Month: May 2025

John Psathas’s “Leviathan” – genre-defying and irresistible

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN PSATHAS – Leviathan
Four Percussion Concertos
The All-Seeing Sky (with Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffelbach)
Call of the Wild (with Adam Page)
Leviathan (with Alexej Gerassimez)
Dijnn (with Yoshiko Tsuruta)

All with Orchestra Wellington and Musical Director Marc Taddei
Orchestra Wellington OW 23CD

Hailed as “genre-defying music”, four of New Zealand/Greek composer John Psathas’s percussion concertos have made a spectacular appearance on Orchestra Wellington’s own label, a release appropriately gathered together under the name of “Leviathan”, the title of one of these concertos. The “genre-defying” aspect reflects Psathas’s intense feelings concerning the role of a contemporary composer, which he feels is a matter of “connection” across all genres and boundaries, one which reaches out to all audiences. For him this “outward” energy conveys that connection, and it has come to inform works such as the four presented on this album. Significantly, Psathas regards Beethoven’s music as an exemplar of such “reaching out” to people, music that embodies, in his words, “that desire to reach another human being”.

All four of these concertos were recorded during Psathas’s “composer-in residency” tenure with Orchestra Wellington, a circumstance that has given him a good deal of joy – “we had these incredible soloists and we had fantastic performances, and we’ve captured them”. As well, the venture is obviously a tribute to the staunch support for Psathas’s music from the orchestra’s Music Director, Marc Taddei.  I’ve not been able to comment on the vinyl format of this release as I’ve only seen the CD format (which, in terms of my own reactionary sensibilities regarding recordings in general, has what I would call the “minimalist” approach to presentation, with no accompanying documentation regarding either the works or their performers, save a QR code which you scan for access to liner notes (“Not I, but some child, born in a marvellous year….” etc.! – however, my own “marvellous child” was able to guide me through these personal “portals of Dis” with nary as much as a backward glance!).

The first of the set’s four percussion concerti, “The All-Seeing Sky” is dedicated to the soloists in the recording, Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffelbach. A “double concerto”, it has three movements – The Portals of Dis, The Upper World, and the titular The All-Seeing Sky  – and it entrances the listener at the outset with its almost subconsciously-heard impulses, a process characterised by the composer as “a very subdued oh wow, this is actually happening kind of feeling”. Of course, the opening movement’s title “The Portals of Dis” suggests something dismal and dark,  a kind of penetration of an Underworld (as suggested by Psathas’s reference to Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy” which he had read, and which characterised for him a sense of antiquity and ancient times, furthered for him by artist Gustav Dore’s nineteenth-century visualisations of the poet’s journeyings through the Inferno – and yet the opening paragraphs of the music evoke more mystery and eeriness than fear and dread as the travellers in the boat in Dante’s poem cross the River Styx, the sounds of the orchestra detailing the almost limitless wonderment of these adventurers amid their surroundings, as the two soloists – Fabian Ziegler and Luca Staffenbach – gradually but inexorably advance the sense of a “journey” with their increasingly compulsive and addictive patternings on, respectively, the marimba and xylophone. Whole sequences of minimalist patternings alternate with newly-wrought material from both the soloists and the orchestral musicians, gradually intensifying the ambiences with extra percussion – timpani and cymbals – and achieving what Psathas describes as a “welcoming fanfare” to the Gates of Dis. It’s one where the traditionally spectral “abandon hope all ye who enter here” mindset of antiquity is leavened by a more modernist view of one’s mind being “its own heaven and hell” (Psathas suggests in so many words a similarly updated view.).

The following movement, “The Upper World” delivers a new kind of eeriness, with the soloists floating and arpeggiating over a series of deeply-voiced slowly-undulating gestures from the orchestra’s lower instruments, striking an occasionally more forceful, and by turns an exquisitely-flowing air with winds and strings, the atmosphere more claustrophobic than free, as if further reminding us that our “Upper World” can take on similar threatening propensities to that of antiquity’s visionary horrors, with the dismissal of a traditional God plus the trappings creating a vacuum filled by any number of entities bent upon dominance of peoples’ minds. This is further explored by the freewheeling third movement “The All-Seeing Sky” – a kind of “juggernaut” through the void, for much of its length, with the kind of energy that freedom brings, along with a price that has to be paid for that “freedom” – it isn’t long before the exhilaration develops an obsessive, hectoring note, breaking off at the climax to sound a warning – the orchestra builds frightening vortices against whose sides the percussionists hammer until the reality of a new kind of imprisonment hits home. In a tremendous crescendo, begun quietly and almost innocently, both soloists define the formidable slopes that have to be climbed and the spaces that must be filled with new resolve, building the sonorities in a do-or-die effort which awakens the entire orchestral forces who play above their weight, reaching a hammering climax of renewed hope – Psathas elaborates here on his idea drawn from his Greek ancestry of a “gladdening sorrow” – in his own words “gratitude for being alive, and sorrow for understanding all that’s ill in the world!”

Following this on the set’s first disc is Psathas’s “Call of the Wild”, a concerto for tenor saxophone and orchestra commissioned jointly by Orchestral Wellington and the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, the recording here presenting the work’s actual 2021 premiere given on July 17th by saxophonist Adam Paige and Orchestra Wellington. My “Middle C” colleague, critic Lindis Taylor, reviewed this concert in glowing terms, struck as much by the work’s “vividly individual” nature as by the brilliance of the performance by soloist Adam Page, and of the orchestra under Marc Taddei’s direction. Taylor highlighted the soloist’s “flamboyant confidence” and noted the latter’s use of a “wide range of techniques” as the music unfolded. The instrument itself, while not a standard symphonic orchestral instrument, has long enjoyed imaginative instances of use by various composers – I would have added Vaughan Williams’s name to the list my colleague proffered (for the review see https://middle-c.org/2021/07/orchestra-wellington-under-taddei-with-adam-page-triumphant-in-psathass-saxophone-concerto/).

Solo saxophonist Adam Page describes in his accompanying notes how musical collaboration often has a kind of “jewel in the crown” quality for artists, even though these experiences are sometimes isolated and short-lived – but with the “Psathas/Page” partnership a true friendship (Page calls it “a lifelong connection”) evolved from the pair’s first collaboration in 2012 when co-writing “The Harvest Suite”– consequently Page “jumped/bomb-dived” at the chance of renewing his creative association with Psathas via a new tenor saxophone concerto the composer was formulating.

Psathas’s description of this work’s genesis encompasses a good deal of his family history, dealing with events that left an indelible and continuing mark on both the twentieth and the present century, but more immediately on his own family – his grandparents and great-grandparents were forced to relocate between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s in what could only be described as devastating and denaturalising circumstances – in the wake of genocidal activities between various racial and religious groups exacerbated by the 1914-18 war in Europe, the governments of both Greece and Turkey deemed it necessary to forcibly relocate ethnic groups whose religious beliefs and cultural mores had become regarded as incompatible with the respective majorities of their citizens, despite the long-established (in many cases) native and indigenous ties these people had created over centuries within what they considered their homelands. There had already been genocidal massacres of non-Turkish Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians both before and after the war and by the time the Governments had signed the 1923 Convention Exchange (called The Asia Minor Catastrophe in Greece), resulting in about one-and-a-quarter million people arriving in Greece from Turkey and over 300,000 Muslims expelled to Turkey by 1923. A Muslim Professor, forced from his home in Crete, to Turkey, expressed in an interview every migrant’s tragedy – “Born in one place, growing old in another place – and feeling a stranger in both places”.

Psathas’s grandparents and great-grandparents experienced the forced marches sustained by people expelled from Turkey during this early 1920s period, resettling in Greece, only to experience a second World War and a subsequent civil war, from which their children (Psathas’s parents) left to emigrate to New Zealand to begin a new life in 1960.. Though he was born in Wellington, most of John’s childhood, along with a sister, was spent in Taumarunui, after which he attended college in Napier. His interest in music developed throughout this time, resulting in his entering University to study piano and composition at Victoria University of Wellington. John’s parents and sister Tania returned to Greece to live in 1988, but apart from trips back to Europe to reconnect, John has remained in Wellington, and he and Carla, his wife, have two children, Emmanuel and Zoe.

Unusual as it is to explore the biographical aspect of a composer to such an extent in a review as here, the works on this CD recording each relate singularly to Psathas’s life experience and familial ties, none more directly that this work “Call of the Wild”. In three movements, Psathas by turns characterises and meditates upon the salient features which define each of his parents, and their heritage and life-experience as embodied in Psathas’s own children and their attitudes and impulses.

Call of the Wild begins with a piece of music dedicated to John Psathas’s mother, Anastasia given the title by the composer “She stands at the edge of the incomprehensible” – a saxophone solo at the beginning, an opening up of a sonic world with which the soloist can play, dominate, integrate, lead or dissolve into. The orchestra becomes the world, giving the energetic impulses of the soloist a sense of direction and unlimited purpose, resonances that seem to have the capacity that resound for all time, in places demonstrating a determination above all else, unquenchable energy of the kind that seems to feed itself – though an almost heart-stopping moment is when the saxophone seems to challenge the limitations of existence itself, sending out a call whose reach is as high as its compass suggests it would allow before pushing even further. Even the surrounding resonances are amazed, perhaps agog at the temerity of this instrument, this single entity pitting its capabilities against the business of being. And then, as if some kind of reassuring synthesis is needed, the saxophone and orchestra come together, surging towards a corelated kind of ecstatic outpouring, then setting an inexorable course towards continuance.

How different is the following, opening with slow, dreamy oscillations of some kind of prenatal nature, Psathas’s father Emmanuel perhaps waiting in the womb to be born, or else meditating the nature of the circumstances of that event in later life. The music suggests a time for reflection upon things that are important to know, feel and conceptualise – in a way it could be characterised as the inner life of the first movement’s outer being, an idea of fusion having different though accessible natures, and each giving to and feeling from the other, Psathas stressing unity of different personalities, spirits, souls. Or it could claim its independence from the outset (Psathas’s title “He can worship it without believing it” suggests this), elaborating upon what the composer considered to be his father’s “staggering force of will” in being “inflexible in his principles of decency and fairness”. Throughout this piece the sounds are unwavering in their constancy and disarming in their quiet persistence and surety. Something of the depth of emotion this piece explores by association is the quoting by a solo violin of a vocal line from the composer’s 2016 work “No Man’s Land”,

From the outset of the third movement (“Tramontane”) there’s a restlessness, both in the setting of different (three-against four) time-signatures for the soloist and the orchestra, which, after a confrontational build-up fuses energies and begins a more concerted exploration – dramatically reducing the pace and the dynamics brings the piece’s elements together, agreeing on the agenda, and setting off again with near-irresistible resolve. This is Psathas’s and his children’s heritage (the name Tramontane literally means “From the other side of the mountains”, and refers to a particular Mediterranean wind which frequently blows up a storm), the composer characterising the energised impulse within his family “to fight for what we needed in life” after his relocation in small-town New Zealand and having to endure being “outsiders” in terms of heritage, custom and religion. What emerges is an incredibly wild ride on the part of the music’s various elements, the soloist’s giving vent to a contemporary “Call of the Wild” in his instrument’s at times frenzied tessitura against the orchestra’s similarly restless soundscapes. In conclusion Psathas comments on the near-inevitability of his children having inherited the same impulsive desire to express what he calls “that nomadic gypsy impulse” and take it to who knows where?

Turning to the set’s second disc, first up is the piece that gives the collection its overall name “Leviathan”. This work, completed by Psathas in 2020, was commissioned as part of an international project with the title “Beethoven Pastoral”, an initiative by the UN Climate Change and BTHVN2020  to promote action on climate change and the environment during the 250th anniversary year of the birth of Beethoven. The Project represented a “determination to be part of the solutions to current planetary challenges’ and the desire “to inspire and be part of that change”. Psathas wrote this work for and dedicated it to Alexej Gerassimez, the soloist in this recording.

“Leviathan” has three movements, summarised as follows – the opening Hightailin’ to Hell crystallises both the composer’s introductory remarks and the feelings generated by the music – “Our planet is in a very bad way, and it seems that we can’t wait to get to the “finish line”. To this end, the human race’s “out-of-control race to environmental disaster” is depicted by the use of “junk-percussion” – The trajectorial impulses are remorseless – the pulsatings never let up as the journey takes the listener through what seems like a thankless and unforgiving, almost lifeless kind of terrain, an experience that gives a feeling of being driven rather than driving – I was put in mind of connections with similarly “driven” music such as Hector Berlioz’s “Ride to the Abyss” from La Damnation de Faust, and (during  the most frantically virtuosic sequences)  parts of the first movement of Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony during which a solo side-drummer is instructed to try and halt the orchestra’s progress at all costs with savage interjections and disruptive counter-rhythms!

The Final Brook , a homage to Beethoven, comes next – a complete contrast, limpid, shimmering, effusions of light and sensation with instruments that suggest the play of light on and through water, a sound-world I to which one can give one’s sensibilities over to entirely and feel refreshed and renewed, while at the back of these instruments the strings are beginning to playing the actual music of Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” in a dream-like, trance-like way – a “fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?’ kind of sensation, one which puts Beethoven’s hymn of praise to nature to the forefront of the madness of today’s polluted world.

A single plastic water-bottle used as an “instrument” by the soloist centres our attention throughout Soon We’ll All Walk On Water – a movement one cross-furrowed with dippings, splashings and “impingings” on our sensibilities, with an eerie cosmic circle of sound sensation revolving around the dancing plastic object – a symbol of the madness threatening our world with ruin.

Finally, there’s A falcon, a storm or a great song – (a quote from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke) – a determined tattoo-like pulsating over luminous orchestra chordings which come and go like fog lights in the gloom, and a grand brass statement reinforced by percussion and driving  tones – a held chord, and jagged rhythmic slashings indicate that action is being called for and, indeed demonstrated by the vigorous rhythmic patternings and the long-breathed calls across the sound-spectrum. The sounds make a stirring impression, even though they can at times tremulously fall back as if lacking certainty,  but then gather and plunge onwards after a dramatic pause – obstacles appear out of nowhere and are subdued and conquered – it can be done, and human beings, whether falcons, storms or great songs, can be inspired to act with such purpose! – in the composer’s words, “of steel and drums and momentum and drive!” Percussionist Alexej Gerassimez and the orchestra players are heroes, every one, under Marc Taddei’s unswervingly focused direction!

Rather more elusive, mercurial and mysterious as a creation is Djinn, a 2009 work which Psathas first crafted as a marimba concerto for Pedro Carneiro, but which has since appeared in various other guises. The soloist here, Yoshiko Tsuruta, remembered the premiere of this concerto well, and was honoured to be invited to present this work in 2024 – in her words,  “an exciting and deeply-rewarding experience”.

Djinn is a marimba concerto in three movements – 1. Pandora – 2. Labyrinth – 3. Out-dreaming the Genie. The first movement is a meditative dialogue between soloist and orchestra depicting the legend of Pandora, who opened a box containing all the evils of the world, leaving only hope inside for humankind. – though distinctive, the movements are interconnected by a common mythological resonance where consciousness and mystery can interact and colour both our individual and collective imaginings. The second, Labyrinth, is perhaps the most profound as it symbolises a journey of self-discovery and has the capacity to surprise and astonish us, despite our expectations. The final movement, Out-dreaming the Genie offers a kind of interpretation of these previous experiences as
sources of hope, confidence and freedom as one might imagine it could be. The soloist, Yoshiko Tsuruta, gives an extraordinary performance,  never missing a beat or nuance, and Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington lead us through the proverbial maze of exploration, entanglement and eventual realisation with single-minded resolve and a degree of hope bolstered by determination – the music  in both its performance and symbolic power becominga synonym for human perseverance.

So, what feelings am I left with  about what I’ve been listening to? Mainly that, to go into and through these pieces, either separately or together, is to undertake a journey that puts one in touch with things that ebb and flow, and helps one crystallise one’s feelings about music in general and about humanity and ITS relationship with music. After listening to these works by John Psathas on this recording, the most resounding thing I’m feeling is to equate music all the more with being human, and reinforce that quality of sharing something that’s about continuance – as someone put it so succinctly, like ”a journey on an overgrown path”. To be thus presented with such a simple yet profound idea is a wondrous achievement – one that I urge people who haven’t yet done so to try through this splendid set of recordings of John Psathas’s music.

 

 

 

 

Home for the Winter with Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding

Posted on by Peter Mechen

“Home for the Winter”
Liam Wooding (piano) and Hannah Darroch (flute)
Music by Jasmine Lovell-Smith, Henri Dutilleux, Lachlan Skipworth, Aaron Copland and Lili Boulanger
Bedlam and Squalor – Level 1, 18 Garret St,. Te Aro, Wellington
6:00 pm, Thursday,15th May, 2025

Things were “swinging away” in great end-of-the-day style at “The Rogue and Vagabond”, the watering-place right next to central Wellington’s Glover Park, as I made my way, a little tentatively, just around the corner and further along Garret St, to where there stood, self-assuredly in its own modest way, the entrance to “Bedlam and Squalor” (ah, thought I – a first cousin to “The Rogue and Vagabond!) – but I was straightaway taken by the contrast of the sombre doorway (of the “abandon hope” sort) with the profusion, above and besides this entrance, of coloured-pencil like horizontal stripes one might have correlated to a kind of urban kindergarten or some sort of art-gallery where the Hogarth-like images I’d entertained of “Bedlam and Squalor” were in reality reverse-euphemisms  for “fun and games”, and obviously nothing worse than “madness and merriment”.

Up the stairs I went, leaving those around-the-corner jollities earthbound as I ascended, finding myself in a quiet, comfortable and welcoming space not unlike a bar itself, but with tables and chairs set up in a rounded area at the room’s end, where there was a piano, beside which the two artists, Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding, were discussing aspects of the music they were about to perform, and greeting us (myself included) as we came in. Pleasantries completed I had just settled down, finding a seat next to an acquaintance whom I’d made at previous concerts and always found most agreeable, when I discovered that, in my haste at leaving home I’d snatched up one of my notebooks, but had forgotten to bring a pen! Help was at hand in the shape and form of a bartender, who was greatly amused by the piquancy of the plight of a music critic who had come without a stylus, but who kindly brought my agony to an end by producing one – I was happy to have thus contributed a “storm-in-a-teacup” strand of incident to the proceedings now that things had been resolved!

So! – here were Hannah Darroch and Liam Wooding, formally welcoming us (we were a small but appreciative audience in that relatively intimate space) and telling us about what they were going to play for us, beginning with a piece which had give the whole recital its name, “Home for the Winter”, a piece written in 2020 for Hannah by Jasmine Lovell-Smith, and whose title was inspired by the “homeward” move made by many New Zealanders in response to the Covid 19 outbreak. The sounds seemed coaxed from out of the air, firstly for the piano, and then for the flute, the lines having a natural, organic kind of flow as if wrought by impulse, a feeling for the actions of wind and water all around – having been brought into being these elements seemed to take human form in song, which became a sort of minstrelsy, a chorus that rose up as the piano intensified the exchanges, before breaking off and leaving the opening resonances as a memory.

Having proclaimed a kind of “this is where we are” introduction, Hannah and Liam took us next to more peopled terrain, with a work by French composer Henri Dutilleux. Though it was one I’d not heard before, I knew and had already been enchanted with pieces by Poulenc, Francaix and Ropartz, and this proved, to my delight, similar kind of territory. I was almost straightaway disarmed by the opening piquancies (mysterious piano octaves echoed and gracefully “danced all about” by the flute) – and I loved the “Peter and the Wolf” opening dialogues of the second movement between the piano’s predatory wolf and the flute’s frightened but intrepid bird, and the following rhapsodic exchanges between the two, suggesting something of a singular “entente cordiale”.

A sudden escalation of energies (brilliant “molto perpetuo” playing from both musicians) seemed to clear the air of menace, entirely, and give the scenario over entirely to the pleasures of tit-for-tat exchange, our sensibilities being given plenty of air and space in places by some soaring lines before being returned to the dance! Towards the end, a cadenza-like episode from Hannah’s flute took us to a Ravel-like place not unlike Daphnis and Chloe’s enchanted grove, before the pair rejoined forces for an ever-accelerating coda, exhilarating for us all in its shared energies and pleasures.

Next was a recently-composed (2022) sonata by Australian Lachlan Skipworth, introduced by Liam, and described by him as “very refreshing” to play, though adding the proviso that the time signatures in the score with their frequent changes – 20/16, 10/16, 18/16 – certainly posed something a “challenge”. From the beginning I found the work a same-but-different experience to that of the Dutilleux, here an almost Gaelic world of exhilaration, with the opening “chaos of delight” morphing into a folk-dance blend of carefree abandon and strongly-pulsed movement.

The piano breaks off to play a solemn, repeated note-pattern to which the flute adds a lovely, rustic song-like sequence, borne along by its own airiness and spaciousness, hymn-like when the piano intensifies the mood, and seemingly tossed into the play of winds and waves when both instruments dance along the hilltops of the melody’s liberated lines – entrancing! Just as spell-binding is the dialogue of voices sequence which follows, like a pair of birds enacting a defining of territories, or a courtship ritual, one which leads back to the exuberance of the folkdance – if the conclusion isn’t quite of the grand finality one might expect, one might say it has an attractively insouciant “well, there it is!” manner at the end.

Our “food for thought” interval was sufficient to process what we’d heard (delightful!) and clear our decks for the next offering, a “different again” experience promised, which Hannah described for us  as “Americana in music” – this was Aaron Copland’s Duo for Flute and Piano, again something I hadn’t heard (oh, the ignorance of some music critics!), and naturally looked forward to an introduction to the piece. The opening movement, marked as “Freely” by the composer, takes us straight into the world of the latter’s ballet “Appalachian Spring” with the flute playing solo, a “voice in the wilderness”, spacious and nostalgic, with the piano’s entry contributing to the characteristic, almost unmistakably “open” sound. The flute begins the dance, strands of movement varying its trajectories, with the piano amusingly “oom-pah” at one point just before the big flute solo! Another pronounced “echo” for me is the similar ambience to the Third Symphony towards the end, a kind of salute to an idealised past…..but, then, what a quirky kind of conclusion! – those sharply-abrupt chordings are almost amusing in their air of dismissiveness!

“Poetic, somewhat mournful”, says the composer at the head of Mvt.II – piano and flute seem to be either looking for or avoiding one another at the start – most of those open harmonies have closed up, and whatever congress the instruments strike, each seems somewhat nonplussed by the other – there’s a moment of accord in a more animated and heartfelt middle section, but compared to the opening, it’s a bit like the difference between a dream and an awakening (whichever suits which!).The piano returns to its lonely furrow, and the flute raises its head for a heartfelt and sonorous single-note look-around!

Both espy a notice saying “Lively, with bounce!”  – so the piano “bounces” and the flute catches on! And what better than a square dance? – lovely, palms-skyward trajectories, with quirky harmonic comings and goings, with the flute occasionally intoning “Where are you?” as the piano rumbles up and down the stairs! – “Back to the dance!” they both chorus, nostalgically smoothing-over the rhythms here and there, but as quickly resuming their “hide-and-seek” – suddenly Hannah’s flute espies an open window and with Liam’s piano in hot pursuit catapaults right through it! – freedom!

Has this been music I’m writing about or some sort of “anything you can do I can do better” kind of game? It just seems that way, at times – but whatever the case, we in the audience were tickled to pieces by it all – and just to show that life bears SOME resemblance to art, we were invited by our stalwart artists to return to our lives with a kind of encore, a piece by Lili Boulanger appropriately entitled “Nocturne”, the flute singing a lullabic song over piano octaves, the tones soaring and settling over gorgeous keyboard undulations, while the harmonies coalesce slowly and beautifully.

Hannah and Liam, you and your instruments brought about such delight and contentment for all of us present this evening – any thoughts of bedlam and squalor were forgotten as I took my leave of my companion (deftly remembering on the way out to return the borrowed pen!) and descended those stairs and met with the open air once again, trying to recall what day it was, where I was, where I was going and what the music was that was playing in my head as I walked through streets that bore no relation, it seemed, to any of those sounds….and I thought it was definitely all part of something well worth remembering……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cantoris – opera that’s tuneful, rhythmic, magical, exotic, funny, murderous, tragic, pompous, escapist, real – what more could you want?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CANTORIS – A Night at the Opera

Cantoris Choir
Soloists: Barbara Paterson (soprano), William McElwee (baritone)
Music Director: Ingrid Schoenfeld
Piano: Heather Easting

Ruggero LEONCAVALLO – Bell Chorus from I Pagliacci
Giuseppe VERDI – Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore
George Frideric HANDEL – Chorus of Enchanted Islanders from Alcina
Giacomo PUCCINI – Humming Chorus from Madama Butterfly
Georges BIZET – Habanera, with Chorus from Carmen
Toreador Song, with Chorus, from Carmen
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART – “Heil sei euch Geweihten” from The
Magic Flute
Christoph Willibald GLUCK – “Quel est l’audacieux” from Orphée et
Eurydice
Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART – Voyagers’ Chorus from Idomeneo
George Frideric HANDEL – “How Strange their Ends” from Theodora
Henry PURCELL – Dido’s Lament and “With Drooping Wings”
from Dido and Aeneas
Giuseppe VERDI – Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco
Brindisi (Drinking Song and Chorus) from La
Traviata
Carl ORFF – Chorus “O Fortuna”  from Carmina Burana

St.Peter’s-on-Willis-Street, Te Aro, Wellington
Saturday, 10th May 2025

What a splendid blockbuster of a way for a choir to begin a season! – and with so many wonderful moments that have actually transcended their “high art” origins and are now “in the culture!” – and none the worse for it! So often certain pieces of music are deemed well-known to the point of cliché, and are therefore passed over, in favour of something more “interesting”. But! – as I fondly remember from my own formative years, it was often one of these very pieces, which would have been regarded by others as “hackneyed”, whose first hearing hit me like a ton of bricks, and to the extent that life was never the same again afterwards!

At school, in the Fourth Form, I had the good fortune to have a teacher who was himself an opera fan – so he would play to us pieces from a recording (of which I now have a prized copy!) of “Opera Choruses”, ALL of which I simply fell in love with on first hearing! – it was partly the way he introduced them to his class of rough-diamond, mostly rugby-playing and pop-music-loving boys who probably didn’t at that stage know Wagner from a Weet-Bix packet, but who listened, spell-bound as he described scenarios to go with the choruses, such as how a rich man, sitting miserably in his house surrounded by his wealth, suddenly heard a crowd of pilgrims passing in the street outside, singing “Alleluiah” at the tops of their voices as they went by the man’s window – and how the man was galvanised by what he heard, and, leaving his house and possessions behind, rushed down the road to join them! – and then, of course, our teacher played us the actual recording of the chorus, and we were “there”, listening to these voices, and imagining how we would have been filled with wonderment at the sounds and jumped up at the end to follow the voices ourselves. This particular chorus (the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Wagner’s “Tannhauser”) wasn’t among Cantoris’s presentations, but the others had an effect this same evening that vividly brought back that memory to me, of my sensibilities being unexpectedly “ignited” by something whose appeal was direct and enduring!

What was especially wonderful at the Cantoris concert was how the choir, with the barest minimum of forces (no orchestra, and no elaborate stage or theatrical trappings with which to fill out the scenarios), was able to generate from their music-making something of this excitement of both discovery and rediscovery amongst their audience. For this they could thank in addition an inspirational music director, Ingrid Schoenfeld, a brilliant pianist, Heather Easting, and two solo singers, soprano Barbara Paterson and baritone William McElwee who threw themselves wholeheartedly into their characterisations of various roles associated with certain of the choruses. Audience reaction to each and every one of the items (even those whose unexpectedly abrupt endings might have taken by surprise people who were just beginning to “groove along” with things – however, opera, as any enthusiast knows, thrives on the unexpected!) was enthusiastic and wholehearted, and the programming with its variety of settings, situations and characterisations meant that one’s interest never flagged.

Within this variety were placed a number of sure-fire favourites with tunes that everybody seems to have heard somewhere or other, those “part of the soundscape” melodies which seem to have always been there – such were two of the Verdi choruses (the “Anvil” Chorus from “Il Trovatore”, and the “Hebrew Slaves” Chorus from “Nabucco”), Bizet’s perennial favourite “Habanera” (solo-and-chorus) from “Carmen”, and the more recent “classic” from Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”, that’s made up for lost time on various television advertisements, “O Fortuna!” Each one had plenty of impact of satisfyingly varying kinds, even if in the “Il Trovatore” excerpt the anvils sounded more “Janissary-like” than whole and ringing, and the gypsy men fudged their first “All’opra! all’opra!”, probably through thinking too much about the gypsy women! Such a distraction wasn’t a problem with Barbara Paterson’s alluringly three-dimensional  portrayal of Carmen in the “Habanera” (the singer using the church’s central aisle to palpable dramatic effect!) – and though baritone William McElwee couldn’t quite match her range of vocal colour and impulse, his confident “presence” as Escamillo in the Toreador’s Song, did ample justice to the bullfighter’s swaggering character, both singers backed to the hilt by the choir’s support and the unfailingly buoyant trajectories of Heather Easting’s accompaniments!

On a different emotional plane were two other solo-and-chorus presentations which resounded afterwards in the memory, firstly Gluck’s chilling “Quel est L’Audacieux” from Orphée et Eurydice, featuring the choir of Furies guarding the Underworld with tones fearsome and implaccable  – and the baritone a tremulous but staunch and persistent supplicant, driven desperately by his love for Eurydice to bring her back from the land of the Dead – the atmosphere generated by the confrontation was properly chilling, with the choir’s tones dark and malevolent before being moved to pity by McElwee’s plaintive pleas – a memorable evocation. Though not cheek-by jowl on the programme, fortunately, we still couldn’t help but register the contrasts in almost every way between the Gluck scenario and Henry Purcell’s famous “Dido’s Lament”, one of opera’s most heart-rending scenes, and given all the space needed for both impulse and stillness to work a powerful spell – Paterson’s singing was beautifully-poised, purer of tone on her second-time-round ascent at “reMEMBER ME” and thoroughly affecting altogether, as was the choir’s following “With Drooping Wings” chorus, its sombre tones and heartbeat-like phrasings seeming to put all of us closer to our tenuous grasp upon life than we might have otherwise wanted.

I don’t intend to scroll through the entire programme in this review, but would like to register some more specific enjoyments, such as the opening “Bell Chorus” from Leoncavallo’s “I Pagliacci”, which gave us plenty of bright, vibrant bell-sounds and ear-catching dynamic variation. Another was the chorus from Handel’s “Alcina”, well-remembered from an enterprising production I attended some years ago at Day’s’ Bay Opera, and bringing back some lovely evocations of that time. In fact the programme as such had a number of lesser-known choruses from works such as from another Handel work, an oratorio “Theodora” (again, adventurously performed, and heard by me, at Day’s Bay, incidentally, as an opera!). Any memory of the work had by this time gone, so it seemed like a new and wondrous experience for me, a solemn, processional-like journey sustained partly by long-held notes, and at other times closely-worked phrases that seemed to gestate from these same lines like a plant coming into flower, the whole suiting the passage of thought and expression of wonderment – for me, a delightful rediscovery!.

Another came from Mozart, this time his “Idomeneo” (one which gave Barbara Paterson another chance to shine as Elettra, one of the characters in the opera’s story, here expressing hopes with some trepidation for a calm voyage to her homeland with the person she loves) – a kind of Mozartean “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” work, here given with flowing, undulating tones from the choir, taking the treacherous upward leap towards the end in their stride!

Comments in general? These are mere opinions and can be regarded as such – but I have to confess to wishing that the trajectories of just a couple of the items had been allowed to flow more easily and dreamily – Puccini’s “Humming Chorus”, for instance, I prefer to hear sounded as if it’s almost “breathed” rather than sung and that we listeners are eavesdropping on something really private and close to the heart! To an extent I thought also that the “Va, pensiero” Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves could also have been taken as if in a dream at the start, making the “outburst” in the middle more of a kind of the captives’ “awakening” a demonstration of despair and grief at their predicament – “O harp, why do you hang so silently?…rekindle the memories in our hearts!”

Enough! – reviewers of concerts should talk about what and how things were done, played and sung, rather than compile wish-lists of such things as “could-have-beens!”! It will be obvious that I got such a lot of pleasure from out of the concert, a good deal of which was reinforced by the enjoyment of those sitting close to me and of other people I talked with afterwards. Congratulations and thanks are due to all concerned for their part in such a warm-hearted enterprise!

Wellington Youth Orchestra – revels ceremonial and fantastical

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra –  Conductor Mark Carter  congratulates WYO leader Alan Kao at the conclusion of the “Fanfare and Fantasy” concert on Saturday May 3rd, 2025

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – Symphony No. 100 in G Major “Military”
MODEST MUSORGSKY (ed. Rimsky-Korsakov) – Night on a Bare Mountain
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY – Capriccio Italien

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Mark Carter (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 3rd May 2025

Wellington Youth Orchestra’s engagingly-presented opening “salvo” of 2025 appropriately began with one of the most agreeably demonstrative pieces of ceremonial music from the classical era, Josef Haydn’s by turns genial and uproarious “Military” Symphony. This was no less than the composer’s hundredth work in a form he himself had practically reinvented and made his own, setting a remarkable benchmark for future attempts by his successors at reconciling the competing requirements of form and content in symphonic music.

Such was Haydn’s fecundity he had come up with all kinds of different ideas over the years to attract and maintain his audience’s interest. Prior to his final years, during which he had become largely a free-lance composer, he had been employed by the Hungarian Esterhazy family at their Eisenstadt residence on the Austro-Hungarian border, and  – as Haydn himself once famously remarked – had the freedom to be “original”. An example of this was a work called the “Farewell” Symphony, which has a final movement where all the players gradually leave the stage one by one, blowing out their candles as they go – Haydn wanted to give his Prince the message that he and his players badly needed a holiday!

By the time he came to write Symphony No 100 in G Major in 1793 (one of a number which became no less than twelve “London” Symphonies), his old employer had died, and Haydn was enjoying new-found freedom, making two trips to London at the invitation of impresario, Johann Peter Salomon (after whom the set of “London” Symphonies are often named), meeting King George III, and being feted by both the court and high society. Despite such blandishments he preferred Vienna, returning permanently at the end of his second trip in 1795, and becoming music director for his new, more austere Esterhazy Prince who preferred sacred to secular music.

The G Major Symphony we know as the “Military” gets its character partly for the instrumentation Haydn uses – the work makes use of Turkish features known to the Viennese through their various conflicts with the Turkish military over years of conflict – known as “Janissary”, these exotic percussive effects (cymbal, triangle, rute, bass drum) had achieved great popularity, which composers naturally wanted to emulate (both Mozart and Beethoven were to use similar effects in some of their own music.).

Here at St.Andrew’s the cheek-by-jowl relationship of orchestra and audience practically enveloped our sensibilities with the Symphony’s marvellous rhythmic and colouristic effects, though it wasn’t all bang, crash, rumble and tinkle, Haydn cannily reserving his “Janissary” forces for the second and fourth movements. The rest brought enchantment of another kind right from the work’s beginning, with the adagio opening ravishingly awakened by the string-tones, and the supporting winds giving great character to the contrasting minor-key colours. An ensuing allegro added to our delight with the winds cheekily taking up the dance and inviting the rest of the orchestra to join in. It was playing from all which brought out the sheer “joy” of exchange, and the “giving” nature of Haydn’s musical instincts in general, conductor Mark Carter underlining our pleasure with the first-movement repeat!

Deceptively charming and relaxed at its beginning, with lovely al fresco colourings from strings and winds, the Allegretto second movement lurched  suddenly into minor-key drama and conflict with its battery of “Janissary” instruments joining the fray, the bass drummer adroitly compounding the instrument’s window-rattling seismic quality with the use of the rute, a bunch of rods loosely bound, and when striking a surface giving a dry, macabre bone-rattling effect! – with triangle, and “Nefer” crash cymbals and the timpani and brass underlining the overall impact, the general impression was more-than-satisfyingly combatative! A brief return to the major-key opening gave us some brief respite, but the famous passage introduced by the bugle call signalled an ‘all-in” sequence whose  impact gave rise to the well-known story of the premiere causing listeners of the time some angst, described by one reviewer as “the clash of arms, the groans of the wounded, and what may be described as the hellish roar of war increase(d) to a climax of hellish sublimity” (perhaps, alas, not so far from contemporary realities in our planet’s war-torn spots!).

The Minuet took us to a different world, a return to order and semblance of the same after battle, the tempi giving a livelier-than-usual effect – I wanted the wind’s somewhat plaintive “turns” in places to be brought out a bit more! – but the musicians’ graceful curving trajectories of the Trio were a delight, effectively contrasted by the “kick” the players achieved in the minor-key bits!

And so to the finale, bubbling with anticipation at its beginning, Mark Carter’s direction bringing out the players enjoyment of  the dynamics’ interplay, in particular their wry, po-faced insouciance at the “crushed phrase” sequence – and having been brought up on Sir Thomas Beecham’s delightful (if in such places inauthentic) recorded version of the symphony I was also enjoyably startled by the timpanist’s full-on entry with his “let ’er rip” gesture, instead of the crescendo I’d long become accustomed to! Wonderful!

There’s a lot of inspired to-ing and fro-ing elsewhere in this finale (at one point one is even tempted into thinking a fugue might be on the cards!) but Haydn’s judgement at reserving his overtly “martial” forces for certain moments in the work pays off with a vengeance!  Apart from a couple of brief last-minute forays for separate strings and winds, it’s the war machine that returns at the end, this time in triumph! It seems ironic that it’s actually the Janissary which is here sounding the victory, but of course by that time the Turks had been defeated and driven out of Austria, so they were obviously no longer regarded as a threat!

From this point we were taken into a new century, as well as northwards to Russia (though, admittedly, then on holiday with a second Russian composer to Italy!) – life can never be said to be straightforward!  Of these two forays under inspection it might be said that the most startling quantum leap was into the creative world of one Modest Musorgsky (different spellings of the surname abound!). Russian-born, he was tragically short-lived, all the more so for being regarded in some circles as the most naturally gifted of a group of composers (known as “The Mighty Handful”) who had emerged from the land of the Tsars amid the tumult of national feeling that had spread all over Europe in the late nineteenth century.

Steeping himself in his country’s folklore Musorgsky made several attempts at setting to music an old Russian legend whose original title was St.John’s Eve on Bald Mountain which he completed in June 1867. Unfortunately his colleagues, especially his mentor and fellow-composer Mily Balakirev, regarded the work as crude, and lacking in proper technical “finish”. As well, neither of the reworked versions of the story which Musorgsky subsequently attempted, the operas Mlada and Sorochintsy Fair were properly completed. In 1886, five years after the composer’s death from the effects of alcoholism, another of his colleagues, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, decided to “rescue” what could be saved of Musorgsky’s original “Bald Mountain” idea and reworked the piece, using parts of the original material and an instrumental arrangement of an excerpt from the opera Sorochintsy Fair as a kind of “epilogue” to the original tone-poem. This became the version that was used in Walt Disney’s famous “Fantasia” film, and which continues to be played today. Musorgsky’s original 1867 tone-poem composition was forgotten until the 1920s when it was rediscovered (a convoluted story!),  finally published in 1968 and given its first public performance and subsently recorded Whether it will ever become as popular as Rimsky-Korsakov’s revision is a matter of conjecture, though it’s certainly worth a watching listen (see below)…..

First to consider, though, was the performance we heard at St.Andrew’s, taken at a less-than-usual headlong tempo by Mark Carter and his players, and giving the music a more earthy and elemental character, but with the playing’s precision still capturing that “hallucinatory” quality generated by the music. The steady tempo throughout kept the macabre elements bubbling to the fore, with the “mad dance” sequences creating their own excitement, as did the “chattering winds” of the witches’ cackling dialogues, The brass fanfares were spot-on at all times, and especially when returning us to the opening, played with more “bite” than ever as the revelry intensified.

The last onslaught began, slowly on the bassoon and building up to an unnerving pace, gathering up detail in its sweep such as stuttering brass, squealing winds and screeching strings as the brass intoned its final call – with the crash of the tam-tam everything fell silent  except for the tolling bell and the hubbub’s dying reverberation, “warmed” beautifully by the harp, and the lovely string playing (great clarinet and flute solos, as well!)

Here’s the original Musorgsky version –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu1no7hOlSs

And so to the concluding item, ancient and nostalgic listening history for me, as Tchaikovsky’s  Capriccio Italien was on one of the first sets of 78 rpm discs I owned when a student (part of a whole bunch of 78 rpm discs I found in a charity shop! – things like Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony on six discs!). Anyway, I played and played the Capriccio until I accidentally and carelessly cracked one of the two discs! (I think I have the performance on CD, somewhere, now!) But I hadn’t played the work for a while, and the performance this afternoon made me fall in love with the music all over again!

What a sensationally-delivered trumpet solo at the beginning! – obviously inspiring the rest of the brass’s majestic and sonorous efforts! The strings, suitably awe-struck in reply, at first, gripped the attention just as steadily, as the exchanges continued. The oboe entered a shade jerkily but soon recovered, building the ambiences with the strings in support until the brass re-entered, the percussion a tad rushed at first but settling down again. We had a breath-catching transition to the waltz-theme –  the oboes and flutes so beautiful and Italianate-sounding with clarinets and bassoons having their turn as well, before the glorious brass-playing completed the sound-picture, with whirling strings adding to the excitement, and percussion snow-capping the climaxes!

Tchaikovsky doesn’t let up with the melodies (I remember already “knowing” both of the “famous” ones here before I ever encountering this work, as they’d obviously been “pinched” by popular music beforehand!) – the second one nicely introduced by the strings and the horn, and then later by the other brasses in turn (how was this Russian composer able to write such Mediterranean-sounding music?). Gorgeously done, with the horns adding an elegant postlude, before the strings reiterated their mock-serious “opening” with the stuttering brass not missing a beat. A well-managed accelerando later, the tarantella was dancing away from the gloom, and  playing “catch-me-if-you-can” with the instruments in its wake, including the tambourine (what a day for the percussion it had been!). But there was further excitement in store for us which came with the return of the Waltz-tune, with the strings and brass on fire and the tambourine-player in seventh heaven for a few scintillating measures – and if that wasn’t enough I had this feeling the conductor was suddenly daring his players  to imagine they were plunging into something elemental like the coda to the composer’s Fourth Symphony’s finale, a “now or never” moment to which everybody seemed to respond without hesitation and bring off with enormous elan! – a burst of youthful energies and dare-devil execution  which I thought appropriately summed up the  enthusiasm and at times brilliance of the afternoon’s music-making – but also, for this listener a great joy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Trio of International Consequence

Posted on by Anne French

NZ Trio – Magnifique

Schubert – Notturno in E flat major (D897)
Pēteris Vasks – Episodi e canto perpetuo (1985)
Linda Dallimore – Self-portrait (2024)
Saint-Saens – Piano trio No 2 in E minor (Op. 92)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace,
Friday 2 May, 7.30 pm

The night of the concert was cold and wet. The big southerly storm that hit on Wednesday was still in force, so the small audience in St Andrew’s was disappointing but not surprising. This review is dedicated to everyone who let the weather keep them away from a stunning concert. Let me tell you what you missed!

After several years of change, NZ Trio has now reached its new form. Ashley Brown retired from the Trio in February, the last of the founding members to leave. Matthias Balzat was billed as ‘guest cellist’, but the exciting news – announced during the concert – is that he will be taking the position permanently from 2026.

Matthias Balzat is a phenomenal cellist. I first heard him perform as a soloist with Wellington Youth Orchestra when he was 17, just about to head to Germany for advanced study in cello, already with a bachelor’s degree from Waikato and a swag of awards to his name. He was already a commanding musical presence with dazzling technique. Since graduating from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, where he was taught by Pieter Wispelwey, he has been freelancing in Germany. The NZ Trio gig, he told us, gives him an opportunity to return home.

How would he fit in to the Trio? Any fears I may have had were dispelled as soon as the Schubert began. The Nocturne is a familiar work, an exquisite piece that Schubert may have intended as the slow movement for his first piano trio.  The tempo was slow, but never too slow. The effect was of an unfurling of beauty, played with high seriousness. It was as though this was the most important music Schubert ever wrote, and the most poignant. He finished it only months before he died, and never heard it performed. I feel certain he would have loved this performance.

The next work on the programme was a piece by the Latvian composer, Pēteris Vasks, written in 1985. This was its New Zealand première. Vasks trained as a violinist at the Riga Conservatory and played double bass in various Latvian orchestras before moving to Lithuania to study composition with Valentin Utkin. As the son of a Baptist pastor, he wasn’t permitted to do this in Latvia, because Baptists were repressed by the Soviets.

He began to compose after hearing a piano arrangement of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, thanks to his piano teacher at the Vilnius Conservatory. His response was immediate: ‘It was like a lightning flash to me – that music can be like this!’ But his works were unknown outside the Baltics until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when fellow Latvian Gidon Kremer started touring his violin concertos in the West.

The Episodi e canto perpetuo is dedicated to Olivier Messiaen. That provided some kind of emotional preparation. This is a powerful and inventive work. The programme notes suggested a battle between light and dark, but that doesn’t do it justice. It requires virtuosic playing from all three instruments, with two frenzied ‘burlesques’ separated by a ‘monologue’. The whole work is a kind of journey from a dark and scary opening movement, with a bleak wash of sound from the strings, moving higher and higher into a kind of frenzy. The Misterioso that followed uses prepared piano and light glissandi on the strings to suggest a ghostly calm. The Unisono began with strong piano chords and a cantabile theme from the strings, building to confidence, then aggression. The effect is loud and humourless, with frightening crescendi. Vasks described the first Burlesque as ‘ironic, almost grotesque’. I thought he must have been listening to Shostakovich, so sardonic was it – or perhaps that was life under the Soviets. The second burlesque, even more frenzied, Vasks called ‘the black culmination of the opus. Road to nowhere.’

After all the terror, in the seventh movement, the first violin sang like a nightingale in a ruin, trilling over blackened stones and empty spaces. Could there be a resolution, my notes asked? The cello, high and sustained, said yes, the plangent violin whispered that there was hope. A shift to the major, like a shaft of sunlight, high and sweet.

This is an important work. If it is his response to Quartet for the End of Time, the man is a genius, because he has transcended it. But there is more. Over the last 40 years Vasks has written three symphonies, other works for orchestra, concerti for violin, viola, cello, and flute, half a dozen string quartets, many choral and chamber works, and several works for violin, cello, and piano. I very much hope that NZ Trio programmes a couple of those. Soon, please.

After the interval, a small, introspective work by New Zealander Linda Dallimore (‘an award-winning composer, flutist, and teacher’) currently based in Los Angeles, where she is completing a DMA at the University of Southern California. It’s a pleasant enough work, ‘inspired by the composer’s first months in LA’, short and rather slight, but full of interesting effects. Unfortunately, coming after the emotional complexity of the Vasks piece, even separated by the interval, it sounded a bit self-absorbed, clever but trivial.

The last work in the programme showed off all three players to good effect, but especially the glorious Somi Kim. Saint-Saens was a remarkable pianist, a prodigy who performed the complete Beethoven sonatas from memory by the age of 10. He wrote this work as a holiday project, in the spring of 1892, 30 years after his first piano trio, to show what the piano is capable of. It is a masterpiece. Somi Kim was in her element, showing us delicacy and powerful pianism, as required. Saint-Saens’ piano writing is demanding and virtuosic, and Kim played like an angel.

The NZ Trio has been regarded as a national treasure for some time now. I have always enjoyed its programming. With Balzat joining the superb Kim and Hall, it has turned into a trio of international consequence. As well as being intellectually adventurous and musically fearless, the players together have the most glorious sound, warm and perfectly unified.  I am truly sorry that their first concert was heard by an audience of only a hundred or so. But take my word for it: you won’t want to miss the other concerts in their 2025 season.  Now would be a good time to book.

A tantalizing 2025 season’s beginning – from Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN PSATHAS – Kartsigar
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 1 in C Major Op.40
EDVARD GRIEG – String Quartet in G Minor Op.27

The New Zealand String Quartet
– Anna van der Zee and Peter Clark (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Callum Hall (‘cello)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 27th April, 2025

Wellington Chamber Music opened its 2025 season with a characteristic blast of fresh musical air, the musicians obliging with an enticing amalgam of pieces whose composers had familiar names but whose music promised anything but familiar, well-worn sounds – though two of the pieces presented in this concert happened to have historic connections with the Society. In chronological order, Dmitri Shostakovich’s First String Quartet was one of the works featured during the Society’s inaugural year (1945); while John Psathas’ 2005 work Kartsigar was actually commissioned by Wellington Chamber Music for its 60th anniversary.

These associations duly noted and tucked under our belts for ready reference, we welcomed to the stage the current New Zealand String Quartet, an organisation that’s had its reorganisations and upheavals over the last little while, but has bounced its presently reconstituted self back ready for action. So, violist Gillian Ansell (a foundation member of the Quartet) and violinist Peter Clark (who had replaced Monique Lapins last year) were joined today by violinist Anna van der Zee and ‘cellist Callum Hall.

I looked up John Psathas’ Kartsigar on the Middle C website for interest’s sake, and discovered that my former colleague Lindis Taylor had reviewed the inaugural performance of the work at that 2005 Wellington Chamber Music concert by the NZSQ of that time, as well as a later 2011 performance by the same players at St.Mary of the Angels Church, a venue whose ample acoustic gave my colleague what he described as “a more enveloping experience” than he’d found on the players’ CD recording they’d made of the piece for Rattle Records. Such observations reflect on different performances to that of the present one, of course, but they’re interesting in further establishing the work’s history and accrued experience on the part of performers and listeners, all of which can help to enrich further encounters and performances.

Kartsigar is a work for string quartet drawn by its composer from traditional Greek music, primarily taximi or free, improvised instrumental solos used as a prelude or introduction associated with a dance or song. In the first movement what sounds like improvised melody from the instruments is the composer’s own transcription of an improvisation from one of Greece’s greatest musicians, the clarino player Manos Acahlinotopoulos, one which “breathes the Voice of Life into Kartsigar”. The cello begins a pizzicato ostinato pedal note, to which the second violin and viola respond with sombre tones of mourning, then expressively added to by the first violin, at once “folksy” and ritual-like, solo lines alternating with shared lines, and instruments going from arco to pizzicato and back to arco – the whole generates a tremendous sense of “occasion” , gradually becoming more and more elaborate, and even more vigorous, until a point is reached when the process seems to disestablish and recede, with tones and impulses growing fainter and fainter to the point of stillness

The second movement begins with an ethereal-sounding pizzicato/harmonic which forms the basis for the whole movement’s trajectory of a kind of mesmerising transferal of impulse – the material shifts from instrument to instrument, the lines and gestures keep us guessing as to where we are going, as if the piece’s “centre” is constantly relocating. I found myself part deliciously, part uneasily “stranded” in scenarios which brought single-note sequences (from the ‘cello, for example) and then sudden “whirling dervish” ecstasies from Peter Clark’s violin! – one’s sensibility became a “loose fragment” tossed all about an ambience, and then just as suddenly left to ponder eerily-held notes with which one “breathes” with the music’s own slow-rhythmed movements, until left only with silence.

In the wake of these colourful immersions in realms awash with improvisation, one couldn’t help feeling taken to a different, more enclosed world with Shostakovich’s First String Quartet, given that the music shows remarkably  little of the intense angst and disturbing dissonances which his later works in this genre would produce. This, after all, was the composer’s first foray into the medium, and about which he was disarmingly frank, as demonstrated by a brief comment he wrote, concerning the  opening as an “original exercise in the quartet form, not thinking about subsequently completing and releasing it”.  Gradually the idea took hold and he finished the work, though still disavowing any particular significance to the exercise, remarking further – “Don’t expect to find any special depth in this – my first quartet opus, In mood it is joyful, merry, lyrical. I would call it ‘spring-like’ ”. It seems that, after the tumultuous years of the composer’s persecution by Stalin and his lackeys over his opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” with what was termed its “formalist” tendencies, Shostakovich was taking refuge in a private, relatively untroubled world, even though he was not to revisit the string quartet medium for a further six years.

The work was first performed in 1938, by the Glazunov Quartet – the composer hadn’t yet established the rapport he was to find with the renowned Beethoven Quartet, to whom he entrusted the premieres of all of his subsequent string quartets except the Fifteenth and last, due to the sudden death of the Quartet’s cellist while preparing the first performance. Commentators have repeatedly described the early work in emotionally-detached terms, such as “divertimento-like” or “Haydn-esque”, indicating the “neutral” content of the undertaking, and whose ostensible purpose was to, literally, keep its composer out of trouble!

The opening sounds more like Borodin at the outset, a distinctively “Russian” ambience betrayed only by the occasional note suggesting a more acerbic strain – there’s a lovely, singing second subject on the first violin sounded over ‘cello glissandi, one which the ‘cello itself “grabs” for a moment of glory! The interchanges wear an almost self-conscious “carefree” air, the development insouciantly augmenting the harmonies and the recapitulation allowing the second violin and viola a “second-subject” variant, before the music poignantly turns for home, having spied out the land and found it ostensibly non-threatening!

A theme-and-variations slow movement in A minor was next, begun by Gillian Ansell’s smokily-toned  viola with a simple folk-tune, ‘cello pizzicati joining in, and then the violins taking up the melody a daintily-astringent half-a-tone higher – the viola’s “Wot’s all this, then?” return sparked a moment of angst before peace was restored by the violin’s open-hearted switch to an E-major rendition of the theme – I liked the players’ handling of the “same again but different” theme variants, and especially warmed to the limpid pizzicato accompaniments to the viola’s return, rather like meek lambs gathered up by their shepherd! Perhaps they could sense the third-movement arrival of some kind of wolf, though it’s really more spectre than substance, here, a spooky ride in constant motion, in the midst of which comes a kind of “lullaby” trio, followed by a blending of the two trajectories – great fun!

Afterwards, the finale takes us to the fairground for some  hi-jinks, the excitement becoming heady and more trenchant, almost “boys’ own” (oo-er! – very “thirties!”) in the second subject, with the vigorous themes becoming more determinedly expressionist and claustrophobic until problems are sorted out and brouhaha is satisfyingly brought back over the final bars. It seems obvious that, In the treacherous slipstream of Shostakovich’s scarifying experience with Stalin over his opera Lady Macbeth, writing this work had obviously felt like some kind of redemptive balm for the composer’s senses.

The concert’s third and final work brought its own particular distinction of novelty and interest to the proceedings – this was Edvard Grieg’s 1878 String Quartet in G Minor, described variously elsewhere as No.1 and No.2 (in fact the composer’s first attempt at a string quartet was lost, appropriately leaving the G minor in its “pole” position). The popularity achieved by the work encouraged Grieg to attempt a further string quartet in 1891, though he finished only two movements, leaving sketches for the final two, making  a couple of subsequent efforts  to finish the work but seeming to lack the inspiration to complete what he called “that accursed string quartet which constantly lies there unfinished like an old Norwegian cheese.” (A couple of attempts have since been made by other composers to complete Grieg’s sketches.)

Grieg’s inspiration, however, proved constant throughout the composition of practically the whole of the G Minor quartet – commenting after finishing the work that it was “not meat for small minds” and adding that “it aims for breadth, vigour, flight of imagination and , above all, fullness of tone for the instruments for which it is written”. It uses a kind of motto theme taken from the composer’s own song “Spillemaend” (meaning Minstrels or Fiddlers) about a water-spirit, the Hulder, who promises musicians great inspiration in exchange for their happiness, one which recurs throughout the work. Violist Gillian Ansell commented in her introduction on the work’s inspiration for Claude Debussy who wrote his own String Quartet in the same key ten years later.

The work has a big-boned quasi-orchestral sound right from its outset, a grand and imperious opening and a fleet and impetuous allegro to follow, featuring incredibly volatile playing, music that breaks off suddenly from whatever mood it inhabits to effect a contrast with another – Anna van der Zee’s playing and leadership throughout I found astonishing, her sweet, silvery tones readily augmented with energetic trajectories and trenchant attacks excitingly replicated by the other players. The movement’s dramatic ups and downs come to a head with a beautiful ‘cello solo that grows out of a tremolando passage towards the end before leading to an explosively vigorous coda.

Added to this, I thought the musicians gave the second movement simply gorgeous treatment – the opening uses a typically redolent “Grieg” melody (one which couldn’t come from any other composer), sonorously projected by Callum Hall’s ‘cello, before “bouncing” into an extraordinarily playful passage involving both pizzicato and staccato phrasings. Then the opening melody returns, the accompaniment this time investing the hapless tune with full-on “salon” treatment, charming in its almost “tea-shop-like” way. It’s then given a kind of Tchaikovsky-like balletic set of guises, before evoking parts of the latter’s “Serenade for Strings” in its acerbic-sweet final harmonies!

The Intermezzo that followed was a vigorously-swinging waltz-like piece, the players digging into those playfully-eyeballing syncopated chordings before gracefully giving way to more demure legato-phrased interactions. Even more delicious was the Trio section, with Grieg revisiting his “Cowkeeper’s Tune and Country Dance” manner to foot-tapping effect, and further spicing the mood with brief bouts of contrasting mania and introspection! All of this was brought off with relish on the players’ part and proportionally huge enjoyment on ours, further underlined by the sheer fun generated from the scampering coda!

Finales often bring composers trouble and anxiety, and there were places in Grieg’s finale where I felt his inspiration was bolstered more by the trajectories of the saltarello form which he had chosen, than any spontaneous melodic invention. Of course, composers are perfectly entitled to “step outside” their own native trajectorial languages and explore something exotic – one thinks of so many who have done so (Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Ravel and Sibelius, to name a few, the last-named indulging in a “Bolero” complete with castanets in his Op. 25 Scenes Historiques music!) – but I can’t help feeling that Grieg was at his most inspired in the other, more ostensibly Scandinavian-influenced movements of this work, even if he puts up a good show in places! Still, a no-holds-barred kind of performance can be relied upon to do any piece of music the greatest justice, and that was what we got here!

After the high seriousness of the Lento introduction, with its canonic recitatives and great crunching chords, a “ready, steady, go” sequence from the players kick-started the finale in fine style! By turns vigorous and lightfooted, and alternating the dotted rhythms of the vigorous saltarello with more straightforward “running” passages, the playing’s impetus kept our sensibilities agreeably focused, apart from a couple of sequences featuring repeated rhetorical chromatic scale passages which briefly felt to me like “filler” and an ending which seemed to be looking for a grand finishing statement but didn’t quite achieve the sheer magnificence of, for instance, the composer’s Piano Concerto! However, in terms of incredible skill and sheer commitment, the players took us to what seemed like the music’s overall limits of achievability in grand style – and Grieg had already given us more than enough in the work as a whole to satisfy our pleasure at encountering what was a significant and remarkable creative achievement! (From where do I buy the CD, again?)

Hats off (well, hearty thanks, at least!) to Wellington Chamber Music – an inspired beginning to a richly promising 2025 season of music-making!