Day: 1 September 2013

Diverting variety in sparkling arrangements for reed quintet, Category Five

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Category Five – Chamber Music Hutt Valley

Wind ensemble: (Peter Dykes – oboe and cor anglais, Moira Hurst – clarinet, Mark Cookson – clarinet and bass clarinet, Oscar Lavën – bassoon, Simon Brew – alto and soprano saxophone)

Tchaikovsky: Overture to The Nutcracker; Mozart: Quintet in C minor, K 406 (adaptation of the adaptation of the Serenade, K 388); Ruud Roelofsen: Tides – a postcard from Zeeland; Rameau: La poule; Bach: ‘Jesu joy of man’s desiring’ (arr. Bryan Crump), from Cantata, BWV 147; Gershwin: Three Preludes; Byrd: Fantasia à 5 – The leaves bee greene; Debussy (Children’s Corner Suite)

The Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Sunday 1 September, 3:30 pm

The first thing that struck me as I sat down at this concert was the good sized audience: more, I think, than most of the evening concerts that I’ve attended in Lower Hutt recently. I guess the committee will be wondering about the wisdom of shifting their concert times, though that could lead to the risk of clashes with the increasing number of other concerts that are attaching themselves to Sunday afternoons. On this particular Sunday there were at least three concerts of classical music.

We heard this excellent ensemble after a couple of their concerts for Chamber Music New Zealand: so far, Te Awamutu and Whanganui with seven more stops around the North Island, and Blenheim and Motueka.

Eight distinct items are a lot; so many shortish pieces might have risked an impression of scrappiness but that was not at all the case for there was a substantial piece in each half, around which the smaller items offered interesting variety.

What is often called the miniature overture to Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker, is no more slight than many an opera or ballet prelude and the important wind parts in the original meant that there seemed little change to the sound, even given the presence of the more foreign alto saxophone in the mix. What the arrangement did for me was draw attention to the inner parts of the score which I had not been particularly aware of before, and the whole made a delightful start to the concert.

The major work in the programme was the piece that Mozart first wrote as a Serenade for wind octet,
carrying the Köchel number 388. It’s one of Mozart’s three serenades that comprise the greatest and most beautiful works in the entire repertoire for extended wind ensemble. When in 1788 Mozart needed a string quintet he arranged the piece which was, conveniently, in four movements, to fill that role, now given the catalogue number 406. This combination, particularly the strange timbre of Oscar Lavën’s bassoon and Simon Brew’s saxophone, gave rise to an odd husky throatiness in the opening phrases; though my ears soon became acclimatised.  Though it could be argued that the original scoring for eight wind instruments, pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns, produces a sound that Mozart has made his own and therefore carries an authentic feeling of inevitability, that was slightly missing from this reduction, and the presence of the saxophone, the sophisticated shape of this piece and its rich invention overcame any pedantic attitudes that might fleetingly have arisen.

A relationship with a young Dutch composer, Ruud Roelofsen, produced a piece, Tides, written for this group, linking the province of Zeeland with this country. There were maritime hints: the sounds bassoon and bass clarinet, from Mark Cookson, used atmospherically to suggest water undulating around wharf piles and lapping the hulls of ships; of ships’ horns; slithering effects, with microtones on the saxophone. An attractive, evocative piece well suited to a wintery harbour seascape.

The familiar La Poule is found in Rameau’s Suite in G minor, one of the two suites comprising the Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin published in 1728.  Given that a group of wind instruments can never replicate the staccato brilliance of a piano, let alone the pecking sound that the harpsichord could imitate even better, the oboe-led performance created an effect that was bright and comical.

The second half began with an arrangement by one Bryan Crump of the chorale known in English as ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’ (Jesus bleibet meine Freude), from the Cantata ‘Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben’, BWV 147. It’s one of those pieces that survive almost any transcription; Peter Dykes’s oboe again led the way with a rapid accompanying motif, and although he remarked that the clarinet would be playing the part of the singers, it was his oboe that rather dominated the performance which was, nevertheless, most affecting.

Gershwin’s Three Preludes were written for the piano but his jazz-steeped spirit proved a real gift for Simon Brew’s alto saxophone, though the pieces lay no less well with the oboe, the bass clarinet or the bassoon, which provided quirky underpinning in the third Prelude.

William Byrd’s Fantasia, ‘The Leaves bee Greene’ was the reason for the presence by Brew’s chair
of the soprano saxophone, and for the cor anglais that Dykes had been nursing. They contrived to bring a thoroughly anchronistic yet delightful quality to the performance.

It proved an unlikely though musically apt prelude to Debussy’s Children’s Corner. This was the counterbalancing major work, against the Mozart in the first half, and its piquant, witty, charming variety was splendidly captured in this very effective arrangement of the piano original. There were aural surprises at every turn, and the turns in the course of the six movements were many. In the sly allusion to Clementi’s studies, the bane of every young pianist’s life, the liquid notes of Moira Hurst’s clarinet climbed from the depths to take on the treble lines of the alto sax and oboe. The Doll’s Serenade was lit by bell-like tones from sax, bassoon and bass clarinet. And this colourful ensemble treated the ever-popular Golliwog’s Cake Walk with great success in the very different sound world of reed instruments and, particularly, the saxophone.

In response to the audience’s delighted applause, they played a very unfamiliar piece by Duke Ellington, after some short remarks from Moira Hurst acknowledging the critical role of Chamber Music New Zealand in organising and supporting their tour, and supporting so much musical performance generally, throughout New Zealand.

 

Stroma – the Elemental and the Fabulous

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma New Music Ensemble presents:
GODDESS AND STORYTELLER

Music by IANNIS XENAKIS, GAO PING, and DOROTHY KER

Nicholas Isherwood (bass baritone)
Thomas Guldborg (percussion)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Stroma New Music Ensemble

Hunter Council Chamber,
Victoria University of Wellington

Sunday 1st September 2013

Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned (those of us who read the program note before the concert, that is….)….short of resorting to an official rubber-stamped, or publicly-broadcast Government Health Warning, the accompanying note did made it quite clear regarding the salient characteristics of the two items written by Greek-born, French-naturalised composer Iannis Xenakis which framed this extraordinary Stroma concert: “….these works are unprecedented in their raw power and violence”.

Both pieces were late additions by the composer to an opera inspired by the classical Greek story known as The Oresteia (a work by Aeschylus, about Orestes, the son of Clytemnestera and Agamemnon, and the series of tragic events involving these characters). The first of these additional pieces was called Kassandra, and featured a series of dialogues between the Prophetess of the same name who had forseen these tragedies, and a chorus. The second, titled La Déesse Athena (The Goddess Athena) took the form of an accompanied monologue of declamation, the text a series of directives by the Goddess to the people of Athens to establish courts of law.

Despite each piece having a “stand-and-deliver” appearance on the part of the musicians that one might associate more with the concert platform than the stage, both made the kind of visceral impact one would expect from raw, graphic theatrical depictions of brutal violence and conflict. The theatricality of each piece was underscored by the remarkable vocal virtuosity of American bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood, required to sing throughout both works alternating (sometimes rapidly) between baritonal and falsetto pitches. It was, one might say, a vocal tour de force.

In the first piece, the two differently-pitched voices represented both Kassandra, the Prophetess, and her exchanges with the chorus of elders. The singer’s voice was amplified (in both pieces), which for me contributed to the immediate “all-pervasiveness” of the sounds –  in Kassandra,  biting, dramatic exchanges between the prophetess and the chorus. Solo percussionist (Thomas Guldborg) activated both drums and wood-blocks, advancing both the declamatory style of the exchanges and remorselessly driving the trajectories of the narrative forward as the prophetess graphically described how Agamemnon would be murdered by his wife and her lover. As well, the singer occasionally activated a kind of psaltery, the sounds imitating an ancient Greek lyre (actually, the instrument was described as an Indian siter).

Just as engaging/harrowing was the second of Xenaxis’s pieces, La Déesse Athena, which concluded the concert – if anything, it was even more blistering an experience than was Kassandra, with the resources of a chamber ensemble put to immediate and confrontational effect. Everything was shrill and hard-edged, with the singer frequently changing from falsetto to baritonal pitch and back again, underlining Athena’s dualistic, male/female nature, and emphasising the implacable, all-encompassing nature of the directives.

From the stark, harrowing pterodactyl-imagined cries of the opening winds, through to the piece’s end, the intensities never really let up, the exchanges between the singer’s dual-voiced utterances and the raw insistence of the ensemble groups expressing sounds of the most elemental and uncompromising kind. Not for nothing was Xenakis quoted by the programme notes as saying that he felt he was born too late, and had nothing to do in the twentieth century – these sounds seemed at once ancient and anarchic, a kind of screaming and moaning from the underbelly of human existence. The archaic Greek texts of both pieces “placed” to an extent the composer’s creative focus, but the classical or pre-classical “statues” referred to in the excellent notes, and here given voice seemed to me, to “speak, sing and scream” to all ages.

The only thing that perhaps could have further advanced these sensational, no-holds-barred performances was to have performed them in a properly theatrical setting. As it was, the presentations were as confrontational and uncompromising as I think they could have been in normal concert surroundings – and, in a sense, the “neutrality” of the concert situation enabled we listeners to focus purely and directly upon the music, to memorable effect.

Thankfully, both Gao Ping’s and Dorothy Ker’s pieces inhabited somewhat different, less harrowing realms, although each had its own distinctive way with sonority and with its organisation of material. I thought Gao Ping’s work was the more overtly discursive and exploratory, as befitted the composer’s title for the piece – Shuo Shu Ren – The Storyteller. Naturally enough, as well as the stories themselves, the storyteller’s own personality and distinctive way of putting across his material were here presented, for our great delight.

One could extrapolate the scenario’s different elements from the sounds – the first section of the music strongly redolent of a “Once upon a time….”, with jaunty, angular winds setting the trajectories at the beginning, but giving way to a whole inventory of textural and rhythmic variations, the lines and timbres engaging us with the idea of a kind of “exposition” of characters, situations and contexts at the conclusion of the work’s first section.

Something of the composer’s idea of myth blending with reality seemed to haunt the wistful, remote opening of the second section, like impulses of a cold memory being stroked and brought back to a state of warmth. Lovely cello-playing by Rowan Prior helped give the sequence a Holst-like austerity, augmented in places with oriental-flavoured intervals and harmonies. The music then re-established its narrative flow, with many imaginative and interactive touches, incorporating both the storyteller’s entrancement and the listener’s rapture.  These interactions brought about a two-note figure of resolution, almost a shout of triumph and fulfilment, brought back by the solo ‘cello to the meditative realms .

A third section gave the wind players plenty of scope to galvanise the narrative and “flesh out” the protagonists – from birdsong beginnings, the figurations grew in animation and girth, underpinned by strings and harp.The kaleidoscopic texture-changes kept the pace keen and listener-sensibilities guessing, culminating in alarm-sounding squeals(winds), acamperings (strings) and flourishes (harp) – very exciting!

The epilogue began with dreamy responses to a perky oboe, strings and winds drifting their lines into harmonies which dovetailed into a cadential trill, then delicately sounded again, to gorgeous, somewhat disembodied effect, with notes sounding across silences and dissolving into them. We readily experienced the composer’s idea of the storyteller dispersing fragments “ephemeral as light”.

An even more interesting-looking assemblage of players trooped out for Dorothy Ker’s work (…and…11), continuing a kind of mushrooming of numbers effect with each succeeding item. Where Gao Ping’s descriptions of his music drew largely upon his childhood memories, Ker’s less overtly personalised language in her programme-note focused intently upon metaphor and imagery describing what she called in her music a “wave-like morphology”, and the resulting “cycles of accumulation and decay” stemming from her use of the word “and” in the piece’s title.

More concentrated, terser and in a sense “tougher” a work than Gao Ping’s, (…and…11)  held our interest in a more immediate, less hypnotic sense, rather as I remembered old radio serials of decective stories used to do, with music soundtracks generating as much imagined expectation and incident as did the voices. I liked Dorothy Ker’s use of a repeated kind of what I immediately thought of as a “radio chord” whose focal-points repeatedly interacted with instrumental incident – percussion rumbles, scintillations, breath-sounds and mutterings, rock-bottom brass sonorities – sequences to create, in the composer’s words, “anticipation, followed by a release energy”.

As with Gao Ping’s work, the sonorities led the ear ever onwards through these sequences – disparate sounds included slashing pizzicati, with strings stinging the fingerboards, chords eerily made by breath-sounds in tandem with deep brass,and recitative-like solos from flute, clarinet and trombone. And the concluding episode was entrancingly done, the dance all-too-briefly suggested before leaving the outcomes to the realms of our imagination.

One was left, at the concert’s end, marvelling at the range and scope of the Stroma musicians’ skills under Hamish McKeich’s clear-sighted direction, bringing into being such a far-flung range of musical realisations with terrific aplomb and conviction.