Day: 19 June 2021

Supertonic conjures up arcadian realms for an evocatively-sung “Rest” presentation

Posted on by Anne French

Supertonic Choir presents:
REST: – Faure’s Requiem and Songs of Remembrance

Supertonic Choir
Music Director Isaac Stone
Soprano Nicola Holt, Baritone William McElwee,
Organist Michael Fletcher

Music by Herbert Howells, Elizabeth Alexander, John Taverner, Kurt Bestor, U2 (arr. Bob Chilcott), Gabriel Faure

Cathedral of St Paul, Molesworth St. Wellington

Saturday 19 June 2021

It was a drear Wellington night. A cold drizzle was falling. I expected to see a tiny dedicated audience huddling in the cavernous cathedral. I was wrong.

The church was a good two-thirds full, and the enthusiastic audience seemed pretty familiar with Supertonic. The choir was founded in 2014, and by my estimation is one of the youngest choirs in Wellington, as well as one of the larger choirs, with 64 singers. The average age seems to be under 30. The sound they make is zingy with youth.

The Music Director, Isaac Stone, is a well trained singer and choir director with a deep background in barbershop and consequently he has an exquisite sense of pitch. For a large choir, Supertonic is gloriously in tune; precise and clean. Isaac Stone is a confident but not ostentatious conductor. He gets exactly what he wants, because all eyes are on him.

The programme was built around the Fauré Requiem and comprised six smaller a capella elegiac works, with the Fauré placed second to last. (More of this later.)

The concert opened with a beautiful and well known work by the English composer Herbert Howells, ‘Take him, earth, for cherishing’. Written in memory of John F. Kennedy, it has the fresh lyrical beauty typical of Howells. The text is from a poem by a fourth-century poet, translated by Helen Waddell, beginning:

Take him, earth, for cherishing,
to thy tender breast receive him.
Body of a man I bring thee,
noble even in its ruin.

All of that is sung by the three lower parts, piano, in a beautiful legato, until the soprano entry on the second page. The soprano sound had a passionate quality over more complex rhythms in the lower parts. The divisi sopranos produced a beautiful bell-like sound in the con anima section. The semi-chorus a little later sounded a tad untidy, as though the dotted rhythms were under-rehearsed; but the next divisi section was confident and together.

It is the sound of Supertonic that is so delightful: the freshness of youth plus the smoothness that is achieved with 60 singers. This was evident in the next work, ‘Y Comienzo a Bailar’, by Elizabeth Alexander, with piano accompaniment. The Spanish text is a soliloquoy of a woman preparing for La Dia de los Muertos, and includes a ravishing soprano solo, sung by Karishma Thanawala, one of the sopranos, with the choir sotto voce underneath.

Tavener’s ‘Song for Athene’ is also well known. Typical Tavener, using minimal material, and requiring utterly precise tuning over a bass drone. The work was most famously performed for the funeral of Princess Diana, sung as her coffin was carried out. Supertonic sang it splendidly; the dissonances were not labored, and the sustained singing built steadily to the crescendo, an outpouring of grief.

This was followed by a work called ‘Prayer of the Children’ by Kurt Bestor, an American composer of new age music and film scores. This is his best-known work, written in response to ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and intended to be used to commemorate tragedies involving children. The words are banal, and the music not to my taste, but the choir sang it as though such thoughts had not occurred to them.

Yet the next work, MLK by the Irish band U2, arranged by Bob Chilcott (a former King’s College chorister), was the exact opposite: simple, direct, moving. It opens with a tenor solo (sung by Joel Miller, one of the tenors) with the choir backing him, and takes on a gospel feel, with a terrific low bass part. Coming after a lot of truly excellent singing, it was the stand-out piece of the first half of the concert.

The stage was reset during a short interval, with five string players and two soloists, soprano Nicola Holt and baritone William McElwee. The Cathedral organ is currently out of commission, so Michael Fletcher played the digital organ, which proved to be a mixed blessing (though the sight lines were good). The organ sound was too dominant in the first two movements, and overpowered the first baritone solo (‘Hostias’). But the choir! Such beautiful singing, with purity of tone and precise intonation.

The Sanctus was almost ruined before it began with an unscheduled ugly blurt of sound from the organ, but the choir’s entry was perfect. The entry of the men at the Hosanna was exciting, but the organ couldn’t match the choir’s volume at the first diminuendo and spoiled the effect.

Soprano Nicola Holt had to do only one thing, to sing the Pie Jesu, and she did it beautifully. She gave it the glorious full Aled Jones treatment and filled the cathedral.

The Agnus Dei had some splendidly sensitive accompaniment from the strings, but too much organ volume both there and in the Lux Aeterna. William McElwee’s Libera Me was assured and sat well in his voice. The organ’s Last Trump was almost too much, but the choir’s crescendo was magnificent, full and urgent. The women’s tone in the In Paradisum was light and ethereal, exactly as required –but once again the organ was just too dominant.

All in all, a gorgeous performance of a very well known and much loved work from choir and soloists with lovely string accompaniment.

And then… one last work. In this case it was an arrangement of a traditional South African song, and it is a pleasing work, well sung. But not well placed after the Fauré, which is after all a sublime piece of choral writing, and next to the plainchant Missa Pro Defunctis, the most perfect setting of the Requiem Mass text.

The Capital Band’s “Strange Meetings” a resounding musical success

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Capital Band presents:
STRANGE MEETINGS
Music by Hindemith, Haydn and Vaughan Williams
Poems by Wilfred Owen

The Capital Band
Musical Director: Doug Harvey
Concertmaster: Nick Majic
Poetry Reciter: Doug Harvey

HINDEMITH – Trauermusik
HAYDN – Symphony No.45 in F-sharp Minor “Farewell”
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor (arranged for string orchestra by TCB)

Vogelmorn Hall, Vennell St,.Brooklyn

Saturday 19th June, 2021

In contrast to the evening’s dark, clammy, out-of-doors ambiences generated by the drizzing rain, the warmth and vibrancy of Brooklyn’s Vogelmorn Hall’s son et lumiere  and pre-concert bustle was a positive pick-me-up for this audience member, generating a palpable sense of something special about to happen far removed from the privations of the weather!

As with some of its previous concerts, the Band on this occasion offered an enticing mixture of standard, regularly-presented repertoire and an intriguing transcription for orchestra of a chamber work, in this case a seldom-performed string quartet by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I’d head the first of the string quartets via a recording, but hadn’t “graduated” to the second – and the Band’s heartfelt musical presentation of the work underlined my wonderment at its relative neglect (but more of that later).

Though the other two works were better-known, neither could be said to be regularly-programmed items at orchestral concerts, in particular the Haydn Symphony, which tends to be a work more talked about than played, even if I have from memory seen at least one other performance, and one which, as here, added the “theatricality” of the players departing one-by-one during the last movement – which is the whole “point” of the piece, of course!

First to be performed was the Hindemith work, the Trauermusik (in English, “Funeral Music” or “Mourning Music”), a piece for viola and string orchestra, written at short notice by the composer in a single day (21st January 1936) as a tribute to King George V of England, who had died the previous evening. Hindemith, who was himself a violist, was in England for the purpose of performing the English premiere of his Viola Concerto, Der Schwanendreher, but when the concert was cancelled because of the King’s death, was asked if he would in its place write a short commemorative piece instead.  Hindemith completed the work in just six hours that day, and with the string players from the same orchestra and conductor (the BBC Symphony and Adrian Boult) was the soloist in a live broadcast of Trauermusik that same evening – a premiere of a different kind!

The presentation throughout the whole concert was nothing if not theatrical, as if “leading on” from the worlds-within-worlds contrast between the rawness of the elements without and the warmth and geniality within the venue at the start; with atmospheric lighting at the performance’s beginning, adding focus to the welcome in Te Reo given us by one of the players, and indicating something of the solemnity of the music’s occasion. Conductor Doug Harvey got a warm, rich sound from his players at the music’s outset, one which brought out a homogeneity of solemn feeling while keeping the individual lines clear. I thought the lower and deeper of the viola soloist’s lines were delivered more warmly and securely, his intonation showing some strain here and there as his line rose, though the accompanying figures gave him plenty of unfailing support. This music always surprises me by its brevity, its sense of “not a note wasted” seeming to defy normal time in a trance-like manner, and awaken us from the spell at the end most unexpectedly – here, the ensemble’s playing readily took us to those realms, and evoked a moment in time, a quiet frisson of valediction.

We are a bit “spoiled” for the “first fifty” Haydn Symphonies in Wellington at present in relative terms, most recently with this performance of No. 45, and the ensemble Camerata gradually working through the earliest essays by the composer in this form, hopefully about to take on No.14 at an as yet undisclosed date! I was sure I’d seen a performance of the “Farewell” elsewhere here in Wellington over the last dozen or so years, but the Middle C search engine (since 2008) has come up empty-handed! Whatever the case this performance made up in spadefuls for the omission with both interpretative focus and performance commitment from the Band, the occasional roughness around the music’s edges mattering not a whit amid the excitement, humour and gracefulness of the playing overall.

At the beginning the vigorous driving rhythms sharply underlined the music’s dynamic contrasts, with horns and winds colouring the textures most evocatively, setting the initial urgency against the grace and good humour of the second subject group. Throughout, the musicians did their best to “fill out” the hall’s somewhat dry ambiences and impart some bloom to the sounds. The second movement tempo adroitly caught the music’s grace and gentle humour, the winds’ entries particularly “pointed” following the gently “covered” tones of the strings. I enjoyed the floated string lines over the deftly “etched-in” accompaniments at the beginning of the music’s middle section, as well as the horns’ beautifully-voiced call in thirds at another point, the enchantment of it all coming from the musicians seeming to really “care” about making their notes speak to us.

The rapid tempo for the minuet took me by surprise, but conductor Harvey and his players made it work, uproariously sounding the tutti sections in contrast to the “Jack, be nimble” feetwork of the surrounding sequences. By the time the horns had gotten to introduce the Trio, I was grooving along with the music most happily, and chortling, albeit unobtrusively, at the music’s “throwaway” ending!

The fourth movement’s allegro wasn’t rushed off its feet, here, but allowed some girth, while still able to scintillate in the quick-moving passages, the dynamics strongly-focused with terrific ensemble-playing. At the opening’s reprise,  the horns and winds sounded out splendidly, holding their lines amid the growing agitations, leading up to the dramatic luftpause. The adagio which followed featured the gradual exit of all the players (and the conductor), and a “thinning-out” of the orchestral textures, finally leaving but two of the first chair violinists, who, sweetly and demurely, finished the work.

Haydn diplomatically devised this composition “scheme” in response to his musicians’ pleas for the composer to intercede with their employer, Prince Esterhazy, to grant them a “break” after a protracted stay at the Prince’s summer palace in the country, a day’s journey away from their families in another town. Apparently the message was understood by the Prince, as the entire court returned to the town the day after the symphony’s performance! It was all beautifully done, with  straight faces from the players and wry amusement amongst the audience!

However, the theatricality of all of this was nothing compared with what awaited us throughout the concert’s second half. Vaughan Williams wrote two string quartets, the second of which dates from the years 1942-44, over thirty years after the earlier work was completed. Consequently the two quartets are literally worlds apart, the Second containing elements relating to both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, which were composed at around the same period. The first three movements owe more to the post-war Sixth Symphony (though the slow movement touches on the earlier Symphony in places), whereas the finale appears to revisit the relative peace and serenity of the earlier(wartime) Fifth Symphony. It’s a work whose neglect in the chamber music repertoire is difficult to understand – and the Capital Band’s transcription of the work for string orchestra splendidly conveys the music’s character in all of its aspects

A feature of the work is the prominent writing for the viola, fruit of the composer’s friendship with a young violist, Jean Stewart, whose quartet, the Menges Quartet, gave the premiere performance of the work in 1944. The first movement sounds very VW, with terrific tension and conflict between upper and lower voices,  the figurations in each register obsessively “at odds” with each other, culminating in a ferocious tremolando outburst which exhausts the combatative instincts of the voices, and imposes a semblance of order upon their interaction, presided over by the viola, again, more reliable in the instrument’s lower register.

Solo strings began the slow movement, a lovely, intimate effect which continued up to the wider-spanned choral-like writing, when the whole ensemble joined in, the contrasting passages between solo strings and larger ensemble recalling similar moments in the composer’s “Thomas Tallis Fantasia”. I found a further extended passage for the quartet alone very moving, the violins especially lovely, the viola and ‘cello properly supportive.

The Scherzo returned us to the eerie, more nightmare-like quality of the Sixth Symphony’s Scherzo. The “haunted flight” of the rapid figurations was readily conveyed by the string body, although again, the viola soloist struggled with his intonation in places. And then, as if by magic, the music “found” a different voice for the work’s finale, the ensemble conjuring up wave upon wave of positive emotion and banishing the darkness – I thought the playing of the more “restrained” lines incredibly moving, here, readily conveying to us the sense of a journey undertaken from darkness into light.

Readers of this review who were at the concert may be wondering why I’ve not until now mentioned the conductor Doug Harvey’s “dramatized” readings of several poems by Wilfred Owen, interspersed between the quartet’s movements. Conscious as I am of the amount of sheer hard work that must have gone into memorising the words and sentiments of these poems and their “enactment”, I simply didn’t feel justice was done to them by Harvey choosing to overtly “dramatize” the narratives with extended movements and marked changes of voice-level for dramatic effect which resulted in a lot of the words losing their clarity and coherence. Someone I didn’t know who was sitting beside me confirmed afterwards that she too had struggled to make out many of the words for exactly the same reasons. Spoken words need clarity and focus in performance as strongly as music does; and I thought the clarity and focus of enunciation and meaning that was lacking in Harvey’s somewhat over-wrought verbal deliveries and depictions, were qualities that he and his musicians readily brought to the music throughout the concert, resulting in that side of things being a resounding success!