Author: Lindis Taylor

James MacMillan conducts NZSO in his own and Cresswell’s music of the past twenty years

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by James MacMillan with Jonathan Lemalu (baritone)

Lyell Cresswell: The Clock Stops, settings of eleven poems by Fiona Farrell
James MacMillan: Woman of the Apocalypse
The Confession of Isobel Gowdie

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 9 May, 6:30 pm

The second of the pair of concerts from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra devoted to music of the past thirty years was a musical success, even though, again, it drew a smaller audience than the orchestra normally attracts. However, given the absence of any standard, familiar music in the programme, it was very encouraging, probably more than might be expected in most cities of comparable size in other parts of the world; and it won, particularly the final work, a noisy ovation with many bravos and a number coming to their feet.

Oddly, the programme note about Cresswell’s The Clock Stops didn’t refer directly to the subject of the poems – the physical and human impacts of the Christchurch earthquakes. It was chief executive Chris Blake’s foreword that mentioned Christchurch, though the language of the poems could easily be read as reflecting the disaster. The tone of the poems, each dealing in the most economical way with different aspects, found their ideal interpreter in the voice of Jonathan Lemalu, for it was the poetry that imposed itself on the composer’s imagination.

In fact, the music seemed to be constrained by the words, throughout the cycle. Not constrained perhaps, but giving rise to what sometimes seemed to me almost too detailed musical responses, and those responses were an orchestral canvas that was subtle, infinitely resourceful, surprising, loud, magically still.  Alongside the engrossing orchestral effects, the actual vocal line, often seeming rather in the nature of Sprechgesang, secondary to the less literal nature of non-vocal music which did the real work of expressing the wide-ranging experiences and emotions.  Each poem created its own unique sound world: ‘Fog’, with shimmering strings, under the image of ‘a woman waking’, while woodwinds echoed the words ‘The bird sings’, an image that returned later, as ‘the bird sings on a broken wall’.

In the poem ‘Map’, every word chiming on the short vowel ‘a’, supplied first an aggressive tone, and then the fragile sounds of two solo violins. The orchestra became transparent, movement absent, in ‘Lullabye’ with pizzicato strings and muted trumpet and Lemalu’s voice, in spite of his throat infection, shifted momentarily to a falsetto. In contrast, the image of ‘Downtown’ called Lemalu up staccato brass and then timpani as Lemalu’s voice coarsened in its low register. Two poems recalled the history of ancient cities that met either a violent end (Jericho) or disappeared under millennia of decay and conquest (Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia).

Each offered substance to the notion of time stopping, bringing the cycle to its strange end. The last words, ‘Tick, tock’, left one with a sense of futility in the face of human and terrestrial catastrophe.

The score called for an orchestra of great refinement and virtuosity, and MacMillan certainly found such an orchestra at hand.

Contrary to the announced programme, the interval was taken at that point and the two MacMillan works were played in the second half. That might have seemed tidy but it did not really serve the composer well. Though written twenty years apart (Gowdie in 1990 and Apocalypse in 2012), the fingerprints were similar. Cresswell’s scrupulous and discreetly used orchestral palette contrasted strikingly with the insistent and sometimes over-blown orchestration in MacMillan’s works.

MacMillan wrote that Woman of the Apocalypse was partly inspired by paintings ranging from Dürer and Rubens to Blake and Gustave Doré, each of whom treated the subject. Its five parts followed each other without break, each offering the reason for tempo and emotional contrast, like symphonic movements. Interest was held, up to a point, through the opportunities these pictorial-based ideas offered: battle, with ferocious timpani and side drums, brass and percussion fanfares, frantic scampering strings to depict the eagle’s wings, and finally her ascension to Paradise that ends with a sweeping Adagio-like passage. Yet the composer’s main concern seemed to be with the exploiting of orchestral colour and power, and while there were distinctive and striking passages and orchestral effects, in the end the work didn’t engage me emotionally, to leave a memorable musical impression.

The earlier work inspired by the torture and murder of Isobel Gowdie as a witch, with hideous barbarity in the 17th century engaged me rather more. It opens with haunting chords from clarinets, bassoons and horns before strings entered, evolving slowly in a way that was more recognizably symphonic. The brutality of her end, of course, provided the stuff of a more complex, agitated and drum-dominated narrative, though my notes remarked that the overwhelming intensity of the percussion, including three sets of drums/timpani at one point, was too much.  However, the intervening passages for violas and cellos, and then for celeste and tubular bells led to a calm, almost lyrical phase during which, rather movingly, the music simply fell away.

So I could understand how this work has gained renown, with many live performances and recordings.

However, at the concert’s end I found myself wondering whether larger numbers might come to a concert of new music if the programme had included one rather more familiar work of the past half century.

 

Lower Hutt Little Theatre gets new Steinway, but several much cheaper improvements still needed

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

A new Steinway for Lower Hutt

Welcome reception and concert for the new piano at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Sunday 4 May, 2014

On Sunday friends of the piano were invited to see and hear the new Steinway that had been bought for the Lower Hutt Little Theatre. Replacing the earlier Steinway which had been used in the Little Theatre since the 1950s, it had arrived and been run-in.

Ten years ago at the urging of players, teachers and audiences the Hutt City Council set about building up a fund for the purchase of a new piano, and a charitable trust was set up in parallel to encourage individual contributions. Committee members of Chamber Music Hutt Valley have been vigorous and prominent in promoting the whole exercise.

Among other contributions were a large number of small donations from individuals and small businesses; and particular value was placed on a ‘Kids for Keys’ piano playing initiative, organised by local music teachers. And individual keys were up for purchase: there are still some for sale.

Concerts by the Hutt Valley Orchestra, Chamber Music Hutt Valley and the newly established Chopin Club also yielded funds for the piano.

While the old model D piano continued to serve pretty well, and most professional pianists tended to be discreetly charitable about its sound and the problems of producing top-class performances, there was little dispute about the need for a new instrument.

The target has nearly been reached through the $60,000 raised by donations to the Trust and most of the balance from the City Council with the proceeds of the sale of the old piano, to meet the $170,000 cost of the new piano.

However, the Trust still needs $7000 to meet its commitment.

After a formal welcome with speeches from Mayor Ray Wallace and the Chair of the Trust, Joy Baird, a varied programme was presented. Poulenc’s Sonata for Piano, four hands, began the concert, with Diedre Irons and Richard Mapp at the keyboard. It was an excellent demonstration of the piano’s dynamic and tonal range, and sensitivity. A virtually unknown piece by Alfred Hill followed: his early Miniature Trio for violin, cello and piano, the violin and piano parts taken by pupils at Hutt Valley High School, Hayden Nickel and Nicholas Kovacev.

Two students of piano teacher and composer Susan Beresford, Thomas Minot and Hannah Louis, played three of her compositions plus a remarkably ebullient piece, Carnival, by Thomas. Pianist Ludwig Treviranus who was a high school student in the Hutt Valley, studied music with Rae de Lisle at Auckland University and took his doctorate at Florida State University, has been a loyal friend of music in both Upper and Lower Hutt. He and his jazz group played a set of jazz pieces as well as the Alla Turca movement from Mozart’s Sonata in A major.

Finally, Diedre Irons showed the piano’s responsiveness to Chopin’s ‘Heroic’ Polonaise (Op 53).

So far, so good.

But in spite of the upgrade of the auditorium and back-stage a year or so ago, and now the new piano, the ambience of the foyer remains bleak and unwelcoming, even though a café has been created and doors now give access to the Library. There are no comfortable seats for the audience before, during the interval and after a concert.

There is no décor of any kind, not even places on which posters about forthcoming concerts could be fixed. The walls could well be used to illustrate aspects of musical activities in the valley since the Little Theatre was built, making use of archival photographs which I’m sure could be unearthed.  And racks could be provided for brochures and flyers advertising future concerts and cultural activities in the Hutt Valley, and in the wider Wellington region.

Given an attractive venue, music lovers will come from far and wide for good concerts: I am just one case, living in Tawa and having been a regular at concerts in both Lower and Upper Hutt for many years. Though one hesitates to make a point that might strike a parochial note, city officials could well take a look at the most attractive environment that has been created and maintained in the Arts and Entertainment Centre in Upper Hutt.

Incidentally, I gather the city council is contemplating acoustic enhancement. In the light of the several much easier and cheaper enhancements that still cry out for attention, the professional services of acoustic engineers would be just a little ridiculous. No auditorium is perfect, and one of the first tasks that a performer new to a hall undertakes is to listen to the acoustic and to ensure that he or she obtains the most rewarding sounds. As it stands, I can see (or hear) no justification for such needless extravagance.

 

NZSO scores a success in recent music delving some of the world’s tragedies

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich with Sara MacLiver (soprano)

Body: Little Elegies
Sculthorpe: Memento Mori
Gorecki: Symphony No 3 (‘Sorrowful Songs’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 3 May, 7:30 pm

The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
The spectre of a half-filled auditorium for a major NZSO concert featuring Gorecki’s famous symphony which had filled this same hall, and halls all over the world, through the 1990s, came as a shock.

Though its first performances outside Poland in the 1980s were roundly abused by most critics, in a typical review, “simply adding to the decadent trash that encircled the true pinnacles of avant-gardism”, it was much better received by audiences. It was the performance recorded by David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta with Dawn Upshaw as soloist that propelled it into the charts, even the pop charts.  The phenomenon was widely seen as a sign that decades of domination of classical music by ‘experimental’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘complex’ music that alienated audiences, were at an end; music that was ‘original-above-all’, music that avoided melody and any sign of musical antecedents, unless of the most radical kind.

Indeed, this symphony played a big part in the reaction against music that drove audiences away whenever a contemporary piece was programmed, and the years since have slowly seen the emergence of composers who knew that all art needs to be grounded in what has gone before, both for its own sake and for it to make sense to its listeners.

There are, nevertheless, still sceptics, of whom I am not one.

The orchestra’s performance under Hamish McKeich was stunningly beautiful, with spellbinding suspense maintained though the long, slow passages that begin and end the first movement in a huge arch, as section after section of the strings enter and later depart with its repeated elegiac phrases in elaborate canon.

One of its significant features is the use of a conservative orchestra, with no percussion and limited numbers of wind instruments; though four flutes/piccolos, pairs of bassoons and contra-bassoons, but no oboes or trumpets. There is a prominent piano part, hinting at bells, and of course the remarkable role for soprano, the splendid Sara MacLiver, singing Polish religious songs, folk songs and a setting of a graffiti prayer left by a victim on the wall of a NAZI prison.

MacLiver’s voice was for the most part well balanced in the orchestral texture, though parts of her range seemed to project less well; nevertheless, she captured the emotion, its moments of contrasting despair and hope, most movingly.

It is uniformly in a lamenting mood, though it is also remarkable for the moments of well-being, that arise through beautifully judged modulations at various points. The second movement, though it was where Gorecki set the graffiti prayer by the 18-year-old girl, provided the richest source of hope, expressed so poignantly by voice and orchestra, with quite limited musical means.

Memento Mori by Peter Sculthorpe
The first half of the concert comprised elegiac pieces by leading Australian and New Zealand composers. Both drew on ‘programmes’ that have strong political and environmental implications, not merely trite, nationalistic reflections on the heroism of war.

Of course, we are singularly starved of opportunities to hear Australian music, and I expect the same is true in the other direction. However, I have tried to compensate on trips to Australia with visits to the Australian Music Centre in The Rocks, Sydney, to get recordings. So I was familiar with the performance of Sculthorpe’s Memento Mori by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under David Porcelijn, a disc mainly filled, not the least incongruously, with his Sun Music.

There were hints of Gorecki in the opening passages of Memento Mori, not an impossibility as it was written in 1993, a year after the famous Dawn Upshaw recording.  But Sculthorpe’s main inspiration was the plainchant, the Dies Irae, which appears, matter-of-factly, after the sombre, Gorecki-like introduction: treading even-paced in both the opening and closing phases of the quarter-hour work. Between those passages was a less bleak evolution of the same music, horns prominent, petering out.

Sculthorpe has made explicit the ‘programme’ underlying this music. He uses the history of the collapse of Easter Island’s society and economy as a metaphor for the approaching degradation of the entire planet, faced with the reckless, comparable exploitation of finite resources.

Yet the piece lightens and the pervading elegiac tone slowly evolves with a sense of calm, offering a possible emergence from catastrophe, given intervention by rational and understanding forces. Though hardly a legitimate gloss for this performance, the notes to the Australian CD refer to echoes of another Sculthorpe piece, Sun Song, which is included on the same CD as Memento Mori.

With the Adelaide performance as a comparison, what I heard on Saturday was better, more simply beautiful and integrated in terms of balance, and in the generation of an elegiac mood as well as a lyrical quality and, in particular, more polished sounds from strings and brass.

Little Elegies
Jack Body’s Little Elegies is nearly 30 years old. Yet its vocabulary is rather more emotionally powerful and elaborate than Sculthorpe’s.

Little Elegies was commissioned by the then General Manager of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Peter Nisbet, for use by TVNZ to celebrate 25 years of television in New Zealand. In his programme note, Body described how he had succeeded in having the music used in an experimental video, directed by Peter Coates, that “inter-cut slow motion gestures of the conductor with what were sometimes quite harrowing topical television news clips”.

The quote in the programme was taken from words included in the Centre for New Zealand Music (SOUNZ)’s listing of the work, which included a few details omitted from the programme, such as the title of book that had inspired Body’s composition: Dith Pran’s The Killing Fields. And interestingly, SOUNZ records that, in addition to its original performance, it has been played again by the NZSO in 1994 and by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2012.

The commission and the TV programme itself of 1985 underlines the degeneration and intellectual decay of television in New Zealand in the subsequent 30 years.

Body succeeded in writing a gritty and politically hard-hitting piece that drew attention to television’s trivialisation of human tragedy, specifically the terrible events in Cambodia at the time. His note in the programme recorded his bemusement that his project was accepted, though he could not recall what, if any, response it had stimulated. Yet today, even such a suggestion for a commission would probably be met with scorn and incredulity.

Body noted that the title, ‘Little’ Elegies, referred to the insignificance of his musical statement alongside the enormity of the events he referred to.

It opened with hints of sirens, and an atmosphere of chaos was evoked by the rattle of tom-toms and thud of bass drum, as glissandi strings uttered screams of pain or anger. Gongs along with soft trombones, xylophone and marimba created an Asian scene; piano and celeste contributed surprisingly to that landscape.  The orchestration was often dense but it sounded carefully judged and I sensed that, if tackled, the composer would have given persuasive reasons for scoring each of the instruments in the sonic texture.

It was interesting to be reminded again, what an imaginative and resourceful orchestrator Body is, as I listened while writing this to some of the pieces on the newly released Naxos recording of Body’s music, reviewed by Robert Johnson in RNZ Concert’s CD review programme, midday Sunday: particularly the arias from his formidable opera for the 1998 Festival, Alley, evincing similar orchestral mastery.

So the music of the concert was interestingly linked; themes of human stupidity, either with regard to the environment or driven by political fanaticism (Sculthorpe and Body) or both of those in an undefined meditation that contemplates, ostensibly without topical significance, landscapes of loss and bleakness that afflicts the world at some times and in some places.

Composer of the Week
And Jack Body, turning 70 this year, is Composer-of-the-Week on RNZ Concert this week, the start of New Zealand Music Month.

(And you will have heard the news item on Radio New Zealand on Sunday in which popular-music critic Simon Sweetman questioned the value of this focus on New Zealand music. He is probably right regarding popular music of most kinds; but classical music does not have such an easy ride, and the Month might still be of value.

(One major step would be to improve the quality of music broadcast by National Radio, including discreet items of New Zealand ‘classical’ music; the choice of music is a serious impediment for me when I tune in to its generally excellent spoken programmes: classical music seems to be wholly banned; but neither does it seem particularly good pop music. Are all its listeners musically illiterate?).

 

Piano trios in sparkling performances by Waikato-based ensemble

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New Zealand Chamber Soloists (Katherine Austin – piano, Amalia Hall – violin, James Tennant – cello)
(Wellington Chamber Music)

Piano Trio in D minor, H 327 (Martinů)
Corybas and Aegean (Psathas)
Piano Trio in F minor, Op 65 (Dvořák) 

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 27 April, 3 pm

I was surprised to discover how long it seems to be since I heard either Katherine Austin or James Tennant in concert. In fact, a search of Middle C back to October 2008 throws up neither name. However, we’ve reviewed three or four recitals involving Amalia Hall.

Most of my experience of Austin and Tennant in earlier years has been in the chamber music series in Wellington or Lower Hutt and at the Chamber Music Festival in Nelson, though I don’t think they have performed there in the last two or three festivals, at least.

So this recital was a pleasure; additionally spiced by Katherine Austin’s ebullient remarks about the music.

I have come to enjoy Martinů’s music over the years and so I found myself feeling much more receptive to this piano trio than I think some of the audience was.

His music is idiosyncratic and I can envisage performances that fail to grasp his spirit. Here however, the trio did not try to make too much of the opening passages: there was a discreet reticence in their approach, though the insistent rhythm, in the shape of motifs of two quavers and a crotchet and the opposite, and the energy that is always present was there, but waiting in the wings, as it were.

Though the melodic ideas are not as strong as in some of Martinů’s music, by the end of the first movement – less than five minutes, it had planted itself very satisfactorily in my head. The second movement starts secretively, on violin and piano though the cello later to enjoy some lovely duetting with the violin. The players didn’t allow the drifting mood of the Adagio to lose its way, though it did seem to take its time to find the exit. The finale found the more characteristic Martinů voice, with its typical ostinato-like motifs and motoric rhythms.

But I await a performance of Martinů’s Nonet from an enterprising ensemble; not to mention one of our orchestras programming one of his six symphonies.

A colleague has observed that the acoustic in St Andrew’s has become a little harder for chamber music since the refurbishment; I’m not sure, as each of the instruments spoke clearly and were always well balanced, even though the piano’s lid was on the long stick and the writing could have tempted the pianist to a more dominant role. (My colleague, Rosemary Collier, told me later that it was probably a rug under the piano that had tempered its sound).

The trio had commissioned Corybas from John Psathas, and he had been inspired to add a short additional piece called Aegean, as an envoi (in the sense of a concluding strophe to, usually, an Elizabethan poem; Psathas called it a postlude).

The pair of pieces had been premiered in Crete in 2011; Corybas had several interlinked references, but was based on a Macedonian dance in complex rhythm; Aegean was in part inspired by the view of the Aegean from his parents’ house high above the sea on the coast of below Mount Olympus.  But Katherine told us that they had decided to play in first, and that seemed very fitting. A complex pattern seemed to lie beneath it but that did not create a barrier for the listener. Its impact was of calm though not, for me, of a seascape. There were long-drawn lines for violin and cello over a busier piano part, and it proved a happy prelude for Corybas.

Strangely, there seemed to be a real affinity between it and the Martinů trio.

The piano opened Corybas with a deliberate exposition of the rhythm, as a serialist might do with a tone-row. But this was no serial or any other kind of avant-garde composition. Though the rhythm was complex, there were quite long passages with a strong and insistent beat; the piece sounded very danceable, at least for someone born in Greece.  I enjoyed the way the energy slowly dissipated as the end approached, though without any loss of spirit. Teasingly, it just got slower and more engaging. The trio has played it a number of times, and their familiarity and affinity added hugely to its acceptance and enjoyment.

Finally, Dvořák’s piano trio: No 3, but the first to make a real mark. Though the programme note linked its character with the recent death of the composer’s mother, there was little, for my ears, that suggested sadness, let alone grief. In a minor key, to be sure, but written with such maturity and confidence (after all he’d written his sixth symphony by this time, 1883; he was 42) that it is the melodic richness, life-affirming vigour and its compositional skill that animates it and gives it stature.

The first movement is the most important, almost a quarter hour and a tour de force given to sudden dynamic changes, a variety of tone and metre and dealing fluently with its fertile thematic material. These players took every chance to exploit all these opportunities, producing a mood of profound contentment. I noted earlier the happy balance maintained between the three instruments; here, perhaps more than before, I was conscious of more than just a feeling of restraint with the cello part, but a view of it as secondary; it may have been where I was sitting, on the left side. Nevertheless, when I turned my attention to the cello, Tennant’s playing was always deeply expressive. And that quality became particularly evident in the slow movement which opens, elegiacally indeed, with a lovely cello melody.

But before that, the scherzo-like second movement, Allegretto grazioso, arrested the ear through the teasing rhythm that seemed to suggest various time signatures, broken by a trio section of quite different and more pensive character.

Both the third and fourth movements, each of round ten minutes, seem to maintain the level of melodic inspiration, as the cello’s melody at the beginning of the Poco adagio is followed by a mirroring melody on the violin that was comparably engaging. And the last movement returned to the serious energy of the first movement where the Katherine Austin’s extrovert piano often led the way in dramatizing the abrupt tempo changes, the accelerandos, the little emphatic outbursts that held the attention even when one, secretly, felt that the composer was prolonging the end somewhat unduly.

So this was a splendid concert, giving a fine exposure to one of Dvořák’s chamber music masterpieces as well as rewarding and successful works of the past half century.

 

Festival Singers under Berkahn explore baroque byways, a romantic Stabat Mater and a modern, jazz cantata

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Festival Singers conducted by Jonathan Berkahn

A Rising Tide – Easter Music, by Buxtehude, Bach, Lachner, Rheinberger, Ireland and Jonathan Berkahn

St Peter’s Church, Willis Street

Sunday 6 April, 2:30 pm

The concert was advertised as performing two works: a Stabat Mater by minor German composer, Josef Rheinberger, contemporary of Brahms and Bruch, and The Third Day by the conductor.

The works that accompanied the Stabat Mater in the first half were of a similar kind: organ and vocal pieces by Buxtehude, Bach, Lachner, and religious songs by John Ireland and Berkahn.

Lachner’s name probably rings faint bells as Franz was one of a Bavarian musical family, contemporary with Schubert and Schumann. This Introduction and Fugue for organ sounded as if he was a pupil of J S Bach, rather than a composer 30 years Beethoven’s junior.  Its virtue was a bold and plain opening, using the 16 foot stops, that switched abruptly to light flutes on the choir manual. The fugue subject was of the most elementary character which might well have served as an exercise for a beginning composition student to explore the mysteries of fugue, but it was followed by a more imposing sequence of cadences that announced its conclusion.

A setting by Berkahn of a religious poem by Wordsworth contemporary James Montgomery followed; in an attractive bass voice, Jamie Henare handled the hymnal melody graciously; though the accompaniment (by the composer) was at a somewhat primitive sounding electronic keyboard.

I’m familiar with some of Rheinberger’s organ music and a few choral pieces but was unaware of a Stabat Mater. I’m afraid this exposure seemed to reaffirm the judgment of history; it recalled nothing of Alessandro Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Pergolesi or Haydn, and certainly nothing of his 19th century colleagues like Rossini, Dvořák or Verdi (it is one of his Four Sacred Pieces). (I recall this choir singing Rossini’s version in 2009; in my review then, I thought the choir displayed a closer sympathy with the Catholic than the Protestant style of religious music).

This was sung in English, to a translation different from that in our programme leaflets. The translation did serve to remind the audience of the Church’s strange obsession with the most ghoulish details of the Christ story; though it was never formally a part of the Catholic liturgy, the Stabat Mater maintained its prominent place in the pattern of worship from the time of the poem’s composition in the 13th century, through its numerous musical settings down the ages.

So if verbal clarity might not have been a major concern in the choir’s rehearsal, other matters had careful attention: ensemble, intonation and style. Here, more than elsewhere, the small numbers of male singers was rather conspicuous in some lack of confidence. Nevertheless, there were several interesting features that the choir navigated well; one was a fugal section which lent the work greater variety and a certain dramatic impact.

Two organ pieces followed. Rafaella Garlick-Grice played Buxtehude’s ‘Ach Gott und Herr’ using stops with discretion, though I wondered whether her tremolo passages were appropriate. Then Berkahn played Bach’s ‘Christ lag in Todesbanden’, here making good use of the organ’s range, its striking contrasts between the Great and Choir manuals, the music, probably dating from Bach’s early years at Arnstadt, rather showing up, in contrast, the relatively limited inventiveness of Lachner and even of Buxtehude.

With Rafaella again at the organ the choir sang a setting by Ireland of ‘Greater love hath no man’, using solo voices from the choir, charming if a bit taxing in the higher register.

There was a ten minute pause as amplification equipment was set up for the accompaniment to The Third Day, which was introduced with an engaging Irish interlude led by flutist/guitarist Bernard Wells.

The Third Day, the text presumably compiled by the composer, deals with happenings before and on Easter Sunday, including Christ’s descent from the Cross and the reflections by Judas and Thomas on the implications of their actions.

Berkahn conducted from the keyboard, in this instance the keyboard of the accordion suspended from his shoulders (he pointed out that before the rise of the dubious profession of the full-time celebrity maestro, music was directed from the keyboard; sometimes it was by the principal violinist or concert master).

The other members of the jazz ensemble were guitarist Andrew James, bass guitarist Adam Meers and pianist Ruth James.

The music is in a delightful post-religious-rock-opera style, that no longer (I imagine) sounds blasphemous in the ears of believers; it uses the choir, soloists and the band in an easy, varied manner, and at a couple of points bass Jamie Henare made the most engaging entries. In the final exultatory section, in triple time, the world was put to rights with the cry ‘Christ is risen, he is risen indeed!’

The concert might have seemed very disparate in style and musical character, but the effect of this very contemporary, and singularly attractive cantata was to lighten the spirits of the audience, and to give perspective to the more sombre music of the first half, perhaps to enhance it in the memory.

 

One-man Slovak cello ensemble featuring voice and rhythm at NZSM

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New Zealand School of Music: Jozef Lupták – improvisatory cellist

Bach: excerpts from Cello Suites nos 1 and 3
Improvisatory performances on Ernest Bloch’s Jewish Prayer, Threnos by John Tavener and O crux, meditation for solo cello by Vladimir Godár

Adam Concert Room, New Zealand School of Music, Kelburn campus

Friday 21 March, 7 pm

Cellist Jozef Lupták came to New Zealand primarily, I suppose, to play Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra; I see he also gave concerts at Rangiora, Dunedin, Rotorua. He was also enticed to visit the New Zealand School of Music to give a masterclass on Thursday and a short recital on Friday 21 March.

His recital started and ended with excerpts from Bach’s cello suites: first, no 3 in C and last, no 1 in G. He played with eyes shut, seeming to be transported as he launched into the Prelude, the cross-string passages driven with a hypnotic energy, with a sort of intensity in which he seemed to seek distinctness in every passage, sometimes at some cost to unity of feeling. Then he jumped to the Sarabande (not the Courante, as the programme had it. Luptak did speak before playing, but I did not hear or missed hearing what he might have said about the movements), dealing with it in an almost painful, exploratory way that meant the stretching and compressing of phrases, quite losing any hint of the movement’s dance origin. But  that was replaced by a transcendental spirit that would have been complete if the light in the Adam Concert Room had been more dim (and there was no reason for it to be so well lit as the player had very little recourse to his score or the audience to the programme notes).

The third movement, consequently, was the pair of Bourrées, which are found only in suites 3 and 4. Here was the return to the real world, though Luptak’s playing introduced a kind of waywardness, again giving individuality to every phrase, which somehow dramatized the shift to the minor key in Bourrrée II. Finally, the Gigue: heavy, emphatic double stopping really caught the spirit of the peasant dance in its earthiness.

Then came his three improvisations. They consisted of the subject piece either at the start or embedded some way in, which was then subjected to the kind of variation treatment that neither Bach, Brahms or Rachmaninov might have recognized. Their only similarity to their predecessors, whether fantasies,  ariations, cadenzas or occasionally improvisations, came through spectacular bravura and showy ornamentation.

Being unfamiliar with any of the three pieces, I felt a bit ill-equipped to follow their treatment in these highly individual improvisatory explorations, as the tunes had not been sufficiently embedded in my head to allow much grasp of the way they were being transformed.

But that reference was to some extent supplied but the voicings with which Luptak accompanied his playing, consisting of a sort of humming of the tunes in question, with the mouth slightly open; simultaneously, the player added a vocal rhythmic accompaniment of clicks and sibilant sounds.

All three pieces had clear and intense religious relevance. Though I found closest kinship, musically, to the pieces by Bloch (a characteristic Jewish Prayer) and Tavener (the moving Threnos, deriving from the composer’s long obsession with the Greek Orthodox liturgy); the third piece was by a fellow Slovak musician, Vladimir Godár, O, crux (‘O Cross …’), obviously inspired by the Catholic Latin liturgy.  All evolved as pregnant, deeply felt inspirations.

The music was diatonic enough, but exhibited, at first, through a series of heavy bow strokes, a violence and anguish that was powerful; later that was set aside by a lighter passage in a dotted, dancing rhythm; the improvisation led off with his rhythmic bouncing the wood of his bow on the strings, that suddenly became more frenetic.

And Lupták allowed his last tongue clickings, in the Godar piece, to lead into the Prelude of Bach’s Suite No 1. Its playing seemed to have been deeply infected by the anguish of what had gone before; and there was little change of tone in the following Sarabande in which all its latent variety and expressiveness was exploited; but the final Gigue, with its gaiety, brought a feeling of peace and satisfaction.

Lupták played two encores: a short improvisation called Six Months and then the brief opening passage of the Bourrée which presumably was from Suite No 4 (not, as he announced, from Suite No 6 which as a pair of Gavottes in that position).

(I have not been able to check what I thought were changes in the Bach movements that I’ve noted above; if any audience member cares to comment, I’d be grateful).

This was an unorthodox recital, only and hour and ten minutes long, but put together with a single-minded ingenuity and imagination and played with high energy and intensity of feeling.

 

Jonathan Berkahn and friends celebrate St Patrick’s Day + 2 with charm and wit

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s: Lunchtime in Ireland

Jonathan Berkahn and friends (Bernard Wells – recorder, Janet Broome-Nicholson – percussion, Carol Shortis – piano, Ingrid Schoenfeld – piano, Michelle Velvin – harp)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 19 March, 12:15 pm

It was only a month earlier that Jonathan Berkahn was at St Andrew’s playing both the church’s organs, and one is used to his appearing more discreetly, accompanying choirs and small ensembles.

Here, Jonathan was more centre stage, wielding his piano accordion, though he was also at the piano keyboard sometimes, stage left, and handling a recorder. As well as playing, he demonstrated a talent as compere and musicologist as he spoke interestingly, in a witty manner about the music and its composers.

We were expecting Irish stuff; if not of the River Dance variety, then at least sentimental popular songs and reels. That hope was fulfilled right towards the end, especially as he was joined in a groups of jigs and reels by Bernard Wells on the flute and Janet Broome-Nicholson on a slim drum, perhaps a kind of frame drum. Berkahn broke ranks there with a recorder to his lips and then moved to the piano to pick up an accompaniment, tentatively at first, in a lively reel.

But it began, perhaps noting Radio NZ Concert’s ‘Composers of the Week’ by Cynthia Morahan featuring Irish composers, particularly William Vincent Wallace (Maritana) and Charles Villiers Stanford, with one who is a well-known Irish composer.

John Field was a genuine Irish composer who was apprenticed to and soon exploited by Clementi in London and then taken to Russia where he spent the best part of his increasingly extravagant and feckless life. With Ingrid Schoenfeld, Berkahn played one of Liszt’s arrangements (four hands) of Field’s many Nocturnes (a form which he invented, and was made famous of course by Chopin).

I can’t resist reproducing a comment (found in Wikipedia) by Liszt about Field’s Nocturnes:
“None have quite attained to these vague eolian harmonies, these half-formed sighs floating through the air, softly lamenting and dissolved in delicious melancholy. Nobody has even attempted this peculiar style, and especially none of those who heard Field play himself, or rather who heard him dream his music in moments when he entirely abandoned himself to his inspiration.”

Was a bit like that.

Then came a surprise: Geminiani. He became an important figure as violinist in London musical circles, but also spent two periods in Dublin.
The real surprise was Berkahn’s appearing with his accordion to play Geminiani’s first Violin Sonata (Op 1, No 1), which Geminiani had arranged for the harpsichord. That move often seems to give licence to later musicians to play fast and loose with such a piece, arranging it for any old instrument. It sounded as if Geminiani really had the accordion in mind all along; yet was hard to conceal its Corelli-Handel influence.

A rarity for one not steeped in Irish music was a set of short pieces by Turlough O’Carolan, an early 18th century musician who became blind, but composed lots of melodies that survived through the ages. They were ineffably, charmingly Irish in flavour especially as played on Michelle Velvin’s Irish harp with Berkahn at the piano.

Composer/arranger/pianist Carol Shortis then contributed a couple of traditional Irish songs: she sang them with an unaffected, easy voice, that did nostalgia in the most charming manner, accompanying herself at the piano. They were sweet, intrinsically sentimental, without a scrap of maudlin.

There was an above-average sized audience which gave off an air of real enjoyment at the music and its artless performers.

 

Triumphant finish to the NZSO’s ‘Five by Five’ lunchtime venture

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival: New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich

Shostakovich: Symphony No 5 in D minor, Op 47

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 13 March 12:30 pm

To programme some of the weightiest pieces of orchestral music at lunchtime might have seemed strange behaviour. Were the festival’s and the orchestra’s managements not alert to the usual view that noon-time music should be light and easy?

This last of the Five by Five symphonies played at lunchtime concerts by the NZSO attracted a smaller audience than the other two I heard; I think that might be because Shostakovich seems not yet to be, in New Zealand, a major figure in the classical music pantheon.

Yet the three concerts I attended and reports of the other two prove the great success of the venture.

There is still a tendency to hear this fifth symphony of Shostakovich as the work of a reformed Communist disciple, who really meant what he wrote to appease the authorities in his note accompanying the score, and to treat the evidence of his horror of the regime, revealed by Solomon Volkov and many others, as a bit dubious.

The music I heard, under the impassioned direction of Hamish McKeich, spoke, in the first three movements, of an unease, of watchfulness, of fear of the 4am knock on the door; those bassoons early in the first movement uttered an ominous, flat-footed, unadorned chill. The sound was brown as in fascist shirts. There was minimal vibrato, and that tight little three-note motif: what other than disquiet, the fear of political criticism, could that portend? Sure, there are moments of sunshine and peacefulness, with the piano episode, the horns and the trumpets, but then terror returns with the side drum and xylophone with their triplet quavers.

With the thudding of basses and cellos there is no change in the political mood in the Allegretto. And though outward gaiety might be suggested at moments, the livelier tempo still sounds to me, in the dark and powerful interpretation we heard under McKeich, as if even signs of happiness and lighthearted behaviour are under surveillance.

In the great, suspenseful, Largo third movement the air of watchfulness remains with the tremolo violins and the dramatic impact of the tight, shrill oboe; and later, screaming strings, and the slow, ringing single notes of the harp, so beautifully articulated yet so full of unease. Nevertheless, the final major chord seems to be the composer’s determination to find humanity in all this.

I was gripped by this great performance which allowed, I thought, no mistaking of Shostakovich’s situation in the midst of the purges that had begun by 1937; while struggling to express a forced gaiety that would deceive the musical commissars, the last movement was still a matter of peering into a bleak future.

Often, attempts to infuse music, or the arts generally, with an extraneous context fails to create a coherent work of art, as non-musical emotions take charge, overwhelming the aesthetic character and its ability to move the listener. Yet there are plenty of successful examples, from the very earliest times: religious music can be considered a major case in point. Religion presents few conflicts of course as the emotions engaged by religion and by the arts have some common ground. But battle scenes and deaths and all kinds of tragic human experiences have commonly been used as sources of musical inspiration; unless handled with genius, they can be a burden that wrecks the musical element.

This symphony is a case of a genius at work, as the emotions have been transmuted so successfully into a musical fabric, and the performance itself was driven with full awareness of and attention to the symphony’s powerful musical character.

Once again, this was a heroic and committed performance that demonstrated the strength and responsiveness of the orchestra to such dynamic and clear-sighted leadership.

Finally it needs to be noted that the five symphonies were conducted by former members, wind instrument players, of the NZSO who have achieved international reputations, and whose magnificent showings here prove their credentials in the mainstream repertoire.

 

Gunter Herbig and his Brazilian-German guitar at St Andrew’s lunchtime recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts

Gunter Herbig – guitar

Music by Dilermando Reis, J S Bach and Villa-Lobos

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 5 March, 12:15 pm

Gunther Herbig has been a distinguished figure in Wellington music for some years and was for a time head of classical guitar at the New Zealand School of Music; he remains in Wellington though now teaching at Auckland University. His background – born in Brazil and growing up in Portugal and Germany – gives him a unique background as a musician and guitarist, obviously in both linguistic and musical terms.

His first two pieces were by Brazilian composer, Dilermando Reis (1916-1977), whose music was unashamedly sentimental and romantic. It was clear from the start that Herbig felt a strong affinity with him, as he created the feeling that he was playing spontaneously, embraced by the unaffected character of the music. Perhaps not strong in a memorable sense, Ternura and Se ela perguntar suggested to me the retiring sadness of the Portuguese popular fado song tradition, which I happen to be addicted to. One of the characteristics was a beguiling tendency to pause, to hesitate in mid-phrase, in the fashion of 19th century salon music that filled the piano albums found in our grand-parents’ piano stools.

And he finished the recital with the more famous Brazilian, Villa-Lobos: three pieces called ‘chôro’ (I noted his pronunciation: ‘sho’ru’) which, he explained, were not really in that genre. These were pieces from his Suíte popular brasileira written in 1928, based, as their names indicated, on European dances: Mazurka chôro, Schottish chôro and Valsa chôro. The ‘real’ chôros were about 15 in number, written through the 1920s for orchestra or a great variety of instruments.

The mazurka and the waltz bore some signs of their rhythmic inspiration, though I wondered where the composer had picked up his impressions of the schottish. They all offered Herbig the chance to reveal the range of subtle articulation available on the guitar, through plucking with the finger nails or the finger-tips, plucking close to the bridge or over the finger-board, forming the same notes with the left hand high on the fingerboard or near the nut. They were most charming if light-weight pieces by this prolific composer.

(It’s always interesting to be side-tracked when exploring Internet resources. I had not been aware that Villa-Lobos had damaged his reputation in the late 30s by becoming an acolyte of President Getulio Vargas in his third, dictatorial period from 1937 to 1945, writing ‘patriotic’ music after the pattern of other dictators of that time).

The serious, classical piece in the programme was Bach’s first Lute Suite, BWV 996. As with the previous pieces, Herbig spoke about its provenance, though without using the microphone and he was hard to hear, even eight or so rows back. Bach was apparently inspired to write these, though not a lutenist himself, by the great lute composer and player Sylvius Leopold Weiss, who was almost exactly Bach’s contemporary. It sounded fine on the guitar for Herbig had the taste and skill to adorn the music with enlivening variety, in dynamics and rubato, in articulation and pacing, capturing the charming meandering character of the Präludium, lending interest to the Allemande by seeming to disguise its rhythm and giving the Courante a very deliberate pace so that it seemed to be jogging rather than running; it allowed the sophisticated melodic line to be properly enjoyed. Herbig’s skill in employing all the refined techniques at his command, as well as all sorts of appropriate ornaments, was best displayed in leisurely paced Sarabande; the two last movements, Bourrée and Gigue, captured a lively spirit in dancing rhythms. Was Bach (or Herbig) teasing us by bringing his gigue to what seemed a somewhat unannounced end?

In all, music that was very skilled, balanced and highly suitable for the digestion of empadas or bratwurst.

 

 

 

Festival opera Ainadamar semi-staged but powerful, strongly cast and magnificently performed

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Ainadamar, opera by Osvaldo Golijov

Production, semi-staged, by the New Zealand Festival with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and directed by Sara Brodie

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Publication here of this review of the performance on 2 March was delayed till 18 March because it is in some part based on my review in the New Zealand Listener; it is unethical to publish elsewhere until the issue of the Listener has gone ‘off sale’, at the end of last weekend.

I made use of the delay to add some material from reviews of earlier productions of Ainadamar. In the light of conflicting attitudes towards the work, I find it illuminating to read a range of opinions from other parts of the world.

Sunday 2 March 2014

In spite of the many attempts by composers of the present day to use contemporary issues and events as subjects for opera, few have survived more than an opening season of performances.  For by determining to display a command of the concepts and fashions that musical academia has developed and made de rigueur for a composer who wants to be taken seriously by his peers,  most have failed to engage more than small dutiful audiences dedicated to serious academic music.

Ainadamar, however, premiered in 2003 at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts (where it won “a shouting, stomping ovation”), and has been rapturously received, at least by audiences, in a dozen places. Certain critics have been less open-hearted.

The work deals with poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca’s assassination by fascists in 1936, though much of the narrative is through a powerful portrayal by actress Margarita Xirgu, who was devoted to Lorca and was the famous creator of the role of Mariana Pineda in Lorca’s play of the same name.  Pineda was an early 19th century liberal who was garrotted by the monarchy (a particularly kindly execution technique practised by the Spanish); she is presented as presaging Lorca’s own fate.

The text is by David Henry Hwang, translated into Spanish by the composer (with good English surtitles).  Using some projected images from overseas productions, this most successful semi-production is a great credit to Sara Brodie; there were several experienced international singers and we were lucky to have Ainadamar veteran Miguel Harth-Bedoya conducting. The former musical director of the Auckland Philharmonia has conducted several incarnations of the work in North America (including the debut of the opera’s revised form in Santa Fe in 2005), produced an authentic, sometimes hair-raising performance. Percussion and guitars made prominent and splendidly vivid contributions.

A reduced NZSO was on stage, and the singers, including a strong, authentically Spanish-sounding chorus (director, Michael Vinten) occupied the space in front of the orchestra and an elevated platform behind it.

Ainadamar might be one of a rare number of contemporary operas to have touched a wider public. However, several critics have attacked it for an alleged lack of coherent story and a literary context for García Lorca, that it’s ‘not really an opera’. And some reviews have been pleased to refer to such phenomena as ‘multi-ethnic hodgepodges’, ‘Arabic music’, ‘Ladino (Sephardic-Jewish)’, ‘flamenco’, ‘indigenous folk’, with a ‘trivial’ libretto, all to suggest an incoherent, tasteless mess.

Most such views seem driven by pre-conceived, negative attitudes, unschooled aesthetic sensibilities, and artistic and intellectual pretension.

One must look at what the creators made, not what critics might fancy.
A sane review of the 2012 Long Beach production in the United States magazine Opera News acknowledges the almost universal praise from most critics, and certainly audiences: “The bestselling, Grammy-winning 2006 recording (DG) with Dawn Upshaw helped spread the reputation of the opera considerably; today Golijov’s taut, lush work is widely viewed as one of his bellwether achievements and one of this generation’s more significant contributions to the art form.”

I go with that.

The four main roles were taken by singers acclaimed in overseas productions.  The most impressive performances were by Kelley O’Connor as Lorca and Jessica Rivera as Margarita; Leanne Kenneally looked a little misplaced as Margarita’s student Nuria though her voice totally redeemed her. The Falangist thug, Ruís Alonso, was excellently sung by Jesus Montoya.  A minor negative in the entire context was the amplified voices, sometimes disconcertingly: with amplification, one loses a sense of the source of the sound, of who is actually singing. These were well experienced opera singers who appeared to have voices that would have projected well.

The story (yes there is one) emerges in three dreamlike ‘imagen’, or tableaux, the first and last in 1969 in Montevideo where Margarita is dying; the second Imagen is Lorca’s murder in Granada in 1936, graphic but not actually seen.

Its power lies in the vividly portrayed emotion arising from a major 20th century conflict between brutal autocracy and liberal democracy, and genuine grief for Lorca’s barbarous death.

No opera can give all the facts in a historically-based drama; we do not need them, and the engaged and curious will go and find them.

But it seemed a shame to have mounted such a fine production for just one performance, given the huge enthusiasm from the full house.

 

Other views of Ainadamar

The first production was at the Tanglewood Festival, Massachusetts, in 2003.

There were reviews of that production in Opera (London) and the New York Opera News.

George Loomis in Opera began by noting Golijov’s rocketing to fame with a St Mark Passion marking the 300th anniversary of Bach’s death, for Stuttgart.  But he judged that there was disappointment with Ainadamar.

He referred to eclecticism, to the dominating flamenco rhythms, incessant repetition of vocal lines that “retraced the same  stepwise successions of intervals”.  He claimed that it “tested the audience’s knowledge of Lorca with cumbersome parallels between his life and the heroine of his play Mariana Pineda (also a revolutionary martyr), while the playwright himself was barely fleshed out as a character”. He thought Lorca himself was “oddly cast as a mezzo-soprano, Kelley O’Connor [whom we also saw in Wellington]”.

However, the critic for Opera News (Willard Spiegelman) seemed to be reporting on a different performance.

He heard the audience exploding after “Golijov’s more [than for the first work in the evening’s double bill] accessible, tuneful, lush and dramatically nuanced Ainadamar”.

He wrote that it possessed “both symmetry and depth”; and he sees Margarita Xirgu as the key figure, saying that “she has triumphantly given voice to both Lorca and Mariana Pineda. In a secular rather than a religious way, Ainadamar traces a path to transcendence.”

After describing the instrumentation, Spiegelman  concludes: “Golijov’s expressive score was, throughout, rich and expansive, but perhaps too often predictably beautiful”. Furthermore, he admired the work of conductor Robert Spano, who brought out “its flamenco and folk tonalities and coaxed his superb, youthful musicians into building the music to heights and depths of romantic passion.”

Dawn Upshaw sang the older Margarita at Tanglewood, as she did for the revised version premiered at Santa Fe and in the 2006 DG recording. “She made her character reflective and passionate, wistful, uncertain and then  confident, by turns.”  He found Kelley O’Connor wonderful as Lorca.

Santa Fe: the Peter Sellars revision

It was also Loomis who reviewed the revised version at Santa Fe in 2005 for Opera. His severity had somewhat abated.  The opera had been worked over by Golijov and director Peter Sellars and one clear improvement was to have Margarita, who, in 2003, had been shared between Amanda Forsythe and Dawn Upshaw, now sung entirely by Upshaw, while some of the role of the young Margarita was assumed by her student, Nuria [sung by Jessica Rivera who, in Wellington, truly moved from being Margarita’s student to being the mentor herself].

Loomis still implies disapproval of the pervading flamenco idiom, but he liked the trouser role given to Lorca, “which allows for mellifluous trios in the tradition of Der Rosenkavalier”.

And he admired the women’s chorus as well as the conducting of Miguel Harth-Bedoya (the conductor in Wellington as well as for several other productions).

But Simon Williams was distinctly more generous in his Opera News review.

“The highlight of the festival was the revised version of Ainadamar…”, he wrote, saying that Peter Sellars’ production did more than merely to recall Margarita’s “profound artistic affinity with the Spanish poet…”; “…it became a ritual that mourned not the death of an individual man but the appalling waste of youth, beauty and life that blighted the last century and now threatens our own.”

I think parts of the review are worth repeating in full.

“Golijov’s mesmerising score articulates the destruction of spontaneity and beauty with disquieting accuracy. The vital rhythms of flamenco are dismembered by the sounds of war – mean fanfares on brass, the oppressive rhythms of the march, the dismal breakdown of tonal beauty, and the incursion of spoken voices, commanding, screaming babbling in fear – which are replaced, in turn, by the piercing, elegant music of lamentation. It is music whose idiom is instantly accessible, arising from the sounds of life, centred constantly on the misery we visit on ourselves through an ineradicable urge towards violence.”

“Dawn Upshaw brought a concentrated inwardness to Margarita Xirgu, her unwaveringly clear, pure vocal line blending effortlessly with the chorus, allowing her to develop the character into a figure of heroic suffering. Golijov sees violence as inherently masculine, suffering and sympathy as feminine; hence the poet Lorca was sung by a woman, Kelley O’Connor , who aptly invested the gentle figure of the poet with a bewitching androgyny.”

Other elements:
“Jessica Rivera embodied horror at the past and a faint touch of hope for the future … the shooting of Lorca – along with a schoolteacher and a movingly inarticulate bull-fighter – by a hysterical soldier … a treacherously pious guard … terrible deeds to which our prejudices and mindless obeisance to authority can drive us.”

Productions since Santa Fe

There have been productions at the Ravinia Festival near Chicago in 2006; by Opera Boston and by Indiana University in 2007; by the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia in 2008; and Cincinnati Opera in 2009.

A CD recording that won a Grammy award was made by DG with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2006: it featured Dawn Upshaw, Kelley O’Connor, Jessica Rivera and Jesus Montoya (Falangist officer).

Later productions have been at the Granada Festival in 2011 and that production went on to Santander and Oviedo.

Long Beach Opera, Los Angeles staged it in May 2012.

In 2012 Peter Sellars directed a production for the Teatro Real in Madrid. And in October the same year there was a production at Pittsburgh.

The Yerba Buena Centre in San Francisco staged it in February 2013

And Opera Philadelphia produced it in February 2014.

Long Beach

A review of the production by Long Beach Opera, Los Angeles, gave a very just view:

“… today Golijov’s taut, lush work is widely viewed as one of his bellwether achievements and one of this generation’s more significant contributions to the art form.

“The Long Beach Opera production … was an aesthetic and musical success, offering a strong artistic vision and sound execution throughout.  …

“David Henry Hwang’s libretto for Ainadamar is a nightmarish meditation on the death of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca at the hands of Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, as seen through the eyes of his frequent artistic collaborator, Margarita Xirgu.

“The work’s uncanny rhythmic vitality and melodic elegance put Golijov’s strengths on full display. Drawing from Latin, Arab, Jewish and European influences, the score blends traditional structural elements with contemporary invention. The comforting familiarity of arias–chorus–dance episode is counteracted by, say, prerecorded gunshots that take the role of percussion instruments. Graceful vocal lines and brutal percussive chaos — it works.”

Philadelphia

But even as late in the day as February 2014, when Opera Philadelphia staged Aindamar, a so-called critic could write a piece that displays perversity, ill-will and an extraordinary lack of perception.

Here is the way it starts:
“Five actors shoot three characters at point-blank range on a stage. Then the executioners break into a choreographed flamenco number immediately after, firing their guns to the beat of the music.

“You might think I’m describing some sort of variation on the ‘Springtime for Hitler’ sequence in Mel Brook’s The Producers, where we are supposed to laugh at the absurdly developed (on purpose, mind you) theatrical production about the Nazi regime.

“But you’d be wrong.

“Instead, the above execution scene is from Opera Philadelphia’s staging of Golijov’s Ainadamar: Fountain of Tears, which is, unfortunately, supposed to be taken seriously.
The opera, which runs a brief 80 minutes, is underwhelming at best, and downright incoherent and disconnected at worst.

“Of particular note is the fact that the main character in the opera, famed playwright and poet Federico García Lorca, is essentially lacking context, development, and ethos. Lorca, who was a gay man, is strangely hetero-sexualized in the production, infatuated with two women (minus one reference to him being a “faggot”); very little historical framework is provided in regards to Lorca as a great literary mind. Instead, we are rushed through a series of redundant, often cryptic scenes where director Luis de Tavira’s extremely stylized hand feels forced instead of organic. Unless you come to the opera with an extremely well-read background on Lorca, his work, and the context surrounding his death, the opera makes too many leaps without what every good undergraduate learns in fiction writing 101: You sort of need a plot.”

But then a proper critic, David Patrick Stearns, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, offered a lucid and understanding review.

“Ainadamar isn’t really an opera but a whirlwind – intoxicating, exciting, and ultimately troubling – whose 90 intermissionless minutes leaves viewers wondering what hit them.

“Osvaldo Golijov’s opera was imposing enough in a Curtis production in the Kimmel Center’s smallish-scale Perelman Theater in 2008. Now it has been brought back by Opera Philadelphia in a larger, imported-from-Spain co-production that has no trouble enveloping the Academy of Music, and is easily among the most stimulating theatrical events, operatic or not, so far this season.

“This meditation on the 1936 assassination of poet/playwright Federico Garcia Lorca is recounted in flashbacks by the actress Margarita Xirgu, Lorca’s soulmate, which means Ainadamar lacks a linear plot. The absence of chronological regimentation supports the production’s multi-layered theatricality, from modern computer animation to archival film footage of 1930s Spain to choreography devised by Stella Arauzo for the revered Compania Antonio Gades dancers that goes well beyond flamenco.

“Golijov’s effortlessly ethnic score, which initially feels like a warm bath, is actually a canny piece of operatic theater with well-calculated peaks and valleys and increasingly stark contrasts: When it hits a particularly congenial moment – Margarita persuading Lorca to come on tour with her to Cuba – it won’t be long before flamenco footfalls have a duet with the gunshots that kill him.

“So effectively does the music penetrate one’s consciousness that there’s little risk of visual distraction: The music seems to colour everything around it, intensifying the whole. One could argue that Ainadamar, and this production in particular, achieves Wagner’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk (total art) more fluidly than Wagner.”