Month: October 2025

“One of a kind” WYO/WYS/WYC “EARTH” concert lives up to expectations – and how!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

WYO/WYS/WYC at the Michael Fowler Centre, October 2025  – photograph: Jiani Li

EARTH
Wellington Youth Orchestra,
Wellington Youth Sinfonietta,
Wellington Youth Choir

Solace Ward (viola)

Conductors: Mark Carter (WYO)
Chris Van Der Zee (WYS)
Rowan Johnstone (WYC)

Programme:
JAAKKO MANTYJARVI – Announcements
SARAH HOPKINS – Past Life Melodies
REUBEN RAMEKA – Waita
ANDRE J THOMAS – Rockin’ Jerusalem
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Overture “Egmont”
ANTHONY RITCHIE – Viola Concerto
Interval
FRANZ SCHUBERT – Symphony No. 8 (Ist Movement)
JAKE RUNESTAD – “Earth” Symphony
GIUSEPPE VERDI – Grand March from “Aida”

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Sunday, October 19th, 2025

A “One-of-a-kind” Concert, said the publicity – and in terms of range of repertoire, performers and level of achievement, this presentation by the combined forces of Wellington’s various “Youth” music ensembles certainly lived up to its description! Nor were the items all “standard” repertoire, but in some cases were chosen to highlight particular aspects of the concert, adding to the “special character” of the event. Consequently, we were treated to a feast of different kinds of music-making, both instrumental and vocal, and featuring individual as well as ensembled skills.

A particular feature of the afternoon’s presentation was award-winning solo violist Solace Ward’s performance of New Zealand composer Anthony Ritchie’s Viola Concerto. At the conclusion of the concerto, and to the delight of the audience, Solace was presented with the Tom Gott Cup (from the trophy’s actual namesake himself!) which added to the pleasure and singularity of the occasion!

In a masterstroke of programming, the concert’s opening was one of delightful singularity from the Wellington Youth Choir under Rowan Johnston  –   a whimsical item courtesy of Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi, sporting the unnecessary title Announcements. We were both informed of and enjoined by the choir to observe the usual pre-concert protocols associated with health and safety, including emergencies  – my favourites were the request for our cell-phones to be switched off, with its paused reminder “Do it now!” which followed – and the somewhat Kafka-esque (ICE-like?) message that “unaccompanied minors will be removed – and may be destroyed” …..

Australian composer Sarah Hopkins’ work Past Life Melodies which followed was once performed by a choir of over 7,000 students with orchestra, didgeridoo and harmonic whirlies at a 2000 international sports event – while this performance didn’t replicate the sheer magnitude of that presentation, it still presented a unique kind of ambient realisation of what the composer terms her  “deeply resonating inner voices”, besides drawing upon influences such as “open-throated” chant singing from Eastern Europe traditions, and Aboriginal-inspired chant and overtone singing. Its beginnings were hummed, then differently voiced, the chant-like melody accompanied by drone notes, the sounds then fanning out beautifully, employing different repetitive patternings and vocalised syllables. Gradually whistling sounds joined the textures, whether voice- or instrument-produced I couldn’t tell, but the effect was certainly at once inner-worldly and redolent of incredibly vast spaces and long- past times…….

At first I thought the next item’s title was a misprint for the word “waiata” – but it turned out to be Reuben Rameka’s Waitā – the name of one of a collection of stars whose grouping creates the Matariki cluster, one associated with the oceans and the foods gathered from it, and with the associated tides and floodwaters. Waitā speaks to listeners of the responsibilities of caring for the ocean environment to which, of course, we owe such gratitude for our continued sustenance.

The words and music described the mingling of fresh and salt waters, the tides that ebb and flow, and the journeyings made to these places of great abundance in the domain of Tangaroa. Single voices evoked the coming together these waters from the land to the sea,  the choir giving voice to the star clusters of Matariki to shine upon the people below and give them signs for the  necessary gathering of food, naming the great oceans and the multiplicity of food that abounded in them.

Different voice texturings  described the tides that ebb and flow and move in unison and as the various fish species were named, the soprano voices floating a unison over the more vigorous lines. Single voices exchanged lines as the canoe  moved to shallower waters, to gather seafood “for a mouth-watering feast from the domain of Tangaroa” – the piece readily evoked a sense of ritual, of order , and of tradition regarding such resource-gatherings  – “Ki tai toitu te marae a Tangata Toitu te tangata”…..

Concluding the Youth Choir’s  bracket of items was Andre J. Thomas’s Rockin’ Jerusalem, a song in the Afro-American tradition – the choir’s male voices began a jazzy rhythm, joined by women’s descant voices, who then took up the rhythmic patterns and punched out the words with crystal-clear declamation! Heartfelt and inspiring, in an upbeat and compellingly physical way, the performance scored a great ovation at the end, a tribute incorporating the choir’s overall achievement!

Came the Youth Orchestra’s turn, introduced by conductor Mark Carter, and beginning with the inspirational “Egmont” Overture by Ludwig van Beethoven – a work based on a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about a 16th-century nobleman, Lamoral, Count of Egmont in the Netherlands, one executed by the Spanish for his resistance against the oppressors of his country. Mark Carter got splendid attack from all his players right from the opening chord, and especially with those famous repeated lower string notes right in the middle of the allegro section, answered so plaintively by the winds. And how well the players kept up the excitement of the concluding “Victory Symphony”, with its steadfast piccolo flourishes ringing splendidly out at the end!

The Anthony Ritchie Viola Concerto brought soloist  Solace Ward onto the stage for what I thought a by turns sensitive and invigorating performance – the work got away to a wonderfully attention-grabbing opening, with almost Oriental-like texturings bolstered by exotic-sounding winds and percussive splashings, and the viola vigorously dialoguing with garrulous winds, giving an impressive of being on an urgent journey to somewhere! The brass cooly and insouciantly slowed things down (I was reminded of Holst’s “The Perfect Fool” ballet music momentarily) while the viola tended to gravitate towards the more fun-loving strings and winds’ tumbling antics, despite a brief but arrestingly expansive interlude. We were again borne aloft by the music’s renewed momentums, with the viola striding confidently along in the flow of it all, when a gong seemed to sound a “that’s enough” kind of warning, bringing the flow of fun to an end.

But what a heartfelt outpouring from the soloist we then heard, taking over the new movement’s beginning, with horns giving the player support and the theme additional colour! Oboe and piccolo joined in with the strings  in supporting the continuance of the soloist’s melodic venturings until a timpani sounded a kind of counter-trajectory, the viola dancing with the winds as the timpani strengthened its rhythmic pulsings  – but the soloist steered the music back to the rhapsodical – leading to a further idyllic cadenza and making the most of these “all creation standing still” moments!

Came the dance, hesitant and quixotic at first from the viola, but gaining confidence and elan, the orchestra joining in – suddenly the mood was almost Coplandesque, the rhythms proudly prancing, the violist folkishly “bending” some of their notes and an even more vertiginous mood overtaking the trajectories. And then, with the music seeming to flip-flop between sinuous grace  and vigour,  the brass decided to sound a concluding note as if enough fun had been had for one day!  I actually enjoyed it all immensely and could have gone on dancing and singing until the cows (?) came home, but…..still, well-deserved applause for Solace Ward as much for their partnership with others in the concerto as for their soloistic efforts – one day, if I’m lucky, I hope I will hear them play the Walton viola concerto!

After the interval it was a largely symphonic second half, with firstly Chris Van Der Zee on the podium and his charges, the Wellington Youth Sinfonietta, taking on the first movement of Franz Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony – a big “ask” for anybody when considering the enormity of the piece in so many different ways, but a task that the young players seemed to relish! The lower strings struck the right amount of gravitas with the opening, the oboe and horns articulated their notes with suitable wonderment, and the whole orchestra dug into the chords that completed the sequence. The second subject had a lovely “lilt” to all its parts, with tenderly-phrased string-tones, contrasted with the sharp attack on the answering chord and its successors! We got a repeat of all of this which more than doubled the pleasure, before the players took to the awaiting excitements of the development section with gusto, Chris Van Der Zee guiding them through the varied soundscapes of conflict and respite with ease and surety.

Then came the concert’s most ambitions item, a performance of US composer Jake Runestad’s “Earth Symphony”, a five-movement work with chorus, whose text by poet Todd Boss chronicles a “conscious history” of Planer Earth over eras of awakening, longing, devastating, lamenting and renewing, with human beings characterised as “mirabilia”, whose marvels and miracles were misused by ambition, characterised by archetypal legends such as the fall of Icarus, and the lamenting by the betrayal and death of the Carthage Queen Dido, but with Nature planning renewal on her own terms, with the eventual return of “a day like the first day”.

I had no text to follow at the concert, being a technophobe when it came to ‘phones and cyber-things, but still caught enough of the choir’s message to follow the basic outline of the run-together sequences, marvelling at the forebearance and stamina of the musicians involved in their unflagging saga of presentation throughout the work –  the epic scale of utterance and its many contrasts enough to demonstrate  what seemed a cosmic tale of endeavour and tragedy.

Beginning the work with primordial-like utterances from percussion and lower instrumental forces, an archetypal scenario of self-creation brought forth “humankind” with the name “Mirabilia” from thought and desire, with instruments and voices almost lullabic in describing the act with the words “You mirrored me to you”. A parallel was drawn with the Icarus legend by the choir’s fearful “How have you fallen so soon?”, a scenario growing from joyous dance and exhilaration to tragedy at ambition so overweening  – “waxen wings undone”  –  the exultation breaking off, with the brass sounding warnings and the sounds gathering weight and urgency. The choir gave voice to fears with cries of “terrore atmosphaera” as a litany of destruction was enacted, the earth itself crying “I am rage! I am war!”, and most damning of all rebukes – “Briefest of species, what have you done?”,. The brasses sounded grotesque mutterings and the strings and cor anglais took up a lament, as the words “Sleep now, my children” were intoned by the choir to Purcell’s well-known “Lament” from “Dido and Aeneas”, the Earth reiterating its message  by the full choir delivering the melody and the orchestra following with a tortured, twisted version of the same.

The final “Recovery” seemed beyond time as we know it with eerie sounds characterising what seemed like a now-humanless world, which the choir described as “empty space – dormant stone”, then murmuring an almost “Sleeping Beauty” scenario of nature overgrowing and subsuming all “human stain”.  However, the enigmatic ending, after describing a “none shall witness – none shall weep” kind of realm, had the Earth addressing this thought to the empty spaces using the aforementioned name “Mirabilia” – is human life here being given a second chance?

Whatever one’s thoughts regarding the work, the achievement of conductor Mark Carter and his forces in bringing it to a level of performance enabling its merits to be considered was of stupendous mettle! – I would have been supremely content to have left the hall at this point with such a multifarious panoply of sounds resonating in my memory – but under the circumstances an all-in finale involving both of the youth orchestras was as appropriate in a different sense! – so the midships were crowded for a spirited rendition by all available hands of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Grand March” from “Aida” which certainly brought the house down in a different way! Great singing and playing did it all proud, with the brass in particular heartily enjoying themselves – as, in fact, did we all!

ENEMY OF THE STATE – a multivaried concert experience with Psathas, Glazunov and Shostakovich

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents
ENEMY OF THE STATE

JOHN PSATHAS – Next Planet
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV – Violin Concerto
DMITRI  SHOSTAKOVICH – Lady Macbeth of the Mstensk District –
(Suite from the Opera – arr. Marc Taddei)

Benjamin Baker (violin)
Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Hutt City Brass
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday 18th October 2025

Concert programmes can be tricky things to put together, whatever the aims and objectives of those who consider what might best fulfil projected outcomes. Some will prioritise the idea of pleasing what would be considered a requisite amount of people for attendances’ sakes, looking to assemble repertoire that’s either tried and true, or novel in a sense of interest generated by reputation or even recent sensation. Others wanting to explore less well-worked vistas which however indicate sufficient potential for attracting interest will gradually build momentums of discovery and exploration for audiences to ease themselves into and hopefully relish such discoveries and thus be enthused all the more, developing a positive and lasting momentum of support.

Obviously my scenario descriptions show a bias in favour of the latter, mainly because it’s a scenario which I think Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington have followed throughout this present season with considerable success, and in their own distinctive way – Taddei could have alternatively “cherry-picked” Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s entire symphonic output over the six concerts, or presented an amalgam of symphonic and concertante works, but instead chose to concentrate on a specific era of the composer’s creative achievement, in this case (and quoting the title of one of the concert programmes)  very much “Under the Dictator’s Shadow”.

What it’s meant is that we’re being given an in-depth resume of a significant period of activity by one of twentieth century music’s most significant creative artists while in the throes of institutionalised disapproval almost to the point of persecution at the hands of the authorities, personified (and instigated) by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The final concert of the sequence will present to us a composer’s ostensible “giving way” to a dictator’s demands with what seems a public gesture of submission, while privately and through encoded musical gesturings, expressing and maintaining defiance. Some commentators continue to maintain that, despite such ambiguities the composer’s behaviour suggests an acquiescence to  the Soviet regime even after Stalin’s death, while others tend to disagree, a debate that continues to divide opinion.

This latest concert instalment of the sequence highlights a particular flashpoint in the dictator/ composer relationship, the latter’s 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, a work that had achieved popular success until Stalin took it upon himself to attend a performance, late in January 1936, and famously leaving the theatre before the work’s conclusion. Little time was wasted in expressing his displeasure at what he heard, via the Soviet newspaper Pravda’s notorious review of the work a couple of days afterwards, bringing down the dictator’s ire, along with that of his collection of toadies  that made up institutionalised Soviet officialdom, on the composer’s head.

Pravda’s resounding phrase “Muddle instead of Music” has since, along with similar  examples of critical invective levelled against Shostakovich,  triumphantly vindicated Oscar Wilde’s famous quip “There is only one thing worse in the world than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about”, Even though in situ there were , of course,  attendant dangers for artists in Stalin’s Russia in voicing any criticism of the regime, history has come out with firmly positive views regarding the opera’s artistic validations of life and culture for Russian people in the era of the time, set within its wider depictions of human universality.

Though even in its somewhat truncated form here “Lady Macbeth” simply dominated in almost every way its concert companions on this occasion, both offerings allowed us a modicum of “food for thought” of divergent kinds. The concert opened with a work by John Psathas, a superbly-ambient “spaced-out” orchestral experience whose title “Next Planet” nevertheless posed for me more questions than it answered by the time the music had run its unexpectedly brief inter-planetary course. Psathas’s work was jointly commissioned by the Tonnhalle Dusseldorf GmbH and the Dusseldorf Symphony as part of an extended environmental protection project whose theme was “sustainability within the concert experience” – “Next Planet” was one of twelve works, each assigned to different sustainability topics, though Psathas, who co-ordinated the project, was allowed to choose his own topic. His response was to write a piece about “the self-aggrandizing heroes…intent on spending billions in taking a few people to Mars, rather than invest that money in improving life here on Earth……”

On the face of things, the music depicted little more than what seemed like the outer-space equivalent of  “a short ride in a fast machine” – but I was taking the music at its face value instead of looking for clues suggesting hidden meanings and agendas. It may be that Psathas’s piece might perhaps have been more appropriately performed  in the orchestra’s finai concert along with the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, (as “coded” a piece of outwardly-optimistic composition as ever was conceived!) – Psathas’s contempt (heartily endorsed universally) for such inappropriately self-glorifying undertakings would have then made a splendidly fatuous-sounding adjunct to Shostakovich’s hollowed-out paeans of praise for an already brutal and repressive regime and its great leader!

Though I would have just as happily heard some examples of shamefully-neglected music by Rimsky-Korsakov (those splendid suites from “Tsar Saltan” or “Le Coq d’Or”) as examples of anti-establishment artistic expression, I took heart at reading about the supportive stances and various kindnesses shown to his fellow composers (including Shostakovich) at various times by Alexander Glazunov, whose Violin Concerto was here programmed. The only previous work I had heard of Glazunov’s was the delightful Ballet “The Seasons”, while his other, somewhat dubious claim to fame I’d encountered  was his much-reiterated ineptitude as a conductor when placed in charge of the ill-fated premiere of the young Sergei Rachmaninov’s First Symphony!

I had never heard the Violin Concerto before – a work notable for its late-Romantic nostalgic feeling and somewhat idiosyncratic structure, its three movements being  reorganised into two, with the usual slow movement “sandwiched” into the first as a kind of “interlude”, and the last movement entered without a break at the conclusion of a cadenza from the soloist. All of this fell most gratefully on the ear, and provided ample opportunity for the soloist, Ben Baker (whom we’d seen and heard at an earlier concert in Mozart’s gorgeous Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola) to display his  virtuosity and feeling for the music’s character.

Soloist and orchestra established a focused, sombre mood at the beginning, the work’s sequential passages then bringing us to the tender second subject, Baker’s tone pure and clean and delightful, with a gorgeous “silvery” aspect in places, though one that was sometimes “covered” by his accompaniments – in the scherzo-like section Baker was more assertive, leading from this into the cadenza with pin-drop concentration, and varied energies. Though one quickly tired of the rather trite fanfare theme of the finale, Baker put across great enjoyment of the more rustic of the variations, and the quickening of the tempi towards the ending brought excitement and daring to the concluding exchanges.

And so the stage was set for the performance of a Shostakovich work which in terms of range and scope and potential trouble from the ruling establishment for the composer, is almost a kind of “companion work” for the epic Fourth Symphony that featured in the orchestra’s previous Shostakovich concert,. The composer’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, was presented tonight in a truncated but still impactful version made up of various orchestral excepts (mostly “interludes” which the composer had crafted especially for the work) and various arias sonorously delivered throughout the story by the opera’s heroine.  Katerina is the bored wife of a merchant husband who spends most of his time away from her on business. She inevitably falls in love with somebody else, and her obsession with her new lover, Sergey, leads to the murders of both her father-in-law and her husband before she and her lover are eventually caught and sent to a labour camp, where Sergey, having grown tired of her, blames her for everything and rejects her, before forming an association with another woman prisoner – in the throes of despair, Katerina drowns both her rival and herself in a nearby lake.

Despite the dark savagery of much of the story, parts of it (Katerina’s arias especially) are genuinely moving, while other parts draw from Shostakovich’s gift for black comedy and irony (the picture drawn of the police force is of pure comic irony, Gilbertian, but with savage overtones). In a society where corruption is rife and brutality and misogyny are close to the surface, the story still readily resonates – to claim that it would lack basic box-office appeal (as does another reviewer, while nevertheless rhapsodising over Madeleine Pierard’s stunning vocal realisations of the aforementioned arias) is in my view a debatable point!

Music director Marc Taddei selected not only the existing orchestral interludes crafted for the opera by the composer, but excerpts from every scene of the opera, contriving, in his own words, “a concentrated symphonic portrait of her passion, independence, transgressions and tragic fate”. Certainly the juxtapositioning of charged, atmospheric orchestral narrative with Pierard’s straightaway arresting voice brought us into almost cheek-by jowl proximity with both the character and the circumstances that would shape Katerina and her destiny. As a “road map” of the opera I found it an incredibly full-on experience, though I felt it was somewhat less “of a piece” with Katerina herself when her character seemed to suddenly recede during the orchestral descriptions of the discovery of Katarina’s husband’s body, the wedding celebrations and the arrival of the police to arrest the lovers. We “connected” with her again when she returned to the front of the platform to deliver her two despairing final arias, here very properly running them into one single utterance so that the character’s opening lament is then subsumed into a nihilistic vision, giving her the only option available that makes sense – simply devastating!

Marc Taddei’s dauntless Orchestra Wellington and their sonorous cohorts, the Hutt City Brass, played their hearts out in bringing into being the composer’s extraordinarily vivid depictions of life under duress for the story’s characters. As with this orchestra’s quite extraordinary realisation of the demanding Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich a couple of months previously, the players seemed to revel in whatever demands the music made on ensemble, or tone production, with only a hiatus or two of trajectory which I noticed on the couple of occasions that conductor Marc Taddei introduced some kind of rallentando in heavily-scored passages where the ensemble seemed to have brief moments of less-than-unanimous response. For all the rest it seemed that conductor and players had again achieved something remarkable with this less-than-well-known but fascinatingly addictive and readily compelling music.

 

Late-afternoon Bach and Shostakovich – worlds and times apart sounding together….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JS BACH – Suite No. 3 in C Major for Solo Violincello BWV 1009
Rolf Gjelsten  (‘cello)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartets: No 5  in B-flat (1952) / No. 2  in A Major Op. 68 (1944)
The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble:
Helene Pohl, Simeon Broom (violins), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (’cello)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday, 18th November, 2025

“Wuthering Heights” might have been an apter name for Roseneath’s “The Long Hall” on Saturday afternoon, when Wellington’s Point Jerningham resoundingly lived up to its reputation as the windiest spot in the capital during a concert given by the Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble, one in which the wind played at pedal points, drones, and vigorous ostinati as constant accompaniments to the music-making.  The latter, of course, persisted and eventually triumphed, with the players’ all-pervading focus on the music happily relegating such disruptions, however tumultuous, to an incidental, scarcely noticeable in situ degree.

The Ensemble’s quartet personnel has undergone fascinating and fruitful variation over the year, in particular regarding a second violinist, and featuring luminaries such as Monique Lapins, Anna van der Zee and Peter Gjelsten in the position. For this concert the player was Simeon Broom, currently an NZSO member with a number of years’ valuable experience spent in various orchestras overseas. Each of the quartet performances in this concert demonstrated both the group’s flexibility and individual members’ skills at adaptation to fresh combinations, auguring well for continuance of presentation by the ensemble of one of chamber music’s core repertoire resources.

As well they might for the purposes of such an exploration of what is becoming increasingly apparent to me as one of the great cornerstones of musical expression of its time and its relevance for other times – Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets. Though Beethoven’s acclaimed cycle of quartets would seem like an obvious inspiration to any aspiring composer tackling the same genre of works, Shostakovich’s relationship with the form took a different path over time, with the young composer, mindful of his experience with the 1936 “Lady Macbeth affair”,  all too aware of those repressive conditions foisted upon creative artists within his homeland, and thus taking care with his first string quartet venture (1938) to avoid any undue excess. It was six years before he returned to the medium in 1944, confident then of giving an impression of a loyal Russian’s patriotic response to the war effort via his references in the work to Russian folk music, though the ethnic elements in this second quartet included definite references to Jewish “Klezmer” music, perhaps more for aesthetic reasons than political ones. The Third, Fourth and Fifth Quartets were less fortunate, with the composer’s increasingly dysfunctional relationship with Stalin and his cohorts resulting in his regarding the works as “for the drawer” – the Third Quartet (1946) received one performance before being withdrawn), while the other two (the 1949 Fourth and the 1952 Fifth)  languished unperformed until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Of longer-term interest is Shostakovich’s love of the music of JS Bach – he headed a Soviet delegation in 1950  to attend in Leipzig events marking the bicentennial commemoration of Bach’s death , where he was quoted as saying “For us Bach’s legacy is an embodiment of flaming emotion, soulful humanity and true humanism, which stands in contrast to the dark world of raw evil and contempt for humanity.” Shostakovich knew the Well-Tempered Clavier intimately (he had been playing it from the age of twelve), when he encountered the 26 year-old Tatiana Nikolaeva playing selections from the work at the International Bach Competition which was one of the Leipzig bicentennial events. Her playing (which won her the competition’s first prize) inspired Shostakovich to compose his own set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, and dedicate the set to Nikolaeva, who premiered them in December of 1952 (she subsequently recorded them no less than three times!).

These Op.87 Preludes and Fugues provide a thoroughly refreshing look at musical examples of the art we readily associate with Bach – counterpoint, fugue and texture, a dynamic collection of captivating opportunities for what one commentator has described as “musical ecstasy and reflection”. And, as ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten pointed out in his pre-concert talk today prior to playing for us Bach’s heart-warming ‘Cello Suite No.3 in C Major,  the work’s confidence, ebullience and mastery of form is a representation of the effect on Shostakovich’s own use of counterpoint and fugue in certain of his quartets, especially evident in the 1944 Fifth Quartet which we were to hear immediately after this work.

I’d recently been enjoying former Wellingtonian cellist Miranda Wilson’s “The Well-Tempered ‘Cello” (published 2022, Fairhaven Press) , describing her own saga of getting to know, working on, and eventually performing these ‘Cello Suites – so the section of the book devoted to this Third Suite occasioned some required (re)reading and (re)relishing!  She emphasises the work’s in-built resonances, being in the C-major key, and Rolf Gjelsten seemed to confirm this with his verdict regarding the work’s general affability and out-going nature – music with plenty to say and with the resonances created that supported this kind of character.

Right from that opening “downward plunge” into Bach’s flow of notes I felt a wonderful sense of well-being – the journey at first was mostly scalic, but with some wider steps and a couple of quirky jumps, and a voice which grows in variety of expression, passing through single notes, phrases, lines and episodes, and with an engagingly droll drone-sequence around the note of G, before a few moments of recitative bring us to the end.  The Allemande contrasts with the bright-and-bushy-tailed Prelude in being so gorgeously relaxed in its graceful trajectory, the sudden chain of double-stopped notes in the piece’s first half, a brief frisson of tension that resolves with a nudge of extra warmth. Rolf had told us about the Courante with its “crazy dance” aspect (Miranda Wilson refers to the piece’s “frantic-up-and-down arpeggios”!) – and to my untutored ear it seemed to possess and swap between two kinds of rhythmic trajectories at will, with beat-stresses changing as if playing a kind of game with my sensibilities!

The Sarabande, my attendant author’s “powerfully moving” rhythm, is similarly characterised by my in situ player as having “a unique kind of intensity” – I didn’t know before this concert that it’s a dance form that was banned in the 17th Century as eliciting “too erotic” a response from its participants! I’ve now been dangerously over-sensitised to its allure, and will have to watch myself over that second note in each bar, in future!  I catch myself savouring it during the performance, here, and thinking that it must be a case of “once heard, etc….!”

The Bourees plucked me our of any such fantasy world I might have ventured into. They’re wonderful, “two-sides to the coin” dances, suggesting different physical, psychological or emotional views of the same location, feeling, or situation. Here the difference seemed like a masculine/feminine distinction, a somewhat conventional response, I know, but one which a lifetime of observation has ingrained for good or ill! And I loved the Gigue, here, with its almost lazily loping stride, and especially the bariolage sections (one note repeatedly sounded in the midst of a whirl of others) which have always had a pleasantly astringent “ring”, and which were followed with a reassuring “that’s enough of that” rejoiner!

So, onto the first of the Shostakovich offerings of the afternoon we went, with the wind just as fulsomely attendant as ever! The Fifth String Quartet appropriately back-ended the Bach Suite performance, allowing the former’s compositional proximity to the composer’s own 24 Preludes and Fugues to resonate more readily, the earlier Second String Quartet having a rather different, and more removed kind of genesis. I was intrigued by other references I’d found to this later quartet’s influences, among them the music of one Galina Ustvolskaya, a former pupil of the composer’s and one he apparently harboured deeper feelings for, following the death of his first wife – Shostakovich quotes a four-note motif from Ustvolskaya’s B-flat Clarinet Trio, played by the first violin in the quartet’s first movement coda (the composer’s feelings, incidentally, were never returned, adding to the poignancy of the quote).

In his introduction to the work for us Rolf Gjelsten emphasised the composer’s predicament at having to indefinitely defer some of his music’s performances, such as this Quartet (along with his two previous quartets, one of which did get a “premiere” but was then withdrawn!). Stalin’s death in 1953 meant that this Quartet could at last come in from the cold, along with a number of other important works “awaiting their time”. It was the first of the composer’s Quartets which joined the movements together in a single sweep, and it contained a number of unusually “personal” references – elements which would come to increasingly characterise the quartets still to come.

The work’s striking opening contained a “walking” theme whose determined trajectories were set upon by trenchant figures whose intensities assailed the music until the second violin’s introduction of a more lyrical subject tossed about between the players. Gradually the mood intensified further, with both the walking and lyrical themes returning but under siege, the lines buzzing like fierce insects, out for blood, but then gradually receding as, firstly, the lyrical theme made an impassioned return, and then, from nowhere, came the aforementioned Ustvolskaya quote on the first violin, disappearing after a second, higher, more ethereal statement as the instrument took the music via a single note and accompanied by pizzicati, to the next movement.

Here, the lines portrayed a kind of stillness, a post-rampage desolation, in places a kind of austere beauty, with eerie unisons and soulful phrases clasping the ambiences and holding them fast, until the viola, obeying a lonely impulse stepped forwards with an engaging phrase in hand to begin the dance, a tart little waltz whose good-humoured gesturings gradually turned once more into the furies that beset the opening movement. And just as unexpectedly as in the opening movement, the tumult ceased, and first the violin, and then the viola impassionedly sounded the Ustvolskaya theme once again, punctuated by emphatic pizzicati from the others. As with its first appearance the theme gave little solace, more a sense of something out-of-reach, emphasised by the subsequent “walking away” of the music, the jog-trot of the finale’s opening leading to a bleaker, much reiterated theme which then dissolved into silence.

After giving us such a “living and breathing from within” response to this work’s emotionally searching sound-saga, the players allowed us an interval’s space before launching into the  stunningly contrasted physicality of the opening “Overture” to the composer’s Second String Quartet , written in 1944 – music sounding for the moment relatively free from the constraints of politics or dogmas, its folkishness serving both as Shostakovich’s loyal citizen-response to the “Great Patriotic War”, and in particular his fondness for Jewish klezmer-like idioms in the exuberant opening theme, here suggestive of a folk-celebration.

Though this remained an ensemble performance overall, throughout the work’s second movement I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the charismatic violin-playing of Helene Pohl in her delivery of the piece’s klezmer-like solo, mournfully expressive soliloquies over drone-like accompaniments, and with the occasional notes ambiently “bent” in what one presumes is an authentic style. At one point the ‘cello sounded a brief solo before the violin began a slow waltz, one into which melody the other instruments gradually climbed, their notes rising to agitatedly “connect” with the violin’s before falling away once more – for most of this movement the violin is played as if it has joined with its player at prayer…..

A nocturnal scherzo/waltz followed, swift, ghostly and chromatic, a real danse macabre, alternating between substance and shadow before taking its “do I wake or sleep?” leave.  In its enigmatic wake was left the finale, an astonishing theme-and-variations movement, recitative-like at the beginning between the instruments , settling down to expound and extract every ounce, strand and tone of the folk-tune introduced by the viola, and then refracted through what seemed like all possible combinations, and every single conceivable characteristic one might ascribe to the composer’s experience. All the players here – violinist Simeon Broom, violist Nicholas Hancox and cellist Rolf Gjelsten – brought into play intensities and virtuosities echoing those of Helene Pohl’s brought over from the previous movement, carrying the music through its tumultuous journey to a monumental conclusion.

I managed a few grateful words of breathless appreciation to Rolf Gjelsten at the end – and then, afterwards, the still-insistent winds were good company as I walked home, drawing out the music’s tumultuous resonances from my memory and setting them dancing in the open air, art and nature joining hands in an unexpected post-concert bonus!

NOYE’S FLUDDE – Delitable in alle wise and a ful gret joie!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul presents:
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – Noye’s Fludde  – Opera in One Act (based on the 15th-Century Chester “Mystery” Play)

Stage Director: Jacqueline Coats
Musical Director: Michael Stewart
Production Manager: George O’Donnell
Stage Manager: Boo Pantoja-Frost
Stage Hands: April and Cara Tan

Cast: Robert Tucker – Noye
Maaike Christie-Beekman – Mrs Noye
Joshua Jamieson – Voice of God
Alexander Stewart – Sem
William Edgecombe – Ham
Blythe Dennison – Jaffett
Eleanor Stanton – Mrs Sem
Zoe Stewart – Mrs Ham
Fiona Liu – Mrs Jaffett
Gossips – Margaux Astrid Detera, Alice Carter, Varsha Ranganathan.
Mischa Thomson. Shenaya Pieries
Phoebe Cassin  – Raven
Ruby Millen-Ingram  – Dove

Orchestra: Solo String Quintet: Christine Wang, Emma Barron (violins),
Sophia Acheson (viola), Eleanor Carter (‘cello)
Malcolm Struthers (double-bass)
Piano Duet:  Kathryn Mosley, Max Toth
Solo Recorder: Kamala Bain
Principal Trumpet: Mark Carter
Organ:  Tom Chatterton
Principal Percussion: Laurence Reese

Handbell Choir of Samuel Marsden Collegiate School (director: Marian Campbell)

Children’s chorus and instrumentalists

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul,
Molesworth St, Thorndon, Wellington
Friday 17th October 2025

“Delightful in every way” was the unsolicited comment made to me straightaway by a fellow-audience member after we’d finished enthusiastically applauding the efforts of the singers and instrumentalists at Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul earlier this evening in a performance of Benjamin Britten’s one-act opera “Noye’s Fludde”.

My first long-ago encounter with this work “live” was as a performer – as a percussionist in the orchestra in a Palmerston North church – and for me there have been a handful of occasions since, though always as an audience member.  One of these  took place in the actual heart of Benjamin Britten country, when I attended the Aldeburgh Festival of 1994! – and how disappointing amid all that excitement then, when the festival organisers that year chose for whatever reason not to follow the composer’s directive that Noye’s Fludde be always performed in a church, by staging the opera in the Maltings concert-hall, famed for its acoustic, but as untheatrical a venue as one could get, certainly to the work’s disadvantage!

The much earlier excitement of taking part in that first performance has never left me; but this evening’s most recent encounter had a similar kind of participatory joy which seemed to include everybody , one which has pushed sleep for the moment  into the background while I savour once again the sheer, undiluted engagement of it all, singers and players inhabiting and filling up the shared physical spaces with gloriously  tangible sounds. And, of course the Cathedral’s generous acoustic responded readily to our own audience efforts vis-à-vis the composer’s directive that we raise our own voices in three of the hymns whose exhortations became part and parcel of the famous story.

Along with the acoustic, the cathedral’s spacious physical surroundings helped define the epic nature of Noye’s and his intrepid companions’ undertaking, via a spectacular backdrop screen depicting aspects of the “Fludde”, adding a truly visceral component to the proceedings, a “window” of the devastation wrought upon the outside world that those in the “shippe” had been spared – Matthew Lawrence’s animations were in places splendidly palpable!  Umbrellas and tarpaulins added to the flavour of director Jacqueline Coats’s choreographing of the perils of the voyage,  aptly emphasising both the physical stresses and anxieties of the shippe’s company, as did our joining in with the singing of “For Those in Peril on the Sea” throughout the weather’s most threatening moments!

Earlier in the story we had relished the gathering of all the “Beastes” wearing all kinds of masks, and summoned from all different parts of the Cathedral by bugle calls, running up to fill the vessel whilst singing their “Kyrie eleisons” – delightful! Though the venue’s spaciousness told against the clarity of the younger voices’ various solos at times, all fronted up and delivered with committed expressions and gesturings – and we had in our generously-appointed programmes practically all of the words (an inspired touch, and with enough available light for us to be able to read and keep track of the essential message!)

As diverting in a completely different way was the interaction between Noye and his recalcitrant wife, who refused to board the boat despite the entreaties of her family members, preferring the company of her “gossips”, and their fondness for carousing together, a situation solved when the “gossips” were graphically swept away by the floodwaters and the sons manoeuvred their mother on board just in time! Robert Tucker as Noye and Maiike Christie-Beekman as Mrs Noye were each superbly dramatic and sonorous-voiced in conflict, Noye endless pleading, and his wife finally capitulating after delivering a resounding slap to her husband’s face!

Right at the work’s very beginning one’s sensibilities were galvanised, with reverberating orchestral chords magnificently bolstered by the percussion – we ourselves felt almost fearful amid such an onslaught while singing “Lord Jesus think on me”! – one which then led to the voice of God magnificently rolling about the vistas, impressively intoned by Joshua Jamieson (not visible from where I was sitting, but an all-pervading presence), his utterances strongly underpinned by timpanist Larry Reese and his percussive cohorts! Then, at the work’s other end were the manifold beauties of a newly-redeemed world, coloured by memorable orchestral contributions, lump-in-throat delicacies of colour and texture for us to sit and wonder at – and how resonant the characterisations of the two birds sent by Noah to spy out the land! –  Phoebe Cassin’s Raven with deliciously slinky ‘cello tones from Eleanor Carter’s ‘cello, and Ruby Millen-Ingram’s dove voiced and danced by Kamala Bain’s dulcet recorder-chirpings, each one supported by Kathryn Mosley’s and Max Toth’s nimble piano-playing.

It all came together with the emergence from the shippe of the intrepid survivors, and the appearance of the rainbow on the screen – the breaking out of repeated “Alleluias” amongst the singers, accompanied by the Samuel Marsden Collegiate Handbell Choir’s instruments, along with those aforementioned redemptive orchestral sounds from the entire company, was simply transformational, as the composer would have intended, the spaces alive with hope for a better world, which, of course couldn’t be more apt in humanity’s presently parlous state around the globe, and to which we were all able to give tongue with our final bugle-accompanied hymn verses.

Special mentions, of course, are due to director Jacqueline Coats for bringing out so effectively and tellingly those essential inclusive elements of the presentation that treated its audience as true participants rather than mere spectators (something I felt manifestly lacking all those years ago at Aldeburgh itself!). And instrumental in the application of these goals was the musical direction of Michael Stewart, both as a kind of affable Master of Ceremonies and as a committed director of the musical and dramatic flow of the presentation. Both of these people brought out what I thought were the most positive aspects of the venue, enabling the work itself to speak well-nigh unimpeded and enhance its relevance for today. Goodness knows our humanity needs such things now as much as it ever did, both for our sustenance and positive continuation.

 

 

Impactful Shostakovich unpacked -The New Zealand String Quartet and the Ghost Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SHOSTAKOVICH UNPACKED
New Zealand String Quartet  / Ghost Trio

String Quartet No. 4 in D Major Op.83 (1949)
New Zealand String Quartet ; Peter Clark (violin) / Arna Morton (guest violinist)
Gillian Ansell (Viola) / Callum Hall (guest ‘cellist)

Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano (arr. Lev Atovmian, 1955)
Peter Clark and Monique Lapins (violins) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor Op 67 (1943-44)
Ghost Trio: Monique Lapins (violin) / Ken Ichinose (‘cello) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

With: ROBERT BURCH (1929-2007) – Essay to the Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich for
‘cello and piano (1975)  Callum Hall (‘cello) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Wellington
Wednesday, Ist October 2025

Part of a welcome (and essential) commemoration here in Wellington of the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has been “Shostakovich Unpacked”, a four-part series of concerts exploring some of the composer’s chamber music masterpieces. This was the third concert in the New Zealand String Quartet’s series which presents five of the composer’s fifteen string quartets along with various other chamber works from similar periods in Shostakovich’s creative life, much of which met by official disapproval, and for a time in the form of censure from no less threatening a figure than the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

I couldn’t make it to the two earlier concerts in the series; and after listening to the ensemble’s superbly-wrought reading of Shostakovich’s Fourth Quartet found myself wishing I had moved more sizeable portions of heaven and earth to try and do so! Still, gratitude for what one has and can do is a marvellous thing on its own terms – and the music-making in this evening’s concert was of an order that one was left to marvel at in astonishment! And, it was little short of luxury casting to have TWO ensembles of such quality performing in the same programme, with the added bonus of items featuring members of each group displaying as much enjoyment in the collaborations as the skills required to successfully bring them off.

I particularly enjoyed the contributions made by the two “guest” players in the NZSQ, each notable for their “blending into” the overall textures as for their individual voices, always alive to the potentialities of each phrase they articulated. Arna Morton’s violin sturdily and ambiently partnered leader Peter Clark’s instrument throughout the folksy first movement, while taking her instrument’s mosaic-like opportunities throughout the rest of the work with great surety. Callum Hall’s ‘cello had more opportunities for its solo voice to shine, repeatedly catching the ear with both rhythmic and lyrical enactments of resounding character. Both players seemed for the occasion a glove-like fit into the ensemble’s realisation of a work from a composer whose personal expressions of ideological belief frequently collided with censorious officialdom at the highest (and potentially deadliest) level.

Shostakovich wrote this quartet on a “high” after having attended as an official Soviet spokesman (amazingly, at the directive of Stalin himself) the “Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace” held in New York in March of 1949. Stalin also revoked a previous (1948) ban on the music of “formalist composers” in order to cast the visit of his “representative” to the US in a more positive light. Obviously emboldened by this, Shostakovich had straightaway begun work on the quartet on returning home in April, and finished it before the year was out. Five months later, after intense rehearsals and soul-searchings, the work was privately performed by the composer’s favourite Quartet, the Beethoven Quartet, to an invited audience, whose members immediately expressed alarm at the new work’s ostensible use of Jewish musical idioms. The upshot was that Shostakovich was persuaded to withhold the first public performance and wait “for better times” – which came with the death of Stalin in 1953, and the work’s premiere in December of that year. By this time, the composer’s cynicism at the “new era” was apparent, writing to a friend, “The times are new, but the informers are old”.

All of this history seemed of little concern as the work’s heartwarming introductory sounds were initially launched by the players – a lovely lyrical ambience whose trajectories first suggested something exotically folkish, almost bagpipe-like, with the droning lines of viola and ‘cello underpinning the rhapsodical outpourings of the two violins – tensions arose between the increasingly insistent, sometimes dissonant voices, before shifting harmonies brought viola and ‘cello into the discourse – a more sombre minor-key shift brings meanderings, a hint of a dance and a brief  return to drone-accompanied lyricism at the movement’s end. The Andantino’s first 4-note phrase on the violin straightaway had me thinking “Tchaikovsky”, but not the rest, an intensely-wrought waltz with the ‘cello silent until the player reintroduced the same “Tchaikovsky” theme  – the intensities rose and fell, with Peter Clark’s violin sounding a beautifully “covered” tone replicated by his companions, and  falling gradually away to echoed remembrances of what had gone before.

A gorgeously “chugging” figure introduced the Allegretto, Callum Hall’s ‘cello leading off with a workmanlike theme repeated by the violin, followed by a whimsical unison “trio” of violin viola and ‘cello, the ambience being of a ghostly kind of “night ride” that was then cranked up by the violin’s Jog-trot rhythms (Shostakovich paid a visit by Rossini?) and with wind-blown chromatic figurations introducing an eerie aspect to the journey. Where it eventually took us was to somewhere akin to Robert Schumann’s renowned “other realms” description of worlds of hitherto unexplored experience, a state of being often requiring courage and steadfastness for both performer and listener. Here Gillian Ansell’s viola was the ideal fulcrum for such action, a voice in the midst of the void inviting others to plunge with her into the throes of one of the composer’s most challenging, and in the circumstances, reckless undertakings.

With several audaciously delivered pizzicato chords the introduction to the finale revealed its creator’s raison d’etre for the work, which gradually built up from its robust, truculent beginnings into a kind of danse macabre drawn from Jewish-sounding dance motifs, an unbridled and unashamedly grotesque outpouring of lament in a similar vein to that sounded by the composer’s Second Piano Trio finale. It was no wonder that the work’s first private audience was disturbed at Shostakovich’s apparent insensibility to potential strife and condemnation with this music – its scale was almost orchestral in places, with powerful unisons, sharp accents, and massive chordings, all of which eventually unravelled to leave mere vestiges of desolation for us to marvel over at the music’s end.

Not in the above written order, the programme’s next item was, appropriately enough, a work written in 1975 by a little-known but still significant New Zealand composer, Robert Burch, as “An Essay to the Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich, for ‘cello and piano”, performed by Callum Hall and Gabriela Glapska, one introduced and preluded by Peter Clark, who read an additional posthumous word-tribute by Burch to his illustrious fellow-composer.

Much of the work was not inappropriately sombre, beginning with heavy introductory unison notes from both instruments, stern exchanges, either in unison between piano and ‘cello or in counterpoint with one another. The mood remained serious and studious at first, occasionally highlighting a particular rhythmic five-single-note figure on both instruments – a passage with the cello played pizzicato followed, as did afterwards an almost ad lib section, the cellist bouncing the bow on the instrument’s strings by way of advancing the theme in a different form. The piano suddenly embarked on a convoluted, rhythmically rugged expansion of the thematic material before taking up a fugue-like passage which the cello interrupted, again with the abrupt five-note passage. After a series of forceful chords from the piano, the instruments seem to enter into some kind of collusion, the ‘cello sounding long-breathed lines and Elgar-like pizzicato chordings, to which the piano replied with gently luminous harmonies in the higher registers, the cello continuing to draw out the five-note patternings in more contentedly-expressed terms of acceptance of the piano’s celestial-sounding representations.

In view of Shostakovich’s well-documented sense of somewhat ironic humour, it was appropriate to have some musical representation of his facility in this respect, with ample proof furnished by a performance of several pieces arranged for two violins and piano drawn from the composer’s various suites of “lighter” music for film and other “incidental music” activities. One of his composer-friends, Lev Atovmian, was frequently assigned by Shostakovich to produce arrangements from several of his stage and film scores, one of which was the collection Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano. I must admit to enjoying looking further into the individual pieces’ genesis (at the risk of further elongating this review!) – the opening Prelude was from the 1955 film score The Gadfly, a mixture of tenderness and ebullience which the players designated with considerable relish. Then came the Gavotte, lovely and “bouncy”, from incidental music to The Human Comedy (1934), and followed by a poignant Elegy from the same work, a sequence originally titled The Panorama of Paris. The succeeding Waltz, supposedly from music for a cartoon film The Tale of the Priest and his servant Balda moved by turns through tense, insinuating and buoyant sequences involving a pompous priest, his beautiful daughter and a resourceful servant – however, the concluding Polka certainly added to its interest with further clarification as to the source –  taken from the Ballet The Limpid Stream, its full title was Dance of the Milkmaid and the Tractor Driver.  (Surely no commentator would pass on an opportunity for such a colourful mention!)

It almost goes without saying that violinists Peter Clark and Monique Lapins, together with pianist Gabriela Glapska, all readily brought out the fun, the quirkiness and the tongue-in-cheek sentimentality of these pieces, making the presentations as much fun to watch as to listen to. Other qualities far removed from such innocent enjoyments, and ironically involving two of the same performers here, then took over the final part of the programme. This marked the appearance of the “other” ensemble, the Ghost Trio, in which Monique Lapins and Gabriela Glapska were joined by ‘cellist Ken Ichinose for a performance of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, one of the composer’s defining statements concerning, in Gabriela Glapska’s own moving notes about the music, “both intimate grief and the collective trauma of a war-torn nation”.

It was my privilege to have heard the same Ghost Trio play this work less than six weeks ago, at a concert at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, to simply overwhelming effect on that occasion  – https://middle-c.org/2025/08/ghost-trios-st-andrews-concert-haunts-the-memory/ –  I don’t propose to try and describe the music all over again, merely to report on the effect I thought the work and its performance had on a different audience. When experiencing the work alongside other music by Shostakovich I felt it made a different kind of impact for me, its “shock effect”  no longer as marked, but when performed in the wake of something like the Quartet, having a deeper, more lasting sense of unease at the enormity and insidious  power of the forces that were obviously arrayed all about the composer’s world in order to keep in place a status quo of power and control – in this case characterised by fear and terror enacted upon any refusing to co-operate. I thought the St.Andrew’s acoustic more responsive to the music as well, where every sliver of impulse seemed to send shock waves in all directions – the ambiences of the Prefab Hall made, I thought, the work’s impact a tad more diffuse, though a second hearing can easily produce variants, musicians being human beings. Though, in short, less of a “knockout” performance for me this time round, the Trio further intensified my awe and respect for the composer in this music and for the people who put themselves “on the line” to bring these works off with such searing commitment!

As did the rest of the programme – a great success for all concerned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beauty, grace, wit, adventure and excitement – the Aroha String Quartet and friends

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Aroha String Quartet and friends                                                                         Photo: Zhongxian Jin              Back row: Nick Walshe (clarinet), Justin Sun (bassoon), Alexander Hambleton (horn),  Oleksandr Gunchenko (double bass)
Front Row: Robert Ibell (‘cello), Haihong Liu (violin) Konstanze Artmann (violin), Zhongxian Jin (viola)

MOZART – String Quartet No.22 in B-flat K.589
NIELSEN – Serenata in Vano FS 68, for Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, ‘Cello and Double-Bass
SCHUBERT – Octet in F Major D.803. for String Quartet, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn and Double-Bass

The Aroha Quartet: Haihong Liu (leader) and Konstanze Artmann, violins,  Zhongxian Jin, viola, Robert Ibell, ‘cello
– with Nick Walshe, clarinet / Justin Sun, bassoon / Alexander Hambleton, horn / Oleksandr Gunchenko, double-bass

St.Peter’s Church, Willis St., Wellington
Sunday, 28th September, 2025

Is there a venue in Wellington for chamber music that surpasses in ambient warmth and atmosphere the gorgeously-appointed “St. Peter’s-on-Willis” (to use the name aligned with that long-given to the well-known “St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace” church in the same city)?  From the moment the players of the Aroha Quartet put their bows on the strings of their instruments to begin Mozart’s adorable String Quartet in B-flat K.589, I immediately felt I was being drawn into a kind of seventh-heaven of existential bliss, one which continued for me right through the work.

As much as it was the music itself, I was particularly taken with the sound-quality of both the individual strands and the concerted blends emanating from the players. Perhaps it was at least due in equal parts to a chemistry of delight in encountering a work by Mozart that I’d never before heard (yes, really! – for some reason all my attention had been “snaffled” by the composer’s string quintets up to this point in time!) – If this was indeed a baptism of sorts, it couldn’t have taken place in an environment more conducive to enchantment of the kind that overtakes its listeners in situ, and in most instances for some time afterwards.

The other two works of the programme generated delights of a different order – in the case of the Nielsen Serenade I had already made the acquaintance of the composer’s obvious delight in wind instruments through his wondrous Wind Quintet, a work replete with the energies, drolleries and wry acceptances of life that were  on show in the brief but totally engaging “Serenata in vano”. After this, nothing could have surpassed the “all brought together” perfection of the programme with Schubert’s chamber masterpiece, the mighty Octet, casting its spell over all and sundry.

It was the Mozart work which worked the first magic of the afternoon, however –  such effortless lyricism, and with so many beautiful exchanges generating what seemed like cascades of joyously lyrical enjoyment amongst those voices, all performed with the lightest and deftest of touches by the players. The pairings of violin and ‘cello, of viola and ‘cello and then of the two violins throughout the exposition brought near-endless delight, the plunge into the development section underlining the minor-key change of atmosphere and the recapitulation enriching the interactions with tendrils of phrasing shared between the instruments, the ‘cello often playing higher than the others and the viola getting significant “running” lines to emphasise the music’s “shared” character.

The larghetto slow movement began with the ‘cello taking the theme, sensitively voiced by Robert Ibell, and winsomely replied to by the first violinist Haihong Liu, though all the players had the chance to shine with individually elaborated series of alternated downward runs throughout the movement.  Again, the passagework was exquisitely decorated and interactive, a quality noticed by the publisher Artaria, who in 1791 referred to these particular works as “concertante quartets”).

Many commentators have remarked upon the Minuet and Trio as being the most vital and progressive part of the work – its “Moderato” marking gives the music room for a decorative aspect which the players here relished to the full, the Quartet leader Haihong Liu in particular exhibiting passages of exquisitely-finished fingerwork. The Trio seemed even more “possessed” by a faery spirit bent upon evoking mischievous endeavours, the players taken to extended realms by the music’s whims of fancy, with fingers, bowing arms and sensibilities all put through their paces!

A carefree spirit as well informed the finale’s 6/8 allegro assai, rather more in the typically Mozartean manner, though with a few twists and turns along the way, some stop-start  harmonic recalibrations, and a few manic trajectoried variants, just for the fun of doing encouraging players to do them! But I thought the nicest touch was at the end where the music shaped up to a conventional tonic/dominant couple of concluding chords, before completely disarming all expectations with a sudden, gently terra firma-engaging concluding phrase!  The general sigh of pleasure at that point, both inward and outward, was palpable!

What a treat to get a (for me!) hitherto unknown piece by the irrepressible Carl Nielsen! While not all of his music is “comfortable” to listen to (some works, like the Fifth Symphony and the Wind Quintet, are glorious, and others, such as the Clarinet Concerto, are just plain irascible!), this little “Serenata in Vano” quintet brings out what the composer’s great contemporary, Jean Sibelius, described in a posthumous tribute to Nielsen as having “head and heart….in the highest degree”. It’s the humanity of this droll portrait that one essentially responds to – that of a group of musicians attempting to serenade a lady, to “lure the fair one out onto the balcony” (in Nielsen’s own words), but without success! – (“in Vano” – in Vain!) – and their subsequent “Oh, well….” kind of reaction, in which they “shuffle off home” is a particularly treasurable moment! It’s worth noting that, included in the ensemble was Robert Ibell’s ‘cello and Aleksandr Gunchenko’s double-bass, each of whom still managed to vividly convey a sense of “to-ing and-fro-ing” despite their barely transportable instruments!

And so we came to the raison d’etre of the concert, Schubert’s justly-famous Octet, the St.Peter’s acoustic as readily amenable to the sounds as it had been to that of the string quartet’s glorious outpourings  I wondered, as the players took their places, whether the strings’ balance of texture in the whole might be affected for us by their facing sideways in the ensemble rather than outward, but the sound, from where I was sitting, seemed in accord with what one expected to hear – from my seat I couldn’t see either Konstanze Artmann’s violin or Zhongxian Jin’s viola being played, but I could hear and appreciate both of their contributions clearly.

Along with the thriil of that first, arresting chord is the great moment when the allegro begins with an upward-thrusting unison, one which really sets the adventure on its path. Tempi are swift, here, with that same “gossamer” effect in the playing I noticed in the Mozart, the work varying between these diaphanous interactions and powerful unison statements to hold the movement’s “thrust” together. The solos were invariably superbly-turned, with Haihong Liu’s violin and Nick Walshe’s clarinet centre-stage for much of the time (in the latter’s case unsurprisingly as it was a clarinettist, Count Ferdinand von Troyer, who commissioned the work and played in its first performance).

The voices took both their concerted and solo opportunities – there was a lovely becalmed “trio” effect from clarinet, bassoon and horn in tandem just before the movement’s recapitulation, and both Justin Sun’s bassoon and Zhongxian Jin’s viola were heard by turns relishing their advancement of the theme as the trajectories took up again and flowed swiftly onwards. Alexander Hambleton’s horn’s brief “bloop” at one point was worth the expression on the player’s face in the aftermath, especially in light of the terrific playing elsewhere, the same player, for example making much of the “hunting-call” theme in the affecting solo just before the movement’s conclusion.

Clarinet and violin acted as “empathetic companions”  for much of the slow movement, such as in a beautiful unison passage leading back to the main theme’s return, after which numerous other solo “turns” played their part in the movement’s beauty of utterance. And then, what a contrast with the ebullient Scherzo! – the players here relished the dynamic contrasts of the exchanges, and brought out the insouciant character of the “whistling tune”  to suitably carefree effect. delivered even more insouciantly, more characterfully carefree. I liked the Trio’s determinedly po-faced  response, Robert Ibell’s cello bringing out the quasi-academic lines with plenty of “keep up” nudgings and encouragings.

The Andante variation movement at first seemed like a series of charming interludes until Schubert suddenly took the music into unrelated, more stratospheric realms, courtesy of strings playing in their upper registers and the winds  floating their lines as if beholding hitherto undiscovered territories! – fascinating! The music seemed then to almost regretfully retreat from these hints of an Elysium somewhere above, lingering for a few seconds before settling back down to more earthy pleasures, with versions of scamperings, gurglings and gentle rumbustifications, ready for the Menuetto. Here, the players make it “swing” and dance in a properly homecoming kind of way (with a very “gemachlicht” kind of Trio to reinforce the mood!).

All the more extraordinary the finale’s opening, then, replete with disturbing tremolandi and baleful chords – so theatrical in effect, yet suggesting  a personal darkness that’s somehow escaped its composer’s inner realms and made its presence felt. It leaves the following Allegro by-and-large cheerful, but with moments of anxiety (manic triplet passages from both violin and clarinet here and later), and eventually drawing us back into proximity with the movement’s opening Void-like darkness, breaking through once again  thrown into prominence at the movement’s beginning. Schubert’s response is to give voice to words he himself had written in a letter, and finish the work with joyful energies, vibrantly expressed by this performance – “When I would sing of love it turned to pain. And again when I would sing of pain it turned to love.”

O FORTUNA – a sacred and profane Wellington/Auckland choral spectacular!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

LEONARD  BERNSTEIN – Chichester Psalms
CARL ORFF – Carmina Burana
Emma Pearson (soprano), Coco Diaz (counter-tenor), James Harrison (baritone)
Jian Liu, Diedre Irons (pianos)
Auckland Choral (Uwe Grodd, Music Director)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington (Brent Stewart, Music Director)
Wellington Brass Band (David Bremner (Music Director)
Brent Stewart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 27th September 2025

Palpable excitement was in the air regarding the Orpheus Choir’s September 2025 concert at Wellington’s  Michael Fowler Centre, featuring as it did the ever-popular choral classic by Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, and coupled with a lesser-known but up-and-coming classic from the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. What gave the concert even more added interest was the double novelty of the Orpheus Choir  being joined by a second choir, Auckland Choral, and being accompanied in Carmina Burana by a brass band instead of the usual symphony orchestra. Together these ingredients gave the prospect of attending such a concert the kind of aura and excitement one recalled from festival events in previous years, an atmosphere palpably alive from the evening’s beginning in both the foyer and auditorium.

Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms  was composed as the result of a commission from the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, the Rev. Walter Hussey, who over the years successfully commissioned no less than eleven significant works from various well-known composers, failing only in his attempts to procure a work from Igor Stravinsky in 1968! Hussey had actually suggested to Bernstein that a Psalm setting  with “more than a hint of “West Side Story” about the music” would be more than welcome; and after some initial misgivings Bernstein became inspired by the Psalm-setting idea, producing in 1965 a work in three movements, to be sung in Hebrew. Its first performance was in New York in July of that year, with the composer conducting, after which came the Chichester Festival’s opening later that month. Bernstein did come to Chichester for the opening but declined to conduct, saying he wanted to hear it “as an audience member”. The success of that occasion was instrumental in inspiring  several more commissions by Walter Hussey for future Chichester festivals, from composers  William Walton, Lennox Berkeley and the American William Albright.

Here in Wellington the combination of the two choirs galvanised the openings of each of the works programmed in a manner each composer surely intended. The Hebrew words of the Chichester Psalms were translated for us in English surtitles, beginning with the declamatory “Awake, Psaltery and Harp” and with percussion and  piano adding to the clamour and excitement of the words. The composer, heedful of his commissioner’s comments referring to “West Side Story” set the following words from Psalm 100 “Make a joyful noise unto the world all ye lands” in a catchy, and in places percussive 7/4 metre, the angularities pointed by the voices and pianists with gusto!

Though I had heard the work only once before, I remembered well the plaintive solo contribution to the second movement with its distinctively “bluesy” flattened note in the melody line – suddenly there it was, in the guise of a memory awakened! From Psalm 23  “The Lord is my Shepherd – I shall not want”, with Coco Diaz’s haunting voice then joined by the choir’s female voices. The choir’s male voices then broke in with sharply-accented cries – “Why do the nations rage?” – similarly sharp, heavy accents rhythms underpinned the women’s voices, until the tenor soloist re-entered singing the words “Surely goodness and mercy”, and with the same  affecting “flattened note line” at the words “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord” – so lovely!

At this point something went awry with one of the lower platforms near the players, as if someone had dropped something percussive, making what seemed like an unscheduled entry!  – but all continued, with composure only briefly shaken and then restored – the pianists played an extraordinarily anxious and fretful sequence – by turns lamenting, brooding, fretting, and sorrowing – until the men’s voices entered with a gently lullabic  Psalm 131  – “Lord, my head is not haughty, nor my eye lofty”, , which the women’s voices joined in semi-canonic fashion, the groups approximating rather than replicating each other’s  utterances, until, joining together, the voices sang the same melody wordlessly (all of this was done in a deliciously improvisatory-sounding 10/4 rocking metre).

In conclusion, the voices turned to Psalm 133  – “Behold, how good and how pleasant it for people to dwell together in unity” unaccompanied, except for the concluding “Amen” – sentiments which, in view of the language used by the work would have resonated in a multitude of ways with many present, mindful of the present day-and-age goings on of the outside world.

Plenty of sober reflection then, to take into the interval and then, upon returning, worlds of difference to encounter!  –  this was Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”, representative of a long-since departed age’s outrageously expressed declarations of defiance and disdain in the face of the supposed spiritual and social hegemony of the church at that time, here in the form of verses written by the more dissident and dissolute representatives of the era, for our edification, centuries later! Oh, yes, and composer Carl Orff also had a hand (or two) in the latter parts of the process!

Having been familiar with the “traditional” choir and symphony orchestra mix in performances of this work for the last fifty years, I was ineffably curious as to how it would all turn out with the Wellington Brass Band in attendance instead!  The opening “O Fortuna” was predictably magnificent, as was the following “Fortune plango vulnera”, both of which had plenty of full orchestra accompaniment in the originals. With the ‘Springtime’ songs the various individual instruments showed what they could do in imitation of normally-heard winds and strings, the first “Veris leta facies” beautifully sung and accompanied. Especially lovely was the second, “slow dance” from Part One, with beautifully “covered” brass notes and gorgeously deep trajectories, seductive in their way. And the beautiful “Chume, Chum, geselle min” featured a gorgeous flute-like solo as well as exquisite singing. Of course the final “Spring movement” Were din werlt alle min” with the “made-to-order” brass fanfares were dispatched by this ensemble and the voices with great pizzazz!

“In Taberna”   began with a clarion call and crash, the instruments pushing the dotted rhythms excitingly along in support of the singer, creating a striking contrast with the fantastic “Olim Iacus colueram”, the grotesque “roasted-swan” song for counter-tenor solo – the scene’s eeriness palpably wrought by the singing and playing as the singer was “turned on the spit” and “basted” by serving-wenches!

The band revelled in the other “tavern” scenarios, particularly the percussive interjections during the Abbott’s plaintive lament “Ego sum abbas”, and the exciting running trajectories in the “In Taberna quando sumus” – it was “Oompah!” with a vengeance, in places!

Among the enchantments of this performance were the brass instruments sounding almost like the winds they were replacing, particularly so in “Amor volat undique” (Love flies everywhere) supporting the children’s choir and the soprano, particularly in the latter’s enchanting “Siqua sine socio” – and the accompaniment of the soprano’s beautiful “Stetit puella” (There stood a young girl) – Emma Pearson everything one could wish for vocally, here! – gave us aural ambiences that were almost unworldly in terms of their beauty.

As for the pianists. Diedre Irons and Jian Liu,  along with the various other percussionists, they were heroes in terms of rhythmic precision, thematic networking and colouristic variety, picking up on each of the score’s different parts its special character, and adapting according to the season, the time of day, the locale and the different emotions in the music which flash or float by, linger or depart, proclaim or insinuate. Together with the band, and at the varied and persuasive instigations of their conductor Brent Stewart they marvellously realised the patchwork of qualities which make up this ever-fascinating work.

All of the solo singers gave what seemed  their utmost to their different roles – James Harrison’s baritone seemed to “fill out” as the work progressed, at his best in the “Ego sum abbas”, (where he enjoyed his touch of play-acting, collapsing on his chair) and at “Dies nox et omnia” (Day, night, and all the World), making a feature of the “falsetto” parts of his recitative and answering in his lower register with real authority. Countertenor Coco Diaz’s “Roasted swan” scene was almost a showstopper in its blend of picturesque timbral ambience and theatricality – a brilliant idea to have him being turned on a kind of “spit” as he lamented his fate! As for Emma Pearson, she enchanted from the moment of her entrance, at “Siqua sine socio” (If a girl lacks a partner”), and came into her own in terms of sheer vocal beauty at “In Trutina mentis dubia” (In the scales of my wavering indecision). The highest notes of the following “Dulcissimi” were effortful compared with the rest, but nevertheless conveyed a kind of “emotion in extremis” pinnacle to which everything had inevitably been brought.

As for the choirs themselves, the Children’s Choir, comprised of singers from  Samuel Marsden Collegiate School and Scots College enchanted from its first utterance in “The Courts of Love” sequence, and enjoyed the innocent rumbustifications of “Tempus est iocundum” (Pleasant is the season). The rest was a truly concerted delivery of vocally sonic delight from two recognised bodies of singers performing as one, and galvanising an audience in doing so. Brent Stewart’s direction of all of this was unerringly focused on bringing out in his singers the work’s obvious strengths of articulation, tonal variety and human interest, so that we were satisfied in all aspects of audience experience. As any listener might, I “heard” some things differently at times, most obviously the faster-than-accustomed-to speeds of some of the concerted passages  challenging and at times even seeming to blur articulation of words – but such observations merely confirm this performance’s desire to challenge and stimulate those who attended to react and resound what was heard and experienced in the memory. Judging from the reactions of people I spoke with afterwards the occasion was a triumph – and it augurs well for the Orpheus’s return visit to Auckland for a further performance, as guests rather than as hosts. For the moment, in the wake of this initial performance, one raises one’s hands in salute of and acclamation for a mighty and most memorable presentation.