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 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” the theme, and elaborated on certain phrases, rising to stratospheric heights – a beautiful sequence! The winds enjoyed impulsive possibilities in response to the violin, bassoons, flutes, clarinet, all joined in a kind of accord, backed up by orchestral forces, excitingly adding tones and trajectories to the excitement – there’s as much tension as there was exultation in the orchestral panoply, the winds cascading and the violins reaching a plateau and then winding down of a repeated figure, joined by percussion, bringing the music back to the soloist…….
The violin, as with the opening, rhapsodised over an orchestra pedal, and was again joined by the winds, and engageing in a brief but tender partnership with the clarinet, after which the flutes briefly returned. As if goaded by concerted impulses, the musing violin then repeatedly confronted the orchestra, whose response included echoed phrases, sharp pizzicati, percussive “slaps”, and repeated-note patterns, echoing each of the soloists phrases and “frontings up” with similarly-derived figures. The violin continued its call for attention” in both studied and volatile forms, concerting its song to that of the winds in a beautiful Holst-like sequence where the violin soared above the wind ostinati. The orchestra, led by the flute, and buoyed along by deep pizzicato ostinato this time empathised rather than “taking issue” with the soloist – and the latter’s rhapsodisings with their corporeal beauty were even more encouraged by the orchestral backdrop.
There’s a gorgeous “wind chorale” sequence which 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 – almost a kjnd of “friend in the wilderness” aspect which perhaps promised hope in whatever form – still-distant, but in the realm of possibility. The writing for the orchestra was spare and uncompromising, refusing to offer “worthless but real” solutions to self-assuredness, but instead seemed 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.
It came across to me as much as a kind of re-exploration or reassessment of deeply-felt experience and feeling. The winds seemed to want to give their hearts at this point, in beautiful acquiescence with the violin. Even the strings gave moments of reassurance, however brief the rhythmic impulses and guarded sighings, leaving the viola and then the first violin to offer the soloist 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!