Shostakovich and Mozart – different kinds of intensities and delights at Roseneath’s Long Hall in Wellington

SHOSTAKOVICH AND MOZART

Helene Pohl and Anna van der Zee (violins), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) and Nicholas Hancox (viola) play Shostakovich

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartets – No. 11 in F Minor Op,122
No. 13 in B-flat minor Op,138
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – String Quintet in D Major K.593

The Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble

Helene Pohl, Anna van der Zee (violins)
Nicholas Hancox, Julia Joyce (violas)
Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

SHOSTAKOVICH -String Quartet No. 11 (1966) – in memory of Vasily Pyotrovich Shririnsky
Introduction, Scherzo, Recitative, Etude, Humoresque, Elegy, Finale

String Quartet No. 13 (1970) – dedicated to Vadim Vasilievitch Borisovsky
(Quartet in One Movement)
Adagio, Doppio movimento, Adagio

MOZART – String Quintet in D Major K.593  (with Julia Joyce – viola)

The Long Hall,
Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday 19th April, 2025

This was the second 2025 “Comfy Concert’ at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall”, part of a benefit series to assist various charities, on this occasion spotlighting the inspirational Arohanui Strings (of which violinist Helene Pohl is the Patron), a visionary Sistema-inspired music-teaching organisation and registered charity based in Lower Hutt. Founded in 2010 by professional musician and El Sistema advocate Alison Eldridge in the belief that all children have a right to a music education, this programme has offered musical instruction to more than 4000 children in some of Wellington and Hutt Valley’s most economically challenged communities.

Though the concert may have been relatively short in performance-time, it surely made amends for any brevity-related aspersions in terms of “moments per minute”. Each of the three works displayed a distinctively wrought sound-world whose singular qualities nonetheless found common cause in their surety of utterance and burgeoning character. And what we heard throughout the afternoon was an “every note counts” quality for which musicians such as Helene Pohl and Rolf Gjelsten have earned unstinted renown over their quartet-playing careers to date, and which their colleagues, Anna van der Zee, Nicholas Hancox and Julia Joyce were readily able to replicate in partnership over the concert’s duration.

In an earlier “Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble” presentation in this same venue a month previously, we’d heard another Shostakovich String Quartet, the Ninth, along with a new work by Chinese composer Gao Ping which was dedicated to Shostakovich’s memory to mark this 50th anniversary year of his death. On that occasion, the second violinist was Monique Lapins, and the violist Chris van der Zee. Given the remarkable variety of the quartets given thus far in this survey, it might be that Helene’s and Rolf’s necessarily pragmatic choices of colleagues for each occasion could arguably add to the music’s appeal, piquantly suiting the “living dangerously” aura around Shostakovich’s own creative efforts in general. Of course, by the time he had come to writing quartets the composer had ostensibly survived his most hazardous brush with the tyrannical Soviet leader Josef Stalin (specifically over the latter’s reaction to the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”), and had since embarked on a series of works which he hoped would give rise to less scrutiny than his more “public” works.

By the time he came to write the aforementioned Ninth Quartet it was 1964, and the composer had appeared to have largely “broken free” from the constraints of a system that had told its creative artists how they should make their art. A Tenth Quartet was written in the same year, and the Eleventh was begun the following year. The latter was the first of a group named the “Quartet of Quartets”, and written for  the violinist Vasili Pyotrovich Shirinsky, a member of the Beethoven Quartet, the ensemble  to whom the composer came to entrust the premieres of all of these works right up to the Fourteenth Quartet. Shirinsky actually died before the work’s completion and the remaining players had seriously considered disbanding the quartet – however Shostakovich had argued for the group to continue, as he maintained the group had “acquired the status of a national institution”.

Rolf Gjelsten introduced this work, commenting most tellingly that it was “great string quartet music which created powerful effects”. The work consisted of seven closely-connected (all marked attacca) miniature movements, beginning Andantino with a short, rhapsodic violin solo, here, beautifully-focused throughout all its appearances by Helene Pohl – answered and echoed by her colleagues, largely expressing a kind of calm acceptance, briefly spliced by a “wrench of agitation” but returning to an integrated kind of poise. The first violin moved things along with the Scherzo – a repeated-note theme, played more legato than pointed and playful, followed by the viola and ‘cello, “dug in”, and with occasional stinging upward glissandi! Together, the violins gave the motif a sinister element by beginning the phrases in fourths, “worrying” the notes insistently – after this all died away, the players suddenly “attacked” the Recitative, with stinging opening sounds, and dissonant resoundings, briefly playing some uncannily ambient “Vaughan Williams-like” contrasting harmonies before returning to the opening, though letting the “stinging” attacks gradually disperse.

Again, the mood suddenly changed with the “Etude”, the solo violin embarking on a sinuous whirling-dervish episode, to which the other players reacted  almost dreamily at first, but then almost grotesquely as the solo violin intensified its flailing attack, the others enacting a kind of drunken sailors’ dance, before anarchy broke out, with the ‘cello joining the fray, as if possessed of its own accord! Out of nowhere, it almost seemed, came  the Humoresque, with an urgent, warning-like two-note ostinato-like figure from Anna van der Zee’s violin, to which both violin and viola took fright (Nicholas Hancox’s viola matching Helene Pohl’s violin in sheer ghoulishness of tone) – such transfixing sonorities made it seem as if we had taken a brief but scarifying turn into a Little Shop of Horrors!).

The Elegy brought sense and feeling to the proceedings in spadefuls – ‘cello and viola first dark and sombre, but still sonorous  and affecting, then the second and afterwards the first violin returning us to daylight, their sounds emoting like prisoners from dark places espying light. And so the Finale was on us, with the players teasing out by turns the work’s past themes, the process filled with conflicting emotions as the memories returned on the various instruments, and ending with Helene Pohl’s violin reaching the work’s final high C with a variously pre-constituted sense of fulfilment….

Aptly chosen as a companion-work for this concert was the similar-but-different Thirteenth Quartet, of roughly an approximate length though differently constituted, having a single movement, albeit with contrasting episodes – an ABA structure similar to Bartok’s Third Quartet. It’s dedicated to the Beethoven Quartet’s violist Vadim Vasilyevich Borisovsky, who had just retired, leaving his replacement Fyodor Druzhinin to take part in the premiere in December 1970. Shostakovich was by then a sick man, having suffered a heart attack shortly after the Eleventh Quartet’s premiere in 1966, and was receiving treatment throughout 1970 at an orthopaedic clinic – the new work’s largely pessimistic outlook stems from his awareness of approaching his life’s end. It’s reinforced here by a late inclusion in the outer movements of some of the composer’s music for Grigori Kozintsev’s film “King Lear”, originally conceived as “Lamentations” for a string quartet.

In introducing the work Helene Pohl made mention of the remarkable “jazzy” elements in the second part, quoting the composer as saying  to somebody “I’ve written a short little quartet – with a “joke” middle!” – a sequence which another commentator had, I read, characterised as “a jam session from Hell”, and which came across as a grim “dance of death”, the composer joining forces with his great predecessor, Musorgsky, in regard to the latter’s “Songs and Dances of Death”.

Appropriately, it was the viola which began the work, a sorrowful solo with others joining in– bare, astringent sounds  with occasional dissonant note combinations. The players took their time, with the violin taking the lead working up to a “crying  out” sequence with the second violin, and encouraging the viola and ‘cello to join in. When the meditative tone resumed I caught a further reminder of a bleak “Vaughan Williams” voice in the harmony, along with the unsettling half-tone dissonances.

Helene had demonstrated to us the repeated-note phrase that began the more volatile middle section, emphasising for us its mournful rather than playful character with more legato-like phrasing. The murmuring lines from the others developed into harsh, stabbing chords set against an angular descending seventh figure from Nicholas Hancox’s viola – which in turn lead into a wonderful, once-repeated “augmenting” chord, the instruments joining in stepwise, punctuated by the repeated-note figure, and the viola’s falling-seventh declamations!  – jaw-dropping stuff!

What developed next seemed to me almost Dada-like! – a viola tremolando, pizzicato figures from the others, and rapid-fire exchanges of the same activated the ‘cello with Rolf Gjelsten giving us a “grooving-along” kind of running jazz pizzicato, prompting the violins into a “cool” dotted- rhythmed note pattern to which the players occasionally beat the wood of their instruments with their bows in syncopated strokes! – these jazzy, syncopated rhythms proceeded to “fight” against mournful, downwardly-sighing  lines from the viola, which grew to resembling a kind of all-out aerial attack on the scurrying inhabitants below! – all so visceral and palpable!

Violin pizzicati provoked a full-blooded response from the cello, whose  mournful lines eventually prevailed against the jazzy rhythms,  with murmuring lines gathering to subdue the ground zero activities and establish an uneasy, ghostly, tremolando-like calm – a couple of  bleak pizzicato repeated-note whimperings from the violin stimulated another startling, though short-lived  outbreak of the repeated note pattern before it too gave up the ghost. All of this was thrill-a-minute stuff, brought into being with an immediacy that, especially in such unprepossessing settings, simply took the listener’s breath away!

Out of the thicket emerged sighing violin lines and trenchant ‘cello responses, with the violin ascending heavenwards in search of some form of redemption/oblivion, its companions resonating in support, the exchanges again briefly sounding that distinctive “Vaughan Williams” ambience that brought to my mind the latter’s Sixth Symphony – most affecting! Then came the viola’s solo, augmented by cadaverous tappings from the second violin – after which the viola continued, joined by the first and second violins in an extended B-flat which slowly burgeoned towards a piercing climax.

Julia Joyce (viola) and the Chamber Pot-pourri Ensemble play Mozart

The intrinsic greatness of Mozart’s music would, of course, have easily survived a cheek-by-jowl placement with these twentieth-century goings-on intact, but the interval break was nevertheless appreciated at that point! It did give one the chance to ponder what we had heard in relative isolation, and especially apposite given the cultural “head start”  enjoyed by an eighteenth-century classic work when pitted against a later “arrival”. I had enjoyed my own particular “first encounter” with Mozart’s K.593 many years ago, courtesy of a fellow bus-driver I befriended during my “mis-spent youth” period of exploration! This particular individual was a Rastafarian-like figure, complete with dreadlocks! – one who completely belied his appearance by frequently conversing with me about art, literature and music, and ultimately making a present for me of a recording of two of the Mozart Quintets in question, one of which was K.593 (and which he himself adored!).

It was a “head-start” of sorts for me with this work, of course, which I grew to love all the more – and on a later, box-set pressing of the same recording (the stereo Amadeus with Cecil Aronowitz)  I also got to know the “alternate version” of the finale’s opening, the phrase written chromatically, rather than in stepwise fashion, and which is now recognised as the “authentic” opening – Helene Pohl pointed this out, playing both versions for our delight, though stopping short of proposing an “audience vote” on the matter!

It was one of a number of delights associated with this performance, another being Rolf Gjelsten’s engagingly individual way with the ‘cello phrase that began the work, repeated in different keys in ways that made the player on my Amadeus recording sound relatively po-faced and non-commital! Also, I’d never before properly “connected” this episode with the music of Haydn, despite owning recordings of things like the “Drum Roll” and “London” Symphonies for years and years, works with similar kinds of slow introductions, and with the same returning at the end of the opening movements! And finally, the presence of the NZSO’s principal violist, Julia Joyce, in the ensemble gave the performance a wonderfully “burnished” glory of exchange, particularly evident in the slow movement, with its frequent conversational violin/viola passages – all very theatrical, as well, I thought, with the tuttis bursting almost to full with expression.

A quickly-flowing Menuetto followed, less about “beats” and more about emotion ”flowing like oil”, as the composer would have said, and, with the Trio, a showcase of ascending arpeggios, a veritable welter of them on at least two occasions, both collegial and celebratory. As, of course, were the wry interlockings of the finale’s workings, where the sheer contrapuntal elan of the writing becomes an “Anything you can do” kind of musical feast with an “Of course!” series of  rejoinings, the exhilaration of matching knife-edged impulses and resplendent tones a glorious display, and one for all of us to savour and remember for a long while to come.

Good Friday 2025 – music of sorrow and resolve, from the Tudor Consort

MEDIA VITA – Music by BYRD, GIBBONS, SHEPPARD, TALLIS and WEELKES
The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

                                                                                                                                                                                               Michael Steward and the Tudor Consort at Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul

ORLANDO GIBBONS – O Lord, in Thy wrath
THOMAS WEELKES – Laboravi in gemitu meo
THOMAS TALLIS – Lamentations of Jeremiah I & II
WILLIAM BYRD – Plorans plorabit
JOHN SHEPPARD – Media vita in morte sumus

The Tudor Consort
Sopranos:  Geneviève Gates-Panneton, Lydia Joyce, Erin King, Jane McKinlay, Rebecca Stanton,
Chelsea Whitfield
Altos:  Christine Argyle, Andrea Cochrane, Alexandra Granville, Helene Page, Kassandra Wang,
Alex Woodhouse-Appleby
Tenors:  Joshua Long, Philip Roderick, Richard Taylor, Axel Tie
Basses:  Brian Hesketh, Joshua Jamieson, Frazer MacDiarmid, Matthew Painter, Keith Small,
Thomas Whaley

Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul, Molesworth Street
Friday 18th April (Good Friday) 2025

What a joy to experience in the here-and-now music written hundreds of years previously with spacious acoustics and worshipful ambiences in mind as spectacularly presented by Wellington’s Cathedral of St. Paul, in Molesworth Street! In fact, the capital boasts a number of churches whose qualities would present a similar-but-different interplay between atmosphere and clarity of sound to that which we enjoyed on this occasion – but for sheer ambient beauty, the sounds made on this occasion by the Tudor Consort voices here in Wellington Cathedral would be hard to beat.

Tudor Consort Music Director Michael Stewart welcomed us to what he obviously considered something of a time-honoured ritual for all concerned, an Easter Concert, with repertoire chosen from the incredible storehouse of music written over the centuries for this particular occasion in the liturgical year – a tradition begun by a previous Consort Music Director, Alastair Carey in 2002, and continued by Stewart since his appointment in the role in 2007.

The two “flagship” works in the concert, Thomas Tallis’s two-part Lamentations of Jeremiah, and John Sheppard’s Media vita in morte sumus obviously gave each of the “halves” a singular kind of distinction and dominance through their sheer physical scale. Though the accompanying works by Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes and William Byrd were obviously of more modest dimensions their qualities unerringly took us into the ambient performance arena and suitably honed our receptivities for dealing with the more extended and complex works that followed.

Orlando Gibbons’ anthem “O Lord in thy wrath” opened the programme exquisitely, the tones beautifully balanced and the lines effortlessly shaped, with telling layerings in places like “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am weak”, and “My soul is also sore troubled”. The final two lines further illustrate the singers’ control of emphases, the line “how long wilt thou punish me?” insistent, and the following “O save me for thy mercy’s sake” expiating the tones with heartfelt sensitivity. By comparison, Thomas Weelkes’ setting of different words from the same Psalm 6 seemed more insistent in its sorrowful reflection on the human condition. It seemed like a lament without solace, tapestried with constant lamentings, snow-capped by a gorgeous but insistent soprano line which drew others upwards to empathise and fall back again, the undulations wrapping around one another, simpatico, and taking some comfort in blending together and sharing sorrows in this vale of tears.

I’d heard both of the following pieces by Thomas Tallis and John Sheppard on recordings beforehand so I knew something of what to expect, taking particular comfort in the visceral collegiality of voices expressing (particularly in the Tallis work) remarkably apposite observations and feelings in a world that’s presently echoing in so many places and ways the strife and accompanying distress of the prophet’s visions. And of course, amid the consolations afforded by music of such beauty in places comes the agonising thought of the suffering being more present-day than prophetic, and the extent to which we can sublimate in art such agonies while people in places like Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine most ostensibly have no such recourse. The horrors of history are difficult enough to bear without having to witness and cope with wilful re-enactments of the same taunting and defiling any such attempts to stimulate awareness, resolve and resistance to such forces through art’s most heartfelt efforts.

Tallis’s Lamentations of Jeremiah are in two parts, and demonstrate with disarming directness an extraordinary range of contrasts of mood and feeling, the settings incorporating titles and headings of different verses of the texts, the latter using the Hebraic names for letters and weaving these names into the otherwise Latin text. So we hear the Hebrew letters “Aleph” and “Beth” in Part One, each given an ornate but emotionally neutral ambience before “easing” or else “plunging” into the actual texts, releasing the listener from the intensities of each verse setting with whole breaths of relative space and re-alignment.

As with the transition from the overall tranquility of the “Aleph” settings to the obvious surge of tone from the tenors at Quomodo sedet sola civitas,  these progressions into text can happen seamlessly, or be underlined by pauses, such as that separating the following “Beth” from Plorans ploravit in nocte.  Amidst the beauty of the singing I wondered whether phrases such as Omnes amici ejus spreverunt eam (all her friends have dealt treacherously with her), here delivered more in sorrow than in anger, were as forceful as what Tallis might have intended – certainly, the concluding Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum (Jerusalem, return to the Lord your God) expressed here to numbing perfection a quietly beseeching tone!

I was struck all over again by the sheer storytelling capacities of the sounds created by the ensemble when Part II of the Lamentations began – having completed two “chapters” of the text we were about to be regaled with no less than three more, with the beauty of utterance putting a listener like myself in mind of a further “unlocking” of a precious casket of treasures. After the splendid “Ghimel” opening, there seemed more insistence and urgency in the interlocking parts, the sopranos arching their phrases heavenwards with plenty of expressive purpose (and especially in the final nec invenit requiem.) The brief “Daleth” introduction to the central verses brings the ear-catching variant of fewer voices for the opening Omnes persecutores emus which builds into an impressive ensemble; and in the following “Omnes porta eius destructae” follows an even more dire scenario with repetitions of the words oppressa amaritudine (bitter anguish) at the end.

The exquisitely architectural “Heth”  preluded the grimmest of the prophet’s foretellings, the tenors forthright with the opening Facti sunt hostes ejus in capite (Her foes have become her masters) and the other voices following suit, obsessively so with the words multitudinem iniquitatum ejus (the multitude of her transgressions). And how affecting did the voices make, firstly, the phrase Parvuli ejus ducti sunt (The children were led away), and then the final, quietly and almost desperately penitential murmurings of the same “Jerusalem” entreaty which had concluded Part I, and here returning with deeper finality.

A smaller ensemble tackled William Byrd’s Plorans plorabit, (incidentally, extending the phenomenon of political subversion in music) with its sombre message to the King of the time (James 1) that the “crown of (your) glory” was under threat! Otherwise its relatively tighter and more integrated sound-picture was to make all the more stimulating and telling a contrast with what followed afterwards. In fact Michael Stewart could scarcely contain his excitement at the prospect of performing this, the concert’s “signature” work – John Sheppard’s antiphon Media Vita in Morte Sumus, regarded as “supreme” in the composer’s output by scholars and performers.

A good deal of discussion has accompanied the work’s more recent history, which Stewart made a passing reference to before leaving it up to us to make our own researches due to the complexities of different editions and attitudes towards the work, though commenting that its impact and magnificence would be self-evident for the listener.

For the work’s certainly become something of an icon in its own singular world of choral music as a result of several factors – its unclear raison d’etre (thought by some to be a memorial for the composer’s first wife), its equally mysterious genesis (no copy exists of the composer’s own score, its survival due to the partbooks used to reconstruct the original in the late 1570s), and its inordinate length in early versions which sought to perform all the polyphonic repeats, a practice which certain newer editions have sought to modify, not by shedding any actual music but limiting the number of repeats of material in performance, as well as changing the order of some of the sections – the place of the canticle, the Nunc Dimittis, for example.  Applying such an approach to extremes would halve the time  some earlier performances might have taken, though Stewart had suggested to us in his pre-concert talk that the Consort’s approach would not be of such a radical order.

At a tempo which readily suggested the celestial movement of unearthly bodies orbiting some distant star, this music’s performance, with its breathtakingly stratospheric soprano line, transported our sensibilities to realms of awareness and imagination far removed from our accustomed realms of being, contemplating an eternal vision which inspires as much fear as longing – Media vita in morte sumus – (In the midst of life we be in death) and contemplating our helplessness at such a prospect at Amarae morti ne tradas nos (- the bitter pains of eternal death) – how readily, to my ears, amid the melismatic Sancte Deus and Sancte fortis, did the soprano lines evoke a distant echo of the yet-to-be-composed Miserere of Grigorio Allegri!

Into this void came the plainchant, given the theatrical treatment of alternating one voice, one section of the voices for the first part of the chant, and then including in the response at the Gloria Patri, the whole choir – if a “time stood still” moment was what was required, then the timing, tonings and placement of the voices was well-nigh perfect in its effect. The resuming of the antiphon maintained the darkness and solemnity of the Nunc Dimittis throughout the following Ne projicias nos (Do not cast us away), during which the radiance of the sopranos was absent with telling sombre effect, and having all the more radiance and candlepower on their return with a repetition of the Sancte Deus/Sancte fortis sequences.

Again the sopranos withdrew at Noli claudere aures tuas (Do not close your ears), with the earthier tones of the lower voices stressing the penitential tones of the suppliants – the more celestial tones take up the text Sancte et misericordis Salvator (O holy and most merciful Saviour) – but even more enchanting was the beautiful, Qui cognoscis occulta corda (You who know the secrets of the heart)  begun by those wonderful stratospheric voices which had given the work so much of its essential character – and together with the altos were what my ears seemed to tell me were the men joining in towards the piece’s end. By this time my sensibilities were drunk with the beauties and intensities of what I’d heard and my notes had begun to resembled mere scribblings of transported emotion, well-nigh indecipherable, as all transported emotion should be! Thankfully, wherever I’d been taken by this piece I did manage to reconstitute my senses sufficiently to get home, since which time it’s all been playing in my head demanding a semblance of order and continuity which has taken time to fall into a kind of coherence! Apart from the supercharged transcendentalism of the ending, I can vouch for my presence of mind during some of it. and thus hope enough of my reminiscing  of the journey makes sense!

 

 

Musical Prodigy Night for Orchestra Wellington

Orchestra Wellington presents “PRODIGY”

Georges BIZET – Symphony No. 1 in C Major
Felix MENDELSSOHN – Violin Concerto in E Minor Op.64
Dmitri SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 1 in F Minor Op.10

Amalia Hall (violin)
Marc Taddei (Music Director)
Orchestra Wellington  (Peter Clark – acting Concertmaster)

Saturday 12th April, 2025
Michael Fowler Centre
Wellington

(pictured at right – Georges Bizet, Felix Mendelssohn-Barthody, Dmitri Shostakovich)

Orchestra Wellington spectacularly lived up to its long-established reputation for innovative concert programming with the first presentation in its latest series “The Dictator’s Shadow”, one doing rich justice to the youthful creative achievements of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose fiftieth anniversary is being celebrated world-wide this year. This opening concert showcases Shostakovich’s remarkable First Symphony, written during 1925 while still a teenaged student at the Leningrad Music Conservatory, and achieving a sensational success, both at home with its Leningrad premiere (May 1926)  and abroad, with the work receiving performances as far afield as Berlin and the United States the following year.

As a concert in itself, the scheme based on the idea of “Prodigy” could hardly have done better, even if any of the last three of the teenaged Mozart’s Violin Concerti could just as easily (and appositely) have been substituted for Mendelssohn’s famous E Minor Op.64 work as a vehicle for the gifted Amalia Hall to play – I must sneakily admit that I, for one, would have relished even more the opportunity to hear her play any of those last three Mozart masterpieces!). Still, the idea of using the Mendelssohn work (apart from the happy availability of such an accomplished soloist) was to bring to notice the composer’s own prodigious creativities with earlier works such as the Octet and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, both of which were completed during Mendelssohn’s teens.

To complete the picture there was no happier way of demonstrating a young composer’s talent, inspiration and versatile technique than presenting the youthful (1855) Symphony of Georges Bizet – and though there were only the merest touches of greatness approaching the order of “Carmen” or “Les pêcheurs de perles” in this seventeen year-old’s enthusiastic concoctions of youthful endeavour, the overall impression of the music is that of a nature by turns vivacious and dreamily melancholic, equally at home in the town or the country, as portrayed by turns, in the various movements.

Marc Taddei’s spirited direction appropriately bounced the opening along, the high-spirited trajectories providing a lovely foil for the plangent beauty of the oboe’s floating second-subject lines soaring above the strings undulating patterns, then playing with the fanfare-like figures which frame the more lyrical sections, and the horn calls that both introduce and bid farewell to the movement’s development. After this, the slow movement’s dreamy, somewhat quasi-oriental meanderings were hauntingly voiced by the oboe after the most enchanting of openings (where did the young genius conjure up this mood from?) had been brought in by the strings. Just as engrossing was the ensuing string fugato with which the oboe then adroitly wove a reprise of the opening melody – had Robert Schumann been alive to hear this sequence, he might have uttered a judgement to rival his famous appraisal of one of Chopin’s youthful words many years before –  “Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!”.

I’ve always loved the Trio section of the charmingly rustic Menuetto-Scherzo which follows, not least because of what I’ve always thought was Bizet’s “gently poking fun in a Beethoven-like way” gesture at the wind players who have the Trio’s melody and repeat it a fourth higher at Fig.8 (in my score). Oboe and clarinet on all the recordings I’ve heard except for one play a delightfully astringent-sounding B-natural in that phrase instead of a B-flat, perhaps to indicate (as Beethoven did with his village band music in the “Pastoral” Symphony), that the players might not be fully up to the music’s demands! Here, I seemed to hear (if my ears were serving me correctly), that the wind-players were playing a B-flat, which of course sounded a lot more mellifluous, but not nearly so tangy and rustic! I have, as I’ve said, recorded evidence for both versions being acceptable, but I do wonder what the composer ACTUALLY wrote!

The finale was an exhilarating, momentum-plus performance, Taddei and his players bringing out the music’s fleet-fingered energies in a toe-tapping way, but giving attention to the shapes and trajectories of the melodies as well, contrasting the “perpetuum mobile” of the opening with the grander, more ceremonial second theme, and a more sinuous refrain, a more vulnerably human, song-like tune with which to “people” the soundscape (the “melodic gift” already strongly in evidence in the young composer!)

Oddly enough Bizet seemed to never give the work another thought as an entity, confining his interest to “cherry-picking” bits of it for use in more “serious” works, such as the opera Les pêcheurs de perles and his music for the play LArlesienne. Thanks to the French musicologist Jean Chantavoine who in 1933 published an article regarding the work’s existence, the symphony came to the attention of the conductor Felix Weingartner, who gave the work its belated premiere performance in 1935, earning for it a “wunderkind” status in league with the efforts of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Rossini and Shostakovich.

But next was Mendelssohn – and if the work chosen this evening was definitely not a “wunderkind” work in terms of years, it still evoked memories of hearing for oneself at another time those two outrageously precocious pieces which have for all time identified their then teenaged composer as one of nature’s creative marvels, the Octet for Strings and the Overture to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. This was the E Minor Violin Concerto, for many listeners the work that epitomises the romantic instrumental concerto with its manifest qualities, and one for which tonight’s soloist. Amalia Hall (the orchestra’s regular Concertmaster), seemed a near-ideal choice as its performer.

I’ve certainly not heard a more silvery-toned performance, one whose gossamer finish seemed in places almost unearthly, especially so in the rapid figurations when the notes seemed to “spill out” from the instrument like stardust from a comet arching across a firmament, with the couple of minor intonation stresses deserving the description (coined by a similarly entranced commentator in another, different context) “spots on the sun”. One might also occasionally have wanted a shade more tonal projection in places from the soloist; but to look for something different would be to besmirch the magic we were fortunate to find ourselves caught up in on this occasion  – and so we contented ourselves with the integral state of things as part of the excitement and wonder from both soloist and orchestra.

The music itself is too well-known to annotate at length – enough to say that the musicians here aptly probed the “character” of each of the work’s movements,  filling the ambient spaces with appropriately vibrant tones and gesturings across the instrumental spectrum, More of a dialogue than a contest throughout, the interaction between Hall and her conductor and players transmuted the first movement’s questings, proposings and              bargainings into concordance with the enticing sweetness of the slow movement’s exchanges before giving the exuberance of the finale its head,  violinist, conductor and orchestra revelling in the freely-shared elation of the work’s full expression.

Our readily-wrought appreciation of Amelia Hall’s playing was further enhanced by an encore item she performed with Peter Clark, her stand-in this evening as Concertmaster. This was a duo written by the Polish composer-virtuoso Henryk Wieniawski, his Etude-Caprice Op.18 No,4, in which the playing of both musicians was as remarkable for its delicacy and finesse as for its brilliance – a true sweetmeat of a bonus!

Casting about for ways to characterise the very “two different worlds”  kind of ambience which grew straightaway from the sounds of Dmitri Shostakovich’s singularly remarkable First Symphony, one has to find words for a “new era” of expression – and in this case, one with something of an almost hallucinatory quality in its music’s rapid-fire contrasts of atmosphere, outlook and motivation. One learns with no surprise that the composer spent much of this time earning a living as a cinema pianist, developing in the process a kind of penchant in his music for rapid movement and change, the introduction of disparate elements, and an almost expressionist delight in their surprising interactions.

These thoughts summed up something of the story of the Symphony’s first movement, presented here by Marc Taddei and his players with, in the wake of the concert’s first-half respectabilities, almost mind-boggling aplomb. It’s all superbly etched in, with the changes of pace and mood here nonchalantly and there explosively registered (though clearly articulated, whatever the voice), and the overall energies of the transitions driving one’s sensibilities on until reaching the droll  “did we dream you or you us?” fragments of out-and-out wonderment at the end that had previously tumbled past us all through the plethora of incident carried by the music.

By contrast, the second movement was here kept constantly and brilliantly on the move, either in a helter-skelter or a trance-like, sleepwalking kind of trajectory, each of which abruptly changed as if Shostakovich was  following a private movie-showing (here, Rachel Thomson relishing her occasional “cinema-pianist” role with gusto!). Or, perhaps, we were being asked to reimagine something grimmer – sequences of flight and agitation followed by funereal processions over desolate battlefields still resonating with crushing piano-chord hammerblows……

The music’s Lento mood darkened and deepened, with Taddei drawing from his players a remarkable soundscape of sorrow, with beautiful oboe and ‘cello-playing, taken up by the horns and strings, the repeated portentous brass call heightening the mood of tragedy – the performance brought out the music’s potent “funeral oration” character, moments of harshly unfettered despairing alternated with bleak, desolate voices, anticipating the Shostakovich of the great and harrowing symphonic adagios to come!

And so to the fourth movement, begun with a snare-drum crescendo which seemed at first an isolated, even fatuous gesture of promise, but which planted a rebellious seed in the Lento that returned, bearing its brass, wind and cello musings – suddenly, trumpets and lower strings were igniting the clarinets and upper strings, and whirling us away on a kaleidoscopic journey of contrasts too numerous and varied to fully describe,  but remarkable to experience in a single span of time! There seemed nothing which daunted these players and their valorous maestro – we were transported from the music’s deep recesses of gloom to its near-frenetic expression of exhilaration as the composer’s “end-game” imaginings were given their head in this engrossingly unpredictable but ultimately edifying ride!

If Orchestra Wellington continues to delight us with anything like the same adventurous spirit, emotional engagement and instrumental brilliance as we heard in this first “The Dictator’s Shadow” concert, the remainder of the series will, for me, be well-nigh unmissable! Full marks to all involved for such intelligent and innovative programming and for the sheer elan of execution (oops! – that word just slipped out, Comrade! – sorry!) of some glorious music!!

 

Josef Haydn’s meditation on empathy, forgiveness and love from Camerata at St.Peter’s-on-Willis-St., Wellington

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross (1786-7)  Image: Bernd Ritschel

Camerata
Anne Loeser – Music Director and Concertmaster

St Peter’s on Willis St. Church
Te Aro, Wellington

Saturday, 5th April, 2025

Co-founder Director of Wellington’s Camerata chamber orchestra, Liz Pritchett, eloquently marked the occasion of the group’s tenth anniversary when welcoming the audience at St.Peter’s-on-Willis- St. Church. to its first concert for 2025, paying tribute to the various efforts of people over the years of the ensemble’s activities in maintaining the ongoing success of the venture. She then introduced Concertmaster Anne Loeser to the platform to begin the evening’s programme, one heralding the liturgical year’s oncoming Easter celebrations by featuring a single work, Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross”, while also continuing the ensemble’s ground-breaking  survey of the composer’s orchestral works.

Haydn wrote this work in 1786 responding to a commission from the Bishop of Cádiz for a work to solemnise the Good Friday service the following year at the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva (an underground church in the Spanish city). The work rapidly became popular, being performed on its publication in its original orchestral guise almost simultaneously in Vienna and Bonn – and later in Rome, Berlin and Paris – in fact, so much so that the composer not only adapted the work for string quartet, but also approved a version for solo keyboard which had “turned up” (Haydn apparently edited the proofs of what was probably the work of an enterprising music publisher!). A decade later, inspired by hearing a further adaptation of the work for choir and orchestra by the Passau choirmaster Joseph Freiberth, Haydn decided to go one better and produce his own choral version, which was completed in 1796.

The work, with its self-explanatory title, consists of seven slow movements, one for each of Christ’s seven utterances while on the Cross. They’re often called “sonatas” or “meditations” with the seven individual pieces framed by a slow orchestral introduction and a concluding “Presto con tutta la forza” which depicts the earthquake described by Matthew’s Gospel at the moment of Christ’s death. Here, Camerata used, of course, the original orchestra version, one which forged something of a link with that first performance in Cadiz by having a speaker (Gregory Hill) intone beforehand each of the seven statements by Christ quoted in the various Gospels. Haydn described in a preface to the work something of the structure of the original service, consisting of each of Christ’s utterances, a discourse on its significance, and then the corresponding piece of music – fortunately we were spared the longeurs of such an arrangement on this occasion!

The work’s dark, D Minor introduction, Maestoso ed Adagio, straightaway engaged our attention, with the players’ fully-voiced and deep-throated sounds generating a real sense of impending tragedy and sorrow, and throwing into relief the more consoling F-major sequences before the opening’s inevitable, inescapable return. The mood actually lightened with the first of Christ’s utterances to be reflected in the music’s phrasings – “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”, the tones  conciliatory and stressing the idea of mercy and forgiveness even in the face of betrayal, mockery and abandonment merely hinted at here by the occasional intimation of darkness.

Similar sentiments coloured the exchange between Christ and the repentant thief via the words  “Today, you will be with me in Paradise”. Major and minor key sequences readily brought to us the drama of the encounter, with forceful attack by the strings on the high exposed notes, followed by the reprise of the opening reaffirming Christ’s positive recognition of the sinner’s repentance.  In a different context was the great and touching tenderness which came over the music for the following “Woman, behold thy son”, where Jesus enjoins his mother to regard her vigil’s companion John the Apostle as her son in his place,  the “held” chords at the phrase-beginnings and the two-note answerings especially affecting, as were the even more plaintive  interactions between strings and winds in the music’s development.

With the dramatic “My God, my God, whv has thou forsaken me?” the level of angst and anguish was suddenly heightened, though with the music’s exhortations reiterated in a major key, having the effect of “humanising” the suffering, the solo violin passages concentrating one’s concept of a single person’s ordeal with its exposed quality, extended by the cello’s and others’ solo lines. And how piteously Haydn then honed in on this suffering in the following “I thirst”,  firstly by the poignant use of pizzicato notes as a background to the words, then forthright repeated-note patterns suggesting the suffering Christ’s extreme duress, as the heart-rending call is echoed by the various winds – also, how affecting is the recapitulation of these various piteous elements of the scene, as the drama draws closer to its end! One must pay special tribute to the brasses in these darker, more dramatic sequences, their colourings adding weight and gravitas to the depictions for our increased absorption!

The drama then enacted, it seemed, a number of “conclusions” of a kind, the first being the finality of the words “It is finished” – a bald unison statement, then a harmonised repetition through the orchestra, the composer alternating the “bare” melody with the harmonised version, as if indicating an eventual cessation of suffering, and an attaining of a “better place”, which indicates why the music didn’t return to the minor key-opening. Then came the final grand statement “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit”, the last of the utterances and a total acceptance, indicated by a warmly sonorous E-flat major – in fact, the music here almost becomes balletic in places, with a triple-time decorative figure appearing for a number of bars – an undeniable sense of occasion, coupled with a certain expectation – but of what?

The answer, of course, came with the final, unnerving “Il terremoto” (The Earthquake), voiced in a frenzied C Minor, which the rushing strings , the thundering timpani and the baleful winds and brasses made splendid use of with suitably telling characterful and concerted seismic gesturings – as if the composer was here adding his voice to all those who have since proclaimed that “this, truly, was the Son of God”. It brought a precipitate finish to what had been a largely contemplative occasion, one whose reflective meditation on aspects of the human condition with its capacities for empathy, forgiveness and love made for a moving and worthwhile experience.

 

 

Come to the Cabaret! – with Stephanie Acraman and Liam Wooding

THE COMPLETE CABARET SONGS OF WILLIAM BOLCOM

 

Stephanie Acraman (voice)
Liam Wooding (piano)

RATTLE RAT D140-2023

Producer: Kenneth Young
Recorded by John Kim and Steve Garden
at the Gallagher Theatre, Waikato University

I imagined I could at first almost hear the beguiling tones of Joan Morris floating around the edges of Stephanie Acraman’s voice as the latter made her svelt, seductive way through the opening song “Over the Piano” of this well-nigh irresistible collection of American composer William Bolcom’s Cabaret Songs, which Steve Garden’s enterprising Rattle Records has captured and released for our delight!

I couldn’t help myself, really – because Joan Morris is the wife of the composer, William Bolcom, of these songs, and the singer for whom they were originally written – and over thirty years ago I remember sitting spellbound in London’s Wigmore Hall listening to Morris and Bolcom weave their magic through an evening of American Song, one featuring names and tunes of composers and music I both knew and didn’t know, but didn’t at all care, the discoveries throughout the evening being as delightful as the familiar songs were enfolding, wrap-around-pleasures!

Not that Stephanie Acraman doesn’t quickly make these songs very much her own –  by the time she and her pianist Liam Wooding had teased my sensibilities with that first number, I found myself falling hook, line and sinker for more!  And I straightaway loved the Ira Gershwin-like word-pairings in the second song “Fur (Murray the Furrier)”, with the matching “worrier” and “hurrier” creating consonances that seemed to spontaneously sprout from the very ground along which the song ambled,  Bolcom’s musical fancies  so readily and adroitly  tickled by his songwriter Arnold Weinstein’s impish wit and word-verve.

Some history – alongside his studies with both Darius Milhaud at Mills College, California, and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, the young William Bolcom was balancing an interest in the works of Boulez, Stockhausen and Berio with a desire to develop his own stylistic links to popular music. This brought him into contact with Arnold Weinstein who was the librettist of a 1964 anti-war satire Dynamite Tonite for which Bolcom had been asked to write the music. Their resulting collaboration went on to produce operas, song-cycles and books of madrigals, besides a number of “single” works over the years, and of course, these “Cabaret Songs”, which appeared in separate “books”, the first completed in 1977 and with Book Four finally appearing in 1996.  These songs embody the concept of “cabaret” as a “theatre of life”, presenting vignettes illustrating all kinds of people in different life-situations, their range and variety here done captivating justice in this particular recording by these two performers.

As the songs pass through one’s consciousness one gasps in places at the abyss-like gulf between portrayals of different human sensibilities, as, for instance, when one breaks off from the antics of the well-practised philanderer of the fourth song, “He tipped the waiter”, in Book One, and straightaway enters the endless but patiently-endured world of longing  of the singer in “Waitin’”, a touching, almost hymn-like paean to hope, voiced by a disarmingly unpretentious soul. Then, there’s the life-enhancing, wing-spreading optimism and oxygenating energies of the free-spirited vocalist (with a suitably jaunty piano accompaniment!) in “Places to Live” (the word “live” perhaps Freudianly misprinted as “love” in a couple of places), and which then somewhat mordantly curdles into the fraught domesticities of “Toothbrush Time”

Besides these (and other) ill-fated couplings airing their dreams and disappointments practically in tandem with one another,  there are the ones that “stand-alone”, the songs which live amidst either a bubbling effervescence of both words and music, or are woven all about the voice’s suggestive curve of tremulous warmth with the piano’s like connivance,  echoing in the memory as worlds of their own long after the sounds have outwardly ceased. These can tell their own story, as with the “Song of Black Max (as told by the de Kooning Boys” – Weinstein’s deliciously macabre ode to a legendary fate-like figure of the Dutch underworld) – or paint a no-holds-barred character picture, like that of “Radical Sally”, a bluesy ballade of a nemesis-like female omnipresence who, in the poet’s words “still looks at you like a long-lost cause” – singer and pianist totally inhabiting both persona and ambient world.

Acraman and Wooding throughout the disc make every sliver of Bolcom’s and Weinstein’s characterisation and flavour count, even the pithy “Thius, King of Orf”, whose elliptic utterance and sudden discharge couldn’t help but remind me of the “la-la-land” life-slices of American cartoonist B.Kliban (“Cynthia is mistakenly crowned King of Norway”, for instance)……as recounted above they do it breathtakingly so, and draw a masterly contrast that follows with the gentle, Blake-like world of “sweet and small” satisfaction of the eponymously-titled portrait of a bee who “sits a second on a rose, sips a bit and goes….”

Turn to anything in these “books”, in fact, and listeners may well find themselves variously amused or disconcerted, charmed or concerned, grounded or transported  – Acraman and Wooding  present without apology a collected means of awakening a whole gamut of responses to these portrayals of the human condition, and which I, for one, couldn’t resist playing right through again, just to revisit what I considered the fun of it! And a second hearing uncovered still more in the “stand-alone” areas that Bolcom and Weinstein give voice and tones to that I caught on my first, fine, careless traversal…..

I found myself going back to the resonances that clung to my memory of Volume One’s “Waitin”, with its “hope-against-hope” loneliness, to Volume Two’s “The Actor” who repeatedly “dies for a living”, along with “George” whose “difference” to others cost him his life (as it did a Puccini heroine in a different context, but hinted at by the same music), to Volume Three’s “Miracle Song” (which pays tribute to Jerry Lieber’s and Mike Stoller’s  “Is that all there is?” but with rather more grotesque imagery (ev’ry third friend you meet – “Hello, so what else is dead?”),  a song leaving us like possuums trapped in car headlights!…and then the final Volume’s vulnerabilities of love, firstly teased in “Can’t Sleep” and then trashed in the following “At the Last Lousy Moments of Love”.  How tellingly Acraman and Wooding give and take with each other throughout these vignettes of human feeling,  with many a vocal impulse proposed, shared and countered by a pianistic rejoiner, and vice versa.

A third  “listen”? – it won’t be the last time, I’m certain, but this traversal had me looking for the ones I might have not given enough time to, and allowed to pass me by in a generalised kind of mind-set – but as with all great music parts of it are loaded to register at later and still more later hearings! So I’m now writing this with the initially-thought trite but charming “Love in the Thirties” from Volume Three suddenly having properly “sprung” its spell (with my own parenthood times poignantly played like a private movie in my head throughout the song!), and finally (appropriately?) the last song “Blue”, tantalisingly ambivalent in its intent for me (a song for someone else or for the self? – I vary, depending on my mood (need?) when listening) …….but those words which I’ve finally paid proper attention to are Wordsworthian in their impact, like distant daffodils! – “behind the eyes, behind the mind you’ll find the sweetest brilliance and a stillness of such blue…..” I’m finding they now leave me weak with their realisation……

I’m left saying that I can’t recommend this recording  enthusiastically enough! – whatever genre of music is one’s “thing”, this for me has transcended such considerations! I wish for it every success – it does proud  everybody involved in its becoming and actual being.

World Premiere at “The Long Hall” – Gao Ping’s tribute to Dmitri Shostakovich


WORLD PREMIERE AT WELLINGTON’S “THE LONG HALL”

Erwin Schulhoff – Duo for Violin and ‘Cello (1925)*
Gao Ping – A Lingering Echo (2025) World Premiere
Dmitri Shostakovich – String Quartet No.9 in E-flat Op.117

The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble
Helene Pohl (leader)* / Monique Lapins (violin) / Christiaan van der Zee (viola)
Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)*

Event held in conjunction with the Kaibosh Food Rescue Charity

The Long Hall, Point Jerningham, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday, 22nd March 2025

One of Wellington’s best-kept secrets of recent times is a building in Roseneath called “The Long Hall”, situated on the land high up from where Oriental Parade turns into Evans Bay Parade, overlooking Point Jerningham. The area is a place best known as a venue for “21-gun salutes” made to honour visiting dignitaries to the capital – but more lately the once-dilapidated hall further up the hill from where the guns are fired has been enjoying a beautifully-restored lease of life, far from those days when it was first set up as an RSA clubroom, and later a practice-venue  for the City of Wellington Pipe band, and then allowed to fall into disuse and disrepair. Rather than lose what seemed to be an obvious community resource, various people reactivated local interest in the hall, among them dance-teacher and events-organiser-extraordinaire Jennifer Shennan, whose particular vision, interest and energies inspired others to join with her to encourage ever-increasing use of the venue,  forming a Trust in 2008 to help organise the hall’s proper restoration.

Today, “The Long Hall” (named to honour the extent of the restoration processes) is proudly and stylishly reclad with native timber floors, a new roof, and its original kauri table-tops refurbished, to the enjoyment and satisfaction of a  host of current users and audiences who gather for events such as today’s concert –  the beginning of a new series of “benefit concerts”, this one in aid of a well-known food rescue charity known as Kaibosh (begun as long ago as 2008!) which collects and redistributes excess food produce to community groups.

Styled as “Comfy Concert #1” by way of emphasising a more relaxed concert atmosphere here in “The Long Hall” the event was introduced by former New Zealand String Quartet leader Helene Pohl, whose group, enterprisingly named “The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble” also included two other former members of the NZSQ, violinist Monique Lapins and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten, as well as freelance violist Christiaan van der Zee. The group chose a programme containing works by composers whose music had some commonality or connection – both Erwin Schulhoff and Dmitri Shostakovich suffered the privations of official disapproval of their work at various times (terminally in Schulhoff’s case), and a third and later composer, Gao Ping, has expressed a fervent admiration for Shostakovich’s music, manifested in a new work “A Lingering Echo” which on this occasion was receiving its actual premiere performance.

The concert opened with Erwin Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and ‘Cello, composed in 1925. Helene Pohl called the piece “a thrilling musical kaleidoscope” in her programme note, which she and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten further elaborated by demonstrating  some of the technical and ultra-expressive devices used by the composer (himself a brilliant string-player),  alerting us to the piece’s incredible extremes of tones, timbres and dynamics across its four movements.

A hymn-like opening theme gradually divested itself of gravitas in pursuit of  more exploratory elaborations – before long the players had energised these more quixotic figurations into gestures that gradually took them to bleaker realms, the instruments sharing a wistful theme made ethereal by  harmonics, a “strained” dialogue that intensified into an “agitato” encounter, but ran out of energy! – the lines then re-emerged, somewhat chastened, in a “molto tranquillo” whose tones dissolved into a kind of tenuous distance.  The second movement’s “Zingaresca” Allegro giocoso was just that, a rollicking exchange of dance-like energies readily evoking a folkish Central European gathering, one whose momentums were engagingly tumbled down the hill at one diverting point, the players musically picking themselves up and carrying on, finishing with a disarmingly wry pizzicato gesture!

We were charmed by the Andantino’s opening exchanges of pizzicato-accompanied melody between the players, until the similar arco exchanges brought a rather more strained, acerbic quality to the interactions, an ”edge” to the heartfeltness. The finale at first seemed to bring back the work’s opening, like a meeting of old friends, though one which here appeared to stumble into contention and argument rather than pleasant exchange, though a heart-stopping series of tremulously beautiful ascending thirds seemed to quell any over-querulous spirits for the moment. However, waiting on the concluding pages was the Presto fanatico, introduced by the galloping cello, upon whose back the violin whooped and  hollered, until the music dramatically slowed, bring the players together in a cheek-by-jowl unison which then reared up spectacularly and delivered its concluding flourish! Wow!

Next to be performed was the afternoon’s “World Premiere”, a work by Chinese composer Gao Ping (a figure well-known to New Zealand audiences by dint of his presence in this country for a number of years as a composer, teacher and performer), written as a tribute to Shostakovich, The work’s title “A Lingering Echo” came from a statement written for the concert’s programme by Gao Ping concerning the work’s genesis, one which deserves to be printed here in full: –

“Shostakovich was part of the reason I became a composer. He was a hero for whole generations of Chinese musicians. Like a lingering echo, he exists in our musical memory, but more than that, he holds a special symbolism in our consciousness. In his life’s struggles and compromises, and in the fierce and defiant expression in his music we witness a human condition that resonates with us regardless of era or space. A Lingering Echo for string quartet is my personal response to the man and the musician. There is no direct quotation from him in the sense of borrowed material, but in all three movements there are constant references to the Shostakovich in my memory and imagination”.

Of interest is the historical association three of this afternoon’s quartet musicians have with the composer. During Gao Ping’s years of residence in New Zealand while an Associate Professor of Music at Canterbury University, he frequently worked with the New Zealand String Quartet as both a performer and composer at the time when Helene Pohl. Rolf Gjelsten and Monique Lapins were members of that same Quartet. Today’s performance would have benefitted considerably from the degree of first-hand experience and identification with the composer’s music in general brought by these same musicians to the occasion. With such  things in mind we awaited all the more eagerly the appearance of the quartet to give this work its first public hearing. In such an intimate environment as “The Long Hall” the occasion seemed all the more direct and epoch-making. I had attended the occasional premiere of New Zealand works in the past but none seemed more “laden” and singular than this one!

The music began with a kind of processional, the textures open and simple at first, but growing more complex as the work proceeded, the two violins intermingling their lines  and the lower strings underpinning the textures – the composer’s directive here was simply “Slow, steady, lonely”, very Shostakovich-like indicators of tone, trajectory and atmosphere. Tremolandi accompanied a first violin recitative as the music took on an almost pointillistic aspect with single notes sounded amidst the ambiences – as the first violin took up the vistas with harmonics the second filled in the dots with pizzicato, everything having begun to drift stratospherically as befitted the composer’s directive – “lonely” – joining forces at the end with the awaiting silence….

Gao Ping’s instruction for the second movement, “Restless, desperate” promised a different kind of experience – and so it proved. Begun with slashing, thrusting chordings, and weighed with heavy, restless phrases, the imposing sound-blocks fitted themselves into a formidable trajectory – a tonal juggernaut throwing out fusillades of sound –  though there was plenty of volatility going along with the ride. Zigzagging individual criss-crossing lines had their say before being superseded by the pompous, heavily-weighted sound-boulders on their grinding journey, continuing the exchange until a violin solo atop a strong, groaning theme brought a sense of lamenting – the first violin’s line piteous, and the second exuding anxiety and agitation – but their pleas halted the dragging, behemoth-like sounds previously heard, clearing the soundscape to allow a sprinkling of the first violin’s harmonics, the second’s tremolandi along with the viola’s, and the cello’s “bounced” notes. The music became fugue-like, using both arco and pizzicato – here, my notes read “violins repeat theme, ‘cello makes a gruff comment, viola grimaces in reply…”  (it sounded as if Dmitri Dmitriyevitch would have readily approved of it all…) – the fugue-like writing continued, both violinists pushing their instruments along fiercely, interspersing the lines with pizzicato and with bows striking using the wood! – the instruments all appeared to rain blows upon an invisible assailant! – and then, with a sudden snarl, the music stopped!……

Mercifully, the composer allowed some outward calm following such a maelstrom – for the final movement, Gao Ping wrote “Measured, static, icy”, which music we settled back down to hear, perhaps not entirely free of trepidation, but released from any further out-and-out assault…here were sounds diametrically different to what we had just heard, bloodless, frozen tones, resembling slowly-melting ice……music shifting and swaying backwards and forwards,  the lower strings performing an ostinato while pizzicato notes gently dropped from the violins, who continued to sigh and creak and squeak…..leaving the lower strings to proclaim their hegemony with stronger chordings and moments of agitation, while the upper strings busied themselves with tentative climbing and falling figures – it seemed almost an ”Endgame” kind of scenario, with the state of things removed from contentment, and consigned to a kind of enigmatic oblivion. All that remained to add was that we, the audience, applauded lustily at the place we deemed was the end!

“The Long Hall” proved a very pleasant “interval” place in which to enjoy a respite from the demands exerted by such concentrated listening efforts (I mean no disrespect by prioritising the needs of the audience over those of the performing artists who’ve been doing all the “real” work, of course!). Still, it was a joy to have people so close at hand to talk with, which of course is all part of the “shared” experience of such an event.

In no time at all, it seemed, we had been summoned back to our seats (the quartet players were actually on the platform before many of us had sat down again!) and were ready to experience at first hand something of composer Gao Ping’s pleasure and wonderment at the music of his “hero”, Dmitri Shostakovich himself!  Earlier, I was thrilled to hear Rolf Gjelsten tell us of the plans of the Quartet to “share” (with the NZSQ) the presentation of the composer’s complete set of string quartets during this, the 50th anniversary year of Shostakovich’s death. What riches we can anticipate enjoying! –  having two groups of musicians at hand capable of doing justice to these remarkable works of art, among the greatest of any in the string quartet medium!

Today we were to hear String Quartet No. 9, written in 1964 after a kind of hiatus of creativity regarding the quartet genre, when, three years before, in a burst of self-criticism, the composer reportedly burnt the first version of the quartet – accounts differ as to what happened next, as references are also made in some quarters to ANOTHER (this one incomplete) 9th Quartet NOT burnt in the stove and marked as Op 113, its surviving Allegretto movement bearing some resemblance to the opening Moderato con moto movement of the finished work. Whatever the case, the new (and completed) No. 9 was dedicated to the composer’s third and surviving wife Irina Antonovna, whom he had married in 1962.

Reckoned as the last of Shostakovich’s three “personal” quartets, (the Seventh dedicated to his first wife, Nina, and the Eighth an autobiographical work, the Ninth shares another feature with the aforementioned ones, with movements that “flow” into one another without interruption. However,  the Ninth singularly has four short movements leading to a finale that’s practically a quartet in itself, as long as the other movements put together. So, though a lighter, less harrowing listen than the Eighth Quartet, it has its moments of anxiety and unease amid the sardonic humour and occasional high spirits.

The first movement’s opening has never seemed to me quite the “relaxed, self-satisfied” outpouring of good humour touted by some commentators – I’ve always heard a bitter-sweetness in some of the chromatic writing for the violins, though there’s the occasional jauntiness of the ‘cello writing which here and there tempts a smile. The immediacy of the venue gave the performers’ tones, textures and trajectories the same incredible intimacy and impact we’d of course already registered with the Schulhoff and Gao Ping items!

Chris van der Zee’s viola took us into the bleak beauty of the second movement’s Adagio, the music’s solemnity delicately treads the line between the sound’s Janus-faced tenderness and desolation – from this Helene Pohl’s violin made the first tentative impulses leading to a sudden vigorous polka-like Allegretto movement, with passing resemblances to Rossini’s “William Tell Overture – the excitemement grew when Monique Lapins’s violin excitingly upped the dynamic levels of the dance, and the music’s temperatures rose! – a kind of ghostly shiver then takes over the ensemble as the first violin makes ghoul-like utterances, repeated by the second violin before the music subsides once again into a second Adagio, darker and stranger than before, with a particularly gripping quality heightened by the closeness of the players – a quality heightened by Monique Lapins’ startling pizzicato, later replicated by Chris van der Zee’s viola – and what great playing by Helene Pohl in her impassioned recitative over the drone-like ambiences of the other instruments!

The beautiful chording which followed prepared us not a whit for the onslaught of the final movement’s aggressively-launched Allegro, the driving rhythms holding sway for a few measures before being taken over by a galumphing peasant-dance, Rolf Gjelsten’s cello contributing a superbly anguished and heartfelt sequence, before being led back to the wild dance by the viola, with the others joining in what sounded like “a devil of a fugue” before the ensemble concluded a tremolando passage with a “great gulp”. Cello recitatives and pizzicato chords seemed then to hold the ensemble in thrall, the concerted response being a series of ensembled pizzicato in reply – but a remarkable passage begin by the cello seemed to mould fragmented gestures from all the players together and stimulate enough concerted movement to  inspire the return of the cantering rhythm that brings back the “William Tell” motive, and  increasedly concerted excitement, leading to a gutsy, determined, “give-it-all-you’ve-got”  build up to a final unison statement of arrival! Its somewhat angular, offbeat trajectory allowed the final payoff to surprise everybody! – so there was a heartskipping moment of silence before we in the audience realised that the composer had actually left the building and it was time to applaud!

Casting the memory back over the afternoon gives one the feeling that it couldn’t have been done better! – very great honour and heartfelt thanks to all concerned for such a richly-appointed and meticulously-wrought show!


The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble at Roseneath’s “The Long Hall” –  from left, Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins, Rolf Gjelsten and Chris van der Zee

 

Michael Houstoun’s Well-Tempered Bach – “through all the tones and semitones”

JS BACH – The Well-tempered Clavier Books One and Two BWV 545-593
Michael Houstoun (piano)
Rattle Records RAT D155 2024 (4)

Recording Producer – Kenneth Young
Recorded by John Kim and Steve Garden
at the Symonds Street, University of Auckland Music Theatre

“Not ”Brook” but “Ocean” should be his name.”
(
Ludwig Van Beethoven, commenting on the German “Bach” meaning “Brook”)

No recording dates are given in the characteristically austere documentation accompanying Rattle’s issue of this historic recorded undertaking by Michael Houstoun, the first by a New Zealand pianist featuring Johann Sebastian Bach’s legendary “48” – the composer’s twice-completed survey of all twenty-four major and minor keys, each in “prelude-and-fugue” form, making ninety-six individual pieces in all. It’s surely worthy for posterity’s sake to note that the 2024 recording dates for the first of the two books were April 6th to 8th, and for the second, July 5th to 8th  (my thanks to Steve Garden for that information!).

Houstoun has previously played both books of Bach’s monumental work in concert over some years – quick searches I made turned up occasions like a 2016 Adam Concert Room performance in Wellington of the entire Bk.2 as part of the Judith Clark Memorial Piano series, and consecutive-evening performances of each of the two books of the “48” in the Music Theatre of the University of Auckland in May 2017, and again on two October afternoons in The Great Hall, Christchurch Arts Centre, that same year. These works have obviously been in his repertoire for sufficient time to consider and make the decision to commit his oft-sounded-out thoughts about them to a recording.

The notes accompanying this production, written by Houstoun himself, fittingly express what this music means to him, inextricably as a pianist and as a human being, with the singular phrase “a series of bottom lines of incalculable value”. He goes on to discuss both melody and harmony in the light of his quoting Beethoven’s words which describe Bach the “master of harmony” by means which the pianist describes as “the miraculous weaving together” of melody. And he talks about the music’s “sheer pulsation” of rhythm and the sense of an infinite trajectorial energy through which Bach seems at times to “carry us into eternity” (a phenomenon which I vividly recall “drew me in” on my own first hearing of the work, many years ago!). Another of Houstoun’s “bottom lines” refers to the actual “character” of the individual pieces, the pianist maintaining that there is more to each one than being either a “keyboard exercise” or “an amenable grouping of notes and rests” – though as the notes themselves contain no dynamic or tempo markings, much of the “character” which emerges from each piece would be at the performer’s own discretion.

What gives these performances something of a singular flavour is Houstoun’s making available to the listener his own brief impressions of each of the pieces’ separate “characters” – he had previously listed these in the programme notes to his former live performances, citing Debussy’s example with his Preludes of publishing titles or descriptions of the pieces. Hans Von Bulow did a similar thing when performing Chopin’s 24 Preludes, some of which epithets have actually stuck to a couple of the pieces over the years. Though curious to know how many others might have applied such an idea to Bach’s work I could find only one instance recorded of a previous occasion when a pianist had performed the “48” with their own descriptions of each Prelude and Fugue listed in the programme, along with some of the responses to this being done! The latter were, to say the least, varied – I’ve chosen just two  polarising samples below…..

This is a terrible idea. You will burn in the Lake of Fire for even considering such a thing.

If someone doesn’t like this, can they just not read them {the titles}? For me they would give an interesting perspective on the performer’s thoughts.

I find myself happy with the latter reaction, in that, especially in the case of Bach’s unadorned scores, ideal performances would surely feature an amalgam of inspirations, ideas and sounds from both composer and performer. How far the latter chooses to reveal such characterisations as a performer is, of course, a personal choice, as is the listener’s in terms of “taking them on”.

From time to time when listening to these stunningly-wrought realisations of Bach’s ineffable genius from Houstoun, I found myself wanting to go back to other interpretations of certain of the pieces I’d heard – by no means did I want to revert to exhaustive comparisons, but merely to register the extent my previous reactions to the music were here either replicated or modified. I’d listened most often to the sets by Sviatoslav Richter, Tatyana Nikolaeva, Andras Schiff and Angela Hewitt (the latter’s second 2007-8 recording) over the years and was interested to “place” my reaction to Houstoun’s performances in the light of those earlier hearings. What follows below isn’t a track-by-track commentary, but a series of observations from my journey with this new recording, interspersed by memories of detail which, as I recall, gave somewhat different impressions, and which stimulated a desire on my part to “update” my own relationship with this remarkable work.

At the outset of Houstoun’s performance (Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C Major) I was instantly entranced – here was tone, tempo and temperament which seemed ideally suited to the notes, creating a kind of encapsulation of the whole in a single span of music-making, an “exposition”, then a “development” and finally a “recapitulation”, more in an emotional than a technical sense, of course, but particularly apparent in this glowing account, one which when I listened to other performances I found myself continuing to value Houstoun’s as highly as a singular experience.

The contrast afforded by the C Minor Prelude (No.2) is suitably dramatic, with touches of the gothic from the pianist’s closely-worked harmonic shifts in the piece’s cadenza at the end, to which the fugue offers a stern reprove! A marvellous change in colour and momentum is afforded by the following C-sharp major Prelude, like thistledown at play, with gorgeously feathery articulations, tempered by a schoolmistressy kind of following fugue, a-fluster at all the gaiety, but secretly longing to join in. One of the great ones of the set is No. 4 in C-sharp minor (Houstoun calls it “Lamentoso”), its reflective sorrow demonstrative in the Prelude and ritualistic in the fugue, the latter building towards institutionalised grief by the end – Houstoun’s recording is quite a contrast with Angela Hewitt’s “growing from darkness” approach in both pieces, a more personalised kind of sound-world – but how beautifully Houstoun himself “sounds” the fugue’s concluding phrase, here.

My own listener’s introduction to the “48” was with the D Major No. 5, and the late, great John Ogdon’s sparkling playing of it all on a recital disc – such “joie de vivre” in the Prelude, and then beautifully-contrasting “lampoonings” of the piece’s opening notes in the Fugue, “snapping” the two-note payoffs of this response in a way that Houstoun eschews with his less playful pairings (both Hewitt and Andras Schiff follow Ogdon’s ebullience, here) though the new performance still delights with its almost schoolboy exuberance of the whole.

It would take too long to go through all of the remaining pieces of Book One as above, though some I still need to “single out” for their ear-catching effect and the superb finish of their presentation. One such is the following No.6, the D Minor, with a Prelude Houstoun calls “Night Ride”, and to which he brings flowing legato tones that actually suggest a dream-like airborne journey, though I don’t “get” his “Creeping Anxiety” impression of the Fugue, which to me suggests more of a “hall of mirrors”, equally gorgeous in effect but suitably bewildering in its echoings and inversions.
A pairing which surprises with its “weight of sorrow”, following as it does the grandly ceremonial E flat Major prelude and Fugue is the latter’s minor-key counterpart, No.8, with its eloquent aria, and sombre three-part Fugue, all of which Houstoun sustains nobly in a kind of “dark suspense”, a mood which the following E Major Prelude’s contrasting sunniness immediately dispels, especially with its determinedly cheerful Fugue, exactly  like “three village gossips”, the phrase by which Angela Hewitt describes its effect!

Moving onto the second disc, we first encounter the brightly fresh F-sharp major Prelude (No.13), with Houstoun’s title “Playing Around” – not a note is wasted in this up-front and totally engaging reading, the accompanying Fugue having a similarly “open” vocal quality, admirably suiting the pianist’s epithet “Sing”. I also instantly warmed to the vigorously athletic No. 15 in G Major and its attitude-striking fugal companion, with its opening subject’s final “so what?” single note, and its droll inversions which suggest a reply. No.17 pairs a jolly dance with a Fugue known in the German-speaking world as  the ”Cathedral Fugue”, a most attractive coupling, moving from gaiety to a more contained and ceremonial mood, one which in the pianist’s hands here, glows and sings.

In places Houstoun’s playing for me recalls that of Helmut Walcha, the blind German keyboard player of a couple of generations ago, and from whose recordings I learnt some of Bach’s keyboard works, among them the “English Suites” – Walcha favoured steady, largely unvaried tempi whose cumulative effect always seemed to compensate for a sparseness of variety and colour – and I was reminded of this by the G-sharp minor Prelude and Fugue, here, the former sombre, the latter unrelenting (echoing the pianist’s description “A grim tale” in its implaccable delivery). What a joy, then, to encounter its successor, the bright, breezy and beautiful A major Prelude (No.19) with its gorgeously pealing bells in the left hand, and then delight in its zany companion, a Fugue whose trajectories can render the unprepared mind bemused and befuddled before the notes finally scamper into well-drilled lines and dance one’s senses towards the end. Gorgeous playing!

I warmed also (who wouldn’t!) towards the toccata-like No.21 in B-flat major (Houstoun’s title for the Prelude enshrining a somewhat more insistent song than that of Vaughan Williams’ celebrated lark), with the Fugue suggesting some kind of celestial angelic rejoicing at this earthly manifestation of exuberance and freedom. Its antithesis is surely its minor-key equivalent (No. 22), the Prelude music of mourning, which Houstoun, not without reason, styles as “Road to Golgotha” (Christ’s crucifixion-place), here, a lonely and pitiless way, almost Schubertian in a “Winterreise” sense. The five-voiced fugue which follows is superbly essayed here, containing the feeling of a multitude immersed in grief.

Whatever consolation one might seek from any such feeling is duly encompassed, though not so much by the bright-and-bubbly B Major Prelude (No. 23) nor its gregarious Fugue with what Angela Hewitt describes as its “gentle transparency” – surely any such “grand consolation” is the preserve of No.24, the B Minor Prelude and Fugue, one whose performance I first heard by Sviatoslav Richter many years ago, and whose tones and trajectories have haunted me like no other performance since, save for Tatiana Nikolayeva’s similarly-conceived reading. Despite it being one of the few Preludes in the WTC with the composer’s own tempo direction (Andante) one can find recordings of it played at a variety of speeds, from Youri Egorov’s near-static amble to Glenn Gould’s purposeful trot, each with its own orbital kind of ambience – while my preference is still for the expansive Russian-school (Egorov/Richter/Nikolayeva) approach, the other pianists mentioned above (Hewitt, Schiff, Gould) have broadened my perspectives regarding different approaches to the music. Houstoun’s playing of the Prelude here unstintingly aligns with the latter group, thus stimulating further re-thinking on my part of the music’s varied capabilities.

And so we’re brought to Michael Houstoun’s exploration of Bach’s Book Two of his “The Well-tempered Clavier”, which the composer, at this time working in Leipzig as Cantor at the Thomaskirche, built up from various sources with constantly-added revisions, enlargements and transpositions. Book One had been extensively used by the composer in his teaching, and after fifteen years he would have wanted a change, as well as “updating” his own compositional style. But he also wanted to “collect and systematise” his own output, which included revising his thoughts regarding a new collection of pieces in twenty-four keys, and producing something with numerous and significant differences. So, Book Two is longer, the writing is more complex, and has a higher degree of technical difficulty for the performer.

Right from the outset the difference is apparent, with the C Major Prelude of Book Two beginning on the grandest scale, in marked contrast to the gentle simplicity of Book One’s opening. Houstoun’s title “The Universe as a Temple” and his monumental pianism reflects the scale of the composer’s conception here, while the three-part Fugue’s energy and playfulness is characterised as “Invitation to Joy (birthright)”. I loved Houstoun’s delineations of the C sharp major Prelude No. 3 , with its mesmerising harmonic shifts and its energised coda-like “Fughetta”, the latter preparing us for the Fugue proper – a character, this one, with a slightly gauche aspect at its beginning, but flexing its muscles increasingly and creating increased momentum toward the end.

I confess to being surprised by the severity of the C sharp minor Prelude (No. 4), whose sounds I’ve more often heard “breathed” as much as played in places, allowing its lyricism to more readily “touch a nerve” – and the Fugue here I thought also had an insistence I found wearisome by the end. But amends are made with the gloriously ceremonial D Major Prelude, trumpets and drums revelling in Houstoun’s vigorous playing. And what a dramatic change in mood with the Fugue! – Houstoun’s “Alms giving” description is curiously appropriate, with its solemn, reverential air of benevolence.  Contrasts abound, here, as the following Prelude, No. 6 in D minor, bursts upon us with what sounds like vehemence at first but gradually gives way to a gruff kind of drollery – and Houstoun gives the Fugue just enough “schwung” to suggest a kind of musical M.C.Escher study in levitational contrasts before the composer deposits us in our bemused state on ground level once again.

Houstoun is all grace and charm with the E-flat major Prelude (No.7), a lovely Pastorale-like dance, whose Fugue, with its rising fifth was considered in some quarters a synonym for God, and Bach himself considered the key of E-flat major in accordance with “the peace of mind that flows from the Trinity” – in all, a happy concordance of music, composer and interpreter. The straightaway more angular D sharp minor Prelude (No.8) has a different, more obsessive character (I liked Houstoun’s “Agreeing to disagree” description!), its Fugue described by the famed commentator Donald Francis Tovey as an “Aeschylean chorus”, (Aeschulus was a Greek poet who regarded music as an important “extra dimension” in the drama), the music’s intensities here underlined (as Bach was wont to do with his fugues) by successive stretto-like entries of whatever subject.

All of this is then left behind in the most disarming way here, by the Prelude No. 9 in E major, with Bach treating our senses to a beguiling fusion of gentle voices here (some of Houstoun’s most ingratiating playing of the set) and in the old-fashioned fugal “Stile antico” which follows (and, was that a snatch of “Rule Britannia” I heard right at the fugue’s end?). Bach’s invention here has played havoc with my intention of singling out highlights from the set and producing a readable review, as the great moments simply keep coming! – in the wake of the disarming E major work we get an arresting  E Minor Prelude (No.10) with its steady stream of semiquavers occasionally played alongside a long trill, their combination heightening the tensions, and a Fugue which the famous harpsichordist Wanda Landowska described as “combatative and vehement”, which qualities Houstoun does full justice with some superbly-controlled playing.

Definitely worth a mention (and closing the third disc) is the Prelude No. 12 in F Minor, written by Bach in what was becoming the new “empfindsamer Stil” (sensitive style) , made popular by the composer’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and demonstrating something of that aforementioned “updating of his (Bach senior’s) own compositional style”. And so to the final disc through which, in the interests of readers being able to “complete the course” I’ll quickly pass, through Houstoun’s winsomely fluent F sharp major Prelude and its attractive gavotte-like Fugue, and the “singing” wistfulness of the following Minor-key Prelude , and its monumental, more stoical Fugue. Houstoun then gives the Master’s eye an engaging glint with the sparkling G Major Prelude and its “toy fanfare” Fugue, before returning to severity with the double-dotted G Minor Prelude (No.16) and its fugal mix of brass calls, repeated notes and grand final gesturings. And mention must definitely be made of the pianist’s masterful control in the Fugue of the following A flat Prelude, penetrating the increasing thickness of the texture with great sensitivity and a sure sense of where it’s all going!

I liked the “galant” style of the following G sharp minor Prelude (No.18) with its delicious chromatic descent in the piece’s middle, and its Fugue taking us into similarly fantastic-sounding byways (with Houstoun clear-headed, as always, as to where he’s taking the listener!). The same qualities help to illuminate the Prelude No.20 in A minor with its constant vertiginous exchange and inversion of themes, dream-sequence stuff that pushes the limits of tonality, especially in the piece’s second half, and in the somewhat zany Fugue that follows (perhaps Bach’s most uncompromising, almost feral in its attitude!) The gently lyrical B flat major Prelude (No.21) and its minuet-like Fugue that follows is part restorative (Houstoun calls the Prelude “Lyric pleasure’ and the Fugue “Persuasive conversation”) and part preparatory for the expected rigours of the work’s final three pieces.

In effect we have already been subjected to the most demanding of the pieces’ travails, as each of the remaining trio is respectively a satisfying summation of rigour, energy and delight (even Houstoun at one point enjoins us to “be of good cheer”!). Beginning with the Prelude in B flat minor (No.22) which has a gently insistent, almost bell-pealing quality, but followed by a more rigorous Fugue bent upon forward motion of both subject and its inversion, we are then taken to the more bubbling and winsome B Major with its “concerto-like” passages that suggest a soloist in places, and with a Fugue that achieves by its deceptively “spare” beginning a wondrously festive air in Houstoun’s hands. But the biggest surprise is the concluding dance-like B Minor Prelude which, though in a “self-contained” minor key has its own particular glow of satisfaction, its buoyancy continued in the Fugue, the sequence as firmly and deftly characterised by Houstoun as his approach to the entire collection. Bach here chooses to conclusively proclaims his genius not with any self-conscious grandeur or brilliance but with humanity and generosity – all are things to which Michael Houstoun responds throughout this set with playing of remarkable technical brilliance and, for me, in most instances regarding the individual pieces, persuasive empathy. Whatever one’s tastes it’s an enterprise whose achievement richly rewards investigation, and as such can be enthusiastically recommended.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Wellington City Orchestra – heartily home-grown with Lilburn and Anthony Ritchie and gloriously global with Inbal Megiddo in Shostakovich

Donald Maurice (conductor) and Inbal Megiddo (‘cello) rehearse Shostakovich with the Wellington City Orchestra, December 2024, at St.Andrew’s Church, Wellington

DOUGLAS LILBURN – Overture “Aotearoa” (1940)
DMIYTRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Concerto for ‘Cello and Orchestra No. 1 Op. 107 (1959)
ANTHONY RITCHIE – Symphony No. 5 “Boum” Op.59 (1993)

Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)
Wellington City Orchestra
Donald Maurice (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington
Sunday, 7th December 2024

A review of the film of this concert courtesy Angus Webb (recording) and Nick Baldwin (camera),
written by Peter Mechen for “Middle C”

To my great disappointment I couldn’t, for various family reasons, get to this concert and had to perhaps settle for the once-removed pleasure of reading a review or possibly even getting to hear a recording.  I was then contacted by the orchestra’s newsletter editor, Jeannine Thomas, who told me the concert actually hadn’t been reviewed, and asked me whether I might be able to at least contribute some comments on the performances from the DVD recording made of the occasion. I agreed somewhat reservedly at first – but to my surprise, the further I went into the DVD of the concert the more I became convinced it would be a splendid thing to do! Angus Webb’s recording seemed to me right from the outset to “catch” a nicely-balanced sound-quality; and Nick Baldwin’s camera-placement, though static, actually gave me a real sense of a well-placed seat in the organ gallery with a view of the whole orchestra. And as for the performances – well, what might I suggest but that one should read on and take the plunge with me into what proved to be an exhilarating and sumptuous feast of music-making! I must add an apology for the lateness of this review in relation to the actual event – but now that the time-toll of the initial delay plus the demands of the festive season has been duly paid, everything can happily proceed!

And what a programme! – beginning with perhaps the most iconic single piece of New Zealand composition penned for orchestra, Douglas Lilburn’s Aotearoa Overture, now eighty-plus years old, and still sounding as fresh and ambient as when it was completed in March 1940, in London, at the conclusion of Lilburn’s studies with the great English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. In a matter of weeks after completion the work had its first performance as part of a concert organised to celebrate New Zealand’s centenary, with expatriate New Zealander Warwick Braithwaite conducting the Sadler’s Wells Orchestra. By August of that year Lilburn had returned to New Zealand, the young composer describing his elation upon catching sight from his trans-Tasman boat of Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman with the words “My heart gave thanks with recognition that I’d returned”, sentiments whose heartfelt feelings he’d already in a sense “composed” as the music for his Aotearoa Overture.

Other Kiwis have since described similar kinds of feelings when hearing this music while overseas – there’s also a growing feeling  that in hindsight the piece ought to have been used to preface the famous 1970 Expo film “This is New Zealand” rather than the Sibelius piece the film-makers chose at the time. Self-doubts of this kind are unlikely to recur, as the strength and purpose of Lilburn’s example has since empowered generations of younger composers who have readily “learned the trick of standing upright here” – and not only here but out there in a wider world of creativity.

The Overture begins with pure inspiration, two flutes springing rapturously into the air from an opening pizzicato chord with a long-breathed melody largely in thirds and augmented by gloriously arching strings and rolling timpani, building through these sounds for our mind’s eye aspects of a landscape we ourselves know and identify with so well. Conductor Donald Maurice and his players gradually widen and strengthen the vistas, while encouraging a growing excitement brought to the sound picture by the brass with fanfare-like shouts and calls to attention which leave us longing to be drawn further into the terrain’s mysteries and marvels. Strings and timpani beckon us into a rippling, rushing, almost volatile texture of sounds which winds brass and percussion evocatively join in with detail – quixotic birdsong, tides breaking over rugged coastlines, bush-clad hillsides and distant splendour of snow-capped peaks. All of this stimulates both tactile pleasure and in places a deeper wonderment, the music taking us between pictorial images and soliloquy-like expressions of awareness at the character of the surroundings and a sense of belonging.

Suddenly we are brought back to the strings-and-timpani opening (catching the timpanist out, here, momentarily) as Lilburn gathers the strands together and builds towards exuding that same “thanks with recognition” which his writing of the work surely must have anticipated. Here conductor and players triumphantly arch the sounds upwards and onto the pinnacle of arrival with those characteristic thrusting impulses! bring about for us at the end.

One thinks more readily of the music of Sibelius or Vaughan Williams as company for Lilburn, so the choice of Shostakovich was a bold and enterprising step for the concert to take,  expressing a different kind of solitude and artistic challenge for a composer. Shostakovich’s First ‘Cello Concerto was completed in 1959 and dedicated to the great Russian ‘cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, a younger, but long-time friend  who had long wanted the composer  to write a work for him to play. I read a rather amusing anecdote about Rostropovich shyly asking the composer’s wife, Nina, if he might ask her husband about this, to which she replied, “If you want Dmitri Dmitrievich to write something for you, then never – NEVER ask him or talk to him about it!” Rostropovich’s restraint eventually paid off when, in 1959 he was asked by Shostakovich to come and hear a new concerto, and play through it – upon assuring the composer that he liked the piece, Rostropovich was disarmed to learn that the work was to be dedicated to him!

Here the soloist was Te Kōkī School of Music’s Associate Professor in ‘Cello, Inbal Megiddo, a player who’s already demonstrated to Wellington concertgoers her superb technique and riveting communicative skills as a musician.  Shostakovich wastes no time with introductory niceties, giving the soloist centre-stage immediately with his characteristic four-note motiv that haunts this work, a figure the composer used elsewhere in various forms as a kind of signature (the notes G,F-flat,C-flat,B-flat  correspond to D-S-C-H in German transliteration), such as in his Tenth Symphony and Eighth String Quartet. The motif is the dominant, even slightly paranoic presence of the movement which the composer styled as “an allegretto in the style of a comic march”, and one that also features the solo horn, the only brass instrument in the smallish orchestra.

Inbal Megiddo’s playing astonishes as the solo part becomes increasingly elaborate and jagged as the music grinds on. The orchestral winds are superb in their support for the soloist with a repeated rat-tat-tat figure, and various other sardonic gesturings adding to the music’s feeling of caricature – and the horn playing from Caryl Stannard is  fearless and remarkable, having to repeat the cellist’s  “signature” theme on a number of occasions and truly capturing its “obsessive” character. Donald Maurice keeps the band on its toes throughout the movement’s tricky syncopated passages, both throughout the opening, and when accompanying the soloist’s second subject and draws the utmost emotion from the horn with its account of the second theme’s anguished and obsessively mournful line.

A beautiful, husky cantabile from the strings introduced the second movement, with suitably mournful tones from the horn bringing in the soloist, the latter ably accompanied by the violas – and how lovely and withdrawn is that “stricken” playing from the strings a little later,  taken up by the ‘cello, and all in very heart-rending fashion! –a slightly jauntier air brings a glimmer of light but all too soon turns to angst and anguish, the orchestra pitching in with heartfelt solidarity. Suddenly the horn sounds a kind of warning, by way of announcing what’s probably the work’s most remarkable passage, with the soloist playing in eerie harmonics accompanied by the celesta and “lost and wandering” figurations from the other strings, and a soulful clarinet – the music sinks helplessly to the ground,as Megiddo begins the elaborate cadenza that make up the work’s third movement.

This was a spell-like montage of soliloquy, pizzicato both agitato and mysterioso, single-instrument dialogues building up up to agitated passagework whose compelling exertions suggest the motif that began the symphony, priming us for the orchestra’s sudden reawakening. And so conductor and players begin to build, push around and stack up blocks of the finale’s music, leading to the  moment when the motif which began the work takes hold of it again and gives everything and everybody – soloist, orchestra and audience – a massive shake-up and drops us onto the floor! – (yes, I say “us!”, because by this time I’ve broken through the membranous tissue separating performance and film viewer, and am in there with the players and audience!) – and  despite our exhaustion we can’t help the feeling of exhilaration! We get up, look around, and it’s over! – we’ve made it home! – what a ride! – Kudos to all!

One presumes an interval followed all of this, enabling everybody, myself included, to “find” their place in the scheme of things once again and get their batteries of all kinds recharged for the concert’s second half, the presentation of a work whose composer, I believe was present for the occasion. A pre-concert Facebook post from Anthony Ritchie articulated some of the excitement and expectation associated with the event (I quote his own words): “I’m really pleased the Wellington City Orchestra is playing the work and I am coming up for the occasion – I haven’t heard it live for a while! I have known members of the orchestra, including my cousin Anne Ballinger on the flute, and have collaborated with Donald Maurice on many projects in the past. I’m glad he is at the helm.”

Of course there’s always something special about a performance attended by the composer, as I’d registered just a short time ago at Orchestra Wellington’s “A Modern Hero” concert at the start of which Auckland composer Eve de Castro Robinson’s work Hour of Lead was given its premiere with the composer herself present – a real buzz! One takes on for one’s own delectation some of any composer’s imagined feelings upon hearing both inspiration and perspiration come to fruition, whether for the first or fiftieth time! How lucky we are to have such people so readily accessible, and so tangibly, to boot!

Ritchie’s First Symphony dates from 1993, while he was Composer-in-Residence with the Dunedin Sinfonia, and received its first performance within a year with Sir William Southgate conducting the same orchestra. The work’s title, “Boum”, is inspired by an incident in E.M.Forster’s novel “A Passage to India” where two of the characters enter the Marabar Caves and experience a mysterious echoing sound which takes on a symbolic meaning in the story relating to the same characters’ grasp of their differing realities. Ritchie uses a tam-tam to replicate this echo throughout the symphony as a kind of “motif”, sonorous and purposeful at the beginning and varying in intensity as the music indicates.

It’s all quite an adventure on its own! – what stays in the memory after the tam-tam opening, is the  gathering of momentums whose energies build to elemental proportions, a saxophone delighting us with a sinuous, suggestive alternative character, and an oboe line getting a deliciously eerie, sinuous backdrop from the strings. The winds here have a fine time playing their themes in canon until a solo cello calls “Enough!” on the fun with a figure that contains the inklings of a march, at first teasingly “played with” by the saxophone and winds, but excitingly burgeoning until the tam-tam reasserts its presence!  The march ceases and the music floats upwards through a winsome series of airborne phrasings, brought again to earth by a softer but just as implacable tam-tam stroke at the movement’s end! So! – what next?

The second movement’s a frenetic dance driven by Cook Island log drums in regular attendance! – Conductor and orchestra relish the enjoyment, as winds and a horn reiterate a three-note fanfare which a perky theme attaches itself to in a cheeky array of guises, The log drum introduces a string quartet and then a wind ensemble, and, of course the brass can’t be kept out of the fun at this point, the players having a ball with their outlandish whooping and blaring! The saxophone also can’t be kept quiet, beckoning its fellow-winds to speak out as the brasses and percussive forces keep the rhythms going, with great, on-the-button work from all concerned! Out of this comes a plaintive theme from the strings echoed by brass and then indulged in by the whole orchestra!. But, of course, the music’s “got rhythm!” – and back comes the opening to hammer the movement to its conclusion!

By contrast, winds begin the slow movement as a lament, karanga-like in its expression of grief as a solo cello further internalises the same. The upper strings beautifully float an elegiac line, joined by the saxophone – the ambience turns back to tragedy as winds, brasses and solo sax are joined by tolling bells underlining the sombre mood, the composer intending this music as a tribute to the victims of the Bosnian wars of that time. Strings seek to comfort but are overtaken by a remorseless build-up of harrowing tones, superbly controlled, the climax echoed by melismatic wind arabesques, the brass entering to underpin the note of tragedy. Beautiful solo string-playing leads to several concluding doom-laden double-bass rumblings, and silence – a bereft, grief-ridden world of its own but one of course tragically echoing present day conflicts and lamenting still more innocent victims.

I loved the darkly rumbustious beginning of the finale, in places reminiscent of Holst’s Ballet Music “The Perfect Fool”, with its touches of sorcery and mischief, a mood which then abruptly changes with what seems like graceful dance-steps by the strings , but gradually becomes almost rock-music rhythmed, the playing generating plenty of exuberance, and a sense of striving towards joy! – the kind of thing that a modern-day Bach might put into a Brandenburg Concerto! Ritchie then, by a further piece of delicious alchemy, brings in his winds to perform a Caribbean-like dance which spreads through the orchestra, pizzicato strings and cruising brasses also “hep to the jive”, the different orchestral sections alert and alive! The return of the tam-tam strokes seems if anything to goad the rhythms into even greater exuberance, until a hugely reproving and resonating blow curbs any further escalations, and casts an “envoi-like” feeling over the rhythms – their gradual diminution leads to a farewell statement by the string quartet of the symphony’s beginning and a final tam-tam stroke – a wonderful moment and beautifully-wrought ending!

What joy, what relief and what pride and satisfaction would have accompanied this concert’s epic achievement on the part of all the musicians! And how wonderful that technology keeps it all alive, so that it’s more that either just a memory or a reminiscence such as that which I’ve been privileged to give, here. Something definitely to remember an already momentous and historic year by, and return to with lasting pleasure!

Orchestra Wellington – heroically fulfilling the need for music

Orchestra Wellington presents:
A MODERN HERO

EVE de CASTRO-ROBINSON – Hour of Lead
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – War Requiem

Morag Atchison (soprano)
Daniel Szesiong Todd (tenor)
Benson Wilson (baritone)

Orpheus Choir, Wellington
Wellington Young Voices

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (music director)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 7th December, 2024

What could possibly preface in concert a work such as Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem?  Here, on Saturday, at Orchestra Wellington’s epic presentation “A Modern Hero”, that challenge was taken up by Auckland composer Eve de Castro Robinson with her brief but searingly concentrated orchestral composition “Hour of Lead”, a sonorous meditation on a similarly-titled poem by Emily Dickinson.

The poet’s words explore the consciousness of pain in a variety of forms and processings, its progressions variously rapier-like, systematic and torpid, with responses paralleling thought, reflex and movement, as do the different characters of the four movements of de Castro Robinson’s work, with each outwardly signing inner turmoil. The first, Searing, takes just milliseconds to live up to its name, with an opening ostinato suddenly pierced by screams. The rhythms trundle jazzily onwards, set upon by punch-drunk szforzandi, whose assaults bring forth raucous clamourings, and building to a tutti for the tumultuous ages. After this comes music of the air, Bittersweet, a vertiginous scenario whose incessant movement quixotically dissolves into a juicily-flavoured hymnal, and reaching zany volume levels with a single, tumultuously constituted chord that eventually self-destructs!

Next is Leaden, with its “quartz contentment”, deeply-wrought sounds with richly-purposeful rumblings, its darkness countering the previous movement’s scintillations. A flowing viola/cello melody sings above the rhythms as winds and brass emit birdlike sighs and cries, which brass turn into gargantuan earth-groans – how wonderful to hear the  strings playing an Orpheus-like role here, their sounds taming the beasts’ convulsions, raising their spirits, and suggesting an ecstasy on the other side of the darkness which reclaims the last few bars.

“Remembered, if outlived” says the poem; and the beginning of the final Chilling scintillates on percussion, winds and high-register-strings before becoming almost extra-terrestrial, freed from gravity and atmosphere! –  all impulses are drawn towards a super-galactic kind of rendition of “Abide with Me”, a kind of invitation for sensibilities frozen in the manner of “centuries before” . Perhaps the “stupor – then the letting go” is the reawakening of human consciousness via the bringing into being a gloriously aleatoric-like pitchless chord which grows to fullness before being “taken up” by the same players’ stamping,, clattering, and then gradually receding footsteps – whether “taken up”, or “being taken”, one is not quite sure, but what an enigmatically human way to end the piece! After such colourful coruscations, the appearance of the piece’s composer, Eve de Castro Robinson, called to the platform at the end, seemed like some kind of angelic or otherwise blessed visitant, come to lift the spell by which her work had held us all in thrall.

And so, to the Britten – after the extra players and singers and their conductor had all made their entrances and set themselves up to begin, conductor Marc Taddei raised his baton and the first sounds of the War Requiem were made by the strings, awkwardly-pulsating figures gradually brought to life. For some reason I felt a proper sense of “atmosphere” lacking, without being able to put my finger on just what was missing – and only right at the work’s ending did I experience what could have made an enormous difference at the beginning. Accompanying the final exchanges between the children’s choir at the words Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis, and the main chorus’s Requiescant in pace, Amen  was the stunning effect of gradual dimming  the stage lighting to near-darkness, the voices’ diminuendo contriving the sounds to disappear as if by magic. How wonderful, I thought, if the work had begun this way, and the lights gradually brought up as the music threaded its way towards its first climax at the choir’s first full-blooded Et lux perpetua luceat eis joined by full-throated bells and percussion!

Britten’s use of the tritone, the interval C-F-sharp, in medieval times known as “diabolus in musica” (the devil in music) dominates these opening exchanges, here brought off tellingly by both voices and orchestra, the composer seeking to suitably “haunt” the text’s idea of “eternal rest”,  usually, in conventional requiems, given the most consoling music possible.  Increased tensions crackled and blistered with the tenor’s first solo entry intoning the first of poet Wilfred Owen’s bitterly challenging verses “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?” – though I found Daniel Szesiong Todd’s enunciation of the words less than clear, he still conveyed the words’ terrible ironies, along with the sounds depicting the battlefield slaughter and the “tenderness of silent minds”. All of the forebodings were then given full vent in the brutal contrasts which followed, the rapt “Kyrie/Christe eleisons” and the great onslaught of instrumental and vocal sounds of “Dies Irae”. Just as awe-inspiring and pitying were the poet’s words in the at once tranquil and fearful, “Bugles sang” which followed,  redolent with echoes of the “Dies Irae” in baritone Benson Wilson ’s hushed but growingly apprehensive conveyance of the bugles’ tones, sounding their sorrowful calls and catching the portentous mood.

Though Morag Atchison’s soprano tones “spread” when put under pressure in the “Liber Scriptus”, she effectively and sonorously “nailed” the text’s message that nothing would remain unjudged or unavenged, sentiments echoed by the chorus’s troubled utterances at “Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?” and by the soprano’s stentorian “Rex tremendae majestatis!” Then, the poet’s supremely ironic “Out there” verses came bounding in, the two soldiers teasing death as a playfellow, an “old chum” , and never as an “enemy of ours”. (we could have done with surtitles for the poetry as the auditorium was too dark to be able to properly follow the words in the programme)!

The chorus splendidly contrasted the women’s prayerful “Recordare Jesu pie” with the men’s later, jagged-edged “Confutatis maledictis”, halted by the timpani’s introduction to the baritone’s saluting of the great gun – “thou long black arm” – ironically addressing its malevolence before uttering a curse upon its being (though the words were not clear the tone of voice was unmistakeable! – great timpani and brass playing, here!). Its brazen function then became clear as the music burst once again into ”Dies Irae”, again magnificently  delivered, but then dramatically slowing, and holding everything in cosmic thrall for the “Lacrimosa” to make its heart-wrenching appearance  – Morag Atchison’s singing was to die for, here!  Britten brilliantly uses the “Lacrimosa” in tandem with what are perhaps Wilfred Owen’s most moving verses in the entire work – “Move him gently into the sun” – no matter that the words were not entirely clear in places, as the overall sense of grief was here palpable beyond description. I think we needed to have been told, somewhere, that there was an interval at this point, because we were uncertain as to what to do at first, after the choir had breathed its concluding “Dona eis requiem” – still, our somewhat mesmerised state wasn’t inappropriate!

As with every note these angelic voices sang this evening, the Wellington Young Voices’ Choir covered itself in glory  with the Offertorium that began the work’s second half – and, not to be outdone, the Orpheus voices then launched into the text with sterling orchestral support, firstly at Sed signifier sanctus Michael, and then giving us a deliciously-crafted fugal romp through Quam olim Abrahae promisisti, one whose conclusion then tossed the momentums into the introduction to another of  Owen’s poems. This one was a setting based on part of the composer’s earlier canticle, “Abraham and Isaac”, but this time with a different and brutal ending to the story. Both soloists here projected their texts more clearly, combining their voices particularly beautifully when describing the “Ram of Pride” sent by God for sacrifice –  glorious singing again from the Young Voices here, in heart-breaking response to the story’s murderous end, in which we were told Abraham “slew his son, and half the seed of Europe, one by one!”, the soloists obsessively repeating the final phrase of the poem. Afterwards, the choir and orchestra then returned to the “Quam olim Abrahae” fugal passage to complete the savage irony of the tale.

Came the Sanctus, resplendent in its glory and especially so in the wake of the Parable’s bitterness – a plethora of shimmering instrumental tintinnabulations and with ecstatic acclamations from the soprano, after which the choir divided into eight parts for Pleni sunt Caeli in terra (the choir stood up section by section, which created great visual excitement!), using the rapidly-repeated words to create an excitable babble of ever-burgeoning voices to the accompaniment of a great instrumental crescendo!  A pause, and then brasses and voices began firstly, the Hosanna in excelsis and then, led by the soprano, the gentler, more processional  Benedictus, the interactive flow here kept alive with great presence by Morag Atchison interacting with voices and orchestra under Marc Taddei’s expert control.

A final Hosanna from chorus and orchestra produced a concluding flourish, and the baritone began Owen’s thoughtful meditation, The End, the poem questioning  the Earth’s capacities for forgiveness of humankind for the carnage, with the beautiful instrumental colourings accorded the words’ images emphasising the bleakness of  the previous music’s religious exaltation. Again, the solo singer’s words were difficult to make out, but the sense of desolation held fast.  The tenor’s rendition of the following verses from At a Calvary Near the Ancre intersected here with the choir’s sing of “Agnus Dei” from the Requiem Mass, the words again highlighting the poet’s angst and anger with war – here, Owen castigates the institutionalisation of  Christian faith and patriotism  by clergy and polilticians. with Britten’s own pacifism never more unequivocally articulated than in this part of the work.

The Libera me, as with Verdi’s setting in his famous Requiem Mass, contains some of the most searing and heartfelt writing, with again, in Britten’s work the universal plea for deliverance and mercy extended to include the “pity of war”.  The opening here was as portentous as anything by Berlioz or Verdi, with the writing filled with vertiginously fearsome chromatic shifts of harmony and colour, gathering momentum and fervour, and brought into sharp focus for us by the soprano’s sudden entry (“Tremens! – Factus sum ergo!”) when she spits out her words, bring the choir’s voices with her, and realising with the orchestra a cataclysmic ferment of energies and strengths –  a truly apocalyptic threshold through which we were taken and left gasping as the sounds gradually died away, leaving the  two soldiers about whom this work has told us such a lot, and, of course, very much on our behalf!

Which left the poet’s last text, a poem called “Strange Meeting”, bringing to us a dream-like sequence  in which Owen describes an encounter involving two soldiers who had been on opposing sides in a battle, one of whom had killed the other in combat – “I am the enemy you killed, my friend”…. exchanging as well “the undone years, the hopelessness” along with “the pity of war, the pity war distilled”, and bringing to bear the desire to cleanse the human spirit with water from the “sweet wells we sunk too deep for war”. And it was difficult to remain dry-eyed throughout the music of reconciliation, with the two men sharing the line “Let us sleep now” in a sequence magically wrought all about its perimeters by the choir’s intoning the Latin hymn In Paradisum – “Into Paradise may the Angels lead thee”, but with Britten again disturbing the conventional idea of “eternal rest” of such commemorations by using the tri-tone interval for the Children’s Chorus’s final utterances of “Requiem Aeternam….” as a kind of “warning” for mankind.

Then came a stunningly evocative ambient withdrawal from the work’s world, achieved by the slowest of diminuendi throughout the work’s final chord sequence, allowing the performers and their sounds to magically and memorably dissolve into the darkness. It was only then I found myself wishing that the musicians had brought the work’s beginning out of the same darkness at its beginning – a work that everybody had so brilliantly recreated for our on behalf of the genius who wrote this music…..

Luu Hong Quang’s Liszt recording proclaims its lustre on Rattle Records

FRANZ LISZT –  Etudes d’execution transcendante S.139 (Transcendental Etudes)

Luu Hong Quang (piano)

Rattle Records RAT-D152 2024

Reviewed  “Middle C” November 2024

Vietnamese pianist Luu Hong Quang is currently (2024) in Wellington while studying for his Doctorate of Music with Professor Jian Liu at Victoria University’s School of Music. It’s a far-flung location from which to throw down the gauntlet to the wider world of pianism at large – but Quang has done this with a new release from Rattle Records which presents one of the piano repertoire’s most formidably challenging works, Franz Liszt’s “Etudes d’execution transcendante”. The recording was actually one that Quang made, appropriately enough, in the concert hall built next to Liszt’s actual birthplace in Raiding, Austria (formerly known as Doborján when part of Hungary at the time of the composer’s birth). No precise recording dates are given, though the pianist recounts in a booklet note a sense of the pilgrimage undertaken over a period of eighteen months to learn and master the work, which culminated in his first public performance in December 2022 at the Vietnam National Academy of Music in Hanoi. (I have since contacted Luu Hong Quang and learned that the recording took place in July, 2023.)

The genesis of Liszt’s Etudes is well-known, having their origins in twelve studies (Étude en douze exercices) he first wrote in 1826 when barely sixteen, then majorly elaborating on them in 1837 (Douze Grandes Études), after having fallen under the performing spell of Paganini and determined to emulate on the piano what the already legendary fiddler was achieving on the violin. By the 1850s, and having long given up the life of the virtuoso, Liszt then resolved to bring some of his youthful technical excesses to heel and “simplify” the studies (only one, “Mazeppa”, is considered even more difficult in its 1852 revision), emphasising the pieces’ poetry and grandeur and generally “playing down” their overtly prestidigitatorial qualities. And while the lighter Erard pianos of the 1830s made those earlier versions less awkward to manage, the heavier “action” of the newer pianos from Russia and Vienna which were gaining in popularity made passages from the 1837 Etudes impossible for all but the fingers of a Liszt!

Even so, for years these works were regarded as the preserve of “super-virtuosi”, having to wait until February 1903 to received their first documented premiere performance as a complete set from the legendary Ferruccio Busoni at the Berlin Beethoven-Saal. Traversals of the entire set remained rare both in concert and on record in the intervening years up to the 1960s – notables such as Egon Petri (1927), Jose Iturbi (1930), Jean Doyen (1943) and Earl Wild (1957) gave concert performances – but the first complete recording wasn’t set down until 1956, when Russian/American pianist Alexander Borovsky recorded the work for Vox, followed then by Gyorgy Cziffra in 1958 and Lazar Berman in 1959. Incidentally (and surprisingly), I can find only a single concert performance of the cycle thus far documented in New Zealand, that by visiting American pianist Kyrill Gerstein performed in Auckland in 2015.

Flash forward to 2024 and it seems as if a “virtuoso revolution” has taken place in world pianism since the Millenium, with almost fifty versions of the Transcendental Etudes I counted as currently available on recordings listed on the prestigious “Presto Classical” website. And now adding to that number will be Luu Hong Quang’s brilliantly-played disc, produced and sonorously recorded and mixed by Paul Carasco, and elegantly presented by Steve Garden’s Rattle Records in association with the support of Professor Jack Richards.

I decided I wouldn’t here set Quang’s recording against any other of today’s “super-virtuosi” for direct comparison, but rather allow my responses to resonate within my own sound-world of accumulated memory and feeling from experiences of first getting to know these works well. This took place through what have since become classic recordings of the complete 1852 set made by Louis Kentner, Lazar Berman and Claudio Arrau (I also heard a recital disc of Vladimir Ashkenazy’s at this time, though, sadly, only of excerpts).  These were the performances which I’d first encountered and which had, from my first hearing of “Harmonies du soir” on that single Ashkenazy disc, drawn me irretrievably into the sound-world of what I came to regard as one of the composer’s most astounding creative achievements. In the light of those three stellar, though vastly different performances quoted above, Quang’s performances are as much redolent of my youthful impressions of this music as they seem freshly-minted to my ears – on a superficial level they most resemble Louis Kentner’s in that they seem primarily concerned with each piece’s “inner being” rather than its external display of whatever. Which is not to say that Lazar Berman, Claudio Arrau or Vladimir Ashkenazy all put virtuoso display ahead of poetic feeling in their readings, but rather that Quang, like Kentner, seemed to unselfconsciously intertwine the music’s “wow” element inextricably with its poetry, so as to constantly draw attention to the view rather than merely to an interpreter’s presentation of it.

Thus the opening “Preludio”, intended to arrest the listener’s attention right from the outset, does so with a true Lisztian combination of brilliance, quixotic wit and suggestive harmonic sleight-of-hand, Quang announcing the composer’s and his music’s credentials in an action-packed nutshell. Though most of the studies have descriptive titles, we’re then plunged straight into one of the two for whom Liszt named merely by their key, in this case A Minor, whose opening rhythmically resembles Beethoven’s famous C Minor Symphony’s opening, but whose restless, quixotic character suggests a more compulsively whimsical spirit – Quang’s playing brings to mind his own reference in the notes to Paganini himself.

Things settle down with the beautiful “Paysage”, a landscape conceived here, it seems from “out of the air’, such is the spontaneity of phrasing and colour that Quang conjures from the notes, with the wonderfully dramatic midway modulation taking us into a differently-hued world for a few precious moments before the tranquility returns. This is all precipitately detonated by the opening drama of “Mazeppa”, with its arresting opening chords and portentous stirrings of agitation leading to the remorseless drama of a wild and torturous captive horseback ride, Quang’s strength and agility ably suggesting by turns the hero’s desperate plight, his longing for release, and eventually, his triumphal redemption. And, in the wake of these heady heroics comes the alchemic magic of the following “Feux Follets” (Will-o’the Wisps), one of Liszt’s absolute masterpieces, famous for its demands on the player regarding velocity, tonal shading, finger-control and poetic evocation, all of which Quang achieves with meticulous differentiation and bewildering evanescent manifestation.

How different is the dark, mysteriously-voiced “Vision” which follows, a grim and black-toned G minor presence whose aspect takes on a proud glow from within under Quang’s fingers as the music’s heroic spirit is awakened and enlivened. Perhaps he isn’t as intensely visionary as Kentner or as granite-toned as Arrau in this music but, as in the following “Eroica”, he conveys in places as telling an awareness of the music’s poetry as its physical forcefulness – he grows the latter piece through its strong-willed opening flourishes, treating us to an intrepid journey from whimsical beginnings through a vainglorious display of valour, before circumspection proclaims that honour is satisfied. No such hint of heedfulness attends the next piece, however – the tumultuous “Wilde Jagd” beloved of German folklore as “Wild Hunt”, here given a tremendous, frenetic opening by Quang before settling to the chase in an almost carnival spirit, complete with a “hunting song”! The subsequent building-up of the music’s sheer physicality and strenuous vigour reaches cataclysmic levels in the pianist’s hands before it all seems to collapse in sheer exhaustion!

All of this leads to what seem to me the disc’s most remarkable performances, beginning with the heart-warming poetry of Quang’s playing of “Ricordanza” (Memories), a piece haunted by ghosts of memory depicted in the music’s piquant figurations and flourishes, shades of the past “filled out” with exquisitely-wrought manifestations – Busoni’s famous and incomparable “discovery of old love-letters” description of the piece is referred to by the pianist in his notes. As befits one of the great musical love-poems, Quang’s playing touches the heart of this listener for one, with its spontaneous-sounding evocations of remembrances couched in terms of a slow-moving, emotion-laden “dance” framed by frequent impulses denoting poignantly-suggestive things whose nature remains indefinite.

The following F Minor Study follows on its predecessor’s heels almost attacca – as well might a piece marked allegro agitato molto!  Quang gives the oft-repeated opening figure more urgency than does Kentner, who keeps the figurations in trajectorial step with their overall context (by contrast Lazar Berman almost eviscerates the figures’ notes themselves with his rapid-fire delivery!). But how deftly Quang manages the midway transition back to the piece’s beginning, splendidly reiterating both the angst-laden declamatory theme and the return to the opening agitations, with those exciting  running syncopations leading to the piece’s coup de grace!

I’ve written of the indelible impression made on me by this work as one wrought by “Harmonies du soir” – and so it’s fitting that Quang here brings the listener to a kind of apex of achievement with this study and its “mirror image” that follows, the equally remarkable “Chasse Neige”. But even now, fifty years after first hearing those opening notes of “Harmonies” sound their opening embrace that enfolds those impulses they give rise to, I still find myself wreathed in that same wonderment as nature’s bells are softly set ringing and then enjoined by a second theme to give full tongue in praise of creation’s beauteous manifestations – and here, nothing is forced or strained but wholeheartedly ‘’released” through the pianist’s obvious love of his subject and his palpable skills and sensibilities.

How prescient of Liszt to give the cycle’s last word to nature, leaving the listener with a sense of worldly impermanence, almost a “Sic transit gloria mundi” observation as the remorseless snows of “Chasse Neige” cover over all trace of the lives made so manifest throughout the rest of the pieces – Quang is totally at one with the composer, here, revelling in the overlapping surges of tone in the piece’s middle section and bringing off the concluding “claw-like” gesture of farewell at the end with suitable gravitas and finality.

Luu Hong Quang would do well to be proud of his response to this “marathon” challenge  with, in his own words  – “a true milestone in (an) artistic journey” – may we hope he might, before too long, undertake to put a proper girdle about the earth by enabling this astonishing work to live and breathe in concert for only a second time within these far-flung spaces of our own hemisphere!