Day: 9 December 2012

Start of a diverting Cello(phonia) tradition at the New Zealand School of Music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Cellophonia II: New Zealand School of Music

Music for cello ensembles: by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, J Strauss II, Bach, Farr

Cellists: Inbal Megiddo (NZSM lecturer in cello), Andrew Joyce, Ashley Brown, Eliah Sakakushev; students of the NZSM and the Young Musicians’ Programme; players from Wellington orchestras

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University

Sunday 9 December, 7.30pm

Last year’s festival for cellists at the New Zealand School of Music was a very popular occasion, and it encouraged Inbal Megiddo, cello lecturer at the school,  and other leading cellists, to stage a repeat. It involves cello tuition, masterclasses and ensemble performance and a cello scholarship, consisting of $1000 plus the use of a Thomas Kennedy cello (c. 1813) for a year.
Professor Shmuel Magan of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance participated during the week, as a tutor.

There were one or two changes from last year in the ranks of professional cellists taking part and a considerable increase in the number of students, and players from amateur orchestras such as the Wellington and the Kapiti chamber orchestras; 29 in all.

An arrangement of Mozart’s overture to The Marriage of Figaro opened the concert, involving 12 players evidently playing seven parts. While it sounded an almost entirely different piece without woodwinds and brass, the variety of tone that could be captured was very interesting, particularly the sounds high on the A string.

Perhaps the most impressive piece on the programme was the arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, which acts as a major member of the cello concerto repertoire both because of its intrinsic musical quality and the heroic demands placed on the solo cellist.

In this case the solo role was passed from one of the principal cellists to another; that was in itself entertaining, but the experience of seeing and hearing it at close, chamber music, quarters highlighted the impact of the virtuosic terrors that it presents. It fell to Andrew Joyce to play some of the most spectacular variations.  As each variation exhibits different performance characteristics, the handling of particular sections by each cellist tended to illuminate these differences most divertingly.  Though focus might have been on the soloists, the accompaniment too exposed the bones of Tchaikovsky’s writing, not quite as interesting as when clothed in the colours of a full orchestra.

The first half ended with a Blue Danube Waltz: think I’ll stick with the version left to us by J Strauss Junior.

After the interval the full ensemble – 29 – emerged to play mainly lolly-pops. The non-lolly-pops were the 6th Brandenburg Concerto and Gareth Farr’s Ascent. The latter, led by Auckland Philharmonia principal cellist Eliah Sakakushev, is a piece written for cello ensemble, in a fairly conventional idiom, but exhibiting attractive musical ideas that seemed to emerge from a composer who was constantly alive to the sounds of the instruments as he wrote the notes on his manuscript (speaking loosely in the age of ‘Sibelius’). It was a delightful piece in its own right.

In contrast, and surprisingly for me, the 6th Brandenburg, though written for strings without violins and which I had imagined would be an easy convert to a wholly cello environment, disappointed. It began with a satisfying crunch, and the perpetuum mobile rhythm of the first movement sustained interest. But the leading melody in the second movement seemed earth-bound, it didn’t fly. And in the third movement I concluded sadly that though cellos are near neighbours to violas, the sounds they produced were simply not very beguiling, while the sounds of the original hovered in my head.

On the other hand, Bach’s Air on the G string (the second movement from his third orchestral suite) worked very well, never needing to be played in a range that was too remote from the limits of the original. The players changed their places from one piece to the next, presumably to give the students and amateur players a good range of experience; in the Bach the leading cellists each shared a desk with one of the students.

Finally, the big ensemble played the brief Trepak from The Nutcracker ballet, another piece that might have seemed a very improbable candidate for this treatment. Though it’s one of the classical pops that has long been on my ‘best avoid’ list, it was kind-of fun.

 

 

A world in a grain of sand – Pepe Becker and Stephen Pickett at Futuna

Posted on by Peter Mechen

COLOURS OF FUTUNA presents:

MUSIC FOR AWHILE……

15th, 16th, and17th Century Songs of love and life,

from Italy, England, France and Spain

Pepe Becker (soprano)

Stephen Pickett (lute and chitarrino)

Futuna Chapel , Friend Street, Karori

Sunday 9th December 2012

All that was needed for perfection to be had in this concert was a more substantial audience – but for one reason or another, people stayed away. Perhaps it was the weather – when Wellington turns on a beautiful day, it’s a place to be out and about like no other, and the prospect of an indoor concert, however felicitous, becomes proportionally less inviting. Still, it was an event whose qualities led one to recall those reproving words from Henry V – “and Gentlemen of England now abed / shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here….”

True, there’s been a superabundance of great concerts in the Wellington region throughout the year, and faced with the delights of such weather, many otherwise committed concert-goers could well have reflected upon cups that “runneth over” and chosen something different this time round. But the much bandied-about “arts capital” epithet which Wellingtonians are certainly proud to own by dint of location did receive a dent, or at least a paintwork scratch in this case, in my opinion. Whatever may have been the alternatives, world-class performances such as what we handful of audience members present heard from Pepe Becker and Stephen Pickett deserved better support than this.

This was my second visit to Futuna Chapel for a concert of recent times, and the venue again worked its unique magic, helping to impart a timeless feeling to the musicians’ explorations of music from distant times and places, and bringing the sounds triumphantly to life for our twenty-first century ears. The acoustic and general ambience admirably suited Pepe Becker’s voice and Stephen Pickett’s accompaniments, catching all of us present up in the music’s world and allowing its full force and flavour, thanks in equal measure to the skills of these performers.

The concert began with a short instrumental solo played on the lute by Stephen Pickett, a Ricercar by Joan Ambrosio Dalza, whose was a composer-name new to me – the work was published in 1508, which goes some of the way towards explaining my ignorance. From this uncommonly elegant beginning we moved to the first song, by Antonio Caprioli, Quella Bella e Bianco Mano (“That fair white hand”), in which love is depicted as both a wounding and a healing experience – beautifully performed.

Pepe Becker welcomed us graciously to the concert, expressing pleasure and gratitude at our attendance (for our part, as an audience, I think we felt embarrassed at our lack of real numbers, but both musicians quickly put us at our ease!). In fact, we were treated like kings and queens throughout, with song following beautiful song as if in some kind of “dream-ritual”. Especially evocative was this first “Mediterranean” bracket, with the soft, musical Hispanic word-sounds in particular adding to the general romantic effect – the last two songs of the group presented different aspects of the Spanish character, the first, by Miguel de Fuenliana, Passevase ei rey moro, a lament for the “Alhambra” in Granada, declamatory and serious in intent; and the second energetic and celebratory, Juan Encina’s dance-like Hoy comamos y bebamos, (“Today we eat and drink”), a roistering song complete with clapping and dance movements.

Stephen Pickett changed from the guitar to the lute for the bracket of English songs, introduced by a piece for solo lute Go from My Window, and followed by John Dowland’s Flow My Tears, with Pepe Becker opening the vocal throttle and suffusing the ambience with glorious resonant tones. If the singer paid rather less attention to word-pointing and more to a sense of  flooding the listeners’ sensibilities with sorrowful sounds, the latter carried the day triumphantly. Robert Johnson’s Hark, hark ,the Lark was also splendidly delivered, with a trio of lovely bird-like ascents to the tops of the phrases, each better than the last. A stratospheric Willow Song from the Dallis Lute Book of 1583 completed the bracket in beautifully bell-like style.

“Charlatans and Mountebanks” was the intriguing title of the next bracket (courtesy of a description (1619) by Michael Praetorius of music made by comedians and clowns), beginning with a solo by Stephen Pickett on the guitar-like chitarrino, and then plunging us into the no-emotional-holds-barred world of Barbara Strozzi, with the singer declaiming wonderfully melismatic lines high and low, stressing different rhythm-points in a way that created occasional mini-tensions, all to a passacaglia-like accompaniment – like much of this fascinating composer-performer’s music, the lines wept, raged and just as quickly dissolved once again. An instrumental Fantasia terza by Melchior Barberiis nicely effected a contrast with the following dance-song, Amor ch’attendi by Giulio Caccini, the singer augmenting the music’s energy and colour with a drum.

With Music for a While by Henry Purcell the musicians concluded eponymously both the final bracket of items and the entire concert, a section which featured as well works for voice by Merula, Monteverdi and Strozzi (again). Some of these were the most overtly expressive of the afternoon, Tarquinio Merula’s Canzonetta sopra la nanna for one, an extraordinarily doom-laden and fate-ridden lament by a mother made over a sleeping child, to an insistently “sighing” lute accompaniment, singing and playing which I found riveting in its intensity. Another was Claudio Monteverdi’s Ohimè, ch’io cado, energetic and volatile, with Pepe Becker demonstrating an exhilarating combination of force and focus over a wide-ranging terrain of emotion. The third of the “trio of intensity” was Barbara Strozzi’s somewhat suggestively-titled L’eraclito Amoroso, a conceit for despairing lovers, with different rhythmic trajectories underlining the spontaneity of thought and impulse, and words like “piangere” brought out and beautifully coloured by the singer. Altogether, a real “tour de force” of vocal expression from Pepe Becker, alternating beautifully “held” lines, with passionately delivered recitative, and holding us in thrall throughout.

As well that Purcell came to the rescue of our somewhat tenderized sensibilities at the very end – here was emotion cleansed of all excess, and rarefied as a pure stream of melody. No wonder he was so esteemed by his contemporaries – his setting of Dryden’s and Nathaniel Lee’s words, presented here by singer and player, persuaded we listeners that , indeed, “beauty is truth, truth, beauty…” and seemed to soothe for a brief time in our lives the sea of the world’s troubles.

 

 

 

 

 

Turning over a Blue Leaf – Adam Page and Stroma

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA with Adam Page  – BLUE PAGE

Adam Page (saxophones and looping)

David Bremner (trombone)

Mark Carter (conductor)

Stroma

Downstage, Wellington

Sunday 9th December, 2012

This concert put me in mind of a review I once read of a performance given by the great 19th Century pianist/composer Anton Rubinstein, while on tour in the United States, the writer turning to a kind of “vernacular” in order to be able to express the wildness of exhilaration that had seized him when confronted with such music-making –

“….the house trembled, the lights danced, the walls shuck, the sky split, the ground rocked – heavens and earth, creation, sweet potatoes, Moses, ninepences, glory, tenpenny nails, Sampson in a ‘simmon tree – Bang!!!……I knowed no more that evening!….”

The concert was billed as “New Zealand s largest chamber ensemble meets New Zealand’s greatest multi-instrumentalist”.  Even though he’s Australian-born saxophonist extraordinaire Adam Page can call himself a Kiwi (or anything else he likes), just as long as he keeps his voyage of spontaneous and interactive discovery as fresh, intriguing and even as dangerous as he did with the Stroma musicians at Downstage Theatre.

Though the concert’s apex-point was Adam Page’s Space, Time and a new pair of shoes,  a work featuring this multi-talented musician’s technique of looping his own and accompanying musicians’ live improvisations into a continually enriched texture of accumulated musical impulses,  the concert featured as well works by Jack Body, Michael Norris and Jacob ter Veldhuis, all taking their starting-point as the tradition of the Blues.

Jack Body’s work Tribute to the Blues began this exploration, a work in four sections. It began with “Big Joe’s Moan” lovely, lazily loping accordion sounds, joined by various other instruments,  playing homage to jazz legend Big Joe Turner by way of setting long and lyrical lines,  over the top of an almost pointillistic soundscape, flecks and single brushstrokes of sound and colour. The following “Penitentiary Blues”,  realized by the New Orleans-based group Tangle Eye, had a sombre and definite “Singing Detective” ambience about its textures, one trying, it seemed, to ”lighten up” and escape the claustrophobia of both form and context.

John Lee’s Pluck came to the rescue, marimba and piano creating a gorgeous “carpet” with string pizzicato joining a sympatico marimba and piano, and finger-clicking from the musicians keeping the faith, as it were, in the spirit of John Lee Hooker. Contrast, if needed was afforded by “Chain-gang Chants”, with heavy bass-dragging beat underpinning a roaring sax and trombone. The lamenting winds and strings  seemed to speak for the human spirit, the roaring brass underpinning the oppression.

Finally, Mary Lou’s Dream (homage to another jazz giant, Mary Lou Williams, pianist composer and educator) presented a kind of “blues fantasia”, with cool, walking-pace rhythms leading the ear into a kind of twilight zone of eerie wind chordings and tremolando strings, until the blues gestures begin to coalesce, building up to great roulades of expression, before expiring with a muttered cadence.

Michael Norris’s Heart across night followed on from a film clip of Theolonius Monk playing his classic Straight, No Chaser, the trio of musicians responding at first with primordial sound-impulses, a muted trombone (David Bremner), rumbling double-bass (Alexander Gunchenko) and quietly scintillating percussion (Lenny Sakofsky), all kept pulsing together by the beat of Mark Carter. The composer’s own poetry was printed as a kind of word-map “paraphrase” of Monk’s piece giving us clues as to his specific visions – thus the irruption of energies could be interpreted as “hot tears crashing”, to all of which the electric double bass seemed to choreograph a kind of “danse macabre” very much on the surface.

“No rest” cautioned the poem, so that even the twilight-zone evocations contained bursts of activity responses to disturbances and terrors within. I found a kind of  perverse joy in David Bremner’s muted trombone, a lovely sound, the instrument later reverting to its full-throated voice. with Stravinsky/Firebird-like glissandi sliding like a board-rider on a molten surface of percussion-driven activity – the climactic “that’s her” getting a volcanic, exciting response from all the players.

The final two items were dominated by Adam Page’s incredible playing, firstly Jacob ter Veldhuis’s Grab It! for tenor saxophone and audio tape, the latter containing samplings from a documentary film of death row prisoners’ aggressive verbalisings. The saxophonist played a series of high-powered synchronisations  mirroring the energy of the constantly-recycled words. The whole scenario was an amazing assault on one’s sensibilities, though the combination of images, music and words drew one into the matrix of anger and despair evinced by the presentation’s various elements – a haunting, life-shaking experience.

Lastly, we got Adam Page’s own Space, Time and a new pair of shoes, a work whose improvisatory spirit created a Baroque-like panoply of melodic and rhythmic explorations processed and shared by Page himself and the whole ensemble in tandem with a looping recorder machine. The technique enabled the musicians’ contributions to and variants of the bluesy opening material to be added to the sound-picture via the recorder-machine, whose agglomerations gradually built up to near-epic proportions. Page commented in his programme notes that he had never used so many musicians when previously presenting this work live, and was thus looking forward to the “unknown” aspect this circumstance would create.

The effect was exhilarating, transporting – a total knockout! – not quite shades of “I knowed no more that evening” but instead, a kind of flabbergasted audience babbling in response, something which, had it also been recorded and “looped”, Adam Page himself would have presumably delighted in augmenting with the excitement of his own visceral, heart-on-sleeve intensifications.  And that would have been yet another work, and it would have been even harder to tear oneself away – as it stood, from Stroma it was no less than a feast of musical discovery, with Adam Page as the inspirational “lead-from-the-front” guide.