Author: Lindis Taylor

Intriguing improvisatory performances by Robbie Duncan and Bernard Wells at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts
Sonic explorations – original music for guitar and piano

Robbie Duncan (guitar, effects) and Bernard Wells (piano, keyboard)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 21 March 12:15 pm

This is a belated, ‘sort-of’ review of the St Andrew’s concert on Wednesday 21 March. So I have filed it out of date order for a few days so that it will be noticed.

I didn’t arrive at the concert till after 12.30; the first few minutes were spent tuning my head to the sounds and to the character of the playing, and trying to sense the players’ personalities and that of the music, so I lost further time before my receptors were working properly. Nevertheless, from the start, I felt in the presence of genuine, serious and imaginative music making. For one who has neither been gifted with nor been able to cultivate improvisatory musical abilites, these gifts in others have always seemed to be a kind of magic making.

Improvisatory talent is not especially rare, but as with every kind of art, the degree of talent varies hugely.

Being rather unfamiliar with the language of jazz commentary, I had initially decided that I couldn’t offer any kind of sensible review. But I gathered that guitarist Robbie Duncan had spoken interestingly and perceptively at the start of the concert; and because I had found the performances more than commonly interesting, I decided to ask whether Robbie could send me an outline of what he (they?) had said. The indirect email messages between us took some time to get through however, and so this is two weeks late.

Robbie began by remarking on the sound qualities of the church, noting that for many years he had used digital emulations of a natural reverberation in recording music. “Now at St Andrews we get to play with the real thing – a beautiful natural reverb, and a real Steinway piano.” Now they could play into and work with the natural reverberation, “allowing silence and space be part of the music”.

Then he touched on the nature of extemporisation as it is more commonly called in classical music. “Not all music has to be written down”, he said. “Jamming is what some musicians do purely for fun – it can be a social activity that those with the language and the interpersonal skills can do simply for fun. Listening is as important as speaking.”

“The scary thing is taking it into the public domain”, he said, likening the process to quantum physics where the observer (the audience) changes the outcome.

“I was initially introduced to improvisation in the 70’s by a Wellington band named Highway, and was then was inspired by Keith Jarrett’s solo piano playing where he would just make it up –  the music has a flow and a trajectory of its own.”

Then he turned to the music that they had played in the concert. “The first piece we played was to settle us down and to tune us into the sound, the acoustic space and to each other. The piece East Cape originated from a back injury I had sustained.” He found that through being in constant pain his guitar playing would speed up, and East Cape was composed with the intention of slowing himself down, with pauses, “where I could remember my breathing and reset myself tempo-wise”.

“The second and third pieces were totally improvised; we knew the start point – that is, the guitar tuning – but from there the music has a life of its own.

Improvising is all about the present moment, he said: relying on both the conscious and the subconscious mind. But more, he suggested, by the unconscious, “for by the time you have analyzed what the other musician is playing the moment has gone – for me, I just have to trust my fingers will know what to do”.

“For me this is extreme sport for musicians – there is no pre-planned structure, It’s like surfing  – you catch the wave and flow with it – sometimes you fall off but that creates the space for the next wave and the next wave.”

Another analogy would be like a dance, Robbie remarked; “sometimes one leads and sometimes one follows”.

Then he touched on his role as master of ‘effects’. “I used the ‘Empress’ echo system for the guitar effects – I believe our brains subliminally like the subtle tensions which can be created both rhythmically and harmonically.”

And unorthodox tunings also featured. He is exploring alternative tunings.
“Creating a new tuning means you can’t play your usual chords or scales,” meaning the fingers don’t instinctively go to the right places on the finger board. “It forces me as a guitar player to develop a new vocabulary, and each new tuning creates a constraint within which to work.”

Bernard responded a bit later to my approach, offering comments on the art of improvisation, and specifically on their own approach to it. He stressed that they practise together to make ‘composition in the moment’ a conscious process, “a dialogue that can continue in conversation long after we have stopped playing! There is however, always an unconscious or intuitive element entering when we play”.

All sorts of different music can be their point of departure, and he mentions everything from Gregorian Chant, through Renaissance and Baroque music to dance traditions, popular songs, jazz….

The process of improvisation “can begin with a meditative, spiritual aspect, a sense of listening to something outside ourselves (the music of the spheres or sensing a ‘potential for music’) that is always there, waiting to manifest through musicians in the physical world”.

The spiritual element begins, he says, “with musicians and the audience in silence and involves trust that we will somehow begin and honour this creative process through to its completion”.

Bernard then described the different or additional challenges with collective improvisation: “We adapt our individual styles to the fact that we are often improvising together and we thus play perhaps fewer notes, e.g. single finger piano lines to make space for the other. This approach leaves us open to invite others to participate in an expanded lineup and yet preserve our transparent musical texture where every voice is heard. We play together with an awareness for transparent quality in the combined musical line and dynamics and pitch register allowing the different qualities of the piano and guitar to be heard (timbre, attack, dynamic, sustain etc.).”

Bernard referred to listening and intuition in exploring “the unspoken communication between musicians improvising as we listen, react and respond to one another in the moment”, which involved practice and the development of intuition, “to sense who is leading at a particular moment and where the music is going (taking us)”.

So although I had missed the first 20 minutes or so of their performance, I found these perceptions by the two musicians retrospectively illuminating, and they resonated with my impressions of the ways in which the two reacted and interacted in the process of spontaneous creativity. Though one has heard improvisation of all kinds over the years, I had the feeling that these two were, more that is often the case, allowing themselves to be genuinely inspired by what had been played by each other, and by what felt like some kind of inevitable elaboration of what had just fallen from their fingers.

There was no question of trying to identify consciously just what was happening in the shape of shifting tonalities, of contrapuntal moments, elaboration of melodic fragments and all the other musical processes that musicians have devised and practised over the centuries. The resultant music had simply left the impression of something that was aesthetically attractive and emotionally rewarding.

I’d certainly like a chance to hear Wells and Duncan again in this environment.

Great singer, and audience, sold short at hybrid festival concert

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival 2018

Anne Sophie von Otter (mezzo-soprano) with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Northey

Schubert: Overture to Rosamunde
Lieder: Der Vollmond strahlt (one of the songs from the incidental music for the play Rosamunde)
Die Forelle (orch. Britten)
Gretchen am Spinnrade (orch. Reger)
Im Abendrot (orch. Reger)
An Sylvia (orch. Anon.)
Erlkönig (orch. Reger)
and her encore: Nacht und Träume

Zemlinksy: Die Seejungfrau – orchestral fantasy

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 15 March 2018, 7:30 pm

I’ll see if I can find space later on to mention the few good things about this concert, apart from the fact that the great Anne Sophie von Otter actually came here and sang for a while.

The Programme
First, let’s see what we could have expected. The first statement in the notice of her recital in the festival season brochure wrote: “Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sophie von Otter is one of the titans of grand opera and French chanson”. And the very abbreviated profile mentioned singing at two famous opera houses, sharing the stage “with the world’s greats”. And the Wellington programme was to “include personal favourites from Schubert lieder and more” (my underlining).

But behold! No opera or French chanson; and certainly, not “more”!

Anyone familiar with the international opera scene and classical music in general knows Von Otter’s wide range in classical vocal music as well as various kinds of folk and tastefully chosen popular music. Since she was the only artist mentioned in the advertising, apart from the orchestra and conductor, it was reasonable to assume that she would dominate the programme with several brackets of opera arias and art songs and perhaps a few European popular songs.

Characteristically, such a programme is fleshed out with three or four orchestral pieces, perhaps an opera overture, an intermezzo, a shortish symphonic poem. But the second half was filled by an unfamiliar symphonic work by Zemlinsky, which turned out to be well worth hearing but seemed an odd accompaniment for a solo vocal recital.

A few days before, Von Otter had sung an excellent programme at the Adelaide Festival, which has, from the very beginning, been a key associate of our festival, in its use of major international artists. There, she had sung, with piano accompaniment, just the sort of programme I might have was expected: innovative, stimulating, appropriate festival fare, doing full justice to both herself and a reasonably knowledgeable audience.

Lieder with orchestra?
Then there’s the question of singing Schubert with an orchestra. Yes, she had done that before, winning a Grammy Award in 1997 for her recording of Schubert Lieder with Orchestra with Abbado and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The impact of performances with orchestra on record is very different from those in a big concert hall, where the problems of balance and atmosphere are difficult. Many such arrangements exist and were popular especially in earlier times: seen as a way of breaking down barriers for people who might be afraid of a concert entirely from a singer and piano accompanist. That was the reason offered here, in the belief that there was no audience for solo vocal recitals, a fiction broadcast by some music promoters here too; which I have always refused to believe.

If she had come here with Bengt Forsberg, her long-standing accompanist, they would have made a tremendous impact. Erlkönig would have set the audience by the ears with its miraculously dramatic piano accompaniment; it and scores of other wonderful Lieder and French mélodies would immediately have created a huge audience for classical song.

Earlier festivals had some wonderful solo voice concerts, one of the most memorable for me being from tenor Peter Schreier in 1990 or 92 in a packed Town Hall.

Rosamunde
The concert opened with the overture to the unsuccessful play, Rosamunde, for which Schubert wrote a variety of incidental music; it was a nice idea, and conductor Benjamin Northey led the orchestra through it carefully – a very slow opening – with clarity and energy supporting its sparkling Rossini character.

And the first song was from the Rosamunde music: a simple, unaffected melody to typically sentimental words: Der Vollmond strahl, naturally orchestrated as part of the orchestral incidental music. (Rather like Bizet’s incidental music for Daudet’s play L’Arlésienne, the music was immediately popular as the play bombed.) The audience had clapped unrestrainedly after the Rosamunde song, persisting even in the absence of any acknowledgement by singer and conductor; and the audience failed to read their clear messages after each subsequent song. Even if unfamiliar with the etiquette, one might have thought they’d have read the musicians’ expressionless wait between the songs. The determination to clap persisted later between movements of the Zemlinsky piece.

Then came five genuine Lieder. Die Forelle written aged about 19, was sung first; it was orchestrated imaginatively by Britten, more interestingly than the three by Reger; I was not altogether captivated by its singular pathos and wit of words and music. Gretchen am spinnrade followed, Schubert’s second published, in 1813 when he was 16, after Erlkonig; both are considered miracles in their musical invention and extraordinarily acute emotion expression. The genius of Gretchen was not much obscured by the orchestration and the singing of the first two songs offered the singer wonderful opportunity to let her undimmed vocal gifts be heard, finding the unsettled innocence of Goethe’s heroine, though one has heard more passionate outbursts, of phrases like ‘…und ach! Sein Kuss!’

Im Abendrot is a slightly less familiar song, and since its piano accompaniment is a little less embedded in the mind, Reger’s orchestration was tolerable, and the performance evoked its oddly religious character well.  An Sylvia is a very old favourite. It was among my parents’ collection of 10” 78s; not much played by them, but it became part of my aural furniture as a child. Even though the orchestra, in the anonymous arrangement, was pared down, the chomping cellos and basses did sound odd.

And finally Erlkönig; Here was a disappointment, not only the absence of the irreplaceable piano part, but also, I fear, not a male voice that for me at least has become such an essential character in the story, perhaps inadmissibly these days. The awakening of the father’s terror with ‘Der Vater grauset’s, er reitet geschwind…’ (the translations of these marvellous words were pathetic) just passed by…

The best song of all was the encore: Nacht und Träume, a late-ish song from around 1825, where I actually enjoyed the horn’s opening phrases followed by other orchestral felicities that, because it’s a song whose piano part has not taken root in my head so much; though I love it. It was beautiful.

Die Seejungfrau
Introducing Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau, in the second half the conductor congratulated those in the hall for staying (many had left in the interval, compensated by a great increase in orchestral forces with quadruple, and more, winds!). And he talked about the link between this and the NZSO’s earlier festival venture into Star Wars, the music by John Williams, and his film music predecessors Bernard Herrmann and Korngold, to Zemlinsky who taught Korngold in Vienna. And he filled in possible gaps in musical knowledge noting the loss of his first wife, Alma Schindler to Gustav Mahler, who in turn lost her to Walter Gropius. Northey noted another detail that might well have been mentioned in the programme note, the orchestra’s recording of the work, under James Judd, for Naxos.

Much as I was uncertain about how the Zemlinsky, which I had failed to familiarise myself with, would sit in this context (on the face of it, strangely ill-assorted), I was quickly won over by its Strauss-era character (its opening might have suggested the beginnings of Tod und Verklärung or Also sprach Zarathustra) as well as its own character that in fact is some distance from Strauss. The performance had a vivid quality that was immediately charming, colourful, warmly lyrical. The work felt coherently structured in spite of the composer refraining from calling it a symphony or even a symphonic poem. The second movement (unnamed) was more light-hearted and mercurial. I didn’t attempt to create from the music images of mermaids and the ocean or other details of Hans Andersen’s tale. And the third movement became more reflective and elegiac, allowing anyone so-disposed to conjure the mermaid’s sad fate.

It was a most accomplished performance, Northey showing himself as fully capable of extracting the emotional qualities, the rich orchestral fabric, the dynamic and rhythmic pulses that brought it convincingly to life. At the end, the enthusiastic applause here was indeed in the right place.

As I load this on Monday morning, I see an excellent, pertinent letter on the programme from Deryn and David Groves in The Dominion Post.

Interesting if unorthodox Festival programme of music for organ and brass at St Mary of the Angels

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival 2018: Chamber Music Series

“Fields of Poppies”
Paul Rosoman (organ) and Monarch Brass Collective: Mike Kirgan, Mark Carter, Barrett Hocking (trumpets), David Bremner, Matthew Allison, Shannon Pittaway (trombones), Andrew Jarvis (tuba), Lenny Sakofsky (percussion)

Music by Schubert, Stanford, Widor, J C Kerll, Giovanni Gabrieli, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Bach, Vierne

Church of St Mary of the Angels

Tuesday 13 March, 6 pm

Having attended the previous chamber music concert in St Mary of the Angels which seemed to have an audience of only about 60 or 70, I was rather astonished to find that what was a predominantly organ recital was a full house (or should that be una chiesa piena?).

I have been heard to express a certain weariness at the four-year-long obsession with remembering the horrors of World War I; and the prospect of further intensification in November and perhaps long after, is perhaps not looked forward to.

Anyway, there were interesting features here: a chance to hear Maxwell Fernie’s organ played again after the church’s restoration and strengthening; the combining of organ and orchestral brass instruments, including a composer like Gabrieli; and a couple of French organ works from around the turn of the 2oth century (Widor and Vierne) – as a unredeemed francophile, I am susceptible.

The military setting was actually a very successful feature, with the crackling of a side drum (Sakofsky?) preceding the trumpet’s sounding of The Last Post (Michael Kirgan?): slow and poignant.

It was followed by an arrangement for organ and brass instruments by David Dobson of Schubert’s nonet for wind instruments, Eine kleine Trauermusik, written when he was 16 (already No 79 in the Deutsch catalogue!). I didn’t know it, but in this arrangement it certainly made a splendid sound in the church.

Stanford and Widor
Then came what I felt a less successful, and much longer work, the second organ sonata (in G minor, op 151) by Charles Villiers Stanford (the habitual use of his first names suggests that he’s still unknown to most people). Written in 1917 and dedicated to Widor (who was 7 years Stanford’s senior) and to France; its three movements depicted aspects of the war (Rheims, a solemn march and Verdun). However, its length was hardly justified by its portentousness and lack of any real humane feeling. Use of La Marseillaise was a feature but that hardly rescued it from its repetitiveness and distinctly second rating. However, the performance was bold and served to display both the organ’s clarity and colours, and the splendid acoustics of the church.

It was naturally a nice idea to follow the Stanford sonata with a Widor piece, also written during the war and actually composed for organ and the brass instruments engaged here. It displayed some of the same characteristics as the Stanford and one could sense an almost coming together of the two composers’ styles, from which Widor might have been the more disadvantaged. In spite of his famous toccata, Widor was not really a composer of flamboyant, heroic music.

The 16th and 17th centuries
Though the Thirty Years War (1628-48) set the German-speaking lands and some of their neighbours back a century in terms of cultural development (compare what was going on in 17th century France and England, even taking account of the Civil War; and look for Book Week star AC Grayling’s The Age of Genius: the Seventeenth Century), it seemed to have inspired music.

During and after the war music depicting battles was not uncommon; the example most familiar to me is by J C Kerll’s contemporary, Biber. Here, in Kerll’s ‘Imperial Battle’, brass was again as important as the organ in a piece that was processional and triumphant rather than reflecting the horrors of war. Yet the organ was adroitly integrated in the imperious clamour, and there was enough suggestion of a somewhat neglected Bach predecessor to make one curious about other Kerll compositions.

Then the brass players disappeared from the organ loft and reappeared making their way to the sanctuary where they played the following three works – by Giovanni Gabrieli, Brahms and Mendelssohn.

One expects to find prominent brass offerings in the splendid Venetian music of the Gabrieli, written to exploit with voices, organ and brass, the splendid acoustic of St Mark’s, Venice. Monarch Brass Collective chose one of the numerous pieces for brass in the Sacrae Sympnoniae, and the players’ impact with the Exultavit cor meum in Domino (C 53), in the even finer acoustics of the post-restoration church was very impressive.

Nineteenth century Germany
Brahms’s Geistliches Lied, Op 30, is an early work, written in 1856 but not performed till 1865. The programme notes remark that it was composed for chorus and organ, and so it was surprising to find it performed by the brass, without organ as far as I could tell from my restricted view of the organ loft. (I also had a restricted view of the screen suspended over the sanctuary showing Rosoman’s hands and feet at the organ, as well as the brass players and roaming around the splendid vaulting and stained glass. It was a good initiative.)

The brass ensemble remained in front of the altar to perform Mendelssohn’s second organ sonata; here I confess, I was perhaps even more surprised and perhaps a little disappointed to hear a brass arrangement of one of Mendelssohn’s six organ sonatas instead of the real thing. Not that I have ever been especially enamoured of his organ works, but I’m always ready to be invited to reconsider: not this time though. I was not the only one to find the lack of specific information in the programme a little confusing; here there was no mention of its rearrangement for brass, or details of its movements which allowed applause after each break between movements.

The arrangement for entirely different instruments rather obliterated Mendelssohn’s fingerprints, causing one to wonder whether it was indeed, Mendelssohn.

A Bach Chorale Prelude
For the following Bach piece, the brass collective, accompanied by the rattle of side drum, retreated again to the organ loft where they joined with the organ in the Chorale Prelude ‘Aus tiefer Not’ which was drawn from his cantata of the same name, BWV 38; the former is considered a more interesting piece, indeed, one of the most admired of his chorale preludes. The addition of brass was not as alienating from one’s awareness of Bach’s genius as it had been with Mendelssohn, and it came off well.

Finale in France
The concert ended with a piece by Vierne, also with a connection with war. 1921 marked the centenary of Napoleon’s death and this was a commission for the commemorative service at Notre Dame Cathedral. It was very appropriate for this concert, as it returned to the character of Widor’s piece in employing the same instrumental forces and adopting a comparable triumphant, celebratory character. Its finale was particularly effecting: as the brass died away the organ took up a great concluding fugue, and brass rejoined with a certain un-Viernish triumphalism and grandeur.

Though I have had several minor criticisms of the programme booklet and of the musical arrangements, the concert broadly achieved its aims in attracting a big audience to interesting and worthwhile music that would have been unfamiliar to most. And that’s always a good thing.

Largely successful Japanese chamber music concert at St Mary of the Angels

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival
Chamber Music Series

‘Distances’
Dylan Lardelli (conductor and guitar); Miyata-Yoshimura-Suzuki Trio(sho, koto, recorder); soloists from Ensemble Musikfabrik (Peter Veale – oboe, Hannah Weirich – violin, Makiko Goto – bass koto); Yuriko Sakamoto (shamisen)

Music by Chris Gendall, Dieter Mack, Keiko Harada, Kikuoka Kengyo, Rebecca Saunders, Dylan Lardelli, Samuel Holloway

St Mary of the Angels, Boulcott Street

Friday 9 March 2018, 6 pm

There are, inevitably, concerts where a critic feels out of his depth; music that is almost of the future, or from a sophisticated culture that one has little experience of. One often approaches them with trepidation, fearing that it will be music that is so remote in spirit and language from familiar Western music that one has no touchstone by which to assess it fairly, certainly with any sense of authority.

So it didn’t help when a young man came out after the stage had been arranged, seats and music stands, to tell us something about changes to the programme. He was on the right; I was seated on the far left; clearly he had little experience in projecting the voice, unamplified, into a big space and I caught about one word in 10.

However, it emerged that two items had been deleted – by Takemitsu  and a recorder fantasie by Telemann, and a couple of others had their order reversed.

What remained as a challenge was simply the style of much of the music from the Gagaku, ancient Japanese court music, from around the 8th century. Though I have heard this music in various contexts over the years, I don’t recall a concert where such refined and sophisticated examples dominated most of the programme. Unfortunately I was not at Chamber Music New Zealand’s concert by this Japanese trio in February 2016 (you’ll find the review by Peter Mechen in Middle C) which would have somewhat acclimatised me to the sounds here.

The remoteness of the music was compounded by the appearance of the word ‘extended’ in the programme note, a word that usually implies that the musicians are taking liberties with the traditional performance styles by exploiting extremes of pitch range or articulation to produce multiphonics (two or more notes simultaneously) on a wind instruments.

The SHO
One was launched unceremoniously into one of the most refined and attenuated pieces of the evening with an anonymous, traditional piece, Hyojo No Choshi (described as ‘an extremely elegant performance ritual’), played by Mayumi Miyata on the sho. It is a Japanese reed instrument where a bundle of reeds are tied together vertically, and held in front of the face. The sound might be compared to a very high reed stop on the organ, though it struck me that the bamboo reeds produced a hint of string sound as well.

The music evolved with extreme slowness, two or more notes sounding simultaneously – multiphonics, some a semitone apart thus producing what to most ears would be discords. The visual effect too was very striking: Mayumi Miyata in white stood behind the altar, freshly painted in white or similar colour under very bright light. Behind her was the beautifully carved reredos.

Two or three minutes were spent between most pieces to rearrange seats, music stands and to bring in or take out various instruments – the most conspicuous being the 13-stringed koto and the even bigger bass koto (I assume also having 13 strings), which could be likened to a lute, zither or cimbalom, though played by plucking rather than using mallets.

Gendall: music and joinery
Both were brought out next, played by Nanae Yoshimura and Makiko Goto. The piece was by Chris Gendall: Reverse Assembly, which the notes described as “a rather adorable internet-search translation of a type of interlocking Japanese joinery”. One had to assume that Gendall had managed to create a piece, regardless of its recondite inspiration, that measured up to the Gagaku aesthetic tradition. Four other players, including two New Zealanders: oboist Peter Veale and guitarist Dylan Lardelli, handled sho and recorder (Tosiya Suzuki) and violin (Hannah Weirich). While the six players indeed created an singular, alien sound, and the inspiration of Japanese joinery quite escaped me, I confess to falling under the spell – eventually.

Dieter Mack: a trio with koto
Next was a piece by German composer Dieter Mack, with a more familiar title: ‘Trio VII for oboe, violin and bass koto’ (commissioned by the German element in the group, Musikfabrik). My notes included words like ‘squeaks’ and ‘screeching’ (violin harmonics) but later my response to Veale’s alternating oboe and cor anglais, the emphatic, low notes on the kotoa, hints of melody, indicated a degree of curious appreciation.

Keiko Harada
The fourth piece was a quartet from a Japanese composer, Keiko Harada: a ‘quartet for sho, recorder, guitar and bass koto’ composed specifically for these players. Suzuki used three recorders: one, the biggest I’ve ever seen, standing more than two metres high with a long mouth-piece that extended, unlike the bassoon, to the top of the instrument; the other two, conventional. Clearly a most serious intention underlay the ensemble of sounds, often most arresting, occasionally evocative even if at the end my notes recorded a degree of mystification: I could only feel that its real secrets rather eluded me.

The shamisen arrives 
Kikuoka Kengyo’s Iso Chdori (Beach plover) brought out Yuriko Sakamoto’s shamisen, a mandolin shaped three-stringed instrument, with a very long neck with a febrile, delicate sound. The other plucked instrument, filling the lower register was the koto whose player, Yoshimura, also gave voice occasionally. This struck me as more evocative of a traditional Japanese idiom, with subtle, coherent tunes, derived from real musical impulse rather than an urge to experiment.

Glance back to Europe with Saunders
Next, a piece the composer Rebeca Saunders attributed to inspiration by lines from a poem by Samuel Beckett: To and Fro, for oboe and violin. Opening with slow warm notes on the G string, some multiphonics from the oboe. Though no Japanese instruments were employed, nor overt references to Japanese music, her obscure, perhaps pretentious inspiration could well have derived from an ultra-refined eastern culture; this listener felt that occasional arresting passages gave the music coherence in spite of the sense of Beckett’s words escaping him altogether.

Lardelli conducts Lardelli 
Dylan Lardelli’s composition, Holding, involved five players with Lardelli conducting; they were arrayed from the left: sho, oboe, koto, violin and bass recorder. Their impact was to create a generally convincing coalescing of European and Japanese cultures; in this instance Lardelli’s words contrasting sound and silence, intimacy and distance, light and shadow did reflect something of the music’s spirit.

The summing up, by Holloway
Finally, six players; sho, recorder, oboe, guitar, shamisen and bass koto performed Samuel Holloway’s Japonisme, a comment, reflection on European approaches to Japanese culture, including ‘appropriation and misrepresentation’, involving what seemed a deeply ingested understanding of the complex processes of cultural integration experiments.

In spite of a frequent sense of being out of my depth, of failing to be sufficiently familiar with the spiritual nuances of Japanese music, this was a most interesting and largely successful attempt in cross-cultural creativity.

 

 

Berkahn shows how you can have fun with Bach

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts

Jonathan Berkahn and friends: Bernard Wells (guitar, whistle, piano); Megan Ward (fiddle, viola); Karla Norton (Fiddle); Emily Griffiths (fiddle); Tom Stonehouse (bodhran)

The Daughters of Invention: music based on the thematic material of Bach’s Two-part Inventions
Jonathan Sebastien Berkahn: movements from a suite: Allemande, Courante, Gavotte
 J S Bach: Two-part Inventions 1 in C BWV 772, 2 in C minor BWV 773, 3 in D BWV 774, 10 in G BWV 781, 11 in G minor BWV 782, 12 in A BWV 783, 13 in A minor BWV 784
Berkahn‘s Digressions on each of the Bach inventions

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 28 February, 12:15 pm

This was one of those concerts that looked enigmatic from the outside, and I wondered whether it was going to deserve a review – not that I’ve ever failed to be greatly entertained by all my previous encounters with the multi-talented Berkahn.

The secret here was to take several of Bach’s Two-part Inventions and respond to what Berkahn takes to be Bach’s suggestion, taking them as starting point to turn “their thematic material to wholly un-Bachian ends, in genres mostly derived from the Irish traditional music I play with friends every Tuesday night at the Welsh Dragon”; in Berkahn’s words.

They began with three of Berkahn’s typical Bach suite movements, such as found in the keyboard Partitas and suites for orchestra, violin, cello and keyboard. An allemande, courante and gavotte; they were played by Berkahn and his cellist son Samuel. They were not bad imitations of the real thing, charming and very agreeable.

Then came seven of the Funfzehn Inventionen as they are called on the facsimile title page (in the Fraktur font) found in my Dover edition of Bach’s keyboard music. Designed as exercises for Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann, these ‘Inventios’, as Bach calls them, are very approachable, not necessarily impossible for the amateur, melodically attractive.

They do not often feature in ordinary keyboard recital programmes, and I have to confess to being rather delighted at their charm and plain musical interest, and I certainly admired their performance. Berkahn’s approach was lively, fully aware of whatever shafts of wit might be found and I find that I wrote the words ‘exemplary playing’ with respect to the first two. And No 3 enjoyed a gentle triple metre.

Bach’s advertisement suggested that with dedication to these studies the conscientious student could acquire “a strong foretaste of composition”. And that was clearly enough to give Berkahn licence for his delightful elaborations. His first Digression made use of the ideas in both the first and second Inventions which he combined nicely, sounding comfortably idiomatic. The other players were employed in varying combinations: in the first, Berkahn played his own piano accordion and Bernard Wells the guitar; the three violins (he pointed up his intended folk-style by calling them fiddles) joined one by one. It all sounded perfectly natural and not all that distant from what Bach might have done if his purpose had been more light-hearted.

Wells gave a nice folkish colour to the third Digression with his whistle and Tom Stonehouse contributed his bodhran – a percussion instrument. In the 11th Digression, entitled ‘waltz’, instruments changed hands again with Wells at the piano, Megan Ward changed to viola, and Berkahn again played the piano accordion. Hardly a Johann Strauss copy, it moved gently, evolving in a most natural way. No 10 followed, merging into a jig, with Ward now borrowing the whistle, to create a nice Irish feeling.

And so it went: entertaining playing, with evident enjoyment by all the participants and casual, droll comments from Berkahn; it built to a finale – the Digression on No 12 in the happy key of A major, turning into a reel. All joined in, including cellist Samuel Berkahn. Hereabouts in my notes I wrote ‘these inventions are such fun’; not the sort of insightful, penetrating remark proper music critics should make.

Concerts involving Jonathan Berkahn (in this case a relative of his named Johann Sebastien Berkahn) are generally likely to have an unorthodox or surprising aspect as well as being fun. This one was all of that.

 

Memorable musical and emotional experience from Jordi Savall, Hespèrion XXI and Tembembe Ensamble Continuo

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival 2018

Hespèrion XXI and Tembembe Ensamble Continuo
Folias Antiguas y Criollas: From the Ancient World to the New World
Directed by Jordi Savall

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 24 February, 7:30 pm

I always find it interesting, and indeed relevant, to look back to find when international musicians were in New Zealand previously. My own reviews for The Evening Post, and then The Dominion Post record Jordi Savall’s coming to the then New Zealand International Arts Festival in both 1996 (when they gave concerts in both the Town Hall and St Mary of the Angels) and 2000, which was the last time we saw Savall’s wife, Montserrat Figueras. She was to have come again with Jordi’s ensemble for Chamber Music New Zealand in November 2008, but could not. She died in 2011.

I have also seen a media reference to them at WOMAD 2012 in New Plymouth.

The 2008 programme created a broad exploration of Medieval and Renaissance music, mainly across the Mediterranean region from Morocco and Spain to Sarajevo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Istanbul and Iran, with glances at France and England.

Their programmes today still often encompass comparably wide regions; but for us the focus was narrower, if more in-depth. On Saturday, it was the pervasive influence of a simple tune or bass figure (which can, according to taste, be called a ground bass or basso continuo), ‘La Folía’. This the concert’s title, Folías Antiguas y Criollas: From the Ancient World to the New World.

Savall’s Programme essays
Savall’s own programme note points to the significance of the ‘dialogue’ between medieval and Renaissance European music and the music of Spain that was deeply influenced after it travelled following Columbus to the New World, by ancient oral traditions of pre-Colomban as well as African cultures.

So I must first express admiration for Jordi Savall’s essays in the programme book, and to repeat what I write frequently, lamenting the charging for programmes. From observation, fewer than half of the audience had programmes, declining them when the price of $10 was mentioned. It is a seriously misguided policy to devote time and expense to preparing programmes, and then to charge so much, or even to change at all, so that many turn away from the programme sellers; especially where they contain significant and fascinating information, that might just help educate an audience and help them put in context what they are hearing. Our audiences are left poorly educated enough in our school system that any chance to broaden horizons and deepen knowledge should be grasped.

Universality of La Folía
The programme’s main theme was the phenomenon of the Folía, and the first bracket was devoted to ancient examples of it. They were almost all in the form of variations or ‘diferencias’ on the basic theme or bass line that is La Folía (or Follia in other languages).

Savall identifies the importance of two particular ancient cultures that were important in assimilating and integrating Iberian music. They were the cultures of the Llanero and Huasteco oral traditions, together with Mestizo folk music derived from African cultures. The Llanero is the grassland region of eastern Colombia and western Venezuela; the remnant of Huasteco speakers are mainly in the state of San Lius Potosi north of Mexico City and some in Veracruz.

What struck me very particularly was the affinity of music from very different cultures that nevertheless had common roots, or that had merely been influenced by different cultural traditions: it all stimulated enjoyment of the interesting and attractive connections and contrasts; for me, and I had to observe in most of the sold-out auditorium.

The first piece, La Spagna by Diego Ortiz who lived through most of the 16th century, gave us a clear basis by which to compare other treatments of the folia and other Portuguese, Spanish and (mainly) Mexican music of the 1500 to mid-1800 period. Over those years La Folía might be regarded as a kind of symbol of the evolution of popular earlier music into more sophisticated, court and ecclesiastic music from the 16th century. And the theme was brought emphatically into ‘classical music’ by Lully, Alessandro Scarlatti, Marais, Corelli, Geminiani, Vivaldi, Bach and much later in Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli.

There followed a couple of ‘folía’ improvisations, the second of them the famous but anonymous Folías Rodrigo Martinez where percussionist David Mayoral’s drum arrived and an apparently unidentified female musician played castanets.

The players and their instruments
I should comment here that while the players were listed with some details of the instruments they played, it would have been interesting (and for me at least, necessary in writing this) to have known who was who on stage along with their holding up the instrument or instruments they played. Photos of the many unfamiliar Mexican and Central American – Huasteco and Llanera – instruments would have been good value in a $10 programme.

Savall himself, seated on the far left, played treble and bass viols with extraordinary subtlety and virtuosity, contributing the most important melodic and emotional element of the performances; his direction of his ensembles colleagues seemed almost casual, though in fact precise and energising. For ensembles they were: five named as of Hespèrion XXI, and six of the Mexican Tembembe Ensamble Continuo.

Savall’s own group consisted of the notable traditional harpist Andrew Lawrence King, seated centre whose contribution was important as was David Mayoral with a variety of percussion; Xavier Diaz-Latorre played guitar and theorbo and Xavier Puertas the violone, or large viol, which I might have called a bass viol had that name not been taken by Savall’s own somewhat smaller ‘bass viol’.

Tembembe Ensamble Continuo comprised three instrumentalists, two singers (Ada Coronel and Zenen Zeferino) who also played, respectively the vihuela and jarana jarocha, both guitar-like instruments; and a dancer (Donaji Esparza).

The three instrumentalists: Leopoldo Novoa played marimbol (‘a plucked box musical instrument of the Caribbean’ {Wikipedia} held between the lower legs) and two kinds of Huasteco guitars, a Llanera harp and a ‘quijada de caballo’, literally a horse’s jaw; Enrique Barona commanded a huapanguera, the large guitar-like instrument of the Huasteco region of Veracruz, a jarana jarocha and mosquito, other varieties of Veracruz guitars, maracas and others; and Ulises Martinez played the violin and sang.

However, all of this variety went for little as there was no attempt to identify the instruments and their sounds.

The composers and their evolution
While several pieces were by anonymous composers, named composers included – 16th century Antonio de Cabezon, Pedro Guerrero and the Italian, Antonio Valente, whose improvisatory ‘Gallarda napolitana’ incorporated some satirical New Zealand references from Zenen Zeferino, which some of the audience obviously caught, but I missed: I couldn’t share the laughter.

Francisco Correa de Arauxo and Gaspar Sanz lived mainly in the 17th century (Sanz featured memorably, for me, in the 2014 Festival recitals by distinguished guitarist Hopkinson Smith). The female dancer Donaji Esparza, appeared during Sanz’s La petenera. She brought a simple though striking grace to the performance. In her earlier offerings, her approach was simply complementary to the music, with clear though unostentatious footwork; but her later contributions displayed a more impressive Zapeteado style that involved her feet becoming percussive instruments: virtuosic and energetic, though still without egotism. However, it would be a mistake to have expected a flamenco character in her performance.

Santiago de Murcia lived mainly in the 18th century. He represented the Huasteco culture of Mexico, with the famous El Cielito Lindo (not to be confused with the hugely popular mid-20th century song of the same name that’s almost become Mexico’s national anthem). It was in Santiago’s enchanting Cielito Lindo that Zenen Zeferino first appeared, his large commanding voice (amplified indeed but its vigorous character was clear enough); he was joined by Ada Coronel, flowers in her hair, a perfect complementary presence who proved just as vivid and confident a performer as Zeferino.

The second half began with El balajú jarocho, music of the Huasteco culture (Moncayo’s famous Huapango is of the same source, the Vera Cruz province) and was one of several expressing particular joy.

Towards the end
The penultimate bracket consisted of 18th century composer (contemporary with Vivaldi and Bach) Antonio Martin y Coll’s Diferencias sobre las folías, perhaps ‘variations based on Las folias’ which might have completely summed up the history of La folía; they varied in tempo and mood enormously, almost encompassing the whole range of human emotions:  Jordi Savall on bass viol, and step by step, Andrew Laurence King’s harp, Mayoral’s drum; castanets, other percussion and the great variety of guitar-variants from the two ensembles.

And at the end, the final Jarabe loco (jarocha) by Antonio Valente; Huasteco music again. The title apparently means ‘crazy syrup’), and the subtitle is ‘Gallarda napolitana’ (Neapolitan galliard? There’s a Savall CD that includes it entitled: ‘Renaisance Music for the Court of the Kings of Spain’). There was a hypnotic sobriety about it.

One doesn’t look for especial musical complexity or sophistication (in a Teutonic sense) in an exploration of the diverting and extremely lively musical culture that has always characterised the Mediterranean world, and in the cultures across the Atlantic that developed from it with a multitude of indigenous influences. Just profound musical delight in styles that are both largely foreign to northern Europe but which supply us with an indispensable counter-balance of musical delight, emotional exhilaration, and rhythmic and melodic energy.

The audience erupted ecstatically at the end.

Jordi Savall is 76 and looks and performs as if 20 years younger. Let’s hope he brings us another of his diverting programmes very soon.

Michael Houstoun memorably opens Waikanae’s chamber music recital series

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Waikanae Music Society
Michael Houstoun (piano)

Bach: English Suite No 2 in A minor, BWV 807
Chopin: Four Ballades (Opp. 23, 38, 47, 52)
Mozart: Sonata No 8 in A minor, K 310

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 18 February, 2:30 pm

This is the season of series launches. The Waikanae Music Society, in contrast to certain other comparable chamber music groups, is in good shape, thanks to an immediately attractive programme of eight concerts, with no patronisingly-popular concerts that fail to touch those likely to be interested in real chamber music; plus an enticing ticketing policy that makes it cheap to subscribe and to attend most concerts.

And that’s compounded by a big population of older people, many of whom seem to be cultivated and musically inclined. The proof of their success lay in the huge audience – I’d guess around 600 – which was of course in substantial part because of Michael Houstoun.

To recruit Houstoun to launch the series was a very good move (and the society chair Germana Nicklin presented flowers and life membership of the society to patrons Sir Rodney and Lady Gillian Dean, in particular, for their help with this concert). It was Houstoun’s 15th recital for the society, and he marked that by playing the same Mozart sonata that he’d played at his first one in 1987: the A minor, K 310.

Bach English Suite
But the concert began with Bach’s English Suite No 2 in A minor (chosen to chime with the key of the Mozart?). Houstoun’s Bach sounded immediately comfortable in the acoustic of the big auditorium and he exploited fully the Fazioli piano’s warmth. Considering its minor key, it was full of positive energy and in complete sympathy with piano rather than harpsichord; Houstoun didn’t subject his playing unduly to the harpsichord’s subtle dynamic boundaries which can obviously be relaxed on the piano. The sparkling Prelude was perfectly conceived.

There are six movements (counting the two bourrées as one); the elegant calm of the Allemande quieted the emotion that the fluid Prelude had established. The varied dance-derived movements might suggest greater distinctness than actually emerges in these, and in most of Bach’s suites. The Courante returns to a mood of sparkling cheerfulness and the Sarabande, in very slow, chaconne-like triple time, sometimes a hard-to-discern rhythm; it’s by far the longest movement.

The last two (three) movements are based on livelier dances. Houstoun’s Bourée I seemed to climb cheerfully up the hill, and then relaxed coming down, at a gentle pace. The Gigue was far from a boisterous peasant romp, but flowed evenly and stayed within the dynamic limits already set.

Chopin Ballades
Chopin’s four Ballades make a thoroughly rewarding package, and the performances by Houstoun the instinctive Chopinist, never sounded simply like a hundred other more routine accounts. There were discreet tempo (No 1 started uncommonly slowly) and dynamic shifts that always seemed just what the composer might have had in mind. (Incidentally, Houstoun clearly intended them to be listened to in pairs, with no applause between Nos 1 and 2, as he remained seated, hands poised for the next: the message didn’t seem to penetrate the audience for clapping again separated Nos 3 and 4. These things are not recondite affectations; they are sought by the performer and the audience should watch body language).

I can never hear No 1 now without recalling the diverting account by amateur pianist-cum-ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (Play it again), of his year-long struggle to master it. Houstoun certainly made it sound rather easier than Rusbridger found it, but its mighty challenges were still, very evident.

Though they can hardly be heard as four parts of an integrated suite, with their very different spirits and narratives (Chopin apparently had narrative backgrounds, but never revealed them) it is rewarding to hear them all together; after all, Chopin chose to use the same word to describe all four. So No 2, in F major, is more sanguine and less tortured than parts of No 1, though its sudden shocks never fail to surprise no matter how many times you’ve been there. Long pauses were an interesting, very telling aspect of Houstoun’s performance.

Nos 3 adopts an easy triple rhythm, never quite a waltz: subdued, with less drama, though with a turbulent left hand that created a feeling of unease. And No 4, after its hesitant opening, led to an uneasy passage with its complex left hand underlay; Houstoun evoked its spirit of uncertainty, embroidered with insight and sympathy. Typically, after a long pause and a prolonged episode of indecision, it hurls itself into a short, tumultuous finale.

This was the end of the concert and Houstoun played an encore: a less familiar Chopin Nocturne, Op 15 No 1.

Mozart’s sonata K310
But the second half of the concert had begun with Mozart’s A minor sonata, one of the great ones which, in a 1950s performance by Walter Gieseking, introduced me in my late teens properly to Mozart’s sonatas. It entranced me (and yes, you can now find it on YouTube!). I have to get used to the reading of the opening bar with an acciaccatura (if I have the term right) rather than an appoggiatura, which seems to be the convention today; Houstoun’s account was considered and absorbing, appropriate to its description Allegro maestoso. In the slow movement, Houstoun’s occasional stretching and slight swaying of the rhythm accorded with the description ‘cantabile con espressione’, even though it might have seemed somewhat unMozartian. Such touches contributed to a performance of one of only a couple of Mozart’s sonatas in a minor key, as masterful, authoritative and beautifully poetic, fleshing out a recital that very obviously fully rewarded the large audience which almost entirely stood in admiration at the end.

 

Masterly playing of Bach’s first sonata and partita from Martin Riseley

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts
Martin Riseley (violin)

J S Bach: Solo Violin Sonata No 1 in G minor, BWV 1001
and Partita No 1 in B minor, BWV 1002

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 14 February, 12:15 pm

It takes other professional and voluntary organisations a long time to organise a few concerts drawing mainly on New Zealand musicians. But impresario extraordinaire Marjan van Waardenberg probably spends a good deal of the summer, putting together something approaching 50 concerts – one a week – at St Andrew’s; perhaps more than all the other chamber music organisers in Greater Wellington combined. They have become an important institution in Wellington’s musical life, providing a down-town venue for students at Victoria University’s school of music as well as a way for established musicians to remain in the public eye.

I gather she has concerts pretty well finalised for the whole year.

As well as offering surprisingly accomplished student performances, we also get to hear top-class professionals in music that is often overlooked by the mainstream promoters.

Bach’s six solo violin works are a case; we hear the cello suites from time to time, and certain of the keyboard suites and partitas but the violin sonatas and partitas, apart from familiar ones like the 3rd partita, seem neglected.

Martin Riseley is Associate Professor and head of strings in the university school of music; in addition he has recently reconnected with Christchurch where he began his tertiary violin studies in the 1980s, becoming Concert Master of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra.

Both the first and second violin sonatas and partitas are in minor keys which indeed seem to lend them a more solemn, less sunny aspect. But as with most music that has less immediate appeal, they all reveal their beauties and musical strengths, slowly, after a few hearings, and I guess my tally is far more than that.

The opening Adagio of the G minor sonata really set the tone of Riseley’s performance, not revealing much lyrical, legato character, but rather his care with detailed articulation that captured its intensely elegiac tone. Fugue is the title of the second movement; on the violin it is a counter-intuitive process, but his playing showed how clearly its fugal character can be heard as well as its strong rhythmic character. The third movement, Siciliana, is laid out to present marked contrasts between phrases on the G string and those on the high strings, which Riseley handled in an easy swaying rhythm. And he drove through the Presto finale, leaning on the first beat of the bar in clean, energetic playing.

Partita No 1, is fundamentally in four movements, but it becomes eight as each is followed by a ‘Double’, or a variation, though it’s sometimes hard to identify aspects of the basic theme since the Doubles dwell on the bass line of the movement itself. So this Partita is about twice the length of the Sonata. The first movement is an Allemanda (Bach uses French and Italian terms seemingly randomly) is marked by double dotted motifs, that explore the violin’s full range, and its complexity always strikes one as particularly profound; its ‘Double’ is brisker and more legato and flowing in style. The Corrente is faster, in triple time, and more sanguine than the first movement, but the real quick movement of the suite is its Double, that Riseley played brilliantly at almost twice the speed of the Corrente itself.

The slow movement is the grave, triple time Sarabanda with routine double stopping that sometimes seems de trop; the following Double is again quicker, more sanguine and flowing. Then comes the last movement, marked Tempo di bourée, a movement that is probably more familiar than most of the others. And its Double is in a flowing rhythm that doesn’t seek to startle, and Riseley handled its long-breathed lines unostentatiously, not attempting to mitigate the pervasive B minor tonality that has generally cast its sombre mood over the whole work.

Martin Riseley’s masterly playing has whetted our appetite to hear all six sonatas and partitas. I wondered to Marjan afterwards whether this was the first of three St Andrew’s recitals for Riseley to play all these great works; she thought not, for now, but agreed it should be done.

A Consort Christmas: Tudor Consort assembles brilliant and diverting package of words and music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Tudor Consort directed by Michael Stewart

A Consort Christmas; carols and secular and liturgical pieces by Jean Mouton, Matteo Flecha ‘El Vielo’, Tallis, Francisco Guerrero, Byrd, Sweelinck, Praetorius, Peter Cornelius, Rachmaninov, Healey Willan, Howells, Poulenc, Richard Madden, and Gregorian chant  
and readings on Christmas themes from Robert Easting and Bryan Crump

Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Saturday 16 December, 7:30 pm

Given The Tudor Consort’s splendidly rehearsed and executed array of carols, chants, liturgical and secular songs connected with Christmas, one had to wonder whether the unusual quantity of Christmas-related music over the past few weeks had brought about some aural fatigue resulting in a smaller audience than I would have expected.

And so, to remind you of all the Christmas-like concerts over the past three weeks, look at the end of this review.

First came a Gregorian chant, Puer natus est nobis, which the programme described as the Introit for the third mass of Christmas Day, which sounded from the back (west end) of the church as choir members walked slowly up the centre aisle with music director Michael Stewart in their midst. Its spirit was one of optimism and joy.

A variant on that subject followed: Hodie Christus natus est by Jan Sweelinck, recorded in the programme as the Antiphon for Vespers of Christmas Day. Here emerged a marked characteristic of the choir’s performance – glorious, high sopranos, including voices that would be soloists in the Tallis Missa puer natus est nobis and elsewhere.

Readings: Robert Easting
After the Sweelinck, erstwhile choir member Robert Easting, Professor Emeritus (English language and literature) at Victoria University, delivered a splendidly orated recital of the 16th century ‘carol’ The Carol of Jolly Wat, replete with convincing contemporary pronunciation and profane histrionics.

(Introducing his verses, Easting mentioned the death this week of another distinguished Wellington academic at Oxford, Douglas Gray. It brought back memories: Gray was Dux at Wellington College in my third form year. By the time I was studying English at Victoria, he was junior lecturer in Professor Ian Gordon’s English Department, and I recall his lectures and seminars in stage II in Middle English and/or Anglo-Saxon. A further pedantic offering: one of our text books was Kenneth Sisam’s classic Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, still somewhere on my shelves. Sisam too was a distinguished New Zealand scholar at Oxford).

You’ll find the carol in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse. The idiom of this late Middle English, popular verse seemed to lie between the literary language of Chaucer and Langland, and the early Tudor poets who are still broadly comprehensible to our ears.

Readings: Bryan Crump
There were three later readings, by Bryan Crump who is familiar as an RNZ news reader. The first relating to a Christmas at Scott Base from a journal of Harry Jones, with amusing observations; the second, Marsden’s account of the first Christmas celebration in New Zealand, in 1814: a bit revelatory, especially in light of later exposure of Marsden’s violent proclivities; and finally a delightfully droll letter to Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens) daughter from Father Christmas.

The ‘serious’ music was interspersed by traditional carols in which the audience was required to join: God rest ye merry, gentlemen (in the programme, victim of common mis-punctuation – the comma before ‘merry’); Silent Night; Good King Wenceslas; Silent Night.

Tallis: Missa puer natus est nobis
The ‘composed’ music was by all those named in the heading. Tallis ‘Christmas Mass’, Missa puer natus est nobis, was divided into three parts and sung at three points in the programme; so it set the concert in what might be considered the heartland of Renaissance choral music. It is regarded as untypical of the Tallis known in most of his other music, perhaps because it was composed as the Catholic monarch, Mary, came to the throne in 1553, after the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, offering a much more friendly climate for Catholic musicians, as Tallis was. The absence from the score of soprano voices is attributed to Mary’s marriage to Philip II of Spain (the same Philip who features in Schiller’s and Verdi’s Don Carlos) whose Chapel Royal which was resident in England with the king seems not to have used high treble voices.

Bits of the mass had been published in the monumental ten-volume Tudor Church Music series in 1928 but no satisfactory performing version was known till 1961, when additional sections were discovered. Though the Mass remains incomplete (most of the Credo is still lost and some of the other movements have missing voices), it has now had several impressive recorded performances; it is now regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the Tudor era. A scholarly edition appeared in 1977 (these details from an article in the Musical Times, on the Internet).

Its characteristics
It has no Kyrie, but begins with the Gloria. As noted in Michael Stewart’s comment below, it follows the shape of Taverner’s Missa Gloria tibi trinitas which was sung by the Tudor Consort in February last year; I reviewed it but had forgotten that detail. I’d noted there that the Kyrie was not regarded as part of the Ordinary of the Mass before the Reformation; though I’m not sure that’s altogether correct. Further, Tallis scored his mass for seven voices; seven soloists led it while the rest of the choir (as far as I could tell, sitting some way back) contributed wonderful richness to the Gloria, in which men’s voices dominated initially, while the high voices soon entered creating a luminous quality above the wonderful polyphony of the middle vocal lines.

I had wondered about references in other sources to the scoring, for seven voices, but no sopranos. When I contacted Michael Stewart to clarify it, he told me he’d mentioned it in his pre-concert talk, which I had missed; he explained: “The sopranos were singing ‘mean’ parts, which had a lower range than the ‘treble’ parts that one would expect from earlier music such as the masses of John Taverner… Compare the tessitura of the Tallis compared with the very high lines the sopranos had to negotiate in last year’s performance of Taverner’s Missa Gloria tibi trinitas for instance. The mass would undoubtedly have been performed lower and with falsettists singing the women’s parts, but that necessitates men who can sing very low and very high, and would preclude the sopranos involvement!”

The second part of Tallis’s ‘Christmas Mass’ opened the second part of the programme: Sanctus and Benedictus. The solo sopranos (Chelsea Whitfield and Phoebe Sparrow) were also conspicuous in here. (The other soloists were Megan Hurnard – alto, Philip Roderick and Garth Norman – tenors, David Houston and Simon Christie – basses). The elaborate counterpoint, taking the text on interesting journeys in the Sanctus; the Benedictus lowered the dynamic level distinctly, giving the sopranos a hushed, ecstatic quality. The Agnus Dei was sung towards the end of the concert, slow and placatory, rhythmically complex, and harmonically dense.

Other Renaissance and later music
Much of the other music was also from the Renaissance, consolidating our feeling for the variety to be found in the early period (Mouton’s Nasciens Mater and the two more secular Spanish pieces, with peasantish, dancelike suggestions), and later composers (Byrd’s English setting of This day Christ was born and Praetorius’s In dulci jubilo).

Particularly striking were two liturgical settings by composers primarily known for orchestral and instrumental music: Rachmaninov and Poulenc: the best-known section from Rachmaninov’s Vespers (‘All night Vigil’), deeply felt, employing idiomatic-sounding Russian, Bogoroditse devo; and Poulenc’s O magnum mysterium the first of his ‘Four Motets for Christmas’.  It was a sumptuous, yet delicate performance that to me remains a fine model of mid-20th century music that is engaging and accessible and at the same time inventive, and sounding clearly of it age.

Music of the 19th and 20th centuries filled most of the second half: two distinct pieces entitled ‘The Three Kings’ (set to different poems), by Healey Willan (a curious yet interesting setting of a poem by Laurence  Housman – brother of A E H), and Peter Cornelius (better known perhaps as an opera composer – The Barber of Bagdad, still heard occasionally in Germany), with a very taxing solo part from Simon Christie.

Finally, pieces by Herbert Howells and Richard Madden. Howells’ ‘Here is a little door’, a curious, childlike text set to music that always strikes me as the quintessentially English, religious manner. While that was an a cappella piece, a 15th century verse, ‘I sing of a maiden’ by still-living Richard Madden was accompanied by Chelsea Whitfield at the organ, with solos by Phoebe Sparrow and Philip Roderick.

The pair of Spanish songs returned us to the 16th century, with composers Matteo Flecha ‘El Vielo’ and Francisco Guerrero: Guerrero’s A un Nino Llorando, with opportunities for well-contrasted female soloists to be heard (Whitfield, Melanie Newfield, Jane McKinlay, Andrea Cochrane and Amanda Barclay); and the latter a peasant-like, Christmas-related song in Riu riu chiu which offered a chance to hear other than seriously liturgical Spanish music of the period (with three good bass soloists – Christie, Houston and Thomas Drent).

 

Christmas (mainly) choral concerts of the past three weeks  

Vox Serbica
Cantoris
Supertonic Choir
A Soprani Christmas (Duo of singers Paloma Bruce and Ruth Armishaw)
Wainuiomata Choir
Baroque Voices in Monteverdi (not strictly Christmas)
Wellington Young Voices
Metropolitan Cathedral Choirs and Orchestra
Tudor Consort
Orpheus Choir and NZSO Messiah
Bach Choir
Festival Singers and The Northern Chorale
Nota Bene:

And to come:

Messiaen’s La Nativité – organ Brian Cash
Counsel in Concert (not strictly Christmas)
Baroque Voices with Palliser Viols

Admirable Sibelius as well as Lilburn and a rare trombone concerto from Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Orchestra conducted by Ewan Clark with David Bremner (trombone)

Lilburn: Suite for Orchestra (1955)
Tomasi: Trombone Concerto
Sibelius: Symphony No 2 in D major, Op. 43

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 10 December, 2:30 pm

Lilburn’s Suite for Orchestra was composed for the Auckland Junior Symphony Orchestra in 1955. Thus it was a sensible piece for a non-professional orchestra, though that is not to suggest that its wide-ranging moods, brilliant orchestration and rhythms that range widely from the utmost subtlety to the unusually boisterous are not very taxing.

Subtle brass playing is rarely a highlight of amateur orchestras and it was trumpets and trombones that had some difficulty in adapting to ensemble expectations, particularly in the opening Allegro movement. However the large string sections and both the horns (four of them) and woodwinds contributed the sort of sounds that are recognisably Lilburn. The middle movement, Andante, offered rewarding opportunities to oboes and horns; while the orchestra’s timpani has been problematic in this church in the past, Alec Carlisle’s handling ensured its role was perfectly integrated in the orchestral texture.

The fifth movement, Vivace, is a delightfully scored dance in Latin rhythms – Mexican I guess, which is no doubt the reason for J M Thomson’s programme notes for William Southgate’s recording remarking on a Copland influence (I imagine, with El salon Mexico in mind; a solo trumpet sounded very idiomatic). Conductor Ewan Clark gave the players their head in this movement and the result was perhaps a rare occasion when Lilburn lets rip – not too much, mind you. However, the performance was a happy opportunity to witness a not often heard aspect of his personality, and it was also sufficient to make the audience aware of the composer’s international stature.

Henri Tomasi (French, not Italian; of Corsican origin) flourished through the middle of the 20th century; he wrote a number of concertos, mainly for winds, and this one seems to have gained popularity. The opening movement is in triple time, entitled Andante et scherzo – valse, and this gave the piece a dreamy quality. David Bremner’s programme note mentions jazz influences – Tommy Dorsey in particular, though I tended to listen for French influences. Debussy and Ravel are there though not dominant, and there are rather more suggestions of later French composers such as Ibert or Jolivet; but Tomasi’s language, while essentially tonal, melodic in a Poulenc sort of way, sounds more radical, testing than either – more acidic, harmonically complex.

There were interesting forays for most other instruments. One interesting event was a sudden break off in the middle of the second movement (Nocturne) which had been going along in a calm, bluesy manner: a trombone breakdown. A gadget called a trigger broke; it enables the player to obtain low notes by diverting the sound back through the tube behind him instead of fully extending the slide forward. Since none of the orchestral trombonists was playing, one of those instruments came to the rescue. So it continued its rather charming (Ellingtonian, I thought) way.

The last movement too was rather diverting, though Bremner didn’t pull off a comparable stunt; here, there were offerings from side drum, timpani, xylophone…, all ear-catching, quirky and attractive.

I’d like to explore Tomasi’s other music.

Sibelius 2
Then came the main course: Sibelius’s Second Symphony. The work opened very promisingly, as we were drawn in with those expectant, pulsing strings and the oboe and then the four rapturous horns; and the strings long legato lines, handled with gentle emotion. This was the first Sibelius symphony I heard played live by the then National Orchestra in the 1950s, and still a feeling of rapture overcomes me.

The second movement is announced almost threateningly, with a startling timpani fanfare, followed almost silently by a longish pizzicato episode that emerges slowly from basses then cellos, overlaid by questioning bassoons. Its rather rhapsodic character – it’s labelled Tempo andante, ma rubato – and its increasing grandeur involved much from the fine horn section; and though other brass didn’t always blend in the otherwise good ensemble, the whole was certainly more successful and more beautiful than the sum of its parts. The slow movement runs to around a quarter of an hour and to hold audience enraptured throughout is a considerable challenge for a conductor, one that Clark met admirably.

The emotional crux of the scherzo movement, Vivacissimo, is the contrasting string of nine repeated notes (B flat?, and repeated a semi-tone higher) from the oboes and these were beautifully played. And the transition from a further evocation of those repeated notes through the steady build-up to the grand opening out into the Finale, Allegro moderato, remains just another of the glories of the work that I have simply never tired of, and although this was not to be compared with the many magnificent performances that one has heard by professional orchestras, live and recorded, any performance that seems driven by an awareness of the emotional and spiritual splendour that Sibelius conceived here, simply works. This one did.