Author: Lindis Taylor

Soprano Nicola Holt and pianist Nicole Chao at St Andrew’s

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Nicola Holt (soprano) and Nicole Chao (piano) Songs by Thomas Arne, Schumann (Frauenliebe und –leben, Op 42) and Schubert; Ballade No 4 in F minor (Chopin)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace. Midday, Wednesday 19 August 2009

I missed the first two songs in this lunchtime concert, but was told that the two songs by Thomas Arne, from Shakespeare (‘Where the bee sucks’ from The Tempest, and ‘When daisies pied’ from Love’s Labours Lost) were most delightfully sung.
But I was very happy to arrive just after the Schumann song cycle had started. Nicola Holt’s very musical and beautifully articulated singing created a wonderfully satisfying performance of the charming and varied Schumann cycle. Her voice has a purity and unaffected quality that captures the sadness as well as the ecstatic qualities of the songs. There was hope and a sunny anticipation in ‘Helft mir, ihr Schwestern’ that shifted movingly to anxiety in ‘Süsser Freund, du blickest’, deeply felt.
The piano kept drawing attention to its major role in the songs, reflecting with rare sensitivity their subtle mood changes.
So it was fitting that the recital gave solo space to the piano, with Nicole Chao’s playing Chopin’s fourth Ballade. There was a carefully hesitant start, as much as to say, ‘dare I tell you this tale where distress and ecstasy alternate?’ Her left hand explored the story’s many facets with confident rubato, sometimes of considerable boldness. Chao’s sense of high romanticism was rewarding, producing impassioned playing towards the climax, with an extended, dramatic pause before the coda, which did become slightly muddied.
Nicola Holt then returned to sing three favourite Schubert songs: Auf dem Wasser zu singen, ‘Du bist die Ruh’ and Seligkeit.
Beautifully as these were sung, they never recaptured the exquisite refinement and emotional adventure that she expressed in the Schumann song cycle.
It was a delight that a singer, occasionally, dares to include well-known songs in a recital of this kind. Programming concerts seems to have become too much a matter of proving one’s ability to tackle the unusual, to expand the audience’s musical experience for their own good.
This tendency could lead to those songs that the older generation has grown up with, when there was nothing shameful about performing well-known songs, becoming the unknown songs before long.
It’s good to reflect that music familiar to us is new to the younger members of the audience, and so a part of every concert should be devoted to such music.

NICOLA HOLT – Song Recital

(with Nicole Chao – piano)

An alternative review by Peter Mechen

Nicola Holt (nee Edgecombe) thoroughly delighted her St.Andrew’s lunchtime audience, delivering a most attractive programme with a singing voice as bright, open and engaging as her platform manner. I had most recently encountered her as the soprano soloist in the Orpheus Choir’s St John Passion performance, in which she sang with a similar openness and clarity, and was pleased to be given the chance to hear her perform in a more intimate and unencumbered acoustic. With pianist Nicole Chao proving a sensitive, responsive partner from the outset, the singer opened her programme with two songs by the English composer Thomas Arne, each a setting from Shakespeare, and capturing in each case the winsome out-of-doors effect that the words suggest. The second song, “Where Daisies pied” from the play “Love’s Labour’s Lost” was notable for some lovely bird-call sequences, whose effect was almost antiphonal in terms of differing colour and dynamics.

Schumann’s song-cycle “Frauenliebe und Leben” (A Woman’s Love and Life) is well-known for several reasons, among them the currently unfashionable sentiments of the poetry concerning women’s dependence on men in stereotyped relationships. Fortunately these politically correct strictures haven’t prevented performances of the work, whose heartfelt fusion in words and music of both ecstasy and tragedy within a human relationship for most people transcend any such societal polemic. This was a lovely performance – Nicola Holt’s voice nicely encompassed the soaring quality of the first song’s lyrical outpourings (Seit ich ihn gesehen), and emphasised the upward-thrusting strength of the following Er, der Herrlichste von allen, though she chose not to attempt the ornamentation at the concluding line of each of the principal theme’s verses, robbing the music of some of its wild ecstasy but compensating with her steadiness. Her word-painting in Ich kann nicht fussen gave an urgent, elfin and volatile flavour to the quickness of the girl’s feelings, the perfect counterweight to her reverential Du Ring an meinem Finger. Nicole Chao’s playing gave sensitively alert support in all but one or two of the more extrovert passages – for example, I thought the piano too reticent in places along with the singer’s ritualistic splendours and joyful energies in Helft mir, ihr Schwestern, though the song’s brief concluding processional postlude was nicely done. The beautiful Süsser Freund moved easefully from its tenderly floated opening line through the central section’s animations and back to its beginning with even more breath-catching rapture; and the contrasting exuberant, almost desperate happiness of An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust made the shock of the final Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan all the more telling. Holt’s singing was here stoic and composed, internalising the tragedy of the beloved’s death, keeping emotion away from the visceral realms, and letting the piano round off the story with its recapitulation of the themes from the work’s opening song. I thought this an extremely fine performance from both artists.

Nicole Chao played Chopin’s Fourth Ballade as a kind of instrumental interlude, though in terms of musical substance and interpretation, the performance kept the musical juices well and truly flowing throughout. Her playing sensitively caught the “song on the water” aspect of the opening pages, though she exhibited surprising volatility (hardly in evidence during the Schumann song-cycle) in the development section, with perhaps too much pedal used at the climaxes on this occasion, the half-empty church acoustic muddying the music’s textures. From the main theme’s canonic treatment onwards, which was nicely shaped, Chao reined in the music more, with clearer control of the swirling figurations; and waited until the stormy coda before once again pulling our her biggest guns, the ending slightly splashy, but very exciting.

Nicola Holt returned for three Schubert lieder, a beautifully differentiated Auf dem Wasser zu singen with subtle intensifications and variations of mood throughout, a heartfelt, slightly effortful, but properly ardent Du Bist die Ruh, (so sublime but so fiendishly difficult!), and to finish, an engagingly joyous Seligkeit, capturing the music’s “schwung” with keen, brightly-focused high notes, and wonderful gaiety throughout.

All in all, a most rewarding , heartfelt and entertaining lunchtime offering from two very fine artists.

Amalia Hall and John-Paul Muir impress Ilott Theatre audience

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Beethoven: Violin Sonata No 1 in D, Op 12 No 1; Ravel: Tsigane, rapsodie de concert; Sarasate: Two Spanish Dances; Fauré: Violin Sonata No 1 in A, Op 13

Amalia Hall (violin) and John-Paul Muir (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Sunday 16 August 2009

It is a little disturbing that the sort of concerts that the Wellington Chamber Music Society particularly wanted to promote when their fine Sunday afternoon series began in 1983, concerts by young musicians, the likely stars of tomorrow who needed encouragement today, seem to attract smaller audiences.

Audience numbers were down on expectations and down on the crowd who came to hear John Chen and the T’ang Quartet a fortnight before.

No excuse could be found in fine weather, and there are always many other concerts competing for our time and money, though no direct clashes that day. Nor was there any reason to scorn the programme just because it included Sarasate, who is much more than a mere encore composer, and a famous piece of fireworks by Ravel: both are works of genius that proved excellent punctuation points in an attractive programme.

The hundred who weren’t there simply missed a recital of great delight, of music that is central to the violin repertoire and rewarding it its own right.

Beethoven’s first violin sonata is the work of a composer who was fully fledged, naturally drawing on the examples of Haydn and Mozart but already in a voice that was identifiably his own. Though there were occasional inconsequential smudges in the piano part, much more remarkable were the pianist’s vivacity and easy accommodation to the dynamic shading that the violin took such pains to achieve. The two demonstrated right from the start how well they had learned the lessons of chamber music playing, attention to the other player that calls for instantaneous sympathetic reaction.

So the two instruments seemed to be instinctively in balance, in full rapport.

Ravel’s Tsigane cannot be dismissed as no more than a flashy show-piece; it is a remarkable composition that could only have been penned by a great composer. And for sure, it is a pretty formidable challenge to (both) players. The piano part is a splendid homage to Liszt while the violin reflects the qualities of Wieniawski and Sarasate, and this was an exciting, totally commanding performance.

The two Spanish Dances, not identified in the programme, were the familiar ones, probably the Malagueña and Habanera of Op 21, which combine melodic and rhythmic charm and brilliance with musical value, products of a highly trained and talented composer of the era of Dvorak, Grieg and Fauré (to name three disparate contemporaries). Their playing was infectious, and one would rather liked to have heard a couple of the other Spanish dances that he wrote.

Fauré himself ended the concert: the first of his two violin sonatas written, like the Beethoven, before he was 30. The programme note quoted a perceptive and generous critique by Saint-Saëns, ten years his senior, from the first performance. It is hard to go past his description of it as combining “a profound musical knowledge and great melodic wealth, with a kind of naïveté that is irresistible;” describing its “delicacy and charm, novelty of form, resourceful modulations, unusual sonorities and unexpected rhythms. Over all,” it continued, “hovers an allure that envelopes the entire work and makes the most unanticipated touches of boldness seem natural.”

This performance delighted in all these qualities, revealing two players who, perhaps because they are young, could respond with spontaneity and gaiety, without affectation, to the originality and youthful confidence of the young Fauré.

The Yeomen of the Guard at the Opera House

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The Yeomen of the Guard by Gilbert and Sullivan

Wellington G & S Light Opera. Musical director: Hugh McMillan; stage director: Gillian Jerome

The Opera House, Friday 14 August 2009

The Yeomen of the Guard is often considered the one G & S comic opera that comes closest to being an ‘opera’; it is a case of a work in an essentially comic genre that ends sadly, with the jester losing his girl.

It becomes poignant because the jester, Jack Point, is sung with such feeling and conviction by Derek Miller; he has been the company’s stalwart character singer, pivotal in their productions, for many years. Again, all eyes were on him whenever he was on stage, with agile, expressive movement, characterful singing and great facility in delivering floods of witty words at high speed.

But there were several other fine performances, starting with Chris Whelan as the Head Jailer, Wilfred, with whom Miller duets brilliantly in Act II. Tall, oafish and a bit thick, Whelan’s voice and comic movements were inimitable, though perhaps his portrayal overlooked the fact that a Head Jailer may well be a pompous ass, but need not be quite as stupid as Whelan had him. Lindsay Groves as Sergeant Meryll and Chris Berentson as the quasi-hero Fairfax (the object of female efforts to rescue from imminent beheading) took their fairly big roles well.

Among the female singers, the sad clown’s partner and love, Elsie, who eventually falls for Fairfax, was sung with real style by the vocally accomplished Celia Falchi. She and Miller sang the quite moving duet that is undoubtedly one of Sullivan’s finest, a real trouvaille, ‘I have a song to sing’.

Not far behind were the Phoebe of Malinda Di Leva and the Dame Carruthers of Sharon Yearsley.

It’s an operetta where the story does count for something: for one thing, perhaps arguing for the sanctity of marriage regardless of insincere or fraudulent original motives. So it was a pity that the words from one or two singers were hard to understand, but not so as to make it hard to follow.

The set is simple – in a courtyard of the Tower of London, costumes conventional, of Tudor times. Movement on stage was fluid though the yeomen themselves overdid the military stiffness. Normal first night shortcomings were evident: a tentative orchestra in the overture and for some distance into the first act; so were some of the early choruses. But the show, full of great music, gained confidence during the first act and there were, particularly in the women’s chorus, some very poised and attractive singing in the second act.

The test of good theatre is whether you start to care about what happens to the characters on stage; I did, and the pathetic denouement quite had its way with me at the end.

(the full and edited version of the review that was abbreviated in The Dominion Post)

Two Lunchtime concerts: Old St Paul’s and St Andrew’s on The Terrace

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1. Richard Apperley (organ)

The German Chorale: Pieces by Mendelssohn, Buxtuhude, Reger, Kuhnau, Hauff, Böhm and Karg-Elert

Old St Paul’s, Tuesday 11 August

The scheduled performer at this free lunchtime concert, Michael Fulcher, organist at the Cathedral of St Paul, had to make an urgent trip to Australia and assistant cathedral organist Richard Apperley stepped in.

He drew mainly on the repertoire that his CV describes as his particular interest: Buxtehude and contemporary organ music, and there were side trips from those centres. For example, as well as music by Buxtehude himself, he played attractive examples of three other of his near contemporaries; but nothing closer to our own age than Reger and Karg-Elert, both of whom died in the first half of the 20th century.

The two Little Chorale Preludes (‘Lobe den Herrn’ and ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’) of Reger, were indeed short yet they served to whet my curiosity to hear more of this somewhat neglected composer’s organ music. Today, Karg-Elert’s organ works are even less known, though I heard his music, and his name stuck I my memory, when I was a student; and this Chorale Improvisation, ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ renewed my interest, though perhaps it’s not typical of the composer whose music is usually more impressionistic (listen to his Kaleidoscope, Op 144).

The recital started with Mendelssohn’s third organ sonata, music that I hear as too serious, too venerating of Bach and of the spirit of 19th century Protestant religion. I’ve tried, having started with a secondary school friend whose own interest in the organ at least educated me a bit to the mysteries of the remarkable instrument. He was learning the Mendelssohn sonatas and I tried my hand too but was not hooked.

However, this performance, employing bright registrations, interestingly flavoured with flute stops made a very good case for it, but the feel of seriously pious music looking backward was undeniable.

Four of the other pieces were from the generation before JS Bach. Two were famous as his mentors: The two chorale preludes by Buxtehude and Böhm had some of the intellect and formal shape of Bach but not the imprint of genius that most of Bach’s music bears. Richard Apperley’s playing provided them with clarity and sufficient tonal variety and complexity to excite interest.

It’s a while since I’d heard the organ at Old St Paul’s played in a formal recital. Having heard it played without much apparent appreciation of its strengths and weaknesses, and sensitivity to the acoustic of the church, it was a pleasure to hear it played with such discrimination and attention to both its character and to the space it has to emerge in.

2. Baroque Workshop, New Zealand School of Music

Music by Telemann, Willem de Fesch and Sweelinck.

Olga Gryniewicz (soprano); instrumentalists: Brendan O’Donnell (flute), Judy Guan (violin), Emma Goodbehere (cello), Tom Gaynor (harpsichord and rogan), Douglas Mews (harpsichord)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace. Wednesday 12 August 2009

The lunchtime concert on the following day was another chance to hear several of the most talented musicians in advanced stages of their studies at the New Zealand School of Music. Intentionally or not, all the music was of the 18th century or earlier; it started and finished with pieces by Telemann.

The first was a Fantasia (No 7 in D minor) for flute and violin (Brendan O’Donnell and Judy Guan). While O’Donnell played it on the recorder, which I felt robbed it of the slightly more interesting texture produced by the flute, the two soprano instruments were played so scrupulously, with such calm, that the experience was rather enchanting both in the gentle Alla francese and the faster Presto, of the character of a courante.

A close Dutch contemporary of Telemann, Willem de Fesch (even closer to Bach and Handel) wrote the next piece, a cello sonata that was played by Emma Goodbehere and Douglas Mews at the harpsichord. There was a slow prelude followed by a quick movement in common time and two minuets, a most accomplished performance adorned with tasteful ornaments that were kept grounded by a carefully balanced harpsichord.

An anonymous piece, rather slight, called the Duke of Norfolk or Paul’s Steeple was played by Judy Guan on the violin with cello and harpsichord continuo: a set of variations on a popular dance tune. Though the violin was a little too bright for its context, it was the violin’s piece and gave Guan another opportunity to display her instinct for and taste in early music.

Jan Pieter Sweelinck lived a full century before Telemann and Bach, one of the most important composers of his age, particularly in the development of the organ. Thomas Gaynor played his Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein End’ which had a lightness that rather belied its morbid subject. Considering the modest colour palette available on the church’s chamber organ, Gaynor invested it with great interest and variety.

A cantata by Telemann brought the concert to an end: ‘Lauter Wonne, lauter Freude’, accompanied by recorder which had well articulated, ear-catching figures at several points, cello and with Gaynor on the harpsichord. Olga Gryniewicz (whom we heard singing the role of Iris in Semele a few weeks before) was the soprano soloist. It was good to hear her in another setting, her voice comfortable if a little tight, evincing some production problems, in the high register, agile, with a quick vibrato under good control.

Her performance was vivacious, the arias expressive, as if she really meant what she was singing, her recitatives dramatic, committed. In the second aria she created striking contrasts between moments of laughter and lamenting. She conveys youthful delight in performance, which transmits immediately to her audience. However, for all Gryniewicz’s accomplished performance, the success of the cantata rested just as much with the instrumentalists accompanying her.

Town Hall Organ Series 2009 – Douglas Mews

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Variations on La Marseillaise (Balbastre), Scherzo from Symphony No 6 (Vierne), In Paradisum (Dubois), Scherzo (Gigout), Grande Pièce Symphonique Franck)

Douglas Mews at the organ

Presented by the Wellington Convention Centre

Town Hall, Sunday 9 August 2009

Now that Wellington has a City Organist to help ensure the better use of one of the greatest, substantially unmodified, organs of its kind in the world, it is good that a recital series is under way.

This one was entitled Vive la France and it celebrated, after a fashion, French organ music. I can understand the motivation for a concert of mainly light, even meretricious, pieces of organ music: the hope of attracting the crowds with some organ fireworks.

Well, I was indeed surprised to find all the seats in the stalls of the Town Hall occupied when I arrived a minute late: clearly the organisers had miscalculated the level of interest and had not put out enough seats and had even closed the gallery (not a bad idea since people tend to sit around the curve of the gallery, so far away that the hall can appear thinly peopled).

Balbastre’s games with the French National Anthem were under way when I arrived. Written, said the programme note, in 1792 (La Marseillaise itself was written by Claude Joseph Rouget de l’Isle in April 1792, in Alsace, as Chant de Guerre pour l’armée du Rhin, but got its name when it was played by a Marseillaise battalion in Paris later), it did little for that most dynamic of all national hymns apart from running through some standard routines used in the ‘variation’ form at the time. I did not mind being a bit late.

The next piece was played by Tom Gaynor with help from Richard Prothero (organ scholars of the New Zealand School of Music and of St Paul’s Cathedral, respectively): the scherzo movement from Vierne’s Sixth Symphony. In introducing the piece, Douglas Mews told the familiar story of his death at the console of the main organ in Notre Dame, falling onto the pedal E flat which continued to sound until it occurred to someone that an unusually sustained pedal note was not resolving into, say, A flat. He reassured us that Gaynor would probably make it through. Death at the organ console was a Paris speciality: One story has Tournemire dying at St Clotilde (formerly Franck’s church), but there are other, more authentic if as strange, accounts of his death.

The other important qualification for organists was blindness; Vierne, Langlais, Litaize, to name three.

We rarely hear more than a few of Vierne’s occasional pieces, such as the Carillon de Westminster, and isolated movements from his six symphonies for organ (he also wrote one orthodox orchestral one). Yet he is a major figure, Franck’s worthy successor (he did have several).

Though Vierne was born in Poitiers, in west central France, it has been pointed out that the great French school of organ composition and performance was born in Belgium: Franck was born in Liège and two other major influences on Vierne, Nicolas Lemmens and François Joseph Fétis taught at the Brussels Conservatoire.

The Scherzo is hardly typical of Vierne’s music, it is light, jazzy, almost flippant, and while no doubt offering performance hurdles, certainly sets up no intellectual challenges.

There followed a couple of other light-weight pieces, by Dubois (In Paradisum) and a Scherzo by Gigout, which were colourful, were decorated by what could be described as tunes; they served to built up an impatience for the major work in the programme – Franck’s Grande pièce symphonique, the largest of his works for organ.

I deplore personal anecdotes that are mere name dropping, but here goes.

My most memorable hearing of it was at Notre Dame, Paris, about 25 years ago. The organ was playing something I didn’t know, though obviously Franck. I sat transported by my good fortune and by the whole situation: being in Notre Dame again, the dim light sifting through stained glass, the murmur of voices, the voluptuous music echoing in the vast cathedral; at the end I asked a woman, also listening rapt, what it was and it was this piece. My life seemed to be utterly fulfilled.

Much as I love Franck’s music, the reality of this piece, recollecting that hearing, sometimes doesn’t quite fulfils my expectations. It might well have been a symphony or sonata in one movement, though it is in three sections, and though its shape and the character of the phases through which it passes can seem a little meandering, rhapsodic, a bit disconnected, but the succession of romantically coloured episodes played predominantly on dark purple, diapason stops, with sudden little fanfares on Bombarde-like stops, a lovely, typically Franckian melody in the Andante central section which ‘hovers round the third note of the scale’ in the words of one commentator.

Perhaps this performance employed registrations that were too colourful, too many reed stops, but ultimately it was a great experience in spite of the absence of dim light shafting through mystic gothic arches; it was on an organ well equipped to do it justice, by an organist who had the technical resources and the taste, and the French and Franckian sensibility to make it a performance in which to immerse oneself in contentment.

Musica Sacra: first of three baroque concerts

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Harmonische Freude – German Baroque music – directed by Robert Oliver

Telemann: ‘Sei getreu bis in der Tod’, TWV1:12184, Quartet No 6 in E minor; Phillipp Heinrich Erlebach: Songs from Harmonische Freude, Nos 12, 21, 14, 2; J S Bach: ‘Der Herr denket an uns’ BWV 196.

Baroque Voices (director: Pepe Becker; Katherine Hodge, John Fraser, David Morriss), Academia Sanctae Mariae (leader: Gregory Squire, with Anne Loeser, Shelley Wilkinson, Katrin Eickhorst-Squire, Robert Oliver, Douglas Mews)

Church of St Mary of the Angels, Sunday 2 August 2009

The collaboration of two groups, vocal and instrumental, under the title Musica Sacra, has been presenting a series of concerts in the latter part of the year at St Mary of the Angels for a number of years. As far as I’m aware, the Academia performs in no other context, but Baroque Voices has a long-standing presence in Wellington as a chamber choir.

This was the first of the three concerts of their 2009 series, this one devoted to German sacred music: two familiar composers, but one unknown, I imagine, to most of us.

Telemann came first, with a cantata that could well pass for Bach to all but the specialist. Instruments played a slow introduction and then the four solo voices entered one at a time, well contrasted and stylistically sensitive. The following sections allowed each voice its turn; David Morriss’s bass seems to have developed in both projection and resonance since I last heard him; in the alto part, Katherine Hodge displayed a most attractive timbre that expressed the gentle piety of the words. The combination of Pepe Becker’s ecstatic soprano with Robert Oliver’s bass viol seemed rather at odds with the scourging words, reviling ‘vain pleasure’; and finally John Fraser sang the more sprightly tenor aria with a voice more at ease with the physical world, accompanied by violins.

Telemann wrote six instrumental quartets – not really the forerunners of Haydn’s – for Paris. Some features: the flute part taken by Katrin Eickhorst-Squire on a ‘voice flute’ = recorder, Squire’s violin given to flamboyant cadenzas, Robert Oliver’s viola da gamba, enjoying some particularly attractive passages, and Douglas Mews at the chamber organ (lent by the NZ School of Music) duetted charmingly with the recorder in the second movement. The organ, often embedded in the continuo textures, supplied a bass timbre in genial contrast to the bass viol.

In contrast to the cantata, these chamber pieces for a Parisian audience, much in triple rhythm, showed signs of the emerging ‘galant’ style, marking the end of the Baroque age.

The programme note enlightened (most of) us about the composer Erlbach, of the generation before Bach. Most of his works were lost in a fire but these songs, for all the strangely naïve piety of the words, proved beautifully adapted to soprano, alto and tenor and also offered rewarding passages, for example in song XIV, for violinists Squire and Loeser and gambist Oliver. The music, one had to say, was a rather more cultivated than the words.

I couldn’t help reflecting on the nature of contemporary English or French poetry, both with several centuries of prolific, more polished and cultivated literary activity than had taken place in German lands. And their civilizations had not been rent by a Thirty Years War.

Yet the words and music again gave Pepe Becker, alone in Song II, scope for floating the long flowing lines that were beautifully enhanced by the church acoustic.

The programme note claimed this to have been the New Zealand premiere of Bach’s Cantata No 196 (it must be very hard to be certain), thought to be for a family wedding. This performance should result in its gaining a foot-hold, for it is a setting of great musical delight, starting with a chorus of celebratory vitality. And then an aria for soprano and a duet for tenor and bass, a chance to hear David Morriss, this time, in happy wedding spirit.

The programme had been devised so that lesser but by no means worthless music laid the ground for this fine, entertaining Bach cantata and it left the audience well contented.

T’ang Quartet and John Chen in fine concert at the Ilott

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Wellington Chamber Music Society concert

Schnittke: Quintet for piano and strings, Gao Ping: Piano Quintet, Dvořák: Piano Quintet No 2 in A, Op 81

T’ang Quartet (Wilma Smith and Ang Chek Meng – violins, Han Oh – viola, Leslie Tan – cello) and John Chen (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Sunday 2 August 2009

Though it is fair to say that Wellington’s taste for new music is probably more adventurous than that of other major cities, it may well have been the pulling power of musicians of such distinction as these that attracted an around 80 percent audience to a programme containing two contemporary works, one newly commissioned and the other probably unfamiliar to 95 percent of the audience.

There were two changes in the quartet’s personnel for this tour. The regular leader, Ng Yu-Ying, was replaced by Wilma Smith and violist Lionel Tan by Han Oh.

Schnittke can hardly be described in terms of other composers of his generation, except in fairly general and unhelpful ways. One might be to say music of the time this piece was composed – the mid 1970s – was still heavily in thrall to the avant-garde, with its conviction that the widening gap between composers and audiences was the latter’s problem. Some of it, from composers of genuine genius, has gained a place in our auditory hard-drive, some has disappeared without trace, while some cling to a raft becoming crowded with more interesting and congenial makers of music of recent years, but may survive:

I think Schnittke is in this last class. While there is a core of music lovers sympathetic to his music on account of his personal situation vis a vis the Soviet Union and his persistent ill-health, there are as many who are sceptical of his aesthetic and the validity of his musical impulses.

This piano quintet, however, seems to spring from a genuine creative inspiration, with less of the trade-mark poly-stylism that strikes many as a gimmick or as a way of masking a lack of melodic invention. It clearly describes a time of personal loss through its spare, bleak textures, long-sustained single notes, the emptiness of the mocking waltz of the second movement, the Andante with its microtones laced with little glissandi, finally closing in a mood of timid hope. John Chen’s role was conspicuously in command of the piano’s striking, sometimes eccentric contribution; the string players clearly understood its emotions and the musical means by which they were expressed, eventually finding some kind of peace in the last movement.

Gao Ping’s piece was commissioned by the Christchurch Arts Festival where it was played, in fact, the day after the Wellington performance.

A piece rather more typical of the current musical climate, music that does not sound so disturbed; in fact, presenting a sunny scene, Though each of the four movements is some sort of reflection on the four qualities that are significant in ancient Chinese literary life, efforts to bear them in mind through the performance seemed superfluous, even irrelevant.

The flow of the music and the rewarding writing for individual instruments, the cello in particular in the third part (Bamboo), made any concerns with non-musical ideas fade away. In the last section, the viola (Han Oh, seemingly perfectly in accord with his colleagues) took charge of a beguiling tune that, teasingly, refrained from evolving as it wanted to. Leader Wilma Smith was notably comfortable in the quartet, in this work, capturing the tone of the Chinese violin, such as the erhu, idiomatically.

The second piano quintet by Dvořák is one of the most loved in the repertoire. Its hearing does, unfortunately, prompt the question in the mind, ‘why is it not possible for today’s composers, some of whom must be comparably gifted with melodic fecundity, to write such music built on beautiful melody that is worked out with such impulsive delight’.

Wilma Smith again sounded in full command of the piece, responding to the style of her colleagues with great warmth; and cellist Leslie Tan took full advantage of his opportunities both at the start of the first movement and the passages of lovely, sustained lyricism in the second movement. Though John Chen was very much a star of the concert, his fluent and interesting playing never drew attention to itself even though one’s ear was constantly enchanted by his perfectly judged role, and contributed to a wonderful unity of spirit through the joyful Finale.

Cook Strait Trio in full sail

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Chamber Music Hutt Valley

The Cook Strait Trio (Blythe Press – violin, Paul van Houtte – cello, Amber Rainey – piano)

Turina: Piano Trio No 2 in B minor, Op76, Psathas: Island Songs, Dvořák: Piano Trio in F minor, Op 65

Lower Hutt Little Theatre, Thursday 30 July 2009

The Cook Strait Trio is just the kind of chamber music group that one hopes and expects Chamber Music New Zealand will promote in its Associated Societies series. That is, the mainly New Zealand groups that it takes under its wing to tour to the score of smaller chamber music societies that flourish – or least survive – in the towns that do not sustain concerts in the so-called Celebrity Series.

Just to remind you of the societies drawing on at least some of the groups in CMNZ’s stable that exist in Greater Wellington – the Waikanae Music Society, Chamber Music Hutt Valley and the Wellington Chamber Music Society (which, for promotional purposes, now drops the word ‘society’). This group had performed this programme at Waikanae on Sunday 26 July.

The three are Wellington-born and/or educated, though it would probably be risky to claim they will long remain working here. Only Amber Rainey has yet to undertake overseas training.

One longs to discover neglected works that prove substantial and beautiful and it was so with the Turina. He is the fourth of the notable Spanish composers born in the 30 years after 1860 and the least known and perhaps least important. Once upon a time his Canto a Sevilla was popular on account of Victoria de los Angeles’ performance.

Though it was most sympathetically played, this trio did not prove more than an agreeable salon piece of a superior kind. That generalization derives from the tone of the music rather than its formal structure which is sophisticated enough, as pointed out in the programme notes. The Spanish character of the music is not of the usual, strongly rhythmic kind, but derived from the more subtle kind of folk music that does fling itself at you. Its besetting sin perhaps is Turina’s excessive use of diminished harmonies that tend to impose a tonal anonymity on the music. The last movement revealed a stronger character, mainly through its piano part, spendidly played by Amber Rainey.

John Psathas’s Island Songs, now 14 years old, has by now attained the rank of a New Zealand classic. The islands are of Greece – not of New Zealand. However, the music, while carrying occasional suggestions of Greek land and seascapes, and sound such as bells chiming in the piano, does not evoke a conventional sound impression of Greece.

In the first movement, the piano underpinned the strings with ostinati reminiscent of Psathas’s early Waiting for the Aeroplane and he surprises those whose knowledge of Greek music is confined to Theodorakis’s music for Zorba and the bouzouki, with the sparest writing to depict the Zeibekiko in the second movement. In the third movement the piano, again moving through a narrow range of pitches, was a little out of step with its colleagues. 

Dvořák’s Piano Trio Op 65 has received some high praise. Some consider it his finest chamber work, but the competition from the Piano Quintet, and the Dumky Trio, the Quintet Op 97, and the American Quartet would seem to be quite strong.

To start with, it is as markedly Czech as one feels the Turina not to be so Spanish. That feeling might stem from its serious, minor key character in the first movement which is announced by the opening unison passage from violin and cello. However, there is a graciousness in the music which Blythe Press’s violin, in particular, caught beautifully, as he did again in the charming slow movement. The strong instruments here were the piano and violin which often tended to cast a shadow over the cello though it enjoyed some lovely solos early in the first movement, leaving no doubt about Paul van Houtte’s musicality.  

There was a certain loss of momentum in the middle section of the second movement: it felt rather more than the Meno mosso marking called for. Perhaps the trio offered the best of themselves through the fusing of their sounds in the Poco adagio, achieving a beautiful stillness at the movement’s end. In the last movement, they handled the many changes of rhythm with great naturalness engaging overdrive excitingly for the final peroration.

 

Christopher Herrick and Leipzig singers at Lutheran Church

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lutheran Church of St Paul, King Street, Newtown 

1 Christopher Herrick (organ) in music by Buxtehude, Bach, Iain Farrington, Boccherini, Flor Peeters and Samuel Sebastian Wesley.

Friday 24 July 2009

2 Ensemble Nobiles – six singers from the Tomaskirche Boys’ Choir in Leipzig. German liturgical and secular music 

Sunday 26 July 2009

Christopher Herrick is one of the world’s most distinguished organists. I spotted his name in an organ journal, listing his concerts on a New Zealand tour. There was one in Wellington and it was at the Lutheran Church of St Paul in Newtown. Where? I didn’t know it and I wondered what could induce a world-class organist to play at what I imagined to be a small suburban church.

However, knowing that an organist is much more interested in the character of an organ than in the popular perception of a venue, it seemed possible that here was an interesting organ which Herrick had discovered. 

Then I started hearing other things about the church. It has a fine piano which is being used for piano recital performances by Wellington piano teachers, and accordingly the church had come up as a possible venue for a piano recital series that’s being discussed.

Music has a strong place in the tradition of the Lutheran church: Luther himself, and then others such as the Bach dynasty; the present Pastor, Mark Whitfield, doubles as organist. The church previously had a small pipe organ, in an alcove above the sanctuary, but it was inadequate. Even as the church had almost signed a contract for a new instrument with an American builder, an interesting one came up for sale in a Dutch hospital. It was built in 1962 as a one manual organ with a permanently coupled pedal range and enlarged with a second manual a year later. When the sale was discussed the addition of an independent pedal department was proposed and a 16 foot pedal stop was installed.

Its opening recital took place in March 2008.

The recital began with five pieces by Buxtehude, arranged to form a sort of suite or at least a coherent sequence, alternating between two praeludiums and two chorale-based pieces around a central toccata. The first Praeludium in A minor (Bux153) offered both a splendid exhibition of the organ’s qualities and of the variety of compositional resources Buxtehude commanded and his ability to make singular shifts in tone and rhythm without losing a feeling of unity.

The organ with its two manuals and limited number of registrations created an ideal clarity and tonal distinction for the two chorale pieces, ‘Komm, heiliger Geist’ and ‘Nun lob mein Seel’ (Bux 199 and 213). The Toccata in D minor (Bux155) may well flourish in a performance on a larger, more powerful organ, but here its striking contrasts, now conspicuously involving virtuosic pedal intervention with a flamboyant flourish at the end.

The rest of the concert offered delightful variety: untroubled by authenticity strictures, Boccherini’s Minuet was beguiling, perhaps a little droll. The fact that a quirky set of pieces like Animal Parade by young English organist/composer Iain Farrington has been composed in recent years attests to the vigour of organ music and a world-wide following. Herrick played three of the twelve highly diverting pieces, including Barrel Organ Monkey that relished both the bravura of a Lefébure-Wély and the nostalgia of the street barrel organ.

Bach arrived at the beginning of the second half in the Trio Sonata No 4 in E minor; pedals busier than ever; with its origin in chamber music with the individual voices so sharply delineated, it was the perfect fit for the organ.

King Jesus has a Garden comprises five variations, from a set of Ten Chorale Preludes by Belgian composer Flor Peeters. Its style varied between serious virtuosity and light-hearted multi-key treatment of the theme, hands tumbling confusedly over each other in the third variation, and finally another pedal display.

The choice of Choral Song and Fugue by Samuel Sebastian Wesley seemed a less than dramatic way of ending the recital; it had some character but mainly of the inoffensive kind. His encore however, Festmusikk by Norwegian Mons Leidvin Takle made a suitably exciting finale.

 

2 On the following Sunday the church hosted a six-voice ensemble from the choir of St Thomas’s church in Leipzig – Bach’s church. The six young man, aged 18 – 19, have completed their last year as boarders at the famous school attached to the Tomaskirche and have all been singing in the choir for nine years. They formed their ensemble, Ensemble Nobiles, three years ago As well as gaining an enviable musical education have also acquired an education of the kind that has long disappeared from New Zealand schools, including the first foreign language from Year 5 and at least one other foreign language a couple of years later.

Their concert took the form of a mass with each section interspersed with a variety of other music – part songs, Renaissance polyphony, little motets and cantata movements, old and new, one by a composer/conductor they have worked with, Manfred Schlenker.

The mass was Schubert’s charmingly naïve Deutsche Messe. I’ve never heard it apart from a performance on CD with full male choir plus organ. This was a totally different experience, one voice to a part, more or less, and a cappella. The Zum Eigang, which opened the concert, was a hair-raising experience, so miraculously balanced, with voices sounding as one, the result of the nine years of listening to each other; and each successive section (eight in all) grounded the entire concert in the style that seemed absolutely native to them. They ranged from Palestrina, Schütz and Byrd through Bach to several little known composers of later periods. A Cantate Domino by one Berthold Hummel (a 20th century one) and three by Hugo Distler, also 20th century, offered variety, displayed textures that were unusual, or dwelt in the lower reaches of all the voices. One of the singers introduced the music, fluently, wittily (not easy to be genuinely funny in a foreign language) and appreciative of the church, the congregation and Pastor Mark Whitfield, who punctuated the concert by playing part of Jean Langlais’s Hommage à Frescobaldi and then Bach’s Fugue in D major.  

I, at least, will be watching musical activities at the church from now on.

Handel’s Semele from NZ School of Music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand School of Music: Handel’s Semele, conducted by Michael Vinten, directed by Sara Brodie

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University, Kelburn Campus. Thursday 23 July 2009

Back in 2001 the Victoria University School of Music staged Semele. It was not this opera however, now produced by the New Zealand School of Music, but the version by John Eccles, the composer for whom Congreve actually wrote the libretto. As the programme notes record, Eccles’s setting was never performed and was not heard till April 1972, at St John’s Smith Square in London; oddly, the notes failed to mention the 2001 Victoria University production, also in the Adam Concert Room.

A few years before, I heard a lecture by the late Professor Don McKenzie, a Victoria graduate of and later lecturer in the Department of English, who became Professor of bibliography and textual criticism at Oxford, and a specialist in 17th and 18th century English literature. He tutored a paper in literary criticism In my MA year; he was about the most engaging and brilliant lecturer I ever had, and I credit the best mark in my honours degree to his inspiration.

McKenzie was also a knowledgeable music lover and the subject of his lecture was English opera, a consideration of the reasons that opera in English did not take root around the beginning of the 18th century, as it had in France with Lully in the late 17th century. His lecture dealt with the case of Eccles’s Semele and its failure to be staged, because Congreve’s libretto was too late for the opening of the new Queen’s Theatre in 1702 and when it was finished and set by Eccles by 1707, a planned production at the Drury Lane Theatre fell through due to certain duplicitous activities by the impresario who opened his theatre with an Italian pasticcio. That was the beginning of the fashion of the nobility and upper middle class for opera in Italian.

McKenzie played recorded versions of both the Eccles and Handel versions, arguing that Eccles had found an idiomatic musical style much more idiomatically adapted to the English language than was Handel’s (it was his only opera in English); he even believed that Eccles version (recorded in 1989) was the more beautiful and successful rendering of Congreve’s text. New Grove Opera declares that the Eccles opera was the finest opera presented in London between the death of Purcell and Handel’s Rinaldo in 1711. If it had been performed in 1707 and a theatre had been ready to encourage English opera as a result, he argued there was a good chance that an indigenous opera in English might have taken root. For example, Handel would probably have written his works in English and his imitators would have ensured that an English tradition continued to flourish.

Handel’s Semele was a good choice in the 250th anniversary of his death; it is presumably considered a good piece for students because of the large number of roles; clearly not on account of ease of performance and interpretation. There are ten main roles and choruses of wedding guests and of Heavenly Deities, many of which are duplicated or even triplicated. There are 19 names in the cast list.

The Adam Concert Room is not an ideal place for staged productions, but it is at least flexible. This time the orchestra was placed in front of the organ, an attractive position (since it focused attention of the charming case and pipe-work of the instrument), while the audience was seated on the other three sides. It meant that those on the sides had an impeded view at times.

The stage was furnished very simply, with a large round bed in the centre, a door between the audience seated on the right and those facing the orchestra, and a stair on the right of the orchestra leading to the gallery (not used by audiences) which encircles the auditorium – it represented the home of the gods. The main prop was a huge white sheet used variously to cover some of the sexual activity that is often suggested and sometimes to suggest a distinction between earth and the realm of the gods.

The wedding guests’ costumes are modern; while deities both great and small were in a variety of seductive gear, hot pants were favoured by several of the female deities.

The orchestra of 24 players, in front of the organ, played with a certain vivacity though there was some rhythmic monotony and I did not find the kind of accuracy that I’m sure I’m right in recalling at many of the productions and concert performances by the school of music of a decade and more ago.

Principals were good, particularly conspicuous the two cellos which had much solo, quasi-continuo work to do. The harpsichord continuo was deftly contributed by Julie Coulson.

The chorus was rarely disposed as a group, a phalanx, as is the default position among less imaginative directors, but were often in an outward facing circle that allowed the audience to hear the three or four voices in front of them much more loudly than the rest. It was just one of the marks that distinguished the direction by the gifted Sara Brodie. The result was an assembly of solo voices rather than a normal chorus; the aural effect was interesting and far from objectionable. They behaved generally as individuals and throughout created visual diversion.

Most of the principals were a good deal less secure at the beginning than later, after the impact of the full house had given them confidence and dissolved some of the nerves.

The leading roles were more than adequately filled, mainly by advanced or graduate students. Michael Gray, as befitted an already fairly experienced performer, was well-cast as a lustful and arrogant Jupiter, though not without a little concern for the welfare of the girl he has identified as a likely target – and vice versa.

His somewhat cynical urge, ‘I must with speed amuse her’, as he realizes how desperate she is, not just for his sexual attentions, but also to be elevated to the ranks of the immortals, with some particularly turbulent orchestral playing, was tempered by a lovely ‘Where’er you walk’ which at least sounded genuine. Juno, like Fricka in The Ring, has the jealous spoiler’s role; that didn’t deny Rachel Day (Laura Dawson sang Juno at other performances) some good moments such as her urgent ‘Hence Iris, hence away!’. Ultimately, manipulated by Juno disguised as Ino, Jupiter accedes to Semele’s insistence; Jupiter has by then sworn to comply with Semele’s demands and is appalled when she asks for him to appear in his true, incendiary form: ‘Ah! take heed what you press’ he pleads uselessly; and she is incinerated.

Amelia Berry as Semele (Rose Blake, her alternate) had a big role, credibly oversexed, and she sang attractively too. Though her report from on high, ‘Endless pleasure, endless love’ was sung instead by Iris, Semele’s ‘Sleep, why dost thou leave me?’ and ‘Myself I shall adore’, exhibiting very different emotions, were heart-felt, and she delivered some rather thrilling, if abandoned, top notes in her aria ‘No, no, I’ll take no less’.

Eventually her insatiable appetite and her Olympian ambition are her undoing.

Her more sedate sister, Ino (Bryony Williams – at other sessions, Bianca Andrew), who was also in love with Athamus, rejoices to be awarded as a second prize to the dead Semele’s bride-groom, and turns out to have an aptitude for sex as eager as her sister’s. Keiran Rayner sang Athamus with some feeling, exhibiting impatience with Semele’s procrastination with his ‘Hymen, haste’; but he’s little more than a plaything of the gods.

Omnipresent was Olga Gryniewicz as Iris, which she sang and acted most vividly, a lively presence throughout the opera. She was given Semele’s aria, ‘Endless pleasure, endless love’ (Congreve had given it to Iris in his libretto but Handel changed it to Semele; this production goes back o the original) which she sang from on high with a gusto as if it was she herself was in the midst of it all. A medium-sized role was that of Somnus, the god of sleep, invoked for somewhat nefarious purposes, sung by Joshua Kidd; he sang his famous aria, ‘Leave me loathsome light’ admirably, with a voice ranging from the hushed to ardent pleading.

As I remarked above, the orchestra sounded a little under-rehearsed though there was much excellent individual playing; the staging was imaginative; the cast was excellently disposed and they moved meaningfully. And the singing, both by the many principals and the choruses, was the thing, a good demonstration of the school’s strength.

On the opening night there was a deserved full house; as the only Handel opera Wellington seems likely to see in his anniversary year, and for quite a while, I hope the rest of the season was well supported.