Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Morton Trio and Friends
Sextets by ERNST VON DOHNÁNYI and KRYZSTOF PENDERECKI
Morton Trio – Arna Morton (violin), Alex Morton (horn), Liam Wooding (piano)
with David McGregor (clarinet), Sharon Baylis (viola) and Jeremy Garside (‘cello)
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 28th April 2024
The first thing I did when I got home from this concert was to get onto the computer and find recordings of each of these unfamiliar and incredible pieces of chamber music that I could purchase without delay, such was the compulsive fascination exerted by each of the works I’d heard that afternoon and brought to the fore by the brilliance and beauty of the performances by the Morton Trio and Friends. In fact I’d already been knocked sideways by the sheer elan of the ensemble’s playing of the Dohnányi piece by the interval, and it did take much longer for the Penderecki Sextet to similarly get under my skin – but the end result of the concert’s presentation was my wanting to have both of these works on hand to enjoy once again as soon as possible.
For me it was fascinating to experience how the two separate processes of coming to grips with each piece took me on quite a different listening course, though concluding in each case with no less of a compulsive quality regarding my wanting to hear the music again. Right from the beginning of the Dohnányi work I was struck by its almost wilful plenitude of spontaneously-wrought sonorities, setting up a more-or-less constant flow of compulsive, “whatever-next?” kinds of expectations that continued in joyful abundance right to the end.
But then, how different seemed my journey throughout much of the Penderecki work, confronted at the outset by a rather more tightly-woven company of motivic impulses and varied texturings over more expansive sound-vistas, a panoply of impressionable happenings whose intent seemed to evolve from out of a first movement’s closely-knit conflict, but whose eventual second-movement resolution “from within” slowly but surely captivated my sensibilities as the sounds strove with all their might towards a kind of dark transfiguration which alternated glimmerings of hope and shadows of tragedy .
I straightaway loved the “questing “ quality of the Dohnányi work, its darkly-hued restlessness at the outset seeming to investigate every possible pathway set up by the music’s trajectories and harmonic shifts. The flexibility of the music’s trajectories gave the work a kind of Cesar Franck-like volatility, and also with an occasional “diabolique” kind of flavour thrown in from a tritone-like interval. Throughout, the ensemble’s virtuoso use of a wide dynamic range took one’s “listener’s breath” away, especially throughout the stormy development section. Then. the second movement’s ghostly opening grew from within a rhapsodic passage interrupted by a ruggedly march-like “carving out” by the players characteristic of the volatility of the piece, as was the return to tranquility at the music’s end.
The next theme-and-variations movement was begun by a clarinet melody, phrased here with an engaging mix of sentiment and insouciance, and followed by a piano solo that had set its mind on goading the rest of the ensemble into action, resulting in a series of delightfully divergent inspirations – running, circus-like exchanges, skitterish triplet-led sequences and occasional returnings to the gentle soulfulness of the clarinet theme. The playing here flowed like oil in an almost Mozartean way, with horn and clarinet striking an attractively elegiac note (was there a brief horn “slip upwards” from the otherwise impeccable Alex Morton at one point?) towards the end with the piano’s steadfast support.
But then, how excitingly the music then “gathered” itself, sounding the tritone as a kind of “something’s happening” signal, and then, without a break, plunging into a “ragtime” dance-rhythm, here so especially “grunty” and joyous in the exuberance and abandonment with which the players dug into the accents! And what a wonderful moment it was when the heart-on-sleeve waltz-rhythm suddenly appeared, sparring with the ragtime rhythm and working up to an almost Rachmaninovian climax, before the coda carried all before it, waltz-tune, diabolus reference and all, teetering towards a gorgeously wrong-harmonied grandstand finish, and then cheekily correcting itself – outrageous and exhilarating!
It was naturally expected that Penderecki’s would be a different world, with the tersely-tattooed piano figure at the very beginning “setting the scene” for the pointillistic, spaced-out exchanges with which the work began, activating the other instruments by turns as the sounds unfolded – a flurry of toccata-like interchange marched along, fell away briefly and almost sorrowfully, but then renewed with even more vigour – such full-blooded playing, I thought, from all concerned! The sounds slowed to a trudge, and took on an almost Mahlerian funereal aspect, mixing grief and anger. I was amazed at the clarity with which the musicians delivered detail, here, despite the insistence of the contrapuntal detailings and the pace at which the ensemble maintained its agitated interactions. Horn and clarinet then paved the way in sonorous fashion for a grotesque kind of march-cum cakewalk which built up to a frenzied bout of gesturings from all concerned before abruptly collapsing!
The viola began the second movement tersely, drawing further elaborations from the piano, before the other strings echoed the viola’s theme, the piano continuing to explore the spaces. A clarinet call evinced a sombre, almost ghostly response from the strings, augmented by a restrained, self-communing horn (I did see a You-Tube performance of this in which the horn player left the stage at the second movement’s beginning to play in the “wings” for a period, but this event wasn’t replicated here). Again, I thought the players’ various detailings of the lines seemed never to miss a trick – the music seemed in “ebb-and-flow” mode, by turns desolate and then forthright and determined, and always “knowing” where it was going, however rudderless the trajectories sometimes seemed.
The volatilities of the work couldn’t be kept down, as even the most mournful of sequences would suddenly energise and flare up, as in a hair-raising triplet sequence featuring the instruments flying up and down the scale in desperate frissons of energy of their own making, trying either to “connect” or “escape” the manifestations and implications of this journey. As I listened I began to feel just what it was the music was heading towards amid its trajectoral and dynamic contrasts. It was a feeling that was summed up best by one commentator, himself a horn player, whose thoughts on the work I shared: – “Underlying the chatter of these contrasting episodes is a minor-key dirge that ultimately subsumes everything else in the work – the message being that you can have all the fun that you want, but the end bears only bitterness and loss.”
Something of this realisation came to me as the work entered a sequence towards the end consisting of long-held chords, a melody from the ‘cello, and a repeated two-note “lament-like” motif which again brought Mahler’s music to mind – the players here held this mood as if it were second nature to them, “inhabiting” the notes and expressing their underlying tragedy, the unearthly string harmonics which concluded the work leaving each of us with little else in mind but to ponder our own destinies.
At the concert’s scheduled end, violinist Arna Morton thanked us for our attendance and observed that the afternoon’s music had probably been akin for a lot of people to a “heavy meal”! – nutritious and satisfying in that sense, but needing something of a sweet for complete homegoing satisfaction! She proposed that the group would thus perform an encore, a piece by the French composer Lili Boulanger originally written for a mixed choir, but arranged by Arna herself for the ensemble today to perform. The piece was originally titled ”Sus bois”, a name translated as “forest floor” or “undergrowth”, a gentle, and beautifully harmonised piece which reminded me in places of Ravel. Its sylvan beauty was certainly an antidote for the sensibilities after the travails of the Penderecki Sextet! In all, a concert long to be remembered!