator-and orchestra” stories, that of Peter and the Wolf with music by Prokofiev – though comparisons were scarcely in order, as the latter was completely reworked, dispensing with a narrator and featuring an animated film to present the story along with the music.

In McLeod’s Anderson setting, Helen Medlyn’s storyteller-delivery bars no holds, her projection as vivid and as wholehearted as if she were performing the piece for a packed auditorium – rather than overpowering the listener in a domestic environment, I found the larger-than-life characterizations she evokes a perfect match for the orchestral panoply with its multifarious colorings and textures and its extremes of loud and soft, weight and delicacy – in fact her voice is used as another orchestral instrument, and the Naxos recording comes to the party most satisfyingly (unlike some other “speaker-and-music” recordings I’ve heard which seem to deny the participants any sort of sonic relationship!)

McLeod cleverly differentiates the music for the “clockwork” as opposed to the real nightingale: the clockwork bird’s melodies are proscribed, angular and turning in on themselves, as opposed to the freer, more improvisatory figurations of the real bird – and the sense of everybody “taking-up” the mechanical tune is splendidly conveyed, with weight and colour. It’s all the more shocking, then, when the clockwork begins to malfunction, and the bird’s song ceases – the music characterizing the emperor’s resulting malaise could have come from Kodaly’s Hary Janos.

I’m pleased flutist Kirstin Eade is credited in the booklet with the flute solos depicting the nightingale, because they’re wonderful – gorgeously turned, and deftly characterized with so many colourings. Alongside her, the orchestral detailing, so magically and unhurriedly wrought by the composer, is here beautifully realized by the NZSO’s contingent of star players.

Three Celebrations for Orchestra date from 1983, though the work was revised by the composer a couple of years ago. The opening “Journey through Mountain Parklands” is classic “road music” at the start – sounds which push forward and throw their ambiences in all directions, defining the range and scope of what’s to follow.  It’s all gloriously tonal and accessible, with strands of texture that arrest the ear, such as the saxophone solo lines, which lead to gentler,more settled evocations before the scene’s underlying grandeur takes over again, percussive textures adding their voices to the driving momentums.

Nostalgia informs the gentler second movement, an invocation of Pukerua Bay, near Wellington. A kind of wistful tenderness winds through the opening, the music allowing for occasional irruptions of pleasure and excitement – would Malcolm Arnold have written in a similar vein had he visited the country and concocted some “New Zealand Dances”? The third episode has the title A&P Show –  the opening a riot of glittering energies, combining the bustle of visitors with the strut and swagger of performers and showpeople – there are Copland-esque, rodeo-like touches at one point! The music allows for both reflection and purposeful impulse, with the final pages generating plenty of colourful activity, the “rodeo-motif” prominent again just before the whiplash close.

Last on the disc is the Rock Concerto. The music actually began life as a “Rock Sonata” for solo piano, written for the gifted seventeen year-old pianist Eugene Albulescu at the instigation of his teacher, Bruce Greenfield; but Albulescu subsequently requested that McLeod recast the work as a concerto. McLeod calls aspects of the music “very much of our own time”, while referring in both spirit and style to composers of earlier times – “distant friends” as she calls them.  The spirit of Gershwin colours some of the more reflective, lyrical moments of the work, though I confess to finding other parts of the writing surprisingly slight of expression. McLeod warns the listener, it’s true, that “those in search of something deeper and darker must look elsewhere…”

Not so the middle movement – subtitled “Elegy for Charlie French” (a friend of the composer’s who died of Aids), the music gradually colours its deceptively simple opening with darker hues, the expression eventually reaching a point of utterance whose candor and sobriety are appropriately moving. The darknesses dissolve somewhat, as the poise of the opening returns, though l liked the bitter-sweet strands the composer threaded though the utterances of the closing pages.

The finale is all angular energy – the composer marks the music allegro giocoso, and translates it herself as “swinging and robust”, an apt description. In true pragmatic, Baroque-composer fashion,  McLeod indicates that each of the movements of the work can be played independently. Is it all too much of a good thing? One senses that, as with whatever she was engaged with, McLeod was “on a mission”, the music enthusiastically encouraging her dictum “it should be enjoyable”. And there will be plenty of music-lovers prepared to go along with that.

 

 

 

 

 

Words, music – and film : Jenny McLeod and Serge Prokofiev

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand International Festival of the Arts presents:

JENNY McLEOD – The Emperor and the Nightingale

SERGE PROKOFIEV  – Peter and the Wolf

Helen Medlyn (narrator – “The Emperor and the Nightingale”)

Suzie Templeton (director, Breakthru Films, UK – “Peter and the Wolf”)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 9th March 2012

I’ve never forgotten my delight in reading, a number of years ago, a Charles M. Schulz “Peanuts” comic featuring Marcie and Peppermint Patti at a Symphony Concert, waiting for a performance of “Peter and the Wolf to begin. In the comic strip Marcie, her face suddenly brightening, whispers conspiratorially to her companion, just before the music starts,  “Maybe this time the wolf will get him!”.  I didn’t feel her comment was an indictment of either story or music – merely a reaction to the prospect of yet another humdrum performance.

Had Helen Medlyn narrated “Peter and the Wolf” on that or this present occasion (as I’m sure she’s done at some stage or other), I feel certain that no-one would have thought the occasion in any way humdrum or routine. As it was, her input regarding this concert was confined to the narration of Jenny McLeod’s setting of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor and the Nightingale”. Her performance was, I thought, riveting – she made every word of the story “zing” in places and “ping” in others, and gave the impression that she’d established some kind of “universal” eye contact with her audience all at once, so that we were undoubtedly transfixed by her storyteller persona’s sheer presence.

Though some time ago, I well remember playing in the percussion section of the Manawatu Sinfonia for a performance of McLeod’s delightful realization of Andersen’s story – I can’t recall the exact year, though it was around 1991 or 1992, at the time the Mayor of Palmerston North was Paul Rieger – because he was the narrator! (He was no Helen Medlyn, of course – but as much as a standard “celebrity appearance” could deliver he didn’t let the side down). I don’t remember the composer being present for this performance, but my memory is that it was done beautifully, our modest orchestra surpassing itself for the occasion.

With that experience in mind, what truly astonished me during this recent NZSO performance was the actual sound and impact of the orchestra – the timbres and colours uncharacteristically (for this venue) bright and sharp and to the fore, with the brass-playing in particular making a delightfully visceral impression throughout. Had the orchestra been “brought forward” on the platform, as it were? I didn’t think so – what I put it down to was Hamish McKeich’s encouragement of the players to “play out”, and make certain details really tell. Quite apart from being arresting in itself, the playing was thus able to match the narrator’s “larger-than-life” deliver of the text with similarly characterful instrumental tones.

A scintillation of exotic wonderment from the orchestra launched the music; and after Helen Medlyn’s beautifully-delivered opening statement, there was more of what seemed like the full panoply of orientalism in music refracted through Western sensibilities – pastiche it might have been, but the composer’s grasp of orchestral use was mightily impressive and resulted in some beautifully-focused and characterful sounds. Though in places reminiscent of Ravel’s “Ma Mere l’Oye”, the music readily found its own idiosyncratic character in some episodes, such as the angularities of the courtiers’ journey into the forest following behind the little kitchen-girl, and the inventive, slightly off-beat sonorities given to creatures such as cows and frogs.

Kirstin Eade’s flute-playing (depicting the voice and character of the little nightingale) was gorgeously turned at all points, and deftly characterised with many different colorings. Alongside her, the orchestra’s detailing was woven of similar magic, beautifully unhurried in its unfolding throughout, and (as I’ve said) flaring up excitingly in the bigger, grander moments. Much less obviously a quasi-instructional exercise for those unfamiliar with orchestral and instrumental sounds than the Prokofiev work, McLeod’s music nevertheless seemed beautifully tailored to the Anderson story, perhaps not as “leitmotiv-driven” than was “Peter”, nor as pungently and vividly characterized – but sufficiently colourful and incident-detailed to work successfully, especially in these performers’ hands.

Chalk followed on from cheese, so to speak, with British film-maker Suzie Templeton’s adaptation of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” story, in a trice taking us all to the movies, via a big screen, and with the luxury of a live-performance soundtrack (the film did have its own non–musical sound effects). For anybody expecting a standard, narrator-driven presentation of the work, it would have come as a huge shock, less on account of the spoken words’ absence, and more due to the harshness of the film-maker’s setting. In a half-urban, half-rural setting, Peter and his Grandfather live in a house on the outskirts of a town, making Peter prey to both the Wolf from within the forest and the town bullies from the urban jungle. What Prokofiev depicted as an idyllic rural existence for a boy and his animals, here is shown to be a somewhat fraught, law-of-the-jungle, siege-mentality scenario, almost of the “film noir” variety in places. There were children (and adults) in the audience who found it all a bit too much, though a lot of the (very audible) angst would, I’m sure, have been due to thwarted expectation – on its own terms, the presentation, though not without contentious elements, was, in my view, stunning.

Conductor Hamish McKeich, God bless ‘im, did at the outset nudge us in the direction of the composer’s original intentions by getting the orchestral soloists (as well as the strings) to play the “themes” of the story’s characters (though, for the benefit of us sight-restricted “ground floor concertgoers” it would have been great if every player had been able to stand up while giving us each of the character portraits). Of course, the presence of a film reduced the importance of this process; and indeed the compelling on-screen character-animations and evocative settings throughout put the orchestra’s contribution somewhat in the shade, beautifully though the score was realized by conductor and players.

The experience, cheek-by-jowl with the Jenny McLeod work, made me realize the extent to which our senses and perceptions interact with one another depending upon the nature of whatever stimuli we’re encountering. Suddenly, the orchestra who had played the “Emperor and the Nightingale” music during the first half so vibrantly and engagingly now sounded relatively distant and once-removed, the sounds coming to us as if in a kind of dream, refracted through those images we were all so readily involved with. At times it seemed as though this was no children’s story, but a life-and-death struggle against archetypal forces of darkness, the film-maker, for example “squaring Peter up” to his town-bully tormentors, whose brutality was unvarnishedly depicted. And there was no room for sentimentality – the drop-dead cuteness of Peter’s duck was unremittingly savaged by the wolf (causing the bulk of noticeable audience carnage), those cathartic sounds of a poor creature swallowed whole and therefore still alive, here given no fulfillment of expression, no cause for rejoicing.

Audience participation and involvement throughout, it must be said, was gratifyingly palpable – and if, at the end Charles M. Schulz’s Marcie didn’t get her wish, there was certainly a new twist to the old tale, if one which seemed to unfortunately tie up a loose end that hitherto belonged to the hapless duck, and put paid to her one chance of survival. It seemed to me that Peter’s loyalty towards his small, awkward but obviously lovable friend was sacrificed by the film-maker in favour of a new denouement evoking some kind of libertarian impulse on the part of the hero, in favor of the wolf. Still, it’s hardly surprising in a day and age that seems to actively concern itself with the welfare of perpetrators of crimes, and pay lip service to the suffering of the victims. (In this case, no less a philosopher than Basil Fawlty might have observed, “Well, if you’re a duck – you’re rather stuck!”)….

Technically, the animation resembled those early stop-frame cartoons with the jerky movements that older children like myself remember from our earliest times; and the results are certainly engaging, the figures and their movements having an uncanny realism, a properly tactile effect. I think it was the direct, somewhat primitive aspect of it all (wrought by extremely sophisticated technology and painstaking skill) which heightened the characters’ capacities for expressive gesture, which, of course, had to serve for actual words throughout. In effect, the film represented the substitution, for a well-known story’s retelling, of one powerful communication tool for another, the latter very much for our time. It’s well worth tracking down and watching, and especially with friends who enjoy heated discussion!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duo Tapas return for more violin and guitar music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Music by Krouse, Anthony Ritchie, Lilburn, Imamovic, Piazzolla, and Bartók

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 7 March, 12.15pm

Duo Tapas has become a fairly familiar presence on Wellington’s chamber music circuit over the past couple of years, even though the combination of violin and guitar has not been a major musical genre, or one that has drawn scores of composers to write major works.

Nevertheless, the music that this attractive duo turns up is always attractive, serving to dispel the notion that classical music consists entirely of great masterpieces by great geniuses all of whom are dead.

These musicians show that very listenable programmes can be built with music written by living composers from all over the world, including some who are their friends.  (All of it has been arranged for this combination from other originals). The names Krouse and Imamovic, as well as Ritchie, and some of the same music – Da Chara for example – have appeared in their earlier concerts.

The latter piece, by Ian Krouse, began with a deliberate or accidental hesitation, but it seemed altogether in keeping with its subdued Irish accents, with hesitant rhythms, the slight fragility in the violinist’s playing, evolving towards the end into a faster dance.

The New Zealand department of the recital consisted of an arrangement by Anthony Ritchie of one his own Five Dunedin Songs of 1996: Stone Woman. It had a bluesy, ‘country’ character , the guitar injecting curious figures alongside the violin’s flowing line. And Lilburn’s Canzona (not Canzonetta) No 1 followed: it seems belatedly to have become a genuinely popular piece (I think it made the RNZ Concert New Year’s Day Count-down), perhaps in a similar class to Farquhar’s Ring Round the Moon music, and similarly perhaps, not highly rated by the composer, misled during those benighted years in which melodies were scorned as a mark of non-seriousness or commercialism. The guitar part seemed the perfect accompaniment, while the violin’s velvety bowing was quite enchanting.

In a recital last year the duo played music by Bosnia-born Almar Imamovic, whom Moriarty met while studying in Los Angeles.  Hints of a modal scale could be detected in Jamilla’s Dance (played in their 2010 recital at Old St Paul’s), and a characteristic Balkan, perhaps Greek touch was present as the dance slowed. It was a slight piece, though effective, given a spirited and careful performance.  A second scheduled piece by Imamovic was omitted for reasons of time.

The two pieces by Piazzolla were in marked contrast. (Incidentally, try looking him up in any music dictionary more than 15 years old, even New Grove: he’s only recently been promoted into the ranks of ‘classical’ music). The first, Oblivión, was a slow tango whose tension was probably as hard to sustain as it would have been to dance to (the emotional state called up makes me think of the evocation of the tango in Kapka Kassabova’s recent memoir/novel on the subject). It’s a condition comparable to a slow elegiac aria, in long phrases, calling for extraordinary breath control. The violin remained on its upper strings while the guitar carefully picked out supporting motifs.

Libertango was a more conventional exemplar of the Argentinian dance in speed and rhythm, the player tapping the guitar body as he picked out the tune around which the violin weaved a counter-melody.

To end, the duo played Bartók’s six Romanian Dances, all quite short but in vivid contrast one with another. Bartók wrote them for publication as piano pieces; Székely arranged them for violin and piano and they in turn were arranged for guitar and violin by Arthur Levering.

The instrumentation brought them back closer to their peasant origins, arresting and strong-minded or languid, sometimes complex in rhythm, sometimes calling for a harsh bow on the strings. All very striking and an excellent way to end a very agreeable recital by excellent, skilled musicians.

 

Strength, delicacy and deep feeling – the New Zealand String Quartet with Jonathan Lemalu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

POWER AND PASSION – New Zealand International Festival of the Arts

The New Zealand String Quartet – Helene Pohl, Douglas Beilman (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) – with Jonathan Lemalu (bass-baritone)

ROSS HARRIS – Variation 25 for String Quartet

GAO PING – Three Poems by Mu Xin

SAMUEL BARBER – String Quartet Op.11 / Dover Beach Op.3

SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No.9 in E-flat Op.117

Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 4th March 2012

Despite the fact that there really ought to be a moratorium declared on the use of the words “power” and “passion” anywhere and at any time, this Festival Concert featured the New Zealand String Quartet and bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu in performances that defined the best sense of those very words.

In fact this concert was the latest to somewhat bend the righteous pitch of my on-going complaint regarding the Festival’s paucity of music events – during this and recent previous years. Though they’re relatively thin on the ground this time round, compared with the glory Festival days of, say, the 1990s, I have to say, in all fairness, that the 2012 concerts I’ve attended so far have certainly compensated in sheer quality for their lack of numbers. This one was no exception.

Again, the New Zealand String Quartet was there, at the forefront of a cutting-edge musical experience (following on in like manner from their Beethoven concerts) – I thought this program classic and meaty “Festival” fare, its content and delivery transcending the brain-dead hype of its title, and giving us a treasurable variety of memorable intensities (that description isn’t particularly flash, either, but I think it’s better than you-know-what!).

On the face of things the combination of string quartet and bass-baritone would, I think, pose for the average concertgoer more the immediate prospect of a challenge than out-and-out delight. The moderate attendance seemed to reflect something of this attitude, the organizers optimistically using the Wellington Town Hall for a concert of music  whose ethos seemed to suggest more intimate surroundings. Still, the performers in this case were renowned communicators, able to reach out and fill the vistas of most venues with their personalities and musical skills.

As it turned out, the performances seemed to easily draw in all those who were there – and there’s a certain vicarious excitement to be had from experiencing a “large” silence as opposed to a smaller one, which we were all able to enjoy and repeatedly savour, throughout the evening. Our enthusiastic appreciation at the concert’s end for the performers’ efforts belied our actual numbers, I’m sure.

Beginning the concert was local composer Ross Harris’ music, his meditation on one of JS Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, called simply “Variation 25 for String Quartet”. The Quartet’s Second Violin Douglas Beilman announced before the music began that the group would first play a transcription for string quartet of the original “Goldberg” variation. Presumably the quartet had the approval of the composer to do this – one wonders whether any composer who’d written something inspired by one of the world’s great music masterworks would necessarily want an audience reminded of the original, as it were, cheek-by-jowl! However, in this case, the “putting-together” of the two gave the opening of Ross Harris’s work such a telling ambient context, one fancied one could almost “sense” the direct lines of inspiration and observe something of the creative process of gradually making one’s ideas one’s own.

So, to my way of thinking, hearing the Bach original at the beginning (albeit in a string transcription) was an enrichment regarding what followed – very much in line with what the composer wrote in his accompanying notes about wanting “to pay my respects to the beauty and richness of the music…” It seemed to me at the outset something like a “hall of mirrors” effect, the canonic agglomerations producing a magical overlapping, coloring, intensifying and resounding texture – rather like how one might imagine a note, phrase or theme would be creatively acted upon.

One could sense the composer’s imagination getting into full stride, firstly with a paragraph of intense, stratospherically arched extremities, and then through various scherzo-like passages, the arguments frenetic and the energies ecstatic. After these exertions came a graceful, limpid dance which restored listeners’ equilibriums, the sounds transforming the former intensities of light into rather more dappled and fitful modes. And in much the same way the piece’s linear tensions seemed to melt into floating echoes of their former selves, the first violin then making a somewhat torturous ascent through the textures to conclude the piece, leaving in its wake a stricken viola mid-phrase.

I did think the Quartet’s performance a shade over-wrought at the outset, with some on-the-edge intonations, to my ears, throughout both the theme and the opening measures of the Harris piece – the price one perhaps pays in places for intensity? As the work progressed, the tones centered more readily – and throughout the other works on the program the playing sounded poised and true. The soft playing, in particular, throughout the works featuring a singer, had our sensibilities in thrall with the magic of it all; and bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu was able to match the instrumentalists’ rapt murmurings throughout such moments with equally haunting tones.

The first of Gao Ping’s settings of three poems of Mu Xin (a writer and artist who died last year in China, aged 84) perfectly illustrated the performers’ skills in evoking the beauty of great stillness – strings and voice together, floating sounds that seemed not of this world. This was a world premiere, an occasion which the programme notes didn’t emphasize, apart from Festival Director Lissa Twomey’s introductory welcome message. The poems were, I believe, sung in Mandarin, the translations suggesting a poet’s finely-wrought sensibility, with occasional erotic overtones (as in the first of the three settings, “My Bountiful Desire”, in which figured lines such as “lips eddy, breast piers, thigh ravine….”).The second settting, equating a bird’s life with happiness, is all pointillistic texturing and evocative calling, while the third, “A HIstory of Love”, begins with a saga-like sense of momentum and movement, rather like a river telling its story in passing. The two previous settings had magical interactions between voice and solo instruments at their conclusions (with violin and ‘cello, respectively) – but this one concluded with some equally haunting falsetto-like singing from Jonathan Lemalu, the words chronicling the passing of time, of youth, of love.

American Samuel Barber’s best-known work is his Adagio for Strings, often played as a commemorative piece, and used in various films (“I couldn’t help it – I kept on imagining helicopters” said my concert-hall neighbour at the end, alluding to the Award-winning film “Platoon”). Usually heard as a work for orchestral strings, here we heard it in its original guise, as part of a String Quartet, the second of three movements (officially there are only two, but to my way of thinking, the return to the material of the opening after the Adagio constitutes a movement of its own, however brief). The performance vividly characterized the volatile nature of the first movement, with its jagged opening and its hymn-like chorale intertwined throughout; while the Adagio’s songful lines here had a spell-binding vibrancy, the climax “built” with inexorable purpose and intensity – amazing stuff from the Quartet, no matter how many times previously one might have heard the piece.

Not heard as often, but a piece whose beauties undoubtedly deserve more attention is “Dover Beach”, Barber’s setting for baritone and string quartet of Matthew Arnold’s poem (I thought there might be a version for voice and string orchestra, which could increase the work’s performance frequency – but there doesn’t seem to be). Again, Jonathan Lemalu’s beautifully-focused soft singing made for pure poetry of sound in tandem with the strings – it struck me how Barber used the voice as a “fifth string” in many places, the vocal line often sharing the phrasings and figurations of the quartet’s. Particularly beautiful was the line “and bring the eternal note of sadness in”, at the conclusion of the music’s first section.

The bass-baritone’s tones sounded less mellifluous under pressure, though the artistry of the singer’s phrasing was evident at “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” – a fantastic outpouring of emotion, especially telling against the setting’s more hushed moments, the controlled anguish of the final “Where ignorant armies clash by night” an ecstasy of intensity approaching pain. Altogether, I thought it a wonderful performance.

Completing what might be regarded as a line-up of varying intensities, the Quartet addressed the Ninth String Quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich with all of the group’s customary energy and focus. Having heard some of its Shostakovich-playing before, I expected and got a veritable roller-coaster ride of full-on incident and raw emotion, all of the music’s spiked energy, droll humor and bleak melancholy given plenty of amplitude. By the sound of such things, these quartets are surely a body of work that these musicians were born to play – and what we heard confirmed my feelings on the subject.

With a “moments-per-minute” performance such as this one, singling out individual moments can seem to do a violence to the whole – but from the very beginning of the work the Quartet caught the music’s character, intense and claustrophobic, with impulses attempting to energize and lighten the mood leading inevitably to a “screwing-up” of tension and anxiety. Right across the work’s five movements (played without a break) the players readily conveyed that echt-feeling of fatalism regarding humanity’s lot, that “to live is to suffer, and to feel is to invite pain” attitude which continuously informs the pages of this music.

I’m sure the unexpectedness of encountering such richly- and readily-wrought listening experiences played its part in making the occasion for me so truly memorable – a truly “surprised by joy” outcome, a festival concert worthy of the name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sixteen’s second concert, a cappella, a benchmark performance

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand International Arts Festival

The Sixteen  conducted by Harry Christophers

A cappella music by Tallis, Morley, Gibbons, Byrd, Sheppard, Tippett, Britten and James MacMillan

The Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 3 March 7.30pm

The second concert by The Sixteen was devoted to music by composers born in Britain, not simply one who spent most of his life in the country, as was the first of The Sixteen’s concerts.

Two groups of Tallis’s ‘Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter’ were sung, four at the beginning and four at the end of the concert. They were a sort of purifying wash to introduce the audience to singing that was not too complex – in fact the first began with four men singing in unison – allowing the unprepared ear to adjust to the acoustic of the hall and to sample the sounds of many individual voices.

The choir is perhaps a little unusual in having more men than women, though that is because parts otherwise sung by female altos are here sung by male altos (or counter-tenors). It lent the ensemble a quality that set the exemplary sopranos in marked contrast to the weight of males singing the other parts.

Tallis’s ‘Salvator mundi’, in Latin, was a striking illustration of Tallis’s versatility, coping with the dangers of religious dogma as the country moved back and forth between Catholicism and Protestantism. And the choir demonstrated the contrast between Tallis’s setting of English and Latin texts as clearly as his shift from the vertical harmony of English music to traditional Latin polyphony.

The Latin element was very temporary and it was followed by English part-songs: Morley’s ‘April is in my Mistress’ Face’ and Gibbons’s very beautiful ‘The Silver Swan’; the weight and warmth of the men’s voices kept the mood from becoming too ‘hey-nonny-nonny’ in Byrd’s ‘This sweet and merry Month of May’. John Sheppard’s ‘In Manus Tuas III’ returned to a Latin text, opening with a demonstration of men’s voices in unison, and then a strong counter-tenor solo.

The first half finished in the 20th century however with, first, James MacMillan’s ‘Sedebit Dominus Rex’, given a subtle Scottish accent (it’s one of his Strathclyde Motets), an attractive separation of men’s and women’s roles, to produce singing of very great emotion.

There was a second piece from MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets later: a striking contribution by women’s voices as well as the gentle opening section by basses, marked his ‘Mitte manum tuum’, again quite short and technically approachable.

The best known part of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time – the five spirituals – brought the first half to an end, with several opportunities for strong solo voices, particularly female.

Yet, what is it about a composer’s fundamental well-spring of invention and emotional power that consigns almost all of his music – apart from arrangements of existing melodies – to museum status almost within his own lifetime? No want of trying on my part, yet I feel impelled to revisit almost nothing even of the music I have on my own CDs.

The second half was also a satisfying mixture of the 16th and the 20th centuries; It began with three more Latin motets by Tallis, each with its distinct character, reflected in the tempo, in the varying amounts of legato singing, and the vocal colours produced by the choir.

The curious little dissonances (remarked in the programme notes) gave ‘O nata lux’ vitality; the next, ‘O sacrum convivium’, was by contrast sombre, calm and quite extended. The third motet, ‘Loquebantur variis linguis’, cleverly simulated a complex tissue of disparate languages through elaborate counterpoint: even those without Latin could have worked it out.

There was another Byrd motet, his masterpiece ‘Laudibus in sanctis Dominum’, that seemed to mark him as an English composer, set to song-like music in which vertical harmonies were as audible as the elaborate counterpoint.

The other major contribution from the modern repertoire were the Choral Dances from Britten’s opera Gloriana. For long, these were about all that was much performed from an opera that was inexplicably felt to be a ritual occasional piece, but is now firmly placed among Britten’s greatest operas. I was delighted to catch a performance a couple of years ago in the Ruhr, in Germany. Britten himself arranged this unaccompanied version of the dances, and I have to say, heretically, they did not make quite the impression on me that the original operatic ones did. They emerged, for me, somewhat affected and bloodless; but the performance of them was far from that.

The choir presented an encore: an arrangement by choral composer Bob Chilcott of a Tallis anthem.

Finally, the programme booklet was a model. It provided a wealth of rich and informative material about the choir and its director, but also writings about the composers and their social and political situation, and evocative thoughts about the nature of the music itself, all of which might deepen listeners’ knowledge.

Not enough of the audience bought the programme however.

From time to time I express my view that programmes for concerts – and other performing arts too – should be provided free. For a year or so New Zealand Opera did that, but later reverted to the practice of confining them to those who could pay the fairly high price for them. That is to sacrifice a valuable opportunity to deepen and broaden the audience’s knowledge of what it is hearing, a matter of even more importance now that most of the population under 50 is approaching the more serious arts without the benefit of any formal exposure to them at school where the sounds of good music (and poetry and foreign languages) can be implanted, perhaps subliminally, in the minds of the young – when that faculty is at its most receptive.

The major cost of programmes lies in the preparation of the texts and the design and formatting of the printing; for the fruits of those efforts to be restricted to a minority of the audience is a sad lost opportunity to educate.

The programme also took the trouble to ask the audience to refrain from clapping between the items in a group; the fact that few on the audience had programmes meant that there was applause between the numbers in Tippett’s Five Spirituals.

Truly festive Handel with The Sixteen

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HANDEL – Coronation Anthem “Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened”

Motet: “Silete Venti” / Psalms: Nisi Dominus / Dixit Dominus

The Sixteen Choir and Orchestra / Conductor: Harry Christophers

Soloist (Silete Venti): Gilian Keith (soprano)

NZ International Festival of the Arts

Wellington Town Hall

Thursday 1st March, 2012

Now, this is the kind of concert in terms of impact and quality that helps make a festival worth remembering. The trappings were, in fact, few – there were no bugles, no drums, just people-generated excitement, right from the initial “buzz” of queuing outside to actually get into the Town Hall, and up to the moment that these world-famous musicians walked onto the platform in front of us to begin their concert.

I wonder if people who attend concerts actually realize what a treasure the WellingtonTown Hall is in respect of providing experiences whose memory seems to embrace the “occasion” as well as the performance – it’s partly my being a bit of an event junkie that squeezes these remarks out of me, but I couldn’t help reflecting on the difference in atmosphere between this concert and last week’s in the Michael Fowler Centre which opened the Festival. The Stravinsky performances were themselves terrific – but I feel the MFC needs a LOT of extraneous help for any event to really “buzz”, whereas the Town Hall simply reflects and enhances what’s already going on.

This was one of two concerts offered by The Sixteen (my concert companion nudged me fiercely at one point and hissed, “I think there are seventeen” (of them)! – shades of “The Sound of Music”?….). One could have had, as here, Handel in a grandly ceremonial manner, readily encompassing all manner of structures and emotions as befits the work of a composer writing for public occasions; or one could have turned, instead, to the rather more circumspect a capella world of various native British composers over a period of several centuries.

I would imagine that, after experiencing the group’s performances of Handel, there would be a number of concertgoers who, like myself, wished they had purchased tickets to both concerts. In the words of Shakespeare’s Henry V, we such unfortunates will on Saturday evening be as those “gentlemen of England now a-bed” who “shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here”. One must, however, thank one’s stars that one heard the group on at least one of the occasions. And after all, pleasure can still be had from imagining how wonderful a second concert WOULD be, having already enjoyed one (a case of “Heard melodies are sweet, but….”, perhaps)…

For those who enjoy chancing their arm with the prospect of picking up last-minute cancelled tickets, The Sixteen is indeed performing again on Saturday, 3rd March at the Town Hall at 7:30pm, a program of British a capella music, ranging from works by Thomas Tallis to those by James MacMillan. In the meantime one can enjoy recalling the highlights of the group’s Handel presentation, involving various soloists, choir and orchestra.

One noticed immediately the intense focus of the sound, both from singers and players, obviously steeped in a performing tradition which has undergone a considerable revolution over the last fifty years. The modus operandi of such groups as The Sixteen sits firmly upon using the forces that the composer would have expected, and producing the sounds in a style that corresponds with period musicologists’ findings. Happily, these strictures were accompanied in this case by a performing style that set great store on sounds with a variety of tone, colour and nuance (emanating from, or else mirrored by, the expressive gestures of conductor Harry Christophers, as non-metrical as one could ever hope to find) – though all within the parameters of accepted baroque practice.

Beginning with the Coronation Anthem “Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened”, orchestra and voices commanded the hall’s sound-vistas, the phrases having at once discernible focus but an ear-catching “bloom”, with everything precisely balanced – one could set one’s ear to “find” any line or texture it wanted and follow its course. The fugal character of the section “Let justice and judgement…” found the composer employing sounds of structures and balances, suggesting the power of law and order. Here, the individual lines took on plenty of character, the timbres being allowed to “sound” instead of subjected to a homogenous blend, so that one was always aware of a quartet-like texture. The lively “Alleluia” had a sensuous feel in the dovetailing of the lines, tied together with an appropriately celebratory concluding note.

Gillian Keith was the soprano soloist for the motet Silete Venti, the text a colorful and descriptive evocation of the bliss which comes with faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The soloist had pure, bell-like tones and flexible energy aplenty to do the music justice, though I thought in places a slightly “kittenish ” aspect crept into her singing, one rather at odds with the subject matter of the motet. The text, I thought, wasn’t without its idiosyncrasies – e.g. “If you strike you cause no wound, your blows are as caresses….” – pardon? Set against her slightly-less-than-crisp articulation of the words in places was a freedom and flexibility of impulse and movement which the singer used to negotiate her runs throughout “Date serta” with such winning ease and grace as to disarm other criticism. And her breathtaking energies in tackling the flourishes at the repeat of “Veni, vein transfige me” in the first part was matched in excitement by her feathery, stratospheric vocal dancings throughout the conclusion’s gigue-like “Alleluiahs”, singer and instrumentalists particularly enjoying things like the effervescent exchange of triplet figurations just before the end.

After the interval we were rejoined by the choir for the two psalm settings, Dixit Dominus and Nisi Dominus, both youthful works (Handel was in his early twenties), but displaying their composer’s great precocity, not only in choral writing, but in his use of the orchestra. The more spectacular of the works, the slightly earlier Dixit Dominus, was wisely left to the end. It would be tiresome to reproduce all of my scribbled notes, inspired by the performances’ many felicities, but certain things deserved to be savored, such as the quality of the contributions from the solo voices within the choir. In the first of the Psalm settings, Nisi Dominus, both tenor and bass made a telling impression, the former’s “Vanum set” a pleasingly-shaped vocal arch of flexible tones, and the latter’s fiery, properly warlike “Sicut sagittae in manu potentis” (As arrows in the hand of the mighty) properly pinning back our ears. Throughout, I liked the bringing forward to the front of the platform the soloists from the choir, making for an almost operatic effect, and giving each voice’s utterance its proper focus.

Dixit Dominus made for an exciting and sonorous conclusion to the evening in this performance – muscular energy at the outset from the orchestra and incisive lines from the choir launched the work with a will – the brief occasional solo lines, with the voices remaining within the choir, struggled in places to be properly heard, though a couple of the more brightly-focused voices managed to make their tones “tell” in the midst of the music’s cut-and-thrust activity. The more extended, out-the front solos were superbly done, and beautifully accompanied. I particularly liked the teamwork of soloists, choir and orchestra at “Dominus a dextris tuis”, the solo voices overlapping and interchanging words and phrases with almost operatic excitement, followed by the unleashing of tremendous tensions at the words “die irae” from choir and orchestra. Among other ear-catching moments was the choir’s pointed staccato treatment of “conquassabit capita in terra”, the words spat out like machine-gun fire, their effect made to sting! Following this the soprano duet “De torrent in via bibet” was of soothing balm, two differently-toned voices blending to great effect.

Impossible to do justice to everything, here – in general, I thought Handel’s music magnificently served throughout, the music’s energies liberated, the textures enlivened, the beauties savoured. The Town Hall’s acoustic gave the performances all the immediacy they deserved, enabling us to enjoy to the full the talents of The Sixteen, their orchestra and their obviously charismatic director. It wasn’t surprising to find people on their their feet applauding at the end, demonstrating their appreciation and enjoyment.