ORCHESTRA WELLINGTON 2026 – “Revelations”
NATALIE HUNT – Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket
CLAUDE DEBUSSY – Nocturnes
FERRUCCIO BUSONI – Piano Concerto
The concert also included items by the Sistema Group Arohanui Strings
Jian Liu (piano)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Arohanui Strings Sistema Youth Orchestra
and associated players
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday 24th October 2026
This latest Orchestra Wellington concert, even during such an enterprising presentation year as 2026, will resonate in the memory as a special event for a long time to come – it was conductor Marc Taddei’s inspirational idea to invite the city’s foremost resident pianist, Jian Liu, to perform Ferruccio Busoni’s massive five-movement Piano Concerto, generally considered the longest and most physically demanding of all piano concertos! Even when the orchestra’s initial claim that this performance would be a “first” for Aotearoa New Zealand was found to be incorrect (British pianist John Ogdon performed the concerto in both Auckland and Wellington with the NZSO and conductor Juan Matteucci in March 1968), the prospect for a new generation of listeners of hearing such a distinctive work had no difficulty in maintained its currency as a true “blue moon” event.
Appropriately enough, the concert’s titled “Revelations” were by no means confined to the Busoni Concerto, thanks to a number of varied delights of association which enriched the evening’s listening experience. It began with a work which was receiving its premiere performance – Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket – written by a New Zealand composer, Natalie Hunt, whose music I had -previously encountered (and reviewed) on a number of occasions. According to my “Middle C” record of concerts the first work of hers I wrote about was one in 2009 at a special NZSO National Youth Orchestra 50th Anniversary concert, when the orchestra performed her “Only to the Highest Mountain” – (review at https://middle-c.org/2009/07/521/) – and there have been several others at various times since then.
Her intention with this most recent work was to make a special connection with the orchestras performing this evening’s concert, Wellington’s Sistema Youth Orchestra Arohanui Strings, and Orchestra Wellington, as well as the presentation’s wider programme which brought into play further influences – the music of Claude Debussy we were to hear tonight, the Trois Nocturnes, was inspired by the “Nocturne” paintings of James McNeill Whistler, with the latter’s painting “Nocturne in Black and Gold – the Falling Rocket” directly inspiring Natalie Hunt’s eponymously-titled composition.
Hunt’s work was a visual as well as an aural treat, introduced by a pūrerehua, a traditional taonga puoro known elsewhere as a “bullroarer”, though in Te Reo it’s the word for “butterfly”, as the sound made by the instrument (a flat, blade-like piece of wood or bone attached to a long cord and swung in a circle around the single player’s head) represents the gentle whirring of insect wings. This action, reinforced with a gentle timpani roll and the toneless “blowing” of brass players’ breath through the instruments’ tubes and bells brought into being a magical sense of spiritual “presences” being given voice in an “other-worldly” kind of manifestation from other orchestral instruments. It’s not actually dissimilar in effect to the opening of Debussy’s work, his first-movement Nuages (Clouds), a work with particular connections to Whistler’s visual evocations of light and shade, and which Hunt referred to admiringly in the programme note to her own work.
The writing made use of deft touches for atmospheric percussion leading to similarly sensitive brass colourations which vibrantly emerged from their somewhat grisaille-like shades of monochrome as the music gathered urgencies and momentums towards joyously exuberant outpourings. This was exemplified by a wild and fantastic trumpet solo that spurred the orchestral ambiences to generate an all-embracing panoply of sound whose impact then just as magically dissipated as it announced its presence at the piece’s beginnings. I thought it was a piece that entirely sure-footed its way into and through its composer’s suggestively referenced interests and purposes, while maintaining its own singular identity, the audience reaction at the piece’s end warmly expressing appreciation for the work and the composer’s appearance.
Marc Taddei then brought onto the platform the “Tui Ensemble”, comprising the younger members of the Arohanui Strings’ Sistema group whose older representatives had taken part in the first item. The youngsters delighted us with their participation in strings-only performances of Bizet’s “Carillion” from L’Arlesienne, along with a couple of other unidentified but similarly jolly pieces. Our attention then turned to Debussy’s Trois Nocturnes, pieces which reflected the composer’s fascination with the impressionistic sensibilities of his own time, and of the cross-fertilisation between art-forms, expressed in music such as these orchestral pieces and in the Piano Preludes with their suggestively-evocative titles.
The work’s beginning, Nuages, brought exquisite textural balancings from Taddei and his the players in realising that particular grisaille quality of monochromatic colouring (grey, black and white with occasional earth-tones of brown or green, though with a preponderance of grey – “gris”).It had that peculiarly bitter-sweet quality, exemplified by the mournful tones of the cor anglais, whose repetitive ascending phrase dominated the movement’s ambivalently veiled, but still expressive solemnities, with immutable colourings and hauntingly soft phrasings at the end. Fetes, the middle movement, made for a properly startling contrast, with sharply-projected rhythms and flashings of light, the opening surveying for us the overall atmosphere of excitement and celebration, before gathering the strands into a near-ominously approaching processional (what stunningly-controlled brass-playing here, as if “from a great distance” as the sounds moved irrevocably closer to us before bursting out in full orgiastic splendour!) – in short, a remarkable sequence of hushed expectation building up to exuberant incandescence, and then gradually dissolving into thin air (superb playing from the winds and the soft trumpets at the end!)
Most enigmatic-sounding was the third-movement Sirènes, with which Debussy had struggled to get from the women’s voices the blended instrumental quality he wanted, and which here sounded as atmospheric as any I’d previously heard – the more forthright vocal phrases at the beginning can be difficult to make properly alluring-sounding, but the softer, more suggestive notes from the voices had all the enticement of promise and captivation of distance, here superbly set-off by the sensitivity of the orchestral playing. And the crescendo-like blossomings from the voices brought near-rapturous responses from the orchestral forces in the work’s central sections, imparting to the dying-fall encapsulations of longing which resonated long afterwards in the memory.
After re-savouring these delights throughout the concert’s interval we were freshly reminded of what was in store by the centre-stage presence of the piano, obviously the primary focus of the Busoni concerto which was to follow. This work, too, had extra-musical aspects relating to other art-forms which had influenced the composer in terms of both the work’s structure and content, most obviously with the inclusion of a fifth movement featuring a male chorus, with the tenors and basses of Wellington’s Orpheus Choir intoning verses written by the Danish poet and playwright Adam Oehlenschläger for a verse-drama Aladdin, based on the well-known story from the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights. Oehlenschläger’s verses are taken from the hero Aladdin’s “Hymn to Allah” in the play, and for Busoni had something of the mystical character of the concluding stanzas of Goethe’s Faust, hence his desire to use male voices rather than a mixed-voice choir. The composer had actually already fallen under the spell of Oehlenschläger’s play and had set this final chorus to music – when he came to write the concerto, he realised this existing work fitted the concerto’s overall scheme perfectly, both as an augmentation of existing sonorities “like a body of soft trombones added to the orchestra” and a philosophical statement of spiritual awareness and growth via maturity and transformation.
Though the work requires a virtuoso soloist for the extremely challenging solo part, the writing is rarely virtuosic for its own sake, with even the most intricately-scored passages incorporated into the work’s overall design. And while the keyboard writing echoes practically every nineteenth-century romantic piano style, the composer performs miracles of integration of these differing pianistic characters into an irrepressible whole. Opinions have differed about the work’s efficacy, with comments including the description “monstrously overwritten” and “a hymn to immoderation” balanced by the words of an earlier commentator, the British critic Edward Dent, who remarked of the piano part, “Busoni sits at the pianoforte, listens, comments, decorates and dreams”.
Busoni himself regarded the work as a kind of variegated temple of sounds and structures with an over-riding symmetry featuring a massive central slow movement flanked by two vigorous scherzo-like pieces, and great, solemn outer edifices at each end (he drew a visualisation of this which found its way onto the front of the published score – groups of temple-like buildings flanked by trees and exotic bird-life, and with a volcano erupting in the background!) – an amalgam of (in the composer’s own words) architecture, landscape and symbolism!
All of this would have gone for little had it not been for the performing zeal of the musicians who had gathered to do what Alex Ross of “The Rest is Noise” fame called “this monster concerto” proper justice. The Orchestra Wellington players, the Orpheus Choir tenors and basses, the intrepid and irrepressible piano soloist Jian Liu, and the uncompromisingly motivational conductor Marc Taddei together made what seemed the insurmountable possible through sheer persistence of application whose momentums and reflections vividly brought out, activated and relished the music’s many and varied features. Across the work’s huge span each of the concerto’s movements by turns proclaimed its distinctive character within the framework of a steadily built-up through-line which led, apotheosis-wise, to the final movement and its appropriately mystical male-voiced chorus.
The work’s ultra-Brahmsian orchestra-only opening glowed with ambient warmth and occasional surges of excitement as Marc Taddei and his players steadily unfurled the welcoming banners for the soloist Jian Liu’s first splendid, almost Tchaikovskian entry, which underpinned the music’s ceremonial character, all confidently and assuredly delivered. The pianist relaxed into a kind of “lyrical overdrive” delivery-mode for the second subject, one whose continuance “grew” the intensities, marked by cascades of increasingly tumultuous and differently-modulated figurations – a more fanciful episode then involved the soloist in dancingly vertiginous, often stratospheric figurations, delightfully jaw-dropping in their filigree dexterities!
The flickering, volatile scherzo (Its pezzo giocoso heading subtitled “vivacissimamente”!) began atmospherically with diaphanous “sprites-at-play” keyboard figurations that invited the orchestra’s vigorous dotted-rhythm dance to burst in and whirl the interactions along with its “living, nature-play” representations. We enjoyed a characterful clarinet solo after a pizzicato-led introduction to a middle section which built up to a rollicking piano-and-orchestra frenzy , leading to a mordant danse-macabre coda from the piano and enigmatic end-of-day brass soundings.
Then came the pezzo serioso middle movement, the “inner shrine” of the piece with its spacious outlines and broad architectural spans. I loved the violas’ playing of the opening melody, bringing to mind Shostakovich’s similarly “laden” epic melodies, as did the winds with their answering lines. And Jian Liu’s attractively Scriabin-like phrasings brought forth noble tones from the brass as preparation for another of this movement’s widely-spaced themes. This was a movement which simply kept on giving, with piano and orchestra bringing back the same themes subject to near-infinite variation, and combining brilliance and profundity, as in a stormy middle section that grew out of the theme’s originally noble and profound beginnings!
No rest, however, for these wanderers after such a journey in itself, with the fourth-movement All’Italiana tarantella waiting, like the eponymous spider itself, ready to pounce! This was surely, however, Busoni’s “Vesuvius-vision”, a volcanic eruption transfixing our sensibilities as we were drawn trance-like into the dance – Jian Liu’s hands and fingers seemed entirely possessed as wave followed tumultuous wave of energy building each time to greater abandonment, the final dance incorporating the work’s most cadenza-like solo sequences, the pianist like a soul possessed to the point where music and musician became one with the whirlwind energies of white-hot spontaneous recreation!
How apocalyptic, then, those massive chords and eerie silences which introduced the final movement Cantico, with its poco sostenuto direction, the piano gently rhapsodising with the orchestra as the music prepared us for the entry of the male voice chorus – the composer instructed that the chorus be “hidden” to emphasise the music’s mystical quality, but surely such a distant and muffled effect would have been counter-productive in securing the “transformative” effect sought. In any case the voices needed all the help they could get in the Michael Fowler Centre’s somewhat flat acoustic!) – only in the later, more stirring passages of the Hymn to Allah did the voices sufficiently stir the blood for me, irrespective of what the composer might have wanted! When the voices reached Hebt zu der ewigen Kraft eure Herzen (“Lift up your hearts to the power eternal”) I began to again feel “connected” with the sounds in the same way as with the rest of the concerto – and in the work’s brilliant coda, both Jian Liu’s flamboyant piano fanfares and the full orchestra’s fervent crashing final chords gave us a truly satisfying sense of heroes working at full stretch to bring about a true apotheosis!