Author: Peter Mechen

Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” a triumph for Witch Music Theatre at Wellington’s Te Auaha

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Witch Music Theatre Charitable Trust presents:
SONDHEIM  –  Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Book by Hugh Wheeler (from a play by Christopher Bond)

Cast: Sweeney Todd – Chris Crowe
Mrs Lovett – Vanessa Stacey
Beggar Woman – Frankie Leota
Judge Turpin – Thomas Barker
Tobias Ragg – Jared Palleson
Beadle Bamford – Jthan Morgan
Anthony Hope – Zane Berguis
Johanna Barker – Olivia Stewart
Adolfo Pirelli – Ben Paterson

Ensemble: Devon Neiman, Emma Salzano, Nino Raphael, Katie Atkins, Isaac Andrews, Allegra Canton, Patrick Jennings, Michaela Cadwgan, Jackson Burling, Sinéad Keane, Minto Fung,  Natasha McAllister, Fynn Bodley-Davies, Joanne Hodgson, Jason Henderson, Tania Dreaver

Musicians: Mark W.Dorrell (Music director/keyboard), Karla Norton (violin), Samuel Berkhan(‘cello), Simon Eastwood/Jandee Song (double basses), Nick Walshe (clarinet), Peter Lamb (bassoon), Brendan Agnew (trumpet), Viv Read (horn), Brent Stewart (percussion)

Ben Emerson (director)
Nick Lerew (assistant director)
Joshua Tucker (technical designer)
Greta Casey-Solley (choreographer)
Emma Stevens (costumes)
Patrick Barnes (sound)

Te Auaha Performing Arts Centre, 65 Dixon St,. Wellington

Wednesday, 30th June, 2021

“Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd” proclaimed the first singer shortly after the opening of Witch Music Theatre’s instantly-riveting Te Auaha production of the eponymous show  – no argument or dissent was brooked, as we had already been ensnared and drawn into an ominous, all-pervading scenario of compelling unease  generated by gothic, phantom-sounding organ figurations, dimly-perceived Nibelungen-like figures materialising from nowhere performing scrubbing-like tasks of enslavement, and a sudden, “scream-like” irruption of fearful , anguished noise, overwhelmingly visceral in its impact. We needed no further enjoiners to “attend” to what developed from this into a veritable cornucopia of theatrical action, the chorus’s taking up of the work’s exposition in an overwhelming and incisive way that never once flagged throughout the evening.

Director Ben Emerson’s approach to Stephen Sondheim’s recreation of the Victorian “penny dreadful” tale of the murderous barber Sweeney Todd has been to pull the action from Victoriana into post WW2 London, though somehow emphasising the more timeless themes of love and loss, lust and cruelty, obsession and vengeance which drive the social, economic and moral backgrounds, of the original tale, thereby, as Emerson puts it, “stay(ing) true to the text while creeping us ever closer to a chilling and hauntingly recognisable reality”, a recreative attitude that has enlivened many a starkly and impossibly cruel and monstrous folk-tale from various cultures. For me the “updating” of the scenario is always less important than the valid and believable depiction of those  qualities of “cynicism, moral ambiguity and corruption” – all of which are by no means new sins, however coloured by changing social mores.

A significant feature of this production was the integration of the orchestra in relation to the stage action. At first I thought this had been miscalculated as regards the solo singing – even with discreet microphoning, the vocal soloists’ tones often seemed masked by the sheer proximity of the instruments, no matter how sensitively played. My seat position, I think, accentuated this problem – second row from the front – from where everything at first seemed very loud. As the show went on, either the balances or my ears seemed to adjust, and I found myself less concerned regarding the singers’ audibility, and more increasingly attuned to the interaction between voices and instruments, to the point where it simply ceased to be a problem.

Central to the interaction between stage and instruments, and to the production’s general ebb and flow was music director Mark W.Dorrell, through whose hands and gestures it all came to life, increasingly so as the first part of the action proceeded. The characterisation of each musical moment, whether physical and energetic, lyrical and flowing, or poised and heart-stopping, was here  “grown” by Dorrell with his players and singers out of the whole with an inevitablilty that took our sensibilities inexorably onward and left us resonating with it all at the action’s end – masterful music-making from all concerned. I particularly relished the lurid deliciousness of the waltz tunes that accompanied some of the story’s blackest sequences, an instance being the hatching of the plan by Sweeney and his accomplice Mrs Lovett to not let the cadaver of the unfortunate “Signor Pirelli” become “an awful waste”! How wonderfully  macabre and gruesomely fascinating a marriage of music and theatre, with moods also brilliantly set alongside others inhabiting different parts of the spectrum – such as the song of the lovers, Anthony’s and Joanna’s “Kiss Me” counterpointing Judge Turpin’s and the Beadle’s discussion re enhancing the judge’s attractiveness to his ward, with “Ladies in their sensitivities”.

Ben Emerson’s direction made the most of the potentialities offered by the venue’s cheek-by-jowl proximity of stage and audience – the first few rows of seats in which I sat, were, most excitingly, in practically the same space as were the performers! – the propinquity of so many energetic, pulsating, sweating bodies right from the beginning gave the choruses a tactile quality not for the faint-hearted! I found the physicality of choreographer Greta Casey-Solly’s deployment of her forces most exhilarating (the asylum scene in Act Two had a particularly urgent, white-hot  quality), and the boldly-contrasted relief of the stillness of some scenes all the more telling – the raptness of Sweeney’s reunitement with his set of shaving razors (“These are my friends”) had a savagely ironic poignancy which then exploded into fierce joy as he exclaimed, holding the blades “My right arm is complete again!” – a moment whose power was as much the sum of the evocative surrounding parts as the gesture itself!

Technically, it was all a tour de force, the various stagings making the most of both different levels and refracted views (a clear perspex “curtain” making a telling variation on the “through a glass darkly” principle at certain moments – characters seen by us but not by those onstage, or given the illusion of concealment, adding a fantastic visual element to the barber’s various throat-cutting despatchings of some of his victims). Post-war and 1950s London would have in places probably have been almost as ill-lit, and smoke- and fog-filled as in Victorian times – though the  exterior scenarios recreated here reminded me more in places of Dennis Potter’s television series “The Singing Detective” than of Dickens. Joshua Tucker’s evocative lighting enhanced Emma Stevens’ costumes’ authentic period glow, and underpinned the morbid juxtaposition of the ordinary and the grotesque, with Mrs Lovett and  Sweeney, dressed in their “blood aprons” discussing a visit to the seaside.

Though some of the singing needed a tad more projection in places throughout the first act, I thought the characterisations of the principals irresistible and compelling throughout – the lovers, Zane Berghuis and Olivia Stewart as Anthony and Joanna, looked and sounded just as one might imagine them to do, Berghuis’s voice properly lyrical and romantic and Stewart’s voice sweet and tremulous, making a poignant blend, both responding wholeheartedly to the energies of their roles as well as to the romantic delicacies. As the Beggar-Woman Frankie Leota captured both the pitiable and the hard-bitten aspects of her character with real gusto, giving her frenzied “City on Fire!” sequence plenty of juice and her mutterings of “Mischief!” real bite.

The “villains”, Judge Turpin (Thomas Barker) and Beadle Bamford (Jthan Morgan), were sharply differentiated, Barker’s depiction of the Judge a no-holds-barred, cruel, but torn and divided man, in enslavement to his lust for his ward Joanna, and seemingly in thrall to his guilt, as witness the self-flagellation scene (as convincing in this scene as any I’ve seen “live” or on video). By contrast, Jthan Morgan’s Beadle here was very much the dandified dilettante-like fop, his affected manner making him appear more to me like a character from a Restoration Comedy – but post-war Europe was in flux and manners and modes up for grabs, a world in which personalities such as Quentin Crisp could and did flourish. Here in Morgan’s portrayal was menace of a different kind, lurking beneath a polished, suave exterior.

Another “character” was the “Italian” showman Adolfo Pirelli, colourfully played by Ben Paterson, with his young helper, Tobias Ragg, (a sensitive characterisation by Jared Palleson), the showman delivering his song brilliantly in front of the crowd,  then later calling on Sweeney after the latter “outshaved” him in a contest, threatening to expose the barber’s secret past (as a deported convict), and meeting an aforementioned grisly end at Sweeney’s hands as a result, the “Italian’s” young helper Tobias duly “adopted” by the versatile Mrs Lovett.  The boy came to regard her as his “charge”, Jared Pallesen subsequently singing a heartfelt, almost desperate  “Nothing’s gonna harm you” to her, voicing his fears for her safety in the company of “Mr. Todd”, fears that ultimately proved all too real.

Though Sondheim’s work is ultimately about the central character, one couldn’t have a great “Sweeney” without a similarly larger-than-life stage partner – and Vanessa Stacey’s Mrs Lovett was the perfect foil for the haunted, obsessive “demon barber”, bringing all of the energy and magnetism the character needed to imprint her own personality on the action – affable, vivacious, practical, earthy and occasionally sensual, classically the opposite of her destined partner in almost every way, she was, in effect, Sweeney’s “dark angel”, firstly recognising his former self, and then reconnecting him with the initial talismanic instruments that once represented his livelihood, and now were transformed into tangible means of vengeance. Stacey’s singing and acting brought out both the character’s everyday qualities listed above, and crucially realised Mrs Lovett’s ultimate tragedy – that she deserved a better fate, but, however brutally and savagely, was somehow, with  ruinous irony, enabled to fulfil her destiny.

As Sweeney Todd, I thought Chris Crowe profoundly satisfying, both in terms of his stand-alone qualities as a character, and in his interactions with others and with the world in general. His acting epitomised a damaged, insufficiently nurtured being, replete with barely-repressed fear and anger, unable to shake off his desire for revenge, as if everything, including his own ultimate destruction, was predestined; while his singing was always finely-honed, his gradations of tone and timbre set upon specific intensities and emotions throughout. I felt an edge to his stage presence the whole time, one that exuded unease and wounded feeling, though never to excess – I’ve already mentioned the totality of feeling he brought to his reconnection with his barber’s razors, characterising their functions so viscerally and chillingly with the words “you shall drip rubies” – but in  so many other places he brought different tones of menace to the part, at one point “calling out” individual audience members as his potential victims in his desire for revenge upon humanity in general and at another cursing London and its cruelties –  “It’s a hole in the world like a great black pit, and the vermin of the world inhabits it”

. He and Vanessa Stacey as Mrs Lovett  made, I thought, a splendid pair!

Circumstances prevented me from completing this review before the show’s Wellington season finished – however I would imagine the production to be regarded by anybody who attended as an excellent advertisement for any forthcoming Witch Charitable Trust Theatre presentations, as well as for the splendidly atmospheric Te Auaha venue and its tireless team of enablers. What else can I say but “Hats off to all concerned!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Octogenarians make a splendid 17th-century pair

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Baroque Voices and Palliser Viols present:
17th Century Octogenarians
Music by Heinrich SchĂŒtz and John Jenkins

HEINRICH SCHÜTZ  (1585-1672)
(from the Symphoniae Sacrae III 1650)
Wo der Herr nicht das Haus bauet (Unless the Lord build the house)
Was mein Gott will (What my God wills)
Mein Sohn warum hast du uns das getan? (My Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?)
(from the Geistiche Chormusik 1648)
Auf dem Gebirge (From the mountains)
Sehet an den Feigenbaum (Look upon the fig tree)
Ich WeiÎČ, dass mein Erlöser lebt (I know that my Redeemer lives)

JOHN JENKINS (1592-1678)
Pavan Ă  5 No.2 in G minor
Duet in D minor, No.3, for 2 Bass Viols
Fantasy à 4  No.6 in F “All in a garden green”
Fantasy à 5  No.3 in G minor
Fantasy Ă  3 for treble, two bass viols and organ
Fantasy Ă  5 No.5 in G minor

Baroque Voices – Pepe Becker, Rowena Simpson (sopranos)
Hazel Fenemor, Milla Dickens (altos)
Peter Liley (tenor)
Will King, David Morriss (basses)

Palliser Viols – Rebecca Struthers, CJ Macfarlane, violins
Sophia Acheson, Will King, treble viols
Kevin Wilkinson, tenor viol,
Robert Oliver, tenor and bass viols
Imogen Granwal, bass viol,
Malcolm Struthers, double bass,
Douglas Mews, organ

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Boulcott St., Wellington

Sunday, 20th June 2021

This concert gave cause for joy on a number of counts, not the least in providing a dry and relatively comfortable place in which to spend a couple of hours on a more-than-usually inclement Sunday evening – though not particularly warm temperature-wise, the interior of St.Mary’s Church worked its usual visual and atmospheric magic over the duration, adding to the beauty and variety of the sounds recreated for our pleasure by the two ensembles, Baroque Voices and Palliser Viols.  We were treated to a marked contrast of genres between the music of each of the two “Octogenarian” composers represented – though they were contemporaries, Heinrich SchĂŒtz and John Jenkins created vastly different sound-worlds by dint of their respective preoccupations. SchĂŒtz wrote practically no stand-alone instrumental music, and Jenkins no vocal music to speak of. And finally, augmenting the pleasure of our hearing such a variety of sounds, there were the informative programme notes written by Palliser Viols director, Robert Oliver.

Through Oliver’s notes we learned of the connections between SchĂŒtz and two of the other “greats” of his time, Gabrieli, and then Monteverdi, whose influences truly “informed” his own music. The notes concerning Jenkins are more to do with his upright character and complaisance as a human being, though his maintenance of the tradition of polyphony was fostered indirectly through Monteverdi’s example via various of the latter’s vocal works transcribed for viols by Jenkins’ colleagues, John (Giovanni) Coprario and William Lawes. Oliver remarked at the conclusion of his notes upon the overall achievement of both of the evenings’ composers, thus – “masters of counterpoint, sublime control of complex textures and structures, producing music of great integrity and beauty”
..

Opening the programme was one of three works from SchĂŒtz’s Symphonia Sacrae III of 1650 to be performed this evening, the first being Wo der Herr nicht das Haus bauet (Unless the Lord build the house), a setting of Psalm 127. A beautiful instrumental introduction heralded the singers’ opening, the sopranos entering in canonic imitation, Pepe Becker’s and Rowena Simpson’s lines resonating gratefully and vibrantly. Beginning in the low register bass David Morriss’s voice gradually blossomed at “Es ist umsonst” (It is vain) as the line rose, to sterling effect. Throughout , the contrasting  timbres of the two soprano voices were delightfully ear-catching, the ensemble bringing fruition at the final “Wohl den”, with the watcher secure, the citadel held against the enemy. A consort song from Geistiche Chormusik, Was mein Gott will (What my God wills) followed, for alto and tenor, the voices singing alternately rather than together, making an attractive blend in cross-patch places though with tenor Peter Liley’s voice predominant and sounding more engaged with the text, alto Hazel Fenemor’s delivery somewhat more contained than I would have wished. Beautifully rounded string-playing and organ continuum gave splendid support throughout.

Came the first of John Jenkins’ works of the evening, the Pavan No.2 in g minor. Involving 5 instrumentalists – including Will King, to my surprise, as a treble viol player! – the instrument propped up on the player’s lap, rather like a miniature bass viol! The Pavan made a gorgeously “layered” sound, the church’s acoustical “bloom” giving the sound an unearthly resonance, as if the gods were making music in Elysium. It all seemed bejewelled, kaleidoscopic and exquisite. Then we heard a Duet (No.3 in d minor) for 2 bass viols – an “Air and Variations”, the theme stately and melancholy, the three variations featuring both running figures and sombre variants of the theme, Robert Oliver’s and Imogen Granwal’s instruments expertly running the gamut of pleasingly- contrasted figurations.

Grisly stuff next, with Schutz’s Consort Song Auf dem Gebirge (From the mountains), the subject matter being the massacre of the “Holy Innocents”(male children under two years of age) ordered by King Herod in the wake of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. A false start meant we heard the opening twice before the voices came in, the two altos, Hazel Fenemor and Milla Dickens, both with soft voices, though with tones that seemed to suit the sombre nature of the text, and the music. Again the instrumental consort gave a rich bed of sound for the singers,  the words “Viel Klagens, Weinens und Heulens” (Much Sorrow, crying and howling) more restrained and hollowed-out than strongly emoted. “Rahel beweinete ihre Kinder” (Rachel is weeping for her children) was similarly inward with a stark beauty, the voices almost instrumental-sounding in their blending – only the rising line at “den es war aus” (that it was over) animated the expression briefly at the end.

Two more Fantasies by Jenkins followed, the first enticingly titled “All in a garden green”, described by Oliver as “a catchy folk-tune”, played by four instruments, the second with a fifth player joining the group. The first of these in F major was the “lighter” of the two, the second by comparison far more melancholic and ritualistic, seeming to tap endless possibilities in its permutations of melody and harmonies, moving from minor to major mode in variously “shaded” ways, and often in unexpectedly fashion. By this time, with the concert’s interval upon us. we seemed to have come a long way from the weather we had left behind at the church door when first arriving.

A comely pastoral air greeted us by way of beginning the second half, sung in canon-like fashion to begin with by soprano (Pepe Becker) and tenor (Peter Liley), both voices forthright and winning, the dancing rhythms at “Das jetzt der Sommer nahe ist” (Summer is close) offset by the long lines and ensuing silence during and after “Himmel und Erde vergehen” (Heaven and Earth will pass), the voices imitating and echoing one another so very evocatively.

Up until encountering the first instrumental Fantasy that followed I hadn’t particularly registered the organ-playing of Douglas Mews in any way but with a predictable kind of enjoyment of the instrument’s “presence” in such tried-and-true hands – then, for some reason these distinctive sounds drew particular attention to themselves throughout the next two pieces – both at the opening and within the course of the Fantasy à 3 for treble, two bass viols and organ, Mews coaxed a particularly delightful figuration from his instrument, giving us glimpses of the “heavenly and Divine Influences” spoken of by one Thomas Mace, quoted in the programme notes. Curiously, I formed the impression that the following Fantasy à 5 No.5 in G minor was taking us on a particularly adventurous and even improvisatory course courtesy of the players, when suddenly the music was halted, the lines having gotten themselves temporarily jangled! – a case of spontaneity gone astray? – the lines of music certainly seemed for a few moments more-than-usually unpredictable as to their course, re their exploratory urgings and coalescent-points! – fascinating!

Robert Oliver mentioned in his notes, in relation to the dramatic nature of the concert’s next item, Schutz’s  Mein Sohn warum hast du uns das getan? (My Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?), how music had acquired increasing expressive possibilities at the time due to the rise of opera, exemplified by the composer’s setting of the passage from St.Luke’s Gospel describing the aftermath of the twelve year-old Jesus’ disappearance of the during a visit to Jerusalem and the anxiety of his parents, Mary and Joseph. The dark and serious sounds of the opening set the tone before two violins enlivened the textures, opening up the spaces for the two voices, soprano and bass, to voice their anxieties, Rowena Simpson’s Mary leading off with “Mein Sohn”, followed canonically by David Morriss’s Joseph, the lines following some lovely downwardly chromatic figures on “Schmerzen gesucht”, the sorrow palpable and affecting. The mood lightened with Pepe Becker’s entrance as Jesus, the vocal line lively and the tones sunny, the instruments echoing the singer’s energies! – the two violins echoed her guileless explanation “Wisset ihr nicht?” with great satisfaction!

Schutz “rounded off” this piece with a setting of Psalm 84, “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen” (How lovely are Thy dwellings), the ensembled voices relishing sequences such as “Mein Leib und Seele freuet sich” My body and soul are joyful”, with energetic and smiling tones, concluding with the richly-laden warmth of “Die dich loben immerdar” (They will praise Thee forever).

Concluding the concert as scheduled was Schutz’s setting of the well-known text, Ich WeiÎČ, dass mein Erlöser lebt (I know that my Redeemer lives), joyously dancing music, with the whole ensemble following on from the womens’ voices. At “Un er wird mich hernach” (And he will awaken me) the dancing rhythms gave way momentarily to declamation, the ensuing contrasts here and in other places enchanting! At the end of the piece the alternation of the declamatory “Und meine Augen warden ihn schauen” (And my eyes will behold Him), and the more excitable and joyous “Ich und kein Fremde” (I and no other) made for a both grand and excitable conclusion to a lovely piece. The ensemble, incidentally, encored the “Wie lieblich” section of “Mein Sohn, warum hast du”, at the concert’s end, bringing out the contrasting characters of the sections even more markedly and smilingly.

In all, a richly rewarding concert experience!

 

 

The Capital Band’s “Strange Meetings” a resounding musical success

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Capital Band presents:
STRANGE MEETINGS
Music by Hindemith, Haydn and Vaughan Williams
Poems by Wilfred Owen

The Capital Band
Musical Director: Doug Harvey
Concertmaster: Nick Majic
Poetry Reciter: Doug Harvey

HINDEMITH – Trauermusik
HAYDN – Symphony No.45 in F-sharp Minor “Farewell”
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor (arranged for string orchestra by TCB)

Vogelmorn Hall, Vennell St,.Brooklyn

Saturday 19th June, 2021

In contrast to the evening’s dark, clammy, out-of-doors ambiences generated by the drizzing rain, the warmth and vibrancy of Brooklyn’s Vogelmorn Hall’s son et lumiere  and pre-concert bustle was a positive pick-me-up for this audience member, generating a palpable sense of something special about to happen far removed from the privations of the weather!

As with some of its previous concerts, the Band on this occasion offered an enticing mixture of standard, regularly-presented repertoire and an intriguing transcription for orchestra of a chamber work, in this case a seldom-performed string quartet by Ralph Vaughan Williams. I’d head the first of the string quartets via a recording, but hadn’t “graduated” to the second – and the Band’s heartfelt musical presentation of the work underlined my wonderment at its relative neglect (but more of that later).

Though the other two works were better-known, neither could be said to be regularly-programmed items at orchestral concerts, in particular the Haydn Symphony, which tends to be a work more talked about than played, even if I have from memory seen at least one other performance, and one which, as here, added the “theatricality” of the players departing one-by-one during the last movement – which is the whole “point” of the piece, of course!

First to be performed was the Hindemith work, the Trauermusik (in English, “Funeral Music” or “Mourning Music”), a piece for viola and string orchestra, written at short notice by the composer in a single day (21st January 1936) as a tribute to King George V of England, who had died the previous evening. Hindemith, who was himself a violist, was in England for the purpose of performing the English premiere of his Viola Concerto, Der Schwanendreher, but when the concert was cancelled because of the King’s death, was asked if he would in its place write a short commemorative piece instead.  Hindemith completed the work in just six hours that day, and with the string players from the same orchestra and conductor (the BBC Symphony and Adrian Boult) was the soloist in a live broadcast of Trauermusik that same evening – a premiere of a different kind!

The presentation throughout the whole concert was nothing if not theatrical, as if “leading on” from the worlds-within-worlds contrast between the rawness of the elements without and the warmth and geniality within the venue at the start; with atmospheric lighting at the performance’s beginning, adding focus to the welcome in Te Reo given us by one of the players, and indicating something of the solemnity of the music’s occasion. Conductor Doug Harvey got a warm, rich sound from his players at the music’s outset, one which brought out a homogeneity of solemn feeling while keeping the individual lines clear. I thought the lower and deeper of the viola soloist’s lines were delivered more warmly and securely, his intonation showing some strain here and there as his line rose, though the accompanying figures gave him plenty of unfailing support. This music always surprises me by its brevity, its sense of “not a note wasted” seeming to defy normal time in a trance-like manner, and awaken us from the spell at the end most unexpectedly – here, the ensemble’s playing readily took us to those realms, and evoked a moment in time, a quiet frisson of valediction.

We are a bit “spoiled” for the “first fifty” Haydn Symphonies in Wellington at present in relative terms, most recently with this performance of No. 45, and the ensemble Camerata gradually working through the earliest essays by the composer in this form, hopefully about to take on No.14 at an as yet undisclosed date! I was sure I’d seen a performance of the “Farewell” elsewhere here in Wellington over the last dozen or so years, but the Middle C search engine (since 2008) has come up empty-handed! Whatever the case this performance made up in spadefuls for the omission with both interpretative focus and performance commitment from the Band, the occasional roughness around the music’s edges mattering not a whit amid the excitement, humour and gracefulness of the playing overall.

At the beginning the vigorous driving rhythms sharply underlined the music’s dynamic contrasts, with horns and winds colouring the textures most evocatively, setting the initial urgency against the grace and good humour of the second subject group. Throughout, the musicians did their best to “fill out” the hall’s somewhat dry ambiences and impart some bloom to the sounds. The second movement tempo adroitly caught the music’s grace and gentle humour, the winds’ entries particularly “pointed” following the gently “covered” tones of the strings. I enjoyed the floated string lines over the deftly “etched-in” accompaniments at the beginning of the music’s middle section, as well as the horns’ beautifully-voiced call in thirds at another point, the enchantment of it all coming from the musicians seeming to really “care” about making their notes speak to us.

The rapid tempo for the minuet took me by surprise, but conductor Harvey and his players made it work, uproariously sounding the tutti sections in contrast to the “Jack, be nimble” feetwork of the surrounding sequences. By the time the horns had gotten to introduce the Trio, I was grooving along with the music most happily, and chortling, albeit unobtrusively, at the music’s “throwaway” ending!

The fourth movement’s allegro wasn’t rushed off its feet, here, but allowed some girth, while still able to scintillate in the quick-moving passages, the dynamics strongly-focused with terrific ensemble-playing. At the opening’s reprise,  the horns and winds sounded out splendidly, holding their lines amid the growing agitations, leading up to the dramatic luftpause. The adagio which followed featured the gradual exit of all the players (and the conductor), and a “thinning-out” of the orchestral textures, finally leaving but two of the first chair violinists, who, sweetly and demurely, finished the work.

Haydn diplomatically devised this composition “scheme” in response to his musicians’ pleas for the composer to intercede with their employer, Prince Esterhazy, to grant them a “break” after a protracted stay at the Prince’s summer palace in the country, a day’s journey away from their families in another town. Apparently the message was understood by the Prince, as the entire court returned to the town the day after the symphony’s performance! It was all beautifully done, with  straight faces from the players and wry amusement amongst the audience!

However, the theatricality of all of this was nothing compared with what awaited us throughout the concert’s second half. Vaughan Williams wrote two string quartets, the second of which dates from the years 1942-44, over thirty years after the earlier work was completed. Consequently the two quartets are literally worlds apart, the Second containing elements relating to both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, which were composed at around the same period. The first three movements owe more to the post-war Sixth Symphony (though the slow movement touches on the earlier Symphony in places), whereas the finale appears to revisit the relative peace and serenity of the earlier(wartime) Fifth Symphony. It’s a work whose neglect in the chamber music repertoire is difficult to understand – and the Capital Band’s transcription of the work for string orchestra splendidly conveys the music’s character in all of its aspects

A feature of the work is the prominent writing for the viola, fruit of the composer’s friendship with a young violist, Jean Stewart, whose quartet, the Menges Quartet, gave the premiere performance of the work in 1944. The first movement sounds very VW, with terrific tension and conflict between upper and lower voices,  the figurations in each register obsessively “at odds” with each other, culminating in a ferocious tremolando outburst which exhausts the combatative instincts of the voices, and imposes a semblance of order upon their interaction, presided over by the viola, again, more reliable in the instrument’s lower register.

Solo strings began the slow movement, a lovely, intimate effect which continued up to the wider-spanned choral-like writing, when the whole ensemble joined in, the contrasting passages between solo strings and larger ensemble recalling similar moments in the composer’s “Thomas Tallis Fantasia”. I found a further extended passage for the quartet alone very moving, the violins especially lovely, the viola and ‘cello properly supportive.

The Scherzo returned us to the eerie, more nightmare-like quality of the Sixth Symphony’s Scherzo. The “haunted flight” of the rapid figurations was readily conveyed by the string body, although again, the viola soloist struggled with his intonation in places. And then, as if by magic, the music “found” a different voice for the work’s finale, the ensemble conjuring up wave upon wave of positive emotion and banishing the darkness – I thought the playing of the more “restrained” lines incredibly moving, here, readily conveying to us the sense of a journey undertaken from darkness into light.

Readers of this review who were at the concert may be wondering why I’ve not until now mentioned the conductor Doug Harvey’s “dramatized” readings of several poems by Wilfred Owen, interspersed between the quartet’s movements. Conscious as I am of the amount of sheer hard work that must have gone into memorising the words and sentiments of these poems and their “enactment”, I simply didn’t feel justice was done to them by Harvey choosing to overtly “dramatize” the narratives with extended movements and marked changes of voice-level for dramatic effect which resulted in a lot of the words losing their clarity and coherence. Someone I didn’t know who was sitting beside me confirmed afterwards that she too had struggled to make out many of the words for exactly the same reasons. Spoken words need clarity and focus in performance as strongly as music does; and I thought the clarity and focus of enunciation and meaning that was lacking in Harvey’s somewhat over-wrought verbal deliveries and depictions, were qualities that he and his musicians readily brought to the music throughout the concert, resulting in that side of things being a resounding success!

New Zealand String Quartet at Lower Hutt – three views of Beethoven

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand String Quartet presents:
BEETHOVEN – String Quartets for the Ages

String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 18 No.4
String Quartet in E-flat Major, Op.74 “Harp”
String Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Op.131

The New Zealand String Quartet –
Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins (violins)
Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Thursday, 3rd June, 2021

I remember reading an interview many years ago with one of the great Beethoven interpreters of recent tines, Alfred Brendel, and warming to him all the more when he responded to a question regarding his “hobbies” by listing one of them as “collecting unintentional humour”. Brendel would doubtless have relished the unexpected “cyber-glitches” experienced by violinist Helene Pohl and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten relating to their respective electronic page-turners’ charmingly (and perhaps appropriately connubial) interaction, just before the music got under way, Helene remarking of Rolf’s device at one point, “His machine keeps turning MY pages!”

Of course there was no ice needing to be broken, no frigid formality here –  the NZSQ’s characteristic “instant engagement” with whatever music the group performs invariably does the trick with audiences in a flash – nevertheless the momentary malfunctionings and the ensuing banter meant that we were this time even more-than-usually “primed” for enjoyment and wide-eared appreciation of what we were about to hear. And, such was the music’s expressive capacity and the players’ involvement with the sounds and their interaction, we were able to truly savour Rolf Gjelsten’s post-performance comments regarding Op.18 No. 4 as a satisfying retrospective of the music, the players having borne out to a tee his references to things such as Josef Haydn’s influence, and the younger composer’s avowed determination to match, if not outdo his great mentor’s achievement in this form.

Being in C minor, a key marking a significantly expressive world of feeling for Beethoven, the Op.18 No.4’s dark opening demeanour made its mark, while being cross-currented with mellowness in places, some especially lovely duetting between first and second violins a delight, and a graceful return to the opening throwing the darker-browed moments into bolder relief. I loved the expectation engendered by the playing of the development, the emotions unerringly terraced with crescendos of feeling, the ‘cello enjoying the same thematic material as the two violins in the exposition, the violin responding with a minor-key version of the same (“Anything you can do, etc
”), before a stepwise progression of the themes brought us to the recapitulation with great theatricality and presence, whose drama of “working out” the material left us humming at the end.

Unusually for the time, a scherzo-like allegretto followed, the daintiness of the fugato entries countenanced by the gruffness of the cello’s entries, the two “modes” playfully snapping at one another’s heels during the exposition. How intently the players made us listen to the development with its hushed, tongue-in-cheek gestures, pinning our ears back with the occasional sforzando and delighting us with moments of rustic gallantry augmenting the delicacies, the interactions having a quality here of such spontaneous enjoyment as giving an almost improvisatory feeling to the working-out.

There followed an amazing third movement! – a Menuetto almost to be “imagined” rather than realised, the chromatic writing enabling the music to appear to change from darkness to light and back to darkness almost within the space of a phrase, Beethoven drawing from Haydn’s example with fanciful exploratory impulses. The players wafted the Trio’s roulade-like figures skywards like flights of ecstasy, making the Menuetto’s return all the more “spooked”-sounding for its urgencies. The finale impishly suggested a minor-key version of Haydn’s “Gypsy” Piano Trio at the outset, but what most tickled the ear was the “give-and-take” treatment of the flowing contrasting theme’s voicing, and then the rapid-fire repeated-note versions of the opening, with first and second violins “juggling” the same theme to delightful effect. And the prestissimo ending here set high spirits against insouciant humour with real aplomb – splendid!

It was a pleasure to listen to Rolf (and, later in the concert, to Helene Pohl), talk about music the players obviously know so well and convey so much affinity with, Rolf placing the Op.18 work we had just listened to in the context of Beethoven’s three “periods” as a composer, and suggesting that here, in effect, would be three different people represented by the evening’s music – firstly the young, thrusting Beethoven, conscious of his influences and wanting to match and even surpass them in his own music, followed by a period during which he  grappled with debilitating deafness, striving to counter and overcome fate, hence the “heroic” aspect of works like the Fifth Symphony and the “Emperor” Concerto, one of which was the Op.74 “Harp” Quartet. Rolf indicated that Helene would later introduce the great Op.131 Quartet, one of those handful of works in which Beethoven seemed almost to transcend human existence in the creative sphere.

Innovative though certain aspects of the Op.18 quartets were, Beethoven’s “usual” quartet of string players (led by the wondrously-named Ignaz Schuppanzigh) seemed by all accounts equal to any technical difficulty in performance, though it was a different story with the later quartets, Schuppanzigh telling the composer that Op.59 (Razumovsky) and Op.74 (Harp) were “too unusual and challenging” to be accepted by the public. And, of course, Schuppanzigh was to dismiss the late quartets as impossible to play at first, eliciting the composer’s famously scathing remark concerning the former’s “miserable violin” (Schuppanzigh and his quartet subsequently “knuckled down” and played them anyway, revolutionising chamber music performing practice in the process, his quartet’s subscription concerts the first to be devoted entirely to instrumental music, and to focus on a single genre in a concert series).

Even to today’s sensibilities, the Poco Adagio  beginning of the Op.74 quartet seems to have an extraordinary and unpredictable expressive reach, the material inhabiting territories whose vistas keep their mystery intact through two sudden separate sforzando chords, as if saying to us “Are you listening?”. Then, with the allegro, the fully-formed composer comes into the light like a force of nature! – here, some remarkably flexible playing took us to the distinctive repeated-note motif that closed the exposition (the repeat eagerly plunging us back to the allegro’s beginning), before entering into new and unnerving realms – where were we going? Those seemingly-spontaneously-wrought modulations, stretching the allegro theme almost to breaking-point brought about a pizzicato-to-arco crescendo in which the players wrought expectations almost to fever-pitch – so exciting! The recapitulation seemed here to give us a kind of looking-glass view of the way we’d come, taking us back to the repeated-note motif, but then, amazingly, drifting into a hitherto unexplored state of consciousness, the players timing it all so deliciously, allowing the impulses to swell and grow before igniting as scurrying violin figures, excitable pizzicati and echoing figurations, eventually bursting out with the properly-conclusive repeated-note motif proclaiming the music’s true destination in (dare one say) almost orgasmic fashion, interactive and exhilarating!

Some beautiful violin-playing began the Adagio ma non troppo, with similarly-voiced support from the others, a hymn-like outpouring whose heartfelt warmth seemed to suddenly fall away and expose a loneliness within, a mood-shift Beethoven seemed to consider deeply, then turn into some kind of ritual, with each instrument adding its warmth and resonance, until, again, the depths were uncovered and we were made to feel the extent of the darkness – enthralling, sotto voce playing, here, then beautiful duetting between the violins, rich tones leavened by birdsong, and a return to the tragic theme, as if the composer was audibly “wrestling” with it all – such a “layered” outpouring of emotion, here so movingly felt and enacted.

From deep feeling to blood-pulsating activity! – the scherzo’s Presto burst out of the blocks, racing at what seemed like top speed, the sounds incredibly energised and varied in dynamic range! And what an explosive Trio section! – a jumble of conflicting emotions caught up in a vortex of ceaseless movement! The repeat asked for more and got it, as wildly and frenetically as before! I loved the fantastical, Berlioz-like arrivals at the sustained open-string-sounding note just before the scherzo’s returnings, the final reprise a ghostly, and fantastical experience, the muted tones as unnerving as the previously impetuous trajectories of the music had been.  From the mutterings grew up a carefree-sounding three-note figure strung together in a step-wise way, the seemingly-innocent chant-like theme giving rise to worlds of kaleidoscopic delight in the variations which made up the work’s finale, the ensemble bringing it all to life – a canonic-like echo-game, a viola-led serenade (the instrument most beautifully allowed to sing in its upper register) and a burst of running activity punctuated with angular off-beats, leading to a soulful, almost hymn-like  a section which gave way to a jolly jot-trot, one during which one could see and feel the players’ involvement with the fun of the accompaniments as much as with the rallying-call of the melody!

But then, what a feat of imagination was the composer’s fusion of varied impulse which led to the work’s conclusion – the repeated cello notes pulsating the music’s life-lines beneath the sotto voce voices of the other instruments, the blood-flow maintained by other voices as the excitement intensified, the opening three-note figure energised and the pulsations swelling (we were all on the edges of our mind-seats by this time!), until the “running” variation burst upon us once again, carrying all before it in triumph, and concluding with a droll “that’s that!” gesture at the end!

What it was about this particular quartet and its performance that has given rise to my writing all of the above, I don’t fully understand! – except that I had heard the NZSQ  players “unlock” the music with such heartfelt commitment as to freshly awaken for me the delight of unlooked-for rediscovery, a realisation that this work wasn’t merely a “prelude” to greater achievements in the genre by its composer, but a universe in itself, a “world in a grain of sand”. I briefly and unexpectedly spoke with Rolf Gjelsten in the foyer during the interval, but wouldn’t have made much sense to him in my somewhat dazed state following such a performance! And still we had, waiting for us in the concert’s second half, Op. 131!

Having fallen under the spell of Op.74, I simply couldn’t escape similar immersion in this later work,  reputedly the composer’s favourite of all of his string quartets. Helene Pohl talked with us not only about the uniqueness of the world inhabited by these late works, but also about Beethoven’s fascination with and study of Jewish themes at this time, illustrating the influences on this particular quartet with some examples from Kol Nidrei (a traditional Jewish declaration of “cleansing” before prayer), citing and illustrating their use by Beethoven in the Quartet, particularly in the sixth movement. What struck me anew at the music’s beginning was the indescribable sadness of the opening theme, played on the solo violin and continued in fugal form by all of the voices, taking the listener into realms of wonderment, everything further intensified by the instruments’ different timbres, each crescendo of intensity exquisitely realised. I was put in mind in places, also, of Tchaikovsky’s music at its most “stricken”, the players adding breadth of expression to the music’s depth, “leaning” almost pathetically into each chord at the end and allowing the resonances their full countenance
.

Out of the gloom a number of impulses lit up, gently dancing, the 6/8 rhythm as spontaneously playful and angular as those similarly-wrought gestures in the composer’s Op.111 Piano Sonata’s Arietta – the brief allegro moderato movement, filled with improvisatory musings and flourishes seemed to proclaim something new and unchartered was afoot, the theme’s serenity and full-throatedness attesting to Beethoven’s unswerving focus and determination to put across “what the spirit told him”, the gentle march-like rhythms engaging violin and cello, then viola and cello, and finally all the instruments in a swinging unison, the “improvisatory” nature of it all captured both compositionally and interpretatively by the players, to enchanting effect. Here were the duetting lower strings daring one another to continue, the violins in ecstasy together, with their flights of fancy, and we in the audience spellbound throughout it all!

Too rich to fully document, though too significant to let pass, the remaining variations seemed to generate themselves from what had gone before in wholly alchemic ways, the rapt textures (again to my ears anticipating Tchaikovsky’s, and Borodin’s sound-worlds) giving way to a ritualised, chant-like treatment energised by the cello with a brusque figure that increasingly impinged, goading the first violin into a reply, while the volatile Allegretto stretched the material every which way, before withdrawing into enigmatic, though momentary, silence
.

Immediately, the Presto was upon us, a repeated two-note figure tumbling through the ensemble and tossed backwards and forwards like a slippery ball – the ensemble had great fun with the pizzicato exchanges, which intensified with each repetition, the players’ control allowing them a real sense of abandonment, creating a kind of illusion of a capricious spirit directing the music to speak, exuberance jumbled up with mystery, the ponticello playing near the end properly sending the shivers up one’s spine! What a dramatic switch, then, to the Adagio quasi un poco andante, brief, but abyss-like in its potential for grief and despair! – and how unequivocally the succeeding  Allegro turned the focus around, away from despair to determination, the music “taking arms against a sea of troubles” with the utmost vehemence, the players here viscerally conveying the music’s conflict, courting the occasional tenderly-consoling sequence, but then building up further heads of steam. And the ending (a scalp-tingling “tierce de picardie”, or major-key ending to a piece in a minor key) featured emphatic C#MAJOR chords! – the perfect rebuff to the “sea of troubles!”

I walked out in a daze, afterwards – fortunately, my car seemed to know the way home that evening!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Orchestra Wellington and Orpheus Choir adventurous in Bartok, irresistible in Orff

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
VIRTUOSO VOICES

BARTOK – Cantata Profana
ORFF – Carmina Burana

Amelia Berry (soprano), Amitai Pati (tenor), Christian Thurston (baritone)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington (Brent Stewart, director)
Wellington Young Voices (Mark Stamper, director)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 22nd May, 2021

Encountering a work in concert every now and then that has somehow “slipped through the net” of my musical experience sometimes results in a bit of a “juggle” of contrasting feelings, and especially when one is a reviewer – I get enormous pleasure in the discovery of something new, but also feel a degree of guilt at not having come across the “something” earlier, and especially if it’s a work by a well-known composer! Bartok’s “Cantata Profana” fell into this category – a work that was new to me, and one which needed some familiarising on my part via recordings before I felt better prepared for the “Virtuoso Voices” concert, so as to get at least some of it already playing in my head.

I confess I didn’t really know what to expect, though having seen and heard Bartok’s opera “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” I was familiar with something of the composer’s vocal writing style, one which reflected his preoccupation with Hungarian and Roumanian folk-tunes and their idioms, a process akin to what Musorgsky had attempted to do a few years earlier in Russia, by reproducing idioms and accents of native speech in his music in search of something “Russian”. Bartok had collected the two poems in the form of Roumanian colinde or carols, on which he based his cantata’s story, in 1914, at first assigning the Roumanian texts to a Hungarian poet for translation, but eventually using his own Hungarian translation. He then entrusted a German translation to Bence Szabolcsi, a Hungarian musicologist, and an English translation to the polygot Michel-Dmitri Calvocoressi (whose translation, ironically, was used at the work’s premiere performance in London, in 1934, the first printed edition of the score using the German and English texts!). Fascinating!

As I’d heard only Hungarian texts in the recordings I’d listened to, I couldn’t help registering the difference made at the concert itself by the relative “softness” (almost to the point of “blandness” in places) of the English works, which presented for myself and people who sat nearby to me at the concert the performance’s only drawback – the unintelligibility of most of what was being sung. For all the Michael Fowler Centre’s qualities as a musical venue it tends to blunt and blur word-detail – vowel sounds and tonal colour do well, as here, but consonants and sharper detail get lost in the spaces without extra emphasis given their articulation – even when words are in English! Had we not had the general outlines of the cantata’s story written in the programme notes we would have been completely lost! – I wondered whether the cantata’s English text might have been somehow projected for all to see?

A good thing it was that the performance was so very atmospheric in an overall sense, its sequences so convincingly characterised, with the musicians conveying to us the different moods of the action and the feelings of the characters, albeit in a somewhat generalised way. From the beginning the story’s mystery and magic was conjured up by the dark sounds, the swirling mists and eerie lines preparing us for the strangeness of the events about to unfold, singers and players held in firm dynamic control by Marc Taddei’s direction, the lines replete with the composer’s characteristic rhythms and folkish figurations, then bursting into action as the hunt was portrayed by the fugal writing, with the story’s “nine sons, splendid offspring” whom their father had brought up and trained “for the savage mountains, with hunting skills”. As the sons pursued their quarry, the music underwent a wondrous change – “
.they found “a graceful bridge showing magic deertracks” –  in crossing the bridge, the sons were changed by this same magic into stags – “the splendid hunters thus became the hunted”.

When the father, searching for his lost sons, found the stags, he raised his rifle to shoot one of them, the music agitating as the choir cried out repeated warnings, prompting the stag to speak with the voice of the son to his father, cautioning him not to shoot – such splendid singing, here, from tenor Amitai Pati, fully equal to the demands of the writing, with the ringing, heroic tones required from the character. The choir introduced the bass soloist Christian Thurston’s softer-grained voice as the father, pleading for his sons to return home to their mother, to “lanterns lit”, and to “goblets of wine” – but the son replied that they could never return home to these things, as their antlers “are wider than your doorway” and that now “they can drink their fill only from clean mountain streams”.

The text then reverted to the story’s beginning for the choir to tell the narrative once again, the voices producing some beautifully-modulated phrases, conveying such longing, and (as on every occasion I listened to a recording) bringing tears to the eyes of this listener as the fate of both the nine stags and their bereft parents were so very movingly reiterated. Though Bartok described this music as embodying “his most profound credo”, he left others to wonder at what he might have meant to convey through the story

he was evidently very much at home with nature, spending a good deal of his time out of doors, avowing nature’s freedoms as opposed to the different kinds of cruelties of civilisation – in this respect the story was a kind of “cautionary tale”, the sons becoming the hapless victims rather than the perpetrators of crimes against living things, and against nature in general, and the father reaping the pitiless price of his own exploitative attitude towards creatures in the wild.

Despite the difficulties concerning the text, the overall impression conveyed by the performance to this listener gave the experience of hearing the work a lasting value beyond words. And it was a perfect foil for what followed in the concert’s second half – nothing less than Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, the composer’s marvellously uninhibited settings of a hedonistic paean to life’s pleasures and sorrows in the form of a collection of anonymous medieval verses which have survived the ravages of time and circumstance in order to delight present-day sensibilities and (in places) console vissicitudes alike!

Having reviewed an Orpheus performance of this work as recently as September 2019 –

https://middle-c.org/2019/09/percussion-driven-carmina-burana-with-the-orpheus-choir-a-triumph/

I’m finding it hard to escape the feeling (from memory) that there could be a lot of repetition in my comments regarding the singing, though as the previous performance involved the Orchestra Wellington Percussion Ensemble rather than the full orchestra, there will be “tweaks” of different emphasis here and there. One detail I had forgotten until I accessed the earlier review was that a SCREEN was used on that occasion to “project” the English translations of the words during the Orff! – I rest my case regarding the Bartok (see paragraph 3 above), this time round!

Another repetitive refrain from yours truly concerns the tempo taken by Marc Taddei for the opening “O Fortuna” on this occasion, something about which I find myself seemingly pushing a fairly lonely critical furrow in opinionating that most conductors take the sequence excessively quickly, given the out-and-out “lamenting” nature of the text! – however, the sheer energy of Taddei’s and the orchestra’s performance on this occasion was admittedly breath-catching, and impressive in its way! Still, the real enjoyment of the performance for me began with “Primo vere” (In Springtime), the bright, piping percussion and silvery winds framing the singing so fetchingly, and the ambience wonderfully spacious in the wake of the work’s almost “blitzkrieg” opening! I liked, too, Christian Thurston’s world-weary baritone solo “Omnia Sol temperat “, the character perhaps seeming a little tired of excessive drinking and whoring, and looking to the spring for renewal!

After the bell had resoundingly lingered at the conclusion of “Ecce gratum”, great percussive crashes heralded the “Dance”, played with a rhythmic verve that almost lifted us out of our seats with the energy of it all. Following the imposing beginning to “Floret Silva” the charm of the subsequent exchanges sounded well-nigh irresistible, as was the women’s plaintive singing in the “Shopkeeper, give me the colour” plea for an “aid” with which to capture a younger lover. The “Slow Dance” wove its spell of sensuous languidity, complete with nostalgically-sounding brass, which left us, like the hapless Faust, about to exclaim “How fair this spot” and looking to remain in damnation! – however the strumming strings woke us from the dream (the men’s voices, too, were a bit slow on the uptake at first with their “Swaz hie gat umbe” at the start of the Round Dance!) But what balm for the senses were the women’s voices in the interlude, before the strings took up the strumming once again! And what brilliant brass playing with which to conclude the sequence, as befitted the “surprise appearance” of the Queen of England, which concluded the first part!

Christian Thurston’s soft-grained voice did its best with “Estuans interius”, and “Ego sum abbas”, both sections calling for fiercer declamations, though he did better with the Abbot of Clucany’s piteous cries of “Wafna!”, accompanied by earth-shattering percussion outbursts! In between came the heart-rending “Song of the Roasted Swan”, with tenor Amitai Pati reappearing, and straightaway “nailing” the unfortunate bird’s anguish, though I thought the men’s voices a tad reticent in their ”Miser, miser!” rejoiners at the end of each verse.  Fortunately they moved their throttle up several notches for the incredibly vigorous “In taberna quando sumus” – the drinking song to end all drinking songs! Especially telling, I thought, was the darkness of it all, with the more sinister utterances as compelling as the clangorous ones!

What a change, as the scene shifted to “The Court of Love”, with everything cool and fresh once more – a superb evocation! The Wellington Young Voices sounded as they looked – bright, eager and innocent, followed by Amelia Berry’s silver-toned “Siqua sine socio”, beautifully supported by the winds. Christian Thurston’s soulful “Dies nos et omnia” came over well, with a properly pathetic-sounding  falsetto and a po-faced descent at the end, the self-communing aspect ruefully conveyed.

As for Amelia Berry’s “Stetit puella”, with those melismatic “Eias’ at the end of each verse, well who would not have fallen in love with her by the time she had finished floating the second one towards and all around our helpless sensibilities? Marc Taddei then took “Circa mea pectora” at a tremendous lick, the repeated Mandaliets almost whizzing into orbit at the end of each verse! The men-only chorus “Si puer cum puella” got a terrific response from the voices here, vigorous and clear-toned, with baritone Christian Thurston characterfully spurring them on, the succeeding “Veni, veni venias” giving the sequence even more visceral excitement, the conflagration spreading from the voices to the orchestra with what seemed like animal energy!

We needed settling down for a moment after that, Amelia Berry’s “In trutina” giving us a precious sequence of gorgeously-shaped singing, the top notes perhaps not as free as in the previous solo, but the descents as graceful and seductive as could be. “Tempus est locundum” then burst in, the children’s choirs (in two parts on either side of the platform) bobbing up and down to sing their refrains by turns with the baritone, the final time all together! This time, at “Dulcissime”, Amelia Berry’s ascent was breath-taking, the line positively snow-capped! – and her final phrase, dream-like and enraptured, immediately put me in mind of soprano Emma Fraser here in the same hall in 2014 who had at that time put me in mind of the incomparable Lucia Popp! What more can one say?

The penultimate “Blanchefleur and Helen” from choir and orchestra made an overwhelming impact straight afterwards (but I forgot to listen for the ringing bell, of which I’m terribly fond!). Whether there or no, we were summarily returned to the mercies of the Empress of the world, “Luck”, with the same massive percussive chords and driving energies as the work had begun with, what now seemed an age ago! Naughtily, but forgiveably. Marc Taddei “held onto” the work’s final chord, asking for more from his singers and players, and, excitingly, getting what he wanted! – a resplendent ending to a remarkable performance and a wonderfully adventurous concert!

 

 

 

 

“Strings for Africa” joyously fill the vistas of St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Sinfonia for Hope and Stringendo presents:
STRINGS FOR AFRICA

JS BACH – Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D Minor BWV 1052
Antonio VIVALDI – Concerto for 4 Violins and ‘Cello – No.10 of Op.3 “L”estro armónico” RV 580
Gabriel FAURE – Cantique de Jean Racine (arr. for ‘cello ensemble)
JS BACH – Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 BWV 1051 (arr for viola/’cello ensemble)

Diedre Irons (piano),
Amelia Hall, Martin Riseley. Monique Lapins, Konstanze Artmann, Rupa Maitra, Martin Jaenecke, Lucas Baker, Claire Macfarlane, Sandra Logan, Sarah Marten, Robin Perks, Lucy Maurice (violins),
Sophia Acheson, Peter Barber, Elyse Dalabakis, Xi Liu (violas)
Inbal Megiddo, Heleen du Plessis (‘cellos)
Chris Everest (continuo guitar)
Stringendo
Sinfonia for Hope
Donald Maurice (conductor)

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

Tuesday, May 18th, 2021

Back In November of 2019 I attended an event called “Cellos for Africa”, at Te Rauparaha Arena in Porirua City,  one described by its organisers as “a multi-institutional and multi-cultural collaboration”, featuring a variety of performing individuals and groups brought together by Heleen du Plessis and Donald Maurice. The event’s primary purpose was to raise funds for a school in Africa which had been established in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2011 by New Zealander Denise Carnihan and her husband Chris. More than $8,000 was raised by this Porirua concert to support the venture, named the “Tamariki Educational Centre”, and situated in the poorest part of Nairobi. This latest concert, “Strings for Africa”, was a kind of follow-up, the funds intended to help establish a fully-fledged music programme at the school.

Both Denise and Chris Carnihan were present at this latest concert, and at the conclusion expressed their heartfelt thanks at the efforts of the event’s organisers and the assembled musicians, as well as acknowledging the support of the members of the audience. We were, throughout the evening,  treated to what could be best described as a kind of “string-fest” – if one forgot official designations and regarded Diedre Irons’ piano as a “stringed instrument”, one could indeed say that the entire company of musicians were string-players!

As befitted the occasion’s focus on the establishment of a school music programme, a goodly number of the evening’s instrumentalists were school-aged children, members of a group called Stringendo, a Wellington-based children’s string orchestra, one which opened the evening’s programme with a performance of JS Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D Minor, conducted by Donald Maurice, the soloist with the ensemble being none other than the aforementioned Diedre Irons! Playing the St.Andrew’s grand piano set back amidst the ensemble players as befitted a kind of “sinfonia concertante” work,  Irons gave a sturdily-focused and clearly-articulated reading of the first movement’s solo part, duetting most charmingly with the violins in a number of places, and plunging into a mini-cadenza which sparked and scintillated like a firecracker, the pianist’s characteristic spontaneity of manner keeping us nicely guessing as to the moment of her instrument’s reunitement with the orchestra!

The sombre, unison statement of the slow movement’s opening theme gave it all great gravity, and a modicum of tension as to its eventual destination! I enjoyed the accompanying strings “sighing tones”, a touching sensitivity evident in the young players’ relating their phrases to the soloist, and the latter in turn elaborating upon the simple, emotionally-direct string figurations. The final  episode enchanted as well, with the strings quietly joining Irons’ melodic line in unison, the utterances spare, and extremely moving!

Sprightly, energetic and animated at the outset, the finale began with the piano creating its own frisson of excitement, and the orchestra its own version of exhilaration, the notes clearly played and their energies well-conveyed. The soloist was never left unattended by the strings for long, the fount of Bach’s invention astonishingly vigorous and varied throughout, and the detailings never less than ear-catching, such as the observance of different dynamic levels and the setting of soaring lines against rapid-fire accompaniments. Irons’s solo part became somewhat fired up towards the piece’s end, but the orchestral musicians maintained active participants right to the final exchanges – well done!

One couldn’t help catching one’s breath as the soloists for the next work on the programme, Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins RV 580, came on to the platform – it was as though the concert had momentarily “cornered the local market” regarding violinistic talent! With Amalia Hall and Martin Riseley on one side, and Monique Lapins with Konstanze Artmann on the other, sparks were ready and set to fly in this work, the music catching into conflagration from the very opening, Amalia Hall and Martin Riseley setting things in motions, answered by Monique Lapins and Konstanze Artmann with the ensemble’s support, straightaway establishing a dynamic variation in the exchanges by way of indicating that no stone of interpretative contrast would be left unturned.

Every solo was characteristically “eventful”, not only notes-wise, but in dynamics and antiphonal direction and its augmentation by any one or more of the “company”, the interchanges filled with the drama of variety of utterance – what to the casual listener might have at first seemed a “sameness” of texture and figuration, with the propulsive opening theme driving the music along, drew us with each repetition further into the panoply of the music’s fantastic world.

The slow movement began with a series of dramatically-delivered gestures, the big dotted-note chords alternating with shimmering arpeggiated figures for both the soloists and the ripeno  – a central episode contrasted this solemn mood with a ghostly dance, as if a chorus of sprites lurking behind the great columns of sound briefly and impishly showed themselves, enjoying their “moment” before dancing out of sight once more.

The sprightly, triple-time finale reinvigorated the sound-picture, the company bending all backs in delivering the vigorous opening theme, before each of the soloists launched by turns into an elaborately modulated discourse, Amalia Hall getting the lion’s share at first, but with the others joining in the rapid-fire exchanges, Inbal Megiddo’s cello as well reminding us at times that the concerto is actually designated “for four violins AND ‘cello” in its place in the Op.3 “L’Estro L’Armonico” collection! What else could one feel when it was all over but privileged to have “been here” to witness the euphoric joy of such music making!

The next item was “unprogrammed” in a written sense, being intended as something of a “surprise”. A group of ‘cellists currently under the tuition of Inbal Megiddo, here gave us a transcription  of an 1865 choral work by Gabriel Faure, Cantique de Jean Racine, originally a four-part work for mixed choir and keyboard. I forgot to actually count the cellists in the group, but there must have been at least eight, including Inbal herself – a gorgeously rich sound! The players infused their various lines with plenty of feeling, nicely inflected and tellingly shaped – I thought there was remarkable strength and confidence in the lead cellist’s playing (at the opposite end of the line from where Inbal was sitting). I liked the group’s intensities in the softer moments of the piece, catching the feeling as readily as during the more outwardly-expressive moments in the music, concluding with a particularly touching final phrase.

Finally, it was the turn of the Sinfonia for Hope to perform for us, an orchestral group established in 2018 for fundraising purposes supporting humanitarian causes, the present Nairobi project being the group’s 2021 focus. Before the group’s item got underway conductor Donald Maurice expressed thanks to both Inbal Megiddo and Heleen du Plessis, describing them as central to the organisation of the evening’s music-making, after which he invited the organisers of the Nairobi Project, Denise and Chris Carnihan, onto the stage as well, the couple expressing their thanks to the musicians, organisers and the audience for their support for the Nairobi venture via the evening’s musical activities. It was gratifying to be told that, as a result of this evening’s concert, the projected music programme at the “Tamariki Educational Centre” in Nairobi would be able to be established.

The Sinfonia’s item was one with a difference, a performance of JS Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 played by an astounding assemblage of no less than twenty-four viola players, along with a large group of ‘cellists, plus a continuo guitar, all conducted by Donald Maurice. It all began with a will, the rich massed viola sound rolling around and about the church’s vistas, each group’s phrases gleefully bouncing off the other’s with almost bumptious heft in places, though allowing ample spaces for the lines of the two ‘cello groups to come through as well. At the outset I found the reiterations of the main theme exciting when re-emphasised by each of the groups, but my ear began increasingly to listen for and appreciate the less assertive lines and phrases and their interplay, finding a different kind of excitement in the play of the “terraced” sounds at the varied dynamic levels.

The slow movement then provided the greatest possible contrast to what we had heard thus far, with solo strings and guitar continuo, the four players, Peter Barber and Sophia Acheson (violas), Inbal Megiddo (‘cello) and Chris Everest (guitar) transporting our sensibilities in the most delightful fashion, a truly memorable performance expressing such finely-wrought contrasts of light and shade, warmth and focus, and strength allied to delicacy as to disarm critical processes
..

After this, the finale’s “jolly hockey sticks” effect of the massed strings’ return brought us back down to earth in the most appropriate way, with sequences of tumbling warmth vying with moments of delicacy and playfulness.  I enjoyed the music’s modulatory swerves into more distant realms, and the dogged meticulousness of the figurations’ homeward journey to the point where the main theme relievedly gathered the threads together and roared out for the last time – what palpable pleasure there was in its final delivery, and in the audience response , a moment to acknowledge and truly cherish as a memory of the evening’s delights!

Welington Youth Orchestra and Mark Carter with violinist Lucas Baker – a Transatlantic treat!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
TRANSATLANTIC
Music by Barber, Britten, Gershwin and Vaughan Williams

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Overture “The Wasps” (1909)
BARBER – Violin Concerto,  Op.14
BRITTEN – Sinfonia da Requiem,  Op.20
GERSHWIN – An American in Paris  (1928)

Lucas Baker (violin)
Mark Carter (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra

St. James’ Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Saturday, 15th May, 2021

The idea of “music that makes one’s mouth water” is, of course, an entirely personal matter, there being literally hundreds of pieces and combinations of pieces which would produce such a response amongst music-lovers – but for me, the Wellington Youth Orchestra’s presentation at Woburn’s St.James’ Church on Saturday hit the spot from the moment I opened the printed programme just before the concert began. I’d seen the “Transatlantic” publicity blurb, with its highlighting of the Barber Violin Concerto, performed by Lucas Baker, but only the names of the composers whose music was to be played alongside this work – so I was all the more delighted at the prospect of hearing the other three pieces, all particular favourites, in the one concert!

Another pleasant surprise was rediscovering the positive aspects of the venue’s acoustic regarding the orchestral sound, one which I’d commented on in a previous review as actually being somewhat “too lively” – here, the  different orchestral textures of the opening piece, Vaughan Williams’ attention-grabbing orchestral frolic  The Wasps  Overture, rang out most divertingly, from the raucous whirrings which opened the piece to the plethora of instrumental strands delivering the concluding “combined” themes of the work at its climax. The generous reverberation gave added weight and tone to parts of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, and enhanced various touches of glamour and sophistication to Gershwin’s adventurous An American in Paris. We certainly felt as if we were inhabiting the “same space” as the band, and enjoying a lot more besides just the notes!

Any concert that begins with VW’s “Wasps” Overture immediately “commands” its audience’s attention – and so it proved here, with the great orchestral “buzzings” goaded to a frenzy by various percussive punctuations. Mark Carter set a jolly dancing tempo for the allegro which allowed the combination of rhythmic verve and soaring melody to “swing” in entirely complementary ways, leaning nicely into the “big tune” which was taken up gloriously by the strings, the winds giving poignant support as the music’s colours rang the changes. The jauntiness of rhythm got by Carter from the players at the return of the “wasps” was positively infectious, leading to the brass’s exciting  clarion calls and irruptions of percussion which pounced on their opportunities to join in the welter of sound! – I liked the lovely legato of the trumpet’s reiteration of the soaring theme, beneath which the strings energetically danced the allegro, the ensemble splendidly robust, conductor and players capping the piece’s ending off with an exhilarating sense of arrival.

What could have contrasted more to this than the opening of the Barber Violin Concerto? – a lovely, lyrical outpouring from soloist and orchestra alike began the work with great tenderness and ardour hand-in-hand, the winds contrasting this heart-on-sleeve manner with a dancing, descending motif that reappeared throughout the movement.  The evolving orchestral textures by turns took us through sequences where full-bloodedly melody gave way to sequences of wistfulness and playful impulse which were suddenly became irruptions clouding the soundscape. Lucas Baker’s playing seemed, chameleon-like, to flower with the music –  more confident, I thought, with the bigger gesturings than with some of the more filigree figurations, his vigorous attack steadfastedly carried the music through the dancing sequence towards those massive orchestral gesturings which seemed suddenly to collapse under their own weight! Baker and his oboe soloist colleague together brought us reassurance by turning once again to the composer’s comforting descending dance theme, one which floated upwards to finish the movement.

A beautiful oboe solo began the slow movement, superbly delivered here, the strings , clarinet and horn taking the melody onto the soloist, whose first focused musings were “charged” by orchestral agitations led by the brass. Though Baker seemed less sure of himself in the heavier, more angular sequences, his confidence returned for the more romantic horn-accompanied passages – and the  rarefied solo sequence just before the impassioned entry of the strings was simply lovely, as was the recitative passage immediately following the orchestra’s taking on of the full-blooded gesturings, Baker delivering the open-hearted beauty of the writing to the rapt ending with great commitment.

A timpani figure began the finale, over which the soloist began a molto-perpetuo rhythm, with the orchestra contributing flecks of colour, a wonderfully rollicking journey brought off here with great aplomb. Baker’s control was splendid throughout, his energies carrying everything along with his instrument as the orchestral presence grew through a crescendo to a hammered climax, the strings taking over the rhythm, the soloist wrestling it back for a few measures, and the orchestra seizing control once again. At the work’s end, soloist and orchestra went for broke hammer and tongs, mixing concerted shouts with helter-skelter solo figurations, and  unequivocal concluding chords.

The church’s ample acoustic helped make the beginning of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem something of a sonic event, highlighting the committed efforts of the players, the irruptions thunderous and oppressive, engendering a sense of deep hurt, sorrow and anger, the instruments speaking for human voices and giving tongue to feelings. From the utmost depths the sounds gradually ascended, the strings followed by the brass and winds, the textures increasingly strident and agitated. With the heavy percussion adding its weight the full orchestral force was superbly brought into play, through to a shell-shocked aftermath – the sudden irruptive fragments of energy then re-ignited brilliantly spreading inexorably through the orchestra, tongued notes from the winds, stinging col legno strings and mocking chatter from brasses. The saxophone lamented, the trumpets sneered, the percussion flecked off shrapnel-shards of notes, while the rhythms built to brutal unisons at the climax, after which the exhausted textures fragmented into silence – how heart-warming, then, was the ensuing dialogue sung here between winds and horns, with the strings turning the textures into upward-thrusting columns of light, augmented by the whole orchestra! The aftermaths were so very moving, with the brass solemnly sounding a warning phrase for the future before the final hope-filled roulade from the strings dissolved into the quietly stoic wind chords at the end. Such great work from the orchestra, conductor and instrumental soloists!

The concert concluded on a rather less burdened note with George Gershwin’s exuberant An American in Paris, a world that seemed far removed from the previous work’s troubles! I’d thought the Britten piece showed off the orchestra’s qualities splendidly, but this differently-focused, more  extroverted Gershwinreally opened up the band’s corporate and individual capabilities, even if the first Parisian taxi whose horn we heard had a first-note hiccup! – but no problems thereafter! That first orchestral paragraph really “set the scene” here, with the tunes roaring through, a prominent one being  “My Mum gave me a nickel”, a vivid contrast with some of the piece’s mood-changes, as the traveller wandered from place to place, the loneliness (a gorgeous violin solo) as palpable as the hustle and bustle.

Throughout, I thought Gershwin’s score was made a living entity by these players, as with the cool bluesiness of the famous trumpet solo, and the insouciant swagger of the accompanying rhythmic trajectories, the style caught to perfection, its extrovert manner beautifully tempered in places by the playing’s tenderness and sensitivity (the strings’ delivery of the bluesy tune, for instance), and the ebb and flow between the two modes beautifully controlled by Mark Carter. Gershwin’s scoring of this work throughout indicated here that both of the eminent French musicians he approached for lessons were right to recognise there was little either of them could teach him, and that his own home-grown “idioms” were the important things to further nurture and develop, the second, jauntier trumpet tune, for instance, again played here with incredible panache – and I loved the “drenched” string/wind sound the players brought to the swinging theme that followed soon after, immediately precluding the music’s “breaking up” and reforming with a vigorous rendition of the original bluesy trumpet theme.

Suddenly we were swinging along with the opening music, taxicab horns and all, and heading for a great peroration – a final bluesy turn of phrase, a crashing chord, and we in the audience were left applauding and shouting our approval! Heroes all, these players, with some star turns, all of which were properly acknowledged – very great honour to all at the realisation of such a splendid concert!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holly Mathieson’s “Dream” debut concert with the NZSO….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
FANTASTIQUE – Music by Takemitsu, Dorothy Ker and Berlioz

TORU TAKEMITSU – Dream (Yume no Toki)
DOROTHY KER – The Third Dream
HECTOR BERLIOZ – Symphonie Fantastique Op.14

Holly Mathieson (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Friday, May 14th, 2021

If this were Australia, the use of the word “Dreamtime “ would perhaps more readily come to mind as an idea which loosely connects the three pieces played in this evening’s concert – as it is, in the case of the opening work, Toru Takemitsu’s 1981 work Dreamtime (Yume no Toki), the composer proclaimed his interest in the idea as a kind of starting-point, inspired by an invitation to attend a gathering of Aboriginal singers, dancers, musicians and storytellers at Groot Eylandt, an island in the Australian Northern Territory. Takemitsu never intended the work which eventuated to represent Australian indigenous culture, and much less the “true concept” of the Dreamtime, as would more obviously neither Dorothy Kerr’s nor Hector Berlioz’s work – each piece instead evokes in its own way a “sense” of what the subconscious mind can convey in the form of dreams pertaining to vastly different worlds and personalities.

It made for an extraordinarily thought-provoking and ultimately satisfying evening’s music, one I thought most skilfully reimagined and directed by New Zealand conductor Holly Mathieson, making her debut with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. I first encountered her work as a conductor of opera, which to my ears resulted in a riveting realisation for New Zealand Opera of Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw”; and was thus anxious to compare her work as a symphonic conductor with another New Zealander who’s recently made HER debut with the orchestra, Gemma New – it’s kind of ironic that both musicians currently have music directorships of orchestras in Canada after working as assistant conductors with prestigious ensembles, Mathieson with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and New with the St.Louis Symphony Orchestra in the US.

Hazardous though the practice can prove for those less adept, Mathieson took the microphone on her arrival and spoke with us, enthusiastically welcoming us to the concert, and deftly characterising the pieces we were about to hear with some well-wrought descriptions and images.  She advised us to “put on our Debussy/Ravel ears” for the Takemitsu work we were about to hear, before cautioning us that the Dorothy Ker work that followed would be a completely different kind of “dream experience”. She then demurely indicated that we would be left to our own imaginations’ devices regarding the Berlioz “Symphonie Fantastique”, the music’s scenario being so well-known and the movement’s titles allowing our fancy plenty of free rein.

Takemitsu’s self-avowed love of French music to my ears haunted his Dreamtime, its textures hovering between a kind of Debussy-esque impressionism and a Messiaen-like unpredictability, yet throughout the composer brought his own kind of gentle volatility to its language, a capriciousness that made each of the work’s wave-like impulses weave its own spell before drawing back into mystery – we found ourselves at one and the same time sated with the fantastical detailing of each outpouring, every gentle irruption of sound uniquely constituted, yet refreshed by the wonder of the ebb which ruled the course of each flow. I found it all exerted a spell from which I was awoken by silence, everything miraculously wrought by orchestral playing of the utmost delicacy and the surest motivation, and contrived by what seemed like limitless sensitivity of direction from the conductor. I was reminded here of the famous British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham’s well-known prescription for successful interpretation as “maximum virility allied to maximum sensitivity”, with the music’s focus never in doubt throughout moments of both intensity and serenity. The piece’s fourteen minutes seemed akin in a timeless sense to poet William Blake’s phrase “eternity in an hour”, where the poet’s words become the agents of vast possibilities similar to those in Takemitsu’s music.

Nothing could have been more different to Takemitsu’s evocations of light and movement than the deep darkness of the concert’s next piece, Dorothy Ker’s The Third Dream, a work whose cavernous percussive impulses at the beginning suggested primordial gestation processes involving deep awakenings, as if the listener had been put in synch with “deep earth” mysteries. The programme note quotes Ker as tracing the origins of this work back to a music theatre work she wrote derived from the Greek myth of Iphigenia, a princess whom the gods demanded be sacrificed by her own father, Agamemnon, in exchange for a “fair passage” to the wars at Troy for him and his army, and whose mother, Clytemnestra relived her anger and despair at her daughter’s sacrifice through dreams. These dreams intensified her anger to the point where “The Third Dream” culminated in Clytemnestra murdering her husband on his return from the Trojan Wars – Ker “lifted” this sequence from the theatre work and reorchestrated it for full symphony orchestra.

From the darkness the sounds gradually coagulated, each impulse a kind of “awakening strand” which wrapped itself around others and stimulated further growth, much of which came from instruments whose players were directed by the composer to establish their own trajectories, unsynchronised with others, a textural and rhythmic scenario which at once engendered “freedom and chaos”, the flecks of impulse becoming like shrapnel, the detailings leaving harsh, indelible imprints. The percussion’s frenzied tatooings and seismic rumblings stimulated shouts of exuberance  from the brass before the opening thundersheet textures returned, bringing with its unrelenting presence an increased volatility, allied to a tremendous weight of baleful, almost vengeful intent, some of the darkest-browed music I’ve ever directly experienced! A rawness, befitting spent and despairing inclination, moaned a lament as the music sounded its death-knell.

After the interval we were intrigued to see a relatively unfamiliar figure approaching the podium to take up the microphone – it turned out to be the orchestra’s contrabassoon player, David Angus, bent upon a mission, that of marking the retirement and final appearance of his colleague in the orchestra, Principal Bassoonist Robert Weeks, with a speech of appreciation and farewell that was amongst the funniest and drollest salutation to a colleague I’ve ever heard given. To his credit, Robert Weeks, after taking a few moments to recover, managed to get to his feet to acknowledge our tribute made by way of applause – amid all the amusement, a moving moment!

So it was then time for a “third dream” of a different kind, that of Hector Berlioz in his “Symphonie Fantastique” of 1830. The work’s title immediately poses a difficulty for any aspiring interpreter of this work – does she or he emphasise the “Symphonie” or the “Fantastique” in the piece? In a sense the two terms denote opposing characteristics, broadly, those of order and fancy, respectively – and any conductor of the work will seek to “marry” these opposite qualities in a more-or-less coherent sense according to her or his idea of what will “work” best.

I thought Holly Mathieson got the first movement absolutely right in terms of finding a balance between structure and spontaneity – the opening music dreamlike, fragmented, episodic, creative, seemingly conjured out of the ether,  the conductor fluid in her movements, tending to use both arms as well as the baton to describe whole roulades of sound with her gestures, but getting the required “attack” as the strings raced through the cross-rhythms to the first “peak” of excitement, and pointedly bringing out the wind augmentations to the strings’ excitable reiteration of the opening. And what a magical sequence we next enjoyed! – with the strings descanting the horn and winds just before the marvellous string tremolandi which led to the appearance of the “idee fixe”, the “motif” which Berlioz will use to denote his ‘beloved” in her many guises throughout the work.
The melody here was buoyant, eager, supple and yielding, and readily “gathered in” as the music gratifyingly pirouetted into the repeat, the fluency and dexterity of the playing even more free and astonishing a second time round! At the development. It was the lower strings that burgeoned forth excitingly with a series of phrases that excitably led to a series of great crescendi, breaking off to allow the horn to introduce the “idee fixe” on the winds this time, the strings grabbing the attention again with a fugal passage, at the end of which Mathieson beautifully facilitated a “moment” of reflection, an “are we all here” sequence, with the lower strings growling their assent.

It was time for the oboe to instigate the thematic passage that must have amazed contemporary ears with its startling modulatory explorations and almost vertiginous swerves of harmony, building up to a great tutti passage, the conductor here not perhaps getting the most exciting and recklessly abandoned playing I’ve heard, but certainly the most detailed! – a second crescendo reinforced its confident sense of arrival, and subsequent readiness to “sing” the movement’s epilogue as if it were a hymn, and the moment had created something almost transfigured
..

At the swirling, mist-shrouded beginning of the second movement, “Un Bal”, I noticed the conductor actually pirouetting on one foot at one point, giving an extra bit of swing to the dance’s opening, the waltz-tune itself then relaxing into a sensual and dream-like manner. I liked the extra angularity of the double basses’ accompaniments to the “idee fixe” in its appearance, and the richness of the string-tone, even if the solo cornet’s optional extra colour and character was missed. Mathieson caught the gathering of excitement at the dance’s end, the clarinets and flutes bringing out the sensual beauty of the melody associated with the “beloved”, before the strings spectacularly whirled everything and everybody away in the dance’s coda.

The beautiful exchanges between the shepherds’ pipes at the beginning of the “Scùne aux champs”, with the offstage oboe replying to the song of the cor anglaise onstage, inspired the violas to enchant us with their rapt voicing of the ascending melody which followed (a lovely accented note at one point!), the conductor getting such astonishingly atmospheric playing from all concerned here – the textures achieve a real “glow” with the help of the horn and the wind choir. Later, the cellos similarly delighted us with the richness of their tones, enhanced by the double-basses’ accenting of their accompaniments, though in the string passages that subsequently built up I thought that the conductor “kept back” the tremolandi outbursts that accompanied the winds playing of the “idee fixe”, as she seemed to do the tempestuous full orchestral outburst that followed. But how lovely were both flutes and clarinet in the passage that followed, joined by the equally poetic oboe at the end, Mathieson then deftly shaping the strings decrescendo just before the return of the shepherd’s song. The heartbreak of the abandoned cor anglais here was almost palpable, even if I thought the timpani were in reply allowed to get too loud too quickly, missing some of the initial menace.

Mathieson chose a quickish tempo for the “Marche au supplice”, exciting in its way, though perhaps having the effect of glossing over the nightmarish crudities and grotesqueries of the scene – the  bassoons’ mockery of the victim in the tumbrel, the timpani’s rumbling of the cart’s wooden wheels and the brass’s snarlings with the mob’s blood-lust – even so, the orchestral detailing leading up to the tremendous crashes in the march’s central section unerringly captured the ear, as did the ironic charge of emotion in the clarinet’s playing of the “idee fixe”, just before the piece’s gruesome climax, Mathieson grimly cutting off the brass’s shouts of triumph at the victim’s beheading.

Even if I felt that I wanted the climax of the symphony’s final “Witches’ Sabbath” scene to be a notch or two wilder and harsher, I thought Mathieson’s control of the opening of the scene was stunningly evocative, with the players delivering the focus and bite the music seemed to call for, the winds balefully “bending” their raptor-like cries, and the basses rumbling their cavernous tones with real menace. I did think the bells underpowered, the idea seeming to be that they sound from a distance, which unfortunately had the effect of lessening their louring, clamorous impact. The brass and percussion response throughout was for the most part overwhelming, even if those two simultaneously-played-though-not-quite-concurrent sets of repeated chords amidst the frenzy of the Witches’ Dance could have been further de-synchronised by the conductor – they sounded too integrated and well-behaved!! Still, the absolute mayhem that broke out at the end was properly gratifying, as was the audience response to the music-making, which, in tandem with Holly Mathieson’s promising NZSO debut, had helped to make this concert such a memorable and significant event, a most appropriate scenario in which to wish her the warmest of welcomes!

 

 

 

Megiddo and Thomson present ‘cello-and-piano treasures at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello) and Rachel Thomson (piano)

MANUEL DE FALLA – Suite Populaire Espagnole (1914)
SALINA FISHER (b. 1993) – Mono no aware (ç‰©ăźć“€ă‚Œ)
NADIA BOULANGER – Trois Pieces (1911-14)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Two pieces from “The Limpid Stream”
CLARA WIECK-SCHUMANN – Drei Romanzen Op. 22
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Sonata in F, Op.99, for ‘cello and piano

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

Sunday 9th May, 2021

‘Cellist Robert Ibell was originally scheduled to perform in this concert, but was prevented from doing so by injury,  his place being taken by Inbal Megiddo. I’m not certain whether the programme was the original performer’s choice, or whether Megiddo and pianist Rachel Thomson made changes – there was a rearrangement of the programme’s printed order, which Megiddo announced after she and Thomson had performed their opening item, an absolutely magical rendition of Falla’s Suite Populaire Espagnole. A pity that St.Andrew’s
has always been a difficult place for speakers without microphones to be heard, so that neither I nor my companions were able to clearly hear Megiddo’s announcement regarding  the programme’s order, so that we all had to wait for the interval to be assured by others of what we had heard. It all fell into place quickly enough once we knew!

The performers began the concert in the most captivating and compelling manner possible with Manuel de Falla’s collection of Spanish Songs, originally published as a set of seven for soprano and piano but performed here in an arrangement for ‘cello and piano (one of many for diverse forces) featuring six of the songs. I’m not entirely sure whether the performers followed the order as printed in the programme – for instance, it seemed to me as though the song Polo printed here as No. 4, was actually performed last, instead of Jota, its harsh, defiant and dismissive tones better fitting the description of the former in the programme notes.  The second song, too, surely must have been Asturiana, rather than Nana, the former’s opening melodic line so reminiscent of Granados’s piano solo The Lover and the Nightingale. What was more important than all of these detailings was the performers’ identification with the overall spirit of the music, along with each piece’s sharply-contrasted differentiation of focus – one couldn’t help but “feel” in Jota the growing animal excitement of the crescendi giving way to florid vocal-like expression in the cello’s recitatives; and, later, the volatile, barely-contained sexual jealousy in Polo, the same energised red-blooded thirst for revenge as in The Miller’s Dance from the same composer’s ballet El sombrero de tres picos.

At the beginning of the concert’s second item, Salina Fisher’s Mono no aware (ç‰©ăźć“€ă‚Œ) I found myself intently scribbling descriptive notes regarding the sounds I was hearing, hoping I would be able to later identify the music – though Fisher’s work was actually listed next on the programme, I wasn’t sure what we were hearing was hers or Nadia Boulanger’s work, though there didn’t seem to be much evidence of Debussy’s or Faure‘s influence in what was being sounded! The piece’s beautiful “awakening” with air-borne piano notes and sighing ‘cello lines wreathing themselves all about my sensibilities made a compelling start, as did a cosmos-like scenario that slowly developed from both nebulous clusters and deeply-wrought rumblings of piano notes to a playing-out in parallel with the cello’s epic realisation of the movements of celestial bodies, the   punctuated with passages of recitative-like eloquence – a kind of cosmic dance or ritual enactment led to a sequence of great interactive intensity, one which allowed itself to play out in contemplation of processes that suggested a kind of “certainty of impermanence “ – Fisher in her notes concerning the work wrote of the symbolic importance of “the ephemeral beauty of cherry blossoms” in contemplations of the kinds these sounds seemed to suggest. (All of these thoughts crystallised, somewhat to my relief, when Salina Fisher herself appeared on the stage to acknowledge the applause at the end of the piece – whew!)

Our whereabouts in the programme were gradually giving themselves away, despite a few moments of uncertainty in identifying the next work. The opening music here had a kind of “stoic bleakness” one could possibly ascribe to Shostakovich (but somewhat removed from Clara Schumann’s “Andante moderato”), the ‘cello’s contined expression of the melodic line’s loveliness poignant and heartrending, before both instruments briefly gathered up their intensities “into one ball” for a few Debussian seconds (!) and returning to the serenity of the opening, with lovely, deeply-sounded notes at the end! As if the ghosts of Shostakovich (and Schumann) hadn’t already been laid to rest, the following “amble through the woods” was far removed from a waltz, its canonic interplay more like Cesar Franck in its lyrical intensity – but though the ebullient finale was suddenly Shostakovich-like at the outset in its motoric octave figurations the 5/4 rhythms were hardly waltz-like, enabling my “internal jury” to take the plunge and confidently “find” for Nadia Boulanger, and be damned to the consequences! But still, what lovely music!

In the item that followed, the “Adagio” marking for the first of two movements transcribed from Shostakovich’s ballet score “The Limpid Stream” suggested at the outset something rather less assertive than what we heard in the music, the strident, assertive piano chords momentarily unnerving our growing confidence in “picking our way” through the items – fortunately Inbal Megiddo’s ‘cello brought the music to order, taking up a languid, long-breathed song, aided and abetted by the piano throughout  whatever mood the music chose, in this case an almost Rachmaninov-like climax, with impressively-generated oceanic waves of sound emanating from Rachel Thomson’s sterling fingers, the ‘cello returning us persuasively to the gentler of the piece’s reminiscences. After this the Waltz was very “waltz-like, jolly and uncomplicated” with heart-warming flourishes of innocent enjoyment from all concerned.

During the interval our “listening conclave” had confirmed the Wieck/Schumann-Boulanger exchange, and felt much better as a result! So, we were able to settle down and enjoy the programme’s second half, beginning, of course, with the Drei Romanzen Op. 22 of Clara Wieck-Schumann, a work which was obviously a transcription of the original violin-and-piano work , which Clara had dedicated to the famous violinist Joseph Joachim, and performed it with him to considerable acclaim. Sadly, these were among the last pieces that Clara wrote, as after her husband Robert’s death in 1856 she concentrated almost exclusively on her performing career by way of helping to promote her late husband’s music.

One understands when encountering this music how various people at the time would have expressed regret that Clara no longer composed – she obviously possessed wonderful lyrical feeling, and the ability to convey such a quality in her writing for both piano and violin. I thought the flattened note in the work’s main theme was a masterly stroke – a kind of “talisman” which gives the music such magic and distinction. The sombre mood of the second movement was relieved by a more lively major-key sequence, with occasional bursts of playfulness in the piano/’cello exchanges, before the minor-key mood crept back into the music, unable, however to suppress a touch of major-key impishness with the final pizzicato chord . The last movement, Leidenschaftlich schnell, seemed to express a yearning for happier, more youthful times, the theme flowing passionately on the ‘cello over constantly-moving arpeggiated figures, the spirit of Robert, one feels, being unashamedly evoked, especially in the main theme’s ardently-rising “Widmung”-like figure.

And so to Brahms, and his Second ‘Cello Sonata – I confess to having a certain ambivalence regarding parts of the opening movement of this work, where it always seems to me that there’s insufficient “room” for all the tones and figurations of the writing clamouring for attention – one feels nothing but sympathy for the hapless ‘cellist who fell foul of the composer’s waspish tongue while performing the work with him after she complained she couldn’t hear herself over the plethora of piano notes! Megiddo and Thomson certainly threw themselves into the “no-holds-barred” fray throughout, making the most of the lighter, more spaced-out moments (some particularly atmospheric playing during the “throbbing engines” sequences, repeated notes on the ‘cello “hung about” with chords and echoes from the piano – lovely!).

The two middle movements brought more light and shade into the music‘s world, the Adagio affettuoso with heartfelt singing tones from the ‘cellist, the textures limpid and breathing, building up to assertive exchanges between the cello’s pizzicato notes and the pianist’s rock-solid chords, followed by a return to the opening’s poetic singing tones and deft colourings from both players. By contrast, the Scherzo’s demonic energies straightaway put our sensibilities on the move, restless, agitated figurations from the piano, against a rollicking tune from the ‘cello, the “galloping horse” trajectories most excitingly, and in places even spookily, played, in contrast to which the movement’s trio section here flowed in a most heart-easing manner!

As for the finale, Megiddo’s and Thomson’s playing brought out for me the music’s similarities to the last movement of the same composer’s Second Piano Concerto, genial and ebullient at the start, varied of mood during its course and resolving all issues with bluff good humour. An appreciative audience readily showed its pleasure at the music’s conclusion, a feeling which continued after the applause had finished with comments of satisfaction from all sides reaching my ears – a most gratifying conclusion to a concert!

PS – Inbal Megiddo and Rachel Thomson are performing this programme as part of the Hutt Valley Chamber Music 2021 Concert Series  at 7:30pm on Thursday 20th May, in St.Mark’s Church on Woburn Road, Lower Hutt.

 

 

 

Michael Endres (piano) – a journey from classical to romantic at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents:
MICHAEL ENDRES  IN RECITAL
Music by Mozart, Schubert and Schumann

MOZART – Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, No. 13 K.333
SCHUBERT – “Wanderer Fantasia in C Major, D.760
SCHUMANN – Etudes Symphoniques Op.13

Michael Endres (piano)

Memorial Hall, Waikanae,

Sunday, 2nd May, 2021

I was particularly anxious to get out to Waikanae to hear Michael Endres give this recital as it had been a long time since I last heard him play – upon subsequently checking “Middle C” I discovered it was in 2013, and also at Waikanae  – and on that occasion he presented a programme that combined range and scope with judiciously matched entities, Schubert leading to Chopin in the first half and Ravel leading to Gershwin in the second.

This time, though perhaps not as widely-ranging repertoire-wise, the journey we were taken on by the pianist spanned the very different worlds of Mozart and Schumann via a “revolutionary“ work by Schubert, each piece demonstrating something of the expressive potential of the keyboard at the time of writing. Even Mozart’s piano (he owned an instrument made by Anton Walter) with two octaves less than a modern piano and lighter and smaller than Schubert’s or Schumann’s instrument would have been, would have spoken for its time with eloquence and character in its own distinctive voice.

I enjoyed without reservation Endres’s playing of both of the two Romantic works on today’s programme, Schubert’s outlandishly virtuosic “Wanderer” Fantasia, and Schumann’s profoundly expressive “Etudes Symphoniques”. And I enjoyed the pianist’s Mozart playing as well, (the B-flat Sonata K.333), though without feeling as though the notes and phrases had for him the same consistency of ownership or through-line identification that marked his playing  of the other pieces. The Mozart had some beguiling sequences, with some especially fleet-fingered and gossamer-toned playing at the outset, but we were unfortunately denied further exploring of these impressions by the lack of the first-movement repeat. The development provided some compensation by “getting down to business”, with minor-key stresses ruffling and clouding the ambiences, resulting in a certain wistful return to the sunniness of the opening, and by way of balance, a touch more emphasis given to certain details.

The slow movement seemed to me surer in its characterisations, Endres catching the charm and depth of feeling of the opening’s spacious operatic dialogue, and moving the music into darker regions almost nonchalantly at first, but gradually registering the “deep waters” referred to in the programme notes. I enjoyed the wonderfully expansive feel to the chromatic progressions that suspended time and motion in its drift back to the opening, this time through all lavishly decorated. Everything was beautifully-voiced, conveying that flow of expression in the music’s substance so very tellingly.

The finale’s light, tripping opening gathered playfulness and energy as the music unfolded, with a degree of impulsiveness “catching” the playing in places, serving the music well during the minor-key episodes, whose harmonic shifts resulted in some surprising twists and turns, our ears being taken on quite a journey! The “way back” to the opening sounded a trifle helter-skelter in places before a cadenza-like passage refocused the excitement, as bravura and delicacy by turns brought the music home.

Having said all of this, I thought it was when Endres began the concert‘s next item, Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasia D.760, that I realised what I was finding hard to fully “get” in his Mozart playing – right from the arresting opening chords there seemed to my ears a certain depth of focus, an intensity of  involvement with the music. Reading my review from the 2013 concert at which I last heard Endres play (also at Waikanae!), I commented then on the “characterful and flavoursome” Schubert-playing – and so it was here, even in a work whose essence couldn’t have been more of a contrast to the Impromptus he gave us on that earlier occasion.

Reckoned to be a real virtuoso challenge – and from all accounts one beyond its composer’s ability to perform adequately – the work here found an interpreter who possessed both the virtuoso “roar” and the recreative temperament that would encompass the work’s immediately contrasting qualities of heroism and capriciousness, the latter charmingly expressed in the second subject as a kind of insouciant “whistling on the trail” feeling in between the more urgent irruptions of energy, and the whole conveying in all of its contrasting parts that seemingly endless forward movement which defines the music.

What rapt stillness accompanied the transition into the work’s slow movement! – Endres’s playing filled the ambient spaces with such breadth of feeling, merging classical strength with romantic longing, opening up the music’s depths with bass tremolandi before seeming to pacify the ensuing agitations with a gorgeously “sung” major key version of the movement’s opening. How poignantly we were then taken between major and minor throughout this sequence, with the play of filigree decoration developing into positively Lisztian torrents of impulse! Endres held us spellbound with his command of the ebb and flow of sonorities, the ensuing calm suggesting a somewhat volatile balance of light and darkness via brooding atmospheres and dark-browed modulations.

The third movement sprang from the luftpause a little uncertainly, I thought, but soon established its audacity, with great, downward-swinging dotted-rhythm flourishes suddenly giving way to an almost carefree theme, the equivalent of the second subjects in the previous movements, one frequently “set upon” by darker forces, Endres giving us a “no-holds-barred” sense of turmoil, here. Being a “scherzo” we got a Trio section whose melody seemed here to be spontaneously improvised by the player, as did the Lisztian musings which accompanied the melody’s gradual decommissioning

certainty seemed to return with the taking up of the dotted rhythm once again, but   our sensibilities were then plunged into turmoil with what seemed like the work’s most tempestuous sequences thus far, flinging great roulades of notes every which way and modulating in what appeared like an alarmingly anarchic manner – marvellous stuff!

Two crashing chords and the fugal finale was upon us, the pianist straightaway giving us the music’s utmost in terms of energy, intoxication and wildness, and in doing so appearing to physically and recreatively become as one with both the notes and his instrument – astonishing! Nothing at the music’s conclusion would have done other than what did take place – a rapturous reception in fair tribute to what we had heard, followed by the wonderment of witnessing at first-hand such an overwhelming performance (and all of this before the interval!)



Thrilling though Endres’ Schubert was as a “stand-alone” presentation, the concert’s second half “clinched” for me the reasons I love piano recitals, quite apart from the uniquely indispensable greatness of much of the repertoire – the unity of response from a lone performer drawing all of the music’s threads together, the intimacy of exchange between this performer, the music and listeners, and (especially) the formative and alchemic process of activation of the instrument’s characteristics (another way of saying I LOVE the sound of the piano!) all incline me by nature and circumstance towards such events.

Here, Endres appeared to very much carry on from where he had left off with the Schubert, his choice for the concert’s final item being a fruition, if you like, of certain elements of the latter’s music into full-blooded Romanticism, though still employing classical structures – Schumann’s Etudes Symphoniques Op.13. The excellent programme notes accompanying the concert summarised the history of the work and the various “editions” that appeared after Schumann’s death – in this case, Endres chose the most commonly-performed version of the work, which inserts five additional variations that Schumann himself had removed for the first publication.

My first experience of this music was via a recording made in the 1960s by Vladimir Ashkenazy, one which helped popularise the work, though in the light of performances by other interpreters I’ve since heard, such as Sviatoslav Richter, the Ashkenazy now sounds less remarkable to me as an interpretation – certainly Endres’ playing of the work on this occasion seemed to me on a different plane of emotional involvement with the music, a few “quirks” involving repeats apart.

As with the Schubert work in the first half, our attention was arrested right from the outset with the opening chords of the “theme”, the sounds sharply-focused and in places the dynamics steeply-graded, as with the “ascent” in the first half of the melody, and the octave leap at the same place I the second half. I don’t propose to go through the work analysing each variation as heard here (which would become tiresome to read), but suffice to say that, despite/along with a somewhat arbirtrary attitude to repeats in certain places, every note Endres played seemed to have a “living” quality which contributed to the structural and emotional effect of that particular variation.

Throughout, the pianist’s concentration and involvement had the effect of the music seemingly recreated on the spot – nothing seemed left to chance, but was delivered in a wholeheartedly focused manner, involving the listener in a fascinatingly kaleidoscopic amalgam of structure and spontaneity. I loved, for example, the almost Prokofiev-like angularities of the fourth variation, the phrases accented and sharp-edged rather than dainty, with some of the accents almost percussive!

The playing seemed inclined to fully explore the sonorities each variation suggested, heightening our reactions to the music, a particular example being the Brahmsian  “Stars coming out at night” variation near the end (not unlike the first of the latter composer’s Op.119 pieces), the music almost completely transcending the theme, and creating a great stillness (Schumann very much in a Beethovenian mood, here) – and the repeats so enhancing our experience on this occasion, that the whole hall seemed entranced! This piece led to the penultimate variation, Endres creating a kind of  agitated suggestiveness here with a tremolando-like introduction and a ”worried” thematic figure as only Schumann could write. It was all played with every ounce of feeling that the pianist could muster up to the point where he simply eased the tension and focus and let the emotion gradually go – an amazing sensation of some kind of essence simply draining away to nothing (such great playing!).

So to the finale of the work (Schumann had borrowed a different theme for this from one of Heinrich Marschner’s operas), the opening of which was resoundingly muscular and heroic, with a gentler “reply” following. Ignoring a strange audience irruption at one point, Endres plunged undeterred into the different world of the second part of the piece, the “variation” theme then appearing as fanfares calling to and answering one another, the pianist performing orchestral-like miracles of sonority at the keyboard – later this “second episode” was repeated in a different key, leading to one of the Marschner theme’s highest notes being unexpectedly sharpened and the pianist going into what seemed like overdrive during the final pages. We were all duly swept away in a veritable deluge of notes and sounds, and, upon reassembling our sensibilities at the end, gave Michael Endres the standing ovation his playing richly deserved! An encore, most appropriately, Schumann’s “Traumerei” restored us to our lives, but piano playing of such commitment and splendour will, I’m certain, not be easily forgotten.