Author: Lindis Taylor

Gems from the tutors at the Aroha String Quartet’s music academy

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s Lunchtime concert

The Aroha String Quartet’s International Music Academy 2016: Tutors’ concert

Music by Schumann, Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 10 August , 12:15 pm

The Aroha String Quartet is more than ten years old and has, through two or three personnel changes, become an important feature in Wellington’s musical scene.

They take their position seriously, now contributing to the teaching, coaching and support of young (and adult, non-professional) musicians. The Academy takes place at St Andrew’s between 9 and 14 August, with two public concerts on Sunday the 14th. The coaching is done by the quartet’s members plus a number of other international musicians, most of whom participated in this recital.

There was only one complete work (Mozart’s Sonata in D, K 381) and three single movements by the other composers.

The piece played in its entirety was a reasonably familiar sonata for piano, four-hands, played by Songwen Li and Xing Wang. They played it in a brisk, staccato manner rather than seeking its lyrical character. Their style no doubt tended to expose possible ensemble flaws in a piano duet, though there was little of that to bother about, with all four hands hitting the keyboard in a well-practised manner with fine ensemble. That applied to the outer movements while the middle, Andante, revealed a more song-lie quality: it was by far the longest of the three movements.

The first item on the programme was the first movement of Schumann’s wonderful piano quintet (Op 44), from the Aroha Quartet (Haihong Liu and Simeon Broom, violins; Zhongxian Jin, viola; Andrew Joyce, cello) with Jian Liu contributing the piano part. It might have reflected the players’ positions, or mine, in the organ gallery, that Jian Liu’s piano and Andrew Joyce’s cello (he had replaced an ailing Robert Ibell) dominated the soundscape. Given that the piano was Schumann’s first love, it’s never surprising in his chamber music that the piano tends to take charge.

Then came the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ piano trio (in D, Op 70 No 1) in which Simeon Broom (second violin in the quartet) and Andrew Joyce were joined by pianist Rachel Church. Here Broom assumed a conspicuous space while Church’s piano was beautifully subdued and genial but by no means obscured; and as usual, Joyce’s cello was a lovely contribution; he attracts immediate attention no matter how gentle or subdued his playing, or how good the other players are.

Then finally, the quartet, alone, played Mendelssohn’s last string quartet, first movement, Allegro vivace assai (in F minor, Op 80) written shortly before he died. For many a music lover, for whom Mendelssohn may not be among the top ten, an exception is made for this: beautifully crafted, infused with a depth of feeling and musical inspiration that is moving and completely arresting. A pity that it took his beloved sister’s death and his own failing health to inspire him to commit it to paper; and the only problem was their stopping at the end of the first movement, and that he didn’t feel the impulse to write more of such genius.

Try to get along to their public concerts at St Andrew’s on Sunday: 3 pm and 5:30 pm.

Piano quartets from Diedre Irons and NZSO string principals

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Wellington Chamber Music
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Julia Joyce (viola), Andrew Joyce (cello), Diedre Irons (piano)

Schubert: Adagio and Rondo Concertante in F, D 487
Fauré: Piano Quartet in C minor, Op 15
Brahms: Piano Quartet in A, Op 26

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 7 August 3 pm

There was little doubt that a piano quartet comprising three of the principals in the NZSO plus one of the most admired New Zealand pianists would produce a delightful concert. And the composers to be played were further assurance of a couple of rewarding hours.

That expectation could withstand the unknown quantity of the first piece, by Schubert. Written aged 19 and therefore, in Schubert’s case, the work of a thoroughly experienced, even mature, composer. After all, he’d already written more lovely music than most composers do in a long life: seven operas, four symphonies, eleven string quartets, scores of songs and piano pieces.

This was practically the only music he wrote for piano quartet. Diedre Irons’s programme note remarked on the prominence given to the piano, and I thought she was to be admired for making little effort to disguise that feature. There were occasional moments when, for example, the cello sounded as if it might be offered something worthwhile to do, but often that was just a passing distraction; and one of the violin’s appearances soon led to a defeated sounding, descending arpeggio.

That was the introductory Adagio part. The Rondo proved a bit more interesting, though it still sounded rather like a piano sonata with obbligato strings. However, there was more liveliness here and better evidence of Schubert’s singular musical gifts. For all the comparative reticence by the three stringed instruments, the players explored all the latent possibilities of colour and dynamics and varied pacing that are to be found in Schubert.

The first of Fauré’s two piano quartets, probably his most popular piece of chamber music, brought us to well-known territory. And there was never a moment’s doubt about either its musical worth or its illuminating playing by these four musicians. By the time Fauré was about 30, when this was written, he was displaying great maturity in handling ensemble music and in creating interesting, well balanced music that evolved in an imaginative way. In this work he seems to be seeking as full and varied a sound as possible, even striving towards the spirit of an orchestral work, perhaps the piano concerto he never wrote.

Often in music these days, what I look forward to is the slow movement (when I was young it was usually the fast, exciting parts). So in this quartet, I particularly enjoyed the Adagio with the slow, thoughtful theme that was introduced by the piano and cello, though soon it encompassed all the strings which were particularly beautiful. And the cello’s return later in an extended passage was especially captivating. The strongly contrasted finale – Allegro molto – created a feeling of inevitability with some moments in which the piano became quite insistent; but the work’s overall feeling is of a generous and perfectly reasonable sharing of all the musical material among the four players.

Brahms was five or six years younger than Fauré when he wrote his two piano quartets. It’s the other one, Op 25, that’s rather better known, and more popular; so this outing was most welcome.

It might seem odd that Op 25 is in a minor key (G minor) while this, which a generally fairly peaceful and meditative, is in the most sanguine of keys, A major. The experts hear a good deal of Schubert in this piece, in the handling of the piano by itself in, to mark out a big extended tune as the strings murmur along. It’s been observed that with these chamber works Brahms was responding to the discovering, unearthing, in the 1850s (much by Schumann), of a great deal of Schubert’s music which had simply been filed away, unplayed and unpublished.

As I listened, I had begun to make notes to the effect that in this quartet, Brahms was stretching the limits of convention by injecting greater variety in each movement with unexpected mood changes and a disinclination to adhere literally to the character of each movement as announced by its title.

This became so erratic and puzzling that when I got home I looked up the movements of Op 26 and discovered that those printed in the programme related to Op 25, and of course, my notes conformed much better to the real names of the movements, as they should have been shown: 1. Allegro non troppo, 2. Poco adagio, 3 Scherzo – Poco allegro, and Trio, 4 Allegro. The main discrepancy was the reversing of the fast and slow, second and third movements. (Op 25’s second movement is marked as in the programme, Allegro ma non troppo and a Trio: Animato). Then it fell into place.

In any case, the players seemed to rejoice in the idiosyncrasies in Brahms’s composition, and there was a real feeling of pleasure and engagement. In the Finale the piano led the way at once with the strings contributing cohesive support for it, though individual strings took their turn in the limelight. And here I had remarked that, if Brahms had intended to inject a gypsy element in it (‘alla zingarese’, in the G minor quartet), he seemed to have encountered a fairly sedate gypsy band that day. However, there was a touch of the zingarese here, though nothing to remark on.

Happily, of course, the mistake probably bothered only the one who was trying to keep track of what was going on, in order to be able to write something that was vaguely sensible.

It was a most satisfying concert, a mixture of the known and the not well known and the unknown; but all rewarding and performed with the greatest musicality, zest and imagination.

 

 

 

 

NZSO and Christiane Libor in wonderful Strauss songs and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony

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New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart with Christiane Libor (soprano)

Strauss: Four Last Songs
Mahler: Symphony No 4 in G

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 6 August, 7:30 pm

It might have been possible to blame a rival entertainment or the wet and chilly weather for the rather loosely packed audience for a concert that I’d expected to have a ‘full house’ notice at the door. One might also wonder whether it’s a reflection on the slow decline of musical tastes, and that those of us who were brought up with a certain amount of great music in our ears as children are disappearing (and being replaced by, let’s say, generations with different tastes).

Has Wellington become blasé about the fact that we have one of the world’s great orchestras living here, conducted by an eminent conductor of the older generation, and the programme comprised a couple of what I’d have thought were among the most popular and best-loved classical works.

German soprano Christiane Libor’s reputation rests primarily on Wagner and Strauss and she is based largely in Europe with a few North American outings; none, by the look of her biography, in Britain or other English-speaking countries. While it would have been wonderful to have heard her in a substantial chunk from the Ring cycle for example, the Four Last Songs are a moving summation of the art of Richard Strauss.

Her gifts were evident within the first few bars of the first song, Spring, with a voice that was not just strong and opulent, but could also find the pathos and beauty in Strauss’s late music. The song’s themes however, are not uniformly elegiac, depicting life’s twilight years, capping a long, richly creative life. This first song is suffused with a calm happiness, the optimism of springtime. The second however, September, presages autumn, is a more elaborate song where Libor could demonstrate her vocal fluidity, ranging between glowing fortissimi as well as quiet.

The third and last of the three Hesse songs, Beim Schlafengehen, introduced by low stings, later featured a lovely solo from Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s violin, and then rose to an ecstatic climax. It sometimes seems to me the right place for the cycle to end (there were discussions about the most appropriate order of the four songs), for the spirit awoken by singer and orchestra seems a mixture of that ecstasy and a going out.

But the words of the last song, Im Abendrot, by Eichendorff, one of the most distinctive poems of the early 19th century Romantic poet, contemporary of Rückert and Heine, do make a more meaningful ending, Libor’s voice now in a warm vein of acceptance.

Though the huge size of Strauss’s orchestra makes possible occasional overwhelming effects, more often it’s the range of instruments used with finesse, that have evolved over centuries in western music, that allows an ever-changing chamber music quality to emerge, subtly reflecting the sense and emotion of the words, and supporting, almost never obscuring, the voice.

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was, I think, the first live Mahler performance I heard, 20-ish, and I remember being at once captivated and baffled by its size and character. It employs a smaller, more discreet orchestra than the other symphonies: no trombones or tuba and only five horns, when some at the time, were using eight or nine (as in NZSO’s last Strauss plus Escher concert). Its character is perhaps defined by the poem used in the last movement, somewhat peasant-like, naïve; so it opens with sleigh-bells (I have an early recording by Bruno Walter where the sleigh-bells are deleted).

Its magic only deepens and expands with the passing years.

Which prompts me to reflect on the behaviour of some of those who ply my trade of music critic. This work attracted some nasty and cruel reviews at its first performances, and some were quoted in the programme notes; similarly it’s sad to read about the cruelly treated Bruckner, himself a somewhat naive figure, who was routinely attacked by the myopic Brahms-lover, Hanslick who seemed to regard music criticism as ablood sport.

It’s the fairy-tale qualities that endear this music to the listener, and De Waart, to help create that, encouraged woodwind players (in particular) to deliver keener, shriller tones, often by raising their instruments to a horizontal position, and making much use of the three flutes plus piccolo. And thematic fragments get passed around in a way that creates a sort of children’s game.

Another peasant-like feature appears in the second movement where Leppänen switches to a scordatura-tuned violin (typically tuning the G string down a tone or so) to capture that amateur fiddler sense, in music that moved between the Ländler dance (pre-curser to the waltz) and rough peasant tunes. The orchestra played along with it all in seeming delight.

The Ruhevoll (Adagio I guess) movement has always seemed to me is a kind of try-out for the Adagietto in the Fifth Symphony and I’ve wondered why it hasn’t achieved a similar life of its own. But it’s great length – round 20 minutes – would be against it. Its variety of mood is also greater than in the Adagietto, with its combination of splendour and delicacy and rough, peasantish passages.

The reappearance of Christiane Libor, walking in slowly during the opening bars of the fourth movement, felt like a home-coming – we needed to hear more of her. In some ways the last movement might seem something of an anti-climax after the splendours of the third. It’s a setting of one of the 700-odd folk poems collected by Arnim and Brentano and published as Des Knaben Wunderhorn between 1805 and 1808.

It was criticised from that time, not for additions through the nineteenth century, but for its lack of scholarship – the sources were not adhered to, some were subject to embellishment or addition, and some were simply inventions by the compilers themselves. But they are no less a rich treasury of folk poetry that helped inspire the many poets and composers of the Romantic era, from Heine and Eichendorff to Weber and Schumann.

The combination of the ebullient, colourful orchestral scoring with a voice beautifully equipped to blend their playfulness, naivete and spirituality. They rejoiced in the simple things of life, bringing about a subsiding, ‘glow of serenity and peace’ (to quote a quote the programme notes take from musicologist Hugh Macdonald).

The absence of a Beethovenish coda led initially to a somewhat subdued response from the audience, though it grew in passion as the minutes passed, as people understood what a wonderful performance they’d heard.

 

Cellist Rebecca Turner with intriguing and entertaining music on carbon-fibre cello

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s Lunchtime concert

Rebecca Turner (cello) with help from electronic tape

Music by Christopher William Pearce, Carl Vine and Pêteris Vasks

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 3 August, 12:15 pm

There are certain benefits in forming habits, and the weekly lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s are among the less sinful of what I’m prepared to confess to. Well, there was the weather. But I was there and though we (Middle C Incorporated) had not assigned the reviewing to anyone, Rebecca Turner’s performance of a totally unknown composer soon had me reaching for pen and notebook.

It was by a composer friend of the cellist, 42-year-old American, Christopher William Pearce, and involved things that I often find pretentious, alienating, uncalled for, even disguising a lack of ideas. Sometimes the involvement of electronics or wacky instruments are a turn-off, but by setting aside prejudice, one can be surprised and delighted.

The first adventure however, was her cello, a black instrument without the traditional shape, but rather the shape of a large acoustic guitar. It delivered a warm and perfectly well projected sound. In spite of a normal wood-like sound produced when she hit the side of the cello, it was made of carbon-fibre which has become widespread in sports equipment and in the popular music field. It’s been accepted more recently in the non-classical field, but is still looked at askance by most classical musicians. I might have believed that too, before becoming increasingly uneasy at the madness of the multi-million dollar Stradivarius market; though I have given up claiming to detect a difference between a 1700 model and a well-made one of yesterday. There are in fact differences in the sound produced, but I suspect the untutored ear would only hear a louder and richer sound.

Rebecca played Pearce’s Variations on Wondrous Love, based on a ‘folk hymn’ from the American South, not familiar to me. It began normally, but slowly started to be interfered with by Asian sounds, a drone at the bottom end of the cello, eerie harmonics at the top, hypnotic sequences, hints of pentatonic tonality, trills and fancy efflorescence. Towards the end she parked her bow and attacked with pizzicato, which developed into a hair-raising technique as the plucking was linked with quick stroke down the string which created a sort of bowed effect. I found myself increasingly intrigued and amused (if that’s an emotion permitted of a reviewer of classical music).

The second piece was by Australian Carl Vine, some of whose music I know: not particularly main-stream.  Rebecca Turner gave some details about how it was to work. It involved a microphone placed near the cello and the activation of a tape that the composer prepared and supplied with the score. That was a bit mysterious to me; I found it hard to see or hear how she activated the tape and controlled its behaviour; how her playing actually engaged with and kept in line with the accompanying tape (and at one point with a not incongruous police siren on the street). The tape later became increasingly dominant, leaving her as an unequal contestant, threatening to obliterate the cello’s mere human-created sounds.  The sounds became increasingly complex, vying with each other, but the cello recovered its confidence and eventually subsided, as the main player, into rather gentle, lyrical music that even had touches of beguiling charm.

It did not annoy me and I had confess that for all its machine-driven aspects, the cellist’s skill in keeping abreast with the tape’s formidable demands, and the actual sounds produced, both impressed and delighted me.

Rebecca Turner, by the way, comes from Wellington – Tawa College, then a bachelor’s degree from Canterbury University, masters from Johns Hopkins and a doctorate from Goldsmiths College, University of London (where she was taught by the late cellist, Alexander Ivashkin, whom she’d followed after he left Canterbury), and where she now teaches.

Another excursion into the unorthodox was Pêteris Vasks’s Pianissimo. (Latvian: I have a special, irrational affection for Riga, a lovely, art nouveau-rich city with a splendid opera house where I got to four operas in a week, and Wagner worked in his twenties).  It is the second movement of a piece called Book. Rebecca also described some of the experimental aspects of this, helping her cause by allowing a secretive smile to appear once or twice. The excitement here was an accompaniment, not from machine but from the cellist’s own voice, as she pursued a gentle contrapuntal line, her voice nicely modulated to accommodate the cello’s strenuous line, and long sinuous glissandi down the A string. In fact, her singing voice carried quite well, though I had some difficulty catching all she said in her introductory remarks.

Though there was no mention of using tape material in the Vasks piece, there were times when the high line carrying the decorative melodic sounds were accompanied by a low drone that I couldn’t imagine could have come from an adjacent string. But in fact, it did – fingering high on the D string, accompanied by the open G string.

Here was a recital where the existence of electronic elements and fairly unusual techniques seemed really at the service of music rather than, as I have too often felt, being experiments for their own sake. In any case, I enjoyed all three pieces for their musical interest and the impressive skill and musicality of the cellist.

 

 

Music Futures diverting showcase for rising young musicians

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Music Futures: The Sound of Wellington Youth Music 2016

Blue Notes (Tawa College Chamber Choir, conductor: Isaac Stone, accompanist: Martin Burdan)
Mendelssohn and Daughters; Zephyr Wills (violin), Vanessa O’Neill (piano) and Emily Paterson (cello)
Guest artists: Malavika Gopal and Anna van der Zee (violins), Thomas Guldborg (percussion)
Lavinnia Rae (cello) and Hugh McMillan (piano)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 31 July, 3 pm

Music Futures is an independent enterprise set up by a group of people who felt there was a need for something more to help talented young musicians through financial awards, performance, opportunities, workshops and masterclasses, mentoring, and lending and hiring instruments. This was their first public performance this year. Members of the NZSO are among the tutors and mentors.

This concert set out in part to illustrate the range of musical genres: a chamber choir, a cut-down concerto, a chamber group and an arrangement of an Indian raga from some of the grown-up participants.

The Tawa College’s small choir, Blue Notes, demonstrated a quality that would, for any average listener, demand top place in any choral competition, such as the Big Sing in Dunedin, where they have been nominated as finalists later this month. Three small pieces, one by their suburban mentor Craig Utting (Monument), slow, clear harmonies and, like all their items a display of admirably sensitive dynamics. Their other offerings were from almost the extremes of western music, from the ‘Agnus Dei’ from Palestrina’s Missa Brevis to Stephen Sondheim’s The Miracle Song. They also contributed at the end of the concert with a careful studied a cappella choral piece by Brahms: ‘Dem dunkeln Schloss der heil’gen Erde’ and Karimatanu Kuicha by Ko Matsushita, that involved tricky intonation and rhythms: all from memory.

The first movement of Mendelssohn’s piano trio in D minor, Op 49 was played by three players from Kapiti and Wellington Girls’ colleges, two girls and a boy, named as if they were Mendel’s son and daughter. Though it’s such a gorgeous work and I know it so well, I can’t remember when last heard it. They played it with a certain languorousness, not altogether inappropriate; but an excellent way to prolong the delicious experience of that rapturous second theme.

Three NZSO players then recreated an arrangement by violinist Malavika Gopal of a raga by Ravi Shankar, entitled La Danse, for two violins and tabla. That offered an attractive contrast to the rest of the concert.

Then we had a foretaste of the concerto that NZSM student Lavinnia Rae was to play the coming Wednesday at the combined concert between the NZSM orchestra and the Wellington Youth Orchestra: Shostakovich’s first cello concerto (first two movements), the orchestra’s part played by Hugh McMillan. Played without the score, this was a remarkably mature and accomplished performance that revealed a real dramatic awareness, as well as brilliant handling of false harmonics in the second movement.

I regretted the likelihood of missing that concert.

There will be two further concerts from Music Futures: on 18 September and 13 November. They too are bound to be highly rewarding experiences for the audience.

 

 

Full success for three works at Edo de Waart’s first Strauss excursion of his tenure

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New Zealand Symphony Orchestra Conducted by Edo de Waart, with Samuel Jacobs (French horn)  

Escher: Musique pour l’esprit en deuil
Mozart: Horn Concerto No 4 in E flat, K 495
Strauss: Sinfonia domestica, Op 53

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 30 July, 7:30 pm

In an account of the music I got to hear in Sydney last December (see review of 4 January 2016), I reported hearing two concerts by Edo de Waart and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; one of them featured Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and I allowed myself to be delighted that we would probably be getting some fine Strauss from him after he took over the reins of the NZSO.

This was the first Strauss outing, though we heard Mahler’s Third Symphony and Beethoven’s Eroica under De Waart in April.  Last year, you’ll recall, he came and conducted Mahler’s Ninth in August.

So the somewhat less often played Sinfonia Domestica was much looked forward to. However, I was a little surprised at the not-full house for this splendid concert, and can scarcely believe that anyone would pass up such a concert in order to sit in the freezing wind in the Stadium to watch a football match.

Rudolf Escher
The concert opened with a real surprise – a symphonic poem by a Dutch composer I’d never heard of: one Rudolf Escher whose father was the half-brother of M C Escher, the artist whose architectural etchings depicting irregular, impossible perspectives have continued to intrigue.

There has always been curiosity as to why the Netherlands has scarcely produced any famous composers, at least not since the Renaissance. Some of those you think might be Dutch turn out to be Belgian, like Joseph Jongen. But there are Alphons Diepenbrock and Willem Pijper; and there are a few others from the mid 20th century, including Rudolf Escher. His Musique pour l’esprit en deuil (‘Music for the spirit in mourning’) impressed me from its opening, the almost inaudible notes, finding in it a great deal of what I enjoy generally of the music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It was written after Rotterdam, where he lived, was bombed to oblivion by the Germans in 1940 destroying most of his scores and possessions. While the music clearly expresses grief, it was also strangely beautiful and compelling, engaging with a rich, complex palette from a large orchestra that was skillfully and interestingly handled. There was apparently no detailed programme; anyway, I rarely try to conjure a narrative or images when listening to new music, though occasionally things come to mind.

Obviously, the composer had much on his mind here, and Edo de Waart helped the music to play itself so that the highly evocative score was endlessly absorbing without any need to look for a story or visual imagery.  The scoring was very colourful, with a piano creating a steady beat for a while, along with a wide variety of percussion, all of which seemed inevitable rather than used just because it was there. The big, slowly assembled, anguished climax came (I don’t think it was intended to depict the bombing, which would have been too trite and superficial in a composer of such obvious subtlety and intelligence), and faded calmly over a long coda, with acceptance.

Horn concerto
Mozart’s fourth horn concerto followed; such a disconnect damaged neither work. The total break between Escher and Mozart, occupied by extensive changes of players and orchestral configuration, to a small body of strings plus two each of horns and oboes. It sounded perfectly adequate after nearly four times that number a few minutes earlier.

The horn soloist was Samuel Jacobs who is soon to return to the position of principal horn in the orchestra after an absence that included the same position with the Royal Philharmonic in London. Even without the obvious international distinction of the post with the NZSO, and the impressive pedigree detailed in the programme booklet, the ears bore evidence enough of gorgeous playing confirming him as one of today’s most distinguished players.

The main feature of his playing is an almost unreal smoothness and perfection of tone which makes no gesture at all towards the idiosyncratic sounds produced by a natural horn, the use of which has become popular even in some late 19th century music. Even for a valved horn Mozart offers challenges, but audible flaws seemed inconceivable. The orchestra matched the elegance of the solo playing.

Sinfonia Domestica
The riches of this splendid concert were not exhausted however. Strauss’s domestic symphony is not as often played as for example, Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra or Don Quixote; and that’s not just because of the embarrassing intimacies that Strauss exposes us to, or the enormous wind forces that he calls for. There’s a certain naiveté and excess that is not always perfectly matched by subtlety and taste; and it’s those characteristics that no doubt fueled its enormous success at its premiere in 1904 in New York and at Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia (6000 attended there over two nights), as well as the rather pious and pedantic attacks and ridicule that some critics have directed at it. If Strauss had refrained from offering any detail at all about the inspiration behind it, I’m sure its reputation would be very different.

Happily, the programme notes did not enlarge too much on the story and the audience was ready to be won over by the spectacular size of the orchestra (five saxophones, nine horns, quadruple winds elsewhere) and the stunningly accomplished performance that could still, and did, generate a rare excitement. That the house did not sell out to a knowledgeable public (do we still have one?) made me cringe for the groundless boasting by civic leaders about the ‘cultural capital’ which has been unjustified since the 1990s.

De Waart’s performance dwelt on the colour, drollerie and the purely musical elements of the composition, while taking care not to overplay aspects that lend themselves to burlesque or caricature. Then, the grand virtues of this episodic and idiosyncratic composition could be heard without hindrance and be enjoyed simply as a somewhat excessive orchestral showpiece with plenty of entertaining features and musical strengths.

It certainly succeeded splendidly at that level.

 

CMNZ scores with brilliant clarinet and piano trio at the End of Time

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Chamber Music New Zealand

Julian Bliss (clarinet) and the NZ Trio (Justine Cormack, Ashley Brown, Sarah Watkins)

Brahms: Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Op 114
Ross Harris: There May be Light
Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 28 July, 7:30 pm 

A programme of what, twenty years ago, might have been seen as a bit forbidding, drew a very good house at this concert, and at the end they responded very enthusiastically.

It may have been partly the fact that here was a conventional chamber group with the added interest of an extra player. It might also have been because audiences have come to accept that there is nothing to fear in Messiaen, even though he was in many ways, and still is, a radical composer who followed a unique path, all his own. In addition, Ross Harris’s music has gained more exposure in recent years; while it still sounds very ‘contemporary’, audience familiarity with much of his recent music, cast in traditional forms such as his six symphonies, has probably won him entry to the small group of new Zealand composers whose names are quite familiar, who are now considered mainstream, no longer too forbidding or incomprehensible.

Even though so far, I can recall only one of his symphonies, the second, being played by the NZSO – just a couple of months ago; there was a piano piece played by Emma Sayers last month and last year a piano quartet; and Requiem for the Fallen was played in 2014 – the year we were overwhelmed with WW1 stuff.

So it was perhaps a small surprise that Ross Harris’s piece, more than Messiaen, was now the most challenging listen, something of a retreat from the big public compositions of recent years, back to the sort of uncompromising composer of his earlier years.

The central piece was Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Harris’s There may be light was commissioned by Chamber Music New Zealand with the suggestion that it might be related to the Messiaen piece. In many ways, sonically rather than doctrinally, it inhabited a similar world, using the same four instruments, but while Messiaen’s writing generally remains within the normal technical scope of the clarinet, Harris had made use of its eccentric possibilities such as multiphonics – creating more than one note at a time, exploiting the instrument’s harmonic resources.

English clarinetist Julian Bliss, who was born in 1989, has already built a notable reputation in the world of music festivals and prestigious venues. He was on stage for all three pieces. He talked about multiphonics before the performance, but it was hardly central to the music; instead, to have introduced the audience to the actual musical ideas might have been more useful in creating a receptive hearing. As a result, there was little chance to absorb themes or motifs or to follow an argument that might have woven the music’s fabric.

Its main impact was unease, mystification, restlessness, produced by scrambling sounds, elusive slivers of melody that quickly evaporated. Clarinet and strings tended to carry most of the fragmentary musical ideas with a sense of purpose, while the piano’s gestures were reflective and struck me as somewhat incidental. Nevertheless, one was undeniably caught up with the piece, with its interesting, unaccustomed, even evocative sounds; and though I abhor saying this, as it’s like a confession of incompetence, another hearing could be illuminating.

The Messiaen performance was quite superb; the first time I heard it, perhaps 40 years ago, I found its widely disparate elements and Messiaen’s unique voice (or voices) bewildering, yet today it sounds as normal a part of the chamber music repertoire as the Brahms Clarinet Quintet. Every one of the eight movements was vividly sculpted, and yet created, as a whole, a mosaic that spoke of the situation of the work’s composition and first performance, as well as feeling still relevant to the human condition today, perhaps even more.

The spotlight moves from place to place, from one kind of religious imagery to another, from all four to pairs of instruments or just one, like the extraordinary third movement, Abîme des oiseaux, where the clarinet alone took us on an astonishing and awful (as in ‘full of awe’) journey through disparate spiritual landscapes. (I heard Murray Khouri play it in total darkness in a memorable performance in Whanganui some years ago). The conspicuously spiritual fifth movement, Louage à l’éterinté de Jésus, is an opportunity for an arresting duet between cello and piano (the one movement without the clarinet); steady, ritualized piano chords underpinning one of the (surely) profoundest musical creations for the cello. The two were in perfect accord.

The association of the brilliant NZTrio and one of the today’s most gifted young clarinetists produced an unforgettable performance.

It’s probably just as well that the charming Brahms trio was placed at the beginning. I was slow in coming to love it but it has taken its place, perhaps somewhere below the quintet and the two clarinet sonatas, but it still delights. If some early parts are less than commanding in terms of musical inspiration, the whole was lovingly and rapturously played, and the last movement, quite short, was a wonderful meeting of minds and hearts.

 

Beguiling concert of French chanson, torch songs, café and cabaret songs by Magdalena Darby and friends

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lunchtime concerts at St Marks, Lower Hutt
Café Européen – Songs of Passion

Magdalena Darby (cabaret singer, chansonneuse) with Ian Logan (piano), Gary Stratton (accordion), Alistair Isdale (bass)

Torch songs, chansons, café music; French and derivative styles

St Marks church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 27 July, 12:15 pm

Magdalena Darby’s bio begins with her studies at the Conservatorium of Music in Utrecht, but shies away from dates, early education, or when she came to New Zealand; one assumes she was born in the Netherlands. Before coming to New Zealand she lived in Mexico and presumably Paris. Her bio refers to performing in Paris as well as London and elsewhere in Europe (can we still assume that ‘Europe’ includes Britain?).

Throughout, her career has been a combination of teaching and cabaret-style singing. Her publicity refers to ‘torch songs’, perhaps not very familiar to the musical generalist, but it describes songs of broken love affairs, of lost love (which tends, I suppose, to be a major element in music of all kinds). The expression to ‘carry a torch for’ someone relates to the word in this context.

Paris was the biggest element in her repertoire, even if there were songs from several other parts of the world. That tone was set as the instrumentalists played Michel Legrand’s theme song from the much-loved film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg featuring Catherine Deneuve (which you can find in the Wellington Public Library). The three instrumentalists were clearly very comfortable in music of this style and era (mostly the 50s to 70s) and lent sensitive support to the singer.

Nearly half of her songs were French, by French singers or sung in French: names that appear in my ‘other self’s’ collection of LPs and CDs, like Serge Gainsbourg, Sidney Bechet (the jazz, soprano saxophonist), and Jacques Brel, but also Piazzolla’s Rosa Rio which she sang in French.

What has always attracted me to the French chanson has been the intellectual, heterodox, often politically dissident, even anarchic quality of their subjects, in addition of course to the edgy, rebellious or pathetic character of the love-songs.

Darby’s voice, exploiting the microphone with finesse, didn’t express just the pain of lost love in Gainsbourg’s songs (Les amours perdues, Les yeux pour pleurer and Indifférente), but an awareness of a fractured, lonely world, with a warmth and seductiveness that seems unique to French singers. Though Indifférente was deceptively upbeat and Les yeux pour pleurer an unusual story of cruel loss and the sudden appearance of a new love.

So one enjoyed hearing echoes and tones of voices like Piaf, even Josephine Baker, Françoise Hardy and males like Yves Montant, Jean Sablon, Charles Trenet…

Bechet’s Petite fleur was of course written for himself and his soprano sax, but lyrics were put to it later, giving it a perfectly Gallic chanson character. Here and throughout, one was seduced by a voice and a control of that voice that captured the idiom of the languages and utterly belied her years.

Darby’s clarity of diction and ability to capture the style of other cultures became clear in Spanish songs such as Carlos Almaron’s Un historia de un amor and Nino Rota’s Theme from The Godfather (the love theme with words by Larry Kusik); she sang the latter in its English version, with some in Italian (if I wasn’t fooling myself).

Her singing of the Second World War song Can’t get out of this mood (words by Loesser, set by Jimmy McHugh) succeeded in demonstrating how deeply a European style of lyric and music affected American popular music: Nina Simone was one of the most famous interpreters of that song in the late 50s, and later, Darby sang her But remember me which displayed her warm, low register, that so perfectly leapt into a high head voice in dealing with the spread of the song’s melody.

There was a break for accordionist Stratton to take front stage with a Piazzolla song, Fiebre, where I suppose the idea was an approximation of the bandoneon; but nothing quite matches that unique Buenos Aires instrument.

The song by Cy Coleman, A moment of madness seemed to step aside from the Gallic spirit that ruled in most of the recital; a song in which the singer tries to persuade herself that she doesn’t care about the moment of madness that ended badly, expressed with its series of short, almost sobbing phrases; but the singer succeeded in planting it convincingly in Paris.

Then there was Jacques Brel, a really tough singer to impersonate with any success; happily she didn’t attempt things like La valse a mille temps, or Marieke, or Ne me quitte pas. But in English, If we only have love, (Quand on n’a que l’amour) was a classic Brel melody the spirit of which, even without that inimitable voice, Magdalena Darby caught with integrity and conviction.

And the three-quarter hour ended with a surprising step to the east, into Yiddish song, which she sang in English, with a short excursion into German (Yiddish is very close to German – derived from Middle High German). At her hands, and with the impeccably idiomatic backing of (especially) pianist Ian Logan, and Gary Stratton and Alastair Isdale, the words and music took root firmly at L’Olympia, Paris, to bring this most beguiling little concert to an end.

A good case for Mendelssohn’s (complete) organ music in cathedral series

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Organ recitals at St Paul’s
The Mendelssohn Project, first recital

Michael Stewart, Cathedral Director of Music

The complete organ works of Felix Mendelssohn
Sonatas, in F minor and C minor, Op 65 Nos 1 and 2
Andante – Sanft; Passacaglia – Volles Werk; Fugue in D minor; Andante con moto in G minor

Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Friday 22 July, 12:45 pm

On top of last year’s Bach Project from Michael Stewart and Richard Apperley and the latter’s Buxtehude Project that’s running now, cathedral director of music, Michael Stewart, has now invited us to pay attention to and hopefully change our minds about Mendelssohn. In his introductory notes for the first of the series of recitals he claimed that Mendelssohn had “made an incredibly profound contribution to the organ and its repertoire”, and that he stood alongside Bach and Messiaen as an organ composer whose influence is felt across all genres.

Quite a statement, though very defensible in the musical environment of the first half of the 19th century.

Stewart went on to say that the three preludes and fugues and the six sonatas were fundamental to the repertoire of any serious organist. And he noted that Mendelssohn had achieved this place in spite of the fact that he never held a post as an organist; he had, however, begun organ lesson aged eleven and started to composer for the organ at once. Though his formal lessons lasted only 18 months, after which time he was self-taught, and confessed to not really mastering pedal technique.

This first recital included the first two of his sonatas whose provenance was unusual – really cobbled together from a variety of smaller pieces – in response to an English publisher’s request for some organ ‘voluntaries’. Mendelssohn claimed he didn’t really know what this peculiarly English liturgical form was and asked that they be called sonatas so they could be published recognizably in Germany. France and Italy.

Sonata No 1 is in four movements; it starts in conventionally grand manner using big diapason stops with what might have been a rudimentary melody on the pedals; it then changes abruptly to a calm, chorale-like phase which is interrupted by returns of the style of the opening. From then the two moods alternated, the heavier seeming to oppress the lighter passages.

The Adagio movement seemed constructed in a similar way, with alternating passages in widely separated registers, jumping from one manual to another. And the Andante recitativo presented a thin little tune that was suddenly overwhelmed by dominating chords, rather similar to the behavior in the second movement, and the two elements continued to alternate, with increasingly complex harmonies. With no pause and almost without a change of tone, the fourth, Vivace, movement took over and brought it to a rather exciting close.

Apart from the second Sonata, the rest of the programme consisted of slighter pieces, without opus numbers. Three from his early teens: first, an Andante which was tuneful and pleasant, seeming very conscious of the sort of music for which the organ was traditionally associated.

A second entitled ‘Volles Werk’, German for ‘full organ’. It was a stately Passacaglia, the theme subjected to a number of variations which became repetitive rather than interestingly contrasted or developed in an organic way (?pun intended).  Eventually brighter variations arrived and one had to credit the organist with providing more diverting registrations here with lively quaver accompaniment. It ended with a return to the portentous style, which was employed to build effectively to a satisfying climax. It did indeed strike me as pretty clever for a 13 or 14-year-old.

An 11-year-old’s Fugue in D minor followed, a counterpoint exercise originally for violin and piano.

Then a piece by a mature 24-year-old: Andante con moto in G minor. Though it set off purposefully on quiet stops, it was only a page long.

The second Sonata was rather shorter than the first (dating from 1844/45). The first movement, Grave – Adagio, could have been described as ‘meditative’ but I wasn’t drawn into any spirit of mature contemplation, founded on any deeply-felt philosophical reflection. It didn’t sound of its era at all and I found myself thinking how it compared with music being written around the same time – especially Schumann’s piano and chamber music (though I don’t know the few bits of organ music that Schumann wrote). I also read that the ever-generous Schumann played Mendelssohn’s sonatas over on the piano and wrote warmly to him, describing them as ‘intensely poetical’; ‘what a perfect picture they form’, he wrote.

It’s not as if Mendelssohn was not as influenced as his contemporaries were by the prevailing ‘Romantic’ ethos of the 1830s and 40s, in his piano and chamber music, his two best symphonies and several concert overtures. Perhaps his awareness of the overpowering impact of Bach inhibited a freedom of spirit that is found in those other genres.

The second and third movements – Allegro maestoso e vivace and  Fugue: Allegro moderato – contained some imposing music, contrapuntal, harmonically formidable and in the Fugue, plenty of evidence of the composer’s study and assimilation of the techniques and meaning of Bach. Nevertheless, even in the absence of the kind of response I have to the organ music of Bach and Buxtehude and to the French school of the later 19th century, I heard an authentic, instinctive organ composer  whose music had genuine interest and vitality, played with as much imaginative use of the cathedral organ’s resources as could have been expected.

All this might well be influenced by my youthful brush with the sonatas. I had a good friend at secondary school whose family moved to Christchurch in the fifth form. There he took up the organ, and during my visits during holidays, we often shared the manuals and pedals in the organ loft of St Paul’s church, Papanui; among other stuff, there was a volume of these sonatas, bits of which we, or rather, he, found his way through. But I fear they made little impression on me.

This time, Mendelssohn certainly made more impact on me, but not quite to the degree urged by Michael Stewart.

 

Buxtehude’s credentials solidly confirmed at the 6th of the organ series at Saint Paul’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Buxtehude Project – Programme 6
Richard Apperley – organ

Buxtehude: Praeludium in C, BuxWV 136; ‘Nimm von uns, Herr…’ BuxWV 207; Fuga in B flat, Bux 176; Magnificat primi toni, BuxWV 203; Canzona in C, BuxWV 166; Praeludium in A minor, BuxWV 153

Wellington Cathedral of Saint Paul

Friday 15 July, 12:45 pm

On 17 June I covered some of the background to the formidable complete organ works of Dieterich Buxtehude, after the first four of the series had eluded me (read: Middle C, or I, had neglected them, a grave oversight).

Here was the 6th of the series.
The first work in the programme was fairly large, employing three fugues; optimistic in tone, as the key of C major seems to inspire in composers. It started with an imposing, somewhat rambling, rising scale – a kind of prelude to the Prelude. The middle fugue sounded more orthodox, in common time, coherent and interesting in its progress and it led to the third fugue cast in a gigue rhythm.

Next came a piece based on a chorale, a set of chorale variations which, to begin, employed much less formal registrations than the Praeludium: flutes and lighter reeds, suggesting bird-song. A second variation was more densely textured, and the subsequent variations continued to offer interesting forays in imaginative registers, often with quite bold counter-melodies underlying the main themes.

The Fuga in B flat was an elaborate exercise, as its several lines of counterpoint were punctuated by dense passages that were occasionally coloured by nasal sounding stops.

A Magnificat setting followed, in which the actual fugal passages alternated with more rhapsodic music, succeeding in exhibiting the fecundity of the composer’s melodic imagination and his ability to fuse grandeur and decorative passages.

Another Canzona (I heard one in the previous recital on 17 June) offered yet another vehicle for the composer’s ingenuity and mastery of the rich variety in styles of organ music that existed in the late 17th century: rippling meanderings; airy, whispering stops suggesting shimmering light; peaceful and lyrical phases; quite striking colour changes as hands moved from one manual to another.

And finally, a Praeludium that was even more imposing and engrossing than the opening one: this time in a minor key: Apperley’s note confessed to its being one of his favourites, and his virtuosic performance was convincing evidence of his opinion. It encompassed music of ever-changing mood, melodic and developmental richness and mastery. It moved through fugal phases and highly decorated scales and arpeggios, changing tempi and rhythms and abrupt changes of direction, all ending with a tumbling, highly complex and thrilling coda that must have left his congregation in the Marienkirche in Lübeck wide-eyed and stunned.

I confess to finding myself in a somewhat similar state after this second dose of the great Danish-German master. And this condition has to be very substantially attributed to the wonderful mastery of the cathedral’s organ by Richard Apperley.

You should look out for the next in the Buxtehude series: there’s nothing boring or pious about this music.

Coming up next Friday, the 22nd, is the first of the Mendelssohn series from Michael Stewart; then Buxtehude Episode 7 from Apperley on Friday 19 August.