Author: Peter Mechen

Triumph tempered by sadness – Hutt Valley Chamber Music faces dissolution despite a sensational 40th anniversary season capped off by the remarkable Diedre Irons

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Hutt Valley Chamber Music presents:
HVCM’s final 40th anniversary concert with Diedre Irons (piano)

Music by JS Bach, Beethoven, Liszt and Schumann

JS BACH – Concerto in the Italian Style BWV 971
BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata No.23 in F Minor Op.57 “Appassionata”
LISZT – Piano Sonata in B Minor S.178

Diedre Irons (piano)

St.Mark’s Church, Lower Hutt

Thursday 31st October 2019

The evening was earmarked as a celebration, a culmination of the 40th year of presenting chamber music in Lower Hutt by the Hutt Valley Chamber Music Society. And the choice of pianist Diedre Irons to give the concert this evening couldn’t have been more appropriate, as back in October 1980 she and the then-concertmaster of the NZSO, Peter Schaeffer performed a recital as one of the Society’s concerts during that opening season. However, by contrast with the joy and optimism of that inaugural year of music-making, this latest occasion gave cause for great sadness, being the Society’s swan-song of concert-giving, until further notice – for a number of reasons, there are no plans for a 2020 Hutt Valley Chamber Music series.

Diedre herself reminded her audience of that long-standing connection she had with the Society’s concerts after she was invited to cut the “Celebration cake” at the concert’s end, expressing the hope in doing so that the Society would rise again, “like a phoenix from the ashes”. The Society’s problem is similar to that of a decade ago, when it seemed that there were not enough volunteers to form a committee with sufficient numbers to run the concerts in 2010 – on that occasion help was forthcoming – but now, ten years on, after retirements at the end of this year, only four committee-members will be left, with no immediate prospect of new and interested people available to offer their services. This has been in spite of frequent verbal pleas to audiences at concerts and statements made in newsletters, as well as through general networking.

We at Middle C have already expressed our alarm at the prospect, my colleague, Lindis Taylor having reflected at the “catchment” of the HVCM Society being approximately 35% of Greater Wellington’s population, and describing the loss as “a very regrettable hole in the region’s musical scene”. Considering the quality and richness of the 2019 concerts, the removal of the series is nothing less than a tragedy for music-lovers in the region, and must surely be similarly viewed by those authorities concerned with maintaining the range and scope of Hutt Valley’s overall pool of cultural activities.

This particular concert, by dint of its outstanding quality, served to further underline the tragedy of any such impending loss. It also reinforced the fact of our having been so fortunate that Diedre Irons chose all those years ago to make New Zealand her home,  bringing with her, as she has done, such an all-encompassing range of skills relating to her piano-playing, to the delight and enrichment of thousands of people throughout her adopted country. For here was a kind of apogee of the pianist’s art laid out for our gratification and pleasure, via her playing of three of the greatest works for the keyboard ever composed.

Though written for performance on a two-manual harpsichord, and designed to employ the contrast in the music between “solo” and “orchestral” writing for the player between the hands, JS Bach’s “Italian Concerto” has become a favourite of pianists everywhere, all relishing the challenge of realising these contrasting passages on a single keyboard. The work’s three movements provide the fast-slow-fast framework of a concerto, while different voicings inflect both the single lines and the contrasting two-handed, “orchestral” aspects of the music.

From the beginning, Irons’ playing had strength and vigour, the opening paragraph a veritable  irruption of joyful energies, everything having a “schwung” kind of quality that seemed to give the music all the elbow-room it needed. Further into the movement I found myself beguiled by the waxing and waning of so many hues and colours from out of the pianist’s different  phrasings, Bach refracting and reimagining his material before our very ears, until the opening flourish returned almost laughingly, bringing us to a full, deliciously burgeoning circle!

My view of Bach’s slow movements has never been the same since listening to ‘cellist Raeul Pierard’s “masterclass” performances of the ‘Cello Suites about a year ago, a saga whose guided journey “opened up” the composer’s emotional world for me to a hitherto unrealised extent – https://middle-c.org/2018/11/baching-at-the-moon-cellist-raeul-pierard-at-st-peters-on-willis-wellington/ Here in the Concerto’s middle movement murmured depths of emotion, out of which, under Irons’ fingers, both the stoically-repeated accompaniment and the exposed melodic line created arabesques of feeling through which we drifted in wonderment, a deeper, richer accompaniment intensifying the sequence’s repetition, its sighing conclusion framed by two deeply-felt trills.

Irons’ touch throughout the work’s finale seemed to me to enable us to leave the world of keys and hammers behind, the instrument transformed into something magical admitting to no age or era, merely a “transport of delight” whose tones sing, chatter, whisper and chuckle in all registers, maintaining that sense of captivation by the music which the pianist seems to me to bring to whatever she plays – a joyous experience for all!

I last heard Irons play the mighty “Appassionata” Sonata of Beethoven’s at Wellington Cathedral, of all places, something of a surreal sonic experience in that fearsome reverberation. Partly to her credit and partly due to our sitting as close to the pianist as we could, she seemed to me to make as much musical sense as was possible of the work amid the haloed ambiences of resonance that threatened to swamp much of the fine detail. It was a truly “enhanced” musical event, the sound-picture akin to, in sonic terms, “a mighty Polypheme”, at once fascinating and grotesque to experience.

By comparison, here in the relatively modest confines of Woburn’s St.Mark’s Church, one could appreciate in an almost completely untrammelled way the pianist’s mastery of the music, the portentous opening gestures disturbingly reaching upwards and into the light, before conflagrating and, avalanche-like, rolling thunderously down into the music’s brooding folds, glint-eyed gestures of defiance having their say before giving way to an opening-up of rich, warmly-laden utterances, the defiant opening theme turned on its head and transformed here into something almost Prospero-like in its wisdom. Irons took us into the heart of each episode, relishing each of the work’s tumultuous arpeggiated episodes leading firstly to the appearance of the ominous Fifth-Symphony-like four-note motif, and then the latter’s even more portentous reappearance just before the movement’s tempestuous coda, the playing encompassing a climax and a dying fall whose force and focus left us stunned!

The middle movement’s theme-and-variations here unfolded simply and directly, with Irons giving the second-half of each of the sequences a crescendo-like flowering of warmth and strength, grown beautifully from the first half’s simplicity. She galvanised us with her rapier-like repetition of the questioning upward gesture at the movement‘s end, and the finale was upon us like the surge of a rapidly-burgeoning river in flood. Irons’ command of the music’s trajectories was total, conjuring up as many ghostly half-lights as there were full-blooded onrushings, the onslaught less a question of tempo and more of focused energy and momentum, the music here controlled, there unleashed, and everything balanced within the vistas of a tumultuous overview – to the point that, when Irons DIDN’T plunge into the movement’s (admittedly controversial) second-half repeat, and went straight on into the work’s coda, I found myself for the very first time in my experience not objecting, so taken-up was I with what she WAS doing instead with it all, to resoundingly satisfying effect! – an amazing performance!

In the wake of such an onslaught of focused musical impulse the Liszt B Minor Sonata held its head up proudly, the work’s unities and diversities finely-judged by the pianist, her playing underlining the shape and intent of the structure, while bringing out the music’s poetry and nobility. Liszt hides nothing in this work by artifice or false emotion – every gesture is whole-hearted and part of an overall integration of thought and feeling, as is the almost alchemic synthesis of the work’s different motifs – a remarkable achievement by the composer, and one which Irons enhanced with her acute instinct for proportion and varied emphasis throughout.

Right from the beginning of the work a kind of urgency informed the proceedings, of the kind which sought out essences rather than glossed over them, and honed them to their sharpest extent – the first few pages of the Sonata give the listener nearly all the material the composer is going to use throughout the whole, single-movement work,  Irons here displaying an almost alchemic flair with each fragment in its delineation and later development. At every turn I felt her playing triumphantly balanced the work’s virtuoso elements with the more inward, poetic content, in a way that left one in no doubt as to the logic of the composer’s thinking and the creative mastery of it all.

Faced with such a recreative achievement one hesitates to dwell on any single aspect of Irons’  performance – but I couldn’t help but be particularly moved on this occasion by the delicate poetry of the “Consolations-like” theme at the piece’s very heart, which all but held the music’s pulsings still for a few precious moments, just before the fugue’s darker purpose grew out of the still-to-be-negotiated journeyings – here, its evocation felt to me almost Dante-ish, life-journeying stuff, like a glimpse through a window into a pilgrim’s soul, and as such, a precious and profound moment.

Very great acclaim at the piece’s conclusion from us all for Diedre Irons, who then treated us to an encore in the form of Schumann’s well-known “Träumerei”, a performance which, to my surprise, I must confess to finding somewhat enigmatic from this pianist in its most uncharacteristic “matter-of-factness”, the notes to my ears expertly but somewhat plainly sounded – I reasoned that, at the conclusion of such a recital, a performer’s instinct may well be to return us to our lives, rather than weave further ongoing spells of enchantment. Whatever the case, and however unexpected, it still didn’t lessen the impact of a remarkable recital, one whose resonances will surely fuel our hopes for some kind of as-yet-unspecified “revival” of chamber music performance in the Hutt Valley for the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delightful, delicious, and declamatory – a “no-holds-barred” night with Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN

CLAIRE SCHOLES – Cuba on Cuba (with the Arohanui Strings)
SAMUEL BARBER – Violin Concerto (Amalia Hall – violin)
AARON COPLAND – Symphony No. 3

Marc Taddei (conductor)
Arohanui Strings (Claire Scholes)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 20th October, 2019

Orchestra Wellington has earned a special niche for itself amid the welter of artistic activities supported by the capital, one that’s steadily developed over the years of Marc Taddei’s tenure as Music Director, and in recent times enjoyed obvious fruition in terms of its enthusiastic audience following. Its appeal is based on several factors, not the least of which is the unflagging wholeheartedness and enthusiasm of conductor Taddei for whatever he’s presently engaged in doing with his players, and the ensemble’s remarkable development in playing standards over the duration. As well, the organisation’s on-going policy of keeping its audiences guessing from year to year as to what’s next in store heightens the fun and excitement of it all, be it the announcement of an oncoming season’s programme or the orchestra’s always delightfully “sprung” collaboration with the youthful Arohanui Strings Ensemble (both of the latter taking place this evening!)

Regular attendees at OW concerts will be well familiarised with the work of this music-education/social development programme, which works with children who grow up in areas of economic deprivation in the Wellington/Hutt Valley area. Begun in 2010 by OW violinist Alison Eldredge, the group includes over 300 children per year in these areas, teaching them string instruments, singing and music notation. Tonight’s concert began with the more advanced students playing a work by Manawatu-born, Auckland-based composer Claire Scholes called Cuba on Cuba, one inspired by the “thriving party zone” atmosphere along Cuba St. in Wellington.

Scholes wanted her piece to be, as far as possible, “children-led”, her writing having the younger musicians presenting the piece’s main ideas, which in turn were taken up and developed by the adult musicians. Beginning with an attractively soulful and melancholic violin solo, the piece brought the dance energies in straight afterwards – aside from a slightly-too-prominent tin-can, the percussive noises brought out catchy, angular figurations  punctuated by occasional “Ooh!” and “Wow!” vocalisations from the players. A brass choir opened up the textures further, revealing a “bright, new country”, not unlike in spirit the vistas to be evoked by Aaron Copland’s music later in the programme., the “tin-can” rhythm joined by other instruments, building up the textures, working jazzy tattoos into the mix between percussion irruptions, and finishing in the time-honoured manner with suitably grand and satisfying gesturings, both music and playing generating a warm reception!

A piece called “Amadeus” followed, an arrangement of the first movement of Mozart’s 25th Symphony (the “little” G Minor!) with some of the writing’s angularities removed. Then the “big guns” were brought out (the youngest of the Arohanui Strings’ students), standing in a line across the front of the platform, to everybody’s great pleasure, and playing a couple of folk-song tunes as well as “What shall we do with a  Drunken Sailor” and the lovely “Hine e Hine”. The response was rapturous!

Came the second instalment of the evening’s packagings, this particular segment unwrapped by the musicians with the utmost delicacy and beauty of feeling. This was Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto, a work written in 1939, and one whose history is of a complexity which the concert’s programme-note writer, Erica Challis obviously considered would be best left well alone! Barber wrote the work for a former classmate of his at the Curtis Institute, Iso Briselli, who responded favourably to the first two movements of the work, but not to the brilliant, but comparatively short finale which he considered somewhat insubstantial! Various other people, including Briselli’s own teacher, added their opinions, the teacher, Albert Meiff, even offering to rewrite parts of the work in consultation with the composer! Barber declined the offer and after various other comings-and-goings between him and Briselli (all to no avail, except that they actually remained friends throughout all of this!) gave the concerto to another violinist, Albert Spalding, who premiered the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy in February 1941.

Unfortunately for Briselli, a version of the story involving his rejecting the concerto because the third movement was ”too difficult” for him to play gained currency at about this time and actually became the accepted “story” of events in most descriptions of the work’s genesis. It wasn’t until fifty years afterwards, when the violinist published correspondence between him and the composer, that the “correct” version of their interaction re the concerto was given its proper status – that it was the “character” of the final movement, and not its difficulty, which had led Briselli to reject the work.

So, leaving behind all the fuss, both preceding the first performance and its aftermath, how was the concerto and its performance as presented by Amalia Hall and Marc Taddei with Orchestra Wellington? – in a word, dazzling! Where the violinist had demonstrated both technical and intellectual strength and flexibility throughout the rigorously earthy Bartok Second Violin Concerto which she’d played earlier in the year with the Orchestra, here she responded as readily and wholeheartedly to the Barber work’s heart-on-sleeve nostalgia, romantic variation and (in the finale) fleet-fingered brilliance. Throughout, Hall treated her line with the greatest of sensitivity, a finely-wrought “voice” threading its tones through a beguiling orchestral tapestry, one which Marc Taddei and his players supported and abetted at every turn.

After a first movement whose performance surefootedly negotiated the music’s ebb and flow between sunlight and shadow, from the utmost tenderness to full-blooded expression of feeling, the sounds gently and beguilingly dissolving at the end into beguilingly pastoral ambiences, the slow movement brought into play equally veiled strings, golden horns and a plaintive oboe, the strings then further “brokering” the material between clarinet and horn before the soloist took up the line – at first tenderly, then more intensely, and further into  anguish, and a sequence shared with distant , muted trumpets that suggested some private grief.

But then, how sweetly Hall’s playing drew from this unpromising state of things a flow of such warmth as to disarm all woe, the music seeming to suddenly open a vein of nostalgia for golden days of yore, as if bidding them farewell – to youth, or perhaps to innocence – times that will possibly come again only in memory…….I thought Barber’s touch exemplary in its refusal to let the music wallow, instead remaining ready to remind all of us that everything under the sun comes and goes – the orchestral “shudders” that followed these outpourings were here as telling as the climactic moments had been.

As for the work’s finale, the subject of much comment and conjecture over the years stemming from the  non-engagement of the originally intended first performer of the work, violinist Iso Briselli, with the music, it was here a tour de force from all concerned, by turns a shimmering of elfin quicksilver and a veritable whirlwind of energy, brilliantly, and astoundingly played by Hall, the accompanying orchestral playing just as astonishing in its poise and knife-edged dexterity! At the end, the applause simply went on and on, all of us present exhilarated by the music’s energies and the soloist’s brilliance, ideally matched by that of conductor and players. What a work and what a performance!

Before the second half’s music was embarked upon, Marc Taddei annouced that next year’s Orchestra Wellington subscription season tickets were now available for purchasing, and, what was more, at their cheapest price, this being the benefit enjoyed by people willing to “take a chance” with the orchestra’s as yet unannounced programme of six concerts. The only clue Taddei would give us was that the composer was strongly identified with the Romantic era – naturally enough, this was enough to ignite all kinds of post-concert discussion, my friend and myself wavering between Liszt and Schumann as likely candidates! Only time will tell, of course!

Try as I might, I couldn’t raise quite the same unbridled enthusiasm at the end for the final work on the evening’s programme, Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, despite what seemed utterly committed efforts on the part of Marc Taddei and his orchestral players. Somehow, I found parts of the work too bombastic and overtly rhetorical, as if in places the music’s purpose had somehow run dry and was left seemingly empty-sounding.

Better, more “felt” to my ears, were the work’s less declamatory, more pastoral moments, both rhythmic and lyrical, such as the beautifully “open” string melody at the work’s beginning, and the wind-choir coda to the first movement, the rest impressive, but in a way that seemed too ready to overstate. True, the quieter moments stood out in all-the-more sweeter relief to the grand gesturings, but I thought the latter here simply too much of a good thing.

Outdoor energies were the order throughout the second movement – rhythms turning into dance, and figurations quick and slower juxtaposing. The exuberances recalled Copland scores that I really loved – Appalachian Spring and Rodeo in particular – hence underlining my ongoing surprise at not responding more positively to the composer in this, his more symphonic mode. Still, I did enjoy the cheek-by-jowl contrasts in this movement , with the brass sounding their themes weightily and grandly, as the rest of the orchestra danced underneath and all around. And the “trio” section, with its contrapuntish winds, was particularly delightful!

The playing breathtakingly caught the third movement’s aching, almost spectral feeling at the third movement’s beginning, before winds and strings attempted stoically to energise one another, to try and return confidence and hope, and began to dance. Despite moments of enchantment and energy the strings seemed to suddenly lose heart, the energies dissipate, and the instrumental lines lose direction and drift upwards – the music seemed suddenly lost, beyond redemption.

Out of this suspended chaos sounded the “Fanfare” theme, steadily played by the winds, when suddenly to growls of approval from the basses, the brasses burst in, their theme punctuated by percussion outbursts – tremendous playing by all concerned, even if (to my ears) by this stage the grandiloquence of such gestures seemed already well “milked”! As the music drove mercilessly to its admittedly magnificent-sounding conclusion, there was no doubting the orchestra’s capacity for giving conductor Marc Taddei what he wanted at this or any point in the work – and aficionados of full-blooded, give-it-all-you’ve-got playing would have been in seventh heaven amid the splendours of the work’s final chord, less actual music, I thought, than a truly seismic event! A nineteenth-century American critic fond of writing in the vernacular, at the end of a review of a particularly tumultuous concert given by the first great American piano virtuoso, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, said it all – “I knowed no more that evening!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Iconic singer/composer Björk celebrated by Claire Cowan’s Blackbird Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Tour-Makers presents:
BJÖRK: ALL IS FULL OF LOVE
The Blackbird Ensemble
Claire Cowan (director, arranger, small strings, keyboard)
Charmian Keay (violin) / Peau Halapua (violin) / Rachel Grimwood (viola)
Rachel Wells (‘cello) / Sean Martin-Buss (sax) / Callum Passells (sax/clarinet)
Henry Swanson (horn) / Chris Townsend (drums) / Rebecca Celebuski (percussion)

Vocals: Priya Sami, Anna Coddington, Mara TK

Shed 6, TSB Arena, Waterfront
Wellington
Thursday, 17th October, 2019

Reviewed jointly with Bec Coogan

Fans of the Icelandic singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir (known internationally by her first name, Björk)  will probably have little more than a certain “academic” interest in the following review, written by someone, myself, who’s a dyed-in-the-wool follower of what’s popularly known as “classical” music, and, up until attending this concert didn’t know even whether the singer in whose honour the event took place was male or female! I’d vaguely heard the name Bjork every now-and-then, but, as with most entertainers in these “popular” kinds of genres, knew next-to-nothing about her or her music.

When I was asked to write a review, I found myself more than usually interested in the idea upon discovering that the “Blackbird Ensemble” presenting the music was directed by Claire Cowan, whose music I had previously encountered as a young “up-and-coming” “classical” composer. But even having noted that “crossover” aspect, I’m not going to even attempt to try and synthesise two creative worlds, in as much as it appears to me that the means through which the music of someone like Bjork and any “classical” composer one cares to name are so different that one has to adopt correspondingly alternative kinds of “receptors” in response. In reviewing this concert for “Middle C” I wanted merely to explore, albeit gingerly, and with the help of my niece, Bec Coogan, who attended the concert with me, those kinds of receptors so as to be able to communicate what I felt about the concert to the “Middle C” readership.

This event was styled as a “show” rather than as a concert, implying that there were significant visual components in the presentation, giving it a “music theatre” kind of character. From what I’ve seen of concert presentations of popular music of late, it’s a kind of “genre” in itself, bringing into play theatrical techniques such as lighting, movement around the platform and occasional highlighting of specific musical skills. There is, of course a display element in all forms of music performance, though non-theatrical “classical” music presentations tend to downplay this. Here, there was for each separate item, spectacularly varied lighting involving the backdrops as well as the onstage activity, with the garb of both the instrumentalists and the singers strikingly Illuminated by lights fixed onto the costumes, resembling animated Christmas trees!

The singers and instrumentalists (including Claire Cowan, the music director) all wore identical garb, contributing to the idea of a unified “ensemble”, which I really liked – the “sameness” gave the message of the music added force by allowing our attention to move from those visuals to “what” the ensemble was doing. The three singers who performed the songs variously as solos, duos or trios all had microphones, as has been the custom in popular music genres for some time now, a reflection of accompaniments whose degree of amplification requires any singer to be similarly “helped” – I wasn’t sure that the quartet of string players each had instruments that were “electric” or otherwise, but every instrumentalist seemed to me to be “microphoned”, allowing all contributions to be “heard”. Despite the potential for “overload” I thought the decibel levels nicely-judged throughout, actually, the sound full and rich at climaxes without ever being overbearing.

All of this was in aid of a desire by the group’s members to pay homage to one of contemporary music‘s iconic figures, Icelandic “pop-star” Björk, regarded as one of the contemporary “fin de siècle” music greats as a composer, vocalist. arranger and producer. I went to the show with my niece, who’s a rock musician herself, and who, naturally enough, “knew” Björk and her music. Afterwards, she said (among other comments) something that I thought truly interesting, that the performance came across to her as a “homage” to Bjork by being something “further inspired” by her, and not merely a slavish copy of a collection of “hits” – though I didn’t know the original versions of these songs, Cowan had “arranged” most of them for her ensemble, so that they seemed to come up with what seemed to me appropriately fresh and immediate  force and colour, by way of presenting a “response” to Björk’s artistry and creativity (the songs Hidden Place, Human Behaviour, and Venus as a Boy were arranged by Sarah Belkner).

I thought the performances were terrific – all the instrumentalists shone and “impacted” with various solos and harmonic or contrapuntal combinations (as much a tribute to Cowan’s artistry as an arranger as to both her “model” and the musicians who were the conduit for the music) – and the three singers in their various ways both as soloists and in duet or trio form all “climbed into” Björk’s singularly-expressed words with interesting results. I thought the two women, Priya Sami (after a somewhat subdued, and slightly “overlaid” beginning), and Anna Coddington, from the moment she launched into her first number, put across “total immersion” in what they were doing – in the vocalisings of both you could “feel” the connection with the material. Interesting though it was to have a male singer (Mara TK) celebrating a female vocalist/composer, I found myself wondering why I wasn’t so enthusiastic about what he was doing – he seemed less involved, more like the “guest” artist (as the vocalists were referred to in the programme), rather than, as each of the women singers demonstrated in spadefuls, an integral part of the show.

My niece, Bec Coogan, with whom I went to the show remembered Björk from “way back” in her musical life, being struck at the time by the extent to which the singer brought something raw, a more unrefined emotion, into her music, which, back then, was unusual to the genre – of course there were plenty of non-mainstream people pushing those boundaries, but Björk seemed somehow uniquely able to bring those qualities with her as something new and distinctive in popular music culture – something along with what my niece called (somewhat tongue-in-cheek-like) Björk’s “cute pixie Icelandness”! It was, of course, an era in which women began asserting themselves and their sex in the western world – though Bec thought in Björk’s case it was as much to do with her individuality and strength as a creator as her sex, with her music speaking for itself in new and exciting ways.

As a result of the concert, the name Björk has for me “fleshed out” via her music and some spectacularly-presented performances of it, the “show” bearing the overall title “All is full of love”. I’m sure most people present would have readily identified each song as it came up, and wouldn’t have been at all worried that the programme didn’t have a performing list (which I would have appreciated!) – however the production and the musicians, together with Björk’s music, “held” me for the duration and readily conveyed the feeling of being caught up with something of value.

 

Enthralling and disturbing – NZ Opera’s take on Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – The Turn of the Screw
(libretto by Myfawny Piper, after the novella by Henry James)

Conductor: Holly Mathieson
Director: Thomas de Mallet Burgess
Designer: Tracy Grant Lord
Lighting: Matthew Marshall
Assistant Director: Eleanor Bishop

Cast: Anna Leese (Governess)
Jared Holt (Prologue/Peter Quint)
Madeleine Pierard (Miss Jessel)
Patricia Wright (Mrs Grose)
Alexa Harwood (Flora)
Alexandros Swallow (Miles)

Members of Orchestra Wellington
Leader: Justine Cormack
Piano/celesta: David Kelly

The Opera House, Wellington

Thursday, October 3rd 2019
(Wellington: Saturday. 5th October

Auckland: 18th, 20th, 23rd October)

 

It’s difficult to think of another opera whose overall theme, story-line and characterisations are more interlaced by ambiguities as Britten’s The Turn of the Screw –  the story on which the opera is based, Henry James’ novella of the same name, carries its own versions of much the same kinds of imponderables, though the opera seems, if anything, to further complicate and intensify the issues. The story tells of a young woman securing a job as governess of two children in a remote setting, only to feel with increasing conviction that the ghosts of a former valet and governess in the house are attempting to “possess” the minds of her young charges for their own purposes.

A critic in 1898 called Henry James’ work “A deliberate, powerful and horribly successful study of the magic of evil”, a judgement that has since been channelled into various critical streams regarding both novella and opera – firstly, that the governess is protecting the children from evil as presented by the ghosts; secondly, that the governess is “imagining” the ghosts, and is thus herself a danger to the children; and thirdly, that the story is purposefully ambiguous in not allowing the reader to decide between these viewpoints. The opera seems to uphold the third course, by ultimately refusing to ascribe blame for the narrative’s ultimate tragedy of the ending to any one cause or party, and leaving us with James’s own dictum, “Make the reader think the evil, make him think it for himself, and (one is) released from weak specifications”.

Mfawny Piper’s libretto gives the ghosts (both mute presences in James’s story) their own voices, well-wrought inventions which enable some background to the past – in particular, these “flesh out” something of the housekeeper Mrs Gros’s knowledge and judgement of each of the characters. She expresses this to the governess, most damningly of the former valet Peter Quint who, in the housekeeper‘s words “made free” with everyone, including one of the children, the boy Miles. Productions of the opera have, since the premiere in 1954, not unexpectedly moved from presenting an out-and-out “ghost” story, and “gone with the times”, by turns reinterpreting the work with Freudian depictions of a frustrated spinster bringing a fevered imagination to bear upon the scenario, fresh awarenesses of issues such as sexual exploitation and corruption of children, and gay “subtexts”, one example of the latter citing the celebrated recitation of Latin nouns by one of the children to the governess, as a “schoolboy list of phallic expressions”.

To its credit, the current production avoids any gross representation of any of those standpoints (as some ego-ridden contemporary opera presentations of any of the standard repertoire mercilessly and deleteriously indulge themselves in), and instead hints at possibilities, leaving its audiences in a state of wonderment (a version of James’s “leaving it to the reader”), which personalises reactions to the details of the events and their outcomes, thus creating far more interesting theatrical situations for people to “take away” from and ponder what they’ve witnessed. An example of this was the scene in the second act where the governess (Anna Leese) sits with the half-undressed Miles (Alexandros Swallow) on his bed, the young woman bent on competing for the boy’s attentions with the marauding ghost of Peter Quint (Jared Holt). The governess’s obvious “longing” for the affections of the children’s guardian (as witness her demeanour when previously  reading aloud what she had written in a letter to him) has sublimated into a version of the same longing for affection from Miles  –  here the dialogue suggested more the talk of lovers who need something from one another than of adult-and-child interaction, yet with the physical boundaries between the two (just) maintained.

In this respect, Anna Leese’s portrayal of the emotionally constrained and psychologically besieged governess – in thrall to a man (her employer, the children’s guardian) she has never met but is bonded to by a sense of duty permeated with her own Molotov-cocktail mix of fantasies involving his approval and her own self-worth – was incredibly finely-crafted. Together with her director, Thomas de Mallet Burgess, she built with great subtlety and whole-heartedness a character with endless depths of longing and anxiety, her voice running the gamut of expressiveness as regards its different versions of beauty and presence. Her singing, though not always entirely clear in terms of diction, gave voice to a character whose sincerity we might not have doubted but whose capacity for self-knowledge and decisive action seemed difficult to fathom, right up to the work’s unnerving conclusion. We left the theatre still carrying a relationship with her that resonated in a somewhat disturbing and unresolved manner – and within our consciousness of what we’ve witnessed echoed most hauntingly that phrase of W.B. Yeats’ from his poem “The Second Coming”, here given by Mfawny Piper to the ghosts to sing separately and together, pertaining to the children, but ultimately to all of us  – “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”.

The governess’s dramatic foil was Patricia Wright’s sonorously-delivered assumption of Mrs Grose, the housekeeper, a long-time servant at the house – a plainly-spoken, simple woman, great of heart, but conscious of her position and lack of education in comparison to the governess. Both singers negotiated this governess/housekeeper relationship with great pliancy and spontaneity, conveying the fragility of things at the point near the story’s climax where the housekeeper took the girl Flora away as if losing faith in the governess’s ability to protect her. I thought Wright’s announcing to the latter (with what seemed like some strangely grim satisfaction) that her letter to the children’s guardian was not delivered, had all the portents of doom required, even if her character at that point  was only a messenger.

The ghosts, Jared Holt’s darkly dangerous Peter Quint, and Madeleine Pierard’s compelling, positively gothic Miss Jessel, were introduced as “presences” long before they actually appeared – their silhouetting on a diaphanous stage-curtain at first underlined their “in the mind” aspect, but their presence was soon made all too tangible at subsequent moments. Jared Holt’s melismatic calls of Miles’ name produced a “frisson” of compelling unease, while Madeleine Pierard’s relatively darker but still riveting tones summonsing Flora gave a more sinister impression of rising from below (perhaps from the lake waters in the house’s grounds).  Holt relished the quasi-heroic music of self-portrait, his words styling him as “ the riderless horse” or the “hero-highwayman”, images associated with unfettered action and feral freedom – Pierard’s darker, more piteous music tied in with her character’s equating with “wronged women” of earlier times. The two ghosts brought matters to a head between one another superbly in their evocation of a shared past, one in which Quint was the wrongdoer and Miss Jessel his victim, uniting only in their common purpose of seeking “a friend”, Quint desiring Miles and Miss Jessel wanting Flora.

No praise can be too high for the on-stage work of the young singers playing the roles of the opera’s two children here in Wellington – Alexa Harwood’s Flora and Alexandros Swallow’s Miles. Neither could be faulted regarding what seemed to me like their total identification with the characters, as if they had each stepped into their respective roles and filled them out from within. Musically, too, each sang like both the angels and the mischief-makers one knows children are capable of appearing to be, all the while. Alexa Harwood’s Flora most convincingly wove her stage movements into the fabric of her singing performance, while Alexandros Swallow, his Miles more often the follower than the leader, matched his stage-sister at every turn, both through gesture and voice, bringing also his considerable theatrical skills to precisely-honed fruition in miming complex piano-playing patterns most convincingly. Each in their different ways conveyed the effect of the drama’s potential for harm upon his or her own character, to profound effect – remarkable performances!

I feel compelled to make the point that, though the opera was sung in English, a good deal of the text I found hard to follow, almost always when the voices were under pressure or singing in ensemble – a number of people I spoke to afterwards confirmed that they would have appreciated surtitles to better serve their understanding of the plot’s finer detail. The clearest enunciation came from Jared Holt in a piano-accompanied Prologue (the opening of a “written account” of the governess’s story) which he delivered in the role of a narrator. In my experience this loss of clarity is a common phenomenon with higher solo voices singing in the vernacular in a large venue – so, in making the difference for listeners between (a) a merely-pleasant-sounding and (b) a “made-more- intelligible” utterance I feel this would be something that everybody would surely want – having said all of this, I find myself wondering how singers themselves feel (felt?) about it?

Initially I was disappointed that the chamber ensemble accompanying the singers was set so far back on stage, almost as a kind of “noises off” accompaniment, having enjoyed so much the vivid interactions between voices and prominently-placed instruments in various recordings I listened to – in the course of the opera’s action I modified this viewpoint to an enjoyment and appreciation of the atmospheric ebb and flow of Britten’s scoring throughout the work. There was certainly no real lessening of impact during the opera’s most forceful moments, once our ears had gotten “the pitch of the hall”, and the quieter, more distant moments had a tragic beauty whose irony gave even more of an edge to the story’s overall impact.

The instrumental playing (largely members of Orchestra Wellington, led by violinist Justine Cormack), and complemented by pianist David Kelly (whose stylish solo accompanying Jared Holt’s narration opened the work) was directed with precision, verve and enthralling atmosphere by New Zealand-born conductor Holly Mathieson, whose work I hope to hear again before too long. I did want to SEE the players play, but as I’ve said the scenario called for a different conception which worked powerfully in its own way.

I couldn’t fathom at first why Alexandros Swallow (who sang Miles) was the first to appear on stage at the work’s beginning UNTIL he sat down at the piano and APPEARED to begin to play the aforementioned solo that accompanied the tenor to begin the opera – and then I remembered he was to play the piano in one of the opera’s later scenes (Variation XIII)  – both sequences were superbly played by the ACTUAL pianist David Kelly (and brilliantly mimed on stage by the young singer!). There were various divergencies of movement and stage placement from what I was expecting, all of which I thought worked save for the appearance of a bed pushed in for no apparent reason at the beginning of Act Two. The rest flowed with irresistible momentum!

Finally, this was a production that looked good and convincing, and maintained a kind of unity throughout – perhaps the scene by the lake during which Flora encounters Miss Jessel didn’t have much “outdoor” ambience, being kept under the omnipresent pall of darkly-inclined variants of illumination that marked nearly all of the scenarios! Still, Matthew Marshall’s lighting generally held us in thrall, scene by scene, by turns revealing and concealing, reassuring and malevolent, warm and chill, delicate and laden, the ambiences working well with designer Tracy Grant Lord’s “framed” portals which gave the spaces at once telescopically-extended vistas with oddly claustrophobic effects – “black holes” of imaginary space in which the characters play out life’s illusions. Director Thomas de Mallet Burgess, together with his assistant Eleanor Bishop, presided over a lucid, if challengingly ambivalent scenario of interaction between the players in the drama, encouraging the essences and their contradictions as expressed in people’s motivations for doing what they do – for ostensible good or evil, or for ends that accord with Peter Quint’s desperate enjoiner to Miles  – “You must be free!” Like anything (and this is perhaps Britten’s (and James’) ultimate message – such freedom comes at a price.

 

 

 

Piano fantasies, dreams and forebodings, from Tony Chen Lin at Wellington’s St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
TONY CHEN LIN (piano)

Music by Mozart, Schumann, Janáček and Gao Ping

MOZART – Fantasia and Sonata in C Minor, K,475 & 457
GAO PING – Daydreams – Suite for Piano (2019)
JANACEK – Piano Sonata 1.X.1905, “From the street”
SCHUMANN – Fantasia in C Major Op.17

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

Sunday, 29th September, 2019

Can it really be three years almost to the day that Tony Chen Lin was last playing for us in this same venue? – delighting and enthralling us on that occasion with a programme remarkable as much for its explorations of the music’s connecting threads and echoings as its contrasts and differences? Perhaps it was the unifying factor of having a similarly “only connect” spirit hovering about the music and the playing on this more recent occasion which helped to “telescope” the intervening period so markedly.

Here, the pianist’s choice of repertoire sought out a thread of fantasy running through each of the pieces, an opening up of worlds of imagination and conjecture across varied mindscapes, ranging from personal angst (Mozart), romantic longing (Schumann), whimsical daydreaming (Gao Ping) and presentiment of tragedy (Janáček). Each of these particular states of mind was presented in vividly-focused tones and sharply-coloured hues by Lin throughout the recital, an approach which eminently suited both the Janáček and Gao Ping works, and, I thought, brilliantly illuminated from within certain aspects of the two Mozart pieces bracketed together by the composer. I did, however, find the pianist’s approach to parts of the Schumann work something of a challenge, for reasons I’ll come to in due course.

Straightaway, with the opening of the great C Minor Fantasie K.475 (written six months after the K.457 Sonata but published together, and which immediately followed the former on this afternoon’s programme), we felt the music’s incredible weight of intensity in Lin’s playing, each note seemingly “reimagined” in our presence, with “flow-like-oil” legato phrases punctuated by emphatic single notes and chords – very “orchestral” playing, of a kind that used the St.Andrews’ modern concert grand to its full, sonorous advantage. And how beautifully was the E-flat theme floated, here, with a legato that lived and breathed, and the line teased out with decoration, before giving way to an abrupt, full-blooded transition into agitation and conflict, a veritable roller-coaster ride of physical and pianistic expression! Mozart’s music was here imbued by Lin’s playing with a kind of Lisztian energy, its progress modulating alarmingly, turning about on its heels, uttering a self-questioning phrase or two, then again precipitously plunging into a vortex-like realm of ferment and unrest. An imposing, monumental return to the opening brought a few moments of uneasy calm, Lin’s concentration and focus keeping us on our seats’ edges right up to the piece’s final ascent – rather like a theatrical curtain suddenly thrown open to reveal the show about to start! – and we were then plunged, without ceremony, into the forthright world of the C Minor Sonata’s opening.

The rather more classically-proscribed lines, textures and overall structures of K.457 still got a vigorous workout under Tony Lin’s fingers  – my first reaction to the energy and dynamic freedom of the playing was to ascribe it all to a “Beethovenish” spirit (in whose direction some of Mozart’s music seemed headed in any case) – but Mozart himself was, like Beethoven, adamant as to where much of his compositional impulse originated, in his heartfelt tribute to the second of old JS Bach’s surviving sons,  Carl Phillippe Emanuel Bach – “He is the father; we are the children,” Mozart reputedly said, and the younger Bach’s restless vigour and dramatic innovation in his music certainly made its mark on the former’s oeuvre in places, not the least in in both of these works.

In the first movement. Lin’s tightly-wound whiplash responses to the music’s running lines made for volatile exchanges and startling modulatory swerves in both the development and recapitulation sections, before a coda gathered in the music’s dynamics to sotto-voce effect, almost Gothic in its eeriness. A beautiful singing line emerged from the opening of the Adagio cantabile, Lin’s playing underlining the music’s sense of consolation as a balance against the agitations of both outer movements – a warm-hearted precursor of Beethoven’s adagio theme from his “Pathetique” Sonata added to the listener’s sense of well-being, which the subsequent Molto allegro Finale disturbingly undermined, with its nervously distracted opening and almost percussive outburst which followed,  the music given the full, “play-for-keeps” treatment, to which it stood up remarkably well. Though not a performance for preconceptions of almost any kind, I thought Lin’s burning zeal and expressive focus carried the day for the composer, demonstrating the extent of the music’s capacities to profoundly disturb and convey a sense of tragedy.

Lin spoke about each of the items beforehand easily and personably, and in the case of Gao Ping’s music, with warmth and affection, the composer having been the pianist’s teacher at the University of Canterbury. Daydreams, a suite for piano (2019) was actually written for Lin, the music commissioned by Jack C Richards. Nowadays, Gao Ping lives and works in Beijing, the music tellingly mirroring that fact in places! – but the composer calls the music “dreams of everyone”. The pieces replicate a Chinese literary tradition of short story-like “sketches”, of ordinary, everyday things in people’s lives. The first, “Twilight”, generated a plethora of colours decorating a gently-insistent musical line,  both scintillating and spontaneously fusing together. Then “Songs without Words” , a piece which instantly reminded me of John Psathas’ iconic “Waiting for the Aeroplane” began with repeated atmospheric notes whose tones were joined by the pianist’s voice, long-held, haunting vocalisings, sounding like a “song after work”, everything delicately brushed in and at rest.

The following “Dance” (the first of two) quirkily came to life, its angular rhythms growing in insistence, before falling back and beginning again. Next, “Blues over a lost Phone” might well have been a present-day mirror-piece for Beethoven’s “Rage over a lost penny”, but with the player again breaking into song, a lament for his phone’s caprice and his own carelessness! – declamation, dialogue, displeasure and despair from the singer, and piquant irony from the piano part! A second “Dance”, wild and awkward, followed, the playing by turns poised and frenzied as the music required, interludes of calm building inexorably into cataclysmic upheavals of energy. The final “Wind Prayers” piece came as balm for the senses in different ways, the piece itself intended as a supplication to nature to bring relief to Beijing, a tragically air-polluted city. All the more poignant were the vocalisings of the pianist during this last piece, repeating the mantra “Come wind, come”, alternated with solemn piano chords and snatches of birdsong – so very moving.

No let-up of intensity was provided by the Janáček work which followed the interval – a piece made all the more remarkable by its genesis, first performance and subsequent “survival” history! Angered at the killing of a Moravian worker by Austrian troops at a demonstration in Brno in 1905, Janáček wrote a three-movement work with the titles “Presentiment”, “Death” and “Funeral march”, but the day before the concert the self-critical composer destroyed the manuscript of the work’s final movement, allowing only the first two movements to be played. He then afterwards took what was left and threw the score in the Vltava River.

What he didn’t know until 20 years later, was that the pianist, Ludmila Tučková, had secretly made a copy of the two remaining movements, and retained them until 1924, when she confessed to Janáček what she had done – he thereupon thought better of his hasty actions and allowed their publication! Such a poignant amalgam of tragic loss and triumphant recovery itself “colours” the remains of the work, expressing here in Lin’s hands the full impact of its componential weight.

We heard the composer’s characteristic blend of lyricism and strength at the work’s beginning, the pianist’s sharply-etched lines, forceful chordings and tightly-strung figurations recreating an inexorable flow of agitated, ever-burgeoning emotion towards its tragic inevitability – such battered, fatally “wounded” silences! Out of this came the second movement, at once still and declamatory, the utterances bewildered by shock and grief, turning to ritual-like means as a way of giving tongue to feelings. The lament gathered weight and agonised stridency, before falling away, the music repeating, trance-like, the same rising motif, a kind of unanswered question, which eventually drifted into nothingness – because the pianist had told us he wanted to dedicate his performance to the victims of the Christchurch mosque shootings earlier this year, the music was left to resonate in silence at the very end.

No amount of silence would have been sufficient for anything to follow in the wake of that music (perhaps we should have taken the Mahlerian step of going for a five-minute walk outside, clearing our emotional decks, and then come back, ready to plunge into the Schumann!)………still, there it was, the latter’s C Major Fantasie’s grand opening, a resounding single note at the head of floods of swirling figurations, suggesting exhilaration, excitement, agitation, turmoil, but with moments of telling lucidity, introspection, and ostensibly quixotic humour in between the great declamations of emotion!

This opening paragraph was handled by Lin with plenty of romantic sweep and ardour, everything carried along in great surging waves, the repeated descending motif very Florestan-like (Florestan was Schumann’s wild and impassioned alter-ego), though for me carrying the swashbuckling energies to a point of over-insistence in a couple of passages that might have had a lighter, more quixotic touch (the Im lebhaften Tempo section, for instance, where the left hand here obscured the right hand in places) – still, the Im Legendenton section was beautifully voiced, everything hushed, tender, and richly supported.

A lovely legato touch marked the end of the Im Tempo section, though once again the music’s playful aspect was, I felt, too readily pushed into frenetic mode; and even the more gently breathed cadences here had to quickly fill their lungs to say their piece just before the Esrtes Tempo returned. Again the recitative-like passages leading to a heartfelt Adagio section were beautifully done, as was the reprise to Im Tempo, but I wanted the Beethoven quote at the coda’s beginning (from his song-cycle An die fern Geliebte) to cast a kind of “spell” right from its entrance over the whole concluding episode – here I felt we were in need of Schumann’s other “alter-ego”, the poet and dreamer, Eusebius – the theme’s announcement on this occasion seemed simply too brusque, and not sufficiently “transformational” to be the something which the whole movement had been leading up to, though Lin then played its subsequent repetitions with more rapture and sensitivity.

Lin “strummed” the second movement’s chordal opening warm-heartedly into being, allowing the music at the outset a steady, dignified momentum, even if the following dotted-rhythmic gait of the music then seemed to want to push him along with ever-increasing insistence, narrowing the margins for any wry humour or variation. But then, the pianist won our hearts by unflinchingly fronting up to the piece’s “horror coda” with its attendant thrills and spills, and, amid the flailing notes, living to tell the tale!

Sanity was restored with the third movement’s opening, played here with the utmost sensitivity, allowing us to relish moments such as the beautiful nuancing of the melody as it ascended for the first time, and the gossamer delicacy of the cross-rhythms answering that opening ascent. Lin didn’t play my favourite sequence in the movement with quite enough “hurt” for me – the theme at Etwas bewegter and its modulating repetitions, with their heart-stopping, inwardly-resonating arpeggiated responses – but seemed to want to move all the more quickly to the passionate welling-up of emotion at the piece’s central climax, which he brought off splendidly, as he did  its recapitulation, right from the hushed beginning. And though I’ve heard the work’s coda performed with more lump-in-the-throat circumspection, this was a young man’s urgently-conceived and passionately wrought response to music which has, of course, no single way it must be performed, but allows for treasurable and necessary individual variation. Such was demonstrated here for us by Tony Chen Lin with undeniable conviction, and, as was reflected in a most heartfelt audience response, for our very great pleasure!

 

Concerted and ensembled efforts from NZSM string players give pleasure at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
The New Zealand School of Music STRING ENSEMBLE

Music by Haydn, Kimber and Bartok

Soloists:
Rebecca Warnes (‘cello)
JOSEF HAYDN – ‘Cello Concerto in C Major (Ist.Mvt. – Moderato)

Ellen Murfitt (violin)
JOSEF HAYDN – Violin Concerto in G Major (2nd Mvt. – Adagio)

Henry Burton-Wood (violin)
JOSEF HAYDN – Violin Concerto in G Major (3rd Mvt. – Allegro)

Debbie King (viola)
MICHAEL KIMBER – Variations on a Polish Folk-Song (abridged version)

BELA BARTOK – Divertimento for String Orchestra  Sz 113 BB.118
Allegro non troppo / Molto Adagio / Allegro assai

New Zealand School of Music String Players
Martin Riseley (conductor)

Wednesday September 25th 2019

What a heartwarming occasion this was, counteracting the bitter chill of the wind outside, making nonsense of what appeared to be a sunny day. Josef Haydn’s music was just the job to lighten the spirits, and we were lucky enough to get a kind of “made-up” concerto for violin and cello, freshly discovered (!)and performed forthwith for our pleasure by various students from the New Zealand School of Music!

No happier beginning to a concerto exists than the first movement of Haydn’s C Major ‘Cello Concerto, and conductor Martin Riseley encouraged his players to plunge into the notes energetically and emerge smiling, then launch the ascending lines of the second subject with plenty of air beneath the notes! Soloist Rebecca Warnes, having contributed to the opening tutti and “played herself in”, fearlessly dived into the music with similar élan, her command of the music’s shape and emphasis compelling, allowing the notes to sing in places where a vocal line was called for, and attacking the more demanding passages with plenty of energy – an occasional phrase I wanted her to “expand” just a bit more, as if expressing just as much enjoyment as determination; but such things evolve with and from within performers, and she showed plenty of identification with the composer’s irrepressible and adventurous spirit.

The composer remained, but player, instrument, concerto and key-signature were changed in a trice for the second movement! This was the adagio from Haydn’s G Major violin concerto, played with generously-wrought tones by Ellen Murfitt, her singing line warmed by the merest touch of vibrato, the intensity seeming to leave little room for light and shade at first, which did come with the second, minor-key section of the music. An assuredly-delivered cadenza finished with what I though a slightly awkward “taking up” of the music by the ensemble, but the accompanying was otherwise easeful and atmospheric. A change of soloist again, and the music danced onwards, the new player, Henry Burton-Wood, joining in with the opening tutti, before carrying the splendidly vigorous energies of the work forward, his instrument producing a bright, silvery tone, the higher passages a particularly engaging feature of his playing.

A new name to me was that of Michael Kimber, an American viola-player and composer, currently based as a teacher at Iowa City’s Coe College, and with an impressive list of compositions for both viola and violin to his credit. We heard a work “Variations on a Polish Song” for viola and ensemble , here played in what the programme called a “shortened version”.The viola soloist, Debbie King, brought the music into being with characteristically soulful tones, an expressive, out-of-doors sound, in keeping with the “folk song” aspect, the orchestra stealing in over a viola phrase, and accompanying the melody’s repeat.

The work allowed the soloist ample opportunity for both display and expression of feeling, moving between double-stopping sequences for the viola against intense accompaniments, followed by dance-like variations, firstly graceful and ritual-like, then catchy, more vigorous Polonaise-like.moments, and leavening these energies with more inward expressions of feeling. The music was rounded off with such a moment, the ensemble reintroducing the theme, before a brief flourish from the viola concluded a pleasing and well-supported solo performance.

The students then tackled one of the string orchestra repertoire’s most challenging pieces, Bela Bartok’s Divertimento, written in the shadow of the oncoming Second World War, and the last work the composer would write before leaving his native Hungary for good. In three movements, the piece opened with a folk-like theme, here presented strongly and purposefully, bringing out the writing’s acerbic qualities along with a sense of the dance – the solo strings sequences provided an engaging contrast (lovely solo viola phrases), before the opening theme returned building the intensities into exchanges which seemed to  “play” with the material – Martin Rieseley and the students eased their way through the music’s often disconcerting changes of trajectory and mood, returning with a sense of having “been somewhere” to the music’s gentle, rueful conclusion.

The work’s Molto adagio second movement evoked winter chills and sombre thoughts, the atmosphere cold and dark – violins and violas exchanged characteristic intensitites, the former piercing and intense, the latter dark-browed and purposeful. The playing brought out the music’s confrontational anxieties and questionings, the buildup of sounds amazing in their focused intensities, the ensemble bluntly “shutting down” any solo instrumental attempt to lighten the mood, and further deepening the despair with an eerie Shostakovich-like sequence.  Almost out of nowhere came a forthright, bitter-sweet folk-like utterance, one which “rescued” our forsaken sensibilities and guided us gently towards the music’s rather “spooked” conclusion – all very involving!

At first we seemed to be plunged back into conflict by the finale’s beginning, but the players suddenly kicked up the music’s allegro assai heels in the manner of a lively dance, the first violin leading the way, and the rest of the orchestra following, in ripieno style. This was all tremendous-sounding fun! – Riseley marshalled his players’ tones, producing an impressive unison, which was then “morphed”  into a fugal passage, inverting the theme along the way! A lovely violin solo led to a motoric rhythm with the dance theme inverted, swarms of angry bees dive-bombing the dancers! The cellos came to the rescue, dancing the music off in a different direction, and taking evasive action against the bee-swarms, intent on causing confusion and chaos! The players then began a most charmingly tip-toe pizzicati version of the dance which left the bees angrily buzzing, the dancers frenetically throwing themselves every which way, the lower strings shrugging their shoulders at the goings-on and the music signing off with an upward flourish!

Versions….and versions – Beethoven, Mahler (orch. Michael Vinten) and Bruckner, from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
BEETHOVEN – Overture to the Opera “Fidelio” Op.72b
MAHLER (orch.Vinten) – Piano Quartet in A Minor (1876) (first public performance)
BRUCKNER – Symphony No. 3 in D Minor “Wagner Symphony” (1874 version)

Michael Vinten (conductor)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra

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

Sunday, 22nd September, 2019

As Michael Vinten told Radio NZ Concert’s “Upbeat” interviewer David Morriss during the week preceding the concert, none of the three works presented by the orchestra were original versions of the pieces. The closest we came to hearing a work representing its composer’s first thoughts was in the Third Symphony of Anton Bruckner – and this was the second of no less than six (or was it eight?) documented versions of the same composition by name. It could thus have been called a concert of music whose composers couldn’t make their minds up!

Each of the pieces thus carried a uniquely remarkable tale of composing and rewriting – Beethoven’s  overture to his opera “Fidelio” was a completely rewritten piece compared with the original and two other revised versions of the work that the composer had previously produced, all with the name “Leonore” (the opera’s original title). Unlike each of the “Leonore” Overtures, the “Fidelio” overture was a “stand-alone” item, making no reference to the plot or the opera’s themes, thereby keeping intact for the listener the events of the opera until their actual exposition in the work! Michael Vinten’s own programme notes explained all of this and the situation regarding the concert’s two other items most absorbingly!

As an assemblage the three works made the concert an enticing prospect for the listener, an adventurous and stimulating amalgam of the familiar and the new. And if the orchestra players themselves felt at all daunted at the prospect of taking on the longest in duration of all the symphonies written by Anton Bruckner, it didn’t show beforehand, except, perhaps for some less-than-unanimous ensemble in parts of the concert’s opening item, the “Fidelio” Overture, which could have just as easily been put down to the piece being rehearsed less assiduously than was the remainder of the programme, due to the latter’s well-nigh obvious demands (pure conjecture on this reviewer’s part, of course!)

After a couple of uncertain entries and chordings during the piece’s slow introduction, Beethoven’s work was negotiated with ever-increasing confidence by the players, solos from the oboe, clarinet and horn steadily and reliably keeping with the conductor’s vigorous lead through thorny thickets of rhythmic syncopation, the performance reaching a transfiguring moment at the opening’s reprise, with the horns’ beautiful playing casting a “glow” over the music that resulted in everything coming together and producing a fizzing, sizzling ending!

The orchestra having “played itself in”, and the conventionalities of an “overture” having been observed, it was time for everybody to get down to business, firstly, with that most tantalising of rarities, a premiere performance! I was surprised that no mention of any such circumstance had been made, either in the programme or on the aforementioned radio interview – but there it was, the first scheduled performance of Michael Vinten’s orchestrated version of Gustav Mahler’s single-movement Piano Quartet in A Minor (besides the first movement left more-or-less completed, there are a few fragments of an intended scherzo extant). I can only attribute the lack of publicity regarding this event’s “first-time” occasion to Vinten’s own avoidance of self-promotion, putting the composer and his music first, instead! As well, the Quartet was linked to the Bruckner Symphony played after the interval by dint of Mahler himself having made a piano duet version of the Symphony, one published in 1880 (a not uncommon occurrence with orchestral music in the nineteenth century before the invention of the gramophone)…………

The Quartet music itself began darkly and purposefully, filled with romantic, atmospheric feeling. The brass produced lovely, dark-hued sounds, the effect somewhat Schumannesque to my ears as the winds answered the serious, sombre statements, the oboe lines in particular shaped strongly and pliably. I thought the brass’s splendid restatement of the opening theme reminiscent of Mendelssohn in a “Ruy Blas” mood, with the strings and winds helping to build up to a terrific climax – a great unison shout by the orchestra stimulated some trenchant, exciting music-making, with a repeated dotted-rhythm phrase storing up energy and momentum, again capped off by well-rounded brass statements.

Solo violin and ‘cello together with the oboe took us back to the dark, brooding opening, before the wind and brasses “martialized” the music beneath the string lines, building once more to the “grand manner”. A short solo violin cadenza later we were into epilogue country, with the brasses nobly sounding the end, leaving two pizzicato chords to finish the piece. At a good fifteen minutes‘ worth, this intensely poetic, romantically wrought music seemed to me a strong and significant addition to the orchestral concert repertoire, thanks to Vinten’s and his players’ sterling efforts, and the conductor’s expertise and zeal on behalf of Gustav Mahler.

More epic questings awaited both musicians and audience following the concert’s interval, with a performance of Bruckner’s Third Symphony more-or-less as originally written in 1873, with a few “touching-ups” on the part of the composer made the following year. Unlike the version of the work I first got to know (one which the composer made in 1889 some time after the disastrous premiere of the work, in an edition by Leopold Nowak) this was how Bruckner originally intended the work to “sound”, with a whopping twenty minutes’ additional music to that contained on my first LP (DGG) of the Symphony! We were obviously in for something of a re-appraisal, with the original version giving the D Minor work the distinction of being the longest of the composer’s works in that genre.

The famous trumpet tune which Wagner had so admired here (and which gave the symphony its nickname) opened the work over the strings’ forward-thrusting rhythms, the player here beautifully “onto it” (as was the reply of the horns), and the orchestra building the crescendo steadily and surely towards the great shouts that led to a modulated repeat of the thrusting rhythms and resounding orchestral declamations! Never has a symphony “announced” its arrival more gloriously than here – and as sequence followed sequence the players bent their backs to the task with both enthusiasm and detemination. Apart from the occasional entry and ensemble stumble amid the music’s torturous, cross-rhythmed course, conductor and players steered a remarkably sure-footed and true-toned passage through the movement’s many changes of mood, pace and tone, holding enough power and energy in reserve for the coda to make its properly overwhelming effect.

The Adagio alternated between tender utterance and forthright declamation, full, rich tones from the strings being succeeded with steady support from the winds and then the brass. Exchanges between the winds and horns generated a kind of rapt, sacred ritual aspect to the figures in places, and the strings generated plenty of fervour in their soaring lines. We also enjoyed the rousing “Tannhauser” quote played by the brass, who proceeded to take the music by the scruff of the neck and deliver spadefuls of its glory and majesty.  And that moment towards the movement’s end which always reminds me of Dvorak’s famous “Largo” melody from his “New World” Symphony was here balm for the soul, the horns holding their supporting notes magnificently.

Sinuous, writhing violins launched the scherzo, building the crescendo towards the great strings-and-brass-and-timpani shouts of purpose and resolve, beside which the second subject sounded a tad anaemic here, the strings happier with the opening than with the peregrinations of the discursive second subject – the Trio, however, was charmingly done, the violas relishing their exchanges with the violins, the latter a tad dry and insect-like in effect. The finale’s opening, eerie, whirling string-ostinati had an almost space-age effect, with the brass entry terrific and the strings resolutely keeping their whirling rhythms – great work from all concerned. The players got a lovely lift from the dance rhythms of the second subject, and brought out the tenderness of the brief moment before the dance started up again. The great syncopated fanfares dovetailed their figurations to great and outlandish effect – a most stirring sound! – and the brasses heroically soared over the top of the rest of the band with their resounding lines.

Everybody bent their backs to the task splendidly during a middle sequence where the composer seemed to frenetically reprise the opening, the dance melody and the syncopated fanfare, at which point we heard the horns nobly suggesting that a “promised land” was imminent – after brief reminiscences of the first three movements, the orchestra opened the tonal floodgates and, in the grandest possible way, ascended the final slopes to the music’s hard-won, but golden-toned summit of achievement – a brief, breathless hiatus of “are we really there?” after the final chord was followed by oceans of applause from all of us who had made the journey with these intrepid musicians!  – surely one of the orchestra’s finest achievements, thrills and spills included, and a tribute in itself to the vision and unfailing skills and energies of conductor Michael Vinten.

 

 

Stroma breathes life into its collection of “Sonic Portraits”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – Sonic Portraits

Works by : Simon Eastwood/Alistair Fraser, Liza Lim, Ashley Fure, Salina Fisher,
                    Rebecca Saunders, Toru Takemitsu

SIMON EASTWOOD/ALISTAIR FRASER – “Pepe” from Te Aitanga Pepeke (2019)
LIZA LIM – An Ocean Beyond Earth (2016)
ASHLEY FURE – Soma (2012)
SALINA FISHER – Kingfisher (2018)
REBECCA SAUNDERS – Ire (2018)
TORU TAKEMITSU – Water Ways (1977)

(All performances except that of the Takemitsu work were NZ premieres)

Alistair Fraser (putorino)
Séverine Ballon (solo ‘cello)

STROMA – Bridget Douglas (piccolo, flute(s), Thomas Guldborg/Lenny Sakovsky (percussion), Anna van der Zee, Kristina Zerlinska, Megan Molina, Rebecca Struthers, Andrew Thomson (violins), Emma Barron, Andrew Thomson (violas), Ken Ichinose (‘cello), Patrick Barry (clarinet(s), Gabriela Glapska, Amber Rainey (pianos),  Alexander Gunchencko (double-bass), Michelle Velvin, Madeleine Crump (harps)

New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Shed 11
Customhouse Quay,  Wellington

Thursday, 19th September, 2019

I came across an interesting article on the American composer Virgil Thomson when exploring the idea of “Portraits” in music. Inspired by novelist Gertrude Stein in Paris during the mid-1920s, who had made a series of free-association “literary portraits” written in a single sitting, Thomson thought he would try the same technique in music composition – his subject would “sit”, and Thomson would compose, on the spot – the subject was allowed to do anything except talk, so that the “psychic transference” (the composer’s words) of the process wouldn’t be otherwise impeded. Picasso was one of those sceptical about the idea, but posed for Thomson, anyway, and received, for his pains, a hyper-energetic bitonal piano “etude” which Thomson called “Bugles and Birds”. To many of the subjects their pieces came across more as how the composer was feeling about them at the time, than what they felt about themselves.

“Portraits” abound in music composition, with perhaps the most well-known musical “gallery” of personalities being that contained in Elgar’s “Enigma” Variations. But away from the direct “visual art” process connotations pursued by Thomson, the “musical portraits” idea has been put to multifarious use, from well-known large-scale instances such as Mussorgsky’s “Pictures from an Exhibition” and Schumann’s “Carnaval” for solo piano, to stand-alone works like Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” or miniatures like Edvard Grieg’s “Niels W.Gade” from his Op. 57 ”Lyric Pieces”, or Elgar’s “Rosemary” 1915 (for piano or orchestra).

Stroma’s “Sonic Portraits” collection further enlarged the concept of musical depiction in  no uncertain terms.  with a collection of evocations of all kinds, mythological, other-worldly, psychosomatic, avian, emotional and locational. The venue chosen by the ensemble, the NZ Portrait Gallery at Shed 11, was itself a challenge for listeners like myself who arrived just in time for the concert and had to sit some way off down a narrow-ish, unraked space, feeling a wee bit divorced from the sound-sources through having little or no sight-lines, and then having to watch one’s back in close proximity to the art hung on perilously imminent walls when one got up to talk with someone or to go! Happily, the vivid and arresting quality of both music and its presentation by these players compensated amply for any such privations, even if I was disconcerted to see Séverine Ballon, the guest ‘cellist, carrying off the platform at her solo item’s conclusion a violin in addition to her ‘cello, which combination I had no earthly (!) idea she was using!

Beginning with the mythological, we heard “Pepe”, a piece from a collection called Te Aitanga Pepeke (the insect world), currently being developed by composer Simon Eastwood in conjunction with ngā taonga pūoro artist Alistair Fraser. This piece evolved out of a transcription by Fraser of a work by Eastwood, the two then reworking the music to bring forth an interactive and intimate dialogue between the ensemble (violin, viola, ‘celli, bass flute and percussion) and the expressive pūtorino. The instrument is unique in that it functions both as a trumpet (the kokiri o te tane /male voice) and as a flute (the waiata o te hine / female voice) and is reckoned to be the home of Hine Raukatauri, the Mäori goddess of flute music. Here, it was Alistair Fraser’s gloriously trumpet-like pūtorino who played Hine’s amorous swain, Pepe, the voice by turns vigorous and insinuating, moving in accord with the ambient earth-sounds of the ensemble.

Having felt the earth’s breath on our cheeks we were then transported by the alchemy of suggestiveness to one of the planet Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, via Australian composer Liza Lim’s work for solo ‘cello,  An Ocean Beyond Earth. Lim’s imagination was obviously fired by recent “news from space” regarding the presence of a body of water akin to an ocean on Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, according to data collected during NASA’s Cassini exploratory mission to the world of one of our solar system’s most iconic members. The same data has suggested that Enceladus has an environment which could support the existence of life as we know it.

Prefacing her work with evocative excerpts from poetry by the 13th-Century poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, and a quotation from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”, Lim’s music, brought into being by cellist Séverine Ballon’s exquisitely sensitive “voicings” at the outset, developed a kind of intermittent dialogue between wind-borne sounds of the air, and grittier, rather more corporately substantial gesturings. Some of the flourishings brought to mind Bach ‘cello suite utterances, framing whole sequences of spatial infinities, juxtapositionings that helped “define” each sound’s antithesis, in places having an almost “electrical” quality of current and intensity, thus throwing into bold relief a parallel sense of objects wrought in a cauldron of ancient natural creation. Other sound-relationships deemed to denote meetings and then minglings of states, effortful “seconds” suddenly scrambled wildly and frenetically, for example, as if “spooked” by their own forwardness – perhaps Virginia Woolf’s quoted cry to the heavens of “Consume me” sparked the irruption; or was it the thought of a limitless “sound of no shore”? The music’s concluding darkness merely opened its cloak and enveloped us in an enigmatic response.

I found listening to the next work – Ashley Fure’s Soma –  something of an unsettling experience, as its “specific psychological referent” was the composer’s own grandmother, who had (perhaps still has) advanced Parkinson’s Disease – the thought that we were anatomising the aberrant condition of an actual human being resulted in my finding it difficult to maintain an uninvolved focus of response, the sounds for me occasionally conveying all too piteously the “plight” of the individual subject and the helplessness of her state being “showcased” – the composer may well have intended such engagement to occur as part of the listening experience, of course.

The degree of “inner turmoil” conveyed by the ensemble here, something “locked in”, but occasionally trying to escape or express something, was all too palpable, with both physical and mental processes respectively conveyed – a rumbling, pulsating percussive presence seemed to express the former in terms of heartbeat, breath and bloodflow, while what seemed like infinite manifestations of both gestural and ambient “disturbance” were engendered by what the composer called “aberrations in placement, pressure, angle, force and speed” of instrumental activity,  and resulting in “fragile and chaotic” soundscapes. While these impulses voicelessly cried out, the percussion rumbled throughout like a kind of tinnitus, disconcertingly looming and then receding, before a final gentle but sharpish blow mercifully suspended the process!

Rather more delightful disengagement was then offered by Salina Fisher’s work Kingfisher, written in response to a poem by Robert McFarlane as part of a larger work The Lost Words, and performed by the New York-based ensemble Amalgama in 2018. Beginning with a not altogether unexpected “splash” and a series of propulsive flurries, the ensuing birdsong figurations were leavened most adroitly by delicate ambient touches, the whole having a delicacy and grace which accorded with the poet’s “neat and still” description of the bird, one which conflagrated as it flashed downwards into the water, and into a different kind of ambience, the piano’s liquid grace flooding into the air-blown vistas and completing the music’s ritual.

Though unspoken, words featured prominently in this  “Portraits” presentation, via the many stimulating and evocative texts and commentaries associated with these pieces. Rebecca Sanders’ Ire was no exception, her accompanying note including a quote from Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher whose paradoxical train of thought here delightfully derailed my every attempt to get through the passage unscathed! Sanders spoke of the “sonic potential” of a trill, hinting at the paradox of the concealment of musical activity beneath a “surface of silence”. Ire is one of three works for strings which Sanders has written to explore this quality – she spoke of exploring “two diametrically opposed guises of the trill” in her work, this seeming to take the form of anatomising both fast and slow trill-like figurations. 

A quiet, almost subversive beginning to the music presented a silence “stirred and shaken” by the instrumental activity, deepening with heavy percussion and double-bass rumblings and groanings. Séverine Ballon’s solo cello trilled in varied and exploratory ways under the fingers of the player, to which the ensemble added weight in the guise of unexplained energies from a void. The “Ire” of the piece’s title accumulated all too readily and nastily, reaching points of frenzy almost as a process of repeated expiation, the whole punctuated by rumbling and roaring percussion (I was too far back to see much of the players’ actual gesturings which would have enhanced a sense of the physical ebb and flow of the outbursts) – uncannily, at the point where I felt we had “had enough” the sounds seemed to abruptly transmorgrify as if by telepathetic means – string harmonies tipped, swayed and groaned softly as if great doors were being swung open to expose the futility of anger – all seemed suddenly like “thistledown on the wind”……

Written well over a quarter-century before any of the above pieces was the work that concluded the programme, Tōru Takemitsu’s 1977 work Water Ways. Inspired by a visit to the gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, the composer was at first reportedly unmoved by the regularity and symmetry of the world-famous vistas until he noticed that a woman visitor had disturbed the water surfaces on one of the ponds – “Only then the music came”, the composer enigmatically remarked!

But what music! – from the very first notes a saturated soundscape, with a piano that simply couldn’t help sounding so Debussy-like with every utterance, vibraphones that exuded pure liquid outpourings, and two harps whose limpid tones helped bind together a flowing and interactive ensemble. These sources were coloured by strings and clarinet whose lines represented fluidity of contrasting textures and tones at their most focused and vibrant, whether a spectacularly cascading waterfall-like gesture from the piano or a long-breathed distillation of stillness and purity of flow from the clarinet. Whether breathtakingly still or gently and raptly moving to a larger rhythmic pull, the players generated a spellbinding amalgam of depths and shallows whose patternings coalesced into a long-breathed three-note life-dance, from which ritual the music bade us farewell, the clarinet uttering the last mysterious, distant word.

A significant proportion of my enjoyment of this concert was registering the pleasure expressed by others sitting around and about me, and, most happily, discussing each of the items with a fellow audience-member next to me – herself a musician, and similarly struck by the range and depth of intensities generated by the players and their conductor, Hamish McKeich, from the evening’s programme. That a concert made up almost entirely of New Zealand premieres of contemporary music could so obviously satisfy and enthral its audience spoke volumes regarding the skill of the performers and the receptivity of their listeners – definitely a feather in Stroma’s cap regarding its avowed mission statement of bringing to audiences new music from both home and abroad.

 

 

 

Nailing it with Style – Circa’s “The Pink Hammer” a delightful and moving tribute to playwright Michele Amas

Posted on by Peter Mechen

THE PINK HAMMER – a play by Michele Amas
Circa Theatre, Wellington

Director: Conrad Newport
Cast :
Louise       Anne Chamberlain
Helen        Ginette McDonald
Siobhan    Harriet Prebble
Woody     Alex Greig
Annabel   Bronwyn Turei

Set and Costume Design – Daniel Williams
Lighting Design – Tony Black

Circa Theatre, Taranaki St., Wellington

Tuesday, 10th September, 2019 (until 5th October)

Author of “The Pink Hammer”, playwright Michele Amas – also an actor, theatre director and poet – died at the very end of 2016, after a 30-year career in television, radio and theatre. Towards the end of her career she turned her hand increasingly to writing, to poetry and for the theatre, producing firstly a pantomime, and then a play, the present production, premiered in 2014 at Palmerston North’s Centrepoint Theatre. She described “the Pink Hammer”, her own work, as “outrageous, laughter-filled, and heartwarming”, a judgement confirmed by a review of that first production, which succinctly described the play’s action as “what happens to a bloke when his man’s shed is taken over by four women who want to get their hands on his tools”.

I saw Michele Amas act only once, in her second of two appearances, 25 years apart (!) in Robert Lord’s Joyful and Triumphant, her portrayal “owning” the character wholly, as she had reportedly done a different character the first time round – I thought her acting “sensitive, low-keyed, but deeply-wrought….”, indicating across the roles of writer and actor something of the command of an impressive range of sensibility and response in her theatrical makeup.

On the face of things (the title included), “The Pink Hammer” was a kind of rollicking “Girls can do anything” presentation intended to further the cause of women’s equality, in this case depicting a scenario of a group of women infiltrating an overtly-regarded bastion of maleness. Stereotypes of all kinds abounded at the outset of the play’s action, such as the setting, a “dedicated” man-hole – in this case a handyman’s shed, replete with tools of the “trade”, along with the presence of various “stimulants” associated with a bloke’s relaxation after a job well done, including liquid refreshment (beer in a fridge), erotica (a pin-up calendar) and entertainment (television). Into this “holy-of-holies” came four women, introducing themselves one-by-one, each a distinctive (if recognisable) personality, all driven by different needs to attempt to acquaint themselves with the use of carpenter’s tools.

Straightaway the tensions began winding in unexpected ways as we discovered that the basic carpentry “workshop” was to have been held by another woman, Maggie, who seemed meantime to have taken herself off somewhere unexpectedly, putting her hitherto unsuspecting husband, Woody (engagingly and convincingly given the full “Kiwi bloke” treatment by Alex Greig), in the “gun seat” as the unwilling, in fact, initially downright hostile, would-be instructor. It was left to one of the women, Helen (Ginette McDonald, with a masterly, no-nonsense display of compelling persuasiveness), having observed evidence of a certain illicit activity on Woody’s part, to slyly convince him of the face-saving efficacy of “taking over” as the workshop’s saviour, in the process matter-of-factly revealing her particular and singular motivation for acquiring woodworking skills.

We had by this stage gleaned the extent of the variety of personality “types” depicted by these four wannabe woodworker women! – Ginette McDonald’s hard-bitten Helen didn’t take long to mercilessly anatomise the painful awkwardness of Anne Chamberlain’s well-meaning but gauche and insecure Louise in their characters’ initial interactions. However. the gulf between the two was then heartwarmingly “packed in” by the irrepressible sunniness of the young Irish colleen Siobhan (winningly and liltingly – a beautiful singing voice – portrayed by Harriet Prebble). Her attractive amalgam of youthful exuberance and not-quite-innocent suggestibility made for plenty of theatrical conundrumming in itself, let alone when set against the “straight-down-the-line” feminism of the guidance counseller, Annabel – Bronwyn Turei’s initial strength and energy made the hidden vulnerability of the latter’s character all the more touching when revealed.

In adding Alex Greig’s delightfully “gung-ho” (if all too human) exuberance as Woody to this already richly-wrought mix, one had a recipe for interaction replete with possibility, especially when his initial hostility began to erode for various reasons……perhaps there were sequences in which Amas’s writing did in places over-favour words at the expense of action, as has been suggested elsewhere, but this cast had the vocal energies as well as the physical fluidities to make everything seem as if in mid-stream, rather than caught in eddyings that impaired the flow. In fact I couldn’t have imagined the play’s dialogue and movement better done than here, a tribute not only to the playwright and the actors, but to director Conrad Newport, who, of course, directed the premiere at Centrepoint in Palmerston North, and most surely brought the full force of that previous experience to bear on this undertaking.

The different motivations that brought each of the women to enlist in the course gradually revealed themselves, enriching, and emboldening them in their different ways. One found oneself focusing increasingly on each of the characters as unique individuals at least as much as registering their “cause” and its accompanying polemic, all of their personalities, including Woody’s, both uncovering and being uncovered. Each of the journeyings had its own profundity, though the playwright adroitly kept our emotions sufficiently balanced with a “tragedy to the heart and a comedy to the mind” quality leavening the action for as long as was needed for the story’s purposes.

Daniel Williams’ set and costume designs seemed at once contemporary and timeless in their evocations, the objects representing  a mix of up-to-date technologies (“apps” on cell-phones, and nail-guns are two that come to mind) with traditional, iconic standard items such as saw-horses! And Tony Black’s lighting unerringly evoked an appropriately utilitarian quality, bright, analytical and pitiless at full strength, and with an unnerving, almost “concentration camp” kind of aspect when illuminated from the outside, adding to the feeling of something “alien” or “dream-like” about various of the action’s happenings.

I came away from the production with two enduring feelings – firstly that I’d witnessed what seemed almost like an effortless sense of identification on the part of each of the actors with their characters, so that the former “were” who their characters were (and, as importantly, were people I felt I knew and could readily recognise and/or identify with, all or in part). Secondly, that sense of “connection” spoken about by director Conrad Newport was richly, if subtly, reflected in the way the actors were an “ensemble”, again something that seemed entirely natural and inevitable, but was obviously the result of an art that concealed art.  That such strong and vivid individual characterisations could jell so readily and unselfconsciously suggests a singular alchemy at work, here satisfyingly and memorably provided by the playwright, the actors and the director in spadefuls. And, after all, glimpses of ourselves are always worth seeing…..

 

 

 

 

 

Percussion-driven “Carmina Burana” with the Orpheus Choir a triumph

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Orpheus Choir of Wellington presents:
CARMINA BURANA

CASEY CANGELOSI – Jazz on Saturn
NEY ROSAURO – Marimba Concert No. 1*
Yoshiko Tsuruta (marimba)*
Orchestra Wellington Percussion Ensemble

CARL ORFF – Carmina Burana (arr.Wilhelm Killmayer)
Amelia Berry (soprano)
Declan Cudd (tenor)
Joel Amosa (bass-baritone)
Wellington Region School Choirs –
Wellington East Girls’ College CANTATA /Wellington Girls’ College TEAL VOICES
Kelburn Normal School / Scots College / Catholic Cathedral Children’s Choir
Samuel Marsden Collegiate Choir
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Thomas Nikora / Stephen Clothier (pianos)
Orchestra Wellington Percussion Ensemble
Brent Stewart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 7th November, 2019

Oddly enough, nowhere in the programme could I see mentioned that this was a version of Carl Orff’s most renowned work prepared by his “disciple” Wilhelm Killmayer in 1956, and authorized by Orff himself, 20 years after the original composition, one allowing smaller instrumental ensembles the opportunity to perform the piece. While relishing the prospect of hearing the Orpheus Choir’s “different” take on the composer’s evergreen “Carmina Burana”, I was nevertheless wondering how the absence of a full orchestra would “work” in music that relies for a good deal of its impact on instrumental colour and weight of tone. I needn’t have worried in the slightest, as it turned out, as the sheer energy and coruscating excitement generated by the voices, the two pianos and the ensemble of percussion instruments under Brent Stewart’s direction made for suitably overwhelming results – different, but just as impactful. And though one registered an instrumental phrase here and there with less “projection” than in the full orchestra version, what was BEING played almost everywhere caught us up most thrillingly in a “here and now” of it all that left no need for comparisons – just a feeling of being immersed in an oceanic surge from all concerned of total and utter commitment to the music.

We were given an enticing taste of the excitement in store for us in the concert’s main work by the Orchestra Wellington Percussion Ensemble’s presentation of two first-half items, the first featuring the Ensemble alone, in an explosive item whose energies recalled the great days of Wellington’s own “Strike” percussion group (one of whose members, Jeremy Fitzsimons, was in tonight’s ensemble). This was a work called “Jazz on Saturn”, written in 2018 by American composer Casey Cangelosi, for percussion quintet – the programme note promised us, among other things, “an exuberant finale – complete with party poppers!” Unsure of what PRECISELY this meant, I was nevertheless grooving most uninhibitedly with the music’s almost Dionysian exuberances in places, while registering, within a basic trajectory of pulse the most beguiling contrasts of texture and colour – mere touches and splashes of gentle scintillation whose whisperings were as impressive in their own way as the ensemble’s’ full-on virtuoso roar – when at the explosive end of an irresistible crescendo the air was suddenly filled with a fusillade of confetti and streamers amid the ensemble’s concluding payoff!

Orpheus Choir Director Brent Stewart who came on stage to introduce and direct the next item apologised to the first few rows of the audience for their unexpected confetti-shower amid great amusement, though I was half-waiting for him to generate further merriment by requesting of those same bedecked rows of people something like, “Now, could we have it all back, please?”

Stewart then introduced and led a warm welcome to the Japanese-born New Zealand-domiciled marimba soloist Yoshiko Tsuruta, appearing to perform what has become the “Concierto de Aranjuez” of the marimba world, a work by Brazilian composer Ney Rosauro, his “Marimba Concerto No.1”, a piece which, according to the programme note, has received over 3,000 performances since its composition in 1986. As graceful and spectacular to watch as the music she played was to listen to, Tsuruta demonstrated complete and utter control and poise in her delivery of this most attractive music, easefully wielding two mallets in each hand as if endowed with the same by nature, and coaxing, both energetically and hypnotically, the music from her enormous instrument – the largest marimba I’d ever seen!

Rhythmically angular and motoric at the beginning, the music relaxed into a more song-like mode as the first movement progressed, the sounds quixotically exploring contrasts between vigorous and lyrical. The second movement opened mysteriously, low sounds providing a contrast with fragments and scintillations, creating a vast and resonant sound-space into which were released some evocative creations. A third movement seemed to me to comprise variants of a sinuous waltz-theme, darkly portentous and symbolic of time slowly passing……..an angular-rhythmed introduction brought in what seemed like a final movement, one whose six-plus five rhythm created in itself beautifully choreographic movements and gesturings, a solo cadenza allowing the player some repose from the tyranny of insistent trajectory, before once again rising to the challenge of the final, vigorous gestures which concluded the work.

And so, to the second half of the concert, and “Carmina Burana” – I thought it was a wonderful idea to project the English translations of Orff’s Latin texts for us to read and enjoy during the work, even if the exercise straightaway reinforced my feeling that most conductors I’ve heard in concert or on record take the famous opening chorus “O Fortuna” too quickly to my ears, turning what the words indicate is a harsh, piteous lament – one that concludes with the words “mecum omnes plangite” (Weep with me, all of you!) – into a jolly, rousing, foot-tapping number, with the dark, ominous rhythms left to skate merrily along the music’s surface! Brent Stewart’s tempo at the outset, while making for superficially exciting results didn’t really explore the music’s dark, pessimistic mood – but neither did Marc Taddei’s treatment of the same passage in Orchestra Wellington’s 2014 performance of the full version, again with the Orpheus Choir.

Fortunately, the rest was, in a word, magnificent! Stewart’s insistence on urgency between verses and choruses in numbers such as the following “Fortune plango vulnera” (I weep for luck’s wounds) kept the music’s juices flowing, as did the choir’s crisp articulation of their lines – and the sheer energy of both Thomas Nikora’s and Stephen Clothier’s piano playing combined with the excitement generated by the other instrumentalists to really pin back our ears!  Then it was suddenly all light and air with beautiful, birdsong-like piano and percussion sounds at the beginning of “Primo Vere” (In Springtime), the words almost breathlessly chanted, as if the singers were mesmerised by the music’s beauty, the “ah-ah” passages particularly magical in effect.

Baritone Joel Amosa delivered his “Omnia sol tempera” (The sun soothes all things) with great sensitivity, fining down his head-voice to poetic, almost vulnerable effect in places – later, he brought plenty of energy to his “In Taberna”, though he was at full stretch throughout the higher passages – as he was with the Third Part’s “Dies nox et omnia” (Day, night and all things), which he nevertheless hung onto throughout the outlandish voice-changes with great determination – however, he greatly relished his rollicking part in the third section’s “Tempus et iocundum”, along with the soprano’s and children’s voices.

I particularly enjoyed the theatricality of the performance, such as the vivid painting of the opening “Floret silva nobilis” (The noble wood) we heard in the cantata’s second part, where women’s and men’s voices enacted a vignette of longing – the women’s plaintive “Ubi es antiquus meus amicus?” (Where is my old lover?) answered by the men’s “Hinc ecqitavit” (He rode away) in heart-breakingly jogtrot rhythm! This was followed by an almost visceral depiction of an older woman “glamouring” herself up to catch a younger lover – “Seht mich an, jungen man!” (the words lapsing into German at this point!), the choir humming a seductive chorale in-between the verses with almost insouciant suggestiveness. Another intensely theatrical moment was superbly realised by tenor Declan Cudd, in his depiction of the roasted swan singing of happier days before suffering his ignoble fate on the spit – vivid and anguishedly-coloured singing from the tenor, punctuated by lamenting interjections from the men’s voices – “Miser! Miser modo niger, es ustus fortiter!” (Wretch that I am! – now black and roasting fiercely!).

Soprano Amelia Berry had to wait for the cantata’s third part “Cour D’Amours” (Court of Love) to be heard, though as is usually the case, the effect was arresting, with the pianos, tinkling percussion and children’s voices sweetly preluding the soprano’s entry with their “Amor volat undique” (Love flies everywhere). Berry’s sweetness of tone captured our sensibilities in an instant and held us still, as she did also with “Stetit puella” (A girl stood) over its two verses. And though at full vocal stretch with the cruelly-demanding “Dulcissime” (Sweetest one), Berry held her stratospheric vocal line steadfastedly and truly, till all was properly given and spent.

How resoundingly everybody then poured their energies into the following  “Ave formisissima!” (Hail, most beautiful), here given plenty of space and weight, the stage-surround lights suddenly and effectively joining in with additional illumination! And if the concluding “O Fortuna” again went like an express train, the concluding bars of the work reaffirmed the undoubted effectiveness of this percussion-driven version of Orff’s choral masterpiece, with sounds saturating the precincts of the hall and occasioning a rapturous audience response! Definitely a triumph for all concerned!