Author: Peter Mechen

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!

 

 

 

 

Two sides of a genius – Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies from Edo de Waart and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
JOY – Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies

BEETHOVEN FESTIVAL – Symphonies 8 in F Major Op.93* and 9 in D Minor Op.125 “Choral”

Sabina Cvilak (soprano) / Kristin Darragh (m-soprano)
Oliver Johnston (tenor) / Anthony Robin Schneider (bass)
Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra*
Edo de Waart (conductor)*

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 31st August, 2019

This, the final concert in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven Festival, presented two symphonic works at what seemed like opposite ends of everything – black-versus-white parameters of style from a composer of genius. Beethoven in his Eighth Symphony appears to be “playing” with the form, parodying the classical symphony, satirising fashions and fads, heightening and debunking all kinds of gesturings and yet still producing a forward-moving, radically original work of art. On the other hand, the Ninth Symphony seems, from its very beginning, to put the listener in touch with a kind of basic life-force that finds its full expression in Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” with orchestral sounds inviting the use of words as an aid to symphonic expression for the first time in the form’s history.

It can be seen from these descriptions that the two works have practically nothing in common except their composer’s name and the degree of freedom and innovation employed in the music’s being. To thus present them in the same concert would ensure a musical feast of uniquely diverting, and, for some, even bewildering, variety. However, as with almost all of this composer’s work these pieces can survive practically any kind of treatment involving musical intent – so we were guaranteed a fully absorbing and thought-provoking evening’s listening!

I’d already heard and enjoyed these musicians’ traversals of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies two evenings previously, remarking in my review that the intensities of music-making seemed to gather and coalesce more purposefully as the evening progressed, finally bursting fully-forth in a performance of the Fifth Symphony’s finale that brought the house down. Here, the same kind of pattern somewhat uncannily emerged, with the great “Choral Symphony’s finale, the “Ode to Joy” releasing such surges of energy as had merely been hinted at throughout the music-making earlier in the evening. It was as if everything had been almost “tailored” for maximum effect towards that final movement, and specifically focusing on the entry of the voices with their message for all humankind!

In theory this approach eminently suited the evening’s musical journey, with the opening Eighth Symphony’s elegance and fluidity emphasised by Edo de Waart’s meticulous approach, a quirky detailing or three thrown in for good measure – while the Ninth Symphony which followed grew its mighty concluding oak-like girth from acorn-beginnings, the intended space of the whole work “suggested” by the first movement’s purposeful gesturings and the scherzo’s energies, except that the actual “substance” came with those voices and the instrumental support they received. As an intellectual construct the scheme was eminently satisfying, though I confess to missing the excitements of a more “visceral” approach in the playing –  I do like things even quirkier in the Eighth, and more epic and rugged in the Ninth’s first two movements …. but, chacun à son gout…..

By contrast with Thursday evening’s attendance at the MFC, which featured a noticeable number of empty seats, tonight’s house was packed full – and my Middle C colleague Lindis Taylor reported a similarly pleasing state of things for Friday’s performances of Nos. Six and Seven. I wondered whether the orchestra might have been better advised to split the four concerts over two weekends or even a fortnight, in the interests of affordability or accessibility –  still, no doubt it was something of an achievement to get the levels of attendance that it did over four consecutive nights of concerts!

So, we began with the Eighth Symphony – but not before we were told – at once poignantly, and heart-warmingly – that tonight’s gig was the cellist Roger Brown’s last concert with the NZSO after 20 years in the orchestral ranks, which occasioned affectionate and appreciative audience applause. Then we were off, Maestro de Waart and his players flinging the opening phrase across the expectant vistas with purposeful energy, everything clear, precise and well-chiselled, the timpani direct and sonorous. A demure, precisely-groomed second subject provided the contrast, while the development set about stocking up the argument with richly-varied textures, building things so very beautifully towards a splendidly forceful full-orchestra statement. The horns having then shown us what nobility of tone and timing they were capable of, the music stuttered to a somewhat quizzical conclusion!

Then came what sounded like a taste of the “new” (Beethoven perhaps inspired by the newly-invented metronome of his friend Johann Maelzel) with an Allegretto scherzando second movement that seemed to pay homage to the “mechanical” of invention and regularity, the music, however, spectacularly “misbehaving” at the end and breaking free of such constraints with gleeful gesturings! I was diverted by this, but thoroughly enjoyed the “old” which then followed, a Tempo di Menuetto, played with delicious “old-world” languour, and featuring a trio in which the double basses literally “stole the show” with their ear-grabbing accented accompaniments of the winds!

What elfin scamperings there were at the finale’s beginning, followed by a truly off-the wall summons to unbuttoned hi-jinks! A contemporary English review of this work commented that “Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony depends wholly on its last movement for what applause it obtains; the rest is eccentric without being amusing, and laborious without effect.” More balanced was the view of Sir George Grove, who described it as full of “those mixtures of tragedy and comedy….which make (Beethoven’s) music so true a mirror of human life….equal to the great plays of Shakespeare….for the same reasons.” Inclined to whatever view, the listener is nevertheless carried along by the sheer energy of it all – de Waart didn’t overplay either comedy or drama, letting the finely-controlled orchestral playing allow us to make of the music what we wanted!

And suddenly (well, after the interval) we were faced with another work, one whose sounds seemed to mirror a different dimension of awareness, a new awakening to the world! So very hushed was the opening (the strings at first seeming more like slivers of light than sound), that the opening crescendo was suddenly upon us, muscular and thrustful rather than monumental and titanic – a mode that seemed to me to dominate de Waart’s interpretation of the instrumental parts of the work. While not straitjacketed, the lines were kept tensile throughout, with the timpani prominent, though more dramatic and whiplash than rugged and epic. There was no rhetoric – the mid-movement cataclysm, for example, almost took us by surprise with its suddenness, the timpani splendidly impactful, the strings and winds giving it all they had, the brass grimly hanging on to their reiterated single note – and then the crisis was passed, and the great river of music flowed onwards.

I thought the scherzo splendidly launched, with the timpani again focused and incisive – as the strands of impulse bonded together and danced along, the music took on an almost bucolic feeling, the energies good-humoured rather than incisive and grimly-focused, the mood further celebrated by the repeats. The Trio section thrust its way into the music’s trajectories, the wind-playing a joy, the horns lovely, the oboe solo delectably-phrased, and the strings judging their crescendi to perfection. Was the scherzo’s return slightly more sharp-edged, more urgent? – perhaps I’d gotten used to the music’s bucolic mood by then…..

The slow movement’s opening phrases moved swiftly and lightly, in accord with what we’d already heard, the impulses fluent and air-borne rather than time-arresting, the strings leading things forward to what’s always seemed to me to be the music’s “inner sanctum”, here the repose had a quality more “on the wing” than one holding time in thrall. But the playing was divine, winds and horn fervently communing, and stimulating a surge, a flow of energy, whose accompaniment even had a “swing” to it! I did want more sense of “leading up” to something with those brass shouts, however – surely more of a “transformational moment” than we got, here? Other listeners will possibly disagree – but I was wanting to be “imbued” with some kind of great “feeling” at this point, and felt not a little perplexed and disappointed at its rapid passsing, which emotion persisted right to the movement’s end…….

No time for any further self-communings – the vocal soloists had by now taken the stage and something was definitely brewing! In crashed the finale, with its “horror chord” leading the way! I wasn’t aware of the performance “hanging fire” in any way, here, except that a couple of people said to me afterwards that “it (the finale) took a long time to get going!”. What I registered was the growing excitement of it all, the brusque dismissal of the work’s previous themes and the impulsive reaction to the first appearance of the “Joy” theme. The melody itself here resembled a “song of the earth” with those superb double-basses, then beautifully “forwarded” by the ‘cellos and violas with the bassoons, and flowering with the violins’ treatment, before the winds and brass rang it grandly out at the climax.

Again the “horror chord”, and its accompanying tumult! – but this time the bass soloist (Anthony Robin Schneider) demanded our attention, with his “O Freunde, nicht diese töne!” – and the whole performance took wing, soloists and choir scaling the heights of physical impact and emotion and inviting the players and their conductor to join them, and spread the “joy” among their enraptured audience. I particularly enjoyed the work of both Schneider and mezzo, Kristin Darragh, and thought the work of the Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir was overwhelming! Here we got the full, transcendental force of the music’s reaching out for the stars at “Über Sternen muß er wohnen”, and the full-blooded vigour of both voices and instruments in the fugal “Seid umschlungen, Millionen” – the work’s range and scope realised in this all-embracing panoply of creative and recreative human energy!

Has it all defined an orchestra and its conductor? Sergei Rachmaninov, asked once why he didn’t play more Beethoven Piano Sonatas, said, characteristically, “The Beethoven Sonatas contain everything – and no one pianist can play everything!” True, in a sense, but how one wishes that he HAD played and recorded them all, nevertheless! And how instructive in so many ways when performing artists, faced with a totality of creative achievement, attempt to realise something of that totality, as here! Very, very great honour to Edo de Waart and his splendid band of musicians for enabling so many of us to make all or even part of that precious journey with them so resplendently.

 

And then we heard……Symphonies Four and Five from the NZSO in its Beethoven-fest……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
DESTINY – Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Symphonies

BEETHOVEN FESTIVAL – Symphonies 4 in B-flat Op.60 and 5 in C Minor Op.67

Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday, 29th August 2019

My Middle C colleague Lindis Taylor having reviewed the opening night of this momentous occasion (one would expect that performing the complete Beethoven Symphonies would be something of a milestone for any orchestra that takes itself and its “craft” seriously), it was my “turn” with the following two works of the canon. This was in no way tied to any preference for any particular work on the part of either of us – I could just as happily have reviewed the first three symphonies, as Lindis could have the following two. I simply happened to have a friend who wanted desperately to go with me to hear the Fifth Symphony – and so the arrangement was duly made. Of course, each of the “Nine” of Beethoven has a kind of distinction which at once singles it out from its fellows and binds it to what has gone before and comes after, so in a sense, wherever one “dips into” the canon of these works one comes up with fascinating ponderables, delights and revelations!

Robert Schumann, ever the one to “poeticise” a creative impulse, statement or finished work of art whether his own or another’s, declared that Beethoven’s “Fourth” Symphony, standing as it did between the mighty “Eroica” and the cataclysmic “Fifth” resembled “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants”. In a sense, Beethoven almost HAD to write something that contrasted with such a world as brought into being by his previous symphony, though in its own way, the Fourth continued the composer’s exploration of symphonic possibilities very much in line with each of its predecessors – Schumann’s delightful characterisation of the work serves more as a starting-point for our senses than an out-and-out appraisal of the music’s merits.

Having said that, artistic endeavour has an endearing habit of attracting many colourful and telling responses bent on conveying an “essence” or a “character” belonging to a work – I’ve always enjoyed, for example, a potent description I came across somewhere of the hushed, shadowy and sombre effect of the Fourth’s opening measures – almost forty bars in length – as “4 am”, and find myself, while listening to most performances, conjuring up in my minds’ eye suitably dark, desolate and unpeopled vistas! Then, with the Fifth Symphony, there’s novelist EM Forster’s famous response of one of his characters in the book “Howard’s End”, to the “ghostly” parts of that work’s Scherzo, equating the music with the footsteps of “a goblin walking quietly over the universe from end to end…” and followed by others, “phantoms of cowardice and disbelief” – until the composer appears and scatters them with “vast roarings of a superhuman joy”.

I’d been told that all seats for the last concert in the Beethoven series, one featuring the “Choral” Symphony, and paired with the Eighth, had been sold – so I was surprised (as my colleague had been the previous night) to find the occasional whole row in the MFC galleries empty as well as spaces dotted around the stalls – I would have thought that the Fifth Symphony concert, as much as that for the Ninth, would have been a real drawcard.  My friend and I were sympathetic when a couple of people at the interval who were sitting alongside us turned and asked us which Symphony it was that we had just heard – but somewhat perplexed when they then asked us what it was that was coming next (were we REALLY in a concert hall in Wellington?)

The music, for the moment, crowded out extraneous thought, as the concert began – with a dark and mysterious B-flat chord whose development took our sensibilities to realms entirely removed from anything found in the aforementioned first three symphonies. Conductor de Waart kept the pulses ticking over throughout, eschewing the “stillness” of many a more romantically-conceived realisation I’d previously heard, with the focus firmly propelled towards the great outburst that launched the allegro, the orchestral playing alert and urgent, with timpani prominent, and wind and brass bolstering the string lines. A delectable “plunge” into the repeat enhanced our pleasure enormously, while the development brought to us those mysterious re-explorings of the opening, underpinned by the timpani, whose crescendo excitingly returned us to the energies of the allegro’s reprise.

Though de Waart’s purposeful way with the slow movement made something of a literal, almost “ungiving” impression with the opening figures, his players brought out the music’s lyricism, the wind-playing in all its forms a dream to experience! Particularly telling was the “vista of loneliness” generated by the solo clarinet, followed by the most heart-warming passage of birdsong from the flute, the contrasts between the two so breathtakingly characterised! After this the syncopated rhythms of the Scherzo set rumbustious accents against winsome lines, the two characters here deliciously “playing” with one another – then, each of the “Trio” sections were like balm for the senses after the hustle and bustle, the horns finally capping off the energies with a round-up call!

De Waart would have been particularly pleased with his players’ efforts throughout the finale – the players achieved a thrilling synthesis of strength and style throughout with some “star turns” where appropriate, such as the various winds’ helter-skelter renditions of the opening figure – the bassoon’s jaunty manner was an absolute delight! I liked also the great “hammerings at the door” which grew out of the molto perpetuo rhythms in places, and the double basses’ almost nonchalant rumblings as they demonstrated that they were up with the play as well!

So, after such disciplined and tightly-woven music-making, what was in store for us with the genre-defining Fifth Symphony? At the outset, de Waart seemed to emphasise the music’s severity and line, rather than any rhetoric and theatricality, the opening “integrated” into the urgency of the whole, with none of the sounds “held” for effect, but quickly moved onto the next phrase. At the development, the horn utterance remained part of the on-going argument rather than presented as an imperious statement, as was the return of the “Fate” theme – emphatic, but remaining “in tempo”, the oboe allowed the merest bit of give for its solo. However. with the string/wind/brass exchanges towards the end, we realised that the music’s tensions had been steadily building throughout, as the groups seemed, suddenly, to begin “fronting up” to one another, with the horns particularly vehement-sounding – most exciting!

The players launched the second movement quickly and eagerly, the great brass shouts at the phrase ends magnificently underpinned by the double-basses with tremendous thrust! The playing had such concentration, such focus, it sounded as if the musicians were “discovering” the music phrase-by-phrase as it went along, with nothing routine or pre-conceived – I felt an air of engagement throughout, not from any great over-emphasis, but from a sense of purpose, resulting in as many rapt and contemplative moments as there were stirring ones. The scherzo continued this process, so that the horns didn’t balefully blare their great repeated-note opening, but integrated it with the music’s overall movement, leading nicely to the double-basses’ great flexing of corporate muscle, echoed by the bassoons and the rest of the band, anxious to join in with the fun!

Then, of course, came the aforementioned “goblins walking across the world” section, here suitably angular and grotesque, the atmosphere suitably “charged” with mysterious expectation, the timpani eventually taking over from the winds and strings, the sounds magnificently held in check until the firmament was rent by the music’s unstoppable surge into C major, the brass finally allowed to roar out their music, and the rest of the orchestra conflagrated by the sheer energy of it all. De Waart’s control enabled everything to “speak”, but encouraged an on-going vitality, incorporating the spooky return of the scherzo’s “goblins” and the composer’s “vast roarings” putting the latter to flight once and for all, the strings singing out in tandem with the bassoon, piccolo and flute, and the music’s surging towards a communal joyousness at the end – the concert as a whole a true “darkness-to-light” journey of the human spirit, and a privilege to witness. Those many people who leapt to their feet at the C Minor symphony’s end in the Michael Fowler Centre in appreciation of what they had heard obviously thought so too!

 

 

Intense, heartfelt and involving – Verdi’s Rigoletto from Eternity Opera at the Hannah Playhouse

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eternity Opera presents:
GIUSEPPE VERDI – Rigoletto (Opera in three Acts)

Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave (after Victor Hugo)
English translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin

CAST :
Rigoletto                James Clayton
Gilda                       Hannah Catrin-Jones
The Duke               Boyd Owen
Sparafucile            Robert Lindsay
Maddalena            Jess Segal
Monterone            Roger Wilson
Giovanna               Ruth Armishaw
Count Marullo      Orene Tiai
Count Ceprano     Minto Fung
Countess Ceprano  Karyn Andreassend
Matteo Borsa       Chris Berentson
Court Usher          Olivia Sheat
A Page                    Alexandra Woodhouse-Appleby
Gang Members     Chris Anderson,  Paul Bothwell, Nikita Crosby
Richard Dean, Jessica Mercer-Short, Garth Norman

Director:  Alex Galvin
Assistant Director:  Laura Loach
Music Director:  Matthew Ross
Producers:  Emma Beale & Minto Fung
Production/Stage Manager:  Joel Rudolf
Costume Designer:  Sally Gray
Lighting Designer:  Haami Hawkins

Eternity Orchestra
Leader:  Vivian Stephens
Repetiteur:  Catherine Norton

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Saturday, 23rd August, 2019 (until 31st August)

I can’t think of a better instance of a small opera company bringing forth by dint of its own efforts a production with the commitment and calibre of Eternity Opera’s production of “Rigoletto”, which we saw at Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse on Friday evening. I won’t go as far as proclaiming this “the best so far” of the company’s productions in this venue, as comparisons of that sort are odious for all kinds of reasons – but I certainly felt I’d witnessed nothing better overall than this from the company in the past.

Right from the orchestral prelude’s beginning we were riveted, held by the playing and conductor Matthew Ross’s control of the music’s tensions, the atmosphere dark and un-nerving, everything generated by the insistent motifs and their sharply-focused realisation – the brass were spot-on and unrelenting, the strings and winds coiled and uncoiled with sinister intent, like a snake preparing to strike, and the percussion startled with its force at the climax and its even more disturbing muted after-presence. Then came the stunning volte-face of the “party-music”, the Duke’s palace bursting with sounds of fantastic life and energy – a great beginning! On-stage, I thought the party looked somewhat tentative at the outset, with the chorus members (in modern dress) taking a while to “loosen up” movement-wise  – everybody needed to “hit the ground running” more confidently, and mirror the energies of the orchestral playing and the Duke’s free-wheeling licentiousness – however, to compensate, the singing (in English) was alive and dynamic, which helped it all grow most satisfactorily as the scene went on.

I thought Boyd Owen’s Duke looked and sounded totally convincing from his first entry, emanating self-confidence in all respects, his energies transcending the production’s somewhat bland non-hierarchical appearance – a playboy despot, in fact. His “Questo e quella” (“This or that girl”) had all the casual insouciance of the practised lecher to go with the exuberance of his freely-ringing tones. By contrast, James Clayton’s compelling Rigoletto cleverly “insinuated” his way onto the stage, his almost Dadaist garb mocking convention in accord with his character, and heightening the “edge” of his acerbic exchanges with the courtiers – the character at once provocative, volatile and reckless.

The appearance of Count Monterone (Roger Wilson) an aggrieved nobleman whose daughter had been seduced and abandoned by the Duke was a splendid moment, with the Count’s curse (a stumbling block for most modern adaptations of the opera) here made properly baleful and even frightening by a convincing combination of the singer’s commitment and his would-be victim Rigoletto’s terrified reaction. After a gripping chorus response to this, the voices generating incredible vehemence in their rebuttal of the Count’s maledictions, the Act’s second scene stole in, here cleverly integrating the characters of the killer-for-hire, Sparafucile, and his sister-accomplice Maddalena, among the party-guests, so that they seemed almost like “an enemy within”, rather than ostensibly sinister night-creatures. Robert Lindsay as Sparafucile kept his voice smooth and steady during his confrontation with the jester, allowing the disturbing accompaniment of solo strings and throbbing bass drum to underpin the horror of his glib-toned, but deadly message for Rigoletto, still distracted by Monterone’s curse, but interested despite himself – the scene all the more macabre here, in its manicured, almost genteel aspect!

Clayton superbly laid bare the jester’s character in his soliloquy which followed, reiterating the curse, railing against his deformity and execrating the courtiers who mocked him earlier, before giving himself over entirely to his daughter, Gilda, here sung by Hannah Catrin-Jones with a presence and intensity that ideally matched the vividly-wrought character of her besotted but fearful father.  How fortunate we were to have such a triumvirate of singers in this work’s leading roles! As she did in her portrayal of “Madama Butterfly” last year for the company, Catrin-Jones “owned” the character of Gilda with a vocal “presence” and dramatic totality of commitment that rightly put intensity of feeling before every other consideration, in places even beauty of tone – and in doing so she again won our hearts and sympathies.

The singing and playing during this scene did full justice to the composer’s remarkable combination of quicksilver movement and heartfelt emotion – Rigoletto’s tenderness and anxiety at odds with one another, Gilda’s concern for her father set against her interest in a young man she had seen at church, a secret she shared with the maid, Giovanna (sensitively and lyrically portrayed by Ruth Armishaw), and the young man’s sudden, covert entrance into the courtyard in pursuit of Gilda (the Duke in disguise, of course, astonished to learn that the girl is Rigoletto’s daughter, but unremitting in his efforts to “get the girl”!) – supporting the singers’ efforts all the way was Matthew Ross’s conducting, generating playing from his musicians by turns as thrustful and exciting or lyrical and atmospheric as required.

The “no-holds-barred” scene between the disguised Duke and Gilda was a tour de force of emotional outpouring on the part of both characters, vocal elegance mattering less than the raging flow of feeling, carrying us all along in its flow – what a mountain for singers to climb! – especially on the part of the tenor, with Boyd Owen’s voice seemingly at full stretch in most places in places but his character totally convincing dramatically! Gilda’s well-known “Caro nome” (Dearest name) in the wake of the Duke’s departure restored beauty and elegance to the proceedings, Catrin-Jones’s exquisite singing most sensitively supported by the orchestra, the winds in particular partners in fragrant evocation, despite a moment or two’s imprecision between singer and players towards the end.

Great work followed from the chorus, the nobles gathering, in disguise, to carry off whom they believed to be Rigoletto’s mistress, encountering him outside the house and deluding him into thinking they were playing a trick on someone else! The energy and thrust of the singing and playing carried us irresistibly along to the point where Rigoletto suddenly heard Gilda’s voice as she was “taken” by the intruders, thereupon tearing off his “mask” and discovering she was gone.

More full-bloodedly ardent singing from the Duke at the Second Act’s beginning – what a role this is! – (though I’ve often thought Verdi a little inconsistent in his characterisation, here  – was this genuine feeling for the missing Gilda he was expressing?) Boyd Owen was again unfailingly sonorous and romantic in vocal feeling, his anguish transformed to joy upon hearing of Gilda’s conveyance to his clutches. Rigoletto, by comparison, was all care and sorrow, turning to anger as he revealed to the courtiers that they had stolen his daughter, James Clayton’s vocal range and depth of emotion overwhelming, the flood of feeling generated, together with weeping strings and plangent cor anglais, breaking all hearts! Gilda’s sudden entrance from the Duke’s bedroom occasioned an oboe solo of equal poignancy, its phrases movingly matched by Catrin-Jones’ achingly lovely tones – as befitted one of opera’s most heartfelt scenes, this performance delivered the sorrow and anguish of it all in spadefuls!

Here, too, was amply-realised justification for the sparseness of the set – unobtrusive in earlier scenes, but absolutely perfect in this instance, with shadows as well as “substance” resonating on or in front of both walls so dramatically – as if there was nowhere, emotionally, to hide – incredibly moving, thanks also to the perfectly-judged lighting on those bare walls!

By general agreement, though, it’s the final Act that’s thought to be one of its composer’s greatest achievements – and here it certainly maintained the voltages from what had gone before, if channelling them into more overtly sinister and potentially murderous realms.  Perhaps it was the fault of what seemed an out-and-out marathon of vocal effort by Boyd Owen up to that point of the evening, but his “La donna e mobile” (Women are fickle), felt to me a shade sedate compared with the volatile energies of the First-Act’s “Questo e Quella”, and even the orchestral accompaniment seemed to lack the last amount of “fizz” – however, not so the magnificent Quartet, which followed soon after! –  here, the voices realised as heartfelt and wide-ranging an expression of both individual and concerted emotion as was one’s right to expect, Jess Segal’s Maddalena given her chance to shine alongside the three principals, which her voice managed with great aplomb.

Though everything from that moment onwards moved with the surety and inevitability of a Greek tragedy towards its brutal outcome, the performances had such here-and-now spontaneity, it was as if we were seeing something, however well-known, for the first time and willing against hope the impossible to happen and the guiltless be spared rather than sacrificed. So tense, so charged was the ambience when Rigoletto was left alone with the sack containing what he thought – in fact what he gleefully TOLD us – was the Duke’s body, that when we suddenly heard the latter’s voice singing his “signature tune” offstage, somebody in the audience audibly giggled – not through disrespect, I felt, but obviously out of either shock or sheer release of tension – I thought it a kind of tribute to the performance’s cathartic power, as well as to the production in general, AND to the composer and his librettist (not forgetting, of course, Victor Hugo!).

I’ve heard ample testimony from others since regarding the overwhelming effect of this production upon those who were ‘there”. The three principal singers, those in the supporting roles, both individual and chorus, the conductor, Matthew Ross and his musicians, director Alex Galvin and his assistant, Laura Loach, the producers and their various technicians, all contributed to what seemed to me like a fantastically interactive and ensembled effort, to produce something resoundingly memorable and eminently worthwhile. To hear, then, a whisper, as I did, of Eternity Opera facing the prospect of having to struggle to receive the necessary support in oncoming years for more productions such as these simply beggars belief. Though opinions differ as to the factors that contribute to a “civilised society”, my view inclines towards support for the arts being as necessary for the greater good of humanity as measures which provide for us air we can breathe and water we can drink – a truly humanising kind of sustenance. May Eternity Opera be assured of continuance, to furnish for us more of such sustenance!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jennifer Stumm and Te Koki Trio share honours at Wellington’s MFC

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
JENNIFER STUMM AND TE KOKI TRIO

Music by Michael Williams, György Kurtág, Schumann, and Brahms

MICHAEL WILLIAMS – Spirit flies Sun Rises
GYÖRGY KURTÁG – Three Pieces for Viola Solo (from “Signs, Games and Messages”)
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Märchenbilder  (Fairytale Pictures)
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Scherzo in C Minor from FAE Sonata  / Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor Op.60 “Werther”

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday, 8th August, 2019

What an excellent idea it was of Chamber Music New Zealand’s to invite viola virtuoso Jennifer Stumm here to perform with Wellington’s Te Koki Trio! – her presence enabled a richly varied programme to be performed with a unique distinction in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre, a programme that’s currently on tour throughout the country.

Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, Stumm currently holds Professorships of viola studies in institutions both in Vienna and London, and teaches and gives concerts about the globe, with a particular interest in supporting young musicians from developing countries, being the founder and co-director of Ilumina, a São-Paulo-based chamber music collective and social initiative whose activities foster rising talent from Latin America at the Iuumina Festival and on tour around the world.

She’s been an advocate for her instrument ever since taking up the viola at the age of eight, calling it “the imperfect instrument” in the sense of having something uniquely expressive to offer to music listeners and performers, winning “firsts” in performance prizes for the viola in various international competitions, making acclaimed recordings, and working with some of the world’s most prestigious and legendary musicians , such as the Beaux Arts Trio and the Alban Berg Quartet.

In this concert she was heard as a soloist (all too briefly) in György Kurtág’s Three pieces for Viola Solo, and then as a duettist with pianist Jian Liu in Schuman’s Märchenbilder  (Fairytale Pictures) and Brahms’ Scherzo from the “F-A-E” Sonata. Finally, she joined Te Koki Trio in a heartfelt performance of Brahms’ Third Piano Trio in C Minor, to which the subtitle  “Werther” is often added, due to the composer’s own insistence that the music is about the fate of the character in Goethe’s eponymous novel. Throughout her performances the printed programme’s “Washington Post” quotation – “an opal-like beauty” – from a review of Stumm’s playing, repeatedly came to my mind.

Before Stumm made her appearance in the concert it was Te Koki Trio’s task to open the concert with a CMNZ-commissioned work from Hamilton composer Michael Williams for a Piano Trio, one titled Spirit Flies Sun Rises. In an eloquent programme note the composer indicated that his initial motivation for the work was an image in his mind of the scattering of the ashes of an uncle by the wind at Raglan, imparting a sense of something like “a bird in flight or perhaps a leaping deer”, a spirit becoming part of “the great all”, while for those living the world still turns and the sun rises.

The unexpected death of the composer’s younger brother just as the work was being freshly addressed after a break gave rise to an “enormously cathartic and unforgettable” experience of re-evaluation of what Williams wanted the work to say, further intensifying the idea of a spirit leaving the earth and being freed. The end result as heard in the Michael Fowler Centre on Thursday evening was something as ethereal and “liberated” in sound as were the spirits of the departed in substance – the work set long-breathed, soulful tones, perhaps of quiet mourning or remembrance, against scintillations of gossamer-like freedom.

It seemed like a kind of nature-ritual, with earthly things both letting go and reclaiming impulses of energy whose time had come to move elsewhere, or perhaps to “return”. What the musicians did seemed to transcend normal manifestations of feeling and energy – Martin Riseley’s violin and Inbal Meggido’s ‘cello intoned what felt like uplifted, trance-like responses to the happenings, while Jian Liu‘s piano created endless and enduring shafts of illumination and whole ambiences of warmth. I thought the understating of it all was ultimately the most powerful and moving aspect of the work and its performance.

It was appropriate, I felt, that the sounds we heard next were those of a single instrument, marked by the appearance of Jennifer Stumm, the illustrious violist here accorded a warm welcome.I had not heard these pieces by Hungarian composer György Kurtág previously  – all three come from a sequence of 24 such pieces for solo viola, “Signs, Games and Messages”, and represent a compositional form and  method characteristic of the composer. His music has been described as “reducing his material to the level of the fragment, or the moment….”, with the individual pieces in this collection ranging in length from three or four minutes to mere handfuls of seconds.

The first piece sounded folksy, a recitative-like piece whose near-claustrophobic “seconds” were piquantly resolved, Stumm producing an amazingly rich and “earthy” sound. The second sounded like a wailing, weeping lament, very “Jewish-sounding” in character, creating the extraordinary effect of a stringed instrument actually “sounding” like a human voice, the notes having a curiously “over-the-top” vibrato, suggesting raw emotion! – Lastly was a kind of dance (the composer inspired, Stumm told us, by an English girl), with both timbres and colours of the sounds changing constantly and the rhythms varying from measure to measure.

Stumm then demonstrated her art in partnership with pianist Jian Liu, beginning with Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder  (Fairytale Pictures), written in 1851. The composer described them as “childish pranks” to the work’s first performer of the viola part (they were written for either violin or viola, Schumann preferring the latter), and he didn’t specify any sources for his inspiration, leaving performers and listeners alike to “create” their own scenarios.  The violist introduced each of the pieces most charmingly, the first having a gentle, flowing opening with both instruments in perfect accord and dove-tailing the melodic lines most exquisitely, Stumm’s wonderful elasticity of tone enabling her to”load” the expression of every bar with variation and flexible nuance.

The march which followed featured viola fanfares at its beginning, the figures turning to song as the music developed, Jian Liu’s nimble playing seeming to entice the viola from the path and into the woods, the sounds playing canonic games amongst the trees, until the wistful strains of the opening theme call the instruments back to their more heroic initial purpose. A dark urgency gripped the music of the third piece, the figurations agitated, viola and piano nimbly alternating the triplet rhythms, before allowing the appearance of a contrasting, more languishing and nostalgic sequence which seemed to yearn for somebody’s return. The music returns abruptly to the insistence of the triplets until what sounded like a cry of despair from the viola brought the piece to an abrupt conclusion.

The final movement’s  “Langsam, mit melancholischem Ausdruck” (Slowly and with a melancholy expression) sounded like a love song, Stumm’s viola with the melody and Liu’s piano soaring overhead protectively, so “intertwined” a feeling (obviously a “Clara-inspired” sequence! – Clara, of course, being Schumann’s wife), so wholly a union! The piano took the lead for some moments, intensifying the ardour with triplet figurations, while the viola momentarily took flight, before the two returned to the opening, and made something characteristically rich and romantic of the ending.

Violist and pianist extended their accord with the audience via an unusual composition, a Scherzo movement written by Johannes Brahms for a piece called the F.A.E. Sonata, a collaborative piece by three composers – besides Brahms, there was Schumann and Albert Dietrich, who was one of Schumann’s pupils. The work was intended as a gift for the violinist Joseph Joachim, whom Brahms had met in Hanover earlier in the year, and who had introduced Brahms to Robert and Clara Schumann – the F.A.E. of the title stood for a phrase that Joachim had taken for a motto – “Frei aber einsam” (Free but alone). All three composers completed their work and Joachim gratefully accepted the gift and played the work! Just before his death, in 1906, he allowed Brahms’ Scherzo to be published. (I’ve not been able to find out whose transcription for viola Jennifer Stumm used).

Never before have I been so aware of Beethoven’s influence on the younger composer in this movement, as in this performance, right from the four-note motive reminiscent of “you-know-what” at the start! Using the viola, Stumm seemed to get the best of two worlds, the extra weight and gravitas of the lower instrument combining with the rich lyrical warmth of her playing of the second theme. And she can “take on” silvery violin-like tones whenever she chooses, it seems, the instruments highest notes having a glistening quality not normally associated with a viola. As for the playing of Jian Liu, her keyboard partner, it scintillated during the vigorous passages and captured the romantic glow of the piano writing in the work’s poetic central section.

Remaining was the evening’s grandest utterance, Brahms’ Third Piano Quartet Op. 60, a work conveniently ignored, it seems to me, by those people who aligned themselves with the musical conservatives of that time, people filled with self-righteous horror at the idea, espoused by Liszt and Wagner, that music was actually “about” something – the doyen of conservative critics Eduard Hanslick led the charge, laying about him with a will at the “progressives” who dared to attach ideas or even “programmes” to the music they wrote. Yet the “darling” of the conservatives, Johannes Brahms, the “upholder of classical traditions and ideals” here produced a work which he himself aligned with a “programme”, going as far as suggesting to his publisher that he print the work accompanied by certain images which would further convey the music’s “meaning”! The silence from the conservatives was deafening!

Brahms, of course was known in his later years for his mordant wit, especially regarding his own music – calling his massive B-flat Piano Concerto “my little concerto with a teeny wisp of a scherzo”, for instance – but in the case of aligning his Op. 60 Piano Quintet with a set of images and a programme, there’s nothing to suggest that he wasn’t serious. Of course, in any such conflict the contradictions abound – and today most music-lovers have little difficulty with appreciation and enjoyment of works from both sides of the historic “divide”!

Stumm and Te Koki Trio gave a strong, “interlocked  ensemble” sound to the first movement of the work, the music’s contrasts characterised so very heartwarmingly, with frequent instances of tender, wistful music-making gradually building towards stormier interactions – the coda seemed to collapse, exhausted, at the movement’s end. A call-to-arms from the piano at the Scherzo’s beginning set in play some partly playful, partly trenchant energies, mischief mixed here with desperation – a rollicking ride with plenty of “glint”.

Inbal Meggido’s ‘cello sang its cantilena-like opening  of the slow movement with much poetry, matched by Martin Riseley’s violin, the music singing and surging throughout, the solos usually “supported” by lines from one or two others, the piano having its turn with both arco and pizz. accompaniments – I was reminded of Dvorak’s “structuring” of his late chamber work melodies, here, with self-conscious building-blocks here seeming more like living tree-trunks advancing the music’s cause.

But what a finale to follow! – agitated at the outset, with the piano anxious and restless, driving the strings onwards and upwards! – a brief moment of calm, and the music surged forward once again, towards a questioning, almost confused “development” section, here “laid bare” for us by the players, before the music’s “flight” aspect again took hold. The ensemble playing all-encompassing in its desperately energised excitement, until the piano’s majestically-sounded chordal utterances rang out like a hymn of defiance! One’s first reaction was to regret the two sharpish concluding chords at the end as an unnecessary convention, until one remembered the composer’s “head with a pistol to it” illustration-directive to his publisher!

After these exertions, it was fitting that we heard some music from Brahms’ great mentor Schumann, the slow movement from his single Piano Quartet, in a performance that kept on reminding me of Borodin, in its limpid, delicately-voiced way……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morton Trio shines in a concert of variety and splendour at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
MORTON TRIO – Music by Kenneth Young, Szymanowski and Brahms

Arna Morton (violin) / Alex Morton (horn) / Liam Wooding (piano)

KENNETH YOUNG – Trio for horn, violin and piano (2007)
KAROL SZYMANOWSKI – Mythes for violin and piano Op.30
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Trio for horn, violin and piano Op.40

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 7th August, 2019

I’m sure that gruff old conservative Johannes Brahms would have been delighted had he known that the music for his Horn Trio would leap over both a whole century and continental and oceanic distances to figure, however fleetingly, as a delightful string of vigorous reminiscences in an Antipodean composer’s work for the same forces! Upon hearing the finale of Kenneth Young’s work at this concert I wondered whether he’d composed the piece especially for the Morton Trio to play in tandem with Brahms’ work on this occasion, though a glance at the programme indicated that the music was written as long ago as 2007. Still, it came up as freshly as new paint in the hands of this group, two of whose members, incidentally (Arna and Alex Morton), had been Young’s students while at the NZ School of Music at Victoria University of Wellington.

On the face of it a horn might seem an impossibly heroic, out-of-doors instrument for chamber music, inextricably associated with vigorous adventure rather than refined, intimate discourse – the sheer scale of the instrument’s potential for strength and power would pose an absorbing set of challenges for any composer wanting to set it alongside any chamber-like forces. Young’s writing didn’t shirk the instrument’s propensity for strength and vigour, while allowing the instrument another of its properties – a “spacious”, open-ended quality, further enhanced by “stopped” or muted notes, Tennyson’s “the horns of elfland faintly blowing”. In fact instruments such as horns
enable chamber music to break those “refined, intimate discourse” stereotypes, and accord the genre its full-blown stature and potential for expression.

Which is what Young’s work did so engagingly, the dialogues animating as the music progressed, the horn rasping in places, the violin responding trenchantly and the piano deciding to “wade in” – the toccata-like exchanges that ensued featuring each instrument at full stretch, expressing the sailent features of the ensemble’s character, before the music turned towards each instrument in turn. So, the violin commanded the stage with a cadenza-like sequence, featuring lovely double-stopped intervals, followed by the piano, its notes spacious and ambient, its mood relaxed and dreamy, inviting both its companions to respond in duet, the horn’s ear-catching stopped notes echoed by the violin, the piano scintillating impulses somewhere in between.

In its single movement, the music readily explored the contrasting moods and ambiences of the instrumental combinations, the music’s “character” swinging between attitudes in what seemed entirely “organic” rather than contrived ways, deliciously “jogtrotting” at one point,  working up enthusiasm to the point of abandonment at another (the horn sounding the alarm at the violin’s gypsy-like antics), then subsiding into further dreams, with the horn noble and distantly heroic once more, the violin responding with gentle, fragrant tones. Suddenly, there it was (Brahms himself might have snorted, “Ha! Any jackass can see that!” all over again!) – I shall, however, risk stating the obvious by registering the “there it was” as the music’s “reminiscing” of the German composer’s main theme in the finale of HIS Horn Trio, the eponymous instrument leading the way! The horn’s encouraging both violin and piano to rumbusticate freely helped vary the pace and mood with some more reflective material, before returning to the Brahmsian fragment, tossing it about with great glee and tremendous elan! What a life-enhancing work it proclaimed itself to be, and especially in these youthful hands!

One of the twentieth century’s chamber masterpieces, Karol Szymanowski’s three-movement work Mythes for violin and piano was played next by Arna Morton and Liam Wooding. IN three movements, the piece draws from its subject matter on Greek mythology, the writing for both instruments replete with complicated harmonies, complex articulations and light, delicate textures, shimmering and vibrant. Szymanowski himself said he had, along with the violinist Paweł Kochański, created with “Mythes” “a new style, new expression of violin-playing, a truly epoch-making thing”, everything “a complex musical expression of the inspiring beauty of the myth”. In the first myth ”The fountain of Arethusa”, we heard flowing waters as the music’s main lines of expression, a spring formed by the goddess Artemis out of the fleeing form of the nymph Arethusa, rescuing her from the advances of the river-god Alpheus.

Rippling textures from the piano activated the stream waters, the violin’s sinuous and silken lines disturbed by the water’s agitations, both instruments so “focused” on their own sound-worlds, yet alchemically ‘entwined” – haunting harmonics from the violin, floating over the piano’s rippling explorations, the delicacies from both instruments building into agitations, the playing here so very visceral and involving! We sensed the effect of the nymph’s transformation, as the spring waters seemed to melt into the impulsive flowing of the whole, the violinist’s extraordinary range of textures and colours breathing more freely over the watery ambiences at the end.

The second myth depicted the unfortunate Narcissus, a full-throated opening from both players, the piano almost Ravelian and bluesy-sounding, the violin radiant, wonderful, long-breathed lines! The double-stopped passages suggested watery reflection as the unfortunate youth caught sight of his own image, the excitement and interest growing, the ecstasy here palpable, the violin surging, buoyed up by the piano’s weight and tone! The double-stopping returned, somewhat eerily, like a “fixed” state holding us in thrall, the music’s ending poised, beautiful and disturbingly static.

Angular and vigorous exchanges marked the opening of the third piece, a sense at once of urgency and abandonment, in the composer’s depiction of the god Pan chasing the nymph-like Dryads about the woodland – agitated figurations from the violinist, fleet-fingered scamperings from the pianist, building up to a tremendous, swirling climax – terrific playing! And what a change overtook the scenario with the evocation of Pan’s flute, here so dreamily conjured up by violin harmonics and gentle, limpid piano sounds, everything mesmerised by the god’s playing. Then, what amazingly quixotic changes of mood and colour in the music, over the final section! – at the very end Pan’s pipes again hold everybody in thrall, until with almost conjurer-like guile, the god and his playmates vanish! A stunning achievement, I thought,  from these two performers!

Back came all three players for Brahms’ Horn Trio, a work written by the composer to commemorate the death of his mother in 1865. Brahms had actually played the horn in his youth, so was well-versed in the instrument’s poetic, “woodland-evocation” qualities, much in evidence in this work’s opening movement. The opening idea, begin by the violin is echoed most evocatively by the horn, a more agitated section “driven” by the piano providing a telling contrast to the lyricism of the work’s opening – these two different sections dominate the movement, strongly underlining the music’s elegiac quality, as much by the poetry of the playing here, as by the characterisation of the quicker, more troubled music.  In the Scherzo which followed we enjoyed the players’ energies, the rhythmic angularities brought out for all they were worth, the teamwork between the three players most exhilarating to watch and listen to – the Trio gave us a tender, nostalgic contrast, rhapsodic in feeling and warm-hearted in effect, throwing into relief the elan and buoyancy of the playing in the scherzo’s return.

Sombre, mournfully-sounded piano chordings began the deeply-felt strains of the Adagio movement, the instruments sounding a gently-voiced lament, the horn then beginning a ritualised contrapuntal passage which the other instruments joined – as the music gradually intensified, the music’s pace quickened and agitated the music’s surfaces before subsiding almost as quickly, leading  us back to calmer, more tranquil realms. Straightaway, the finale gathered us up irresistibly and danced us along its exhilarating, sometimes madcap course – the group’s rhythmic zest and tremendous thrust carried the day right into and through the various sequences, the horn having its moments of unfettered “whoopery”, while playing its part in the music’s overall “give and take”, and helping to give this young ensemble the distinction of being a force to be reckoned with.

Innovative, adventurous, AND intensely musical!! – “Pictures” with Orchestra Wellington and Marc Taddei

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Music by Debussy, Barber, Alex Taylor, Musorgsky

CLAUDE DEBUSSY – L’Isle Joyeuse (orchestrated Bernardino Molinari)
SAMUEL BARBER – Concerto for ‘Cello and Orchestra 1945
ALEX TAYLOR- Assemblage (robotic incarnation by Simon Ingram)
MODEST MUSORGSKY – Pictures at an Exhibition (orchestrated Maurice Ravel)

(Images accompanying Musorgsky’s “Pictures” courtesy of Tony Mackle
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa)

Lev Sivkov (‘cello)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 2nd August 2019

Such a cornucopia of sound, image and incident, with projected images and robotic contraptions playing an integral part in the proceedings! One certainly sensed that something out of the ordinary was being enacted here in the Michael Fowler Centre, although it must be said that, right from the very beginning, in the foyers outside the auditorium was that familiar “buzz” of expectation which we’ve come to expect accompanying Orchestra Wellington concerts – and then, inside, was the overwhelming impression of a full-to-bursting hall of people instantly making for a kind of frisson of anticipation entirely its own. What a tribute to the work of the orchestra, along with its conductor and management over recent times!

True to form, there was even an unchartered surprise in store for us throughout the evening, conductor Marc Taddei at one point enjoining his enthralled audience to assist in the making of a “virtual reality” cyber-game which involved a player conducting an orchestra, and, in response to this receiving appropriately adulatory, lukewarm or downright derisive audience reactions to her/his efforts. What fun we all had, prompted by Taddei, simulating by turns a few seconds of each of these responses, all duly recorded!

All of it certainly added up to a distinctively “different” evening with an orchestra – and if some of the more experimental happenings were received with as much bemusement and bewilderment as appreciation, it was all part of the experience. Some of these “experiments” I do admit I found it difficult to respond to without sounding impossibly fogey-ish, but, buoyed along by the spirit of adventure and enterprise that marked the whole, I thought it important to set down a reaction as a mark of respect for people’s efforts, if nothing else. I should say, before going on, that musically, I found the evening an enthralling experience – even the Samuel Barber concerto on this occasion, which has in the past never done much for me.

The concert began with Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse though here, of course, in a version orchestrated by the composer’s friend the Italian conductor Bernardino Molinari. The latter used a large orchestra, a measure of the power of Debussy’s original solo piano evocation, which was inspired directly by a painting by the eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau, L’embarquement pour Cythère (The departure for Cythère), depicting a group of revellers leaving for the island associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It was around this time that Debussy was “escaping” with his lover, Emma Bardac, to the island of Jersey, hence the music’s sensuality and excitement. We were shown Watteau’s painting on a screen above the orchestra during the performance, the image perhaps needing one of those gradually “closing in” views during the music for some of the central detail to involve us more immediately – but nevertheless, a nice idea.

Beginning with lovely, engagingly throaty wind-gurglings, everything delicately energised and transparently coloured, the music danced its way along, the orchestral timbres allowing a more obviously visceral element to the music, but keeping to the fore a constantly-turning, kaleidoscopic quality, the winds nimble and atmospheric, and the brass magically sonorous. The strings took full advantage of their thematic moments of romantic warmth, the whole gradually building up the excitement with surging “La Mer-ish” moments, then bursting forth with a full panoply of orchestral splendour!

After this, Samuel Barber’s “Cello Concerto seemed at first like dried biscuit following a sumptuous dessert, until one got use to the composer’s almost self-consciously fragmented manner in dealing with his themes, the first movement of the work mercilessly “worrying” its material for much of the time. I did think, though, that the playing of Lev Sivkov, the soloist was most impressive. The slow movement, however, converted me to the cause more than anything, a kind of measured Sicilienne, featuring beautiful work from the soloist and woodwind players alike, the oboe singing with the solo ‘cello in a dance-like processional, with all the winds distinguishing themselves in gorgeous outpourings, becoming increasingly fraught with emotion as the music proceeded – deeply moving in effect!

The finale’s full orchestral opening approached a “cry of pain” in effect, though the music quickly moved into gear, crackling with angular energies, Sivkov bringing off a number of fiendish-looking runs the length of the fingerboard, the orchestra by turns muttering and “shouting” the main theme insistently. A seesawing orchestral ostinato built up intensity like an approaching juggernaut, before allowing the ‘cello a little declamatory space, though there was no let-up in the orchestra’s determinedly-renewed onslaught, save for an impassioned solo from the ‘cello that did seem to gain some ambient empathy. A quirky triplet rhythm, another impassioned solo, and orchestra and cellist swiftly dealt the music its coup de grace-like final gesture!

Alex Taylor’s piece Assemblage came inextricably linked with visual artist Simon Ingram’s “autonomous painting robot”, its various manifestations mightily intriguing all and sundry! I wasn’t quite prepared for the “austerity”, let alone the somewhat static nature of the visual result, as the machine took its time to produce single lines, curves, arcs, in tandem with the musical composition. In this particular case the actual relationship between visual artist and composer, machine and music, was, as Alex Taylor explained in his SOUNZ interview, not dissimilar to any of the pictures/music relationship in the Musorgsky work, except that the “source material” for the composer (the machine and its visual creation) was , as he put it “alive, and an active part of the piece”.

As a listener/observer, one had to accept that the experience was “what it was” in terms of having to take in (a) the robot’s workings, (b) the picture that was being crafted by the machine as prompted by its operator, and (c) the music. It was all too much for this “bear of little brain” at a first encounter, my instincts (as with the Musorgsky work that followed, which was “inundated” with visual images) being to focus my attentions towards the music, though the distractions in this case produced more of a bewildered response than anything else, rather like the sailor in AA Milne’s poem from “Now We Are Six” who “never could think which he ought to do first”.

As for the music, orchestral sounds mingling with amplified robotic workings, the result was nothing if not inventive, beginning with low, sinister Fafner-like growls (I had not long ago listened to Wagner’s “Siegfried!), then suggesting some kind of inter-planetary lift-off, coinciding with the robot’s workings and its resulting arc-like markings being shown, enlarged, on the screen. We heard a series of excitable crescendi with differently-scored scintillations punctuating the flow, the effect at times filmic and transcending the robotic workings in terms of imagery suggested, while in other places generating toccata-like frenzies of motoric excitement.

After subsequently gathering its energies for a “birth-pangs” series of mighty efforts, and dragging something from the pupa – with the strings supporting a nobly heroic theme on the brass,  the music triumphantly reached a kind of “breaking free” threshold, suggesting open spaces and wide-eyed wonderment at some kind of journey’s end, the robot’s peregrinations having produced an angular assemblage of circles, as enigmatic as the machine’s actual workings!

Our “virtual reality audience” collaborations having then been mooted and satisfactorily executed, it was time for the evening’s culmination – a performance of Modest Musorgsky’s most famous undertaking, but one with a difference. In keeping with the evening’s focus upon music’s powers of “visualisation”, we were not only given French composer Maurice Ravel’s justly-celebrated orchestral transcription of Musorgsky’s original work for piano solo, but were shown a series of artworks from the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa to accompany the music, images selected to “match the categories of castles, tombs, witches and unhatched chicks”, as the programme note put it.

I wanted this idea to work, as it seemed such an exciting and out-of-the-ordinary thing to do – but as soon as I got the accompanying insert containing what seemed to me to be a huge number of images, I felt misgivings – surely all of this was far too much to “load into” a piece of music whose original conception was of pieces written in response to just ONE single image for each? Straightaway, the idea of showing different images of “people walking about in a variety of contexts” to illustrate the composer’s originally unifying and binding intention seemed to me damagingly discursive and superficial. Where were these people all going, and for what purposes? What was the plan?

In effect, the exercise for me became more frustrating than fulfilling – I felt there were too many vaguely conceptualised images, with most in any case having detailings that were impossible to discern properly at that distance. Occasionally one popped up which was arresting, and whose impact stayed with me – an example was the Waharoa, or gateway, from the Te Papa collection,  something whose power and gravitas could have easily maintained its stunning impact right throughout the playing of the work’s final ”Great gate at Kiev”. The problem of detail could have also been better addressed by having “close-ups” (detail!) from the picture or image selected. Musorgsky would have expected audiences to “enter the world” of each of his specific musical images during their individual courses – no chance of that was possible, here, unless one shut one’s eyes, or focused primarily on the music.

Which was what I eventually did, and which course brought forth such riches! – for, irony of ironies, this performance by Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington was one of the finest, most focused, exquisitely-detailed and richly-characterised I’ve ever experienced. Here was beautifully deep and rich brass-playing, characterfully nimble and artfully-textured winds, string-sounds of every conceivable hue and colour, both rich and delicate, (the players’ eerie pianissimi in “With the dead in a dead language” simply unearthly!), and everything from the deepest and most sonorous percussion to the lightest and most delicate detail. Individual touches such as the saxophone in “the Old Castle” and the tuba in “Bydlo” were vividly projected, the players deserving their own special accolades at the performance’s end, as did, from a justly appreciative audience, the whole orchestra and its conductor!

Voices of the World – Stroma’s ambient “girdle round about the earth”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
VOICES OF THE WORLD

Works by Celeste Oram, John Psathas, Luciano Berio. Julia Wolfe, Jack Body, Anna Clyne

CELESTE ORAM – An Overture (1807, rev. 2018, 2019)
(devised by Celeste Oram, Rob Thorne (taonga puoro), Ludwig van Beethoven and Stroma Ensemble, with Keir Gogwilt, violin, and Matthew Allison, trombone)

JACK BODY – “Bouyi” (from “Yunnan”2008)
Anna Van der Zee, Emma Baron (violins), Andrew Thomson (viola),Ken Ichinose (‘cello)

ANNA CLYNE – A Wonderful Day (2013)
Patrick Barry (bass clarinet), Thomas Guldborg (percussion), Sarah Watkins (piano),
Callum Allardice (guitar), Ken Ichinose (‘cello), Alexander Gunchenko (double-bass)

JULIA WOLFE – Reeling (2012)
Patrick Barry (clarinet), Thomas Guldborg (percussion), Sarah Watkins (piano), Callum Allardice (guitar), Ken Ichinose )’cello), Alexander Gubchenko (double-bass)

JOHN PSATHAS – Irirangi (Meditation) 2019
Alistair Fraser (taonga puoro), Bridget Douglas (flute)

LUCIANO BERIO – Folk Songs 1964
Bianca Andrew (soprano), Bridget Douglas (flute), Patrick Barry (clarinet), Michelle Velvin (harp), Thomas Guldborg/Sam Rich (percussion), Andrew Thomson (viola), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)

Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Thursday 1st August, 2019

Every Stroma concert I’ve had the good fortune to attend has pushed back my frontiers regarding what I’d thought of as viable and coherent musical expression, and by use of techniques and/or media that I might have previously regarded somewhat removed from “musical” realms. This “giving voice” to unconventional objects and means could be seen as taking one’s listening back to a time when music existed only as natural sounds which would have then slowly been developed alongside speech as a kind of language, the sounds then imitated by whatever objects came to hand, and which could in some cases be manipulated and varied for different results and purposes.

This latest Stroma presentation “Voices of the World” featured a couple of items which explored the idea of these pure, primitive sounds making their way into and through various human cultures and being gradually shaped for descriptive or expressive purposes. The concert’s first item was one of these, a new, intensely collegial work-in-progress called Overture 1807, rev.2018, rev.2019 (an impressive stand-alone chronology of connection in itself!). The work was the brainchild of NZ-born California-based composer Celeste Oram, an overture to a projected opera-in-progress whose material was “collectively devised and improvised” by a whole host of performer thus far in the work’s life, and included the playing of Rob Thorne, a noted exponent of taonga puoro, and material from 18th Century Vienna (though the overture as heard here extensively quoted Beethoven’s “Coriolan” Overture, a work from the early 19th Century).

Stroma’s programme note most illuminatingly told of one Georg Forster (1754-94), who, as a teenager, accompanied his father, a naturalist and scientist, on the voyage with Captain James Cook on the HMS Resolution between 1772 and 1775, visiting many South Seas Island places including New Zealand. As well as displaying sophisticated ethnographical skills in analysing different Polynesian Societies, the young Forster was a talented essayist whose book A Voyage around the World, published in 1777, earned him great fame as it uniquely combined factual and reliable data with colourful descriptions and observations of the different peoples and their customs, even including notated and translated  Polynesian songs. Goethe, Wieland, and even Beethoven were all said to have read some of Forster’s work, one commentator in the 1930s even suggesting that the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was inspired by a Maori chant!

By way of relating  the work of a great composer to a host of creative impulses that might have preceded it, and even “prepared its way” in generic forms, Celeste Oram chose the composer’s “Coriolan” Overture as the fulcrum around which were encircled various sounds and gesturings instigated by the taonga puoro playing of Rob Thorne – I found this experience a kind of “turned on one’s head” happening, the haunting tones, textures and timbres of the older instruments (including stones) “giving birth” as it were to the impulses that became the Beethoven Overture, by helping create the surrounding agglomerated ambiences. So this wasn’t “deconstructed” Beethoven, but rather “inseminated” (is there a unisex expression for this?) thought, impulse and gesture, all given musical and theatrical expression. Rob Thorne’s taonga puoro evocations of an ancient “being” instigating processes of creativity which, rather than self-consciouslessly wrought had a kind of “uncovered” aspect, made discernable by creative awareness, and leading towards the measures of (here) oddly-syncopated Beethoven that we knew so well, though underlining for us at the piece’s end the infinite patience of the sources of these tones and impulses in returning our sensibilities to the place of origin, though, of course, never to be quite the same again.

Each one of the concert’s next three pieces featured pre-recorded human voices (a duet and two solos) given a kind of freshly-wrought reactive ambience, as likely to contrast with as complement the singers’ sounds. These were “field” recordings, caught on the wing, as it were, and thus requiring from the instrumentalists a similar kind of spontaneity of utterance, an “entering into” the world of the vocalisings in both a physical and a spiritual sense. Jack Body’s Bouyi was something of a “rogue entry” into a catalogue of field recordings from Yunnan province in China, this being actually from Guizhou, a neighbouring province. It featured the voices of two Bouyi women duetting, though no translation was provided.

Two violins began softly and folkishly, evoking a spacious kind of serenity, enlivened by the women’s voices, to which the viola and ‘cello responded – the instruments gave the impression of “listening” to the voices, the instrumental harmonisings tender, sensitive and ambient, contrasted with the voices’ elegant earthiness. The instruments occasionally copied the voices’ interval of a second in places, but always discreetly and resonantly – it all gave an impression of a precious moment in time caught on the wing, to be enjoyed and marvelled at in times to come.

The ambient contrast between this and a similar kind of undertaking by British composer Anna Clyne couldn’t have been more marked, the recording being of an elderly man in a Chicago Street singing and tapping his walking-cane as he walked down the city’s “Magnificent Mile”. Stroma’s resident conductor Hamish McKeich magically appeared to direct this piece which was titled A Wonderful Day. The man’s voice made a great subject – very forthright, his “feeling” very emotional and overt, both in speech and song, the instrumental accompaniments gently “played with” the singer, before cranking the delivery up into a kind of gospel hymn! The piano and percussion helped to “open up” the ambiences, the double-tracking of song and commentary giving the performance a kind of resonance, riding triumphantly atop the traffic noise – a tremendously involving and great-hearted realization, the first of a collection of electro-acoustic recordings of street noises entitled “Chicago Street Portraits”.

American composer Julia Wolfe’s work Reeling used a recording of a French-Canadian singer who possessed an extremely rhythmic and lively vocal style, one generating tremendous momentum from the outset – the instrumentalists took up the vocalised rhythms firstly with fingers and feet, gradually bringing in clarinet, piano, cello and guitar, and finally the double-bass – the “ditty” was challengingly angular and syncopated in rhythm, sounding very street-wise, and clinching the “interactive” illusion when the percussion joined in with what seemed like proper “jamming”. The instruments were allowed a few measures without the singer, keeping the energy levels primed, the players matching the singer’s exuberance with gestures like the clarinet’s “transported” bird-calls sounded at the height of the tumult, and the singer then concluding with a flourish of strung-together cadences almost vertiginous in effect! Fabulous!

One would expect John Psathas’s music to easily replicate such Dionysian exuberances – but here was the composer of View from Olympus exploring a completely different realm of expression, one concerned with hidden, almost metaphysical properties of sounds and music, and evocations of such sounds. Psathas used the word “Irirangi” as a title for his piece, meaning a “faint voice”, a kind of “aspiration” produced by what he called a “reaching out” of realms towards other realms, but equating awareness of this phenomenon with the idea of “meditation”, a listening for these hidden voices (shades, to my surprise, of Robert Schumann’s proclaimed “one soft note for he who listens secretly” in his solo piano work Fantasie in C Major of 1839). As with the concert’s opening “Overture”, the piece here began with sounds equating more to the natural than to the “human” world via recordings of insects, birdsong, and rain, along with taonga puoro  played by Alistair Fraser, to which Bridget Douglas’s flute responded at first with simple, descending figurations, which gradually took on the character of something like an Aeolian harp, with as much breath as tone – all of these delicacies and subtleties attuned and honed our listening sensibilities in a way the composer undoubtedly meant with the word “meditation”, bringing into play the phenomena of normally inanimate objects such as stones being given the capacity to sound and “speak”, and “suggest” to the flute that it absorb these same sounds and “echo” them as the “faint voice” or “irirangi”. Haunting and moving……

As most people know, Luciano Berio wrote his Folk-Songs for the singer Cathy Berberian, to whom he was married. First performed in 1964, these are arrangements of folk songs and melodies from various parts of the world, and scored at that time for voice, flute/piccolo, clarinet, harp, viola, cello and percussion (Berio made an orchestral arrangement  in 1973). He’d set two of the songs, “La donna ideale” and “Ballo” much earlier (part of a student work from 1947 “Tre canzoni popolari”), before reworking them for the later collection. One presumes that the composer’s professed “profound uneasiness” when listening to piano-accompanied popular songs stemmed from his dislike of what he regarded as some kind of “gentrification” of the music, and that his scoring for a chamber ensemble to accompany the singer was meant to bring listeners closer to what he called “the expressive and cultural roots of each song”. Certainly the individuality of each setting is sharply expressed by the instrumentation,  more so than could a piano accompaniment alone provide – though it’s worth remembering that, often, “less is more” in these matters, and that we all (the composer himself included) “hear” things differently…….

As much as I would like to pleasurably dwell on soprano Bianca Andrew’s smilingly-voiced and vividly-characterised realisations of each one of these songs, I must hold myself in check and report merely that she seemed to me to take us right into the ambient realm of each song’s idiosyncratic world – the work of an artist with a gift for direct communication. I never, alas, heard soprano Victoria de los Angeles “live”, but a good friend of mine who did would always recall that singer’s ability to communicate a kind of “personalized” warmth of utterance, as if performing for each individual listener alone – throughout these songs I felt a similar directness of giving from this singer, an invitation to “share” the words and the music, with each item a delightfully individualized experience.

The first two songs aren’t actual folk-songs, but were composed by a Kentucky song-writer, John Jacob Niles – in “Black, black, black” the viola introduced the song, then whispered an accompaniment, before “answering” the singer after the first voice, together with the harp, everything ambient and lovely – “I wonder as I wander” was more processional, like a harp-accompanied carol, the winds contributing gently-floating harmonies, with flute and clarinet impulsively contributing some duetting bird-song! The Armenian “Loosin yelav” featured liquid harp notes and a gentle clarinet descant to the voice, concluding with a flurry of wind notes as the moon was chased into the clouds! – after which the French “Rossignolet du bois” gently told of a nightingale instructing a lover how to woo a sweetheart, voice, harp, clarinet and gentle percussive effects used here to persuasive effect.

What a contrast with the Sicilian “A la feminisca”! – at once herioc and dangerous seafaring sounds, the vocal line declamatory, in places low and trenchant, the accompaniments strident, but concluding with some lullabic assurances! The two Italian songs, “La donna ideale” and “Ballo” are both droll philosophical pronouncements concerning love, the former lyrical, the second energetic, with fantastic instrumental playing and a soaring vocal line rounding up the “whirling dervish-like” energies. More darkness with “Motettu de tristura” from Sardinia, plaintive vocal utterances, with deep, resonant chords, the flute and percussion piquant and pleading – far better to be in the Auvergne, unhappily married or no, as the case may be, in the first song! – the light, pastoral atmosphere here seeming somewhat at odds with the querulous subject-matter (Ironic as only the French can be, perhaps!) With the second Auvergne song we enjoyed the contrast between the viola’s and cello’s grim, sombre soundings, and the quasi-cautionary tale aspect of the singer’s story, the voice arched upwards so freely and expressively, the harp at the end adding a telling, liquidly-flowing  postscript.

As for the concluding Azerbaijan song, with the “untranslatable” words, here it swept along with plenty of elan, the musicians “telling” its unmistakably focused story without need of any translation, the discourse filled with glint, energy, mischief and scandalous revelation, finishing with a slate-cleansing shout, and metaphorically bringing the house down! –  the evening a triumph for Stroma’s avowed goal of engagement of its audiences with new music and new ideas, via performances of unfailing interest and brilliance.