Mulled Wine Concerts, Paekakariki
The Homewood Trio (Bridget Douglas – flute, Andrew Joyce – cello, Rachel Thomson – piano)
Haydn: Trio in F for flute, cello and piano, No 1, Hob XV:17 (No 30 in the Robbins Landon list of all the trios)
Charles Lefebvre: Ballade for flute, cello and piano
Villa-Lobos: The Jet Whistle
Philippe Gaubert: Trois aquarelles (Three Water-colours)
Martinů: Trio for flute, cello and piano
Paekakariki Memorial Hall
Sunday 11 August, 2:30pm
A relatively unusual ensemble usually calls up music that is similarly off the beaten track, and this was no exception.
The best known name was Haydn, though the piece would probably have been known almost only to flutists and those who happened to have a 2003 CD on the Concordance label by three Wellington musicians, Penelope Evison (6-keyed flute), Euan Murdoch (classical cello) and Douglas Mews (fortepiano). They recorded all three of Haydn’s flute trios using period instruments, most distinctively Douglas Mews on Victoria University’s fortepiano.
Haydn wrote these three piano trios in 1790 with the treble part scored for the flute instead of the violin. They are numbered 28, 29 and 30 by Haydn scholar H C Robbins Landon, and are nos 15, 16 and 17 in the Hoboken catalogue. Both catalogues include them among the total of some 45 works for piano trio.
If that had been a somewhat too scrupulous attempt at authenticity, so lacking much robustness, this performance on a Schimmel piano and modern flute and cello, made few gestures in that direction. The piano opened boldly and the flute had all the marks of modern orchestral sound, though acknowledging the habits of the ‘classical’ period through a fluent range of sparkling ornaments. The cello’s role was confined mainly to the doubling of the piano bass line. In total, the players paid full attention to the music’s formal shapes, the modulations and changes of tone, the variations, and the teasing pauses and phantom closures and the whole work emerged as a great deal more substantial than might have been imagined. Haydn is predictable only in his delight in the unpredictable.
Flutist Bridget Douglas explained how she had come across the score of Charles Lefebvre’s Ballade among a collection that had belonged to long-standing NZSO principal flute, Richard Giese. Lefebvre was not a major French composer, a near contemporary of Massenet and Fauré, but there was no doubt, listening to the affectionate and studied playing by these musicians, that even a merely competent piece can become delightful and interesting in imaginative hands. All three determined to find the maximum enjoyment and interest in the music, the cello in particular catching my ear in quite striking passages. It deserves to be more played in contexts such as this.
Brazilian Villa-Lobos wrote a lot of music for unusual combinations and The Jet Whistle, for flute and cello, is a good example of his originality and quirkiness, some might say eccentricity. Its first movement is much given to endlessly repeated notes and gestures that can strike one as time-filling; the second movement is allowed to be more lyrical and again the players accorded it a degree of attention and care that rewarded its listening. It’s most famous for the build-up in the third movement of a screeching whistle from the flute, simulating the sound of a jet aircraft preparing for take-off on the tarmac. Last time I heard it, Bridget Douglas (I think it was) was in a space that allowed her to let rip with the final shriek that might do significant hearing damage; she was a little more restrained this time.
Philippe Gaubert was another rather minor French composer of a generation later than Lefebvre, born in 1879 (c.f. the wrong date in the programme). He was primarily a flutist during an age when the flute
was extremely popular, so most of his not inconsequential compositions are for that instrument. His Three Water-colours depict three scenes: ‘On a clear morning’, ‘Autumn evening’ and ‘Serenade’.
Though not likely to be mistaken for Debussy, Gaubert cannot help being influenced by him or Ravel, his greater contemporaries; the morning music ripples with arpeggios, dreamy, seeming to flow effortlessly from his pen; the evening creates a more sombre mood though I can’t claim that my mind was filled with crepuscular imagery; a Spanish feel enters in the third water-colour, with more distinct atmospheric and rhythmic changes. Even if Gaubert is no Ravel, his music is listenable and charming, emerging without marks of great toil such as to tax the listener.
Martinů was hugely prolific; much of his music is so characterful and marked by such vivid melody and insistent rhythms, that it is memorable and commands more attention than most of the other music heard this afternoon. I have known this trio for years though cannot recall where heard, and a rehearing only confirmed my affection for it.
A friend and I reflected sadly on the fact that we could recall none of Martinů’s six attractive symphonies being played in this country.
The music plunges straight into passages of clear, well-constructed themes and their varied repetition, the flute typically soaring over other busy motifs from cello and piano. The second movement seemed to fall somewhat into a repetitive routine though it recovered charm towards its end. Its last movement starts misleadingly: the flute with a slow solo statement. But there’s a sudden bursting into life with the arrival of a moto perpetuo which eventually comes to an almost Haydn-like stop, only to resume in a meditative, exploratory phase. It leads to a coda in which an insistent rhythmic motif takes hold and builds to a finish that is positively exciting in a way that little post-WW2 music is.