Orchestra Wellington presents:
“The Jazz Age”
KEITH MOSS – A Kalahari Eclogue
Arohanui Strings and Orchestra Wellington
GEORGE GERSHWIN (arr. RUSS GARCIA) – Porgy and Bess
Deborah Wai Kapohe (soprano)
Eddie Muliaumaseali’i (bass)
Siliga Sani Muliaumaseali’i (tenor)
Signature Choir,
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei – Music Director
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 9th November 2024
Orchestra Wellington, under the directorship of Marc Taddei, continues to bring off presentations whose initiative, innovation and execution continue to engage, astonish and delight audiences, as with the band’s latest endeavour “The Jazz Age”. This concert’s showpiece was obviously George Gershwin’s groundbreaking 1935 folk-opera “Porgy and Bess”, but here done with a difference – a shortened concert performance featuring iconic Hollywood arranger Russell Garcia’s innovative reorchestration of the work for jazz performers, and served up within a framework of a “live” 1930s radio broadcast, complete with announcer, and commercial breaks!
Arohanui Strings perform with Orchestra Wellington and Music Director Marc Taddei at the Orchestra’s latest concert “The Jazz Age”
Included on the programme as an introduction were two other items whose performances featured the recent activities of the Sistema-inspired “Arohanui Strings” trainee pupils, with the older students taking part in the concert’s opening work “A Kalahari Eclogue” by South African composer Keith Moss (currently resident in New Zealand), and then being more-or-less “upstaged” by what music director Marc Taddei aptly called “cuteness” in the form of the Strings’ youngest members coming onto the performing platform, to the audience’s delight!
Taddei’s introduction for the Arohanui Ensemble included a comment concerning the SECOND instance I’ve recently learned of a music educational group in Aotearoa having its funding cut for 2025 by Creative New Zealand (the other being the Wellington Youth Orchestra), continuing what another commentator described as a “baffling” withdrawal of investment in the region’s future artistic development. Not, of course, a priority for our present Government to investigate, one would expect……but on an administrative and supportive level it’s a particularly unhelpful response to the Arohanui Strings Trust’s recent extension of activities in adding brass and woodwind classes for children.
Keith Moss’s “A Kalahari Eclogue” (commissioned by SOUNZ for Orchestra Wellington and Arohanui Strings) suitably evoked a “landscape” here, with the lower strings right at the beginning setting the scene and awakening consciousness from other parts of the orchestra, with ruminatory themes provoking impulses of colour from winds and percussion before developing and voicing their own intensities. A string “chant” was answered by a horn solo, joined by brass ostinato whose insistence brought forth song-like string textures and colourful washes of brass. The figures then interplayed and built to a tremendous climax, capped off and silenced by percussion – having thus encompassed the vastness of the territories, the piece allowed the winds a kind of “and so it goes” comment, an appropriate conclusion to this engaging and evocative piece, and most suitably given a warm reception.
By way of further encouragement for the youthful “Arohanui Strings” players, the orchestra launched into an unnamed Astor Piazzola Tango, before bringing onto the platform the aforementioned junior members of the group – undaunted, they gave us, by turns, spirited and lyrical renditions of “Frere Jacques’ and the classic Maori melody “Hine, e Hine”, before bringing the house down with Offenbach’s famous “Can-can”, firstly at a moderate tempi, and then at Taddei’s insistence, at a far more exhilarating clip! What an experience for those youngsters and for their tutors, to be thus involved in Orchestra Wellington’s inspired presentation!
Came the interval, and while the audience enjoyed its customary walkabout interlude the performing platform was a fascinating hive of activity, with the various groups of musicians’ and technicians’ coming-and-going, accompanied by snatches of jazz-like music, simulating a kind of event set-up and building a kind of anticipatory excitement. It soon became clear that this was a kind of radio-station-broadcast scenario featuring Gershwin’s famous folk-opera – and, being radio, the emphasis was firmly on the music rather than any kind of stage production.
The programme notes told us that we were to hear an award-winning “jazz arrangement” of the work first conceived in 1956 by the legendary composer and arranger Russell Garcia, and made famous world-wide in a recording the following year featuring performers Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong in the opera’s title roles, and conducted by Garcia. It was one of a number of varying presentations of Gershwin’s original folk-opera at that time, which would have been many people’s first experience of hearing those famous “numbers” as belonging to a “whole”, however far removed from the composer’s original.
Clearly, tonight’s performance was a “knockout”, with singing and playing and overall presentation that completely “owned” the idea and its execution – that this was a period-style radio broadcast, all atmospherically set-up with a compere introducing the show and singers who even performed commercials on behalf of a sponsor, along the way! Though there was no “stage action” as such, the show’s compere, tenor Siliga Sani Muliaumaseali’i, adroitly “telescoped” parts of the story’s unfolding with quick-fire narrations in places, and the other singers, soprano Deborah Wai Kapohe and bass Eddie Muliaumaseali’i, took various parts besides the title-roles, all of which they brought off with considerable aplomb. The resourceful “Signature Choir” plotted its course sonorously through various functions, among them a gorgeous vocal quartet’s delightful “commercial breaks”, and several well-focused solo voices contributing to the opera’s roles (the “Honey Man”, the “Strawberry Woman” and the “Devil Crab Man”) besides the group’s heartfelt “Doctor Jesus” prayers, pleas and laments during the storm and its sequel.
Right with the singers all the way was the magnificent Orchestra Wellington, whose playing was, in a number of ways, incredible! The energy, the enthusiasm, the deftness, the timing, the accuracy, and the sheer sound of the orchestra in all its parts was a tribute to the skills of each player, to the ensemble at large and to its indefatigable maestro, Marc Taddei. Shut your eyes and you could have been in any great concert-hall in the world, or so it seemed, in terms of the sound of a crack orchestra seeming to play its insides out. My reaction is, I must admit, tempered by my familiarity with Gershwin’s original “folk-opera” score via recordings I’ve been listening to a lot, lately, and which has left me somewhat disconcerted by the fabled Russ Garcia’s “arrangements” of Gershwin, much of which, to my ears, seemed excessively heavy and in places contrary to the spirit of the original (alternatively, I can’t recall ever having heard any of the “jazz versions” of Gershwin’s work on record, which, I suppose, accounts for my reaction to these things).
So, while I thought what the singers, players and their conductor achieved was stupendous on one level, I came away from the experience with less of the great “love” that I was expecting for some of what I heard – I thought all of the singers suffered in places from accompaniments that were too loud, “laden” in places by brass and percussion sonorities unnecessarily “piled up” by the arranger – as, for example, with Porgy’s touching “When God made cripple he mean him to be lonely” which wasn’t allowed to convey the pathos that I was accustomed to – fortunately Eddie Muliaumaseali’i’s impressively sonorous voice saw him through, as it did with the famous “I got plenty o’ nuttin”. Deborah Wai Kapohe, who was absolutely splendid in the equally well-known “Summertime” had to struggle against the orchestra in places in the great duet with Porgy, “Bess, yo’ is my woman now”, and to my disappointment that wonderful sequence with the words “mornin’ time and evenin’ time” lost some of its beauty and poignancy, with both singers having to “push” their tones through the orchestral opaqueness that the arranger couldn’t seem to resist. And I can’t imagine why Garcia watered-down what should have been one of tenor Siliga Sani Muliaumaseali’i’s great moments in the work as the rapscallion Sportin’ Life, in removing all of those deliciously zany interpolations (“Wah, doo! – zim bam boodle-oo!” etc…) echoed by the chorus, from the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So”……..
I’m straying into superfluity, now, by highlighting things the performance didn’t do, which for a critic should be beside the point – getting back to what was done, my critical incredulity returns, reflecting upon an achievement of evocation which, if not entirely Gershwin’s, impressed on so many counts, to the point where singers, players and conductor seemed transfixed by their own efforts as the work leapt from the page and into the spaces where we sat, mesmerised by it all – that in itself made for an experience which will resound in the memory for a long time to come.