Author: Peter Mechen

“Achieved is the Glorious work!” – Orpheus Choir with Orchestra Wellington recreate Haydn’s “The Creation”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOSEPH HAYDN – The Creation
Anna Leese (soprano), Frederick Jones (tenor), Joel Amosa (bass-baritone)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Brent Stewart (conductor)
with Airu Matsuda/Jemima Smith (dancers)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 24th August, 2024

Haydn’s “The Creation” seems to be on the “short list” of anybody’s compendium of great choral music experiences, but it was something that had, purely by accident, evaded me over the years. This of course necessitated on my part some urgently-driven and intensely-constituted preparatory experience of the work prior to my attending the Orpheus Choir’s and Orchestra Wellington’s eagerly-awaited Wellington performance.

My plan was to listen to several highly-regarded recordings, thinking I would get a well-rounded view of it all, though I confess to taking little notice of the circumstance that all of these performances presented the work in German even though I do remember reading about the fascinating peregrinations of the original anonymously-written English libretto that came into Haydn’s hands while in England.  He then took it back to Austria and turned it over to Gottfried van Swieten, who translated it into German for Haydn to set to music, van Swieten also recasting the English words to “fit” with the composer’s work. It was one of the first works up to that time published with a libretto in two languages.

Having digested all of this, and feeling by the end of my listening that my surroundings and person-prototype had been suitably, not to say systematically reconstructed by the composer with the aid of an anonymous libretto drawn from Genesis, the Book of Psalms and John Milton, I felt more than ready for some ”live action”, as popular advertising would have it! And I was, of course, further intrigued by the publicity accompanying the Orpheus Choir’s 2024 presentation, with its promise of “stunning special effects” including a cinematic LED screen adding sight to sound, and dancers from Footnote New Zealand choreographing parts of the music-making! Obviously something special was afoot!

Adding “special effects” to live music-making in general is nothing new of late, and not even in the case of the classics, where, in performances of music traditionally presenting the notes of the score alone, there’s been a world-wide interest in augmenting such activities with just the kinds of things we were given this evening. Even certain works whose essential gravitas seemed to require a pure and unadorned approach have been given extra “componentry” in that it’s more than just the “sound” of the music that’s presented – Bach’s St.John Passion has , for example, been presented with dance choreography at this year’s prestigious Salzburg Festival.

These initiatives of course come with the best of intentions, with purposes most persuasively put – to quote the words of one entrepreneur: “Interractive concert technologies have introduced exciting ways to engage audiences during live performances. From synchronised light shows and projection mapping to mobile apps that enable audience participation, these technologies create a multisensory experience, blurring the boundaries between performers and spectators and fostering a deeper connection between the music and the audience.” A frequently recurring theme in these philosophies is the perceived “conservatism” and “exclusivity” of classical music as a barrier that needs to be broken down – as one event director put it, “….trying to make the music less intimidating and exclusive to people who can’t identify with the conservative, exclusionary image that classical music often has.”

Something that routinely divides audiences at performances with these “special effects” is the difference in attitude between age-groups. Those I talked with on Saturday night after the “Creation” performance included younger people who in general enjoyed the screened images and the dancers, and older people who mostly found them distracting and even annoying. For myself (these days a paid-up member of the grey-haired brigade!) I found parts of the screened imagery appropriately theatrical and dramatic (the contrast between the opening “void” with its convoluted and claustrophobic imagery and its sudden, dramatic, near-blinding light at the choir’s words “and there was LIGHT!!!” was stunning in its effect, for example, as was the ”sunrise/moonrise” imagery accompanying some of the beautiful concluding music of Part One).  However as scene followed subsequent scene I found myself wondering what we were expected to be most engaged with – was it the music or the accompanying images?  Under such circumstances I felt the most important consideration was a question of a proper synthesis between the two – and for me there seemed a significant proportion of the visual throughout the evening whose “busyness” was more of a distraction than the interactive motivation which the music surely deserved. The “extra” detailing I enjoyed as much as the more focused visual depictions was the presence in Part Three of the two dancers, Airu Matsuda representing Adam and Jemima Smith depicting Eve, their movements always in what seemed like properly organic synchronisation with both the words and the music, and earning them well-deserved plaudits of their own at the end.

Turning to the music and its performance by the singers and orchestra is to encounter what I thought were the occasion’s most resplendent qualities – right from the dark-browed, brooding instrumental opening of the work followed by bass-baritone Joel Amosa’s entrance as the Archangel Raphael and his splendidly-weighted voice (making me catch my breath momentarily at the realisation that he was singing in English!), the sounds held us in a grip of wonderment and expectation! It made that moment of release of both the choir’s and orchestra’s tumultuous torrent of sound at the word “Light” all the more elemental in its power and joyous in its liberation!  What better a beginning, I thought, to such a cosmic event!

If tenor Frederick Jones sounded at first slightly tentative during the opening of his aria “Now vanish before the holy beams”,  his voice “broke through” with the description of Satan’s host’s defeat and consignment to “endless night”, with the Orpheus voices revelling in the writing’s energy and determination with their cries of “Despairing, cursing rage attends their rapid fall”. And his ringing tones splendidly capped off the orchestra’s depiction of the majestic sun and the beauteous moon to great effect. Even better was his performance in Part Two of the great aria “In native worth and honour clad”, one describing the creation of man and woman (the sequence appropriately accompanied by the famous Michelangelo Sistine Chapel depiction of God creating Adam – however clichéd the image, it had for me that interactive “rightness” that made its proper mark).

Soprano Anna Leese’s brightly-focused voice made the perfect contrast to Joel Amosa’s splendid recitative “And God made the Firmament” when she undertook the celebratory “The marvellous work” with the choir again matching the soloist’s exuberant mood, Leese returning in more lyrical fashion for a bewitching “With verdue clad”, to which the orchestral winds added evocative detail that heightened the “ravish’d sense” of the beholder. As befitted the extra dynamism of living creatures, the soprano’s “On mighty pens” paid both sprightly and lyrical homage to the birds of the air, specifically the eagle, lark, dove and nightingale, the visuals “treating us” however vicariously and distractedly, to a simulated ride on the back of an eagle during this section! – though Anna Leese’s voice did manage to refocus our attentions on the music for some of the time, and garner sufficient appreciation for a lovely performance!

Of course the duet sequences of Part Three between the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, are always a highlight of this work – and here we were charmed by the interaction between the pair, firstly by the aforementioned dancers’ sequences which I thought of a piece with the whole in terms their simply-adorned and dream-like quality of expression; and then with the re-entrance of Anna Leese as Eve and Joel Amosa as Adam dressed almost as if for a wedding, which of course their union symbolizes in an archetypal sense. Even the tenor took part in the ritual’s beginning, introducing the pair in the most mellifluous of tones “In rosy mantle now appears”, a lovely piece of singing by Frederick Jones! It’s the precursor of a series of duets and declamations heart-warming in their effect, be it the pair’s alternating praise of and delight in the newly-created world (“Of stars the fairest”) or each one’s heartfelt declaration of love for the other during the course of “Our duty we have now performed”, both singers conveying a real sense of wonderment at their “coming into being” in a new world and sharing their rapturous excitement.

In attendance with all of this, and in places leading the way was the wonderful Orpheus Choir – music director Brent Stewart must have been well-and-truly stoked with his voices’ response to the composer’s every storytelling excitement, rhapsodic description and grandly resplendent moment,  through all of which the choir never faltered. To single out any particularly memorable moment (which I’ve done already!) would be to underplay the totality of the Orpheus’s achievement in conveying Haydn’s sheer inventiveness and flexibility. Right with the choir for every demisemiquaver of the journey was Orchestra Wellington, whose recent appearances in a punishing schedule of concerts had already confirmed its reputation as a brilliant and formidable ensemble – here, enhanced even further.

While the effectiveness of much of the “reimagined” aspect of the presentation will remain a matter of taste and opinion, there can be no doubt as to the stellar musical qualities of the occasion thanks to all concerned, conductor, soloists, choir and orchestra! To quote wholeheartedly from the libretto itself – “Achieved is the glorious work!”

 

Revisiting Romance with Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Romantic Generation – Orchestra Wellington – August 2024

STRAVINSKY – The Fairy’s Kiss
KORNGOLD – Violin Concerto (1945)
HINDEMITH – Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria Von Weber

Amalia Hall (violin)
Marc Taddei (Music Director)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 17th August 2024

With its latest concert presentation, “The Romantic Generation”, Orchestra Wellington has reached the halfway stage of what could justly be called its “richly inventive” 2024 season, with nary a foot put wrong in bringing to its audiences a repertoire which at once constantly challenges and almost invariably delights those who are drawn into the compulsive convictions of both its vision and brilliance of performance. Music Director Marc Taddei excels in this kind of exploratory undertaking, knowing just how far to push the boundaries of interest in and tolerance of the unfamiliar, and how to integrate such daring explorations into more familiar contexts.

The previous concert “The Classical Style” adroitly illustrated this idea, pairing the relatively unknown Piano Concerto by the “Les Six” French composer Germaine Tailleferre with standard classical repertory symphonies by Prokofiev and Beethoven. And the year’s opening concert “The Grand Gesture” even more daringly included a recently contemporary composer Lukas Foss’s responses to baroque masterpieces by JS Bach and Handel, as well as including some more consciously neo-baroque entertainment in the form of Igor Stravinsky’s 1920 “Pulcinella” Ballet Suite.

Now, here, with “The Romantic Generation” Taddei and his Orchestra turned the spotlight on romanticism by highlighting certain of its characteristics – its strains of exoticism, its cult of performance and its overtly heroic and emotional focus – from the perspectives of a later era. In a sense the evening’s presentation took our own ears simultaneously backwards and forwards in time, as the viewpoints we heard all came not directly from the Romantic era itself but from various twentieth-century composers applying their own interpretative styles to these already bygone romantic sensibilities. And, of course we ourselves have since moved into a new century, forming our own circumspect (and further enriched by experience) reactions to these processes.

The music of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky made a second appearance in the orchestra’s 2024 series tonight with the composer’s complete ballet “Le Baiser de la Fee” (The Fairy’s Kiss), a work inspired in this case by Stravinsky’s hero, Tchaikovsky. The story was based on Hans Christian Anderson’s dark tale of a child who is “marked” at birth by the kiss of a mysterious Fairy, one who returns later in life to claim him for her own. Stravinsky adapted a number of lesser-known piano and vocal works by the older composer (the best-known being the song “None but the Lonely Heart”) producing an attractively ambient continuum of danceable numbers, some of which conjure up Petrushka-like scenarios (much of the ballet’s Second Tableau “A Village Fete”), and some which go towards suggesting the high drama of Swan Lake (the conclusion of the Third Tableau “At the Mill”, when the Fairy returns to claim the by now young man for her own).

Mark Taddei and his players seemed to my ears to catch the music’s every mood at the performance, whether echt-Stravinsky or faux-Tchaikovsky – I must confess that the music “grew” on me the more I returned to it by way of preparing myself for the actual concert, overcoming my initial feeling that Stravinsky had “emasculated” much of Tchaikovsky’s overtly-expressed emotion with relatively dry, intellectually-conceived reconstructions. In fact I baulked at one writer’s assertion that ”Tchaikovsky’s faults – his banalities and vulgarities and routine procedures – are composed out of the music and Stravinsky’s virtues are composed into it”….my first reaction was that I preferred Tchaikovsky’s whole-hearted “banalities” to Stravinsky’s dry-as-dust tidy-ups! However, repeated hearings have softened this view, and I warmed to Marc Taddei’s direction and Orchestra Wellington’s superbly-articulated playing – too many stellar instrumental solos to list, and moment after moment of radiantly-voiced or scintillatingly-wrought ensemble. Particularly memorable was the return of the Fairy towards the end disguised as the young man’s fiancée (accompanied by the “None but the Lonely Heart” theme in various instrumental guises), with the tensions building up to the moment of the young man realising that he is, in fact, in the Fairy’s power and cannot escape – at that point not even Stravinsky could deny Tchaikovsky’s music its full emotional thrust, as the music takes the Fairy and her captive to “a land beyond time and place”.

A different world of sensibility was brought to view by Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto, a work which brought into play both its composer’s richly-endowed sense of romantic and heroic adventure in his scores written for a number of legendary Hollywood films during the 1930s, and his ability to replicate a spectacularly virtuosic level of musical expression in a romantic concerto reaching back to the nineteenth century tradition begun by violinist Nicolo Paganini. We’ve become accustomed to Amalia Hall relinquishing her orchestral concertmaster’s role to tackle as soloist some of the world’s greatest violin concertos in the past – her performance of the Britten Violin Concerto last year remains a hauntingly resonant memory – and with fellow violinist Justine Cormack again substituting for her, we got another masterly display of virtuosity and sensibility from Hall which brought out all the work’s brilliance and lyricism. I loved that feeling of nothing being “forced” by the musicians, of everything instead unfolding as naturally and spontaneously as seemed to be required.

Amalia Hall with Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington playing the Korngold Violin Concerto – photo by  R.Bruce.Scott

Korngold used several themes from his film music for the work’s material throughout each of the three movements, the slow movement in its middle section having the kind of suggestible magic I associate with a certain episode in a work by Korngold’s greatest contemporary, Richard Strauss, his opera “Der Rosenkavalier” – the haunting wind chords that accompany the famous “Presentation of the Rose” scene in that work – even if Korngold’s work has a darker, more volatile quality. The rollicking finale which followed began with a kind of staccato jig whose trajectories delightedly seemed in places almost MC Escher-like in simultaneously ascending and descending, with soloist and orchestra never missing a beat, besides including episodes featuring beautiful lyrical variants of mood and colour before the work concluded with helter-skelter passages punctuated by exuberant horn calls.

Amalia Hall then treated us to an encore whose in situ identity was a mystery to everybody I spoke with afterwards, but was revealed in due course – this was Fritz Kreisler’s Recitativo and Scherzo-Caprice Op.6, obviously something of a virtuoso violinist’s calling-card, with ample variation of mood and detail – apparently it’s the famed violinist’s only extant opus for solo violin, and was something of a surprise for people like myself who know of Kreisler’s compositions only through his Viennese-salon and imitation-Baroque pieces. This was a full-blooded rhapsody-with-fireworks display which under Hall’s expert fingers brought the house down at the end!

Further ravishment of a slightly different kind awaited us before the concert’s final scheduled item, a work by Paul Hindemith with a title which one might think describes something impossibly turgid or dreary – Symphonic Metamorphoses on themes by Carl Maria von Weber. In fact we were given a glimpse of the piece’s true character by the appearance of a strange, dulcimer-like instrument brought to the front of the stage, and the subsequent entry of a beautiful young Chinese woman who proceeded to play for us one of the “themes” used by Hindemith in his work. This was a melody that composer Carl Maria von Weber had “borrowed” from philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionaire de Musique of 1767 (Rousseau considered music to be an ideal manifestation of different human cultures) to use as part of the former’s incidental music for Schiller’s adaptation of Carlo Gozzi’s play Turandot (Puccini used the same source for the story of his 1926 opera).

The instrument was a guzheng, on which the player, Jia Ling, beautifully realised the melody that Weber had got from Rousseau (who had procured it from an unnamed Sinologist), and which Hindemith made as the basis of the second movement of his “Symphonic Metamorphoses”. It all seemed to me entirely characteristic of Orchestra Wellington’s and Marc Taddei’s going that “extra mile” to illuminate and enrich our experience as an audience at these concerts. Certainly Jia Ling’s and her guzheng created an enchantment which resonated for me long after the orchestra had played the entire Hindemith work.

The rest of the “Symphonic Metamorphoses” work used material from a volume of Weber’s piano duets, whose themes remain recognisable (like Rousseau’s “Turandot” theme) but with radical changes made to the harmony and in places the addition of countermelodies. The opening movement brazenly announced its presence, Taddei getting an infectious “swinging” rhythm from the players, and giving the music ample space to round out its phrases and flex its muscles, with a piquant oboe solo, augmented by flute, piccolo and bassoon, and joined by some deliciously “off the beat” percussive action from the players. And, by contrast, I loved the utmost delicacy with which the opening of the slow movement, with its “Turandot” theme, was delivered, Taddei keeping the ever-burgeoning detailings on the leash throughout the plethora of irreverent instrumental trillings towards the mid-movement explosion from which grew that gorgeously tongue-in cheek fugue, the players covering themselves in glory, not least of all the percussion section, relishing their interactive “moment” along with all the other gradually-liberated impulses across the orchestral spectrum whose turn it was to have their say until overtaken by the silences.

The following Andantino saw clarinet, and then bassoon soberly restore some of the music’s dignity, with the accompanying orchestral colours sounding so “right” in sympathy, and the strings and then the winds then giving us a “balm for the soul” subsidiary melody that would here have unruffled the most troubled sensibilities. After that came the joyous “hold onto your seats” shout from the brass introducing the finale, the sounds swinging around the corner, as it were, and bearing down upon us with intent, the lower strings rolling the rhythms along with gusto! With the winds tonguing like crazy the horns then brought in the triumphal home-coming theme to which everybody added their voice, building the excitement in almost “circus-coming-to-town” fashion and leaving us at the end breathless but exhilarated by the sheer orchestral energies of joyful music-making!

 

 

Where Fairburn Walked – worlds of home-grown sounds

Posted on by Peter Mechen

WHERE FAIRBURN WALKED
– an exploration of New Zealand Piano Music

Jian Liu (piano)

Rattle RAT – D149 2024 (3 CD set)

In 1987 Kiwi songwriter Ross Mullins wrote a song “Where Fairburn Walked” for an album “Passing Shots”, a song subsequently taken up by singer Caitlin Smith in her 2004 album “Aurere”. Various commentators whose opinions I’ve read have since expressed regret that the song never quite achieved what was deemed “classic status”, though the appearance of its title on a new set of recordings on the Rattle label suggests that It hasn’t entirely been forgotten – in fact I was able to ”connect the dots” in making the discovery that the Steve Garden who currently runs Rattle Records was also the producer of Ross Mullins’ “Passing Shots” album on which the “Fairburn” song itself first appeared.

The “Fairburn” of the song is of course poet A.R.D. Fairburn (1904-57), who, at the time of his premature death was considered one of the country’s most important poets – his work has since survived a something of a post-mortem dip in status and regard, with his contribution continuing to undergo a revitalised appraisal. So, when I first saw this new Rattle compilation of twentieth (and twenty-first) century New Zealand piano music bearing the title “Where Fairburn walked” my first thoughts were of some of the poet’s laconic verses from “Walking on my Feet” (Fairburn was an inveterate walker for practically all of his life) –

I know where I’m going
where I’ll lie down
nice quiet place
Long way from town

long way to go
I’ll sleep all alone
fingers round the earth
earth round the bone…

The simple directness of such writing is disarming, though not characteristic, as readers of Fairburn’s other poetry will know – but the willingness to engage with the isolation and earthiness of the land heightens the appropriateness of the new recording’s use of the poet’s name, as it does with much of the music we hear.


                                                                                                                                                            A.R.D (Rex) Fairburn

Rather more poetically evocative in terms of imagery and feeling (and according more readily with some of the music found on these recordings) are these lines from a later poem “Estuary” –

The wind has died, no motion now
in the summer’s sleepy breath. Silver the sea-grass
the shells and the driftwood,
fixed in the moon’s vast crystal.

The lynch-pin of this latest undertaking has been pianist Dr. Jian Liu who’s currently both the Head of Piano Studies at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington, and the Acting Head of School at the NZSM, and is widely celebrated both as a performer and music educator. The recording was in fact produced by Dr.Liu in conjunction with sound engineer Graham Kennedy at the New Zealand School of Music’s Adam Concert Room, with help from the New Zealand Music Trust and Rattle Records. Funding for the project came from Creative New Zealand in conjunction with Victoria University of Wellington and SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, and from the New Zealand Music Trust itself. The recordings complement an earlier undertaking involving the publication in China of two volumes containing these same piano works by the Shanghai Music Publishing House, the largest classical music publisher in Asia.

                                                                                                  Dr. Jian Liu

I did express some surprise to Jian Liu at the omission of any of Douglas Lilburn’s piano music from the set – however, because of difficulties in securing copyright from the Lilburn Estate to publish any of the composer’s pieces in China, it was decided to maintain the accord between the publication of the music and these recordings. Of course Lilburn’s spirit is still a “presence” far beyond the single actual reference to him found in Jenny McLeod’s Tone Clock Piece X – “for Douglas on his 80th birthday”. It’s Interesting that Fairburn himself was well aware of Lilburn as a composer, and in fact they corresponded regarding the possibility of Lilburn setting some of Fairburn’s poetry, with the composer suggesting that the “shorter, simpler poems” (such as the aforementioned “Walking on my Feet”) would be best for such a purpose (Denys Trussell “Fairburn” Auckland University Press 1984 Pg.212) – alas that it was an idea that never bore fruit.

Still, these might-have-been conjectures have their own separate life; and Lilburn’s piano music has certainly received its due on disc already through the stellar efforts of interpreters like Margaret Nielsen, Dan Poynton and Michael Houstoun over the years. It’s entirely appropriate that this new set of recordings should be a world unto itself, one in which the compelling uniqueness of the music’s character is honed by the incredibly-focused commitment towards and identification with the music on the part of Jian Liu. And completing the picture is the brilliance, clarity and atmosphere of sound engineer Graham Kennedy’s recording. The three discs together constitute an overall programme whose structure sustains listening interest through both consistency and contrast. Jian Liu himself indicates in the booklet notes that each disc represents “increasing levels of technical difficulty and musical complexity”, providing new and interesting repertoire choices for pianists in different spheres of activity.

Disc One reflects the possibilities for pianists wishing to begin such a journey – and there ‘s a kind of chronology present as well in the process which adds to the flavour of things with names like Warwick Braithwaite, Thomas Haig, Gordon McBeth, Harry Hiscocks, Ernest Jenner, and Paul Schramm, all of whom were born in the nineteenth century. There’s a definite period charm about Warwick Braithwaite’s Fragment, Gordon McBeth’s An Idyll,  Harry Hiscocks’ Nocturne, and Ernest Jenner’s Foxglove Bells – and both Thomas Haigh’s deliciously glutinous-sounding Rotorua (Boiling Mud Pools) with its accompanying touches of gothic atmosphere, and Paul Schramm’s What a Silly Joke with its knockabout comedy routine are all evocatively presented by Liu’s ever-prevailing sense of time, place and character in the music.

On the same disc one finds contemporary composers exploring these same charming, fragrant, atmospheric, and pictorial evocations – though there’s insufficient space to comment on every individual piece one still responds to Ronald Tremain’s artlessly attractive Sleigh Ride, and Claire Cowan’s more exploratory Paper Dragonfly, and with extension of the rich variety of keyboard textures provided by David Hamilton’s Clouds over Aoraki and Gillian Whitehead’s Outlines Through Rising Mists. Gareth Farr’s Love Songs and Anthony Ritchie’s Caroline Bay Suite set simple but satisfying rhythmic challenges of ostinato and syncopation.

The remainder of pieces on the disc take the player to more demanding levels of achievement both technically and interpretatively with Jenny McLeod’s Mysterious Whirly Square Dance providing a stimulating test for any beginning player, and Paul Schramm’s already-mentioned What a Silly Joke even more so.  Gillian Whitehead’s Lullaby for Matthew and Craig Utting’s Covenant have more reachable notes but inhabit worlds which require an advanced synthesis of hands head and heart. And so to John Elmsly’s Six Little Preludes which conclude the first disc and which in Jian Liu’s hands definitely represents a kind of technical and aesthetic gateway through which a player needs to pass to tackle the demands of the “next level” of keyboard accomplishment.

Straight away one senses a more elevated world of expression with the beginning of Disc Two, and one to which the pianist instantly responds, firstly with Kenneth Young’s Elusive Dream, a series of spontaneously-wrought roulades becoming increasingly interactive as their explorations flirt with both expectation and illusion – a kind of “growing-up” metaphor, an awakening to a new reality. Liu adroitly enables David Farquar’s Three Inventions to playfully lock horns with one another before coming to a kind of “rubbed-off-edges” terms with themselves, while Ross Harris’s utterly charming Nga Manu delineates by numbers the birth processes of birds from incubation, through hatching and feeding and pushing out fledglings, including a somewhat pitiful “runt of the litter”.  Leonie Holmes’s Nocturne comes with a poem describing the flight of a moth, the sounds, Liu perfectly realising Holmes’s fine detailing expressing the creature’s “Midnight Empress” status and her “unchallenged” sweep into and through her “hushed domain”. And just as majestic in a different, “other time and place” manner is Michael Williams’s Arteria Meridionali, whose ritualistic, almost Respighi-like gestures seem to evoke something of their European origins.

It was simply my way of thinking about things, but Anthony Ritchie’s grandly-conceived Olveston Suite, a tribute to an historic Dunedin stately home, seems to mark the end of the set’s “coming of age” evocations, the “grand gesture-like” sounds nostalgically reawakening my youthful impressions of such places with their faded glories and echoes of old times. Everything here seemed like a newly-minted dream with lots of rumbustion (The Kitchen and Scullery – as well as, surprisingly, the Billiard Room!), proper old-world etiquette (the Dining Room) and some genteel tranquility (the Writing Room), all part of the fairy-tale-like fantasy of a lost age.

After this, I felt the remaining works on the disc, Jenny McLeod’s Four Tone Clock pieces and Anthony Ritchie’s selection of PIano Preludes, possessed a gravitas which lifted them away from the other pieces, more akin to the collection of works on Disc Three. All of the pieces had that depth of content, either focused or discursive, which required the kind of responses to technical difficulty and/or musical complexity as outlined by Jian Liu in his introduction to the set.

McLeod’s Tone Clock pieces were inspired by Dutch composer Peter Schat’s theories regarding equal-temperament tonal and chromatic approaches, expanding Schat’s basic idea to incorporate what she called a “Grand Unified Theory” far beyond the idea’s original source. Liu plays four of McLeod’s twenty-four pieces, two of which are each dedicated to previous composer-colleagues of Mcleod – Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar – both of whom had preceded her as Professors of Music Studies at Victoria University. I imagined I could “hear” certain characteristics of each of the older composers in the pieces McLeod had inscribed to them.

While more conventionally named as “Preludes”, Anthony Ritchie’s survey for solo piano encompasses the accepted spectrum of all twenty-four keys from the chromatic scale. Jian Liu recorded five of these for this recording, covering a wide range of differing “character” pieces, influenced to some extent by other composers’ efforts in this form but remaining true to the composer’s own “sound and musical expression”. Each has a particular distinctive character which Liu brings out with splendid-sounding surety – I particularly enjoyed the contrasts in his playing of No. 15, with its agitated, excitingly “dangerous-sounding” figurations vying with bell-like treble sounds, dismissed mockingly and derisively, when compared with No. 24 (subtitled “For my Mother”), a time-aged memory of mother and child at the keyboard perhaps? – something at first charming and nostalgic, though at the end, sounding a strangely forlorn note…..

True to Jian Liu’s previously-quoted overview, the two previous pieces and those occupying Disc Three all seemed ineluctably “ingrained” in terms of conveying a character, environment, situation, emotion or any other such viewpoint relating to this part of the world with requisite skill and conviction. Two of the third disc’s pieces were by composers whose music was appearing for the first time in this set – interestingly one was the oldest in the group (Edwin Carr 1928-2003) and the other was the youngest (Selina Fisher (b.1993) – beside which we heard further works by David Hamilton, John Psathas, Gareth Farr, Gillian Whitehead, Claire Cowan and John Elmsly.

Whether it was the juxtaposition of youth and age, or the “newness” of the two composers’ music on this disc, I found myself unexpectedly, but more resoundingly, drawn to both Edwin Carr’s and Salina Fisher’s very different sounding works. Carr composed prolifically in most forms, including a number of works for solo piano, among them this attractively-varied set of four sharply-characterised pieces requiring from the player, by turns, both a lyrical touch and brilliant virtuosity. By contrast Selina Fisher’s world is more readily ambient and impressionistic, though capable of sharply-etched incident and irruption, however micro-cosmic. Both of these pieces would certainly encourage me to seek out further explorations and expressions of the world of sound, light and ambience through which we all move and deign to share with others. It‘s a kind of overall unifying quality which all of the pieces on these three discs so brilliantly and evocatively presented here by Jian Liu have a share in defining and characterising as our very own distinctive living-space.

Henry Wong Doe, and a paean in praise of piano recitals…….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

     Wellington Chamber Music presents :
HENRY WONG DOE – Piano Recital

FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN – Sonata in E Minor Hob.XVI:34 (1784)
LEONIE HOLMES – Time Rustling for piano and fixed media electronics (2023)
ALBERTO GINASTERA – Piano Sonata No. 1 Op.22 (1952)
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN – Nocturne in D flat Major Op.27 No.2 (1836)
MODEST MUSORGSKY – Pictures at an Exhibition (1874)

Sunday 21st July 2024
St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Welliongton

Consider, reader, if you will, the piano recital – a presentation involving a single musician playing on an instrument which has inspired some of the greatest, most profound and far-reaching musical compositions ever devised by human beings within the framework of Western civilisation.

The classical repertoire alone for pianists seems boundless, including sounds associated with early keyboards and gradually evolving over centuries to the majestic tones wrought by today’s concert grands – instruments capable of reproducing near-orchestral swathes of tones and timbres which give multifarious tongue to all kinds of compositions, both original and transcribed from any era or alternative sound-source. And the music written for a single player and instrument alone is itself so richly-extensive as to commandeer a lifetime’s attention and satisfaction.

Which leads me to pose the question – WHY is it that the piano recital itself has seemed of recent times to have lost some of its former frequency, or currency, or status, or allure, or more to the point, NECESSITY in the music programmes of various organisations?

Time was in Wellington, for example, when every international piano soloist (or guest instrumentalist or singer) who appeared with the NZSO gave a solo recital as well. Quite apart from the stellar line-up which I “missed out” on seeing over the years (including luminaries like Claudio Arrau, Annie Fisher, John Ogdon and Tamas Vasary), I WAS fortunate enough to hear in the 1970s and 80s artists such as Alfred Brendel (an all-Beethoven programme), Vladimir Ashkenazy (Mozart and Chopin), Alicia de Larrocha (an extraordinary all-Spanish recital), Peter Frankl (Chopin),  Jorge Bolet (Schumann, Grieg and Liszt) and Stephen Hough (Schubert), in recital in the Town Hall playing music that seemed their “meat-and-drink” when compared with the fast-food popularity of the “standard” piano concerto repertoire they also performed with the orchestra.

Now I love piano concertos – don’t get me wrong, here! – who wouldn’t want to hear those works by Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Saint-Saens, and Ravel, played by a world-class pianist? – It’s just that piano concertos represent a one-sided aspect of pianism when set against the solo repertoire that’s just as much their and our heritage. And it’s a heritage we concertgoers in t  his part of the world are being deprived of.

Such a loss was underlined in spectacular fashion last weekend at a Wellington Chamber Music Concert which featured a magnificently-played solo recital by Auckland-born pianist Henry Wong Doe, who’s back home in New Zealand to visit family and take some time out from his current duties as Professor of Piano at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. I had not long ago reviewed Wong Doe’s most recent recording for Rattle Records of one of today’s recital’s “jewels”,  Musorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” –  https://middle-c.org/2018/02/two-resounding-recordings-from-rattle-classics-and-a-feisty-newcomer/ – so I was interested to have the chance to compare my impressions of the two readings.

While the CD enterprisingly linked the Musorgsky with another work inspired by pieces of art, New Zealand composer Eve de Castro Robinson’s, fantastically-wrought “A zigzagged gaze”, Wong Doe included at today’s St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace recital, a work by Aucklander Leonie Holmes, Time Rustling, for piano and fixed media electronics. This had been one of six works commissioned by the pianist from different Kiwi composers living both in New Zealand and in places around the world in 2022, Wong Doe inviting them to write pieces illustrating their experiences and perspectives during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Otherwise the programme was a kind of compendium of the recitalist’s art, with works from the classical, romantic and twentieth-century eras, one which could be simplistically described as a “something for everybody” presentation, but whose essence expressed much more than any such glib kind of prospectus – each piece had its own “attitude” and special character in its own right.

Take the Haydn E Minor Sonata Hob.XVI:34 which opened the recital, for instance – the first movement so intriguingly equivocal at the beginning, the pianist’s upward arpeggios quizzical and questioning, and with “full stops” at the ends of some of the sequences – what might Haydn have been thinking? – Wong Doe generates moments of volatility to the discourse, contrasting dynamic levels and places where the horse seems to be momentarily given its head before being reined in,  sounding in places not unlike a young Beethoven, but ultimately with more circumspection than certainty, especially at the movement’s end.

The slow movement sounded vocal-like from the outset, the line florid and decorative. The middle section explored both minor and major key changes before returning to the opening, Wong Doe’s agile fingers making the lines seem like embellishments of themselves, steering the music towards the final movement’s darker territories without a break. He then spurted into the finale’s Vivace molto with a will, presenting incredibly quicksilvery fingerwork, relying on velocity and brilliance for effect and playing down the opportunities for variety of touch and droll humour that a slightly more varied  tempo would have given – still, the effect was undeniably exhilarating!

After this came the Leonie Holmes work, part of the pianist’s “Perspectives 2022” project referred to above, and which Wong Doe recorded for Rattle Records on RAT D147 2023  (see this review’s heading). This was one of two pieces from the set whose composers used electronic sounds in their work (Leila Adu-Gilmore’s work “Home” was the other), the remainder being entirely for acoustic solo piano and player.

I’ve always liked the unvarnished honesty of Leonie Holmes’s work, the most recent one I’ve heard being an orchestral piece “I watched a shadow” premiered by the NZSO on consecutive nights (May 17/18th) in Auckland and Wellington. I thought Holmes’s work on that occasion easily out-grew its inspiration, a friend’s somewhat homespun poem, the resulting orchestral rhapsody convincingly conveying an austere soundscape undergoing what seemed as much oceanic as tectonic forces at work, enlivened by ebb-and-flow wind-and-brass irruptions.

Here, by comparison, the stimulus originated more from within, a meditation upon time characterised strongly by the isolation of the Covid-19 era. Holmes wanted to “grow the piece” via the “strange ways” of time by refracting her initial sketches of memories of the sounds of wind rustling through the branches of trees through an electronic media, then mixing the later piano timbres with these earlier memories.

Beginning with electronics whose sounds resembled a chord which burgeoned and refracted, the piano responded with gently-voiced melancholic tones., the combination sometimes augmenting or taking turns with one another – a tolling-bell sequence mirrored, then drifted apart, while the tape’s rumbling, sighing ambiences prompted low, murmuring chordal utterances from the piano, Bartokian chords growing into scherzando-like animations. As the intensities faded, gentler Debussian piano sounds took over– gentle pin-pricks of sound-light gradually bade those beautifully ambient chords a farewell.

Next we heard a starkly contrasting piece, Alberto Ginastera’s First Piano Sonata, a tribute by the composer to the folk rhythms of his native country, Argentina, and producing a coruscating display of keyboard physicality from the pianist. As well as their South American flavour, the themes had a Prokofiev-like energy and piquancy with the music’s more lyrical moments of the music framed in toccata-like trajectories which kept the listener’s blood pulsating right up to the coruscating repeated-note onslaughts of the movement’s final flourishes.

This was followed by a presto misterioso second movement, setting sinister “whirling dervish” textures against breathlessly-repeated toccata-like sequences. Wong Doe’s feathery brilliance conjured up something of a nightmarish soundscape traversal which disappeared at the end as eerily and wraith-like as it had begun. What a contrast with the slow movement’s building from the silences a series of quietly expressive “figures” their immobility imbued with portentous mute intention, before opening up and giving tongue in agitated tones. After a climax the sounds seemed to withdraw into themselves once again as mysteriously as before.

Suddenly the finale’s “ruvido ed ostinato” erupted, joyously and frenetically under Wong Doe’s fingers, the dance-like rhythms whirling all of us along on a growing tide of energy and exuberance,  animating those infectious-sounding folk-melodies beloved of the composer  – the whole movement represented an irresistible bubbling-up of exhilaration towards a final, volcanic surge of energy from the pianist up and down the keyboard. It was Incredible stuff, bringing some people to their feet, and leaving others like myself too gobsmacked to do little more that applaud as if in a daze!

After some of us had “talked among ourselves” over the interval and calmed down, we were ready for the second half, beginning with a Chopin Nocturne, and concluding with Musorgsky’s famous “Pictures”. The Chopin work, in D-flat major Op.27 No. 2, was one of a “pair”, which the composer was fond of crafting with these works. This one, in contrast with the more turbulent No. 1, was more consistently song-like throughout, a mini-crescendo of excitement apart in the middle section of the work (very operatic-like, and betraying the composer’s fondness for the voice.)

Wong Doe charmed us with this, beautifully demonstrating to us the well-known description of  “Chopin rubato” – the leaves of the tree are being blown every which way by the wind, but the trunks remain solid and keep strictly in time.

I hadn’t heard Wong Doe’s recording of the Musorgsky for a while, and thought I’d prefer to encounter it afresh, in any case – at the start I thought the gestures suitably invigorating and virile, presenting a composer who, rather than bowed by grief at the loss of his artist friend, Victor Hartmann, seemed determined to do his memory justice via the inspiration given to him by the artist’s pictures.

While making the most of the contrast the cycle afforded, Wong Doe didn’t go into “Horowitz territory” in terms of over-orchestrating the different subjects – The Gnome, for instance he played hard-and-fast, carrying over some of the opening promenade energies without a pause or break,  and emphasising the creature’s malevolence. The Old Castle evoked the Troubadour, but not so much his song as his playing, as also with the caprice and playfulness of the children in Tuileries. But Bydlo (The Ox Cart) was here superb, massive and relentless at the climax, and with its decrescendo given all kinds of variants of tone and colour. The Ballet Of Unhatched Chicks then properly enchanted, while the two Jews, Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle were brilliantly operatic in their interactions.

I enjoyed the delightful garrulity of the Marketplace at Limoges, here contrasted stunningly with the eerie Catacombs – suddenly we could scarcely dare to breathe in between those massive chords and their silences! I also remember the almost Lisztian transcendence of the Cum Linguis in Lingua Mortua (Musorgsky’s own schoolboy Latin!) and the lump-in-throat effect Wong Doe’s playing had, both here and in his recording.

Baba Yaga was simply breathtakingly done with almost blindingly brilliant finger-work, with the central part’s eeriness and menace strongly drawn! Some pianists hold back with the introduction of the Great Gate of Kiev theme, as if hearing it from a distance the first time (which I quite like), but Wong Doe gave it his all straight away! Both the succeeding priest’s hymn and the massive bell strokes were begun softly, but the re-entry of the Promenade theme caught us up in its growing excitement until it all seemed nothing but great festive bell sounds, a ceremony as all-embracingly spacious and reverberant as one could want at the end.

I wish I’d taken more notice of the Gareth Farr encore, whose name I don’t even remember, such were the resonances still playing in my head from the Musorgsky! I remember soft, tolling bell sounds, with rhythms beginning to bubble and shimmer, while underpinned by deeper, richer sounds, until the shimmering textures reached a bubbling-over point, after which everything gradually receded, and calm was restored again. Someone who had kept his or her head better at this point might well be able to add to this somewhat distracted account of mine with more information – I was still wandering in my head, lost somewhere in Kiev, in thrall to those sounds that had made the afternoon’s piano recital such an enthralling experience……

“Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” -Pepe Becker (voice) and Dan Poynton (piano)

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Lieder from Schumann and Brahms – Pepe Becker (soprano) and Dan Poynton (piano)

Two performances: Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul, Molesworth St.
Friday, 5th April 2024
Goethe Institute, Cuba St., Te Aro
Friday, 19th July 2024

ROBERT SCHUMANN
LIederkreis Op. 39 –  Mondnacht No.5, Auf eines Burg No.7, Zwielicht No.10
Op.40 No.2 – Muttertraum
Dichterliebe Op. 48 – In wunderschönen Monat Mai No. 1, Ich will meine Seele tauchen No. 5,
Hör ich das Liedchen No.10, Am leuchtenden Sommenmorgen No.12,
Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet No.13
Piano Solo – Gesange der Fruhe Op.133 No.1

JOHANNES BRAHMS
Die Mainacht Op.43 No.2
O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück Op.63 No.8
Sommerabend Op.85 No.1
Mondenschein Op 85 No.2
O Tod, wie bitter bist du Op.121 No.3

Encore: SCHUBERT – Winterreise D.911 No.24  Der Leiermann

Soprano Pepe Becker and pianist Dan Poynton gave lovers of German art-song in Wellington a a rare treat recently, by performing two identical recitals of Lieder by Schumann and Brahms, but at different venues in the city.  Each of the venues provided such sharply contrasting sound-worlds as to make the concerts two markedly different listening experiences.

The earlier occasion, in April, took place in the voluminous precincts of Wellington’s Cathedral of St. Paul in Molesworth St, a venue noted for its sound’s warmth, luminosity and long-lasting reverberation. Afterwards I learned that Pepe Becker and Dan Poynton had decided they would repeat the same programme at a different venue, one whose smaller, more intimate proportions would allow much greater clarity and presence, and listeners given a “truer” idea of what singer and pianist were themselves “doing” with these songs.

So, in July, more than three months after the initial concert some of us made the pilgrimage to the Wellington Goethe Institute’s modestly-sized performance rooms situated on the sixth floor of a Cuba St. building in Te Aro (prudently made agreeably accessible via an elevator!). Recognisable though artists and songs undoubtedly were from the duo’s last presentation, their s0und had undergone several changes, chiefly to do with the acoustic  colouration of voice and piano sound – the singer’s tones had seemed at the Cathedral wreathed with a markedly present reverberant beauty as song followed song, a kind of heavenly procession of celestial sounds which mingled with the dulcet piano figurations and gave the recital a kind of overall ritualistic loveliness.

Here at the smaller venue was straightaway a more “unvarnished” quality to the sound, one which focused on the musicians for the infinitely greater variety of dynamics, colour, and shadings to the musical lines. Had singer and pianist been content with their first recital and left it at that, we would still have regarded the experience as a uniquely beautiful projection of art-song in a grandly transformative sound-environment. How wonderful, then, to be able to “revisit” these very same works and with the same artists in a different world of sound!

No better introduction to the concert could have been devised than Schumann’s setting of a somewhat macabre Hans Christian Andersen poem “Muttertraum” with a macabre twist at the end, the piano lines floated through the spaces as the singer tells of a mother watching over her infant child in a kind of reverie, while outside the window the ravens plot to seize the child for their supper. The next song, Brahms’s “O wüsst ich doch den Weg zurück” also suited Pepe’s childlike tones in this lament for a lost youth, particularly poignant at “Und nichts zu forschen, nichts zu spähn” (To quest for nothing, to hunt for nothing).

I liked the “old-worldliness” of Schumann’s “Auf Eine Burg” , Pepe’s voice expressing the solitariness of the knight in his “silent den” – the words suggest a once-real person become as lifeless as stone while undertaking his centuries-old vigil on the watch. Singer and pianist negotiate the silences, the third verse “Draussen ist es still und friedlich’ bringing forth a stillness of the ages, which even the fourth verse’s wedding party cannot relieve – “Und die schöne Braut, die weinet” (And the beautiful bride, she weeps). The following Brahms song “Die Mainacht” (May Night) brought similar colourful treatment via a passionately-delivered second verse befitting the “darker shadows”, Pepe stemming the flow of fraught emotion in the face of the night’s enchantment. until the last line’s touch of despair was encompassed in a single tear – “bebt mir heisser die Wang’ herab” (trembling hotter on my cheek…)

A beautiful bracket of songs from Schumann’s “Dichterliebe” brought us face-to-face with what Dan Poynton described to us as a “year of song” for the composer, a “Liederjahr”, here augmented with one of the composer’s Op.133 Gesänge der Fruhe (Songs of the Dawn) with hymn-like chordal sequences whose melodies and atmospheres brought to my mind the deep contemplations of  earlier works like Kreisleriana, complete with a brief vehement middle section characteristic of the volatilities found in those pieces. We also heard from Dan regarding the composer’s generosity of spirit contrasting in places with Brahm’s habitual (and much-documented!) gruffness of manner.

The ”Dichterliebe” songs were balm for the spirit – the yearning opening (like the petals of a flower) of “In wunderschönen Monat Mai”  (Pepe nicely “softening” the repeated rise of the melodic line) was followed by the similarly ardent and more urgent “Ich will meine Seele tauchen”, as befitted the words “Das Lied soll schauern und beben” (The song should shudder and tremble”), while the “little” song “Hor’ ich das Liedchen klingen” was here given plenty of varying impulses in its colourings and impulses, from “wildem Schmerzendrang” (Savage surge of pain) to “Ubergrosses Weh!” (Overwhelming grief!). The concluding “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” (which had given its name to the whole presentation) had all the ghostly unease of a nightmare scenario, with Pepe turning her back to us for the spectral delivery of the piteous vocal line sardonically echoed by Dan’s brusquely-muttered piano chords, voice and piano uniting briefly in anguish amid the dream’s nightmarish conclusion to the scenario – all theatrically and superbly brought off!

Three of the remaining songs featured moonlight, all in different ways – the first, by Brahms, with words by Heinrich Heine, “Sommerabend”, linked the magic stillness of moonlight to the unexpected irruptions of the alluring charms of a water-nymph, singer and pianist relishing the contrasts between the song’s tranquil opening and the playful splashing of the nymph’s arms in the water. Brahms and Heine again gave us another “Mondenschein” song, with Pepe and Dan fraught and anxious-sounding at the start as the traveller considers the unfamiliar way and the loneliness and weariness of the journey, but then finding solace in the  “silent blessing” of the moonbeams, the song’s final two lines given a pure, radiant line by the singer – “My torments melt away / And my eyes brim over” – so very touching…..

The final “Moonlight” song was Schumann’s, pure bliss in essence, right from Dan Poynton’s poetic “heaven-and-earth” marriage of sounds with Pepe Becker’s pure child-like utterances of radiance and wonderment, Joseph von Eichendorff’s words returning my own sensibilities to memories of that same moonlit magic I felt when a child, allowing earthly escape for what seemed like moments in that huge darkness akin to eternity…..even so, Death then trumped lunar effulgence on this occasion, with Brahms’s song “O Tod, wie bitter bist du” given the programme’s last “official” utterance, a Janus-faced presentation, with an agitated and declamatory opening verse regarding Death as one who threatens happiness and contentment, followed by a contrary view which regards Death as a release from suffering – all most satisfyingly expressed by the musicians, to our pleasure!

As with the earlier presentation, Pepe and Dan offered an “optional” encore, whose performance the last time round caused a good deal of surprise and delight, regardless of the work’s subject-matter – this was the final song Der Leiermann (No.24”) of Schubert’s “Winterreise”.The ambient resonance I previously recalled was here exchanged for a more appropriate tonal bleakness and bitter resignation in the words’ acceptance of a forsaken lover’s desolate withdrawal from the world. If Pepe and Dan do decide to perform Schuber’s entire “Winterreise”, it would be a journey I wouldn’t hesitate to want to make with them…..

Aroha Quartet goes even one better with Oleksandr Gunchenko’s double-bass

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Aroha Quartet, with Oleksandr Gunchenko


GEORGE ONSLOW – String Quintet No.15 in C Minor Op.38 “The Bullet”
LOUISE WEBSTER – Swim the Sliding Continents (2012)
ANTONIN DVOŘÁK – String Quintet No. 2 in G Op.77

Aroha Quartet –  Haihong Liu (leader), Konstanze Artmann (violin), Zhongxian Jin (viola)
Robert Ibell (‘cello)
– with Oleksandr Gunchenko (double-bass)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Friday, 12th July, 2024

I had heard the name George Onslow mentioned in various reviews of recordings over the years, but had never “taken the plunge”, being culpably averse to taking up the music of any “new” composer unseen or unheard – I must admit to a sneaking propensity for the “bowled over by something new” experience  in such matters, which is exactly what happened on Friday evening at St.Andrew’s in Wellington, with a first hearing of one of Onslow’s String Quintets, sensationally presented by the Aroha String Quartet with double-bassist Olelsandr Gunchenko.

This was the composer’s Fifteenth String Quintet, and one bearing the title “De la balle” (The Bullet), whose inspiration was drawn from Onslow’s experience of being accidentally shot in the face while watching a hunt in a forest. While not exactly programmatic as to the actual event, the different movements delineated an almost Berlioz-like reimagining of what was obviously a life-threatening personal experience, the second movement (Minuetto: dolore – suffering) and a Trio (febbre e deliro  – fever and delirium), the third Andante sostenuto – convalescenza), and the triumphal finale (Allegro – guarigione) healing. I was left stunned by the impact of it all, and, not unexpectedly, resolved to explore some more of this fascinating figure’s output to make up for what I might well have been missing for all these years!

It was actually a guilty pleasure (not always the case!) to re-read my notes afterwards, written at the same white heat as the performers were generating, simply by way of trying to “keep up” with what was happening! – I enjoyed the C-minor opening of the work’s suitably dark, cavernous sound, with the voice of the double bass adding to the textures, and contrasting markedly with both the brilliant violin figurations, and the beautiful second subject solo from the ‘cello. The music made much of these contrasts throughout, with upper strings suggestively elfin disturbances, and the lower strings bringing darker intensities to the argument. Then came that astonishing Menuetto with its opening whirlwind figurations and spectral tones, creating a almost Gothic mini-scenario with eerie chromatic resonances and sudden outbursts, and the Trio’s “Febbre e delirio” deliciously feverish in effect!

The Andante sostenuto brought some relief (the programme note termed it “hymn-like”) suggesting a release from “the nightmare”, which the work’s final movement confirmed in no uncertain terms with its vibrant, over-the-top “Convalescenza” (a lovely word!), evoking a polar-opposite exuberance to the travails of what had gone before, and to which I couldn’t help at one point but laugh out loud, to the surprise of my neighbours! Afterwards I had to apologise to at least one of them, my excuse being that I thought the music sounded as if it had been composed on “speed” or something similar!

Not for the first time this year have I found myself jumping on the internet at home after a concert, and (in this case) almost as feverishly looking for a recording of the Quintet, at which point I was surprised again by how many recordings WERE actually available of George Onslow’s music, and not merely his Quintets.  As I sent off my order to make good my discovery, I felt something along the lines of what Allen Curnow once wrote in a different context– “Simply by sailing in a new direction you could enlarge the world…..”

Ahem! – were there other works played at this concert? – oh, yes! – my apologies! Different worlds again, to be sure, and as an assemblage rich and strange, though of course united in instrumentation.
An interval after the Onslow did allow the more fanciful souls present (such as myself) to regain their composure before the second half brought us a work by New Zealand composer Louise Webster, one written originally for a school chamber orchestra from Auckland’s Westlake District Schools, “Swim the sliding continents’.

The work’s title was suggested by some lines from a poem by Australian Judith Wright, words which expressed movement through both air and water, “swimming , floating and drifting above lands/ gulfs/chasms…..” as the programme notes put it. At once sparely and concentratedly written, the work began with the direction “drifting” for a violin solo and double bass and cello pizzicato, the violin accelerating, impassioned, and joined by an ostinato from the second violin, to various responses from the others rising from the depths. When movement was stilled, there were haunting passages of different voices, the first violin rarefied, the second repetitive and mesmeric, the viola and cello echoing certain phrases and the double bass a deep-voiced bedrock foundation – a brief two-violin-voiced coda, and the piece ended, suggesting for me rather more than it actually spoke.

Having explored what could be considered two diametrically opposed ends of the emotional spectrum in music, George Onslow’s almost Gothic horror-adventure complete with its Disney-on-steroids ending and Louise Webster’s cool abstractions of tectonic relocation, the Aroha Quartet with its distinguished guest Oleksandr Gunchenko opted for some middle ground with the concert’s final item, Antonin Dvorak’s single String Quintet that uses a double-bass, his Op.77 in G. This work, originally composed in 1875 with five movements, was published as Op. 18, but then revised by the composer with an “intermezzo” movement removed (and later republished).  Dvorak’s publisher then gave the Quintet the later Opus No. of 77, a ploy Simrock was fond of using to persuade people that certain works of the composer’s were more “mature” than was the case.

While this work has never been one of my favourites of the composer’s (for me the second and fourth movements lack the melodic and rhythmic attractiveness of the rest) the quintet of players here obviously felt no such impediments as they by turns attacked, caressed, sang and danced to the music with a will. The first movement in particular leapt gleefully off the pages to our ears, the players’ strong and flexible pulses bringing out both the music’s  leaping, thrusting character, and the rustic charm of the more lyrical passages – particularly wonderful was the final reprise of the principal theme and its acceleration into the excitement of the coda!

The players did their best with the somewhat repetitive scherzo, the best part of which was the winsome Trio sections whose swaying motions charmed the ear more than usually – but the performance really “glowed” with the slow movement’s gorgeous singing cello melody, and rapturous first violin responses which reprised beautifully with triplet decorations later in the movement – for me the performance’s highlight! But however much energy the players put into the rhythms of  the finale, I remained puzzled by the composer’s reluctance to turn to anything more than variations of downward scales for lyrical effect to go with the generated excitement of the movement’s trajectories.

I’m reminded of a story I once read about Handel who reputedly once looked at a manuscript by a contemporary of his, one Maurice Greene, before opening the window and dropping it outside with the remark that “it needs air!” – by which, of course, he meant melody. Dvorak’s music normally doesn’t “need air” of any kind, in my usual experience, hence my relative disappointment here, and especially in tandem with all that rhythmic energy. Of course one doesn’t have to like EVERYTHING any composer does, and judgements of this kind can be subjective and ornery, and there was, as I’ve said, absolutely nothing lukewarm about the players’ response throughout. The rest of the evening’s music produced untrammelled delight– and in the case of Onslow’s music it was the sort of musical discovery one would, as a friend of mine was fond of saying, die for! So, my thanks are due to the Aroha Quartet and Oleksandr Gunchenko for their wondrously committed efforts, and especially in bringing to life music whose sounds I felt “enlarged my world” that evening.

 

 

 

A Cornucopia of musical delights and pianistic thrills from Duo Enharmonics

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music  – Sunday Afternoon Concert Series 2024 Duo Enharmonics – Beth Chen and Nicole Chao (piano duo)

J S BACH – “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit” (from Cantata BWV 106 – arr. György Kurtág)
FRANZ SCHUBERT – Fantasy in F Minor D.940
MAURICE RAVEL – La Valse (arr. Lucien Garban)
JOHN PSATHAS – Fragment (2001)
SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Six Morceaux Op.11
J.STRAUSS Jnr. – Blue Danube Fantasy (arr. Greg Anderson)

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

Sunday, 7th July, 2024

This concert was a further instalment in the wondrous evolution of my exposure to the astonishing talents of Duo Enharmonics, the piano duo team of Nicole Chao and Beth Chen, the most recent of Wellington Chamber Music’s Sunday Concert Series. Until that sensational presentation I attended almost two years ago, featuring the duo’s performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, I’d been something of a voyeur regarding the talents of these musicians, relying upon enthusiastic reports from other reviewers of things such as the “energy and force” of their “outstanding teamwork” (Steven Sedley, Middle C, September 2020), and especially in regard to music I myself dearly loved, such as Mozart’s KV 381 Duo Sonata, or Ravel’s “La Valse” in a four-hands transcription. Here, now, was a second chance for the word to become flesh for me in musical terms, and especially with the delectable Ravel work on today’s programme!

What struck me with increasing force and intensity as today’s programme unfolded was the sheer depth of musicality of what we heard in both compositional content and its presentation. Any sense  of the four-handed piano repertoire being a “lesser” or even somewhat “contrived” art-form was properly negated by the purity of focus and the surety of vision displayed by the performers in each of the pieces presented. Even in instances such as the transcription of “La Valse”, which one might regard as a lesser entity compared with the orchestral version, I felt the spirit of the latter evoked as surely as if I had been listening to Ravel’s original sound-world.

With the exception of the last piece on the programme, a fantastical four-handed arrangement of Johann Strauss Jnr’s famous “Blue Danube” Waltz by Greg Anderson (of its kind, a stunningly colourful demonstration of the range of sonorities possible on a keyboard played by four hands), the pieces presented today by Nicole Chao and Beth Chen needed no further augmentation as sound for their essential messages to reach out to and enfold our sensibilities – in other words, I found it hard to imagine any of the performances today done better, revelling as I did in the enchantment of each and every recreated moment throughout.

The concert was a model of its kind in terms of the range and scope of the pieces – and it couldn’t have begun more enticingly than with György Kurtág’s arrangement of the beautiful introductory music to JS Bach’s funeral cantata “Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit” (God’s time is the very best time). Begun by the secondo player, Beth Chen, the opening textures were augmented by an intertwined combination of secondo and primo hands, the end result interesting to watch, but absolutely enchanting to listen to – a brief but ravishing introduction to the afternoon’s music-making.

Has anybody composed a more poignant amalgam of conflicting emotions than in the Fantasy in F Minor of Franz Schubert’s? The work’s rolling, undulating Allegro molto moderato opening suggested a vast interior landscape of quiet despair, Nicole Chao and Beth Chen finding a proper “Schubertian pulse” in the music – a brief major-key flirtation prompted more agitated sequences, before the opening returned. The players threw down the gauntlet for the dramatic, almost operatic Largo with its declamatory utterances, double-dotted phrasings and long trills – there was but momentary relief from a more conciliatory episode before the music lurched into an allegro vivace Scherzo, the players performing miracles of varied touch and phrasing by way of conveying the music’s multifaceted mood, bringing out the piquancy of the Trio’s music as a contrast to the almost grim determination of the Allegro vivace. And the dramatic return of the work’s opening music here generated feelings both of reprieve and inexorable futility, the players generating a torment of fugal-like conflict and variance, but all to no avail in the face of the theme’s grim final triumph.

After this, Ravel’s “La Valse” was almost a relief at first for the individual spirit, suggesting, as it did a different, more societal kind of fatalism and dissolution – interesting, though, that, despite the plethora of commentary in the interim suggesting the music as representing the decline of the “old” pre-First World War era of European civilisation, Ravel himself categorically denied any such scheme in his music, stating that the work expresses nothing more than his “intense attraction to these wonderful (waltz) rhythms”….still, this having been said the composer was seriously affected by the horrors of warfare, gleaned from his own personal experiences as a soldier (he was a truck driver and often near the front) as well as the deaths of numerous friends in combat, though stoically managing his grief and despair in works like “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “La Valse”.

I’d gotten to know this music well in its orchestral guise, ever since hearing the piece at the very first orchestral concert I attended, back in the 1960s! – what a thrill that memory still evokes!  Though unfamiliar with the piano duo version, I felt Nicole Chao’s and Beth Chen’s all-embracing touch uncannily breathed life into those ghostly, inchoate scenarios at the work’s beginning, gradually liberating both form and movement from the “whirling clouds” of the composer’s own description, and bringing various dancing couples into view – and what dancers gradually emerged! – all of them seemingly refracting themselves into “an immense hall, peopled with a whirling crowd”, with every detail of the composer’s recaptured by Lucien Garben’s faithful transcription.

As well as Ravel’s score glitter and glamour we heard its darker, more sinister and grotesque aspects, evident in a couple of the dance’s more disruptive sequences, and calling for some spectacularly-essayed keyboard figurations from both ends of the sound-spectrum before order was restored and the music continued. From beneath the seemingly tireless and supercharged fingers of the duo the waltz displayed all of its glamour, allure, charm and coquettishness, recovering anew from whatever irruption bubbled up from beneath the music’s surfaces – but suddenly  reaching the point at which it realised its moments of glory were numbered and the game was up! The music gathered itself from within and transformed its hitherto lilting rhythms into thrusting, flailing gestures signifying death-and-glory oblivion. Our pianists seemed transfigured at this point, imbued with this same all-or-nothing spirit and with flailing arms and fingers pushing and thrusting themselves, the music and us into a vortex of chaos and confused silence, hammered home by those apocalyptic final chords! Sensational stuff!

Judicious programming gave us the interval to recover from the onslaught; and the two pianists themselves re-emerged differently garbed and with their primo and secondo roles reversed,  Nicole Chao as secondo beginning a piece by New Zealand-Greek composer John Psathas, called Fragment, originally written for two marimbas – beautifully-modulated repeated chords made a hypnotic effect, which the entry of the primo player, Beth Chen attenuated with birdsong-like notes, together creating a kind of “moment in time” stillness, a kind of aural metaphor of solitariness, but with awareness of a surrounding environment rather than mere emptiness – by the piece’s end the different elements seemed to have merged, with either the solitary individual subsumed by the surroundings or the ambience enhancing or elongating,  or even being redefined by the presence of the “new” element, perhaps a redefinition of sorts reading  “To be solitary is to………”.

Sergei Rachmaninov’s Six Morceaux Op.11 was new to me, but had especially excited my interest with its relatively early composition date, 1893 – two years before the completion of the composer’ First Symphony, which had its disastrous premiere in 1897. I’ve long believed that the failure of the first Symphony had an adverse long-term effect on the composer’s compositional abilities, and have accordingly been interested in hearing anything he wrote before the symphony’s first performance. For me, this work bore out that view, in that the pieces exuded the kind of confidence and originality of a young composer who hadn’t yet been told that his work was a failure (as Rachmaninov was to experience to a devastating degree in 1897 after the symphony’s first unfortunate performance).

In six movements, the Op.11 set began with a Barcarolle in G Minor, built simply from a rocking rhythm at the outset, with a melodic line that patiently builds an elongated and fruitful utterance whose central section spontaneously breaks into amazing filigree figurations which briefly return as a potent echo at the piece’s ending. The second piece, Scherzo, has a mischievous, almost devil-may-care insouciance, requiring incredible virtuosity as well as a quixotic, tongue-in-cheek sense of  fun – a great piece! The Theme Russe was simpler, more soulful and melancholic, its theme given various accompaniments, incorporating thunderous octave-scales, whirling figurations and grand and celebratory, imperial-like chordal passages. Next came a Valse, more salon-like than Chopin’s, with some cheeky descant counterpoints and some gorgeous AWOL harmonies, including a “wrong modulation” ending to boot!  A darkly passionate, somewhat obsessive Romance revealed a young composer unafraid to express his feelings – and the last of the pieces was Slava, which rather wonderfully used the well-known Russian “choral theme” from Musorgsky’s “Boris Godunov”, Rachmaninov indulging in his obvious love for church bells of all different kinds. These near-thunderous sonorities came to dominate the latter stages of the piece, the playing making the precincts of St. Andrews ring with more-than-usually-Slavic intensities!

Fittingly, the concert’s final item was the duo’s act of homage to the astounding Piano Duo team of Elizabeth Joy Roe and Greg Anderson which had toured New Zealand in 2018, and whose Wellington concert I had the good fortune to attend as well. Certainly, the choice by Nicola Chao and Beth Chen of one of the American duo’s “calling card” items as today’s concert finale indicated that the Duo Enharmonics pair had little to fear from any comparison, and the latter’s performance here in my mind put the seal on that viewpoint. The astonishing “Blue Danube Fantasy” obviously represented the ”display” aspect of a two-piano combination, of which Chao and Chen proved entertainingly more than capable; but the rest of the programme brought to the fore the pair’s musicianship of a deeper, and more satisfying kind, making their activities on our behalf something of an ongoing treasure to be cherished and deeply valued.

 

Orchestra Wellington and Marc Taddei – legacy of The Classical Style

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington Music Director, Marc Taddei – photo credit: Latitude Creative

SERGE PROKOFIEV – Symphony No. 1 “Classical”  Op.25
GERMAINE TAILLEFERRE – Piano Concerto (1924)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Symphony No. 9 in D Minor “Choral” Op. 125

Somi Kim (piano)
Emma Pearson (soprano), Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano),
Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono (tenor), Robert Tucker (baritone)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 6th June 2024

Orchestra Wellington’s visionary and compelling 2024 survey of concert music and some of its significant milestones certainly lived up to expectations with “The Classical Style”, a most attractive and “something for everybody” selection highlighting pieces whose composers took their inspiration from classical forms through which they were able to refract their own individuality and distinctive voices.

The highlight of the evening for me was undoubtedly the Piano Concerto by the French composer Germaine Tailleferre, a beautifully luminous and engaging piece whose relative neglect until recent times I find difficult to fathom on the strength of pianist Somi Kim’s sonorous, attractive playing and Orchestra Wellington’s gorgeously sinuous accompaniments. Also, framing this work were two far better-known but still ineffably fascinating pieces by Prokofiev and Beethoven whose “add water” appeal would have nicely eased audiences into Tailleferre’s relatively unchartered territories.

Before the concert began, maestro extraordinaire Marc Taddei took the liberty of using the occasion to promote an important new recording project involving the orchestra and himself, one paying tribute to the music of a composer whose work Taddei and the Orchestra have valiantly supported over the years, New-Zealand-Greek composer John Psathas, (born in Wellington, in 1966, to Greek parents). This is a recently-recorded two-disc (both vinyl and CD) set on the Atoll label titled “Leviathan” containing four concerti, three for percussion and one for tenor sax. (“Leviathan” is, of course the title of one of the percussion concertos). With the help of concertmaster Amalia Hall, Taddei displayed the LP set with its stunningly-contrasted coloured vinyl (one disc white and the other blue), all with the kind of “fatal attraction” allure that a vinyl-collector like myself would find impossible to resist – as with the orchestra’s previous unmissable recording project involving two Beethoven symphonies to which, of course , I readily succumbed! If this paragraph sounds like an advertisement, it’s because I simply can’t help myself at this point! – so, back to the concert! (see the conclusion of this review for details regarding the recording’s availability)….

Where was I? – Oh, yes! – one finds it difficult to think of a better choice to begin such an evening as we had scheduled than with Prokofiev’s self-proclaiming “Classical” Symphony, and in a performance which, for three of the four movements seemed to me to attain an “ideal” regarding the ever-tantalising balance in performance between surface execution and feeling.  The opening movement properly launched itself upwards with great gusto, but with enough ‘wriggle-room” for the momentums to generate the piece’s infectious eagerness while allowing a flexibility of movement between the different themes.

The adorable slow movement was by turns tender, limpid, forthright and glowing – I particularly enjoyed the enticing “lift” to the triplet rhythms that accompanying a later reprise of the principal theme, and the quiet dignity with which it all ended. The Minuet I also found utterly charming, Marc Taddei allowing his players enough “expression” in their exchanges to reinforce the idea that these were real dancers, rather than simply marionettes going through the motions. After these delights I thought the finale a tad too hasty, to my mind exchanging some of the music’s deliciousness for the sake of sheer brilliance (though the orchestra certainly rose to the occasion, the wind players in particular performing miracles of fingering and tongueing in keeping up the tempo!).

French composer Germaine Tailleferre has until relatively recently been known by the musical world at large merely for her membership of the French group of composers named “Les Six”, and for little else, a similar fate to two other group members, Louis Durey and Georges Auric. Tailleferre, who had distinguished herself as a pupil at the Paris Conservatoire, and who received further encouragement from both Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel, became a member of “Les Six” in 1920. She composed a great deal during the 1920s and 30s, much of which was lost during World War Two after she had fled France for the United States – her creative output continued after her return to France up until her death in 1983, by which time she had produced almost two hundred finished works. Her 1924 Piano Concerto survived the war, becoming one of several concertante works she completed, including a Second Piano Concerto, a Violin Concerto, a Double Piano Concerto and a Double Guitar Concerto!

Somi Kim, piano, plays Germaine Tailleferre’s 1924  Piano Concerto with Orchestra Wellington – photo credit: Latitude Creative

Though not a long work the Piano Concerto features the piano playing practically without a break, a task which the soloist Somi Kim undertook sporting a sparklingly eye-catching dress which seemed to visually echo the music’s constantly effervescing glitter throughout the three movements, and especially in the outer ones, with coruscations continually flying off in all directions!

The first movement, in lively, quick-march tempo, straightaway engendered a sense of a festive occasion, with music that seemed to be purposefully “on the move” somewhere, the playing beautifully gradated by both pianist and orchestra to a similar objective, whatever the orchestrations and however discursive the key-changes. Throughout, I was put in mind of JS Bach’s First and Third Brandenburg Concerti with their constant sprinklings of instrumentation channelled towards both the act of interchange and the establishment of a kind of overall “understanding” between the participants as a desirable and complementary process, rather than any kind of duel or contest.

The slow movement seemed the emotional “heart” of the work, with Somi Kim’s piano solo seamlessly enhanced by the winds, and Marc Taddei enjoining the strings to make the most of an ongoing sinuousness melody. The ensuing tutti took it up, buttressed by rich chordings from the piano and further warmed by a sappy trumpet solo – so much achieved, I thought, with relatively simple means! A warm-hearted oboe solo then gave way to a “worrisome” flute, bringing a forlorn note to the proceedings before the movement’ concluding surprise – a remarkably haunting and certainly unexpected modulation to distant realms right at the end!

I enjoyed the ambivalence of the finale’s opening rhythm, my ear jumping to and from different numbers of beats to the bar as the music’s trajectories evolved, keeping me guessing in delicious-sounding ways. Again, It’s all more of a concertante work than a concerto, really, a true partnership in the baroque/classical manner, rather than any kind of contest between soloist and orchestra – Kim and Taddei dovetailed their piano and orchestral parts splendidly throughout, and the solo cadenza near the end gave the pianist the chance to “sound out” a couple of beautiful church-bell-like cascades before the solo trumpet invited the rest of the orchestra back into the discourse for the work’s coda, one not unlike a gentler, more urbane version of the final bars of Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, with its prominent solo trumpet part! Certainly, I felt,  a work to get to know better.

Somi Kim responded to the warm audience applause at the end with a lithe, nimble-fingered encore rendition of the well-known Rondo a la Turca from Mozart’s Piano Sonata K.311. I would have enjoyed as much her playing something by Poulenc or Satie or even Ravel, if only to keep up Gallic appearances, but the audience obviously loved it – so c’est bon!

After the interval, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony might have seemed “le deluge”-like at such a concert – it was, after all, the nineteenth’s century’s most influential symphony with even its “number” becoming an insuperable burden for at least seven subsequent symphonists I know of who ventured into those same numerical realms and faltered – Schubert, Dvorak, Bruckner, Mahler, Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold and Roger Sessions. Marc Taddei further stressed the significance of Beethoven’s work by talking about the composer’s simultaneous adherence to tradition (four contrasting movements, including a sonata-form opening movement, a scherzo and a slow movement) AND to the work’s ground-breaking aspects (the work’s epic length, and with a symphonic finale like no other with vocal soloists and choir!) So the work epitomised a composer’s knowledge, experience, use and further develop of this creative ethos called “The Classical Style” like no other had done up to this time.

As I’d found with his conducting of the “classics” occasionally in the past I found Marc Taddei’s very direct and at times to my ears more-than-usually brusque approach to Beethoven’s opening movement of the Ninth Symphony hard to get in accord with at first – I’d always thought of Beethoven’s opening movement as having a rugged epic grandeur which explodes in places with excitement – but Taddei’s “never-let-up” tempo made the whole movement seethe with barely-contained energy, exciting in its way, but hardly with a “epic” quality.  I thought the famously seismic “middle section” of the movement, for instance, didn’t have the sheer impact I was accustomed to feeling because much of the rest of the movement had already been given so agitated a character. It certainly made me rethink what Beethoven himself might have been after – something less monumental and more kinetic and volatile, which Taddei and his players certainly put across with few holds barred and with such elan and brilliance! I did come to the end of the movement thinking “Golly! It’s over, already!” having lived for so long with more colossal-sounding traversals. This one was, for me, quite a wake-up call, and certainly an ear-opening experience!

I could far more readily equate with Taddei’s treatment of the Scherzo, the opening biting and incisive, the timpani blows galvanising and the rhythms spot-on throughout – the movement’s  compelling amalgam of high spirits and restlessness was put across with incredible panache, both in an ensemble and individual sense – the timpani’s almost visceral attack was exhilarating, and the wind-and brass playing throughout the Trio sections were a joy to listen to! And I did appreciate the repeats, enabling us to enjoy that feeling of physical excitement and exhilaration for much of the piece all over again!

As with the first movement I took a bit of getting used to the quicker pulsings of the slow movement, again wanting a longer-breathed, more “epic” quality to prevail, something which, as my own rhythms “caught up” with the conductor’s, I increasingly enjoyed as the movement progressed, Taddei actually allowing the strings enough space for their phrases to bloom,  and the lines to sing. The sequence with the winds and the solo horn took on a lovely glow in places (the latter player’s brief solo flourish was gorgeous!). And though I again felt the triplet variation section was overly pushed along, it was given a charm of its own by the superb playing. I didn’t like the excessively staccato treatment of the great fanfares, wanting them to have more of a “resounding” character in those celestial spaces hovering around and about the notes. In all, the movement certainly sounded beautiful playing-wise, even if I felt my listener’s usual “transfigured”  sense of feeling  in this music thwarted by its quicker-than usual pace…..

Soloists Emma Pearson (soprano), Margaret Medlyn, (mezzo-soprano), Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono (tenor) and Robert Tucker (baritone), with the Orpheus Choir of Wellington, Orchestra Wellington, and Music Director Marc Taddei –  Photo credit: Latitude Creative

And so to the finale! – what a magnificent “horror chord” opening utterance we got, straightaway! The recitatives then jumped out of their blocks quickly, perhaps with not enough weight to convey firstly their disapproval (instrumental versions of “O Freunde. nicht diese töne!” – O friends, not these sounds!) and then their exultation when the “Ode to Joy” melody finally appears (“O Freunde, freuden vollere!” – O friends, more joyful ones!). The orchestral basses were INCREDIBLY quiet at the beginning of their “Ode to Joy” theme, while the strings and winds partnered really well for their verses, and the brasses were simply magnificent in their utterances!

A second “horror” chord introduced the soloists – and Robert Tucker made a tremendous initial impression with his recitative, though less so with his verse, the line being low for his voice – I suddenly felt that the soloists perhaps ought to have been at the front with the conductor, and not behind the orchestra – surely Beethoven wanted them to be heard, and not just as solo choral voices! I was surprised when I realised that Margaret Medlyn was singing the alto part, and not Melissa Crennan, as per programme (I was told later that the latter had fallen ill). Generally the soloists were audible, though soprano Emma Pearson’s clear, bell-like tones stood out from the rest. The Orpheus Choir were the real heroes – great shouts of “Vor Gott” (Before God) ushered in the tenor solo, (Emmanuel Fonoti-Fuimaono), though he was hampered by the trajectories disappointingly sped up and the rhythms flattened out, leaving him almost no swagger in his step, and little room for any real heroic timbre in his voice!

I wondered why the horns sounded here as if they were “joining” their pairs of repeated notes in the brief introduction to the choir’s reprise of “Freunde, schöner Gotterfunken” (they WERE playing very softly)…..the latter was splendidly done, as was the whole “Seid umschunglen, Millionem” (Oh, you millions, I embrace you!), during which sequence I at last got a real “cosmic” sense from the music, thanks to the “space” accorded the singers by the conductor, expressing the moment’s mystical and epic gravity. Perhaps the Orpheus’s most splendid moment was the great Choral Fugue “Seid umschunglen, Millionem” which then followed, the voices and orchestral brass achieving real grandeur together!

The solo quartet’s “moment of truth” came at the end of the sequence with the choir at “Freude, Tochter aus Elysium”  (Joy, Daughter from Elysium), and the “Alle menschen werde Bruder” (All men shall be Brothers) sequence, where the soloists individually rhapsodised over the words, raptly concluding with a high B-flat from soprano Emma Pearson – nicely, if a wee bit circumspectly rounded off! Then it was the famous final presto sequence, choir and soloists intoxicated with joyful feeling and racing to the work’s conclusion, with the orchestra having the final riotous say!

Away with the perfidy of critics! – all were heroes, singers, choristers, players, conductor! – and all were enthusiastically and resoundingly applauded, and the magnitude of their achievements, singly and corporately,  given their just dues. I babbled about the performance highlights afterwards to anybody nearby who would listen, and gleaned from the exchanges that those present absolutely revelled in what they’d just heard, drunk with those copious dollops of “Freude, schöner Gotterfunken”, given to humankind as a gift for the ages.

Wellington City Orchestra sounds a classy farewell to conductor Rachel Hyde

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Anna Gawn performs Ross Harris’s Klezmer Suite with Rachel Hyde conducting the Wellington  City Orchestra

Wellington City Orchestra presents:
Music by BERLIOZ, ROSS HARRIS, TCHAIKOVSKY

HECTOR BERLIOZ – Marche Hongroise (Hungarian March) from ”La Damnation de Faust” Op.24
ROSS HARRIS – Klezmer Suite (2023)
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No. 6 in B Minor Op 74 (“Pathetique”)

Anna Gawn (mezzo-soprano)
Rachel Hyde (conductor)

St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 29th June 2024

This was a triumphant concert tinged with sadness for all associated with the Wellington City Orchestra, being the last occasion for some time on which Rachel Hyde will appear as the band’s conductor, as she’s planning to spend the next couple of years in Europe.  Her long-time association with the orchestra has featured her as a regular guest conductor for a number of consecutive years.

The rapport with the orchestra players that Rachel has built up over this period obviously paid dividends in many instances today, resulting in a concert that provided plenty of thrills both of a novel and well-honed nature – a “call-to-arms” work by Berlioz to stir the blood which opened proceedings, followed by a colourfully exuberant, quixotic, whimsical and heartfelt collection of klezmer-inspired pieces by Ross Harris, and concluding with a cornerstone work of the romantic orchestral repertoire, Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the  “Pathetique”. I thought that, as a collection the pieces both drew from and played off one another in a satisfying archway of presentation, incident and reaction for all concerned.

The last time I heard the Berlioz work in concert was, I think, as part of an NZSO presentation of the complete “La Damnation de Faust” under conductor Edo de Waart as long ago as 2017 – whether as part of a dramatic scenario or as a concert item, the March, whose origin was a song recalling the deeds of a legendary eighteenth-century Hungarian patriot, Francis II Rákóczi, which Berlioz adapted for his “dramatic legend”, never fails to generate palpable audience enthusiasm, as it did here. If things got off to a somewhat muffled opening fanfare-beginning from the brass (who redeemed themselves handsomely in due course), the piece’s rhythmic gait was most adroitly picked up by the perkiness of the wind-playing and their full-blooded exchanges with the strings. The brass, too, soon seemed to have cleared their throats, with some properly portentous responses to the heroic major-key exhortations of winds and strings in the music’s middle section.

Hyde kept the tempo rock-steady throughout the piece’s martial exchanges, allowing the tensions to build surely and excitingly, and encouraging the percussion to “let-er-rip” along with the brass, before swinging magnificently into the march theme’s final full-throated glory, carrying us all along with the music’s brazen trajectories – and the conductor’s superb control of the famous final chord, with its crescendo-decrescendo flourishings made for a breathtaking end-moment of which the players could all be proud!

It must have been like greeting an old friend for Rachel Hyde to programme Ross Harris’s Klezmer Suite, the next item on the agenda – she and the Kapiti Chamber Orchestra had commissioned and premiered this work the previous year. I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from it all, but I needn’t have worried as to the efficacy of such a delightful amalgam of ritualised song and dance as was given here. In fact, though written in a similarly worlds-apart style, Ross Harris’s work somewhat unexpectedly reminded  me in places of David Farquhar’s Dance-Suite Ring Round the Moon in terms of its transposition from a language and culture equally as removed from Aotearoa New Zealand but having an ease and universality of expression and feeling which allowed the listener to readily enter and enjoy its distinctive world.

Harris took a number of dance-like movements from the repertoire of his Klezmer Band “The Kugels” and orchestrated them, interspersing these different “moods” with several Yiddish songs, written for the soloist Anna Gawn (the soloist for last year’s premiere performance), settings of verses by various Yiddish poets, The opening dance-like “Shteti Tanz” (Simple Dance) set the atmosphere for the suite, lively, edgy, almost neo-Bartokian in flavour, and contrasting strongly in mood with the following “Dos lid fun a meydi” (The Song of a girl), a beautiful performance by singer Anna Gawn, her hands as expressive as her voice, and with flavoursome support from strings, clarinet and horn.

The orchestra-only pieces contrasted moods such as the brooding, meditative darkness of “Trit bay trit” (Step by Step) whose lower strings and brass darkly supported a plaintive, emotion-filled violin melody, and the two more energetic pieces, firstly “Hanoi” (To have fun) – an almost nihilistic “eat, drink and be merry” general dance – and “Narish” (Silly) which seemed to characterise a burlesque mood with clowns or knockabout comics doing their thing! The final piece, a song “Shtil iomir ale farshvindn” (Softly, let us all vanish) re-established the heartfelt mood, voice and oboe together generating a lamenting, almost “lost” quality, with every note, song or played, made to “speak” simply and sincerely.

Complementing the “Suite” generously was an encore, again performed by the singer, but this time accompanied by Ross Harris himself on the accordion and a fellow-member of “The Kugels, violinist Robin Perks. The song was one of those “Impossible task” folk-tales involving lovers trying to “prove” their feelings for one another via deeds of wishful veracity (a kind of Yiddish “Scarborough Fair”, perhaps?), here with a spacious, atmospheric introduction from the solo violin and with  orchestral violins supporting the singer’s expressive tones, the words of the song augmented by what seemed like brief but telling vocal melismas, all very moving and heartfelt.

After this, and an interval allowing us to put something of an aura all about what we had heard, the players filed back onto the platform for the concert’s concluding business, the great “Pathetique” Symphony by Tchaikovsky one of romantic music’s most durable utterances judging by its seemingly limitless popularity. Having heard the work on countless occasions I had found myself wishing beforehand that Rachel Hyde had chosen something less frequently performed – but as soon as the lower strings had ushered in the bassoon solo that began the work I found myself drawn into it all over again! – what made it special on this occasion was that I was sitting right in the front row of the audience, and thus almost “with” the violinists, and able to observe their fingerings, bowings and vibrato-ed phrasings almost like a voyeur!

What I gained from this experience was an awareness of the richness and subtlety of the composer’s writing for the strings all though the players’ opening exchanges and interactions with the winds – I’d never realised quite to the same extent how “Mozartean” Tchaikovsky’s writing was here, how he would “share” his themes among the instruments, and sometimes in unexpected ways with the lower strings, making them play higher and lighter in places than one might expect. I thought Rachel pushed the players along to their utmost capabilities in places, so that sometimes the exchanges didn’t quite dovetail as precisely as they might – but they always “found” each other again. The strings ascended to the beginning of the “famous” melody beautifully, and with support from brass that seemed happier than in places near the beginning of the work, the tune was given a pliable, breathing shape, nicely contrasted by the winds’ ascending melody, with flute, clarinet, oboe and bassoon each playing their part. The return of the string melody at a higher voltage, with the brass in sharp attendance was heartwarming, the emotion palpable and pulsating!

The thunderclap of the succeeding allegro was terrific! – conductor and players put across the agitations with trenchant energy,  growing the sounds towards the first climax with thrilling intensity and with the brass holding their lines through the “Russian Requiem” theme. Just as pungent were the exchanges between strings and winds that followed, capped by piercing piccolo shrieks and swept along by stuttering brass towards the second, all-out climax, all sections giving their all!  After these detonations were done, the basses heaved themselves upwards once again and beckoned everybody back to life once more, timpani and clarinet surviving a moment of realignment before pouring oil on the troubled waters, leaving the coda’s brasses creditably holding their notes and restoring peace.

The 5/4 movement that followed was given a swift, evanescent reading, the players on their toes at their conductor’s urgings, though with the detailings still sounding a little rushed and the dovetailings the first time round stretching to properly “connect” –  the music’s flow settled as the movement went on, though some details, such as the strings’ pizzicato notes didn’t quite have the space to “sound” with sufficient clarity.  The players sounded more at ease in the “Trio”, the ebb and flow of emotion filling out more spaciously and focusedly.

No such reservations about the third and fourth movements! I felt, right from the scherzo’s beginning, that Rachel had hit the “tempo giusto”, the players filling out their spaces with confidence and verve (I loved the piccolo playing, which always had such a “presence”!).   The famous “march tune” announced itself with a crash and swung into view with a vengeance, mid-movement – a great moment, and with the string triplets wonderfully incisive! And what excitement conductor and musicians built up as the crescendo’s sounds rose up to greet us, with the percussionists having the proverbial field day at the back as the whole orchestra magnificently roller-coasted its way to the end – never mind about the slight hit-and-miss payoff!!

A great and noble account of the last movement followed (again, the string writing from where I was sitting sounded amazingly “layered” and detailed!) Rachel and her players encompassed all the sadness, despair and fatalistic gloom implied by Tchaikovsky’s writing, by turns full-blooded and sensitive. Apart from an initial brass burble and a slightly premature string entry, the major-key section of this movement was most affectingly grown, the strings singing crazily and the winds and brass joining in for all they were worth, making the movement’s subsequent death-throes all the more appalling, with the positively ghoulish muted brass particularly cruel and mocking, as was the single gong-note and fate-laden brass afterwards – all that was left was for the orchestra to weep amidst growing silence.

I would imagine that Rachel herself, her players and the orchestral staff were thrilled with the results of their efforts in every way, and not the least with the audience reaction to it all – there was cheering and foot-stamping at the end and a genuine feeling afoot that we had all been witness to something exceptional, besides the realisation that this was an occasion that won’t be repeated for a while to come, with Rachel’s departure pending. However, legends are made of this kind of stuff, and everybody would have been left with his or her own sense of what made this occasion special, not the least of which was the chance to express thanks, gratitude and best wishes to Rachel Hyde for some memorable music making and many happy and fruitful times to come.

 

 

A Rossini Opera for Down Under – from NZ Opera

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Gioachino ROSSINI – Le Comte Ory
Original libretto by Eugenè Scribe and Charles-Gaspard Delestre-Poirson, freely adapted for NZ Opera by Simon Phillips
NZ Opera June 2024, St.James Theatre, Wellington

Act One:  Wade Kernot (Coach), Manase Latu (Count Ory), Moses MacKay (Raimbaud), NZ Opera Chorus – photo credit: Lewis Ferris

Cast: Manase Latu (Count Ory), Emma Pearson (Countess Adele), Hanna Hipp (Isolier), Moses Mackay (Raimbaud), Wade Kernot (Tutor/Coach), Andrea Creighton (Ragonde), Tayla Alexander (Alice)

New Zealand Opera Chorus Wellington /Te Whanganui-a-Tara
Orchestra Wellington (Concertmaster: Amalia Hall)
Brad Cohen (conductor)

Simon Phillips (director)
Tracy Grant Lord (set and costume designer)
Matthew Marshall (lighting designer)
Luka Venter (assistant conductor)
Matthew Kereama (assistant director)

St. James’ Theatre, Wellington
Thursday 13th June, 2024

New Zealand Opera continues its progressive “new look” agenda for 2024 under its new General Director Brad Cohen with a rarity for local audiences, Gioachino Rossini’s penultimate opera, Le Comte Ory. Regarded by many as the composer’s comic masterpiece, the opera has a story whose exploration of sexual deception, disguise and manipulation not only adroitly ticks all the boxes of its own time and place, but responds remarkably well to a near-complete reworking in its relocation to Aotearoa New Zealand, with all of the associated updates necessary for the change of scenario amusingly (and in places disconcertingly) kicking in with a vengeance!

It took a while to win me over to director Simon Phillips’ in places radical reworking of the libretto’s English translation (a French speaker would have been totally nonplussed attempting to marry a good deal of the words enunciated by the singers with the surtitle texts!), but I eventually “gave in” to the idea – I think the moment of my actual capitulation was when the story’s young and inveterately libidinous “Count Ory”, posing as a spiritual guru at a wellness retreat for women, was spectacularly unmasked as his true lecherous self at the end of Act One by the appearance of his own rugby coach, plus team-mates, hot on his AWOL trail and intent upon returning him to “the fold”. This near-apocalyptic moment all but transfixed our sensibilities when the singers’ exclamation “Ciel!” (Heavens!) appeared on the surtitle screen as “What the f….?” All reservations from that point onwards were made null and void by the sheer crypto-current impact of the subsequent revampings! My misgivings, despite themselves,  knew no more that evening!

I’m still tickled by the thought of the transcription of the words “du sang du Sarracin” (the blood of the Saracens)  as “Springboks’ blood” in the husbands’ homeward message of triumph on the contemporary field of battle to their wives! In Act Two the updated amendments came thick and fast, most of them funky and to the point, even though some didn’t seem worth the effort (one of them to do with “an over-forward forward” and another making reference to a “coccyx”) – and Ory’s slip of the tongue when first calling his sisterhood “the squad” didn’t work as well as the original’s faux pas “ce sont eux…..er, ce sont ells!”. A by-product of the surtitle rewritings was that I felt they became a kind of “reality TV” in themselves in places, frequently taking our attention away from what the singers were actually doing with the words on the stage. Most of what Phillips came up with I enjoyed, but, as I’ve said, it was for me laid on a tad too thickly at times.

The rest of the updated on-stage detailings hardly missed a trick, with many a delightful and amusing touch – the birdsong right at the start, the “Hi-de-hi!” welcoming entourage at the station, complete with a truly wonderful steam-train entrance, and the preponderance of cell-phones among the “guests” invited to the “Chateau Whareora”. Word has spread regarding the presence of the “guru” thanks to the efforts of his right-hand man, Raimbaud, who prepares for Ory’s entrance with a red carpet and coloured flags, and various “gifts” donated by people who have heard of the hermit’s “healing powers” and helpful advice. We meet Ragonde who’s the PA for the Countess, and worried about both her mistress’s melancholic state and her own husband’s continued absence, then afterwards Isolier, young, feminine and sporty, who’s Ory’s personal physio, but in love with the Countess, and Tutor, the rugby team coach who’s looking for Ory, having heard about the “guru” and having his suspicions as to where “Horny McOry” is.  Another red carpet entry, complete with photo-popping paparazzi, brings us the extremely chic Chateau-owner, Countess Adele, to the joy of the love-sick Isolier – but just as the goatish guru-in-residence thinks he has Adele at his fingertips and outmanoeuvred his rival, the Coach suddenly reappears and denounces Ory by revealing his true identity (see above!)….

Le Comte Ory – Act Two  (beginning) – NZ Opera Chorus, with Emma Pearson (Countess Adele),  Tayla Alexander (Alice) and Andrea Creighton (Ragonde)

The Second Act features Ory’s follow-up plan to gain access to the Countess, disguising himself and his teammates as women members of a local religious sect being pursued by the same Ory and his men. The so-called pilgrims are let into the lodge when a fierce storm breaks – wonderful sound and lighting effects – and the women/men are given shelter by the Countess and her women. Left to themselves the imposters show their true colours with a round of drinking songs (did Berlioz take a leaf out of Rossini’s book here for his roistering  Auerbach’s Cellar Scene in “La Damnation de Faust”?) as all make merry while anticipating further sport afterwards (“There’s nosh as well as potential nookie”) but they retire at last. When Isolier arrives with news of the womens’ husbands’ unexpectedly early return, she warns the Countess that in fact the pilgrims they are housing are Ory and his men in disguise! This is resolved by a delicious trio where the principal randy intruder is tricked into bed with the two women and then tied up, having to admit defeat and leave, taking his “entourage” with him as (thanks to adroit changes behind the scenes) none other than the All Blacks (in traditional uniform to boot!) arrive home to their wives, as champions – and all is well.

Whatever one’s opinion of the antipodean reworkings of the original scenario of the opera, one couldn’t help but admire the zest, energy, enthusiasm and the palpable enjoyment that emanated from the St James’ stage this evening – everybody I spoke with afterwards had that sense of experiencing something of what Simon Phillips called the vibrancy and amusement of human behaviour’s foibles in what they’d seen and heard in this modern realisation of the opera. And as Phillips also put it, even if such treatment was not to some people’s taste they would still have revelled in what he called the “sheer virtuosity of this dazzlingly talented cast” in bringing the performance to life.

One couldn’t help but reflect on how the transformation of the original opera’s time-and-place scenario resonated in the present, however unexpectedly and incidentally – simply the Countess Adele’s idea at the beginning of the Act Two to provide shelter for whom she considered at first to be homeless people, and then more seriously refugees fleeing from oppression straightaway reflected contemporary situations of which we’ve been all too regularly made aware. And the libretto’s crudely reworked translations brought into focus a long-held feminist viewpoint that opera seems to regularly institutionalise the undoing of women as victims of male brutality; and that the “calling out” of certain attitudes and behaviours as exhibited by Count Ory for what they represent in a larger picture is in fact long overdue. The recent “me too” movement has also reflected a change in the balance of power regarding interaction between the sexes that these  candid commentaries from both sides resoundingly echo.

In whatever sense, each cast member brought a distinctive quality of whole-heartedness to his or her role – as Count Ory, Manase Latu seemed to fill out every cubic measure of his character with roguish intention of a concupiscently self-serving kind, almost Falstaffian in his buffoonish scheming and ultimate humiliation – his voice impressively negotiated the numerous stratospheric notes in a way that readily conveyed his character’s overweening confidence. Equally compelling was Emma Pearson’s enticing portrayal of the Countess Adele, by turns confidently imperious and vulnerably girlish, and with a vocal armoury that seemed in charge of every emotion – an enthralling performance.

Ory’s partner-in-crime, Raimbaud, was sung by the mellifluous-voiced Moses Mackay, the first solo voice we heard in the opera, summoning the people who had gathered to attend to his master, his tones ringing and clear, his presence persuasive and credible. And in Act Two his retelling to the disguised “pilgrims” of his liquor-collecting adventure became a tour de force when echoed by the chorus’s enthusiastic interjections. Another voice we heard early on was that of Andrea Creighton’s with her steady, whole-hearted and ever-solicitous assumption of Ragonde, the Countess’s PR agent and confidante, one whose husband was among those absent on the “field of battle”, and, along with the other women, intrigued by the presence of the “holy man”.

I enjoyed Hanna Hipp’s whole-hearted Isolier, completely at ease with her character’s delightfully equivocal function in the story’s re-working of the “trouser-role” practice common in opera, here as a same-sex would-be lover of the Countess. As in last year’s “Cosi fan tutte” I found her singing and absorption of her character totally compelling, with her devotion to the Countess touching and resonant throughout. She also effectively established her connection as team masseur with Wade Kernot’s authoritative Coach, with whom she arrived at the resort, in search of the missing Ory, Wade Kernot then riveting us with his imposingly-voiced “tale of travail” regarding his troublesome protégé!

Rossini always writes engagingly and excitingly for his choruses in opera and “Le Comte Ory is no exception – particularly in the Second Act there’s fun and games aplenty, which  the “Wellington Chapter” of the New Zealand Opera Chorus took to like the proverbial ducks to water. In terms both of singing and stage deportment, the singers achieved marvels of evocation, delighting us with their antics in all manifestations.  Of course it was Michael Vinten in Wellington doing the honours as Chorus Director in his accustomedly splendid manner.

All of this, of course, was conceived, planned and executed with aplomb by director Simon Phillips, set and costume designer Tracy Grant Lord and lighting designer Matthew Marshall, whose efforts couldn’t have helped but been admired in regard to their (at times) breathtaking daring but still ultimately well-grounded sense of what was possible to make work on a stage in Aotearoa New Zealand. As Oscar Wilde once put it, the important thing is “being talked about” – and this is what’s been here achieved.

As befits somebody who’s actually made a recording as a conductor of this very work (Naxos 8.660207-08 – https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.660207-08), conductor Brad Cohen (who also happens to be the current General Director of NZ Opera) seemed to bring to the performance all the musical and theatrical qualities needed to put across the zany escapades of the work with burning conviction. Perhaps the charm of a previous generation of Rossini conductors I’ve encountered on recordings (Vittorio Gui, Tulio Serafin, Carlo Maria Giulini) has been of late overshadowed by a more up-to-date snappiness of manner and generally higher-octane virtuosity among today’s maestri and their musicians. That old-world charm is something I occasionally find myself again yearning for – but there was no doubting the brilliance of both individual and corporate skills from Cohen and Orchestra Wellington in the pit of the St.James Theatre on this particular night, garnering a well-earned tumult of applause and appreciative shouts at the work’s conclusion from an obviously well-satisfied audience.