Author: Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington ends its year in blaze of irreverent glory

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orff: Carmina Burana; Haydn: Symphony No 87 in A.

Arohanui Strings, an El Sistema-inspired programme providing string instruments and tuition to children from deprived areas: at Pomare and Taita Central schools

Orchestra Wellington, the Orpheus Choir and Wellington Young Voices, conducted by Marc Taddei

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 15 November, 7:30 pm

This last of Orchestra Wellington’s most successful 2014 subscription series not only delivered the last of the Haydn’s Paris symphonies, but brought together Wellington’s other major, locally-specific musical organization: the Orpheus Choir, to perform what is one of the most popular, large-scale compositions. Also called for in Carmina Burana is a children’s choir and Christine Argyle led Wellington Young Voices to contribute that element.

In the first half, Haydn’s No 87 was given a splendid, full-blooded performance, opening in four-square, positive spirit, staccato and emphatic. Only in the development section of the first movement does Haydn temper the joy, saying, ‘But look here! Life’s no bed of roses’. And Taddei lent emphasis to the caution by his exaggerated pauses between sections.

Several wind players had their place in the sun, particularly the oboe, in the Trio of the Minuet. And while the Finale resumes the optimism of the first movement, Haydn again makes us pause with his not uncommon phantom endings that can lead to untimely applause. Not here though; yet, after what I thought an utterly delightful and characterful performance, the applause petered out rather abruptly.

The concert also offered the opportunity for a high-profile appearance of Arohanui Strings, founded in the Hutt Valley by Orchestra Wellington violinist Alison Eldredge and inspired by the Venezuelan-originated El Sistema; the project involves children from less favoured areas learning instruments and playing in an orchestral setting. The performance began with a simplification of the opening of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, with many of the more experienced children sitting at the orchestral desks alongside members of the Orchestra: pretty good!

Then another group of younger children carrying violins emerged from both sides and took up their places across the front of the stage, ranged in size from left to a surprisingly small girl on the right (her evident feeling for rhythm, at least, must have drawn the audience’s attention particularly). They followed Alison’s gestures, all lifting their violins in unison, and placing them professionally under the chin. They played Pachelbel’s Canon and then a square dance by Brooker and an approximation of the tune known to Mozart as ‘Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman’, the English version known as Twinkle, twinkle, little star’.

The whole affair had the faces of the audience wreathed in smiles. It was a delightful episode.

But it’s not enough for such an important phenomenon to exist as a result of isolated initiatives in one or two places nationwide. These things should be funded and guided, though better not actually run, by the Ministry of Education.

As if that wasn’t enough of delightful diversion, one of the most astonishing pieces of music of any era filled the second half. Perhaps we should forget that Carmina Burana was written by a German composer, in Germany, just before the Second World War; at the time when the music of most classical composers, especially the Jews, was being classified as degenerate by the Hitler regime, this work was a success and was acclaimed by the cultural gestapo. It’s a wonder that Orff was not, like Wagner, condemned for being approved by a nasty political regime.

Though many of the poems, written in medieval Latin and various vernaculars, were the work of students and clerics, piety is hardly present; it is the secular, popular notion of Fortune that rules, and perhaps it was the rather irreligious, satirical, earthy, not to say occasionally bawdy character of the texts that allowed the Nazis, notably heathen, to feel comfortable with the work.

The Michael Fowler Centre was emphatically the right place for this performance. First, because contrary to much ‘informed opinion’, I like the place as a whole, including the acoustic, which does have varying sound characteristics in different areas of the auditorium; and Saturday’s  full house would have meant hundreds turned away from any other suitable city venue.

Timpani and brass launched the performance with a mighty, stunning attack which established a benchmark for the rest of the evening. There was no lack of fortissimo and sheer energy (a different thing) from the choir and orchestra; the staccato assertions from the men’s chorus, with chilling side drum, of the inevitability of Fate in ‘O Fortuna’, the medieval notion that underpins many of the miscellaneous poems and songs, also set a standard that never slackened. Nevertheless, the many rejoicing episodes were no less convincing as the Springtime songs proved, illustrated with choral and orchestral colours. One of the main delights of the work lies with the varied and pungent use of individual sections of the choir, sometimes small and sweet as in ‘Floret silva…’  which drew attention to the many younger voices in the choir.

The children’s choir becomes an important element in the third part, Cour d’amours, and though I wrote in my scribbled notes ‘not unduly perfect in ensemble’, the sheer innocence of their voices worked its magic.

Three very fine soloists were a major strength. First, Australian baritone James Clayton who entered with ‘Omnia sol temperat’ and grew in histrionic impact with every successive entry. He became a one-man theatrical performance with his combination of vocal and gestural energy.

It’s curious that the biographical note about James Clayton omited his earlier New Zealand connections. Middle C records his performances in Rigoletto (Count Ceprano) in 2012, in the bass part in the Mozart edition of The Messiah from Orchestra Wellington and Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir in June 2013 and this year the totally over-the-top Baron Ochs in Days Bay Opera’s Der Rosenkavalier. We’ve noticed before that the notes about visiting artists often omit mention of earlier New Zealand appearances, as if the person putting the programmes together does no more than copy the agent’s hand-out, which can very well omit appearances, such as those in New Zealand, that are deemed unimportant in building an artist’s profile for international consumption. I suppose it could be a commentary on our own often ill-based inclination to boast that we punch above our weight in many things, such as the arts.

We at Middle C would be happy to be consulted by New Zealand concert and opera promoters to help flesh out inadequate biographies. Or anyone can search our archive without any sort of barrier to check such things – the archive goes back to our beginning in 2008.

Australian tenor Henry Choo emerged from the left of the choir In the Tavern, as it were, in ‘Girat, regirat garcifer’, a clear and penetrating voice that did show a little strain at the top but made a truly musical and dramatic impact. Dunedin-educated Emma Fraser is well-known: here she waits for her first outing till the ‘Amor volat undique’ in the Cour d’amours part, but the wait was fully rewarded, and she handled her last florid, operatic peroration in the ‘Tempus est iocundum’ with a keen feel for the message and musical style. In that part, Clayton and the children’s choir also join, as the minor key reasserts the power of the Wheel of Fortune – of Fate; that all worldly pleasures are passing fancies and futilities.

There was a shouting and standing ovation at the end, that went on and on. It’s hard to imagine a more magnificent climax to what must have been, in every way, one of the orchestra’s most successful years. Marc Taddei has again proved to be a marvellous gift to Wellington’s musical culture.

In speaking to the audience, Taddei spoke about next year’s plans which will follow the pattern in 2014 with a series of six symphonies to be played in six concerts. Tchaikovksy was the obvious candidate and the Russian theme will lead to a lot of other Russian music, mainly 19th century, that will be explored most rewardingly. In addition, Michael Houstoun will be piano soloist throughout, again in a series of mainly Russian piano concertos, including less familiar but splendid examples like Scriabin’s in F sharp minor.

Good to stay alive for another year!

 

Diverting and wide-ranging concert from the SMP Ensemble

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

SMP Ensemble: Nachtmusik

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht for string sextet, and other music by Salzedo, Britten, Biber, Brad Jenkins and Cilla McQueen

Jennifer Newth (harp); Gregory Squire and Tabea Squire (violins); Peter Barber and Megan Ward (violas); Jack Hobbs and Charley Davenport (cellos); Rebecca Steel (flute); Karlo Margetic (clarinet); Nick Walshe (bass clarinet); Chris Gendall (conductor)

St Peter’s church, Willis Street

Friday 14 November, 7:30 pm

The SMP Ensemble’s programmes, often devoted to experimental, New Zealand music, are not always particularly easy for the average classical music lover to enjoy. This one, advertising Schoenberg’s best-loved piece, Verklärte Nacht, guaranteed pleasure. But word of it had obviously not got out as the audience was sadly small.

The first half did include a couple of, shall we say, unusual pieces, but it began and ended with harp player Jennifer Newth performing two established harp compositions that were intrinsically beguiling, but also played with astonishing virtuosity and exquisite delicacy. Carlos Salzedo was born in Paris of Sephardic Spanish parents, and later came to find an affinity with the Basques. He took up the harp as a child and gained a world-wide reputation becoming a famous virtuoso as well as composer for his instrument. Read the interesting entry in Wikipedia which draws attention to his wide-ranging musical activities as composer (for music in many genres), conductor, teacher, and to his international reputation in the general musical world and around the world.

Salzedo’s playing is described in that article as characterized by clarity, facility, articulation, fluidity, and subtle phrasing. They were some of the words that came to mind as I listened to Jennifer Newth’s enchanting and breathtaking performance of Chanson dans la nuit.

Jennifer returned before the interval to play the Nocturne from Britten’s Suite for Harp which he wrote in 1969. I was not familiar with the piece and might have been hard pressed to identify its composer. After the preceding two New Zealand pieces, it emerged as main-stream, genuinely musical, exposing Britten’s idiomatic and imaginative writing for the instrument. Its nocturnal setting did not prevent
its becoming muscular and emphatic as it progressed through this incisive and insightful performance.

Brad Jenkins (notes in the programme leaflet about the composers and the music were rather limited; and, incidentally, the meaning of the acronym SMP seems to be ever concealed: I am told it stands for Summer Music Project) is a young Wellington composer who won the Douglas Lilburn prize at the New Zealand School of Music in 2012 for the piece played here, Nocturne No 1. It belongs to the long tradition of experiments in sound that seem to be an essential part of a student composer’s equipment in the ‘coming-of-age’ process. It involved ‘players’ positioned on all sides of the audience: piccolo/flute Rebecca Steel (her second appearance for me this week), cellist Charley Davenport, dismembered clarinet Karlo Margetic, bass clarinet Nick Walshe, viola Peter Barber, violin Tabea Squire, all conducted by Chris Gendall. Jenkins’s aim was to deconstruct the character of each instrument by removing all its essential tonal sounds so little more than breath or the swoosh of bow cutting through the air was audible. Slowly, hints of pitches emerged and the sounds became more abrasive, scrupulously unmusical ion the normal sense. I wondered as I listened whether this was what the world would be left with after its conquest and domination by ISIS or the Taliban.

Cilla McQueen is known to me, and I suppose most, as a poet; but here was another departure from the orthodox. Her ‘score’ of Rain Score 2 was reproduced on the back page of the programme: a spiral formed by faint, interlacing seaweed or elementary life patterns. The septet stood in a semi-circle in the front: the two violins, the two clarinets, Peter Barber, Charley Davenport and flute. Again, orthodox sounds were few as the players improvised, imitated, in a sort of aleatoric process, though there were sheets of paper on music stands visible to some players that presumably offered a bit of notated guidance. The performance even involved the mysterious effect of bowing the cello below, but not apparently touching, the strings.

The main draw for the concert was the original, string sextet version of Verklärte Nacht. Here, the string players already mentioned were joined by cellist Jack Hobbs.  I was immediately entranced by the performance, in an acoustic that was beautifully adapted to it. There was something in the sound that drew attention, as it hasn’t before for me, to the marvelous variety of the piece’s scoring in which each instrument has the most interesting individual lines, and there were entrancing utterances and delights in many short passages from, for example, Hobbs’s cello and Megan Ward’s viola.

The episodes of the poem’s story, depicted graphically enough in the score, were dramatized with particular clarity and with the emotional generosity that had obviously attracted Dehmel and Schoenberg to explore the lovers’ delicate situation. It’s interesting that Schoenberg later dismissed the poem as repulsive and sought to have the music heard as independent of it. Thus commentaries that relate the sections to episodes in the couple’s nocturnal experience are, like most attention to the ‘programmes’ of music, unhelpful and distracting.

But those thoughts do not detract from the delight one feels at the evolving shapes and emotions, key changes, acidulous harmonies that Schoenberg presented to the Vienna of Johann Strauss and the Secessionist movement. This performance captured the floaty, suggestive transfiguration; and it must have been a delight to be involved in such a beautifully integrated performance.

The concert ended with a couple of German lullabies, in which Tabea joined as gentle, subtle singer. And then Heinrich Biber’s The Nightwatchman had Greg Squire singing the words from the rear, coming forward in woollen jerkin and cloth cap for the second stanza. The light slowly dimmed as players left one by one to diminuendo staccato notes, to end a diverting and highly enjoyable concert. One regretted deeply that so few were there to enjoy it.

 

Polished and delightful lunchtime with winds at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Music for winds by Villa-Lobos, Doppler, Briccialdi, Chopin, Schumann, Arnold

Played by Rebecca Steel (flute), David McGregor (clarinet), Calvin Scott (piano and oboe)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 12 November, 12:15 pm

To return from a nearly two-month trip in Europe to a Wellington rich with such plentiful and excellent live music has been a considerable consolation. Not that I ever underestimated the phenomenon of a fairly small city with such a wealth of practising musicians, plus their indispensable facilitating by enterprising impresarios and concert managers such as St Andrew’s enjoys.

In the Paris weeklies Officiel des spectacles or Pariscope, in a city 20 times Wellington’s size, you will find some 20 concerts on an average day, equivalent to Wellington’s one or two, on a good day. (I wasn’t in Paris this time though).

Wednesday was an average day, with the usual lunchtime concert at St Andrew’s.

Still a bit jet-lagged, the promise of some music for three wind instruments was just what I needed. It proved a beautifully measured programme, beautifully played.

And surprisingly, the three musicians had names that rang only vague bells. I recall oboist Calvin Scott as a member of the Aeolian Players in a Lower Hutt lunchtime concert in 2011 and see that Frances Robinson had heard clarinettist David McGregor in an NZSM concert at St Andrew’s last year and Peter Mechen mentioned him playing in a recent National Youth Orchestra concert.

But I can spot Rebecca Scott’s name in no Middle C review. This concert seemed to be led by her; she spoke before most of the pieces, though both other players spoke once. Rebecca is a highly experienced orchestral flautist, in London and Sydney as well as Wellington and Christchurch; and here she proved a versatile and engaging chamber musician, evidently returned permanently to Wellington.

The six pieces were perfect midday fare: a mix of the bright and the pensive, the classical and the modern. Rebecca and David opened playing Villa-Lobos’s Chôros No 2, not one of the more familiar ones (for me), but an engaging exercise in agility and wit in a performance that captured the native idiomatic character of Brazilian street music.

Franz Doppler was a contemporary of, let’s say, Franck, Johann Strauss II, Lalo, Vieuxtemps, Bruckner, Gounod, Offenbach … But he was Polish-Hungarian, born in Lwow, then in Austria-occupied Poland, now Lviv in Ukraine, from which the Polish population was expelled in 1945. He was primarily a flautist, and followed a style that owed much to Paganini and Schubert and melodically to Chopin and early 19th century opera. His Andante and Rondo for two flutes (the second flute part here by clarinet) and piano, Op 25, keeps his name alive, and this virtuoso performance demonstrated why, with its charming, melodies, swaying rhythms, turning to a brisk march later in the Andante section. There was brilliant, delicious twinning of the two parts – enhanced in colour, I thought, through a clarinet replacing the second flute.

Then came a version of Carnival of Venice, a folk song that’s been used by many composers including Paganini (his reused by Liszt) and Bottesini. This one for flute and orchestra by Briccialdi, another contemporary of Doppler, offered spine-tingling passages of brilliant ornamentation, triple-tonguing through the otherwise graceful triple-time tune. Obviously a popular party-piece for the flautist, and here a stimulating lunch spicing that Rebecca Steel tossed off effortlessly.

The favourite Chopin Nocturne, D flat, Op 27 no 2, came in an arrangement in which the right hand part was taken by flute and clarinet. Its character was altogether changed, I wasn’t entirely sure, for the better; though on its own terms it employed flute and clarinet in thoroughly idiomatic ways.

Rebecca retreated so that David McGregor and Calvin Scott might play an arrangement of Schumann’s ‘Stille Träne’, from the Twelve Songs by Justinus Kerner, Op 35. (Kerner was a close contemporary of Byron’s, though he far outlived Byron). This didn’t work so well without the words and their varied timbres and emotions, and the long notes rather cried out for verbal qualities. Yet the clarinet still captured much of the lyrical beauty of the song.

Finally, the most delightful piece of the afternoon: Malcolm Arnold’s Divertimento for flute, oboe and clarinet. Here pianist Scott abandoned the keyboard and took up his oboe which he played with comparable accomplishment. Though the piece is in six movements, Arnold has offered an admirable example of a work that is full of ideas that in other hands might encourage elaborate and extended treatment, but which makes its startling impact with such economy and brilliance.

Here, each movement lasted around two minutes; though it began about 12.55pm, the concert ended pretty much on schedule before five past one. In the space of this time, we had been subjected to a dizzying range of musical moods and rhythms, the three instruments rarely playing in ensemble fashion but contributing disparate elements in wild contrapuntal fashion that fused together in the most delightful way.

The applause seemed hard to stop. A great welcome home to Wellington!

 

Orchestra Wellington confirms its vital role in city’s musical life with wonderful Haydn and Mahler

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Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei with Kieran Rayner (baritone)

Haydn: Symphonies No 85 in B flat and 86 in D
Mahler: Songs of a Wayfarer (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen) arr. Schoenberg
Schnittke: Moz-Art à la Haydn

Opera House, Wellington

Sunday 7 September, 4 pm

In the lobby before the concert a friend asked whether I’d been to Marc Taddei’s pre-concert talk and I confessed I had not. She, with a wide knowledge of music, though from another artistic perspective, had been delighted with it, had gained rewarding insights in what was about to be played.

Some pre-concert talks are more fascinating than others; Taddei’s are among the best: he has a gift that reaches both young people and those who might think they know it all, and serious assistants (in the French sense; to avoid the obnoxious word attendees) should make time for them.

Haydn’s Paris Symphonies
One of the topics he would have covered would have been the Paris symphonies of Haydn which have provided the backbone of all the orchestra’s subscription concerts this year. This concert was special, with one each at the beginning and the end.

They are probably among the symphonies that even the moderately well-versed might recognise but be unable to ascribe a number to. That is certainly my case. Though the symphonies were commissioned by a Paris orchestra, Haydn did not conduct them in Paris, as Mozart had his a few years earlier.

No 85
No 85, reputedly a favourite of Queen Marie-Antoinette, opens with stately, perhaps ponderous Adagio, rather un-Haydn-like, with a deceptive dotted rhythm; its move into the substantive first movement, is as serious as the opening of an early Beethoven symphony, and seemed indeed to call for a bigger orchestra than we had. Though the programme notes recorded how Haydn had taken advantage of what he knew to be the great size of the Paris orchestra, we were limited to the scale of an Esterhazy ensemble. There were six each of both violin sections, down to just one double bass.

However, Taddei, through his brisk triple-time speeds and a sense of resolve, soon succeeded in creating the impression of a big band, acknowledging a work of major significance, as Haydn displays his assurance in adroit modulations and his unfailing wit in the varied treatment of his themes. The second movement, scarcely a ‘slow’ movement, either as written or as played, with its solid emphasis on every other crotchet, in common time, handles a French folk tune said to have been one the Queen played in her prison cell a few years later awaiting her 1793 fate under the guillotine. Indeed, memorable, with its charming flute obbligato weaving through it.

The Minuet and Trio had an unusual quality, with its asides and solo excursions for violin and woodwinds; but notably the little diversions and the discursiveness, especially in the shy Trio, almost a Schubertian Laendler, a sort-of mirror image of the Minuet itself, which avoided any risk of the predictable, all of which were charmingly captured. The finale had a more orthodox feel: brisk and bright, though there’s the characteristic Haydn diminuendo and the music’s near disappearance before the recapitulation. All performed with a splendid feeling of affection and an authentic feel for the gallant/classical period.

No 86
I might as well mention here the other symphony – No 86 in D major – played at the concert’s end. Though played with the same forces, and even though I had found No 85 thoroughly delightful, this was even more imposing right from the more than a minute-long introduction – Adagio, with an illusion of greater weight, such as Haydn would have imagined in the orchestra for which he was writing. And perhaps, though I don’t have perfect pitch, a reflection of the way composers felt about the D major key.

After that fine rhetorical Adagio, the Allegro spiritoso came like a moment of sheer delight, and it brought me to what I’m sure has driven Taddei to programme all six of these works this year – the realisation that, given Haydn’s remarkable sense of the differences in culture and style between London and Paris (then and now), these symphonies are every bit the masterpieces that the dozen London Symphonies are.

Compared with No 85, the slow movement here really is that, though oddly labelled ‘Capriccio largo’.
Though the programme note observed that the melody was not especially memorable, in fact the whole movement IS memorable, for the spirit of poignant seriousness, of profondeur and throughtfulness
that invested its performance.

The Minuet and Trio were no less engaging, with the Trio again offering charming episodes for solo violin against, woodwind solos, its tune undecorated in comparison to the Minuet itself in which almost every note is embellished. And it ends with an imposing, finale, quite the equal in grandeur and zest of any Salomon-symphony: timpani, brass and all. Which was a splendidly-judged ending to a splendid concert.

Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen by Mahler
But the second work in the concert was Mahler’s Wayfarer songs sung by young Wellington baritone Kieran Rayner. I’ve been hearing him over many years since he was getting parts as an undergraduate in the School of Music operas and other performances; and since then in the wonderful Candide, done by the Orpheus Choir and Days Bay’s Così, Alcina and Viaggio a Reims.

This youthful cycle (Mahler was about 25) is a fine exercise for a singer at Rayner’s stage, and accepting the very occasional technical blemishes, he invested each song with its individual character and emotion: full of opportunity for rich and extreme late Romantic passion and grief. His discreet hand gestures and facial expressions were all that was needed to support the words, which emerged clearly.

The orchestra may have felt that the Schoenberg arrangement of the score better suited the small orchestra that had been decided on for the Haydn. Many would have found the score perfectly satisfactory, but with Mahler’s own orchestral sounds in my head, the orchestra’s size: small string bodies and the limited range of wind instruments, seemed a little dry.

Others have found in Schoenberg’s arrangements their own intensity and colour, which is felt to match what Mahler himself set on paper. Rayner captured the moving expression of pain in ‘Die zwei blauen Augen…’, though I found something inauthentic in the sound of strings against single clarinet and flute: ‘Quelque chose manquait’. Yet there were many aspects that I enjoyed, the contributions of both piano and the digital (I suppose) harmonium, in ‘Ging heut’ Morgen…’ and the agitated feel of ‘Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer’, for example. And above all the final words, ‘Unter dem Lindenbaum … War alles, alles wieder gut/Alles! Alles, Lieb und Leid/Und Welt und Traum!’: defeated and lost, accompanied by small, thin flute and clarinet notes.

Ideally, one would have liked both German and English texts to have been offered in the programme; after the synopsis of each song, the English translation of each was a bit redundant: better to have printed the German.

Schnittke
Finally, and to my mind a bit oddly, Schnittke’s manipulation of his notion of the style and sense of Haydn and Mozart.

When we returned after the interval, the stage was in darkness; slowly, figures could be discerned entering, a violin began to play a jaunty, fractured tune, then another violin and eventually the stage lit up to reveal the full orchestra and conductor, standing. The music, in detached scraps, came from unfamiliar music Mozart wrote for a commedia dell’ arte; they had no impact of themselves, and it was hard (for me) to derive much entertainment or enlightenment from Schnittke’s efforts.  After a few minutes, the stage started to dim and players left one by one, as in the Farewell Symphony, and it ended with the double bass playing alone with Taddei tapping his baton on the music stand. I was left wondering what it was that I’d missed, that had gained it the sort of standing it has in avant-garde circles. (Does Schnittke actually love Haydn and Mozart? Does he love music? For all his difficult life and the sadness of his last years, I have never warmed to his music).

However, the Haydn and Mahler were the real thing, deeply touching both the mind and the emotions, and the orchestra’s performances offered another demonstration of the value of a city based orchestra which tackles music that is less played by the NZSO, but which is revealed as of major importance.

 

Chamber Music New Zealand hosts exciting concert by pianos and percussion

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Chamber Music New Zealand: “Rhythm and Resonance”

Mozart’s Sonata for two pianos, K 448; Ravel: Le tombeau de Couperin (arr. Guldborg); Bartók: Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion; Lutoslawski: Variations on a Theme by Paganini (arr. Ptaszynska)

Diedre Irons and Michael Endres – pianos; Thomas Guldborg and Lenny Sakovsky – percussion

Michael Fowler Centre

Tuesday 26 August, 7:30 pm

This step outside the usual range of string-dominant chamber music attracted a big house in the Michael Fowler Centre; the welcome by CEO Euan Murdoch also suggested that a larger number of younger people had been drawn by this programme, with its less familiar instrumental context, yet of major works.

And he drew attention to the use of an overhead camera that projected a bird’s eye view of the array of instruments – mainly the percussion – on the stage.

But the concert began with the only sonata that Mozart wrote for two pianos (the only other piece for two pianos is a Fugue in C minor, K 426). It’s a magnificent richly melodic masterpiece that responded whole-heartedly to treatment by four hands on two Steinways – the thought of any possible advantage from fortepianos never entered my head. The performance exploited the sonic possibilities of two instruments without producing sounds that were too dense or cluttered.

The two instruments were lined up side by side rather than facing each other with their bodies curling intimately together; so the primo player (in this case Diedre Irons) was visually dominant. The two have not dissimilar approaches to performance, devoted to playing of clarity and vigour as well as a scrupulous treatment of the varying dynamics. Even more impressive was their subtle rhythmic elasticity which, from the very percussive nature of the piano, poses a considerable challenge for two players: mere ensemble is hard enough.

In brief, this was music of genius played by two pianists who were virtually flawless in ensemble and musical spirit, and their performance entranced me from start to finish. There are so many beguiling phases, among the most charming the exquisite trill-opened motifs near the beginning of the Andante which were crystal clear yet imbued with magic.

The performance of Ravel’s Tombeau might have surprised an audience unprepared for the arrangement of the stage, pianos removed, leaving it dominated by three marimbas to be played by the two NZSO percussionists. From the start I found myself quite accepting of the altered quality of the music: much as I love the piano original, I am particularly partial to the marimba. Yet I wondered whether there might have been some monotony in the sound after a while. But that was at least partly avoided as Sakofsky moved, at the beginning of the Forlane, from the marimba at right angles to the audience, to one facing the audience, that produced a somewhat brighter, keen-edged tone. The spirit of Ravel survived excellently, since the eight mallets flourished by the players seemed to encompass all the notes in the piano score.

After the interval there were further re-arrangements: marimbas moved to the rear and xylophones, along with tam tam, side and bass drums, timpani and cymbals filled the stage. Oddly, this was one of the first truly ‘modern’ pieces of classical music I came to know through the small but curious collection that my girl-friend (later my wife) brought to our joint LP collection when we were about 21. It’s one of those works that seems to sound just as shocking and barbaric now as it did then (and that performance, an Argo recording paired with Contrasts for piano, violin and clarinet, still surprises me by its violent sounds and extreme dynamic contrasts).

What we heard on Tuesday was rather more well-mannered and less fierce. In addition, the big acoustic of the MFC subdues the harshness and acerbity of extreme sounds, and it was no doubt the more civilised sound that the four players produced that allowed the audience to enjoy this classic of modernity as they evidently did, judging from the applause. I think it loses little with less hard-edged sound and brutalism and that was the way it came off the stage; though it would have been too much to ask that such music be flawless in togetherness and finesse.

Incidentally, instead of being on the medium level stage as earlier chamber music concerts, including the Houstoun Beethoven concerts, had been, these performances which involved more instruments were at the usual high level of the stage which makes visibility difficult for the front dozen rows – hence the usefulness of the view from above, projected on the screen.

The last item had not been on the advertised programme or otherwise conspicuously announced: Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini. It is shorter than other famous treatments of this piece (Paganini’s 24th violin Caprice), though there are about twelve variations (the programme note did not disclose and that was my slightly uncertain count).  Lutoslawski wrote it in the early years of the war in German-occupied Warsaw, when he and Panufnik lived by playing piano duets in cabarets (for a revelatory account of that, read Panufnik’s autobiography Composing Myself). It was about the only one of Lutoslawski’s pieces to survive the horrendous German onslaught on Warsaw to put down the famous Warsaw uprising, as the Soviet army sat on the other side of the Vistula and did nothing to support the Polish resistance.

What we heard was an arrangement of the two-piano original commissioned by the Danish Safri Duo, made not by the composer, but by Polish Chicago composer Marta Ptaszynska. Compared with that original, I have to confess to finding the percussion additions a little superfluous. The original, which contains echoes of the Rachmaninov version, is sufficiently percussive and the addition of percussion instruments seemed to reduce the unique impact of the two pianos which, in good hands has all the brilliance, excitement and visceral scariness that is needed to bring a concert like this to a thrilling, hire-wire climax.

To hear and see what I mean, look at You Tube for a recent performance by Anastasia and Liubov Gromoglasova in Moscow. However, that is a small matter alongside the otherwise brilliant exhibition of skill and musicality that these four splendid musicians demonstrated in all four works. I had the very clear impression of a delighted audience leaving the MFC at the end.

 

 

Forbidden Voices liberated in NZSM conference on music and musicians banned by Nazis

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand School of Music: Recovering Forbidden Voices:
 Responding to the Suppression of Music in World War Two

Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday)
Schreker: Sonata for violin and piano in F major
Zemlinsky: Serenade in A major
Korngold: Violin Sonata in G major, Op 6

Duo Richter-Carrigan (Goetz Richter – violin and Jeanell Carrigan – piano)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Saturday 23 August, 8:15 pm

This evening’s concert was session number 11 in the weekend’s conference of talks, concerts and panel discussions dealing with the suppression of music and other arts during the second world war, primarily through the Nazi suppression of what they considered ‘Entartete Kunst’ – ‘Degenerate Art’. It’s been a mixture of music and the spoken word, the latter examining aspects of the hideous impact of Nazism on art and artists wherever the regime gained control. Jews were by no means the only artists, musicians, writers to suffer, and music by Shostakovich and Messiaen have been heard in the concerts.

To this point there had been a performance of Hans Krasa’s children’s opera Brundibar (reviewed by us), concerts of chamber music by Schulhoff, Weinberg, Ullmann, Gidon Klein, Schoenberg and Shostakovich, as well as contemporary composers whose lives were deeply affected by fascism and communism; lectures and discussions about the repression of Jews and other minorities, and musicians in exile like Martinu; a celebration of the work of conductor/composer Georg Tintner, who sought refuge in New Zealand from WW2, but was largely ignored. He began to make musical headway only after going to Australia in 1954.

One of the ironical effects of the Nazi treatment that made so much art, music and literature disappear, was the West’s pursuit of the avant-garde in many of those fields since the end of World War 2, resulting in those composers remaining ignored for several decades, only now being revived, as here.

For Middle C the conference has presented a bit of a problem as various things have prevented each of us from paying the kind of attention that we should have liked, and which it deserved.

This lecture-recital began with a brief talk by the violinist Goetz Richter expanding on the theme music and the aesthetic of revenge – the revenge being that of Hitler against the bourgeois society that had rejected him as a creative artist (according to Richter). Unfortunately I was not sitting close enough to hear it well and Richter delivered it at a pace that was not well adapted to a thesis that was dense with complex propositions and argument.

Goetz Richter is a violinist, trained at the Hochschule für Musik, Munich. with a PhD in philosophy from Sydney University, a past associate concertmaster in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, now an
associate professor at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Jeanell Carrigan is senior lecturer in ensemble studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, having obtained her musical education in universities in Queensland, Sydney, Wollongong and studies in Europe with various piano pedagogues including Alfons Kontarsky and Karl Engel.

The duo has been playing together for 30 years.

The programme included works by three German or Austrian Jewish composers born with 25 years at the end of the 19th century. Each was written when the composer was young: the Schreker aged 20, the Zemlinsky at 24 and the Korngold at the age of 15. It was the Korngold piece that was the longest and most ambitious, and may have proved the most challenging in execution.

The three movements of Schreker’s piece are: Allegro Moderato, Andante con Moto, Presto. While his sonata bore the marked influence of Brahms, and sounded the most conventional of the three, given the time of its composition, after major chamber music by Debussy for example, Korngold’s sonata of only 14 years later was much more complex technically. Though, unlike the music that Schoenberg was writing by then, it was melodically still accessible; however, it does not sound as imposing or perhaps as promising as does Strauss’s violin sonata of ten years earlier.

Schreker’s second movement was quietly meditative, breathing calmly with a performance that was warm and burnished, yet quietly adventurous harmonies peep through. There may well have been hints of the later Schreker of the operas such as Der ferner Klang, Die Gezeichneten, Der Schatzgräber – which I’ve just missed during visits to Germany over the past decade as they have been unearthed, given interesting productions and been widely acclaimed.

The Zemlinsky piece of 1895 was a Serenade (or suite) in five fairly short movements: Massig; Langsam, mit grossem ausdruck; Sehr schnell und leicht; Massiges Walzertempo; Schnell. It was a charming piece, distinctly lighter inspirit than a sonata, its rhythms and melodies more striking and engaging than some of Zemlinsky’s music of more serious intent. The main theme of the first movement was quite joyful, while the second, that I’d noted, in the absence of movement names in the programme, as a Largo, was lit by its variety of twists in melody and rhythm and quixotic mood changes, ending with a passage of heavy piano chords. The fourth movement, a waltz, risked becoming schmaltzy had it not been so well crafted, so inventive and playful – tossing the waltz rhythms back and forth between the two instruments. The last movement called the Schumann of the early piano pieces to mind.

Then the astonishing Korngold sonata. One of the characteristics that caught my ear was the melodic tendency of spirit-lifting upward grasps such as Scriabin performs, and from then on I tended to feel the presence of the Russians like Rachmaninov and Medtner. A long work, it presented the players with daunting technical challenges with mighty fistfuls of notes at the piano and passages of both dazzling virtuosity and quiet beauty from the violin – in the third movement especially. Though later in the Adagio it slipped into a commonplace, late romantic character.

The four movements are: (1) Ben moderato, ma con passion; (2) Scherzo: Allegro molto (con fuoco) and Trio – Moderato cantabile; (3) Adagio: Mit tiefer Empfindung; (4) Finale: Allegretto quasi andante (con grazia).

The last movement impressed me however as more rigorous in shape and structure, with quite striking melody: the piano soon announced a fugue which evolved interestingly between the two instruments. Perhaps as a result of the discipline imposed by the fugue, and the commanding and illuminating performance by Richter and Carrigan, it came to seem the most imaginative and substantial music in the whole sonata.

So this was one of those recitals that the timid or unadventurous would avoid, but which revealed three composers and three works by those composers that were revelatory and most important of all, thoroughly engaging and enjoyable at the hands of two musicians of the top rank. It served to show how little we know of the Australian music scene that such splendid players, who have been playing as a duo for three decades, were unknown to me and, I imagine, to almost all the audience (which was sadly small).

 

Unexciting, lowpowered NZSO programme under Alexander Shelley yields riches after all

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Shelley

Shakespeare in Music

Korngold: Suite from incidental music for Much Ado and Nothing
Mendelssohn: Three pieces from the incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Walton: Henry V suite (arranged by Muir Matheson)
Strauss: Symphonic Poem Macbeth

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 2 August 7:30 pm

The one programme in the NZSO’s 2014 season that looked problematic when I first scanned the offerings last year was this one. No soloist, no well-known conductor, no crowd-pulling music centre-piece.

So I was not surprised to see one of the smallest audiences for the NZSO that I can remember.

However. The music, all of it, was enjoyable and Alexander Shelley proved, as he had with the National Youth Orchestra last month, an engaging and energetic conductor. I’d heard him interviewed by Eva Radich on Upbeat during the week and was interested in his enthusiasm and ideas for engaging younger people in the enjoyment of classical music.

He spoke about each of the works on the programme, pertinently, with a wit and charm that could hardly have bothered anyone (though I often hear what I consider churlish complaints about musicians who presume to tell the audience things that they think they already know or, if they don’t know, don’t want to).

Korngold’s incidental music for Much Ado was for a Max Reinhardt production of the play in Vienna when the composer was 21, about the same time that he wrote Die tote Stadt. The claim in the programme that Korngold had won the admiration of Mahler struck me as unlikely, though I was aware of comments on the prodigy’s genius from others. After all Mahler died in 1911 when Korngold was only 13.  But the truth is more amazing, as the boy had been introduced to and played for Mahler in 1906, aged about 9!

The five pieces (out of a total of 14) gave immediate evidence of the composer’s theatrical flair and his predisposition for a Hollywood career which came in the 1930s. They were colourful, charmingly orchestrated, opening with a big chirpy tune, depicting the spunky Beatrice, and then a romantic tune more suitable to Hero and Claudio (according to the programme note). The next piece depicted the Bridal Morning, gentle and delightful with prominent flute and cello. And so it continued, each piece strongly characterised, and immediately engaging. The suite is scored for small orchestra: no basses, with single woodwinds, trumpet and trombone and just two horns, harp, piano and percussion.

The last section is Masquerade, a hornpipe, which is familiar – not what is heard in the British Sea Songs, the BBC Proms fixture on the Last Night, nor one of the Hornpipes in the Water Music. But a great little number, splendidly played. The music was a hit in post-ww1 Vienna and deserves to be heard occasionally today: in RNZ Concert’s Cadenza or their early morning programme, for example; and they now have an excellent recording thereof.

The orchestra played the Overture, the Scherzo and the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music. I’d wondered whether the normal principals – Leppänen, and the two Joyces – viola and cello, who were absent for the Korngold would reappear for the rest of the concert, but the sub-principals remained, including Donald Armstrong as Concertmaster.

The Overture danced with sparkling clarity and brilliance through the elfin-like opening bars, and the following tutti was especially enlivened by bell-like flutes, in fact the woodwinds were having a particularly fine evening, specially evident in the Scherzo; and throaty trombones restored the Wedding March from its manifold mutilations to its proper splendid celebratory character.

Though I do not usually warm to the bombast, heroics and bluster of Walton, and not Belshazzar’s Feast  either, it was either the fine orchestral playing or a sudden awakening on my part to the composer’s gifts that made me enjoy, even admire, the music he wrote for the war-time film of Henry V. The Passacaglia was especially attractive, with remote touches of Tudor music, of Gluck, of Grieg… I couldn’t really nail it. The battle scene was obviously a brilliant accompaniment to bowmen’s battles and cavalry charges. It struck me that there must have been something in the water between 1897 and 1902 (when Korngold and Walton were born) that led to such instinctive film music composers.

Finally, the least known of Strauss’s tone poems, Macbeth: I’d long thought it must have been his first as it has seemed less memorable, burdened with too much thick orchestration, and a biggish melody that tries to emerge on the strings failed to take root. In fact, both Aus Italien and Don Juan preceded it and Tod und Verklärung was written at the same time. So there’s no reason in terms of composing maturity for me to find Macbeth less arresting and interesting. But I do. It uses a normally large orchestra, with triple winds and five horns, and though this was a thoroughly lively and resonant performance it was only in the closing phase that the music showed signs of cohering and evolving in a promising and interesting way.

The concert as a whole was most enjoyable however; as I wrote above, however, there was no ‘must see/hear’ about the programme. For me, several other Shakespeare-inspired works would have suggested themselves, such as Berlioz Symphonie-dramatique, Roméo et Juliette from which around 40 minutes of beautiful excerpts could have been played. Or the Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev music for the same play might have had more pull than any one of the pieces programmed.

 

Inspiring concert by young students of Donald Armstrong

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lunchtime concert at Old Saint Paul’s

Andrew Kelly – Brahms: Violin Sonata No 3 – First movement
Claudia Tarrant-Matthews – Elgar: Violin Sonata, Op 82 – First movement
Melanie Pinkney – Bruch: Violin Concerto No 1 – First movement.  François Schubert: The Bee
The Elegiac Trio (Andrew Kelly, Josiah Pinkney – cello, Claudia Tarrant-Matthews – piano) – Rachmaninov: Trio élégiaque No 1, in G minor
Catherine McKay was the accompanying pianist for the three violinists.

Old Saint Paul’s church

Tuesday 29 July, 12:15 pm

This concert, in the regular Tuesday lunchtime series in the former Pro-cathedral, was the last appearance of The Elegiac Trio before they took part in the final stage of the Schools Chamber Music Contest, held this year in Christchurch on the coming Saturday. It proved a remarkable exhibition of young talent by the three members of the Trio as well as the 12-year-old violinist Melanie Pinkney. All three violinists are tutored by NZSO associate concert-master Donald Armstrong.

Andrew Kelly established at once what could easily be felt as the prevailing quality in the violin playing: a warm and even tone that provided the foundation for playing that was rich in dynamic subtleties; in which the central section of the Brahms sonata was so magically hushed, demonstrating the composer’s essentially romantic and emotional character, though cast within broadly classical shapes. It prepared the audience thoroughly for his role in Rachmaninov’s elegiac trio at the end of the concert.

Claudia Matthews, 16, is a little younger than Andrew, but showed greater confidence, though their playing was invested with very similar degree of painstaking care and finesse in handling the bow. Elgar’s sonata is not nearly as familiar to most people as Brahms’s three sonatas: perhaps it does not have the same immediate melodic charm and memorable character; it’s one of those works whose beauties are slower to become embedded in the mind. Claudia’s confidence, firmness and accuracy matched her ease in navigating Elgar’s particular way with the notes, bending them secretly, creating an air of remoteness and gentle drifting, speaking of a maturity that seemed well beyond her years.

Melanie Pinkney is only 12, and I imagine I was not alone in feeling that her musical gift was in the class of the musical prodigy. The Bruch concerto in G minor is a truly grown-up masterpiece; it opens with Catherine McKay’s piano, capturing the orchestra’s character hypnotically, drawing the audience mysteriously towards the memorable first theme by the violin.

Melanie planted her notes with mature assurance, giving no suggestion that it presented any difficulties, since it all lay so comfortably under her fingers. She dealt with every musical colouring and decoration as if she was improvising, yet also with beguiling musical feeling that held you spellbound.

The fine Bruch structure was followed by a little Schubert piece that I haven’t heard for many years. Yes, it IS by Franz Schubert, but he goes under the French version, François – and that’s because it’s a fellow born in 1808 in Dresden, not Vienna, and died in 1878 and though he lived more than twice as long as the eponymous Viennese musician, he didn’t gain immortality. Though The Bee, from his Bagatelles, Op 13 (No 9), named in French, L’Abeille, published in the 1850s, survives.

In any case, it offered another display of a wonderfully fluid bowing arm that produced perfect tone.

After all this precocious virtuosity, one might be surprised at nothing, and that was the case with Rachmaninov’ first piano trio – he wrote two, both called Trio Élégiaque. This first is in G minor while the second in D minor, which is much longer, was inspired by the death of Tchaikovsky.

The tremolo opening of the piece seemed to emerge mysteriously from the dim timber recesses of the church, as the arrival of each instrument each seemed in turn to pick up the same emotion and tonal character of the previous one. They seemed to have paid scrupulous attention to each other’s sound; as the violin took up the theme from the cello it seemed simply to be an extension upward of the latter’s sound, not a different instrument.

Admittedly, this is a gorgeous acoustic for chamber music, but the raw material needs to be there for it to flourish. These musicians seemed not only to have worked together to integrate their sound but also to have judged successfully how their playing needed to be adapted to the space.

Much credit is due to the teacher of the violinists, Donald Armstrong, who oversaw the concert as a whole, but also to Andrew Joyce who coaches cellist Josiah Pinkney and Claudia Tarrant-Matthews’s piano teachers.

 

Cathedral’s festival celebrated by satanism and the supernatural in film and music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Phantom of the Opera – silent film accompanied by organ
A Cathedral Jubilee Festival Event
Barry Brinson – organ, Hannah Catrin Jones – soprano

Cathedral of Saint Paul

Saturday 26 July, 7:30 pm

How satisfying is the experience of a silent film?

As part of the Cathedral’s 50th anniversary, a famous silent film made in 1925 was screened, with a dedicated sound-track comprising a live organ performance. The inspiration for an organ accompaniment came from the theme of the film itself set in the Paris Opéra where performances of Gounod’s Faust were taking place. The film tells the tale of an organ-playing ‘Phantom’ which has taken up residence in the dungeons beneath the theatre and is doomed to remain there with his deformed face until a woman loves him.

The woman targeted is an opera singer, Christine, who is understudy to the role of Marguérite in a production of Faust. The Phantom makes it known that the prima donna, Carlotta, must stand aside so that Christine can sing the role.

Our first encounter with the opera is the ballet scene (well, two of the seven numbers in the ballet) which Gounod wrote when Faust was produced by the Paris Opéra in 1869 (it had premiered at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1859, with spoken dialogue and various other differences from the version usually performed today). The ballet was an addition to the orgiastic witches’ scene on the Brocken in the Harz mountains in central Germany, known as the Walpurgisnacht: another appropriate link with the Gothic (last year your reviewer went by steam train up to the Brocken searching for evidence of earlier heathen depravity, but was disappointed).

After the threat has been fulfilled and Carlotta is ‘sick’, we hear Christine singing Marguérite’s affecting last act aria, ‘Anges purs, anges radieux’, sung beautifully by Hannah Catrin Jones. But the next night in spite of the Phantom’s threat, Carlotta again attempts the role, and Hannah sings the Jewel Song (it would have been nice to have had surtitles for the words of these), but amid flickering lights, the mighty chandelier in the auditorium crashes on to the audience. The Phantom seizes Christine and holds her in the dungeon below the theatre.

In the second half Hannah sang ‘Il était un roi de Thule’ and the Phantom at his organ went through the motions of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor: M. Brinson did it much better, as he did with Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. After the final chase leading to the disposal of the Phantom in the Seine, Brinson played one of those splendid Lefébure-Wély-type pieces with which Parisians make their exits from church.

There is no need to narrate the complex and rather contrived story after that, and its departures from the original novel as well as the changes made in the course of the film’s production; the ad hoc modifications that had to happen in the course of recovering and restoring the film, the original 35 mm version of which had been lost, are to be found on the Internet.

So: how satisfying as a theatrical and music experience was this silent movie?

The film cannot really rank as a classic of the silent film era, as there is far too much incoherent, clichéd, ‘horror’ effects, suspense, pointless chase scenes, dwelling on the Phantom’s hideous face and the satanic elements, not to mention a story that echoes, in a confused way, aspects of the ancient Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman legends, hinting at the idea of redemption through a woman’s sacrifice, as well as echoes of the Faust story itself.

Many would have been there for the music though. While Barry Brinson accompanied with imagination and frequent pointed effects, any attempts to echo the supernatural and the intended terrifying phases of the story did not quite measure up to the kinds of music such things might inspire from an imaginative composer of today, so that the dated visual devices were hardly rescued from their weaknesses by the injection of dramatic and chilling music.

Nevertheless, the presence of an organist who knew his way around this versatile instrument and managed generally to find music, some from related material such as the Andrew Lloyd Webber version of the story, with a lot of tremolo rather than much real musical evocation of scenes of ‘horror’ and suspense. Yet we heard a musician of impressive improvisatory, and well as memory skills who actually produced the kind of musical accompaniment that might have been heard in the 1920s in a movie theatre.

The novel and the film of The Phantom of the Opera fall into the broad class of Gothic fiction that arouse in the late 18th century.

The Gothic pattern involved calling up a variety of effects and situations: mysterious, supernatural, terrifying or horror-filled. There are visions, omens, shadows on walls, ghosts, ancient castles, or, in this case, a rather wondrous neo-gothic – architecturally neo-almost-everything – opera house; they often involved a woman threatened by violence from a fiendish character, accompanied by staring eyes, fainting, screaming.  The story makes great use of suspense, supernatural events, inanimate things coming to life, appearances and disappearances, a woman in danger, tyranised by a crazed or evil man.

The French origin of the film was a novel of the same name that appeared in serialised form in 1909-10. It was emphatically in the tradition of the Gothic fiction that touched poetry, drama and the novel, as well as opera and ballet and the visual arts throughout the 19th century. It was a very important sub-genre of the Romantic movement.

The movement had started with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764 and novels of Ann Radcliffe such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, The Monk by Matthew Lewis (who became known as ‘Monk Lewis’), aspects of Walter Scott’s novels, the stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, elements of Dickens, like Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. Later examples were Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.

The genre flourished in the German Romantic movement from the time of Schiller’s Die Räuber in 1782 (which became Verdi’s I masnadieri), Kleist, Tieck and most importantly ETA Hoffmann. Jean Paul’s novels were steeped in the genre (his Titan reverberated through the 19th century, even, misleadingly, to Mahler’s First Symphony). In opera there was Weber’s Der Freischütz, with Samiel, the Satanic ‘Black Hunter’ and the magic bullets, Marschner’s Der Vampyr drawn from a story by John William Polidori, the creator of ‘Vampire literature’ – a sub-genre; and de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine (a water sprite) which inspired much later writing and music, such as operas by Hoffmann himself, Lortzing and Dvorák’s Rusalka.

In Russia, Gothic elements exist in Pushkin’s Queen of Spades and Lermontov’s Demon (both of which inspired operas by, respectively, Tchaikovsky and Anton Rubinstein).

Later in the 19th century the style revived with R L Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Henry James The Turn of the Screw. And of course it could be no surprise that the cinema soon realised how brilliantly the whole assemblage of hysterical and supernatural nonsense could be exploited on the screen.

 

Engaging lunchtime concert by woodwind students

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Woodwind students of the New Zealand School of Music

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 23 July, 12:15 pm

Five students under head of winds Deborah Rawson at the school of music gave a delightful recital on a cold day which saw a slightly smaller audience than usual at St Andrew’s.

As usual the standard of the performances was remarkable, resulting in several revelations of unfamiliar music. The first was a movement from Saint-Saëns’s clarinet sonata, one of his last pieces, written in the year of his death. Hannah Sellars played its second movement, Allegro animato, not without slight blemishes but with interesting variety of tone and an easy fluency in the runs and other decorative elements.

A second clarinettist was Patrick Richardson, rather more confident both in his presentation and his execution; he played two pieces, the first a successful arrangement of Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin, and then the Allegro from Stamitz’s 2nd clarinet concerto (while the programme had J (for Johann) Stamitz as composer, Richardson said correctly that it was by Carl, Johann’s son; Johann wrote only one clarinet concerto). The Debussy was limpid and fluid, every note entranced by the girl’s beguiling hair, the piano part only slightly diminished in its importance; the concerto movement by the son of the genius of the Mannheim school which so influenced Mozart, was a happy experience, chosen no doubt to exemplify the stylistic contrast between the classical clarinet and the late romantic. The clarity of tone, the player’s firm confidence carried him through the decorative phrases and cadenzas, with striking support by pianist Rafaela Garlick-Grice.

Harim Oh was a third clarinettist; he chose a piece that represented a very different challenge: the first movement, Lento, poco rubato, from the solo clarinet sonata by avant-garde Soviet composer Edison Denisov, born in 1929 and died in 1996. Littered with tricky pitches, micro-tones, note bending and smudged trills, this was a fine performance of a famously seminal piece, defying Soviet orthodoxy.

Two other instruments featured: Annabel Lovatt’s oboe and Peter Lamb’s bassoon. Annabel’s presentation was slightly hindered by nervousness compounded by a non-functioning microphone; however I did hear her say that the CPE Bach piece for solo oboe was originally for flute – no doubt for his patron the flute-playing Prussian king Frederick. One of the really significant revelations of recent decades has been the discovery of Bach’s oldest son’s genius, replacing the earlier view of him as a merely talented odd-ball. This piece made its way through an Adagio with an intriguing, twisting melody, short varied pauses and odd tempo changes; then the Allegro, a show-piece that was just as inventive and entertaining, punctuated by unexpected pauses, which Annabel played with considerable accomplishment. It may well have been more difficult on the oboe than on the flute.

Peter Lamb played a short suite for bassoon and piano by Alexander Tansman, who came alive for me when I visited the city museum in Lodz some years ago to find it largely dominated by Arthur Rubinstein and Tansman, both born there – Tansman 1897–1986. Since then, Tansman’s music seems to have emerged interestingly. This suite explored the instrument’s great and highly contrasted range in sunny melodies that engaged the piano (always played so splendidly by Garlick-Grice) in a real partnership. There seemed to be four movements, varied in a neo-classical manner. Not only does his music avoid modernist tendencies (in Paris in the 1920s, he declined an invitation to associate with Les Six) and certainly the serialists, but there is little to suggest any kinship with his compatriot Szymanowski, 15 years his senior. So this was an engaging, and interesting work that the two played with affection and commitment. It’s time for more serious exploration (by RNZ Concert?) of Tansman’s impressive oeuvre.

Comments later confirmed my impression of a particularly engaging concert.