VIRTUOSI – Orchestra Wellington
ELGAR – Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra Op.47
ELGAR – Concerto for ‘Cello and Orchestra in E Minor Op.85
BARTÓK – Concerto for Orchestra Sz116
New Zealand String Quartet : Peter Clark, Martin Riseley (guest player), violins;
Gillian Ansell, viola; Martin Smith, ‘cello
Inbal Megiddo, ‘cello
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei, conductor
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 27th June 2026
This concert was replete with memories of formative music-listening experiences which have sung and danced throughout my musical life for almost fifty years – so the reader must forgive what seems like my self-indulgent bias towards these works, and especially, as here, in the wake of such committed, heart-warming performances!
Originally a borrowed word from the Italian virtuoso (referring to both “virtue” and “skill”) and used as word to denote “substantial knowledge and learning” in an individual, the term “virtuosi” has become wider than its more recent use relating to the arts, and now describes individuals and groups who exhibit skill and proficiency of the highest order in practically any human activity. Here it was used to describe both individual and group distinctiveness in musical performance – and in these engaging presentations the term was richly merited.
This concert featured the music of two “similar-but-different” composers – on the face of things the “Englishness” of Edward Elgar (1857-1934) and the Hungarian “folkishness” of Béla Bartók (1881-1945) would seem to have little in common, even if their lifetimes partly coincided. Unlike his younger native contemporaries Holst and Vaughan Williams, Elgar was no ethnomusicologist, whereas Bartók immersed himself in the folk-music of his native soil, both in his studies of comparative musical folklore in Hungary and his fusion of these elements with his own personal style of expression. Both composers were “countrymen” but it would seem the Malvern Hills near Worcester, beloved of Elgar, might be somewhat removed in spirit from the isolated Carpathian Mountains of Hungary which Bartók explored, finding his most “authentic” Magyar folk music amongst those isolated communities.
Where Elgar and Bartók meet, I feel, is in the uniqueness and strength of each composer’s distinctive musical “character” – most of Elgar’s work has that instantly recognisable combination of nobility and introspectiveness which looks simultaneously outwards and inwards, in the manner of an artist at once confident and insecure, forthright and nostalgic, expressing a dichotomy that would reach its peak in the composer’s ‘Cello Concerto played this evening. By contrast, Bartók’s music is characterised by asymmetrical themes and rhythms, modal scales, drones, and energetic folk-dance trajectories – as with Elgar, there are opposites at work, the “classical” structures expressed by “folk” music, the tonalities that contain dissonances, and the polarities of emotion which frequent the musical journey.
I though it interesting that both Elgar pieces in tonight’s programme, though far-removed from one another in time, began with similarly vigorous and trenchant opening minor-key chords. First up was the composer’s earlier “Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and String Orchestra”, its opening straightaway proclaiming an almost Baroque-like splendour and severity of utterance, one that meant business right from the outset! How appropriate, then, that kicking off the evening’s “virtuosi” scenario in this music were members of the New Zealand String Quartet, taking the concertante role of the music’s solo quartet of strings. This ensemble has steadfastly continued its activities with various guest players, following the departure early in 2025 of two of its long-time members – happily, one of the vacancies has been filled by recently-appointed ‘cellist Martin Smith, while the second violinist role for this concert featured a distinguished guest, Martin Riseley, a member of the celebrated Te Koki Trio. Violinist Peter Clark did the honours as leader this evening, while, happily, the mainstay of the ensemble, violist Gillian Ansell continued as the rock-like fulcrum around which the group’s comings and goings have been deftly managed over the past two years.
Both the quartet and the accompanying Orchestra Wellington strings under conductor Marc Taddei brought off the resonantly muscular opening of the work with great elan, leading into tantalising interchanges, baroque style, between solo strings and the ripieno (larger ensemble), with pre-echoes of the themes given ear-catching contrasts of emphasis and colour. Then came the famous “Welsh tune” (the composer reported as hearing this sung by a distant voice while on holiday in Wales) played here firstly by Gillian Ansell’s viola – so tenderly and heart-stoppingly – before being given the full-blooded ensemble treatment.
This sense of wonderment continued right up to the beginning of the Allegro (at Fig.7 in my Novello score), not with the “fast stuttering theme” as mentioned in the programme notes but with a quietly-stated, flowing version of the theme first heard hinted at by the solo quartet just after the opening flourish – here, begun as simply and as straightforwardly as the first few steps of a momentous journey, and then building up to the aforementioned “stuttering theme”. This took us most excitingly to the work’s resplendent major-key all-together central statement of the opening theme, marked with Elgar’s favourite “Nobilmente” direction, and given plenty of ceremonial swagger, and vigorous energy.
After a tremulous reappearance of the “Welsh tune” Marc Taddei took the players into what Elgar famously described as “a devil of a fugue”, one whose initial composure seemed to suddenly take fright halfway through its course and “spook” its own trajectories – fantastic playing, here, from the band, with hair and resin given no quarter! The eventual recapitulation of the Allegro led this time to a full-throated version of the “Welsh tune”, with solo strings and ripieno tossing parts of the reprised themes back and forth, before the coda bound up all the players in a compulsive concerted dash towards a resounding final pizzicato chord – great excitement!
The 1919 ‘Cello Concerto which followed inhabited a different world, the older Elgar having to lay bare his feelings regarding the ravages of the Great War (1914-18), while at the same time tormented with growing self-doubts as a composer as his music was gradually and increasingly regarded by critics as “old-fashioned”. As a consequence, the concerto took a long time to establish itself in the repertoire, especially after a disastrous premiere helped put paid to any of Elgar’s own hopes for the work as giving an impression of being “good and alive”. It turned out to be the last major work he created – a direct and honest statement of feelings regarding his place in a world forever changed, both in a public and private sense.
‘Cellist Inbal Megiddo had the measure of the work’s sombre mood right from the outset, her tones and phrasings circumspectly coloured, enough to convey the emotion without excess throughout the movement, though the orchestral tones in the first tutti were lovely, as was the soloist’s rhapsodic response. She allowed herself greater warmth in the major key exchanges that followed, and rose to match the intensities of the orchestra’s subsequent climax, though falling away as quickly back into introspection for the pizzicato chords that heralded her accompanied recitative – here her ‘cello even cajoled the orchestra in places before initiating the scampering scherzo with its wry “catch me if you can” exchanges exhibiting a droll kind of mischief. With her all the way was Marc Taddei’s suitably reactive echoing of the solo instruments’s quixotic moods in the myriad orchestral detailings, earnest and intense in the opening movement and playful in the second (the slightly untidy final chord at the latter’s conclusion of little consequence….)
The third movement seemed at first almost reverential – here, from Megiddo and her fellow-participants, it was a superbly-controlled outpouring of nostalgic beauty, capturing both the music’s audible rapture and its central stillness – so much so, that I was surprised by the performers’ “bookending” this exquisite movement rather than letting its open-ended conclusion drift into ineffable space at the end and “give rise” to the finale as a matter of course – there’s no “attacca” instruction in the score, but we could have done without all the “next movement” rustling and re-adjusting (my only misgiving regarding the performance!)
The finale’s “swing” soon restored all through-lines, real or imagined, with this performance’s rumbustious girth, playful “hide-and-seek” routines and wry interchanges between the soloist and the groups putting me in mind in places of the composer’s “Falstaff” to a never-before extent – particularly so in the almost tavern-like scene of inebriated jollity when the soloist joins the orchestral cellos for a mock-serious choral-like unison sequence, brief, but good-humoured! All the more heart-rending, then, was the “drifting -away” of this mood, as the composer emulated his Shakespearean alter ego, lamenting the passing of the “good times” with upward-thrusting phrases that descended, weeping unashamedly, on both ‘cello and strings….
A brief episode re-evoked a distant memory of the Adagio’s loveliness, before the soloist seized the mettle and, after the work’s heartbreak accepted the inevitable with a stirring and courageous gesture of grim acceptance! A sterling performance!
A different world awaited us after the interval, with Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, written by the composer in 1943 in the United States at the invitation of the renowned conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitsky. Bartok was seriously ill by this time, and in exile from his homeland due to the Nazi threat throughout Europe, so the commission came as a much needed boost to his waning creative energies – he was able to write several other works as well as the Concerto (its title referring to the “concerto grosso” aspect of the music, similar to Elgar’s work, but much larger in scale and across the whole orchestral spectrum.)
My introduction to this work was through Hungarian conductor Antal Dorati, who was actually a pupil of Bartók’s in Budapest, and who recorded the Concerto several times, besides coming to New Zealand in 1973 and conducting the work with the NZSO in Wellington (for me an unforgettable concert experience!). Still, in line with my memory of Orchestra Wellington’s outstanding Shostakovich series from last year I was eager to hear what Marc Taddei would inspire his players to achieve with Bartók’s masterpiece – and I wasn’t disappointed. Again, as with the Elgar works of the first half, the most compelling quality of the music-making was the bringing out of the character of the work’s sound-world right from the beginning – the mysterious opening proclaimed kinship to the composer’s characteristic “night” pieces, the lower strings enunciating a series of fourths in response to which the upper strings and winds sounded similarly atmospheric undulating figures. Throughout the first movement these leaping fourths and their immediate inversions played an important thematic role, both in exciting fugal sequences for strings and stirring brass passages, as did gentler moments like the oboe’s lullabic mid-movement figure which echoed throughout the more lyrical sections. Everything was given the space it needed to proclaim its significance to the moment as well as to the whole.
The Concerto’s two Allegretto movements are the best-known to audiences and most readily remembered. Both were spectacularly presented here, the second being the famous Giuoco delle coppie (Game of Couples) with its sequence of folk-oriented melodies for pairs of instruments, each playing in finely-wrought parallel with its partner at different intervals; and the fourth a somewhat notorious Intermezzo interotto, whose fame rests on Bartok’s “lampooning” of a theme of Dmitri Shostakovich’s in his wartime “Leningrad” Symphony, a simple marching tune drawing forth cackling trills from woodwinds and vulgar sliding raspberries from the brass (on this occasion, from the trombones, easily the most gloriously blatant and visceral spoofings I’ve ever heard in concert or on record!), before being sent packing, with little more than a whimper!
The work’s two remaining movements were no less spell-binding – and I was simply and truly blown away by the orchestral response Taddei got from his players in the central palindromic Elegia, right from the ”night-music” ambiences of the opening (in which we seemed lifted up through the darkness and into extra-terrestrial regions), and through a coruscating series of searing cries from a string section playing well above its weight and reinforced by full-blooded wind-descents and biting brass chords with timpani – incredibly intense string-playing along with extraordinary timbral ambiences (and with lovely work from the violas at one point). But the intensities summoned up by the string-playing here in particular brought back to me something of what Dorati got from his NZSO players all those years ago – as then, with an extraordinary amalgam of incisiveness and eloquence!
After all of this, the finale represented something of a release, with plenty of ebullience from all the players, Taddei creating a veritable ferment of excitement from all sections, the winds also enjoying their fugato-like passage before introducing a new theme which went like wildfire through the rest of the orchestra – such an infectious mood of exhilaration with the brass and timpani capping it off splendidly! The tongue-in-cheek string fugato got a querulous response from the winds, who took the argument into subaqueous regions, until what sounded like an orchestral dishwasher on rinse-cycle was suddenly thrown open and everything and everybody tumbled out, picked themselves up and skedaddled towards something of a well-deserved grandstand finish – a younger audience would have perhaps leapt to its feet after such a comprehensive orchestral display, but the ovation was still suitably warm-hearted and appreciative. I had a feeling that, in the midst of all the excitement Marc Taddei might have forgotten to acknowledge his horn section at the end – or perhaps its members simply missed their cue! Whatever the case, all the musicians were heroes – and my previous cheek-by-jowl memories of hearing this work performed will now have to be updated in the most positive and enduring way!