Month: November 2023

“A sense of belonging somewhere” – The New Zealand String Quartet’s “Notes from a Journey” on Atoll Records

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Notes from a Journey
Atoll Records ACD 118   Vol.1 (2010)
Music by JOHN PSATHAS, ROSS HARRIS, JACK BODY, MICHAEL NORRIS and GARTH FARR
Atoll Records ACD 289  Vol.2 (2023)
Music by GILLIAN WHITEHEAD, GARETH FARR, TABEA SQUIRE, ROSS HARRIS, LOUISE WEBSTER and SALINA FISHER

The New Zealand String Quartet  –  Helene Pohl, leader / Douglas Beilman (2010), Monique Lapins (2023) violins / Gillian Ansell, viola / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Atoll Records Producer – Wayne Laird / Recording Engineer – Graham Kennedy

Notes from a Journey

is the title of a story in music that reaches a new chapter with the release of a new  (November 2023) CD from Atoll Records, one which furthers the New Zealand String Quartet’s already-impressive commitment to home-grown musical sounds. This present recording echoes a previous, similarly-titled presentation from 2010, and forges links of all kinds in doing so, both through direct connection and ongoing influences upon the works of a younger generation.

The title of these CDs is taken from a 1974 poem by Sam Hunt, one dedicated to fellow-poet Hone Tuwhare, appropriate in that, like a fellow-versifier, these are properly home-spun voices, as are the sounds brought to performance-life by these gifted musicians who feel the “flesh and blood” of the composers’ soundscapes and present it all with such heartfelt intensities…..

The earlier of these two notes from a journey recordings, incidentally, won a Vodafone Award in 2011 as the Best Classical Album of that year, and with a different second violinist in the ensemble, Douglas Beilman, who altogether completed 26 years with the Quartet before moving on in 2015. By this time the group had firmly established its credentials as an advocate of New Zealand music, with previous noteworthy recordings of string quartets by Anthony Watson, Gareth Farr and Helen Fisher, and premiere performances of the String Quartets of Ross Harris. There were also landmark collaborations that featured works by Gillian Whitehead, Jack Body and John Psathas. So, when this first notes from a journey collection appeared, it effectively showcased the expressive and varied flowering of some of the era’s most striking homegrown creative outpourings, as well as confirming the ensemble’s identification with and commitment to these and associated works.

John Psathas’s 1996 work Abhisheka began the first of the two recordings. Psathas’s work takes its title from the Sanskrit word for “anointment”, creating a sinuous and sensual feeling of something ritualistic, singular interactions of sounds with silences which represented a major departure for the composer at that time from what he himself had somewhat ruefully described as “an over-caffeinated style”, here instead opting for contemplative, slowly-paced soundings of tones alternating with wondrously-wrought spaces. There’s interplay between a quartet of voices creating resonating chordal sounds and solo lines, sometimes employing quarter-tones whose unchartered territories set tensions against profundities to wondrous effect. The Quartet gave this work’s premiere in Nelson in 1998, and previously recorded it on a Rattle disc called “Rhythm Spike” – even then something of a “moment of calm” in turbulent seas!

The proverbial modernity of JS Bach’s musical inclinations is given sufficient emphasis in the original Variation 25 from his set of “Goldberg Variations”, a string quartet transcription of which I heard the NZSQ play in its entirety in Lower Hutt an unbelievable decade of years ago, now!  Even to this day the memory of that occasion haunts any subsequent rehearing, be it of the original keyboard version, a transcription or (as here) an evolutionary step-child! Composer Ross Harris in his Variation 25 takes the original’s “immensity of human sorrow” and adroitly finds more refracted expressions of emotion through harmonic tensions and explorations which briefly pit their own momentums against one another in piquant displays of independence which stay in the memory long after order of sorts is restored!

What a pleasure to re-encounter Jack Body’s “Three Transcriptions”!  –  each has a haunting  “presence” by way of capturing the candour of the sound’s “openness”, the first being a Chinese  version of the “Jews’ Harp”  sound in Long GI YI, the harmonics so very plaintive and captivating, and with vocalisings bolstering the persistent rhythms. Ramandriana is a dance from Madagascar, mostly pizzicato, with occasionally piquant “held” bowings to colour the rhythms., all wonderfully complex and often asymmentrical, and marching off so engagingly! If the latter dance was essentially a “plucked-note” one, the last, Ratschenitsa, from Bulgaria, as much emphasised the “bowed” as the “plucked”, with foot-stamping and yelped vocalisings adding to the excitement, as did the 7/8 driving rhythms which constantly bent one’s ears and kept one’s inner trajectories on the boil!

One encounters a number of evocations of a projected “afterlife” in music of all kinds, with Michael Norris’s Exitus here adding a stimulating quartet of contrivances pertaining to different cultures’ view of an afterworld. A composer might conceivably select at random from the manifold cultural examples worldwide of corresponding scenarios, but the four Michael Norris have chosen contrast so markedly both with one another and with archetypal Western concepts of afterlife, the results in themselves are morbidly fascinating, underpinned by the composer’s own sonic imaginings for each.

We began with Quidlivun – The Land of the Moon where, in Inuit mythology, the virtuous are taken to their eternal rest, the soundscape appropriately remote, spare and dry, alternating engagingly animated impulse (new arrivals, perhaps?) with spacious, long-breathed lines which suggest endless, infinitely varied connections. A sudden irruption brought instant relocation to Xibalbá – The Place of Fear, the underworld of Mayan civilisation with the latter’s dominant societal figures of kings who were the intermediateries between humans and gods and wielded absolute power over ordinary people. This meant subjugation to a belief system that, amongst other things , threatened departing souls to Xibalbá with numerous trials and tribulations both on their journey to and throughout the Underworld. Involving delights such as “darkness, cold, fire, razor blades, hungry jaguars and shrieking bats” – long-held string lines punctuated by vicious sforzandi buffetings, eerie sul ponticello-like whip-lashings and poisonously-curdling cries and mutterings.

While the all-out assault was then somewhat relieved by the following  Niflheim – the House of Mists, the oppressiveness of a different kind was just as unrelenting – this was the cold, dark world of the dead ruled by the goddess Hel. I was reminded in places of Sibelius’s similarly bleak and implaccable ambiences in one of his Four Legends, Lemminkainen in Tuonela, except that Michael Norris’s evocation is an even more unequivocally bloodless and lifeless realm “from which no traveller returns” – no Orpheus would seek an Eurydice, nor a mother recover the body parts of her son for reassemblage in such totally unremitting  territories!

After so nihilistic an evocation it was something of a relief to encounter the more positive, dance-like aspect of Oka Lusa Hacha (Black Water River), over which the soul passes to reach the “good hunting grounds” of the native American Choctaw Tribe. Despite readily employing similarly sharp-edged, biting string timbres and tones to the previous evocations, the ritualistic rite of passage depicted had an almost joyous and certainly anticipatory aspect for most of the journey, with even the “log crossing” trial presenting  concentrated, almost positively ritualistic efforts and gesturings rather than the more fearful and despairing earlier depictions!

The disc’s final work, Gareth Farr’s He Poroporoaki (A Farewell) commemorated a premiere for similar forces undertaken at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli in 2008. Upon first hearing, I thought Richard Nunns’ playing of the putatara (conch) and putorino (flute) together with the composer’s sounding of the pahu pounamu (Greenstone gong) conjured up a vividly raw presence which the string lines  sought to “ritualise” in suitably elegiac style. I liked the Vaughan Williams-ish modal sequences which then “framed” the famous “Now is the Hour” melody – but I thought the latter might have been given more “suggestive” treatment rather than played in full and harmonised.I confess to finding the effect here a shade syrupy, but perhaps only because I was expecting more abstracted melodic treatment somewhat along the lines of the disc’s other pieces. A second hearing worried me less, being more along the lines of my thinking ”it is what it is” and accepting it as such.

So – with the sounds of this first recording still ringing in my head I was drawn to make the connection with Notes from a Journey II, recorded thirteen years later by the same Quartet but with a different second violinist, Monique Lapins having taken over from  Douglas Beilman in 2016.

The new disc underlines the journey’s continuation, sharing with the first recording both a title and the work of artist Simon Kaan, with cover art detail from images named as a related series. It began powerfully with a work by Gillian Whitehead, Poroporoaki, dedicated to Richard Nunns, one of the pioneers of the use of Maori instruments (taonga puoro) in composition – this was a stirring imitation of the pūtōrino (trumpet), and went on to imitate other instruments outlined in the text. The transcription powerfully blended ritual with individually characterful voices expressing melodic, rhythmic and specifically timbral sounds in aid of giving breath to the process of farewell.

Gareth Farr’s Te Koanga  is next, an evocation of the title, which means “Planting Season”, and the activities associated with such a time, activities which naturally involve the ritual of work and song for purposes of evocation as much as productivity. The work is as atmospheric and melodic as structural, incorporating the intrinsic value of the presence of birdlife in Wellington’s natural environment – there is a tui’s song enshrined in the detailing as well as contributions from other birds such as the weka. As the piece draws to a close the ambiences bid us a farewell…

Tabea Squire’s piece I Danced, Unseen captivated me on its first hearing – it seemed as though the composer was at first awakening her store of inner voices more than any latent physical urgings, but with the music suddenly enlivened our focus was energised and sharpened, bringing  our sensibilities to their feet! These impulses continue to gravitate from melody to rhythm as the piece progressed until the sounds achieved full bloom as a unified conception, the players’ breathing strongly in evidence in places giving extra palpable energy to the proceedings.

In a different way Ross Harris’s String Quartet No. 9 straightaway compelled one’s attention with the players vocalising as part of the “chorale” motif which itself underwent as profound a journey as did the “episodes” which each chorale rendition introduced. Beginning as inwardly glowing blocks of sound, the chorale vocalisations stimulated increasingly colourful, discursive and exploratory variants of the same, alternating between gestures whose thrusting and angular aspects coruscated with what sounded like irruptions of both col legno and sul ponticello timbres,  the players swapping pizzicato and arco techniques at will  (as if opening and closing a kind of a Pandora’s Box of bombardment!). These energies eventually dissipated into independent  phrases and single notes, with the chorale “released “ to the strings alone, the players and their instruments “reaching out” towards the end, seeking a kind of transfigured resolution.

Louise Webster’s work This memory of earth presented perhaps for me the most epic of the disc’s scenarios, beginning with an ambience shaken and stirred through bird-calls repeated by different instruments to form a kind of consort communing with a sonic environment. These solo instrument calls variously brought into focus a remarkably concerted tactile picture of a world in accord with a growing individual sensibility, with the composer gradually morphing the sounds into a new, somewhat more desperate and in places lamenting scenario, as if the world of childhood order was threatened – the cello intoned a moving lament-like chorale which drew the other instruments into its mode. The utterance became in places almost mystic as the long-remembered bird cries searched for their once-prized ambient responses from their surroundings – a sobering, exhortatory soundscape of recollection and remonstration, conscious of and fearful for the fragility of the natural world that was once ours – all extraordinarily moving.

Lastly, Salina Fisher, the youngest of the composers represented by their works on this CD, expressed with her work Tōrino the resounding effect of taonga puoro artist Rob Thorne’s music upon her listening experiences. The work was premiered by the New Zaland String Quartet in 2016 and went on to win the SOUNZ Contemporary Award the same year. Tōrino means “spiral”, with the music suggesting parallel kinds of recurring patterns as the strings seek to explore expressive similarities with the pūtōrino (known as both a trumpet and a flute due to its capabilities for reproducing both kinds of timbres and tones).

Fisher’s piece begins with vigorously ear-catching “trumpet” tones (kokiri o te tane, or male voice),  which give the impression of  summonsing calls and gesturings by the strings, both cello and viola readily sounding and overlapping one another, then joined by the two violins echoing the same figures and their variants.  The pūtōrino can also sing in different registers such as its “flute” personality when played at its other end, or when the player activates a different voice again by blowing over a “middle hole” in the instrument. Fisher achieves a “spiralling” effect with each of these expressive modes echoing and developing their material,  while in addition her inventiveness creates as much a sonic environment as a panoply of characterful voices.

Growing out of this synthesis come the more elusive, almost self-communing “middle hole” utterances, the piece’s “echoing” inclinations giving each impulse a resonating connection with what follows, be it a variant or a silence. They are the harbingers of the pūtōrino’s waiata o te hine (female voice), outpourings whose insistences slowly but assuredly reawaken the trumpet-toned voices, their reaffirmations proving to be the final, enduring sounds as the piece closes.

The performance of Fisher’s piece here epitomises the New Zealand String Quartet’s generous and single-minded commitment to the whole enterprise, with at every moment of engagement the players’ attack, phrasings and tones seemed to take us “inside” the notes and phrases, ambiences and silences. The two discs, of course, are separate entities, but their “bringing together” here reaffirms the extraordinary commitment of the players to these home-grown manifestations of what Douglas Lilburn in his celebrated 1969 essay “A search for a Language” called on behalf of local composers at the time “a sense of belonging somewhere”. And the works on these two discs are here reproduced with a fidelity of letter, spirit and atmosphere enabled in splendid partnership with Atoll Records producer Wayne Laird and recording engineer Graham Kennedy, people whose skills enable the sounds to retain what feels to me on each hearing as “an urgency of recreation” –  a listening  experience I would strongly recommend to all to try. The earlier disc has actually been sold out for some time, so perhaps a new and augmented groundswell of interest in this more recent notes from a Journey Vol.II production might well awaken and even rejuvenate its older, and no less worthy “sleeping partner”.

Whatever the fates decree, let plaudits be given to all for such a stellar achievement!

History in the making in 2023 – Alban Berg’s opera “Wozzeck” performed “live” for the first time in New Zealand

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:

RED MOON – Alban Berg’s opera “Wozzeck” (1925) arr. Eberhard Kloke

Cast: Wozzeck – Julien Van Mallaerts
Marie – Madeleine Pierard
Captain – Corey Bix
Drum Major – Jason Collins
Doctor – Paul Whelan
Andres – Alex Lewis
Margret – Margaret Medlyn
First Apprentice – Robert Tucker
Second Apprentice – Patrick Shanahan
Soldier – Richard Taylor
Idiot – Corey Bix
Marie’s Child – Ivan Reid

The Tudor Consort (Music Director – Michael Stewart)
Schola Cantorum of St Mark’s School ( Music Director – Anya Nazaruk)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (Music Director)

Director – Jacqueline Coats
Stage Manager – Janina Panizza
Lighting Design – Daniel Wilson

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 11th November, 2023

It’s the stuff this country’s musical legends are made of, joining occasions notable for their uniqueness such as (off the top of my head) Igor Stravinsky’s conducting of the then NZBC Symphony in 1961, the first-ever “at home” performance of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger” at the 1990 Wellington International Arts Festival, Michael Houstoun’s ground-breakingly-complete cycle in 1993 of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, and the first all-New Zealand cast performance of a Wagner opera, Parsifal, in 2006 in Wellington – readers with longer and/or sharper memories than mine will doubtless construct their own “pantheon “ of legendary home-grown occasions to which this one might well be added.

I’m referring by association to the incredible achievement of all the people involved with Saturday evening’s performance in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre of Alban Berg’s opera “Wozzeck”, a work which had its own first performance in 1925 in Berlin, and has thus taken almost a hundred years to get to these shores and be performed “live”.  But that’s just what Marc Taddei, Orchestra Wellington, the singers and the associated creative team managed to finally “bring off” – and, to add appropriate lustre to the occasion, with the confidence and surety that gave the presentation the kind of elan and brilliance that took one’s breath away! Though it was one might call a “semi-staged” production, and the deployment of the singers might, in my opinion, have on occasions been differently undertaken to the work’s greater advantage, the sheer commitment, verve and aplomb of the singing and playing never faltered throughout the entire evening, as evidenced by the sustained applause at the work’s end.

Conductor Marc Taddei in his pre-performance talk earlier in the evening characterised the performance of “Wozzeck” as the culmination of Orchestra Wellington’s 2023 season of works which had been “looking to opera for increased representation of the “human” spirit”, and finding at the end an opera which presents that very spirit in totally unvarnished form – it “lays bare the lie that the poor can simply get on with their lives and survive”, though Berg himself was adamant that “what happened to Wozzeck can happen to anyone who is subjugated by others and cannot defend himself”. In this opera there’s no institutionalised or miraculously-produced “force for good” which speaks up for Wozzeck, alerting us to the uncomfortable fact that it will have to be us, the audience members, who will need to do so, to look at the tougher parts of life and not look away. As one commentator wrote of the character of Wozzeck – he is “a metaphor for one of the opera’s fundamental concerns – the generative, toxic force of societal humiliation”……

Jacqueline Coats’s production here put the performers together on the normal orchestral platform of the Michael Fowler Centre, giving each of the singers a degree of  elevation in their scenes but keeping them largely behind the orchestra. This certainly directed one’s focus onto the opera’s music rather more than its stage action – something that I didn’t object to in principle, it being semi-staged anyway – but here it had the disadvantage of distancing each singer’s character from the audience, both physically and vocally, the faces and figures of the singers feeling somewhat “removed” from us, and the voices having to cut through from the rear the sometimes crowded acoustic sound-picture taken up by the orchestra.

It wasn’t until Act Two’s Scene Four (the dance-scene in the beer garden), that the Two Apprentices and Wozzeck were brought forward, almost to the front of the stage, the Apprentices with their “brandy wine” verses, and Wozzeck’s bitterly-voiced condemnation of his wife Marie’s dancing with the handsome Drum-Major – suddenly, what a difference to the immediacy of the characters before us this closeness made! In the following scene in the Soldiers’ barracks the sleepers were arrayed again out the front on the floor, which surely should have been where the Drum-Major’s and Wozzeck’s confrontation took place – but they were returned to behind the orchestra once again. Both voices could clearly be heard, but if only they had been closer to give us more of the physical flavour of their set-to! True, the singers acted primarily with their voices rather than gesture and movement, but simply their closer physical proximity would have brought more of the characters’ salient defining features into focus, advancing the story’s theatricality and impact.

If I seem to be making too much of this “placement” of the singers, I should emphasise all the more that all of the voices had sufficient strength to properly sound their words from wherever they were placed – so while it often looked more oratorio-like than operatic in terms of stage action, it was all well-served by both voices and instruments as regards the work’s musical values. And as we had briefly but tellingly observed with Orchestra Wellington’s recent foray into the music of one of Berg’s contemporaries Anton Webern, Marc Taddei and his players seemed to revel in the complexities and varieties of the composer’s scoring, unflinchingly addressing the expressive power of countless moments in the work, examples being the two horrifying orchestral crescendi following Marie’s murder by Wozzeck, and the naked anguish of the full orchestra’s final interlude separating  Wozzeck’s drowning from the children bringing news of Marie’s death to her child, who in a wrenching moment of bathos concludes the opera by continuing to ride his hobby-horse (these and other moments seeming to lose nothing of their power in arranger Eberhard Kloke’s judicious score reductions). But in addition, all of these things were set in stark contrast to the opera’s manifold beauties and delicacies of scoring in places, stressing the piteous aspect of the work’s tragedy  – for example, the beautiful sonorities of the string and brass playing echoing Wozzeck’s fearful rant while in the fields, with his  “Ein Feuer! – Ein Feuer” outburst; and again when accompanying his friend Andres’s tender concern as the latter led his disconsolate friend away to home. Conductor Marc Taddei’s wondrous grasp of the ebb and flow of these disarming contrasts and his players’ ability to deliver the full range and force of their extremes made in itself an unforgettable impression.

Just as astonishing were the performances of all of the singers, triumphing over their at times awkward stage placements with what seemed like the utmost commitment and confidence. In the title role, Julien van Mellaerts laid bare the both the quiet desperation and the frightening hallucinatory torment of the poor soldier, his piteous attempts at explaining his situation falling on deaf ears all about him, undermining his relationship with his wife Marie and driving his desperation to an abyss of madness. He conveyed so many telling vocal contrasts in places such as between his first-scene phrase “It must be fine indeed to be virtuous”, and the following cry “If we should go to heaven we shall be thunder-makers!” – again, I thought his all-too-brief front-of-stage moments in the Act Two dance scene after he witnessed Marie’s consorting with his rival, the Drum-Major, straightaway conveyed by dint of his immediacy more of the sense of a theatrical character, something his performance as a whole deserved to be allowed to generate more often. Alex Lewis as Wozzeck’s more straightforward friend and fellow-soldier Andres consistently used his fine voice freshly and lyrically, such as in his attempts to distract his friend from his disturbing hallucinations when together in the fields, and in the Act Two dance-hall scene with his guitar-accompanied ballade.

In the very opening scene we relished Corex Bix’s Captain conveying all of his character’s patronising and judgemental sanctimony in his attitude to Wozzeck, the latter becoming both the vehicle for and object of his superior’s derision, a default setting which stretched like a spider’s web over most of the drama. In addition, he ably brought to life the small but significant part of the Idiot at the dance who tells Wozzeck that he “smells blood” as Marie and the Drum Major are flagrantly dancing, while the drunken Apprentices (Robert Tucker and Patrick Shanahan in turn, sounding nicely unbuttoned and with alcohol having unloosened their tongues, to risible effect) are philosophising on the nature of human existence.

As Wozzeck’s ill-fated wife Marie, Madeleine Pierard conveyed a splendidly rich and tangible vocal presence, her voice easily riding atop the orchestral textures, and relishing the score’s tenderer moments with her (here invisible) child in places like her Act One Scene Three “Lullaby” song “Hansel, spann Deine sechs Schimmel an….” , so very beautifully accompanied by the orchestra’s  tuned percussion, and also in her gloriously guilt-ridden “jewel song” (her feelings underlined by lurid stage lighting) when considering the Drum Major’s gift to her of a pair of earrings. Though she wasn’t ever brought to the front of the stage during the production, her interactions with various other characters, such as her neighbour Margret, and the Drum Major, not to mention Wozzeck himself, were admirably conveyed by vocal means, even if we missed the dramatic impacts of more tangible physical gesturings in places such as her tryst with the Drum Major – it was left to the orchestra to express all too graphically the paroxysms of desire and lustful action between the characters.

As Margret, one of Marie’s neighbours well aware of what was going on and constantly at logger-heads with Marie, Margaret Medlyn (who had previously played Marie’s character in an Australian production some years ago) made a suitably inquisitive and self-righteous-sounding bystander, both in the street when watching the Drum Major passing with his band, and at the second dance scene in Act Three. Though essentially one-dimensional a character, Jason Collins’s libidinous Drum Major readily conveyed his character’s concupiscent appetites and brutal nature by dint of his boastful, vainglorious tones and gestures, his word-made-flesh moment being the beating he gave the unfortunate Wozzeck in the soldier’s barracks at the end of Act Two.

Another authoritative symbol of Wozzeck’s oppression was the figure of the Doctor (assertively and sonorously  portrayed by Paul Whelan), with whom Wozzeck had entered a kind of arrangement involving various idiosyncratic medical theories which the Doctor tests by using Wozzeck as a kind of guinea-pig, and for which he pays the latter a mere pittance. Though not an actual physical assault, perhaps the opera’s most mean-spirited act of humiliation inflicted upon Wozzeck was perpetrated by both the Captain and the Doctor together, meeting Wozzeck out on the street and callously insinuating to him the gossip involving Marie’s infidelities with the Drum-Major, leaving him distraught and undone at the realisation of his wife’s betrayal.

The opera delineates processes by which human capacity for suffering can reach destructive limits through unrelieved and often institutionalised neglect and abuse – Wozzeck’s tragedy is his victimisation through such processes, giving him insufficient means of escape from such a descent and from such a place. Besides its individualisation such processes can have effects which are both transmittable and hereditary – though Marie’s murder is shocking, just as disturbing and piteous are Wozzeck’s visions and phobias which took him to such a murderous state. Also just as disturbing is the opera’s final scene, in which Marie’s and Wozzeck’s child is confronted with the news from his playmates of his mother’s death (and later, by extrapolation his father’s death by drowning at the same time) – to which the boy’s response is to repeat a simple playground chant as he rides his hobby-horse off somewhere – a moment’s stunned silence after the child leaves brought home to us the idea that the child now has no-one to take care of him, his parents having been obliterated in a suitably shocking manner, and he is left in a world which has demonstrated over the past hour and a half of operatic presentation little or no sign of caring, and left us with the realisation that unless we care about such things nothing of the kind will change.

After that “moment” there was heartfelt and sustained applause for all concerned, with the reaction continuing afterwards with talk into the night as to what it had all meant, a removal from our (well, for most of us!) normal experience and an immersion into the stuff of nightmares resulting in desolation and despair – and all rounded off with a repeated childlike cadence that bleakly commented on existence emptied-out of hope and redemption. What a work, and what an experience for us all!…….

 

 

Helen Moulder’s and Sue Rider’s Bicycle – a conveyance par excellence at Circa

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Bicycle and the Butcher’s Daughter

A play (2020) by Sue Rider and Helen Moulder

Helen Moulder – (Olivia, Harry, Jennifer, Lexi and Grace)

Directed by Sue Rider
Stage Manager / Operator – Deb McGuire/Xanthe Curtain
Lighting Design – Giles Burton
Graphic Design – Rose Miller
Music (Beethoven Violin Sonatas No. 5 “Spring” and No. 9 “Kreutzer”)
– recorded by Juliet Ayre (violin) and Richard Mapp (piano)

Circa Theatre Two, Taranaki St., Wellington

Wednesday, Ist November 2023

Helen Moulder’s and Sue Rider’s play “The Bicycle and the Butcher’s Daughter” is the most recent of four shows created by the pair, beginning with the uniquely special “Meeting Karpovsky” of 2002, which appeared in collaboration with the late, great New Zealand dancer Sir Jon Trimmer. This latest show first took the stage in 2020 amidst the Covid-19 epidemic, a circumstance which caused the play’s ending to be rewritten to reflect the state of things the world had come to and its effect upon the play’s characters. “The Bicycle and the Butcher’s Daughter” captures a funny, idiosyncratic, poignant, outrageous and heart-rending amalgam of personalities all, in the space of an hour-and-a-quarter, constituting the modus operandi of a single family

In achieving this during a solo performance onstage Helen Moulder is a veritable colossus, one that variously shaped-shifts and freeze-frames by turns five characters, who in the course of their tantalising circumstances and interactions present to us each of their ineffably individual view of “things” as they pursue their goals, ideals and priorities, and face up to their outcomes. Moulder moves between this plethora of ambitions, interactions and consequences with breathtaking ease and surety, taking us with her on this sometimes whirlwind, sometimes painstakingly detailed journey with all the confidence and bravado of a tour guide who’s both in love with and exasperated by her subject.

She has a few companions accompanying her journey – an iconic coat-rail containing the play’s wardrobe, an articulate office chair, and a folding bike whose initially mute and ingloriously dismantled presence gives it a kind of potentially Promethean aspect. But there’s also Beethoven in attendance, via two of his best-known violin-and-piano sonatas, the “Kreutzer” and the “Spring” (which certain family members, we learn, were involved with recording – the excerpts HERE recorded and played superbly by Kiwi musicians, violinist Juliet Ayre and pianist Richard Mapp), and with each of the scene-changes, while relaxedly and naturally moved through, are supercharged in their psychological impact by the composer’s “every note counts” set of impulses.

Moulder presents a proudly home-grown family company, Paterson’s Meats, going through its paces – we’re first introduced to Olivia Paterson, who’s now CEO of the firm after her Dad’s retirement, very much in control of things, dealing, at the flick of a wristband switch, via the latest up-to-date communication technology, with international customers, tradespeople and other family members, exemplifying the firm’s motto “On ya feet with Paterson’s meat” with plans to help bring relief to a hungry world. We get the “complete executive” image with on-the-spot te reo Maori in everyday greetings and the occasional phrase in Mandarin when dealing with the Chinese customers, and poise and grace the whole while which don’t falter, even in the face of adversity brought on by various factors such as a recalcitrant family, Covid-19 and fake media news (rumours of a Pukeko Pie takeover!).

Olivia’s Dad is 96 year-old Sir Harold Paterson, retired and living in Palmerston North, whose character Moulder slips into as if it were a glove, asserting from the outset that he had started out “just wanting to feed Palmerston North!”, and gobsmacked at the recent news item suggesting that Patersons “export Pukeko Pies to China!” Though worried about his company (“I never wanted Patersons to get this big…”) and his other family members, Harry takes refuge in his own philosophy in accord with the tuis who visit his garden – “My own personal tui – what more can I ask? – out here making my peace with God. And with myself.”

Olivia’s sister is Jennifer, a “living the dream” would-be-art-gallery owner whose opening in Featherston Street is being plagued by plumbing issues – the name “The Eleventh-Hour Gallery” is a nice risible touch! – she’s in perpetual warfare with her executive sister, and in a moment of what seems like subconscious revenge drops the rumour concerning the Paterson Meats’ “Pukeko Pies” export deal into the clutches of a nosey journalist! Moulder’s nicely-modulated portrayal of manifold sisterly difference between Jennifer and Olivia is, however, a model of circumspection compared to her full-frontal, up close and personal cameo of Lexi (Alexandra), who’s Olivia’s and her late husband Nick’s daughter – we’ve already heard that Lexi is a musician, a pianist, but currently pursuing a career as a stand-up comedian, and now we experience her in action as the latter – no holds barred! – her routine is the opening of her comedy gig in which she eats a banana, then confronts all of us, full on! – asking us to raise our hands if we are meat-eaters, then telling us how much she hates us – “Eating meat is plain fuckin’ wrong – why don’t you get it?….” then describing herself as “a cross between a Greek god (her father) with a long, white cloud (her Kiwi mother)……a fuckin’ tropical cyclone!…” and then, having introduced herself, returns to the attack with tirade after tirade against “fuckin’ carnists!” pouring scorn upon vegetarians as well! Moulder sounds here as if she’d received plenty of standup comic training from open mic nights, totally relaxed and confident and in control right throughout the routine – and utterly committed! Impressive stuff!!

On the other side of the characterisation ledger is eleven year-old Grace, whose “out of the mouths of babes” address to us was akin to being visited by an angelic presence, redolent in her own definitions of her name being “kindness” and “being thankful”. There are touches of all kinds of qualities here, which at once inhabit and transcend day-to-day existence, our “angel” touched by tragedy in her disclosure to us of having a kind of blood cancer, while concentrating on the here and now of what was important to her, which was riding her bike, and, of course, in an unlooked for encounter alluded to by Olivia near the play’s end, giving help and encouragement to “a lady who was trying to ride a bike”, and, as the final scene in the play attests, succeeding!

Throughout all of these characterisations and their interactions, I found myself drawn into each and every one of the scenarios and engaged by what were recognisable versions of the truths and sympathies and inclinations of all the people involved – we were told who these people were and invited to recognise aspects of ourselves for our enjoyment as well as our advantage. It’s the kind of thing that, in my humble opinion, deserves to become a classic. Very great credit to Helen Moulder and Sue Rider for their efforts in both creating and breathing life into this particular shared journey.

The Bicycle & the Butcher’s Daughter. Directed by Sue Rider and starring Helen Moulder. Circa Two, to November 11.