Author: Lindis Taylor

Michael Stewart’s adventurous organ recital at Cathedral of Saint Paul

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Presented by the Wellington Organists’ Association


Praeludium No 2 in E minor (Bruhns); Fugue in A flat minor, WoO 8 (Brahms); Trio on ‘Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr’, BWV 676 (Bach); ‘Wondrous Love’ – Variations on a shape note hymn (Barber); Master Tallis’s Testament and Paean from Six Pieces for Organ (Howells)


Cathedral of Saint Paul, Wellington


Friday 10 September, 12.45pm


This was one of the regular Friday recitals given on the cathedral organ, and it contributed importantly to the plethora of organ recitals all over the city during National Organ Month.


We heard the music director, Michael Stewart, from the rival cathedral up the road, the Sacred Heart, in the very model of a programme for a National Organ Month. It reached into lesser-known territory, but never into the quite large body of vapid music that finds its way too often into organ recitals. Absent was any music from the great 19th and 20th century French school, and for once I did not miss it, such was the pleasure and sense of discovery in the entire three-quarter hour recital.


I don’t recall hearing music by Bruhns before; he was, like Bach briefly, a pupil of Buxtehude who was based at Lübeck. Bruhns was born, a generation before Bach, in the province of Schleswig-Holstein that vaccilated between German states and Denmark, and he became organist to the Danish court at Copenhagen. This piece was the longer of two Praeludiums that he wrote in E minor; I was charmed by several passages, particularly rhythmic flute ostinati. The whole piece, which easily sustained interest through its ten minutes or so, struck me forcibly as more varied and characterful than what I know of Buxtehude; there were many phases that seemed to have been written a lot later than the late 17th century. Sadly, Bruhns died of plague in 1697, aged 31. Its brilliant playing on this fine, colourful organ made it an engrossing discovery.


Bach’s Trio in G on ‘Allein Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehr’ is one of three chorale preludes on this hymn that form part of he Clavier-Übung III (‘keyboard practice’: No III being the only one of the four volumes of Clavier-Übung designed for the organ). This too was clearly chosen as a diverting piece for midday with tripping rhythms in triple time, with colourful exercises that involved repeated shifts from manual to manual.


Brahms’s organ music is generally in the shadow of his orchestral, chamber and piano music and songs, but his organ music always impresses me too. This Fugue, without Opus number, written in 1856, began with a careful statement of the tune which slowly gathered strength through the increasing complexity of its fugal evolution. It impressed as an early work, not just for the singularly skilled and inventive writing which never seemed a mere academic fugal exercise or to fall into mere repetition; nevertheless its musical richness and command of fugal techniques had an engrossing, emotional impact.


Samuel Barber’s was another novelty for me, a piece based on a hymn that employed the ‘Shape note’ system, an American notation system that uses differently shaped notes to indicate pitch. A religious tune with a simple, primitive quality, it offered Barber a basis for sympathetic treatment, not through piling on complexity but by elaborating the tune, varying the harmonies and registrations, with imaginative passages in low registers over pedals to create a genuine religious feeling, that Stewart never allowed to be  overwhelmed by the forces at his disposal.


Two pieces from Herbert Howells’s Six Pieces for Organ ended the recital; the first somber and introspective, reflecting that slightly dull seriousness that characterizes some English music; that soon gave way however to robust and interesting reflective passages. The Paean began with the Swell closed, but the volume and richness of registrations steadily increased till the final phase, meandering and suspenseful, created a blaze of excitement towards the end.


It was a splendid programme designed to offer the curious plenty of rewarding discoveries, of the kind we hear too little of; but much more than that, these were all performances that were vivid in their range and imaginative in their combination of stops, rhythmically bracing, ornamented with taste and bravura, played by hands and feet with huge agility.


Percussionist Currie dazzles in brilliant NZSO concert

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Appalachian Spring Suite (Copland), Percussion Concerto (Jennifer Higdon), I paesaggi dell’anima (Lyell Cresswell), Symphony No 6 ‘Pastoral’ (Beethoven)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Shelley with Colin Currie (percussion)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 3 September, 6.30pm

Are Wellington audiences losing their taste for adventure? What was it that led to so many empty seats at Friday’s concert, which turned out to be one of the (if not THE) most exciting concerts of the year so far. I too had wondered about the programme, but that would certainly not have stopped me going. My main thoughts were, how would the Copland ballet score (well, most of it) stand up in the concert hall, and would I find that I had heard the Pastoral Symphony once too often?

I was at a slight disadvantage, not having heard the 2008 concert that Alexander Shelley had conducted in Wellington, and was thus not as certain about the sort of performance he would deliver.

In 2008 Shelley conducted one of the orchestra’s regional tours, and a special Wellington concert with cellist Maria Kliegel that included performances of Messiaen’s Les Offrandes Oubliées and both the suites from Daphnis et Chloé. He had made an impression then. Two years later his achievements are highly impressive, and his presence on the podium spoke of confidence but also of a concern to communicate, not to mention the energy, delicacy and vividness of the orchestra’s response to his leadership that made an immediate impact.

Appalachian Spring is enchanting ballet music, probably most people’s favourite Copland piece. But I was not expecting to be so enchanted by its exquisiteness as a concert piece (the Suite contains 80 percent of the music). That was brought about to a large extent by the performance, starting with by series of gorgeous, lyrical solos; first by clarinet, then flute, followed by shimmering cellos, evoking the day’s dawning. And a little later there were more beautiful solos from oboe, bassoon and horn, not to overlook the brilliant little xylophone episodes.

The entire orchestra was vitalized to play with a special sense of delight. It was at only classical strength for most of the programme, with double winds and string strength at 12, 10, 8, 6, 5; fewer than 60 players, but let’s confess: most orchestral music can be played wonderfully with that sized orchestra. Only the percussion concerto required a larger orchestra, with triple winds and tuba.

Copland’s music is not just endlessly varied; any competent composer can do that, but few can create the endless surprise and delight through beguiling melody, at every turn, even when one knows it all. The players found its magic with the help of a conductor whose movements, and physical grace inspired such vivid aural images, through its momentum and an awareness of its architecture.

I can’t remember my last live hearing of the Pastoral; but I should have been prepared to be surprised at the excitement and wonder that a really fine Beethoven performance can produce. The classical size of the orchestra was absolutely right; some might say it would have sounded even better in the Town Hall, but from my seat, this was pretty vivid, with particularly opulent cellos and basses, that have such an important role filling Beethoven’s aural spectrum.

Shelley is given to brisk tempos and there could be argument about the ‘ma non troppo’ of Beethoven’s first movement, but the momentum quickly came to feel perfectly right as a depiction of the ‘awakening of joyous feelings on arrival in the country’. The tempo was very consistent too: the human pulse was present more in the undulating dynamics and an imperceptible rubato.

Here again, solo woodwinds, particularly Philip Green’s clarinet, offered elegant yet earthy beauty in the Andante con moto, and the dance-like third movement was particularly enriched by cellos, bassoons and double basses giving it a roguish, peasant quality.

There is a repetitiousness in this music that exposes a lesser conductor. On Friday evening every one of the five or seven or nine repeats of a phrase sounded fresh; I never waited for a movement to finish, as I confess to feeling occasionally in the past.

The party piece was Jennifer Higdon’s percussion concerto.

I confess to not being especially attracted to percussion en masse, apart from the tuned instruments, and often feel that their over-use can too easily disguise the absence of real musical creativity. The same goes for any music that relies greatly on heavy, complex scoring and massive orchestral variety. The marimba, in fact, took a leading role in the huge battery of percussion spread from one side of the stage to the other, starting with four sticks in a scarcely audible tremolo.

Higdon, one of the United States leading young composers, knows how to woo her players; Colin Currie may have been the star, but unusually, the orchestral players of these instruments were accorded comparable tasks that taxed their skills to the extreme as well as permitting the real musical quality of many of the percussion instruments to emerge. There, at the back of the orchestra, unfortunately invisible to scores of people in the front rows of the stalls, were Leonard Sakofsky, Bruce McKinnon, Thomas Guldborg and timpanist Laurence Reese, echoing or playing along with Currie.  (The orchestral layout bosses need to pay more attention to this weakness of the MFC).

It was a worthy tribute to the strength of the orchestra’s percussion section. But in a piece of this kind, much of the entertainment value, and let’s not be pretentious about that, rests with the sight of the percussionists, both soloist and those at the back.

Though at first hearing I took some time to identify threads of music, the last ten minutes persuaded me that the music would survive and gain appeal with further hearings. Showpiece for sure, there was also a lot of real music in there, being magnificently played.

Lyell Cresswell’s 2008 piece for string orchestra, I paesaggi dell’anima (Landscapes of the Soul), after I had set aside thoughts about the pretentious title, proved a work of extreme fastidiousness as well as robust structure. I have not always warmed to Cresswell’s cerebral scores that can seem overburdened by intellectual concepts and elaborate musical textures, but Shelley’s success in drawing an extremely refined performance from the strings was the kind of advocacy that any composer would dream of.

It was indeed a complex piece, each string section often subdivided to obtain a richly luminous, if sometimes a rather too detailed and dense harmonic fabric, but the musical ideas were often lyrical, somewhat enigmatic, even droll, enlivened by Messiaen-like twitterings, tremolos, staccato passages, all of which coalesced to create an impression that was ultimately both satisfying and intriguing.

So four very different pieces, two of them very new and one 70 years old, all flourished in most persuasive and distinguished performances.  Those ill-advised enough to have stayed away missed a great concert.

Thomas Gaynor opens National Organ Month

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Pieces by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Lemare, Bonnet, Widor and Vierne

Thomas Gaynor – Organ

Cambridge Terrace Congregational Church, Wellington

Thursday 2 September, 12.45pm

September is National Organ Month and Wellington organists have filled the first fortnight with performances on several of the city’s most interesting organs.

Though there had been a recital on Tuesday the 31st, on the organ at Old St Paul’s, a little light-weight recital by Ken MacKenzie, the month began on the remarkably good organ in what is now the Cambridge Terrace Congregational Church. The organist was Thomas Gaynor, one of the more talented students at present studying at the New Zealand School of Music where he is in the second year of a B. Mus. At 13 he was Junior Organ Scholar at the Cathedral of St Paul, and is now Richard Prothero Organ Scholar at the Cathedral. Last year he won the New Zealand Association of Organists’ competition and the intermediate section of the Sydney Organ Competition; he has toured to Europe with the cathedral choir, playing and singing at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, Westminster Abbey and Saint-Eustache in Paris.

His programme opened with the first movement  from Elgar’s Organ Sonata, which I missed most of. Then I was a little disconcerted when his next piece was a famous organ lollipop by Edwin Lamare, Andantino in D flat, Op 83 No 2 (aka Moonlight and Roses, from the words later attached to it by someone else). Lemare (1866-1934) was a distinguished English organist and composer who toured widely through America, coming to New Zealand where he had a hand in designing the Auckland Town Hall organ, according to Wikipedia.

Gaynor told us the story of Lemare’s battle to get a share of the royalties from the published song which sold millions of copies, and which he eventually won. As well as making impressive demands on the organist’s technique, the piece lends itself to gross sentimentalizing, but by honestly acknowledging that, Gaynor drew out its plain musical quality, investing it with some charm.

Gaynor also drew attention to another technical quirk: a technique known as ‘thumbing down’ where the left hand plays an accompaniment on the Choir manual, while the fingers of the right hand play the tune on the Solo manual, and the thumb of the right hand simultaneously plays the tune on the Great manual, which is below the Solo manual, in parallel sixths. He thus played on three manuals at once.

We were all enthralled.

Vaughan Williams followed – one of the Three Preludes on Welsh Hymn Tunes: Rhosymedre. Though this too risks sentimental handling and he did not refrain from using heavy diapason stops, his skilled and discriminating playing made it a small piece of some consequence.

I might be revealing, again, Francophile prejudice, but I felt that the rest of the programme was what an organ recital should focus on, if it’s not to be Bach. Gaynor chose three of Franck’s pupils/successors: Widor, Vierne and Bonnet.

Bonnet’s Op 1, Variations de concert, is not a complex or particularly ambitious work; beginning with a splendidly arresting introduction on the full organ, it proceeds to lay out the tune which is followed by three pretty and well contrasted variations. The third is the show-piece, a stentorian beginning, then a spectacular solo for the pedals in which the audience’s attention was entirely on what was visible below the bench, and a peroration, again displaying pedal bravura with equally virtuosic handling of the manuals.

Widor is known mainly for one famous movement, from his Fifth Organ Symphony. Its fame is not unjustified; however, the virtues of his other music – and there’s a lot of it – are not immediate. On the one hand, it can sound facile and merely pretty; on the other hand, that superficial character works its way with you and seems misleading; unlike some music of apparent profoundity which comes to seem boring after a while, one’s respect for much of the French organ school increases with familiarity and it soon gains a special life of its own.

There’s no doubt that the organ repertoire can seem too dominated by technicalities and by organists’ skills, as distinct from musicality. Simply because of the considerable amount of knowledge that has to be mastered, of registrations, which vary from instrument to instrument, as well as the focus on technique, music-lovers from other areas often feel alien. The Andante sostenuto from Widor’s Symphonie Gothique exemplifies concern with the player’s skills, particularly in the pedal department. Gaynor succeeded in making real music of it.

Lastly, Gaynor played two of the pieces from Vierne’s collections of Pièces de fantaisie: Naïades and Carillon de Westminster. He played the first with scintillating delicacy, light-weight I suppose, but not vacuous. The Carillon finds its way into many CD organ anthologies and is certainly an entertaining and hypnotic piece, given to insistent rhythms and ostinati. It provided Thomas Gaynor with a splendid chance to demonstrate his ability to handle the instrument, and it’s an excellent instrument, with wonderful skill but to discover the real music within these attractive and flamboyant works.

Memorable and commanding Schumann and Shostakovich string quartets

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The New Zealand String Quartet

Schumann: String Quartets Nos 1 in A minor and 2 in F; Shostakovich: Nos 13 in B flat and 7 in F sharp minor

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University

Tuesday 31 August, 7.30pm 

This was an important series of ten concerts by the New Zealand String Quartet, in five centres nationwide; it included two different programmes, of all three of Schumann’s quartets and four of Shostakovich’s 15.

I heard the first of the two programmes at the church of St Mary of the Angels on Saturday the 28th, which my colleague Peter Mechen has reviewed (that programme had also been played a week earlier in the Hunter Council Chamber at Victoria University) and the second on Tuesday 31 August, also in the Hunter Council Chamber. There were probably round 200 at St Mary’s and a full house (about 160) at the Hunter room.

The quartet’s challenge was to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Schumann who wrote only three string quartets, by putting them with another composer whose music might complement it in some way. At first glance, Shostakovich looked an odd choice, and though Helene Pohl made a reasonable case in her introductory remarks, the connections were rather tenuous: Schumann’s personality dichotomy: his imaginative creations Florestan and Eusebius, and Shostakovich’s two faces – the public one acceptable to the Soviet authorities and the private one which expressed his inner self.

In the end I felt Schumann had paid the bigger price, for there is hardly any music written in any age that equals Shostakovich’s intensity, anguish and profound personal self-revelation in a fearful political environment. Most composers in past eras have lived under repressive regimes of various kinds, but they were the norm; social barriers, lack of freedom and extreme inequality were everywhere; it did not occur to them to depict it in their music.

But Shostakovich’s fate was to live in a place which had declined into a condition that had become much more repressive and dangerous than the rest of Europe (give or take Fascism).

Alongside Shostakovich’s, some of the Schumann music sounded to me emotionally lightweight, as if he was trying to write music that would entertain rather than what was genuinely spirited, with integrity and genuine expressive power.

That struck me particularly in the F major quartet, played last. In the second movement Schumann seemed to be putting on the mask of a happy face to please Clara, who had urged him to write music that audiences would understand. While the Scherzo appealed strongly as one of the most interesting movements, of variety and confident handling, I felt that in the finale, Schumann reverted to his jolly mask, writing music that was more conventional. The real Schumann, on the other hand, wrote music that was joyful, spirited which, up to a point, becomes more exciting the faster it is played, such as the March of the Davidsbündler in Carnaval or the finale of the Piano Concerto, or the Piano Quintet.

Though I had had similar feelings about the last movement of the A minor quartet, its minor key succeeded in keeping Schumann from conventional temptations in the three earlier movements, and the players always exploited in the liveliest way his inventiveness and impressive competence of writing for the four instruments.

What was striking about all Schumann’s quartets however, was both the warmth of the tutti sound, and the interesting music given variously to all four instruments; and I heard more arresting individuality from Gillian Ansell’s viola and Douglas Beilman’s violin that one often hears in quartet context.

Though it was Schumann’s birthday, it was Shostakovich who really stole the limelight. Again, we had the pleasure (if that is in any way the word) of two more of the little-known quartets of Shostakovich. If there were rewarding passages for the viola in Schumann, Shostakovich could be accused of having a torrid love affair with it.

No 13 is an extraordinary piece, written in 1970 when the composer was ill, and at its opening the viola carries most of its unrelenting bleak view of the world – of his world at least. It is in one movement, though there are several contrasting episodes that do offer sufficient variety and structural character to justify its formal status as a quartet. Rolf Gjelsten’s cello also has a major role in the music’s landscape.

Though Shostakovich’s language is essentially tonal, dramatic use is made of pointed discords, that might be followed by high, marcato notes from the violins. Above all, if one does not succumb to the outward pessimism, there is dark and tragic beauty in this piece, which ends with a series of rising harmonics that might suggest either some kind of spiritual aspiration or merely life evaporating to nothingness.

In the second half, they played the more conventionally ordered No 7; three movements following the normal pattern, through a dark liveliness in the first movement, to which the players brought a fierce energy and a thrusting sense of momentum; the change in the Lento movement to Doug Beilman’s angular violin arpeggios, soon joined by Helen Pohl’s febrile first violin. The last movement opens with stunning violence that Gillian Ansell diverted to hollow rhetoric with her beautifully resonant viola; and the piece ends with the violins and viola in flighty ascending scales that seemed to offer solace or consolation.

A Shostakovich Quartet Series
That the quartet has got nearly a third of Shostakovich’s quartets under their collective belts for these two concerts prompted the rather obvious thought that they should be encouraged to master them all and offer them as the musical highlight of the 2012 New Zealand International Arts Festival. It is time for a musical renaissance at the festival.

I was at the wonderful Verbier Festival in Switzerland in 2007 where, at 10pm every other night in the alpine village’s minuscule protestant church, the Israeli Aviv Quartet played them all, not in order but in groups evidently guided by length and contrast. During a week’s stay I heard seven quartets in three concerts (Nos 4 and 14, 1, 12 and 8, and 3 and 7).

The performances captured the more dedicated chamber music lovers and there were struggles to get inside the church, all successful, overcoming any scruples by the local fire department or festival administrators.

These concerts have proved that we have a string quartet capable of interpreting these works with a passion, ferocity, and depth of musical and political insight that is rare. They should be encouraged to undertake the entire Shostakovich quartet canon, some of the greatest music of the 20th century.

Good Taste in the Art of Musick: Geminiani at St Paul’s Lutheran

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Songs and sonatas from Scotland, by Geminiani

Musica Lyrica: Dougals Mews, Rowena Simpson, Kamala Bain, Brendan O’Donnell, Shelley Wilkinson, Peter Walls, Ann Goodbehere

St Paul’s Lutheran Church, King Street, Mount Cook 

Sunday 29 August 5pm

This concert was advertised as part of St Paul’s Lutheran Church’s regular concerts, many of them associated with the church’s normal vespers services, when Bach cantatas, eventually all of them, are performed.

But this was different.

Peter Walls (in other lives, Professor of Music at Victoria University and now CEO of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) had talked during the week on RNZ Concert’s Upbeat, and in his introduction to the concert, about its nature and aim, offering interesting bits of scholarship about violin practice as well as about the byways of music in 18th century Britain.

The great Italian violinist and composer, Geminiani, a leading pupil of Corelli, had moved to London in 1714 and developed an interest in Scottish folk music. As well as his treatise on violin playing, which gave its name to this concert, he collected a large number of folk songs in a volume called Orpheus Caledoniensis.

But before the concert could start, cellist Emma Goodbehere, had a mishap with her baroque cello, damaging the finger board, and she had to withdraw from the performance. It left a number of the songs and instrumental pieces short of bass substance, and caused the dropping of the Cello Sonata, Op 5 No 2, which would have been the major instrumental piece.

But the rest of the concert was pure delight. Soprano Rowena Simpson took all the song parts, and she decorated her lines with the most natural sounding ornaments as her voice proved an idiomatic vehicle for these fresh and melodic songs. They made it easy to understand how the folk songs of Scotland later became such hot property, encouraging publishers to commission composers like Haydn and Beethoven to make arrangements of them. 

Typically, the song was performed first, and then followed by a sonata based on it, using Peter Walls and Shelley Wilkinson on violins, or treble recorders* (Kamala Bain and Brendan O’Donnell) plus a continuo that was provided by Douglas Mews at the harpsichord and Ann Goodbehere on the viola.

Kamal Bain played a descant recorder* with  a couple of items and these were quite disarming, especially for one who has never felt very drawn to the instrument.  Her playing was fluent and utterly charming; without too much effort the sound of the bagpipe could be imagined.

The last of the Sonatas, based on ‘The last Time I came o’er the Moor’ used the two violins which elaborated on the song even more that the voice itself had, and it ended with a postlude the led to a graceful slow dance.

Bear these concerts in mind for a late Sunday afternoon: the standard of music making is very high.

*We had the sizes of the recorders wrong in the original review. The sizes here are now correct (L.T. 3.09.10)

Great liturgical works from the Bach Choir

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The Bach Choir conducted by Stephen Rowley

Frank Martin: Mass for Double Choir; Cherubini: Requiem Mass in C minor (1815)

St Mark’s Church, Basin Reserve

Sunday 29 August, 2pm

The Bach Choir has a distinguished history in Wellington since 1968, when it was founded by the gifted organist and musical scholar Anthony Jennings. Like all choirs, its fortunes have fluctuated: for the past two years it has regained its position, directed by Stephen Rowley; its recent achievements have included the B Minor Mass, Elijah, a concert of Handel and Purcell, and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

It was an adventurous concert. In Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir the two choirs of about 20 singers each, were placed diagonally, at right angles to each other, facing the conductor.

But ideally it needed more singers to give a more homogeneous sound to each section; among other things, there were too few altos and tenors to provide a uniform carpet of sound. Whether that realisation was what caused the evident shakiness at the beginning, and which recurred quite often, I cannot say; another blemish, quite early, was a worrying abrasive sound from one or more male singer, perhaps pushing too hard and high at fortissimo. However I was told that the dress rehearsal had gone very well.

One of the most rewarding books on music of the past few years is Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. He remarks that Martin’s Mass has been “entrancing audiences with the archaic majesty of its language. Martin had a gift for immersing himself in styles of the past without seeming to imitate them.” That is nicely put. It is not to say the music is easy to sing or to ingest. The Kyrie begins with an indeterminate plainsong-like prelude that may not be hard to sing, but seems hard to place before the bolder polyphonic entry by the full choir. The sound might be Palestrina or Victoria.

The antiphonal possibilities of writing for two choirs were notable, using, say, sopranos on one side and basses on the other, or using entrances of various sections, aurally spaced, with striking effect. The contrasts between somber passages in the Gloria such as ‘Domine fili unigenite’ and the more excited ‘Quoniam tu solus sanctus’ were examples of the composer’s detailed conception of the mass, which the choir dealt with scrupulously. Later, in the Credo, I enjoyed the onomatopoeic rising and falling scales that illustrated ‘Et ascendit in coelum’.

Stephen Rowley succeeded very well, given the music’s difficulties, in expressing the varied emotions and religious sentiments, the sense of the words and the contexts of Martin’s very meticulous, intricate scoring that so rewards careful study and rehearsal.

Martin’s view of religion was nowhere more clear than in his setting of the Sanctus: reverent and sober; compare with the almost ecstatic Bach, heard only a week earlier.

It was only when I looked into the music itself that I realized why Douglas Mews’s organ accompaniment was so tentative: it was simply to support the choir in an otherwise a cappella work.

I was looking forward even more to hearing live for the first time, Cherubini’s Requiem for mixed choir; he has always interested me for his place in music history, bridging the classic and romantic eras, and the Italian, the German and the French, as well as for the real strength of his own music.

He was commissioned to write this one to commemorate the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, following the defeat of Napoleon in June 1815, when Louis XVIII returned to Paris in July, evidently to Cherubini’s relief. Later, the forces of conservatism throughout society, unleashed in the backlash to the ‘radicalism’ of the Napoleonic era, brought back a ban on women singing the liturgy, and Cherubini wrote a second requiem in 1836 in preparation for his own funeral, for men’s voices only.

On the whole, this was easier for the choir to sing. Though the electronic organ hardly offered the supporting grandeur of a pipe organ, let alone the original orchestral accompaniment, Douglas Mews supplied valuable sonorities.

The Requiem is a remarkably strong work without being adorned with particularly memorable melodies. It has the character of the quintessential requiem, having absorbed that of Mozart and probably the liturgical music of Zelenka, Haydn and Salieri, but before Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and the requiem’s secularization by Berlioz and Verdi. It sounds rather like what Beethoven might have written if he had decided to (and he admired Cherubini, especially this work).

The dramatic character of the work, to be expected of a composer whose career till he was over 40 had been dedicated mainly to opera, though only occasionally with great success (particularly Lodoïska, Médée and Les deux journées), is part of its strength.

It pays close attention to the sense of the text, starting the Introit in a very subdued manner, allowing a subtle crescendo with the words’Exaudi orationem meam’ which the choir handled carefully. But soon, in the tutti sections, one rather longed for the richness and sustained body of voices in a bigger choir.

A more sanguine tone flourished in the Graduale however, but the ferocity of the start of the Dies Irae was a little subdued, though there was more venom towards the end in ‘Confutatis maledictus’. However, other parts of the Dies Irae where Cherubini typically overlaps phrases and divides words between sections of the choir for narrative purpose, and  through the more emphatic ‘Mors stupebit’, were effective. The change of style in the ‘Recordare’ hinted at Cherubini’s opera habits, to handle the tripping trochee meter of the liturgy in this section, and it might have benefited from greater rhythmic vitality.

The long Offertorium was kept alert with a quasi-marching, open-air, staccato tread, here conspicuously supported by the organ.  After the gentle Pie Jesu faded away, the final, momentarily forceful Agnus Dei and ‘Lux aeterna’ (left out of the programme), lent renewed vitality that ended with the prayer for eternal rest. Again, a smallish choir fell a shade short in creating a profound sense of peace through the music’s long-sustained harmonies.

Given that ideally both works would have gained so much from a rather larger body of singers, I was very glad to have heard these admirable live performances, a real credit to conductor Stephen Rowley.

National Youth Orchestra in brilliant form

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (Vaughan Williams), Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments (Stravinsky), The Chairman Dances (Adams), Symphonic Dances (Rachmaninov)

NZSO National Youth Orchestra conducted by Rossen Milanov with Jason Bae (piano)

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 26 August, 7.30pm

The habit of reviewers reporting, in mock wonderment, that the concert by the current incarnation of the National Youth Orchestra has offered the most exciting and committed symphony concert of the year, or decade, has become traditional, almost a ritual. Such claims are made in all good faith and in the hope of being seen as friends of the young and apostles of hope that the mature population will follow the lead of youth.

To do otherwise is very difficult, especially when the facts obviously favour the tradition. Especially this time; for not only was this perhaps the most uniformly talented body of musicians that the orchestra has gathered together, their ages ranging from 12 to 24, but it was also guided by a conductor with a gift for inspiring his players with some kind of rare and profound spirit, and drawing from them revelatory and polished performances.

Fast-rising Bulgarian-born conductor, Rossen Milanov, had devised a slightly eccentric programme, yet one which I had imagined might have filled the Michael Fowler Centre. I am clearly not a good judge of the tastes of most of my fellow citizens, however, for the MFC was more poorly inhabited than I can remember for some years. Though I gathered later that it might have been flaws in the seat booking system.

Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis opened: it was a deeply reverent, delicate account that let us hear how the limited body of strings could play with a refinement and subtlety that one hardly expects from youth. The performance steered between an overtly English pastoral style and an overdressed metaphysical expression in a Germanic tradition. Punctuated early on by an unrestrained cough in the audience, it evoked the dim light of a medieval cathedral, its long polyphonic melody soon given substance by a gentle rhythm and harmonies that respected its origins.

The orchestra’s arrangement was interesting, reflecting baroque practice. The chamber sized ripieno ensemble was in a tight semi-circular phalanx at the front while the concertino of nine strings was spread out across the rear of the orchestral terraces; affording visual support to the arresting aural effect, which was to lend the small group a remote air, especially when playing with mutes, rather than giving prominence to such a solo-like group. In addition, the quartet of string principals played the beautiful prayer-like passage with a maturity and commitment that was typical of the entire concert.

The plan to give strings and winds distinct exposure in the first half might have been an ingenious one, with the first piece for strings alone and the second for winds and percussion; but the choice of Stravinsky’s piano concerto was unfortunate. It might well be the only work that features the piano with a wind band (though there are also six double basses and timpani), but it is a particularly tough and somewhat abrasive example of the composer’s neo-classical style. The brass players, mainly the horns and trombones, did not cope well at the start, though trumpets soon restored an equilibrium. Such a piece has to be played with tremendous musicality and accuracy, making musical what can otherwise sound chaotic. 

Pianist Jason Bae, an 18-year-old Korean studying at Auckland University, proved a remarkable executant, coping brilliantly with Stravinsky as if he had been living with this music happily for years. After the troublesome start, woodwinds were more successful in managing the tortuous rhythmic and harmonic hurdles.

The full orchestra came successfully together in the second half. John Adams’s The Chairman Dances, commonly thought to be drawn from his opera, Nixon in China, was not incorporated in it, but the association remains pertinent. It is a mesmeric piece that has its detractors, possibly among those who cannot accept that a 1980s piece can actually be, or alternatively, has any right to be, listenable.

It is a latter-day Bolero in its repetitiveness, in the way it slowly accelerates and increases in orchestral complexity and density. For me, this was a performance of huge delight, brilliant in every department, filled with virtuosic playing, colour, and infectious rhythms. The performance had every appearance of being huge fun for the orchestra.

Finally came the piece that I would have thought might have had the greatest pulling power: Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. It had the stamp of a full-scale professional performance, by an orchestra fired up by a really gifted conductor.

It was an inspired choice, offering evidence of the orchestra’s mastery of biting staccato attacks, of spacious, long-breathed melodic lines, of moments of relaxation; and throughout, opportunities to hear some of the orchestra’s most conspicuously gifted players: the alto saxophone and the bass clarinet, the piano, the oboes and bassoons, the horns. The first movement has a particularly gorgeous passage where first violins and cellos lead other sections, not in any ordinary musical sequence, but heart-stopping, rapturous and eloquent.

In the waltz-tempo second movement, the sour, muted trumpets set the scene, another angle on Ravel’s ironic vision in La Valse. Here we heard a lovely solo from concertmaster Jessica Alloway, and later the big viola section – equal in numbers to the second violins – picked up the waltz tune darkly, capturing its sinister voluptuousness as if these young people had seen a lot more of the dark side of human nature than one hopes they have.

Here, as everywhere in the concert, one’s eyes, as well as ears, were transfixed by the conductor’s balletic performance on the podium; often, such movement can be more self-serving than musically useful, but Milanov is the real thing: a conductor whose gestures and foot-work seem to be intrinsic to the dynamic totality of music in live performance.

More percussion emerged in the edgy finale, hinting at a witches’ Sabbath, Berlioz or Liszt – tubular bells, eerie flourishes from clarinets and flutes, and Ravel again – La Valse, the Concerto for the Left Hand – in the jazzy rhythms, the skeletal clatter of the xylophone in its treatment of the Dies Irae. For those who didn’t know the piece, there could have been no more stunning introduction to one of Rachmaninov’s masterpieces.

Two choirs join to expose Salieri the choral composer

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Mass in D (Hofkapellmeister Messe) and Te Deum for the Coronation of Emperor Leopold II; La tempesta di mare and Overture: Armida

The Festival Singers and the Wainuiomata Choir, and orchestra, conducted by David Beattie

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart

Sunday 15 August at 2.30pm

My colleague Rosemary Collier allowed herself to lament that so many choirs had scheduled their concerts in such a short span this month; and the overload continues. On Wednesday 11th there was a concert by the choir of Sacred Heart Cathedral, augmented by singers from Christine Argyle’s Nota Bene, who had joined forces with the Choir of Christchurch Boys’ High School, conducted by Don Whelan. They sang Widor’s Mass for Two Choirs and Two Organs; I heard about it too late and was very disappointed to have missed it.

This past weekend, there have been two performances of Monteverdi‘s monumental Vespers of 1610 by Musica Sacra at St Mary of the Angels, and this concert under review of choral and orchestral music by Salieri.  Next weekend comes Bach’s B Minor Mass from the Orpheus Choir (Sunday 22 August); the following Sunday, the 29th, the Bach Choir tackles two great liturgical works: Cherubini’s first Requiem (C minor) of 1816 and Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir; and on Saturday 4 September the Tudor Consort sings major works by Schütz and Domenico Scarlatti.

The Salieri concert involved two choirs; choirs that, like so many others, struggle to attract male voices, and they made an excellent decision to combine for a particularly interesting concert. It was given entirely to the compositions of one of those well-known but little heard composers that populate the pages of music history.

Thanks to that popular but disgraceful film Amadeus, the 19th century myth about Salieri’s role in Mozart’s death, together with an almost entirely false representation of Mozart himself, did serious damage to music history and to the reputations of two composers. They left the impression that Salieri might indeed have been a murderer.

But it has also stimulated curiosity about Salieri and has led to the exploration of his music by orchestras, choirs and opera houses around the world. Opera Otago produced his Falstaff in 2006.

In fact, the two composers were quite close, and though Mozart was disappointed not to get the position of Hofkapellmeister to the court of Joseph II, which was given to Salieri and for whose coronation he wrote this Mass in D, there is plenty of evidence of a normal friendly relationship.

In his last surviving letter from 14 October 1791, Mozart tells his wife that he collected Salieri in his carriage and drove him to the opera, to see The Magic Flute, and he writes that Salieri was enthusiastic: “He heard and saw with all his attention, and from the overture to the last choir there was not piece that didn’t elicit a ‘Bravo!’ or ‘Bello!’ out of him”.

If there had been jealousy on either side, it was much more likely to have been on Mozart’s, for Salieri was by far the more successful composer in Vienna for most of the 1780s.

For example, when Salieri was appointed Kapellmeister in 1788 he revived Figaro instead of bringing out a new opera of his own; and when he went to the 1790 coronation festivities in Frankfurt for Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor he had three Mozart masses in his luggage. Mozart was passed over for any official role at the coronation, but he went at his own risk and expense, played his piano concerto in D, K 537 but failed to make much impact.

The Te Deum performed in the second half of this concert was Salieri’s offering for Leopold’s coronation in Frankfurt.

Though the orchestra, drawn mainly from players in the Wellington Chamber Orchestra, announced itself with a degree of uncertainty in the first bars, the entry of the full choir in the Kyrie of the Mass in D reassured me that I was in for an interesting time. The tone was serious without pomposity, revealing a work furnished with attractive and original melody, and put together with taste and polish. It was imposing, and could easily have been mistaken for a liturgical work of Mozart or Haydn. But the musical quality was not uniformly maintained, for example in the rather more routine Credo, though its ‘Et Resurrexit’ was jolly enough. Its virtues lay in its sheer compositional skill and variety, and Salieri’s flair for dramatic colouring.

That the music’s strengths were so clear was due in some part to the performance. Though the orchestra had its weaknesses, a concertato string group in single parts contributed happily; a cello solo in the Gloria, and violin and cello in the Benedictus, acquitted themselves capably in charming episodes. On the whole the festive orchestration, with prominent trumpets and timpani, created the sort of ceremonial effect, including a quotation from the Austrian National Anthem in the Agnus Dei, not far short of comparable works by Mozart.

On the other hand, the decision to draw solo voices from the choir itself was generally less successful: better trained voices were needed, or these episodes should have been left instead to small ensembles. However, the full choir, even on occasion, a cappella, excelled themselves and the effects were often exciting. The Agnus Dei with its arresting pauses, the dramatic impact of ‘Dona nobis pacem’ spoke of a composer of great skill and considerable gifts.

The second half was taken largely by the Coronation Te Deum. The church’s organ (Jonathan Berkahn), together with the orchestra, provided the accompaniment for the full choir, with conspicuous attention to balance and phrasing by David Beattie (conductor of the Wainuiomata Choir); the result was an opening of considerable grandeur. If not impeccable, the orchestra again gave the performance all the colour and rhythmic élan needed; distinguished by a high trumpet at the words ‘Dignare, Domine’. Although Salieri demonstrated his confidence by employing nothing but a plain major triad as pivot for the final section, ‘In te Domine’, a composer of greater genius was needed to carry off such a self-imposed challenge.

The second half had begun with two opera overtures: Armida and La tempesta di mare. I can find no corroboration of the programme notes’ statement that it was the overture to the opera Europa riconosciutta (though that opera opens with a storm) which Salieri wrote for the opening of the La Scala theatre in Milan in 1778; it was also used to re-open La Scala in 2004 after major restoration.

Both overtures were products of the Sturm und Drang era – a reaction against the Enlightenment, Classicism and the rationalism of the earlier 18th century, a precursor of Romanticism – that produced Haydn’s symphonies of the early 1770s, like Il Distratto, and Schiller’s play Die Räuber which Verdi turned into I Masnadieri:.rhetorical, expressing extreme emotion, imitating noises of nature, rising and falling scales and arpeggios, ostinati, drones, dramatic percussion, and… some iffy wind intonation.

Armida was one of Salieri’s most important Italian operas, dated 1774, as a protégé of Gluck whose influential Iphigénie en Aulide appeared in that same year. The story, taken from that fertile Renaissance source of theatre stories for the next three centuries, Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata, was also set by composers from Lully and Vivaldi, Handel, Gluck, Jommelli, Mysliveček, Sacchini, Haydn, Rossini (his gained attention through a spectacular production this year by the Metropolitan Opera, New York), and, most surprisingly, Dvořák. The overture was a little more substantial than La tempesta di mare, with again, clear signs of Gluck’s influence. The depiction of the magic in the story took a form that suggested to me pantomime rather than anything more supernatural.

These pieces did less to enhance Salieri’s musical reputation than the two choral works, but were nevertheless interesting in fleshing out one’s view of opera in the 1770s.

The concert was a welcome adventure, carried off with sensibility and musical diligence.

Violin Sonata spectacular at Lower Hutt: Hall and Muir

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Chamber Music Hutt Valley; Amalia Hall (violin) and John-Paul Muir (piano) 

 

Sonata for violin and piano: Mozart’s in E minor, K 304; Fauré’s No 1 in A, Op 13; Brahms’s No 1 in G minor, Op 78; Debussy’s in G minor, Lesure 140

 

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

 

Tuesday 10 August at 8pm

 

The second to last in the concert series of Lower Hutt’s chamber music organization featured two young musicians, still in the midst of studies, now overseas. Yet their programme made no concessions to youth and imagined inexperience for both players have played together, sporadically, for at least three years and are much at ease on the recital platform.

 

Before I proceed however, it is worth noting the amount of music, particularly chamber music, that happens outside of Wellington city itself. All of it deserves the attention of those who live in other parts of the metropolitan area; one of the reasons for my quitting reviewing for the Dominion Post was its ban on the coverage of performances outside the city, along with other frustrations.

 

There is the particularly successful, and often adventurous series at Waikanae, a smaller but excellent series at Upper Hutt and the quirky Mulled Wine concerts at Paekakariki which sometimes extends beyond the strictly ‘classical’ field. With train services reasonably convenient for Upper Hutt and Paekakariki, and soon for Waikanae (but sadly not for Lower Hutt), there need be no fear of traffic or parking problems.

 

The Lower Hutt Little Theatre is a more attractive venue than it was; the piano does have certain shortcomings but the acoustic should not be subjected to the sort of comment that I sometimes hear. It is clear and lively.

 

We heard four sonatas, all central to the repertoire. The Mozart is one of a Paris-published set that follows a two-movement pattern, copying the form from composer Joseph Schuster. For the 22-year-old, it shows amazing confidence and maturity: minor key, more than usual prominence to the violin, with invention and treatment of melodic ideas with strength and individuality.

 

Nevertheless, Amalia Hall played her opening phrases with studied diffidence and hesitancy alongside the bold and confident piano of her partner. Yet as they played together he modified his dynamics to match hers. It’s not to say her playing is routinely self-effacing, for it was often full-bodied and generous, and always alert to the needs of every phrase, with scrupulous use of vibrato. In fact her vibrato showed her attention to the emotion and meaning of every phrase; it was not simply a routine shake.

 

John Paul Muir performed some kind of unusual rhythmic turn in the very first bars of Fauré’s sonata that hinted at a slip, but I remained uncertain of what I heard. There was no doubt about is feeling for this music however, in which he again applying clearly contrasting dynamics to his role in response to the violin’s needs. The piece is filled with the seductive melody that Fauré lavished on his early works, and the pair played rhapsodically, taking every chance to discover fresh nuances; and especially in the slow movement Muir evinced an endless curiosity, constantly seeking to find what might be behind the plain notes on the page. Dynamic delicacy led him to give occasional emphasis to certain notes, making the accompaning violin part even more interesting and charming. I felt there was more exploratory curiosity than plain ‘vivo’ in the scherzo movement. Here I wondered at the odd blurred note from the piano, whether its action is a bit heavy to respond reliably to soft, fast repeated notes; and there were a few blemishes in the last movement from the piano.

 

The order in the printed programme of the sonatas in the second half was reversed. They played first the Brahms, then Debussy.

 

If Fauré was the French Brahms (as has been remarked, with that disagreeable hint of German condescension), then let me call Brahms’s first violin sonata, with its rhapsodic charm, a work of the German Fauré.  Much as Muir’s playing was imaginative and filled with an exploratory sense, there were times when his penchant for emphasis of particular notes and phrases was misplaced, and I felt that here a difference of maturity was evident; the shy, quieter passages were not what they might have been.

 

In the second movement Hall captured its profound meditative beauty, and the last movement which is no bold heroic finale, was again the opportunity to be touched by her ability to sustain long melodic lines filled with genuine emotion.

 

I found myself, first, simply filled with wonder at the remarkable assurance and level of melodic and rhythmic originality in Debussy’s sonata, hardly paying attention to the playing itself. Happily, it dawned on me that my wonder at Debussy was the fruit of the performance itself. It (the composition) was assured and confident because, even in pain, Debussy’s genius did not desert him and his sure feeling for shapes and harmonies created something that sounds perfectly inevitable and natural even though it had moved so far from the sounds of most of his contemporaries: even in the terrible war years that distressed Debussy so profoundly.

 

Though the piano was still inclined to overemphasis, it became clear why they had decided to end with Debussy. For the playing by both artists captured the playfulness of the Intermède, and the restrained animation., the scintillating finale, was an uplifting experience, filled with gaiety, flippancy, wonder and breathlessness (to borrow from the programme notes).

 

Just in case the audience were in any doubt about sheer virtuosity, they encored with Sarasate’s Gypsy Dances, which was overwhelming, evidence of the violinist’s skill as well as her sheer musicianship.

 

 

Houstoun honours Chopin and Schumann magnificently at Paekakariki

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Mulled Wine Concert: Michael Houstoun (piano) in Schumann and Chopin

Schumann: Arabesque Op 18, Kreisleriana, Op 16; Chopin: Sonata in B flat minor, Op 35; Nocturnes Op 37, Nos 1 and 2; Etudes Op 25 Nos 1, 7, 5, 12

Memorial Hall, Paekakariki

Sunday 8 August 2.30pm

This is exactly the kind of concert I expect to mark important anniversaries of two of the world’s great composers: an intelligent selection of some of the two composers’ most representative and enjoyable music. Naturally, a poll of the audience would throw up many other works that ‘should’ have been included.

That would yield a programme lasting several days.

Schumann’s Arabesque is popular and pretty well-known, but Kreisleriana is less so and that perhaps, I remark cynically, is why it is often rated among his finest piano works; it is certainly one of the most difficult to bring off.

Houstoun’s own note about it advises the audience not to trouble with the literary reference of the title – a novel and other stories by E T A Hoffmann; the subject, an eccentric, passionate musician. If you’re there just for the music: correct. But for many of us, all the connections, literary, artistic, religious, sociological and so on, lead towards interesting insights and help furnish the mind.

The Chopin in the second half may have been the more familiar and delightful to the audience, but personally, Schumann often does just a little more for me. Kreisleriana was the last of his major piano works that I came to know, and live performances have been rare. One first falls for Carnaval and the Fantasia, Papillons and the Symphonic Studies, then the Kinderszenen, and much later, Davidsbündlertänze and Faschingsschwank aus Wien, before the less overt attractions of Kreiselriana start to absorb you.

This was no ordinary performance. Houstoun has clearly lived with it, thought about its manifold moods and worked on its technical problems for a long time, so that it emerged utterly engrossing, emotionally quixotic, kaleidoscopic, unorthodox and often plain beautiful.

The transitions between the vividly contrasted Eusebius and Florestan sections, were so clear, as the journey passed through all the eight pieces from the opening, marked Ausserst bewegt – extremely excitable, or molto agitato – to a slightly more gentle lyrical central section, dreamy, employing themes that speak in the private language of his Schumann’s  two personas as well as of his love, Clara.

The challenge for the pianist is to find a sense of continuity and a connected narrative within each movement, as the tempo, the mood, the tonality, the rhythms constantly change and surprise you. Quite soon I found myself with the words ‘commanding’, ‘authoritative’, ‘multitudinous’ in my head.

So the strength of this performance lay in the pianist’s success in creating and maintaining a feeling of integrity, utter absorption though the half-hour long piece.

The second section, Sehr innig und night zu rasch – very reflective and not too fast – opening with short-lived meditative, rising and falling phrases, followed by a wild Intermezzo in which the left hand is all over the keyboard; then a spacious statement of the main tune, another more rhythmic Intermezzo before returning to the initial material. It is such an extended, fully-formed movement, in several sections, that it’s surprising that it hasn’t been taken out as a separate concert piece.

The fourth movement is marked very slow, its character is rambling and expansive and the slow-paced melody performance was beautifully played.  And finally, it might have come as surprise that a pianist with such a command of the more profound things, could find such gaiety and playfulness in the dotted rhythms of the last movement – Schnell und Spielend – and nothing is more surprising than its simple, vanishing ending.

Though the delicacy and delight of his Arabesque should have prepared us for all of that.

The programme notes, by Michael Houstoun, were illuminating; artists ought to be encouraged to write their own programme notes for there are often matters that they could bring interesting to listeners’ notice. Here, it would have been useful if the details of the movements of Kreisleriana had been listed, with their timings, as breaks between movements and between the sections of each are not always self-evident.

The second half was all Chopin, and details of the Sonata’s movements, and of each Prelude and Etude were given. The second Piano Sonata seems to some commentators like four distinct pieces and I think that is a valid proposition; as little seems to connect them as might connect the four Ballades or Schubert’s two sets of Impromptus.

There was no mistaking the openness and full-bloodedness of the performance as a whole. In the first movement Houstoun’s playing gave full expession to the ebullience beneath its heroic and sometimes lyrical exterior; and it became open and urgent in the Scherzo. The third movement only becomes funereal in its latter stages; earlier, there was grandeur and in the central section a sanguine singing character. In this sonata however, I was left with the feelings both of its disparateness and its being still ‘work-in-progress’ in Houstoun’s hands.

The two Nocturnes of Op 37 make an attractive pair, the first steady, sober, pensive, the second more rapturous and rhythmic.

And four Etudes from the second set – Op 25, linked according to the pianist’s own feeling about their contrasting characters rather than the keys (not that Chopin grouped them by key sequence). The keys were not listed; in the order played: A flat, C sharp minor, E minor and No 12 in C minor. No 7 in C sharp minor is the longest of the group and Houstoun created a seemingly large-scale dramatic scena of it with a fortissimo climax in the middle. Of course, the last Etude, for a reason that rather escapes me, called ‘Ocean’, a flawless, virtuosic tour de force, raised the roof and brought long applause for this thrilling ending to a very satisfying and entertaining recital.