Around Renaissance Europe in 80 minutes

Music by Tallis, Byrd, Le Jeune, De Sermisy, Lassus, Issac, Josquin, Gombert, Palestrina, Marenzio, Victoria, Lobo, Morley, Gibbons, Weelkes

The Tudor Consort conducted by Michael Stewart

St James Church, Lower Hutt, Wednesday 24 June 2009

This is only the second time in their 23 year history that The Tudor Consort have sung at St James’s in Lower Hutt, both occasions as part of Chamber Music Hutt Valley’s concert season. There’s a general belief that singing doesn’t agree with fans of chamber music, but here was contrary proof: I sensed that the audience was bigger than for most of their purely instrumental concerts.

It was an Anglo-centric programme, starting and finishing in England, with a guided tour around Renaissance Europe – France. Spain, the Netherlands, Central Europe (meaning the German states) and Italy.

Michael Stewart’s pre-concert talk drew attention to the fact that France was not represented by any polyphony and England by only Tallis and Byrd. Though the latter two opened the evening, their pieces, a Pentecost motet by Tallis and Attolite portas by Byrd were among the more challenging pieces to bring off. The writing does not create the kind of almost naturally blended sound that the Continental polyphonists seem to produce; individual voices were more evident and the English composers’ intention was clearly to let the singers’ skills, and probably the force of the words, be appreciated.

The choir’s task was the greater challenge as a result of the church’s lack of reverberation, a surprise considering its size; the reason: acoustic tiles on the ceiling.

Loquebantur variis liguis began with fairly complex counterpoint at once, with long melismas on words like the first one. So the final line, ‘Gloria Patri et Filio…’,.sung in unison by the men, was all the more dramatic. 

The contrast with the two French chansons was striking, as Stewart had warned. Inevitably, their composers would have been unfamiliar to most, Claude le Jeune and Claudin de Sermisy, both working in the middle and late 16th century: both sung by a five-voice madrigal-style group. Le Jeune’s Revecy venir du printans was a charming song with quite a modern feel though the performance revealed a certain lack of ease. Au joli bois was in marked contrast: slower, more thoughtful with more touches of polyphony.

Orlando de Lassus, contemporary with Byrd, Palestrina, Victoria, was Flemish-born, but working in Munich, offered, for me, the first taste of the choir’s real strength in an imposing work, his Magnificat: Praeter rerum serium. Plain chant, evoking a much earlier era, alternated with polyphonic antiphons. Though they gave various opportunities for men’s and women’s voices alone, the masterly weaving of the counterpoint flowed with subtle dynamic variations while their dramatic pointing, such as emphatic attack on key words,

The heartland was reached before the interval, with the two other Flemish masters, Josquin and Gombert. Josquin’s Inviolata, integra et casta es revealed the beauties of the women’s voices in soprano-led passages, while Gombert’s Tulerunt Dominum demonstrated the choir’s control of long slow sentences in which volume and intensity ebbed and flowed.

Here the choir’s real talents, their careful vertical blending and contrapuntal textures, in great music, were most to be admired, all the work of conductor Michael Stewart.

After the interval there were shorter pieces. The ‘Kyrie’ from Palestrina’s landmark Missa Papae Marcelli and a succulent madrigal by Luca Marenzio.

Introducing the two Spanish pieces, Michael Stewart noted their performance a couple of days earlier for the visiting King Carlos of Spain, the Versa est in luctum by Lobo, wondering about its appositeness – for the funeral of Philip II in 1598.  Neither it nor Victoria’s O quam gloriosum was long: I’d have tolerated rather more of such beautifully sung music, a robust bass line lending it character.

Then and elsewhere, I thought again how the atmosphere would have been enhanced by dimmer lighting.  Lighting has always been a matter of which the choir has taken care: it really matters.

We were then back in England, with two madrigalists, Morley and Gibbons. The latter’s The Silver Swan, was short, adroit, stylish, if perhaps without brilliant vocal contrasts – but that’s the dilemma of demanding very different genres from one group of singers – this one, trained, and perfect, in complex polyphony.

So they did well to end with Weelkes’s Gloria in excelsis Deo which again demonstrated their true skills in highlighting stereophonic effects, tossing phrases from section to section, and the beautiful balance and blending of voices within each section.

 

 

 

Elijah from the Bach Choir (conductor: Stephen Rowley) and the Palmerston North Choral Society. (conductor: Alison Stewart)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace, Saturday 20 June 2009

For me, Elijah is a problematic work. In terms of its fans, it seems to draw a line in the sand between paid-up choral music groupies, particularly traditional deists, and other music lovers whose interests lie, to varying degrees, with chamber music, or orchestral music, or opera.

The latter groups suspect that the popularity of Elijah derives from its religious subject, and from its kinship with the great choral works on religious topics by Bach and Handel.  In New Zealand and other ex-British countries, it might have more to do with the musical tastes of the expanding middles classes in Victorian England whose social aspirations led them both towards religious grandiloquence and socially-driven enthusiasm for what they saw as great music. Those characteristics came with the 19th century immigrants from England to places like New Zealand.

German, Jewish-born, Lutheran-convert Mendelssohn epitomised most of that: well-educated, cultivated and hard-working, enjoying an intimacy with the British Royal family, with an obviously great musical talent starting as an infant prodigy, and an output of music that echoed the great German composers but eschewed the scorned modernities and non-classical features of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner.

His is well-written music, with a few numbers that are both popular and worthy.

As for its religious subject, I am bemused by it, seeming to buy into the primitive violence and religious intolerance that lies at the heart of the Old Testament.

The oratorio was originally set to the German Bible text but it was adapted to the King James version for its Birmingham premiere. I’d have preferred the former, or better, in Arabic or Tagalog, where the words would not matter.

However, the performance was generally admirable. Jonathan Berkahn accompanied on the church’s main organ; as in his work with the Menotti and Weill radio theatre pieces a week before, his was a highly impressive contribution. That was clear from the outset, as he supported Peter Russell singing Elijah’s introduction in sober, velvet tones, and then in the interesting Overture, though Mendelssohn made no effort to depict the character of the primitive, 9th century Hebrew story that followed. In truth, the music itself that follows is far more coloured by Bach-driven influence and conventional Christian piety than by any feeling of the barbarous nature of Old Testament society.  (In time, will our descendants revere stories glorifying the behaviour of the people of Bosnia, of Irak, of Sri Lanka, of Northern Ireland?) 

The conducting was shared between the conductors of each choir – Alison Stewart with Part I and Stephen Rowley the second. I could detect no differences in their approaches, no doubt because of the fusion, in rehearsal of any stylistic individuality that each might have brought to it.  The energy and accuracy, clear diction and fine ensemble singing were a credit to both.

The opening chorus presented an even, balanced sound and the benefit of more than doubling the normal size of the Bach Choir with Palmerston singers was evident straight away. Adequate men’s voices provided good foundations for the sound and we were not so exposed to the inevitably uneven quality of individual voices with a smaller ensemble. I was struck particularly by the men’s voices in the first chorus of Part II, ‘Be not afraid…’. And soon after, the rather unchristian ‘Woe to him, he shall perish….’ was appropriately strong and cruel – a foreign import, from Jermiah, a century after Elijah.

That standard was maintained throughout, for example, with distinctive calm in No 9, ‘Blessed are the men who fear him…’ (actually from Psalm 112). 

The first duet by soprano Nicola Holt and mezzo Felicity Smith was a further encouraging sign of the quality of the singing throughout. Both singers, with European training, have voices of considerable polish and character and their performances were always well-studied and convincing.

The tenor role was taken by William Parry. As Obadiah, his voice was strident, and his phrasing slightly uncomfortable; that was perhaps partly a problem of singing the not particularly euphonious English (taken here from the book of Joel, which is quite unrelated to the story of Elijah as told in 1 Kings).  The effort to enunciate clearly, as he did, was a bit at odds with the forming of flowing musical lines. When Obadiah reappeared at the end of Part I and in Part II, his voice and the musical line seemed much more at ease.

There were omissions, a major one No 5, the Chorus of the People, ‘Yet doth the Lord see it not…’, dictated by time constraints.

Trouble with the rhythm of the words struck me here and there, with the chorus of the Priests of Baal, ‘Baal, we cry to thee…’; what an unmusical word ‘extirpate’ is! 

Alto Felicity Smith was prominent at the early stage, as an Angel, very comfortable at the top, and with excellent control of dynamics – lovely soft notes.

The scene between Elijah and the Widow, soprano Nicola Holt, was very successful, starting with the Widow’s plainly characterized statement, ‘What have I to do with thee…’. Russell caught the consoling quality of Elijah’s response well, even if his voice isn’t really suited to the higher notes.

From a dramatic point of view it was odd, however, as they seemed to talk past each other; but that’s oratorio and is perhaps it’s why Elijah and other oratorios are sometimes staged, opera-like.

Later, Holt took the role of the Youth, which was beautiful, with clarity and refined dynamics at the top. And she made a fine impression again in the Air at the start of Part II, polished and well characterized.

There are, admittedly, effective dramatic moments, such as the Priests’ call to Baal where the chorus acquires a fine, ringing passion and heavy ascending and descending scales on the organ support their impact. And the organ leads peacefully to Elijah’s aria, ‘Lord God of Abraham…’. Not for the only time, of course, I was bemused by the composer’s (not to say the prophet’s) glorifying of Elijah’s command that the prophets of Baal be slain – after all, they were only doing their job.

Peter Russell of course carried most of the solo singing; his baritone voice has a very distinctive timbre, smooth, flexible but perhaps better adapted to song and lyrical roles than to dramatic ones. So those aspects of Elijah’s speeches that expressed sympathy or gentleness better represented his talent than the calls to vengeance or the proclamations of religious bigotry.

Perhaps alto Felicity Smith shared my feeling, for I enjoyed the uncharacteristic gentleness with which she sang the harsh echoing sentiment (‘Wo unto them who forsake him…’, presumably by the People, and like much else, is taken from another ‘foreign’ text, Hosea – 8th century BC, with nothing to do with Elijah).

In spite of my difficulties with the subject and its handling by Mendelssohn, and to some degree with the musical style (and I have to point out that contemporary opinion is still admiring: for example it’s among the 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear before You Die), I found myself engaged by the performance. The fairly small audience – I guess around 100 – may have been due to the clash with an NZSO subscription concert which the choirs ought to have been able to avoid. It certainly deserved a much larger crowd.

Vector Wellington Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei with Michael Houstoun (piano) and Aivale Cole (soprano).

Brandenburg Concerto No 3 (Bach), Piano Concerto No 2 in B flat (Beethoven), Death and Transfiguration and Four Last Songs (Strauss)

Town Hall, Saturday 13 June

Fortune is at last smiling on Wellington’s Orchestra. First, there’s the happy appointment of Marc Taddei as music director, whose instinct for attractive and rewarding programming is combined with a ready skill in communicating with an audience and sound conducting talents.

Next, there was the astute decision to include the winner of the Lexus Song Contest in one of their concerts, and the winner turning out to be a Wellington singer of Samoan descent who captured the public imagination.

And since Aivale Cole had won such great admiration, there and in her subsequent Wellington recital, for her singing an aria from Strauss’ opera Ariadne auf Naxos, the obvious choice for her was Strauss’s best loved group of songs. At least 2000 Wellingtonians were captivated by the attractiveness of the package.

However, the concert did not get off to an altogether brilliant start. Baroque orchestral music has rather become the preserve of specialist ensembles who have implanted in our heads the sounds of baroque instruments with gut strings and warm tone, little vibrato yet a particular bite in string playing and a certain rhythmic elasticity; and speeds are often faster too.

The orchestras that play these works are typically small, often one instrument to a part, giving a chamber music quality.

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 3 opened the evening with, properly, three each of violins, violas and cellos, plus a double bass and a harpsichord. Fine: but the opening Allegro moderato was not very moderato – not such a fault per se, but I missed certain things. Bite in the strings, more pronounced accents on the strong beats and a bit of breathing space, occasional rallentandos, a little more variety of tone and articulation to generate interest in repeated phrases and motifs. There could have been more attention to these things, but occasional untidy playing was of little matter.

It was only the first movement that suffered however; for the speed of the last, a straight Allegro, seemed fitting as its spirit is headlong, impetuous. I hadn’t heard Penderecki’s Adagio meditative cadenza linking the two quick movements before and was impressed by its compatibility and particularly by its wonderful performance by violist Victoria Jaenecke.

Michael Houstoun is playing all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos in this orchestral series: on Saturday it was No 2, actually the first he wrote, and very clearly in the shadow of Mozart, though Mozart at his most imaginative; the orchestra here was of classical size – 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, as far as I could see. There were no real faults in the performance and Houstoun’s playing was stylishly tasteful; in spite of that, the concerto did not really take flight, lacking intensity and delight, at least until the ear was captured by the spirit of the slow movement and particularly the delicacy of the short second movement cadenza. But on the whole it remained a conscientious, well-considered affair that just missed the chance to win over the record audience attracted to this otherwise splendid concert.

‘Splendid’ related to the second half, when the strengths of conductor and orchestra emerged vividly. Tod und Verklärung – Death and Transfiguration – is one of Strauss’s less often played tone poems, though I have always found its dark, anguished emotion strangely compelling. The dread-filled, macabre opening by brass and timpani created a chilling atmosphere, even more by flute and harp; I was rapidly persuaded that this was to be a thrilling performance and it surprised me that Taddei inspired his round 70-strong orchestra to such dramatic power and such highly charged playing.

There was evidence from all departments of real professional quality, from the solo violin of Matthew Ross, through horns, flutes, and indeed from the larger body of strings, naturally far more opulent than was there for the Beethoven. It allowed the final Transfiguration pages of the score to be uttered with a blazing power and intensity, some sort of victory over the dying man’s death agonies.

Though the scenario of the piece is all too evident, it is really of only curiosity value, for the music must stand as music without external help. Many composers have created works that originated with some kind of story or theme, but have had the sense to refrain from explaining, knowing that it can create the false idea that music is capable of ‘understanding’ in the same way as a piece of writing does.

Taddei reversed the order of the two Strauss pieces, ending with Aivale Cole’s singing of The Four Last Songs, in line with chronology and making better sense of the related themes of the two works.

Again, Cole vindicated herself in Strauss; not overwhelmingly in the more simple utterance of Frühling, but certainly in the undulating beauties of September (what beautiful horn playing!), and later where she expressed subtle and nostalgic sadness in a voice that rose and fell, changed colour with the meaning of the words.

And here in Beim Schlafengehen we had Ross’s gorgeous violin solo that pre-echoes the soaring voice that resumes with the words ‘Und die Seele, unbewacht, wie in freien Flügen schweben…’ I could almost forgive the burst of applause at its end, though it was indeed a sore disturbance of the mood. It happened after each song in spite of the clear signals from conductor and singer to desist.

The end of Im Abendrot, with its slow sequence of unresolved chords, left the audience deeply moved, many damp-eyed, though not so overwhelmed as to actually get a shy Wellington audience to its feet, which it should have.

I have remarked before that I am mystified as to what the world could have been like, when I was only about 12, when these songs did not exist.

Caprice Arts Trust (organiser: Sunniva Zoete-West): The Old Maid and the Thief (Menotti); Das Berliner Requiem and three songs (Kurt Weill)

Salvation Army Citadel, Friday 12 June

Caprice Arts exists to provide a platform for performance by independent professional musicians in the Wellington region, and to promote New Zealand and other contemporary music. They do not pay professional fees, and provide their own services gratis.

This evening included performances by two distinct groups. The common thread was their commissioning by radio stations in the Inter-war years.

Das Berliner Requiem was commissioned from Weill and Brecht in 1928 by Radio Frankfurt; The Old Maid and the Thief was commissioned from Gian-Carlo Menotti by the NBC in New York in April 1939.

Rather than follow the style of the production in Wellington by the De La Tour Opera in about 1977, when it was staged normally, the present production accepted the equally difficult task of staging the radio performance. The singers, in street clothes, stood to sing into microphones as appropriate, ignoring the audience, though they occasionally allowed themselves to act rather whole-heartedly as if there was an audience present.

The style of production was interestingly echoed in the following week-end’s opera from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, La Sonnambula, screened at the Penthouse cinema. That was conceived as a rehearsal in a New York studio of a production to be staged in Switzerland (the locale of Bellini’s opera) and we were to see the performances as if the singers had no audience before them; most were in casual street clothes, working in a plain rectangular rehearsal space. But normal audience-aware performances emerged at various times, and elements were staged with singers in costume. For example, Amina – the victim of the compromising sleepwalking incident – enacts both her sleepwalking appearances in costume.

So with The Old Maid, certain phases had singers performing in ways that would hardly have arisen in a real radio studio.

The Salvation Army Citadel provides an agreeable space for performances of this kind, but the acoustic is not always helpful; some voices were clearer than others but the combination of a sometimes too prominent piano and an acoustic that produced too many overtones often obscured words. And for performances of this kind, words were rather important.

The Menotti piece began informally as the singers came out haphazardly, making adjustments to equipment and seating, and the Announcer, Craig Beardsworth, finally calls them to order, “Come on people! We’re On Air” and opened the broadcast: “Caprice Arts Trust presents this live Radio broadcast of The Old Maid and the Thief”, to a lively piano Prelude, somewhat Bach-inflected with interesting contrapuntal lines.

The pianist, Jonathan Berkahn, did a fine job throughout, his playing full of character, varied in tone and rhythm, and good at giving emphasis to particular notes and motifs such as an orchestra might deliver.

The story is set in a small American town, in the house of the old maid, Miss Todd (Ruth Armishaw), a local busy-body, censorious and uncharitable. Her young and evidently lively young housemaid, Laetitia, is sung by Barbara Paterson. A vagrant, Bob (Kieran Rayner), referred to rather as a Wanderer, knocks on their door and Laetitia, finding him attractive, persuades her mistress to let him stay, and to remain, by suggesting that Bob is in love with her (Miss Todd).

But Miss Todd’s friend, Miss Pinkerton (Sharon Yearsley), her equal in pious nastiness, hears that a convict has escaped and they jump to the conclusion that it is their guest.

To help support their increased expenses, Miss Todd starts stealing from her neighbours and eventually from a liquor store (being too embarrassed to buy liquor openly in a post-prohibitionist environment).

It ends with Laetitia and Bob stripping the house and fleeing, leaving the mean-spirited Miss Todd with her come-uppance (nothing disagreeable seems to happen to the equally mean Miss Pinkerton).

The singers were uniformly well cast and very adequate to their tasks, apart from a lack of clarity in the higher voices. Barbara Paterson produced the most vivid performance, with impressive, high coloratura in her party-piece lamenting the timid man. Ruth Armishaw and Sharon Yearsley (mezzo and soprano respectively) made a convincing pair of self-obsessed, malicious small-town spinsters, though adopted American accents were a bit forces at times. Kieran Rayner’s velvet voice (and appearance) did his role proud, with a rollicking, drunken waltz song inspired by the stolen gin.

The production found a good balance between the studio setting and occasions when they let the mask slip, and acted; I would not have been deprived, for example, of Laetitia’s hilarious efforts to seduce Bob and the raid of the liquor store even created real suspense.

In the second half, all three female singers sang Kurt Weill – three very distinct songs in quite distinct modes: Yearsley in Mr Right from one of the Broadway pieces, Armishaw in Pirate Jenny from Threepenny Opera and Paterson in the French cabaret song Youkali, with Berkahn on the piano accordion this time. All characterized with brilliant stylistic flair.

The evening ended with Weill’s dark, gritty Das Berliner Requiem to poems of Bertolt Brecht for three male singers – tenor Laurence Walls, baritone Craig Beardsworth and bass Matt Painter, plus a largish wind ensemble including saxophones, guitar and organ, conducted by Justus Rozemond. Even in the late 20s it still aroused nervousness in Germany and Weill had difficulties getting it performed; only one performance was broadcast, in May 1929.

Laurence Walls read translations of Brecht’s unsentimental, violent poems that Weill set. It starts and finishes however, with hymn-like movements in a late medieval character. In between were four sections that moved between sombre, stark musical settings, and quiet, tender parts. The elegiac second part is accompanied by guitar, while there’s a tenor solo in third section, accompanied by saxophone and clarinet in a bluesy waltz-time piece that’s touching, said to be a tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, The fourth and fifth sections comment on the unknown soldier offering no hope of an after life, with emphatic timpani strikes. Craig Beardsworth alone sang the fifth section with its organ accompaniment, to more expressive, sympathetic music to which his voice was very well suited.

The whole evening was a credit to the professionalism of the Caprice Arts Trust and the musical direction by Jonathan Berkahn and Justus Rozamond; it is an assembly that operates on the slenderest means but achieves much through the generosity of all concerned. They bring to Wellington music that is off the beaten track but very much worth knowing.

Two other performances took place in Plimmerton and Lower Hutt.

New Zealand School of Music: Concerto Competition Final

Finalists: Judy Guan, Rafaella Garlick-Grice, Alex Chan, Andrzej Nowicki, Hannah Darroch, Charlotte Fetherston, accompanied by pianists Diedre Irons, Richard Mapp and Emma Sayers

Adam Concert Room, New Zealand School of Music, Friday 29 May

The annual concerto competition, formerly of the Victoria University School of Music, now the New Zealand School, ought to be a much more high profile event than it has ordinarily been. There is a very good school orchestra and the City Council would doubtless offer the Michael Fowler Centre at a peppercorn rent for a concert of such interest and importance and that might reinforce the status of Wellington as musically significant.

Wellington, after all, has been able to create and hold no major music contest, such as both Auckland and Christchurch cherish.

Judy Guan perhaps put herself at a disadvantage by playing a Chinese concerto, very popular there, but an essentially vacuous piece from the first decade of the Communist Chinese regime: The Butterfly Lover’s Violin Concerto. Beautifully played but, even though edited down to about 20 minutes length, it still far outlasted its musical content; it sounded padded: every time the end seemed nigh, the violin would set off afresh with another variation in the same saccharine vein. Nor was it a very rewarding exercise for accompanying pianist Emma Sayers. As adjudicator Michael Houstoun commented, such a slender piece demanded more personality, more varying dynamics and interest invested in phrasing.

Rafaella Garlick-Grice played the first and third movements from the Fifth Piano Concerto by Saint-Saëns. Her technique enables her to perform this highly virtuosic, but musically fine concerto with astonishing virtuosity and accomplishment, The problem was that the almost incessant, complex scales and bravura note-spinning, was delivered at an unremitting fortissimo and without the variety that should make every phase interesting.

Houstoun commented that he would have chosen the slow movement to play with one of the fast outer movements, for variety’s sake: a contrasting meditative piece was needed; he remarked that she tended to play at a constant mezzoforte instead of creating a magical pianissimo in the fast scales and The effect was no doubt aggravated by the fact that here, necessarily, was the only concerto involving two pianos: Diedre Irons’s orchestral reduction still contributed a torrent of notes that added to the aural assault.

Nevertheless, here is a highly accomplished pianist who won the audience vote for best performer.

Weber concertante pieces for woodwinds occupied two contestants. Alex Chan rather astonished with her high-pressure, unyielding performance of the Andante and Rondo Ungarese for bassoon. Though not among his best such pieces, rather pedestrian in the Andante, it is a fine and demanding showcase for the instrument; the Rondo is familiar and Chan managed its uninterrupted speed and energy with impressive stamina.

Clarinettist Andrzej Nowicki played the second and third movements of Weber’s Second Clarinet Concerto, accompanied again by Irons. The calm opening phrases of the Romanza caught the audience with their exquisite pianissimo expressiveness. The Alla Polacca was studded with quick, adroit ornaments, constant variety of articulation. The whole was spirited, ever varied, fluent and persuasive.

Praising the immaculate performance, its inflections, shaping, constant changes of tone, Houstoun awarded Nowicki the prize.

Perhaps the most challenging concerto from a musical point of view was Nielsen’s Flute Concerto – the first two movements. Hannah Darroch had Emma Sayers deputizing for an orchestra, and here, in spite of Sayer’s wonderful sensitivity, was perhaps the most problematic of the piano transcriptions, and the orchestra’s absence added to the soloist’s problems in spinning coherent lines and phrases. though the long quasi-cadenza, with supporting repeated bass piano notes, offered one of the occasions when the flute, with fluttering ornaments, specially impressed. In the third movement, Allegretto, Darroch showed her keen understanding of Nielsen’s idiom, the tricky rhythms and the shaping of phrases, and in the thoughtful moment just before the end.

Houstoun’s comment here noted the beauty of her playing, as well as the pianist’s, but added that Darrogh’s playing was probably not strong enough for performance with orchestra. Though it struck me that she had probably subdued her playing for the environment she was in.

Finally, Charlotte Fetherston played movements 1 and 2 of Walton’s Viola Concerto. She and Rafaella Garlick-Grice were the only two who played from memory and Houstoun commented on the professional expectation of memorising. He admired her confidence and the high intelligence and intensity that she brought to the music.

It was the performance that I gave my own audience vote to, as I was impressed by her musicality, the coherence of her long phrases that in lesser hands can quite misfire. Fetherston’s musicianship is superb, her tonal variety – she played close to the bridge a good deal, attenuating her tone where it counted – and her physical size and demeanour – why should that matter? – suggested the epitome of a violist. She was splendidly supported by Richard Mapp. Like Houstoun, I noted intonation lapses, but unlike him, did not feel that they vitiated what I thought was a very fine musical performance. I suspect that aspect might have led him to give the prize to Nowicki rather than her.

However, Fetherston is one to watch; really, of course, all six are to be watched.

String Quartet No 1 The Kreutzer Sonata (Janáček); Exitus for string quartet (Michael Norris); String Quintet, Op 77 (Dvořák)

The New Zealand String Quartet and Hiroshi Ikematsu (double bass)

Wellington Chamber Music Society

Ilott Theatre, Sunday 21 May 2009

I believe the audience for this concert in the Ilott Theatre was a little larger than had been expected, perhaps due to the presence of another contributor, NZSO principal double bass player, Hiroshi Ikematsu. Many will have heard him in concert with chamber groups and word could have got out that he was a player of remarkable accomplishment and talent.

My initial thought, looking at the programme, was that this piece by Dvořák may not have been a very clever choice to display his skill and musicality. At the end of the concert, this feeling was still lurking.

However, the concert began with Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata quartet, a nice choice for those who had seen the interesting theatrical performance last year that told Tolstoy’s story in which the Beethoven violin sonata is the catalyst for a deadly extra-martial affair, intimately tied to the playing of the quartet by the Nevine Quartet.

Though I do not place importance on the non-musical sources of compositions, their programmes or aspects of the composer’s experiences, what is common knowledge can crop up; sometimes it gets in the way, sometimes it might provide a rewarding context.

In the case of such a deliberately named piece, the story can hardly be avoided. Ever since re-reading the novella a few years ago, the constant background of the railway journey in the narrative, the clicking of wheels on rail joints, has seemed to me present in the cello’s spiky notes that punctuate the first theme that recurs, passed from player to player.

Commentators differ on the nature of the Janáček’s message, some arguing that it is possible to hear aspects of the novella in great detail, others pointing to a great difference between Tolstoy’s and Janáček’s views of love and marriage.

Some quartets see the music more romantically than others. In the hands of the New Zealand String Quartet there was little ominous in it, though they gave voice to an agitation that’s present in parts of it; however, the very deliberate theme that first violin Helene Pohl announced, warm against the second violin’s tremolo, suggested no more than expectancy.

There was more unease in the second movement especially from the tremolo violin passages, chillingly sul ponticello, and similar effects recur in the third movement. Gillian Ansell’s viola contribution was striking throughout, seeming to find more angst and soulfulness than one hears in some performances. 

By the end, we had been in the grip of a tale of pity and of something irreconcilable in human nature, not simply tragedy.

I heard Michael Norris’s Exitus at the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson in January and it was interesting to hear it again: I confess, it was the composer who told me that he had shortened it in certain ways for these later performances; I did not pick it.

There is a common stylistic thread running through all four sections, with predominant use of high harmonics and tremolo, high tensile bowing, so lightly touching the strings that the pitch becomes indistinct.

The subject is the rituals surrounding death in four different cultures: interestingly, neither the Greek underworld, nor Maori/Polynesian myths about the passage to the afterlife, with which we are probably most familiar, were treated. It was Inuit, Mayan, Nordic and the Choctaw tribe of American Indians and their Black Water River experience that were explored. Each part evoked something of the environment and, with very limited expressive means, suggested the experience of the soul passing through whatever screening system each people believed led to the other world.

For example, the Mayan piece, Xibalba, created a rather frightening underworld scene through short upward bow strokes, long held notes interrupted by spiccato and emphatic thrusts by all four instruments, effects that are far from routine but which the players handled as if they were mere warm-up exercises.

In Nelson I had felt that the end could have followed the third piece, Niflheim, the equivalent of the Adagio movement, since it ended after a passage of very high shimmering harmonics from the cello, dying so perfectly. 

In the end I still felt that the problem of the piece was a too unvarying stylistic character; in spite of the subtle differences from one to another, the very subject matter that imposed a too uniform tone on the whole piece when one’s instinctive need was for something in the sun, among the living. But I have no suggestions….

Finally, the showpiece for the double bass. As I hinted, the bottom line of this piece by Dvořák hardly offered this brilliant player scope for the range of lyrical, legato, melodic, not to mention the amazing virtuosic skills of which he and his instrument are capable. It was confined, in fact, to music considerably less interesting than the cello enjoyed (and the cello collected bits of melody quite often), yet even within these limitations, the pizzicato and the fairly unadorned bowing of the bass line was uncommonly musical and provided a deep and rich underpinning for each movement.  

But the work as a whole falls into the class of the serenade or divertimento rather than of the string quartet. Happy tunes, some recurring too often, folk rhythms, all very skillfully written; and all the players gave it an affectionate and lively performance. But surely Dvořák would have come across the Paganini of the double bass, Bottesini, who was 20 years his senior, and would have known what the lovely instrument could do.