Author: Lindis Taylor

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

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Flights of Fancy: music by Handel, Falla, Piazolla, Persichetti, De Castro Robinson, Grenfell, Andres, Fauré, Ravel, Ibert

Flight: Bridget Douglas (flute) and Carolyn Mills (harp)

Chanel Arts Centre, Motueka, Sunday 25 January

At 2pm a Family Concert entitled Animal Antics took place in the School of Music. It featured Carnival of the Animals and Poulenc’s Babar the Elephant, with accompaniment from four of New Zealand’s finest pianists – Michael Houstoun, Diedre Irons, Richard Mapp and Emma Sayers, and the narratives, Ogden Nash in the case of the Carnival, were spoken by Helen Moulder.

It clashed however with a concert at Motueka called Flights of Fancy, from Flight, the flute and harp duo of Bridget Douglas and Carolyn Mills: that’s what I chose. Reports of the Animals concert from those who’d been there made me regret being unable to spirit myself from Nelson to Motueka at 4pm.

Flights of Fancy met with a rather small audience, possibly because some people wonder if the two instruments can sustain their delight for two hours. The concert began with one of Handel’s flute sonatas, the harpsichord part nicely transferred to the harp.

The balance of the concert was slightly skewed however because an arm injury that has afflicted Carolyn Mills, stopped her playing one of the De Falla pieces, a piece by American, John Thomas, as well as Bach’s Flute Sonata in C. The rest of the programme consisted of fairly recent music, both New Zealand and foreign, plus a final set of three happy and familiar French pieces that left the audience content.

The unfamiliar pieces were chosen with a certain flair. Eve de Castro-Robinson’s Pearls of the Sea called for the novel sound of the bass flute, and for a variety of unorthodox sounds – glissandi, tapping the harp’s soundboard and the keys of the flute. Four Pooh Stories came from a second New Zealand composer, Maria Grenfell, again creating an original sound world that was often droll and perhaps trite but evocative of A A Milne.

Serenade No 10 by American composer Persichetti comprised eight very brief and very different movements that seemed to call for a visual programme of some kind. But I most enjoyed a suite of pieces by Bernard Andres called Narthex, depictions of stained glass in French churches of Cluny and Saint Lazare, with their evocation of medieval Christian imagery through clear, vivid melodies: refreshing, straightforward stuff…

Adam Chamber Music Festival,Nelson

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Pianissimo: Piano Duos by Mozart, Bizet, Barber, Rachmaninov

Michel Houstoun, Diedre Irons, Richard Mapp, Emma Sayers

Nelson School of Music Sunday, 25 January

The evening concert was absolutely the essential stuff of a music festival; these performances, of great music, would have excited audiences at great European festivals like Verbier or La Roque d’Anthéron.

The Nelson audience was certainly conscious that it had witnessed something momentous as they clapped and shouted at the end of Rachmaninov’s long and strenuous Suite No 2 for two pianos, Op 17. Nothing could have been less apposite that the concert’s title, Pianissimo. I have sometimes wondered whether this dense and mighty work that emerges as if from one mighty instrument, would reveal more interesting interplay if the pianos were widely separated. The performance by Michael Houstoun and Diedre Irons was monumental in its energy and power and in its near perfect ensemble; that alone is a singular achievement in such a piece.

Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos, K 448, which is also one of his great masterpieces, had opened the concert; it was played by Diedre Irons and Richard Mapp with Emma Sayers and Michael Houstoun in the humble role of page-turners. If the declamatory and extrovert outer movements were witness to Mozart’s self-confidence and his powerful creativity, the mature and profound slow movement was not only impressive in its unanimity and singular ensemble, but deeply felt, suggesting long gestation on the part of the players.

The concert was given a special quality through the use of projections from above of the players at the two keyboards on to screens at the back of the stage. Without distracting attention from the music, the images seemed to provide an insight into the sensuous intimacy that the strange phenomenon of the piano duet offers.

Nowhere was this slightly intrusive insight more delightful than the performance by Mapp and Sayers of Samuel Barber’s duet, Souvenirs, Op 28, involving a great deal of overlapping of hands, one often on top of the other or chasing each other the length of the keyboard.

Perhaps the most delicious, and to many, surprising piece was Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants, every bit as serious music as Mozart or Schumann. This was at the hands of Michael and Diedre at one keyboard and they revealed the uncelebrated genius of Bizet as piano composer. For Bizet’s death at 35 (the same age as Mozart) was a terrible loss not just to opera, but to piano and orchestral music, and probably chamber music too. The music itself is filled with spontaneity and rich invention, but it needs a joyous and boisterous performance such as we heard here to demonstrate just how fecund was Bizet’s melodic imagination and his sense of shape and style.

The following evening (26 January) the same pianists returned for more; this time the emphasis was on aural spectacle, some, like Mark Wilberg’s Fantasy on Themes from Carmen frankly vacuous pyrotechnics, others – Saint-Saëns’s Variations on a Theme of Beethoven (from the Trio of Sonata Op 31 No 2) and Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini of some musical worth. John Rimmer’s Hammerheads, a 2008 work commissioned for four talented young Nelson pianists, was frankly astonishing.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

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The Saturday Clash

Concertante: Clarinet Quintet (Anthony Ritchie), String Trio (Jindrich Feld), Caligraphy (Edward Ware), Sonata for flute, viola and harp (Debussy), Sinfonia Concertante in E flat, for violin and viola, K 364 (Mozart) 

New Zealand String Quartet; Prazak Quartet; Bridget Douglas and Carolyn Mills (Flight); Philip Green (clarinet)

Nelson Cathedral, Saturday 24 January

The festival’s second concert was blighted by the sort of misadventure that is familiar in a big city but ought not to happen in Nelson.

A major clash.

The Sealord Opera in the Park has been a major fixture in February each year for more than a decade. This time it moved, reportedly on account of the availability of certain singers, to Saturday 24 January, and thousands filled Trafalgar Park .It must have impacted on the size of the audience in the Cathedral: a great pity, for this was an exceptional concert.

Again, it employed both string quartets as well as the three other instrumentalists, in music that is almost never played in ordinary chamber music concerts. New music of an engaging character was again prominent.

First was a Clarinet Quintet (Op 124, no less!) by Anthony Ritchie, written for Christchurch arts patron Christopher Marshall in 2006: this was its third performance. If there were few reminders of its predecessors by Mozart and Brahms, there was a comparable sense of musical inevitability, of a composition that has arisen from genuine musical impulses rather than non-musical ideas, concepts, technical considerations. It feels as if conceived in purely music terms in large bites, with a structure that suggested a strong sense of shape, giving no impression of note-spinning or routine passage-work.

Clarinettist Philip Green opened with playing that was remote, disembodied, suddenly displaced by ethereal string harmonics, and players of the New Zealand String Quartet then entered, leading without pause to an Allegro energico: sanguine, jazzy, very grounded and carrying hints of the famous Clarinet Concertino by Ritchie’s father, John. The slow movement employed a quotation from Ritchie’s opera, The God Boy, first on the clarinet, expressing anxiety according to the programme notes.

The Prazak Quartet then played, without second violinist, a String Trio by Jindrich Feld, a Czech composer who died in 2007. This work supports one’s impression that mainstream music has largely broken free of the complex, the intellectual, the disdaining of melody or delight that blighted it through the mid and late 20th century. An unpretentious piece in four pithy, engaging movements, with hints of Martinu in the second movement, motoric quavers expressing an optimistic mood in the last movement.

The third contemporary piece was Caligraphy for solo cello by Wellington-born composer Edward Ware, now living in Barcelona. This too held no terrors either for the audience or for cellist Rolf Gjelsten who gave it a compelling performance. The music’s idiom might have been of the 19th century, but by the end, there was no doubt that it was essentially closer in spirit to Bach.

The third of Debussy’s wartime sonatas, and the last to be completed, is for flute, viola and harp. Harpist Carolyn Mills confessed that it was her favourite piece for her instrument, and that was clear. I am less moved by Debussy’s big orchestral works than by his chamber and piano music and songs; and these players (Gillian Ansell was the violist) made it easy to be convinced by this sonata’s unique flavour and sonorities, its undiminished musical inspiration.

And the concert ended with a novelty: an arrangement published in 1817 for string sextet of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra. No great violence was done to its character.

The sextet comprised both string quartets minus the two second violinists; the front desks were occupied by violinist Vaclav Remes and violist Josef Kluson, but they by no means dominated the solo parts. The orchestral parts are compressed to single string parts and the solo parts distributed among the other players, often the cellist instead of the violist.

Especially for anyone new to it, it sounded authentic, for the greatness of the work easily survives this sort of sympathetic treatment. My first exposure to it, aged round 20, was from a recording from the Casals Festival of 1951 at Perpignan, with soloists Isaac Stern and William Primrose. Ever since, most performances fall short. I was enchanted by this performance however, in spite of certain ensemble looseness, and had no problem with the reallocation of some of the music even though the solo passages hardly matched that ideal performance that resides in my soul.

Adam Chamber Music Festival, Nelson

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Gala Opening Concert

Telemann: Concerto for four violins; String quartet (Michael Norris); Ravel: Introduction and Allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet;  Smetana: String Quartet, ‘From my life’

New Zealand String Quartet; Prazak Quartet; Bridget Douglas (flute) and Carolyn Mills (harp); Philip Green (clarinet)

Nelson Cathedral, Friday 23 January

The Festival’s Gala opening concert took place, as usual, in the Nelson Cathedral, a strangely incomplete building, its primitive Gothic arches seeming to announce a much larger and more massive building; but above the arches, when money ran out, there is an incongruous ceiling, and walls of concrete blocks and an unsympathetic spire.

However, its acoustic properties are simply superb for singers and small ensembles; and the back wall of the sanctuary, painted deep blue and lit attractively, often provided an atmosphere that suited music as dusk fell on the long summer evenings. . This concert introduced both the New Zealand and the Prazak string quartets, as well as three other musicians. The result was perhaps an unusual programme but one which proved highly rewarding.

The ‘other’ musicians, from the NZSO, and the NZSQ, allowed the performance of Ravel’s enchanting Introduction and Allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet. Carolyn Mills took centre stage with the harp; while the piece may be a miniature harp concerto, the two wind instruments (Bridget Douglas – flute and Philip Green – clarinet), virtuosic and shrouded in subtle chiaroscuro, acted as if they were facets of the one instrument, and the strings too created sonorities that were haunting and ethereal. It was an experience that comes to you live perhaps once in a life-time.

Bridget opened the second part of the concert with a particularly seductive account of Debussy’s Syrinx. In retrospect, the opening piece, a concerto for four violins by Telemann, was incongruous. Though it opens with an enchanting, delicate Grave movement, the rest didn’t fulfill its promise, ending in a rather vapid, inconsequential Vivace.

Nothing could have been as remote from the Telemann as the premiere of a piece by Wellington composer Michael Norris. Commissioned and played by the NZSQ, his String Quartet is inspired by the treatment of death by four distinct cultures that offered scope for contrasting moods and a radical catalogue of ‘extended string techniques’.These included a first movement based entirely on harmonics and a third movement with extensive sul ponticello (bowing close to the bridge).

In Niflheim, its 3rd movement, Rolf Gjelsten’s left-hand fingers climbed so close to the cello’s bridge that one marveled that there was still space for the bow. The piece seemed to want to stop with the stark silence at the end of that movement, but as the fourth evolved it seemed to amend one’s impression of the architecture of the whole. While its structure and many of its ideas were musical, the piece suffers, like so much of today’s music, from the weight and expectations of its programme and its intellectual paraphernalia.

The centre of the concert came at the end with the Prazak playing the quartet From My Life by their compatriot Smetana. My attention passed from one player to another, each time with the feeling that here was the heart of the music. Yet the combination was so flawless and homogeneous, so richly opulent and so filled with the spirit of the composer’s life story, from joyousness to tragedy, that I felt that I had heard finally the perfect, never to be equalled performance.

New Zealand Opera School, Wanganui

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New Zealand Opera School, Wanganui

Grand Final Concert in Royal Wanganui Opera House. Monday 12 January

Review by Lindis Taylor

The survival of a musical organization over 16 years is no mean feat.

The New Zealand Opera School has survived that long. It is the kind of musical education institution that the State, in a more civilized country, might well provide; in fact it is not too much to expect that such a summer course might have been established by a university music department.

But the State in New Zealand has not taken many steps to make fuller and more imaginative use, of their facilities during vacations.

A summer school of singing has flourished for many more years in Hawke’s Bay and it has usually overlapped with the Wanganui school. A few years ago attempts were made to coordinate the two schools so they would not clash. But it proved impossible because both depend on overseas vocal tutors who typically have only a short time free at the beginning of January to travel to New Zealand.

But each school caters for singers at rather different levels and pursuing different singing ambitions. The National Singing School in Napier caters for jazz and music theatre and cabaret singers while the Wanganui school has confined itself to singers who have already made progress up the ladder, even having won roles in professional opera productions.

Thus the big public concerts at the end of each school has been an opportunity to hear a number of our most promising singers at an interesting stage of their training and early career.

So often it is one person who has had the energy and leadership skills to initiate and hold together valuable enterprises, inspiring others and giving them a sense of involvement and satisfaction.

That has been the gift of Donald Trott since the school began: erstwhile banker, but better known as a baritone with the Perkel Opera Company and long-serving board member of successive Auckland opera companies.

He presides over the whole enterprise, recruiting tutors and accompanists, negotiating with Wanganui Collegiate School for the use of their music facilities, but most importantly persuading potential funders that here is by far the best investment for funds that shareholders can do without.

His public face appeared on this occasion as compere and general factotum, suave, debonair, generous in his acknowledgements and encouragement, ensuring that the success of the evening brings its rewards to everyone who gives their time to it.

Guided by British vocal lecturer Paul Farringdon, several notable New Zealand voice teachers (Margaret Medlyn, Barry Mora, Richard Greager) and others such as stage director Sara Brodie and Italian coach Luca Manghi, the concert is no mere string of arias.

Several others made for the great success of this concert and the entire running of the school: most notably Donald Trott’s assistant director, Ian Campbell, his wife Sally Rosenberg and Bryan and Marion Wyness; the accompanists, a different one for each bracket: Greg Neil, Phillipa Saffey, David Kelly, Francis Cowan, Iola Shelley and Bruce Greenfield; long lists of sponsors and benefactors; and a group of friends who have managed to raise the school’s profile in the city through recitals, masterclasses, a chapel service on Sunday, during the school: Wanganui Opera Week..

Each bracket of arias or ensembles had a theme and various devices were used to move from one item to the next, so that a feeling of a tenuous story was sometimes created.

The Spoils of War opened with Frances Moore’s performance of ‘Chacun le sait’ from La fille du régiment, accompanied by a platoon comprising the whole company, bearing arms. In another scene involving guns, Jason Slade brought a nice baritonal quality to the tenor showpiece in the last act of Tosca, ‘E lucevan le stelle’. But Catherine Leining captured the false sincerity well in the usual aria from Samson et Dalila, not that it really suited her.

Each group was separated by theatrical business: here, before the group entitled The Things we do for Love, Luc Manghi suffered the first of his comic misadventures which led to Rachel Day’s effective performance in Monica’s aria from The Medium, which was enlivened with quite elaborate production elements.

Elizabeth Daley was not well advised to tackle Ilia’s role in Idomeneo – ‘Zeffiretti lusinghieri’, as it simply calls for more intensity than she can summon now, but is certainly within her reach. From Mozart’s last opera seria, La clemenza di Tito, Felicity Smith displayed some polish and dramatic ability with her ‘Parto, parto’.

The group bearing the name Desire Takes Flight strung together Claire Barton’s performance of ‘O mio Fernando’ from Donizetti’s La favorite and others by Granados (Anna Argyle singing the ‘The Maja – Woman – and the Nightingale’) and Bizet: Brent Read in the Flower song from Carmen.

Then Julia Booth sang an unfamiliar aria from Floyd’s Susannah, invoking tender longing in a quasi-American, near-Broadway idiom. She sang against a backdrop of a starry night sky which also served the quartet from A Midsummer Night’s Dream that showcased four of the evening’s best singers: Kristen Darragh, Barbara Graham, Daniel O’Connor and Michael Guy.

Each expressed the individuality of the lovers, waking from their dream-world of love-making, with careful fairy-like precision.

Naturally, some of the best performances came from seasoned singers like Darragh who will be remembered as Xenia in Boris Godunov: her Lucretia (Britten) was as harrowing as it was fully realised. Michael Guy also sang from an opera in English – Toni’s ‘Here I stand’ from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, combining a Shakespearean style with a sort of histrionic Sprechstimme that was one of the most complete performances of the evening.

The second half began with A Rose by any other Name which put together three arias from Shakespeare-inspired operas.

Two of them were from famous versions of Romeo and Juliet (though the Bellini draws not primarily on Shakespeare but on the 16th century Italian sources that Shakespeare took the story from). Gounod’s ‘Je veux vivre’ was sung with great vivacity by a perhaps Natalie Dessay-in-the-making, Tania Priebs. Barbara Graham sang ‘O quante volte’ from I Capuleti e i Montecchi, displaying a promising bel canto talent: agile and soulful with beautiful sustained lines.

There followed a rarity; the overture of Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor and Falsaff’s drinking song are well-known, but nothing else seems to escape Germany where the opera is still common enough. Alexandra Ioan gave us ‘Nun eilt herbei’, the equivalent of Mistress Ford plotting revenge, in a stylish blend of French opéra-comique and Donizetti.

Under the ‘etiquette’ From Russia with Love, most of the men on hand gave us the unusual experience of hearing arias from all three male protagonists in Eugene Onegin. Daniel O’Connor was a somewhat too unsympathetic Onegin as he declines Tatyana’s overtures, though his singing was indeed very fine; William Parry sang the unfortunate Lensky’s aria before the fateful duel, his voice accurate but not yet well grounded. Prince Gremin’s aria was sung by the splendid Hadleigh Adams, with warmth and vocal assurance.

The last group was entitled Ah! Perfidy, though Louise’s famous aria does not seem to fit into such a characterisation. It was sung prettily enough by Polly Ott. The last item was Eboli’s famous aria from Don Carlo: ‘O don fatale’ from Rachelle Pike, whose voice is big and given to too much fortissimo, though it was clear she had good dynamic control when she chose.

The entire assemblage went through entertaining stage business to perform the Papageno/Papagena duet from The Magic Flute to bring the evening to a most appropriate close.

 

 

 

 

RICHARD FARRELL The Complete Recordings Volume One

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

RICHARD FARRELL The Complete Recordings Volume One
Music by GRIEG, LISZT and BRAHMS
Richard Farrell (piano)
The Halle Orchestra / George Weldon

Atoll ACD 208/1-2

The exhumation of mostly long-invisible recordings by New Zealand’s greatest pianist has been a slow and laborious exercise. Richard Farrell who died aged 31 in 1958 left only a small number of commercial recordings, although there is other evidence of his career surviving in the Radio New Zealand sound archive which I hope will also soon reach the light of day. I heard Farrell play more than once though I can pin-point only one concert in 1951 when I was a 6th former at Wellington College, as I still have his signed recital programme from the Wellington Town Hall.

Atoll Records are in the process of releasing three double albums of the extant recordings. The first has just appeared and contains an interesting variety of music, and with playing that emerges as so revelatory, so commanding, so effortless yet dazzling in its virtuosity and entrancing in its musical feeling. The first disc opens with the Grieg Piano Concerto. It’s a long time since I sat and actually listened to the work, either live or on recording and I was quite beguiled both by its charm and its high level of musical inspiration. Grieg of course has fallen out of fashion for many listeners more concerned with being in tune with what is critically a la mode than to listen to music through their ears and to respond with their emotions. Words that have been used often to describe Farrell’s playing are ease, naturalness. The Grieg concerto may not be among the most challenging in technical terms but the sound, the flawless playing and the timeless quality of Farrell’s interpretation remove it from any hint of being a restored vintage recording. Interpretation is the wrong word too, for this a simply a glorious, lyrical many-coloured performance of Grieg without any sense of the pianist’s own mannerisms or ego interventions.

Next come the Brahms Ballades Op 10. Farrell plays these not-so-familiar early pieces with a simplicity and feeling for their singing qualities that we are more familiar with in the last groups of piano pieces from Op 116 onwards. No 3 in the set is particularly interesting. There is a concentration and imagination in the playing that is not common. It is a bold and somewhat dark fairy-like piece in which Farrell makes magic out of its fleeting emotions. The fourth ballade is the longest and owes more perhaps to Chopin and foreshadows the mature piano pieces; Farrell holds the attention with the poised delicacy of his playing. Given the age of the recording – in this case 1958 – the piano tone that he draws is warm and opulent and remarkably varied. The rest of the first disc is taken with the 16 Waltzes. Brahms himself adapted his original duet version for solo piano and again Farrell displays his gift for investing rather slender music with eloquence and charm if not actually grandeur. The second disc starts with Grieg again. The Ballade in G Minor, a kind of keyboard tone poem, 20 minutes long, is one of Grieg’s finest works but because of cyclical musical fashion, little known. Farrell offers a delicate and quite entrancing rendering that establishes a sympathetic disposition for the group of Popular Norwegian Melodies and Lyric Pieces that follow. From few pianists since Farrell (perhaps Emil Gilels, or Leif Ove Andsnes) have we had such profoundly sympathetic Grieg performances. These are far from trivial pieces – in sophistication, artistry and plain musical inspiration, they are in the class of comparable music by Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, music quite simply of the greatest beauty whose neglect has been a real loss to the last generation.

For me, these recordings have done far more than reawaken my huge admiration for Farrell, but have renewed my affection for Grieg, understanding why a couple of generations ago he could be classed among the great composers. The First Piano Concerto of Liszt was originally issued with the Grieg on a Pye LP and later, in stereo, on the American Mercury label. Accompanying was the Halle Orchestra conducted by George Weldon, one of Britain’s finest conductors of the post-war period, the conductor who first made the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra into a great ensemble. The concerto is a model of discretion, orchestral and piano clarity, yet it does not lack excitement and rhetoric; the contemplative character of the first section allows the subsequent dramatic passages to make greater impact. Both conductor and pianist are clearly at pains to show Liszt’s poetic and lyrical qualities, and they take time to dwell on these aspects to an unusual degree. There is a joyousness, a youthful buoyancy, clarity of detail yet dazzling virtuosity in the piano, as well as a beautifully balanced orchestral presence in this performance.
This re-issue of recordings long out of circulation, the work of Wayne Laird of Atoll Records, ought to be embraced wholeheartedly by New Zealanders, finally able to appreciate the great gifts of the one pianist of undeniable international stature that we have produced.

Opera Society’s year-end gala concert

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Opera arias and Liebesliederwalzer, Op 52 by Brahms

The New Zealand Opera Society, Wellington Branch.

Year End Gala Recital with Madeleine Pierard (soprano), established and rising singers accompanied by Bruce Greenfield and Julie Coulson.

National Library Auditorium, Wednesday 10 December 2009

The New Zealand Opera Society is one of New Zealand’s longest-lived musical institutions, founded at the same time as the first home-grown opera company, the New Zealand Opera Company, in 1954. Its purpose was to be friends of the company. The company died in 1971, but the society knew that it still had a job to do, supporting opera wherever to emerged in New Zealand. It has survived one other major national company, based in Auckland, which lasted a mere three years.

Since the 1970s the society whose main strength was, and still is, in Wellington, it publishes the monthly magazine, New Zealand Opera News and its Wellington Branch presents regular recitals and opera events of many kinds. In recent years it has also run screenings of opera on film and DVD but has struggled to attract audiences to live recitals.

Wednesday the 10th of December was a singular exception when there were few empty seats at the National Library auditorium.

The reason obviously, was Madeleine Pierard whose rise to celebrity has even overcome the general level of media neglect of classical music. Hardly out of her studies at the Royal College of Music in London, she has already been cast in significant roles at Covent Garden and other important opera houses. Back in New Zealand this past week, she has sung in the meretricious Paul McCartney concoction, Ecce Cor Meum as well as in a magnificent, full-house Messiah with The Tudor Consort in the Town Hall.

For the opera society she was in the spotlight with two brackets of arias.

The first comprised excerpts from opera seria: from works by Handel, Mozart and Rossini. The second bracket comprised ‘Mon coeur ne peut changer’ from Gounod’s Mireille and Marietta’s Lied from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt.

Madeleine’s absolute command of style and technique held the audience spell-bound in the aria from Handel’s Alcina, ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’ Without denigrating the supporting singers, here was a star, not just in the making, but made, though there are areas in which she will develop, for example in cultivating greater warmth and lyrical qualities. In the strange artificiality of Handelian belcanto, she brought an electrifying dramatic sense, utter security, agility and brilliance. In music closer to recognizable human emotions, in the aria ‘Deh se piacer mi vuoi’ from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito: there was fury and ambition. It was interesting to hear her mezzo soprano range still strong and natural. Finally, in Rossini’s famous Semiramide aria, ‘Bel raggio lusighier’, she demonstrated a virtuosity that I would risk saying might be unmatched by any other New Zealand singer.

Madeleine moved onto Kiri Te Kanawa territory with Marietta’s Song from Die Tote Stadt: very different indeed: the velvet and lyricism replaced by a crystalline, almost spectral quality which captured the opera’s decadent, Freudian obsessiveness.

Finally, a welcome exposure of Gounod’s other opera – Mireille, some rank it ahead of Roméo et Juliette as his second finest work. This aria, ‘Mon coeur ne peut changer’ has been recorded by Malvina Major on her CD Casta Diva. Madeleine sang it with the right combination of wistfulness and sparkle.

The concert was by no means simply a showcase for Ms Pierard however.

Georgia Jamieson Emms opened the evening with Norina’s ‘Quel guardo il cavaliere’ from Don Pasquale, with a degree of uncertainty in both style and panache, but her later arias – The Queen of the Night’s Act I aria and Zerbinetta’s stratospheric aria from Ariadne auf Naxos, displayed considerable flair both vocally and histrionically.

The other solo performances were from Daniel O’Connor, a young baritone who has acquired a natural ease of delivery and attractive stage presence. The notes of ‘O du mein holde Abendstern’ (Tannhäuser) may not be hard to find, but it can be a dull and stiff affair; with O’Connor it was anything but that, and there was an intelligent grasp of the Wagner idiom. Then he sang Onegin’s Act II aria, in fine Russian, with a proper degree of empathy and gentleness. Perhaps he is on the same path as T T Rhodes.

Barbara Graham is a young singer who, like O’Connor, has been on the New Zealand Opera‘s emerging artist programme. She had both the personal assurance and the musical talent to carry off, if not at especially breakneck speed, the brilliant ‘Glitter and be gay’ from Candide.

Throughout, the singers had the benefit of the most sensitive and finely judged accompaniments from Bruce Greenfield. His page turner throughout the recital had been Julie Coulson who eventually took a seat at the treble end of the keyboard to share the duet accompaniment for Brahms’s Liebesliederwalzer. None of the young featured singers took part in that performance: instead four of Wellington’s leading resident singers joined forces: Lesley Graham, Linden Loader, Richard Greager, Roger Wilson.

Individually, they brought life and affection to these somewhat pale imitations of what Johann Strauss II was wowing the world with at the same time (to be fair, Brahms did call them ‘innocent little waltzes’ to make clear that he did not aim to ape Strauss, whom he greatly admired); but as a vocal ensemble, their voices were not particularly engaging. It does not reflect on individual vocal qualities, but could as easily happen if you put together four of the world’s greatest singers: the art of selecting voices and managing them so that they blend is a delicate matter, and the smaller the number of singers the more difficult the job.


Wanganui Spring Music Festival September 2008

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Wanganui Spring Music Festival
Five concerts by Jenny Wollerman (soprano) Murray Khouri (clarinet) Simone Roggen (violin) Edith Salzmann (cello) Petya Mihlova and Phillip Shovk (piano)
Royal Wanganui Opera House, Wanganui
12th-14th September 2008

This review may be belated but because a rather important initiative was largely ignored by the main media – my own paper, for instance, declined to print this review – here are my impressions of the inaugural Wanganui Spring Music Festival in September. It took place in one of New Zealand’s most charming old opera houses, a wooden building dating from 1899. Though its interior has been somewhat modified in an art deco style, the exterior and the lobbies are original; a recent refurbishment has reduced the seating capacity from around 1000 to some 850, an ideal size for opera as well as for more intimate music. Music festivals are a growth industry in the northern hemisphere where musicians of all kinds have found a fruitful way of occupying the summer months (and sometimes other times of the year) and tens of thousands head to picturesque towns that have found a pretext for a festival in order to overcome the lack of good live music during the dry season.

Festivals have started to flourish in Australia, but New Zealanders have been slow to catch on. Nelson, with its wonderful Adam Chamber Music Festival, has been New Zealand’ top classical music festival town since 1992. Next to Nelson as a festival candidate is Wanganui, with its history; its river, a good museum, and one of the country’ best art galleries: it was spared the worst impacts of 1980s growth with many century-old buildings remaining (though too many are still being lost); and of course there’s the 1899 opera theatre.

Wellington clarinetist Murray Khouri has been running a small, successful chamber music festival in Bowra, a small town south west of Sydney, with a population of alternative life-stylers, artists and affluent refugees from the big city. A year or so ago Murray decided to try a similar festival in a comparable New Zealand town. Wanganui seemed to have the necessary attributes, not too close to or too far from a couple of major cities. It’s the sort of town that, in the northern hemisphere at least, appeals to festival crowds. Though this first one failed to attract the crowds it deserved, particularly from the city itself, perseverance should pay off.

The festival ended with a famous piece of 20th century chamber music that exploited both the music’s character and its performance setting: Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time was a coup-de-theatre. A quartet for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it has eight unique movements; at the end of the second, the lights went out and a half minute later a single spot fell on clarinettist Murray Khouri (doubling as festival artistic director), as he played the bird-song-inspired contemplation of sorrow and light. The performance was enhanced by other lighting and scenic elements. It brought the curtain down on the festival . There were five concerts over the weekend, the first of which was entitled Music in Miniature, offering an introduction to all the players through a series of small, attractive, sometime unfamiliar pieces such as Milhaud’s Jeux and Pierné’s Canzonetta. The players were three New Zealanders, an Australian, a Bulgarian and a German resident in New Zealand; Every concert held something special. There was a lot of Mozart, including two piano trios (K 502 and K 548); also Brahms’ second piano trio, with violinist Simone Roggen and cellist Edith Salzmann.

Two concerts were devoted to solo performers. Wellington soprano Jenny Wollerman is too little heard in her home town – many of the songs that she sang, by Mozart and Schubert, were familiar but the experience of hearing them sung with such intelligence and charm, and so delicately accompanied by young Bulgarian Petya Mihneva was like hearing them for the first time. As well as sharing the playing of several of the chamber pieces with rare subtlety, Australian pianist Phillip Shovk gave an entrancing recital: of what is probably Mozart’ best-loved sonata – in A, K 331 and the four Impromptus, Op 90, by Schubert, all overflowing with melody and spiritual profundity. If that were not enough, ten of Rachmaninov’ preludes from both Opp. 23 and 32 filled the second half. Though this first festival could have been better supported, it will surprise me if Wanganui’s attractions and the chance to hear top rate musicians in great and beautiful music does not bring much bigger audiences in future. Make a diary note for next year’ festival! (LT)