Month: September 2014

Plentiful talent at Wellington’s Aria Contest courtesy Hutt Valley Competitions Society

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Hutt Valley Performing Arts Competitions Society

Aria Final, 2014

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday, 7 September 2014, 7 pm

The adjudicator at this year’s senior vocal competitions was José Aparicio, from Hawke’s Bay.  The aria competition attracted a record 23 entries, and eight finalists were called, rather than the usual six. The performers were all of a high standard, and the size of the audience was greater than it has sometimes been for this annual event.

Mark Dorrell accompanied all the finalists except one, in his usual splendid fashion; Tamara Buckland was accompanied by Catherine Norton – it was good to see the latter back in action in New Zealand after study overseas.

The concert was divided into two halves, with the competitors singing, in the same order, an aria in each half.

Compèring the evening was Georgia Jamieson Emms, summarising the plot of each opera for the audience.  Throughout, she gave us introductions that were witty and well-expressed, of just the right length.  Not only did she inform the audience, her ebullient turns of phrase must have helped to put the contestants at ease.

The evening opened with the rich, powerful voice of Tamara Buckland singing an aria from Massenet’s Werther. Buckland’s French was excellent, and she expressed the sentiments of the aria well.

Elisabeth Harris is dramatic both in appearance and voice; her low notes in “Give him this orchid” from Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia were full of delicious timbre.  This was a difficult aria, with a very wide vocal range; the drama was all there in Harris’s face and voice. All in all, it was a very fine performance.  Another Britten aria was next: “The embroidery aria” from Peter Grimes.  The grim story was put over with very clear English words by Rebecca Howan.  Her voice has a lovely quality of unforced clarity.

Hannah Jones also sang Gounod’s famous “Jewel” aria, and acted it out in gesture and facial expression.  Her tone was very pleasing, though it was lost a little on the lowest notes and she sang slightly sharp at times, early on.  This performance was also quite fast, but Jones was better able to manage the tempo.  Many words needed more projection.

Olivia Sheat proved to be the possessor of a lovely voice.  What with her clear words, the fact that her low notes were as clear as her high ones and her gorgeous rendition of the beautiful “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka by Dvořák, with its long-breathed notes.  I was very impressed.  She has great stage presence, and alone among the performances, I found her singing of this wonderful aria moving.

Katherine McIndoe’s performance of Mozart’s “Ah, ich fühl’s” from The Magic Flute was excellent, and she conveyed the mood well through her voice, but her face was completely bland, and she was a shade flat once or twice.  Finally, the sole male in the contest, Christian Thurston (who came third in the recent Lexus Song Quest final) sang “Avant de quitter ces lieux”, another venture into Gounod’s Faust.  His fine baritone was rich, and he gave a splendid performance.

After the break, we heard “Song to the Moon” again.  Once more, Tamara Buckland made a great sound, but occasionally sustained notes did not stay on pitch.

Elisabeth Harris sang “O ma lyre immortelle” from Sappho by, yes, Gounod.  The long legato lines were carried beautifully.  This aria also exploited her excellent range and dramatic skills (and thrills).  Rebecca Howan didn’t quite reach the standard of her first aria, but she shows promise. “O war’ ich schon mit dir vereint” from Fidelio by Beethoven was perhaps a little too demanding for a young singer.

Hannah Jones followed with “Quel guardo il cavaliere” from Don Pasquale by Donizetti.  This gave her the opportunity for good facial and musical expression, since it is humorous in its effect.  The words needed to be clearer through being projected more, but it was a fine performance in other respects.  Olivia Sheat gave another attractive performance, full of character and nuance, this time with Puccini’s “Quando m’en vo” from La Bohème.  She told the story that Musetta was conveying, and had me smiling.

Katherine McIndoe made a more accomplished and involving performance this time, of the difficult aria “No word from Tom”, from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress.  To end the evening’s singing, Christian Thurston sang “Per me giunto… O Carlo ascolta” from Verdi’s Don Carlos.  As probably the most experienced singer in the group, it was appropriate that he was the only one to sing Verdi.  He evinced great breath control, but I found some of his notes rather muddied.

Some words from the adjudicator were not all easily heard; unfortunately he did not use the microphone, so I missed most of them.  Awards were: 1st prize of $4000 from the Dame Malvina Major Foundation and Rosina Buckman Memorial Cup, to Christian Thurston; 2nd prize $1000 from the New Zealand Opera Society, to Elisabeth Harris. The Robin Dumbell Cup for the singer with the most potential went to Olivia Sheat; the Rokfire Cup for most outstanding competitor throughout the senior vocal classes, to Katherine McIndoe. The Jenny Wollerman award of $200 for the best rendition of a song or aria in French was won by Hannah Jones, and the $200 Patricia Hurley Opera Tours award for the best song or aria in Italian by Katherine McIndoe.

Congratulations to all the winners, and to The Hutt Valley Performing Arts Competitions Society for encouraging young singers and putting on a splendid evening of singing.

 

Orchestra Wellington confirms its vital role in city’s musical life with wonderful Haydn and Mahler

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei with Kieran Rayner (baritone)

Haydn: Symphonies No 85 in B flat and 86 in D
Mahler: Songs of a Wayfarer (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen) arr. Schoenberg
Schnittke: Moz-Art à la Haydn

Opera House, Wellington

Sunday 7 September, 4 pm

In the lobby before the concert a friend asked whether I’d been to Marc Taddei’s pre-concert talk and I confessed I had not. She, with a wide knowledge of music, though from another artistic perspective, had been delighted with it, had gained rewarding insights in what was about to be played.

Some pre-concert talks are more fascinating than others; Taddei’s are among the best: he has a gift that reaches both young people and those who might think they know it all, and serious assistants (in the French sense; to avoid the obnoxious word attendees) should make time for them.

Haydn’s Paris Symphonies
One of the topics he would have covered would have been the Paris symphonies of Haydn which have provided the backbone of all the orchestra’s subscription concerts this year. This concert was special, with one each at the beginning and the end.

They are probably among the symphonies that even the moderately well-versed might recognise but be unable to ascribe a number to. That is certainly my case. Though the symphonies were commissioned by a Paris orchestra, Haydn did not conduct them in Paris, as Mozart had his a few years earlier.

No 85
No 85, reputedly a favourite of Queen Marie-Antoinette, opens with stately, perhaps ponderous Adagio, rather un-Haydn-like, with a deceptive dotted rhythm; its move into the substantive first movement, is as serious as the opening of an early Beethoven symphony, and seemed indeed to call for a bigger orchestra than we had. Though the programme notes recorded how Haydn had taken advantage of what he knew to be the great size of the Paris orchestra, we were limited to the scale of an Esterhazy ensemble. There were six each of both violin sections, down to just one double bass.

However, Taddei, through his brisk triple-time speeds and a sense of resolve, soon succeeded in creating the impression of a big band, acknowledging a work of major significance, as Haydn displays his assurance in adroit modulations and his unfailing wit in the varied treatment of his themes. The second movement, scarcely a ‘slow’ movement, either as written or as played, with its solid emphasis on every other crotchet, in common time, handles a French folk tune said to have been one the Queen played in her prison cell a few years later awaiting her 1793 fate under the guillotine. Indeed, memorable, with its charming flute obbligato weaving through it.

The Minuet and Trio had an unusual quality, with its asides and solo excursions for violin and woodwinds; but notably the little diversions and the discursiveness, especially in the shy Trio, almost a Schubertian Laendler, a sort-of mirror image of the Minuet itself, which avoided any risk of the predictable, all of which were charmingly captured. The finale had a more orthodox feel: brisk and bright, though there’s the characteristic Haydn diminuendo and the music’s near disappearance before the recapitulation. All performed with a splendid feeling of affection and an authentic feel for the gallant/classical period.

No 86
I might as well mention here the other symphony – No 86 in D major – played at the concert’s end. Though played with the same forces, and even though I had found No 85 thoroughly delightful, this was even more imposing right from the more than a minute-long introduction – Adagio, with an illusion of greater weight, such as Haydn would have imagined in the orchestra for which he was writing. And perhaps, though I don’t have perfect pitch, a reflection of the way composers felt about the D major key.

After that fine rhetorical Adagio, the Allegro spiritoso came like a moment of sheer delight, and it brought me to what I’m sure has driven Taddei to programme all six of these works this year – the realisation that, given Haydn’s remarkable sense of the differences in culture and style between London and Paris (then and now), these symphonies are every bit the masterpieces that the dozen London Symphonies are.

Compared with No 85, the slow movement here really is that, though oddly labelled ‘Capriccio largo’.
Though the programme note observed that the melody was not especially memorable, in fact the whole movement IS memorable, for the spirit of poignant seriousness, of profondeur and throughtfulness
that invested its performance.

The Minuet and Trio were no less engaging, with the Trio again offering charming episodes for solo violin against, woodwind solos, its tune undecorated in comparison to the Minuet itself in which almost every note is embellished. And it ends with an imposing, finale, quite the equal in grandeur and zest of any Salomon-symphony: timpani, brass and all. Which was a splendidly-judged ending to a splendid concert.

Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen by Mahler
But the second work in the concert was Mahler’s Wayfarer songs sung by young Wellington baritone Kieran Rayner. I’ve been hearing him over many years since he was getting parts as an undergraduate in the School of Music operas and other performances; and since then in the wonderful Candide, done by the Orpheus Choir and Days Bay’s Così, Alcina and Viaggio a Reims.

This youthful cycle (Mahler was about 25) is a fine exercise for a singer at Rayner’s stage, and accepting the very occasional technical blemishes, he invested each song with its individual character and emotion: full of opportunity for rich and extreme late Romantic passion and grief. His discreet hand gestures and facial expressions were all that was needed to support the words, which emerged clearly.

The orchestra may have felt that the Schoenberg arrangement of the score better suited the small orchestra that had been decided on for the Haydn. Many would have found the score perfectly satisfactory, but with Mahler’s own orchestral sounds in my head, the orchestra’s size: small string bodies and the limited range of wind instruments, seemed a little dry.

Others have found in Schoenberg’s arrangements their own intensity and colour, which is felt to match what Mahler himself set on paper. Rayner captured the moving expression of pain in ‘Die zwei blauen Augen…’, though I found something inauthentic in the sound of strings against single clarinet and flute: ‘Quelque chose manquait’. Yet there were many aspects that I enjoyed, the contributions of both piano and the digital (I suppose) harmonium, in ‘Ging heut’ Morgen…’ and the agitated feel of ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’, for example. And above all the final words, ‘Unter dem Lindenbaum … War alles, alles wieder gut/Alles! Alles, Lieb und Leid/Und Welt und Traum!’: defeated and lost, accompanied by small, thin flute and clarinet notes.

Ideally, one would have liked both German and English texts to have been offered in the programme; after the synopsis of each song, the English translation of each was a bit redundant: better to have printed the German.

Schnittke
Finally, and to my mind a bit oddly, Schnittke’s manipulation of his notion of the style and sense of Haydn and Mozart.

When we returned after the interval, the stage was in darkness; slowly, figures could be discerned entering, a violin began to play a jaunty, fractured tune, then another violin and eventually the stage lit up to reveal the full orchestra and conductor, standing. The music, in detached scraps, came from unfamiliar music Mozart wrote for a commedia dell’ arte; they had no impact of themselves, and it was hard (for me) to derive much entertainment or enlightenment from Schnittke’s efforts.  After a few minutes, the stage started to dim and players left one by one, as in the Farewell Symphony, and it ended with the double bass playing alone with Taddei tapping his baton on the music stand. I was left wondering what it was that I’d missed, that had gained it the sort of standing it has in avant-garde circles. (Does Schnittke actually love Haydn and Mozart? Does he love music? For all his difficult life and the sadness of his last years, I have never warmed to his music).

However, the Haydn and Mahler were the real thing, deeply touching both the mind and the emotions, and the orchestra’s performances offered another demonstration of the value of a city based orchestra which tackles music that is less played by the NZSO, but which is revealed as of major importance.

 

Fine Israel in Egypt from Tudor Consort in challenging acoustic

Posted on by Frances Robinson

Handel’s Israel in Egypt

The Tudor Consort with The Chiesa Ensemble (comprising 25 members of the NZSO, with Douglas Mews  harpsichord), directed by Michael Stewart

Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Saturday 6 September 2014

Israel in Egypt sets out to recount the Old Testament story of Israel’s final period in Egypt under a Pharaoh that withdrew all previous privileges and inflicted on the Israelites a physical bondage of the harshest kind. Handel set an entirely biblical libretto which dramatically depicts the Ten Plagues that Israel’s God visited on the Egyptians, the captives’ escape towards the Red Sea, the Egyptian pursuit with murderous intent, and the parting of the waters to provide safe passage for the Israelites. Unlike many other oratorios of the period, the chorus is here the central protagonist , with recitatives and arias sung by choristers, rather than by separate vocal soloists.

The opening orchestral prelude was beautifully balanced and sympathetic as were the first recitative and chorus, all of which set the brooding  background of Israel’s grief  and despair at their hopeless situation under the new Pharaoh. Michael Stewart judged the reverberant acoustic of St. Paul’s perfectly and used broad tempi that allowed the fugal entries and lines of both orchestra and chorus to be cleanly heard, and the story clearly heard.

As the narrative unfolds,  Handel uses the libretto to paint a succession of dramatic contrasts, offsetting the sombre elements of the tale against the more violent visitations  of  the plagues. Chorus and orchestra gave a wonderfully vigorous depiction of episodes such as the clouds of locusts, hailstorms mingled with fire, Jehovah’s ruthless elimination of  the Egyptian firstborn and the final fate of Israel’s pursuers as the waters of the Red Sea engulfed them.

Interspersed were evocative contrasts like the “thick darkness over the land, even darkness which might be felt”, and the lighthearted pastoral pipes and shepherds’ voices of  slaves released. Handel’s masterful orchestration and choral writing was given its fullest value by both singers and orchestra, with the impeccable technical and musical skill that one has come to expect from the Tudor Consort and NZSO players.

Yet I felt a deep sense of frustration with the performance because much of that talent and musicianship was, in the final analysis, defeated by the reverberant acoustic of St. Paul’s Cathedral.  The broad tempo sections worked well, but the high speed intricacies and fugal lines of the fast tempi became an overwhelming blur of sound, where there was no chance of verbal clarity. For me, the magic
of Handel’s oratorios is his stunning realization of the story – where he lifts an already absorbing literary drama onto quite another plane with his astonishing musical paintbrush. The music is created specifically to tell the story, and if that story cannot be heard, the point of the work is lost.

It saddened me that the obvious talent and commitment of the musicians could not be properly appreciated in the enormous space. Given the size of the audience, I suspect they might have fitted into Old St. Paul’s, where I think there would have been a greater chance of acoustic success.

Unfortunately I was not able to stay for Part Two of the work, but the format is very similar to Part One, and I doubt my impressions would have been very different.

 

Source of innocent merriment – Wellington G&S Society’s “The Mikado”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington G & S Light Opera presents:
GILBERT AND SULLIVAN – The Mikado
Libretto by W.S.Gilbert / Music by Arthur Sullivan
Stage Director: Gillian Jerome
Musical Director: Hugh McMillan

Cast:  The Mikado, Emperor of Japan (Derek Miller)
Nanki-Poo, His Son (Jamie Young)
Ko-Ko, Lord High Executioner (John Goddard)
Pooh-Bah, Lord High Everything Else (Orene Tiai)
Pish-Tush, A Noble Lord (Kevin O’Kane)
Go-To, A Noble Lord (Lindsay Groves)
Yum-Yum, a Ward of Ko-Ko (Pasquale Orchard)
Pitti-Sing, a Ward of Ko-Ko (Michelle Harrison)
Peep-Bo, a Ward of Ko-Ko (Marion Wilson)
Katisha, an elderly Lady, betrothed to Nanki-Poo (Jody Orgias)

Chorus and Orchestra of the G & S Light Opera Company
Opera House, Wellington,

Saturday 6th September, 2014

Those of us who know and love the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas confidently expect that, despite the swings and roundabouts of popular taste and fashion, they will continue to delight, charm and entertain – in short, endure as classics. Though uniquely of their time they still express relevant commentaries regarding equivalents among individuals and circumstances in contemporary life. Perhaps first and foremost of them, and probably still the most popular, is “The Mikado”.

From the moment that the Japanese ornamental sword fell off the wall of W.S.Gilbert’s study, giving the author the idea for a libretto which would be set in Japan, but would mercilessly lampoon the British bureaucracy, “The Mikado” has commandeered a position of on-going success among the “Savoy” Operas, one which its fellows, even the well-known “HMS Pinafore” and “The Pirates of Penzance” haven’t quite emulated. No other G & S operetta casts its satirical net so widely, nor pulls in such a memorable catch. And as Jonathan Miller’s legendary, though disconcertingly not-so-recent, production update of the work at the English National Opera demonstrated, “The Mikado” lends itself readily to modernization, provided  that it’s done creatively and intelligently.

Wellington G & S Light Opera’s recent production of  the show (which Gilbert adroitly sub-titled “The Town of Titipu”) played its modest part in following the “updating” tradition via references to recent “Down Under” events. The opportunities for interpolation occur mostly in two songs, firstly Ko-Ko’s famous “Ive got a little list” in which the Lord High Executioner informs us of the most likely candidates for pending decapitation, and secondly, the Mikado”s equally well-known “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime”, also a list, detailing the fate of certain types of miscreants, each in a manner that befits the original offence. Standard performance practice, really, and hardly ground-breaking – but the updates always have the effect of to some extent revitalizing the performance/listening process, and so it proved here.

In fact I was expecting rather more “input” considering the plethora of politically poisonous goings-on of late in our normally po-faced little country – but I thought Ko-Ko’s song the more imaginatively “doctored” of the two efforts, the best contemporary reference being to Nicky Hager’s recent book, the line containing the “dirty politicist” phrase bringing the house down! By comparison, the Mikado’s best in situ reference in his song was the punishment for the window-pane scribbler in railway carriages, having to “ride on a buffer on Hutt and Johnsonville trains”, though there was also a side-swipe at list MPs which caused an amused rustle. Still, the important thing was that the updated interpolations were done and duly enjoyed.

At the opera’s beginning we noted the traditional cut of the Japanese costumes, elaborate enough without being cumbersome, and sufficient to suggest the orientalism of the operetta’s original inspiration. The chorus’s singing throughout was excellent, even if their stage movements sometimes lacked the rhythmic snap and verve suggested by the music – the opening “If you want to know who we are” looked marvellous in tableau, but I felt it still needed more theatrical energy and dynamism in both movement and attitude.

The gentler, very different character of the women’s choruses created their own worlds of expression, although I noticed a tendency to adopt tempi in some of the music that didn’t allow the melodies to bloom – no heeding of the plea “fleeting moment prithee stay!” when the women intoned “Comes a train of little ladies”, and even more disappointingly, “Braid the raven hair”, both of whose lovely tunes seemed to me subjected to something of a hustling, “come along, now!” treatment that I felt compromised their soaring, lyrical qualities. However, I did like the feistiness of tone with which the women sang throughout – not especially beautiful a sound, but very schoolgirlish and convincing!

So, the choruses gave a lot of pleasure both in appearance and in vocal terms. But where I thought some members could have been profitably deployed was in assisting both of the “imperial” entrances, both of which seemed too bare and exposed, wanting in theatricality and gravitas. Firstly, I expected there would have been a short, sharp whirlwind of a disturbance with the vengeful arrival in Titipu of Katisha, the Mikado’s daughter-in-law elect, to reclaim her fugitive fiancee, Nanki-Poo. As Katisha, Jodi Orgias seemed, at her entrance, strangely unattended as befitted her station, apart from two rather impassive imperial guards – could we not have had, for example, a quartet of attendants drawn from the onstage chorus (I’m certain there’d none of them be missed!) quickly running in and prostrating themselves in terror by way of announcing her arrival?

The Mikado’s entrance was similarly underwhelming – there was no sense of any imperial retinue indicating the character’s majesty and overweening importance – I would have thought it simply needed half-a-dozen or so of the chorus “redeployed” as attendants to the Monarch – in fact none of the men’s chorus was required on stage in Act Two up to that point, so a transformation from Titipu citizen to royal attendant would have been a relatively easy thing to achieve. Any number would have made a more ceremonial and worshipful impression than did just the same two guards as came with Katisha.

Both men’s and women’s choruses, as I’ve said, made splendid noises, as, by and large, did the principals, the singing discreetly aided by some amplification – I found it a shade aurally confusing at first, until I worked out just how it was being done (though one is opposed in principle, one can put up with it when, as here, it’s unobtrusively handled).

As Nanki-Poo, tenor Jamie Young fearlessly attacked his lines with enthusiastic, ringing tones, characterizing his delivery most adroitly in the different stanzas of “A Wand’ring Minstrel I” – and while the voice wasn’t entirely easeful and elegant in places, what he did always sounded wholehearted. Kevin O’Kane’s Pish-Tush was smartly and stylishly presented, able to put across “Our Great Mikado” with some relish, amid the appropriate stuffiness. And I liked the pompous cut of Orene Tiai’s Pooh-Bah, who seemed to savor his every utterance with a fine sense of his own puffed-up importance (including at one point a “Minister of Maori Affairs” reference – or words to that effect – to add to his list of portfolios!). And his little vocal cadenza at “Long life to you!” was an especially delicious moment.

Both Jody Orgias as Katisha and Derek Miller as the Mikado did their best to convey a sense of imperial gravitas. We also got Katisha’s vulnerable, soft-hearted side from Jody Orgias – I was moved by her “The hour of gladness”, and in the second act her distress at the tale of the fate of the “little tom-tit” who died for love gave an additional dimension to the ferocity of her duet with Ko-Ko, “There is beauty in the bellow of the Blast”, though neither her nor her duetting partner, John Goddard as Ko-Ko, managed at the conductor’s speeds to REALLY point and get across to us the deliciousness of those words: “……but to him who’s scientific there is nothing that’s terrific in the falling of a flight of thunderbolts!”.

I wanted some more interplay between the Mikado and Katisha just after their first entrance, with the “Daughter-in-law-elect” making it quite clear that she intended to rule the roost in the Royal Household! – oddly enough a publicity photo in the programme of this scene in rehearsal conveyed much more sense of this happening than I thought we actually got on stage! And, whether Derek Miller’s “A more humane Mikado” was deliberately cut or whether there was some kind of mishap I don’t rightly know – but having re-established the “running order” of the song, he gave a good account of the rest of it, even if the interpolations weren’t quite up to those in wit and sting written for and sung by Ko-Ko in his “little list” song.

The “Three Little Maids from School” invariably score a hit, and the winsome trio of Pasquale Orchard (Yum-Yum), MIchelle Harrison (Pitti-Sing) and Marion Wilson (Peep-Bo) brought off their “signature tune” with wit, gaiety and appealing freshness – though again I felt they were unnecessarily overtaxed by the tempi adopted for the following  “So Please you Sir, we must regret”, as was Pooh-Bah, in reply. While Pasquale Orchard’s appealing Yum-Yum properly dominated, with a performance that sparkled and glittered with ripples of surface delight upon oceans of character, Michelle Harrison’s grainer, more circumspect Pitti-Sing was the perfect foil, a kind of “Despina” to her sister’s “rolled-into-one-Fioridiligi/Dorabella”, making an all-too-convincing job of her description of the unfortunate Nanki-Poo’s bogus execution!

I’ve left John Goddard’s portrayal of Ko-Ko, the hapless Lord High Executioner, to the end because his was a pivotal performance – he “owned” the stage and consistently “placed” his character just where it should have been. His timing of the words in his songs, as with his dialogue, was exemplary, and he made the most of his set of topical interpolations. His character seemed alive to possibility at all times, rather like a musician who thinks about and fairly places every single note in the score – nothing gave the impression of being mechanical or by rote, but was instead lived and relished. Along with Michelle Harrison and Orene Tiai, he played his part in bringing into grisly focus “The Criminal cried”, one of the performance’s highlights.

Apart from a slightly uncertain beginning to the Overture, and a tendency in places to push the music a tad too hastily, music director Hugh McMillan kept the performance securely on the rails, drawing some lovely solos from his orchestral players, led by Orchestra Wellington’s Slava Fainitski, along with some deliciously deft ensemble sequences, as well as plenty of energy in appropriate places. As with other recent G&S Light Opera productions there was much to enjoy during the course of the evening, the splendour of the tried-and-true classic in places shining forth with enough warmth to stimulate and satisfy our pleasure.

 

Nikau Trio celebrates Spring with enchanting, vivacious music

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Haydn: Trio no.1, Hob. XV:17, for flute, cello and piano
Enescu: Cantabile and Presto, for flute and piano
Martinů: Trio for flute, cello and piano

Nikau Trio (Karen Batten, flute; Rachel Thomson, piano; Margaret Guldborg, cello)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 3 September 2014, 12.15pm

The opening trio fitted the mood of the day, and enhanced it.  Haydn’s good humour was just right for another windless, sunny day (following over a week of such delightful spring weather), and it was harmoniously reflected in what we heard from these three fine musicians.  They played this joyous music with alacrity and commitment.  The flute particularly, evokes spring and the bursting of new life.  The work was charmingly and sensitively played.

Romanian composer George Enescu (1881-1955) (misspelt as Enesco on the printed programme) wrote his work in Paris, in 1904, we were told by Karen Batten.  The Cantabile had quite a sultry feel; it began low in the flute’s range.  It was a graceful movement, with beautiful passages for both instruments.  When the presto commenced, immediately the playing was more dynamic and forceful, yet still graceful.  It proved to be a delightful work.

Rachel Thomson talked about the fun and good humour in the work by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů – i.e. in similar vein to Haydn’s.  Gaiety bounded from the first notes.  Each part seemed independent, yet in their coming together they made up to more than the sum of their parts.  The first movement had lots of that – running movement.

The tranquil adagio was the opposite – great stillness to begin, but gradually working up to a fierce climax, before subsiding to a gentler mood.  It was full of piquant harmonies and juxtapositions of the diverse timbres of the three instruments.

The third movement opened with only the slow flute, followed by a sprightly, bouncy allegretto with jaunty themes.  A grand theme at one point failed to quell the high spirits.  Then a wistful, slower section had Margaret Guldborg’s cello sounding solemn, even plaintive, with the mute in use.  Exuberance returned, and the music dashed away to a spirited conclusion with many notes, especially for the pianist, whose complex part seemed at times to prefigure minimalism in its repetitions.

This was a wonderful programme of music that was unfamiliar to me, played by a trio exhibiting great elan, musicianship, technique and enjoyment. Bravo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passion and circumspection from the wonderful Faust Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
FAUST QUARTET

(Simone Roggen, Annina Woehrle, vioiins
Ada Meinich, viola / Birgit Böhme, ‘cello)

JOHN PSATHAS – Abhisheka

LEOŠ JANÁČEK  – String Quartet no.2 “Intimate Letters”

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN  – String Quartet in A Minor Op.132

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Tuesday, 2nd September, 2014

Named after German literature’s archetypal questing figure, the Swiss-based Faust Quartet currently on tour in New Zealand, gave us an appropriately far-reaching programme for their Chamber Music Hutt Valley Concert at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre. Led since 2012 by New Zealander Simone Roggen, the group also has German, Norwegian and Swiss members, its cosmopolitan “face” also reflecting the range and origins of the music presented on this occasion.

As with the group’s previous Wellington concert (reviewed by Rosemary Collier for Middle C), the programme featured two “classics” of the quartet repertoire with a contemporary piece. New Zealander John Psathas’ work Abhisheka began the concert, the focused intensities of the work nicely sharpening our sensibilities and preparing us for what was to follow. Moravian composer Leoš Janáĉek wrote two String Quartets, the second of which, subtitled “Intimate Letters”, was nothing short of a sharply-focused outpouring of almost pure emotion relating to the composer’s love affair with a much younger married woman. The evening was “rounded off” by Beethoven’s renowned Op.132 String Quartet in A Minor, itself a work of great intensity, containing the well-known “Holy Song of thanksgiving from a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian Mode” as its slow movement – no rest, it seemed, for either players or listeners!

John Psathas’s single-movement work 1996 work Abhisheka has become something of a classic quartet repertoire piece in this country, one whose qualities seem somehow freshly-minted with each performance one hears. Its exotic, meditative sound-world suggests a kind of ritual, as befits its name, derived from a Sanskrit word for “anoint”. The work’s themes have a definitive Eastern flavour, underscored by occasional pitch-bending on certain notes in the solo lines. There’s drama, too, in the way that some chords (such as at the work’s very opening) seem to come into being from a void of silence, a kind of metaphor for the birth of consciousness, or of awareness of a special state of being,  the “anointing” perhaps associated with the conferring of a state of grace upon the individual’s soul.

Whatever the case, Psathas has, with this work, contrived a unique sound-world, whose utterances draw us deeply into what seem at first like normal divisions of music and silence. However, with each note-clustered crescendo we’re taken further and more strongly into a kind of timeless state of being, where every gesture and its accompanying impulse and associated resonant effect seem to adopt a Wagnerian “time and space are one” quality, freed from movement towards and away from certain points, and having instead a ‘”centre of all things” fullness. The Faust Quartet’s concentrated, transcendent playing enabled us to give ourselves entirely over to the world into which the music had so readily transported us.

In retrospect the intense focus of Psathas’s work had the effect of activating and priming our sensibilities in “controlled conditions” by way of preparation for the scorching blasts of Leos Janáĉek’s fierily passionate String Quartet “Intimate Letters”. This was the second of two quartets written by the Moravian composer, both towards the end of his compositional life. They were inspired directly by his unrequited passion for a younger, already married woman, Kamilla Stösslová, the first quartet, subtitled “Kreutzer Sonata”, appearing in 1923, and the second written in 1928, the year of the composer’s death. Though Kamilla was the inspiration for both quartets, it’s in the second work that Janáĉek explicitly and directly expresses his feelings for her – incidentally, the subtitle “Intimate Letters” was given the work by its composer.

What a work, and what a performance! The players delivered this jagged, volatile, highly emotional, and in places seemingly unstable music at what seemed “full stretch”, employing the widest possible dynamic range and the greatest possible diversity of tones, timbres and colours. I’m sure I sat open-mouthed for much of the time, marveling at the gutsiness of it all, at the group’s readiness to meet the music at its expressive extremes, conveying without hesitation or reserve the unbridled, part-exhilarating, part-disturbing force of the composer’s hot-house bestowment. On this cheek-by-jowl showing, Janáĉek’s music puts even the Cesar Franck Piano Quintet in the shade as regards erotic suggestiveness.

Janáĉek’s penchant for extremes of  showed its hand right at the work’s beginning, with full-blooded declamations followed by whispered pianissimi, after which introduction followed sequences of such tangible physicality paralleled with moments of breathtaking tenderness – the playing of the violist Ada Meinich, in particular, seemed to suddenly underline the incongruity of concert-dress for such abandoned and unconfined utterances. The second movement’s romantic, rhapsodic-like beginning gave our sensibilities some respite, Janáĉek getting his players to bend, stretch, twist, coil and unwind the same melodic fragment  through countless treatments, before too long galvanizing the rhapsodic feeling with some savage, biting accents and manic presto-like scamperings.

Whatever the music did the players were there, pouring out sounds from their instruments that one couldn’t imagine wrought with greater intensity of physical and emotional commitment. The wild, winsome third movement, with its forceful dotted rhythmic trajectory, and the equally fraught finale both were put across to us with what seemed like anarchic force, to the point in the finale where one felt the music was expressing something near to emotional disintegration. Those episodes of vicious tremolandi during the work’s last few minutes sounded so raw, so animal-like, as if all human reason had been lost, and only primordial impulse remained – even more frightening was to encounter these savage gestures in tandem with moments of folkish gaiety and lyrical tenderness!

We certainly needed an interval after these outpourings, and especially in view of the music that was to take up the concert’s second half – Beethoven’s mighty Op.132 A Minor Quartet, known as the “Heiliger Dankgesang” Quartet by dint of its remarkable slow movement. Perhaps it was partly my expectation in the wake of the Faust’s remarkable performance of the Janáĉek work that I felt, increasingly so in retrospect, some disappointment in the players’ delivery of this very part of the work. It could also have been that the group’s concentration had been unsettled by the unfortunate circumstance of Simone Roggen’s instrument breaking a string at the beginning of the movement’s first dance episode, and that the music’s organic flow had been fatally checked – but however it was, the succeeding variants of the opening molto adagio seemed to me not to build in intensity and radiance as I would have expected – falling short of that “life infused with divinity” description, commented on by the program note.

I wondered, too, whether the experience for all of us of hearing the Janáĉek work earlier in the evening put extra onus on the performance of the Beethoven to “atone” in a way for the Moravian composer’s emotional excesses – here were the very different outpourings of two powerful creative spirits responding to tribulations of contrasting kinds. What Janáĉek’s music was depicting was its composer’s wrestling with the unrequited nature of his love for a younger woman – hence the music’s desperate, in places almost deranged aspect. Beethoven’s music had a corresponding kind of power, but of fierce determination and intense triumph over tragedy, and the intensity stemmed from both determination and triumph. I thought the quartet’s playing of Beethoven’s molto adagio sequences needed more of that fierce, intense sense of “being there” thru determination and tragedy, in a sense completing a process that Janáĉek, for all his greatness as a composer, wasn’t by dint of circumstance able to do.

The interesting thing was that the remaining three of the Beethoven work’s movements were given by the quartet one of the finest performances I’ve ever heard, nowhere more so than with the last movement. I’ve waited for many years to hear a reading of the latter that matched in feeling that of the old pre-war recording made by the Busch Quartet, to the extent that this present one did. Here, the players caught the “strut” of the music at the beginning, the theatricality (gothic-gestured in places) of the mad, melodramatic recitative-like section, and the darkness and unease of the subsequent allegro appassionato, the playing superbly conveying its swaying, vertiginous rhythm and haunted thematic material, as the music traverses the “dark wood” of human experience with all its enigmatic and expressionist gestures of dogged progression and determined resolve to “get through”.

How wonderfully the players caught that frisson of energy and thrust at the movement’s end, the accelerando both thrilling and hair-raising, for fear of where it might end, but bringing the music at last out into the sunlight, where there’s relief and circumspection rather than joy and celebration – the end is certain and emphatic without being aggrandized in any way – here it was what Sir Edward Elgar would have called a triumph for “the man of stern reality”, as he described the conclusion of his “Falstaff”. But for the curious want of real thrust and intensity in places in the slow movement, as well as occasional edginess of intonation on single notes in passage work, I would want to call this performance of Op.132 a truly great one. It was certainly, in the context of the whole concert, a memorable listening experience.