Author: Peter Mechen

Lights which keep us from darkness – CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610

The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

Sopranos: Anna Sedcole, Erin King, Jane McKinlay, Lydia Joyce, Pepe Becker,
Rebecca Stanton   Altos: Andrea Cochrane, Alexandra Granville, Helene Page,
Alexandra Woodhouse-Appleby, Kassandra Wang, Maaike Christie-Beekman
Tenors: Axel Tie, John Beaglehole, Josh Long, Phillip Collins, Philip Roderick,
Richard Taylor   Basses: Brian Hesketh, David Houston, Frazer MacDiarmid,
Joshua Jamieson. Keith Small, Matthew Painter

Violins: Greg Squire, Anne Loeser   Violas:  Sophia Acheson, Lynsey Mountford
‘Cello: Jane Young    Viola da gamba: Imogen Granwal   Violone: Joan Perarnau Garriga
Cornetti: Danny Lucin, Matthew Manchester, Peter Reid   Recorders: Kamala Bain,
Katrin Eickhorst  Sackbuts: Peter Maunder, Byron Newton, Jon Harker
Dulcian: Ben Hoadley   Lute; Jonathan Le Cocq   Organ: Bethany Angus

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Boulcott St., Wellington
Saturday, 13th September 2025

Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin) could well lay claim to be the composer’s equivalent “signature work”  to that of Georg Frideric Handel’s  Messiah. Of course the latter’s popularity has never been in doubt,  triumphantly surviving even its somewhat grotesquely-inflated periods of presentation throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and continuing (in more “authentic” formats) to be widely-performed today. Monteverdi’s work, on the other hand, written well over a century earlier, has by comparison both a mystery-shrouded genesis and early performance history.  The work’s 1610 publication was in the form of eight partbooks rather than as a single, complete score, of which it seems only one has survived – and no performance of the Vespers in the composer’s lifetime has been documented. It wasn’t until 1932 when the first “complete” edition of Monteverdi’s works appeared that the work as a whole began to receive attention from scholars and performers, attention which has since come to represent almost iconic status!

Today with the help of both recordings and (happily, here in Wellington) “once-in-a-blue-moon” stellar live performances, we can be freshly astonished at the grandeur and splendour wrought by such an opulently resonant sound-window as that thrown open by the present performance. My own introduction to the work was in 2010 at the same venue through St Mary of the Angels’ then music director Robert Oliver’s magnificent celebration of the work’s 400-year existence with local singers (Baroque Voices) and instrumentalists (Academia Sanctae Mariae) – see the review at https://middle-c.org/2010/08/resplendent-monteverdi-at-st-mary-of-the-angels/  A quote from that review equally applies to what I heard just the previous evening (incidentally, with a few of the same singers and instrumentalists who performed the work in 2010) – one that remarked upon “virtuoso singers and players with a brilliant command of all the instruments and techniques”.

Tudor Consort director Michael Stewart chose not to use the Antiphons included by Oliver in his performance  (antiphons are texts, sung or spoken, used in conjunction with Psalms (quotations from the Old Testament) to rejuvenate the meanings of the latter in a more “Christian” sense). Monteverdi pairs each Psalm with a Motet, the latter termed  “sacred concertos” intended more as a contrast to, rather than an expansion of the Psalms – the wonderful verses Nigra sum and Pulchra est, for example, both being texts from the Biblical “Song of Solomon” – though the Psalm Lauda Jerusalem, is followed by a Sonata sopra Sancta Maria. Such differences between performances serve to indicate (here, admittedly, in a relatively minor way) how arguments might have developed regarding what ought/ought not to be included in the Vespers, and which have continued over the years since the work’s new-found world-wide popularity. Like all great music, it remains a work in progress rather than a museum piece!!

Long before the first note of the work was sounded, the atmosphere in the church was burgeoning and vibrant, the venue having almost filled up half-an-hour before the starting-time – amazing! If ever one wanted an indication that the city’s receptiveness towards and appetite for the performing arts was demonstrative and urgent, this all seemed as propitious a sign as any. To enthusiastic applause the musicians at last appeared to take their positions, the work beginning with tenor John Beaglehole’s ringing entreaty of the Almighty  – the opening of Psalm 70, with the words  “Deus, in adjutorium,meum intende” ( O God, make haste to deliver me!)  – followed immediately by the choir’s equally sonorous “Domine,  adadjuvandum me festina”!  (O Lord, make haste to help me!) accompanied by a fanfare-like orchestral panoply that its composer had previously used to begin his opera La favola d’Orfeo, a melody whose impact holds fast to its theatrical and emotional glory here as much as elsewhere.

What an amazing roller-coaster ride Monteverdi gives both his musicians and his listeners! Time and space obviously precludes a detailed description of the entire performance, so a modicum of description will serve to illustrate – suffice to say that Michael Stewart’s consistently vital direction infused his singers and instrumentalists with an infectious sense of joy and purpose throughout even the most complex figurations and deeply-felt sonorities realised by the presentation. And, as much to the work’s sense of the momentous and ceremonial, we were drawn into its rather more personal and intimate moments by the singing’s and playing’s beauties, evident in particular during those various “sacred concerto”  motets.

Beginning with that solo-voiced declamation, and those answering fanfares and choral entreaties came the first psalm setting, “Dixit Dominus”,  with its six-part choir combining steady sonorities in places (Sede a dextris meis – “Sit at my right hand”) with exciting rapid-note and -phrase emphases (Donec ponam inimicos – “Until I make  your enemies your footstool”). Sopranos Anna Sedcole and Erin King  voiced beautiful exchanges and adroit teamwork (Virgam virtutis tua emittet Dominus ex Sion – “The Lord shall send out the rod of thy strength from Zion”), while the choir’s different voice strands created great excitement with Dominus a dextris tuis confregit in die ira sua reges (“The Lord at thy right hand shall destroy kings in the day of his wrath”), the whole, with its interspersed contrasts between tonal beauty and physical excitement enticingly preparing us for what was to follow further.

An unfortunate audience sneeze briefly interrupted (but fortunately didn’t impede) the beginning of the beauteous Nigra Sum one of two excerpts from the “Song of Solomon” – texts used here in both cases for motets intended to be “antiphon substitutes” in a Vespers Service.  Here, tenor soloist Richard Taylor Taylor relished the delicious word-painting describing a black woman’s beauty, and the music’s animation at the King’s response to her charms, concluding with a gracefully-delivered final Tempus putationes advenit (“The hour of pruning is at hand”).Though the texts of this and Pulchra Es seem almost to border on the erotic, there was at this time in certain quasi-sacred works something of a sensual view of the soul of the Mother of God in line with being a spiritual kind of “Bride for the Church” – a similar attitude voicing this somewhat elevated kind of eroticism in relation to Mary appears also in the Psalm Audi Coelum later in the Vespers.

The ensuing Psalm Laudate Pueri Dominum was suitably adorned by warm and fluid texturings from the outset, individual voices  introducing separate strands beautifully cohering into descriptions of “the rising and the setting of the sun” (A solis ortu usque ad occasum) and of transformations of peoples lives – the men’s voices proclaiming Suscians a terra inopem (“He raises the simple from the dust”) and joining with the women’s voices to simply proclaim Ut collocet cum cum principibus (“That he may set him with princes”) – so beautiful! I enjoyed also (as did the singers) the “happy ending” of the phrase concerning the “barren woman” as becoming  matrem filiorum latantem  (“A joyful mother of children!”).

While not effacing my memory of Pepe Becker’s and Jayne Tankersley’s voices in 2010 with the erotic charge of their “Pulchra Es”, sopranos Anna Sedcole and Erin King here blended and intertwined their voices with echoes of the same, if with a notch or two’s gentler suggestiveness. In “Duo Seraphim”  it was the turn of the “Three Tenors” to shine, with Phillip Collins’ and Richard Taylor’s voices both floating their individual lines and negotiating their repeated-note phrases with confidence, joined by Philip Roderick at Tres sunt, qui testimonium  (“There are three who bear witness”) to reaffirm the Trinity. The ten-part double-choir forces of the succeeding “Nisi Dominus” gave us great, rolling sound- trajectories at the beginning, with energies aplenty enlivening both  Vanum est vobis ante lucem surgere (“It is vain for you to rise before dawn”)  and the rapid-fire triplet passages at Sicut sagitta in manu potentis (“As arrows in the hands of the mighty”), followed by a grand and rolling “Gloria” with a blazoned “Amen”.

The second half brought us an exquisite setting of the Psalm Audi Caelum, tenor Phillip Collins  pouring  whole draughts of feeling into the opening words Audi verba mea plena desidero et perfuse gaudio (“Hear my words full of longing and pervaded by joy”) – and straightaway beginning a paean of fulsome praise of the Virgin Mary as a woman, again enthusiastically blurring any boundaries dividing secular worship from  sacred devotion, the text somewhat coming to its senses as the declamations continued! Throughout, the echoed responses of the distantly-placed Philip Roderick seemed to exert a charged, “time-standing still” effect on the scene giving rise to a kind of magical wonderment of being.

“Lauda Jerusalem” which followed was guaranteed to break such a spell with gusto! – the singers seemingly to “melt” the bar-lines and fuse the irresistible trajectories of the  music into a kind of unstoppable flow! A stately and solemn Gloria at the end brought us to an equally conclusive and undisputed “Amen”, From these unbridled energies we were able to rest on what seemed like the immutable structures of the hymn “Sancta Maria”, the sopranos resembling snow-capped mountain peaks rising from the plethora of forests, ravines and plateaus suggested by the variegated instrumentql forces in their tireless, priestlike task of constant accompaniments of the “same-but-different” choral repetitions of the prayer.

In what seemed like no time at all we had left the mountaintops and were gazing at a star whose light spanned a vast ocean – Monteverdi’s first three verses of the hymn Ave Maris Stella (Hail, Star of the Sea) praise the Mother of God, rename Eve, the first woman, with the word “Ave”, and petition her with putting wrongs to right, light to darkness and bad to good. Each verse was followed by a different instrumental scoring with the aforementioned three choral (all delightful), the next three with solo voices (all characterful – soprano Rebecca Stanton, alto Maaike Christie-Beekman and bass Frazer MacDiarmid) and with a return to the choir for the last one. And with that we came to the Magnificat, the equivalent of a skyful of stars!

Monteverdi included two setting of the Magnificat in the 1610 Vespers publication, the first seven-voice part one being that used here. The twelve sections each feature a vocal line, either solo or with other voices, sometimes silent and at other times joining the instruments in the elaborations – the clear, long tones of the chants are thus festooned with what must have seemed like “music of the spheres” to Monteverdi’s musicians and listeners – as one critic put it, “dazzling variety married to simple unity” – as if it were the “Maris Stella” of the piece,  the steady light to which all else seems drawn. I enjoyed the vigour of Matthew Painter’s and Joshua Jamieson’s  Quia fecit (“For he that is mighty”), as I did the evocative echo-play between Phillip Collins and Philip Roderick against the women’s beautiful “Gloria”  – but found myself equally touched by two well-remembered voices from that 2010 Vespers, soprano Pepe Becker’s and alto Andrea Cochrane’s blending beautifully and indeed appropriately at Esurientes implevit bonis (“He hath filled the hungry with good things”).It was an apt metaphor for the musical feast to which we were being treated.

Such works as these Vespers stay in the memory as do lights which keep us from darkness  – what can one say, except to express boundless gratitude to the composer and his work’s devoted performers!

 

The Monster in the Maze – putting community on the stage

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Ipu Laga’aia as Theseus, Sarah Castle as his Mother, and Joel Amosa as Daedalus with members of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Community Singers –      photo, Emma Brittenden

New Zealand Opera presents:
The Monster in the Maze by Jonathan Dove, libretto by Alasdair Middleton.
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, community singers and musicians
Cast: Maana Pohatu – King Minos of Crete
Ipu Laga’aia – Theseus
Sarah Castle – Theseus’s Mother
Joel Amosa – Dadaelus
Conductor: Brent Stewart,
Director: Anapela Polata’ivaom ONZM
Creative Producer: Stacey Leilua
Choreographer: Petmal Petelo
Production and Lighting Design:
Filament Eleven II – Rachel Marlow / Bradley Gledhill

Friday 12th September, St James Theatre (Wellington)
Until September 19 and 20 (Auckland).

Review by Peter Mechen (Middle C)

I took my six-year-old nephew to the St James Theatre in Wellington to see “The Monster in the Maze” – his first-ever opera experience! Of course, I was as excited as he was, expecting something completely and fascinatingly different to the usual operatic experience afforded by works such as “Carmen”, “The Magic Flute”, or “La Traviata”. For one thing, this production places as much importance upon its own unique style of presentation as it does on the story and its characters – the people on the stage ranged from opera “professionals” (a few members of the New Zealand Opera Company) to amateur singers, mostly young people who make up most of the 150-plus chorus members.

For another, the story is a simple, basic version of the age-old and well-known myth about the Greek hero Theseus and his plan to kill the terrible half-man, half-bull Minotaur who lived in a fearful maze called “The Labyrinth” on the island of Crete. And for a third, the situation which the opening of this production presents has resonances which are anything but distant mythological tales confined to the never-never land of fantasy – the cruel and barbarous regime of the King of Crete and his murderous plan to subjugate the Athenians he has just conquered bears an almost sickening likeness to the present genocidal situation  in the Middle East being inflicted upon the Palestinians in Gaza by their remorseless Israeli oppressors.

Maaka Pohatu as Minos, King of Crete    –   photo, Emma Brittenden

In fact the opening scene of the production had enormous theatrical weight and dramatic menace, thanks to the spine-chillingly forceful energies of Maaka Pohatu (King Minos of Crete) who totally dominated the stage with his delivery of the words (clearly spoken rather than sung) and his brutally boastful presence. He was actually given surtitles of a kind inscribed on the archways, somewhat ironically, as he was the one character least in need of them for his intentions to be conveyed to his riveted audience! For this reason I found a good deal of what the other main characters sang hard to decipher – always a problem with opera, even when  in English! I thought surtitles should have been continued throughout (though certainly NOT on cell-phones, as was suggested at one point – why would we go to opera only to have to read things on our cell-phones?)

Such was the power of Pohatu’s delivery of the pitiless proclamation we were stunned, almost as if we ourselves were under the King’s sway along with the Athenians. Certainly, the scenes involving the Athenian children required by Minos to be sacrificed (either every seven or nine years, depending on which version of the myth one reads!) by being put on a ship to Crete bound for the labyrinth in which they will be fed to the Minotaur had enormous poignancy – the children’s youth, beauty and innocence touching on feelings of pity, dread and horror, all exacerbated by a sense throughout the theatre of all-pervading “involvement”.

We were, of course, all buoyed up by the arrival of Theseus (variously lyrical and heroic of voice, and clear of diction) wanting to know what was “up”, and after being told the situation, determinedly announces that he will go with the children and with his machete put an end to the Monster! His mother (Sarah Castle) was, of course aghast at losing her son but Theseus was adamant – he will save Athens and its people from this oppression!

The set design was wonderful, broad-brush-stroke stuff, beginning with dark, starkly-lit pillars evoking King Minos’s forbidding palace as the king issued his proclamation from its depths, then withdrawing the pillars in favour of horizontal beams which rose and fell as requiring opening or more constricted spaces, then criss-crossing with the pillars when the children accompanied by Theseus enter the boat to take them to Crete, the ship’s progress atmospherically “plotted” on a series of horizontals along which the image “sailed”, slowly diminishing in size, the watchers sadly dispersing, led by the Mother, after the ship leaves.

As the ship approached Crete, we saw some of the inhabitants waiting, cast here as a quasi- oppressed group of people, darkly, almost militaristically dressed in near-combat attire, moving about a dim and dismal scenario, enacting a kind of reception-party. The children and Theseus disembarked, the set having formed a kind of criss-cross matrix of imprisonment with a small entrance, through which the visitors passed – though the walls, portals and columns were stylised, straight-sided matrices they readily invited the audience’s individual imaginations to flesh out their reality as the beginning of the labyrinth. The intended victims suddenly encountered a fellow captive, Daedalus (Joel Amosa), the actual designer of the Labyrinth (and who, in some versions of the legend, was himself lost in its intricacies) – whatever the mythic detail, the character was no friend of King Minos, and so helped the hero to find his way to the Minotaur, a manifestation whose appearance was not quite what one might have expected….

Theseus probed deeper as his fearful companions hid behind various outcrops or in secluded configurations – the colours became increasingly lurid (the lighting scenarios were magical in their evocative power) and the appearance on the stage of what seemed like an infernal band of brass musicians was a masterstroke of theatre, especially as the tension was mounting with the viscerally-frightening prospect of the Minotaur’s arrival! – to a blaze of rasping tones from the musicians the hero was confronted with his invisible but incredibly “present” enemy, on whom he fixed his gaze, while slashing and jabbing with his machete! – we were terrorised and fearful, convinced that Theseus was fighting for his life against an enemy we couldn’t actually see but KNEW was there! Theseus companions sang and shouted encouragement as the hero gave his utmost to the fray. By this time the lighting had soaked the setting’s textures in blood from which Theseus arose, machete aloft and triumphant! The devil might be in the detailing, but this unseen devil was now no more, and the way was now open to freedom, release and continuation of life! How more cathartic a feeling could have been conveyed than this one? It remained only for the sadistic Cretan King Minos to express his anger, grief and despair at the destruction of his plan for total subjugation of the Athenian people, thanks to the heroism of Theseus, who was triumphantly reunited with his family and his people!

Members of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Community Singers    –    photo, Emma Brittenden

More, much more, than a splendid depiction of heroism overcoming tyranny, this production spoke for a kind of power of involvement obviously leading up to and throughout the story which, by the end seemed to have resonated with every single person in the theatre. For those of us who were regular opera-goers the unbridled exuberance we found ourselves witnessing on the stage among performers and enablers of the production seemed no less than intoxicating! And people on either side of me in the audience whom I spoke with immediately afterwards (none regular opera-goers) seemed overwhelmed by what they had just seen and been themselves caught up with! As for my six-year-old nephew – he was most gratifyingly entranced by the whole show!

It made memorable the moment when everybody involved with the production, from director Anapela Polata’ivao, creative producer Stacey Leilua, choreographer Petmal Petelo, and the Filament Eleven II design team of Rachel Marlow and Bradley Glkedhill,  together with conductor Brent Stewart and his onstage/offstage musicians, gathered together on the stage at the end to unite with the audience to enjoy the fruition of those expressions of mutual appreciation and communal achievement which in the words of NZ Opera General Director Brad Cohen, come from experiencing storytelling through the power of the human singing voice.

 

 

“The Phantasmagoria is constant!” – Ravel approves his magical new 1925 opera!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MAURICE RAVEL  –  Opera in One Act – “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges”
(libretto by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)
Students and staff of Te Kōkī / New Zealand School Of Music
Victoria University of Wellington / Te Herenga Waka
– in association with Toi Whakaari / NZ Drama School

Sara Brodie – Director
Therese Hanaray – Assistant Director –
Martin Riseley – Conductor and Head of Strings
Kathryn Mosley – Chorusmaster and Head of Collaborative Piano
Grace O’Brien – Set and Costume Design
Alex Fisher – Lighting Design
Brooklyn Saunders – Production Manager\

Cast and Musicians
Charlotte Secker  –  The Child
Francesca Fagan  –  The Mother, the Cup
Charle Rainey –  The Armchair, the Male Cat
Greer McCarthy – The Bergère Chair
Joseph Clinton – The Grandfather Clock, a Tree
Elias Nguyen – The Teapot, the Arithmetic Teacher, the Tree Frog
Chu My Duyen – The Fire, the Nightingale
Cadence Chung – A Shepherd, the Dragonfly
Eve Parker-Groves – A Shepherdess, the Bat
Emilia Gray – The Princess
Eunice Ng – the Female Cat, an Owl
Tiaki McArdle – the Squirrel

Members of Te Kōkī Orchestra, New Zealand School of Music

The Hannah, Hannah Playhouse, Cambridge Terrace, Wellington
Saturday 6th September, 2025

Maurice Ravel’s only operatic ventures during his remarkable compositional career were two smaller-scale works, written and performed a number of years apart – firstly, in 1911, came the brilliant, tongue-in-cheek satire “L’Heure espagnole” (The Spanish Hour), and then (in the wake of the Great War) succeeded by an ostensibly less “adult” but more deeply-felt creation, “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges” (The Child and the Magic). The latter is a work whose explorations of a child’s world don’t spare the listener occasional moments of cruelty, darkness and sorrow touched upon in places by the story. The original idea for the scenario came from the author Colette, whose first intention was for the story to be told in the form of a ballet. Ravel, however, had been persuaded that an operatic successor to “L’Heure espagnole” was needed, and had meantime been stimulated by the “new wave” of musicals and revues with new dance-forms by composers such as Gershwin. As the new work took shape so too did the composer’s enthusiasm for these “operetta-style” features take wing, to the point where Ravel could enthusiastically describe preparations for the first performance in Monte Carlo in March 1925  with the words “…an extraordinary production – the roles are numerous and the phantasmagoria is constant!”

This 2025 realisation was co-ordinated by Jenny Wollerman, Head of Classical Voice at Wellington’s Te Koki School of Music, bringing together students and staff members from both the Music School and Toi Whakaari (NZ Drama School). It joins a number of memorable productions by the Music School over the years, with, to my mind  Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Verdi’s rarely-performed “Il Corsaro” readily resonating in my memory still, as I write this.

Director Sara Brodie’s production at “The Hannah” most appropriately celebrated the work’s one-hundredth birth-year, echoing triumphantly the composer’s enthusiastic description of the original event with its “continually and intimately-mingled” dancing on the part of the singers. She made splendid use of the venue’s multi-levelled and -entranced features, encapsulating the audience within bevies of singer/actors on two sides and musicians on the remaining two, so that we felt at times as much participants in as observers of the story’s by turns dream-like, quixotic, unpredictable and heart-warming expositions.

Straightaway, Ravel’s innocently sinuous Prelude drew us into the dream, a kind of twilit world of light and shadow, suggesting the “old-fashioned Normandy country home” of Colette’s setting, complete with armchair, fireplace and Grandfather clock – even the shadow cast by the offstage character of the Mother effectively reinforced the “old-world” atmosphere and its sense of well-established order.

These things were, of course then shattered, literally, to pieces, firstly by the disobedient Child’s tantrums in destroying or disabling almost everything she could find in the room, then by the fantastic “coming to life” of many of these same objects, each bent on demonstrating to the Child her wilfulness, selfishness and even cruelty in carrying out her unthinking acts of destruction and unkindness to both creatures and objects that co-existed in her world.

Even when escaping to the garden, the Child’s relief was short-lived, as the trees themselves confronted her with the “wounds” she had subjected them to, her guilt intensified further by a dragonfly whose mate she had killed so as to pin to a wall, and also a squirrel she had enclosed in a cage. Overcome by shame, she called out for her Mother, infuriating the creatures, who then attacked her – in the subsequent melee, a squirrel was wounded, and the remorseful Child confounded the creatures present by dressing the squirrel’s wounded paw. Moved by this change of heart on the part of their previous tormenter, the animals and trees then sang “Il est bon, l’enfant, il est sage” (The Child is good and wise”), at the end of which she was reunited with her (still offstage) Mother.

The power of emotion in Ravel’s music never ceases to amaze me, as here – above all else, it’s the depth of sadness in the music, including that expressed by the Child for her much-loved but now-forsaken “Princess” which indicated the composer’s capacity for depth of feeling behind the accustomed “coolness” of the mask. But more bleakly and tragically we shared the Child’s confrontation with her part in the dragonfly’s loss of its mate and the squirrel’s equally heart-rending loss of its freedom, moments which cumulatively “seeded” the animals’ final forgiving chorus to produce a lump-in-the-throat effect which for me flooded those concluding ambiences, and was here achingly, almost cathartically realised by the singers and players.

The set’s atmospheric qualities buoyed up every scene, sometimes amusingly, sometimes poignantly  and sometimes startlingly, invariably making the point to the Child that each irruption was the consequence of her doings. As the Child in the Blue (Second) Cast, Charlotte Secker was superb in both her singing and acting delineations of her character’s situation, and in her reactions to her accusers, taking us on a kind of journey through her various stages of realisation. In each instance she demonstrated fear, guilt and remorse in appropriate and ever-changing proportions as the encounters clicked over, her voice eloquent both in exclamation and song (particularly so in her serenade to the Princess).

As for her various accusers, every scene had a particular flavour of characterisation brought out either in voice, in demeanour or in both, by each of the single protagonists or groups. In every case the physical characterisations were admirable, the olde-world aspect of the pair of chairs, “LeFauteuil” and “La Bergere”, the petulant Grandfather Clock, the quixotic Teapot and Cup, the excitingly fearsome Fire, the pastoral charms of the Shepherds and Shepherdesses, and the beautiful Fairy Princess (for me, shades of the “Fairy” in the “Pinocchio” story I often read as a romantically-inclined child!), not to mention the manic, attention-grabbing  Arithmetic teacher and his well-drilled coterie of numbers! – such brilliant singing, movement and staging!

Two wonderfully-characterised Cats then made the most of their delightful “rubber ball” scene, managing to be suggestive together (without resorting to Andrew Lloyd-Webber-like vulgarity!) – before the story took the Child outside to the Garden. Of course there was no respite there, with everything, trees, insects and animals, testifying to the by-now remorseful Child’s cruel and insensitive treatment of Nature, with even the group of bats’ beautifully-lit movements and the frog group’s lilypad cavortings suggesting flight and escape as much as play, and the dragonfly’s and squirrel’s vocal contributions in particular so very tragic and touching and beautiful.

This was a classic “ensemble” affair, in which everybody – singers, musicians, directors, designers, stage-managers, technicians, and enablers of all kinds – gave of their best to bring to fruition something which should resonate in memory for a long time to come! – very great credit to Sara Brodie whose direction of it all made possible such a captivating operatic experience.

 

NZTrio – “fantastique” here in Wellington in every way

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZTrio presents “Fantastique”
Music by Turina, Shostakovich, Chen Yi, Psathas and Franck

JOAQUÍN TURINA – Circulo (1936)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Trio No. 1 in C Minor (1923)
CHEN YI – Tibetan Tunes (2007)
JOHN PSATHAS – Angelus (2025)
CESAR FRANCK – Piano Trio No. 1in F-sharp Minor (1841)

NZTrio – Amalia Hall (violin) / Callum Hall (‘cello) / Somi Kim (piano)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 30th August, 2025

To my surprise I discovered my last encounter with the justly-vaunted NZTrio took place no less than seven years previously – though the Covid pandemic can be held responsible for numerous  cancellations, dislocations and reorganisations of music presentations over time, such a biblical duration of estrangement in this case hardly seemed likely! On further investigation I found I had actually been “gazumphed” on a handful of occasions by my fellow-reviewers who’d obviously snaffled the Trio’s more recent Wellington appearances for their own delectation!

Now, here in 2025 I realise this is not the same NZTrio I had seen and heard perform in 2018 – in fact, not even slightly! These are three different musicians whose qualities have naturally realigned my expectations, but whose performance has predictably given rise to a “vive la difference” reaction, and particularly as I had already encountered both Amalia Hall and Somi Kim as concerto soloists in concert to spectacular effect.

To enrich matters even further, the group had a “guest” cellist on this occasion, one who’s currently filling in for the recently-appointed Matthias Balzat – apparently the Trio are using “guest” cellists in different programmes throughout the year, of which Callum Hall (who happens to be Amalia Hall’s brother) is one for this Fantastique programme. Whether this arrangement will continue in future seasons, or the Trio will eventually “secure” Balzat’s occupancy of the cellist’s chair remains to be seen!

Described as “a programme of contrasts”  this Fantastique presentation certainly filled the bill, with a positively global range of evocations! Joachim Turina’s music is slowly finding its way back into concert programmes of all kinds, my memory being of a recent performance in Wellington of the once-popular and colourful Danzas fantásticas, and of not-so recent but still-remembered occasional outings for the composer’s second Piano Trio. Tonight’s work was new to me, and a joyful surprise – a brilliant evocation of an Andalusian day, whose title, Circulo, suggests the metaphorical “circle” of a regular world-wide phenomenon of progression from dawn through midday to dusk – there are, of course, “no words to make the sun roll east”, as New Zealand poet ARD Fairburn once wrote….

The music appropriately began with Amanecer (Dawn), with darkly and deeply pondering cello and piano exchanges, from which grew an opening melody on the cello – the violin took it further, and with the piano’s full-blooded support united with the ‘cello in a soulful string unison utterance! How beautifully the NZTrio players then nudged the growing light of day forwards, colouring the changes beautifully with alternating harmonies and reaching a point where the music was liberated into the morning’s fullnesses! Here the violin and ‘cello soared upwards as the piano cascaded light-and-sound energies in all directions, the music conveying an irresistible sense of joyous delight at the day’s promise amid pending excitement, then breaking off exultantly at the top of the music’s concluding phrase!

The second movement, Mediodia (Midday). plunged us into the world of flamenco trajectories and sonorities, with flailing pizzicati from the strings and crunching rhythms from the piano dramatically riveting the listeners’ attentions, see-sawing throughout the movement  from pizzicato to arco and from jagged accents to sultry lines – the flamenco rhythms gathered themselves for a final sequence of exuberant swashbuckling gesturings before grandly tipping over and into the work’s final Crepúsculo (Dusk) movement, redolent with feelings of spent energies and relaxed release, the music gradually and beautifully surrendering its buoyancies and high spirits to the oncoming night and its mysteries – gorgeous string  playing from Amalia Hall and Callum Hall, with sonorous support from Somi Kim’s piano here, redolent with a nostalgic sense of farewell – with such playing it was easy for me to fall madly in love with this work.

As promised each item brought with it a markedly different sense of “place”, with Dmitri Shostakovich’s youthful Piano Trio in C Minor bringing a new world to view. The marked contrasts within the piece itself were somewhat accentuated by the seventeen year-old composer’s somewhat agitated state when the work was written, of having fallen in love and subsequently dedicating the work to the object of his affections  – she eventually married someone else having left her indelible mark on this music’s wildly passionate character! Adding to the music’s character are the pronounced influences of Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Glazunov, the last-named  Shostakovich’s composition teacher at the Petrograd Conservatory. Despite its juvenile aspects the music readily hints at a number of the composer’s lifelong traits, such as his love of grotesquerie in various forms – sudden changes of mood through contrasting dynamics, timbres and trajectories, His occasional employment as a cinema pianist also shows through –  I read an account of Shostakovich actually rehearsing his part in the work with others as an accompaniment to some films he was playing for!

The piece had almost everything its instrumentalists could want as regards satisfying and involving display of all kinds – trenchantly-involving lines, lyrical display, brilliant and quixotic passages of teamwork, and in certain places near-fulsome virtuosity – both Amalia Hall’s violin and Callum Hall’s ‘cello caught the heart-on-sleeve melancholy of the opening exchanges, but were equally at home with the skitterish contrasting episodes which boiled over in places, the players appearing to relish the “sparring” aspects of the sequences – as for pianist Somi Kim, her playing delivered in spadefuls every variation of mood, from the deep, full throated utterances of the opening, through the more gently-lyrical Rachmaninovian sequences to the all-out virtuosic sweep of the work’s more coruscating moments! Another tidbit of information I picked up from elsewhere was that the final section of the work had at some stage been lost, so that the piece’s last 16 bars in the work as published (not until after the composer’s death) were apparently “added” by one of Shostakovich‘s pupils (Boris Tischenko).

Next came music by Chinese-born American-based composer Chen Yi, a work called “Tibetan Tunes”, one which I’d previously heard twelve years ago, when it was played by the “old” NZ Trio at a memorable “China meets New Zealand in music” concert held at Victoria University of Wellington.  Chinese-born Chen Yi, now living in the United States was trained as a classical violinist, but was inspired by her contact during the Cultural Revolution with Chinese folk music to take up further studies of her folk music heritage. She moved to the US in 1986 to continue her musical studies at Columbia University, and at present is Distinguished Professor of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri/Kansas City.

Her two-movement work Tibetan Tunes, written in 2007 for the New Pacific Trio and premiered by them the same year was inspired firstly by a Tibetan folk melody “Du Mu” which is the name of a god of Tibetan Buddhism, one which the composer here wished  to depict “in a serene mood”. I remember thinking at my previous hearing of the work how evocative of something “elsewhere” was the writing for the instruments – as it was here, the violin’s harmonic-like held notes contrasting with the rhapsodic, folkish cello tune while the piano’s echoed the exchanges with decorative roulades. After some gentle, widely-spaced canonic gesturings, the strings joined in unison to celebrate the god’s all-encompassing equanimity, and afterwards reflecting individually, leaving the piano with the last word.

The second piece, “Dui Xie” had its genesis in ensembled folk-music featuring bowed and plucked strings and bamboo flutes – dance-like from the beginning, and altogether livelier than the opening work, the strings sang a melody and its variants over the piano’s rhythms, the cello’s lines having a particularly folkish kind of portamento character in places – charmingly old-fashioned! This excitingly changed to exciting string pizzicati and driving piano figurations, before the opening returned bringing  expressive, recitative-like harmonics – amazing playing from Amalia Hall – along with piano ostinati, sustained trills from the strings and a climactic mid-air finish!

Appropriately one of the concert’s stopover places was Aotearoa New Zealand,  represented here by a work from John Psathas, a piece with the name Angelus and freshly commissioned from the NZTrio itself. It’s actually in part derived from an earlier work for ‘cello and piano called “Halo”, one whose final movement Psathas reworked for NZTrio – these are the composer’s comments at the time of writing the complete work: –

I created this piece around the time of my mother’s death, something I’ve always found it difficult to write about.

The pre-recorded sounds in this piece are very subtle, and in a live performance it should not be visible to the audience how and when these sounds are beginning and ending.

The ‘circle on the head of an angel’ is a good metaphor for these extra sounds; they are like an audio ‘halo’ around the live sounds. They should be quiet enough that the listener isn’t sure if they are hearing them or not, almost like it’s an invisible processing of the natural piano sound.

They are supposed to represent the presence of a spirit from ‘the other side of life’ – for me it is the presence of my mother’s spirit in the room. For you or anyone listening, it could be anyone in your life or mind or heart.

The last movement is really about (the memory of) conflict between child and parent. This conflict is fuelled by strong emotions, mostly love, and is often powerfully dramatic. The way our anger and conflict can be shaped by love within our closest relationships.

The last LH idea in the piano is a way to end with a question, and also a representation of the infinite, and also a dissolving of the physical (the live instrument sound) into the spiritual (the invisible audio halo). I love this ending very much – it is like music from beyond life. (John Psathas)

From the piece’s abrupt beginning the music grabs the listener with its insistent driving rhythms, the syncopations activating exhilarating criss-cross rhythmic thrusts and tugs, with pizzicato violin set against arco cello set against running piano, the intensities rising and falling as the violin’s sul ponticello tones rasp and sting, with the strings  descending into the depths, the tremolandi tones intensifying, and the piano sounding doom-laden pronouncements. As the ambiences descend further the composer’s “audio halo” sounds as if from another world, eerily activating a harmonics response from the strings, a strange and wondrous dialogue of connection of sounds floating through space.

Out of the exchanges come impulses of urgency, the energies pushing all ways, upwards, downwards and forwards simultaneously, the piano elaborating on an ever-ascending chorale-like theme which leads to an impassioned kind of recitative from the strings, additionally “whipped up” by swirling piano figures – the resonant sonic wave emanating from the sudden climax of this cornucopian all-together is almost heart-stoppingly allowed to run its course until a gentle piano ostinato emerges, registering first a violin then a cello tremolando response – and, as the piano continues to gently rhapsodise and the strings murmur their assent, the sonic halo reappears, transfixing our riveted sensibilities into an indefinite silence…..what an experience!

I was looking forward to the César Franck Piano Trio at the programme’s end, fascinated at its Op.1 place in this composer’s output and marvelling upon further investigation at there actually being two other similar works sharing the same Opus number! These works were praised by both Mendelssohn and Liszt, the latter generously organising further performances throughout Germany – but Franck’s early years and works were blighted by his difficult relationship with a dominant father, resulting in eventual estrangement and the young man going his own way, pursuing the career of an organist and only returning to chamber and symphonic works in his maturity. As someone who loves masterpieces such as the Violin Sonata and the Piano Quintet, this Op.1 Trio was for me fascinating in sounding occasional pre-echoes of the inspiration that would eventually flower to produce those resounding achievements of Franck’s later years.

A stepwise piano figure opened the work, joined by cello and violin elaborating on a soulful theme, with the exchanges intensifying the interaction – out of a sudden pause came a charming second theme, the instruments then building the triplet rhythms up with gusto, Somi Kim’s piano pounding out the trajectories  as Amalia Hall’s violin passionately sang the melody, with Callum Hall’s ‘cello-tremolandi filling out the quasi-orchestral textures with urgently upward-rushing figures! These vigorous peregrinations wound the exchanges down through major-minor key shifts to a crashing,almost apoplectic-making concluding chord!

An allegro molto movement followed, the piano tapping out a repeated note triplet rhythm and the strings urging along a kind of horseback-ride melody – splendid stuff, with the strings adding skitterish figurations for exciting effect! – the trio section did well with simple means, a downward-rushing scale in canon between piano and strings, varying this effectively with the strings ascending against the piano’s descent! A return to the triplet scherzo music had the solo strings varying the  mix with pizzicato repetitions of the horseback music, almost to sinister effect in places – this led to an unexpectedly resounding plunge, attacca, into the work’s finale – a stirring transition which worked splendidly, so that, almost before we knew what was happening, the Allegro Maestoso was on its way, complete with  great pianistic flourishes and gesturings from Somi Kim.

Easeful, lyrical and whole-hearted playing from Amalia Hall’s violin and Callum Hall’s ‘cello engaged our interest through contrasting minor-key episodes and some singular, almost honky-tonk modulations – the young Franck determined to flaunt his wares! – that done, the players raced into what felt like the movement’s coda, at the conclusion of which , the unexpected pause before the final flourish caught us out, as it would have done many audiences before, bursting in as we did, with premature applause! –  followed, of course, by subsequent laughter and giggles all around at the combination of our eagerness and the youthful composer’s largesse! All in all –  Fantastique! – just as promised!

STROMA – a quarter-century of recreated effervescence in heaven and earth!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – Heaven and Earth – a celebration of 25 years of bold new music

Works by Leila Adu-Gilmore, Olivier Messiaen, Gemma Peacocke, John Rimmer,
Sofia Gubaidulina and Michael Norris

OLIVIER MESSIAEN – Louange à l’immortalite de Jesus (1941)
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Gabriela Glapska (piano)
LEILA ADU-GILMORE – Heaven is Life (2025) (premiere)
Julia Broom (violin), Nicholas Hancox (viola). Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
JOHN RIMMER – When Sea Meets Sky 2 (1975)
Hamish McKeich (conductor), Bridget Douglas (flute), Patrick Hayes
(clarinet), Lenny Sakofsky (percussion), Gabriela Glapska (piano),
Julia Broom (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
MICHAEL NORRIS – The Spaces in Between (2025)
Gabriela Glapska (piano), Anna van der Zee (violin) Ken Ichinose (cello)
SOFIA GUBAIDULINA – Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeit (1980) (Garden of Joy and
Sorrow)
Bridget Douglas (flute) / Michelle Velvin (harp) Nicholas Hancox ( viola)
GEMMA PEACOCKE – Sky-fields (2020)
Bridget Douglas (flute), Gabriela Glapska (piano) Ken Ichinose (cello)
Thomas Guldborg (percussion)

Public Trust Hall, Wellington,

Wednesday, 27th August, 2025

This was a red-letter concert for Wellington’s contemporary music ensemble Stroma, being the 25th anniversary (almost to the day) of the ensemble’s very first concert on the 18th of August, 2000. Michael Norris, one of the founders of the fledgling group (and a co-director of the present Stroma Ensemble) welcomed us all warmly,  outlining for us something of the flavour of the group’s genesis and current raison d’etre, including the evening’s inclusion of both home-grown and off-shore works, and the presence of at least one premiere (see below).

The concert this evening actually began with an excerpt from a larger work by Olivier Messiaen – which I’ll describe at the end of this review, and instead give pride of place to the palpable excitement generated by the evening’s premiere, second on the programme. This was  New Zealand composer Leila Adu-Gilmore’s Heaven is Life, a work which has its genesis in the composer’s reaction to present-day global strife and civil unrest in the wake of travelling in India and encountering a community of Tibetan Buddhist nuns at Karma Chokor Dechen Nunnery in Rumtek, Sikkim, India, a group of women, in the composer’s words, “caring for others, garnering respect, and sought out more and more for practices previously performed by men”. Adu-Gilmore was particularly moved by the nuns’ chanting for hours both morning and evening, in ceremonies for the local community, and decided to record the ritual, from which she eventually picked a short, self-contained chant with the title Green Tara, the community’s conceptualisation of a “Mother Earth”, a being whose wisdom and compassion would help those in their time of need. She then composed a string trio whose gesturings and tones would complement the nuns’ voices, intending to blend the recording of the material within the Trio’s performance. The result is this performance, dedicated to the nuns and young children in their care at Karma Chokor Dechen Nunnery, in Rumtek, Sikkim, India.

The performance here created a truly singular effect with the nuns’ voices intermeshed with the instruments in a parallel expressions of invocation, sharing through common cause a heightened sense of a process centred on the life-force –  for the nuns the focus was “Green Tara”, while from the standpoint of the composer and musicians the resulting instrumental sounds made for a kind of connective recognition. This was most marked, oddly, when the chanting voices stopped, leaving the stringed instruments in possession of those “acquired” connections, and charged with conveying their retrospective essence to us! The shift from meditative lines and impulses to dance-like gesturings in the trio’s music indicated something of that inclination to further communicate something of a “Heaven is Life” feeling for the here and now…..

John Rimmer’s Where Sea Meets Sky 2 is a “twin” manifestation for acoustic instruments of a previous electroacoustic piece of the same name. and which was inspired by a flight across the Tasman. The piece was an “outgrowth” of the electronic piece for the composer in that the acoustic version did things that the electronic version didn’t do, though without one superseding the other.

The work had an arresting beginning – a loud chord bolstered by tremolando notes from winds and piano, but allowed to die away, followed by a sliver of percussion and deep piano chords, stimulating string-timbres, and winds hanging on to ever-diminishing tones. The piece’s evocations had a constant state of flux, with the instruments’ variations between spectral irruptions and sustained tones adding to the atmosphere – for instance,  we heard percussion scintillations with a gong-stroke, then strings playing disembodied held notes as winds sounded single-note irruptions and piano adding to the ambiences with brief treble impulses – the instruments particularly crowded in their impulses throughout the music’s middle section, creating a constantly interactive cornucopian sound picture to the point of near frenzy, before slowly dissipating, gradually favouring longer-held tones (clarinet and flute solos remaining in the memory), augmented by wide-ranging “dampened” piano notes and gradually receding percussion – all reflecting its composer’s particular sensitivity towards ambient detail.

Michael Norris, himself contributed a thoughtful (and entertaining) spoken preface to his recent (2025) and intensely visceral composition “The Spaces in Between”, a work which here put us in touch with the music’s subject-matter in no uncertain terms – I confess to always enjoying Norris’s readiness in his music I’ve heard for employing direct and often graphic (though invariably intuitive-sounding) stimuli – two pieces in particular I remember which demonstrated for me this power of  illustrative evocation are, firstly a 2018 performance of Claro, written for full orchestra, (described as :”an exercise of expressivity out of abstractiveness”) , and (when reviewing the disc in 2023) a recording featuring an epic string quartet work Exitus, one containing a number of raw musical depictions of different cultures’ conceptualisations of afterlife.

Here, I particularly enjoyed Norris’s succinct descriptive phrase  “rocks can bend” words which he attributed to his father, and which sums up the effect of forces constantly at work in our own Earth’s particular geosphere, in direct relation to which is the composer’s own sonic realisation of the interplay of these forces – “The Spaces in Between”. Norris quoted both Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Rashmirathi at the beginning of his programme note about the music, firstly (Ovid) “the shifting story of the world”, and then (Ramdhari Singh) “everything is born from me, everything returns to me”.  The music’s evocation therefore deals with a transitory world, where the idea of terra firma is in fact one subject to “inexorable flux”.

To entrust the depiction of such forces at work to the seemingly economical contingent of a piano trio seemed a boldly ambitious scheme, but the musicians here seemed to readily transcend any such physical limitations with the energy and focus of their evocations throughout, with firm, constant-sounding beginnings from the piano playing fifths and the strings establishing a palpably “present” state of being.  As the strings began “pulling” gradually at the tones and patternings of the notes, suggesting inexorable pressures, the piano intensified its patterned fifths into a rapid ostinato, the strings’ intensities deepening, with “bending” of their notes, indicating the elemental nature of forces at work. The ostinato fifths galvanised into more rapidly-repeated note-patterns as the irresistible forces exerted their effect – the strings played both held and repeated notes against the piano’s constant arpeggiations and tremolandi depicting the ferment within and the evident disruptions without, the music’s key-changes further dramatizing the processes. The tones suddenly took on a soaring kind of aspect whose strands melted down to meet the irruptions from below, with a single-note “centre” that turned into a warmish chord slowly spreading through the sounds’ harmonic world, the piano’s fifth transformed into octave-sounds, everything slightly “smudged” in effect, or “fractured”, a quality that felt to the listener like a recast or remoulded state of being – as if one’s own sense of existence had been reshaped,  and a new order prevailed – again I found myself thinking of TS Eliot’s description of “an eternal action, an eternal patience”.

Sofia Gubaidulina  who died earlier this year at the age of ninety-three was notable for her work’s “purity of sound” and her love for “ecstatic incantation”. Growing up in Soviet Russia in a predominantly atheist household, she maintained an unquenchable personal religious faith which found its way into her music despite official disapproval (she took heart from the quiet support of Shostakovich at the time), and was admitted to the Union of Soviet composers in 1961.Inspired by her contemporaries, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Part and Valentin Silvestrov, she looked beyond her Russianness to 20tth century modernism in general, and developed a reputation for incorporating theological ideas in her concert music, famously Introitus (1978) and Offertorium (1980), besides numerous other works since then.

Her 1980 work Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeit (Garden of Joy and Sorrow) was inspired directly by two literary works. One was a biography of a legendary Armenian storyteller/singer Sayat-Nova, written by the Russian writer Iv Oganov, and the other a set of verses by the modern German poet Francisco Tanzer – the two works encapsulate Gubaidulina’s creative philosophy in the merging of their different influences, Oganov’s intense and rapturous personalisation of the garden’s flowering here finding a kind of sublimated detachment of feeling in Tanzer’s wry reasonings – Gubaidulina’s score directs that the original German text of the poet’s words be read aloud – a good thing the programme notes gave us some of Oganov’s sentences as well! – “the peal of the singing garden grew”, and “the lotus was set aflame by music” – those thoughts enabled us to experience even more directly the composer’s  own progressions in her music  from bright, visceral colourations to their “true endings”.

This engagingly ambient work for flute, harp and viola began with a kind of “awakening” duet between flute and harp, the sounds gradually coalescing into consciousness via encouraging breaths of tone from the flute and bent glissando tone-gulps (almost sitar-like) from the harp, followed by eerily beautiful fanfare-harmonics from the viola, two different sonic worlds gradually effecting a meeting. The viola darkened its tones, flute and harp tremulously acclaimed its presence, and the “trialogues” began – beautifully arpeggiated exchanges, firstly flute-and-harp, and then viola-and-harp, the latter “preparing” the strings for a bone-dry ostinato to accompany the like-minded viola. How resonant was the following sequence, the three instruments building blocks of effervescing phrases, until the flute’s spectacular downward-cascading tumble! And what a journey we were taken upon by the composer’s  “ecstatic flowering” versions of the music’s bright major aspects – such a joyous and uplifting flute solo on the piece’s “central plateau” which was then set against those“darker intervals” of minor seconds and thirds which then grew out of the crevices and cracks of the aftermath’s rather more rueful continuance!  A  meditative viola solo took us back to the work’s beginning with those nostalgic viola arpeggio harmonics, sitar-like harp glissando-notes and envoi-like flute notes – how interesting to then have the human voice making a contribution to what the music expresses, which we got from violist Nicholas Hancox at the end…….

Originally from Hamilton, Gemma Peacocke studied firstly at Victoria University and the  New Zealand School of Music before moving to the United States in 2014  where she  worked with various ensembles, including her co-founded Kinds of Kings Collective, often in projects with a sociopolitical focus on under-heard voices.   Sky Fields, a 2020 work (which for some reason got into the programme listed as a 2025 composition), concluded the concert with a kind of visionary series of vignettes, introduced  and re-emphasised, often with compelling, attention-grabbing urgency, by the ensemble’s delivery of “blips” – unpredictably-placed but redolently hopeful irruptions of energy  whose sequence suggested a kind of life-dance which Peacocke characterised in her programme-note with the words “even when we can’t see it  there is hope”. The composer drew her title from a sequence in J.R.Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series of books when one of the characters in the third book Return of the King refers to the promise of the coming day, though hidden in the darkness, already opening in the eastern mountains’ Sky-Fields.

The ”blips” which began the piece could be said to “clear the air” for both performers and the audience, a kind of “sky-washing” of sonic textures in preparation for something new and original – the toccata-like togetherness of the opening trajectories initiated by the “blips” combined irruptive energies, such as the flute’s explosive interjections, with more delicate, patient intertwinings. There was a feeling of the textures being airborne rather than earth-bound, with even the bowed marimba notes seeming to arise from out of the earth and take flight – it all brought a cumulative kind of momentum to the music, heading towards the “what happens next” pause before the second movement…

Again, the blips! – the flute gave us what sounded like birdsong, a summons of sorts to the cello singing with the piano and the flute and marimba dancing, then all coming together on a “shared “ note, commented on by the piano and irradiated by a sparkling cymbal roll. Movement Three then blended the sounds beautifully, the lines “floating’ between the instruments and their different timbral characteristics and punctuating things with a nudged phrase or occasional “blip”, the intensities of exchange growing, resulting in a kind of concerted recitative point, the gestures ‘displaying” to the others in turn, each almost vying for attention!

The toccata trajectories rebegan, the interactive energies ranging from ghostly murmurings to sudden ghoul-like cries – and then, out of the silence came a new kind of awakening, a fifth movement with a more relaxed pace, and the lines a quiet radiance that suggested a growing towards surety – more “blips” and other irruptions refocused the players, occasional reminiscences of things like the flute’s bird song calls helping to reinforce a “coming together” – as the music reached a dance-like stage a robustly upward concerted call finished the piece!

I thought I’d finish the review on a kind of retrospective “where it all began” note in relation to the concert, particularly as the work from which this movement was taken has long been regarded as something unique in musical history. For its composer it represented  “a leap into an invisible paradise”.  Unlike his contemporaries, French composer Olivier Messiaen did not want to eradicate the old world or fix his gaze totally on the thereafter – instead he saw Paradise in daily life, in the words of Alex Ross, its “happenstance epiphanies”. In a way, Stroma’s collective modernist instincts seemed, like the contents of this evening’s programme, inclusive rather than rigorously “avant-garde” in a pure sense. Which is why I felt that Messiaen’s excerpt from what probably became the most famous of all his works, the “Quartet for the End of Time” was a more-than-appropriate way to begin this anniversary concert. And while I haven’t mentioned above the playing of any of the musicians by name in any of the other items (trusting in an acceptance of a certain standard excellence of quality on everybody’s part throughout the evening) I can’t help but comment on the rapt beauties of both Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s and Gabriela Glapska’s playing of their respective instruments throughout the work’s final piece, Louange à l’immortalite de Jesus. Time certainly seemed to stand still throughout this tribute to the composer, the circumstances, the occasion, the musicians involved past and present, and to music in general as an on-going living entity. And to Stroma? Messiaen was saying in his music, “Que tu vives pour toujours”.  Agreed.

 

Ghost Trio’s St.Andrew’s concert haunts the memory

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Ghost Trio –
TAKEMITSU, BEETHOVEN, DOWNIE and SHOSTAKOVICH

The Ghost Trio – Monique Lapins (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
Gabriela Glapska (piano)

TAKEMITSU – Between Tides (1993)
BEETHOVEN – Piano Trio in D Major Op.70 No.1 “Ghost”
GLEN DOWNIE – Sonata da chiesa (2024)
SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Trio No.2 in E Minor Op. 67 No.2

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Te Aro, Wellington
Sunday 17th August, 2025

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

“What’s in a name?” could well have been the unspoken phrase hovering about St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace on Sunday afternoon prior to the opening of Wellington Chamber Music’s most recent presentation, whose first item was, as per the written programme supposed to be Beethoven’s D Major Piano Trio Op,70 No.1, better known as the “Ghost”, due to its haunting second movement, ripe for association with  famous theatrical “ghosts” such as those that occur in Shakespeare – Hamlet or Macbeth coming most readily to mind. And here, on the performers’ platform was scheduled  none other than an eponymously-named trio of musicians to open the concert by “playing their song”. What happened instead, of course, is now history, with the musicians themselves deciding that Beethoven’s somewhat overwhelming string of “ghostly” scenarios could result in tidal waves of resonance that would swamp the gentle undulations of the work by Tōru Takemitsu due to follow.

So, in the minds of listeners who knew the Beethoven, and would have prepared themselves for that tumultuous opening salvo of energised sounds, the surprise intervention by Takemitsu’s  “Between Tides” would have seemed like the proverbial sea-change into something rich and strange! – here were delicacies of sound evoked by lightly astringent piano harmonies, answered by string phrases whose solo lines variously trailed into their own silences, or intertwined, Ravel-like in places, briefly touching on their own worlds before returning to the piano’s sway, and awaiting the next version of exchange..

A world of  chameleon-like pursuit was the result, every wave of impulse bringing its own variant of the same life-force. I was reminded while listening of human breath when still, and of surrendering to impulses not necessarily my own – also of the infinite variety of the experience  from one’s imagination  either from the harmonics or tremolandi played by the strings or the free-ranging spaces between piano notes, contrasted with assertive unison utterances that give further musical food for contemplation. It’s a piece I found throughout to be “in waiting” in general terms, though its tensions occasionally bubble up and almost right over – its ending is satisfying enigmatic, leaving one with the idea of, in TS Eliot’s words, “an eternal action, an eternal patience” ……

Having been suitably dispersed by the action of tides, our sensibilities were gathered in once again with a vengeance by the promised Beethoven! I was at last allowed the delayed indulgence of pointing out an obvious kind of coincidence, correlation or conjunction with what seemed like paradigmatic “ownership” of this music by the ensemble – right from the very first whirlwind ascending phrases there was, I felt, a “this is what we do” feeling of full-blooded identification! The intensities of this work are concentrated, throwing together both heroism and turmoil throughout the opening movement,  with as much sprung intensity in the hushed exchanges of the second subject as in the flamboyant opening unison – how “breathing as one” they sounded, here, throughout these contrasting episodes, and how much they relished the concerted singing passages in the development as the more vigorous “horse-and-rider” episodes leading to the recapitulation – such an invigorating journey!

Cello and violin are vibrato-less at the slow movement’s beginning, the piano interspersing with suitably ghostly eloquence, extended by the ‘cello and violin who together voice the feeling of some kind of other-worldly presence, though leading us towards some consolation amid the gloom. The music’s central section begins darkly, the cello leading the way, contrasting agitated and desolate-sounding lines, suggesting personal sorrow, loneliness and frustration in the music’s explorations, the players leaving us with a single repeated enigmatic note over which to ponder at the end.

How resilient the mind that can produce such a finale after so downcast a mood! Here, like with the first movement, was a “tour de force” of ensemble playing, with absolutely brilliant pianism from Gabriela Glapska, and equally stunning dovetailing of their concerted passages from Monique Lapins and Ken Ichinose. The “questioning” aspect of the opening theme led to all kinds of suspensions and adroit manoeuvrings of both the whimsical and helter-skelter variety, leaving us all breathlessly invigorated at the end, and somewhat gob-smacked at both the individual and concerted virtuosity of the players!

Glen Downie’s was a new name for me, as was the work, Sonata da Chiesa, a piece written this year for the Ghost Trio to take on tour. The music takes its name (literally, “Church Sonata”) from baroque times, and was inspired by music written by Vivaldi for the ‘cello. In a programme note Downie talks about the music “breaking away” from its original inspiration (characterised by ruins of “worn material”) and attempting to rebuild anew from the “surviving stone”. A specific inspiration for the piece was a UK building, the Christchurch Priory, originally a Norman building, but containing layers wrought by different eras in the building’s history, a quality Downie intended his piece to replicate as “a uniform expressivity”

In four movements, the piece began with piano arpeggios, and attention-grabbing violin notes, the latter reverting to a sombre exploration of the piano figurations, whose buildup suggests an architectural quality, with a dancing violin astringency supplying outward detail and reaching a climax as the cello supports the structure with an ostinato-like figure.

Beginning with a rushing piano figure, the second movement highlights strings pinging , burning and slashing, with the piano’s chords structurally resonating at first at first, then exchanging spiky figurations with the strings. The more resonant-sounding piano notes beautifully morph into pregnant-like water-droplet notes, as the cello and violin play “out of the air” pizzicato harmonics – the piano finishes as it began, with agitatedly mobile figurations.

Sostenuto-like cello chords begin the third movement, here backed by limpid piano sounds – the violin. something of a decorative, outwardly-defining constant force, plays more tortured figures as the cello muses with the piano – what lovely, long-held notes! – the violin again sounds acerbic, and we hear the “clash of seconds” that the players had demonstrated beforehand, which then gradually resolve – very architectural, solidly-based timbres and tones – from meditative to grand and imposing!. The violin “grows” a lighter, more evanescent outward texture, as the music for cello and piano goes deeper, more inward, the players digging into their tones with rolling figurations – very ‘cello-centred! The violin remains a more quixotic-flavoured  figure, here, its tones  pointilistic in effect, with harmonics and pizzicati, and in places almost pentatonic-sounding!

The fourth movement has a very pointillistic beginning – knockabout notes from the strings, pizzicato and arco, and the piano very punch-line in effect! The strings leave  floating legato lines avove the piano’s cryptic staccato comments – the movement is very short!

I’m left with an impression of a structure in the music’s bones, but I would like to hear it again, being able to relate parts more readily to the whole – there would have been many connective references I didn’t place in context first time round, and am keen to explore that connective tissue aspect of the work relating to architecture and to the ravages of time on any kind of structure given such status by my experience and imagination!

Its engagement with the listener was all brought off with the greatest of aplomb and confidence by the players!

The concert concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s deeply personal 1944 Piano Trio in E Minor, composed in memory of the composer’s friend Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky who had died in February that year of a heart attack at the age of forty-one. As with many “documented” incidents on Shostakovich’s life, accounts differ as to when the composer began work on the Trio (principally whether it was before or after hearing the news of Sollertinsky’s death, the latter event even presenting in one account as a rumoured NKVD (Russian Secret Police) murder rather than a heart attack) – however, a certain consensuality (as with the present programme’s notes on the music) places the first movement as all but completed when Shostakovich received the news.

The work’s been represented variously as a requiem, either for one man or for the millions of Russians who perished during the war, as a protest against the anti-Semitism rife in the Soviet Union culminating in the Nazi atrocities committed against Russian Jews in the death camps of the time, and as an indictment of the Soviet System in general under the iron-fisted Stalin, whose censorship of the composer’s music reached its nadir at this time, causing the Trio to be banned from public performance in1948 as “decadent “ and “formalist”. Not until the dictator’s death in 1953 did the work begin to gradually return to favour

It’s now celebrated as one of the greatest of Shostakovich’s works, and part of an enviable “piano trio” tradition in Russia alone  – Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Arensky, Borodin, Taneyev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Rachmaninov all helped “pave the way” for the younger composer, whose own writing, however, eschewed the prevalent quasi-orchestral textures of the Romantic piano trio, choosing instead a sparser, more transparent sound-picture, not without force and impact, but with a bleaker, and less “cushioned” effect. Shostakovich had always professed an admiration for Jewish music, delighting in what he called its “multifaceted” quality  – appearing to be happy when in fact it is expressing tragedy (a quality shared by Mahler’s music) – and this ambiguity of expression comes to the fore in the Trio’s finale, a veritable Todtentanz with macabre associations, more of which below. The work as a whole gravitates from being the composer’s grief for his friend’s death to a catalyst for his feelings regarding the other tragedies whose impact were weighing increasingly heavily on his existence.

What, then, of this performance? In a word, gripping, from its very first intensely spectral harmonic note intoned hauntingly by cellist Ken Ichinose almost at the top of the instrument’s range and soaring above the violin’s conventionally-voiced though similarly elegiac tones and the piano’s basso profundo utterances – the spell’s intensity was palpable, the instrumentation a play of parallel states of being, dream floating alongside consciousness, and both far above deeper and darker reality – within  the same being, or with three different beings cast adrift?  Briefly, the cello “comes back to earth”, joining the violin in a steady single-note rhythm, exchanging single-note-accompanying and melodic roles as the momentums continue with both tempi and intensities building,  the music swinging into a dark-browed and determined jogtrot mode! The musicians seem gripped by the music’s compulsions, pizzicato exchanges, trenchant piano chordings, slashing single-note string utterances, all suggesting some kind of search for a way through, with Monique Lapins’s violin-playing in particular, in places incredibly exploratory!

If respite was sought, it was not to be found in the second movement – Allegro con brio, the music proclaimed, with violin and cello flexing muscle and expiating energies, and further driven along by the piano’s pounding chords and trumpeting arpeggiations.  What began as a high-spirited fun dance seemed to get more obsessive and trenchant, descending into repetitions of groaning drone-like tones trapped in their own vortices – a trio-like section almost promised the dance-theme some breathing-space, but the wildness soon returned, pianist Gabriela Glapska’s seemingly endless energies spearheading the music’s drive towards a breathless concluding flourish! Whew!

But then! – bleakly spaced-out piano chords seemed to slice the ambiences pitilessly  into shards, with first the violinist and then the ‘cellist picking up from the fragments a tragic, elegiac theme – a Passacaglia, with violin and cello continuing to play variants of the theme over the piano’s repeated sequences. The sense of desolation grew with the instruments’ gradual descent into depths of sorrow, the mood at its darkest  suddenly interrupted by the piano beginning an insistent, hypnotic rhythm ,and introducing the Mahlerian irony of a Yiddish-like dance, one whose themes the composer would repeatedly use in his later music (Shostakovich later described them as dances of death and despair, perhaps mindful of accounts he had heard of atrocities such as Jewish prisoners in the “death camps” made to dance on their own graves by their Nazi captors before being executed).

I found this music extraordinary, even almost hallucinatory jn places, thanks to what seemed like the three performers’ total and unstinted immersion in its composer’s world. The build-up to the music’s ironic interplay of humour and savagery in the finale was overwhelming, with the gradual evaporation of that nightmarish scenario right at the work’s end leaving one utterly drained and aghast at what one had just been told.

Even among what must surely seem for Wellington Chamber Music over recent times like a plethora of outstanding performances, this one by the superb Ghost Trio had, I thought, something uniquely special to return to in one’s memory and relish anew.

 

 

 

Nota Bene’s melodious and heartwarming Wedding of Liesl and Duncan

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Nota Bene Choir presents:

THE WEDDING OF LIESL AND DUNCAN
7:30pm,16th August, 2025
Wesley Church, Taranaki St., Wellington

Liesl – Barbara Paterson (soprano) / Duncan – Robert Tucker (baritone)
Friends and Guests – Nota Bene Choir
Pianists: Heather Easting / Emma Sayers
Music Director – Maaike Christie-Beekman
Devised, Written and Directed by Jacqueline Coats

Order of Service:
WELCOME – Liesl’s family, friends and  guests in the Old Hall

J.STRAUSS Jnr. – Champagne Chorus (Die Fledermaus) – Liesl, with Choir
HAYDN  –  Die Beredsamkeit (Eloquence) – Choir
LEHAR  – Vilja Lied (Die Lustige Witwe) – Liesl, with Choir
SCHUBERT – Der Tanz – Choir
SCHUMANN – Lied der Braut – Liesl – solo
BRAHMS – Sehnsucht – Choir
BRAHMS – Wie bist du, meine Königin – Duncan, solo
SCHUBERT – Schicksalslenker, blicke nieder – Duncan, with Choir
HAYDN – Die Harmonie in der Ehe (Harmony in Marriage) – Choir
SCHUBERT – Trinklied – Duncan – solo

Guests are invited to be seated in the Church

THE SERVICE – Entrance of the Bridal Party
WAGNER – Wedding March from Lohengrin –  Choir
BRAHMS – Liebeslieder Waltzer
1. Rede, Madchen, allzu liebes (speak, dear girl) – Choir
Exchange of Vows
2. Am gesteine rauscht die Flut (the tide rushes on the rocks) – Choir
3. O die Frauen, O die Frauen (O women!) – Tenors and Basses
4. Wie des Abends schöne Röte (the evening’s beautiful red) – Sopranos and Altos
5. Die grüne Hopfenranke (the green hop vine – Choir
6. Ein Kleiner, hübscher Vogel nahm den Flug (a small, pretty bird took flight) – Choir
7. Wohl schön bewandt was es (my lover no longer sees me) –  Liesl
8. Wenn so lind dein Auge mir  (If your eyes are so gentle) – Choir
9. Am Donaustrande da steht ein Haus (By the Danube stands a house) – Choir
10. O wie sanft die Quell – (Oh, how gentle the spring) – Choir
11. Nein es its nicht auszukommen (No, it is not possible..)- Choir.
12. Schlosser auf, und mache Schlosser (Locksmiths, up and make padlocks!) – Choir
13. Vogelein durchrauscht die Luft (Birds fly swiftly through the air) Sopranos and Altos
14. Sieh, wie is die Welle klar (Look how clear the waves are!) Tenors and Basses
15. Nachtigall, sie singt so schön (Nightingale, you sing so beautifully) Choir
16. Ein dunkeler Schacht ist Liebe ( A dark pit is Love!) Choir
17. Nicht wandle, mein Licht (Do not wander, my Light) Tenors
Exchange of Rings
18 Es bebet das Gestrauche (The bushes tremble) Choir
Pronouncement and Celebration
MENDELSSOHN  (arr. Nota Bene) – Wedding March

“The Wedding of Liesl and Duncan” – a fertile music-theatre brainchild of director Jacqueline Coats, which makes creative and heart-warming use of the manifold skills and attendant enthusiasms of musicians belonging to and associated with Wellington’s Nota Bene Choir.  Readers expecting a conventional review of a group  performing a first-half programme featuring a collection of operatic solo and choral items, followed by a second-half presentation of Brahm’s Liebeslieder Waltzes might wonder at encountering, first-up, this introductory  plethora of detailed information that could take as long to read through as the actual review itself! I hope the method in my madness at offering this storehouse of elaboration to begin with “sets the scene” for the effusion of delightfully theatrical, and even in places intensely dramatic entertainment which  elevated much of the music’s otherwise divertissement-like status into far more connective musical tissue.

Brought into play was a real, infectious sense of a nuptial occasion by (a) the choice of venue, in Wellington’s Taranaki Street Wesley Church, and (b) the theatrical method of incorporating the audience into the actual celebrations. So it was that we were all invited at the outset to join the bride’s family, friends and guests into one of two gathering-places capaciously provided and linked by a corridor (I suspect each simply “filled up” followed by the other, leaving, incidentally, very few spare seats!). At each place was a pianist (ours was the versatile Heather Easting, while the other would have certainly enjoyed the equally capable artistry of Emma Sayers) – after being welcomed by the indefatigable Jacqueline Coats and enjoying some soothing strains of firstly Bach and then Pachebel on the piano, there subsequently appeared suitably-attired guests and friends of the couple to be married, along with the major participants, Liesl (Barbara Paterson) and Duncan (Robert Tucker) who alternated between both of these places, by turns recounting for each of the groups some of the history of their meeting and subsequent engagement.

This “getting to know” first the bride and then the groom was accompanied by the first “Welcome” bracket of songs, beginning with a spirited “Champagne Aria” from J,Strauss Jnr’s “Die Fledermaus” sparklingly (ahem!) delivered by the bride and guests. I found a lot of the spoken commentary from all the characters difficult to make out in that acoustic, sitting as I was at the far end of the group – but I could hear enough to decipher salient detail, such as information pertaining to the non-arrival, thus far, of the groom – a droll chorus (“Eloquence” by Josef Haydn) suitably commenting on various apposite kinds of character traits! To my great pleasure we heard next the ravishing “Vilja Lied” from Lehar’s “Die Lustige Witwe” most plaintively sung by Paterson (with lovely dynamic control of those ecstatic high notes) and echoed by the chorus. Schubert’s “Der Tanz” followed, after which Liesl introduced, a mite confusingly, both her “adoptive’ and “real” parents, in tandem with Schumann’s lovely “Lied der Braut”, Liesl’s solo here blending affectingly with the following “Sensucht” by Brahms, for the choir.

Consternation reigned as Duncan (Robert Tucker), the Groom, suddenly turned up, effusively pressing his suit with another Brahms song, “Wie bist du, meine Konigin!”, beautifully and pliantly delivered here by both singer and pianist. We got some semi-confessional “history” from the singer of a previous relationship and an existing offspring (too much information?) associated with the beseeching “Schicksalsenker” by Schubert for tenor and choir, which captured all hearts, before the groom was off again, “looking for Liesl!”, to the strains of Haydn’s satirical “Die Harmonie in der Ehe”, all boisterous good fun for the choir! Duncan returned, jubilant, and in a time-honoured gesture to blokedom, launched into a Schubert “Trinklied”, extolling Baccchus, “Plump Prince of Wine!” – the wedding was definitely “on!”

The preliminaries having been addressed and given their due, we were enjoined to be upstanding and take ourselves via some of the way we had already come to the church for the ceremony. Our director-cum celebrant fulsomely welcomed our presence, reminding us that before things went any further we needed a bride! –  and so we had the lump-in-throat enchantment of the expectantly fresh-toned “Wedding March” from Wagner’s Lohengrin as Liesl and her escort came down the aisle to the altar.

The bride being thus delivered and the groom suitably prepped, our celebrant took the opportunity to “set the scene” with the help of the composer of the aforementioned “Liebeslieder Waltzes”. I had listened to these songs perhaps once before and remember at the time thinking them somewhat underwhelming as regards the “must hear again” department – but what a difference here, brought to life via the bright and sparkling Nota Bene voices, Maaike Christie-Beekman’s exuberant direction, and our duo pianists’ by turns incisive and melting playing  – how wonderful for these songs to be given such a vibrant theatrical and even dramatic context! Each one seemed to “possess” its different character, imbuing the normally threadbare three-four trajectories with tangible on-the-spot representations as well as tying together their unifying flow in the larger scheme that held the whole evening together so successfully.

If we had thought the marriage “done and dusted” by then, we were in for a few (almost soap-opera) surprises! –  from the beginning, the celebrant touched on the potential “will it happen?” travails of a relationship, underpinned by the first song’s “Rede, Madchen, allzu liebes” (Will you, who rouse passion, relent?”) to which the groom, Duncan, reopened his “confessional” doubts, spurred by the choir’s “Am gesteine rauscht die Flut” (The flood rushes onto the rocks), and the age-old bachelor’s refrain “O die Frauen, O die Frauen” (further elaborated here as “I’d have been a monk were it not for women”). It was time for Liesl to enjoy some affirmation with the soprano/alto voices’ beautiful “Wie des Abends schöne Röte” (How the evening redly glows).

As the vows begin, so do the doubts arise, darkly harmonised by “Die grüne Hopfenranke”  (like a creeper stuck in the ground) from the choir, the celebrant suitably agitating and the mothers appearing to give their daughter solace (all superbly theatrical!). Liesl isn’t much  comforted by the idea of a pretty bird being caught  -“Ein kleiner, hubscher Vogel nahm den Fug” (Christie-Beekman brings out so much more flavour from the choir’s voices in these places than I previously recall!). The bride remains unmoved at first, remembering how “it all seemed much easier when we were young” – “Wohl schön bewandt was es”, and now…….The choir quickly moves to comfort Liesl with “Wenn so lind dein Auge mir” – reassured by gentle eyes, she takes her bouquet as the next song quickly capitalises on the mood –  “Am Donaustrande, da steht ein Haus” , sings the choir, breaking through the impasse of doubt as if shattering a barrier of glass! Liesl completes her vow! – triumph!

To the strains of “O wie sanft die Quelle” the couple waltz to the moving waters!  Just when it all seems plain sailing comes another cloud – “If any person knows of any reason, etc…..” From the ranks of the choir a man steps forward and confesses his secret love for the bride! – Pandemonium! The Choir erupts with “Nein! – es ist nicht auszukommen!” (No! It’s impossible!”) The couple run away from the tumult as the choir angrily declaims “Schlosser! Auf, und mache Schlösser” (Locksmith! Up, and make some locks!). but peace is soon restored and the errant suitor is dismissed, as the sopranos and altos sing of birds rushing through the air to their rest  (“Vögelein, durchrauscht die Luft”) and the tenors and basses extend the peace further with “Sieh, wie ist die Welle klar” .

The nightingale sings, and the world seems to stand still – “Nachtigall, sie singt so schön”  intones the choir – Liesl is firmly on the side of love and helps steer Duncan through his “dark night of the soul” memory at “Ein dunkeler Schacht ist Liebe” (Love is a dark pit”), though he’s lost for words at this, the last fence! “Boys, you gotta help me out, here!” his whole aspect is saying, and the  tenors come to his aid with “Nicht wandle, mein Licht” – a beautiful reassurance of a homecoming, AND of the appearance of the rings – where? – here! – no! – yes! – with the choir giving the final and  clearly affirmative “lift” to the rhythms and tones of “Es bebet das Gesträuche” – (as the bushes tremble with the birds’ flight, so does my soul with desire and fear at the thought of you!).  As the couple sign the register and their union is pronounced, so does Mendelssohn’s Wedding March sound and resound as Liesl and Duncan are resplendently (and deservedly) acclaimed! What a journey, and how richly bedecked it all proved, proclaiming Jacqueline Coats’s vision as transformational and the response of all of the performers, conductor, singers and players, something to truly savour in the memory.

A Masked Ball – Wellington Opera’s presentation of perilous concealment

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Julien Van Mellearts (Renato) and Jared Holt (King Gustavo)
photo – Stephen A’Court

Wellington Opera presents:
Giuseppe VERDI – Un Ballo in Maschera  (libretto by Antonia Somma)

Jared Holt – Gustavo, King of Sweden
Julien Van Mellearts – Count René Anckarström (Renato), the King’s secretary
Madeleine Pierard – Amelia, the Count’s wife
Natasha Te Rupe Wilson – Oscar, the King’s page
Kristin Darragh – Ulrica Arfvidsson, a sorceress
Samuel McKeever – Count Ribbing, a conspirator
Morgan-Andrew King – Count Horn, a conspirator
Lila Crichton – Judge
Daniel O’Connor – Cristiano, a sailor
Chris Anderson – Amelia’s servant

Director – Jacqueline Coats
Set Design – Michael Zaragoza
Lighting Design – Rowan McShane
Costume Design – Lee Erihäpeti Williams

Conductor – Brian Castles-Onion
Wellington Opera Chorus (Director – Michael Vinten)
Orchestra Wellington

Opera House, Wellington
Friday, 8th August 2025

Wellington’s beautiful Opera House was the venue for the latest offering from the city’s eponymous opera company –  Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, which opened on August 6th – I attended the second Opera House performance two evenings later, conscious that the production had had already garnered a good critical response.

Amongst the intriguing advance publicity for the work were references to the production’s use of classical archetypal elements presented in the ancient Greek myth of Artemis and Actaeon, the famous “hunter becomes the hunted” story. The opera’s Prelude accordingly depicts the drama’s monarch, King Gustavo of Sweden, with a pair of hunting dogs, cleverly mirroring this theme at the work’s end with a depiction of the King at a “masked ball” wearing a pair of stag’s antlers, thus symbolising the victim he was to become of a conspiracy amongst his courtiers.

The masks of course underpin another defining motif of the work, that of concealment, one emphasised in a programme note by the production’s director Jacqueline Coats, and given obvious emphasis in the opera’s final definitive ball scene, but also throughout the story in different ways.

Permeating the drama, of course, were the dominant themes of the King’s covert love for Amelia, the wife of his best friend Renato, in tandem with the conspirators’ plot to assassinate their monarch. And various intrigues enriched the action, such as Gustav’s and his courtiers disguising themselves for a visit a fortune-teller who had been threatened with banishment. This in turn led to a midnight tryst between Gustav and Amelia, and their affair’s eventual discovery by Renato, engendering the latter’s secret alignment with the conspirators to bring about Gustav’s end.

From the beginning the drama’s musical fabric was wrought of magic by Orchestra Wellington under conductor Brian Castles-Onion’s direction, the latter never missing a beat or a turn of phrase denoting an action or emotion by his players and singers. The chorus, representing both “allies” and “enemies” of the king, acquitted themselves sonorously as befitted their intentions, the result of Wellington Opera chorusmaster Michael Vinten’s always expert coaching  – Jared Holt’s King Gustav replied regally and graciously as the loved-cum-hated monarch, a foil for the initially more workmanlike tones of Julien Van Mellaerts’  Anckarstrom (Renato), the King’s secretary,  whose opening canzone “Alla vita che t’arride” was solicitious and dignified as suited the occasion.

Natasha Te Rupe Wilson (Oscar) – photo, Stephen A’Court

Some of the scene’s most consistently-engaging singing came with Natasha Te Rupe Wilson’s portrayal of Oscar, the King’s Page – the voice and theatrical deportment were a real delight in places such as her defence of the fortune-teller, Ulrica, in her ballata “Volta la terrea fronte alle stelle”, rebuffing the condemnations delivered here somewhat jejunely by Lila Crichton’s Judge. In conclusion Jared Holt was able to generate plenty of devil-may-care energy in his “Ogni cura si doni al diletto”, inviting his courtiers to join him in donning a disguise and visiting the fortune-teller’s lair!

Scene Two, while vividly wrought by the orchestral introduction, seemed to visually fall short of Kirsten Darragh’s vivid descriptions in her “Re dell’abisso, affrettati!”. Nor did the chorus’s “O come tutto riluce di tetro”  reflect “how luridly everything glitters” –  here,  more ice-cold than lurid and infernal, as if this Ulrica was Erda out of Wagner’s “Ring” instead. As with the ensuing scene’s supposedly “campo abbominato”, I thought it all too brightly- and cooly-lit to reflect the “dark and infernal” aspect of the words, though the singers did their best. Ulrica’s palm-reading realisation that the man whose future she was predicting was REALLY doomed  was tellingly conveyed by Kirsten Darragh, especially the idea of the killer being his friend! Jared Holt did well with the rebuff of this in his “Ề scherzo od è follia”, his “laughing” tones adroitly conveying his public incredulity at the prophecy.

Madeleine Pierard’s Amelia rose above the discrepancies evident between the scenario of her gathering of the magic herb and her descriptions of it – her opening “Ecco l’oriddo campo ove s’accoppia al delitto la morte!” made me wonder whether the valiant scene-shifters had actually got the right “piece” out on the stage! – hardly suggestive of a place of execution such as a gallows, and with the scene itself surely needing to be darker to reflect Amelia’s terror and loathing (“m’empie di ricappriccio e de terrore!”). She and Jared Holt worked hard at their love-duet that followed without, I felt, recapturing the exhilarating charge of their “Tosca” the previous year here in Wellington, their kiss here far from any kind of “caution abandoned” quality suggested by their words.

By contrast, the arrival of, firstly, Renato to warn the King of danger, and then of the assassins themselves was superbly staged, the overt menace of the latters’ concerted torch-lit aspect making the mordant “comedy” of their discovery of Renato with his wife on a “nocturnal moonlight stroll” all the more delightful – their “laughter”, relished enormously by the audience well aware of the subject couple’s acute anguish, proved a highlight of the evening!

Madeleine Pierard (Amelia) – photo, Stephen A’Court

No less riveting was the subsequent exchange between vengeful husband and sorrowing wife, Madeleine Pierard’s “Morro, ma prima in grazia” as deeply-felt and moving as Julien Van Mellearts’s “Eri tu” was by turns impassionedly angry and deeply grief-stricken. And two more voices to impress in the following “plotting” scene were those of the conspirators, Samuel McKeever as Count Ribbing and Morgan-Andrew King as Count Horn – a resoundingly dark-toned duo!

Rivalling these two scenes in impact here was the splendid finale, launched by the brief appearance of the antler-clad King and the appearance of the masked revellers at the ball, the singing and choreography of the chorus again outstanding. Interactions between Oscar (another superb song-and-dance cameo from Natasha Te Rupe Wilson) and Renato over the mystery of the King’s identity further heightening the tensions created by the masked conspirators closing in on their prey with Renato in the van ready to strike, unaware that his victim had already proclaimed Amelia’s innocence by giving her the freedom she desired (touchingly expressed here, at the end, by Jared Holt’s mortally-wounded Gustav.)

No other art-form conveys so many different emotions in simultaneous ferment so exquisitely and heart-rendingly. Given some production aspects that didn’t resonate with me, I still found myself, along with the rest of this evening’s audience, warmly appreciating and acclaiming this “A  Masked Ball” as a feast of compelling theatrical action and music-making.

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW REVISITED – New Zealand premieres from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

                                                                                                     Shostakovich and Britten

PARTY FAITHFUL

BRITTEN – ‘Cello Symphony Op.68
SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 3  in E-flat Major Op. 20 “The First of May”*

Lev Sivkov (‘cello)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
*Orpheus Choir of Wellington(Brent Stewart, director)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 26th July 2025

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

What an occasion! – TWO New Zealand premieres, Britten and Shostakovich, in one evening! While perhaps not unique in this country’s concert-giving history, such an event’s “blue-moon” aspect provoked all kinds of responses from the capital’s music fraternity, with the music’s unfamiliarity seeming at once a drawcard with its own kind of excitement and sense of discovery, and something of a risk! – the relatively unknown administered here in what might have seemed to some like over-sized doses! With characteristic adventurousness, Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir of Wellington plunged into the fray, and emerged triumphant on all fronts, the audience’s enthusiastic response at the conclusion of each of the concert’s halves unequivocally and unstintingly great-hearted, more than making up for the marginally thinner attendance compared with the numbers present at the season’s first two concerts.

How was this near-miracle of approbation brought off so heart-warmingly? – several reasons; firstly by the charismatic cellist Lev Sivkov’s “owning” of the somewhat elliptical solo part of Benjamin Britten’s formidable ‘Cello Symphony; secondly, via conductor Marc Taddei’s remarkable mastery of the scores and control of his orchestral and choral forces; and lastly through the astonishing results of the intrepid musicians’ meticulous efforts in regard to each of the works’ completely different demands!  So it was that Marc Taddei would have felt more than justifiably vindicated in his pre-concert enthusiasm regarding the “adventure” of this undertaking.

First up was one of the more enigmatic works by Benjamin Britten, his singularly-titled “Cello Symphony” begging the question regarding the piece’s actual genre, having an instrumental soloist in a work styled as a “symphony”, and bringing together what might normally be regarded as differently-constituted musical narratives. It wasn’t an entirely unknown format, with previous works by various composers entitled “Sinfonia Concertante”, and with composers (like Berlioz in his work for viola and orchestra “Harold in Italy”) having produced “symphonies” with solo instrumental parts.

Such works had in the past produced problems of thwarted expectation on the part of musicians (the most well-known being the legendary violinist Paganini’s dismissal of Berlioz’s aforementioned work, and which the former never played). Britten’s dedicatee was the renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (for whom he had already composed several pieces), and who had probably expected a brilliant instrumental concerto showpiece compared with what he actually received. What Britten was writing proved to be a tribute to the ‘cellist’s musicianship as much as to his technical brilliance, as the work casts the soloist as an equal partner with the orchestra in their exchange and development of the work’s themes and juxtapositions and contrasts.

An enjoyable and intriguing aspect of tonight’s performance was the engagingly demonstrative playing of the cellist, Lev Sivkov, whose gestures had an expressiveness which choreographed the musical line and strengthened the interplay between soloist and orchestra. Though the cello’s opening double-stopped chords were brusque compared to the orchestra’s darkly-conceived lines, they had a pliability that suggested  dialogue more than opposition, even when the soloist’s increasing  energies  brought “spiky” wind chordings and “snappy” brass notes, as subsequent lyrical exchanges between the cello and clarinet and flute phrases more readily suggested, and which the oboe and brass softly continued. Particularly memorable was a touching sequence of interplay between pizzicato strings and cello outpourings, even if the latter’s somewhat anxious two-note phrases against the strings pizzicato began suggesting more darkness than radiance and conflict afoot, brought into increasing prominence by the timpani’s repeated patternings, and the  winds and heavy brasses exchanging chords. But a desire for accord persisted with brass-and-percussion irruptions balanced  by beautifully poignant-sounding wind-harmonies – almost fairy-tale sounds – as if simultaneously-wrought “threads” were constantly trying to “dance around” each other, with the cello playing a kind of “fulcrum” role, keeping determinedly businesslike amid the claustrophobia of heavy percussion irruptions, brass “pedal-notes” and skitterish wind passages. We sensed relief with the soloist’s response to it all – poised pizzicato chordings over resignedly rumbling lower instruments, while the winds played a Mahlerian “dying fall” theme – a soft gong-stroke and a few pizzicato notes later this absorbing movement came to an enigmatic close.

What a marvellously nocturnal scherzo we got next! – the cello  quicksilver,  playful and even furtive, and straightaway alerting the muted brasses! The soloist’s dancings were answered throughout with either gruff single notes or quixotic, melismatic figures haunted by the brasses’ echoings. Constant movement and exchange became  increasingly frantic, halted at the end  by the cello’s animalistic whimperings and a dismissive grunt from the brass – all brilliantly-conceived, and  here superbly-realised! By contrast, the Adagio’s solid, granite-like tones brought a solemn march, the cello’s solemn, step-wise theme replete with massive timpani ramparts and mournful keenings from winds and an evocatively responding horn solo – and what beauties the soloist with supporting horn, strings and gentle percussion gave us here! The rest of the movement returned to the march-like opening, the brass splendidly building the music’s progress towards a grim magnificence while the cello increasingly rhapsodises in defiance, and eventually breaking into a cadenza, one whose progress soloist Lev Sivkov mesmerically “defined” for us with his rapt, seemingly improvised gesturings throughout

Without a break, the music transmorgrified into the finale, the solo trumpet sounding a kind of “liberation” as the cello seemed to walk from the darkness and into the light afforded by the concluding Passacaglia’s six variations. I loved the winds’ dancing  sequences, the cello’s mad scamperings pursued by winds and percussion, and the intensely Mahlerian rhapsodic fervour of the cello’s musings immediately before the great surge of long-awaited optimism given to us by the whole orchestra’s tsunami-like concluding response to the soloist’s heartfelt efforts!

If I’ve dwelt overmuch on the music’s detailings at the expense of its actual delivery,  here, it’s because the performance was a further (and remarkable) step towards my own appreciation of what I found an initially challenging listen! – I hope these reams of self-indulgence have some point for the reader, especially any finding themselves going through the same process of determined discovery!

Shostakovich’s Third Symphony, another work new to me, was a different kind of journey, one no less fascinating, but somewhat less “layered” than the Britten work, though it brought its own set of distinctions to the concert, One of these was its composer’s own remark, now forever associated with the work – “It would be interesting to write a symphony where not a single theme would be repeated”. one that he strove to fulfil with this remarkably vernal, pulsatingly “in-your-face” music.

What made the performance more than worthwhile was the up-front orchestral playing, and the “joyful and triumphant” tones of the evening’s “rent-a-socialist” ensembled voices, the Orpheus Choir. Printing the English words in the programme was tongue-in-cheek enough – a real blessing was being given these indecipherable words as sterling statements unimpeded by on-stage visual translations! – heed was taken of conductor Vasily Petrenko’s words in the programme notes concerning the “banal, amateur” poetry – and the supreme irony of the presentation came with the performance’s full-blooded commitment to the cause (of the music, of course!). Maybe some day we’ll get to hear some of those later Shostakovich symphonies from this orchestra as well! (imagine the subscription numbers generated by the thought of THAT series!)

For now, we had our ears bent in somewhat different directions as Marc Taddei and his seemingly tireless musicians took to Shostakovich’s most irreverent piece of symphonic writing to date. Despite its beautiful opening for two clarinets (superbly delivered) the work soon accelerated into a veritable ferment of action. dissonant passages crowding one another as the trajectories rang the changes from grim martial rhythms to maniacal scamperings, culminating in grotesque “horror-chordings” and continued reckless headlong careerings, whose frenzied momentums were lessened  by a side-drum’s call to attention, a solo clarinet succeeding in quelling the energies of the flight, and bringing an uneasy calm to the soundscape after further horror chordings reacquainted acquainted us with the obstacles still to be surmounted.

From here, we were given a few stress-free moments of relative tranquility from solo violin and eerily spectral winds, the latter gradually shrugging off their ghoulish aspect in search of some much needed pastoral charm, gladly welcomed by the strings, their warmth  persuading other elements that a salvation of sorts might be imminent –everybody dug more deeply, pulling from out of the depths of texture sonorities and impulses which seemed to gradually ignite the whole orchestra! A fresh burst of momentum brought in compulsions of rhythm, particularly Russian in flavour, whose energies pushed the music onto a kind of plateau of heroic expression, underlined by a great percussive onslaught –something momentous was being enacted, leaving us awaiting the arrival of some great endpoint, a kind of magnificence whose presence we sensed but whose entry was still being prepared. Then, with a great cymbal crash, the choir suddenly stood up, electrifying us all!

A brief orchestral introduction and the voices burst out, whole-heartedly, lustily –  oceanic waves of sound punctuated by percussive irruptions, peaking and breaking over the edges and washing over their listeners.  We knew and did not know of what they sang – it mattered less than their fervour and spirit and sense of joy!  And at the conclusion, with the musicians having given their all, we relished their achievement  amidst our shared relief and exhilaration!

Joanna Dann and David Neild – a feast of ‘cello-and-piano presentation at St. Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St, Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert series
JOANNA DANN (‘cello) & DAVID NEILD piano)

ROBERT SCHUMANN – Fantasiestücke Op.73
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano No. 4 in C Op. 102/1
SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Andante (third mvt.) from Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano Op.19
FRANZ SCHUBERT (arr. David Popper) Du Bist die Ruh (Rückert -1823)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, 16th July, 2025

Some blithe spirit must have quietly done the rounds and spread the word  regarding this particular recital, with  St.Andrew’s Church close to being more-than-usually packed by eager lunchtime-concert-goers, as noted by the organiser who welcomed us and introduced the artists – it would have been especially heartening for both cellist Joanna Dann and pianist David Neild upon entering to encounter such a veritable sea of eagerly awaiting faces! The programme was, of course, a drawcard in itself, containing the kind of music which would warm both senses and sensibilities in a direct “simply add water” kind of way – and so it proved, judging by the warmth of the reception the pair’s playing of these works drew from the audience at the end.

Robert Schumann’s Op.73 Fantasiestücke opened the concert – is there another composer whose music always so quickly betrays its creator’s identity? Both performers drew forth lovely, light-and-lyrical tones from their instruments, moving easily between the major and minor modes, and with neither instrument claiming any ascendancy – the cellist almost uncannily “matched” the piano tones whether in lyrical tones or quicker figurations, producing a kind of seamless interplay. This continued throughout the second movement’s “lebhaft – licht” (Lively – light), in which the players achieved an almost fairy-like grace with their interactions, the pianist’s gossamer-like tones mirroring the similarly “will-o-the-wisp” peregrinations of the cellist. I was, however, expecting rather more forthright sounds than we got in the “Rasch und mit feuer” finale, where I began to crave more cello tone expressing Schumann’s more assertive writing, his ardour and muscularity which contrasts with those passages where, once again, the interplay between the voices seemed like a “marriage of minds” – but in other places  I couldn’t help feeling  like a kind of Oliver Twist, asking the cellist for more!

Beethoven, in his five ‘Cello Sonatas of course transformed the previous role of the cello in this genre from being either a solo instrument with extemporised “accompaniment” by one or more players, or an obbligato instrument for a keyboard sonata. His first two Cello Sonatas (Op. 5) were written in 1796, and in fact designated “Two Grand Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte with a Violincello obbligato”, but unlike those earlier “obbligato” sonatas, both of the Op.5 works had through-composed cello parts which in places were independent of keyboard figurations. By the time he had reached his two Op.102 Cello Sonatas in 1815, the composer had embarked upon his “late” period of composition, so that these works readily display those characteristics we’ve come to recognise as typical of that time, such as unconventional form, and deeper, more probing expression.

His Fourth Cello Sonata begins with a ‘cello solo, beautifully voiced, gently joined with by the piano, the lines concentrated and sonorous, seemingly “captured from the air” rather than composed, the instruments gently nudging the sounds together, until a sudden vigorous unison breaks the spell! Here the forceful piano somewhat dominated the ‘cello, whose notes one had to strain to hear in all but during the occasional quieter episodes, somewhat negating the composer’s intention of giving the instrument more of a “voice”! What I could hear of the cellist’s playing sounded true in terms of rhythm and intonation, but the piano was so much to the fore, it sometimes couldn’t help giving an impression that the cellist was playing more for herself than for us.

The Adagio brought the ‘cello back to us again, the players each giving us enough to better balance the sound, with the long sombre lines of the opening, and the beautiful exchange between the instruments that followed working really well in relative terms – though I thought there was still scope for the ‘cello to “sing” even more in places. The finale’s beginning with its playful exchanges made a properly whimsical impression, and the ‘cellist bought out some of the darker lines, but the higher, brighter melodic exchanges needed to bubble and sizzle more equally more often! One could hear there was a fine interpretation there, but it was simply a question of coaxing more tone from the ‘cello for the music’s course to sustain its full and glorious effect!

The Rachmaninov ‘Cello Sonata’s  Andante movement in places brought out the best qualities in both players, with the wonderful major/minor key sequences of the piano’s opening paragraph gorgeously realised, as were plenty of subtle gradations enticing our ears further and further into the piece; while the ‘cellist replied in kind with much sensitive articulation of those long melodic lines – though the tone lessened as the line moved up the stave she chose to give her lines a quieter, more reflective sound, even though I could occasionally have done with more “outward push” in some of the phrases – but still, what gloriously vibrant music emerged in places from these players’ efforts (I should have liked to have heard the whole sonata, accustomed as I am to wanting more of such things!)

Instead we got what was surely the highlight of the programme for most people – this was cellist David Popper’s arrangement for ‘cello and piano of one of Franz Schubert’s most beautiful songs  – the composer’s 1823 composition “Du bist die Ruh”. Both the pianist and ‘cellist by turns realised this music to exquisite degrees – a beautiful piano introduction was gorgeously augmented by the ‘cellist’s tones in her opening phrase – has anybody composed anything more heart-rendingly beautiful than this? When it came to the song’s climax, that glorious ascent towards a celestial high note, we were taken by the composer and his two musicians to some kind of Elysium-like place for a moment, not once, but twice – and of course there are as many ways to “sound” that final note as there are musicians! Between them, Joanna Dann and David Neild gave us untold pleasure with such moments – a most satisfying way to end any lunchtime’s music-making!