Month: August 2025

STROMA – a quarter-century of recreated effervescence in heaven and earth!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – Heaven and Earth – a celebration of 25 years of bold new music

Works by Leila Adu-Gilmore, Olivier Messiaen, Gemma Peacocke, John Rimmer,
Sofia Gubaidulina and Michael Norris

OLIVIER MESSIAEN – Louange à l’immortalite de Jesus (1941)
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Gabriela Glapska (piano)
LEILA ADU-GILMORE – Heaven is Life (2025) (premiere)
Julia Broom (violin), Nicholas Hancox (viola). Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
JOHN RIMMER – When Sea Meets Sky 2 (1975)
Hamish McKeich (conductor), Bridget Douglas (flute), Patrick Hayes
(clarinet), Lenny Sakofsky (percussion), Gabriela Glapska (piano),
Julia Broom (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
MICHAEL NORRIS – The Spaces in Between (2025)
Gabriela Glapska (piano), Anna van der Zee (violin) Ken Ichinose (cello)
SOFIA GUBAIDULINA – Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeit (1980) (Garden of Joy and
Sorrow)
Bridget Douglas (flute) / Michelle Velvin (harp) Nicholas Hancox ( viola)
GEMMA PEACOCKE – Sky-fields (2020)
Bridget Douglas (flute), Gabriela Glapska (piano) Ken Ichinose (cello)
Thomas Guldborg (percussion)

Public Trust Hall, Wellington,

Wednesday, 27th August, 2025

This was a red-letter concert for Wellington’s contemporary music ensemble Stroma, being the 25th anniversary (almost to the day) of the ensemble’s very first concert on the 18th of August, 2000. Michael Norris, one of the founders of the fledgling group (and a co-director of the present Stroma Ensemble) welcomed us all warmly,  outlining for us something of the flavour of the group’s genesis and current raison d’etre, including the evening’s inclusion of both home-grown and off-shore works, and the presence of at least one premiere (see below).

The concert this evening actually began with an excerpt from a larger work by Olivier Messiaen – which I’ll describe at the end of this review, and instead give pride of place to the palpable excitement generated by the evening’s premiere, second on the programme. This was  New Zealand composer Leila Adu-Gilmore’s Heaven is Life, a work which has its genesis in the composer’s reaction to present-day global strife and civil unrest in the wake of travelling in India and encountering a community of Tibetan Buddhist nuns at Karma Chokor Dechen Nunnery in Rumtek, Sikkim, India, a group of women, in the composer’s words, “caring for others, garnering respect, and sought out more and more for practices previously performed by men”. Adu-Gilmore was particularly moved by the nuns’ chanting for hours both morning and evening, in ceremonies for the local community, and decided to record the ritual, from which she eventually picked a short, self-contained chant with the title Green Tara, the community’s conceptualisation of a “Mother Earth”, a being whose wisdom and compassion would help those in their time of need. She then composed a string trio whose gesturings and tones would complement the nuns’ voices, intending to blend the recording of the material within the Trio’s performance. The result is this performance, dedicated to the nuns and young children in their care at Karma Chokor Dechen Nunnery, in Rumtek, Sikkim, India.

The performance here created a truly singular effect with the nuns’ voices intermeshed with the instruments in a parallel expressions of invocation, sharing through common cause a heightened sense of a process centred on the life-force –  for the nuns the focus was “Green Tara”, while from the standpoint of the composer and musicians the resulting instrumental sounds made for a kind of connective recognition. This was most marked, oddly, when the chanting voices stopped, leaving the stringed instruments in possession of those “acquired” connections, and charged with conveying their retrospective essence to us! The shift from meditative lines and impulses to dance-like gesturings in the trio’s music indicated something of that inclination to further communicate something of a “Heaven is Life” feeling for the here and now…..

John Rimmer’s Where Sea Meets Sky 2 is a “twin” manifestation for acoustic instruments of a previous electroacoustic piece of the same name. and which was inspired by a flight across the Tasman. The piece was an “outgrowth” of the electronic piece for the composer in that the acoustic version did things that the electronic version didn’t do, though without one superseding the other.

The work had an arresting beginning – a loud chord bolstered by tremolando notes from winds and piano, but allowed to die away, followed by a sliver of percussion and deep piano chords, stimulating string-timbres, and winds hanging on to ever-diminishing tones. The piece’s evocations had a constant state of flux, with the instruments’ variations between spectral irruptions and sustained tones adding to the atmosphere – for instance,  we heard percussion scintillations with a gong-stroke, then strings playing disembodied held notes as winds sounded single-note irruptions and piano adding to the ambiences with brief treble impulses – the instruments particularly crowded in their impulses throughout the music’s middle section, creating a constantly interactive cornucopian sound picture to the point of near frenzy, before slowly dissipating, gradually favouring longer-held tones (clarinet and flute solos remaining in the memory), augmented by wide-ranging “dampened” piano notes and gradually receding percussion – all reflecting its composer’s particular sensitivity towards ambient detail.

Michael Norris, himself contributed a thoughtful (and entertaining) spoken preface to his recent (2025) and intensely visceral composition “The Spaces in Between”, a work which here put us in touch with the music’s subject-matter in no uncertain terms – I confess to always enjoying Norris’s readiness in his music I’ve heard for employing direct and often graphic (though invariably intuitive-sounding) stimuli – two pieces in particular I remember which demonstrated for me this power of  illustrative evocation are, firstly a 2018 performance of Claro, written for full orchestra, (described as :”an exercise of expressivity out of abstractiveness”) , and (when reviewing the disc in 2023) a recording featuring an epic string quartet work Exitus, one containing a number of raw musical depictions of different cultures’ conceptualisations of afterlife.

Here, I particularly enjoyed Norris’s succinct descriptive phrase  “rocks can bend” words which he attributed to his father, and which sums up the effect of forces constantly at work in our own Earth’s particular geosphere, in direct relation to which is the composer’s own sonic realisation of the interplay of these forces – “The Spaces in Between”. Norris quoted both Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Rashmirathi at the beginning of his programme note about the music, firstly (Ovid) “the shifting story of the world”, and then (Ramdhari Singh) “everything is born from me, everything returns to me”.  The music’s evocation therefore deals with a transitory world, where the idea of terra firma is in fact one subject to “inexorable flux”.

To entrust the depiction of such forces at work to the seemingly economical contingent of a piano trio seemed a boldly ambitious scheme, but the musicians here seemed to readily transcend any such physical limitations with the energy and focus of their evocations throughout, with firm, constant-sounding beginnings from the piano playing fifths and the strings establishing a palpably “present” state of being.  As the strings began “pulling” gradually at the tones and patternings of the notes, suggesting inexorable pressures, the piano intensified its patterned fifths into a rapid ostinato, the strings’ intensities deepening, with “bending” of their notes, indicating the elemental nature of forces at work. The ostinato fifths galvanised into more rapidly-repeated note-patterns as the irresistible forces exerted their effect – the strings played both held and repeated notes against the piano’s constant arpeggiations and tremolandi depicting the ferment within and the evident disruptions without, the music’s key-changes further dramatizing the processes. The tones suddenly took on a soaring kind of aspect whose strands melted down to meet the irruptions from below, with a single-note “centre” that turned into a warmish chord slowly spreading through the sounds’ harmonic world, the piano’s fifth transformed into octave-sounds, everything slightly “smudged” in effect, or “fractured”, a quality that felt to the listener like a recast or remoulded state of being – as if one’s own sense of existence had been reshaped,  and a new order prevailed – again I found myself thinking of TS Eliot’s description of “an eternal action, an eternal patience”.

Sofia Gubaidulina  who died earlier this year at the age of ninety-three was notable for her work’s “purity of sound” and her love for “ecstatic incantation”. Growing up in Soviet Russia in a predominantly atheist household, she maintained an unquenchable personal religious faith which found its way into her music despite official disapproval (she took heart from the quiet support of Shostakovich at the time), and was admitted to the Union of Soviet composers in 1961.Inspired by her contemporaries, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Part and Valentin Silvestrov, she looked beyond her Russianness to 20tth century modernism in general, and developed a reputation for incorporating theological ideas in her concert music, famously Introitus (1978) and Offertorium (1980), besides numerous other works since then.

Her 1980 work Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeit (Garden of Joy and Sorrow) was inspired directly by two literary works. One was a biography of a legendary Armenian storyteller/singer Sayat-Nova, written by the Russian writer Iv Oganov, and the other a set of verses by the modern German poet Francisco Tanzer – the two works encapsulate Gubaidulina’s creative philosophy in the merging of their different influences, Oganov’s intense and rapturous personalisation of the garden’s flowering here finding a kind of sublimated detachment of feeling in Tanzer’s wry reasonings – Gubaidulina’s score directs that the original German text of the poet’s words be read aloud – a good thing the programme notes gave us some of Oganov’s sentences as well! – “the peal of the singing garden grew”, and “the lotus was set aflame by music” – those thoughts enabled us to experience even more directly the composer’s  own progressions in her music  from bright, visceral colourations to their “true endings”.

This engagingly ambient work for flute, harp and viola began with a kind of “awakening” duet between flute and harp, the sounds gradually coalescing into consciousness via encouraging breaths of tone from the flute and bent glissando tone-gulps (almost sitar-like) from the harp, followed by eerily beautiful fanfare-harmonics from the viola, two different sonic worlds gradually effecting a meeting. The viola darkened its tones, flute and harp tremulously acclaimed its presence, and the “trialogues” began – beautifully arpeggiated exchanges, firstly flute-and-harp, and then viola-and-harp, the latter “preparing” the strings for a bone-dry ostinato to accompany the like-minded viola. How resonant was the following sequence, the three instruments building blocks of effervescing phrases, until the flute’s spectacular downward-cascading tumble! And what a journey we were taken upon by the composer’s  “ecstatic flowering” versions of the music’s bright major aspects – such a joyous and uplifting flute solo on the piece’s “central plateau” which was then set against those“darker intervals” of minor seconds and thirds which then grew out of the crevices and cracks of the aftermath’s rather more rueful continuance!  A  meditative viola solo took us back to the work’s beginning with those nostalgic viola arpeggio harmonics, sitar-like harp glissando-notes and envoi-like flute notes – how interesting to then have the human voice making a contribution to what the music expresses, which we got from violist Nicholas Hancox at the end…….

Originally from Hamilton, Gemma Peacocke studied firstly at Victoria University and the  New Zealand School of Music before moving to the United States in 2014  where she  worked with various ensembles, including her co-founded Kinds of Kings Collective, often in projects with a sociopolitical focus on under-heard voices.   Sky Fields, a 2020 work (which for some reason got into the programme listed as a 2025 composition), concluded the concert with a kind of visionary series of vignettes, introduced  and re-emphasised, often with compelling, attention-grabbing urgency, by the ensemble’s delivery of “blips” – unpredictably-placed but redolently hopeful irruptions of energy  whose sequence suggested a kind of life-dance which Peacocke characterised in her programme-note with the words “even when we can’t see it  there is hope”. The composer drew her title from a sequence in J.R.Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series of books when one of the characters in the third book Return of the King refers to the promise of the coming day, though hidden in the darkness, already opening in the eastern mountains’ Sky-Fields.

The ”blips” which began the piece could be said to “clear the air” for both performers and the audience, a kind of “sky-washing” of sonic textures in preparation for something new and original – the toccata-like togetherness of the opening trajectories initiated by the “blips” combined irruptive energies, such as the flute’s explosive interjections, with more delicate, patient intertwinings. There was a feeling of the textures being airborne rather than earth-bound, with even the bowed marimba notes seeming to arise from out of the earth and take flight – it all brought a cumulative kind of momentum to the music, heading towards the “what happens next” pause before the second movement…

Again, the blips! – the flute gave us what sounded like birdsong, a summons of sorts to the cello singing with the piano and the flute and marimba dancing, then all coming together on a “shared “ note, commented on by the piano and irradiated by a sparkling cymbal roll. Movement Three then blended the sounds beautifully, the lines “floating’ between the instruments and their different timbral characteristics and punctuating things with a nudged phrase or occasional “blip”, the intensities of exchange growing, resulting in a kind of concerted recitative point, the gestures ‘displaying” to the others in turn, each almost vying for attention!

The toccata trajectories rebegan, the interactive energies ranging from ghostly murmurings to sudden ghoul-like cries – and then, out of the silence came a new kind of awakening, a fifth movement with a more relaxed pace, and the lines a quiet radiance that suggested a growing towards surety – more “blips” and other irruptions refocused the players, occasional reminiscences of things like the flute’s bird song calls helping to reinforce a “coming together” – as the music reached a dance-like stage a robustly upward concerted call finished the piece!

I thought I’d finish the review on a kind of retrospective “where it all began” note in relation to the concert, particularly as the work from which this movement was taken has long been regarded as something unique in musical history. For its composer it represented  “a leap into an invisible paradise”.  Unlike his contemporaries, French composer Olivier Messiaen did not want to eradicate the old world or fix his gaze totally on the thereafter – instead he saw Paradise in daily life, in the words of Alex Ross, its “happenstance epiphanies”. In a way, Stroma’s collective modernist instincts seemed, like the contents of this evening’s programme, inclusive rather than rigorously “avant-garde” in a pure sense. Which is why I felt that Messiaen’s excerpt from what probably became the most famous of all his works, the “Quartet for the End of Time” was a more-than-appropriate way to begin this anniversary concert. And while I haven’t mentioned above the playing of any of the musicians by name in any of the other items (trusting in an acceptance of a certain standard excellence of quality on everybody’s part throughout the evening) I can’t help but comment on the rapt beauties of both Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s and Gabriela Glapska’s playing of their respective instruments throughout the work’s final piece, Louange à l’immortalite de Jesus. Time certainly seemed to stand still throughout this tribute to the composer, the circumstances, the occasion, the musicians involved past and present, and to music in general as an on-going living entity. And to Stroma? Messiaen was saying in his music, “Que tu vives pour toujours”.  Agreed.

 

Ghost Trio’s St.Andrew’s concert haunts the memory

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Ghost Trio –
TAKEMITSU, BEETHOVEN, DOWNIE and SHOSTAKOVICH

The Ghost Trio – Monique Lapins (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
Gabriela Glapska (piano)

TAKEMITSU – Between Tides (1993)
BEETHOVEN – Piano Trio in D Major Op.70 No.1 “Ghost”
GLEN DOWNIE – Sonata da chiesa (2024)
SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Trio No.2 in E Minor Op. 67 No.2

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Te Aro, Wellington
Sunday 17th August, 2025

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

“What’s in a name?” could well have been the unspoken phrase hovering about St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace on Sunday afternoon prior to the opening of Wellington Chamber Music’s most recent presentation, whose first item was, as per the written programme supposed to be Beethoven’s D Major Piano Trio Op,70 No.1, better known as the “Ghost”, due to its haunting second movement, ripe for association with  famous theatrical “ghosts” such as those that occur in Shakespeare – Hamlet or Macbeth coming most readily to mind. And here, on the performers’ platform was scheduled  none other than an eponymously-named trio of musicians to open the concert by “playing their song”. What happened instead, of course, is now history, with the musicians themselves deciding that Beethoven’s somewhat overwhelming string of “ghostly” scenarios could result in tidal waves of resonance that would swamp the gentle undulations of the work by Tōru Takemitsu due to follow.

So, in the minds of listeners who knew the Beethoven, and would have prepared themselves for that tumultuous opening salvo of energised sounds, the surprise intervention by Takemitsu’s  “Between Tides” would have seemed like the proverbial sea-change into something rich and strange! – here were delicacies of sound evoked by lightly astringent piano harmonies, answered by string phrases whose solo lines variously trailed into their own silences, or intertwined, Ravel-like in places, briefly touching on their own worlds before returning to the piano’s sway, and awaiting the next version of exchange..

A world of  chameleon-like pursuit was the result, every wave of impulse bringing its own variant of the same life-force. I was reminded while listening of human breath when still, and of surrendering to impulses not necessarily my own – also of the infinite variety of the experience  from one’s imagination  either from the harmonics or tremolandi played by the strings or the free-ranging spaces between piano notes, contrasted with assertive unison utterances that give further musical food for contemplation. It’s a piece I found throughout to be “in waiting” in general terms, though its tensions occasionally bubble up and almost right over – its ending is satisfying enigmatic, leaving one with the idea of, in TS Eliot’s words, “an eternal action, an eternal patience” ……

Having been suitably dispersed by the action of tides, our sensibilities were gathered in once again with a vengeance by the promised Beethoven! I was at last allowed the delayed indulgence of pointing out an obvious kind of coincidence, correlation or conjunction with what seemed like paradigmatic “ownership” of this music by the ensemble – right from the very first whirlwind ascending phrases there was, I felt, a “this is what we do” feeling of full-blooded identification! The intensities of this work are concentrated, throwing together both heroism and turmoil throughout the opening movement,  with as much sprung intensity in the hushed exchanges of the second subject as in the flamboyant opening unison – how “breathing as one” they sounded, here, throughout these contrasting episodes, and how much they relished the concerted singing passages in the development as the more vigorous “horse-and-rider” episodes leading to the recapitulation – such an invigorating journey!

Cello and violin are vibrato-less at the slow movement’s beginning, the piano interspersing with suitably ghostly eloquence, extended by the ‘cello and violin who together voice the feeling of some kind of other-worldly presence, though leading us towards some consolation amid the gloom. The music’s central section begins darkly, the cello leading the way, contrasting agitated and desolate-sounding lines, suggesting personal sorrow, loneliness and frustration in the music’s explorations, the players leaving us with a single repeated enigmatic note over which to ponder at the end.

How resilient the mind that can produce such a finale after so downcast a mood! Here, like with the first movement, was a “tour de force” of ensemble playing, with absolutely brilliant pianism from Gabriela Glapska, and equally stunning dovetailing of their concerted passages from Monique Lapins and Ken Ichinose. The “questioning” aspect of the opening theme led to all kinds of suspensions and adroit manoeuvrings of both the whimsical and helter-skelter variety, leaving us all breathlessly invigorated at the end, and somewhat gob-smacked at both the individual and concerted virtuosity of the players!

Glen Downie’s was a new name for me, as was the work, Sonata da Chiesa, a piece written this year for the Ghost Trio to take on tour. The music takes its name (literally, “Church Sonata”) from baroque times, and was inspired by music written by Vivaldi for the ‘cello. In a programme note Downie talks about the music “breaking away” from its original inspiration (characterised by ruins of “worn material”) and attempting to rebuild anew from the “surviving stone”. A specific inspiration for the piece was a UK building, the Christchurch Priory, originally a Norman building, but containing layers wrought by different eras in the building’s history, a quality Downie intended his piece to replicate as “a uniform expressivity”

In four movements, the piece began with piano arpeggios, and attention-grabbing violin notes, the latter reverting to a sombre exploration of the piano figurations, whose buildup suggests an architectural quality, with a dancing violin astringency supplying outward detail and reaching a climax as the cello supports the structure with an ostinato-like figure.

Beginning with a rushing piano figure, the second movement highlights strings pinging , burning and slashing, with the piano’s chords structurally resonating at first at first, then exchanging spiky figurations with the strings. The more resonant-sounding piano notes beautifully morph into pregnant-like water-droplet notes, as the cello and violin play “out of the air” pizzicato harmonics – the piano finishes as it began, with agitatedly mobile figurations.

Sostenuto-like cello chords begin the third movement, here backed by limpid piano sounds – the violin. something of a decorative, outwardly-defining constant force, plays more tortured figures as the cello muses with the piano – what lovely, long-held notes! – the violin again sounds acerbic, and we hear the “clash of seconds” that the players had demonstrated beforehand, which then gradually resolve – very architectural, solidly-based timbres and tones – from meditative to grand and imposing!. The violin “grows” a lighter, more evanescent outward texture, as the music for cello and piano goes deeper, more inward, the players digging into their tones with rolling figurations – very ‘cello-centred! The violin remains a more quixotic-flavoured  figure, here, its tones  pointilistic in effect, with harmonics and pizzicati, and in places almost pentatonic-sounding!

The fourth movement has a very pointillistic beginning – knockabout notes from the strings, pizzicato and arco, and the piano very punch-line in effect! The strings leave  floating legato lines avove the piano’s cryptic staccato comments – the movement is very short!

I’m left with an impression of a structure in the music’s bones, but I would like to hear it again, being able to relate parts more readily to the whole – there would have been many connective references I didn’t place in context first time round, and am keen to explore that connective tissue aspect of the work relating to architecture and to the ravages of time on any kind of structure given such status by my experience and imagination!

Its engagement with the listener was all brought off with the greatest of aplomb and confidence by the players!

The concert concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s deeply personal 1944 Piano Trio in E Minor, composed in memory of the composer’s friend Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky who had died in February that year of a heart attack at the age of forty-one. As with many “documented” incidents on Shostakovich’s life, accounts differ as to when the composer began work on the Trio (principally whether it was before or after hearing the news of Sollertinsky’s death, the latter event even presenting in one account as a rumoured NKVD (Russian Secret Police) murder rather than a heart attack) – however, a certain consensuality (as with the present programme’s notes on the music) places the first movement as all but completed when Shostakovich received the news.

The work’s been represented variously as a requiem, either for one man or for the millions of Russians who perished during the war, as a protest against the anti-Semitism rife in the Soviet Union culminating in the Nazi atrocities committed against Russian Jews in the death camps of the time, and as an indictment of the Soviet System in general under the iron-fisted Stalin, whose censorship of the composer’s music reached its nadir at this time, causing the Trio to be banned from public performance in1948 as “decadent “ and “formalist”. Not until the dictator’s death in 1953 did the work begin to gradually return to favour

It’s now celebrated as one of the greatest of Shostakovich’s works, and part of an enviable “piano trio” tradition in Russia alone  – Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Arensky, Borodin, Taneyev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Rachmaninov all helped “pave the way” for the younger composer, whose own writing, however, eschewed the prevalent quasi-orchestral textures of the Romantic piano trio, choosing instead a sparser, more transparent sound-picture, not without force and impact, but with a bleaker, and less “cushioned” effect. Shostakovich had always professed an admiration for Jewish music, delighting in what he called its “multifaceted” quality  – appearing to be happy when in fact it is expressing tragedy (a quality shared by Mahler’s music) – and this ambiguity of expression comes to the fore in the Trio’s finale, a veritable Todtentanz with macabre associations, more of which below. The work as a whole gravitates from being the composer’s grief for his friend’s death to a catalyst for his feelings regarding the other tragedies whose impact were weighing increasingly heavily on his existence.

What, then, of this performance? In a word, gripping, from its very first intensely spectral harmonic note intoned hauntingly by cellist Ken Ichinose almost at the top of the instrument’s range and soaring above the violin’s conventionally-voiced though similarly elegiac tones and the piano’s basso profundo utterances – the spell’s intensity was palpable, the instrumentation a play of parallel states of being, dream floating alongside consciousness, and both far above deeper and darker reality – within  the same being, or with three different beings cast adrift?  Briefly, the cello “comes back to earth”, joining the violin in a steady single-note rhythm, exchanging single-note-accompanying and melodic roles as the momentums continue with both tempi and intensities building,  the music swinging into a dark-browed and determined jogtrot mode! The musicians seem gripped by the music’s compulsions, pizzicato exchanges, trenchant piano chordings, slashing single-note string utterances, all suggesting some kind of search for a way through, with Monique Lapins’s violin-playing in particular, in places incredibly exploratory!

If respite was sought, it was not to be found in the second movement – Allegro con brio, the music proclaimed, with violin and cello flexing muscle and expiating energies, and further driven along by the piano’s pounding chords and trumpeting arpeggiations.  What began as a high-spirited fun dance seemed to get more obsessive and trenchant, descending into repetitions of groaning drone-like tones trapped in their own vortices – a trio-like section almost promised the dance-theme some breathing-space, but the wildness soon returned, pianist Gabriela Glapska’s seemingly endless energies spearheading the music’s drive towards a breathless concluding flourish! Whew!

But then! – bleakly spaced-out piano chords seemed to slice the ambiences pitilessly  into shards, with first the violinist and then the ‘cellist picking up from the fragments a tragic, elegiac theme – a Passacaglia, with violin and cello continuing to play variants of the theme over the piano’s repeated sequences. The sense of desolation grew with the instruments’ gradual descent into depths of sorrow, the mood at its darkest  suddenly interrupted by the piano beginning an insistent, hypnotic rhythm ,and introducing the Mahlerian irony of a Yiddish-like dance, one whose themes the composer would repeatedly use in his later music (Shostakovich later described them as dances of death and despair, perhaps mindful of accounts he had heard of atrocities such as Jewish prisoners in the “death camps” made to dance on their own graves by their Nazi captors before being executed).

I found this music extraordinary, even almost hallucinatory jn places, thanks to what seemed like the three performers’ total and unstinted immersion in its composer’s world. The build-up to the music’s ironic interplay of humour and savagery in the finale was overwhelming, with the gradual evaporation of that nightmarish scenario right at the work’s end leaving one utterly drained and aghast at what one had just been told.

Even among what must surely seem for Wellington Chamber Music over recent times like a plethora of outstanding performances, this one by the superb Ghost Trio had, I thought, something uniquely special to return to in one’s memory and relish anew.

 

 

 

Nota Bene’s melodious and heartwarming Wedding of Liesl and Duncan

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Nota Bene Choir presents:

THE WEDDING OF LIESL AND DUNCAN
7:30pm,16th August, 2025
Wesley Church, Taranaki St., Wellington

Liesl – Barbara Paterson (soprano) / Duncan – Robert Tucker (baritone)
Friends and Guests – Nota Bene Choir
Pianists: Heather Easting / Emma Sayers
Music Director – Maaike Christie-Beekman
Devised, Written and Directed by Jacqueline Coats

Order of Service:
WELCOME – Liesl’s family, friends and  guests in the Old Hall

J.STRAUSS Jnr. – Champagne Chorus (Die Fledermaus) – Liesl, with Choir
HAYDN  –  Die Beredsamkeit (Eloquence) – Choir
LEHAR  – Vilja Lied (Die Lustige Witwe) – Liesl, with Choir
SCHUBERT – Der Tanz – Choir
SCHUMANN – Lied der Braut – Liesl – solo
BRAHMS – Sehnsucht – Choir
BRAHMS – Wie bist du, meine Königin – Duncan, solo
SCHUBERT – Schicksalslenker, blicke nieder – Duncan, with Choir
HAYDN – Die Harmonie in der Ehe (Harmony in Marriage) – Choir
SCHUBERT – Trinklied – Duncan – solo

Guests are invited to be seated in the Church

THE SERVICE – Entrance of the Bridal Party
WAGNER – Wedding March from Lohengrin –  Choir
BRAHMS – Liebeslieder Waltzer
1. Rede, Madchen, allzu liebes (speak, dear girl) – Choir
Exchange of Vows
2. Am gesteine rauscht die Flut (the tide rushes on the rocks) – Choir
3. O die Frauen, O die Frauen (O women!) – Tenors and Basses
4. Wie des Abends schöne Röte (the evening’s beautiful red) – Sopranos and Altos
5. Die grüne Hopfenranke (the green hop vine – Choir
6. Ein Kleiner, hübscher Vogel nahm den Flug (a small, pretty bird took flight) – Choir
7. Wohl schön bewandt was es (my lover no longer sees me) –  Liesl
8. Wenn so lind dein Auge mir  (If your eyes are so gentle) – Choir
9. Am Donaustrande da steht ein Haus (By the Danube stands a house) – Choir
10. O wie sanft die Quell – (Oh, how gentle the spring) – Choir
11. Nein es its nicht auszukommen (No, it is not possible..)- Choir.
12. Schlosser auf, und mache Schlosser (Locksmiths, up and make padlocks!) – Choir
13. Vogelein durchrauscht die Luft (Birds fly swiftly through the air) Sopranos and Altos
14. Sieh, wie is die Welle klar (Look how clear the waves are!) Tenors and Basses
15. Nachtigall, sie singt so schön (Nightingale, you sing so beautifully) Choir
16. Ein dunkeler Schacht ist Liebe ( A dark pit is Love!) Choir
17. Nicht wandle, mein Licht (Do not wander, my Light) Tenors
Exchange of Rings
18 Es bebet das Gestrauche (The bushes tremble) Choir
Pronouncement and Celebration
MENDELSSOHN  (arr. Nota Bene) – Wedding March

“The Wedding of Liesl and Duncan” – a fertile music-theatre brainchild of director Jacqueline Coats, which makes creative and heart-warming use of the manifold skills and attendant enthusiasms of musicians belonging to and associated with Wellington’s Nota Bene Choir.  Readers expecting a conventional review of a group  performing a first-half programme featuring a collection of operatic solo and choral items, followed by a second-half presentation of Brahm’s Liebeslieder Waltzes might wonder at encountering, first-up, this introductory  plethora of detailed information that could take as long to read through as the actual review itself! I hope the method in my madness at offering this storehouse of elaboration to begin with “sets the scene” for the effusion of delightfully theatrical, and even in places intensely dramatic entertainment which  elevated much of the music’s otherwise divertissement-like status into far more connective musical tissue.

Brought into play was a real, infectious sense of a nuptial occasion by (a) the choice of venue, in Wellington’s Taranaki Street Wesley Church, and (b) the theatrical method of incorporating the audience into the actual celebrations. So it was that we were all invited at the outset to join the bride’s family, friends and guests into one of two gathering-places capaciously provided and linked by a corridor (I suspect each simply “filled up” followed by the other, leaving, incidentally, very few spare seats!). At each place was a pianist (ours was the versatile Heather Easting, while the other would have certainly enjoyed the equally capable artistry of Emma Sayers) – after being welcomed by the indefatigable Jacqueline Coats and enjoying some soothing strains of firstly Bach and then Pachebel on the piano, there subsequently appeared suitably-attired guests and friends of the couple to be married, along with the major participants, Liesl (Barbara Paterson) and Duncan (Robert Tucker) who alternated between both of these places, by turns recounting for each of the groups some of the history of their meeting and subsequent engagement.

This “getting to know” first the bride and then the groom was accompanied by the first “Welcome” bracket of songs, beginning with a spirited “Champagne Aria” from J,Strauss Jnr’s “Die Fledermaus” sparklingly (ahem!) delivered by the bride and guests. I found a lot of the spoken commentary from all the characters difficult to make out in that acoustic, sitting as I was at the far end of the group – but I could hear enough to decipher salient detail, such as information pertaining to the non-arrival, thus far, of the groom – a droll chorus (“Eloquence” by Josef Haydn) suitably commenting on various apposite kinds of character traits! To my great pleasure we heard next the ravishing “Vilja Lied” from Lehar’s “Die Lustige Witwe” most plaintively sung by Paterson (with lovely dynamic control of those ecstatic high notes) and echoed by the chorus. Schubert’s “Der Tanz” followed, after which Liesl introduced, a mite confusingly, both her “adoptive’ and “real” parents, in tandem with Schumann’s lovely “Lied der Braut”, Liesl’s solo here blending affectingly with the following “Sensucht” by Brahms, for the choir.

Consternation reigned as Duncan (Robert Tucker), the Groom, suddenly turned up, effusively pressing his suit with another Brahms song, “Wie bist du, meine Konigin!”, beautifully and pliantly delivered here by both singer and pianist. We got some semi-confessional “history” from the singer of a previous relationship and an existing offspring (too much information?) associated with the beseeching “Schicksalsenker” by Schubert for tenor and choir, which captured all hearts, before the groom was off again, “looking for Liesl!”, to the strains of Haydn’s satirical “Die Harmonie in der Ehe”, all boisterous good fun for the choir! Duncan returned, jubilant, and in a time-honoured gesture to blokedom, launched into a Schubert “Trinklied”, extolling Baccchus, “Plump Prince of Wine!” – the wedding was definitely “on!”

The preliminaries having been addressed and given their due, we were enjoined to be upstanding and take ourselves via some of the way we had already come to the church for the ceremony. Our director-cum celebrant fulsomely welcomed our presence, reminding us that before things went any further we needed a bride! –  and so we had the lump-in-throat enchantment of the expectantly fresh-toned “Wedding March” from Wagner’s Lohengrin as Liesl and her escort came down the aisle to the altar.

The bride being thus delivered and the groom suitably prepped, our celebrant took the opportunity to “set the scene” with the help of the composer of the aforementioned “Liebeslieder Waltzes”. I had listened to these songs perhaps once before and remember at the time thinking them somewhat underwhelming as regards the “must hear again” department – but what a difference here, brought to life via the bright and sparkling Nota Bene voices, Maaike Christie-Beekman’s exuberant direction, and our duo pianists’ by turns incisive and melting playing  – how wonderful for these songs to be given such a vibrant theatrical and even dramatic context! Each one seemed to “possess” its different character, imbuing the normally threadbare three-four trajectories with tangible on-the-spot representations as well as tying together their unifying flow in the larger scheme that held the whole evening together so successfully.

If we had thought the marriage “done and dusted” by then, we were in for a few (almost soap-opera) surprises! –  from the beginning, the celebrant touched on the potential “will it happen?” travails of a relationship, underpinned by the first song’s “Rede, Madchen, allzu liebes” (Will you, who rouse passion, relent?”) to which the groom, Duncan, reopened his “confessional” doubts, spurred by the choir’s “Am gesteine rauscht die Flut” (The flood rushes onto the rocks), and the age-old bachelor’s refrain “O die Frauen, O die Frauen” (further elaborated here as “I’d have been a monk were it not for women”). It was time for Liesl to enjoy some affirmation with the soprano/alto voices’ beautiful “Wie des Abends schöne Röte” (How the evening redly glows).

As the vows begin, so do the doubts arise, darkly harmonised by “Die grüne Hopfenranke”  (like a creeper stuck in the ground) from the choir, the celebrant suitably agitating and the mothers appearing to give their daughter solace (all superbly theatrical!). Liesl isn’t much  comforted by the idea of a pretty bird being caught  -“Ein kleiner, hubscher Vogel nahm den Fug” (Christie-Beekman brings out so much more flavour from the choir’s voices in these places than I previously recall!). The bride remains unmoved at first, remembering how “it all seemed much easier when we were young” – “Wohl schön bewandt was es”, and now…….The choir quickly moves to comfort Liesl with “Wenn so lind dein Auge mir” – reassured by gentle eyes, she takes her bouquet as the next song quickly capitalises on the mood –  “Am Donaustrande, da steht ein Haus” , sings the choir, breaking through the impasse of doubt as if shattering a barrier of glass! Liesl completes her vow! – triumph!

To the strains of “O wie sanft die Quelle” the couple waltz to the moving waters!  Just when it all seems plain sailing comes another cloud – “If any person knows of any reason, etc…..” From the ranks of the choir a man steps forward and confesses his secret love for the bride! – Pandemonium! The Choir erupts with “Nein! – es ist nicht auszukommen!” (No! It’s impossible!”) The couple run away from the tumult as the choir angrily declaims “Schlosser! Auf, und mache Schlösser” (Locksmith! Up, and make some locks!). but peace is soon restored and the errant suitor is dismissed, as the sopranos and altos sing of birds rushing through the air to their rest  (“Vögelein, durchrauscht die Luft”) and the tenors and basses extend the peace further with “Sieh, wie ist die Welle klar” .

The nightingale sings, and the world seems to stand still – “Nachtigall, sie singt so schön”  intones the choir – Liesl is firmly on the side of love and helps steer Duncan through his “dark night of the soul” memory at “Ein dunkeler Schacht ist Liebe” (Love is a dark pit”), though he’s lost for words at this, the last fence! “Boys, you gotta help me out, here!” his whole aspect is saying, and the  tenors come to his aid with “Nicht wandle, mein Licht” – a beautiful reassurance of a homecoming, AND of the appearance of the rings – where? – here! – no! – yes! – with the choir giving the final and  clearly affirmative “lift” to the rhythms and tones of “Es bebet das Gesträuche” – (as the bushes tremble with the birds’ flight, so does my soul with desire and fear at the thought of you!).  As the couple sign the register and their union is pronounced, so does Mendelssohn’s Wedding March sound and resound as Liesl and Duncan are resplendently (and deservedly) acclaimed! What a journey, and how richly bedecked it all proved, proclaiming Jacqueline Coats’s vision as transformational and the response of all of the performers, conductor, singers and players, something to truly savour in the memory.

A Masked Ball – Wellington Opera’s presentation of perilous concealment

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Julien Van Mellearts (Renato) and Jared Holt (King Gustavo)
photo – Stephen A’Court

Wellington Opera presents:
Giuseppe VERDI – Un Ballo in Maschera  (libretto by Antonia Somma)

Jared Holt – Gustavo, King of Sweden
Julien Van Mellearts – Count René Anckarström (Renato), the King’s secretary
Madeleine Pierard – Amelia, the Count’s wife
Natasha Te Rupe Wilson – Oscar, the King’s page
Kristin Darragh – Ulrica Arfvidsson, a sorceress
Samuel McKeever – Count Ribbing, a conspirator
Morgan-Andrew King – Count Horn, a conspirator
Lila Crichton – Judge
Daniel O’Connor – Cristiano, a sailor
Chris Anderson – Amelia’s servant

Director – Jacqueline Coats
Set Design – Michael Zaragoza
Lighting Design – Rowan McShane
Costume Design – Lee Erihäpeti Williams

Conductor – Brian Castles-Onion
Wellington Opera Chorus (Director – Michael Vinten)
Orchestra Wellington

Opera House, Wellington
Friday, 8th August 2025

Wellington’s beautiful Opera House was the venue for the latest offering from the city’s eponymous opera company –  Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, which opened on August 6th – I attended the second Opera House performance two evenings later, conscious that the production had had already garnered a good critical response.

Amongst the intriguing advance publicity for the work were references to the production’s use of classical archetypal elements presented in the ancient Greek myth of Artemis and Actaeon, the famous “hunter becomes the hunted” story. The opera’s Prelude accordingly depicts the drama’s monarch, King Gustavo of Sweden, with a pair of hunting dogs, cleverly mirroring this theme at the work’s end with a depiction of the King at a “masked ball” wearing a pair of stag’s antlers, thus symbolising the victim he was to become of a conspiracy amongst his courtiers.

The masks of course underpin another defining motif of the work, that of concealment, one emphasised in a programme note by the production’s director Jacqueline Coats, and given obvious emphasis in the opera’s final definitive ball scene, but also throughout the story in different ways.

Permeating the drama, of course, were the dominant themes of the King’s covert love for Amelia, the wife of his best friend Renato, in tandem with the conspirators’ plot to assassinate their monarch. And various intrigues enriched the action, such as Gustav’s and his courtiers disguising themselves for a visit a fortune-teller who had been threatened with banishment. This in turn led to a midnight tryst between Gustav and Amelia, and their affair’s eventual discovery by Renato, engendering the latter’s secret alignment with the conspirators to bring about Gustav’s end.

From the beginning the drama’s musical fabric was wrought of magic by Orchestra Wellington under conductor Brian Castles-Onion’s direction, the latter never missing a beat or a turn of phrase denoting an action or emotion by his players and singers. The chorus, representing both “allies” and “enemies” of the king, acquitted themselves sonorously as befitted their intentions, the result of Wellington Opera chorusmaster Michael Vinten’s always expert coaching  – Jared Holt’s King Gustav replied regally and graciously as the loved-cum-hated monarch, a foil for the initially more workmanlike tones of Julien Van Mellaerts’  Anckarstrom (Renato), the King’s secretary,  whose opening canzone “Alla vita che t’arride” was solicitious and dignified as suited the occasion.

Natasha Te Rupe Wilson (Oscar) – photo, Stephen A’Court

Some of the scene’s most consistently-engaging singing came with Natasha Te Rupe Wilson’s portrayal of Oscar, the King’s Page – the voice and theatrical deportment were a real delight in places such as her defence of the fortune-teller, Ulrica, in her ballata “Volta la terrea fronte alle stelle”, rebuffing the condemnations delivered here somewhat jejunely by Lila Crichton’s Judge. In conclusion Jared Holt was able to generate plenty of devil-may-care energy in his “Ogni cura si doni al diletto”, inviting his courtiers to join him in donning a disguise and visiting the fortune-teller’s lair!

Scene Two, while vividly wrought by the orchestral introduction, seemed to visually fall short of Kirsten Darragh’s vivid descriptions in her “Re dell’abisso, affrettati!”. Nor did the chorus’s “O come tutto riluce di tetro”  reflect “how luridly everything glitters” –  here,  more ice-cold than lurid and infernal, as if this Ulrica was Erda out of Wagner’s “Ring” instead. As with the ensuing scene’s supposedly “campo abbominato”, I thought it all too brightly- and cooly-lit to reflect the “dark and infernal” aspect of the words, though the singers did their best. Ulrica’s palm-reading realisation that the man whose future she was predicting was REALLY doomed  was tellingly conveyed by Kirsten Darragh, especially the idea of the killer being his friend! Jared Holt did well with the rebuff of this in his “Ề scherzo od è follia”, his “laughing” tones adroitly conveying his public incredulity at the prophecy.

Madeleine Pierard’s Amelia rose above the discrepancies evident between the scenario of her gathering of the magic herb and her descriptions of it – her opening “Ecco l’oriddo campo ove s’accoppia al delitto la morte!” made me wonder whether the valiant scene-shifters had actually got the right “piece” out on the stage! – hardly suggestive of a place of execution such as a gallows, and with the scene itself surely needing to be darker to reflect Amelia’s terror and loathing (“m’empie di ricappriccio e de terrore!”). She and Jared Holt worked hard at their love-duet that followed without, I felt, recapturing the exhilarating charge of their “Tosca” the previous year here in Wellington, their kiss here far from any kind of “caution abandoned” quality suggested by their words.

By contrast, the arrival of, firstly, Renato to warn the King of danger, and then of the assassins themselves was superbly staged, the overt menace of the latters’ concerted torch-lit aspect making the mordant “comedy” of their discovery of Renato with his wife on a “nocturnal moonlight stroll” all the more delightful – their “laughter”, relished enormously by the audience well aware of the subject couple’s acute anguish, proved a highlight of the evening!

Madeleine Pierard (Amelia) – photo, Stephen A’Court

No less riveting was the subsequent exchange between vengeful husband and sorrowing wife, Madeleine Pierard’s “Morro, ma prima in grazia” as deeply-felt and moving as Julien Van Mellearts’s “Eri tu” was by turns impassionedly angry and deeply grief-stricken. And two more voices to impress in the following “plotting” scene were those of the conspirators, Samuel McKeever as Count Ribbing and Morgan-Andrew King as Count Horn – a resoundingly dark-toned duo!

Rivalling these two scenes in impact here was the splendid finale, launched by the brief appearance of the antler-clad King and the appearance of the masked revellers at the ball, the singing and choreography of the chorus again outstanding. Interactions between Oscar (another superb song-and-dance cameo from Natasha Te Rupe Wilson) and Renato over the mystery of the King’s identity further heightening the tensions created by the masked conspirators closing in on their prey with Renato in the van ready to strike, unaware that his victim had already proclaimed Amelia’s innocence by giving her the freedom she desired (touchingly expressed here, at the end, by Jared Holt’s mortally-wounded Gustav.)

No other art-form conveys so many different emotions in simultaneous ferment so exquisitely and heart-rendingly. Given some production aspects that didn’t resonate with me, I still found myself, along with the rest of this evening’s audience, warmly appreciating and acclaiming this “A  Masked Ball” as a feast of compelling theatrical action and music-making.