Month: November 2025

SHOSTAKOVICH – “unpacked” and emptied out – a life’s remarkable music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Estella Wallace introduces her new work “Of Sorrows” at the Prefab Hall, Wellington’s “Shostakovich Unpacked” – photo: Maeve O’Connell

SHOSTAKOVICH UNPACKED – Concert Series from the New Zealand String Quartet

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Quintet in G Minor Op. 57 (1940)
Sonata for Viola and Piano Op.147 (1975)

ESTELLA WALLACE – Of Sorrows, for String Quartet (2025)  – world premiere

Gillian Ansell (viola, New Zealand String Quartet)
Peter Clark (violin, New Zealand String  Quartet)
Anna Van Der Zee (guest violinist, New Zealand String Quartet)
Andrew Joyce (guest ‘cellist, New Zealand String Quartet)
Jian Liu, piano

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Wellington
Tuesday, 25th November, 2025

Shostakovich and his music have never before had it quite so good in Wellington New Zealand – throughout this year of years for the composer (the fiftieth anniversary of his death) his music has undergone an exploration of a concentrated focus not previously experienced to the same extent in the capital. I recall a few great Shostakovich moments from past NZSO concerts here – among them, Kurt Sanderling (in the Town Hall in 1981) conducting the composer’s Fifth Symphony, and Vasily Petrenko (at Michael Fowler) with the epic “Leningrad” Symphony – but these were drops in the ocean compared with the relative riches served up to us during 2025. Orchestra Wellington’s stunning Shostakovich season took in the first five symphonies and a shortened concert version of the composer’s notorious opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”  (sadly, the NZSO seemed to completely ignore the commemoration, even though given carte blanche regarding any of the ten remaining Shostakovich symphonies by Orchestra Wellington’s programming). As well, various chamber ensembles with players made up of both current and ex-New Zealand String Quartet members performed a number of the string quartets and several of the other chamber works. Yes, we could have done with some solo piano music as well (as far as I know Wellington awaits a first complete performance of the composer’s remarkable Op.87 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano) but one must instead be truly grateful for what we were enabled to receive! – in short, quite a year!

This evening’s concert in the New Zealand String Quartet’s enterprising “Shostakovich Unpacked” series gave us a delightful “bonus” item in the form of a new piece written by Estella Wallace, a student at Te Koki New Zealand School of Music, and the winner of a new “Finlayson Prize for Composition”. This competition was developed in partnership between the NZSM and SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, and sponsored by the Hon. Christopher Finlayson in the form of prize money and a number of professional development opportunities for the winner – composition students had been invited to create new works “inspired by or responding to” the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Estella Wallace herself introduced her work “Of Sorrows” to us at the concert’s beginning, speaking about her love of Shostakovich’s music in general, and her fascination with his Viola Sonata which we were to hear tonight. She talked about using fragments and themes from the music into her work, as well as her own responses to “the tension and sorrows” of the life he had lived. Her piece tread an adroitly-shaped path balanced between tension and melancholy right from its beginning with arresting opening chords reiterated to interrupt a violin recitative, and melodic lines that followed savaged by frenetic scherzo-like figurations, the thematic material coming thick and fast, via driving trajectories and wailing melody-lines. These gave way to eerily ambient chordings from sul ponticello violins, to which the viola joined, its melody darkly “coloured” by the other instruments – introspective and truly desolate –  bringing the work to a poignant conclusion. These thoughts – jotted down “on the run” – came, in the capable hands of the New Zealand String Quartet, from a powerful and deeply-engraved impression on this listener and on an appreciative audience at the end.

Perhaps it would have been even more appropriate to have played Wallace’s piece as a prelude to the Viola Sonata at the second half’s beginning  – still, in view of the frequent contrasts of mood in Shostakovich’s work as a whole, it did no violence to contrast this opening piece’s sobrieties with the Piano Quintet’s arresting and  flamboyantly ceremonial, neo-Baroque piano solo opening, here spectacularly and sonorously played by Jian Liu. The quartet of strings echoed the music’s declamatory splendour before setting off with the viola in attendance on a sombre waltz which, however, developed with the other instruments into a full-scale, almost epically-surging elaboration of the material of the kind the composer admired in intricate Baroque music but also felt as if it owed something to late-romantic fulsomeness!

The Fugue which followed, begun quietly by the strings and then joined by the piano, gradually became more impassioned, with the exchanges intensifying until the piano commandingly took centre-stage with a grand recitative statement followed by the other instruments in more conciliatory tones which brought our sensibilities closer to a sense of “peace”, possibly a reaction of the composer’s to the turmoil he experienced during  the years leading up to the Fifth Symphony. Towards the end the strings brought out a richly-phrased theme which, together with the piano, sighed, reiterated, grumbled, and then resounded with finality.

Next, the Allegretto Scherzo danced its way cheekily into the soundscape, its somewhat artless theme nevertheless keeping the music’s energies on task with (readily inverted) clarion calls, and ”shepherding” the music back from trio-sounding excursions into vortex-like episodes which rather alarmingly build up unwanted tensions until suddenly things were defused, and brought back in line – as the famed conductor Sir Thomas Beecham once observed in a different context, this music couldn’t help but give the idea, in places, as if a lot of yaks were there all jumping about!

The Intermezzo, marked Lento  brought pizzicato cello and arco violin  together, joined by the viola, tones invested with exquisitely-nuanced variety by Anna Van Der Zee’s solo violin and Gillian Ansell’s viola – then with Jian Liu’s piano as a patiently sonorous guide all the strings “grew” their figured  intensities in pairs, Peter Clark’s violin matching Anna Van Der Zee’s and Andrew Joyce’s ‘cello in complete accord with Gillian Ansell’s dusky utterances. And the “where to from here? question begun by a somewhat awry canonic sequence from the violins was of course resolved by the composer with the piano!

I simply adored the playing in this final movement –  the piano’s initial confidence and sparkle, the strings’ moments of chromatic unease, the fanfare-like surges of hope, the continued vacillations as the strings continued to wrestle with their doubts, the viola and ‘cello seemingly more confident at times  in a “come on” sort of way, and the piano always ready to rally the troops – the ending, when it came was like a musical smile of quiet relief, and certainly balm for tortured sensibilities…..a cherishable moment!

Gillian Ansell (viola) and Jian Liu (piano) play Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata – photo: Maeve O’Connell

And then, after the interval, we found ourselves suddenly transported to the composer’s “evening”, thirty-five years later, with his valedictory Viola Sonata. At various times Shostakovich had expressed a wish to write a viola sonata to go with  those for violin and cello that he had completed. He only just made it in relation to his failing health as he died in August 1975 shortly after the work was finished – he was able to tell its dedicatee, the violist Fyodor Druzhinin on July 5th 1975 that he had completed the work and sent it off to be published. The work was first performed privately at Shostakovich’s apartment on September 25th by Druizhinin, with pianist Mikhail Muntyan, and received its first public performance in October that same year from the same artists.

In her illuminating programme note Gillian Ansell told us what we needed to know regarding the music’s circumstances along with something of its character. Before beginning the performance she and Jian Liu demonstrated to us something of the significance of the composer’s frequent use in the work’s finale of recognisable phrases from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.

Although much of the composer’s later music was dark and pessimistic, this work is different, especially in the outer movements. The first movement of this work is marked Moderato, and was described by the composer as a “novella”, a description which suggests something smaller or reduced in scale, more concentrated. The opening pizzicato notes (recalling Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto), led to a soulful kind of dialogue between the instruments, gradually leading to a great mid-movement outburst – great “schwung from both players – one followed by the piano quoting the opening pizzicato notes nd the violin playing eerie sul ponticello tones. A strange, unsettling waltz-tune followed, leading to a cadenza which interspersed the opening pizzicato notes played arco, then returning to the pizzicato at the movement’s end.

The scherzo which followed used material from the composer’s unfinished opera “The Gamblers” – we enjoyed plenty of folkish “slides” and note-bending  in this sardonic and sometimes savage kind of “danse macabre” – a darkly sinister viola theme led to a kind of “trio” begun by great pizzicato and furthered by declamatory exchanges and an impassioned string solo before the dance returned, as volatile and ornery in places as before, and then gradually fading into indeterminant spaces.

The finale began with a beautifully-sustained string solo, capped off by soft pizzicato notes, out of which came the piano’s first, deeply-voiced three-note figurations  bringing to mind the spirit of Beethoven, and answered by the violin’s voicing of the “Moonlight” Sonata’s theme, simply the dotted phrase’s opening with (sometimes) the first rising note of its continuation, here repeated and varied continually. It was even brought into an impassioned cadenza, whose mood then took over the viola-and-piano exchanges, as if the composer was wrestling with demons rather than fond remembrances (with quotes from his symphonies and the Second Violin Concerto tumbling through the music), before giving up the struggle and accepting that all of this was, in fact, a farewell to life. How interesting that it was the unassuming viola to which Shostakovich had given pride of place to perform this momentous task!

This concert made a brilliant and fitting finale to the New Zealand String Quartet’s richly-crafted commemorative 2025 tribute in memory of the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most truly significant creative artists. Heartfelt bravos to all who contributed to bringing the music of Dmitri Shostakovich into such finely-crafted focus for all of us here to enjoy!

 

 

Music from Home and Abroad – for its time and for all time

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:

THE ARTIST REPENTS

VICTORIA KELLY – Requiem
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 5 In D Minor Op.47

Barbara Paterson – soprano
Alexander Lewis – tenor
The Tudor Consort
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei – conductor

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 22nd November, 2025

The sixth and final concert in Orchestra Wellington’s 2025 series The Dictator’s Shadow portrays a creative artist’s dilemma living and working in a regime seeking to curb individual artistic expression and freedom of speech, and while under severe duress producing a work which adroitly treads a path of compromise. Dmitri Shostakovich had fallen foul of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin with an opera, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” in 1936 which brought the full weight of displeasure upon the composer’s head via the Government’s official print-organ, the newspaper “Pravda”, which condemned the work and its performance on the basis of Stalin’s negative reaction to the production (ironically, since its premiere two years previously, “Lady Macbeth” had been a resounding success with the public and with officialdom!).

Reeling under the weight of the regime’s official expression of displeasure, Shostakovich had his opera withdrawn within two months of the “Pravda” article, and then did the same with his ballet “The Limpid Stream”, which was being performed at the time, and came under similar attack from the same source – while this was happening, he was writing his Fourth Symphony intending to have it performed, but was persuaded from doing so by friends and associates who heard the work in rehearsal and feared for the composer’s safety if the performance went ahead. Shostakovich complied with the advice and turned, not to an ostentatiously patriotic cantata or regime-praising ode, but to yet another symphony, one, however, that came to have bestowed upon it the famous byline (whether from the composer himself or another commentator is uncertain) “A Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism”.

The work’s reception, in November 1937 could possibly have saved Shostakovich’s skin, judging by the fate of some of his friends and colleagues whose activities had similarly displeased Stalin at around this time. It addressed all of “Pravda’s” criticisms regarding the composer’s previous efforts – the music was tonal, with simple, direct language, its form was classical, with easily-discernable themes, and it ended on a positive note, in fact with a triumphant fanfare-like apotheosis. Shostakovich said later in private that the music for the finale was a kind of satire, with a hollow exuberance glorifying the dictator. One of the composer’s biographers, Elizabeth Wilson, aptly characterised the situation for Shostakovich, commenting that in this music “he had found a way to be truthful for those who had ears to listen.”

All of this was here laid aside for the concert’s second half, as the evening’s opening item confronted us with a vastly different work in many ways – New Zealand composer VIctoria Kelly’s 2023 Requiem, for soprano, tenor, mixed choir and orchestra. In her programme notes she calls the work “a secular contemplation of life and mortality”, using texts from five New Zealand poems, alongside word-fragments of the text for the Latin Requiem Mass. We were fortunate to have the composer’s presence at the concert, emanating as vibrant a force in person when acknowledging the applause and the efforts of the musicians as had her music done that we’d heard.

Kelly wrote the work in response to the deaths of her parents, ten years apart, telling us that her music and the poets’ words were her responses to not being able herself to find “words for the events” bringing with them such loss and grief and all of their manifold associations. For her it took shape as a non-religious work. hence the “secular” poetry, but with connections to tradition briefly acknowledged (the word “Requiem” itself being an example). She talks of the poems as “filled with the wonder of nature, of grief and longing, of surrender and letting go”….

This work has already achieved fame, winning the SOUNZ Contemporary Award / Te Tohu Auaha at the 2023 APRA Silver Scrolls. I had the enthralling experience of watching the SOUNZ/RNZ film of the premiere performance at the Auckland Town Hall, given by the Auckland Philharmonia and conducted by Vincent Hardaker, with soloists Simon O’Neill and Jayne Tankersley, together with the Luminate Voices Women’s Chamber Choir and Lux Singers   – so I was in a sense prepared for tonight’s performance, while finding myself consumed with expectation as to how different it could sound with different performers!

What particularly transfixed my reactions to both performances were the solo singers in both cases – Kelly required the tenor in particular to sing in falsetto for much of the time, far above his natural register, wanting his voice to convey “vulnerability, hope and fear”, which Alexander Lewis certainly managed, though not as effectively as Simon O’Neill due to the latter being so closely-miked (as were both the Auckland soloists). In this latter performance both singers, though miked, were not as clearly projected – I could hear more of Barbara Paterson’s voice, though she, like her partner, struggled in places to be heard over instrumental and sometimes choral tones. We had the texts in our programmes, and I could read them, but still found them difficult to follow – and friends sitting elsewhere told me during the interval that it was too dark where they were sitting to make out the words on the page!

Having said all of this it struck me that the impact of the work as sound alone was conveying such a visceral impression, with orchestra and choir making music which, in Kelly’s own words  “ebbs and flows around the poetry”, that one could surrender readily to the degree one often experiences so exhilaratingly in opera where the singers’ voices are the catalysts for overwhelming emotion rather than the words’ “meaning” in a literal sense!  This in an almost animalistic way gave to us throughout the work so much of that “reaching for one another” sensation which Kelly described as creating “harmony” – here a kind of transcendent thing that didn’t need explaining, as so many great abstracted instrumental pieces of music do with their tones alone.

We were able, therefore, to “experience” those frissons of feeling described by the singer with the words “I stayed a minute – and the garden was full of voices” – the “language of earth” activated for our pleasure in the midst of sorrow! Likewise, we were taken, here tumultuously, with the ascending voices and percussive scintillations illustrating Sam Hunt’s lighthouse keeper manning the lights “to reappear among his polished stars”. Coincidentally, I had not long before heard John Rimmer’s beautiful instrumental realisation “Where Sea Meets Sky” using those same words by poet Ian Wedde as used here by Kelly, here poignantly continuing with the second part of the poem , in which friends long to embrace once more “between sea and sky”, to the accompaniment of the chorus’s beautiful “Libere eis de morte aeterna” (Free them from eternal death).

The voices began and continued Chloe Honum’s claustrophobic “Bright Death” with canonic “Lacrimosa, dies illa” phrases  accompanied by piteous oboe tones, the music inexorably and obsessively building towards grief-stricken utterance, before concluding with a quietly-voiced “Requiem”. And lastly, we felt a liberation of sorts with James K. Baxter’s “High Country Weather”, with spacious string and percussive texturings, and voices sounding like unfettered winds sweeping through the sky – the choir built great utterances from the word “Gloria” after which the silences surged softly backwards and forwards, allowing the soprano to intone the thoughts of a life in what seemed the throes of its finality, with the words “Surrender to the sky your heart of anger” marking a final acceptance of what is and will be. Barbara Paterson’s celestial soprano took us there unerringly and gratefully (with a quieter, less demonstrative, but just as needfully “present” voice as Jayne Tankersley’s), one which, along with the choral voices and instruments drifted through hypnotic repetitions of the word “surrender” and into the silence finally left by a single sustained instrumental note…

As much thoughtfulness as discussion (mostly regarding the solo voices and the different impression they made) seemed to absorb every moment of interval before resettling and proclaiming us ready for the Shostakovich symphony to follow. It proved a more than fitting finale to the composer’s “season”, with Marc Taddei and his well-versed forces bringing all the music’s sharply-focused accents, upholstered tonal weight and gait, and purposeful attitude to the fore throughout the first movement’s tense, playing-for-keeps utterances!  Those baleful brass calls splendidly activated the rest of the orchestral forces towards an allegro which in turn pushed the playing  excitingly into  the string reiteration of the opening – so gloriously wild and combatative! The big recitative-like unisons would have gladdened all hearts at that first performance (most likely for different reasons!) – but they were just the job, as were the great crashes leading to the flute-and-horn “appeasement” passages (with one or two slightly “blurped” brass notes here simply adding to the excitement!).

Then, what terrific attack we got from the lower strings at the Allegretto’s beginning! – such incredibly “engaged” playing from all the sections! And what a contrast with the Largo, with its real sense of “lament” (I read somewhere there were accounts of people at the first performance weeping during this movement!) – the performance made much of the contrast between the moments of tension and the hush of the more desolate sequences, Again one was made to think in various places of the “layered” agenda of the composer in giving the establishment what it thought it wanted!

As for the finale, its “enormous optimistic lift” referred to by most Soviet critics was here made more than palpable by the orchestra’s performance, the playing holding nothing back, its full-bloodedness a resounding indication of how officialdom’s faith in the composer’s  restoration of “all that is bright, clear, joyous, optimistic and life-affirming” would have been restored. And, of course, we also heard in this performance what other critics were able to discern at the time as “unsettled, sensitive, (and) evocative music” inspiring “gigantic conflict” – the same sounds which the composer reportedly referred to as “forced rejoicing”. Those massive concluding bass-drum strokes here at the work’s end continue, as they did at the time, to speak volumes in today’s world of enforced glorification and scarce toleration of views which dare to be different!

To Marc Taddei and his redoubtable Orchestra Wellington players I dips me lid in sincere tribute to their incredible collective artistic achievement throughout what has been a truly memorable season of music-making that’s exhibited both brilliance and depth – brilliance in the standard of execution, and depth in the explorations of music as a living entity of our human condition, be it a Requiem with a recognisably home-grown articulation of ritual from the orchestra’s resident (and native-born) composer Victoria Kelly,  or the music of a distant Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich which expressed attitudes and values out of step with those of the ruling powers, and initiated what potentially became a life-and-death struggle, one with wider implications for humanity at large. I look forward to the continued enrichment of music and music-making from these amazing artists with the advent of 2026.

 

NZSO’s Symphonic Dances concert explores Nature, Life and Love

Posted on by Peter Mechen

TABEA SQUIRE – Conversation of the Light-Ship and the Tide (World Premiere)
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV – Saxophone Concerto in E-flat Major Op 109
DARIUS MILHAUD – Scaramouche for saxophone and orchestra Op.165c
SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Symphonic Dances Op.45

Jess Gillam (alto saxophone)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Gemma New (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Thursday 20th November 2025

“Symphonic Dances” seemed an apt enough description of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s latest concert with inspirational Music Director Gemma New – however while listening to the concert  another title occurred to me, that of the well-known  “Nature, Life and Love” trilogy of orchestral Overtures completed by Antonin Dvorak. I thought it would make an apt key to characterising the programme we heard in the Michael Fowler Centre last evening, with star British saxophonist Jess Gillam taking a significant role in three of the four pieces we heard.

“Nature”, then, formed the basis of the concert’s opening item, a world premiere performance of music by Tabea Squire (b.1989 in Scotland, of Kiwi (NZ) and German parents). The work’s title “Conversation of the Light-ship and the Tide” reflected something of the composer’s multi-national origins, as it depicted the once-common practice of various Northern Hemisphere countries with coastlines too rugged and impassable for lighthouses to instead use “light-ships”, vessels containing warning lights who were moored close to any such hazards to warn any passing ships of the attendant dangers.

Tabea Squire’s music took us immediately to remote, unpeopled places, with sounds and impulses devoid of flesh-and-blood human activity – here were louring brass tones, percussive patternings and stark, almost pitiless wind-and-brass chords, made bleaker and more unremitting by undulating strings, whose occasional sul ponticello tones  further highlighted the isolation and loneliness of the seascape. Slowly the characters in this scenario emerged – the ship, bound, but patient and stoic, and the sea, with its near-limitless resources giving notice of its power while holding itself at first in reserve.

Clarinet and piccolo brought light and animation, the ship feeling the ocean’s all-encompassing but relatively static embrace and conveying its gratification, which the brasses at first seemed to confirm, though occasionally reminding the vessel of its tenuous grip upon oceanic tranquility – however, the winds’ ever-increasingly playful, and La Mer-like interactions with the strings which followed seemed to defy at first the disquiet of the increasingly baleful brass – but then, with the tocsin adding portentous soundings, the ocean finally voiced its displeasure and impatience, unleashing its dominance over the hapless ship. In the wake of the agitations a kind of cosmic balance seemed crucial and came with the winds’ restoration of serenity, with the strings’ stratospheric tones resounding in empathy as vessel and ocean retreated into silence.

With Jess Gillam’s superb alto saxophone playing “life” was definitely on the cards for both of the next two items, the Saxophone Concerto by Alexander Glazunov being a new piece for me, though I’d heard Darius Milhaud’s “Scaramouche” before played by two pianos. Glazunov wrote his concerto for Sigurd Rascher, a German-born American saxophonist, who, according to the composer “mercilessly hounded” the latter for the piece’s completion. He himself never heard a public performance of the work.

Though Jess Gillam “owned” the performance in a visual, “playing with her whole body”  sense, we were just as entranced by the exchanges between soloist and orchestra throughout – Glazunov didn’t seek to exploit the instrument’s more jazzily contemporary qualities, but instead expressed and shared with the orchestra an old-world romanticism, to which Gillam and the players responded with breath-bated beauty. Perhaps the gem from the piece was the fugal finale, which tossed the material around between soloist and orchestra before the saxophone skipped off on a kind of goose-chase of recycled material and then regaled us with a hilariously raucous fanfare finish!

Darius Milhaud’s Scaramouche was even more winning than I remembered in its saxophone-and-orchestra guise – a delightfully vertiginous opening, with the soloist’s whirling figurations buoyed up by strummed strings and bubbling winds and brass! We were regaled by a version of “Ten Green Bottles” which differed from the one I was taught at school but resonated just as strongly, its trajectory then deliciously interwoven with the opening! The middle movement’s dream-like processional took us to a graceful waltz sequence, then combined the two, before whirling us into a final Brazileira, a samba that produced toe-tapping activation all around and enthusiastic applause at the end. Gillam’s encore, Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood”, couldn’t have rounded the life-vibe off better!

And what, then, of love? Sergei Rachmaninov’s music for many people embodies such a feeling, though with this, the concluding work of his creative career he would have pronounced his achievement as something of a failure, describing his composing self as “a ghost wandering in a world grown alien…..” and calling his Symphonic Dances, his Op.45, his “last spark”. However, the love Rachmaninov felt as an exile from his lost homeland, Russia, is manifest throughout all of this music. And it was a love that was greater and deeper for being unattainable – the Russia he knew and loved had gone.

Gemma New’s performance of the work with the NZSO was an extraordinary experience for me, due to the abiding sense I got from her realisation of the music with her players of this quality of love. It was expressed in many ways – in the players’ attack throughout the work, in the weight she accorded the phrasing of the main themes, in the variegated emphases she gave different phrases so that they sounded freshly-minted, and in her awareness of the specific character of each of the work’s episodes. Not the least of these achievements was her inspired collaboration with the same Jess Gillam as the “guest” orchestral saxophonist in the first movement’s great instrumental solo.

Only at the end of the first movement, when Rachmaninov relinquishes his iron grip on the music’s driving rhythm and allows a reminiscence of the “Dies Irae” theme from his First Symphony to make an appearance, did I experience a pang of disappointment – New took us straight into this moment without reflection upon its sudden reincarnation. whereas I wanted to be taken more tenderly to this “freshly disinterred” episode from a work whose ham-fisted premiere performance (conducted, ironically, by Alexander Glazunov!)  had given the young composer the most harrowing artistic experience of his career.  Of course it’s one of those instances of a different interpreter’s subjectivity having to be accepted and validated. But the rest brought ample compensation, with one of the most moving and exciting performances I’d ever heard for all the above reasons, and richly deserving of enduring memory.

Darkness to light never brought so much relief! – from Shostakovich to Mozart via Ross Harris, at Roseneath’s Long Hall

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Darkness to light never brought so much relief! – from Shostakovich to Mozart via Ross Harris, at Roseneath’s Long Hall

Comfy Concert #8 from the Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 15 in E-flat Minor
ROSS HARRIS -Long Hall Quintet 2025
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – String Quintet in C Major KV 515

Helene Pohl, Donald Armstrong, violins
Nicholas Hancox, Chris van der Zee, violas
Rolf Gjelstan, ‘cello

Special Guest Item – KASTURUN (Traditional Javanese composition)
(performed by The FIrst Smile Gamelan Ensemble)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday 15th November 2025

Kaibosh Food Rescue Benefit Concert

This eighth and final 2025 Comfy Concert marked the 80th anniversary of The Long Hall (built in 1945) and called for a special presentation, which the organisers and musicians involved  responded to with memorable and resonant results! Violinist and founder of the “Comfy Concert” Series Helene Pohl shared with us in a programme note details of both the year’s performances and the successes of the concert’s affiliated Charity Kaibosh Food Rescue, and its associated colleague organisation Arohanui Strings, as well as introducing all of today’s performers, including a Special Item from the First Smile Gamelan Ensemble  which concluded the concert.

Though not officially sporting the title “From Darkness to Light” today’s presentation couldn’t have been better described in terms of its overall trajectory. Beginning with the Fifteenth and final String Quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich, the occasion brought to us the uniquely fascinating culmination of the composer’s epic but sadly unfinished journey towards realising his dream of producing a string quartet in each of the twenty-four keys.  We were confronted right at the outset with a work that itself all too readily seemed to proclaim that “this was the end” for its composer.

Both the work’s genesis itself and preparations for its first performance were instigated under profound difficulties, and not only for Shostakovich, with his by then recurring health problems (the work was finished in May of 1974 while he was convalescing in a Moscow hospital). At this time Sergei Shirinsky, the cellist of the Beethoven Quartet (the group to whom the composer had entrusted the premieres of nearly all his quartets) was himself already ill after suffering a heart attack earlier that same year, and died not long after the group had begun rehearsals of the work. Shostakovich had to reassign the work’s premiere to another ensemble, the Taneyev Quartet, to whom he had previously shown the work as well, and who were thus able to fulfil the task in November 1974.

Every detail of the quartet contributes to its singular character – all six or its movements are marked  Adagio, with the fifth movement, Funeral March, given the extra descriptive weight of Adagio molto. All are in the key of E-flat Minor, and are played without a break, adding to the concentration of intensities throughout. As well, the Quartet gave the work here in the relative gloom of shuttered windows and drawn curtains, heightening the almost funereal atmosphere of the music’s world – not that there was absolute stasis throughout the work, which in places demonstrated both agitated and heavily louring trajectories – but all such impulses were transfixed, encapsulated throughout in a kind of over-riding heartbeat of inexorable transience….

Interestingly, Shostakovich’s instructions to the performers were recorded as “Play the first movement so that flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience leaves the hall out of sheer boredom” – however, I felt entranced instead, charmed by the quasi-hymn-like lines and their evanescent harmonies, and definitely left not wanting to leave! But then, with the Serenade, introduced by the first violin’s sforzando-like exclamation, followed by several of the others’ similarly disconsolate cries (even the ‘cello joins in, after some initial hesitation!), the “dream” took a darker turn, the waltz-tune that follows fraught with anxiety, as were the aggressive pizzicati that punctuated the continued sforzandi! The Intermezzo (superbly addressed by Helene Pohl’s frenzied figurations!) felt for much of the time in the nature of sharing a space with a trapped and frightened animal, before calm returned, and the Nocturne’s wonderfully “haunted”, almost creepily luscious melody was sung on Nicholas Hancox’s sonorous viola, before the ensemble took the music on a kind of “walk on the wilderness side” – a real “fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?” moment in the work!

The Funeral March grandly reclaimed the work’s focus with both viola and ‘cello soliloquising in between the solemn, more “publicly-delivered” ensembled statements – Rolf Gjelsten’s  cello eloquently voiced the private emotions of the music in contrast with the grander outbursts, everybody “chording” passionately and ambiently, while the solo instruments gave utterance to their individual lines.   How like the composer to then counter such focused moments of both public and private feeling with an Epilogue which returned us, as here, to the uncertainty of life’s existence!

Helene Pohl’s frantic agitated salvos at the movement’s beginning unnervingly took us into a kind of bedlam out of which we heard snatches of the work’s opening hymn-like chanting, with Donald Armstrong’s violin desperately trying to reclaim what seemed like a distant memory – one that was obscured by the cello’s churning disquiet from the depths, and the violins’ disconsolate duetting – but we were also diverted by the onset of strangely fairy-like agitations, unquiet spirit voices which unnervingly haunted both solo lines and the ensemble’s briefly-concluding chorale-like note.

At the end, one could only sit and reflect in the silences that “surged softly backwards” at what visions, strains and impulses the composer had seen fit to characterise as his “swan-song” in this genre……very great honour and credit to the players for taking us with them to what felt like such unnerving degrees of visceral immediacy! (Incidentally the Quartet was, in fact not “the end” for its composer, as its music seemed to suggest – the following year he completed a Viola Sonata Op.147, a work dedicated to Fyodor Druzhinin, violist of the aforementioned Beethoven Quartet – sadly Shostakovich died
in hospital within a month of finishing the work and without ever hearing it performed.)

This concert enjoyed a “thrice-blessed” aspect – not only had we participated in the tribute played by the series to a great twentieth century composer, but we could then witness and enjoy another “tribute”. This came from Wellington composer Ross Harris who had attended several of these “Comfy Concerts and been inspired by a number of features which gave the occasions their singular kind of distinction – the composer himself made reference to the distinctive charm of  the hall  and the miracle of its preservation as a community resource, as well as representing a bulwark standing firmly in support of musicians who were presently experiencing “tough times”.  With Shostakovich himself being a kind of embodiment from a different era of “tough creative artist times”, his quartets’ performances seemed here more than apposite – though Ross confessed that his main stimulus in composing for the venue a commemorative work was hearing at one of the earlier concerts a string quintet by Mozart!  Of course it all fell together very nicely when in tandem with another of the divine Wolfgang’s quintets programmed to finish this concert.

Beginning with a ‘cello solo, the music resonated through the instruments in turn, with the second violin inverting the melody and modulating entrancingly, even toying with a kind of “re-inversion”! A running theme from the violins was cheered on by a pizzicato viola figure, before a chorale-like section proposed further inversions decorated by beautiful descending pizzicato notes – I liked the Ravelian touch of violin and viola in unison octaves, and the dance-like sequence underlined by the pizzicati. Even Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht came to mind at one point, with an extended viola solo taken further by the ‘cello, a few breaths of mosaic-like textures fixedly engaging our sensibilities. Then, a square-dance theme danced across the spectrum, eventually giving way to a dream-time sostenuto mood, achingly sustained into a silence. One needs, of course, further hearings to “place” these detailings more coherently, but on first acquaintance each seemed to me delightedly satisfied with its own “moment” in time and space, and along with its composer at the end were given all due appreciation.

The Mozart Quintet which followed was not one I’d heard for some time, and I’d forgotten just how extraordinarily detailed both the first movement exposition and development were – such rapid-fire modulations which at one and the same time “flowed like oil” and took one by surprise with their adventurousness, such as the major-to-minor contrasts of the opening theme, and tne “light-as-a-feather” touchings and elaborations of the second subject – beautiful playing in thirds in so many places, after all of which the insouciance of the ending was an all-the-more delightful touch.

The Minuetto, brisk and athletic, seemed straightforward enough until the onset of  the Trio’s churning chromaticisms! – what were these, and where was it all leading to? Had Mozart lived longer he might well have further anticipated Beethoven’s  “new paths” and perhaps even bypassed some of it in taking his own way! The Andante is largely an amiable dialogue between Helene Pohl’s violin and Nicholas Hancox’s viola, with Rolf Gjelsten’s ‘cello counterpointing the viola to mellifluous effect in places – while the finale is a truly ensemble affair, with crisp, energy-sharing exchanges involving plenty of major-minor variants of phrase-swapping, and nifty thirds bounced in tandem by the “pairs” racing around and about the anchoring cello – it was all so memorable and celebratory and, and boded well for continuation of “the same but different” at the “Long Hall” in seasons to come!

Finally came the third of the “tributes” which helped give this occasion its distinctive flavour – this was a special performance item featuring  “The First Smile”, the name taken by  the gamelan ensemble whose instruments and regular performance activities are centered around  “The Long Hall”, which is now established as the group’s home. The Instruments were first brought to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1974 by Allan Thomas, Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Victoria University of Wellington from Cirebon, West Java, who had located the instruments from a collection of heritage items held on location at a once-active royal court, and with the help of fellow-ethnomusicologist and composer Jack Body organised their purchase and transportation to New Zealand.

The instruments are played regularly by a small group of dedicated musicians, as well as by students from Roseneath School (The Young Smile) and preschoolers and new entrants (The Little Smile). In December 2024, The First Smile released an album of compositions for the ensemble, available through Rattle Records as a CD or digital download.

This afternoon we heard the ensemble perform Kasturun, a traditional Javanese composition, said to evoke an image of angels standing in heaven, a conjuring up of traditional imageries wrought by musical structuring which employs repetitions of the same motif. The sonority of the instruments was partly determined by their different sizes, resulting in vastly different kinds of timbres associated with particular images and emotions – endlessly resonant evocations and fascinations drew us into an interior world of a different order to that which we’d experienced earlier in the afternoon, and we couldn’t hep but feel refreshed and reinvigorated by the experience of renewed gratitude for yet another aspect of “The Long Hall” and its bounty.

 

Amazingly vibrant, energetic and tumultuous “Christmas Oratorio” – the Bach Choir of Wellington, Nota Bene and the Chiesa Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Bach Choir, Nota Bene Choir, The Chiesa Ensemble and soloists, conducted by Shawn Michael Condon  – photo, Colin McDiarmid

JS BACH – Christmas Oratorio
BWV 248 – Parts I, II, III and VI

Georgia Jamieson-Emms (soprano)
Maaike Christie-Beekman (alto)
Iain Tetley (tenor / Evangelist)
Robert Tucker (bass)

Douglas Mews – organ

The Bach Choir of Wellington
Shawn Michael Condon (director)
Nota Bene
Maaike Christie-Beekman (director)
The Chiesa Ensemble
Rebecca Struthers (director) / Anne Loeser  (Concertmaster)

Shawn Michael Condon (conductor)

St.Mary of the Angels Church
Boulcott Street, Wellington

Saturday 15th November, 2025

There’s been a definite kind of newly-furbished “buzz” associated with choral events I’ve attended in Wellington over recent times, particularly associated with a venue, St.Mary of the Angels Church, which by dint of its richly-appointed  ambiences and built-to-standard acoustical properties seems made-to-order for public performances of works of an ecclesiastical nature – two such for me have been, firstly, of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers for the Blessed Virgin ( ) and, more recently, of JS Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. I’m actually anticipating some kind of triumvirate of performance in writing this, as another different vocal ensemble based in the capital, Baroque Voices, is set to perform another work of JS Bach’s, the Six Motets BWV 225-230, later this month, again in St.Mary of the Angels Church  – hopefully the occasion will be as tumultuously supported as were both the Monteverdi and the more recently performed Bach work which I’m here reporting on….

Of course the excitement of a “sold out” concert for both musicians and audiences can’t help but add layers of lustre to any such occasion, and would have certainly “fired up” the musicians involved in this recent presentation. I’m certain there would have been a degree of corresponding “lift-off” to the performance we heard, relating to such overwhelming audience support, and  particularly as the opening chorus of the work “Jauchzet, frohlocket” (Celebrate, rejoice) was sung and played at the liveliest pace I’ve ever heard it performed – in fact, conductor Shawn Michael Condon took it all a tad too vigorously for my liking, though all the musicians, vocalists and instrumentalists, seemed to get their notes in! And I was sitting close enough to register the absolute delight and definite purpose on the faces of those in the choir singing this music, as if the extra notch or three of trajectorial purpose was stirring the blood of all concerned even more!

Conductor Shawn Michael Condon, with soloists Iain Tetley (tenor), Maaike Christie-Beekman (alto), Robert Tucker (bass) and Georgia Jamieson-Emms (soprano) –  photo, Colin McDiarmid

The rest had manifold pleasures and beauties – all of the vocal soloists made ear-catchingly impressive “beginnings” – the first to be heard, tenor Iain Tetley, handled his opening “Es begab sich aber zu der Zeit” (It came to pass at that time) with great aplomb and nicely-varied impulse, continuing to do so right through the evening, though the composer’s near-impossible demands upon the tenor in the final cantata seemed to take something of a toll! Elsewhere, though, his tones and enunciation of the text were a joy to listen to, in Part Two catching the excitement of the heavenly hosts,  and in Part Three conveying plenty of the narrative’s thoughtfulness, particularly  regarding Mary’s pondering of the words spoken about the infant’s wondrous birth…

I enjoyed the dulcet tones of alto Maaike Christie-Beekman, her line steadily and fluently maintained in “Bereite dich, Zion” – and she was especially  moving in Part Two’s lovely “Schlafe, mein Liebster” where her lovely long notes and sensitivity in general made up for a somewhat prosaic “Schaut hin, dort liegt im finstern Stall”  from the choir – a pity, as the soprano choral tones had been so lovely in the previous part’s “Wie soll ich dich empfangen?”

Bass-baritone Robert Tucker’s versatility was in no doubt with his “Grösser Herr”  giving great pleasure and managing to even make something of those lower notes which were more difficult to “centre” than others! I thoroughly enjoyed his brief but vivid cameo of the despicable King Herod in Part VI , while earlier, his “So recht, ihr Engel, jauchzt und singet” joined with the heavenly host’s excitement at “Den Menschen ein Wohlgefallen”!  He also interacted splendidly with soprano Georgia Jamieson-Emms’s Angel in Part Three’s  Duet Aria “Herr, dein Mittleid” , both singers given ample space to float and negotiate their tones  while the oboes (I couldn’t tell from where I was sitting who was playing) were splendidly vital, by turns lyrical and energetic in their support.

Part VI had splendid orchestra playing, with the trumpets and timpani displaying pin-point accuracy and with plenty of “schwung” besides, from both chorus and orchestra. That done, the tenor and bass  vividly paved the way for the Angel’s condemnation of Herod’s treacherous intentions – Georgia Jamieson-Emms certainly gave her recitative plenty of bite, and, aided by great support from strings and oboes tackled the angular lines of her aria with plenty of verve and appropriate resolve.

All four soloists relished their interactive dramatic recitative, preparing us for the work’s final chorus, a tour de force for both instrumental and choral forces, alternating as it did the chorale lines with more vigorous instrumental passages. The instrumental playing from the various Chiesa Ensemble members (strings, flutes, oboes, brass and timpani) throughout couldn’t be faulted (including leader Anne Loeser’s hand-in-glove accompaniment of  Maaike Christie-Beekman’s “Schliesse, mein Herze”), the players  (including the continuo of Douglas Mews’ organ) achieving a standard I’ve not heard bettered in any performance of a baroque work I’ve previously attended.

Members of the Chiesa Ensemble – Kirstin Eade (flute) and Robert Orr (oboe) – photo, Colin McDiarmid

My abiding memory, though is of the chorus throughout, of those faces showing every sign of putting their hearts and minds into every syllable of what they uttered, and filling the building unstintingly with their tones accordingly. Their response to conductor Shawn Michael Condon’s every impulse was direct and giving, demonstrating in the most heartfelt way what their voices were conveying. It all made for a memorable and vibrant experience of a piece with the music we heard and enjoyed.