Author: Lindis Taylor

English anthems straddling 1600 offer rich and satisfying concert from voices and viols

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

‘This is the Record of John’
English Verse Anthems for voices and viols
Music by William Byrd, Peter Philips, Thomas Campion, Thomas Tomkins, John Amner, Orlando Gibbons, John Ward

Baroque Voices (leader: Pepe Becker; and Anna Sedcole, Katherine Hodge, Jeffrey Chang, Phillip Collins, David Houston)
Palliser Viols (leader: Robert Oliver; and Lisa Beech, Sophia Acheson, Jane Brown, Sue Alexander, Kevin Wilkinson)
Douglas Mews (harpsichord)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 29 May, 7:30 pm

Verse anthems are the English equivalents of the Latin or French motet or Lutheran cantata.

They were not just an early music genre, but continued to be composed till modern times. The Bach Choir recently sang an English verse anthem, in Parry’s Hear my Words, Ye People. In Tudor times they were particularly prolific. All of the anthems and harpsichord pieces in this concert came from the Elizabethan and Stuart periods, though Tomkins survived into the time of Cromwell’s Protestant Commonwealth.

The concert began with compositions of a couple of less familiar composers whose music has barely escaped disappearance: John Ward and John Amner. Each opened with the gorgeous sound of the viol ensemble of two trebles, three tenors and Robert Oliver himself on the bass viol, followed by the entry of voices, their numbers varying between five and six. Both pieces could have been written by the same composer; perhaps designed for singing by amateurs, to create a cheerful, harmonious atmosphere in a salon where cultivated people could enjoy themselves. Some of the pieces could have been as part of the church liturgy.

One can imagine different settings for the various pieces presented, according to the subject, whether distinctly religious or not. If not for liturgical purpose, did listeners have to be silent during the performance? Did they clap after each piece ended?

Ward’s piece was slow and meditative and apparently not drawn from a Biblical source while Amner used words from a Psalm, I am for peace. Robert Oliver’s programme note provided interesting background to the likely settings and purposes of anthems over the years.

The concert was punctuated by three non-vocal pieces. The first of them, Passamezzo Pavan à 6, was by Peter Philips, for viols; it was more spirited than the preceding vocal pieces. Another anthem, probably by Ward, followed: Mount up my Soul, where the tenor had a prominent part. A further piece by Ward came after the interval: How long wilt thou forgive me, set at a steady tempo to charmingly fluent music, for the usual two sopranos and one each of the other three voices.

There was a set of three pieces by Thomas Campion, songs to his own words (he was an admired poet as well as composer), rather than anthems, though the first two had religious subjects, of a kind: Never the weather-beaten sail and Author of Light. One had to admit that the words were strikingly more poetic, imaginative and picturesque than one finds in 99% of routine Protestant hymns. The third song, Jack and Joan, was clearly for two single voices, Pepe Becker and Philip Collins (I assume), and displaying much more of a popular, folk song spirit.

The first of two anthems by Orlando Gibbons supplied the title given to the concert: ‘This is the record of John’. The notes did not reveal the source of the words; they presumably refer to John the Baptist. Though I am no Biblical scholar, the reference to the voice crying in the wilderness is from either Isaiah or John’s gospel; in the latter: “John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet: ‘I am a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.'”. Thus it was probably intended for church use. Here, I had thought more could have been made of its narrative character, enlivening the direct speech quotations by a pause and change of tone between question and answer.

Gibbons’s second item was See, See the World Incarnate. Its musical character indeed supported Oliver’s rating it as a masterpiece; the alto’s voice was very distinct and the several vocal lines interwove engagingly. Although the musical invention continually held my attention, I was struck by what I felt was an odd, even inappropriate, relationship sometimes between the words and the music to which they were set, as if Gibbons was pursuing a musical idea regardless of the words’ meaning.

Thomas Tomkins was a near contemporary of Campion. His verse anthem, ‘Above the stars my savior dwells’, is a charmingly simple text, though richly set with soprano and tenor prominent through most of it, and employing a second tenor voice in the last couplet.

It was preceded by a Pavan and galliard à 6 by Tomkins, which, I might note here included all six viols plus the harpsichord of Douglas Mews, whose unobtrusive, carefully idiomatic playing was probably more important than that of any one of the viols. The pavan is a stately dance, the galliard somewhat quicker, and here was an opportunity to hear the generally impressive skills of each player.

The third instrumental piece was an organ Fantasy by Byrd which Mews played on the chamber organ. Though it began with only a pure flute stop, it became more complex in terms of registrations, harmony and canonical devices, ornaments and flamboyant scalic flourishes through its considerable length.

Finally, voices and viols joined for Byrd’s Christ is rising again – Christ is risen. But unfortunately, I had great difficulty in facing the need to leave before it, to catch a train, or have an hour’s wait for the next. It was especially painful in the light of the notes’ description of it as a “magnificent pair of verse anthems …a superb example of Byrd’s transcendent and unexcelled art”.

This was a most satisfying concert, confined, to be sure, to just one genre and one national school during hardly more than a half century, but bearing such evidence of the richness of English music, not to be seen again (apart from the momentary brilliance of Purcell) till the 20th century.

 

The Magic Flute in brilliant production, with mainly New Zealand cast of polish and energy

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Magic Flute (Mozart)
New Zealand Opera

Conductor: Wyn Davies
Director: Sara Brodie; Assistant director: Jacqueline Coats
Set and props designer: John Verryt; costume designer: Elizabeth Whiting; Lighting designer: Paul Lim; Sound designer: Jason Smith

Cast: Tamino: Randall Bills; Pamina: Emma Fraser; Papageno: Samuel Dundas;
Queen of the Night: Ruth Jenkins-Robertson; The Speaker/Armed Man/Priest: James Clayton;
Three Ladies: Amelia Berry, Catrin Johnsson, Kristin Darragh
Monostatos: Bonaventure Allan-Moetaua; Papagena: Madison Nonoa; Priest/Armed Man: Derek Hill; Three Boys (Genii): Barbara Graham, Katherine McIndoe, Kayla Collingwood

St James Theatre

Saturday 28 May, 7:30 pm

This production that has engaged a number of young and highly promising New Zealand singers (only three from overseas), was probably among the most spectacular (and expensive I imagine) ever seen in New Zealand. Happily, it also succeeded in capturing the essential qualities of this hybrid work. It combines singspiel, comic opera, mime, vaudeville, employing a text that mixes Masonic ritual and ancient Egyptian religion, a touch of Christianity with the Enlightenment in an intellectual atmosphere bred of French revolutionary politics.

There was a pretty full house and the audience was highly responsive to the entire performance.

After conductor Wyn Davies conducted Orchestra Wellington through a spacious, strong and careful overture the curtain, which has slowly turned from a deep star-spangled blue to speckled gold, rises to reveal a bed on which the shape of a body appears, and from under it a large serpent emerges. We guess it’s Prince Tamino, and he half-wakes to find the serpent and cries for help.

Three women (‘Damen’ or Ladies) in the most brilliant, sparkling costumes, slits to the hip, arrive in the nick of time, kill the serpent with their javelins and then begin to perform ‘sexually offensive’ acts on the apparently still-sleeping Tamino. He fails to notice.

The Three Ladies were sung by three New Zealand singers, soprano Amelia Berry from Wellington, now in New York; mezzo Katrin Johnsson, born Sweden, now in Auckland; and mezzo Kristin Darragh, Aucklander, resident in Germany; they had powerful presence, their voices were well contrasted, vocally strong and well projected; their costumes were sparkling, nocturnal, and I haven’t seen three more impressive or alluring Ladies in the many productions I’ve seen. (Their name has been victim of PC-ness: ‘Lady’ is now verboten. In a review for The Evening Post, probably of the 1999 production, a subeditor changed my words to ‘The Three Women’).

Anyway, it was a highly amusing start.

Australian Samuel Dundas’s arrival brought another vivid character in the shape of Papageno; he’s a singer absolutely born for the role, making good use of genuine Ozzie swagger in demeanour, rough wit and vocal expression, both in his dialogue and his commanding self-introduction, ‘Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja’. His role is by nature the most colourful of the opera; all eyes were drawn to him. (It’s not surprising that he’s sung Dr Malatesta in Don Pasquale and Belcore in L’elisir d’amore, no doubt highly praised).

And then the exchange with Tamino, American tenor, Randall Bills, about the dead serpent which Papageno claims to have killed with bare hands, and is punished by the Ladies who padlock his mouth, for lying. It’s a very animated scene in which the staging calls attention to itself, with two big, leafless trees on either side, their branches interwoven to form a bridge across the stage, useful in several later scenes, for example, for the Three Boys to ensure human decency and to act as saviours.

Here, after the Ladies have shown him an image (four huge You-Tube style photos) of the Princess Pamina, Tamino sings his ‘Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernt schön’. Though in English, which I thought a pity, as almost all the memorable arias and ensembles are thoroughly familiar in German and sounded odd in English, and we still needed the useful surtitles at least for some of the singers. Though I must say that the words were much more understandable than usually in opera, perhaps in part helped by the hard surfaces of the sets. Furthermore, the translation, no matter how apt, often fitted ill with the rhythms and shapes of the music.

But though a lovely aria, sensitively performed, ‘Dies Bildnis…’ was not quite strong enough to draw attention away from Papageno or the Three Ladies. (Bills has sung at Leipzig Opera, with New York City Opera, the Rossini Festival at Pesaro and several other smaller German houses).

The Queen v. Sarastro
British coloratura from the North of England, Ruth Jenkins-Robertsson then arrives, as The Queen of the Night, glitteringly garbed, and recognizes in Tamino a candidate for a rescue operation to recover her daughter Pamina from the clutches of her arch-enemy Sarastro.

Her first aria ‘O zittre nicht’ is one of the most famous of the coloratura genre, second only to her Act II ‘Der Hölle Rache’. Though her top F disintegrated and I felt that last degree of ruthless vengeance was not very marked, her voice had all the agility demanded and her whole presentation was splendid.

Emma Fraser, originally from Dunedin, was perfectly cast as Pamina; Pamina is not a particularly strong character, but with Fraser’s beautiful voice it spoke of innocence and kindness; compared to most of the other leading characters, she is, like Tamino, dressed virginally, demurely and she acts accordingly.

The Three Boys, or Genii, arrive, though not ‘in person’. They are cast in various ways; sometimes boys with suitably trained voices are available, but in a country where there’s almost no tradition of children’s, more especially boys’, choirs, they are probably hard to find. Here three sopranos manage cute puppets who do the job, often on the bridge between the trees, fitting their role as ‘heavenly creatures’. At first, apparently as servants of the Queen to guide Tamino and Papageno in their mission to ‘rescue’ Pamina; but later they are clearly not in the Queen’s camp, but rather that of the enlightened Sarastro, capable of humane intervention, to perform as a saviour later, as ‘heavenly creatures’.

Several of Sarastro’s disciples/vassals are conflated into just two. The Speaker appears first, taken with authority and clarity by James Clayton, convincingly defending his chief, Sarastro, to Tamino against the Queen’s vilification; but the roles of the others, two ‘Armed Men’, and two or three Priests, and are compressed or deleted and taken by the fine young baritone, Derek Hill, listed as ‘Priest/Armed Man’. No real harm was done, though he adopted a crabbed accent and I wondered at the meaning of his being a cripple, just as I’d been curious about the reason the Queen was hobbling about on sticks – I’d never detected anything in her character to suggest physical disability, but I bow to the superior intuitions of the director.

Sarastro himself was sung by Wade Kernot, who has indeed an elegant, resonant voice, but apart from its thinning rather sadly at the bottom early in his first aria (it recovered somewhat later), he lacks just a little of the gravitas (sorry about that overused word) essential to the role.

Then there’s the predatory Moor, Monostatos, whose role has always rather mystified me; some of his part is cut, especially his cavorting with his three slaves, and that was not missed. Regardless of the meaning of his part in the story, he was splendidly portrayed by Bonaventure Allan-Moetaua.

Sarastro’s counter-offensive allied with the lovers
Act II begins with a suspiciously Christian scene of women of Sarastro’s court washing Pamina’s feet (forget that his court is monastic – men only, and not specifically Christian). In this production the chorus is enlarged to include women, no doubt to comply with pressure from the Human Rights Commission on sexual equality. That brings the situation into conflict with the several verbal slights against women (chuckles from the audience), their moral and intellectual strength, but it undermines the authenticity of Mozart and Schikaneder’s drama which should always remain true to its fundamental conception. We just have to acknowledge that attitudes towards women in the 18th century were different. If this directorial decision was misguided, at least the language was left unmutilated.

The chorus is nevertheless one of the chief glories of the production, as was the orchestra’s performance. Again, the clarity and liveliness of music director Wyn Davies’s handling of all his musical forces was admirable. I have earlier touched on aspects of the look of the stage and the singers and their positioning and movement on stage, invariably handled with unerring sense of what worked for the audience and, I guess, an awareness of the opera’s literary and philosophical background which is much more interesting than might first appear.

The last character to appear is Papagena, whose role with her male namesake is always a delight, and this was no exception. Madison Nonoa was garbed in keeping, amusingly and her singing, just right, fitting deliciously with Papageno’s.

All costumes were appropriate and often startlingly lavish, generally in keeping with one’s own imaginings, based on many past productions. In particular, there was much attention to lighting and sound effects, other than what came from the pit. The lighting was particularly effective: surprising, sharply illuminating in both literal and symbolic senses. And there were other props such as a huge hairy spider that contributed to the entertainment though not especially enhancing the operatic experience. The hollow tree trunks served for magical appearances and disappearances and allowed for Papageno’s tree-climbing prowess; and the trap-door in the floor provided for surprising entrances and exits, even for the conductor to emerge to receive the huge, final applause.

In all, this was a simply splendid production, one of the best the company has ever done, and even among the best anywhere in New Zealand. Undoubtedly hugely to the credit of director Sara Brodie and assistant Jacqueline Coats, it is a must-see, and a vindication of the genius of Mozart as well as of his literary collaborator, Schikaneder. For it was a work that certainly changed the nature of German theatre in its own language, and to which many attribute the eventual revolutionary achievements of Wagner.

 

Postscript: the Flute’s history in New Zealand
I was prompted to look back at the record of earlier productions in New Zealand.

The Magic Flute was a late-comer to the New Zealand stage. While there was a rich procession of almost all the standard opera repertoire, even some Wagner, through New Zealand from touring companies from the 1860s and till the mid 20th century – Adrienne Simpson’s exhaustive history lists about 130 different operas and operettas brought to New Zealand till 1950, Mozart was rather neglected. Only The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni were seen before the birth of the New Zealand Opera Company in 1954, which, after the establishment of the then National Orchestra in 1947, came at the real beginning of our own, indigenous performing arts history, along with the creation of the New Zealand Players and the New Zealand Ballet about the same time.

It was that great and adventurous company which gave the New Zealand premiere of The Magic Flute in April 1963 in the same theatre that opens this new production in Wellington. That was toured, with more or less orchestral accompaniment, to fifteen towns through New Zealand.

After the Wellington-based New Zealand Company was disgracefully wound up in 1971, smaller companies arose throughout the country in what looked by the 1980s like a permanent awakening of opera as a popular musical genre, not nationally based, but with strong roots in local communities.

Canterbury Opera was the first among the rising regional companies to stage The Flute, in 1986 and they staged another production in 1996.

In March of the Mozart bicentennial year of 1991 (of both the opera and of Mozart’s death), Wellington City Opera followed with a controversial production designed by the gifted Kristian Fredrickson.

Auckland Opera staged it in 1993 and Wellington did it again in 1999, its last year before the company’s merger with Auckland to create New Zealand Opera. Curiously, by then Auckland had renamed its company ‘New Zealand Opera’ and Wellington retaliated by changing its name to the ‘National Opera of Wellington’.

From then The Flute had productions in other parts of the country: Opera Waikato produced it in 1999 and Hawke’s Bay Opera in Hastings in 2003.

Among the many city companies, only Dunedin’s company, which was founded in the mid 1950s and is the only survivor among the original companies, seems never to have produced The Flute.

There have been university productions such as Otago’s in 1991 and Victoria’s in 1996; and the lively and prolific Opera Factory in Auckland produced it in 2001, performed largely by young singers.

Ten years ago, in 2006, New Zealand Opera produced The Magic Flute for both Wellington and Auckland.

Enso String Quartet highly impressive in all eras particularly 20th century France

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Enso String Quartet: Maureen Nelson and Ken Hamao (violins), Melissa Reardon (viola), Richard Belcher (cello)

Beethoven: Quartet in E flat, Op 74 ‘Harp’
Dutilleux: Ainsi la nuit
Alex Taylor: a coincidence of surfaces (CMNZ Commission)
Ravel: String Quartet in F

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 20 May, 7:30 pm

One of the first things that many people would have asked about this concert, was ‘what’s the name mean or is an acronym for?’ Nowhere in the programme could I find the answer.

However, their website does ‘sort-of’ explain:

“The ensemble’s name is derived from the Japanese Zen painting of the circle, which represents many things: perfection and imperfection, the moment of chaos that is creation, the emptiness of the void, the endless circle of life, and the fullness of the spirit.”

But it doesn’t explain why it has the name; a four letter word ‘s connection to a Japanese painting of the circle doesn’t really help, except in a misty impressionist way.
Perhaps they meant to add, “Enso is Japanese for a circle, or ‘a painting of a circle’”.
The second violinist, Ken Hamao is of Japanese descent; is that a connection?
One of the leader’s, Maureen Nelson, teachers was Yumi Ninomiya Scott: another connection?

But the concert.

Familiar classics opened and closed the concert; first, one of Beethoven’s ‘middle period’ quartets called the ‘Harp’ on account of a lot of pizzicato particularly in the first movement.

It began secretively, as if to allay any discomfort about what probably sounded rather radical, though hardly alienating, to audiences of the first decade of the 19th century. I was immediately won over by the scrupulous attention to every marking and, one felt, dynamic and bowing refinements that Beethoven might have hardly conceived. There were moments of frenzy, with general pizzicato and touches, like the surprise-like fortissimo single chords, that awoke an awareness of the Beethoven-to-come more emphatically a decade later – the ‘Late’ period.

Perhaps, I wondered after a while, there are a few listeners of acute, self-acknowledged sensibility who feel there was just too much particularity, too much fussiness in articulation and subtle rubato and dynamic delicacy; not I.

The second movement’s unobtrusive opening melody points more towards the future, as if careful to avoid a full-blooded tune, but then it arrived – the really gorgeous melody, emerging perhaps from the earlier hesitant theme, and its treatment was almost too voluptuous as the second violin took charge of it while the first played a rocking accompaniment.

The quartet tackled the scherzo movement, Presto, with all the ferocity needed. To make an impact, what might be called the Trio is a forthright section that departs from the triple time of the main part, to common, 4/4 time; though it’s in quaver triplets which turns ghostly again to simply peter out, leaving just a moment before the Finale begins. The Finale, a theme and variations, was again treated in a spirit that exploited its surprises. It too contains moments of pianissimo that become startling and the players handled it all with wonderful variety, a seeming utter inevitability.

Dutilleux’s only string quartet is not entirely untypical of his other, rather small quantity of music, considering he almost reached 100. The two symphonies, the cello concerto (Tout un monde lointain), and the piano sonata are reasonably approachable, warmer, more comfortable.

In 2012 the Amici Ensemble played the quartet at a Wellington Chamber Music concert; I did not hear it. (See Middle C’s review of 12 August 2012).

The demands of a string quartet prompted Dutilleux to refine his voice and devote himself to cultivating all the subtleties of colour, to chisel the most detailed contrapuntal contours, seeking a composing equilibrium through an act of dizzying balancing. The structure of the music, designed uniquely by the composer, as is not uncommon in this age, does at the start present an intellectual hurdle, if the listener is of a mind to follow the music’s argument as the composer has presumably intended.

There are two alternatives:
i) either you give over, without paying much attention to the composer’s notes, to whatever impressions the music makes, hoping it will prove rewarding;
ii) or you study the notes beforehand, preferably listening to a recording (I would even add, ‘and reading the score’, if that was not likely to be quite useless in a work of such phantasmagorical capriciousness), and attempt to relate the descriptions to what you hear. For a great many quite serious listeners this course would probably create a pre-ordained sense of defeat. I chose the former course this evening, though I had listened to a recording a couple of times, the explanatory notes to hand.

The first five of the seven movements are linked by what Dutilleux calls ‘Parentheses’, recognition of which in the withering density of the music is hard if not impossible at first hearing. In a French commentary: “the parentheses – often quite short – which link the parts one to another are important for the organic role which devolves on them. The allusions to what is to follow – or what has preceded it – take their place like points of reference.”

It’s the sort of work, by a highly regarded composer, that many would not want to be judged for confessing to mystification; showing they lack sensibility or taste or discernment or insight into contemporary music. There are almost constant tremolos, pizzicato, muted passages, false harmonics, spiccato; one hears fragmentary themes emerging, and returning later, and much atmospheric evocation, occasional calm passages in which the four players have a chance to communicate more calmly with one another

In other words, many would have found it hard to ‘follow’, though to gain a sense of its generally brittle emotional character is not so hard, and a performance such as we heard, from a highly talented, youngish ensemble for whom Dutilleux’s language is probably as familiar as Haydn, could not help being highly persuasive.

The CMNZ commission from young Auckland composer Alex Taylor presented a soundscape that was not all that remote from Dutilleux. A short piece of about six minutes, it had time to make an impression from the hands of these musicians who were apparently in sympathy with the music’s character and inventiveness, and towards the end seemed to drift into a narrative that sustained its last page. Though the first few minutes offered little opportunity to gain a familiarity with its musical ideas so that one could follow its structure (a feat that some claim to achieve at once though others tell the truth). One of the advantages of a short piece is the opportunity for it to be played again.

And so it was, but even better. At the end of the concert the audience was invited to remain while the Aroha came to the stage to join Enso in a performance of the octet version.

The Aroha Quartet had been involved in Elizabeth Kerr’s pre-concert talk (which I didn’t hear) where they played another version of Taylor’s piece, rather slower, more lyrical, less hectic. The two versions had been written so they could be played together. Each quartet sat in a separate semi-circle. The two accounts could thus be quite easily distinguished and for me, perhaps with the benefit of hearing the music, in a rather different guise, a second time, it became distinctly more coherent and, well, musical.

Ravel’s String Quartet ended the programme. Seventy-four years older than the Dutilleux, 113 years older than Taylor’s.

Enso launched into it with energy and affection, finding all its expressiveness and subtlety. Ravel’s failure to win the Prix de Rome, with this work on the desks of the adjudicators, is one of the great mysteries of musical history, since it’s so rich in vitality, not to mention melody. One can perhaps understand Dubois’s failure to get it, but hardly Fauré’s, even acknowledging that the Assez vif second movement is a bit spiky, and studiedly un-romantic; Enso handled it commandingly. The strange, ghostly episodes in the third movement were among the most arresting points, returning slowly to the real world at the end, as a lovely viola passage caught my ear, in a breathless, exquisite spirit.

The finale, Vif et agité, was just that, bringing a memorable performance to an end; and I wondered whether, in another thirty years or so, the Dutilleux will sound as scintillating and varied and memorable as the Ravel does now.

 

 

Unusual trios for contrasted groups, influenced disparately by viola d’amore and the Holocaust

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Music of Sorrow and Love
Archi d’amore Zelanda and the Terezin Trio

Archi d’amore Zelanda (Donald Maurice – viola d’amore, Jane Curry – guitar, Emma Goodbehere – cello)
Michael Williams: Suite per antichi archi
Boris Pigovat: Strings of Love (2016)

Terezin Trio (Katherine McIndoe – soprano, Reuben Chin – alto saxophone, Heather Easting – piano)
Ellwood Derr: I never saw another butterfly

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 18 May, 12:15 pm

This lunchtime concert combined two young chamber groups in music that touched on tragic themes and conditions of the heart, physical and emotional. Perhaps they were to be seen as metaphysically linked.

We have heard several performances by Donald Maurice’s Archi d’amore Zelanda; the last let us hear both the viola d’amore and the modern viola; in fact the last outing was just a fortnight ago, as part of an octet playing Vivaldi.

Today, they played two pieces commissioned by them and which will have their ‘world premieres’ in a forthcoming trip to Poland where they will play at the Europejskiego Centrum Muzyki Krzysztofa Pendereckiego w Lusławicach (or European Center for Music, Krzysztof Pendercki, Lusławice), a small town east of Krakow. Check it out on the Internet.

It is an important cultural centre with origins as an intellectual and artistic centre in the 17th century. It is not far from Penderecki’s birthplace, and the composer bought the old manor in 1976 and restored it to create a music centre, with a beautiful contemporary building opened in 2013.

The Trio will also give concerts in Krakow and Warsaw.

Michael Williams
Suite per antichi archi was commissioned from Hamilton composer Michael Williams.

His piece touched on the heart, and its first movement was named for the heart condition, ‘Arrhythmia’, an obtuse reference to music with varying rhythms. For the first few minutes all three instruments were plucked, rhythmically though in varying bar-lengths; then viola d’amore and cello returned to bowing. The music might not have been too complex or academic, but it was attractive, untroubled. The second movement, Cavatina, was slower and elegiac, with much attention to the lower strings of all three instruments; there was a hint of Spanish music guitar of the 17th or 18th centuries (Hopkinson Smith’s concerts at the 2014 Festival stimulated my interest in and enjoyment of it). The third movement was a fugue, with the bowed instruments used mainly in that way, gaining speed subtly as the mood lightened and became dance-like, though remaining in an antique mode.

Boris Pigovat
Boris Pigovat and Donald Maurice have formed a partnership/friendship since the composer wrote a Holocaust Requiem in 1995, with an obbligato viola for Maurice, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Nazis’ atrocity, Kristallnacht. Atoll Records recorded it by the Wellington Orchestra under Taddei with Maurice as violist.

The latest fruit of that association is Pigovat’s Strings of Love.

Because I hadn’t heard very much of what the musicians said about the music, I asked Donald Maurice for some help and he gave me the following about this piece.

“Much of [Pigovat’s] music since [the Requiem] is reminiscent of those ideas [in the Requiem], in particular in his viola sonata, and in this new piece, Strings of Love, there are similar ideas to the ‘Lux Aeterna’ from the Requiem. It also includes a clear quotation of the nursery lullaby ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby, on the Tree Top’. This poem was believed to have been written by a pilgrim who travelled on the Mayflower and it was a comment on the way the American Indians rocked their babies to sleep by hanging their bassinets off tree branches. This observation about the significance of the theme in the trio is my own, not from Boris!”

So there was dreamy quality in the viola and cello in the opening part, then a kind of a popular tune, with perhaps the influence of a guitar, though the viola dominated the melody. The mood lightens and the tempo increases towards the end. Both the music’s intention and its performance were of attractive clarity and should help create a nice repertoire for the innovative combination of viola d’amore, cello and guitar which, judging by the sort of music they inspire, evokes feeling that relate Renaissance or Baroque sensibility to contemporary musical values and social issues.

Ellwood Derr
I never saw another butterfly was written in 1966 around poems written by children in the terrible concentration camp at Terezin in Czechoslovakia. So it has an affinity with the much later written Third Symphony of Gorecki.

It’s composed for a trio, appropriately entitled Terezin: soprano, alto saxophone and piano. Soprano Katherine McIndoe has, in only a couple of years, established an attractive record in competitions and small opera performances, such as with Days Bay Opera. It’s a strong voice with a keen-edged vibrato that might need watching in years to come, but which showed admirable accuracy in the early quasi-atonal music and an air of electrified fear in the section so marked. Her spoken words came almost as a shock.

Reuben Chin’s contribution on the alto saxophone too, was most accomplished: twittering and bird-like (rather than simulating a butterfly) in the Prologue; while the calm, Debussyish, accepting spirit of ‘The Garden’ hardly disguised the underlying hopeless grief that is embedded in the music. Throughout, Heather Easting’s piano lent expressive and sympathetic backing, often rather dominating the scene as near the end of the fourth section, marked ‘Fear’.

I had hesitated about coming to this concert, thinking one of my colleagues was to review it, but was engrossed by both these unfamiliar trio ensembles right from the start.

 

Bach Choir offers rewarding looks into Purcell, Mozart and later English music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Bach Choir of Wellington conducted by Peter de Blois, with Douglas Mews – organ

Soloists: Sharon Yearsley, Maaike Christie-Beekman, James Young (replaced by the conductor), Simon Christie and Chris Buckland – soprano saxophone

Purcell: Te Deum Laudamus and Jubilate Deo, Mozart: Vesperae solennes de confessore, K 339; James Whitbourn: Son of God Mass; Parry: Hear my words, ye people

Church of St Peter, Willis Street

Sunday 15 May, 3 pm

This concert had been scheduled for Saturday 16 April but, as explained by conductor Peter de Blois, there was an organ problem which required an organ transplant (probably a hoary one for organists).

De Blois also announced another change; the tenor was indisposed and so his place was taken by the conductor who happened, fortuitously, to be vocally equipped in a suitable way.

Purcell’s Te Deum Laudamus and Jubilate Deo
The earlier music came in the first half: two of Purcell’s last church compositions, written a year before his death in 1795, at the ripe Mozart and Bizet age of 35 or 36 (depending on what dates you observe for Purcell). The Te Deum Laudate and Jubilate Deo are often linked: Handel’s Utrecht Te Deum and Jubilate follow the same model.

The Te Deum was composed with orchestral accompaniment and, though I didn’t know that at the concert, I made unappreciative comments about the organ registrations in my notes; though I conceded that the contrast with the choral singing was ‘interesting’. Oh for accompaniment by brilliant trumpets and strings, something that one yearned for in the Mozart too!

Bass Simon Christie opened the singing strongly and confidently and mezzo (listed as ‘alto’) Maaike Christie-Beekman followed with rather impressive handling of the highly decorated melismatas from the verse ‘ The glorious company…’. Though the choir’s singing was generally well integrated and accurate, the entry of three soloists at ‘To thee all angels cry aloud’ introduced a rather more polished element; particular musical were the soprano-alto duet episodes, and the solo contributions from soprano Sharon Yearsley, and when De Blois’s tenor parts arrived they were perfectly comfortable.

One of the most affecting episodes was Christie-Beekman’s ‘Vouchsafe O Lord…’.

The Jubilate Deo is set to more lively music, with well-balanced choral singing; Douglas Mews’s organ playing was sympathetic. Again, Maaike Christie-Beekman’s voice proved splendidly appropriate to the music, tripping through the quick dotted rhythms, and again there was charming soprano-alto duetting. Another interesting duet was between the alto and bass where the bass had the melody much of the time, though pitched lower.

Vesperae solennes de confessore, K 339
Mozart’s Solemn Vespers fulfilled my linguistic preference for Latin (Purcell’s setting was in English). It’s some time since I heard the entire work, his last for Salzburg Cathedral; though the ‘Laudate Dominum’ has the familiarity of a popular opera aria. The soloists are not such a constant presence as in the Purcell, so one paid greater attention to the chorus. After a moment of uncertainty early in the ‘Dixit Dominus’, the choir performed well, with plenty of energy with the momentum of the triple rhythm. It quickly served to remind me of the greatness of this music that seems somehow to be ranked below the Mass in C Minor or the Coronation Mass or of course the Requiem; with little justification.

The ‘Confitebor’ offered fine opportunities for the soloists, with short episodes for the two men which sounded very well. The four soloists in the ‘Beatus Vir’ enjoyed a striking moment, from ‘Gloria et divitiae..’ and again at ‘Jucundus homo’, singing through the verse one by one, sort of in canon. And the soprano here sounded especially practised and polished.

They did well in the fugal ‘Laudate Pueri’, with inflections that seemed to show meaning of the words. And the drop in dynamics as they entered the final verses, ‘Gloria patri et filio..’ found dramatic qualities in the language of the Psalm (113), which always raises Mozart’s liturgical music above the merely religious. The ‘Laudate Dominum’, of course, offered Yearsley an arresting solo opportunity; and it’s not without lovely choral episodes. Heard in the context of the six parts of the Vespers service, the ‘Laudate Dominum’ does not really stand out in isolation from the marvellous music in all parts of the work.

The last section, the ‘Magnificat’, ranks with other great settings of that text and the choir did it energetic justice, with a final gathering of splendid solo forces; and bold choral singing, though once again, high trumpets and pulsing strings were missed, in spite of Douglas Mews’s very creditable efforts on the organ.

James Whitbourn: Son of God Mass
It was a good idea to separate Parry from Mozart with a piece written in the 21st century. Whitbourn’s Son of God Mass, written in 2001 for a BBC documentary, employed an obbligato soprano saxophone, in the hands of Chris Buckland, and it’s actually scored for organ accompaniment. So the organ part, presumably with detailed registrations, was interesting in the fabric of the singing. Much of the organ part was comfortably low pitched, better integrated with the voices. As a quote from the review of a recording remarks, comparisons with Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble are inevitable, though not invidious. Not all the Mass is used.

It’s melodic in an unapologetic way, the music is varied in articulation and dynamics, speed and rhythms, and the saxophone does unusual, somewhat spiritual things. It uttered a loud cry at ‘Domine fili unigenite’ and remained at hand through the start of the ‘Credo’, where the words were pronounced slowly and deliberately.

The choral parts are not too challenging, yet there were plenty of opportunities for dramatic outbursts: the ‘Hosanna in excelsis’ provided an obvious occasion for a bit of ecstasy. The final Amen ended with voices and saxophone way up high. An attractive and successful piece.

Parry’s Verse Anthem
Returning to Parry, Hear my words, ye people was written in 1894 for a diocesan choral festival at Salisbury Cathedral, to be sung by combined parish church choirs, so it’s not too hard. But the parts for soprano bass, and the organ are more taxing. It might be for that reason that I had the feeling that the organ was not always on the same page (excuse the popular cliché) as the choir.

I also felt that this music, conceived for the huge space of an English cathedral, called for a generous acoustic that would wind the sounds around the side aisles and up into the vaulted ceiling before returning to human ears in the nave in careful confusion. Minor choral weaknesses could be disguised and the impact enhanced, to suggest more of a colourful and grand religious, even spiritual, ritual. All four soloists had happy moments in the limelight; the bass enjoyed quite a dramatic experience, though it went a bit low for his comfort at one point.

The main weakness for me was the descent in the last phase, to a very ordinary hymn, O praise ye the Lord, that sounds just like the thousand other hymns sung in Anglican and other protestant churches around the world.

Yet in many ways, this work represents much that was excellent in English 19th century music, and from the 21st century perspective, it can be judged more generously than ‘Parry and Stanford’ were by many critics and audiences of the mid 20th century. We are probably seeing a timely revision of these attitudes.

Memorable NZSO concert with rising young conductor and acclaimed pianist

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Gimeno with Stephen Hough (piano)

Brahms: Piano concerto No 2 in B flat
Gareth Farr: From the Depths sound the Great Sea Gongs, Part I
Shostakovich: Symphony No 1 in F minor

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 13 May, 6:30 pm

I am sometimes tempted to think that the publicity by the NZSO, which I usually find rather cluttered with over-used superlative clichés, has the unfortunate effect of deadening the impact of those few occasions when something really very special is about to happen. It would have been a pity if constant, indiscriminate hype had numbed discerning concert-goers to an occasion when some extravagant superlatives were warranted.

Nevertheless, the language of the early May press release about tonight’s concert announced a performance by one of our era’s finest pianists, Stephen Hough, and a young Spanish conductor who has been seriously acclaimed in no merely routine manner. Gimeno has been garlanded with praise by very discriminating audiences, orchestras and critics from his 2014 debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and on through the Orchestre National de France, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the Dresden Staatskapelle, and others, all in little more than a year. He has just been appointed principal conductor of the Luxembourg Philharmonic; strangely, Bramwell Tovey, last week’s NZSO conductor, was their conductor in the early 2000s.

Brahms’s second piano concerto was placed first in the programme, and so the focus was mainly, as is normal, on the pianist rather than on the conductor, though the grandeur and rapture of the orchestra’s part could not be missed. Of course, that could be put down simply to the fact that our orchestra usually plays like that.

Untypically at that time, apart from Beethoven’s fourth concerto and Schumann’s, Brahms here uses the piano at the start, serenely, with velvety horns, but it’s quickly overtaken by a far more grandly dramatic spirit; and the piano is never absent for very long. The concerto was also a departure from the usual, in the 1880s, having four movements, widely criticised (e.g. ‘an inappropriate attempt to imitate symphonic form’), and in including no cadenzas of a formal sort.

But today, judgements based on such conventions seem tiresome and pedantic. The overwhelming response to the concerto is naturally to the weight, imaginativeness and excitement of the piano part, and that was vividly expressed, but this performance also demonstrated its overwhelmingly symphonic character, to which the pianist was an equal contributor. It fulfilled my own feeling that it is at least the equal of the second symphony and violin concerto before it and rather more weighty than the lyrical third symphony after it.

Stephen Hough’s playing was both meticulous and full of bravura and it was a delight to be able to watch his energetic and balletic playing as well as merely hearing it (I usually don’t bother to seek a seat with a view of the keyboard). It was one of those performances that unfurled just as I envisaged it in that ultimate ‘ideal’ version that takes root in the mind – an amalgam of all the performances you’ve ever heard and that you couldn’t attribute to a particular pianist or orchestra. Hough was responsive to each emotion or gesture, whether subtly lyrical and rhapsodic, or carelessly capricious, enjoying moments of bravura, or dancing with emphatic rhythms – through his hands, not with extravagant arm and body movement.

The orchestra handled the opulent music with arresting rhythmic flexibility, particularly in the scherzo, second movement. For all its weight, the economy of the orchestration is conspicuous, with very few occasions when more than one section, perhaps over a discreet bed of strings, or a soloist – oboe or cello for example – played at a time. Such economy allowed the conductor to exploit big moments the more dramatically.

Gareth Farr’s piece was moved to after the interval. Incidentally, I was not impressed when ushers allowed quite a large number of later-comers to take their seats between movements one and two, some down the front, climbing over people. Let people in by all means, quickly and silently, but insist they remain standing at the back.

Farr’s From the Depths sound the Great Sea Gongs has become one of New Zealand’s most popular orchestral pieces. It’s a showpiece for percussion, with a mesmerising array of rototoms, manned by three percussionists, dominated the stage, rather than actual gongs; so it’s a celebration of the percussion-driven music of various Pacific nations, including Japanese taiko drumming and Bali gamelan. Our Spanish conductor, raised in a musical culture in which strong and exciting rhythms feature largely, sounded totally in control of it. Of course, in contrast to the abstemious Brahms who, as I noted, uses his orchestra fastidiously, in Farr’s even larger, Straussian-sized band, everyone was fully committed: triple winds, five horns and so on. And they made a splendidly exciting, emphatically musical, noise.

In spite of its shameless exuberance, for which the composer would of course make no apology, it’s still real music, and its popularity is properly earned.

Then came one of the most famous first symphonies, up there with Schumann’s, Brahms’s or Mahler’s; and written much younger than any of those. It was written during the early Leninist years of the Revolution, when the relationship between the regime and writers and artists was good and when books and music from abroad were freely available and visits by western European musicians were common.

So touches of Stravinsky and Hindemith and several others ‘progressive’ composers can be heard in this student piece; the influence of Petrushka is strong, particularly in the first two movements. But the word ‘student’ gives entirely the wrong idea of the maturity of the work, which lies in the character of the music itself, and the absence of any hint of ordinary youthful exuberance. Though one could sense his anticipation of a career in which the huge talent of which he was well aware, would flourish and be recognized.

There are many events in the music that one assumes have an emotional meaning, such as the stunning piano chords that bring the second movement to a rude conclusion, seeming to announce an end or a banishment. The Lento that follows seems to draw attention to what some consider at the dominant theme: Death; hardly an expected subject in a first major work by a teenage composer; and Death also commands the last movement, conspicuous in such gestures as the bare timpani eruption, three times repeated. And it might be expunged in part through the anguished and beautiful cello soliloquy.

Gimeno’s view of the work, was both powerful and vivid, seeking clarity of texture, and revealing as much as possible of the characteristics mentioned above. It is permissible to wonder that a conductor who is perhaps no more than a decade older that Shostakovich was at its composition (19), could draw from it such energy and emotional depth, as well as sheer orchestral virtuosity.

This concert, for its pretty big audience, will surely find itself on lists of the most memorable of the year.

 

Beguiling, wide-ranging guitar recital from Owen Moriarty a fine substitute for lunch

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Owen Moriarty – solo guitar

Music by Turina, Nikita Koshkin, Santiago de Murcia, Tarrega and Donal Macnamara

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 11 May, 12:15 pm

As noted in my review of the recital by NZSM guitar students on 20 April, this programme was to have been by the students, while Moriarty would have played on 20 April.

It was well worth the wait. Each of Moriarty’s recitals produces an extraordinary range of music either written or arranged for the guitar, from all eras from the Renaissance to the present. This recital spanned from the early 18th century to about 1980.

First was Turina’s Hommage (sometimes – perhaps in Catalan – Homenaje) a Tarrega. Like the other famous Spanish composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Turina composed few works for guitar; but many of the piano pieces have been transcribed for guitar. He wrote five, this ‘Homage to Tarrega’, being his last for guitar. It has two movements: Garrotin (Catalan for ‘stick’) and Soleares (I guess it has to do either with the sun or being alone). The first a steady-paced piece in common time, the second more flowing and perhaps Andalusian in character.

The amplification worried me a bit at the beginning – it diminished some of the subtlety of the music and its performance, but I stopped noticing quite soon.

Then came the most unusual of guitar pieces, Nikita Koshkin, a prominent Russian composer and guitarist, born in 1956. The Prince’s Toys is evidently one of his most famous pieces, a story paralleling Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges – the tale of a spoilt, cruel young prince who’s nasty to his toys and suffers his retribution. But without the microphone, I caught little of what Moriarty said: there are twelve pieces in the suite.

The three movements that Moriarty played exhibited the surprising and often highly virtuosic range of sounds available to a skilled guitarist, sometimes combining gentle strumming under a more prominent melodic line, involving left hand plucking; surprising quiet passages; tapping or merely brushing the belly of the instrument while other hands (so it often seemed) perform high-speed acrobatics from end to end of the finger-board.

Santiago de Murcia (the region between Andalusia and Valencia) was a decade older than Bach and Domenico Scarlatti; most of his music is lost, but Moriarty described the discovery in Mexico half a century ago of a revelatory collection of his music, and other music has been discovered recently in Chile, though there is no suggestion that he ever travelled to Latin America. The three movements of his Sonata in D, arranged by Bill Kanengiser, who was one of Moriarty’s teachers in Los Angeles, revealed a melodic and stylistic gift that draws on popular musical traditions. There was a slow and gentle middle movement in triple time, of singular charm, and a lively gigue-like last movement that was both subtle and fluent; and so were they played.

Then came three pieces by Tarrega himself: an Alborada, hushed tones suggesting a slow dawn, Rosita, that seemed full of reminiscences, quite taxing technically; and then the Jota, which I encountered first (half a century ago?) in the splendid piece by Glinka: Jota Aragonesa, which I haven’t heard on the radio for decades. There are many others, including the entr’acte to Act 4 of Carmen, by Liszt and Saint-Saëns, etcetera. It evolved in various ways and was quite extended, though it still ended rather too soon.

Finally, in a sort of family reminiscence, of which I caught little, Moriarty talked about an Irish piece by Donal Macnamara who lived in the 18th century; A Gaoth Andheas (something about the south wind). Typically Irish in tone, gently lamenting and nostalgic. The programme note follows a website that I too stumbled on: “South Wind was written in the 1700s by “Freckled Donal Macnamara” in homesickness for his homeland in County Mayo, as described in Donal O’Sullivan’s wonderful book, “Songs of the Irish.”

A delightful recital to be sure!

 

NZSO ‘wastes its sweetness upon the desert air’ with some splendid, approachable, 21st century music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Aotearoa Plus
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bramwell Tovey with Stephen de Pledge (piano)

Bramwell Tovey: Time Tracks
Magnus Lindberg: Piano concerto No 2
Christopher Blake: Voices (premiere)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 6 May, 6:30 pm

Above all, this concert again raised for me the old controversy about the handling of new music. Whether it is best to ghettoize music that is unlikely to find a large audience, or to place these pieces carefully in concerts that include an irresistibly popular masterpiece.

If the intention is to persuade the timid to expose their minds to something unfamiliar, the size of Friday’s audience showed again that approach No 1 does not work, for very few of the ‘conservatives’ would have been there, and so the hope of getting the reluctant to open their ears, failed.

It’s not as if much music being composed today uses the kinds of artificial notions of what the basic patterns of melodic structure should be, so widespread at mid-century. Though polytonality is often used and conventional melody often seems avoided in case it suggests that a ‘serious’ piece of music is really lightweight, much music, including what our own composers produce can actually be enjoyed by simply opening the ears, without prejudice.

Tovey’s opera suite from The Inventor
This first visit to New Zealand by English-born, Canadian conductor, pianist and composer, Bramwell Tovey, revealed an accomplished, versatile musician who has conducted a number of distinguished orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Montreal and Melbourne Symphony, and the Philadelphia orchestras. He has been conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra since 2000. His compositions range across many genres, including the 2011 work for Calgary Opera, The Inventor, which was well received there. This concert began with the premiere of an orchestral suite, Time Tracks, the second suite that Tovey has drawn from his opera. The opera tells the true story of a charismatic con-man with a variety of versatile criminal talents than culminated in an unintended climax on the Bremerhaven docks: an insurance swindle goes wrong with an explosion that kills about eighty people.

Tovey introduced his piece entertainingly, useful for those who had not bought a programme. I’m not sure that the music was much more enlivened by accounts of the opera’s subject, as it stood on its own feet as an obviously dramatic sequence, opening with bold and colourful statements. It revealed a facility in handling narrative and situational elements through the use of a wide variety of tuned percussion, as well as tam-tams and hand bells and the usual range of drums, occasional solos and episodes from orchestral sections that were attractive or arresting in their own right. A couple of times, Tovey stepped off the podium to play a honky-tonk piano to his left, a sort of bluesy lament and later evoking a dreamy quality, no doubt reflecting the opera’s depiction of the flawed character’s insight into his own weaknesses. Among the many evocative phases in the score are touches of big-band jazz and motifs and harmonies that hint at the influence of John Adams. A particularly vivid moment is the depiction of a train gathering speed.

Piano Concerto No 2 by Lindberg
Lindberg’s second piano concerto was written with the character of its soloist (Yefim Bronfman, who has played with the NZSO), with the New York Philharmonic, very much in mind. In the words of the programme note, it was a response to Bronfman’s “muscular performances of Bartok and Prokofiev”. The sound and energy of those two composers were certainly audible in the music, but at the beginning, also Ravel (though not, as the programme note suggested, Debussy); Lindberg himself has mentioned Ravel’s Concerto for the left hand as inspiring the music. Inevitably, one can also be persuaded of the influence of other 20th century composers, even Rachmaninov in the last movement, perhaps Szymanowski too.

A throbbing motif imposes itself early on, but soon the piano attempts to impose itself. For much of the time, it failed, not because De Pledge lacked the ability to bring the right amount of energy and incisiveness to the performance, but because a great deal of the time, Lindberg cannot resist imposing a massive accompaniment that smothers the piano. I came to feel that this was perhaps more the result of a failure to impose restraint on and require greater discretion and subtlety from the orchestra; it was after all, a larger than normal orchestra with extra brass instruments and pains were needed to find whatever chamber-music-like qualities existed in the scoring.

The piano had its moments nevertheless, such as the start of the second movement, and between what one felt were obligatory hair-raising, bravura passages, there was sufficient evidence of the presence of a real instinct for the great piano concerto tradition as it has evolved in the past century. There was a passage of attractively warm playing from cellos; horns contributed with finesse, and there was no question that the score lay well within the orchestra’s interpretive abilities.

Christopher Blake’s second symphony
Finally, the second half, was Christopher Blake’s second symphony, entitled Voices, based in sometimes quite literal ways on Eliot’s The Waste Land. A daunting task, one might think, to find musical intimations or coherence in that still-disturbing poem, laden with abstruse classical and modern literary and musical references. Blake doesn’t employ the titles Eliot gave to the five cantos of the poem, but focuses on the people who populate each part.

Here, in contrast to the music in the first half however, was a piece that employs as large an orchestra with wonderful discretion, only rarely allowing full tuttis to emphasise aspects. Blake’s notes draw attention to the way his symphony has cross references between the movements and, though reassuring us that the music does stand alone, without reference to the poem itself, that “it is amplified and harnesses other worlds of meaning when viewed through the lens of Eliot’s poem”. So I look forward to the performance being released by the NZSO and Radio New Zealand Concert, accompanied by a gloss with annotations to help the listener elucidate more of the music’s secrets and its connections to the poem.

Its character was announced right at the start with a prolonged, unison horn evocation, followed by a startling attack from wood blocks; then mysterious string murmurings. It’s in the first part that Eliot quotes four lines of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, “Frisch weht der Wind…”, with electrifying musical impact, and the music is there. The second part, ‘Albert and Lil’, (A Game of Chess in Eliot), is coloured with gently sleazy blues sounds, involving various instruments, including an alto saxophone, played seductively.

Perhaps the fifth section was the most intriguing and enigmatic, starting with a shocking attack from tuned percussion, and soon one of the few passages for the full orchestra with propulsive, racing strings, with its references to things not in the actual poem, but in Eliot’s notes, like the journey to Emmaus and Shackleton, a fine oboe solo, and a great variety of brilliant, cleanly-used, individual instruments, raising in one’s mind more questions than answers, especially in one’s effort to recall the poem.

Each section bears its own tone and significance, as does the poem itself, and I remained, quite simply, thoroughly engaged by the sound world that was created as well as by an admiration for the composer’s evident intention to employ the orchestra to display so well the strengths of its soloists and of each section. A very nice way for a chief executive to compliment his employees for their skill and dedication, not simply in his own composition but for the huge contribution that the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra makes in the protection, against the sort of decaying and decadent cultural forces described by Eliot in 1922, of some civilized standards in this country.

 

 

NZSO and Madeleine Pierard with Ross Harris’s anguished Second Symphony to mark ANZAC Day

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich with Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
‘Spirit of ANZAC’

Frederick Septimus Kelly: In Memoriam Rupert Brooke
George Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad, Rhapsody for Orchestra
Ross Harris: Symphony No 2

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 21 April, 6:30 pm

I have been heard to utter unpatriotic feelings about the seeming endless attention paid in New Zealand to war and in particular the First World War and Gallipoli, which took place around 100 years ago. I have no problem with the stimulus the centenary has given to serious re-examination of the political background to the war, its pursuit and the catastrophic results of the Treaty of Versailles that sought to fix the world afterwards. But I wish more attention was given to those other aspects, involving other parts of Europe and the Middle East, for it is the outcome of the war in those spheres, and the self-seeking, diplomatic manoeuvering, the persistent imperial ambitions of all the main players that have created today’s ever-more insoluble crises, particularly in the Middle East. We are still led to believe, at least in much of the English-speaking world, that the war was all about Gallipoli and parts of the Western Front.

However, this evening’s music was concerned mainly with the war’s impact on individual people – soldiers and their families.  Not just with an amorphous ‘loss of life’ and ‘national tragedy’.

In Memoriam Rupert Brooke
It began with a string composition by one Frederick Septimus Kelly, an Australian, who was with his friend Rupert Brooke when he died and was buried on the Greek Island of Skyros. It was rather a moving piece, echoing some of the music of the early 20th century, Vaughan Williams, perhaps Elgar: pastoral, warm and reflective. An elegiac viola melody in the middle lent it a certain strength. It achieved its purpose very well, as McKeich led the orchestra through a sympathetic, unaffected though expressive performance.

Butterworth
George Butterworth, who was killed, with Kelly, at the Somme in 1916, has become a more famous name and his better-known A Shropshire Lad, for full orchestra, demonstrated a gift that might have had him rated with Bantock, Ireland, Moeran or York Bowen, perhaps even in the class of Holst, Howells or Vaughan Williams if he’d lived.

It begins in the character of Butterworth’s lovely The Banks of Green Willow, with strings and solo entries from clarinet, bassoon and cor anglais and follows an emotional path that reflects much of the pervasive emotion of Housman’s poems. In the middle section it expands notably with heavier brass and its pastoral charm is lost. This rather vivid section might have felt a little at odds with the character of many of the poems, though, admittedly, many in the big collection extend far beyond nostalgia and the English countryside, and are primarily reflections on mortality, on the loss of young lives in war (though of course they were published 20 years before the First World War): nevertheless, the rather extravert brass felt a shade too literal and specific.

Harris: Second Symphony
The major work was Ross Harris’s 2nd symphony. Like all his symphonies, this was commissioned and premiered by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, in 2006. It has rather surprised me that neither Wellington-based orchestra has commissioned a symphony from this major Wellington composer, as one after another has been written for Auckland; this one has even had a second playing in Auckland. (His sixth is scheduled for APO performance later this year). And I don’t think any have even been performed here; if so, this was a momentous occasion – the first Harris symphony to be played in Wellington.

This was one of the earlier collaborations between poet Vincent O’Sullivan and Ross Harris. Though cast in four movements, and obviously with an important orchestral element, it could as well be described as a song-cycle, as a symphony. There are eight stanzas, distributed through the four movements.

It tells a story, based on a newspaper report, of a young soldier in France, falling in love with a local girl, deserting, having a brief love, and coming to a sad, predictable end. I suppose it’s superfluous to say it reminds me of M K Joseph’s poignant novel, A Soldier’s Tale.

On stage was a large orchestra including large percussion, with tubular bells, though just double winds, under conductor Hamish McKeich who confirmed quickly his commanding grasp of the score and delivered a taut, dramatic and very moving performance.

Also on stage is Madeleine Pierard who sings the poetry through all the movements, taking first the soldier’s, then the French girl’s roles. It’s vividly descriptive music, starting in hushed strings, cor anglais, interrupted shockingly with mighty bass drum, violent brass, with military sounds, ironic marches; while the poem speaks soon of dreamy advances through poppy fields, with flashes of soldiers’ graves and snow and the sudden awakenings to reality. Pierard’s earthy, penetrating soprano kept the story anchored to real people and their emotional crisis, and even to their brief ecstasy.

The second movement deals with the love story, and the music opens in spell-binding unreality, in dread presentiment of its brief span, employing a limited tonal range, a momentary, almost subliminal echo of one of the Sings Harry songs. There were moments when the music seemed to strive too hard to reflect the words, though it was still the music that made the deepest impact, sometimes heart-stoppingly awful; so it was in the third movement where the violence of the soldier’s capture and killing are dealt with swiftly, violently, and the orchestral tumult is all that’s needed to understand.

In the fourth movement, poem 7, tubular bells, clarinet, strings, express the tragedy and the girl’s grief, perhaps better than the clarity of words can ever do. Though the last stanza, “Who, who is this young man…” with a cello solo accompanying the girl’s stricken loss, and her slow walking from the stage, to the fading music, was inevitably the most affecting part of the composition. The last lines are sung from back stage, as if from the grave.

Predictably, there were many empty seats, though the audience responded enthusiastically to soprano, conductor and orchestra, as well as to poet and composer who filed onto the stage.

 

Student guitar talents offer entertaining replacement concert at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s Lunchtime concert

Guitar students from the New Zealand School of Music
Jake Church, Emma Sandford, Joel Baldwin, Amber Madriaga, Dylan Solomon, three of whom comprised the NZSM Guitar Trio: Madriaga, Sandford and Baldwin

St Andrew’s on The Terrace
(This review was posted late because of the replacement of one of the guitarists, whose name and the title of his choice of music I had asked for, but failed to follow up. My apologies to the players.)

Wednesday 20 April, 12:15 pm

This programme was a last-minute replacement for the scheduled performance by guitarist Owen Moriarty who will now play on 11 May. These students were to have played on that day.

There was another alteration, with the first player, Royden Smith, replaced by Jake Church who played a pot-pourri of tunes from La Traviata arranged by Julian Arcas. It made an engaging start to the concert.

Emma Sanders chose what might be Albéniz’s best-known piece, Asturias. It’s a piece I used to think was one of the big collection of piano pieces entitled Iberia. But Wikipedia says it was originally the Prelude to the early set, Chants d’Espagne, and later included, after Albeniz’s death, in an unauthorised ‘complete version’ of the Suite Española by the publisher Hofmeister. There it was entitled Asturias (Leyenda = legend).

The title had always puzzled me though, as the music is clearly Andalusian in spirit and rhythm, and not from Asturias, which is on the north coast of Spain where the folk music is quite different. Like Tarrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra, it’s one of the most popular pieces of Spanish guitar-style music. Though a bit much weight was given to big chords at the beginning of the repeated main phrase, Emma played with admirable fluency.

Joel Baldwin and Amber Madriaga both played parts of suites by Bach. Joel, the Prelude and Sarabande, from the E minor lute suite, BWV 996; Amber, the two minuets from the E major solo violin suite, BWV 1006a. Both demanded arrangements for performance on the guitar, but both players gave them most persuasive accounts, interpreting them as if conceived originally for the guitar, as if Bach himself was a master of the instrument.

An important contemporary of Bach’s, Sylvius Leopold Weiss, was one of the most famous lute players of the time and his music translates easily for the guitar. Dylan Solomon’s choice was Weiss’s Suite in F – three movements, the last of which demanded the bottom string being re-tuned down a tone to match the lute’s tuning. The Prelude, confident, the Allemande with moments of uncertainty, though I may have misinterpreted deliberate hesitations; and the final Gigue, probably not as complex a composition as say one of the gigues in Bach’s the cello suites, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Finally the New Zealand School of Music Guitar Trio (Madriaga, Sandford and Baldwin) came together to play Klaus Wüsthoff’s Concierto de Samba. Born in 1922 and evidently still alive, he is an extraordinarily versatile composer, working in a myriad of styles. Though I didn’t catch much of Baldwin’s introduction, the music presented itself buoyantly through an engaging performance.