Day: 25 November 2012

Bach Choir brings its 2012 to a splendid conclusion with Vivaldi, Handel and a trumpet

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Bach Choir conducted by Stephen Rowley with soloists Rebekah Giesbere, Ruth Armishaw, Hannah Catrin Jones, John Beaglehole and Rory Sweeney
Janet Gibbs – organ

Beatus Vir, RV 597 (Vivaldi)
Trumpet Concerto in E flat (Neruda) with Mark Carter – trumpet
Dixit Dominus (Handel)

St Peter’s Church, Willis Street

Sunday 25 November, 4pm

The Bach Choir is one of Wellington’s more distinguished choirs, founded in 1968 by the late Anthony Jennings, a notable harpsichordist and one of New Zealand’s leaders  in the revival of interest in the authentic performance of baroque and early music.

Though the choir’s fortunes have fluctuated over the years, it has experienced a steady improvement in performance standards and confidence under Stephen Rowley.

Vivaldi’s transition from a minor, one-piece composer (The Four Seasons) who was generally absent from the ranks of significant composers (look at any book of music history from before the second world war, even 1950), to a major eminence alongside Bach and Handel has been interesting. His surviving operas have been the most recent discoveries. It was probably Vivaldi’s melodic fecundity and resultant absence of the need to elaborate endlessly one or two hard-won tunes, that caused earlier generations to deprecate and dismiss him.

I had not heard this Beatus Vir before; the earlier of his two surviving settings.  A famous Beatus Vir was one of the first pieces of early Baroque music I ever heard, in my teens – the setting by Monteverdi. And I seemed to hear echoes of it in Vivaldi’s version of a century later.  Vivaldi sets the text (Psalm 111) taking care to reflect meanings, almost of every word, and the use of individual singers, soprano and alto (Rebekah Giesbers and Hannah Catrin Jones) at first and then tenor John Beaglehole, lent the rather severe imprecation of the Psalm brightness and delight.

One of the departures from the strict liturgical character is the repetition of the opening line, imposing a musical rather than an ecclesiastical character on the work, The polish of the orchestral accompaniment from the Chiesa Ensemble comprising NZSO players, lend the whole enterprise a professionalism which the choir readily took upon itself; oboes contributed elegantly in accompanying women’s solos and duets; and Janet Gibbs, largely unobtrusive, emerged occasionally as the principal accompaniment.

But the most striking feature of the performance was that sheer melodic ease that both choir and orchestra handled with such endless accomplishment.

A trumpet concerto completed the first half of the concert: a rarity by a Czech composer, Johann Baptist Neruda, born a generation after Vivaldi, Bach and Handel, proved rather more than a routine baroque concerto. The soloist, Mark Carter, made no concessions to baroque practice, playing a modern, valved instrument; though, probably in accord with the practice of the time, he also directed the orchestra, waving his trumpet about gracefully.  Trumpet and orchestra bloomed in the fine acoustic of the church, allowing the easy legato of the Largo movement to expand, and taking the last movement, marked Vivace, at a pace that was rather slower than that. Though the first movement offered bravura opportunities, it was in the cadenza towards the end that Carter’s fluency finally showed itself. The endless emerging of music by forgotten composers and of lost works by better-known ones, serves to blur age-old judgements about the received masterpieces of the handful of ‘famous’ composers who have dominated music history for several centuries.

Confirmation that such things as masterpieces can still be acknowledged came with Handel’s Dixit Dominus, which occupied the second half. This remains undisputedly a prodigious creation by the 22-year-old composer from his Italian years. Written in Rome while the famous Papal ban on opera was in effect, all of Handel’s dramatic gifts are heard in the Dixit Dominus (Psalm 109); it is marked by one of the most dramatic openings, at least of the baroque period.
It was an arresting start signalling the great opera composer who was to emerge as soon as he reached a more congenial climate – Florence.

The three soloists who had shared the Vivaldi were now joined by soprano Ruth Armishaw  and baritone Rory Sweeney, for a  variety of episodes; alto Rebekah Giesbers enjoyed a striking episode with cello obbligato in the ‘Virgam virtutis’; the fast chorus ‘Tu es sacerdos’ went very well, though sopranos sounded a bit stretched as they negotiated the high passages; when all soloists sang together with chorus, as in (vi), ‘Dominus a dextris tuis’, the similarity of timbre between tenor and nominal bass, Rory Sweeney, somewhat reduced the variety that is a significant aspect of Handel’s composition; but this taxing episode for all soloists against throbbing bass strings they carried off splendidly.

‘Judicabit in nationibus’, in which Handel displays his fugal skills, was probably more tricky that it appeared; it’s little wonder, listening to this, particularly the exciting, staccato passage from ‘Conquassabit…’, that he had so quickly made a big impression in the Roman musical world. The two sopranos promptly changed the tone in ‘De torrente’ capturing beautifully the lamenting character of the verse. The soloists’ diction was generally excellent, while that of the choir was uniformly clear, even though they were probably tiring in the pulsating, motoric rhythm of the Gloria that becomes an extended fugue as it moves to its exultant conclusion.

Though both the works of the first half of the concert are very fine, and so well performed as to display their best qualities, this early Handel masterpiece was a splendid way to end the Bach Choir’s year.

 

Kapiti Chamber Choir offers antidote to Christmas commercialisation

Posted on by Mary Singleton

Joyous Christmas Music
Christmas Oratorio by J S Bach

The Kapiti Chamber Choir with Orchestra directed by Stuart Douglas

Soloists: Imogen Thirlwall – soprano, Emily Simcox – contralto, James Adams – tenor, Kieran Rayner – bass
With a 20 piece Orchestra led by Jay Hancox.

St Paul’s Church, Kapiti Road, Paraparaumu

Sunday 25 November, 2.30pm

Praise be to Stuart Douglas and the Kapiti Chamber Choir for giving Kapiti residents the opportunity to hear arguably the best Christmas music ever written, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Accompanied by an excellent orchestral ensemble they gave an enormously joyful performance from the first thrilling trumpet notes of Andrew Weir’s piccolo trumpet to the full bodied final chorale. They were obviously in the hands of a conductor with a great sense of musicality and style.This performance was not just a series of arias and chorales but a thoroughly integrated dramatic event.

The Orchestra, led by Jay Hancox, was a mixture of capable amateur and professional players, many of whom are Kapiti residents. Their playing was vibrant and exciting though just occasionally a little too heavy for the bass and contralto soloists in their lower registers. The instrumental obbligatos, virtually duets with the solo singers, were sensitively performed by Andrew Weir on trumpet, Peter Dykes on oboe and Malu Jonas on flute, all of whom gave thoroughly professional performances.

Douglas’s choice of the four young soloists was excellent. They all sang beautifully and were able to convey the full drama of the Nativity story. Soprano Imogen Thirlwall has performed several times in Kapiti and her rich and powerful soprano soared easily above everything the Orchestra threw at her. Emily Simcox, contralto, who has previously performed with the Kapiti Chorale, has a voice  of great warmth and tenderness which she combines with a riveting presence.

As the Evangelist tenor James Adams proved himself a true story-teller, singing with drama and communicating well with the audience. Bass Kieran Rayner has been singing in Kapiti since he was very young and showed the increasing maturity and depth of his voice. His well-known acting skills were well to the fore in his exciting presentation.

The choir performed Bach’s very demanding score with vigour and precision, providing a big sound when necessary but also great delicacy in the unaccompanied chorale Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier. The usual lack of strength in the tenor section, due to lack of tenors, did not seriously detract from this uplifting performance. The soprano section was notably excellent.

With judicious cutting of the original score by Douglas we were given a full two hours of glorious music – a wonderful antidote to the crass commercialisation of the season. As I was leaving an audience member said to me “I feel so much better for that”.

 

Rain, wind and moonlight – Stroma’s “Pierrot Lunaire” and more……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA presents PIERROT LUNAIRE

Madeleine Pierard (soprano)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Kirstin Eade (flute/piccolo) / Phil Green (clarinet/bass clarinet)

Blas Gonzalez (piano) / Megan Molina (violin)

Andrew Thomson (violin/viola) / Robert Ibell (‘cello)

HANNS EISLER – 14 Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Fourteen Ways of depicting Rain)

AMNTON WEBERN – String Trio Op.20

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG – Pierrot Lunaire

Ilott Theatre, Wellington

Sunday, 25th November, 2012

Stroma brought up the 100th anniversary of Arnold Schoenberg’s landmark creation Pierrot Lunaire in unique style at Wellington’s Ilott Theatre, as part of a program featuring the music of both pupils and contemporaries of the composer.

Naturally, the concert’s focus centered firmly on Pierrot Lunaire, with the advance publicity’s imagery suggesting a theatrical presentation, one featuring the extremely gifted singer Madeleine Pierard. This performance took up the second half of the program, with Hanns Eisler’s Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Fourteen Ways of depicting Rain) sharing the first half with Anton Webern’s String Trio.

The Hanns Eisler work was played here in accordance with the composer’s original intention, in tandem with a film. Dedicated to Schoenberg on the occasion of his 70th birthday and scored for the same instrumentation as the master’s Pierrot Lunaire, the music was a manifestation of Eisler’s fascination with and study of music’s relationship to the medium of film. The composer “set to music” an existing silent film, Regen (Rain) made in 1929 in Amsterdam by filmmaker Joris Ivens.  Its montage-like construction featured scenes whose placement suggested a kind of understated interplay between natural elements, mostly rain, and people going about their business in a city.

Completing the first half was Anton Webern’s String Trio Op.20, to the uninitiated, a work presenting the wonder of new sensations, especially the lyrical explorations and variants of the same throughout the first movement, then with the second movement introducing what felt like a more “physical” kind of engagement, stimulated by greater contrasts of timbre and rhythm. Interesting that the performance was “conducted” by Hamish McKeich, something that, for me, added a kind of dimension to the sounds, almost like a life-pulse beneath the contrasting plethora of surface incident.

As for “Pierrot”, it has always been regarded as “new”, even a hundred years after its creation. After the premiere in Berlin in October 1912, with the composer conducting and Albertine Zehme as the vocalist, the musicians took the work around Germany and Austria. A critic after a performance in Augsburg the following month suggested that, in order for people to “understand, enjoy, or at least feel” the work, they would need to grow “ears of the future” – a statement with particular relevance for concert-hall audiences.

It’s a truism that in almost any creative sphere things which seemed like daring, almost anarchic cutting-edge first-up presentations can in many cases become absorbed by the main-stream of forward movement, and their edges rounded-off for more general consumption. Where “shock value” was and is an integral part of a work’s message, this can place extra stress on contemporary performers to try and replicate that essential sense of outrage and anarchy, public or private.

Of course, in a world all-too-accustomed to daily presentations of atrocity and carnage as television news entertainment and much worse (so I’m told) awaiting mere mouse-click activation via the Internet, it’s perhaps the performance-context that then becomes all-important for art-music.

I believe that’s why the “refined order” of the concert-hall and its age-old associations continues to allow music of all eras their specific kinds of impact and impressions. And, with reference to this present concert, even though our ears may have gotten “used” to the relative astringencies of the sounds produced by members of the “Second Viennese School” (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, et al…), in performance situations certain impulses activated by intensities unique to that performance will always have an impact.

Also, one doesn’t underestimate the increased familiarity and better-developed understanding of any work that comes with repeated exposure, a kind of “roundabout” that makes up for the loss of the shock value’s “swing”. This concert afforded us plenty of food for reflection along these lines, the items able to engage us in all kinds of ways and at different levels of receptivity, from surfaces to inner recesses.

Regarding the opening work by Hanns Eisler, I loved the combination of film and music on this occasion (being normally a last-ditch opponent of add-on visual accoutrement to music presentation). Of course, this was different to that, the film being the composer’s original inspiration for his music. On the face of it, fourteen musical vignettes stitched together would, one might think, produce a disjointed hotchpotch of impressions in sound, with no guarantee that the whole would be greater, etc….. But for a variety of reasons we as listeners seemed to be taken out of ourselves and ‘put in touch” with a kind of synthesis of sounds and images throughout, in places cleverly dovetailed, and in others interestingly contrasted in terms of feelings produced.

I could detect no strain, no discomfort or lack of co-ordination regarding the musicians’ performance (expertly duetted, cross-media-style, with the on-screen happenings through Hamish McKeich’s direction). It all seemed as one, the music-making reaching back from its immediate “face” to make the connections, as any piece of music might similarly fuse with aspects of a listener’s previous experience.

In the wake of Eisler’s work Webern’s Op.20 String Trio promised a potentially less immediate and engaging experience for the listener, an expectation that for me was confounded by the austere beauty of the sounds made by the trio of violinist Megan Molina, violist Andrew Thomson and ‘cellist Robert Ibell. Originally intended by the composer as a three-movement work, the surviving two movements seemed complementary, a kind of “air and dance” pairing. A commentator whose analysis I read called the work “jagged and severe”, qualifying the judgement with “yet strangely beautiful and lyrical”. The latter statement came out more readily with these musicians’ playing.

Here were finely-wrought exhalations of breath at the beginning, a gentle flow of movement, angular in places, and flecked with little irruptions and pizzicati impulses. Its companion movement seemed more impulsive, volatile in line and figuration as well as in dynamics, each player in this performance seeming both singer (in places more like “sprechgesang”) and listener, such was the playing’s interactive spirit throughout.

The interval done, Madeleine Pierard took the platform, dressed and made-up as Pierrot and accompanied by Hamish McKeich and the ensemble. She was stationed to one side, well-lit, while the musicians and conductor were in the centre. Immediately behind the group was a backdrop of a screen on which titles, translations and images were played, giving the audience plenty of help regarding the texts of the poems. First impressions were of an immediacy and clarity of utterance from both singer (beautiful diction) and players (beautifully-focused, transparent lines and atmospheric tones). The voice encompassed a frequently startling dynamic range, wonderfully mirrored by similarly explosive accents and contrasts from the players.

I confess I was transfixed by the clarity and focus of it all throughout the first couple of numbers. It actually took me until midway through Part One’s grouping of seven songs to regain my critical senses sufficiently to realize just why it was that Madeleine Pierard’s performance sounded so much more lyrical, wistful and engagingly human than any other singer I’d heard on record (I had never heard the work in concert before). She was actually SINGING a great deal of the text and sustaining many of the pitches of her notes to a greater extent that any other exponents of the role I’d encountered. There was, of course, variation in what I’d previously experienced, to the extent that, without a score it was impossible to plot precisely where Schoenberg had intended his “singer” to sing and where to break into speech, or at least “bend” the note pitches. But this performance was, to my ears, “sung” like no other I’d heard.

The effect was to “humanize” many of the poems’ utterances, and play down the more grotesque, often deranged-sounding modes adopted by the singer. Whether this was how Madeleine Pierard “saw” the work, along with her conductor, Hamish McKeich, or whether it was due partly or wholly to a lack of experience in performing it, resulting in more conventionally accepted modes of utterance being used, I’m not sure. Schoenberg himself was undoubtedly influenced when writing the work by the vocal capabilities of the first person to “create” the role of Pierrot, the actress Albertine Zehme (who, incidentally, chose the poems for the work). I came across a fragment of the correspondence between composer and singer-actress which was revealing:

The singing voice, that supernatural, chastely-controlled instrument, ideally beautiful precisely in its ascetic lack of freedom, is not suited to strong eruptions of feeling…..Life cannot be exhausted by the beautiful sound alone. The deepest final happiness, the deepest final sorrow dies away unheard, as a silent scream within our breast, which threatens to fly apart, or to erupt like a stream of lava from our lips…..We need both the tones of song as well as those of speech. My unceasing striving in search of the ultimate expressive capabilities for the “artistic experience in tone” has taught me this fact.

There was no doubting Madeleine Pierard’s considerable skills in bring this work to life, and her ability to make the words of the poetry pulsate – only in one or two instances did I feel that she hadn’t freed the music completely from the page, partly due to her playing-down the grotesque, spectral element which the sprechgesang mode would have helped emphasise – in Der kranke Mond which concludes the first part, she didn’t quite match the ambience of her flutist Kirsty Eade’s wonderful solo, her voice a shade earthbound, without the suspended gleam of the moonlight’s focus. But what a contrast, then, with her almost primordial, pitch-dark rendering of the following Nacht! – her deep-throated tones redolent of the abyss, as it were. She also captured the out-and-out horror of the Rote Messe, with its “gruesome Eucharist”, though I thought the sound of the words of Die Kreuze, the final song of Part Two, needed more of a certain spectral, “blood-bled” quality, something that more focused sprechgesang would have possibly given. But certainly there was vocal energy and finesse from this artist to burn.

The singer’s costuming and make-up was first-class, as was the organization of the backdrop screen and the timing of the text translations. I did wonder whether her lighting-pool was too unrelieved – some shadow on the face at certain angles would have given some contrast and allowed her a bit of freedom – as it was, every glance and every flicker of expression was laid bare, throughout. Make-up and costume suggested a theatrical statement was being made, and I felt it could have been followed through more strongly and consistently. Again,I don’t know whether Madeleine Pierard’s presentation was “directed” as such by anybody, but she could have been encouraged to incorporate what glances she did give her conductor (understandable in a score such as this!) into a kind of pattern of derangement or moonstruckness – something theatrical, or at least cabaret-like. And I would have liked her lighting to have had SOME shadow, a dark line allowing some facial contouring which she could have used for some respite along with more covert purposes.

Enough! Hang these comments, which matter far less than the fact that Pierrot was here a “tour de force”, a work whose stature was overwhelmingly conveyed by singer, conductor and players. Each of the instrumentalists did splendid things, conductor Hamish McKeich was the music’s flexible but unbreakable anchor-chain, and Madeleine Pierard’s voice gave us its beating heart. Performers and everybody associated with the Stroma team deserve our gratitude for giving us the chance to share so graphically and tellingly in a great work’s hundredth anniversary.