Month: December 2025

“Conversations with Bach” – Inbal Megiddo plays the six suites for solo cello The Six Cello Suites of JS Bach

Posted on by Peter Mechen


J.S.BACH – The ‘Cello Suites Nos 1-6 BMV 1007-12
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)
Atoll Records ACD 233
(recorded at Stella Maris Recording Studios,
Seatoun, Wellington)

It took me a little while to approach the Bach ‘Cello Suites as a listener – though I got to know something about the instrument itself soon enough, as it figured prominently in the very first orchestral concert I attended, back in July of 1969. The programme opened with Rossini’s “William Tell” Overture, featuring a solo ‘cellist and the player’s various cohorts introducing that most evocative of musical paintings, a sunrise taking place over the Swiss Alps. It was a sound which seemed to me more “substantial” than the solo violin passages I also got to know at various times, its resonance and depth putting me in mind of the voice of a great actor!

Rossini is a long way from Bach, of course, but I was taking leaps and bounds through music in those younger, more energetic days, mostly with the help of my local Public Library’s classical music LP collection. It seemed only a matter of time before I was within coo-ee of one of the great artistic resurgences of the twentieth century – Pablo Casals’ far-reaching encounter with Bach’s ‘Cello Suites, one which led to the making of an historic set of performances and recordings.

Casals had come across the works in a music shop in Barcelona when still a teenager, had spent the next twelve years studying them, and then presented them in public, usually singly, and programmed with a concerto. Fortunately for us, he then decided to record them, which took place between the years of 1936 and 1939 in both Paris and London. To date the recordings remain unique in terms of an interpreter’s commitment to the music, a realisation one commentator described as “an embodiment of vigour, spirituality and humanity”.

What I vividly recall, upon hearing Casals’ recordings of Bach for the first time was the “earthiness” of the instrument’s sound, largely due, I think, to the player’s own volatile temperament, and his visionary sense of achieving something unique and precious at all costs. More recent interpreters of these works have brought out vastly different characteristics, for example Pierre Fournier’s intuitively seamless flow and refinement, Yo-Yo Ma’s dance-like, spare-sounding lines and tones, and Janos Starker’s simple, unfussy, easily-breathed versions.

Such is the music’s well-nigh endless resource of possibilities, there are now almost any number of recordings to choose from – but it’s a particular pleasure to encounter one made by a musician whose work one knows well in “live performance” contexts. Atoll Records features a complete recording from such a musician, Inbal Megiddo, currently an Associate Professor of ‘Cello at Te Koki New Zealand School of Music in Wellington, and whom I’ve often seen and heard as a concerto soloist and a chamber musician, as well in the role of principal ‘cellist with Orchestra Wellington. Listening to her play these works is to encounter a unique summation of her skills and sensibilities, refracted here through the demands of making some of the world’s greatest music written for the instrument speak its own truths.

As if pre-ordained my encounter with this recording came after an earlier discovery I’d made of a truly absorbing book about these same works by an ex-Wellingtonian musician, Miranda Wilson, presently living with her family in Moscow, Idaho, USA, while Professor of ‘Cello at the University of Idaho. I was taken by her book right through every single movement of the suites, equating them all as stages in a life relating both to their composer and to her own experience of getting to know and play them. So I was all the more delighted to find Inbal Megiddo, in the booklet accompanying the new Atoll recording, expressing similar kinds of fascinating and thoughtful meditations regarding the suites. I think she sums things up resoundingly when she writes “Bach’s genius lies….in creating music that transcends the limitations of its time and speaks to universal experience, while still allowing each performer’s unique experience to shine through….they (the Suites) are living documents that gain richness through the multiplicity of approaches they inspire….”

Wayne Laird of Atoll Records has crafted a beautiful recording of Megiddo’s traversal of these life-giving works. From the opening Prelude of the G Major Suite there’s a delicious sense of the player delighting in the sounds that flow with such ease, grace and spontaneity – the music’s not unlike the very first Prelude (C Major) from the composer’s “Well-Tempered Clavier, which also has arpeggiated chord progressions, though the ‘cello work occasionally varies the repeatedly-ascending trajectories of the keyboard Prelude. But there’s the same slightly hypnotic sense of “do I wake or sleep?” as the familiar patterns change notes and harmonies, rather like a face subtly but constantly altering its expression – here, Megiddo’s delightfully unforced soundings of the changes seem both impromptu and yet inevitable.

The following Allemande (a French title meaning “German”, incidentally) introduces us to a recurring character of these suites, their affinities with dance forms, not actually accompanying dancers, but suggesting their movements. While Megiddo relishes the ornateness of the spacious melodic lines of this dance, she adroitly marks its turning-points, with Bach giving her lots of rhythmic “help” amid the florid lines, the higher notes decorating and the lower notes marking time, all the while keeping the essential grace of the dance to the fore. She makes the following dance, the Courante, a kind of joyful release with its ready physicality after the Allemande’s decorative elegance, and in even more striking contrast to the slow and stately Sarabande which followed. Bach sometimes used this latter form to heighten moments of great intensity, such as in his St,John and St,Matthew Passions, though Miranda Wilson in her book considered she herself was at first inclined to over-emphasise the piece’s solemnity in performance, largely ignoring its “dance” origins. To my ears Inbal Megiddo sufficiently maintains a terpsichordean feel in the music while still enabling us to enjoy her beautifully filled-out tones, recreating an unselfconscious duality of movement and melody. The concluding movements had no such polarities – the Minuets relished their major /minor key “turns” (the hints of wistfulness in the latter mode a nice touch), while the concluding Gigue draws from Megiddo a truly spirited response whose invigorating effect at a concert any audience might “scarce forbear to cheer”.

Rather than follow the Suites’ catalogued numerical order on this recording, Megiddo chose to record Nos. 1, 3 and 5 on this first disc – so letting the CD play on at first hearing without checking this arrangement surprises me when the ebullient tones of No.3, the C Major Suite’s grand opening, makes an appearance! In the player’s own words here, it’s “confident, eager and full of optimism”. It requires an extension of technique using the thumb in places which, when first reading Miranda Wilson’s description of “how it’s done” makes it sound fearsomely awkward, though reading on also brings one to a description of the player’s joy when the technique is mastered! Inbal Magiddo’s playing conveys that kind of joy throughout this ebullient piece!

This Allemande is rather more ebullient than that in the opening G Major Suite, and the following Courante has an almost frantic aspect – and it’s one of those pieces in which my obviously susceptible brain finds itself listening to passages as common-time pieces rather than ones in ¾! Fortunately, the Sarabande comes to my rescue, through Megiddo’s steady, though beautifully pliable phrasings, which restore my faith in my own musical responses. After this we are treated to a Bouree, whose common-time straight-forwardness eminently suites this work as a whole – the minor-key section is played more legato, more inwardly and introspectively. But then Megiddo returns wholeheartedly to Bachian ebullience with the final Gigue, especially relishing that brief but spicy double-stopped “droned” sequence with its chromatic two-note exclamatory gesture that I’ve always delighted in hearing.

The Fifth Suite, the last on this disc, breaks a pattern set by the previous two works, as well as the Second and Fourth Suites (on the other disc) – in the first place, the cello is tuned differently, Bach using the technique known as  scordatura, which refers to a kind of tuning to achieve a different sound and harmony, in this case two strings tuned to the note G. Another difference is that the Prelude to this Suite isn’t like the others form-wise – this one is more like a Baroque tone-poem, its portentous, ornamented opening leading to a fugue, the composer’s writing adroitly suggesting that new parts continue to enter, and that they keep on moving along, even when not audible – amazing “sleight-of-hand” exhibited here by Megiddo in her all-encompassing figurations. The Allemande here is as slow and weighty as the Prelude, while the Courante, described by one commentator as “lusty” in its robustness maintains the Suite’s somewhat darker, typically C Minor quality. And then. the Saraband suddenly eschews all ornamentation, Megiddo here bringing out the essential loneliness of the traversal  – her descriptive words “solitude and contemplation” are more than apposite for this music, particularly in regard to the deepest notes of this meditative journey.

Into the void dances the dark-browed Gavotte, its physicality emphasised by the chunky “blocked” character of the writing, into which Megiddo engagingly throws herself holus-bolus, so that as a listener I myself almost feel as if I’m playing the instrument myself! The contrasting episode is chalk-and cheese, a running, triplet-like flowing, all chunkiness removed or sidelined, and listening in amazement, until its “feistier-than-ever” return. There remains the Gigue, a real ”swinger”, here, more waltz than jig-like to my untutored, even temporarily child-like ears, almost like a parent swinging an ebullient child – did Bach engage in those pastimes, I wonder?

Though I feel as though I’ve written a lot. Megiddo’s playing makes me feel as though I’m “flying” through the music, completely absorbed with it all, and at the halfway point already! Suite No.2 in D Minor, first-up on the second disc featuring “even-numbered” works, remains an extraordinary listening experience in the wake of the first Suite’s relatively carefree romp, beginning with the yearningly long-breathed Prelude, which Megiddo builds with unerring judgement towards the moment when the piece’s first “rest” occurs on an unresolved chord, and the piece seems to think out loud, “what now?”  – here, the ‘cellist’s beautifully-circumspect renewal of the music’s D Minor key with five spacious arpeggiated chords seems a perfect resolution. The Allemande is a little mini-adventure on its own, journeying out of and then back into the home key, one which Megiddo seems to have all the time and space in which to do – a journey one wishes would simply go on!

“A mad dash of sixteenth notes” is Miranda Wilson’s recorded opening comment re the Courante, an opinion modified upon her realisation that the piece shares a bassline with the composer’s great Chaconne from the Second Partita for solo violin, one of the all-time “classics” of Bach’s instrumental music. Nevertheless, the oft-used “devil at your heels” description certainly adds spice to the music, and Megiddo’s playing of it heightens the contrast with the Sarabande which follows. This latter movement, extraordinary in its own right, draws an incredible range of intensities here, from the deep solemnity of the opening to the almost operatic expansion of line in the concluding moments of the piece’s second half. Even the Menuet which follows is full-on, it seems, in Megiddo’ s hands, right from the opening, though the major-key of Menuet II is relaxed and charming. And the Gigue here partly surprises and partly fulfils expectations with its forcefully-droning bassline delivering plenty of D Minor intensity!

Inbal Megiddo equates the E-flat ‘Cello Suite (No.4) with increased maturity, as does Miranda Wilson, who states unequivocally that it’s “music for grown-ups”. Part of the increased complexity involves the music’s key of E-flat not corresponding with any of the cello’s open strings, meaning that the player has to “find” or “make” the correct pitch, as well as make many “extended” left-hand positions, while not enjoying the same resonances that an open string would supply. The E-flat key  gives the music a wonderful richness at the start, which continues and deepens until the music reaches the cavernous depths of a low C-sharp – almost as if its sounding is of the “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” variety, the music pauses and seems to take stock of  elaborating briefly on the excitement of proximity to these extremes before climbing back to the starting-point of the movement. Then, dance movement though it is, I find Megiddo’s playing of the Allemande a fascinating discourse in its own right, filled with inflexion and interest. The livelier Courante, too, thanks to the player’s ever-pliable touch, presents an engaging amalgam of its busy lines; and afterwards, the following Sarabande is, quite simply, a heartfelt expression of warmth of the human spirit.

Continuing in this great-hearted vein is Part I of the Bouree, its five-note ascending motif eagerly driving the piece onwards, alternating with occasional downward-swoops and dance-like phrases – the physicality of Megiddo’s playing exuberantly makes the most of where the momentums carry the lines. Part II of the dance is just as committed, if rather more earthbound with its drone-like underpinnings – but the music takes wing again with the Gigue, which for me Megiddo turns into a high-spirited romp, a kind of “liberating” gesture when set against the solemnity of certain of its earlier movements.

How, then, to put such music against what follows with the Sixth and last of the Suites? Megiddo describes the D Major Suite as “the beyond, the afterlife…..(which) transcends earthly concerns entirely” – while for Miranda Wilson, it’s the Sarabande movement whose simplicity has the most power, a duality of timeless and awareness of mortality in its sublimity. Inbal Megiddo’s comments regarding the five-string ‘cello that Bach supposedly wrote this music for indicate that she too used a five-stringed instrument for this recording of the Suite. Opinions continue to vary among scholars, musicians and commentators regarding the use and efficacy of such an instrument when performing this work – Megiddo’s performance with her chosen instrument seems to me an almost unqualified success, be it the celebratory strains of the Prelude, the quiet authority of the Allemande, the ebullience of the Courante or the intense nobility of the Sarabande.

For me the D Major opening of the Prelude is like no other – it proclaims an ecstatic kind of triumph which combines a bright and welcoming ethos, while using a freer form with more display-like passages that liberates thought and gives emotion wing right across the instrument’s five-string sound-spectrum. I particularly loved Megiddo’s luftpause towards the Prelude’s end, allowing those unresolved chords to resonate into an expectant silence before gently and calmly leading the resolution home.

I was, I admit, taken by surprise by the impetuosity of Megiddo’s playing of both Gavottes, expecting a more “other-worldly” treatment (as might befit the Gods at play in Elysium?) – the easier, somewhat more loping manner of the concluding Gigue more in accordance, I thought, with the player’s description of “a reaching towards heaven” in the music. But is heaven, after all, merely a fulfilment or a transcendence of one’s expectations? Bach’s music here, in Inbal Megiddo’s hands, has taken me further than I expected to go, joyously demonstrating all over again that “known and yet new-found” experience one gets from hearing whole-hearted performances of great music.

Handel’s “Messiah” from the Orpheus in warm-hearted seasonal tradition

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orpheus Choir and soloists  with Brent Stewart  in Handel’s “Messiah” at the MFC

George Frideric Handel – MESSIAH
Emma Pearson (soprano)
Maaike Christie-Beekman (alto)
LJ Crichton (tenor)
Joel Amosa (bass)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Brent Stewart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 13th December, 2025

Walking into a concert hall foyer a good half-hour before the performance’s starting time and encountering a veritable sea of faces and conglomerate of bodies all exuding a kind of excitement and anticipation tells you that you’re somehow onto a good thing for the evening!

Such an osmotic buzz of expectation spreads like a forcefield throughout the shared spaces to the performers, creating a “charged” environment through which the ordinary is metamorphosed into the fabulous even before a note is sounded.

Through some kind of alchemy, Handel’s “Messiah”, no matter how many times it gets performed, never loses its appeal. I’ve practically lost count of the ones I’ve attended, and the details have a habit of running together when I try to fetch up specific memories of a presentation with this conductor and that singer, and especially in tandem with dates – but it has for me developed the aura of a ritual in which I feel something of an unexplained compulsion to repeatedly take part.

Of course a major consideration for many people is that “Messiah” is almost never the same work on each occasion it’s presented – and I don’t mean merely in terms of differences of interpretation of the same score, because there is no single “same score” – no single “definitive” version. A statistic I encountered recently which took my breath away was that Handel had produced forty-three versions of the work’s fifteen solo numbers, the composer making numerous adjustments to suit the needs of the different singers he used at various times. Different versions of the whole work also appeared, beginning with the Dublin version in 1742, then a London version the following year, followed in 1750 at the London Foundling Hospital and a revision in 1754, featuring different music and alternate version of numbers.

This near-profligacy of difference makes each performance of this work something of an adventure for the listener – and it’s definitely a factor in the music’s never-ending joy and fascination. Naturally interpretation plays a part in this on-going process, with different conductors and soloists (and choirs and orchestras, for that matter) bringing to each occasion singular characteristics and qualities. While I can remember with great pleasure certain aspects of past performances involving both individual and concerted efforts, it’s a particular joy to encounter, as here, something of a shared benchmark of achievement on the part of all the performers. In fact I can put my hand on my heart and declare that I thought this a splendid and great-hearted “Messiah” which set out from the very beginning to “engage” with us, drawing us increasingly and unsparingly into the story’s intense wonder, drama and fulfilment regarding Christ’s sojourn on Earth.

Under conductor Brent Stewart’s focused direction, orchestra, soloists and choir were able to touch realms that seemed almost transcendent in places –  of course every listener will cherish certain singular “moments” and mark them out for “legendary” status in times to come (as I’ve done now and then with past hearings of this work,as an essential component of the process). Tonight’s soloists rose to the occasion in various instances  – tenor LJ Chrichton pleased with his attractively airy “Evry Valley” at the work’s beginning, even if his opening phrase of  “Comfort Ye” seemed more like a “test run” than the real thing  – but his subsequent longer-held phrases made sonorous amends! At the other end of the expressive scale was his more-assured Part Two set of recitatives and ariosi, concluding with the vigorous “Thou shalt break them”, which featured some confident ascents to the demanding top notes of “thou shalt dash them in pieces” – sterling, true-toned efforts!

His bass counterpart, Joel Amosa, impressed throughout with his virility and flexibility, pinning our ears back with his “Thus saith the Lord” and rolling his voice up and down his runs on the word “Shake” in fine style. Even more thrilling was his partnership with the orchestra in “Why do the Nations?” , a high-energy combination of rushing orchestral figures and melismatic vocal lines, the singer’s triplet figures riding the orchestra’s impetuous common-time trajectories with breathtaking adroitness! However, it was Amosa’s partnership with trumpeter Lewis Grey in “The Trumpet Shall Sound” which carried the day, the singer’s prescient introductory story-telling tones paving the way for the splendid combination of voice and brilliantly-sounded instrument that we were then treated to.

I’ve always thought the alto in “Messiah” had fewer opportunities to really “shine” in this work compared with the other singers, with the exception of the great aria “He was despised”. Here, Maaike Christie-Beekman movingly took us right into the hollowed-out chamber of sorrow and rejection  suffered by the beleagued Christ, almost as if it were a great and private universal “confession of sorrow”. I’m nearly always disappointed when a performance neglects to include the tempestuous middle section “He gave his back” because of the dramatic contrast it sets up – a real “trial” for everybody concerned, though, when it happens!

Soprano Emma Pearson’s first recitative entry, of course, was preceded by the sublime sweetness of the “Pifa” (the Pastoral Symphony characterising the shepherds), after which she sang the 4/4 version of “Rejoice greatly” (my first hearing of this was Handel’s first gigue-like 12/8 version) – the coloratura passages were terrific, really capturing a “joyous” effect! Pearson’s lovely voice also came into its own in the second half of “He shall feed his flock”, following the alto’s opening verse with another, “Come unto him”. Where Pearson’s singing, however, for me “touched” that transcendence I’ve mentioned beforehand was in “I know that my Redeemer liveth”, her clear-as-a-bell rendering still giving the line affecting nuances while fully proclaiming the emotion of belief and surety – something about the unaffected simplicity of her “And though worms destroy this body” I found ineffably touching without knowing really why, but it was a moment that has stayed with me as one of those memories which will endure – a salutary experience for an unbeliever!

As for the “Mighty Orpheus” (as the choir has been known for decades) the voices were at one with their conductor/director Brent Stewart right from the outset, with a vigorous and stirring response to “And the Glory of the Lord”, with the sopranos particularly radiant in their soaring, largely single-note lines.  I felt at times that the rapid tempi for a couple of the choruses missed a certain “deliciousness of utterance”  (“And He shall purify” was one and “His yoke is easy” was another), but I could register the enjoyment of a compensatory “effervescence” in the overall effect (for example, in “All we like sheep” the voices scintillated like bubbling and cascading springs!).  Though not at all related to THIS performance, I still can’t help repeating  for enjoyment’s sakes a reasonably well-known anecdote attributed to the famous conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who was heard to remark at one point in a “Messiah” rehearsal.  “Ladies and gentlemen of the chorus, when you sing “All we like sheep have gone astray”, could we please have a little more regret and a little less satisfaction?” ).

At the other end of the expressive scale the chorus work projected tremendous potency – in “Surely He hath borne our griefs”, for example, whose opening word was like a hammer-blow – then, in both “He trusted in God” (the most thrillingly incisive performance I can remember ever hearing of this!) and “Let us break their bonds asunder” with similarly biting lines, allied to fantastic energy, making the words come alive – and  making the most of dramatic contrast in “Since by man came death”, bursting out from its positively sepulchral opening in grandly theatrical style. I especially relished, too, the varied treatment of the final “Amen” Chorus, which featured sequences of solo and paired string-playing alternating with the voices – a scalp-prickling effect, then rounded off with plenty of suitably sonorous orchestral tones in support of the voices – wonderful!

With stirring support from the Orchestra Wellington players (a scaled-down band to more readily reflect a Handelian sound-world) aided by the mellifluous strains of  both Bethany Angus’s harpsichord and Jonathan Berkahn’s chamber organ, Brent Stewart and his performers gave Handel’s work a solidly-based sonority from which the details readily sprang, always interestingly, and often excitingly to the ear. The “buzz” that had begun earlier that evening in the foyer had certainly done its job on this occasion, and  in the best seasonal “Christmas tree” tradition!

Melencolia – ANTHONY RITCHIE – Three String Quartets, from the Jade String Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MELENCOLIA
ANTHONY RITCHIE’S STRING QUARTETS 1-3
Jade String Quartet
Miranda Adams, Charmian Keay (violins).
Robert Ashworth (viola), James Yoo (’cello)

Producer: Kenneth Young
Engineers: John Kim, Steve Garden
RATTLE RAT-D159 2025

After first-time listening right through in a single, totally absorbed (occasionally transfixed) sitting to a recently issued Rattle Records recording of Anthony Ritchie’s three string quartets, here played by the remarkable Jade String Quartet, I found myself afterwards wishing my tongue could utter the thoughts that arose in me!

Rousing myself from the daze I’d drifted into, I couldn’t help thinking of a similar “body” of works I’d recently been made familiar with to an unprecedented degree – the string quartets of another composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, whose music has been “spotlit” here in Aotearoa New Zealand, during the latter’s 50th death anniversary year. It simply and suddenly occurred to me (I freely admit, on an acquaintance that was, at this stage, hardly in-depth in either case!) that both composers seemed to have taken pains to reserve a certain concentrated quality of utterance for the string quartet medium.

In Shostakovich’s case, beleaguered as he was for writing “public” music (symphony, opera, concerto, cantata) which didn’t “conform” with the authorities’ need for artists to produce “uplifting, positive-sounding” works that reflected the joys of life under the rule of the great dictator, Josef Stalin, the composer turned to the “more private” medium of the string quartet to utter those personal aspirations, comments, and criticisms which for many years couldn’t be made in public. Only with the death of Stalin in 1953 was any kind of freedom of expression mooted for artists, and even then and afterwards there were disapproving “official” voices raised against some of Shostakovich’s later works.

Hardly a jot of semblance links Shostakovich with Anthony Ritchie regarding the conditions under which they wrote their music, except for the fact of both having to wait long periods for certain of their works to be performed after composition – Shostakovich 25 years after the composition of his 4th Symphony, Ritchie a whopping 37 years for his First String Quartet to be premiered after its completion! What forcibly struck me when hearing the Jade Quartet’s stupendous new Ritchie recording was the music’s startling originality and definitive focus, a “this is what I mean” kind of voice that I found put me frequently in mind of the Russian composer with his string quartets, and the single-mindedness of those uncompromising utterances.


                   Anthony Ritchie

Ritchie’s three quartets reach over a period of no less than forty years, with the first one written in 1983, while the composer was studying in Hungary at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, researching the music of Bela Bartok for his PhD. Writing music in such resonating surroundings could have made it difficult to fetch up a properly distinctive voice, but in the First Quartet’s opening Solo viola and trio Ritchie’s deep-browed solo viola voice straightaway captures something in the folkish air that awakens different responses…. such that could perhaps prove both accompanists, and even further, themselves become caretakers of the journey.

Quartet 1 has overlapping 7/4-like phrases, with beautifully- and delicately-inversed vertical figures, morphing into and out of pizzicato, as the motif plays “lost-and-found” in a plethora of activity. The bows bounce upon strings, then each theatrically lapses into sequences of theatrical recitative as the others gossip in pairs –  “What a rude glissando! – Yes, wasn’t it!”. The reputedly 7/4 rhythm returns, with arco, pizzicato – and silence! The next Solo ’cello and trio opens exotically, with folkish phrases and “turns”, before the solo cello enters, working wonderfully declamations into the line, before unaccountably appearing to fall asleep! Are the other instruments then dreaming the ‘cello, or is the ‘cello dreaming them?

Quartet 2 delightfully plays “catch-me-if-you-can” passages, with cheeky “portrait” poses taking turns before being off again, entangling themselves convivially in each others’ figurations! – exhilarating! – More reflections, before there’s a surreptitious swoop, and exclamations of  “pretend fright” before the façade is gone without a trace. Immediately, more serious business arrives in Duets – gone are the triplet-rhythmed fun-and-games, for these are the heavies, working in pairs, and not even the most impassioned pleas will stop them, it seems! A respite is brief, as the attack resumes from the air, but the responses hold their ground!

The tumult slows and morphs into Quartet 3  without a break – a disjointed world with its inhabitants trying to join forces with growing intensities and desperations! – Again, we’re taken straight to the next and last movement, Four solos – each vying for supremacy, pleading its case, so eloquent and piteous! – the tumult gradually ceases as the voices realise they have done what’s possible and viable for themselves and for one another – and we suspect that it’s the viola who returns to have the last word!

The Jade String Quartet:  Robert Ashworth (viola), Maranda Adams (violin),  Charmian Keay (violiin),  James Yoo (‘cello)

The Jade String Quartet has more-or-less taken over guardianship of this astonishing work of late, giving only the second public performance in Auckland last year (2024), and subsequently making this recording – the group’s espousal of the work’s determinedly-focused sense of youthful adventure on the composer’s part will surely win the music many new friends.

As for the equally compelling String Quartet No. 2 (2003), the work was commissioned and premiered by the Nevine String Quartet on a Chamber Music New Zealand tour, the group then then recording the work for Atoll Records on a CD (Octopus – Atoll ACD112) which featured several of Ritchie’s chamber music pieces. Less immediately recorded than the Jade Quartet, the Nevine’s reading brings out more of the work’s spaciousness and, particularly in the second movement, an attractive “Whistler-like” ambience, the music’s blue-grey colourings and lullabic tones at once so suggestive and evanescent. Elsewhere, the newer recording’s closer balance and the Jade’s sharper and more volatile responses engage the listener in what feels like a more tactile and primitive kind of engagement – the music’s swaggering gait at the very beginning has tremendous physicality, and contrasts beautifully with the “sighing” sequences that decorate the later ostinato passages, the ending’s piquant gesturings drawing us wonderingly into the silences.

Wonderful writing throughout the Like a Lullaby second movement – with the Nevines we lose ourselves in the ambiences, whereas the Jade Quartet doesn’t relinquish its tight grip on our sensibilities, heightening the sense of unease and shadows that are unresolved. The violin’s “voice from the gloom” stimulates other voices to follow, then leads the way out when the tensions reach disturbing levels, allowing the angst to gradually ebb away – incredible playing in both versions!

The third movement’s Allegro Pesante has more incisive, razor-sharp attack from the Jade Quartet, almost unrelenting in its penetrative persistence, contrasting the “slow waltz” aspect of the Trio all the more with the soulful melancholy of its lines, as does the return of the biting opening reacquaint us with its fearful obsessive manner. Both performances vividly characterise the finale’s juxtapositioning of its Misterioso opening with a driving allegro molto, the music’s sharply contrasting moods reflecting the extent of variation exhibited in human behaviour, an anomaly suggested by the dissonance of the work’s final  chord.

Moving our time machine’s dial forward once again we encounter Ritchie’s String Quartet No, 3, not inappropriately subtitled “In Time”, and composed specifically for the Jade Quartet in 2023. Its programme is ostensibly an oblique commentary on the stages of human life in general term, the movements “framed” by a First Dance and a Last Dance, and sporting pensive titles such as Heartbeat, Perpetual Motion and Funeral March, each bearing associated “mortal coil” confluences.

First Dance is vibrant and changeable, good-humoured and acerbic, essentially interactive, and expressing joy in its sharing – a marked contrast with Heartbeat, where everything is subjected to the “steady beat of time”, the responses to the plucked rhythms occasionally “out of synch”, suggesting arrhythmia or ectopic beats as part of the human condition. There’s also touches of Haydn’s drollery in places, as with the latter’s “The Clock” Symphony.

Perpetual Motion is something else again, the rhythms angular and anxious, going in and out of both conviction and certainty – the playing builds up wonderfully aggregated trajectories before the music self-reflectedly winds down, a single voice cast adrift – “frei aber einsam” – its solitariness a contrast with that of the following Funeral March, and its intensely communal outpourings of emotion from those still living. After this, Last Dance is something of a surprise, a kind of “is that all there is?” response to the certainty of life’s ending – the music conjures up a determination to vitalise existence with almost folk-fiddle-like movement, energy and life, to the point of obsessiveness and even hints of desperation – but the final gesture is determinedly upbeat and unequivocal!

This is a release to put with two other landmark recordings of string quartets by New Zealand composers that I’ve enjoyed over the years – Anthony Watson’s on a 1994 Continuum CD  (CCD1065), and Gareth Farr’s recorded by the Morrison Music Trust on MMT 2019.  The new disc of Anthony Ritchie’s trio of quartets from the superb Jade String Quartet has already given me the utmost pleasure, as outlined above – and I look forward to many more rehearings, both here and in concert! Thoroughly recommended!

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS – Wellington City Orchestra’s congress of assorted realities

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, with Diedre Irons (piano), Brendan Agnew (conductor), and Virginie Pacheco (Assistant Conductor)

SAI NATARAJAN – In This Corner Of The World
LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor
DOUGLAS LILBURN – Symphony No. 2

Diedre Irons (piano)
Virginie Pacheco (Assistant Conductor – Natarajan)
Brendan Agnew  (Conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 7th December, 2025

Now this was a treat for any concertgoer relishing the thought of something old and something new, combining an easeful kind of familiarity with more challenging musical terrain, as well as setting home-grown worlds in a wider context. Wellington City Orchestra’s programme enterprisingly opened up for us here-and-now impressions of creative forces at work in Aotearoa, before time-travelling us to Beethoven’s world and back again, and finally giving us a time-in-motion slice of “being” at a significant emerging point in our own colourful history. The sounds we heard spoke volumes for each of these times and places – it was something of a proverbial journey!

Different people participated in this process, and in different ways – we were welcomed to the concert at its beginning by Rowena Cullen, the orchestra’s President who’s also a member of the violin section, after which today’s conductor Brendan Agnew firstly paid tribute to a recently deceased orchestra member, Mark Hill, and then introduced today’s concert’s assistant conductor, Virginie Pacheco, who directed the concert’s opening performance, a heartwarming piece by youthful composer Sai Natarajan. At its conclusion Brendan Agnew then  bade us welcome pianist Diedre Irons to the stage to deliver her Beethoven concerto performance. Like the “players” in Shakespeare’s “Ages of Man” all of these individuals had, by their own lights, a special part to play in the panoply.

Beginning the concert charmingly  and sonorously was a work written by emerging freelance composer Sai Natarajan, from Palmerston North, one called “In This Corner of the World”. With Assistant Conductor Virginie Pacheco (the first to actually hold this title with the WCO) at the helm, we were transported at the beginning to the Manawatu plains, with Sibelius-like wind impulses sounding across the deeper murmurings of those open spaces, all the while engendering awakenings of activity, the thrustings and resoundings suggesting  iceberg-tips of the “absolute powerhouse of artistic and musical talent” that abides in the region.

The music gathers itself and epically “pushes out” this landscape, contrasting numerous “forest murmurings’ with attention-grabbing percussive scintillations, a recurring motif resounding in one’s attention as the brass give us some Lilburn-like reminiscences suggesting the inherent “musicality” of natural rhythms. My own experiences as a born-and-bred Palmerstonian responded to the composer’s recognition of “artistic toiling” in modestly-appointed, yet still-resonating hatcheries of human productivity in all fields of expression. I remember watching as my parents and their contemporaries set examples for us of partaking of things resulting for some of us in what Sai Natarajan calls  an artist’s “joys, struggles, disappointments and triumphs”, and from which modest origins still brought forth “beauty and joy”  in the doing, and occasionally even something enduring and worth celebrating – as this this great-hearted piece certainly was!

Happily, “In This Corner of the World”, after being premiered by the Manawatu Sinfonia in 2024, was recorded earlier this year by the NZSO as part of their annual NZ Composer Sessions initiative. I would imagine we haven’t heard the last of this intuitive, versatile, and delightfully communicative composer.

The programme’s suggestion of a wider context of human creativity was hinted at by the music of a composer whose output for many people epitomised a kind of universality  of utterance, Ludwig van Beethoven. His Third Piano Concerto is a kind of bridge-work between the classical and romantic eras, a realm which Mozart had also occasionally explored in music written in a similar key, but one more fully and dramatically furthered by this and other works by Beethoven.

Having splendidly recorded all of the composer’s piano concertos, and frequently played them in concert Diedre Irons was the ideal soloist to realise the “sturm und drang” of this work, aided by a suitably dark-browed accompaniment from the orchestra, with conductor Brendan Agnew on the podium. The opening was the orchestra’s alone, strongly-focused and well-detailed, to which the soloist responded with suitably dramatic contrasting gestures – it wasn’t all high drama and theatricality, with the second subject group almost playful in intent in places under Irons’ fingers, but leading back to a stern recapitulation by the players under Agnew’s direction and a properly virtuoso performance of the solo cadenza. Here, Irons was in complete command of the drama and volatility of the writing, bringing out the almost ghostly ambiences of the instrument’s return to the world of interaction in the movement’s darkly-enigmatic coda.

One of the most beautiful of Beethoven’s slow movements followed, with piano and orchestral passages delighting the ear, and the interchanges expressing a heartfelt “communal” sense of expression. Irons’ voicing of the decorative poetic utterances made every impulse a joy, and the winds and strings in particular matched her ardour – though the strings’ pizzicati could have been a tad firmer in places as they were near to inaudibility, so sensitive was their response! Particularly lovely were the last few interactions, the strings tender phrasings and the piano’s “haunted” chordings all underpinned by dark wind-and-brass murmurings before the latter echoed the piano’s final descending notes and brought in a final single chord – magical!

I loved the insouciance with which Irons then started the finale’s ball rolling – but the orchestra was ready for her, picking up the traces of the trajectories and ready to do its bit with the first big tutti – what great exchanges between orchestra and piano with those mighty chords and flourishes! A lovely clarinet solo introduced and elaborated on a new episode, and a string fugato followed, after a while beginning to loosen at the seams, but managing to complete the task as the pianist jumped in and steadied the rhythms! The recapitulation was strong and purposeful, as was Irons’ final grandstand solo flourish before the coda’s cheeky beginning, with truly spectacular piano-playing and a suitably vigorous audience response.

She was accorded a richly deserved tribute from all, but had not done with us yet! To our delight she sat back down at the piano and began the deliciously droll F Minor Allegro moderato dance from Schubert’s adorable Moments Musicaux. It was playing in which every note resonated and every impulse “choreographed” its own sound, inviting parts of us by turns to listen and sing and dance in our minds – and the moment towards the end when the final line impishly turned to F Major seemed as if the music was suddenly smiling at us and telling us to forget our troubles – magical piano playing!

An interval saw the piano further “magicked” to one side, leaving more space for the players to resound the strains of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant musical compositions, Douglas Lilburn’s Second Symphony. Completed in 1951, this iconic work had to wait until 1959 for its first public performance. Part of the problem was the country’s National Orchestra still being in its relative infancy (it gave its first concert in 1947) and its early conductors were certainly reluctant at that time to “take the plunge” with anything as off the beaten track as a locally-produced symphony – rather, they were set upon establishing the standard repertoire. The composer’s First Symphony had been an earlier casualty, completed in 1949, and premiered in 1951, to be then ignored for a further ten years. It wasn’t until the advent of John Hopkins as the National Orchestra’s Principal Conductor in the late 1950s that Lilburn’s music began to be performed more regularly – the composer’s gratitude was such that he went on to write a Third Symphony in 1961 and dedicate it to Hopkins!

The Second Symphony has always been associated with quintessential aspects of New Zealand life and landscape. What the composer referred to as “the imponderables” of the natural world feature strongly in the work – contrasts of light and shade and the vagaries of weather are prominent characteristics of the music’s different ambiences. Human influences are also a factor – in the second movement Lilburn immortalised what he described as the ”nasal and tangy” cry of Wellington’s Evening Post Paper-boy’s call, heard as he passed through the capital en route to or from the South Island. Others have commented upon the “search for identity” aspect of the music in the other movements, particularly in the third “Introduction”, where the “frontier” aspect of the environment seems somewhat remote and forbidding and essentially solitary. The music’s angst-like textures and ambiences seem to reflect struggles associated with a 1950s “coming of age” in artistic and other matters, one which the final movement translates into more positive and robust gesturings. I must here admit to a degree of dissatisfaction with the “Introduction” movement regarding its brevity – though expertly crafted, it doesn’t for me go far enough or even resound sufficiently within its existing parameters, eluding the feeling of a truly epic statement of being (it’s significantly shorter in scale than both the first or last movements!) – or have I been listening to too much Mahler or Bruckner or Shostakovich of late?

But to the beginning – beautifully and wistfully opened by the strings the first movement also featured buoyant solos from oboe, clarinet and flute, with the horns in atmospheric alignment. The strings, winds and brass raised us to the heights mid-movement with the horns having a wonderful “Carl Nielsen” moment (I once got taken to task by Lilburn himself for suggesting  the merest connection of him with that composer!), and the timpani adding to the music’s “epic” quality before the strings, with the oboe supported by the horns, bring the movement to a relatively placid close. A pity the St.Andrew’s acoustic had difficulty sorting  the dynamics, with the brass, to my ears sounding a bit lost in the mid-movement tuttis’ welter of sound!

Better-realised was the Scherzo, a more nimble, less weighty sound, the oboe doing a great job with the perky theme, and the brass and timpani lively at the climaxes. The other winds did splendid things with their variants of the theme, but the most nostalgic moments were the cellos’ introduction of the “paperboy” theme, and the strings in general joining in with its more extended moments. Elsewhere, the “snap” and “bite” of the rhythms was a joy.

The opening of the third movement  “Introduction” with its bleak and unremitting atmosphere was promising – strings and winds in tandem advanced the sobriety of it all, bringing out an almost Sibelius-like feeling of isolation to the textures. The strings pursued a “wandering” course underscored by the brass and counterpointed by the horns, and with the oboe and flute doggedly “lifting” the mood in places. The brass seemed warmer and more heroic when first entering, but their aspect quickly darkened in accord with the strings, the anguished chordings from both heightening the unease which the flute sought to console. At this point I wanted more, but for whatever reason the composer had decreed “enough”, and before we knew where we were, the finale was upon us and the clouds had dispersed …..

Though the composer might have given this marvellous finale more to react to in situ,  the energising warmth and freshness of the movement’s opening textures set the tone for what followed, impulses which seemed like a symbolic renewal of confidence following a dark night of the soul. Lilburn had already in words enjoined his fellow-composers to engage in what he called “a search for tradition” relating to the necessity of “writing our own music”, in his now-historic 1946 Cambridge Music School lecture written under the same title. Here, now, he practised his own dictum in the composition of this symphony, and to the extent he felt it necessary, whatever critics might say about the result! The work emphasised both challenge and possibility, and the results today spoke for themselves.

The coming-together of these things in this finale was a heady experience – moments in which the big ringing brass theme soared out gloriously, and the orchestra in other places seemed to pick up its skirts and dance were made the more memorable by a final peroration begun by stratospheric strings, and chiselled out of the texture by resounding brass and rolling timpani in glorious C Major! It had the effect of consuming everything at the concert’s conclusion in swathes of splendour and happiness!

 

 

 

BACK TO BACH from Baroque Voices takes the listener on a journey

Posted on by Peter Mechen
Baroque Voices at St.Mary of the Angels – from left: Pepe Becker, Andrea Cochrane, Samuel Berkahn, David Morriss, Imogen Granwal (‘cello), Simon Christie. Jamie Young, Toby Gee, Rowena Simpson

 

JS BACH – The Six Motets (BWV 225-230)
Baroque Voices (directed by Pepe Becker)

Pepe Becker, Rowena Simpson (sopranos)
Andrea Cochrane, Toby Gee (altos)
Samuel Berkahn, Jamie Young (tenors)
David Morriss, Simon Christie (basses)
Imogen Granwal (baroque ‘cello)

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Boulcott St., Wellington
Sunday 30th November, 2025

To my shame, I had never before heard a single one of JS Bach’s Motets before finding out about this concert – I’d “heard of” a couple of the titles of famous ones, such as “Komm, Jesu, komm” and “Jesu, mein Freude”, but had never taken the step of getting to know them, thinking that the “Passions” and the “B Minor Mass” and the “Christmas Oratorio” and the “Magnificat”, plus a clutch of Cantatas sufficiently qualified me as an accredited “Choral Bach listener”. So I was both delighted and intrigued upon being told by Baroque Voices’ director Pepe Becker some time ago that this concert was coming up, and DID managed to track down a couple of recordings and fit in some “listening” beforehand so as to get something of an idea of what I was in for…..

The concert date duly arrived and the presentation took place with the succinct title “Back to Bach” for  the Voices’ heady “whirlwind tour” through all six of the composer’s sacred motets, performed by the Wellington ensemble in the sumptuous (perhaps a tad too much so acoustically!) setting of St.Mary of the Angels church in the heart of the city. The director, Pepe Becker, described these works in her programme notes for the concert as “sublime, complex and deeply moving”, though one could add plenty of further epithets to the description of the afternoon’s performance by the ensemble. We warmed as readily to the exuberance of the writing, its enjoyment generated as much by the music’s own urgencies of feeling as by the voices’ different physicalities, all with their own channelled energies. These things all came together, the pieces amply reflecting their creator’s unquenchable human spirit and belief in a higher divine authority.

Unlike the cantatas, which Bach wrote regularly for every Sunday of the church year, the motets were infrequently produced for special occasions in Leipzig, and some may have even been lost. The six surviving ones were in fact the only choral works of Bach which didn’t disappear entirely from view until the renowned “Bach revival” of the 19th Century. The famous story of Mozart’s joyful response, upon hearing in Leipzig in 1789 a performance of Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (Sing to the Lord a new song) bears witness to these works carrying a torch for future generations.

It’s unclear what Bach’s intentions were regarding the instrumental accompaniment of these works – only one of the motets, Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf (BWV 226) has extant orchestra parts, and two other Motets have separate continuo basslines written, Furchte dich (BWV 228), and Lobet den Herrn (BWV 230). So there is no “final word” regarding instrumental accompaniment, according to the composer. The works would probably have been accompanied at least by basso continuo (an organ or a melodic bass instrument) – Baroque Voices use a bass stringed instrument in all but two of the Motets – Komm, Jesu, komm (BWV 229), and Jesu, meine Freude (BWV 227), here a baroque cello, played by Imogen Granwal.

Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied got the concert away to a stirringly festive beginning, with the wonderful “pinging” calls of the opening Singet, the tones brightly shining, and the lines mellifluously blending, swirling nicely together at Die Gemeine der Heiligen sollen in loben, (Sing His praise in the congregation of saints). As well, the infectious “dancing” tones of Die Kinder Zion sei’n frölich über ihren Könige  (Let the children of Zion be joyful in their King) were delightful, leading to the  splendid all-in tones of the climactic Mit Pauken und Harfen sollen sie im spielen! (Let them sing praises unto Him with the timbrel and harp)! The second-movement Chorale Wie sich ein Vat’r erbarmet (As a father is merciful) had one group singing the chorale, and the other interspersing lines from the aria Gott, nimm dich ferner unser an (O, Lord, continue to care for us) – beautiful, heartfelt exchanges! A suitably zestful Lobet den Herrn in seinen Taten (Praise the Lord for His mighty acts), then moved without a break in momentum to a triple-time Alleluia for a satisfying finish.

Next was the tremulously-expressed Komm Jesu, Komm (Come, Jesu, Come), so very theatrical at the outset, and with the individual voices then conveying the hardship of life’s vicissitudes with Die Kraft verschwindt je mehr und mehr (My strength is fading more and more), and the solace of expectation, freed from “Der saure Weg” (the stony path). The voices put an infectious eagerness into the renewed cries of “Komm, komm”, and a renewed strength of certainty  (with touches of elation!) into the trajectories of Du bist der rechte Weg, die Wahrheit, und das Leben (The Way, the Truth and the Light). The concluding Chorale, Drum schliess ich mich in deine Hande (So I entrust myself into Thy hands) quietly exalted in its certainty here, right to the final long-breathed notes.

Though written for the funeral service in October 1729 of Johann Heinrich Ernesti, longtime rector of the St. Thomas School  in Leipzig, Bach was perhaps inspired by the great man’s positive qualities by writing some attractive and inspirational music for this motet, Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf (The Spirit also helpeth our infirmities). Its cheerful, forward-pressing gait and general overall tone includes some droll references to the “Spirit’s” intercession for our prayers “mit unaussprechlichem Seufzen” (with unutterable groanings)! The music’s lovely 3/8 trajectory at the beginning changes to common-time for both the “groanings” and the references to “Der aber die Herzen forschet” (He that searcheth the Heart). My only other thought was that the Chorale could perhaps have been a little more hushed, and varied in delivery at the outset, as befitted the words “Du Heilige Brunst, süsser Trost” (Heavenly Fire, sweet consolation) – which sounded as if they might have come from Schiller, for goodness sakes!

The interval gave us time to reflect on the magnificence of the music and the manifest qualities of the performances, which were considerable – brightly-shining tones, nimble trajectories, neither rushed nor dragging, distinctive individual voices, and, despite some idiosyncratic vocal “blends” in certain places, still successfully ensuring the voices’ clarity and the words’ flavourings and colourings were imparted. I wondered in places whether the acoustic was actually a bit “too much”, resulting in some of the singers’ tones being amplified more than others, and wondered whether a smaller, sparser acoustic might have integrated the sounds better. However, it was a “sometimes” effect, as more often the ensembled sounds came together most mellifluously.

The lovely opening of Fürchte dich nicht (Fear not) with its euphonious exchanges continued our pleasure, as did, in an entirely different way, the dramatic interpolations of recitative-like utterances of “Ich stärke dich!” from individual singers, and the contrast between the austere chromatic fugal passages and the radiant chorale excepts from the sopranos in the ensuing fugue, a vocal contrast that continued to delight us until the final concerted statement “Furche dich nicht – Du bist mein!” Heartwarming!

The longest and most complex of the motets is Jesu, meine Freude  (“Jesus, my Joy”). Essentially scored for five voices, including a second soprano line (as with Bach’s Magnificat) it alternates a chorale tune by Johann Crüger with settings of texts by Johann Franck and from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. It’s uncertain just when this motet was composed, or for what particular purpose, with one scholar even advocating the idea of Bach using the work just for educational purposes with his St.Thomas’s Leipzig  choir.

The beautiful opening sang out gloriously, the singers relishing the third of each group of lines of text, arching each towards a moment of intense feeling – a marked contrast with the beginning of the next movement’s Es ist nun nichts Verdamliches (There is therefore now no condemnation) with the word “nichts” separately and pointedly repeated, and the following line “Die nicht nach dem Fleische wandein” (Who walk not after the flesh) which wanders graphically in a kind of wilderness! The wonderful third movement Unter Deinem Schirmen (Protected by Thee) returned to the chorale tune, whose serenity was “roughed up” with references to Kracht und Blitz (“Thunder and Lightning”) and then Sünd und Hölle (“Sin and Hell”) adding to the dramatic effect. The three women’s voices then consoled our fears with the fourth movement’s Denn das Gesetz des Geistes (“For the Law of the Spirit”).

More drama and contrast was depicted by the fifth movement’s  Trotz dem alten Drachen (“Defy the Old Dragon”), the singers hurling the word “Trotz” (Defy!) upwards and outwards, and agitatedly word-crafting a world raging and quaking (Tobe, Welt und Springe – ”Rage, world, and quake!”), before painting a picture of the soul standing and singing  in perfect peace with God (Ich steh’ hier und singe in gar Sicher Ruh). The following movement Ihr aber seid nich Fleischlich (“For ye are not of the flesh”) most winningly here contrasted a quick-moving fugal opening with a sonorous chorale-like conclusion Wer aber Christi Geist nicht hat, der ist nicht sein! – (“Yet one who has not the Spirit of Christ is not His!”).

The vigorous and wonderful Weg mit allen Schätzen(“Away with all earthly treasures!)  that followed featured the soprano with the chorale line set against such deliciously contrasting and detailed figurations from the others – the urgently-delivered opening from the lower voices and with its first word Weg! repeated, was such a delight! And the singers conveyed the “strongly-felt essence” of other utterances such as Elend, Not, Kreuz, Schmach und Tod (“Poverty, distress, Cross, disgrace and death”) so very vividly at the conclusion.

The winsome So aber Christus in euch ist (“And if Christ be in you”) was gentle and dance-like, here, until the words Der Geist aber ist das Leben “But the Spirit is life”, when the figurations quickened, though leaving us with a somewhat unresolved conclusion – this was supplied by the following Gute Nacht, O Wesen (“Goodnight, O earthly Life”) – here, a stunningly beautiful piece whose lines I thought the sopranos  took a little time to settle into at the beginning, but which achieved a magic by the end.

After these heartfelt articulations, So nun der Geist des (“Now that the Spirit of him”) seemed businesslike and anecdotal by comparison, almost a case of the narrator moving the story on to its inevitable conclusion! Bach replicates the manner of the work’s second movement in the use of a repeated word (here, “Geist” is repeated, as was the word “Nichts” in the second movement) and the text has the same instruction-like tone as Es ist nun nichts Verdamliches. The true frisson of feeling came with the final Weicht, ihr Trauergeister (“Disperse, sombre spirits”), with the original opening Chorale melody taking us back to the work’s beginning in the most disarming and direct way – all truly wonderful!

There remained the “orphan” of the bunch to give some attention to – the motet Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden (“Praise the Lord all ye nations”), the one that there’s “doubt” as to whether or not it’s by Bach at all.  Pepe Becker put it succinctly in her programme note about the piece, saying that “it’s hard to imagine who else could have written such a vital, well-crafted piece”. And who could blame her, with such material to perform? At the beginning a sprightly combination of lines led to a splendidly-voiced fugue at “Und preiset ihn, aller Völker”, after which an appropriately slower section made reference to Seine Gnade und Wahrheit (which will) waltet uber uns in Ewigkeit “His mercy and truth (which will) reign over us for all eternity” – and with everything then enlivened by a sequence of triple-time Alleluias – an appropriately joyful way to end such a concert!

What to say? – except that the experience for me of hearing these works in concert for the first time was life-changing. To Pepe Becker and her Baroque Voices grateful thanks for a truly resounding experience!

 

NZSO’s night of beauty and splendour with Berlioz and Bruckner

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Joyce DiDonato sings Berlioz with the NZSO and Gemma New – photo credit Phoebe Tuxford

HECTOR BERLIOZ – Les Nuits d’ete
ANTON BRUCKNER – Symphony No. 7 in E Major

Joyce DiDonato (mezzo-soprano)
Gemma New (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday, November 28th. 2025

We would have been forgiven, at the conclusion of this Wellington concert’s first-half-outpouring of glorious vocalism from American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, for imagining that the rest of the evening’s music-making would prove at best worthy, but perhaps not scaling the heights to which we’d been taken. And with good reason, as we had just heard one of the most beautiful of all orchestral song-cycles, Hector Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’ete”, here performed in a way that simply embodied the idea of a singer “inhabiting” a piece of music, with every note, phrase, expression and gesture savoured as if parts of a living entity. For Joyce DiDonato, it’s music that, in her own words, is “emotional, beautiful and identifiable – it has both the light and the dark, a little bit of humour, and then the pathos.”

From the moment she stepped onto the Michael Fowler Centre stage DiDonato had her audience’s attention (as befitted a renowned international singer making her New Zealand debut) and, on this occasion transfixed her listeners with the first few notes of “Villanelle”, the cycle’s opening song, a charming “pastorelle” describing the onset of the spring, and the simple peregrinations of lovers, and with the singer’s voice by turns eager, wry, teasing and tender. As with the other songs, not a phrase or gesture went for nothing – we saw the “pearled dewdrops” and heard the “blackbirds call”, in “the month that lovers bless”, all delivered with a natural-sounding fluency, an artistry concealing art and revealing living feeling.

So it was with the different world of “Le Spectre de la Rose”, the renowned song which depicts a dream-like sequence of a rose plucked and worn at a ball, and promising to return every night to haunt its wearer’s dreams – the singer firstly galvanised us with the splendour of words such as “..j’arrive du Paradis” (I come from Paradise) – but then, how different a world the same voice plunged us into with the following “Sur les lagunes” (On the Lagoons), with the opening words “Ma belle amie est morte” (My beautiful love is dead), with each of the verses’ chilling and prescient Mahlerian final line “Ah!  Sans amour s’en aller sur la mer!” (Alas! – to go over the sea without love).

My favourite from the cycle has always been the radiant “Absence” – and DiDonato didn’t disappoint, tugging at the heartstrings even more than Regine Crespin and Janet Baker in favourite recordings, with her luminous “ownership” of the opening “Reviens” (Return) and her pitiable “Comme une fleur loin du soleil” (like a flower away from the sun). So bewitched were we, the audience, with her “moth-to-the-flame” detailing and resonating lines of ambience in “Au Cimetière” (In the cemetery) that, when what sounded like a stray cell-phone tone broke the ending’s silence, the audience hurriedly applauded to cover the intrusion!  The musicians then, in turn, broke into the applause to deliver the final, exuberant “L’ile inconnue” (The Unknown Isle) – here done with irresistible verve and detachment sense of release from what had been up to that moment the composer’s longed-for and sadly unrealised “Toujours” (always) from the opening “Villanelle” – acknowledged here by DiDonato with wry equanimity, rather than bitter resignation to “la jeune belle”, with the open-hearted words at the end – “Ou voulez-vous aller? – La brise va souffler….” (Where would you like to go? – the breeze is about to blow….).

Having received rapturous audience accolades for her efforts, DiDonato repaid us handsomely, with, firstly, the “Habanera” from Carmen (orchestra AND even some audience voices supplying the chorus’s “Prends garde a toi!” response here, in each verse!), and then what the singer called “a present to us in return from her part of the world”, a verse and chorus of Harold Arlen’s  song “Somewhere, over the Rainbow” from the film “The Wizard of Oz”. At that, even this diehard critic found himself on his feet, applauding!

But then! – the evening’s biggest surprise for me, however, came with the Bruckner! I had heard the NZSO give radiant performances of some of the symphonies over the years with maestri such as Franz-Paul Decker and more recently Simone Young, both of whom held established “Bruckner credentials” – so the orchestra had proven itself as a “Bruckner ensemble” in distinguished company. And while I’d been impressed over the last couple of years with Gemma New’s conducting of Mahler I’d never been one to “presume” (as many seem to do) that proficiency with the latter automatically guarantees the same with Bruckner’s similarly large-scale but vastly different worlds of expression. And I hadn’t been able to find any record of New having conducted Bruckner before, so this seemed to me like something she was undertaking for the first time.

Straightaway I was frustrated by the symphony’s opening, since New, after ascending the podium, very quickly gave the orchestra the signal to begin –  which meant that the whispered string tremolando with which the work opens was for me on this occasion almost totally inaudible due to audience “rustle” as part of the settling-down process. I SAW the violins begin, but simply heard the “E” of the lower strings “begin” the music! I wish she’d instead secured absolute stillness in the auditorium before beginning, and allowed the sound to magically conjure itself as it were out of the ether –

And then the surprise unfolded – not instantly, but as a slowly growing and evolving feeling as the symphony progressed that I was actually witnessing a superbly-played and wondrously-articulated performance. The symphony’s very first theme, for me had a pliable elasticity contributing to a parallel expansion and intensification of the sound as the trajectories proceeded, and with everything beautifully voiced. New kept the tempi of the different sections related to what seemed like a single inner pulse so that nothing had to speed up or slow down appreciably to properly “speak” its character – for instance, the massive brass entry featuring a minor-key inversion of the opening theme seemed more organic than disruptive in this overall context –- and how beautifully the composer used his wind players’ material to elaborate on existing themes when these variants were brought back later in the movement.

The majestic slow movement, Bruckner’s tribute to Richard Wagner, was just as successfully unfolded by New’s unhurried, but vitally-phrased tempi at every turn –  the first upwardly thrusting string phrase taking the lead in exuding emotion of a vigorous and resounding kind – while the deep brass, at first contained, still made so eloquently the perfect foil for the following full-throated strings-and-winds’ songbird manifestations. As the movement developed so did the urgency and vigour of New’s marshalling of the music’s tectonic forces towards and into a spaciously resplendent climax, one superbly delivered by conductor and players. However, it became as much a funeral oration with the news of Wagner’s death “capturing” this music for history from that moment on, the flute sonorously summonsing the resplendent “Wagner tubas” and their tones of sorrowful tidings, and bestowing upon the music a kind of immortality.

After this, there’s a lithe, muscular Scherzo, here splendidly directed and delivered in every way imaginable, the normally bucolic impulses of Brucknerian scherzi in this case to my mind worthy of elevation both by association and sheer exuberant excellence to the realms of “sport for the Gods”. But then, for me, it was New’s and the orchestra’s playing of the finale as much as anything else in the symphony that lifted the experience beyond my expectations, transforming what I’d always previously regarded as a somewhat “poor relation” of a movement to a piece that suddenly seemed bristling with nuance, impulse, spontaneity and variety while appearing to know unto itself exactly where it was going!   And, what was more, as with the symphony’s beginning, I  had another brief  questioning  “moment” at the end , thinking that New had begun the work’s coda too abruptly, and that what was needed was more time and space to “savour” the whole of what we had heard, and to bring the work to a “grander” conclusion. Halfway through the coda I found myself thinking, “This actually works! – in fact, it’s exhilarating!” – and by the end, my thought was “Wow! What a performance!”

Joyce DiDonato and her extraordinary singing will remain an ineffable memory for me! – but Gemma New’s Bruckner was also a revelation, one that I hope we’ll get even more chances to experience in times to come!