Day: 29 July 2013

Fine Choral Symphony from Wellington Youth Orchestra, but where’s the audience?

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Beethoven: Symphony no. 9 in D minor, Op.125

Wellington Youth Orchestra, Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus, members of the Bach Choir, Madeleine Pierard (soprano), Bianca Andrew (mezzo), Derek Hill (tenor), Robert Tucker (bass), conducted by Hamish McKeich

Wellington Town Hall

Monday 29 July 2013, 7pm

The Wellington Youth Orchestra obviously works very hard, and is made up of extremely competent young musicians.  It is only two-and-a-half months since the last concert, which included a taxing Shostakovich Symphony.  Here they are again, playing Beethoven’s demanding final symphony, with choir and soloists; a considerable undertaking for a youth orchestra.

But where was the audience?  This major work has not been performed very recently in Wellington.  Perhaps people think ‘this is a kids’ orchestra – it won’t be very good’.  That is totally incorrect.  Where, though, was the advertising?  I was unaware of the concert until a few days before it happened.  I didn’t see any flyers handed out at other concerts (perhaps there were).  Here was a major choral concert, but the Wellington Regional Committee of the New Zealand Choral Federation was not notified of it, for their excellent listing emailed to choirs, giving details of forthcoming choral concerts.

Not only was the audience small; the orchestra and choir were both smaller than is usually employed for this work.  This did not matter in a less-than-half-full hall, and both lived up to expectations, on the whole.

Again, the orchestra had ‘friends and guest players’, whose names were not listed, joining to support some sections.  I noticed the NZSO’s principal double bass and others added to that section, the principal flute from the NZSO, plus a horn player, a cellist and a violist  There may have been others.

The concert began 10 minutes late – for a relatively early concert timing, this was an irritant.  However, I was soon disarmed by the playing: crisp rhythms and lively variety of dynamics were immediately apparent.  As I sat back and enjoyed the music, I thought what a great a symphony this would have been even without the choral finale.

These young musicians knew what they were doing, as the majestic first movement grew in stature – everything was given full weight.  This is not easy music, but there was no hesitancy and only a very occasional wrong note from this fine ensemble of 50-plus players.

The second movement was driven along forcefully by Hamish McKeich.  All parts were beautifully articulated in this highly dramatic scherzo.  The tempi of the movements were rather confusingly printed in the programme; suffice to say that they are 1 fast; 2  Scherzo: faster; 3 slow; 4 fast, with numerous slower bits interspersed.

The gorgeous slow introduction to the third movement, with its noble melody is followed by
variations upon it.  The playing was full of wonderful woodwind and horn ensembles.  Occasionally the pizzicato accompaniment on strings was not completely together nor loud enough, but that is a quibble; the playing was generally splendid and built up the tension marvellously well.

Beethoven’s motifs came through more than adequately – for example, the frequent pizzicato
passages for the cellos.

The final movement opened quite fast.  There was a big moment for cellos and double basses, and they performed it very well.  Then they were lucky enough to introduce the grand theme upon which the remainder of the movement is built.  The bassoon variation was played superbly.  When the violins finally got their chance, followed by the full orchestra, the music was declaimed with confidence and strength.

Beethoven’s words to introduce Ode to Joy by Friedrich Schiller were sung by Robert Tucker with plenty of power, and a rich vocal quality, although the lowest note was rather beyond his easy reach.  The other soloists were all exemplary, but their placement behind the orchestra meant a lack of volume and clarity at times.

The chorus of about 35 voices was, on the whole, impressive. However, the orchestra rather overwhelmed it at some climactic moments.  The men were strong in their passages sung without the women.  They are frequently asked to sing in a high tessitura, and those passages are spiked with chances for error, only one of which I was aware of the men falling into: shortening the word ‘muss’, thus making an unpleasant hissing noise where it was not wanted.

Tenor Derek Hill is quite slight of build, but he delivered the goods.  Bianca Andrew’s and Madeleine Pierard’s voices blended well, and were similar in timbre.

While I don’t expect the soloists to have ghastly grins on their faces, I would have thought that Ode to Joy might have evinced some appearance of happiness from the soloists, especially at the end; the women particularly looked very glum.  In some performances of the work, but not in this one, the soloists join with the chorus at the end, which seems a good idea – all the singers combining in the last great shouts of joy.

I haven’t listened to a performance of this masterwork for many years – instead, I’ve sung in it
numerous times.  This performance was uplifting – and I didn’t have to worry about whether I could reach the repeated top notes!

 

Nikolai Demidenko at Upper Hutt’s Classical Expressions

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Classical Expressions, Upper Hutt presents:
Nikolai Demidenko – Carnivals and Sonatas

SCHUMANN – Carnival Jest from Vienna (Faschinsschwank aus Wien) Op.26
Carnaval – Scenes mignonnes sur quatre notes Op.9
SCHUBERT – Sonata in A D.664 / Sonata in A Minor D.748

Nikolai Demidenko (piano)

Classical Expressions Upper Hutt

Monday 29th July 2013

It was an occasion which brought home to me the refreshing reality of live music-making as opposed to the ethos presented by presentations of the artist “on record”. I had not previously heard Nikolai Demidenko in the concert-hall (though he’s been to New Zealand before), encountering him only through recordings.

It wasn’t so much what I’d heard that surprised me, as what I imagined the artist would be like. Photographs of the pianist seemed to suggest some kind of wild, intense, volatile spirit, aloof, uncompromising and ultra-romantic in a kind of “Wuthering Heights” sense. And, of course, the music he seemed to carry a particular torch for – that of Nikolai Medtner’s – itself had a similar aura – enigmatic, exotic and slightly out of the mainstream.

So, I was preparing myself for the entrance of some kind of Dostoyevskian figure, when a dapper, bearded, bespectacled man walked quickly, even a little nervously, onto the platform and bowed courteously to his audience – he had a somewhat ruddy complexion and his hair was reddish-brown, or appeared so in the light. Surely – surely not? – was this my wild, uncompromising, romantic artist from the land of the endless steppes? How could this be? It wasn’t long before Demidenko’s actual playing restored some of my equanimity, conveying to me (in a way that his initial appearance certainly didn’t) plenty of the volatility, energy and grand manner that I was expecting.

He began, at first none too commandingly, with Robert Schumann’s Carnival Jest in Vienna (Faschingsschwank aus Wien), ever-so-slightly smudging the treacherous opening flourishes; but his playing soon settled – his tones deepened and his focus sharpened. In between the fanfare-like reprises of the opening were beautifully-contrasted interludes, one of which was a delicious “strutting” rhythm, which eventually built up to a defiant quote of the opening of La Marseillaise (the song had been banned by the Austrian censor) – Demidenko hurled the tune forth with the greatest of gusto.

The suite of movements has plenty of variety; and Demidenko gave us essences of each one in turn – the fanciful dream-world of the Romanze was followed by the gaily-spirited, repetitive “skip” of the Scherzino, with its alternations of playfulness and pageantry. Then came the darker purpose of the Intermezzo, all swirling agitation at the outset, but with the pianist superbly delineating the individual currents so as to allow the embedded melody to sing forth – great playing!

After this the finale’s opening exploded with energy, causing Demidenko’s fingers to momentarily “jump the rails” (it all added to the excitement!) – it was, like Sviatoslav Richter’s playing on his famous “live” Italian recording of the piece, extremely forceful, “free-wheeling pianism” as one might put it, but exactly what the music itself suggested – Schumann at his most exuberant.

There was more of the same kind of excitement and enthusiasm throughout Demidenko’s playing of Carnaval, that fantastical procession of characters, both make-believe and from among the composer’s own friends and colleagues. Demidenko’s view of this “portrait-gallery” was as absorbing as any I’ve heard, right from the beginning, with his grand and rhetorical Préambule, and – playing for maximum contrast – fascinatingly halting and nervous Pierrot, leading to a teasing, mercurial (if none too accurately-played) Arlequin!

To go through the work and give Demidenko credit for every single moment of illumination of Schumann’s wonderful writing would tax the reader’s patience to excess – nevertheless, one must make mention of the pianist’s ghostly evocation of the rarely-played Sphinxes, a brief kind of “appendix” to the Coquette/Replique sequences, which Schumann didn’t intend to be performed, even if luminaries such as Rachmaninov, Cortot, Horowitz and Gieseking chose to include it in their recordings, for our delight.

Usually it’s the final section of the work, the Davidsbundler putting the Philistines to flight, which guarantees plenty of keyboard thrills – but Demidenko cut loose earlier with Paganini, Schumann’s tribute to the violinist’s overwhelming presence and virtuosity – a veritable onslaught, with cascades of notes, leaving us all open-mouthed with astonishment! The Davidsbundler triumph at the end thus had a slightly less “death-and-glory” and more ritualistic aspect to its energies, as much a summing-up as an actual coup de grace stroke, the piano tones properly rich and satisfying.

In the second half, Schubert’s A Major Sonata D.664 was balm to the senses after Schumann’s invigorations! Here was another side of Demidenko’s pianism, one of lyrical poetry, the player bringing out both the music’s weight and its weightlessness, the contrasts bound together with the same ease of flow. Schubert was able to bear us away upon the wings of whatever mood he chose to explore, sometimes setting tranquility and anxiety cheek-by-jowl, as in the first movement’s sounding of bass figurations beneath the filigree treble ones at the recapitulation, and the second movement’s melancholy darkening after the rich loveliness of the opening.

Demidenko brought out the “bigness” rather than the drawing-room aspect of the finale, contrasting the prettiness of the opening theme with great rolling colonnades of sound serving as flourishes between the lyrical moments – these purposeful energies dominated the central section of the movement, and playfully vied with the melodic impulses right at the end – an approach which arrested and held, rather than stretched out one’s attention, right to the final chords.

In some ways the previous work’s antithesis, the A Minor Sonata D.784 which followed began as it meant to go on, with furrowed brow and grim forward motion, then plunging into agitated figurations involving cascading octaves and heart-stopping sforzandi tremolandos.

Demidenko preferred urgency to portentousness throughout, but wonderfully controlled all of the different dynamic levels of the various statements, so that each had a slightly different “weight” of character. In places I thought he pushed the music too fast, as with the arrival of the resplendent fanfares at the climax of the development, where the effect was a shade brusque rather than truly climactic – but the agitato element was certainly maintained, if at the expense of some of the music’s “haunted” stillness.

The pianist gave us an exquisitely-voiced melodic line at the slow movement’s beginning, before allowing the shadow of the twisted chromatic figure to darken the ambience and hold it in thrall. I liked the heartfelt surge of feeling mid-movement, as well as the lyrical response, the opening theme taking flight as it were, trying to escape those chromatic growlings in the bass – all very exploratory and wonderful!

As for the finale, under Demidenko’s fingers it became a whirling dervish of a movement, weaving together strands of panic, nervousness, determination and wide-eyed exhilaration – the pianist got plenty of glint in some of his flourishes and a real “ring” on the tone of his topmost notes, making up for some occasional fumbling of the syncopation in the midst of the excitement. The music’s second subject was a poor, consoling thing, easily swept away on the recurring tide, its uneasy calm already “spooked” by the music’s sudden irruptions of desperation, which die as quickly as they appear.

After the return of the wretched, consoling theme the music erupted for the last time, with extra weight and emphasis, perhaps the most desultory ending of any of the composer’s sonatas for piano. What strife, what trouble, and what grim resolve! Fortunately Demidenko redeemed our troubled spirits with a couple of encores, firstly a Chopin Nocturne, giving its melody a deliciously wayward trajectory, and then a stirring piece by Medtner – whose music the pianist has magnificently and resolutely championed over the years. The music sounded like it was a first cousin to one of the Rachmaninov Etude-Tableaux – and Demidenko’s playing of it brought the house down.