Orchestra Wellington presents “Creation”
DARIUS MILHAUD – La Création du Monde
BÉLA BARTÓK – Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion
CARL NIELSEN – Symphony No. 4 “Inextinguishable”
Ballet Collective Aotearoa
John Psathas Group – Akvilė Šileikaitė, Michael Houstoun (pianos)
Fabian Ziegler, Katarzyna Myćka (percussion)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei – conductor
Michael Fowler Centre. Wellington
Saturday 22nd August, 2026
Orchestra Wellington’s latest presentation spanned fascinating varieties of time, place and human expression in bringing together different manifestations of creative impulse ranging from the trans-Atlantic cosmic (Milhaud) through flavoursome folkish interaction (Bartók) to an individualised and spectacularly conclusive life-perspective (Nielsen).
This occasion wasn’t the first on which the orchestra and Marc Taddei had invited dancers into the concert-hall (I remember a remarkably atmospheric dance presentation of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin in 2023) but as one of the current items (Darius Milhaud’s La Création du Monde) just happened to be an original ballet score, the challenge of a dance presentation was taken up and readily accepted by the Ballet Collective Aotearoa on a surprisingly-accommodating stage in front of the orchestral platform. Further out-of-the-ordinary performance configurations followed with the appearance of two grand pianos and numerous percussion instruments on the platform, making ready for Bela Bartók’s fascinatingly collaborative Concerto for two Pianos and Percussion. Here the version with the composer’s own orchestrations was played (the original was for four players only), the music exploring a complex network of creative instrumental combinations bringing together classical, folk and futuristic elements.
In conclusion, the concert presented us with a singular view of the creative process via an orchestral symphony whose title eponymously described its very character – this was Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, given the name “Inextinguishable” by its composer, a direct affirmation of, in the composer’s words “life and movement” readily suggesting the “will to life” as being “indomitable and inextinguishable”.
Such is the increased “global” focus of present-day humanity, it’s hardly surprising that there’s increasing interest shown by creative groups worldwide in exploring the commonalities of intrinsic human activities, views regarding existence in general and including stories from different places relating to origins of the world and the life it has supported and developed. French-born composer Darius Milhaud’s 1923 ballet “La Creation du Monde” conspicuously represented a kind of amalgam of pioneering discovery on his part involving both his exposure to New World jazz music when visiting New York in 1922, and his fascination with a collection of West Central African Creation mythologies – these had been compiled by the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, in vogue with a fascination in 1920s French artistic circles regarding “primitivism” perfectly expressed by African art and legend. In response to a commission from the impresario Rolf de Maré for his Ballets Suédois (Swedish Ballet Company) in Paris, Cendrars devised the ballet’s scenario with cubist sets and costumes designed by Fernand Léger. The ballet unfolded across five movements whose connections charted a “creation” course from “Chaos” through awakenings of Nature, and the creation of Man and Woman – a scenario not unlike the biblical story of Genesis.
Fascinatingly, the ballet’s scenario was here adapted for the Ballet Collective Aotearoa by choreographer Tanemahuta Grey, with the dancers depicting the Te Ao Maori creation story of the separation of Rangi-nui and Papa-tuanuku. The choreographer’s voice spoke the introductory incantations in Te Reo (a translation not provided that I could see, which was a pity!) However, the Te Ao Māori story is well-known enough by audiences to make an involving and sonorous connection with the music possible and meaningful, and was brilliantly essayed by the dancers (as well as by the musicians on their part) throughout. It was interesting that, as the group had more female than male dancers Tanemahuta Grey stressed the aspects of the story involving the births of the two female deities Hine Ahu-Ons and Hine Titama, more than the activities of Tane and his brothers at the story’s beginning – a differently-weighted focus to what one usually encounters in the story.
Though the detailings of the myth were differently emphasised to that of the well-known story (Rangi-Nui the Skyfather, and Papa- Tuanuku, the Earth-Mother are forced apart by the efforts of their son Tane Mahuta, after the attempts by various of the other children had failed), the union and separation of the parents (Olivia Platt as Papa-Tuanuku, and James Buechell as Rangi-Nui) readily conveyed both the closeness of their union and the agony of their separation. This was achieved by Tane-Mahuta (Tabitha Dombroski), with suitably forceful connivance from additional dancers Amelia Chandulal-Mackay and Lyndon Foley. Then, the coming into the world of the daughters of the union, Hine Ahu one (danced by Zoe White) and Hine Titama (Ruby Clarke) was conveyed with due exchanges, minglings and separation sequences. A more detailed explanation of the scenario would have enhanced our understanding of specific movements towards union and separation, but the somewhat abstracted gesturings and concerted movements managed to convey the ritualised essence of origin and representation we needed to give the movements their symbolic meaning – and the music-making was wonderful!
Creation was followed by re-creation in terms of the next item, both in the performing space’s adaptation for the presentation, and the original work’s “enlargement” by its composer Bela Bartók. This was the Concerto for two pianos, percussion and orchestra, and was a work which I’d heard not long ago in its original 1937 format, for two pianos and percussion, and which the composer and his wife Ditta Pásztory had premiered in Basel, Switzerland in 1938 with great success. This led to the composer’s publisher Hans Heinsheimer suggesting that Bartók recast the work with orchestral accompaniment after he had left Hungary for the United States in 1940 to give his music increased performance opportunities – the original solo parts for the work were largely unchanged, and the work was premiered in its new format in London late in 1942. Bartók and his wife Ditta gave the American premiere of this work in January, 1943 at Carnegie Hall, New York, the last occasion on which the composer appeared in public as a performer, as he was to die of leukemia in September 1945.
This performance featured an ensemble with the name John Psathas Group, formed by an international ensemble of artists dedicated to “bringing contemporary chamber music to life” with the promotion of John Psathas’s music a “raison d’etre” for the ensemble along with other recent works. Fittingly, New Zealand’s Michael Houstoun was invited to participate in this concert with fellow-pianist Akvilė Šileikaitė, and percussionists Katarzyna Myćka and Fabian Ziegler. As I’d never before heard the “concerto” version of this work the occasion had more-than-usual interest for me.
The work began with soft drum rolls and low piano notes, suddenly “lit up” by the first of two scintillating irruptions, each conveying an idea of something eventful awaiting its appointed time – the pianists gradually built up their figurations in presence and excitement with increased detailings from both percussionists and orchestra, becoming giant stride-like beats as the “presences” amplify and accelerate their intensities, alternating energetic piano dovetailings with percussive colourings from the soloists and fanfare-like crescendi brilliantly bursting forth from the orchestra. What sounded like a “devil of a fugue” introduced by the side-drum roll made for hair-raising irruptive sequences, both playful in their “falling back” to folkish expression and startling in their contrasts of extremes! We were kept on tenterhooks for most of the movement’s course, so volatile and differentiated were the sequences and their interactions!
Bartók’s “night music” drew us into a fantasmagorical amalgam of impulse and stillness, sounds that owed nothing to convention and everything to nature, the music gradually creating its own trajectorial instincts towards a kind of unease which now and then “spooked” the textures either with isolated sforzandi or eerily swirling chromatic piano figures which pursued glissandi-like impulses of disquiet – everything sounded so “feral”, so unconcerned with form or shape, predisposed instead towards a self-
contained ambient presence set in timeless surety by long-held wind tones claiming proprietal rights at the end.
A flurry of energies sent tones, scintillations and percussive patternings dancing in the last movement’s opening! – the xylophone and timpani danced alternate steps goading the pianists into following suit, and elongating the festive, almost Shostakovich-like air of joyous release. Akvilė Šileikaitė and Michael Houstoun took up the mischievous variations of their respective trajectories, one second direct and business-like, and the next “playing” with droll and loping rhythms before dashing excitedly together into an urgently-conceived crescendo of energies whose concerted impulses resonated through the spaces most satisfyingly! The pianist’s “cake-walk” pastiche-like sequence got everybody’s rhythmic instincts in synch most splendidly, almost as if “jam-sessioning” would keep us going indefinitely! – however, Bartok chose to make a tongue-in-cheek gesture of wry acceptance over the work’s last few bars, with a few piano notes and a muttered percussion gesture ending the work and leaving us all bemused but happy!
We spent the interval musing over conductor Marc Taddei’s words addressed briefly to us before the Bartók item regarding recent funding decisions from Creative New Zealand reducing its annual support for Orchestra Wellington by almost 40%, and alerting us that the cuts would carry serious implications for the orchestra’s ability to stage the kind of innovative and ambitious presentations we’d enjoyed from OW of late. Such sobering realities didn’t, however, inhibit the impact of the second-half performance of Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony, one that, under such circumstances, aptly bore the name “Inextinguishable”. As it meant to go on, the symphony exploded into being in the conductor’s and players’ hands, the full-blooded playing announcing in no uncertain terms that this music had something to say!
The work as a whole felt like a “stream of consciousness” with its composer intent upon demonstrating the inexhaustible process of life and its variety – so, the four “sections” in the symphony featured the same notes, themes and progressions repeatedly “turning up” in different guises in boundless displays of energy and reflection, underlining the sharply-contrasted nature of the exchange. In the wake of a cello solo supported by the flutes, the clarinets took up the great descending theme which dominates the work, followed by the strings, intermingling fragments of the opening things before a brusque repeated viola figure broke into the mood, preparing the way for the following energetic version of the same glorious clarinets’ theme, here made rumbustious and raucous. Throughout, Marc Taddei’s control of his forces steered the music unerringly through its by turns steady and frenetic manifestations, with strings, winds, brasses and timpani unhesitatingly throwiing themselves into the fray, each vying for our attention! Eventually, we were moved towards and through a great E-major orchestral statement of exhausted but triumphant finality which proclaimed its victory before sinking downwards towards the next movement’s beginning!
As timpani and violin mused quietly on what had gone before the wind choirs suddenly broke out in cheerful song, via fresh, out-of-doors flavourings from both reeds and flutes, playing in what sounded like an “old-world” fashion, but with subtle hints of later harmonic language, evident in the more “exploratory” string pizzicato passages, everything here so deliciously and disarmingly delivered, right up to the clarinet’s entry with rather more sobering and tentative phrases, as if the player had realised some kind of “brink” was threatening – which it was!
As if a giant cosmic firmament was suddenly opened up before us, the Orchestra Wellington strings turned the intensities upon us with a vengeance! – though there weren’t masses of strings their focused sounds galvanised our sensibilities as they delivered the third movement’s spectacularly resonant opening utterances, reinforced by irruptions from the timpani and lower strings, motifs from the symphony’s opening. The violas and cellos joined in, just as whole-heartedly, and a fugal section piled the emotion up higher and higher towards a wonderful moment of release, though the performance didn’t let up with the intensities – despite a piquant oboe solo lifting its beseeching voice the strings brushed the moment aside and launched into a furious fusillade-like violin unison passage, skin and hair flying, and which the lower strings then took up as well – breathless excitement! (I read about a telling exchange between conductor Sir John Barbirolli and his Halle orchestra leader Martin Milner who, when rehearsing the work requested that the conductor take this passage with the strings “a little slower, for clarity’s sake” – to which Barbirolli replied “Oh, no! – if we take it any slower, people will hear what you’re playing!”).
Here the music exuded joy and energy, the performance “taking wing”, expressing the “inextinguishable” qualities of life itself, though the composer still had a wild-card to play – the addition to the orchestra of a second set of timpani, which had been silent up to this moment, but which now joined in with the vigorous expressions of delight and energy. Though my seat in the Michael Fowler centre gave me an excellent view of the first timpanist, I could only just catch glimpses of the tops of the flailing drumstick- heads of the second player, placed as he was partly under the upstairs audience overhang – so I missed the spectacular visual effect of the additional player’s joining with the movement’s opening festivities, and, more importantly, the later, combatative sequences between the two players’ instruments. After the two timpanists seemed to size each other up, the music momentarily calmed down, the winds making reassuring noises as the strings hovered uneasily, as if reluctant to launch into the work’s great “life” theme and face the challenge of the heavy artillery! Brass and winds then sounded warnings of what was to come as the “battle” began in earnest – though I couldn’t clearly see the second timpanist, the surges of sound that raged back and forth across the vistas were impressive in themselves, the conflict flavoured by shouts from the strings and cries from the brass! A final percussive crescendo and the drums broke off their onslaught, while orchestral forces lifted their voices in triumph with the composer’s all-pervading “life theme”, the timpani then joining in with the final peroration as partners rather than foes, the players all sonorously savouring the spoils of victory!
A classic concert experience, then – and, for me, one to savour in the memory as a revelation!