Trio Obscura – singular tones and timbres bringing to life old and new music with verve and sensitivity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

TRIO OBSCURA
Bede Hanley (oboe), Robert Ashworth (viola), Sarah Watkins (piano)

AUGUST KLUGHARDT (1849-1902)
“Schilflieder” (Songs of the Reeds) – Five Fantasy Pieces   (1872)

ALYSSA MORRIS (1984- )
“The Big Questions” (2024)
1. Who am I?  2. What is this Crazy Thing called Life? 3. How is it Possible?  4. What Comes Next?

CHARLES MARTIN LOEFFLER (1861-1935)
Two Rhapsodies for Oboe, Viola and Piano (1901)
1. Lento (un poco andante ) – L’etang (“The Pool”)
2, Un poco maestoso  (Andante) – La Cornemuse (“The Bagpipe”)

JANET JENNINGS  (1957- )
Five Emotional States (2025)
1.Anxiety   2.Melancholy   3.Anger  4.Relief  5.Exhilaration

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday 10th May, 2026

Trio Obscura’s name reminded me somewhat of TS Eliot’s wonderfully idiosyncratic poem “The Naming of Cats”, in which the poet describes a cat’s reverie when contemplating “…his ineffable, effable, effanineffable, deep and inscrutable, singular name”.  Of course, there’s no such comparable mystery regarding “The Naming of The Trio” (its title is sufficiently and resonantly suggestive!), but there’s certainly a kind of singularity in the actual combination of “sounds” here, one which was sported blithely and cheerily by this combination of musicians!

I’d not heard of two of the four composers on today’s programme, the first of whom was August Klughardt, born in Köthen, Germany, in 1849, and who grew up during a time of turmoil in music between conservatives who held to classicism and its traditions and the progressives who wanted to explore new modes of expression. From an early age he worked at developing his performing as well as composing skills, first as a pianist and then as a conductor, in which capacity when working at the Ducal Court in Weimar he encountered Franz Liszt, who exerted a profound impression upon him, introducing him to Richard Wagner and the “New German School” of creativity (Klughardt was to conduct Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the court in Dessau in later years). His own compositions, however, reflected a kind of eclectic attitude to the music of the times, taking elements from both traditional and progressive influences. Today his music – symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal and chamber music – is hardly known, though his chamber music is beginning to receive increased attention –  an obvious influence in his work we heard today was that of Schumann  (as it was in Klughardt’s own 1884 Piano Quintet, the appearance of which suggested an act of homage made by one composer to another!)

Today’s work “Schilflieder” (Song of the Reeds) took the form of five “Fantasy Pieces”, inspired by the poetry of Nikolaus Lenau (1802-50), whose work also inspired music by Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. This particular set of verses devotes a separate stanza to the different moods of a wanderer’s day and evening in a forest and by a pond.  “Schilflkieder” was written in 1872 and dedicated by Klughardt to Liszt himself – and actually achieved well-deserved attention for the remainder of the composer’s lifetime.  Interestingly, Klughardt noted in the score that the oboe part could be played if necessary by the violin, a starkly practical, if somewhat radical-sounding adjustment to a sound-world!

The first piece, titled “The sun is sinking over there”, was begun by Sarah Watkins’ piano solo as a sombre preparatory.  The music continued its melancholy course on Bede Hanley’s oboe, until Robert Ashworth’s viola’s entry brought a contrastingly flowing, more expressive character to the mood, seeming to have cheered the oboe up considerably when it re-entered. In this mood of appeasement the instruments ended the piece quietly together. With the following “Darkness falls, the clouds are flying”, I was straightaway taken into what seemed a Schumannesque world = the music had that same earnestly-toned sense of striving (the music marked “impassioned”), with, of course the viola’s sombre tones adding to that so-distinctive ambience! With the following, and so delectably, in places, Brahmsian  “Along a secret path”  I found myself straining to hear the viola at first, against the piano, (the composer’s rather than the player’s fault, here!) wanting more body of tone to make the lines sing. The oboe had no difficulty in this regard, even despite the florid nature of the piano writing, but the viola’s line I thought too subdued in places for the material.,

As for the fiery “Sunset” which followed, it sounded as if we were on board Wagner’s Dutchman’s ship battling the tempests – Sarah Watkins’ piano-playing conjured up a veritable storm through which the oboe piped strenuously and heroically, except that the viola was for the most part, to my ears, lost, swamped in the torrents of sound! Most thankfully, with the “sehr ruhig” of the final piece “On the pond, the motionless one”, we heard both exquisite solo lines and beautiful duetting between oboe and viola, suggesting perhaps moonlight on the tranquil waters after the storm, the viola spaciously raising its voice and singing its melodic traceries. The piano still generated energies aplenty with triumphant-sounding chords in places, but was content to accompany its companions over the work’s serenely lyrical close.

Another name new to me was Alyssa Morris (b.1984), an American composer whose style was described in the programme as “approachable, flashy and beautiful” – the title of her 2024 work “The Big Questions” poses the idea of confronting our very existence, pondering imponderables such as “Who am I?” / “What is this crazy thing called Life?”/ “How is it Possible?” / “What comes next?”.  Reasoning that there are as many potentialities and possibilities as there are humans on this planet capable of flooding one’s sensibilities with uniquely-conceived minutae potentially delivering as much confusion as enlightenment (that sentence will do for a starter!), I strained forwards in my seat hoping to discern via the infintinesimal/infinite action of sound-impulses upon my primed sensibilities a true sense of awareness illuminating my inner being. I wasn’t sure whether the result would be any different to my listening to a favourite piece of music at any given moment of out-of-the-ordinary receptivity – but I counted myself at that particular moment as “ready for anything”.

It struck me that the composer was indulging in a kind of “sleight-of-hand” in giving us the existential titles I’ve already quoted, their “idea” actually containing the seeds of execution more than the actual sounds that followed. “Who am I?”, for example, began with a viola’s single note over which oboe and piano elaborated, recitative-style in a series of “statements” – the piano floridly invited the oboe and viola to similarly elaborate their lines. The music became very “Big American Musical” or “Big Screen”,r even “Big Country”, encouraged by fulsome instrumental tones. A by-product of these fulsome amplifications was that I felt “engaged “ with ideas while losing any specific sense of any uniquely distinctive and definitive state – was it me in this “Who am I?” moment, or was I actually experiencing with this “the craziness of the thing called Life?”

There were “clues” as to what was happening – conversational exchanges between the three instruments punctuated by crazily sassy detailings such as the viola’s sudden downward-plunging glissando, followed by pizzicato-like excuses for such off-the-wall spontaneities! Then there’s a waltz-rhythm, with the three players “bending the trajectories” in Salvador-Dali-like ways, until the famously flaccid structures raised themselves up with an effort and brought off a surprisingly “cutsie” gesture of farewell!

By this time, the question of “What comes next?” that we felt “ready for” had been gazumphed in itself so many times by the music itself we felt ready for anything! A piano solo, gesturing and ruminative, answered by the viola and echoed by the oboe (where he/she goes, we go! was almost sentimentally refrained by the ensemble) – until there was definitely a sense of something impending – was this, perhaps “The Next?” – the piano plunged into  a running, surging accompaniment-like figure which had left its soloists at the starting post by accident! – but which oboe and viola catch up hurriedly! The music became a full-scale song, almost Negro-spiritual-like in manner! The instruments fulsomely decorated their lines as if approaching a kind of climax! Suddenly, everything stopped! – could this be “an end”?  Was there actually such a thing?  I remember when a small boy thinking “When the spaceship reaches the so-called “end of space”, what’s behind that end-wall? – there’s still more space!” Similarly, was this an ending? – or was there simply no end? Was this “What comes Next?” – will there be “no end” of “What comes next?”… except continued (and gorgeous!) soft playing?  The music drifts into space – the oboe and violin hold their notes……the piano softly elaborates…..and finishes!

We needed a half-time! – the sense of “Where am I?” needed some familiar, reassuring sign-posting  – also, I was uncomfortably aware of having perhaps too readily indulged in fancy throughout Alyssa Morris’s essentially “escapist” piece. I needed something more earthily “real” once again, upon which to plant my feet. Interestingly,  the composer Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935) whose music was next on the programme  was to supply me with a soupcon of empathy in this respect – Loeffler was described by violist Robert Ashworth in his introduction as “a German man trying to be French”! This was a reference to the composer’s reluctance to acknowledge his actual birthplace (Schonëberg, Berlin), and his somewhat “displaced” sense of upbringing, as he spent most of his life claiming his birthplace was in the Alsace region, which famously borders France, Germany and Switzerland! – (in fact a number of references I checked continue to maintain his claim that he was born in the French Alsacs region!)

Embarking on a career that took him from his birthplace in Germany to the United States via France, Russia, Hungary and Switzerland, the young Loeffler studied the violin in Berlin with Joseph Joachim and then composition with Ernest Giuiraud in Paris, playing in various French orchestras. After his move to the United States in 1881 he joined the Boston Symphony, with whom he performed as assistant concertmaster until resigning from the orchestra to devote his energies to composition. He’s known today as a skilled, highly fastidious and self-critical composer, belonging to no “school”, but combining his earlier French influences and sensibilities with his later “New World” experiences . In February 1931 Olin Downes, Music Critic of the New York Times, wrote in a seventieth birthday tribute to the composer, that Loeffler was “one of the representative musicians of an age”, but concluded that “his expression of that age has come from within, and not, as an imitation of fads and shibboleths of the hour, from outside.”

This work was originally planned as a set of Three Rhapsodies in 1898, but was extensively revised by Loeffler after the tragic death of the dedicatee – one of the pieces was shelved, and the two remaining works were rescored during 1901 for oboe, with viola and piano The first of these Rhapsodies became a memorial for the composer’s deceased colleague. Consequently, the piece began darkly, with the viola answering the piano’s first sombre notes strongly and whole-heartedly, more than matching the oboe’s plaintive tones, the viola here far more assertively-voiced than was the case with the Klughardt work. The style recalled the late-Romanticism of Ernest Chausson, evident in the “longing” nature of the phrases for all of the instruments, the oboe delivering a particularly beautiful solo episode at one point over the piano’s rippling phrases. A darker passage for both instruments resulted in recitative-like passages suddenly seeming to break into a dance , almost like the “friss” which follows a “lassu” in the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt, the music readily ebbing and flowing across the instrumental timbres, until the sombre mood suddenly returned, the viola again richly-and darkly-toned against the plaintive oboe and  piano, with the music hauntingly drifting between minor and major harmonies as the voices died away.

The Second Rhapsody (subtitled “The Bagpipe”) actually began as if it were a Liszt Rhapsody, with a florid piano passage, but then wistfully morphed into a kind of plaintive Bartokian folk-song – perhaps the bagpiper’s tune? Its repetition was suitably lump-in-the throat in its wistfulness – oboe and viola responded most rhapsodically, the “bagpipe” theme by turns lively and ruminative, either goading its listeners into dancing-mode or regaling listeners with a story. We felt regaled by story-telling tones and gestures from each of the instruments, feeling as if the listeners had “heard this tale before” and were reliving its characterisations and narrative lines! And what a particular joy it was to hear the viola sing so sonorously, next to its companions!  After oboe and viola had finished their near-operatic “duet” with the piano’s sterling guidance, the three instruments engaged in a brief, gestural “are we all here, still?” exchange before letting the tones of the discursive tales find their rest.

For those who felt that the Loeffler work was much too earnest a response to those “Big Questions” posed by Alyssa Morris earlier in the afternoon, an alternative, “thistledown-on-the-wind”-like  rejoiner to “Life And Its Problems” was posed by Waikato composer Janet Jennings (whose work “Voices of Women” I’ve previously reviewed on “Middle C” – see https://middle-c.org/2020/09/16161/ )  This work – “Five Emotional States”  – is described in a programme note by its composer as “not to be taken seriously”, a comment that on a certain level of engagement makes plenty of good sense, but may simultaneously “beg the question” of emotional health in general for those who look beyond the work’s wondrously rollicking capacities for entertainment and into the real world of 2026 New Zealand, where people of all ages and circumstances are often forced against their will into situations where these states are all too palpably experienced. I’m not saying the work shouldn’t have been written – rather the opposite! Perhaps, though, it needs, in my opinion, not to be trivialised.

Having gotten that concern “off my chest”, may I say that the experience itself was for me an absolute riot, a palpable and resonating amalgam of delight and disturbance whose sequences I could all too readily recognise as having a degree of self-ownership of feelings generated by both inward and outer tensions – it also made me aware of the vital role that hope has to play amidst such experiences, given expression here in the section called “Relief”, and without which for me would have been akin to a horrifying, inwardly Faustian prospect of eternal damnation! Am I myself thus guilty of doing what the composer urged her audiences not to do?  I was, all above concerns considered, ultimately delighted by the experience – and, to the performers, Sarah Watkins, Robert Ashworth and Bede Hanley, I dips my lid in boundless appreciation!

Tales of the New Zealand String Quartet 2026

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet presents
“STORYTELLERS”  – the 2026 Season

Part One: ORIGINS

MIKA CORNELIUS – Universal Veil
FRANZ SCHUBERT – String Quartet No. 10 in E-flat Major D.87
GARETH FARR – String Quartet No. 2 “Mondo Rondo”
MISSY MAZZOLI – Death Valley Junction
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Op.25

New Zealand String Quartet
Peter  Clark, Manu Berkeljon, violins
Gillian Ansell, viola
Lavinia Rae, ‘cello

Prefab Hall, Jessie St, Mt Cook, Wellington
Wednesday 6th May, 2026

Concerts never cease to amaze! – even when the music is familiar, performers can illuminate what one thought was familiar territory and revitalise one’s responses with freshly-wrought approaches and energies. But there’s nothing like hearing live performances of unfamiliar or completely “new” music to one’s own ears, which was my experience at the New Zealand String Quartet’s first “Storytellers” Concert of 2026.  It was one that would have given a heart-warming dollop of interest and pleasure to a wide range of concert-going people in Wellington, pushing out the boundaries and widening the vistas normally associated with chamber music and string-quartet-playing to revelatory degrees while still remaining recognisably familiar and viable as an art-form.

I thought it was a pity that Auckland-born and Melbourne-based composer Mika Cornelius could not be with us tonight, here in Wellington, for their work which opened the Quartet’s season of concerts -this was a journey we were taken upon through an absorbing, almost William-Blake-like world of delineation involving the osmotic growth of fungi! – in a phrase, a single mushroom! The exercise of re-enactment of this singular “force-of-nature” process had itself a fascinating kind of multi-media identity in terms of expression and conveyance – beginning with our receptivities as an audience having been appropriately engaged and stimulated by the actual words of the composer about the piece, here spoken by the NZSQ’s General Manager Aslinn Ryan who had welcomed us to the concert, and then introduced the musicians and their four stringed acoustic instruments. It was, in general terms, a scenario whose inescapably “public” ambience seemed, most fascinatingly, to be somewhat at odds initially with what seemed like the essentially miniature, almost microscopic processes required to bring about fruition!

Mika’s words succinctly characterised their work’s depictions, descriptions and delineations of the subject’s components and the latters’ processes for us, movement by movement – firstly there were the “hyphae” – these were “delicate threads that form the foundation of fungi”. How distant, primitive, primordial and raw seemed the sounds made by the players’ instruments, singular and insubstantial, spontaneous by default in their existence, unresponsive to the presence or movement of others. Whatever the scale of things, microscopic, nanoscopic and sub-atomic, or of magnitudes thicker, longer, wider, taller and deeper than one could imagine, these “hyphae” at some point were stimulated by bearers of stimulus which could be described as magical, and given here the universal symbol of “autumn rain”.

The sounds made by the players began to coalesce in almost spontaneous and seemingly random ways – some of the interactions were rhythmic, while others were slow and linear; some connected readily to neighbours, while others were more independent – all rather like a process of adolescence, with  variously-growing foci, but somehow these impregnated, coalescent organisms couldn’t help but express a destiny, expressed here by a burst of rhythmic unanimity, a shock to systems whether active or passive! – they became products, results, outcomes!

This newness of identity began to coalesce as spores! – they appeared, whether randomely or purposefully, and with enough self awareness to perform a graceful dance! Tending to pizzicato at first, the sounds gradually “grew into” arco, instrument by instrument, entering a realm of what the composer called “silent eruptions of energy”, with spiralling tones whirling as they took flight!  “Is this world our oyster?” became a “Tower-of-Babel-catch-cry”, a buzzing, chattering, babbling refrain as the energies sought their destiny.

A heartfelt, winsome, sighing kind of dance slowly crystallised as the “mycellum”, the “Mecca” of the world of fungi, formed an intricate web – more recitative than melody, and interweaving the individual lines of expression, tremulously draping its sounds all about the textures  as the mycellum infiltrated all around and over the earth, forming what the composer called “a Universal Veil”, and validifying at one and the same time the idea of individuality having a collective essence – we ourselves are, like ants, or termites – or, ultimately, fungi! – connected!  The music’s lines ended quietly and reflectively, its course showing the way for its infinite progeny to follow….

After this musical version of our somewhat “Magic Schoolbus” adventure we were able to resize, and refocus our existential parameters on a youthful Franz  Schubert’s Quartet No.10 in E-flat Major, written when just sixteen years old, and intended for performance by members of the composer’s family – consequently, the work’s become known in some quarters as the “Haushaltung”,  (“Household” or “Family”  Quartet). The many hours the young musician spent in the “family” quartet gave him a working insight into what each instrument could do. While the individual parts in this quartet (which has the date “1813” on the autograph manuscript) certainly don’t match the excellence or difficulty found in the composer’s later, “great” masterpieces, they are by no means negligible – Schubert would probably have conceived these early works less as aspects of a “personal testament” and more as “things to be effectively performed” – with several notable touches immediately apparent in the NZSQ’s fresh-sounding reading.

The warm initial tones of the work’s opening phrase, with its three conclusive staccato notes brought out, in a single phrase a sense of both balance and humour, with lovely lines and deftly-touched impulses, a young composer’s sense of equilibrium at work, here and in the interplay between lyricism and playfulness as the exposition unfolded. The development and recapitulation sections followed traditional sonata-form practice, maintaining the E-flat major key this time in the latter right through to the movement’s concluding chords – conventional but still impressive!

I straightaway recognised from a previous encounter the perky, leaping-octave opening of the scherzo with its dancing reply – here put second, instead of third, as on my recording  (optional?) which followed with its leaping octave briefly taking on the clamour of a concerted chorus at one point, and also cheekily inserting a “false start” grace note on occasions! – and what a beautiful and redolently flowing minor-key“ trio interlude the players delighted us with!

The slow movement’s opening began with forte/piano phrases, here, beautifully and simply delivered, the songful themes then continuing, here-and-there further decorated by repeated-note sequences both together and separately – all serene and unclouded and lullabic. As for the finale, I loved the music’s opening  Keystone Cops-like scampering rhythmic trajectories, the players hardly missing a beat when reverting to triplets, and, then, even more cheekily, to the insouciant walking rhythms of the second subject – with  Schubert all the while indulging in his already-burgeoning melodic gift of producing hummable tunes!  Naturally, with unalloyed glee the players again “pounced” on the “running” rhythms at the reprise of the opening, whirling us through the trajectories to the work’s coda!  The final ensembled gestures of the piece here had all the conviviality of a family occasion with a burst of devil-may-care energy just to round things off at the end – so very enjoyable!

I was looking forward immensely to the programme’s next scheduled item, Gareth Farr’s String Quartet No. 2 Mondo Rondo, which I’d heard once before in concert but had much earlier (1999, in fact!) reviewed the work’s first recording by the NZSQ of that time for the Morrison Music Trust. We were amused greatly when the players this evening told us of an occasion somewhere when they’d asked audience members to record and send to the group their reactions to Gareth Farr’s music! – subsequent responses included  reports of “accelerated heart rates” and images of “disturbed ants’ nests” – though the zaniest was of “sped-up scenes of a New York train station interspersed with images from a sausage factory!”….whether any further such hallucinatory impressions would emanate from this evening’s audience as a result of tonight’s performance will remain to be seen!

I found myself sufficiently “challenged” by the players’ invitation to audience members to contribute their own impressions of what thoughts and images the music generated, though I remembered at the end of the first movement (subtitled “Mondo Rondo”) that I was supposed to be reviewing the Quartet’s performance, rather than my own recreative reactions to it!  Nevertheless, by that movement’s end I had firmly fixed in my mind the pathetic struggles of a puppet on a stage in a half-dressed state trying at once to pull the rest of its clothes on properly while acting out and dancing a story, and getting in a terrible tangle as a result!

It just wouldn’t have done to continue in this vein – so I returned to my “critic” guise for the rest of the work, registering the second “Mumbo Jumbo” movement as a kind of rhythmic-texture loop-cycle, sounds ensnared in the workings of a machine, the tones and timbres characterised by dry pizzicati and instrument-tapping which almost without warning changes completely in character to arco-bowed cries of distress and despair, as if the sounds had suddenly acquired a distinguishable “voice” and were crying to be heard, saved, released, helped to escape – arco, pizzicato and “struck” timbres jostled and tumbled together until the voices gradually relinquished their tones and were distantly silenced, leaving what seemed like a kind of void of impulse and emotion – a feeling no longer able to feel……

Like a kick-started machine bursting into life after a few vain attempts, the rhythm of the third movement “Mambo Rambo” got under way, the ostinato rhythms supporting an exotic, Middle-eastern-like theme with both languid and more energised forms alternated by violin and viola over the incessant trajectories of the second violin and ‘cello, in places rhythmically “crunchy”, in others beset by syncopated “groans” and eerily wandering lines, before the exotic melody returned, enjoying a full throated reprise on all the instruments and then abruptly flung to the winds and disappearing! I couldn’t remember enjoying the piece more than I did here – all so engaging and persuasive, even my very own half-dressed pathetic puppet at the beginning!

After an interval enabled us to get our breath back, we were enjoined to steel ourselves for a visit to “Death Valley Junction”, which was the name of a piece by the American composer Missy Mazzoli, a ten-minute work for string quartet which recreates the ambiences of one of the most renowned places of desolation on Earth – Death Valley, in California’s Mojave Desert. The Junction was “discovered” by Mazzoli on a road trip with her husband in 2004, finding a building that, almost forty years before, in 1967, had been converted from some kind of recreation hall into a hotel-cum-opera house through the efforts of Marta Becket, a former ballet dancer who, inspired by the location of the building developed the idea of establishing a performing arts centre – she herself presented weekly one-woman shows there as well! Mazzoli was, in turn, inspired by the whole concept of what Marta Becket had done, and in  2010 wrote her piece Death Valley Junction, dedicated to Marta Becket herself (the latter died in 2017, aged 92, but her spirit lives on in this music).

In her programme note for the work the composer described the piece as beginning “with a sparse, edgy texture – the harsh desert landscape” and then transforming the ambiences with “a wild and buoyant dance”. From the outset we were made aware of the environment’s notorious heat and aridity by the bleakness and dryness of the instruments sostenuto lines, augmented by the viola’s vivid, and almost in places sinister glissandi, as if representing swooping birds of prey. Gradually the tones took on increased movement and rhythm, glissandi and note-patternings coming together, as if life was signalling its presence, and with movement and energies even suggesting the spirit of song and dance. We were borne, dream-like, through a soundscape suggesting a fusion of co-existence, not through heavy-handed subjugation, but more by determined adaptation of the human spirit to what seemed like a particularly intractable instance of the natural world’s harsh environment. This was particularly characterised by the ‘cello’s on-going dynamic activity, its “human” component in the soundscapes achieving the sense of a small but nevertheless significant instance of survival and achievement.

The programme’s final work was Benjamin Britten’s String Quartet No.1, part of the NZSQ’s tribute to the composer to mark his fiftieth anniversary year. Whether purposed or merely coincidental, the work gave me the impression of seeming to naturally “grow out of” the various soundscapes the NZSQ had already presented us with in the concert –  Britten’s writing had elements of the microcosmic growth impulses of Mika Cornelius’s vision, the youthful exuberances of Schubert’s quartet, the madcap energies in places of Gareth Farr’s pulsations and the distinctive feeling for particular “ambiences” demonstrated by Missy Mazzoli’s work. It was the first of his three numbered String Quartets (Britten had written various others as student efforts), and written in 1941 in the United States, the composer and his partner Peter Pears, both pacifists and conscientious objectors, having fled the strictures of the war in Europe. The work was the direct result of a commission by arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and received its premiere in Los Angeles from the Coolidge Quartet, to grateful acclaim from the composer.

In four movements Britten combines elements of classic forms and instances of freer, more spontaneous expression, with marked contrasts of mood both between and in the course of some of the movements. The first movement began quite wondrously with unearthly, top-of-the-range, sostenuto tone-clusters from the upper strings, leaving the ‘cello as if earthbound, looking up and succinctly commenting upon the wonders all about what seemed like the upper reaches of the music’s firmament. Halfway through the movement these sounds died away and the stillness of the visionary mood was suddenly set upon by all the instruments, playing a vigorously-racing, exhilarating, almost “disturbed” kind of triplet-rhythmed, “flailing -in-all-directions” episode, before the pace of things slowed and the music seemed to want to climb back up to the stratospheric heights from whence it began. This process echoed in varied guises until a final “star-cluster, like glow-worms suddenly disturbed in a dark cavern, peremptorily extinguished their light-lines! – superbly-managed musical theatricalities here from the players!

The second movement was a cheekily rhythmic Allegretto, punctuated by abrupt triplet exclamations, and running passages, the mood spontaneous and volatile, almost a kind of danse macabre featuring spasms of energy which dissipated as quickly as they appeared. Not so with the third Andante calmo movement, here as good as its word, with the music seeming in places almost to anticipate the “Moonlight” orchestral interlude in Britten’s yet-to-be-written opera “Peter Grimes”. This was the sequence that ostensibly impressed the American critics who attended the premiere most profoundly, one likening the movement to a kind of “Memorial for a lost world” – the steadily played-out 5/4 rhythms enabled individual instruments to gently rhapsodise in different keys through moments reflecting quiet intensities of both stillness and motion.

The first of a series of scampering arch-like gestures began the final movement, individually and haltingly at first, and then coalescing into partnership in a kind of joyous ferment! Again, the upper string and the ‘cello undertook different pathways through the same scenarios, interchanging turns at intoning soaring lines set next to vigorously dancing figurations, the players achieving exquisite balancings of different themes and counter-rhythms, and delighting us with the tonal, textural and rhythmic differences! And, what a wonderful concerted declamation the ensemble achieved at the end, with trajectories spiralling downwards so heart-stoppingly and spectacularly into the gestures leading to the final chord! Tremendous and resonating stuff for me, as it was also for a number of people I talked with afterwards – a new leaf of exploration turned over for me regarding the fascinating compositional world of Benjamin Britten, but a definite feather in the collective cap of the New Zealand  String Quartet!

Wellington Youth Orchestra with Mark Carter serves up an orchestral feast.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra with Mark Carter at St.Andrews-on-The-Terrace  –  photo credit:  Cindy Young Waldron

SIBELIUS – Finlandia
ELGAR – Suite No. 2 from “The Wand of Youth”
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – A London Symphony

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Mark Carter, conductor

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, May 3rd, 2026

“Pines to Pastures” was the Wellington Youth Orchestra’s programme-title for its first 2026 concert – it succinctly described the book-ends containing the action-packed musical journey we were taken upon by the orchestra and its inspirational conductor Marc Carter throughout an eventful Sunday afternoon. The programme featured the music of three composers whose names often appear on the lists of “master orchestrators” –  Sibelius, Elgar and Vaughan Williams – with each of the pieces’ very different evocations bringing its own particular technical and interpretative set of challenges for the players to grapple with. The end result was a triumph – throughout the concert the playing regaled us with wall-to-wall instances of ear-catching detailings, characterfully-wrought vignettes and larger scale scenarios of beauty, drama and excitement. Every note sounded was accorded, to my ears, a kind of living, pulsating quality, with the players’ concentration seeming never to flag  nor the energies falter.

Opening with Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia”, the big, dark-browed brasses at the start straightaway  focused our attention, contrasting sharply with the plangent pastoral sounds of the winds, and then the passionately insistent strings, and with the winds and strings building the urgencies towards the brass’s sharp-edged calls – the wonderfully “grinding” lower strings conveyed a sense of a force about to be unleashed as the rest of the strings and the brass traded outbursts of pent-up energies. All of this led into the precipitous allegro, with tumultuous percussion heralding the driving orchestral forces, joyously and vigorously responding to the great horn calls, and surging excitingly into and through the climaxes! That done, and the exhausted forces having given their all, the way was open for, firstly the winds, and then the strings to sonorously intone the famous ”tune” that has subsequently found its way into all kinds of celebratory and worshipful scenarios world-wide. It was fitting that, having regained their composure, the more combatative sections of the orchestra were then able to rouse themselves for a return to the allegro in its most celebratory tones, capped off by a splendidly conclusive, and full-blooded “Amen-like” coup de grace!

Stirring though the Sibelius performance was, I subsequently felt that it was during the playing of the various dances comprising the next item (an adorable suite of dances by Edward Elgar called “The Wand of Youth”), that the orchestra seemed more relaxed and assured, having “played themselves in” during the Sibelius for the concert’s remainder.  While “Finlandia” was exciting, it felt very “tightly-wound” throughout – with the Elgar, however, conductor and players seemed to “expand” further, and fill parts of the music up with a different kind of relaxed exuberance. I particularly noticed how both “The Little Bells” and “The Wild Bears” pieces exuded such great warmth, whole-heartedness and unbuttoned “swagger” in places. While “The Little Bells” has always been a favourite of mine, due to its heart-wrenching echt-Elgarian “second” theme (such a beautiful counter-theme on the lower strings the second time through! – and I was especially taken by the excellent playing of the glockenspiel by a nimble, if unsighted percussionist), I did so enjoy the orchestra’s spectacularly exuberant playing of “The Wild Bears” –  it was wonderful stuff (though I had to strain to make out that very first and well-remembered triangle “ping!”)!  These dances were from two orchestral suites based on some of the composer’s childhood musical sketches he had made when aged eleven, for a kind of “fantasy play” which he and his siblings were to perform, and which were miraculously relocated much later, and reworked for our pleasure!).  A small point here – I realised after the concert that I had NO memory of the orchestra playing the enchanting “Fountain Dance” listed in the programme – was the spell cast by the music so great that I actually took leave of my senses for a few minutes during the proceedings? – or did Mark Carter and the orchestra simply omit the dance?

No matter – there were even greater landmarks looming on the musical horizon for the players, in the form of a four-movement symphony that’s become almost as iconic as anything written by Elgar – this was his younger English contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A London Symphony”, first completed and then extensively revised by its composer after its first performance in 1914 (this ‘original version” still exists, found nowadays in a revelatory Chandos recording made by the late, lamented conductor Richard Hickox).  The symphony continued to be revised (and even occasionally performed in “newer” manifestations) until a final authorized performing version appeared, published in 1936 (Wikipedia has an absorbing account of the genesis and various appearances of different versions of this work!). Richard Hickox’s fascinating reading of the “original” gives the work’s supporters cause for both lamentation (that so many passages in the original were removed) and relief (that the work displays increased coherence and stature with those same passages excised)!

One doubts whether the “original” 1914 version will ever outstrip the 1936 “finished” work in popularity, but it certainly adds to the fascination of the work in particular and the trajectories of the composing process in general. Vaughan Williams was certainly no Bruckner regarding the latter’s woeful lack of confidence in his own, composing abilities, but he did listen to advice from friends, including interpreters of his music who occasionally might suggest the occasional change or an edit here or there. He certainly retained a great affection for this work, and is on record as declaring, later in life, that it was perhaps still “the favourite” of all his symphonic offspring!

The work gives a confident impression from the outset as indeed being a “Symphony by a Londoner” (as the composer later mused over what he thought should perhaps have been the work’s “proper title”). The opening Lento, here. with lower strings and murmuring winds sounding atmospheric chords and lines was an evocation of a city before dawn magically emerging from the darkness, the instruments gradually opening up the vistas as the ambiences lightened and everything gradually came alive – the Westminster chimes sounded, and amid fanfare calls the sun’s rays seemed to suddenly break through and reveal the pulsating heartbeat of a city! We got plenty of activity from the strings in response to the joyously percussive fanfares, and the jaunty “walking movement”, firstly from the winds, then the strings, and then the brass carried the exuberant rhythms onwards towards a return of the great introductory fanfare of the city’s awakening! The  players enjoyed the folk-dance-like ditties and the exuberant shouts alike as the city boisterously flexed its human muscles, then took us to quieter, more subdued vistas where the melancholy strains from the cor anglais initiated moments of reflection, leading then to a ‘cello solo joined by other strings – a poignant episode, practically chamber-music! – and beautifully sounded by the players, obviously revelling in such gorgeous string-writing!  The fanfares sounded again in the distance and the energies reawakened, gradually rebuilding and redoubling the previous excitements and working up to a last, protracted fanfare resonating through to the end of a long-held final chord.

“Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon” was the composer’s description of the slow movement’s opening – a beautiful solo from the cor anglais rose out of quiet string passages, the strings repeating the melody and extending the tranquil mood – a gentle horn and trumpet passages, and the strings returned more impassioned than before – altogether a heartfelt evocation – a solo viola fluently began a series of atmospheric street-call-like phrases, answered by other instruments and punctuated by the percussion’s gentle jingling of cab harnesses passing by, and drawing forth a rapturous burst of nostalgic tones from the whole orchestra – it was scalp-pricking stuff! – all beautifully evoked! It was left to the cor anglais, horn and solo cello to re-establish the prevailing atmospheres, giving the movement’s last few sounds to the solo viola once again.

The scherzo was a lively nocturne, with specific instructions from the composer to the listener, to “imagine himself standing on Westminster Embankment at night, surrounded by the distant sounds of the Strand….with its crowded streets and flaring lights….” Conductor Mark Carter encouraged a delightfully insoucient swagger from his players throughout this engaging music relying on accent and nuance rather than speed to invest the music with plenty of characterful “bounce” – this music always reminds me of certain books I read when young about English childhood adventures, such as “The Otterbury Incident” and “Stig of the Dump”, with their somewhat rollicking, devil-may-care attitudes adopted by the protagonists! I particularly enjoyed the orchestra’s detailing throughout, (including an especially spectacular piece of horn-playing of the main theme at one point!) – and the winds and percussion also had great fun with the trio-like interlude featuring the sounds of a busker’s wheezing accordion! And conductor and players “coaxed” the dying strains of the day from out of the movement’s end so very sensitively.

Every time I hear this work’s finale, with its “cry of pain” at the very opening, I find myself wondering just what Vaughan Williams was meaning – it’s almost Mahlerian in its unexpected angst and darkness of aspect! Not unlike Mahler’s Fifth Symphony’s opening, it has an explosive beginning, then settles into a march-like episode of grim, dark-browed intent! – was this REALLY VW’s view of London? I remember reading somewhere very early on that VW was here expressing the city’s darker, more tragic side – the march-like rhythms hinting at the misery of those down on their luck, hungry, unemployed, and even homeless. Other commentators have referred to the city’s traditional pomp and ceremonial gravitas over centuries, which are expressed here in tones of sombre grandeur. Typically, the composer kept his thoughts largely to himself regarding much of his music, though in this particular movement’s case he famously referred to H.G. Wells’s 1908 novel Tono-Bungay, which contains a passage describing the novel’s narrator sailing down the River Thames and seeming “to be passing all England in review”, as influencing the work’s elegiac closing pages, beginning with a reiteration of the first movement’s “Westminster Chimes” and then simply drifting unhurriedly to a close……the concluding words in the novel are – “The river passes…..London passes….England passes.”

I hope I’m forgiven for dwelling on this aspect of the music besides writing about its performance – these references to aspects of the composer’s inspiration for the work can’t help but further inform my opinion of the excellence of the Youth Orchestra’s performance and the surety of the guiding hand of conductor Mark Carter throughout. It’s precisely that tragic and  lament-like aspect that hovers over this music which was what these players brought out so movingly – the silence at the piece’s end in this performance was indicative of the effect it all had on its audience – we had been witness to something extraordinary, something that deserved its moment of contemplation as well as acclaim at the very end. I’ve refrained from describing anything specific at this point in the work – it all seemed integrated and inevitable, just as night follows day, with the players’ energies and concentration seemingly unflagging! And afterwards, who could blame them for wanting to conclude the afternoon with something a bit more festive and rousing! – especially since it was the return of  “The Wild Bears” which came to the rescue of the symphony’s “stricken” conclusion with even more panache than in the first-half performance – and THIS time I definitely and unequivocally heard that wonderful, nostalgic tintinnabulation of the triangle first time round! I went home after hearing all of that as happily as any concertgoer had a right to be – no affirmation could be more appropriate or deserved!

 

 

 

Echoes of woodland scenes rubbing shoulders with companionable coffee-houses! – an echt-Viennese musical lunchtime experience for Wellingtonians at St. Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Christine Wang (violin), Beth Chen (piano), and Sebastian Dunn (horn)

EUGÈNE BOZZA (1905-1991) – En Forêt (In the Forest) Op.40
Sebastian Dunn (horn), Beth Chen (piano)

FRITZ KREISLER (1875-1962) – Schön Rosmarin (Old Viennese Dance No. 3)
Christine Wang (violin), Beth Chen (piano)

JOHANNES BRAHMS  (1833-1897) – Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano in E-flat Major Op.40
Christine Wang (violin), Sebastian Dunn (horn), Beth Chen (piano)

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, April 29th, 2026

Every now and then in a concert one encounters music one has never before heard, or even heard of, and sometimes even whose composer has a name one doesn’t know. On certain occasions audiences sit primly and attentively and at the end applaud, congratulating the composer(s) and the musicians, and of course, one another upon according the piece or pieces due attention. But on once-in-a-blue-moon occasions such hitherto unknown music can unexpectedly generate an instant impact akin to a real frisson of excitement, one which lingers on in the memory for ages afterwards. It’s happened to me a few times over my years of concert-going experience – the latest being my attendance at a recent St Andrew’s-on-The Terrace concert featuring three outstanding musicians – Sebastian Dunn, horn, Christine Wang, violin, and Beth Chen, piano.

To be accurate, the truly “instant combustion” fireworks took place most markedly during the concert’s first item, featuring horn player Sebastian Dunn and pianist Beth Chen in a vivid presentation of an ear-opening horn-and-piano piece by French composer, Eugène Bozza (1905-1991). This was En forêt  (In the Forest), a piece written in 1941 as an entrance exam piece for the Conservatoire de Paris, and one regarded ever since as embodying the entire technical and expressive capabilities of the French horn. The piece depicted a hunting party in a forest, the writing combining different horn-playing techniques with an impressionistic piano accompaniment. Both  Sebastian Dunn and Beth Chen revelled in their concerted evocations of the hunt and their individual depictions of various scenes and moods throughout – a particularly atmospheric feature was the horn’s magical use of call and distanced (or muted) respondings. The visceral impact of the piece and its performance almost literally “brought the house down” at the conclusion, so evocative was the playing of both musicians throughout in terms of recreating presence and distance, activity and reflection.

After these somewhat “larger-than-life” exertions, violinist Christine Wang next took the platform with Beth Chen to give us “something completely different” – a most charming and nostalgia-soaked piece titled Schön Rosemarin – Old Viennese Dance No.3, by Fritz Kreisler. Before the piece was even halfway though, the winsome charm and delicacy of the players’ violin and piano strains had taken us far away from the forests and the hunters, and was instead enabling us to “drink in” the ambience of the Viennese coffee-house with its traditional “Atmosphäre von Gemütlichkeit”. Fritz Kreisler, besides having been, of course, a renowned virtuoso violinist, was also a composer, but he preferred to publish some of his music under an assumed name so as to give the pieces the chance to be judged by their own merits and not by his “virtuoso violinist’s” reputation. By comparison with Sebastian Dunn’s riveting display of “virtuoso roar” with HIS instrument, violinist Christine Wang seemed to me to catch the completely different kind of “olde-worldly” ambience of the Kreisler piece perfectly, as did Beth Chen’s equally delightful pianistic identification with the spirit of the music.

These seemingly far-flung performing aureoles and contrasts in delivery then magically came together for the programme’s third item, Johannes Brahms’s Horn Trio in E-flat Major. In his introduction to the piece Sebastian Dunn talked about the composer’s preference for the “natural” (i.e. “valveless) horn over the more modern version.  Obviously the “Waldhorn” as it was known, had nostalgic connections for Brahms (his father had taught him as a child to play the instrument) besides what the composer specifically referred to as the horn’s more “natural” characteristics, its intrinsic tonal shadings and generally “softer” sound. Dunn assured us that he would do his best in this performance to compensate for his own “modern” instrument’s relative “brashness”!

This work was written in 1865, and probably inspired chiefly by the death of the composer’s mother earlier that same year. As with Brahms, its genesis wasn’t perhaps entirely straightforward, as befitted his generally enigmatic response to various influences regarding his music.  The Trio’s somewhat changeable moods across its four-movement span have prompted various other conjectures regarding sources of inspiration – besides recalling his mother singing the folksong “Dort in den Weide steht ein Haus” (There among the willows stands a house) as influencing part of the Adagio Mesto slow movement, Brahms hinted at another, more mischievous song in the work’s finale, “Es soll sich ja keiner mit der Liebe abgeben” (No-one should have anything to do with love), one which ably suited his ongoing “confirmed bachelor” status. As with any piece of music its creative motivations, whether conscious or otherwise, invariably reflect a veritable jigsaw of influences.

Brahms’s combination of violin, piano and horn was innovative at the time, but has since inspired a number of other works, most obviously (and perhaps, surprisingly) György Ligeti’s 1982 work Hommage à Brahms. Here, the performance of the “original” generously brought out all of the work’s inherent qualities, the opening Andante movement enjoying its relative freedom as the only “sonata-ish” work of Brahms’ to pay little heed to sonata form! – this was more of a rondo-patterned melancholy main theme with a livelier contrasting sequence, the two sections alternating and  subtly blending gestures from one another’s material into a beautiful coda.

The second movement was a dancing Scherzo begun by the piano, and juxtaposing a leaping opening theme with occasional syncopated shouts of consenting glee, catapaulting the trajectories through to the resonantly sombre Trio, after which the Scherzo’s return restored the music’s high spirits. Came the Adagio mesto slow movement, a funereal introduction by the piano heralding a scenario of sorrowful lament, violin and horn almost weeping, it seemed, as the piano moved the cortege forwards – there appeared no respite until the movement’s end, despite an occasional “lifting up” of the melodic line, only to be brought down to earth again under the weight of emotion and gradually dissolving into the mists of gloom….

What a transformation the music then underwent with the finale’s delicious bubbling-up of energies from within!  – with rompings and frolickings spreading like wildfire through the music’s textures! Christine Wang’s violinistic brilliance, by now fully come into its own, and Beth Chen’s vigorous “foundation-rock” piano-tones were the constant “movers and shakers” of the music throughout. Interestingly, (and ironically), I’ve always felt Brahms’ writing for the horn never fully conveyed the out-and-out exhilarations of the “Waldhorn” world, one made so manifest by the Bozza piece we heard at the concert’s beginning – though, of course Sebastian Dunn’s skilfully-reproduced rumbustions during the Brahms work were sufficiently ebullient in certain places to make the instrument’s presence felt, and especially towards the piece’s end!

A group of us, amid plenty of excited babble, managed to make our way across the Terrace to a coffee-shop afterwards, where we were able to reflect anew (and not by any means for the first time!) upon our good fortune at having a lunchtime concert series in the city to attend which featured such resoundingly memorable musical treasures delivered via absolutely first-class performances!

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Wilby – To those who dwell in realms of day…….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REFLECTIONS, MINIATURES, AND SOUNDSCAPES  by Gary Wilby – FUTUNA CHAPEL 2026
Gary Wilby – electric piano
Petrina Wu, Tina Wilby (‘cellos)
Natasha McMillan (violin)
Julie Coulson (narrator)
Futuna Chapel, Friend St., Karori, Wellington
Sunday, 19th April, 2026

Gary Wilby himself regards his sound-creations as “miniatures and intimate”, echoing in a real sense something of poet William Blake’s respect for small things, with the latter’s  words “a world in a grain of sand”, reflecting Wilby’s own reflection of the worth that can be found, as he himself says, “…..sometimes in a small cell….”.

At Futuna Chapel in Karori we were invited to join In Gary’s “looking back” presentation of his own soundscapes and miniatures, often in interactive tandem with well-known works by some of the “greats” in cases when there’s been particular empathies with certain of these pieces – to the point where cross-fertilisation delightfully bubbles over like a babbling fountain. He actually used the music of JS Bach both to introduce and “round off” his concert, playing for us on an electric piano the theme from the “Goldberg Variations” and some impulsive “variants” which any Baroque composer transported to the twenty-first century would have surely recogtnised as viable connective musical tissue!.

Futuna Chapel, of course, needs no introduction to many Wellington concertgoers since its “induction” into the process of becoming a music-performing venue. Its wonderfully-vaulted ceiling acoustic gives the sound a “bloom”, and its striking stained-glass window configurations a visual ambience which together beautifully enhance the atmospheres generated by the efforts of modestly-numbered groups of musicians, both instrumental and vocal. Wilby cherishes a particular connection to the venue as a great and singular honour, in the form of his previous association with sculptor Jim Allen whose work in the chapel brilliantly enhanced the designs of the original architect John Scott.

After the Bachian introduction to the concert we next head a recording made by two string instrument players from Aotearoa New Zealand when visiting another far-off part of the world, the Monastery of Santa Maria in Sobrado dos Monxes. I’m guessing that one of these string players was a ‘cellist, but am unsure whether the other was a violist or violinist, or even another ‘cellist! Whatever the case Gary Wilby’s ensuing “Chant Futuna Connections” composition was given its first hearing in this country via the recording, haunting sounds putting something of a girdle about the earth!

Wilby then played a piece which he had come to associate with the Erebus Air New Zealand disaster, as the first music that came to his mind after hearing news of the tragedy – a teaching colleague from the UK whom he had got to know while at the same school during her time in New Zealand was among those killed in the disaster. The piece played was Chopin’s C Minor Prelude Op.28 No.20 – the lively and energetic variation was intended as a reprise which reflected Wilby’s recollection of somebody replete with an abundance of life and energy.

He then dashed into a kind of medley which he had given the title “Mashup” and which featured pieces with a similarly recurring harmonic pattern  – I didn’t list the pieces whose transmorgrifications  I still recognised, but the exercise seemed as much fun to play as to listen to! The following piece by Darius Milhaud then gave us one of the dances “Sorocaba”, from a Suite of the Saudades do Brazil Op.67 – this was the first of the dances which hearkened back to Latin American dance rhythms, though more wry and nostalgic than I was expecting from the composer.

I did enjoy Richard Rodney Bennett’s “A Week of Birthdays” characterising the famous nursery rhyme describing different “birthday” attributes, stimulating and picturesque little “character-sketches”, one for each day of the week. Footnote: – I remember once checking out my own actual birth week-day and vaguely remembering it might have been Wednesday – oo-er!!  – still, Bennett’s “Wednesday’ piece is not unlike in character and mood a couple of Dmitri Shostakovich’s more “moody” Preludes from the Op. 87 set, so I’m perhaps in good company!  I had not previously heard the Ravel piece, to my shame (and I thought I knew all of the composer’s keyboard works!) – Wilby’s description of this brief piece mentions its “notational ambiguity and surprising dissonance” which seemed to sum up what we heard most enchantingly and disconcertingly.

True to instinct, his next piece was very much a concerted effort on the part of some fellow-musicians – it was named “Compassion Chant” resulting in a spontaneously-composed outpouring of feeling in response to the Island Bay Home of Compassion ‘s Sisterhood making a ‘millenium gift” oi a substantioal lease owed the Home by the adjoining Marae, Taput e Ranga, for the purchase of land some years earlier. The piece was first performed for the ceremonial Millenium handover which took place late in December 1999.

The occasion’s “reimagined” piece featured violinist Natasha McMillan playing a “prelude” to Julie Coulson’s spoken introduction to the work, followed by cellist Petrina Wu, whose instrument sounded the “chant proper”, before being joined in duet by the second  ‘cellist, Tina Wilby – the recitative-like line became animated, even agitated in places, but then returned to a more peaceful and considered tone, imparting an awareness for us of the emotional range and scope of the situation.

Next, Gary Wilby reiterated William Blake’s idea of “a World in a grain of sand” with his “Three Contrasts”, pieces by turns whimsical, wry, deft, off-beat and abrupt, and then followed by a more extended collection of shortish characterisations, one which he had called “Simple Simon”, and based on a series of three descending notes.  Two of the seven  pieces (I think they were the last two) continued to resonate afterwards, each reminding me of Russian music –  the bass resonances of one of the pieces brought Mussorgsky’s more reflective parts of his “Pictures” to mind, while the following piece featured a wayward-sounding Russian song with off-beat accompaniments, like a Tchaikovsky “Troika” gone slightly awry!

Perhaps the most esoteric of the presentations was ‘Water, Voice, Pulse”, three separate sound-bytes brought together on a pre-recorded “take” whose repeated character certainly garnered a mesmeric kind of effect, and with the rhythms gradually slowed down, leaving at the end a kind of “lost in space” effect – the chords resonate as the voice murmurs indistinctly until only single sounds are left, in the original repeated note form, followed by silence.

All that was left was the return of the “Goldberg Variations” theme,  itself having now been “seasoned” or “grounded” by the concert’s multifarious influences one realised upon hearing the results of such exposure that things for the relatively straightforward theme could never be quite the same again, as the player’s musings and impulses demonstrated. Sincere appreciation to Gary Wilby and his candidly-expressed musical revelations, the afternoon’s peregrinations giving us all something to think about, and think about again……..

Saxophone opening up the chamber vistas – Simon Brew with the Amici Ensemble at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Series 2026 – Simon Brew with the Amici Ensemble

RUSSELL PETERSON (b.1969) – Quintet for alto saxophone and strings 2003
MAX RICHTER  (b.1966) – On the Nature of Daylight (2004)
ELLEN TAAFFE ZWILICH (b.1939) – Quintet for Saxophone and Strings
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1791) – String Quartet in F Major K.590
ASTOR PIAZZOLLA (1921-1992) Winter and Spring from The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (arr. Mary Osborn)

Amici Ensemble (Saxophone Quintet)
Donald Armstrong (violin), Anna van der Zee  (violin), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Andrew Joyce (‘cello), Simon Brew (saxophone)

St.Andrews-on-The-Terrace
Sunday, 12th April 2026

The saxophone as a musical instrument has made quite a journey – its inventor, Adolphe Sax, intended his instrument as a kind of “missing link” between winds and brass in the symphony orchestra, wanting  to combine the power of brass instruments with the flexibility of woodwinds, though the earliest saxophones tended to find their way into French military bands because of their ability to project their sounds outdoors. The instrument did appear in some nineteenth-century classical compositions, mostly by composers with names unknown today (has anybody previously heard the names of Jean-Baptiste Singelée, who wrote a Premier Quatuor  for Saxophones in 1857?- or Jules Demersseman, the composer of an 1860 Fantasie for Saxophone and Piano? ) but also with a number of “pioneering” examples of usage, such as in George Bizet’s incidental music for the play “L’Arlesienne” (1872), in music by Delibes (the 1876 ballet “Sylvia”) and in Massenet’s operas (“Le Roi de Lahore”, “Herodiade” and “Werther”) the earliest of these in 1877.

Of course since the turn of the century the orchestral gates have occasionally opened to admit the saxophone, with concertante works from composers such as Debussy, Glazunov and Ibert, and significant contributions from the instrument in works by Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Strauss, Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss and Ravel (via Mussorgsky) among others. In chamber music, too, the saxophone has noticeably figured, both in original works for the instrument and different kinds of arrangements, each of which were featured in this afternoon’s presentation by saxophonist Simon Brew and the Amici Ensemble.

Our concert began with American composer Russell Peterson’s 2003 Quintet for Alto Saxophone and Strings, the music beginning plaintively with strings only, then hauntingly continuing with the saxophone’s disarmingly dulcet tones – a sombre, processional-like exposition with gently melancholy dialogues and concerted passages – whose ambiences were then briefly but arrestingly galvanised by an impassionedly rising saxophone sequence, the music falling back to the previous subdued manner , only to again arch splendidly and disconcertingly – one was transfixed anew by the saxophone’s arresting power of utterance when at “full throttle”! –  I enjoyed the movement’s following dance-like, somewhat exotic-sounding sequences, despite a  “sameness” about the saxophone’s repeated “rise-and-fall” aspect to the music.

The second movement’s Bartok-like dance rhythms brought repeated-note patterms, more saxophonic declamations and running figurations, with the violin’s folkish lines echoed by the cello’s soulful responses. What appeared to be a third movement was begun by the saxophone, partnered by the ‘cello in a kind of  sombre and almost canonic duet, whose musings were broken into by the viola, beginning a fugal-like sequence, and joined by the second violin, the mood remaining sombre until the first violin burst in with a more dance-like line, inspiring the ‘cello to begin a spirited, “running” kind of response to which the saxophone joined, the pace of the music quickening until the opening chords of the second movement returned. This then sent the music into a kind of “spin”, the saxophone pursuing a kind of orgiastic folk-theme, whose cries brought the strings running towards and executing as one a brilliant concluding flourish!

The contrast with Max Richter’s meditative and “slow-chapp’d”  work for strings On The Nature Of Daylight,  which followed couldn’t have been more profound – at first, not unlike the opening of Strauss’s “Metamorphosen” the music almost straightaway developed in a different, more esoteric direction, beginning here with three players delivering long, slow, mesmeric and suggestive chords, until a fourth enters with a melody that derives wholly from these chord progressions. The piece’s popularity has actually begun to generate a kind of reaction to its over-use by film-makers, a counterproductive kind of  “bleeding the piece dry” effect, though Richter’s powerfully simple evocation will, like so many over-used pieces of music have previously done, doubtless survive its unselfconscious fecundity and remain fixed for future generations. I couldn’t imagine a more “centred”, sensitively-judged performance than we got here from our quartet of string-players.

The first half’s highlight for me was the Ellen Taafe Zwilich work, a 2008 Quintet for Saxophone and Strings, one with its opening Beethoven Grosse-Fugue-like beginning announcing its credentials and intents before setting off to a jogtrot-like journey throughout vistas of ear-catching detail. At first, the strings trod measured steps while the saxophone undertook a “whistling an air” kind of attitude, but with the group occasionally varying the trajectories, moving between a kind of lyrical wonderment, spontaneously impulsive gesturings and a droll “take it as it comes” manner.

Short, sharp impulses aplenty set the second movement on its intriguing course, in-and-out of occasional sequences which “papered over the cracks” in the music’s sustained lines (some evocative saxophone outpourings in places!). Our ears were kept engagingly activated by these wonderfully benign conniptions of expression, and highly entertained by an amusingly po-faced set of false “endings” to the movement leading up to the music’s true one!

The cello took up a nostalgic rocking rhythm at the third movement’s opening over which the saxophone sang a lullabic refrain, the strings joining in with a repeated-note accompaniment – fabulously ear-catching! As the saxophone began to energise its voice, the strings caught the mood and adroitly “syncopated” the exchanges, until the opening rocking rhythm made a sudden reappearance on the strings – saxophone and violin rhapsodised over the import of the moment, which intensified as the “chugging” rhythm also returned. The opening chord of the work then resounded, and echoed, before the players decided to have done with the past with a few terse, no-nonsense chords. I sat at the end, unexpectedly enchanted by it all!

After the interval, Mozart proved to be a perfect re-entry point to the concert with one of his “Prussian” Quartets (K.590 in F Major), albeit one of his greatest compositions, and one fraught with “might-have-beens” at the time the quartet was written – the circumstances have conspired to give this quartet a particularly distinctive flavour in a number of respects. At the time of writing this work the composer was in financial straits due to a recession in the Austrian economy caused by a drawn-out war with Turkey, resulting in fewer concerts and commissions. He had, in 1789, travelled to Berlin to meet the Prussian monarch Friedrich William II, an amateur cellist, hoping to make a good impression on the music-loving monarch, but instead had to be content with meeting the King’s Director of Chamber Music, the ‘cellist Jean-Pierre Dupont.

Afterwards he wrote to Constanze, his wife, that he had received money and commissions for six string quartets and six keyboard sonatas after performing for the Queen on a second visit. But there is no entry in the Court records for either money or commissions being made, and researchers have concluded that Mozart probably borrowed the money from friends, and invented the story regarding the visit and the commissions so he would have something to show for his efforts on his return to Vienna! He did complete three string quartets, two of them during 1790, the year following the Berlin visit, the second of which we heard today.

It’s an extraordinary work in itself, right from the beginning – two soft introductory notes and then a third louder and more insistent, followed by a scampering and unresolved unison descent – the whole then balanced by a repetition with solo violin, the dynamic contrasts softened, and the descent harmonically resolved. Mozart then uses that same three-note pattern and the scampered descent throughout the movement, the playing here of the Amici’s strings as deft and tonally varied as one might wish.

The following Andante has a hymn-like beginning, to which each instrument adds an embellished dance-like variation, leading to a stratospherically piquant ending. The Menuetto’s lively dance is characterised by an oscillating accompanying figure which passes from voice to voice throughout and in places moves up-and-down in almost vertiginous chromatic ways, while the Trio makes much of gawkily-witty grace-notes at some of the phrase-ends – charming! As for the finale it thrives on fluidity of utterance and quicksilver reactions, with several of the modulations seeming to flirt with atonality in places, while leaving our ears to actively wonder whether the lines would actually “find” one another again – such extraordinarily forward-looking juxtaposing of rhythms and harmonies! And what a delightfully po-faced concluding cadence – a wonderful sleight-of-hand ending!

Simon Brew brought his soprano saxophone with him this time, to conclude the concert with music by Astor Piazzolla, and featuring two excerpts from a work I’d not previously heard and was looking forward to – Piazzolla’s “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”. The composer originally wrote and scored the pieces separately between 1965 and 1970 for his own ensemble, which featured his own instrument, the bandoneon (a kind of accordion). Like much of the composer’s music they have been arranged for all kinds of combinations, including a version by Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov for string ensemble which occasionally quotes from Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons.

The Amici players performed two of  these “seasons”, winter and  spring, the first Invierno Porteño (Winter),having a gorgeous melancholic flavour, with much languishing at the piece’s beginning, and then with the saxophone tones bring out a truly exotic flavour to the textures and tones. Both pieces use the term Porteño, a word referring to a native of Buenos Aires, so that the Spring is given the name Primavera Porteña –  the music’s somewhat livelier than the first piece, though the players here give even the slower middle section’s rhythms plenty of “heft” . We enjoyed the experience so much we were able to persuade the ensemble to return to the platform and give us some more Piazzolla, a characteristically sultry opening, with the strings sighing as the saxophone literally took flight, the lines soaring like a bird, before the instrument brought these impulses back to earth, joining the strings for a soulful concluding melody in luscious thirds. Gorgeous sounds! – we couldn’t have helped enjoying the ensemble’s wonderfully cosmopolitean adventurings throughout a variety of times and places – a real treat for the senses in every way!

Pianist Otis Prescott-Mason – an unexpected but precious gift for us of Schubert’s heavenly G-Major Sonata D.894.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

FRANZ SCHUBERT – Piano Sonata in G Major D.894

Otis Prescott-Mason (piano)
St.Andrews’-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, 8th April, 2026

Firstly, a bit of background, which I gleaned from the concert’s programme leaflet  – pianist Otis Prescott-Mason has recently completed his undergraduate studies with Dr.Jian Liu at the New Zealand School of Music here in Wellington. During this time, he’s taken part in several competitions throughout the country, winning firstly the 2020 New Zealand Junior Piano Competition and then both the 2022 PACANZ National Piano Competition, and the Lewis Eady National Piano Competition in Auckland that same year. More recently, in  2025 he won Third Prize at the National Concerto Competition in Christchurch with Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, and has performed with various regional orchestras such as the Christchurch Symphony, Orchestra Wellington, and the Auckland Philharmonia.

Now having completed his undergraduate studies, Prescott-Mason is looking forward to his next step on the pianistic ladder, taking him to a course of study further afield at the prestigious Yale School, of Music in New Haven, Connecticut, USA during the 2026-27 academic year, and working towards a Master of Music with the great Boris Berman, a Professor at the school, and a pianistic “hero” for the young musician. He joins a prestigious group  of past keyboard-achievers from these shores who have similarly  ventured outwards to seek further artistic and musical fulfilment.

I had seen and heard Otis play before on occasions which included a memorable 2020 St. Andrews’ solo recital (review at https://middle-c.org/2021/11/firstly-sparks-and-then-a-conflagration-pianist-otis-prescott-mason-in-recital/), as well as a “shared” recital with other solo pianists (actually a ”preparation”  concert for the aforementioned 2020 NZ Junior Piano Competition, which Prescott-Mason won!), and a sparkling lunchtime concert duo recital (four hands) with Sunny Cheng in 2021. In all, my expectations had been suitably primed by the above to regard this concert as something not to be missed!.

Upon making his appearance, the pianist explained to us that, rather than fronting up with his originally-planned programme of predominantly virtuoso pieces (which I was expecting to hear) he’d felt of late much more like spending time with an audience in the company of a composer like Schubert – so to my special delight (and partly also because I had already heard him play a couple of the originally-scheduled items, and this was something very different!) he’d decided to play the Schubert Sonata in G Major D.894, a work I’d become particularly fond of in recent times thanks to Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter’s daringly leisurely (and, for me, utterly mesmerising!) performance, especially in the case of the work’s first movement.

Though Prescott-Mason didn’t attempt to emulate Richter’s “near-timeless traversal”
of the first movement’s oceanic-like expanses, he caught at the very outset the music’s unique blend of surety and resonant utterance which the slightest hint of any haste or impatience or anything mechanical in a performance can deaden and neutralise. In fact, at the work’s very beginning the pianist “set the scene” for all of us so very beautifully by adopting the once-fashionable opening gesture of playing a series of gently-modulating figures (sometimes chordal, sometimes arpeggiated) as a kind of “storyteller’s introduction” to what was to follow. (Those readers who know of and have heard the late, great Roumanian pianist Dinu Lipatti’s legendary “farewell” recital, recorded “live” as long ago as1950, will be familiar with this enchanting and heartwarming practice!).

Schubert’s own opening chords were then gorgeously-voiced, the whole introduction entirely and disarmingly spontaneous in effect – even more elfin-like were the sounds of the following contrasting sequence, both hushed and beautifully darkened by the deeper bass notes. The music then “opened up”, gloriously amplified through its newly- burgeoning joy and intensity. Though Prescott-Mason seemed to allow the ensuing flowing trajectories of movement at first “play themselves”, he made the following filigree right-hand decorations dancing above the music’s gentle progress utterly captivating. And the timing of these decorations’ sudden downward movement was superb, generating just enough sense of momentum, strength and spontaneity to underline the sense of a kind of “arrival” at the exposition’s end, though with things remaining yet to be fully understood.

Throughout the repeat we found ourselves as entranced by the pianist’s concentration as before, the music unfolding as delightfully and spontaneously, with the descent into those declamatory chords leading to an enchanting postlude resonating with even greater gravitas and resonance this time round. Of course, the development’s sudden pitiless onset of dark-toned attack opened up a new world of frightening disturbance, from which the music’s furtive moments of “escape” into desperately-sought gesturings of consolation get beaten back by the composer’s own demons. We heard one or two instances of near-derailment as the pianist wrestled with these dark forces before managing by sheer effort of will to endure their grim purposes with sufficient patience – though I thought the recapitulation of the opening here could have conveyed a deeper, more spacious and exhausted sense of the “trauma of experience” the music conveyed so vividly in those throes of despair.

All was well by the time the coda was reached, with Prescott-Mason’s re-entry into the music’s trance-like world bringing out those almost archway-like “gates of heaven” utterances with what seemed like wonderment and gratitude, surely and generously taking us with him, as the descending phrases concluded this first part of the journey.

What enchanting song-like lines we then heard at the Andante’s beginning, the tones engaging and the mood almost joyous in its reiteration of full-throated lyrical phrasings – then, how dramatic a plunge into the second group of utterances we got here! Some  detailings seemed to have a couple of out-of-focus moments in the more beseeching parts, but the pianist kept his head and steered the music back on course  – along with the occasional unexpectedly “repeated” phrase, these felt like “corrections” of things originally mistimed…… (perhaps a by-product of the programme’s relatively late re-alignment for the recital?)

Far more important was Prescott-Mason’s maintaining of the music’s overall character, the reprise of the movement’s opening was again beautifully elaborated, with just enough suggestibility and insinuation for us to register the lasting impact of the various plungings into more shadowy and stressful sequences, a wonderful exposition of a relationship between well-being, conflict and eventual resolution. The dramatic Menuetto/Scherzo, too, was delivered with telling contrast between the opening’s muscular purpose and the wryly piquant responses, an interaction which largely dominated the movement – a lovely moment is the occasional quixotic reprise of the opening in more muted tones and with occasional wry grace-notes (as if the more bumptious manner of the opening can occasionally exhibit a more personable “inner” character, one which is brought out here to perfection. As for the Trio, it was pure enchantment on this occasion, almost like a “sleepwalking” sequence displaying an alternative side of the same coin, an “echt-Schubert” moment!

The finale here is surely one of the composer’s happiest creations, an utterly disarming instance of a composer “coming to terms” with the demons lurking in some of the music’s earlier recesses. Prescott-Mason beautifully captures the music’s charm and good humour of the opening, his technique having the spring and pliability that readily give these qualities an irresistible demeanour. And he has the gift of a delightful insouciance, which adds to the music’s appeal while keeping its significance in the larger scheme of things intact and resonant – his playing doesn’t erase memories of the journey but adds to the composer’s own achievement in  deepening the impact of the whole as a living entity. Implicit in this was his simple and heartfelt playing of the work’s final phrase, whose silences that followed were true resonances of memory. What a way to spend a lunchtime! – one, at the end of which we were left feeling such gratitude to both composer and performer!

 

 

Music from the memory, in the air and on the wing – all from Wellington City Orchestra’s opening 2026 concert!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra’s 2026 concert series – a fresh and adventurous beginning!

LILI BOULANGER – D’un Matin de Printemps *
LOUISE WEBSTER – Violin Concerto (In Hollowed Bone I hear the Seas Roar)
LILI BOULANGER – D’un Soir Triste
SERGE PROKOFIEV – Ballet “Romeo and Juliet” – Suite No. 2

Helene Pohl (violin)
Justus Rozemond (conductor)
Virginie Pacheco (assistant conductor)*
Wellington City Orchestra

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday 28th March, 2026

This opening Wellington City Orchestra concert of 2026, brought to its audience a truly engaging and stimulating  programmme. Conductor Justus Rozemond and his WCO musicians here followed up their enterprising 2025 concert of works by Nicolai, Rachmaninov and Berlioz with an even more exploratory selection – two compositions by the tragically short-lived French composer Lili Boulanger (the first of which was directed by the WCO’s Assistant Conductor. Virginie Pacheco and which opened the concert), followed by a Violin Concerto from Auckland composer Louise Webster, here played by the work’s first performer in 2016, Helene Pohl – and with the composer in the audience! – and finally, a Suite of dances from one of the most beloved of twentieth-century ballets, Serge Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”.

Assistant Conductor, Virginie Pacheco (who had made such a positive first impression in last year’s concert series), took the rostrum for the concert’s beginning and launched her players enthusiastically into the opening wide-eyed spring-like strains of Lili Boulanger’s D’un Matin de Printemps, (A Spring Morning). This was one of the last works the composer completed before her untimely death in 1918 at the age of twenty-four – she had written several chamber versions of the piece for different instruments, but wanted its “full-orchestra” expression as the piece’s last word.

The music’s remarkably verdant textures were conveyed here throughout the “spring morning” opening section with a judicious amalgam of elan and delicacy – a more sombre set of sequences followed, featuring strings and wings in forest-murmur-like “nature-exchanges’, which built up through a splendid crescendo, becoming at the end a kind of exultant processional exuberantly capped by a splendid harp flourish – wonderful, atmospheric playing!

The front violin-desks were then moved back to make room for the concerto soloist – this was Helene Pohl, who had given the premiere performance of Louise Webster’s Violin Concerto as long ago as  2016 with Auckland’s St.Matthews’ Chamber Orchestra. The composer was originally going to write an “overture-like” piece for the concert with passages for a solo violinist, but when she discovered who the violinist was going to be, the present concerto simply “growed”, inspired by Webster’s regard for Pohl as a musician. Incidentally, Webster subtitled the work with the quotation from Ruth Dallas’s poem about the  sea – “In hollowed bone I hear the seas roar” – AFTER the music had been written, a truly organic, rather than “made-to-order” gestation!

The following year, Pohl was due to reperform the work with the NZSO as part of the SOUNZ readings of music by New Zealand composers, but conflicting schedules meant that NZSO violinist Yuka Eguchi had to step in to perform the work instead. Now, ten years after that first SMCO performance Pohl was delighted to have the chance to revisit the concerto in concert – she recalled being particularly struck by the work’s fusion of emotional expression with colourful pictorial detail, making the concerto all the more pleasurable a prospect to go back to.

The work’s beginning instantly arrested one’s attention – over a low orchestral pedal-point the solo violin entered with an ascending theme, the orchestra repeating the theme at a quicker pace. The violin’s “similar but different” wandering, soulful theme, joined by the flutes, gradually energised things, elaborating on certain phrases, rising to stratospheric heights – a beautiful sequence!  From there on the movement played host to sequences alternating tensions and exaltations, all joined in a kind of accord which  featured the soloist reacting to and interacting with both single/smaller groups and with larger orchestral forces – however, a brief confrontation sequence with the orchestra brought forth echoed phrases, sharp pizzicati, percussive “slaps”, and piled-up-note patterns, cautioning against easy conquest!

In other places the interactions of the violinist with smaller groups had an intimacy and candour that suggested something of a “friend in the wilderness” relationship – the soloist frequently parleyed with winds such as the flutes or piccolo, or tenderly mused with the clarinet, or larger groups of sostenuto strings, as well as gentle wind chorales with pizzicato accompaniment – the violinist soared above the winds’ ostinato -like figures in a beautiful passages reminiscent of Holst, sometimes echoing, and at other times supporting each of the soloists phrases and “frontings up” with similarly-derived figures. Another gorgeous “wind chorale” sequence encouraged the soloist to break into a kind of dance, joined in with by the orchestra – something which seemed for a few treasurable moments to unify the music’s questing spirit.

It came across to me as much as a kind of re-exploration or reassessment of deeply-felt experience and feeling.  various both tension and exultation.  The writing for the orchestra in places spare and uncompromising, seemed still  to respond to the soloist with things she already knew, echoing or elaborating phrases and impulses from the solo instrument’s own plethora of realities.  At the end  even the strings gave the soloist moments of reassurance in return to her oputpourings, however brief the rhythmic impulses and guarded sighings, leaving a solo ‘cello and then a viola to offer the soloist concluding impulses of companionship.

Conductor Justus Rozemond got the second movement to grasp the trajectories and flex plenty of orchestral muscle, bringing out a swinging theme that was punctuated by various wind, brass and percussion irruptions. The violin danced at first, then after letting the orchestra echo the dance, re-entered, soaring and swooning beguilingly as the winds amicably chattered away. Eventually the orchestra decided to join in with the violin, grasping the mettle with force and energy, trajectories riding upon surges of almost joyous collegial abandonment. Honour satisfied, the momentums sank to rest – so that when the violin tried to revitalise the dance the orchestra abruptly called a halt!

The third movement, written for soloist and strings alone, drifted into being like a half-realised dream, solo violin harmonics floating into and out of the bleak sostenuto orchestral string textures. The orchestral strings remained glacial as they built an impassioned climax (reminiscent in places of the slow movement of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony). The solo violin toyed with other solo lines, all wanting to fill the ambient soundscapes, all trying in places to break through a kind of expressive stranglehold, but constantly being brought back to order by the sheer intensity of the orchestra’s impassive response.  The solo violin returned briefly to its world of spectral, half-lit tones and muted impulse, so that the work proverbially ended “not with a bang but with a whimper”. Whew!

A delighted composer came onto the platform at the end to congratulate the musicians and acknowledge our applause – what a work, and what a committed performance! And what an inspiration Helene Pohl’s incredible mastery of the solo instrumental writing would have obviously been in terms of enabling the music to work its spell – all due credit to all concerned!

We needed an interval to take it all in sufficiently, of course, and especially in view of having another of Lili Boulanger’s heartfelt final compositions to give our attention to in the concert’s second half. I was wondering whether we would get Virginie Pacheco back to conduct the second Boulanger piece, D’un Soir Triste but it was Justus Rozemond’s turn as conductor to guide the players through the second of the composer’s pieces. It proved to be the diametrical opposite of the joyous “Spring Morning” piece we had enjoyed – though its title gave us some warning of what was to follow, the music unequivocally takes the word “Triste” in the title to near-unbearable depths of despair.

The piece began with a faint heartbeat rhythm whose trajectories awoke the senses with firstly the winds and then along with the strings beginning what seemed like a death-struggle with oncoming darkness. Each of the music’s upward-thrusting agitations took us towards a remorselessly grinding climax, in which percussion and brass savagely intoned their despairing message. The haunting throbbing of drums and a cello solo clothed in mourning delivered a scenario of intense sorrow, given tongue by the strings and winds. A harp and piano added to whatever consolation the music seemed capable of giving, though the brass and percussion didn’t hesitate to imbue the same themes with sterner, more fateful and sharper-edged accents. The strings aided by the winds continued their threnody of consolation, though the increased intensities led to tragic outcomes and eventual darkness.

The piece’s ending here seemed an incredible evocation of bravery and raw courage from a composer in the midst of the gathering darkness of impending death. Adding to the poignancy of it all was music-making from conductor and players which responded to the work’s heartfelt emotion with focus and commitment that was itself moving to experience at first hand.

Even so, after such rawly-unmitigated emotion, one was almost grateful for the relative distance and paradigmatic tragedy of the “Romeo and Juliet” story, as expressed by the variety of feeling, colour and action in Serge Prokofiev’s music for his famous eponymously-named 1935 ballet. Renowned as much for its initial neglect when first completed, the ballet had to wait until a 1938 production in Brno, Czechoslovakia, for its first public staging, and until 1940 for its first presentation on Russian soil by the Kirov Ballet. The composer meantime had resorted to compiling suites of dances from the complete work to be played in symphonic concerts, as well as extracting ten pieces arranged for solo piano, as a means of getting the music known.

We were given the composer’s arrangement of a second suite of dances from the work, beginning with the portentous “Montagues and Capulets” sequence of orchestral crescendi which serves as a prelude to the “Dance of the Knights” from the ballet’s first act. These famous crescendi were delivered with tremendous gusto by the brass and percussion here, with the sudden hushed ambiences leaving the string tones floating beautifully. Justus Rosamond took a wonderfully portentously tempo for the “Dance”, conveying the arrogance and brutality of the Capulet Knights and the contrasting minuet-like sequences depicting the disguised Montagues at the ball. And how wonderful to briefly hear the timbres of the saxophone taking up the resumption of the Knight’s Dance music towards the end.

The strings made an outstandingly nimble and winsome job of Juliet’s music, Rozamund allowing the clarinet no respite in the alternate sequence (beautifully played!), but relaxed expansively for the touching flute-and-solo-cello portrayals later. In his music Friar Lawrence was a younger, more vigorous priest than I’d been accustomed to, a refreshing alternative – the portrayal got lovely bassoon work, and was ably supported by the horn and the strings. A whimsical favourite of mine has been the “Dance of the Five Couples”, one in which the various players scampered about to great effect.

More expansive was the “Romeo and Juliet before Parting”, with gorgeous, lump-in-the-throat flute playing at the start, and beautiful replying strings, before the horn splendidly made its presence felt, along with the various winds, each “launching” the lines with real presence, such as with the viola solo, nicely animated and properly demonstrative.
The more concerted reprise of the “farewell” music was properly full-blooded, with the occasional “bloop” adding to the desperate, heartfelt nature of the scenario, setting in poignant relief the ostinato-like accompanying lines from the winds and strings as the lower instruments growled an ominous foretaste of the tragedy to come in the bass registers – a splendidly-wrought scenario!

More poignance was to be had with the old-fashioned-sounding “Dance of the Maids from the Antille”, here touchingly characterised by both solo and concerted violins, and contrasting clarinet and saxophone contributions. Came the  inevitable “Death of Romeo and Juliet”, the players digging into the rawly-wrought lines, and the brasses making a properly anguished array of tones, and the cellos and violins throwing out the lovers’ ill-fated theme with heart-wrenching resonance – the whole orchestra’s delivery of the “funeral procession” sequence made for a highlight of the afternoon’s presentation. All that was left at the end were the bleak, comfortless tones of the strings and piccolo, sounding without words the refrain – “for never was a tale of such woe/than that of Juliet and her Romeo”….

All in all, the concert made a truly memorable start to a year’s eagerly-awaited music-making, with every item representing and delivering “moments per minute”, rather than the other way round! A touching “extra” occasion-moment was the marking of Rowena Cullen’s retirement from ten years’ Presidency of the Wellington City Orchestra with a presentation and a warm-hearted ovation. But the afternoon’s music was splendid and special in many ways, not least of all due to composer Louise Webster and violinist Helene Pohl. And, to conductor Justus Rozemond, and his concert assistant conductor Virginie Pacheco, and to all the players, well done for a great beginning to 2026!

 

 

 

Still more musical miracles reported and evidenced in Wellington, this time at Roseneath’s The Long Hall!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The creative spirit continues to work wonders in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa – (“Kei te ora tonu te wairua auaha ki Te Whanganui-a-Tara o Aotearoa”)

Peter Gjelsten tackles a Bach Violin Sonata (No. 2 in A Minor BWV 1003) at The Long Hall, Roseneath

The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble
A Kaibosh Food Rescue Benefit Concert

ROSS HARRIS – 2 Micro-Trios (2020)
Helene Pohl, Peter Gjelsten (violins), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)
NICCOLO PAGANINI – Caprice No. 9 for solo violin
JS BACH – Sonata for solo violin in A Minor BWV 1003
Peter Gjelsten  (violin)
CRAIG UTTING – Four Wellington Dances for violin and cello
Helene Pohl (violin), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)
FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – String Quartet in G Major Op.33 No. 5
Helene Pohl, Peter Gjelsten (violins)
Sophia Acheson (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

The Long Hall, Point Jerningham, Roseneath
Saturday 21st March, 2026

Fresh from attending my first St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace lunchtime concert earlier in the week, I had the good fortune to catch another. not dissimilar kind of musical happening – this one a 2026 “first” for the capital of a series instigated a year ago by violinist Helene Pohl at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”, situated on the Point Jerningham lookout reserve next to Roseneath Primary School. The concerts are designed to alternatively support the Kaibosh Food Rescue charity, and the Arohanui Strings, the Sistema-inspired early intervention music education programme. The Kaibosh charity makes a significant difference to food and energy waste and carbon emissions, enabling thousands of kilos of food to be redistributed to community groups, resulting in renewed efforts by the same musicians over the present in continuing and supporting an eminently worthwhile venture.

Thanks to the inspiration, skills and capacity for hard work of Helene Pohl and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten, the 2025 concert series was a great success. The two musicians, aided by various colleagues, were able to simultaneously commemorate and take advantage of composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s 50th death anniversary, performing a number of the composer’s chamber works in tandem with a wide range of other pieces, including a couple of contemporary works written specifically for these concerts (and therefore both world premieres!) by composers currently both on-and off-shore, Ross Harris and Gao Ping, respectively.

Now, to begin the 2026 series the Long Hall’s opening Kaibosh Food Rescue programme paid appropriate homage to some of the previous year’s delights, including works by “resident” composers (two of whom were present today!), as well as instrumental solos which illustrated the power of a single voice’s communication, and a string quartet by the composer who effectively defined the form and whose efforts provided all kinds of “springboards’ for those others who followed suit.

First up was music representing a kind of timely antidote to Aotearoa New Zealand’s present version of Trumpish madness, two Micro-Trios by Ross Harris, written during the much-discussed lockdown period of 2020 for the Pohl/Gjelsten family members present today. The two works, as if conceived with different personalities in mind, displayed contrasting characters, the first beginning in a restless, slightly anxious 5/4 which developed more forthright impulses befitting a kind of “confused turmoil of being” in response to the isolated circumstances. The second work took a more lyrical approach, with long-linked lines attracting all kinds of impulses which attached themselves to the lines before dropping off the pace and wandering quizzically through unfamiliar vistas (like an ageing process, perhaps – with apologies to the composer!).

Violinist Peter Gjelsten followed up his 2025 performance of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Third Sonata (“Ballade”) for Solo Violin with another work by a virtuoso violinist-composer, perhaps the doyen of them all, Niccolo Paganini – The Ninth of his 24 Caprices for solo violin was given here with plenty of confidence and elan, the opening “hunting calls” resounding their thirds with spirited effect in dynamically-contrasted episodes readily suggesting the shouts of purpose and encouragement from the riders relishing the chase.  The “sport”was given plenty of incident by the violinist’s confident throwing-off a middle-section’s skitterish runs broken by stentorian phrases, suggesting both mishap and success in the pursuit!

Sterner stuff followed these hi-jinks, with Peter Gjelsten giving us JS Bach’s wonderful A Minor Sonata for solo violin, one of three Sonatas for the solo instrument, all of which are often coupled as a performing edition with three Partitas for the same instrument. An all-purpose differentiation between the two titles “Sonata” and “Partita” is that the former is traditionally a four-movement structure which often features linked slow-fast sections  and a fugue, whereas a Partita consists of different types of Renaissance/ Baroque dance movements. True to type this Sonata includes a fugue as the second movement.

First impressions of this work emphasised seriousness over gaiety, the solemn, declamatory opening commanding our attention with the player’s presence of intonation and command of nuance giving his listeners an engaging sense of exploration right to the movement’s final questioning note. The Fugue’s elegance and poise at the outset opens out, Gjelsten finding plenty of room for variations of tone and presenting an astonishing array of different voices – the music’s trajectories buildup and carry us along with wonderful ”heads of steam”, so that the phrases and statements really resonate.

Gjelsten’s control of the Andante’s pulse enabled both melody and rhythm to coexist, often in little more than whisperings, but with an underlying strength of overall purpose. We felt taken to another world by the second half of the movement, with the composer  seeming to allow us a lingering glimpse of his serenity of outlook and purpose of faith – I could imagine a young player in future years delving even further into the music’s timelessness that allow these sounds to linger long after the player ceases. The concluding Allegro is here excitingly launched and teasingly sustained with the antiphonal alternating phrases made here to dance through our sensibilities’ spaces. The rapidly-executed impulses have an exhilarating ring to them, and we’re “teased” with what seems like the approach of a final cadence, but with geyser-like irruptions that suddenly push the boundaries out further – tantalizing playing that keeps us on our toes and  enables us to relish the music all the more.

We had been promised a quick, “straight-through” concert at the beginning, so our kaleidoscopic musical journey  suddenly whirled us homewards via local composer Craig Utting’s engaging “Four Wellington Dances”, for violin and ‘cello (written in 2025 for Helene and Rolf.) The work began with an entirely apposite “Wind Dance”, a nagging 7/8 perpetuo-molto rhythm  by turns driving, teasing and cajoling the notes into sound-impulses whose insistence any Wellingtonians would recognise, and with alternating instruments adding a moaning-sighing figure over the agitations, catching their constant unpredictabilities. Next was the strangely mesmeric “Whale Song”, introduced by spectral “con sordino” violin tones (which set the scene for strangeness) and galvanised further by hauntingly-charged “vocalisings”, firstly in the lower and then upper registers of the ‘cello – an incredible soundscape, tapping into a “natural world” communication, with the instruments conveying a real sense of ambient surroundings and language essentially removed from human interaction.

“Seagulls”, the third dance, has an introduction flecked with further atmospheric touches, such as the ‘cello playing eerie glissandi to the violin’s arpeggiations and rather touching “seafarer’s song”, first played, incidentally, lower than the ‘cello’s accompaniments, though the instruments exchange their roles at certain points – the melody is a real charmer, replete with nostalgia! Finally, the “Habanada” imbues a well-known operatic rhythm with a mischievous spirit during short sequences of dance-tunes and  illicit collaborations with ostensibly unlikely partners such as Saint-Saens’s “The Swan” and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Bumble Bee”, with even Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” making a brief appearance before falling down the stairs and (thankfully) coming to its concluding senses!

After all of this, what better finale than to be given a masterwork from a composer whose music paralleled the conditions that produced each of the concert’s preceding works – isolation, compositional mastery, instrumental fluency, and a need for entertainment? All these things come together in the string quartets of Franz Joseph Haydn, whose Op.33 set of six string quartets were written in 1781, and became known as the “Russian” Quartets, due to the dedication to the Grand Duke Paul of Russia. Another nickname given to these works is Gli Scherzi  (The Jokes) referring to the replacement of the older style Minuet with a quicker, more dynamic movement.

Here, then was the fifth of the Quartets from this Op.39 set, a work which itself has been nicknamed with the English sobriquet phrase “How do you do?”, drawing attention to the Quartet’s very beginning, a pianissimo galant cadence which actually returns to conclude the movement with which it started. the opening “How do you do?” cadence is only a prelude to the ensuing Molto Allegro, which seizes hold of the argument and propels it excitingly forwards. The mood lightens for the lyrical second subject, only to unexpectedly plunge into the almost “groaning downwards” chromatic modulation towards the end of the exposition. The volatile development dances, swoops and plunges as the music unfolds, releasing almost operatic surges of energy in places, with the “how do you do” cadence realigning the music’s focus for a recapitulation – we are, by this time, agog at the music’s volatilities, and marvel at how quickly the music races to its concluding cadences without missing a beat!

Our heartstrings are tugged immediately by the slow movement’s intensities, most strenuously propelled forwards with almost unrelenting energy, to which one simply has to surrender and allow oneself to be borne aloft and taken somewhere. What a contrast, therefore, with the impishly impulsive Scherzo, filled with all kinds of hesitancies and impulses!  The Trio brings a steadier, more genteel character, as if wishing to reform such excesses, though to no avail when the opening returns, as quirky and ornery as ever, though with a touch, perhaps, of guilt via its almost evanescent ending!

After this, the finale’s music is almost prim and proper, in what seems like variation form, with the first violin decorating and elaborating on the melodic line in both subsequent variation movements, and then, the viola and cello taking turns to decorate the dance steps for a subsequent movement. Finally, there’s a Presto which scampers to a satisfyingly breathless conclusion!

Such a lot packed into a relatively short time! Nevertheless, we were replete – delighted by the music and the playing, and honoured by the good and prestigious company – a truly memorable occasion!

 

Masterpieces from masterly musicians – A St. Andrew’s lunchtime concert, from Rolf Gjelsten and Nicole Chao

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington  – Lunchtime Concert Series

BEETHOVEN – ‘Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major Op.69
TCHAIKOVSKY (arr. Fitzenhagen) – Variations on a Rococo Theme Op.33

Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) and Nicole Chao (piano)

Wednesday 18th March 2026

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

“Two masterpieces for the ‘cello-and-piano repertoire, delivered by a pair of musicians regarded as among the country’s top players of their respective instruments” – well, it  sounds like nothing less than a dream prescription for a concert!  Alternatively, the blurb for the occasion could have fixed as easily upon its contrast with present-day scenarios – ranging from world-wide upheavals undermining one’s sense of national and personal security to localised disillusionment and desperation faced with escalating dysfunctional infrastructure and cost-of-living price-hikes – and invited us “to escape from it all into the relative bliss of St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church for a free lunchtime concert of uplifting music”.

However one chooses to view these regular Wednesday lunchtime concert occasions they have given many Wellingtonian classical music-lovers much joy with a stimulating variety of performers and repertoire. In this case we were thoroughly spoilt as regards the concert’s essential ingredients, with cellist Rolf Gjelsten, late of the New Zealand String Quartet, but more recently affiliated with Korimako, a piano/string trio formed with pianist Michael Endres and violinist Helene Pohl, and here joining forces with pianist Nicole Chao, most readily associated with the much-acclaimed Duo Enharmonics together with fellow-pianist Beth Chen.

I had heard Rolf Gjelsten’s solo playing on a couple of occasions, most recently in an absolutely delightful performance of JS Bach’s Third Violincello Suite in C Major at a “Long Hall” Roseneath concert; but I’d not heard Nicole Chao as a solo recitalist since briefly at a 2009 song-recital concert with soprano Nicola Holt, where for an instrumental interlude she gave an atmospheric, by turns finely-detailed and splendidly volatile performance of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade. Though not solo performances this time round, today’s offerings readily demonstrated the technical and interpretative skills of each of the players, brought together beautifully here in St.Andrew’s.

As befitted such a positive partnership, the occasion featured an actual milestone in the repertoire of the solo ‘cello with Ludwig van Beethoven’s ground-breaking Cello Sonata in A Major Op.69. Though this was the third actual sonata of five written for the instrument by Beethoven, this one was the first which gave “equal partnership” status to the ‘cello in a sonata, instead of  (as with the composer’s two Op.5 works, described as “piano sonatas with accompaniment by the ‘cello”) merely providing a supporting role for the keyboard. In fact Beethoven wrote this work for the same cellist, Nikolaus Kraft, who had taken part in the first performance in 1808 of the composer’s Triple Concerto.

At the work’s beginning the ‘cello celebrates its new-found status with its solo announcement of the opening theme, effortlessly floated into being by Rolf Gjelsten  before intensifying the tones with the instrument’s alighting upon a sustained E – to which Nicole Chao’s piano then replies with a lyrical “rounding -off” of the theme and a brief flourish. What follows is an enthralling exchange of ideas which each player acts upon in a sense of both thoughtful contribution and impulsive challenge to the music’s argument – I’ve always loved the music’s ascending runs in this movement, figurations that seem to me to almost “dare” each player (but especially the cellist in the second, higher figuration!) to markedly “sound” and relish these ascents, a kind of “flight of fancy” that’s contrasted with the earthily, no-nonsense agitato plungings into the succeeding episodes by both instruments. The minor-key passage which constitutes the development is delivered with the same focused combination of energy and fancy, breathtaking in its “give-and-take” rapport throughout lyrical and impassioned sequences. And ‘cellist’s and pianist’s instinctive capacity for mutual understanding beautifully bring off the sequence which transforms what sounds like a “third exposition” into the movement’s coda, turning Beethoven’s simplest of phrase-resolutions into a precious kind of homecoming, complete with a “grandstand finish” for the pundits!

The allegro molto Scherzo became something of an “anything you can do” game of syncopated daring, exhilarating to give oneself over to and feel “borne along“ by the players’  sharply-focused trajectories – again, music with contrasting episodes afforded by an obsessively grumbling trio and a po-faced pizzicato coda. No slow movement as such – but an opening sequence of rapt lyrical beauty, wrought by playing that seemed to commune with listeners in mutual enjoyment, before abruptly and mischievously breaking into a precipitous, fleet-fingered (footed?) dance, one which delights as much in contrast of mood as anywhere else in this sonata. So Gjelsten and Chao revelled as much in the music’s “sotto voce” excitement as in the hell-for-leather passages, enabling the energies unleashed by Beethoven to tingle expectantly throughout both exuberant and more circumspect passages – such a COMPLETE performance!

Those of us who had seen the concert’s original listing were expecting the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations to follow, but the printed programme at the church had listed only the Beethoven work – so some people (feeling with every good reason satisfied with what they’d already heard) were getting up to leave when the musicians reappeared for the second item. As well most returned, because the Tchaikovsky work, normally heard in concert played by ‘cello and orchestra, was given simply gorgeous treatment by Gjelsten and Chao, to the point where I found myself preferring the ‘cello-and-piano combination to the original!

I would imagine most cellists are aware of the controversy accompanying this work from its inception, largely due to the activities of its dedicatee, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, a German cellist and fellow-professor at the Moscow Conservatory, who had given the first performance of the work in 1877. Fitzenhagen had been asked by Tchaikovsky for advice regarding his finished “first-draft” for ‘cello and piano, but the composer wasn’t prepared for the extent to which his dedicatee then “revised” the score with the changes (both in the solo and accompaniment parts) then being incorporated into the published ‘cello-and-orchestra score). Though Tchaikovsky was documented as being furious at Fitzenhagen’s changes, his displeasure never actually translated into action, and the score was published in 1889 in the dedicatee’s version.

Tchaikovsky’s own version of the work wasn’t performed until 1941 in Moscow, but the score of the original had to wait until 1956 to be completely reconstructed, along with the cello-piano arrangement (though even the reconstructed version has been questioned because of the methodology used!). Several recordings have now been made of the original, though the Fitzenhagen version still regularly appears in concert and on record. It wasn’t made clear at today’s concert whether the version used by the musicians was Tchaikovsky/Fitzenhagen, or echt-Tchaikovsky (enquiries to this end are proceeding!).

I grew up with the “Fitzenhagen edition” of the work (used by practically all the  versions on record at the time), as per the recording by Rostropovich with Rozhdestvensky and the Leningrad Philharmonic, and loved it to pieces, though I also heard Janos Starker play the work with the NZSO in the1980s in Palmerston North (also a fabulous concert!). I bought what I believed to be the first-ever recording of Tchaikovksy’s original version of the work, made by cellist Raphael Wallfisch as long ago as 1983, but haven’t played it as much as I have the earlier recording, preferring to my shame the “dark side” territory of Fitzenhagen’s version – it seems to me that the only crime regarding the latter’s rearrangement of the work was that he wasn’t Tchaikovsky!

What we got here from Gjelsten and Chao sounded to my ears pretty well like the version I’d become accustomed to – and the playing gave me such pleasure I hardly stopped for a moment to consider just whose work I was hearing. Undoubtedly the sheer elan and sensitive beauties of the playing here influenced my feelings concerning the matter, but I felt the music in this instrumental format reflected even more deeply the composer’s love for Mozart and the classical style surrounding his work – and the “theme” itself wasn’t an existing rococo or classical melody, but Tchaikovsky’s own.

The work’s two concluding sequences here sounded particularly captivating – the Andante presented a sorrowful minor-key song, with the melodic line augmented by echo-like effects from both instruments, the whole rounded off by piano musings and a wistful ascending ‘cello phrase. It had an intimacy which the piano-and-orchestra version couldn’t replicate. Then, with the Allegro vivo Finale and Coda we got a spirited, exhilarating finish, with the cello’s vigorous utterances made playful by the piano’s counter-melody before both instruments finished the piece with suitably demonstrative gestures. We couldn’t have asked for anything more satisfying from two musicians in absolute accord with one another and with the music!