Author: Lindis Taylor

David Guerin celebrates the new Hutt Little Theatre piano with the Goldberg Variations

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Chamber Music Hutt Valley

David Guerin (piano) with Bach’s Goldberg Variations

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Sunday 17 April, 3:30 pm

This special, extra concert was presented to mark the unveiling of a plaque recording the names of donors to the Little Theatre Piano Fund. It would have been hard to think of a more monumental piece of music for the occasion than the Goldberg Variations.

The last time I heard David Guerin playing was in an ensemble of four at the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson last February. Alone he played a piece from Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus, and with others, pieces by New Zealand composers.

This concert was a bit different: devoted to one great work alone.

It is a work that lends itself to almost endless performance and stylistic approaches. Some pianists get through the Goldberg’s in about 40 minutes; others can take round 90 minutes and there’s lots in between. Guerin was nearer the upper end. To me, each performance seems perfectly right after a couple of minutes. Though there are many piano aficionados who make a production of writing off one or another for reasons of tempo and many other displays of their erudition and refined taste, such as treatment of ornaments or performance on a modern piano instead of a harpsichord.

I don’t really remember David Guerin’s earlier playing of this work, for the Wellington Chamber Music Society, perhaps 20 years ago. Only that it was, I think, my first live hearing, and therefore a momentous occasion.

On Sunday I found myself in a totally accepting frame of mind, enjoying the extended playing time of the initial Aria, after which nothing else in this performance seemed too slow. When it’s played at such a deliberate pace, there’s room to hear every note individually, and they are exposed to the curious ear rather than caught up in great rushes of sound or electrifying cascades of decorative figuration. Very fast performances can create the impression for listeners that the piece is easy to play.

But I suspect that to play slowly and deliberately is more risky as the exact weight given to every note and the spaces between each, invites more awareness of any minor unevenness. So there can be a degree or two more anxiety or awareness by both player and listener of very minor blemishes that would simply not be perceived at speed. And so I was conscious of such things a great deal, and it brought me, someone with extremely modest keyboard accomplishments, to an even greater admiration for Guerin’s handling of the exposed technical demands of the music and of empathy with the suppressed nervousness that no doubt accompanied him.

And so it didn’t surprise me that the most virtuosic variations, some uncharacteristically fast, were among the most outwardly confident, for example, many of the so-called Arabesques, the second variation in each triplet: Nos 11, 17, 20, 26, 29 – this last particularly masterly. Several of these were specified by Bach to be played on a two-manual harpsichord, thus emphasising the importance he placed on achieving variations in colour and articulation.

Especially striking in Guerin’s performance were the last variations, which were variously, more bravura than most of the earlier ones, and some even slower. He seemed to spin out the Quodlibet endlessly, even to the point when I thought that he could be repeating certain phrases to create the sense of an endless experience. After all that, and after a Mahlerian length, seated almost motionless for an hour and a quarter, the return to the Aria was remarkable in its emotional impact, on the audience, and perhaps on the pianist; though as he slowly stood, he displayed neither relief nor exhaustion; not even exultation, which would have been justified.

The audience reaction left no doubt that they shared the latter emotion.

 

J

 

 

Chamber Music New Zealand season opens with exquisite French baroque concert by Les Talens Lyriques

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Chamber Music New Zealand
Les Talens Lyriques (Christophe Rousset – harpsichord, Gilone Gaubert-Jacques and Gabriel Grosbard – violins, Atsushi Sakaï – viola da gamba)

Marin Marais: Suite No 5
Antoine Forqueray: Première Suite
François Couperin: Les nations: ‘La Piemontaise’
Jean-Marie Leclair: Deuxième récréation de musique, Opus 8
Jean-Philippe Rameau: Pièces de clavecin – Troisième concert
Couperin: Le Parnasse ou l’Apothéose de Corelli

Michael Fowler Centre

Wednesday 13 April, 7:30 pm

As a rather excessive Francophile, I was more than delighted at the prospect of hearing the distinguished French baroque ensemble, Les Talens Lyriques, live in my home town. Knowing the strange and sometimes narrow musical tastes of some chamber music lovers whose horizons are often limited to the German and Italian lands, I rather feared that the unfamiliar music of the French baroque might have drawn a rather small audience. But I have misjudged my compatriots: there was a very decent-sized audience in the stalls of the Michael Fowler Centre.

This distinguished ensemble was born in 1991, inspired by its present leader, Christophe Rousset, and their name is mentioned in the company of the English Baroque Soloists, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Academy of Ancient Music, Musica Antiqua Köln, Concentus Musicus Wien, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century or their compatriots, Les musiciens du Louvre. Though, being just a quartet on this tour, their repertoire is different from that of larger ensembles.

The programme was somewhat chronologically arranged, starting with Marin Marais, a Suite that reflected one extreme of the French style, melody that was so subtle and unassertive as to be hard to apprehend; its beauty lay in its elusiveness and the finesse and taste (words of Leclair quoted in the programme notes) of its embellishments. Though the dance-derived movements were stronger and of course rhythmic, and melody was of great refinement. It was the remarkable deftness and elegance of the performance however, that was the overwhelming impact of the music. The harpsichord is by nature almost excessively reclusive (we should have been in a more suitable venue, such as the Town Hall, its fixing disgracefully stalled, to capture its sound better) but its important support was audible if you really turned your attention there. The two violins, both in sublime duetting and alone, and above all, the astonishing virtuosity and beauty of Atsushi Sakaï’s viola da gamba held between them the essence of the style.

Most of Antoine Forqueray’s music has been lost but his Suite in D minor, for harpsichord and gamba, one of the five surviving, provided a vehicle for Sakaï’s almost supernatural command of his magnificent instrument which could sound in its upper register, more like a violin than either a cello or a viola ever does. Not only that, but this endlessly complex, fantastically embellished composition was played without the score.

Then we came to Couperin (next time you’re in Paris, visit the church of Saint-Gervais where the family dynasty reigned for generations; behind the Hôtel de Ville in the 4th arrondissement). The first of the two Couperin works was one of the four suites or, as Couperin wrote, Ordres, entitled Les Nations, each celebrating one of the Catholic powers: France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the Savoy dynasty of Piedmont. This was the fourth, La Piémontaise. ‘Each is a combination of an Italianate trio sonata with its free-form virtuosity and a large-scale and elaborate French dance suite’ (quote from a Naxos recording). The first movement dominated the piece, with numerous switches back and forth from pensive to meditative phases, from the French to the Italian style, though the Piedmontese, or Italian, character rather dominated the suite. Again, the performance spoke of a deep-rooted idiomatic understanding of the essential Couperin on the part of Les Talens.

Leclair was the most nearly ‘classical’ of the five composers in the programme: he lived from 1697-1764; the notes refrained from retelling the tale of his death, murdered in a Paris street, believed to be related to his separation from his wife a few years before. (If you’re curious, read Gérard Géfen, L’Assassinat de Jean-Marie Leclair, Belfond, 1990, which offers a solution to the mystery). But there’s nothing shady about the music, the Second Récréation de musique, its full title adding ‘for easy performance by two flutes or two violins’. Bearing clear marks of his country, it is easily placed in its era and nationality, along with other composers of the early 18th century, not excluding Couperin; it contains occasional operatic gestures. The second movement, Forlane, in triple time, was quite an extended piece that carried echoes of German and Italian music of his period. And then came an un-Bach-like Chaconne – danceable, lively. And here was one of the places where I felt the harpsichord was a bit disadvantaged in this space.

Rameau is probably the French composer most familiar with the general musical public through the revival of all his operas, mainly by French companies, in the past 20 years. And indeed the tune in the last movement, Tambourines, reminded me of a tune in one of them. Almost a contemporary of Bach, Handel and D Scarlatti, Rameau’s life before opera, which began aged 50, consisted of theoretical treatises and harpsichord and chamber music. In fact the five ‘concerts’ or suites of the Pièces de clavecin en concerts, published well after the three books of Pièces de clavecin, were the only real chamber music he wrote. They played the third ‘concert’, which called for one violin (Gilone Gaubert-Jacques), gamba and harpsichord, with the latter playing an altogether more involved role than as merely a continuo instrument, and the result was three quite vividly characterized movements, brilliantly played. Particularly touching was the enchanting sotto voce ending of the second movement, La Timide.

And the concert ended with a second Couperin suite, Le Parnasse ou l’apothéose de Corelli, a famous musical excursion which speaks of his admiration for Corelli, the great Italian born fifteen years before Couperin. Here, all four players returned, and it was more entertaining as Rousset read (in French) the little introductory phrases before each short movement, describing Corelli’s reception by the muses as he arrives at Parnassus and he is introduced to Apollo. It seemed to reaffirm the return of French music to the mainstream, after the diversion to a somewhat contrived ‘French’ style cultivated by Lully and his followers.

All one’s hopes and expectations were fulfilled by these superb performers, admirable ambassadors for the revelatory music that they played.

 

 

 

Talented young pianist impresses at St Andrew’s lunchtime concert

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St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts

Nick Kovacev – piano

Haydn: Sonata in B minor, Hob XVI/32
Bach: The Toccata from Partita No 6 in E minor, BWV 830
Schubert: Impromptu in B flat, D 935, no 3
Ginastera: Danzas Argentinas (1937)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 13 April, 12:15 pm

The New Zealand School of Music is a major supplier of talent to the year-long series of lunchtime concerts at St Andrew’s on The Terrace. Most of those who play are at somewhat advanced degree levels, but this time it’s pianist Nick Kovacev who is in his first year at the school. I had not read the brief note about him in the programme at the start of the recital and had imagined that he was probably about a third year student, such was the polish and confidence of his playing. Even though there were occasional slips, which of course reassures us that we are listening to a live performer and not a highly enhanced recording playing behind an animated papier-mâché model of a pianist seated at the piano.

I’m sure others were misled too as he proceeded to dazzle the audience with one of Haydn’s more spectacular sonatas, Hoboken’s No 32 in B minor, from memory, as was the entire recital. It was not far removed from the more breathtaking of Scarlatti’s sonatas: staccato, animated, fluent, his playing displayed awareness of dynamic variety, produced through a well-applied palette of articulations. His posture suggested maturity with a flair for the pregnant pause and taste sufficiently cultivated to enrich the shapes of tunes which were never merely repetitious.

The Toccata from Bach’s 6th harpsichord partita provided Kovacev with a different idiom to explore. The improvisatory start and finish lent a sense of spontaneity, as if he was making it up as he went along; it compared strikingly with the sobering effect of a fugue which arrives a rather a surprise. His playing showed purpose and mastery, as he paid careful attention to the evolution of the fugue. The programme notes used the words ‘earnest simplicity’ to describe the next piece, by Schubert and it struck me that it applied to the Bach too.

Schubert’s big Impromptu in B flat (among the two longest of the eight) drew attention to yet another facet of Kovacev’s talent. His ability to sustain the musical line in a major piece of music was very evident; it is a set of variations on one of the rich, poignant melodies in his incidental music for the play Rosamund, and its structure can be compared with Beethoven’s sets of piano variations. The unexpected changes of mood though modulations sounded both inevitable and surprising and the performance proved a rewarding experience. Kovacev dealt skillfully with minor, understandable memory lapses.

If these pieces from memory were not impressive enough, Ginastera’s Danzas Argentinas was a sort of summary of his imposing technical and interpretive accomplishments at present. It begins with a dance by an old herdsman: bi-tonal, dissonant, heavy-footed and virtuosic, then lyrical, feminine and elusive in the second, and finally, to portray the arrogant gaucho: hectic, forceful and deliberately shapeless. It was a rather spectacular demonstration of a young pianist’s achievement and his ambitions for the future.

One will keep an eye on his progress.

 

 

Committed and successful concert of Russian classics from Wellington Chamber Orchestra

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Wellington Chamber Orchestra conducted by Rachel Hyde with Helene Pohl (violin)

Khachaturian: Adagio from the ballet, Spartacus
Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No 2 in G minor, Opus 63
Borodin: Symphony No 2 in B minor

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 10 April, 2:30 pm

I was prevented from getting to the first half of this concert, which, with the tough though splendid Prokofiev concerto with Helene Pohl, would obviously have been the highlight.

But Borodin is no stroll through the birch forest either.

The Prokofiev concerto had an interesting provenance, as the composer later recounted: “The number of places in which I wrote the concerto shows the kind of nomadic concert-tour life I led then. The main theme of the 1st movement was written in Paris, the first theme of the 2nd movement at Voronezh, the orchestration was finished in Baku and the premiere was given in Madrid.”

The second concerto is more attractive and lyrical than the first but there is much that is complex and difficult and it is brave and ambitious for an amateur orchestra to tackle; and no easy matter even for a soloist such as Helene Pohl, one of New Zealand’s most polished and cultivated violinists. It’s a fine, strong work, calling for a fastidious and brilliant violinist and I very much regret having missed it, especially in what I gather was such an emotionally committed performance.

Spies told me that, although there were inevitable glitches in the concerto – in the orchestral playing, it was considered a great success, very well received by the audience and certainly an achievement and rewarding experience for orchestra and conductor.

The concert had opened with the famous (‘Onedin Line’) Adagio from Khachaturian’s Spartacus which was well within the capacities of the orchestra; as someone said, it just played itself.

I was impressed at once by the richness of the string ensemble that opens Borodin’s best-known symphony; quickly followed by carefully articulated horns – four, as scored, and then more general wind entries. I gather that the four horn players are using new instruments, and their work, for an amateur orchestra, was surprisingly accomplished.

Rachel Hyde achieved a really characteristic Russian sound that lay somewhere between Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov; perhaps it occasionally lost its grip after the development phase got under way, but there was a clear feeling for the music’s shape. The second movement is a Scherzo of intriguing irregularity with a strikingly different Allegretto in the middle, and that was exploited satisfyingly.

The orchestra stopped to retune between second and third movements, breaking the flow a bit; but the reward was an Andante movement of considerable charm, opening with nice playing by clarinet and harp and soon a fine horn solo; and other wind players also had rewarding solo opportunities. The strings led the long, warm melody that rather dominates the movement which, at the end, merges curiously into the last movement without a break. The Allegro finale had striking energy, characterized by repeated short motifs of a pentatonic character that chased each other from one section to another.

Although Borodin thinned out the brass parts when he revised the symphony two years after its 1877 premiere, a performance like this in a limited acoustic, does not produce sounds from brass and percussion that are exactly refined or subtle. Nevertheless, listening between the notes, so to speak, the playing emerged as well-rehearsed, committed and energetic.

Though I had not heard what I guess was really the most interesting, even exciting, music in the concert, what I heard was admirable, and what I heard about, even more so.

Beautiful lunchtime with a flute and piano at St Andrew’s

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Rebecca Steel – flute and Diedre Irons – piano

Poulenc: Flute Sonata
Franck: Flute Sonata in A (transcription of the violin sonata)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 6 April, 12:45 pm

I’ve heard Rebecca Steel at least three times over the past year, playing with a pianist or as part of a trio, in interesting music, often adapted from music for other instruments: Debussy piano pieces, Piazzolla, Chopin, or authentic flute works such as by Bach or Villa-Lobos or Persichetti.

This time we heard what is perhaps the most famous and attractive flute sonata of the 20th century: Poulenc’s; and one of the several adaptations of César Franck’s Violin Sonata which is so lovely that everyone wants a piece of it. And here, with her partner, one of New Zealand’s finest pianists, we heard a version that proved just how universal is its pertinence.

Both performances were world-class; a reminder that St Andrew’s had gained such a reputation that the country‘s top musicians find it worthwhile (not in a pecuniary sense) to play there. There was an audience of nearing 100, and I could sense that their applause recognized that they knew they were hearing music both memorable and splendidly played.

Poulenc, though nearing the end of his life, produced here a piece that, though its first movement is marked Allegro malinconico, is a little slower than ‘allegro’ and not all that melancholy. It was full of vitality and melodic piquancy, and the dynamic attack and variety of articulation and colour had the audience sitting upright, with smiles on their faces. The second movement begins with a slowly rising arpeggio, and like most of Poulenc’s music, blessedly tonal, its face turned away from the strictures of the avant-garde. Nevertheless, its idiom could be of no time but the mid 20th century. Then the third movement, Presto giocoso, presents a sudden, almost shocking attack delivered equally by the two instruments. But it doesn’t persist, reverting for a moment to the calmer spirit of the first movement, with reference to what is somewhere referred to as ‘Poulenc’s trade-mark motif’, only to plunge back into the boisterousness of the first part to bring it to an end.

Franck’s sonata always raises the question in the minds of listeners, why didn’t he write lots of music in this gorgeous, melodic vein? Well, of course there is other music that supports his claim to be among the 20 greatest composers (make your own lists).

And it’s one of the pieces that seems to survive rearrangement for other instruments with no damage. I don’t think I’d heard a flute arrangement before, and was immediately won over, partly because of the strength of the music in melodic and structural terms, and partly through the brilliant and tasteful performance, by both flutist and pianist. The flute spun a lovely, lyrical line that banished any feelings I might have had about the ability of the flute to create the kind of legato phrases that come naturally to the violin. The duo allowed a subtle rubato to emerge, accelerating and slowing along with the rise and fall of the music. I feared that with the sparkling climax at the end of the second movement, applause might break out, but we had an audience that was sensitive to what the music was saying.

The following Recitativo movement was calm and beautiful, allowing the melody slowly to find its way, making us listen. I even had the inadmissable feeling that the flute was creating a more memorable impact, capturing the music’s essence more successfully that a violin would; it was so calm and peaceful.

The melody of the last movement is so sublime – it has stuck with me since I first heard it, played by a fellow student one sunny afternoon at a famous University Congress at Curious Cove in Queen Charlotte Sound long ago. The soft, velvety sound of the flute, immaculately matched by the piano, might have sounded, for a moment, a bit off-hand as the end approached, but the spell was nevertheless sustained.

It brought an unexpectedly beautiful recital to an artless, heartfelt conclusion.

 

 

 

Cervantes’ quadricentenary through diverting music of the 17th to 20th centuries

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A Tribute to Cervantes

Spanish music from the 17th to the 20th century
Gaspar Sanz, Boccherini, Enrique Granados, and songs by Federico García Lorca (presuably words and music) and by Manuel de Falla, Antonio Alvarez Alonzo, Manuel Lopez Quiroga, Santiago Lopez Gozalo, Pascual Marquina

Manuel Breiga – violin and Adrian Fernandez – guitar

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 27 March, 6 pm

This year is the 400th anniversary not just of the death of Shakespeare, as the whole world knows, but also of Miguel Cervantes. Not only the same year, but also the same month – April – and even more surprising just one day apart! S. on 23 and C. on 22 April.

Cervantes was longer-lived, having been born in 1547. In an introduction it was pointed out that the two players were, serendipitously, from La Mancha which was the home of Cervantes’ hero.

The concert was supported by the Spanish Embassy in Wellington and the Spanish and Latinamerican Club,

Violinist Manuel Breiga introduced each bracket (in Spanish, and his words were translated). Evidently he gave no information about the composers or their music, other than the titles, which were, in any case, in the printed programme. Perhaps, given that it was a free concert and much of the audience was there for Spanish rather than musical reasons, this was acceptable.

The celebration of Cervantes was marked with the use of music written around 70 years after his own time. Don Quixote was written between 1600 and 1613 while Gaspar Sanz was born 24 years after Cervantes died (Sanz’s dates: 1640 to 1710) and most of his music was written between 1670 and 1700.

It was interesting to hear the six pieces by Sanz, since I had been awakened to his significance by the concerts given at the 2014 festival by the American lutenist Hopkinson Smith who played a number of Sanz’s pieces, some of which were used by Joachim Rodrigo in his charming Fantasia para un gentilhombre. At least three of the pieces Rodrigo chose were also played at this concert.

Tunes from the first dance, Españoletas, the fourth, Fanfarria de la caballeria de Nápoles and the sixth, Canarios, were all used in the Rodrigo Fantasia. They were divertingly varied in style, rhythm, mood, from the forthright Españoletas, to the more lively Gallarda y Villano and Rujero y paradetas, the latter enlivened with a shift to a skipping, triple time, in a middle section.  Though the violin led the way most of the time, the guitar had a long solo passage in a dance in six/eight, dotted rhythm.  The big confident sound produced by the amplified instruments gave a very different impression of music from an age of discreet taste, though not one that would have seemed inappropriate to most listeners; and it’s not merely a question of using early music in a modern way on modern instruments; Rodrigo did that very successfully.

The passacaglia movement from the famous Boccherini quintet, Op 30 No 6 (Música nocturna en las calles de Madrid, to give its title in Spanish) lay well for these two instruments – it survives all sorts of arrangements.

Only a fortnight ago the violin/guitar duo, Duo Tapas played at St Andrew’s, and they played one of the Granados dances that these Spaniards chose: the Oriental from his Twelve Spanish Dances. This evening we also heard No 5 of that set, Andaluza, the most popular of them. Even though they were written for the piano, the latter dance has become so familiar on the violin that Breiga’s performance sounded perfectly idiomatic; the Breiga-Fernandez duo played both Granados pieces splendidly.

Then they played a group of Spanish folk songs by Federico García Lorca. They were all from the Trece canciones espanolas antiguas – ‘13 old Spanish songs’. Breiga referred to Lorca as both poet and composer which came as a surprise to me. My impression from glancing at Internet references, was that the music was either traditional or by others; after all Lorca called them ‘old’. However, the website IMSLP states categorically that the composer is Federico García Lorca. The pieces were characteristic, genuine, perfumed in various ways, though they did rather cry out for a voice; they are all sung beautifully on YouTube by Teresa Berganza, and a few are also sung by Victoria de los Angeles. While the violin and guitar did them reasonable justice, their García Lorca inspiration was diminished without the words.

The final group of five songs and dances, were varied, though all speaking of aspects of Spain and its rich popular culture. They began with the Miller’s Dance from The Three-cornered Hat by De Falla, which was carried off with gusto; then Suspiros de España, ‘Sighs of (for?) Spain’, by the short-lived Antonio Alvarez Alonzo, plaintive with its falling phrases.

Maria de la O by Manuel López-Quiroga had a deeply traditional air, though it looks as if its origin was in a 1958 film. Again, sung versions had a passion that the more subdued violin and guitar performance could not really generate.

However, the taste of these recent Spanish songs and access to impassioned and persuasive sung versions has provided me with an hour or so of unexpected pleasure as I write this. A traditional, trumpet-led tune called Gallito by Santiago Lopez Gozalo, and España Cañi by Pascual Marquina ended the concert, apart from an encore of the tenor favourite, Granada.

The sound this very accomplished duo produced was not what we are used to hearing today in music of this kind. While it is normal to amplify a guitar except in a domestic situation, it is unusual to amplify the violin. Here both instruments were amplified to an unnecessary degree, which rather changed the character of the music and imposed a sometimes deadening uniformity of tone where the variety available in a natural acoustic would have been more interesting.

The duo’s style clearly suited music of the 19th and 20th centuries better than that of earlier periods: amplification there seemed more acceptable. So I found the second half of the recital more enjoyable than the first, which I had not really expected.

But it would have been interesting to have developed the Cervantes theme rather more, through music more closely associated with the Spain of the 16th century.  I wonder about the early 17th century, baroque flourishing of the Zarzuela and its association with the great dramatist Calderón, whose career lay between Cervantes and Sanz.

 

Website problems: acknowledgement of Turnovsky Endowment Trust grant

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Because we have been unable to carry out certain functions on this website, our mast-head still bears our acknowledgement of sponsorship by the Adam Foundation which gave us greatly appreciated support in the early years. Late last year we were given a generous grant by the Turnovsky Endowment Trust, and that should have been published at once on the home page.

We are very embarrassed about this. The problem arises because we have lost contact with the person who set up our website using WordPress and our failure to find anyone who can manage it technically.

This handicap has also affected other functions.

Readers will no doubt have observed that our ‘Coming Events’ section has been neglected so far this year, as we simply cannot load anything new in that space. Nor is the facility for ‘comments’ operational. None of our efforts so far to manage these difficulties have been successful.

We would welcome offers of assistance from anyone with technical familiarity with WordPress.

 

Innovative and fitting celebration of Kiri Te Kanawa with New Zealand Festival: a full MFC

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Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Voices New Zealand, Terence Dennis (pianist) and conductor Karen Grylls

A New Day – a choral improvisation (Voices New Zealand)
David Hamilton: Un noche de Verano (Voices)
Jake Heggie: Newer Every Day – Emily Dickinson poems (Kiri)
Fauré: Cantique de Jean Racine (Voices)
Mozart: Laudate Domium from Solemn Vespers, K 339 (Kiri and Voices)
Heggie: Monologue from Masterclass (Kiri)
Brahms: Four Quartets, Op 92 (Voices)
Schubert: Ständchen, D 920 (Kiri and Voices)
Johann Strauss II – Benatzky: Nuns’ Chorus from Casanova (Kiri and Voices)
Te Rangi Pai: Hine e hine (Kiri)

Michael Fowler Centre

Sunday 13 March, 6 pm

The Michael Fowler Centre was full for the Sunday early evening concert. A song recital with a few contributions from a local choir would not ordinarily have filled St Andrew’s on The Terrace; the name Kiri Te Kanawa changed everything.

Very few singers are still in business over 70 years of age (Joan Sutherland stopped in 1990, aged 64, and I suspect that even if age was starting to tell in the voice or the appearance (which really it is not) this remarkable singer would still pull them in. It’s a combination of a singularly beautiful voice, a charming and outwardly modest personality and an instinct for presenting a programme with conviction, even though on paper it looked interesting rather than compelling.

For indeed, the programme was hardly orthodox. If you expected, from one of the world’s great opera singers a handful of popular arias plus a couple of unfamiliar though worthwhile items, some well-loved choruses and ensembles from opera or oratorio, making use of the choir; then a couple of groups of German lieder and French songs by famous composers, you’d be disappointed.

But the applause, even between the short songs in a cycle, and the standing ovation at the end, probably showed that most of the audience was there for the name rather than their musical knowledge; it would have been the same whatever she sang.

On the other hand, the programme showed much thought and considerable pains had been taken with the stage presentation, especially the opening where the auditorium was plunged into darkness as choir members murmuring very quietly, crept down the aisles; secretively, they began to sing ‘a choral improvisation’ devised by conductor Grylls and the choir’s vocal coach Robert Wiremu, quoting phrases from ‘All through the Night’ and ‘Early one Morning just as the Sun was Rising’ and others. As lights rose the choir’s singing turned into David Hamilton’s a cappella setting of ‘Una noche de verano’ by Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Its haunting quality was enhanced by the sounding of a singing bowl, akin to such instruments as the glass harmonica.

The more conventional part of the concert began with a cycle of songs commissioned from composer Jake Heggie: set to poems of Kiri’s choice; she chose Emily Dickinson, and she spoke naturally about her affection for Dickinson’s poetry. (Heggie’s operas include Dead Man Walking, The End of the Affair and Moby Dick). The settings were engaging, sometimes droll, witty, touching, and Kiri’s performances with Terence Dennis’s exact reflections at the piano, caught their intimacy and disarming character, accompanied with appropriate, natural gestures. The last song, ‘Goodnight’, sort of mocking the convention of the endless reiteration in many an opera aria, very keen-eyed.

The choir sang Fauré’s much-loved Cantique de Jean Racine, in gentle, slightly uninteresting tones. Here, the absence of an orchestra mattered somewhat, even though Dennis’s accompaniment was as sensitive as possible.

The first half ended with the ‘Laudate Dominum’ from Mozart’s Solemn Vespers, for choir and soprano, a favourite that age (of neither the music nor the singer) does not dim. If the absence of opera arias (apart from the encore) was conspicuous, this wonderful sacred solo offered evidence of the still beautiful voice, smaller and less voluptuous perhaps, but still capable of touching the emotions. Her dress too gave little hint of passing years: white blouse with summery, striped skirt, perfectly suiting a singer who, from mid stalls at least, might have been approaching her fifties: she was animated, looking almost youthful.

Another of Heggie’s notable compositions began the second half: the Monologue from Terence McNally’s play, Masterclass, inspired by Maria Callas’s famous 1972 masterclasses in New York. It’s a moving little masterpiece, richly reflecting the lessons of age that might perhaps apply as well to Dame Kiri as they had to Callas. Expressed and dramatized by this evening’s diva with quiet humour and belief; one line stuck in my mind: ‘The older I get the less I know’. Like much else in the concert, a great deal resonated with the experience of aging which would have touched a lot of the audience, including your reviewer. She spoke too about the work of her foundation, which provides valued guidance and tutoring to many young New Zealand singers.

Then the choir returned to sing Four Quartets for four voices, Op 92 to Brahms. It was an opus of songs written at different times, to poems by different poets, which Brahms collected and published in 1884. The first is by Georg Friedrich Daumer, the poet of the Liebeslieder waltzes; and the others by Hermann Allmers, Hebbel and Goethe. All use imagery of the night to conjure feelings of fragility and the passing of time. The acoustic of the auditorium, perhaps dampened by the curtain behind, tended to reduce the impact of the occasional rises in the emotion expressed by the choir, which were singing with great sensibility and insight, and there was the subtle, illuminating piano accompaniment.

Schubert wrote several Ständchen (serenades). This was not the most famous one, much arranged for all manner of voices and instruments. Opus D 920, set to a poem by Grillparzer, as beautiful, if not of similar, anthologising quality, was written originally for baritone and men’s chorus; but Schubert also scored it for soprano and women’s chorus, which is how it was sung. I was a little surprised that Kiri sang this reasonably familiar piece using the score. And again, my attention was particularly caught by Terence Dennis’s sparkling and thoughtful playing the of colourful piano part.

Kiri has made something of a signature piece of the Nuns’ Chorus (‘Nun’s’ in the programme! I noticed more than one nun singing in the chorus), almost from the beginning of her career. The melody by Johann Strauss II was not from a waltz or an operetta, but written some 20 years before his venture into the theatre in 1871. It was spotted about 80 years later by Ralph Benatzky (most famous for his Im weissen Rössl – At the Whitehorse Inn) and included, along with other music by Strauss, in the pasticcio operetta, Casanova, which went down well in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic. It was given imaginative theatrical treatment, though it didn’t quite conjure the atmosphere of Viennese (or here, Berlin) operetta.

The concert ended with the predicable Hine e hine; repeated as a second encore after the first encore, the only operatic offering of the evening: ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Gianni Schicchi. And there was long applause, with most of the audience eventually standing.

I should have commented earlier on the excellence of the programme book, which sets a good example with intelligent biographies of Te Kanawa, Dennis, Grylls, as well as interesting musicological and other details about the pieces. The nature and origin of the Fauré chorus and the ‘Laudate Dominum’ were simply described; Jake Heggie’s two pieces were placed in context; the pithy note on Schubert’s Ständchen might have commented on his settings of the other songs with that name; the provenance of the Nuns’ Chorus was clearly attributed; and dates were employed usefully throughout: not a strong point among many annotators.

But you have to go elsewhere (Wikipedia the most accessible) to refresh your memory about Dame Kiri’s origin. Typically, the biography is coy about her birth: born in Gisborne, Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron, on 6 March 1944. (after all, the note on Newer every day disclosed that it had been commissioned for her 70th birthday in 2014). Why doesn’t the feminist movement insist that birth dates of female personalities are routinely published in the same way as men’s are?

In all a splendid recognition of one of New Zealand’s true international celebrities.

 

Exploratory and interesting offerings from the engaging Duo Tapas

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Duo Tapas: Rupa Maitra – violin and Owen Moriarty – guitar

Pachelbel: Chaconne in D minor (arr. Anton Hoger)
Telemann: Sonata in A minor TWV 41 (arr. Edward Grigassy)
Granados: Spanish Dances, Op 37, Nos 2 and 11 (arr. Vesa Kuokannen)
Alan Thomas: From The Balkan Songbook: Haj Mene Majka, The Shepherd’s Dream, Sivi Grivi

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 9 March, 12:15 pm

Duo Tapas have been long-standing ornaments at St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts and are enterprising in the range of music they find to perform. That of course is due mainly to the lack of music written specifically for the two instruments, although the pair lend themselves readily to music for violin and piano and for the guitar, accompanying many other instruments.

Unusually, they began with a piece by Pachelbel for organ which might have seemed a stretch. The result was far from it as so much baroque music does not seem to be designed with particular instrumental sounds in mind. (which, dare I say, often makes our generation’s obsession with authentic performance, using instruments that get as close as possible to those of the period, seem a bit precious). To start with, the melodic characteristics of this chaconne reminded one of his famous Canon; but it went much further, to elaborate the themes more fancifully than happens in the Canon, so demonstrating that Pachelbel was not only more than a one-hit wonder, but a worthy contemporary of Bach’s predecessors such as Buxtehude (he was Buxtehude’s contemporary, of the generation of Corelli, Purcell, Alessandro Scarlatti, Biber, Charpentier, Marin Marais…).

The music breathed, and seemed to relish the experience of instruments that so clarified and illuminated the sounds as the violin and guitar did.  Sure, it wasn’t Bach, but an awareness of the mind and the sounds of Bach did not work to its detriment.

Telemann was born 30 years after Pachelbel, and lived most of his life in the northern parts of Germany – Saxony, Thuringia, Hamburg – and he was immensely prolific. The sonata, TWV 41 was originally for oboe and continuo and again sounded charming as arranged, though I suspect that the slow, lyrical Siciliana first movement might have been more beguiling with an oboe. This, and indeed all the movements were short, without much embellishment or repetition of the tunes.

The second movement was entitled simply Spirituoso , more lively with the two players exploiting the light and shade with fluency and warmth even though the guitar had little more than a routine accompaniment to handle. The Andante did rather create the feeling of a stroll through shady woods, the recipe for relief from the busy life as musical director of Hamburg’s five main churches (the breathtaking baroque interior of St Michaelis adorns the desktop of my computer; I ticked off all five churches in a visit a few years ago).  Though the Vivace movement was lively enough, it was also vapid and forgettable; the performance however drew even more from the music than was really there.

Two of Granados’s Spanish Dances were much more enjoyable. No 2, Orientale and No 11, Zambra were both familiar; these were the high point of the recital. In the enchanting Orientale the violin generates a particularly warm, liquid atmosphere with its beguiling melodies while the guitar unobtrusively supported her in elegant arpeggios. In the Zambra, Maitra’s dark, sensuous violin maintained a sombre quality through music that was superficially more spirited, and while Moriarty’s guitar was confined in the main to arpeggios, but he took advantage of a lively repeat of the main tune in the middle section. Granados’s music is rather neglected these days: as well as the popular No 5, Andaluza, most of this set of twelve dances deserve to be more played. And I am reminded of the fine 1998 Meridian recording by Richard Mapp of a good selection of the piano music.

The web-site of American guitarist/composer Alan Thomas shows that his ‘work-in-progress’ The Balkan Songbook has eleven pieces in it so far. The Duo played three of them. Haj Mene Majka (which Google Translate shows as Croatian, meaning ‘Hi my mother’) certainly has the character of peasant Croatian music with its fast South Slavic decorations, and the apostrophe to the composer’s mother is arresting rather than affectionate.

The Shepherd’s Dream starts with the violin alone and slowly swells beyond the dream state; this too is described in the notes as Croatian, though introduced with a few words of W B Yeats, ‘And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood’. (It’s from ‘He tells of a valley full of lovers’ from the collection The Wind among the Reeds. I was impressed that the composer was so familiar with the huge body of Yeats’s poetry that he could light upon this).  And indeed, the words seem to align with the music which slowly diminishes and ceases.

Sivi Grivi was said to be based on a Bulgarian dance, but the ever-reliable Google Translate identified the words as Slovenian, meaning ‘Gray mane’. The guitar begins with a hesitant meandering; the violin soon joins to create a dance rhythm of increasing energy to an exciting finish.

As always, I found this musical duo interesting, musical and exploratory, with a nice mixture of the known and the unknown; just the thing for midday, leaving the rest of the day to reflect and explore further.

 

Enchantments of baroque instrumental combinations: Archi d’amore trio

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Archi d’amore Zelanda (Donald Maurice – viola d’amore, Jane Curry – guitar, Emma Goodbehere – cello)

Vivaldi: Largo from Concerto for viola d’amore and guitar, RV540
Piazzolla: Café 1930
Michael Willliams: Fugue
François de Fossa: Sonata No 1 in A (from Op 18)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 2 March, 12:15 pm

I last heard this trio in October last year in the Adam Concert Room at Victoria University where I was taken with the unexpectedly charming effects of the combination of three instruments, none of which demand attention to itself at the expense of the music or of each other.

The Ryom catalogue of Vivaldi’s works lists eight concertos including the viola d’amore, and this is the only one that is scored for the lute as well as the viola d’amore. Many of the pieces played by a group of this kind necessarily involve arrangements, but here we could enjoy the most minimal of translations from lute to guitar. The performance of R540 captured the singularly opulent tone of the viola d’amore, the effect of the large number of strings – 14 – half of which are passive resonating strings, threaded through the lower part of the bridge and not played. Its play of sounds with the guitar was enchanting.

Though it is still fashionable to deprecate – ever so slightly – Vivaldi’s music on account of its Telemann-like profusion and its to-be-expected stylistic similarities, one listens to it, always, with pleasure and admiration, and in my case, more than Telemann.

Then came Piazzolla’s four-movement Histoire du Tango: the second part, Café 1930. It begins with the guitar alone, wistfully; and the viola d’amore’s entry, so lyrical and idiomatic, removed it from the Buenos Aires café to a French café with the sensual tango tamed to a more sedate character. It’s music for the heart rather than the feet, Donald Maurice remarked, for by 1930 the tango had become a more sophisticated that the bordello music of the turn of the century, music to listen to, interesting and involving.

They had a new piece to play, Fugue, composed for them by Hamilton composer Michael Williams; they’d premiered it the week before in Bangkok. It opened sounding like a very traditional fugue with a useful diatonic tune, shifting in the middle to a lively phase, never striving for anything resembling an avant-garde or strenuously ‘original’ character. It formed a nice link between Piazzolla’s Latin idiom and their next step back to the early 19th century.

François de Fossa’s name cropped up earlier last year in a St Andrew’s concert by a trio of Jane Curry, with saxophonist Simon Brew and flutist Rebecca Steel. There they played a trio in A minor.

This time the piece was listed as a sonata, No 1 in A, and though I could not recall the music played last year, I suspect it was the same ‘Trio in A, Op 18’ played then: the four movements shown in today’s programme were the same as those shown in the Wikipedia partial list of his works, for Op 18 No 1.

In any case, after recording my impressions of this performance, I found they were very similar to what I wrote ten months ago, though I’m sure that the present combination sounded more authentic and convincing than the adaptation for saxophone which, while interesting, did not altogether persuade me. Here, I was quite won over both by the warmth and femininity of the viola d’amore combining with guitar and cello, especially in the Largo where the three ebbed and flowed so charmingly from one to another. Though the cello’s role was essentially a ‘continuo’ one, there were surprising little flourishes occasionally.