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.