Search Results for: Jack Body

Jack Body’s 80th birthday concert – music and creativity of enduring worth

Posted on by Peter Mechen

                                                                                                                                                                                      Jack Body (1944-2015)

“Jack!@80” at St.Andrew’s
(an 80th birthday concert of Jack Body’s music)

Concert organisers: Pepe Becker, Judith Exley, Robert Oliver,
Dan Poynton, Jennifer Shennan, Yono Soekarno

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington
Saturday, 12th October, 2024

A concert devoted to the work of a single composer by its very nature promises to be a singular occasion no matter where in the world such an event takes place. In the past we in Aotearoa, New Zealand have had a number of concerts to celebrate anniversaries of some of our composers, alive or dead, with Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar being the first to come to my mind. And certainly many others have produced sufficient volumes of work that would fill out plenty of single-composer concert programmes – so there have probably been other instances of such single-composer events that I simply haven’t heard of.

Anniversaries do provide welcome excuses to “celebrate” a particular composer’s work – and such a chance presented itself this year with the eightieth birthday anniversary of Wellington composer Jack Body, who died in 2015. A group of the city’s prominent musicians and associates set about bringing together various performers who were associated with Jack Body as students, colleagues or simply contemporaries of his, all drawn to the manifold creative energies and significances emanating from his music – strands of influence that were brought together to wondrous and colourful effect last Saturday evening at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church in Wellington.

Aptly described in the programme for the event as “a selection of Jack’s smaller-scale solo and ensemble works” the concert nevertheless clearly demonstrated something of the range of his interests and preoccupations as a composer. Especially prominent was evidence of his activities regarding the establishment of cultural links with Indonesia, China, Cambodia, and other places throughout Asia besides his awareness of western traditions of song, dance and literature. Though Jack’s seemingly boundless energies in organising larger-scale events featuring his music were only hinted at here – one thinks of his opera Alley (based on the life of Rewi Alley, and performed at the1998 International Festival of the Arts), the multi-event “Sonic Circuses” of the 1970s, the promotion of Asian music and musicians both here and in various Asia-Pacific Festivals and Conferences of which he was the artistic director, and on numerous other festival occasions often the “featured composer”, in addition to his work as “Composer-in-Residence” with the Auckland Philharmonia in 2012-13 – there was no doubt as to the range and scope of his creative imagination evidenced by the works we heard, even if in some cases the “snippets” from complete works left one wanting to have one’s cake and eat more than a mere tantalising slice or two!


The First Smile Gamelan Group – Jennifer Shennan and Gerard Crewson (right) assisted by Chris Francis and Rosalind Jiko

At the outset prospective concert attendees were charmed upon entering the church by the sounds of a gamelan group of four called The First Smile performing on their instruments at the rear of the church nave, playing pieces composed by two of the actual group members, Gerard Crewdson and Jennifer Shennan, assisted by two others, Chris Francis and Rosalind Jiko. Also, remarkably, as if apropos of the cornucopia of achievement on the part of the concert’s subject about to be presented, each person upon entering and contributing a koha was offered a free copy of “Jack – celebrating Jack Body – Composer” – a gorgeously lavish book which had been published by Steele Roberts in 2015, a collection of tributes and recollections penned by Jack’s many friends, colleagues and contemporaries from over the years, all beautifully appointed and illustrated.

Once inside and all gathered we were welcomed to the concert by Robert Oliver, former director of music at St.Mary of the Angels Church in Wellington, and well-known as an instrumentalist and conductor with a number of ensembles in the capital over the years. In thanking the audience for coming to pay tribute to Jack Body’s memory and legacy, he remarked on the need for the latter’s remarkable qualities and creative achievements to be remembered and given their due and “not to be interr’d with his bones”.

And so began a veritable feast of musical sounds for our pleasure, enjoyment and wonderment, beginning characteristically with the composer’s 2006 work Rainforest, originally for flute and harp, but here adapted for flute and piano. We heard four of the work’s six movements, played by Monica Verburg (flutes) and Dan Poynton (piano), each one preceded by a “field recording” of music performed by the Aka and Ba-Benzele Pygmies of the Central African Republic, and recorded by the French/Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha Arom. The first, Hunting Song, featured some brief vocalisings whose repetitive pattern was elaborated into ostinato from the piano and accompanying decorative flute phrasings. No.3 was the first of two Lullabies, a chant accompanied by percussion, and here developed into a folk-dance-ish pattern, with the flute exploring a “bluesy” counterpoint, the two working up to a jazzy, riff-like response. A second Lullaby sounded like a wordless vocalised meditation, to which the piano and flute responded with what seemed like ecstatic wonderment akin to “loving” exchanges, with the piano reaching downwards as if “earth-breathing” in between each melodic flowering – lovely. The final movement, Children’s Games, brought three singers to the platform with the instrumentalists, reproducing the tape’s brief but racy chanting, with the flutist joining in with the singers’ energetic vocalisings in places while the piano played off-beat syncopations , all to exhilarating effect, and finishing with a flourish as the singers scampered off the stage at the piece’s end!

One of Body’s most-travelled works is the “Five Melodies for Piano”, a work written for and premiered by Margaret Nielsen in Europe (she also recorded the work for Kiwi-Pacific Records). Dan Poynton told us of his introduction to the work while a student of Jack’s, and being given each of the pieces separately to “try” out! Tonight’s version had the added interest of incorporating a solo electric guitar transcription, here played by Gunter Herbig (in what I presumed was his own reworking) of two of the pieces. The piano led off with the well-known opening 3-note repetitive figures, the composer’s “melody within a melody” idea borne out by the performer using the left hand to “mute” some of the played notes, varying the mutes and their intervals and incorporated “extra” notes as the piece proceeds. Gunter Herbig’s guitar took the second and third melodies, the second melody delivered in a breath-holding sequence of beautifully-suspended notes occasionally punctuated by near-toneless “strummings” as the melodic line climbed into its own near-stratospheric space to be swallowed by the silences.

Even more intense was the third piece’s plaintive three-note call with its achingly sharpened second note, the sounds entering their own kind of “nirvana”, the composer inspired by the sound-world of the ancient Chinese zither, Gu Qin, and here transporting our sensibilities most affectingly. Dan Poynton’s piano returned for the fourth melody, beginning with a similarly “lost” figure, the mood then “cleft in twain” by a Saint-Saens-like cock-crow from “Danse Macabre”! The interaction continued, with the cock-crow distended over the keyboard’s whole range! – pulled every which way, hammered, screwed, stretched and flattened, before being allowed to quietly recompose itself and slink away, its “squawk” whimperingly pulled out to a “ninth” in a pathetic gesture of submission! A more seemly envoi came with the final melody (piano again), a gentle ostinato, with notes that established their own patterns before pushing exploratory feelers gradually into different realms, transforming themselves almost effortlessly into impulses which expressed at one and the same time wide-eared amazement and calm acceptance – here, something of a Zen Buddhist attitude when contrasted with the tortured journey of the previous melody.

Exploring a vein of nostalgia can, of course, put one’s sensibilities in touch with unexpected surges of feeling, something which Body felt compelled to explore when recalling his parents’ and grandparents’ fondness for “old songs” – hence his fascinating, almost Brittenesque settings of four such songs, three of which were performed here in different parts of the concert. First up was the ever-popular “Daisy Bell”, performed with suitably sonorous sentiment and gusto by baritone Roger Wilson with pianist Michele Binnie’s sure-fingered accompaniment (we were adjured as an audience to “join in” with the chorus, with what I thought was a creditable response!) – then variously during the concert’s second half we heard another baritone, Chris Berenson (again with Michele Binnie’s piano) in the lesser-known and thus more audience-shy “Sweet Genevieve”, followed later by the hymn-like “All Through The Night” with Pepe Becker’s heavenly soprano and Michele Binnie’s gorgeous piano chordings leading the way through the verses and leaving us to chorus the song’s one-liner refrain!

Back to the first half now for another vocal work, one I’d previously seen performed in full – Body’s 1982 work ”Love Sonnets of Michelangelo”, of which a single one, No.5 “Non posso altra figura immaginarmi” was presented. Originally written for the dancer, Michael Parmenter, and two female voices, this concert version featured Pepe Becker’s soprano with a viola played by Nicholas Hancox taking the lower-voiced part of the duet, an interaction which I found extraordinarily moving,  the artist/poet’s words being given “voice” within yet another kind of medium, a different abstraction…..both singer and player brought out the poem’s “ecstasy of despair”, as it were, underlined by the occasional foot-stampings of both musicians and the obsessive quality of the actual notes…..

There followed an electroacoustic work “Musik Dari Jalan” (Music from the Street), a soundscape which drew for its composition from field recordings made in Indonesia by the ethnomusicologist Allan Thomas of the sounds of Jakarta street hawkers. Interestingly, this work won prizes at a major electroacoustic music festival in Bourges France both in the 1970s and 1990s. Further similar interest was garnered by the item which closed the concert’s first half – here, a quartet of string players (Edward Clarkson, Eros Li (violins), Nicholas Hancox (viola) and Jamie Beardslee (‘cello) performed two separate pieces from a 2008 work called “Yunnan”, a collection of transcriptions and arrangements of Chinese minority nationalities in the South-West China province of Yunnan. The first , Bouyi 1, actually NOT from Yunnan (as Body admitted in a performance note) was a kind of “fantasia” for string quartet, the players interacting with the taped singing voices of two Bouyi women, and drawing forth sounds of a particularly haunting quality, with some episodes reminiscent of modal-like passages in English string music by Elgar and Vaughan Williams.

A second piece entitled Bai Sanxian was more dance-like and didn’t appear to feature taped sounds, but simply “live”, dance-like music-making which put one in mind of some kind of exotic-sounding lute, in this case a “sanxian”, its singularities ably suggested by the players.

So much was there to talk about during the interval that it seemed no time at all before we were being refocused upon the platform and the second half’s intriguing beginning – a kind of “Tour of a Neighbourhood” item which emanated from pianist Stephen De Pledge’s commissioning a set of “Landscape Preludes” from New Zealand composers – Body’s characteristically singular contribution to the idea was this 2007 portrait in words and music of his own neighbourhood “The Street Where I live”.  Dan Poynton here “teamed up” with the voice of the composer (as pianist Henry Wong Doe had done on the piece’s first recording) to realise the “counterpoint” of  speech and its “musical analogue”. Here I thought the voice in places insufficiently projected, with the piano notes occasionally blurring the spoken message; and the abrupt start first time up seemed to leave pianist Dan Poynton in his starting-blocks! – but a re-run righted the balance, and all thereafter was well!

Body’s constantly inventive creative urge brought out many unorthodox touches to his compositions, one of which was the use of “invented language”, vocalising sounds “with no semantic meaning”. His 1989 work “Five Lullabies” was first performed by the Tudor Consort, conducted by its founder, Simon Ravens, and this evening featured three singers, Pepe Becker, Jane McKinley and Andrea Cochrane, from that first performance, here joined by Samuel Berkahn for the second of the two selected lullabies.

                                                                                                                                                        Singers Jane McKinlay, Pepe Becker, and Andrea Cochrane, with Robert Oliver

The first, No. 3, uses what the composer called the “wonderful vocal polyphonies” of China’s minority cultures, with the so-called “dissonant” interval of a second often held to resonate instead as “consonant” , Pepe Becker and Jane McKinley steadfastedly “holding their lines” with these almost Schoenbergian “more distant” consonances! It was No.5 which worked its magic almost unreservedly for me, however – such hauntingly long and sinuous lines, with Samuel Berkahn’s and Andrea Cochrane’s tones seeming by turns to meld into and drift alongside Pepe Becker’s unswerving lines, the voices’ creating amazing resonances, partly lullabic, and partly lament-like, with the intensities maintained until the cortege of sounds seemed to pass enigmatically into the night.

Yet another glimpse of Body’s seemingly unquenchable search for expression through means that disregard convention was given by pianist Dan Poynton with two excerpts from a work written for and dedicated to him, called “14 Stations”. It’s a title which straightaway suggests to anyone familiar with Christian beliefs a kind of representation of Jesus Christ’s torturous journey towards his crucifixion and death, though Body has proposed the term might as well apply to any journey involving “stations”, such as one by rail. Also, the composer had as well suggested the title might refer to the many different travails undergone by pianists who have to practice at a keyboard for hours each day to “perfect” their art. Certainly each excerpt from this work which Poynton presented here illustrated a specific area of physical effort which, as Body remarked in his programme note subject the body “to stress and discomfort which can extend to physical pain”.

I’d seen one of Dan Poynton’s concert performances of this work not long after the premiere, so was able to relate each of the excerpts’ titles to that memory – each one concentrated on its title’s subject, the first one, “Shoulders” (No.10), moving from an intensely thoughtful aspect to vigorous jabbing motions and a kind of “kneadling” counter-movement, the pianist sighing with the effort at its conclusion. By contrast, “Stiffness” (No.14) presented a hyperactive figure stretching in different directions, percussively beating the instrument’s different surfaces, with moanings and gruntings, then feeling all about both the instrument and his own person to see if there was still life in (a) the instrument and (b) the pianist! We were left hungry for more…..though after such hyperactivity the following 1979 work “Aeolian Harp” resembled a journey from chaos to order, with Nicholas Hancox’s instrument conjuring up harmonic sounds of such unworldliness we felt somewhat disoriented, even “haunted” in ourselves by the readily-imagined passing of air-borne spirits and the resonating earth-echoings left in their wake – stunning!

Such resultant ambiences seemed to spontaneously generate an unprogrammed but entirely apposite item from Dan Poynton on one of the electric keyboards to hand, in bringing to life a precious relic of a bygone age – Jack Body’s own theme music from the television series of what seemed like so many lifetimes hence, “Close to Home”, with the years for a few brief moments peeling off so many listeners’ shoulders (mine among them) like spring blossom from a tree. However redolent for many of us, the composer’s shade was having none of such things as a “farewell”, instead making his “exit” with a somewhat anarchic cocking of a snoot in the face of convention – this was his setting of Auckland writer Russell Haley’s quirky verses which made up “Turtle Time”, a matching of composer and poet whose interaction in itself imbued the piece with singular character.

                                                                                                                                        “Turtle Time” with speaker Jonathan O’Drowsky, and conductor Robert Oliver.

Poet Ian Wedde vividly characterised Russell Haley’s work in a written tribute after his death in 2016 as “subversive deadpan comic surrealism, where even the most factual and banal components of it, such as the names of people and places, are stretched thinly over layers of alternative reality and identity.” The script of “Turtle Time” revels in such subversions and their separate realities, though this evening’s performance needed, I thought, clearer and perhaps more “Brechtian” poise from its engagingly energetic, if rather too over-excitable speaker/actor Jonathan O’Drowsky, from whose utterances, however zestfully zany, I would have liked a bit more spaciousness and clarity in places  (I must add, to be fair, that the St. Andrew’s acoustic has never seemed to me especially kind to ventures featuring the spoken voice sans microphone!). Still, conductor Robert Oliver unfalteringly marshalled his instrumental forces throughout both the trajectories of freely-non-metrical impulse and the spontaneous clusterings of colour and stasis here served up by his expert players, Monica Verburg (harp), Jonathan Berkahn (harpsichord), David Treefrog Sanders (organ) and Dan Poynton (piano).

The concert’s last strains were those of “Auld Lang Syne” in a version very probably wrought by Body himself, and rendered by Dan Poynton on one of the keyboards as a very much “in keeping” gesture. At the end it very much seemed we had spent a most successful evening in the company of a remarkable creative spirit – Jack Body’s is undoubtedly one of those whose legacy will not be forgotten.

                                                                                   Some of the performers at the conclusion of “Jack@80” at St. Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church,  Saturday 12th October, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jack Body – lightning leaping from the pages

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JACK! – celebrating Jack Body, composer
edited by Jennifer Shennan, Gillian Whitehead & Scilla Askew
published by Steele Roberts, Aotearoa, 2015

Available from:
Steele Roberts Publishers,
Box 9321, Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand
e-mail: info@steeleroberts

Wednesday 10th June 2015

This beautifully-prepared and richly-annotated volume contains a remarkable array of testaments of love and regard for a man whose life and work deeply touched not only immediate friends and colleagues, but many people involved with music in New Zealand, throughout South-East Asia and around the world.

Happily, it appeared while its subject, Jack Body, was still very much alive, by all accounts – an acknowledgement is made by the editors to the composer’s “stamina and concentration” in making every effort to assist with the work. Hence the opening pages proudly carry the dedication “To Jack and Yono, with love” (Yono Soekarno being Jack’s long-term partner).

Appropriately heading the list of names on a subsequent “Acknowledgements” page is another Jack – a long-time friend and supporter of Body’s, and much-esteemed arts patron Jack C.Richards, recipient of the 2014 Arts Foundation Award for Patronage, and whose support for this project made the book’s publication possible.

A feature stemming directly from the attitude of the book’s subject to biography is its avoidance of what one of the editors, Jennifer Shennan, calls “conventional ordering”. In citing Body’s “low tolerance for boredom, cliche and comfort zones”, she relishes all the more his initial response to the project – “Oh, I don’t need a book – better to have a concert!” – before recording the composer’s inevitable “day-follows-night” movement towards interest and enthusiasm for it all.

It follows that the finished work is, like its subject, a unique phenomenon, inviting no comparisons and following no formulae – it assuredly won’t be the last word on Jack (other biographers will see to that!) but his proximity to its “making” gives it all extraordinary resonance, his presence almost talismanic throughout its many adroitly-woven parallel strands which cluster around and about “pools” (well, oceanic lakes, really!) of deep-currented osmotic activity.

The composer’s actual biographical details can be found amid these different contexts, both via a section of its own called “Beginnings: family and music” (significantly, NOT at the book’s very beginning!) and a transcript of a landmark interview of Body’s with Elizabeth Kerr, as part of Radio NZ Concert’s “Composer of the Week” Series during 2014.

So, Jack himself tells some of his own story, but by far the bulk of the observations regarding his life, activities and achievements are made by the hundred-plus people whose contributions (mostly the written word, but also photographic and musical) give the reader something of the true measure of the man’s manifold accomplishments regarding his own and other people’s music, his range and scope of things in those areas alone being positively Lisztian!

One would think that the impression made by such and so many laudatory statements would begin to pall upon a reading-through of them – but Jack’s net of contact with people was obviously cast so widely and deeply (and cross-culturally), that one is struck as much by the variety of response as by its positive consistency. As individuals recorded their responses so must they have been encouraged from the start by Jack’s openness and warmth to be themselves with him deeply and utterly – so what comes across is a rich diversity and vibrancy of response that simply encourages one to read more – and more……..

There are more gems of individuality among the tributes than I can list, but I offer a few, nevertheless – “musical spark-plug” – “a true rangatira” – “visionary nation-builder” – “bottomless bounteousness” – “a great “zhi yin” (bosom friend) of Chinese music” – “the song-catcher” – “totally subversive” – “gift of a man” – “changed my life by 180 degrees” – “wonderful Body-parts”……one senses that Jack’s inspiration often gave rise to creative impulses of affection and admiration for which music was only the starting-point.

Speaking of starting-points, one such is the direct initial impression made by the publication, a volume without a dust-jacket but still nevertheless eye-catching in appearance with its gold-leaf title “Jack” embossed upon an (appropriately?) burgundy-hued cover containing also a white-pencil sketch of the composer’s face, featuring the characteristic moustache. Inside, the paper is pleasing to the touch, and the fonts with their few variants are attractive and clearly set, invariably on white backgrounds, and never against colours or hues which clash with and obscure the letters.

The words having been given their dues, the accompanying graphics are telling and vivid throughout – each of the sections features an introductory title page bedecked with designs or motifs characteristic of and readily suggesting its subject, and almost every contributor is represented by a photograph, colour, sepia and/or black-and-white. Some bring a smile, while others raise the eyebrows with a start – a particular favorite of mine features Body as a mad, google-eyed gamelan player delightedly unnerving two hapless members of the ensemble.

In short, it’s a book which to my mind has considerable visceral appeal, even before one begins reading – one enjoys the ready “chaos of delight” of colours and textures which blaze forth, but is then drawn into the “mix and mingle” to find method in the tumbling warmth of it all, the strands encircling the different pools and resonating with the sounds of voices and music suggested by the words.

Cleverly, we’re taken to each of the different areas of exploration and activity Body involved himself in and with, beginning the process with a section devoted to Indonesia, the first of the composer’s “exotic” explorations, and here subtitled “discovering a new sensuality”. As well as warm and grateful tributes from his indonesian mentors and students, there’s a detailed appreciation of his work from a fellow-ethnomusicologist, who did work for the Smithsonian “Folkways” set of recordings from the USA. This was inspired by Jack’s recordings of the country’s ethnic music, his American colleague admiring the “integrity” of his gathered material and his methods.

And so the book proceeds through the various “theatres” of Body’s work, by way of similar sections devoted to China and to Cambodia, as well as activities and projects back in New Zealand and elsewhere.  In the “China” chapter, events of vital significance to this country’s cultural heritage, such as the premiere of Jack’s opera “Alley”, are highlighted. The premiere’s conductor Peter Walls thoughtfully and beautifully equates the genesis and societal context of the work with that of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” in seventeenth-century Italy. Another section, “In performance – embracing the world”, brings into focus Jack’s relationship with groups such as the Kronos Quartet, for whom he wrote a number of works that have since been performed in places far removed from New Zealand.

Running alongside and through these sections is the inspirational Radio NZ Concert interview with Body, conducted with insight and sensitivity by Elizabeth Kerr – again, no mere retelling of a life’s minutae, but one furnishing so many insights per minute (rather than the other way round!). I found most illuminating the sections where the composer outlines and explores his compulsions to firstly explore material and then use, or (as he puts it) “reinterpret it”. He goes on to confess, openly and modestly, that the music is transformed through his actions  to reveal something of himself, with all his limitations.

What’s refreshing is the candor of the man, a composer who doesn’t hesitate to express his creative angst of having to fill emptiness, and therefore turning with relief to something that’s already there and refashioning it “nearer to the heart’s desire”. And what about any associated “crises of confidence”? – in the same utterance they’re characterized as “no bad thing” for a composer, which is remarkable as a metaphor for strength of will overcoming self-doubt. It’s also part of the demystification processes which Jack Body saw as central to his particular “heart’s desire”. And this book gives us many such instances of the essence of Body’s particular no-holds-barred brand of creativity.

The most complimentary thing I can think of saying about the book is that it’s enabled me to feel as though I now know Jack Body a whole lot better than I did. People who knew him well will be far less surprised by what’s covered here, but to others like myself whose contact with him consisted of meeting occasionally at concerts, registering, however briefly, his warmth and friendliness, and who know some of his music through live performances and recordings, the sheer range and depth of his activities here presented is nothing short of revelatory – as fellow-composer Helen Bowater said about meeting him for the first time, it’s like “being struck by lightning – never the same again!”.

Editors Jennifer Shennan, Gillian Whitehead and Scilla Askew can, I think be extremely proud of the result of their labours, in tandem with Steele Roberts Publishers. Together they have done for Jack what he himself repeatedly did in his own work – expressed essential and enduring things, which his friends already knew, but which people such as myself can now discover and realize more fully for ourselves throughout these lively, warm-hearted and inspiring pages.

 

 

 

 

“Body Beautiful” excites, awe-inspires, and charms as a life’s occupation is celebrated.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Koki – New Zealand School of Music presents:
BODY BEAUTIFUL – a tribute to Jack Body in his 70th year

Saetas  (string quartet and accordion)
A House in Bali  (narrator, accordion, string quartet and gamelan gong keybar)
Yunnan Sketches  (string quartet, guitar, tape)
Songs My Grandmother Sang  (voices, piano, string quartet)

New Zealand String Quartet
Ross Harris (accordion) / Richard Greager (baritone) / Margaret Medlyn (soprano)
Christopher Hill (guitar) / Jack Body (narrator)

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University of Wellington

Monday 14th April, 2014

Jack Body celebrates his 70th birthday this year – and he’s determined to make the most of this particular anniversary, helped by warmth, acclaim and gratitude from the many people he’s come into contact with over the years as a teacher, composer, author, publisher and general advocate for the music of this country in both a Pacific and world-wide context.

This particular concert, appropriately titled “Body Beautiful” took place in Victoria University of Wellington’s Adam Concert Room under the auspices of the New Zealand School of Music. The music for three-quarters of the concert presented aspects of the composer’s fruitful relationship with the New Zealand String Quartet, before finishing, just as heartwarmingly, but in a completely different sound-world, with Body’s Songs My Grandmother Sang.

Preferring to talk with his audience rather than supply written program notes for each of the items, Body was in his usual excellent form as a communicator, giving us a real sense of process and context as well as a description of each of the “end product” in relation to the music we heard.

First up in the program was Saetas, which was a NZSQ commission dating from 2002. Body explained that he had at the time been exploring a genre of music associated with religious feasts held during Holy Week in Spain, semi-improvised, highly ornamented songs derived from the flamenco tradition. These songs, sometimes unaccompanied, sometimes using a strong drum-beat as a kind of pulse, were often associated with a quejío, or lament, a kind of cry sung as a phrase during the course of a single breath.

Body accentuated the “lament” aspect of these songs in his transcriptions in different ways. In both the first and last pieces a kind of “quejío” was exclaimed by the musicians at the beginning. But also, in the opening song Body took aspects of pieces by both Tchaikovsky and Hugo Wolf cast in a similar expressive vein and worked certain of these figurations and gestures into the music’s fabric. Fragments of both the “Pathetique” Symphony’s finale and a song from Hugo Wolf’s “Spanish Songbook” gave a strangely familiar, dreamlike flavour to the scope of the sounds, throwing their familiar contexts open to the wider world of human angst and suffering.

To my ears the music in the first piece in general seemed to take on a kind of Russian sound in places, moments featuring sweet, open-air harmonies, a sound I associate particularly with Borodin in some of his chamber music. But this could be mere fancy on my part as could also be a reminiscence I heard earlier in the piece of one of Wagner’s rising phrases associated with the flooding of the Rhine waters from “Gotterdammerung”.

The other three pieces saw ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten relinquish his normal instrument for the accordion, a change which accentuated the biting rhythmic accents of the next of the Saetas, a piece with string see-sawings and squeeze-box crunchings, the viola playing a Moorish tune in the middle of it all. The following piece had stuttering and stammering strings set against long-breathed cluster chords from the accordion. The viola played a chant suggesting something ancient, the violins echoing the notes and gradually tapering off as the viola continued, the accordion keeping in ambient touch with things.

Again the instrumentalists gave voice to the music’s feelings at the beginning of the final piece, reinforcing the anguish with foot-stampings, though varying the dynamics so as to make things antiphonal-sounding. As the strings clustered their tones around a driving, beating rhythm, the accordion played a kind of melodic counterpoint, adding to the ever-increasing texturings of the sounds – biting accents, fierce glisssandi and running scales all drove the music onwards as the players’ stamping feet beat out the pulsations to incredibly exciting effect!

Next on the program, A House in Bali combined several strands of diverse activity. First there was Jack Body himself reading exerpts from writings by Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer turned ethnomusicologist, based on his experiences in Bali during the 1930s, and describing vignettes of Balinesque village life. Incidentally, the actual house McPhee lived in was subsequently inhabited, for a short time, by the pianist Lili Kraus, before she was incarcerated for a time during the war by the Japanese.

But the piece’s chief musical feature was its “jointly-composed” aspect, Body responsible for writing the quartet and accordion contributions and the Gamelan composer and orchestra leader Wayan Gde Yudane writing the pre-recorded Balinese gamelan orchestra music. Strings and accordion (the latter played here by Body’s fellow-composer, Ross Harris) took their cues from the gamelan sounds, allowing the speaker intervals of sufficient ambient space for his words to be heard by the audience.

Body had said in an earlier interview that the rehearsals of this piece for this performance had been hair-raising, because the gamelan group in Bali seemed to him to have set much faster tempi than when it was played here previously by the New Zealand ensemble. Parts of the opening did sound rather like a kind of Balinese hoe-down, though the music’s breathless pace let up sufficiently for the mood to allow some lovely exchanges between the two quite different worlds of sounds, strings and accordion on one hand and the gamelan group on the other.

I thought the gamelan sounds extraordinary – a magic and resonant world! The scenes described by McPhee’s words were distinctive – firstly a cricket duel, with the creatures suitably prepared for the fray, like a kind of ritual battle with music. Another evocation was Nyepi, the yearly day of silence (I enjoyed the words “demons pass by, thinking the village deserted”), the seeming emptiness underpinned by lonely, isolated strands of “snake-charmer” melody from the instruments. More animated was a vignette described by McPhee of pigeons with bells tied to their legs flying around in tintinabulating flocks – the gradual diminuendo of sounds as the birds disappeared was extremely effective.

China was the focus for the next work on the program, a piece which was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet in 2007, called Yunnan Sketches. The first was Bouyi, a duet setting, using a tape Body had made of two women singing, one which the composer described as “initially discordant” but whose harmonic rigours were softened by the instrumental accompaniments. I found the results hauntingly beautiful. The other two reworkings, “Bai” and “Lahu”, were each very different – the first rhythmic and syncopated, a solo viola mixing pizzicato with arco, creating a sequence that Stravinsky would have appreciated for its angularity. Finally, “Lahu” featured Christopher Hill’s guitar, interestingly, but not altogether successfully, I thought, as the instrument almost completely lacked the plangency one associates normally with oriental stringed instruments – this sounded too much to my ears like a tourist in a foreign land who’d wandered off the beaten track….

As if further evidence of Body’s versatility as a composer was needed, the concert concluded with a sometimes piquant, sometimes droll-humoured item, made up of three of the set of Songs My Grandmother Sang, performed here by Richard Greager, Margaret Medlyn and pianist Jian Liu (with audience participation in the final song “All Through the Night” encouraged by the composer!).

The composer took the songs from an album which he recalled was a favorite songbook of his grandmother’s at the family home in Te Aroha. He spoke briefly about his youthful distaste for sentimentality and his efforts to avoid it at all costs in his own music – though he then admitted, rather like Noel Coward once remarking on “the potency of cheap music”, that he’d since discovered “something about it”. He added, a little ruefully, that, though his father didn’t really care for his arrangements of the songs, he had an uncle who did like them very much.

Tenor Richard Greager led off with “Two Little Girls in Blue”, a song whose words brought forth wry grins at the convolutions of the age-old “eternal triangle” situation – one here with a bit of a difference – “and one little girl in blue, lad / who won your father’s heart / became your mother, I married the other / but now we have drifted apart….”. Rather like Benjamin Britten’s piano accompaniments for his folk-song settings, these began by supporting the tune, but then seemed to do their best to try and destabilize it – at a previous concert at which I heard these songs performed, the pianist on that occasion, Bruce Greenfield, affectionately described the accompaniments as “quite mad”!

Having enjoyed Richard Greager we were now treated to the rich, balladic tones of Margaret Medlyn, singing Body’s setting of “Genevieve” – a wonderful “open” accompaniment took flight along with the singer’s excitingly vertiginous vocal line and the help of the string quartet, which joined in with the music throughout the last verse, the tones at the end oscillating upwards and disappearing.

With the third song came the audience’s chance to make its presence really felt – a grand, chordal accompaniment supported both singers and the quartet players, while, after each introductory couplet massed voices were raised on high with the words “All through the night”. The instrumental building blocks of sound supported the melodic line beautifully, and it was left to pianist Jian Liu to play a brief, rapt chordal postlude, which he did, before reverting to a clipped “that’s it, folks!” manner for the final chord.

Very great acclamation for the composer at the concert’s end, from fellow-performers and audience alike. There’s evidently an Auckland concert coming up (30th April) at the University, featuring different repertoire to what we heard tonight. One can only wish Jack Body all the best for this concert and for further fulfilments of exploration, engagement and completion by the year’s end.  To you, Jack, every possible satisfaction and a richly-wrought sense of fulfillment on the occasion of your 70th birthday and the completion of a remarkable year.

 

 

Éblouissant! John Chen’s recital of French piano music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

John Chen –  French Piano Music Recital
(presented by Wellington Chamber Music)

FRANCIS POULENC – Three Novelettes (1928)
HENRI DUPARC (transcr. John Chen) – 4 Melodies (1869)
CÉSAR FRANCK – Prelude, Chorale et Fugue (1884)
GABRIEL FAURÉ – Theme and Variations in C-sharp Minor Op.73 (1895)
CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS – Six Etudes Op.111 (1899)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 15th June 2025

In his biographical note accompanying the programme John Chen was described as having “a passion for twentieth-century French music”, even though only one of the works in today’s recital – Francis Poulenc’s Three Novelettes of 1928 – would have qualified for inclusion in that category. On the basis of the overwhelming success of this concert one could justifiably conclude that the pianist’s sympathies had definite historical precedents in this repertoire, with playing whose style, brilliance and commitment extended backwards to works whose influence on twentieth-century French composition was undeniable.

It was, therefore, ironic in a sense that Chen’s recital today opened with music that was the programme’s sole direct twentieth century representative. Poulenc’s first of his Three Novelettes began with a beguiling sense of weightlesness, of “floating” with the music throughout the opening paragraph, in parallel with a wealth of counter-themes – a minor key episode brings a wistful touch that cheers up when firstly a toy-soldier marches by and then a clockwork dancing couple strut their stuff, before the music returns to the opening.

Chen played the next piece very much akin to the “frantic scherzo” description, with stinging attack suggesting reckless abandonment, a dimension of energy extra to how I’d previously heard the piece delivered (and blowing the cobwebs from the rafters of my idea regarding the music’s droll ambient humour in spectacular fashion!). Amends were made to my sensibilities with the last of the three pieces having a beautifully flowing, almost “grateful unfolding” kind of trajectory with its sights set upon a profound serenity.

Next came four of Henri Duparc’s 1869 Melodies, but with a difference – these were the pianist’s own transcriptions of the songs, realisations whose apparent sympathy with the ethos of the originals would surely place them in the category of a precious gift for any recitalist.  The first, L’Invitation au Voyage is a setting of Charles Baudelaire’s sensuous plea to a lover to accompany him on a journey of ”abundance, calm and sensuous delight”, the music around the melody all gratuitous suggestion and scintillation. The second with its title Elégie resembles Rachmaninov’s similarly “charged” depth of feeling for keyboard texture in its rendering of words by Irish poet Thomas Moore describing the pain of a bereaved lover.

Chen’s gift for story-telling irradiates the somewhat gothic “layers” of Duparc’s setting of Francois Coppée’s La vague et la cloche (“The wave and the bell”), a dream depicting a hapless adventurer’s storm-tossed sea-voyage and a somewhat macabre bell-tolling episode in a remote bell-tower. Finally, in a rather more conventionally romantic scenario, the final Extase is a sinuously-crafted setting of a poem by Jean Lahor expressing the feelings of a lover sleeping on his beloved’s breast.

César Franck was long considered a somewhat sanctimonious and sentimental figure who composed primarily for the organ, achieving fame with his setting of the sacred song “Panis Angelicus”, which for many years hampered even his D Minor Symphony and the popular Symphonic Variations for (piano and orchestra) from being taken seriously. But the re-emergence of works like the Violin Sonata , the Piano Quintet, the String Quartet, and solo piano works such as the present Prelude , Chorale and Fugue has allowed a far more important and significant creative figure to emerge and be given his proper dues. His piano works in part represent his early career as a keyboard virtuoso with their formidable technical demands, though this work (1884) dates from his maturity as a composer and the emergence of many of those works on which his reputation now stands.

As with the later solo piano Prelude, Aria et Final, this present work features the composer’s potent amalgam of mystical solemnity, robust structural strength and a fluent melodic gift – Chen enabled both its declamatory strength and fluid animation to coexist at the Prelude’s beginning, all the while keeping to the fore that enlivening spirit, a kind of ineffable energy bent on searching for a purpose.  The opening strands having explored the terrain, they then regrouped to acclaim the first strains of a chorale theme (one perhaps inspired by the bells in Wagner’s “Parsifal’) buoyed up by arpeggiated chords which moved from section to harmonic section with majestic assurance in Chen’s hands!

From this ever-increasing splendour grew a Lisztian passage that tipped the excitement over into the fugue, a descending opening figure whose explorations Chen took on a totally absorbing journey, involving different registers and inversions, building towards a sonorous climax, at which point a cadenza like passage called forth the wonderful “Bell” chorale theme and the fugue’s subject together in a stunning peroration-like coda, the notes flailing amid fanfare-like cascades before the crashing concluding chords – what more could we ask of a work and its performer but that?

There was plenty to talk about at the interval, so much so that when the pianist reappeared we all had to break up our discussions and scurry back to our seats so that the concert could “get on”! The second half began with a work that was actually new to me, and to which I had listened from a recording and failed to really enthuse about – I thought at the time the music, Gabriel Faure’s Op. 73 Theme and Variations, all a tad tired-sounding, and so was inclined to share the blame between composer and performer. To my surprise, right from John Chen’s playing of the first phrase I was made to prick up my ears as if I was hearing a different piece of music! Here the opening was strongly delivered and finely shaped, the theme not so much “solemn” in character as forthright and determined.

The variations also seemed to have acquired stronger, more characterful outlines, so that instead of waiting for each one of them to end I found myself here eager for a new one to begin! Variation One has Chen meticulously balancing the theme in the bass with gentle filigree patternings in the treble register. Next is a scherzo-like piece with contrasting energies, at first madly rushing about, then looking about to see who else might be listening, an activity which then morphed into earthier, more vigorous “jumping” figures with onlookers shaking heads in disbelief and despair! Even more exploratory were the next variation’s far-flung figurations, decorative and demonstrative, and attention-grabbing. Then came a great roulade of sounds turning like a ferris-wheel, as onlookers watched from below, craning necks as the wheel turned.

I found the sixth variation equally arresting, pinpointing both stratospheric and near-subterranean notes with great arches between them, and the seventh filling the spaces thus created with regular note suspensions run up and down like ladders. The eighth variation was a beautifully wistful and thoughtful version of the same, complete with onlookers’ “oo-er-ings”, while the ninth was even more rhapsodical and far-thinking via its creation of hitherto unglimpsed views. A restless spirit then overtook the music for the tenth variation, an insouciant up-and-down ride pushing back the boundaries of adventure to the point where the composer’s zeitgeist must have intervened at the point of such excess with the next and final variation, lifting the music suddenly beyond all striving and searching, and quietly exulting in a fulfilment of serenity.  Such a different experience to my first hearing of the work, and so very rewarding…….

Camille Saint-Saens was, of course in temperament something of the joker to Faure’s philosopher. Saint-Saens was ten years older, and the relationship began as master and pupil, but it lasted sixty years, and ended as one of compositional contemporaries. They had their differences, Saint-Saens’s tastes being the more conservative, but the latter was always solicitous towards the younger man’s music, though disapproving of some of his colleague’s enthusiasms.

Their musical differences were heavily underscored by John Chen’s staggeringly brilliant presentation of Saint-Saens’s Six Etudes Op. 111, music that revelled in a number of aspects of spectacular technical display. Beginning with Tierces Majeures et Mineures (Major and Minor Thirds), the right-hand figurations’ gossamer delicacy was then eschewed by those for the left-hand in favour of a more turbulent character, after which the Traits Chromatiques (chromatic figurations) seemed to let loose a whole swarm of Rimsky-Korsakov’s eponymous Bumble Bees! Prélude et Fugue grandly acknowledged JS Bach’s pre-eminence in this form, giving a forthright theme an insistently varied accompaniment between the hands, and a fugue which followed more conventional lines while tossing in toccata-like touches such as the irresistible flourish right at the end.

The Lisztian Les Cloches de Las Palmas (which, in places, recalled for me Jack Body’s Five Piano Pieces!) is simply replete with resonances as if Saint-Saens had unlocked some kind of deeply  archetypal stimulus to memory inside the listener which somehow transcends the title’s specific geographic reference. Different evocations rang out in No.5, Tierces majeures chromatiques (Chromatic major thirds) whose particular sonorities readily conjured up whole swathes of the macabre in feeling and sensation long before film composers turned such devices into cliches (Chen’s astonishing finger-dexterity here garnering jaw-dropping awe from his audience which, if anything, turned into childlike bemusement at the piece’s throwaway ending!

But all of this had to defer to the composer’s outrageously indulgent self-pillaging of a previously completed work in the concluding Toccata d’après le 5e Concerto (Toccata from the finale of the Fifth Piano Concerto)! Dedicated to one of the most eminent French pianists of the time, Raoul Pugno, the piece’s ebullient virtuosity draws from different sequences in the concerto’s finale, mingling near- exact passages with more extended and rhetorical ones while keeping the pulses and energies of the original at fever-pitch, the solo piano at the very least rivalling the soloist-and-orchestra combination in the concertante original.

Fired-up as our enthusiasms were at this point, our sensibilities were mercifully allowed to gradually reinhabit less rumbustious living-spaces by the concert’s end, with John Chen giving us the adorable slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C Major K.330, which I knew, but couldn’t place, name-wise – the pianist came to my rescue! It closed, quite perfectly, an afternoon of uncommonly sublime music-making which will linger in my memory and in that of others – what a telling and resonant advertisement for the need many of us crave (and occasionally voice) for more piano recitals! Thank you, John Chen!

The First Smile – 50 years of Gamelan in Aotearoa New Zealand – a celebration!

Posted on by Dan Poynton

The First Smile | Gamelan Ensemble – Rattle Records (2024)
Players: Gerard Crewdson, Chris Francis, Rosalind Jiko, Helen Lowe, Hui Luo, Barbara Lyon, Keith McEwing, Jennifer Shennan

The First Smile is not really a CD, it’s a celebration!
Actually where to start with the celebrations? Nothing less than a list is in order:
*50th anniversary of the heroic role this rustic little orchestra – The First Smile – has played in New Zealand gamelan
*Feast of sensuous and intimate sounds from the rich heritage of Indonesian gamelan
*Carnival of the probing expansion of this tradition by a panoply of Kiwi composers
*Hats-off party to New Zealand’s original gamelan pioneer, patron saint of The First Smile, and all-round lovely man, Allan Thomas
*A marvelling at yet another exquisite artefact from Rattle Records, in an age where such relics have largely been devoured by the rapacious ether.

Allan Thomas – photo by John Casey

Allan Thomas was offered this neglected little village gamelan orchestra (whose origins were at the Sultan’s Palace of Kacirebonan) in exchange for “many bags of rice”, while he was studying traditional music in Cirebon, northwest Java, in 1974. The only condition was that the gamelan would be played, not just displayed. Allan was to treat this promise as a solemn oath and over the last 50 years the ancient engineering of this Cirebon gamelan has been tested way beyond the call of duty – not bad for a taonga thought to be over 300 years old.

As The First Smile was the very first gamelan to ever arrive on these shores, 2024 was the 50th anniversary of gamelan in New Zealand. Jennifer Shennan, the well-known and loved proponent of Baroque dance and all-round powerhouse of the arts in Wellington, is now the adoring and jealous custodian of the gamelan, as Allan passed away in 2010 (Jennifer also happens to be Allan’s wife, and mother of their two daughters). Jennifer decided something special needed to be done for the gamelan’s 50th, and the result is The First Smile – the CD!

Thanks to Allan’s trailblazing, there are a dozen or so other gamelan in New Zealand these days, not the least of which is Gamelan Padhang Moncar (GPM), a grander courtly gamelan from the Central Javanese tradition, which is housed at the School of Music, Victoria University. When Allan established Ethnomusicology at Victoria, the Cirebon gamelan was the star attraction and the gateway for many students to experience a new musical universe away from the Western tradition for the first time. Later, as demand grew, the larger GPM would become the main gamelan, and when I first joined the gamelan in 1984, under Allan’s inimitably understated and just-let-it-happen guru-ship, the Cirebon gamelan was looking a little battered and not being played so much. Over the summer holidays Allan sometimes organised a leaner “commando unit” to play the Cirebon gamelan at Summer City and other events and festivals in and out of Wellington. The mysteriously smiling Jack Body was never far away either – and many other great Wellington characters. They were fun days.

Nowadays, if you snake down a little path next to Roseneath School, past “Allan’s seat”(complete with a plaque to the man himself), you’ll finally arrive at The Long Hall on a windswept promontory overlooking Wellington Harbour. In this old army barracks you will find The First Smile in pride of place. Jennifer transferred it here in 2011, and was also the mover and shaker behind the renovation of The Long Hall, which is now an active community hub. Events such as Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten’s ongoing concert series now take place there, and Helene and Rolf are so delighted with  The First Smile that they have programmed in a live performance of Ostinato and Cantor’s Infinity from the CD, as curtain raiser for one of the upcoming concerts (see Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten ‘s “The Long Hall” Concert Series – https://middle-c.org/?s=The+Long+Hall)

Gambang ( xylophone-type instrument, struck with soft beaters, and with wooden keys unlike other bronze-keyed instruments of The First Smile gamelan )

Based in this little (and long) fortress, The First Smile has had a true renaissance, and the little group practises and performs here dedicatedly. It is not easy to take the old and precious instruments out, but a generous exception was made in October 2024 for Jack!@80, a celebration of the late Jack Body’s 80th birthday at St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington. Featured as entrance music were Lagu Allan by Jennifer and Lagu Jack by Gerard Crewdson, especially written for the occasion (see Jack!@80 at https://middle-c.org/?s=Jack+Body).

But enough history! To the CD:

What an artefact! My CDs are now all sadly stored away due to the encroachment of newer, horribly efficient media, but this one has been placed glamorously on my bookshelf, for anything else would be a waste. Such a beautiful thing to hold: The evocative photos by John Casey and contributing artwork from Barbara Lyon…the moving stories about Allan, the composers and others…the ravishing production and design permeated with Indonesian ethos. It’s best described as a mini-coffee table book with a CD – the sort of thing we have come to expect from Steve Garden and Rattle Records, those dauntless promoters of NZ music. And credit must once again go to that most benevolent paternal spirit, The Lilburn Trust, for its grant towards the recording.

Saron — bronze keyed instrument struck with wooden beater ( drawing by Barbara Lyon, photo John Casey )

To play the exacting CD critic for a moment: the one worry is if you open the CD with gusto (probably the case), you are more than likely to witness a UFO as the disc itself catapults across the room. But what a gorgeous orange batik UFO! – so perhaps this was the desired effect from Rattle.

The recording by Warwick Donald is miraculous. The First Smile was transported into my living room, so intimate and whispering are the sounds. Everything speaks as it should, from the piquant and limpid ringing of the bonang and saron to the soul-penetrating gorgeousness of the gong. The sound of the gong obtained here is particularly poignant for, as Allan taught me all those years ago, the large gong is usually only played occasionally at the end of cycles, but contrary to a typical Western hierarchy, it is viewed as the most important instrument, and should only be played by those with the appropriate mana.

The traditional music is the backbone of any gamelan, and for me, this is also the case with this CD. There are only two classical Cirebon pieces on this CD, due to the wealth of NZ composers that had to be packed in, but I was definitely left wanting more.

Dr. Joko Susilo, patron of The First Smile, is a gamelan leader and wayang kulit dhalang (shadow puppet master) and renowned authority on the musics of Indonesia. Joko now lives in Dunedin but is often commissioned to give workshops and performances internationally. On a recent residency at La Musée de la Musique in Paris, working with musicians of the Paris Philharmonic, Joko discovered that the ensemble they play is also from Cirebon, gifted by the Dutch to the French to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, no less. The implication of this is that the gamelan Debussy, Ravel and Satie famously first heard at the 1899 Paris Exhibition was a Cirebon gamelan. They were all utterly enchanted, and the exotic sounds and ethos were to seep subtly into their own music.

“Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint that make Palestrina seem like child’s play,” Debussy wrote. “One will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a travelling circus.”

A simpler counterpoint than Palestrina’s is felt in the CD’s first traditional piece Sinjang Kirut (‘crumpled sarong’), but its gentle tintinnabulation, so typical of gamelan, beguiles nonetheless. Also typical is the subtle pulsing accelerando (surely the racing heart of the Cirebonese lady as she discovers her prized sarong has been crumpled?), followed by the homecoming ritardando (the lady realising her sarong is salvageable, and forgiving the delinquent boys responsible?).

Kasturun, the disc’s other traditional number, is usually used as accompaniment for female court dancers and evokes an image of angels descending from heaven. The introduction is more upbeat as it reaches into a sky full of angels, and then drops back to the earth of the balungan (backbone melody). Hypnotic and catchy, the balungan is funkily punctuated by the ketuk, with the accelerando/ritardando patterns coming in waves. In the end things are settled by the traditional final gong stroke, which in this piece comes right on top of the second to last note of the balungan –sounding a little premature and eccentric to my ears. Although, as I was informed, this is actually the accurate way to close this piece, I can see Allan giving us one of his little smiles – and certainly not “the first smile” he gave as a gamelan leader. As he always emphasised, gamelan is community music and is famously flexible with such things.

Gong (l) Kempul (r) : ( photo John Casey)

The CD begins with the solemnly spacious and courtly Lagu Senyum Pertama (“Inner melody of The First Smile”) by Anton Killin, one of the NZ composers on the disc. Anton studied ethnomusicology with Allan at Victoria and has been prolifically involved with gamelan. Composed in 2017 for The First Smile, this lagu is based on codes using letters from each of its members. I admire the restraint of this piece, which doesn’t try to be anything other than what it is.

The world-famed US composer and gamelan expert, Lou Harrison (who in later years was also a park ranger in California) worked with Allan and Jack Body in 1983 when he came to NZ as a senior Fulbright Fellow. On the disc are two of the pieces he wrote for this very Cirebon gamelan, obviously from the hands of a master gamelan composer. Lou dedicated the pieces to Allan and Jennifer.

Lagu Lagu Thomasan sports a poised strolling balungan of decidedly strong backbone, with softly ironic and offbeat punctuation from the ketuk and kenong. A nice representation of Allan Thomas’ spirit, I’d say.

Lagu Victoria, with its understated funky riff on ketuk, and an utterly catchy balungan, takes the prize for sheer cuteness.

“The Prof”, as we used to secretly call the rather distant David Farquhar when he taught us  composition (extremely dryly!) as professor of music at Victoria University, was not exactly known for the seductive charm of his music, even if he did compose Ring Round The Moon, one of the few “classical” pop hits ever to come out of New Zealand. But with Ostinato, The Prof has produced a gorgeous charmer! It’s definitely one of my favourites on the CD, and shows what an adaptive master craftsman David was. The Prof was an early adopter of Cirebon gamelan, and encouraged his students to play and compose for it soon after Allan first brought it to Victoria. David thought, to be fair, he should have a go himself, and Ostinato is the result. There’s a Spaghetti Western music feel to it – although I’m not sure the movie has been made yet…

Nhemamusasa means “building a temporary shelter from musasa branches for hunters” and Chris Francis has adapted it from mbira (“thumb piano”) music of the Shona people of Zimbabwe. Chris, an old colleague from my GPM gamelan days, has truly had a vision in bringing the people of Cirebon and Zimbabwe together through gamelan. The music works so well, it’s as if the Cirebon gamelan did indeed emerge from the savanna of southern Africa, and the somnolent fade-out at the end seems to evoke the hunters dropping off to sleep, dreaming of friendly cheetahs…

Wetonan Cycle was written in 2017 by Alison Isadora, when she was back in NZ as the Lilburn composer-in-residence after decades of living in Holland. The piece involves a story from the childhood of Joko Susilo (see above). Joko’s father was a dhalang (puppet master) in Solo, and through a timetabling mix-up caused by confusion over the Javanese 5-day week and the 7-day Gregorian calendar, Joko’s father got double-booked. As it was considered bad luck to cancel a booking, the 7-year-old Joko was brought in to replace his father for an all-night show. His celebrated success launched Joko on his dhalang and gamelan career. The 35-day cycle of the two combined calendars is called Wetonan, and Alison has created an intricate tapestry of 5- and 7-note motifs. There are also dancers and the choreography of the players as they come and go to their instruments – surely a feast to behold. The piece is composed by someone who really understands gamelan, but one senses it would be a fuller experience if in the presence of the visuals.

This richest of CDs is given the perfect ending by a real gem: Cantor’s Infinity by Gerard Crewdson. Gerard is a long-time player with The First Smile and here he uses Georg Cantor’s Theorem of Infinity to generate a series of rhythmic cycles potentially expanding into infinity. God (or Cantor) knows how Gerard does this, but magic happens here. The cycles finally morph into an ominous tolling, and Gerard himself on a trumpet wails above, thin and sepulchral, as if the Ghost of Miles Davis has been summoned to accompany The First Smile.

The First Smile and Jennifer, we need more!
How about a follow-up Rattle CD of all-Cirebon traditional music?
Or the definitive performance of Lagu Allan and Lagu Jack coupled with music by Jack Body?

Whatever happens in the recording department, Jennifer and The First Smile are busy sowing fecund gamelan seeds among the young with The Young Smile gamelan, made up of Roseneath School pupils, and The Little Smile, featuring preschool gamelaners – including several of Allan and Jennifer’s grandchildren.

Here are just two reviews of The Young Smile by its primary school members:

I feel so privileged to be able to have such an opportunity and when I found out that I was going to be able to play Gamelan I was so happy. I had just seen it and thought it was amazing but playing it is a whole other story. I also love learning about the history and origins of it and I am just so happy that I was able to do it. I also really hope when all of you reach Year Seven and Eight you get to try this magical experience. (Evie)

My favourite thing about gamelan is that every second of it is something really special. Almost no kids my age get to play gamelan not to mention with an amazing teacher.  Also another really cool thing that happens is the geckos that live in the rafters, sometimes we find their shredded skins on the floor, the patterns are amazing and we’re going to make them into puppets for our gamelan story. The instruments make up a beautiful array of sound but also you can actually feel the music. (Sebi)  

The future of New Zealand gamelan appears to be in good hands.

“A sense of belonging somewhere” – The New Zealand String Quartet’s “Notes from a Journey” on Atoll Records

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Notes from a Journey
Atoll Records ACD 118   Vol.1 (2010)
Music by JOHN PSATHAS, ROSS HARRIS, JACK BODY, MICHAEL NORRIS and GARTH FARR
Atoll Records ACD 289  Vol.2 (2023)
Music by GILLIAN WHITEHEAD, GARETH FARR, TABEA SQUIRE, ROSS HARRIS, LOUISE WEBSTER and SALINA FISHER

The New Zealand String Quartet  –  Helene Pohl, leader / Douglas Beilman (2010), Monique Lapins (2023) violins / Gillian Ansell, viola / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Atoll Records Producer – Wayne Laird / Recording Engineer – Graham Kennedy

Notes from a Journey

is the title of a story in music that reaches a new chapter with the release of a new  (November 2023) CD from Atoll Records, one which furthers the New Zealand String Quartet’s already-impressive commitment to home-grown musical sounds. This present recording echoes a previous, similarly-titled presentation from 2010, and forges links of all kinds in doing so, both through direct connection and ongoing influences upon the works of a younger generation.

The title of these CDs is taken from a 1974 poem by Sam Hunt, one dedicated to fellow-poet Hone Tuwhare, appropriate in that, like a fellow-versifier, these are properly home-spun voices, as are the sounds brought to performance-life by these gifted musicians who feel the “flesh and blood” of the composers’ soundscapes and present it all with such heartfelt intensities…..

The earlier of these two notes from a journey recordings, incidentally, won a Vodafone Award in 2011 as the Best Classical Album of that year, and with a different second violinist in the ensemble, Douglas Beilman, who altogether completed 26 years with the Quartet before moving on in 2015. By this time the group had firmly established its credentials as an advocate of New Zealand music, with previous noteworthy recordings of string quartets by Anthony Watson, Gareth Farr and Helen Fisher, and premiere performances of the String Quartets of Ross Harris. There were also landmark collaborations that featured works by Gillian Whitehead, Jack Body and John Psathas. So, when this first notes from a journey collection appeared, it effectively showcased the expressive and varied flowering of some of the era’s most striking homegrown creative outpourings, as well as confirming the ensemble’s identification with and commitment to these and associated works.

John Psathas’s 1996 work Abhisheka began the first of the two recordings. Psathas’s work takes its title from the Sanskrit word for “anointment”, creating a sinuous and sensual feeling of something ritualistic, singular interactions of sounds with silences which represented a major departure for the composer at that time from what he himself had somewhat ruefully described as “an over-caffeinated style”, here instead opting for contemplative, slowly-paced soundings of tones alternating with wondrously-wrought spaces. There’s interplay between a quartet of voices creating resonating chordal sounds and solo lines, sometimes employing quarter-tones whose unchartered territories set tensions against profundities to wondrous effect. The Quartet gave this work’s premiere in Nelson in 1998, and previously recorded it on a Rattle disc called “Rhythm Spike” – even then something of a “moment of calm” in turbulent seas!

The proverbial modernity of JS Bach’s musical inclinations is given sufficient emphasis in the original Variation 25 from his set of “Goldberg Variations”, a string quartet transcription of which I heard the NZSQ play in its entirety in Lower Hutt an unbelievable decade of years ago, now!  Even to this day the memory of that occasion haunts any subsequent rehearing, be it of the original keyboard version, a transcription or (as here) an evolutionary step-child! Composer Ross Harris in his Variation 25 takes the original’s “immensity of human sorrow” and adroitly finds more refracted expressions of emotion through harmonic tensions and explorations which briefly pit their own momentums against one another in piquant displays of independence which stay in the memory long after order of sorts is restored!

What a pleasure to re-encounter Jack Body’s “Three Transcriptions”!  –  each has a haunting  “presence” by way of capturing the candour of the sound’s “openness”, the first being a Chinese  version of the “Jews’ Harp”  sound in Long GI YI, the harmonics so very plaintive and captivating, and with vocalisings bolstering the persistent rhythms. Ramandriana is a dance from Madagascar, mostly pizzicato, with occasionally piquant “held” bowings to colour the rhythms., all wonderfully complex and often asymmentrical, and marching off so engagingly! If the latter dance was essentially a “plucked-note” one, the last, Ratschenitsa, from Bulgaria, as much emphasised the “bowed” as the “plucked”, with foot-stamping and yelped vocalisings adding to the excitement, as did the 7/8 driving rhythms which constantly bent one’s ears and kept one’s inner trajectories on the boil!

One encounters a number of evocations of a projected “afterlife” in music of all kinds, with Michael Norris’s Exitus here adding a stimulating quartet of contrivances pertaining to different cultures’ view of an afterworld. A composer might conceivably select at random from the manifold cultural examples worldwide of corresponding scenarios, but the four Michael Norris have chosen contrast so markedly both with one another and with archetypal Western concepts of afterlife, the results in themselves are morbidly fascinating, underpinned by the composer’s own sonic imaginings for each.

We began with Quidlivun – The Land of the Moon where, in Inuit mythology, the virtuous are taken to their eternal rest, the soundscape appropriately remote, spare and dry, alternating engagingly animated impulse (new arrivals, perhaps?) with spacious, long-breathed lines which suggest endless, infinitely varied connections. A sudden irruption brought instant relocation to Xibalbá – The Place of Fear, the underworld of Mayan civilisation with the latter’s dominant societal figures of kings who were the intermediateries between humans and gods and wielded absolute power over ordinary people. This meant subjugation to a belief system that, amongst other things , threatened departing souls to Xibalbá with numerous trials and tribulations both on their journey to and throughout the Underworld. Involving delights such as “darkness, cold, fire, razor blades, hungry jaguars and shrieking bats” – long-held string lines punctuated by vicious sforzandi buffetings, eerie sul ponticello-like whip-lashings and poisonously-curdling cries and mutterings.

While the all-out assault was then somewhat relieved by the following  Niflheim – the House of Mists, the oppressiveness of a different kind was just as unrelenting – this was the cold, dark world of the dead ruled by the goddess Hel. I was reminded in places of Sibelius’s similarly bleak and implaccable ambiences in one of his Four Legends, Lemminkainen in Tuonela, except that Michael Norris’s evocation is an even more unequivocally bloodless and lifeless realm “from which no traveller returns” – no Orpheus would seek an Eurydice, nor a mother recover the body parts of her son for reassemblage in such totally unremitting  territories!

After so nihilistic an evocation it was something of a relief to encounter the more positive, dance-like aspect of Oka Lusa Hacha (Black Water River), over which the soul passes to reach the “good hunting grounds” of the native American Choctaw Tribe. Despite readily employing similarly sharp-edged, biting string timbres and tones to the previous evocations, the ritualistic rite of passage depicted had an almost joyous and certainly anticipatory aspect for most of the journey, with even the “log crossing” trial presenting  concentrated, almost positively ritualistic efforts and gesturings rather than the more fearful and despairing earlier depictions!

The disc’s final work, Gareth Farr’s He Poroporoaki (A Farewell) commemorated a premiere for similar forces undertaken at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli in 2008. Upon first hearing, I thought Richard Nunns’ playing of the putatara (conch) and putorino (flute) together with the composer’s sounding of the pahu pounamu (Greenstone gong) conjured up a vividly raw presence which the string lines  sought to “ritualise” in suitably elegiac style. I liked the Vaughan Williams-ish modal sequences which then “framed” the famous “Now is the Hour” melody – but I thought the latter might have been given more “suggestive” treatment rather than played in full and harmonised.I confess to finding the effect here a shade syrupy, but perhaps only because I was expecting more abstracted melodic treatment somewhat along the lines of the disc’s other pieces. A second hearing worried me less, being more along the lines of my thinking ”it is what it is” and accepting it as such.

So – with the sounds of this first recording still ringing in my head I was drawn to make the connection with Notes from a Journey II, recorded thirteen years later by the same Quartet but with a different second violinist, Monique Lapins having taken over from  Douglas Beilman in 2016.

The new disc underlines the journey’s continuation, sharing with the first recording both a title and the work of artist Simon Kaan, with cover art detail from images named as a related series. It began powerfully with a work by Gillian Whitehead, Poroporoaki, dedicated to Richard Nunns, one of the pioneers of the use of Maori instruments (taonga puoro) in composition – this was a stirring imitation of the pūtōrino (trumpet), and went on to imitate other instruments outlined in the text. The transcription powerfully blended ritual with individually characterful voices expressing melodic, rhythmic and specifically timbral sounds in aid of giving breath to the process of farewell.

Gareth Farr’s Te Koanga  is next, an evocation of the title, which means “Planting Season”, and the activities associated with such a time, activities which naturally involve the ritual of work and song for purposes of evocation as much as productivity. The work is as atmospheric and melodic as structural, incorporating the intrinsic value of the presence of birdlife in Wellington’s natural environment – there is a tui’s song enshrined in the detailing as well as contributions from other birds such as the weka. As the piece draws to a close the ambiences bid us a farewell…

Tabea Squire’s piece I Danced, Unseen captivated me on its first hearing – it seemed as though the composer was at first awakening her store of inner voices more than any latent physical urgings, but with the music suddenly enlivened our focus was energised and sharpened, bringing  our sensibilities to their feet! These impulses continue to gravitate from melody to rhythm as the piece progressed until the sounds achieved full bloom as a unified conception, the players’ breathing strongly in evidence in places giving extra palpable energy to the proceedings.

In a different way Ross Harris’s String Quartet No. 9 straightaway compelled one’s attention with the players vocalising as part of the “chorale” motif which itself underwent as profound a journey as did the “episodes” which each chorale rendition introduced. Beginning as inwardly glowing blocks of sound, the chorale vocalisations stimulated increasingly colourful, discursive and exploratory variants of the same, alternating between gestures whose thrusting and angular aspects coruscated with what sounded like irruptions of both col legno and sul ponticello timbres,  the players swapping pizzicato and arco techniques at will  (as if opening and closing a kind of a Pandora’s Box of bombardment!). These energies eventually dissipated into independent  phrases and single notes, with the chorale “released “ to the strings alone, the players and their instruments “reaching out” towards the end, seeking a kind of transfigured resolution.

Louise Webster’s work This memory of earth presented perhaps for me the most epic of the disc’s scenarios, beginning with an ambience shaken and stirred through bird-calls repeated by different instruments to form a kind of consort communing with a sonic environment. These solo instrument calls variously brought into focus a remarkably concerted tactile picture of a world in accord with a growing individual sensibility, with the composer gradually morphing the sounds into a new, somewhat more desperate and in places lamenting scenario, as if the world of childhood order was threatened – the cello intoned a moving lament-like chorale which drew the other instruments into its mode. The utterance became in places almost mystic as the long-remembered bird cries searched for their once-prized ambient responses from their surroundings – a sobering, exhortatory soundscape of recollection and remonstration, conscious of and fearful for the fragility of the natural world that was once ours – all extraordinarily moving.

Lastly, Salina Fisher, the youngest of the composers represented by their works on this CD, expressed with her work Tōrino the resounding effect of taonga puoro artist Rob Thorne’s music upon her listening experiences. The work was premiered by the New Zaland String Quartet in 2016 and went on to win the SOUNZ Contemporary Award the same year. Tōrino means “spiral”, with the music suggesting parallel kinds of recurring patterns as the strings seek to explore expressive similarities with the pūtōrino (known as both a trumpet and a flute due to its capabilities for reproducing both kinds of timbres and tones).

Fisher’s piece begins with vigorously ear-catching “trumpet” tones (kokiri o te tane, or male voice),  which give the impression of  summonsing calls and gesturings by the strings, both cello and viola readily sounding and overlapping one another, then joined by the two violins echoing the same figures and their variants.  The pūtōrino can also sing in different registers such as its “flute” personality when played at its other end, or when the player activates a different voice again by blowing over a “middle hole” in the instrument. Fisher achieves a “spiralling” effect with each of these expressive modes echoing and developing their material,  while in addition her inventiveness creates as much a sonic environment as a panoply of characterful voices.

Growing out of this synthesis come the more elusive, almost self-communing “middle hole” utterances, the piece’s “echoing” inclinations giving each impulse a resonating connection with what follows, be it a variant or a silence. They are the harbingers of the pūtōrino’s waiata o te hine (female voice), outpourings whose insistences slowly but assuredly reawaken the trumpet-toned voices, their reaffirmations proving to be the final, enduring sounds as the piece closes.

The performance of Fisher’s piece here epitomises the New Zealand String Quartet’s generous and single-minded commitment to the whole enterprise, with at every moment of engagement the players’ attack, phrasings and tones seemed to take us “inside” the notes and phrases, ambiences and silences. The two discs, of course, are separate entities, but their “bringing together” here reaffirms the extraordinary commitment of the players to these home-grown manifestations of what Douglas Lilburn in his celebrated 1969 essay “A search for a Language” called on behalf of local composers at the time “a sense of belonging somewhere”. And the works on these two discs are here reproduced with a fidelity of letter, spirit and atmosphere enabled in splendid partnership with Atoll Records producer Wayne Laird and recording engineer Graham Kennedy, people whose skills enable the sounds to retain what feels to me on each hearing as “an urgency of recreation” –  a listening  experience I would strongly recommend to all to try. The earlier disc has actually been sold out for some time, so perhaps a new and augmented groundswell of interest in this more recent notes from a Journey Vol.II production might well awaken and even rejuvenate its older, and no less worthy “sleeping partner”.

Whatever the fates decree, let plaudits be given to all for such a stellar achievement!

Wellington entrants shape up for the National Junior Piano Competition Finals

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Koki New Zealand School of Music presents
THREE NATIONAL JUNIOR PIANO COMPETITION FINALISTS 2020

Otis Prescott-Mason (St.Patrick’s College Town, Wellington)
LISZT – Sonetto 104 del Petrarcha / JACK BODY – No.5 from Five Melodies / BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata No.28 in A Major Op.101 (Ist.Mvt.) / PROKOFIEV – Piano Sonata No. 3 in A Minor

Ning Chin (Wellington College)
JENNY McLEOD – Tone Clock Piece No. 1 / JS BACH – Prelude from Partita No. 5 in G major / SHOSTAKOVICH – Preludes Op.34 Nos 2, 3 / MOZART – Piano Sonata in B flat Major K.333 (Ist Mvt.) / Schumann – “Abegg” Variations Op.1

William Berry (Hutt Valley High School)
CHOPIN – Scherzo in C-sharp Minor Op.39 / BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata in F-sharp Minor Op.78 (2nd Mvt.) / WILLIAM BERRY – Spring Prelude / CARL VINE – Piano Sonata No.1 (2nd Mvt.)

Adam Concert Room,
Te Koki New Zealand School of Music,
Victoria University of Wellington

Thursday, 17th September, 2020

New Zealand School of Music Head of Piano Studies in Wellington Dr. Jian Liu organised this recital for the above three Wellington pianists, all of whom are finalists in next month’s 2020 NZ Junior Piano Competition in Auckland, as a means of giving them a little extra “fine-tuning” concert performance experience. All three replicated a 20-minute recital programme of their own choice, including examples from at least three musical periods, as stipulated by the competition for performance in the final.

Music competitions come in for a lot of criticism for a number of reasons –  it’s undeniable that, at the end of the “process” through which each of these performers are going to pass , there is going to emerge a “winner”, an essential by-product of competitions, as are the numbers of competitors left who don’t “win”! There’s therefore pressure  to “perform” at these events in an out-of-the-ordinary way, which can adversely affect the quality of music-making in some instances. The subjectivity of a judge’s or several judges’ decision can also seem a cruel and random way of evaluating music performance (as, of course, can reviews written by critics!). However, many successful performers in such events are those who are able to forget about the competitive aspect and “be themselves” and seek to communicate the music’s power and beauty rather than consciously “impress” listeners and judges.

I was impressed on the latter count by the playing I heard tonight from all three pianists, all of whom at different times seemed to immerse themselves totally in their music. Subjective a reaction though it is to an extent, I feel there’s a kind of “force” at work which is generated of itself at moments when composer, music and performer seem to the listener to “meet” in a transcendental fusion of vision, impulse and effect. They’re moments which a late and much-lamented music-lover friend of mine would say “one lives for” – and thanks to the sensibilities and skills of each of these young players this evening, I experienced a number of treasurable moments such as these.

Indeed, from the first rising impulses of intent at the beginning of Liszt’s Sonetto 104 del Petrarca, as played by Otis Prescott-Mason, I felt transported by the sounds to the world of the composer’s poetic inspiration, the music beginning life as a song, a setting of one of Francesco Petrarch’s sonnets to a beloved, conceived as such by Liszt when holidaying in Italy with Marie, Countess d’Agoult, but transcribed later as a piano solo as part of the Second Book of the composer’s Annees de Pelerinage. After the initial upward flourish, the music was bardic at the song’s outset, but became more and more impassioned, with mood-swings alternating between tenderness and anguish, as per the words of the poem. These moments were all, by turns, poetically and impulsively shaped by Prescott-Mason – though I wanted him to hold his breath for the merest milli-second around the delivery of the highest of the pairs of notes during the epilogue – the poet (and composer) identifying in that moment of frisson just who it was that had caused so much delight and grief!

Jack Body’s piece (No.5 from “Five melodies”) exerted its accustomed hypnotic spell, the notes seeming to “happen” rather than being played,  the pianist enabling and then going with the music’s spontaneous flow. After this, Prescott-Mason brought the opening of Beethoven’s A Major Op.101 Sonata into being as if it were an enthralling “ritual of early morning” the textures delicate and freshly-awakened, with each phrase nicely engendering the next one, and the dreamy syncopations magically floated all about us. As with the other items he played, the music’s dynamism unfolded from within itself so that nothing sounded forced or over-modulated. Only the opening of the Prokofiev Third Sonata’s performance lacked that last bit of surety for me, the opening needing to be crisper, the rhythms a bit less clouded – however, the rest was vividly characterised, a lovely wistfulness in the second section. a Janus-faced eeriness/grotesquerie in the third “episode”, and the impishness brilliance of the finale, all glowed and sparkled under Prescott-Mason’s fingers.

Ning Chin, the second pianist, began his recital with a Tone-Clock Piece by Jenny McLeod, the first of the set (and, incidentally, a tribute-piece to fellow-composer David Farquhar, for his sixtieth birthday!) – the music Ravel-like in its crystalline clarity and gentle melancholy, the phrases seeming to pair up to answer, or “round off” any questioning or unfinished statements. A great piece of programming followed, the bracketing of music by JS Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich – Shostakovich, of course, wrote a couple of sets of keyboard preludes, Op.34 and Op.87 (the latter with fugues a la JS Bach), Chin playing Nos 2 and 5 from the Op, 34 set. I couldn’t help feeling how “modern” Bach was made to sound in retrospect once I’d heard the Shostakovich pieces, the first an elaborately decorated waltz-tune, and the second a droll left-hand melody ducking for cover beneath whirling right hand figurations. Chin’s sparkling fingers made for beautifully-wrought passagework in all instances.

Chin’s next piece was the first movement of Mozart’s B-flat Major Sonata K.333, given here in a straightforward manner (“It should flow like oil” said the composer) which gradually “warmed” over time, though the repeat didn’t seem to change its expression very much, the minor-key episode calling, I think, for just a wee bit of “sturm und drang” feeling – a bit more “relishing” of the music and its more palpable features, such as the flourishes and occasional spread chords –  to be fair, I thought more of a sense of the music’s “fun” began to appear towards the movement’s end.

I thought the Schumann “Abegg” Variations teased out the best playing from Chin – dynamics were interestingly and convincingly varied throughout the opening, and the pianist demonstrated a real “ring” in his tone that helped the second piece sparkle. Brilliant playing also marked the running-figure waltz variation, not without the occasional slip, but with such things merely adding to the excitement. I liked the “arch” gesturings, both musical and physical, of the next variation, which contrasted with the following sequence’s deftly nimble fingerwork, and the throwaway impudence of the finale – not a note-perfect performance but a characterful one!

William Berry was the third and final performer, his playing of the terse, uncompromisingly abrupt utterances  opening Chopin’s third (Op.39 in C-sharp Minor) and most enigmatic of his four Scherzi instantly grabbing our attention, before we were plunged into the presto con fuoco agitations of the opening theme, the playing suggesting its wildness and incredibly Lisztian surge before relaxing into the gentle grandeur of the E major chorale, with its accompanying filigree arpeggiations. Interestingly, I felt the pianist “grew” the filigree decorations from out of the chorale more organically when in the minor key, giving them more space in which to “sound” as if resonating in sympathy. Afterwards, he oversaw a most resplendent building up of the big chorale theme before breaking off with some astoundingly-wrought whirlwind-like agitations carrying us to the wild defiance of the final crashing chords.

Next was Beethoven’s richly enigmatic finale to the two-movement Op.78 F-sharp major Sonata, a transition from the Chopin which took our sensibilities a while to adjust to – I wondered whether Berry would-have been better served by the music to have begun his presentation with this work, both playing-in his fingers and “energising” his audience sufficiently for the Chopin piece’s coruscations to then have their full effect…….to my ears, and perhaps in the wake of the Chopin’s high-energy afterglow, he rushed the playful drolleries of Beethoven’s toying with the major/minor sequences and missed some of the humour. Still, enough of the glorious incongruities and resolutions of the dialogues which brought so much delight in this piece was caught, here – and delight, too, was to be had from Berry’s own brief but vividly expressed “Spring Prelude”, which depicted in lush Romantic terms a kind of awakening and a burgeoning of seasonal delight.

Knowing the composer of the final piece’s name but not his music, I was intrigued by Berry’s choice of a movement from a Piano Sonata by Australian Carl Vine to finish his recital – this was the second movement, marked as “Leggiero e legato”, of Vine’s two-movement Piano Sonata No. 1.  Composed in 1990 for the Sydney Dance Company (ballet rehearsal pianists beware!!) the work has since achieved full stand-alone concert-hall status, its dedicatee, Michael Kieran Harvey performing and recording the work to great acclaim, one review of his performance remarking of the work “eighteen minutes of piano dazzlement combined with a profound melodic sense”.

Berry certainly had the requisite energies and pianistic agilities to tackle this torrent-like music – beginning with a molto perpetuo, the racing energies eventually gave way to a chorale-like section, a somewhat plaintive “can we come out, now?” sequence of “eye of a hurricane” tranquilities, a suspended calm which then engendered its own burgeoning detailings to the point where the music sprang into angular declamation, then motoric action once again – one had to admire Berry’s stamina and clear-sightedness amid the plethora of pianistic incident, augmented by portentous bass rumblings, with Herculean upward thrusting gestures giving their all, and then surrendering to silence with a wraith-like final gesture. After Berry’s stunning performance I was reminded of a review I once read of one of pianist Anton Rubinstein’s American recitals given somewhere in the Mid-West, the climax of the evening’s music-making summed up by the reviewer, writing in the vernacular: ‘ “I knowed no more that evening”……..

What more can one say, but to wish these three gifted young pianists all the best in the oncoming competition……..

Baroque Voices’ “Bingen to Becker” a harmonious celebration

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Baroque Voices presents:
BINGEN TO BECKER (Vocal music from the 12th to the 21st Century)

A Concert of Music by Hildegard von Bingen, Morley, Dowland, Hume, Monteverdi, Poulenc, Durufle, Pepe Becker, Jack Body, Constantini, Handel, Annea Lockwood, and Anon/Trad…..

Baroque Voices: Pepe Becker (director), Anna Sedcole, Jane McKinlay, Rowena Simpson, Andrea Cochrane, Katherine Hodge (with Robert Oliver – bass viol)

The Third Eye – Tuatara’s Temple of Taste, Arthur St., Te Aro, Wellington

Sunday 16th August, 2020

Thanks to a newly-emerged Covid-19 chapter in Auckland we were a precautionary “restricted” audience for this concert, but of good cheer, nevertheless, with convivial company and food and drink available at the venue, the evocatively-named “The Third Eye – Tuatara’s Temple of Taste”, from out of which scenario “emerged” the musicians, informally dressed and congregating at the platform end of the listening-space, six singers and a bass violist, all as relaxed as if spontaneously inspired to entertain the company! By way of settling both the ensemble and its audience in, we were treated straightaway to the programme’s first two items, the first something of a “Pepe Becker Special”, Hildegard of Bingen’s O ignis spiritus, the soprano having made Hildegard’s resonant, ecstatic vocal lines music very much her own of late in these parts, and deservedly so – this was followed by an anonymous 14th-Century 3-part Canon “O Virgo Splendens” whose catchy dance-rhythms combined sacred worship and secular energy in a wholly delightful way, the ensemble’s six voices imitating a flowing river of streamlets intertwining and separating within the irresistible flow of the whole.

The introduction having “cleared” all throat and nasal (singers) and auricular (listeners) passages, Becker officially welcomed us to the concert, intended as a 25th Birthday affair for the ensemble, but “extended” to being closer to a 26th  celebration by dint of the aforementioned worldwide events exerting their influence to within Aotearoa’s shores. She talked about the concert’s themes, the items prominently figuring both love and death, and suggesting that, with humanity still in the grip of an on-going ailment, the music was expressing something of where we all were at present. Thomas Morley’s Arise, get up, my dear appropriately “revitalised” the programme from this point onwards, the singing confidently resounding through the range of tones from the altos’ beginning phrases to the silvery utterances of the sopranos at the top. “Semper Dowland semper dolens” went the name of one of the composer’s songs, and came to characterize Dowland’s oeuvre in the public’s mind – and Can she excuse my wrongs? proved no exception to this mood, Pepe Becker’s plaintive tones given a sure trajectory by Robert Oliver’s nimble accompaniments.  The changes were further rung by Oliver’s sure-fingered solo rendition of Tobias Hume’s A Pavin, featuring some extremely deft double-stopping enlivening the second part of the dance’s ritual of elegant sobriety!

Again Dowland figured with a characteristically-titled song Flow my tears, the Becker/Oliver combination suitably sombre in effect, the soprano doing well in a vocal range I wouldn’t have associated with her natural gifts, achieving dignity and clarity – the second half of the song brought forth a degree of liberation into the light, with phrases such as “Hark! – you shadows!” ringing out clearly. What a difference in every way was wrought by Monteverdi’s Madrigal Come dolce hoggi (How sweet is the breeze!) from the composer’s Book 9, the singers’ tones appropriately bright and outdoors-ish at the beginning, the vocal expression thrown widely and exploringly, the vocal ornamentations strengthening on repetition as the voices accustomed themselves to each frisson of energy, the piece’s ending expansive and resonantly lingering in the silences – lovely! The unaccompanied Poulenc Ave Verum Corpus bore an attractive, melancholy colour,  the “open” harmonies occasionally adding a medieval-sounding touch – and while the Durufle piece Tota pulchra es shared some features with the Poulenc, a pleasing melancholy, and “older” touches of harmony, the piece had a livelier, more insistent and declamatory texture, kept airborne by a lovely rocking rhythm, here beautifully regulated by the singers.

To finish the half, Becker introduced her Taurus 1: Night and Morning, a setting of Robert Browning’s pair of poems “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning”, wryly mentioning to us the piece was now twenty years old (an “excesses of youth” commentary, perhaps?)  – the singers’ mingling of exhalations of breath, charged utterances and harmonic tensions, with the darkness lit by occasionally soprano soarings, all established the “romantic tryst” mood, the brief (and presumably heartbreaking) epilogue of the morning’s parting encapsulating the experience as a recalled moment in time.

On to the concert’s second half, then it was, beginning with two “Nowel/Nowell” settings (though unseasonal, it hardly matters, as each Christmas comes so quickly on the heels of another in any case, these days!) – both lively, “ringing” kinds of evocations in their different ways, the first revolving the joyous message in an infectious “back-and-forth” way, with acclamation-like cries at the end. Jack Body’s “Lithuanian manner” Nowell began with characteristically crunchy harmonies exchanged by two pairs of singers facing one another, something Mussorgsky (of “Pictures from and Exhibition” fame) would have, I think, relished, in memory of his similarly sequenced dialogues between voices in “The Market Place at Limoges” – here, the singers  built on the earthy figurations’ growing excitement and accumulations of joy and certainty as the exchanges reached a plateau of exhilaration, humanity enlivened by tidings from on high!

Alessandro Constantini’s Confitemini Domino continued the festive mood, resounding with joyous and angelic utterances, Oliver’s accompaniments reinforcing the Alleluia’s dancing rhythms with gusto. A remarkable and contradictory precursor of a similar mood evoked by the great Handel was the following duet No, di voi no vo’fidarmi, here sung superbly by Becker and Rowena Simpson, with Oliver’s assured bass viol accompaniment,  the familiar lines of “For unto us a Child in Born” from Messiah  used in the service of a completely different text, one of accusation and dismissal of love – Handel had written this (and another duet Quel fior che all’alba ride similarly re-used) a matter of weeks before beginning work on Messiah, and duly incorporating the music into the larger work! – what a delight to encounter the “original” version of such well-known music, and to hear such a committed and assured performance!

Gentler, with longer-breathed lines, and tensions of a different kind brought into play was another work by Handel, Amor, gioie mi porge, a somewhat calmer portrayal of the hardships of love, one which gathered weight and darkness as it proceeded, taking in a central, more energetic section allowing the sopranos to soar, but returning to beseechment and despair at the end, the two singers, Anna Sedcole and Becker sustaining their lines throughout with great spirit! The prospect of hearing any of Annea Lockwood’s music always excites interest, though I was disarmed by the simplicity of her 1983 work Malolo, (Rest), a Samoan lullaby using hypnotically repeating sounds, the singers “terracing” their utterances to enable all kinds of echoes and resonances, the lower voices finishing the piece as hauntingly as  it began.

Three traditionally Irish folk-song settings arranged by Pepe Becker were filled with drollery, melancholy and gentle wit, my favourite being “The Galbally Farmer”, with its rhythmic “snap”, earthy, drone-like accompaniment, and wryly-sounding vocal reinforcements of some of the text’s phrases, concluding with the tried-and-true existentialist lament “I wish I had never seen Galbally Town!”. Becker’s compositional skills were again evoked by When will we know?, a gentle balled-like setting whose closely-worked harmonies had a cool, even bluesy colouring from the viol’s plucked-string accompaniments and wind-blown vocal abandonments at the song’s end. We thought at first the evening’s music would finish by circling back to its opening, with another of Hildegard’s hymns, O viridissima Virga – this one a long-breathed unison for all the voices, ambiently accompanied by Becker’s shruti box and Oliver’s viol, the whole a kind of ritualized “bringing together” of elements presented in a flexible, organic, very human manner, the voices not perfectly together, but in expressive purpose acting as one – to our surprise and delight, we were treated to a brief encore, which deserves its own paragraph……

Once attributed to Henry Purcell, How Great is the Pleasure – Canon for Three Voices was actually written by Dr. Henry Harington (1727-1816) an English physician, composer and author, and was published around 1780 with the title Love and Music – a Favourite Catch for Three Voices. Beginning in unison, with accompaniment from the viol, the melody soared like a Shaker Hymn, then divided among three parts, finishing with words that could have described the evening’s music-making – “When harmony, sweet harmony, and love do unite!” Most satisfying!…….

 

 

 

“Cello for Africa” at Porirua City a spectacular and moving multi-cultural collaborative event

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Sinfonia for Hope presents:
CELLO FOR AFRICA – a multi-institutional and multi-cultural collaboration
Director – Donald Maurice

Performing Individuals and Groups:
Te Kura Māori o Porirua (kapa haka and waiata)
Inbal Megiddo, Rolf Gjelsten, Jane Young (cellos) Stringendo (director: Donald Maurice)
Linkwood Guitar Duo (Jane Curry and Owen Moriarty)
Sam Manzana (Congo drum)
Virtuoso Strings (directors – Craig Utting and Elizabeth Sneyd)
Cellophonia (director – Inbal Meggido)
Amalia Hall (violin), Tinashe Chidanyika and Sarah Hoskyns (mbira)
Ruby Solly (taonga puoro), Hannah Neman (percussion)
Lyrica Choir, Kelburn Normal School (director – Nicola Holt)
Sinfonia for Hope  (conductor: Hans Huyssen)
Heleen du Plessis (‘cello)

Music by Antonio Vivaldi, Jack Body, Craig Utting, Anthony Ritchie, Hans Huyssen

Guest Speakers:
Dr.Taku Parai (Chairman, Kaumātua, Ngāti Toa)
Her Worship Anita Baker, Mayor of Porirua
Associate Professor Hon. Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban
Professor Sunny Collings, Dean and Head of Wellington Campus, University of Otago
Professor Donald Maurice, director of Sinfonia for Hope

Te Rauparaha Arena, Porirua City

Sunday, 24th November, 2019

“Cello for Africa” was, in the words of co-organisers Heleen du Plessis and Donald Maurice, an event designed “to bring people from different cultures together using music, and specifically, ‘cellos, to help create a platform for cultural interaction and human connection in support of causes in Africa”. The concert’s specific target was to raise funds for a school established in Nairobi five years ago, the Tamariki Education Centre, by New Zealander Denise Carnihan (who was present at the concert).

The event brought together four youth performance groups augmented by a goodly number of professional performers to perform, among other things, at least one world and one New Zealand performance premiere (not a Venn diagram in words – I meant TWO separate pieces!). New Zealand composer Anthony Ritchie contributed the world “first” with his piece “Kia Kaha Tamariki”, and South African composer Hans Huyssen the New Zealand premiere of his “Concerto for an African ‘Cellist”. There was a Vivaldi concerto for two ’cellos, a work for two guitars by Jack Body, and a piece for strings called “Goodnight Kiwi” by Craig Utting. And extending the diversity of the occasion were various haka and waiata performed by Te Kura Māori o Porirua Kapa Haka, a colourful sequence of Congo drumming by master percussionist Sam Manzanza, and a bracket of songs performed by Kelburn Normal School’s Lyrica Choir, directed by Nicola Holt.

We were welcomed at the outset by Dr Taku Parai, the Ngāti Toa Chairman and Kaumātua, accompanied by Ranei Parai and the splendid Te Kura Māori o Porirua Kapa Haka group. I was struck by the similarities in places between the sound of the Maori chant and some of the Gregorian chant I’d heard, with similar nuances and impulses in places, and underlined by the plangency of the young women’s tones – by contrast the haka passages were incisive and striking for different reasons! After the group had moved off to the side in the time-honoured manner, the Mayor of Porirua, Her Worship Anita Baker spoke to us, most impressively, drawing resonant parallels between Ntairobi in Kenya, and Porirua, here in New Zealand, and welcoming our support for the “Cello in Africa” venture. At this point I felt it would have been good for the event to have had a properly-appointed MC, merely to provide a kind of ongoing flow during the transitions between the numbers – the members of the Stringendo group simply “appeared” with the continuo ‘celllist, Jane Young, after whom came the two soloists for the next item, ‘cellists Inbal Megiddo and Rolf Gjelsten, together with conductor, Donald Maurice.

The two soloists began the work vigorously and adroitly, Megiddo taking the more assertive lead with Gjelsten seeming somewhat “laid back” of projection in reply, both in this way most effectively “terracing” the exchanges, while Jane Young’s continuo kept a watching brief over the exchanges. The tutti passages had great effect, with the extra weight of numbers producing a real “What does the crowd think?” kind of response in the sound’s impact – I’m certain the spontaneous applause at the first movement’s end would have underlined for the players our enjoyment. The slow movement featured the soloists and continuo only, the players again differentiating their lines via a fetching minor-key melody, with Megiddo’s sumptuous tones stimulating a thoughtful, more circumspect response from her companion. Some of the younger players weren’t expecting or had forgotten about a repeat in the music, as several moved to make a grand tutti entry at one point, but lowered their bows again when the music turned on its tracks and repeated a second-half section – very sweet! The younger players got their chance at the “true” beginning of the finale, playing the repeated theme as the soloists overlaid the  music with decorative passages, then intensifying the repetitions with a couple of modulations – all sounding very daring on their part, and garnering considerable applause at the end!

Next was a transcription for two guitars by Jack Body, made from recordings of the Madagascan “vahila”, a kind of “zither” made from a bamboo tube, and regarded by many as the country’s “national” musical instrument. A tumbling, rhythmically teasing piece called “Ramandriana”, it kept shifting its emphasis and thus varying its gait, the players, Jane Curry and Owen Moriarty, finding a wealth of variation of tone and timbre, which would have stemmed from the original instrument recording. (The duo should, I think, have been at least introduced to the audience as “The Linkwood Guitar Duo”, but, again, there was no “MC”.There were names and  information in the programme to be sure, but again, a welcoming voice would have, I think, made a more easeful difference.

We were delighted to welcome Sam Manzanza, the Congloese drummer, resident in New Zealand since the 1980s, where he’s been popularising traditional African music for a number of years with his AfroBeat Band – here he was performing solo with a single drum, and producing an amazing variety of sounds , accompanying his rhythmic patternings with various chants, and encouraging audience participation most successfully! Continuing on an African “wave”, we responded warmly to the next speaker, Associate Professor Hon. Luamanuvao Dame Winnie Laban’s congratulations to South Africa for winning the World Rugby Cup! Her acknowledgement of the work of the organisers of this evening’s concert also elicited an enthusiastic response, as did her confirmation of the Te Ata Festival Project for 2020.

Composer, and co-director of Virtuoso Strings, Craig Utting introduced his ensemble in preparation for the nest item, a version of TV NZ’s famous shutting-down-transmission piece, “Goodnight Kiwi”. Accompanied by the lowering of lights for the music’s beginning, the piece established an all-energies-spent feeling, the string figurations drowsy and  droopy at the phrase-ends, the fragments of one phrase answering another across the vistas created by the ensemble standing in a wide half-circle to perform. The music suddenly energised into angular waltz-like movement, the rhythms and themes lazily dovetailing, its bitter-sweet ambience underlined by a “wilting” kind of inclination, until finally a driving, toccatalike 7/4 rhythm awoke a voice singing the famous Hine e hine words, with heartfelt feeling – the singer beautifully maintained her line and steadiness of tone , right until darkness overtook the music and the players on the stage………

After an interval, and a welcome and brief address from the Dean and Head of Otago University’s Wellington Campus, Professor Sunny Collings, we were treated to composer Anthony Ritchie’s Kia Kaha Tamariki, a musical tribute to the Kenyan School whose founding five years ago in Nairobi has changed the lives of so many African children. The work (a world premiere) was performed here by Cellophonia (40+ cellists!) along with violinist Amalia Hall, cellist Inbal Megiddo, mbira players Tinashe Chidanyika and Sarah Hoskyns, taonga puoro player Ruby Solly, and percussionist Hannah Neman.

Ritchie’s work emphasised the ideas of exchange and accessibility of different musical sounds – a pity the orchestral “platform” was so far away from its audience, across the vistas of what was another performing-space, as it reduced the visceral effects of the more exotic instruments, such as a view of “how they were being played” (the Huyssen Concerto which concluded the evening had a similar kind of “removed” aspect to it – we were, indeed, in the same “space” as the performers, but arguably with too much “air” between us all!). Still, the sounds made an impact, and the conventional and exotic instruments created wholly unique worlds,  even if I felt the music sounded more “Caribbean” than African (ethnomusicologists may well apply to have my travel visas revoked upon reading that statement, though it’s just my (admittedly uninformed) opinion!).

Moments of “Elgarian-sounding” string-writing for the ‘cellos rubbed shoulders with more exotic rhythms and timbres as the non-string-players took up their instruments, the whole given an additional ambient context by Ruby Solly’s taonga puoro sounds. After a colourful sequence featuring the more exotic instruments alone, the drums intensified the rhythms and the cellos intoned an eminently singable/danceable melody, immediately suggesting a ready response in kind from listeners – the work was rounded off by a brief irruption of percussive impulse and gesture – altogether a direct and approachable tribute to a worthwhile cause.

There were hurryings and scurryings from certain people in preparation for the next item, the outcome seeming a little Houdini-esque as it turned out, with everybody’s attention focused on a completely different entrance to that through which the members of Lyrica (Kelburn Normal School Choir) and its director, Nicola Holt, finally appeared! – the group sang three songs bringing out poignancies and sweet colourings in the first two and plenty of rhythmic energy in the third, all accompanied on an electric piano most adroitly played by Nicole Chao, though I thought the second song, a lullaby could have just as effectively been performed voices-only. The choir recently took part in the Orpheus Choir of Wellington’s performance of Orff’s Carmina Burana, which I attended, and remember enjoying the children’s singing a great deal.

I wondered whether programming a fully-fledged three movement instrumental concerto at the end of a tumultuous evening was the best course, as the attrition rate among the audience was certainly noticeable at that stage, despite people’s best efforts – still, the work was meant to be symbolic of a fusion of voices and languages and cultures, and therefore judiciously placed at the concert’s climax. It represented a herculean effort of technique, emotion and crossover sensibility on the part of the solo cellist, Heleen du Plessis, who gave what sounded like a totally committed performance, from the “Partida”, or exploratory opening movement in which she enabled her instrument to “speak its language”, through the exchanges with other instruments over the second and third sections (the latter movement including a vocalised section from mbira-player Tinashe Chidanyika), and into the final Mapfachapfacha (in the Zezuru language, “a sudden arrival of many”), which sounded like a celebration of the coming together of diverse voices.

Composer Hans Huyssen’s use of non-standardised instruments (and the human voice) as constituent parts of such a formalised composition as a “concerto” has plenty of precedent in Western music, as witness, for example, the various instances of use of such things in the Mahler symphonies. And there were precedents of all kinds for the use of voices in such works as well, from Beethoven onwards, giving the words intoned by the orchestra players at the end of this work, referring to the music’s journey in search of a commonality amid the diversity, and its discovery within, their own unique resonances – the whole occasion generated so much warm feeling it was difficult to be analytical or judgemental regarding what we had heard! Its task, as far as I could discern from everybody’s response at the evening’s conclusion, was completed most successfully.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voices of the World – Stroma’s ambient “girdle round about the earth”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
VOICES OF THE WORLD

Works by Celeste Oram, John Psathas, Luciano Berio. Julia Wolfe, Jack Body, Anna Clyne

CELESTE ORAM – An Overture (1807, rev. 2018, 2019)
(devised by Celeste Oram, Rob Thorne (taonga puoro), Ludwig van Beethoven and Stroma Ensemble, with Keir Gogwilt, violin, and Matthew Allison, trombone)

JACK BODY – “Bouyi” (from “Yunnan”2008)
Anna Van der Zee, Emma Baron (violins), Andrew Thomson (viola),Ken Ichinose (‘cello)

ANNA CLYNE – A Wonderful Day (2013)
Patrick Barry (bass clarinet), Thomas Guldborg (percussion), Sarah Watkins (piano),
Callum Allardice (guitar), Ken Ichinose (‘cello), Alexander Gunchenko (double-bass)

JULIA WOLFE – Reeling (2012)
Patrick Barry (clarinet), Thomas Guldborg (percussion), Sarah Watkins (piano), Callum Allardice (guitar), Ken Ichinose )’cello), Alexander Gubchenko (double-bass)

JOHN PSATHAS – Irirangi (Meditation) 2019
Alistair Fraser (taonga puoro), Bridget Douglas (flute)

LUCIANO BERIO – Folk Songs 1964
Bianca Andrew (soprano), Bridget Douglas (flute), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Michelle Velvin (harp), Thomas Guldborg/Sam Rich (percussion), Andrew Thomson (viola), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)

Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Thursday 1st August, 2019

Every Stroma concert I’ve had the good fortune to attend has pushed back my frontiers regarding what I’d thought of as viable and coherent musical expression, and by use of techniques and/or media that I might have previously regarded somewhat removed from “musical” realms. This “giving voice” to unconventional objects and means could be seen as taking one’s listening back to a time when music existed only as natural sounds which would have then slowly been developed alongside speech as a kind of language, the sounds then imitated by whatever objects came to hand, and which could in some cases be manipulated and varied for different results and purposes.

This latest Stroma presentation “Voices of the World” featured a couple of items which explored the idea of these pure, primitive sounds making their way into and through various human cultures and being gradually shaped for descriptive or expressive purposes. The concert’s first item was one of these, a new, intensely collegial work-in-progress called Overture 1807, rev.2018, rev.2019 (an impressive stand-alone chronology of connection in itself!). The work was the brainchild of NZ-born California-based composer Celeste Oram, an overture to a projected opera-in-progress whose material was “collectively devised and improvised” by a whole host of performer thus far in the work’s life, and included the playing of Rob Thorne, a noted exponent of taonga puoro, and material from 18th Century Vienna (though the overture as heard here extensively quoted Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture, a work from the early 19th Century).

Stroma’s programme note most illuminatingly told of one Georg Forster (1754-94), who, as a teenager, accompanied his father, a naturalist and scientist, on the voyage with Captain James Cook on the HMS Resolution between 1772 and 1775, visiting many South Seas Island places including New Zealand. As well as displaying sophisticated ethnographical skills in analysing different Polynesian Societies, the young Forster was a talented essayist whose book A Voyage around the World, published in 1777, earned him great fame as it uniquely combined factual and reliable data with colourful descriptions and observations of the different peoples and their customs, even including notated and translated  Polynesian songs. Goethe, Wieland, and even Beethoven were all said to have read some of Forster’s work, one commentator in the 1930s even suggesting that the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was inspired by a Maori chant!

By way of relating  the work of a great composer to a host of creative impulses that might have preceded it, and even “prepared its way” in generic forms, Celeste Oram chose the composer’s “Coriolan” Overture as the fulcrum around which were encircled various sounds and gesturings instigated by the taonga puoro playing of Rob Thorne – I found this experience a kind of “turned on one’s head” happening, the haunting tones, textures and timbres of the older instruments (including stones) “giving birth” as it were to the impulses that became the Beethoven Overture, by helping create the surrounding agglomerated ambiences. So this wasn’t “deconstructed” Beethoven, but rather “inseminated” (is there a unisex expression for this?) thought, impulse and gesture, all given musical and theatrical expression. Rob Thorne’s taonga puoro evocations of an ancient “being” instigating processes of creativity which, rather than self-consciouslessly wrought had a kind of “uncovered” aspect, made discernable by creative awareness, and leading towards the measures of (here) oddly-syncopated Beethoven that we knew so well, though underlining for us at the piece’s end the infinite patience of the sources of these tones and impulses in returning our sensibilities to the place of origin, though, of course, never to be quite the same again.

Each one of the concert’s next three pieces featured pre-recorded human voices (a duet and two solos) given a kind of freshly-wrought reactive ambience, as likely to contrast with as complement the singers’ sounds. These were “field” recordings, caught on the wing, as it were, and thus requiring from the instrumentalists a similar kind of spontaneity of utterance, an “entering into” the world of the vocalisings in both a physical and a spiritual sense. Jack Body’s Bouyi was something of a “rogue entry” into a catalogue of field recordings from Yunnan province in China, this being actually from Guizhou, a neighbouring province. It featured the voices of two Bouyi women duetting, though no translation was provided.

Two violins began softly and folkishly, evoking a spacious kind of serenity, enlivened by the women’s voices, to which the viola and ‘cello responded – the instruments gave the impression of “listening” to the voices, the instrumental harmonisings tender, sensitive and ambient, contrasted with the voices’ elegant earthiness. The instruments occasionally copied the voices’ interval of a second in places, but always discreetly and resonantly – it all gave an impression of a precious moment in time caught on the wing, to be enjoyed and marvelled at in times to come.

The ambient contrast between this and a similar kind of undertaking by British composer Anna Clyne couldn’t have been more marked, the recording being of an elderly man in a Chicago Street singing and tapping his walking-cane as he walked down the city’s “Magnificent Mile”. Stroma’s resident conductor Hamish McKeich magically appeared to direct this piece which was titled A Wonderful Day. The man’s voice made a great subject – very forthright, his “feeling” very emotional and overt, both in speech and song, the instrumental accompaniments gently “played with” the singer, before cranking the delivery up into a kind of gospel hymn! The piano and percussion helped to “open up” the ambiences, the double-tracking of song and commentary giving the performance a kind of resonance, riding triumphantly atop the traffic noise – a tremendously involving and great-hearted realization, the first of a collection of electro-acoustic recordings of street noises entitled “Chicago Street Portraits”.

American composer Julia Wolfe’s work Reeling used a recording of a French-Canadian singer who possessed an extremely rhythmic and lively vocal style, one generating tremendous momentum from the outset – the instrumentalists took up the vocalised rhythms firstly with fingers and feet, gradually bringing in clarinet, piano, cello and guitar, and finally the double-bass – the “ditty” was challengingly angular and syncopated in rhythm, sounding very street-wise, and clinching the “interactive” illusion when the percussion joined in with what seemed like proper “jamming”. The instruments were allowed a few measures without the singer, keeping the energy levels primed, the players matching the singer’s exuberance with gestures like the clarinet’s “transported” bird-calls sounded at the height of the tumult, and the singer then concluding with a flourish of strung-together cadences almost vertiginous in effect! Fabulous!

One would expect John Psathas’s music to easily replicate such Dionysian exuberances – but here was the composer of View from Olympus exploring a completely different realm of expression, one concerned with hidden, almost metaphysical properties of sounds and music, and evocations of such sounds. Psathas used the word “Irirangi” as a title for his piece, meaning a “faint voice”, a kind of “aspiration” produced by what he called a “reaching out” of realms towards other realms, but equating awareness of this phenomenon with the idea of “meditation”, a listening for these hidden voices (shades, to my surprise, of Robert Schumann’s proclaimed “one soft note for he who listens secretly” in his solo piano work Fantasie in C Major of 1839). As with the concert’s opening “Overture”, the piece here began with sounds equating more to the natural than to the “human” world via recordings of insects, birdsong, and rain, along with taonga puoro  played by Alistair Fraser, to which Bridget Douglas’s flute responded at first with simple, descending figurations, which gradually took on the character of something like an Aeolian harp, with as much breath as tone – all of these delicacies and subtleties attuned and honed our listening sensibilities in a way the composer undoubtedly meant with the word “meditation”, bringing into play the phenomena of normally inanimate objects such as stones being given the capacity to sound and “speak”, and “suggest” to the flute that it absorb these same sounds and “echo” them as the “faint voice” or “irirangi”. Haunting and moving……

As most people know, Luciano Berio wrote his Folk-Songs for the singer Cathy Berberian, to whom he was married. First performed in 1964, these are arrangements of folk songs and melodies from various parts of the world, and scored at that time for voice, flute/piccolo, clarinet, harp, viola, cello and percussion (Berio made an orchestral arrangement  in 1973). He’d set two of the songs, “La donna ideale” and “Ballo” much earlier (part of a student work from 1947 “Tre canzoni popolari”), before reworking them for the later collection. One presumes that the composer’s professed “profound uneasiness” when listening to piano-accompanied popular songs stemmed from his dislike of what he regarded as some kind of “gentrification” of the music, and that his scoring for a chamber ensemble to accompany the singer was meant to bring listeners closer to what he called “the expressive and cultural roots of each song”. Certainly the individuality of each setting is sharply expressed by the instrumentation,  more so than could a piano accompaniment alone provide – though it’s worth remembering that, often, “less is more” in these matters, and that we all (the composer himself included) “hear” things differently…….

As much as I would like to pleasurably dwell on soprano Bianca Andrew’s smilingly-voiced and vividly-characterised realisations of each one of these songs, I must hold myself in check and report merely that she seemed to me to take us right into the ambient realm of each song’s idiosyncratic world – the work of an artist with a gift for direct communication. I never, alas, heard soprano Victoria de los Angeles “live”, but a good friend of mine who did would always recall that singer’s ability to communicate a kind of “personalized” warmth of utterance, as if performing for each individual listener alone – throughout these songs I felt a similar directness of giving from this singer, an invitation to “share” the words and the music, with each item a delightfully individualized experience.

The first two songs aren’t actual folk-songs, but were composed by a Kentucky song-writer, John Jacob Niles – in “Black, black, black” the viola introduced the song, then whispered an accompaniment, before “answering” the singer after the first voice, together with the harp, everything ambient and lovely – “I wonder as I wander” was more processional, like a harp-accompanied carol, the winds contributing gently-floating harmonies, with flute and clarinet impulsively contributing some duetting bird-song! The Armenian “Loosin yelav” featured liquid harp notes and a gentle clarinet descant to the voice, concluding with a flurry of wind notes as the moon was chased into the clouds! – after which the French “Rossignolet du bois” gently told of a nightingale instructing a lover how to woo a sweetheart, voice, harp, clarinet and gentle percussive effects used here to persuasive effect.

What a contrast with the Sicilian “A la feminisca”! – at once herioc and dangerous seafaring sounds, the vocal line declamatory, in places low and trenchant, the accompaniments strident, but concluding with some lullabic assurances! The two Italian songs, “La donna ideale” and “Ballo” are both droll philosophical pronouncements concerning love, the former lyrical, the second energetic, with fantastic instrumental playing and a soaring vocal line rounding up the “whirling dervish-like” energies. More darkness with “Motettu de tristura” from Sardinia, plaintive vocal utterances, with deep, resonant chords, the flute and percussion piquant and pleading – far better to be in the Auvergne, unhappily married or no, as the case may be, in the first song! – the light, pastoral atmosphere here seeming somewhat at odds with the querulous subject-matter (Ironic as only the French can be, perhaps!) With the second Auvergne song we enjoyed the contrast between the viola’s and cello’s grim, sombre soundings, and the quasi-cautionary tale aspect of the singer’s story, the voice arched upwards so freely and expressively, the harp at the end adding a telling, liquidly-flowing  postscript.

As for the concluding Azerbaijan song, with the “untranslatable” words, here it swept along with plenty of elan, the musicians “telling” its unmistakably focused story without need of any translation, the discourse filled with glint, energy, mischief and scandalous revelation, finishing with a slate-cleansing shout, and metaphorically bringing the house down! –  the evening a triumph for Stroma’s avowed goal of engagement of its audiences with new music and new ideas, via performances of unfailing interest and brilliance.