Month: October 2023

Robert Wiremu’s REIMAGINING MOZART – a mind-enlarging expression of human tragedy in music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Robert Wiremu’s REIMAGINING MOZART
(dedicated to Helen Acheson)

Presented by Chamber Music New Zealand

Karanga to the Composer – Melissa Absolum (Voices Chamber Choir)
Composer – Robert Wiremu
Instrumental Ensemble – Liu-Yi Retallick. Joelia Pinto (violins), Johnny Chang, Helen Lee (violas)
James Bush, Sarah Spence (‘cellos), Eric Renick (vibraphone)
Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
Music Director – Karen Grylls

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Wellington

3:00pm Sunday, October 29th, 2023

 

Apart from it all having  a superlatives-exhausting effect from a critical point of view, I found as an audience member, composer Robert Wiremu’s “reimagining” of sequences from Mozart’s final work, his “Requiem”, a profoundly engaging and deeply moving experience. It was thus on so many levels, though naturally the presentation exerted its fullest and deepest effect with all things considered – the atmosphere of the venue (the beautiful St.Mary of the Angels Church in Wellington), the cultural merging of ritualistic procedures, European and Maori, the idea of a “requiem” in the presence of karanga (call), kaupapa (matter for discussion) and poroporoaki (leave-taking) relating to and delivered by the composer in relation to  his subject matter, the use of both specific and “re-presented” parts of the Mozart work, both the overall and specific parts of the presentation’s “narrative”, the technical prowess of the performers, the beauty of their singing and playing, and, of course the skills and complete authority of Music Director Karen Grylls. All of these things interacted to present a work whose range and scope was breathtaking, both when experienced in situ and in subsequent resonant reflection.

Earlier this same month (October) Wiremu had outlined in a radio interview certain aspects of the presentation which conveyed a real sense of what we would subsequently hear in its performance – and to the production’s credit the printed programme available at the venue further enabled the listener to clearly follow the general organisation of the work. Wiremu recalled that the idea of using Mozart’s Requiem as a kind of “starting-point” was part of the commission given to him by CMNZ’s chief executive at the time, Gretchen la Roche, and that he was able to then sublimate the kind of universal human grief for the dead in Mozart’s work as a statement focusing on a more specific and immediate tragedy involving this country, the Mt.Erebus plane crash which claimed 257 lives late in 1979.

Wiremu was given certain specific directives regarding the commission. because the piece was going to go “on tour” – his resources were limited accordingly, thus  the use of a chamber choir and a limited-sized instrumental ensemble . Along with a small group of strings Wiremu chose the vibraphone as an ideal instrument of evocation particularly as the thought of the Erebus happening took shape in his mind.  Though he himself remembered the news of the actual incident (he was nine years old at that time), Wiremu decided he would make no reference in the work to any specific person or organisation involved in the incident in any way, his purpose being to emphasise the idea of sorrow and grief in universal human terms of loss connecting the Mozart work and the Erebus disaster. He also resolved that he would not change the actual notes of Mozart’s that he used,  instead adapting different instrumentations from those of the original.

Interestingly Wiremu developed in his mind a tenuous link between Mozart’s work and the Erebus accident via a tape cassette player called a “Walkman” (available in 1979) and the Requiem thereby being recorded on a cassette and becoming part of the event of the plane’s destruction and the deaths of the plane’s occupants – all of which regarding the player and its cassette being pure conjecture on the composer’s part, with no ACTUAL evidence of a tape of any of Mozart’s music on the plane. However Wiremu imagined the notes of the music on the mythical tape carried into and through the same “fractured, scattered, broken, distorted, twisted (and) disfigured” process as all else on the aircraft, and in places the notes are thus subjected to similar kinds of treatment. At the beginning and end of the piece there is birdsong reproduced by the instruments and by the choir members actually whistling some of Mozart’s own notes from the work as they walk to and from their places – in Wiremu’s schema the piece also features a dedication, remembering a singer in the group, Helen Acheson, who was involved with this project but who died earlier this year – this was Mozart’s last completed work, and Wiremu introduces its performance by the choir with 43 bell-notes played by the vibraphone and accompanied by major-minor chordal undulations from the strings, a note for every year of the dedicatee’s all-too-short life.

Each of the seven movements of Robert Wiremu’s  piece was given a Maori name, the opening KARANGA here performed arrestingly and sonorously by alto Melissa Absolum from the Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir, welcoming the composer to the place of performance and inviting him to speak about what we were going to hear this afternoon. Wiremu then greeted us, explaining something of the grieving ethos of human loss in Mozart’s work as being redirected and reimagined to reflect a tragedy in the South Pacific in similarly non-specific terms.

The instrumentalists began the work, creating eerie harmonies from “bowing” the keys on the vibraphone, the sounds of birdsong realised in a variety of ways, from glissando notes on the string instruments to vocalisings (whistlings) from as the singers as they entered down each of the side-aisles and congregatged with the instrumentalists at the front, followed by Music Director Karen Grylls. Amidst these ambiences the strings and vibraphone began the instrumental introduction to the Requiem, joined by the choir, the singing sonorous and clearly-lined, with the Kyrie Eleison fugue gloriously articulated, those treacherously dramatic ascents thrown off with great elan, leading to the powerfully dramatic concluding ELEI-SON!

The opening having captured the growing excitement of the plane nearing Antarctica, the following RERENGA (flight) features the driving rhythms of Confutatis Maledictis depicting the aircraft’s propulsion, with contrasting emotions represented by the interspersed, gentler Voca me cum benedictis from the choir. A culmination came with the ecstatic response of the voices in their great, unaccompanied cries of Sanctus! as the icebergs were glimpsed from the aircraft, along with the breathless exultation of the unaccompanied Hosanna fugue. By contrast the HINGA (descent) which followed used part of the Recordare in a blurred, unclear way as the flight entered a clouded-over unknown world, the strings expressing confused, discordant progressions, with downward glissandi depiction a descent into the gloom. The vibraphone briefly evoked dislocation and confused suspension before the strings plunged the scenario into darkness and confusion, unisons attacking and blurring each other’s lines, the sounds strained, stretched, stressed and tortured until the process gradually abated, the punishing clashes and dissonances drawing  back, and leaving only confused silence – TE KORE, the emptiness, is all that is left…..

Into the silence burst the Dies Irae, here fantastically realised, the lines at once powerful and knife-edged, with both instruments and voices throwing themselves at the notes Mozart wrote! The vibraphone’s sudden interspersed moment of terrible nothingness and emptiness compressed and eventually fractured the Dies Irae utterances, the words broken up into whisperings and single word gesturings, the chant then reduced to ghostly, spectral whisperings of both the Dies Irae and Quantus tremor verses. It is over – there are no survivors of the crash.

In the ensuing silence the vibraphone played the Lacrymosa, joined by the voices only, the strings silent, the voices rising in grief and sorrow and anger – the vibraphone took us to strange tonal realms as if the music was denying its own home key and annihilating its own essence, the voices sounding similarly estranged, with individual notes stuttering and halting, and the vibraphone having to reinvent harmonies for the voices’ melody. As for the choir’s singing of the “Amen” – such a cathartic moment, sounding a kind of run-through realisation of an awful finality.

MUTUNGA stands for completion, here accompanied by anguished string chords and bell-chiming descants from the vibraphone as the chorus sang the Agnus Dei, alternating forthright opening phrases with gentler replying Dona eis Requiem utterances, to which the instruments played a gentle contrapuntal accompaniment. We were led back to the beginning, with strings and bowed vibraphone notes joined by the choir, the plaintive vocal lines turning vigorous as the words Requiem and Dona eis Domine were repeated, all so very wondrously and ardently realised. The awful inevitability of nature’s processings of the tragedy were duly acknowledged by Wiremu as Mozart’s response to the words in the Requiem seek to console all those who suffer the anguish of loss in all its forms.

As if bringing into individual human focus these archetypal processes of grief, Wiremu concluded his work with a Dedication given the title MARAMA (light), with a performance of Mozart’s last “finished” work, his “Ave Verum Corpus”, one integrated into the earlier-expressed, more collective consciousness of tragedy through a kind of “summons” via bell sounds, here given no less than the 43 strokes in commemoration of the life of Helen Acheson, a friend and colleague of Wiremu’s who as previously mentioned died earlier this year. Strings and vibraphone played a contrapuntal accompaniment of some glorious singing from Voices New Zealand under Karen Grylls’ inspirational direction, leaving all of us in no doubt that we had witnessed something unique and special, and to be remembered and appreciated for a long time to come.

Haydn and Mozart Camerata’s perfect fellow-churchgoers at Wellington’s St.Peter’s-0n-Willis

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Camerata presents: HAYDN IN THE CHURCH 2023

Josef HAYDN – Symphony No. 17 in F Major Hob.1.17
Wolfgang MOZART – Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat K.364

Anne Loeser (violin) / Victoria Jaenecke (viola)
Camerata Ensemble

St.Peter’s Church-on-Willis, Wellington

Friday, October 20th, 2023

Sometimes one goes to a concert which by dint of the music and the playing seems  not a moment too short or too long – this evening, with merely two works on the programme (one of which took  less than two thirds of the time of the other), it felt as though we were transported from one to the other by a kind of osmosis, as there was no “proper” interval between the two, merely what felt like a “luftpause” to allow the slightly different arrangement of the two works to be set up.

The programme opened with a Haydn symphony (No.17 in F Major), part of a series that has been a feature of the ensemble’s presentations of late. This was an early work of the composer’s , and not unlike some kind of extended three-part operatic overture in effect – certainly a grand and varied beginning to one’s listening for the evening.

Straightaway I was transported by the openness of the sound during the work’s first few bars, with the horn timbres taking the music al fresco, and the joyfulness of the dancing rhythms doing the rest  As in some of the earlier Mozart symphonies, the winds also frequently coloured the texture with long but supple lines –  so although the strings had the bulk of the melodic material, the winds  (including the horns) frequently “coloured’ the ambiences, which in this symphony were lively and not a little exploratory, developing both the theme’s upward-rushing muscularity and making use of numerous “offshoots” of impulse in unexpected ways.

The slow movement was graciousness itself at the beginning, its sequences seeming to weave an endless continuation of variants of the opening – I became lost in its enchantment and its apparent inexhaustibility – no contrivance or striving for effect, but simply creativity being given quiet but purposeful energy. As with the previous two movements, the finale finds ways of making the expected unexpected – the triple-time Allegro turns, twists, runs and jumps, and generally led our ears a merry dance! Again, the horns open up the spaces suggested by the music’s energies, and the winds’ rustic colourings delight the sensibilities. Despite the movement’s brevity, Haydn’s seemingly boundless invention seemed to once more carry our interest along with the sounds’ continued delight in discovery.

Nothing could have better prepared us for the delights that were to follow, with Camerata leader Anne Loeser and violist Victoria Jaenecke entering to play for us Mozart’s adorable K.364, the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat for violin and viola. From the beginning the sound was lovely, with especially telling dynamic variation from winds and horns and lower strings – the violins themselves seemed a trifle overwhelmed by their colleagues’ characterful strains at first, though the wonderful “Mannheim crescendo” that Mozart gives us in this first tutti here really made an exciting impact. Both soloists with their first notes were silver-toned and ethereal, each more so than I expected they would be, even though their passage-work was exemplary. Anne Loeser led the way into the beautiful minor-key development, each soloist making the most of the music’s pathos, and supported by the orchestra players so well. And their teamwork during the cadenza was exemplary, playing into each others’ music with real aplomb, though both gave me a start by plunging back into the allegro more quickly with their concluding trills than those on my favourite recording (the Oistrakhs pere and fils).

I couldn’t imagine the slow movement being better done than here, with each of the soloists seeming to “play out” more than in the first movement, while integrating their tones clearly and sensitively in the exchanges, the cadenza passage a highlight of the performance with its heart-stopping sense of time almost standing still. And the finale reinforced this “playing as one” kind of Elysium-like culmination of energies and purposes throughout the work – we all  enjoyed the  tidal ebbing and flowing between violin and viola, and also soloists and orchestra, as the work arched upwards towards its culmination in a final grand accord.

Anton Webern steals the show! – Orchestra Wellington and Marc Taddei with “Pharaoh”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ORCHESTRA WELLINGTON presents “PHARAOH”
GEMMA PEACOCKE – Manta
(with Arohanui Strings)
ANTON WEBERN – Passacaglia Op.1
JOHN PSATHAS – Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra  “Pharaoh”
(with Tomoni Nozaki – timpani)
BRIAR PRASTINI (vocalist) – White, Red, Black
WOLFGANG MOZART – Incidental Music to “Thamos , King of Egypt”
(with the Orpheus Choir of Wellington – Brent Stewart, Director)

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 7th October, 2023

Programme-holding audience members at Orchestra Wellington’s Saturday evening concert “Pharaoh” at the Michael Fowler Centre might have been a little confused upon turning to the opening page of a publication to find the heading “Prophecy” at the top of the page containing the evening’s listed items – hang on! – wasn’t “Prophecy” the title of the previous concert? There was also some disagreement in print regarding John Psathas’s scheduled Timpani Concerto – was it called “Planet Damnation” as on that introductory page with the programme listing? Or was the work’s name actually “Pharaoh”, which stood at the top of the section in the booklet devoted to each individual item, and which gave “Planet Damnation” as the name of the concerto’s third movement?

These things were, of course, minor hiccups which distracted little from the concert’s overall impact, which was considerable, and, thanks to Music Director Marc Taddei’s extraordinary empathy with young musicians demonstrated a heart-warming variety of delights throughout the presentation’s opening segment of music-making. Wellington’s long-established youth programme for aspiring string players, Arohanui Strings, were there in force, from tiny tots to teens, and obviously bursting to play their part in the concert’s opening item, Kiwi composer Gemma Peacocke’s beautiful, multi-stranded instrumental response to the subaqueous world of manta rays who populate the waters of the Outer Hauraki Gulf Tikapa Moana, as characterised in a story by Wiremu Grace, called Whaitere, the Enchanted Stingray.

Peacocke’s piece seemed wrought from sounds at once pulsating with movement and endlessly regenerating, beginning with attention-grabbing soaring and descending lines, a seascape with something of the quality of Sibelius in “The Oceanides”. The supporting winds and brasses sounded repeated figures and long-held pedal notes, with the youthful string-players steadfastedly holding their own lines as the creatures of the deep in the music reaffirmed possession of their world. A solo violin characterised for a moment something of a single creature’s adventure and undertaking, as the oceanic frisson with which the piece began rose and fell impressively once more before the waters resumed their preordained rituals of ceaseless movement.

Marc Taddei then took the opportunity to allow the youngsters their moment of glory, encouraging them to join in with a simplified version of Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”. After starting them all off, the conductor stood motionless, leaving them to it,  exclaiming to us “Don’t they all sound better when I stop conducting them?” to great amusement all round! Then it was the “Tiny Tots” turn to impress (with even more than their obvious cuteness!), coming on stage with their tiny instruments and playing a folk-tune, then playing it again much faster, to breathless effect! After a lullaby restored composure, Taddei proceeded to give all of us a hint regarding one of the pieces of music scheduled for the as yet unannounced 2024 programme for Orchestra Wellington, telling us the Arohanui Strings will play a tune that “will give the show away!: – which it certainly did! And with that the youthful players took their leave……

What then was wondrous was how such heartwarming vignettes of youthful musicians playing what might in some cases have been their first-ever concert notes then “morphed” into the spectacle of the full Orchestra Wellington on the platform with their conductor tackling a score which truly represented a kind of acme of orchestral execution and epoch-making-and-breaking composition – this was the 1908 Op. 1 Passacaglia of Anton Webern, the composer’s simultaneous tribute and farewell to Romanticism in music, his only composition to be performed in public that was written under the tutelage of his teacher at that time, Arnold Schoenberg.

The 20-plus variations of this work (a Passacaglia traditionally consists of a short theme in the bass which becomes a foundation for a set of variations on that theme) use a brilliantly-worked array of sounds, often lush in the manner of Mahler but at times hushed and sparse, with brilliantly inventive combinations of instruments – Webern organises his variations into an almost symphony-like plan of movements, with a central slow section and contrasting scherzo-like textures, all concluding with a ghostly epilogue. Listening to the players negotiating this tightly-worked scheme with what seemed like absolute confidence and conviction, I found myself simply taking off my mythical hat to both conductor and players – I knew the work reasonably well, but couldn’t remember hearing on record or seeing on film a more exciting and involving performance!

I must confess to finding John Psathas’s Timpani Concerto which followed a bit perplexing in contrast to what I’d just heard – and unfortunately my seat was in a place where my view of the timpanist was obscured by the conductor, so I missed some of the visual excitement of the soloist’s obviously virtuosic command of the instruments. As it wasn’t a work I’d heard before I figured earlier I might find a You-Tube performance with which to familiarise myself regarding the piece – and I found a clip which bore the title “Planet Damnation”, featuring a most exciting performance by Larry Reese, the NZSO timpanist. I didn’t know I was hearing and getting to know only the final movement at that stage, so the onset of the first movement nonplussed me for a while, as did what seemed like an over-insistence of the percussionist playing the woodblocks! The slow movement, when it came, was something of a blessed relief.

Though it was just as unfamiliar, I really enjoyed the slow movement, as it gave the timpanist, Tomoni Nozaki, a beautiful young Japanese woman, a chance to demonstrate the skill and variety of her touch and her ear for all kinds of sonority, instead of her being often drowned out by the rest of the orchestra (I found the woodblock part for one far too insistent!). Then came the movement I’d already heard, and I was able to better relate to the plethora of percussive irruption that the first movement had seemed to unfetter upon our sensibilities. I don’t think it’s a work I shall ever love, but the skills on display by the soloist were sufficiently interesting to make the piece work throughout those two latter movements.

We had a different running-order to that of the printed programme, so we got Briar Prastiti’s “White, Red, Black” after the interval. I liked this work a lot, admiring the composer’s orchestrations of her material, the wind-blown ambiences of the opening carrying my sensibilities along with the music’s trajectories, sharpening my interest more with bird-song-like figurations suggesting in places things coming into focus. What I found slightly disappointing was not being able to hear a single word of the vocalist’s line (despite a microphone being used) from where I was sitting (and my companion similarly reported that he could not hear the singer, and nor could somebody else I spoke to afterwards)….the accompaniment was invariably beautiful, but whenever the song’s intensities sharpened or  grew in body, so did the accompaniments! For this reason, the most telling vocal moments for me were towards the end, when the voice became as an orchestral instrument, the wordless vocalising as haunting as any other of the sounds we were hearing.

Before the final item of the evening, Marc Taddei announced certain salient details of the Orchestra’s 2024 programme, certainly whetting our appetites with some of the detailings – it seems to be a kind of survey of masterpieces representing different eras of artistic creativity, beginning (if I remember correctly) with the Baroque era, and finishing with a contemporary work (I didn’t write all the “clues” down, but Taddei assured us that full details would be released at the Orchestra[‘s final programme for the year, “Red Moon”, on November 11th.

And so to the evening’s final item, which, though splendidly performed and presented, with resplendent singing from Brent Stewart’s Orpheus Choir, and, by turns, stirring and meltingly beautiful orchestral playing, either in support or leading the way, I thought it all essentially lacked the last modicum of focus and interest to be truly engaging. Perhaps if we had had the words, the extra focus would have enlivened the undoubtedly “Game of Thrones” like scenario for which Mozart produced this music. Or, perhaps we needed a narrator with a suitably theatrical “presence” to knit the scenario together more readily –  In reality, everybody – choir and orchestra – did their best with the material, but for me it never really caught fire! I found myself wishing at times that the orchestra was instead giving us the G Minor Symphony K.183, which was what the music occasionally sounded a bit like. And, as I walked to my car after the concert, the thing I found myself wanting to do the most was to get home and play that sensational Webern work again! It was , for me, the evening’s indisputable highlight, and I remain grateful to Marc Taddei and his players for THAT most of all – a truly remarkable experience!

 

 

The New Zealand String Quartet at Waikanae – Emperors, dictators and husbands in music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents:
The New Zealand String Quartet with Diedre Irons (piano)

JOSEF HAYDN – String Quartet in C Major Op. 76 No.3 “Emperor”
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 5 in B-flat Major Op. 92
AMY BEACH – Piano Quintet in F-sharp Minor Op.67 (1907)

The New Zealand String Quartet – Helene Pohl (leader), Monique Lapins (violin), Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Waikanae Memorial Hall,

Sunday 8th October

Straightaway one felt something out of the ordinary as soon as the NZ String Quartet players took the Waikanae Memorial Hall stage and put their bows upon the strings to begin their concert – there was resonance in the voices, spring in the rhythm, and fluency arm-in-arm with an ease of variety and contrast – and to think I had thought beforehand, to my shame, “Oh, not another “Emperor! – with almost seventy other Haydns to choose from!” , when as it turned out, this was one which the playing made me really want to hear!

All of the above was part of the build-up to the great moment in the first movement that cellist Rolf Gjelsten had gotten his fellow-players to demonstrate for us in his introduction to the work – that plunge into the full-blooded rusticity of the dance, with strings suddenly becoming pipes and drones and stamping feet – outlandish, even gawky at first hearing, but so organic in the playing’s wider context that it placed the composer entirely at home in the scenario – It’s in this almost incomparable fusion of aristocratic and peasant-like that Haydn’s genius shines as brightly as anywhere else in his oeuvre!

Magic of a different kind was wrought by the Quartet’s hushed intensities with the slow movement’s beginning, lifting the much-vaunted melody far above cliché and commonplace utterance, and proceeding to ennoble it further with different voices for each repetition, the players in the final variation “centring” their tones as to produce a kind of extra-terrestrial expressive world reminiscent of Tchaikovsky and Borodin almost a century later.

The players danced the Menuetto through the music’s wry asymmetries, allowing a droll pesante touch with the slurred-note cascading passage that answered the opening set of phrases. How beautifully we were eased into the minor key Trio, with its briefly nonchalant shift to the major and back again to the minor, a “did we dream you or did you dream us?” moment! Far more volatile was the finale, with its three opening whiplash chords and scurrying minor-key presto figures making a helter-skelter impression, the players demonstrating spectacular fingerwork, in places excitingly tossing impulses from instrument to instrument, and bringing honour and acclaim to the music’s arrival at its eventual major-key conclusion!

On paper it seemed like something of a quantum leap from Haydn to Shostakovich, but the players seemed at the outset of the latter composer’s Fifth String Quartet of 1952 to straightaway forge links between the clarity and focus of the sounds created by each of these two masters of the genre. Shostakovich’s work and its predecessor, the Fourth String Quartet each had their genesis from a time in Russia (immediately post-Second World War) when, along with fellow-composers Prokofiev and Myaskovsky, he had been castigated by the authorities for not creatively responding as whole-heartedly as was expected to marking the thirtieth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. Shostakovich was unnerved by these attacks to the point where he held back publication of several of his major works of that time until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

The Quartet’s music grows out of a five-note motif which the composer developed in imitation of JS Bach, who featured his own name in his music via the notes representing B-A-C-H, Shostakovich using the notes C-D-Eflat-B-Csharp derived from his own D-S-C-H motif. He also quotes from another source in this work, a Clarinet Trio written by a student of his, Galina Ustvolskaya, whose friendship Shostakovich valued and whose work he admired. At the outset his Quartet intersperses the five notes of the motif with obsessively-driving rhythmic figures before quoting Ustvolskaya’s contrasting waltz-like theme, and then exploring various permutations of the latter interacting with his own five-note motif, all the while intensifying the trajectories and accretions of the music’s forward movement.

The NZSQ players, to whom these kinds of musical intensities always seem meat and drink, held all of this together superbly, setting the beleaguered lyricism against the savageries with unfailing focus as we ran the emotional gauntlet towards the movement’s sudden de-escalation and eerie transition, via purposeful pizzicato passages and a spectral solo violin line, and found ourselves taken to mysterious places wrought by the second movement’s wraith-like fugal musings. These growing intensities with their “time standing still” aspect were steadily and patiently transporting us to “different realms” when the lines were strangely augmented by “wailing” sounds, at which point  the quartet stopped playing to listen to the intrusion with evident bemusement! (The locals, however, were not perturbed – these were the Waikanae volunteer fire brigade’s summonsing calls, a delicious irony being that a wartime photograph of the composer as an actual volunteer fireman does apparently exist somewhere  – giving rise to the thought that this interjection was meant as some kind of token of kinship!)

With the air of a group steadfastedly maintaining its own shared vision, the players picked up their journeyings through the music’s ambient wastes and continued their peregrinations – a “return to life” set of impulses became a kind of  “way through” and took us far from the initial conviviality of the finale’s opening jogtrot rhythms and into places where the five-note motif’s appearance and insistent repetitions reawakened tensions aplenty, the players running the music’s energies ragged, and spectacularly bolstering some of the more assertive figures with forthright pizzicati echoes of “belonging”, which, when done with led to some of the epilogue’s most heartfelt utterances – how piquant were those final pages, with the cello’s and solo violin’s laments comforted by the middle voices’ sustained life-lines.

Footnote: I decided, simply out of interest at first, take the opportunity to find out more concerning the background to the composer’s relationship with the aforementioned Galina Ustvolskaya, whose music Shostakovich quotes several times in the first movement of this quartet. I was greatly surprised to find a fierce controversy had arisen after Shostakovich’s death from various published interviews and dismissive statements made by the younger composer about her supposed “mentor”, giving rise to some of Ustvolskaya’s supporters adding to what amounted to a “denigration” of Shostakovich, both as a man and as a composer. All I can say in response is that, whatever reasons people might have had to cast aspersions upon the idea of a composer’s greatness, in this instance their comments and viewpoints ran counter in no uncertain terms to my own previous experience of Shostakovich’s music and, not least to what I’d just come from here regarding the NZSQ’s staunch, unswerving  journeyings through an “inferno” of angst-ridden outpourings from a truly creative soul.

So to the concert’s second half, the subject of which was the incredible American-born Amy Beach (1867-1944), a quintessential nineteenth-century woman composer who eventually overcame societal obstacles and made a career for herself as a performer and composer. One wonders what she might have achieved had her circumstances allowed her talents to flourish at a much younger age! – though it’s arguable, however, whether Beach’s situation led to musical deprivation or fulfilment on her part, as her husband’s insistence that she restrict her performance activities did lead to an intensification of her composing abilities, which itself has left an important legacy.

Dating from 1907, Beach’s Piano Quintet owed a lot to Brahms’s Piano Quintet, which she herself had performed with the Kneisel Quartet in 1900. Hearing its dramatic opening straight away reminded me as much of the sound-world of Cesar Franck as that of Brahms – the romanticism of the work’s dark, mysterious beginning has a kind of charged quality expressed in chromatic terms that’s similar to Franck’s, further expressed by the rippling piano part, though the excitingly assertive piano octaves that followed, full and rich under Diedre Irons’ fingers immediately brought Brahms back to mind, as did the swaying second subject presented by turns by the strings and on the piano (the tolling bell a feature of the keyboard writing). I thought the players relished the stormily dramatic string unison that began the development section, matched by the piano’s equally commanding reply (amazing piano playing!), all of which morphed into a reprise of the lovely second subject with bell-like piano sonorities, and a quiet, brooding end to the movement.

Firstly the strings, then the piano ravished our senses with the slow movement’s opening melody, the strings musing for a while afterwards, then the violins repeating the melody, Monique Lapins whole-heartedly with the theme and Helene Pohl tenderly descanting overhead – a series of intense interchanges culminates with a virtuosic outburst from the piano, and a deep, rich rendering of the melody from the cello, Rolf Gjelsten giving the lines full play and stimulating the other voices to full-throatedly take the melody to the heights of expression.

The finale’s vivace opening waltzed in to great effect, with an impish agitato character stalking the dancers every which way and all very chromatic, Gillian Ansell’s gorgeous viola solo providing much-appreciated if temporary respite! The agitato impulses returned, the strings exhausting their lyrical capacities over the next little while, and nervously taking refuge in tremolandi, then playing hide and seek with an agitated fugal passage kept most excitingly kept on the rails right through to the last flourish!! The players then gingerly picked their way through the myriads of spent intensities, the piano leading the way and the strings rhapsodising – then the music surges again, the players giving the composer’s unquenchable romantic spirit here full rein. And the work’s coda is spectacular, by turns, headlong and unrepentantly rhapsodic – and finishes with a flourish! – cor, blimey! I’m still feeling exhausted by it all as I write this! The NZSQ musicians (and the indefatigable  Diedre Irons) certainly gave Amy Beach her dues, and we loved them and her for it!