Author: Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra – revels ceremonial and fantastical

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra –  Conductor Mark Carter  congratulates WYO leader Alan Kao at the conclusion of the “Fanfare and Fantasy” concert on Saturday May 3rd, 2025

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – Symphony No. 100 in G Major “Military”
MODEST MUSORGSKY (ed. Rimsky-Korsakov) – Night on a Bare Mountain
PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY – Capriccio Italien

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Mark Carter (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 3rd May 2025

Wellington Youth Orchestra’s engagingly-presented opening “salvo” of 2025 appropriately began with one of the most agreeably demonstrative pieces of ceremonial music from the classical era, Josef Haydn’s by turns genial and uproarious “Military” Symphony. This was no less than the composer’s hundredth work in a form he himself had practically reinvented and made his own, setting a remarkable benchmark for future attempts by his successors at reconciling the competing requirements of form and content in symphonic music.

Such was Haydn’s fecundity he had come up with all kinds of different ideas over the years to attract and maintain his audience’s interest. Prior to his final years, during which he had become largely a free-lance composer, he had been employed by the Hungarian Esterhazy family at their Eisenstadt residence on the Austro-Hungarian border, and  – as Haydn himself once famously remarked – had the freedom to be “original”. An example of this was a work called the “Farewell” Symphony, which has a final movement where all the players gradually leave the stage one by one, blowing out their candles as they go – Haydn wanted to give his Prince the message that he and his players badly needed a holiday!

By the time he came to write Symphony No 100 in G Major in 1793 (one of a number which became no less than twelve “London” Symphonies), his old employer had died, and Haydn was enjoying new-found freedom, making two trips to London at the invitation of impresario, Johann Peter Salomon (after whom the set of “London” Symphonies are often named), meeting King George III, and being feted by both the court and high society. Despite such blandishments he preferred Vienna, returning permanently at the end of his second trip in 1795, and becoming music director for his new, more austere Esterhazy Prince who preferred sacred to secular music.

The G Major Symphony we know as the “Military” gets its character partly for the instrumentation Haydn uses – the work makes use of Turkish features known to the Viennese through their various conflicts with the Turkish military over years of conflict – known as “Janissary”, these exotic percussive effects (cymbal, triangle, rute, bass drum) had achieved great popularity, which composers naturally wanted to emulate (both Mozart and Beethoven were to use similar effects in some of their own music.).

Here at St.Andrew’s the cheek-by-jowl relationship of orchestra and audience practically enveloped our sensibilities with the Symphony’s marvellous rhythmic and colouristic effects, though it wasn’t all bang, crash, rumble and tinkle, Haydn cannily reserving his “Janissary” forces for the second and fourth movements. The rest brought enchantment of another kind right from the work’s beginning, with the adagio opening ravishingly awakened by the string-tones, and the supporting winds giving great character to the contrasting minor-key colours. An ensuing allegro added to our delight with the winds cheekily taking up the dance and inviting the rest of the orchestra to join in. It was playing from all which brought out the sheer “joy” of exchange, and the “giving” nature of Haydn’s musical instincts in general, conductor Mark Carter underlining our pleasure with the first-movement repeat!

Deceptively charming and relaxed at its beginning, with lovely al fresco colourings from strings and winds, the Allegretto second movement lurched  suddenly into minor-key drama and conflict with its battery of “Janissary” instruments joining the fray, the bass drummer adroitly compounding the instrument’s window-rattling seismic quality with the use of the rute, a bunch of rods loosely bound, and when striking a surface giving a dry, macabre bone-rattling effect! – with triangle, and “Nefer” crash cymbals and the timpani and brass underlining the overall impact, the general impression was more-than-satisfyingly combatative! A brief return to the major-key opening gave us some brief respite, but the famous passage introduced by the bugle call signalled an ‘all-in” sequence whose  impact gave rise to the well-known story of the premiere causing listeners of the time some angst, described by one reviewer as “the clash of arms, the groans of the wounded, and what may be described as the hellish roar of war increase(d) to a climax of hellish sublimity” (perhaps, alas, not so far from contemporary realities in our planet’s war-torn spots!).

The Minuet took us to a different world, a return to order and semblance of the same after battle, the tempi giving a livelier-than-usual effect – I wanted the wind’s somewhat plaintive “turns” in places to be brought out a bit more! – but the musicians’ graceful curving trajectories of the Trio were a delight, effectively contrasted by the “kick” the players achieved in the minor-key bits!

And so to the finale, bubbling with anticipation at its beginning, Mark Carter’s direction bringing out the players enjoyment of  the dynamics’ interplay, in particular their wry, po-faced insouciance at the “crushed phrase” sequence – and having been brought up on Sir Thomas Beecham’s delightful (if in such places inauthentic) recorded version of the symphony I was also enjoyably startled by the timpanist’s full-on entry with his “let ’er rip” gesture, instead of the crescendo I’d long become accustomed to! Wonderful!

There’s a lot of inspired to-ing and fro-ing elsewhere in this finale (at one point one is even tempted into thinking a fugue might be on the cards!) but Haydn’s judgement at reserving his overtly “martial” forces for certain moments in the work pays off with a vengeance!  Apart from a couple of brief last-minute forays for separate strings and winds, it’s the war machine that returns at the end, this time in triumph! It seems ironic that it’s actually the Janissary which is here sounding the victory, but of course by that time the Turks had been defeated and driven out of Austria, so they were obviously no longer regarded as a threat!

From this point we were taken into a new century, as well as northwards to Russia (though, admittedly, then on holiday with a second Russian composer to Italy!) – life can never be said to be straightforward!  Of these two forays under inspection it might be said that the most startling quantum leap was into the creative world of one Modest Musorgsky (different spellings of the surname abound!). Russian-born, he was tragically short-lived, all the more so for being regarded in some circles as the most naturally gifted of a group of composers (known as “The Mighty Handful”) who had emerged from the land of the Tsars amid the tumult of national feeling that had spread all over Europe in the late nineteenth century.

Steeping himself in his country’s folklore Musorgsky made several attempts at setting to music an old Russian legend whose original title was St.John’s Eve on Bald Mountain which he completed in June 1867. Unfortunately his colleagues, especially his mentor and fellow-composer Mily Balakirev, regarded the work as crude, and lacking in proper technical “finish”. As well, neither of the reworked versions of the story which Musorgsky subsequently attempted, the operas Mlada and Sorochintsy Fair were properly completed. In 1886, five years after the composer’s death from the effects of alcoholism, another of his colleagues, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, decided to “rescue” what could be saved of Musorgsky’s original “Bald Mountain” idea and reworked the piece, using parts of the original material and an instrumental arrangement of an excerpt from the opera Sorochintsy Fair as a kind of “epilogue” to the original tone-poem. This became the version that was used in Walt Disney’s famous “Fantasia” film, and which continues to be played today. Musorgsky’s original 1867 tone-poem composition was forgotten until the 1920s when it was rediscovered (a convoluted story!),  finally published in 1968 and given its first public performance and subsently recorded Whether it will ever become as popular as Rimsky-Korsakov’s revision is a matter of conjecture, though it’s certainly worth a watching listen (see below)…..

First to consider, though, was the performance we heard at St.Andrew’s, taken at a less-than-usual headlong tempo by Mark Carter and his players, and giving the music a more earthy and elemental character, but with the playing’s precision still capturing that “hallucinatory” quality generated by the music. The steady tempo throughout kept the macabre elements bubbling to the fore, with the “mad dance” sequences creating their own excitement, as did the “chattering winds” of the witches’ cackling dialogues, The brass fanfares were spot-on at all times, and especially when returning us to the opening, played with more “bite” than ever as the revelry intensified.

The last onslaught began, slowly on the bassoon and building up to an unnerving pace, gathering up detail in its sweep such as stuttering brass, squealing winds and screeching strings as the brass intoned its final call – with the crash of the tam-tam everything fell silent  except for the tolling bell and the hubbub’s dying reverberation, “warmed” beautifully by the harp, and the lovely string playing (great clarinet and flute solos, as well!)

Here’s the original Musorgsky version –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu1no7hOlSs

And so to the concluding item, ancient and nostalgic listening history for me, as Tchaikovsky’s  Capriccio Italien was on one of the first sets of 78 rpm discs I owned when a student (part of a whole bunch of 78 rpm discs I found in a charity shop! – things like Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony on six discs!). Anyway, I played and played the Capriccio until I accidentally and carelessly cracked one of the two discs! (I think I have the performance on CD, somewhere, now!) But I hadn’t played the work for a while, and the performance this afternoon made me fall in love with the music all over again!

What a sensationally-delivered trumpet solo at the beginning! – obviously inspiring the rest of the brass’s majestic and sonorous efforts! The strings, suitably awe-struck in reply, at first, gripped the attention just as steadily, as the exchanges continued. The oboe entered a shade jerkily but soon recovered, building the ambiences with the strings in support until the brass re-entered, the percussion a tad rushed at first but settling down again. We had a breath-catching transition to the waltz-theme –  the oboes and flutes so beautiful and Italianate-sounding with clarinets and bassoons having their turn as well, before the glorious brass-playing completed the sound-picture, with whirling strings adding to the excitement, and percussion snow-capping the climaxes!

Tchaikovsky doesn’t let up with the melodies (I remember already “knowing” both of the “famous” ones here before I ever encountering this work, as they’d obviously been “pinched” by popular music beforehand!) – the second one nicely introduced by the strings and the horn, and then later by the other brasses in turn (how was this Russian composer able to write such Mediterranean-sounding music?). Gorgeously done, with the horns adding an elegant postlude, before the strings reiterated their mock-serious “opening” with the stuttering brass not missing a beat. A well-managed accelerando later, the tarantella was dancing away from the gloom, and  playing “catch-me-if-you-can” with the instruments in its wake, including the tambourine (what a day for the percussion it had been!). But there was further excitement in store for us which came with the return of the Waltz-tune, with the strings and brass on fire and the tambourine-player in seventh heaven for a few scintillating measures – and if that wasn’t enough I had this feeling the conductor was suddenly daring his players  to imagine they were plunging into something elemental like the coda to the composer’s Fourth Symphony’s finale, a “now or never” moment to which everybody seemed to respond without hesitation and bring off with enormous elan! – a burst of youthful energies and dare-devil execution  which I thought appropriately summed up the  enthusiasm and at times brilliance of the afternoon’s music-making – but also, for this listener a great joy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A tantalizing 2025 season’s beginning – from Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN PSATHAS – Kartsigar
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 1 in C Major Op.40
EDVARD GRIEG – String Quartet in G Minor Op.27

The New Zealand String Quartet
– Anna van der Zee and Peter Clark (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Callum Hall (‘cello)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 27th April, 2025

Wellington Chamber Music opened its 2025 season with a characteristic blast of fresh musical air, the musicians obliging with an enticing amalgam of pieces whose composers had familiar names but whose music promised anything but familiar, well-worn sounds – though two of the pieces presented in this concert happened to have historic connections with the Society. In chronological order, Dmitri Shostakovich’s First String Quartet was one of the works featured during the Society’s inaugural year (1945); while John Psathas’ 2005 work Kartsigar was actually commissioned by Wellington Chamber Music for its 60th anniversary.

These associations duly noted and tucked under our belts for ready reference, we welcomed to the stage the current New Zealand String Quartet, an organisation that’s had its reorganisations and upheavals over the last little while, but has bounced its presently reconstituted self back ready for action. So, violist Gillian Ansell (a foundation member of the Quartet) and violinist Peter Clark (who had replaced Monique Lapins last year) were joined today by violinist Anna van der Zee and ‘cellist Callum Hall.

I looked up John Psathas’ Kartsigar on the Middle C website for interest’s sake, and discovered that my former colleague Lindis Taylor had reviewed the inaugural performance of the work at that 2005 Wellington Chamber Music concert by the NZSQ of that time, as well as a later 2011 performance by the same players at St.Mary of the Angels Church, a venue whose ample acoustic gave my colleague what he described as “a more enveloping experience” than he’d found on the players’ CD recording they’d made of the piece for Rattle Records. Such observations reflect on different performances to that of the present one, of course, but they’re interesting in further establishing the work’s history and accrued experience on the part of performers and listeners, all of which can help to enrich further encounters and performances.

Kartsigar is a work for string quartet drawn by its composer from traditional Greek music, primarily taximi or free, improvised instrumental solos used as a prelude or introduction associated with a dance or song. In the first movement what sounds like improvised melody from the instruments is the composer’s own transcription of an improvisation from one of Greece’s greatest musicians, the clarino player Manos Acahlinotopoulos, one which “breathes the Voice of Life into Kartsigar”. The cello begins a pizzicato ostinato pedal note, to which the second violin and viola respond with sombre tones of mourning, then expressively added to by the first violin, at once “folksy” and ritual-like, solo lines alternating with shared lines, and instruments going from arco to pizzicato and back to arco – the whole generates a tremendous sense of “occasion” , gradually becoming more and more elaborate, and even more vigorous, until a point is reached when the process seems to disestablish and recede, with tones and impulses growing fainter and fainter to the point of stillness

The second movement begins with an ethereal-sounding pizzicato/harmonic which forms the basis for the whole movement’s trajectory of a kind of mesmerising transferal of impulse – the material shifts from instrument to instrument, the lines and gestures keep us guessing as to where we are going, as if the piece’s “centre” is constantly relocating. I found myself part deliciously, part uneasily “stranded” in scenarios which brought single-note sequences (from the ‘cello, for example) and then sudden “whirling dervish” ecstasies from Peter Clark’s violin! – one’s sensibility became a “loose fragment” tossed all about an ambience, and then just as suddenly left to ponder eerily-held notes with which one “breathes” with the music’s own slow-rhythmed movements, until left only with silence.

In the wake of these colourful immersions in realms awash with improvisation, one couldn’t help feeling taken to a different, more enclosed world with Shostakovich’s First String Quartet, given that the music shows remarkably  little of the intense angst and disturbing dissonances which his later works in this genre would produce. This, after all, was the composer’s first foray into the medium, and about which he was disarmingly frank, as demonstrated by a brief comment he wrote, concerning the  opening as an “original exercise in the quartet form, not thinking about subsequently completing and releasing it”.  Gradually the idea took hold and he finished the work, though still disavowing any particular significance to the exercise, remarking further – “Don’t expect to find any special depth in this – my first quartet opus, In mood it is joyful, merry, lyrical. I would call it ‘spring-like’ ”. It seems that, after the tumultuous years of the composer’s persecution by Stalin and his lackeys over his opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” with what was termed its “formalist” tendencies, Shostakovich was taking refuge in a private, relatively untroubled world, even though he was not to revisit the string quartet medium for a further six years.

The work was first performed in 1938, by the Glazunov Quartet – the composer hadn’t yet established the rapport he was to find with the renowned Beethoven Quartet, to whom he entrusted the premieres of all of his subsequent string quartets except the Fifteenth and last, due to the sudden death of the Quartet’s cellist while preparing the first performance. Commentators have repeatedly described the early work in emotionally-detached terms, such as “divertimento-like” or “Haydn-esque”, indicating the “neutral” content of the undertaking, and whose ostensible purpose was to, literally, keep its composer out of trouble!

The opening sounds more like Borodin at the outset, a distinctively “Russian” ambience betrayed only by the occasional note suggesting a more acerbic strain – there’s a lovely, singing second subject on the first violin sounded over ‘cello glissandi, one which the ‘cello itself “grabs” for a moment of glory! The interchanges wear an almost self-conscious “carefree” air, the development insouciantly augmenting the harmonies and the recapitulation allowing the second violin and viola a “second-subject” variant, before the music poignantly turns for home, having spied out the land and found it ostensibly non-threatening!

A theme-and-variations slow movement in A minor was next, begun by Gillian Ansell’s smokily-toned  viola with a simple folk-tune, ‘cello pizzicati joining in, and then the violins taking up the melody a daintily-astringent half-a-tone higher – the viola’s “Wot’s all this, then?” return sparked a moment of angst before peace was restored by the violin’s open-hearted switch to an E-major rendition of the theme – I liked the players’ handling of the “same again but different” theme variants, and especially warmed to the limpid pizzicato accompaniments to the viola’s return, rather like meek lambs gathered up by their shepherd! Perhaps they could sense the third-movement arrival of some kind of wolf, though it’s really more spectre than substance, here, a spooky ride in constant motion, in the midst of which comes a kind of “lullaby” trio, followed by a blending of the two trajectories – great fun!

Afterwards, the finale takes us to the fairground for some  hi-jinks, the excitement becoming heady and more trenchant, almost “boys’ own” (oo-er! – very “thirties!”) in the second subject, with the vigorous themes becoming more determinedly expressionist and claustrophobic until problems are sorted out and brouhaha is satisfyingly brought back over the final bars. It seems obvious that, In the treacherous slipstream of Shostakovich’s scarifying experience with Stalin over his opera Lady Macbeth, writing this work had obviously felt like some kind of redemptive balm for the composer’s senses.

The concert’s third and final work brought its own particular distinction of novelty and interest to the proceedings – this was Edvard Grieg’s 1878 String Quartet in G Minor, described variously elsewhere as No.1 and No.2 (in fact the composer’s first attempt at a string quartet was lost, appropriately leaving the G minor in its “pole” position). The popularity achieved by the work encouraged Grieg to attempt a further string quartet in 1891, though he finished only two movements, leaving sketches for the final two, making  a couple of subsequent efforts  to finish the work but seeming to lack the inspiration to complete what he called “that accursed string quartet which constantly lies there unfinished like an old Norwegian cheese.” (A couple of attempts have since been made by other composers to complete Grieg’s sketches.)

Grieg’s inspiration, however, proved constant throughout the composition of practically the whole of the G Minor quartet – commenting after finishing the work that it was “not meat for small minds” and adding that “it aims for breadth, vigour, flight of imagination and , above all, fullness of tone for the instruments for which it is written”. It uses a kind of motto theme taken from the composer’s own song “Spillemaend” (meaning Minstrels or Fiddlers) about a water-spirit, the Hulder, who promises musicians great inspiration in exchange for their happiness, one which recurs throughout the work. Violist Gillian Ansell commented in her introduction on the work’s inspiration for Claude Debussy who wrote his own String Quartet in the same key ten years later.

The work has a big-boned quasi-orchestral sound right from its outset, a grand and imperious opening and a fleet and impetuous allegro to follow, featuring incredibly volatile playing, music that breaks off suddenly from whatever mood it inhabits to effect a contrast with another – Anna van der Zee’s playing and leadership throughout I found astonishing, her sweet, silvery tones readily augmented with energetic trajectories and trenchant attacks excitingly replicated by the other players. The movement’s dramatic ups and downs come to a head with a beautiful ‘cello solo that grows out of a tremolando passage towards the end before leading to an explosively vigorous coda.

Added to this, I thought the musicians gave the second movement simply gorgeous treatment – the opening uses a typically redolent “Grieg” melody (one which couldn’t come from any other composer), sonorously projected by Callum Hall’s ‘cello, before “bouncing” into an extraordinarily playful passage involving both pizzicato and staccato phrasings. Then the opening melody returns, the accompaniment this time investing the hapless tune with full-on “salon” treatment, charming in its almost “tea-shop-like” way. It’s then given a kind of Tchaikovsky-like balletic set of guises, before evoking parts of the latter’s “Serenade for Strings” in its acerbic-sweet final harmonies!

The Intermezzo that followed was a vigorously-swinging waltz-like piece, the players digging into those playfully-eyeballing syncopated chordings before gracefully giving way to more demure legato-phrased interactions. Even more delicious was the Trio section, with Grieg revisiting his “Cowkeeper’s Tune and Country Dance” manner to foot-tapping effect, and further spicing the mood with brief bouts of contrasting mania and introspection! All of this was brought off with relish on the players’ part and proportionally huge enjoyment on ours, further underlined by the sheer fun generated from the scampering coda!

Finales often bring composers trouble and anxiety, and there were places in Grieg’s finale where I felt his inspiration was bolstered more by the trajectories of the saltarello form which he had chosen, than any spontaneous melodic invention. Of course, composers are perfectly entitled to “step outside” their own native trajectorial languages and explore something exotic – one thinks of so many who have done so (Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Ravel and Sibelius, to name a few, the last-named indulging in a “Bolero” complete with castanets in his Op. 25 Scenes Historiques music!) – but I can’t help feeling that Grieg was at his most inspired in the other, more ostensibly Scandinavian-influenced movements of this work, even if he puts up a good show in places! Still, a no-holds-barred kind of performance can be relied upon to do any piece of music the greatest justice, and that was what we got here!

After the high seriousness of the Lento introduction, with its canonic recitatives and great crunching chords, a “ready, steady, go” sequence from the players kick-started the finale in fine style! By turns vigorous and lightfooted, and alternating the dotted rhythms of the vigorous saltarello with more straightforward “running” passages, the playing’s impetus kept our sensibilities agreeably focused, apart from a couple of sequences featuring repeated rhetorical chromatic scale passages which briefly felt to me like “filler” and an ending which seemed to be looking for a grand finishing statement but didn’t quite achieve the sheer magnificence of, for instance, the composer’s Piano Concerto! However, in terms of incredible skill and sheer commitment, the players took us to what seemed like the music’s overall limits of achievability in grand style – and Grieg had already given us more than enough in the work as a whole to satisfy our pleasure at encountering what was a significant and remarkable creative achievement! (From where do I buy the CD, again?)

Hats off (well, hearty thanks, at least!) to Wellington Chamber Music – an inspired beginning to a richly promising 2025 season of music-making!

Delicious, profound and adventurous – an irresistible orchestral feast from the Wellington City Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen


WELLINGTON CITY ORCHESTRA
Justus Rozemond (conductor
with Sophia Acheson (viola )

Nicolai –  Overture “The Merry Wives of Windsor”
Rachmaninov – Tone-Poem “Isle of the Dead”
Berlioz – “Harold in Italy” – Symphony with Viola obbligato

St,Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 5th April 2025

Concert viewed via video – thanks to Nick Baldwin (camera)
and Angus Webb (editing)

Thanks also to Rowena Cullen (Wellington CO President)

Review for Middle C by Peter Mechen

I’d seen this programme by the Wellington City Orchestra advertised, and was instantly drawn to its boldness, variety and colour, with three works owing nothing to one another but irresistibly drawn together by their very singularity and vividly-wrought panoply of contrasting human emotion. It’s the kind of programming to which orchestras that have a variety of music-directors can bring enterprise and exploration in the form of each maestro’s particular enthusiasms, and whose audiences benefit from such wide-ranging presentations.

So when circumstances conspired against my attending the concert I was delighted to be able to “catch up” with what took place via the kind auspices of Rowena Cullen, the Orchestra committee’s President, through a video of the concert made by Nick Baldwin and Angus Webb, from which I could write a “report” of the proceedings (as I was able to for the orchestra’s final 2024 concert under similar kinds of circumstances). In each case, what I’ve really liked about the results I’ve seen and heard is that along with the judiciously-balanced sound quality the film replicates a single audience member’s view of the concert, rather than the usual “from all-angles” viewpoints, so that one feels like a “bona fide” concertgoer rather than some kind of “voyeur” hovering about the ranks of the players, closely watching them activating their mouthpieces and fingerboards!

Where Otto Nicolai’s exuberant Overture to his opera “The Merry Wives of Windsor” brings together a veritable farrago of characters with engaging personalities and conflicting intentions making for a “spice-of-life” variety of interaction, Sergei Rachmaninov’s darkly-brooding, phantasmagorical tone-poem “Isle of the Dead” presents a bleak scenario of a solitary life’s journey reaching its inevitable conclusion at a forbidding and ultimately pitiless place of interment. No two cheek-by-jowl  presentation scenarios could have been more profoundly different!

In some ways, Hector Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy” is even more visionary in its uniqueness – a work for solo viola and orchestra which brings together both compositional ingenuity and idiosyncrasy with little more than quasi-Byronic characterisations by way of portraying the “adventures” of the music’s ostensible hero. In fact the Childe Harold of Byron is largely absent from Berlioz’s depictions of the chief protagonist, the latter being drawn largely from the composer’s own Italian experiences, however much he might have identified with the general traits of the poet’s title character. The work is a collection of scenes through which the traveller passes, bring to each his own, by turns, exuberant, poetic, introspective and downcast set of moods, with Berlioz’s firebrand inspiration setting even the touches of banality in the story alight! -are those indefatigable brigands, for example, perhaps having one round of carousing too many?

Whatever the conjectures regarding any aspect of these presentations, it seemed expectations were simmering when conductor Justus Rozemond stepped up to the rostrum to begin the afternoon’s concert with Nicolai’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. And what a beginning! – such a gorgeous opening paragraph to a work! – here were the first notes so magically “sounded” by the violins, the theme fulsomely so by the lower strings, and all repeated by the violins, staunchly but gently supported by the winds and the horns! It  brought the first signs of mischief afoot, with a perky theme tossed back and forward between the strings and the winds –  a couple of loose notes quickly tucked out of sight! – and then the fun began, with the gossipy exchanges between winds and strings building up a real head of steam – “He wrote what? – Look, it says so here! – the old rogue!” as the two  “Merry Wives” read the fat knight Sir John Falstaff’s fawning letters and resolve to plot his downfall! Some smartly brought-off quick-fire exchanges between instruments – “Are you ready? Here he comes! Quick, hide!” and the famous melody sings out, nicely “nudged” at its top note by the strings, and given plenty of sensuous “sway” by conductor Rozemond. The excitement knew no bounds as brass and percussion joined in, anticipating the fat knight’s downfall – and his entry was delicious, the music suddenly acquiring great girth and pomposity from the heavy brass (though I wish they’d kept those heavy accents going through all the unfortunate miscreant’s music!) as the object of the deception fled in shame when he realised his ruse had been thwarted – the music then repeated the sequences almost as before, though reintroducing the “big tune” (one of the world’s charmers, in my opinion) earlier, and with the brasses and percussion helping to celebrate the triumph of goodness and modesty over self-importance and connivance. All in all, It made a splendid opening for the concert.

To grimmer business, then, with Rachmaninov’s “Isle of the Dead”, his sombre evocation of a painting depicting the carrying of a body over water to its resting-place, the music a dark-toned barcarolle whose “wandering” 5/8 time suggests the steady rowing of the oarsman as the boat with its coffin and robed white figure neared a kind of “burial island”. This was an image which the composer first saw in a black-and-white reproduction in Paris in 1907, composing his “tone poem” two years later.  Rachmaninov himself conducted the work’s premiere in Moscow in 1909, and subsequently recorded the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra in America in 1930. Incidentally, the artist, Arnold Böcklin, actually made several versions of the work, all slightly differently detailed – and it’s fascinating to learn that Rachmaninov, on subsequently viewing one of the original colour copies of the picture, remarked that he would not have composed the work if he had seen the painting in colour!

I thought the performance by the orchestra a remarkably fine achievement – the opening sounds were steadily and remorselessly brought into play, Rozemond and his musicians conveying a proper “heaviness of spirit” and a sense of lamentation, steadily and patiently maintained. What the winds and strings were doing so well, the brass sturdily continued, helping to build up to the first of the work’s vantage-points, where the music briefly paused, muttered, sighed and exclaimed (lovely work by all concerned, strings, wind and brass, with the latter using their mutes superbly) before resignedly accepting that the journey ought to continue.

And so the lower strings rebegan their steady 5/8 rhythms with even more energy and purpose, building the columns of sound up steadily and impressively, with the brasses sturdily holding the top lines. The winds elaborated on the  repeated motifs, the brass moaned, and the strings had a short-lived moment of warmth before the “Dies Irae” melody made a sombre appearance on the cellos, sparking a response through the whole orchestra, the players putting all their energies into the theme, driving it upwards and outwards like an avenging spirit, and propelling the cortege to what seemed like its resting-place on or near the shores of the forbidding island.

The brass sounded the theme (superbly played), weighing down upon us with a kind of finality – but out of sheer desperation came a beseeching strain, a different, more human-sounding plea, led by the strings but coloured by wind and brass, one seeking solace and perhaps salvation from a certain quarter. Such was not to be, as the brass and wind tones rose from out of the orchestral panoply and brutally mocked any such supplications. This brought fabulously full-blooded playing from the strings, and was augmented at the climax by the winds and brass as the harsher realities of death delivered their judgement – one from which it seemed there could be no escape.

Perhaps the most telling sequence in the whole work was the aftermath of this crushing utterance  – a steady pizzicato from the strings, repeating the Dies Irae theme, various solo instruments sounding variants of the theme, and the entry of the solo violin playing an agitated tremolando version before ascending to join the winds – oboe and clarinet then linked to the brass, who sounded a kind of “Requiem” (so reminiscent of the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony here!) – before the strings again took up the “rowing” 5/8 rhythm, decorated by descending winds, and with the lower strings playing a fuller version of the Dies Irae theme, locking its strains in our memory for all time, and leaving its last few notes floating in the fading ambiences of the scene – amazing!

After such an experience one imagined that the actual concert needed an interval for its audience to be properly revived!  Everybody having used the space accordingly, the concert’s second half could proceed…..at this point I need to confess to taking a while as a youthful listener to properly “get” Berlioz’s “Harold in Italy”, the last work on the programme. My first reaction to the work was somewhat akin to Schumann’s famous opinion of Chopin’s “Funeral March” Sonata, whose movements he described as “four of Chopin’s maddest children”. But a beautiful recording by violist Nobuko Imai with Colin Davis drew me afresh into the work’s magical realm – and so it was here with the playing of the soloist, Sophia Acheson, whose gorgeous tones encompassed sounds ranging from a beautifully-wrought self-communing meditation to places requiring full-throated energy and lyricism. However, the great violinist Paganini’s complaint about the work Berlioz had written for him – that there was too little for the soloist to do – certainly bears scrutiny, especially in the light of other concertante works that appeared at around this time, though the composer had never intended to (and never did) write a concerto in a conventional sense!

The work’s sombre opening found the conductor and orchestral players gently coaxing the music out of the void and into some kind of coalescence, introducing a minor-key variant of the melody in the winds that would come to dominate much of the work , with the lower instruments shepherding the lighter ones (the winds and upper strings) into being from their places, patiently and gradually painting a Mediterranean-like ambience into which the character of the wanderer could be introduced. It all came when the music’s key turned to the major, prompting solo viola and harp to speak together, with violist Sophia Acheson responding poetically to her harpist Anne-Gaele Ausseil’s beatific tones, and drawing out further responses from the orchestra, a sunnily-wrought statement of the theme expressed in heartfelt terms. The music took a quixotic turn, with the orchestra sounding fragments of the allegro theme which would dominate the first movement, and the soloist, hesitatingly at first, taking the same music up, and instigating a fascinating interplay between viola and orchestra – the theme was tossed between the participants with glee and gusto, the players handling Berlioz’s capricious demands with skill and perseverance, and bringing real elan to the build-up of excitement and culmination at the movement’s end.Sophia Acheson, Viola

Of the four movements my out-and-out favourite has always been the second, the “March of the Pilgrims”, music which so impressed Berlioz’s friend Franz Liszt he made a solo piano transcription of this movement alone to perform at his recitals, besides transcribing the whole work for viola and piano! It’s a wondrous soundscape of a kind of processional pilgrimage moving though all kinds of natural and man-made vistas – Berlioz wrote in his memoirs of observing “returning gleaners from fields singing soft litanies to the accompaniment of the sad tinkling of the distant convent bell”, which ties in with the music’s progress here being continually drawn onward by a bell-like sound (in a different key to the music that both the orchestra and the viola are playing – so magical and memorable an effect!). Over this evocative and varied wall of sound the soloist played her first movement melody, and other variants, including a sul ponticello (the bow on the strings close to the bridge) sequence of arpeggiated chords (Berlioz apparently liked to strum his guitar on his mountain walks!), all adding to the overall atmosphere. I would have liked the tempi a notch or two slower and dreamier in this movement, but this pacing brought a kind of “fervour” to the proceedings, which the ending beautifully dissipated as the repeated orchestral notes echoed and re-echoed the bell-like sounds after the pilgrims had disappeared, leaving the viola to make a final arpeggiated comment by way of a farewell.

After this the peasant revelries swung into earshot with the third movement, the winds attractively rustic-sounding at the beginning, with the cor anglais leading the way for the “serenade” section, matched by the oboe’s plaintive tones, as well as the horns, giving golden support.  The winds beautifully framed the soloist’s entry, and continued to decorate her figurations with all kinds of felicitous gestures – though the horns missed their footing momentarily, they made amends a few moments later with a similar passage sonorously negotiated. The dance resuming, a particularly beautifully flute solo towards the end of the movement, left the strings to usher the dancers off (the orchestral violas having a brief moment of quiet glory!), leaving the soloist pondering as to whether it was all a dream.

The finale began with a crash! – the music veered between gloom and frantic excitement as the soloist reprised some of the themes from the previous movements. The orchestra “caressed“ some of these fragments in partnership with the viola as if in a dream-like state (a particularly lovely sequence largely with the clarinets), but seemed unable to escape the “allure” of the brigands’ carousings (and driving the soloist from the platform as they did so!), keeping the incisive whiplash rhythms coming splendidly! It seemed everybody was caught in a kind of vortex of brigandish euphoria and largesse! – musically, everybody covered themselves with glory in embracing these bacchanale-like excesses, and especially during the over-the-top repeated passage for strings against snarling brass –  fabulous stuff!

Just when the brigands’ excesses had begun to boil over for a third time a deathly hush suddenly overtook the scenario – in the distance could be heard a reminiscence of the Pilgrim’s March (two offstage players) and at the back of the orchestra reappeared the viola soloist, appearing to join in with these sounds, but gradually overcome by the orchestra’s somewhat rogue inclination to rejoin the brigands!  Which they did, to brilliant and conclusive effect, the players giving out as if their lives depended on the outcome!

Kudos aplenty to all those people who played a part in both performing and bringing this concert into being – even on film I found it a totally involving and astonishment-provoking experience!  The thrill of witnessing a group of musicians literally playing their hearts out in tandem with one another has been a pleasure and, indeed, something of a privilege to witness. Again, congrats to the conductor and the players, to the sterling group of organisers and enablers, and, of course, the supporters, who gave well-deserved acclaim to these performances – by turns, delicious, profound and adventurous!

 

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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  (photo: Cassandra Wang)

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen


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”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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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