Author: Peter Mechen

Brahms’ String Quintets on Naxos – graceful, beautifully-lit readings by the NZSQ with Maria Lambros (viola)

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet, with Maria Lambros (viola), presents
BRAHMS – String Quintets – No.1 in F Major, Op.88 / No/2 in G Major, Op.111

Helene Pohl (leader) / Monique Lapins (violin) / Gillian Ansell (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)
(with Maria Lambros – viola)

Naxos CD 8.573455

Playing and getting to know this disc recorded in Canada as long ago as 2016 has been, for me, a salutary experience on a couple of counts – firstly it’s been a recrimination of sorts, one that’s asked me in no uncertain tones of disapproval, why I hadn’t sought out and explored this venture by one of our most renowned and treasured musical ensembles before now! A different kind of reproof concerns the actual music, which I didn’t know nearly as well as I ought to have, other facets of the world being too much with me, to the detriment of my appreciation of the works on the present CD.

Continuing in this vein and juicily “flavouring” my present litany of self-deprecation with the admission that I’ve never really “got” Brahms’ chamber music that’s minus a piano would bring shock and horror into the argument as well as coals of condemnation down upon my head from dyed-in-the-wool Brahmsians, with whom I’ve skirmished before! So, it’s with surprise and delight that I’ve here started to listen to these works afresh, and seemingly begun to appreciate what their composer was doing, thanks to the luminously persuasive way of the players of the New Zealand String Quartet and their collaborator, Maria Lambros, with this music!

For whatever reason, the recording presents the Second (in G Major, Op.111) of the composer’s two String Quintets first up on the disc. Brahms originally thought this would be his last major chamber work, but then met clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld the following year (1891), and no less than four more chamber pieces came from his pen, inspired by the playing of a musician Brahms called “the nightingale of the orchestra”. Nevertheless, the Quintet displays a similar autumnal feeling in places to the clarinet works that followed, in between the invigorating bursts of energy – in fact the music’s vigorous opening immediately brought to my mind the Elgar of the Second Symphony, the trajectories having a similar “striding” aspect, and the exultations displaying more than a hint of the determined and ripely forthright about them, a “not to be thwarted” feel in the way the music unfolds. Somewhat Elgarian, too, is the way the music adroitly and seamlessly reveals its composer’s more lyrical inclinations as a kind of “inner core” – and the NZSQ players’ (including the second violist’s) beautifully-judged way with realising each of these contrasting moods and their symbiotic relationship is one of the things which gave me such pleasure throughout this opening movement’s journey.

With the following Adagio, we are enveloped in a gentle melancholy, whose potential for sorrow is softened by the music’s blood-pulsing flow and, in places, exquisite gentleness – there are outbursts of more heart-on-sleeve emotion in places, but always the music ultimately “takes care” of the listener’s concerns, the occasional shivers of loneliness placed in a wider context of stoic resignation, leaving us moved but not bereft. How gently and richly the playing takes us along this path, the viola leading the way, slightly “rushing” the slide upwards in the music’s second phrase (but giving it more “room” in its final appearance towards the movement’s end), and otherwise enabling us to fully enjoy the music’s songful outpourings. And the sequences when the night’s stars are gently revealed to us are exquisitely voiced by the ensemble, making the brief moments of agitation all the more telling.

The third movement’s Un poco Allegretto takes us closer to the world of the later Clarinet/ Viola Sonatas, an ardently proclaimed, though expansively phrased expression of controlled feeling, beautifully channelled along a ¾ rhythmic pathway, the textures voiced exquisitely in their ebb and flow of intensity, both in the minor-key opening and the contrasting major-key “trio” sequence, the lines in the latter having a Dvorakian “outdoor” quality in places. The finale depicts Brahms at his most engaging, with, again, the players’ penchant for keeping the lines airy and luminous giving the music so much variety and nuance, and to my ears entirely un-yoking the composer from any debilitating “keeper of the sacred flame” mantle wrought by his reactionary supporters – instead, this is playing which allows Brahms to be Brahms!

The ensemble also does well with the full-on opening of the earlier Quintet (F major, Op.88), keeping those lines sharply-focused and pliant (the influence of “period-practice” in the playing, perhaps?), the textures all the better-sounding for the players’ subtleties. Again, the music sounds freshly-minted, in places glowing with new-found delight (am I confusing my response with that of the players, here?), and skipping lightly over the bedrock of the pedal-points, both the solo viola and first violin giving the “Viennese Waltz” suggestion plenty of “juice” and relishing the ambivalence of the cross-rhythmed accompaniments. I liked the especially plaintive touch of the first violin’s high-flying phrase at the movement’s end, creating a brief “timeless” space before the throwaway ending.

Though this work has, on paper, only three movements, the complexities of the middle movement’s structure give a sense of a slow movement and a scherzo combined, the composer turning to a couple of baroque-like keyboard pieces from his earlier years, a sarabande, and a gavotte, as his source-material. Marked Grave ed appassionato at the outset, the music has a sighing aspect which the players here seem to “breathe” easily and naturally, allowing each change of texture, colour and dynamic to unfold and run together like a narrative. The charm of the contrasting Allegretto vivace is nicely caught, its almost insouciant character the perfect foil for the return of the movement’s opening, the “heartfelt” quality intensified – but the composer then, Beethoven-like, confounds our expectations with a presto variant of the Allegretto, followed by an even more richly-laden revisiting of the movement’s opening music. Once more, these players give the music the gravitas it needs with a beguiling lightness of touch and a rapt concentration over the last few bars which has one catching and holding one’s breath.

Two chords begin a finale of engaging fugal fun, the instruments playing games of chase, the rapid figurations momentarily exhausting themselves and alternating with chromatically-shifting triplets, everything freely modulating and exploratory. At a later point I thought I detected a brief moment of over-eagerness in one of the lines of the fugal figures’ incessant gyrations – but it somehow adds to the visceral excitement, culminating in the music suddenly shifting to a fleet-footed 9/8 rhythm, and converting the chase into a spirited dance. And I could also have imagined relishing a touch more rhetorical emphasis from the ensemble at the coda’s end, a stronger sense of homecoming – but in return for this I might have had to forego those treasurable moments during which this performance’s “incredible lightness of being” seemingly for the first time truly opened my ears to this glorious music.

 

Wilma and Friends win all hearts at Wellington Chamber Music’s first 2019 concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents
WILMA AND FRIENDS – The Opening Concert of 2019

Wilma Smith (violin) / Anna Pokorny (‘cello) / Ian Munro (piano)

Ludwig van BEETHOVEN – 10 Variations on “Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu” Op121a
Ian MUNRO – Piano Trio “Tales from Old Russia” (2008)
Gareth FARR – Mondo Rondo, for Piano Trio (1997)
Jean FRANCAIX – Piano Trio in D Major (1986)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace Church, Wellington

Sunday 10th March 2019

Beginning the year with the musical equivalent of a hiss and a roar is always a good sign for what might follow – and Wellington Chamber Music organisers can feel well-pleased with their opening offering for 2019, regarding both repertoire and the performances. In fact I sat there throughout this concert imagining, for some reason, how much “better” it all possibly might be were one in London, Berlin or New York listening to a similar kind of programme at some prestigious venue or other, and then finding myself again and again beguiled by some felicitous individual turn of phrase or arresting surge of augmented tones from these players which totally disarmed any thoughts of wanting to be anywhere else! What better feeling to take away from a concert experience?

“Wilma and Friends”, a performing concept devised by violinist Wilma Smith, features the now Melbourne-based former New Zealand String Quartet leader and concertmaster of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in a yearly series of chamber music concerts with different colleagues, performed throughout Australia and New Zealand The idea’s in its eighth year, now, and shows no sign of letting up, if the present concert’s ready excitement, focus, variety and colour are any true measures of continued life and success  – for me, the programming had a tantalising “something for everybody” flavour, covering a wide range of eras and a stimulating variety of places of origin.

Wilma’s partners in this latest venture represented what seemed like a well-nigh irresistible pair, with their combination of youth and experience – ‘cellist Anna Pokorny from Western Australia, a graduate of the Australian National Academy of Music and the International Menuhin Music Academy in Switzerland; and Australian pianist Ian Munro, a composer, writer and music educator, with numerous international awards as a performer to his credit, most notably a second prize at the 1987 Leeds International Piano Competition.

Whatever conventional wisdom suggests regarding outcomes of performances by musicians who join together for “limited tenure” periods, we listeners seemed on this occasion to reap all the benefits of the arrangement’s inherent spontaneity, newly-wrought discovery and sense of adventure in the music-making, with no apparent disadvantages or limitations. I’m not sure how many concerts the trio gave before this Wellington appearance, but they appeared to have already and handsomely “played themselves in” regarding a unanimity of purpose, of feeling and on-the-spot impulse to a most delightful degree.

First up was the exotically-named “Kakadu” Variations for Piano Trio by Ludwig van Beethoven, a work I had never before encountered in concert, and scarcely knew via recordings – I was, I admit, predisposed in the work’s favour through the title, intrigued by the quotation “Ich bin der Schneider, Kakadu”, and attracted by the prospect of another Diabelli-like transformation of a simple theme by the composer. Of course it didn’t turn out exactly like the latter, but I was nevertheless fascinated by the music’s sombre opening, Beethoven obviously taking a lot of trouble with his mood-setting and the musicians registering the elaborations of the mood with great sensitivity.

Then the cheeky march rhythm presenting  composer Wenzel Müller’s led the way to the other variations, all of which, as played here, by turns beguiled and tweaked the ear most pleasantly. Among others, I particularly enjoyed the “dialogue” variation between violin and ‘cello with its sweet playing, and the succeeding “running” variation, leading to the minor-key gravitas of the ninth episode, the piano phrases answered beautifully by the harmonising strings; and I also responded to the playfulness of the succeeding variation, with its working of a canon-like tune into the skipping rhythms and working up quite a head of steam! – most entertaining stuff!

Ian Munro’s credentials as a composer were cemented in 2003 by his winning First Prize for his Piano Concerto “Dreams” in the Queen Elisabeth International Composers’ Competition in Brussels that year. Here, we were treated to a performance of his 2008 Piano Trio “Tales from Old Russia”, a work that had been premiered in New Zealand as a result of a commission from Christchurch concert organiser Christopher Marshall, and reflected Munro’s interest in folk- and fairy-tale as part of a wider desire to write music for children. Each movement of the work is inspired by a particular tale, the first that of the Cinderella-like Vassilisa, a story complete with cruel stepmother and spiteful stepsisters. The second, titled “The Snow Maiden” is more quintessentially “Russian”, though the third, “Death and the Soldier” also has counterparts in other cultures.

Beautiful, eerie, crystalline sounds began the work, with the “Beautiful Vassilisa” in the story seemingly brought straightaway to the fore, and then set against the starkly contrasting sounds of the witch Baba Yaga. The writing exploited the strings’ ability to evoke dark, sinister ambiences contrasting those with purer, freer sounds. In other places the sounds startled with their intensely physical bite and pounding ostinato-like rhythms, reminiscent in places of Shostakovich’s writing. Both piano and strings forced the pace towards a climax and a becalming, returning us to the eeriness of a diametrically-opposed sound-world of breathtaking beauty, the atmospheres stark and awe-struck.

A second movement, which I assumed was an evocation of the Snow Maiden, began with dialogues between violin and ‘cello, the violin’s harmonics readily evoking ice-clear scintillation and cool beauty, with the piano conjuring up the play of light upon the Maiden’s person – perhaps the ‘cello’s darker, more sobering sound suggested the Maiden’s eventual fate as the fire melted her into the form of a cloud, the transformation accompanied by receding piano chords.

Munro’s timbral inventiveness as a composer made the third movement “Death and the Soldier” even more of an adventure, the music accompanied in places by various skeletal “knockings” wrought by fingers and knuckles tapping and knocking the wood on the instruments, the story’s central conflict between the soldier and the ghostly spirits building up to a wonderfully macabre free-for-all, everybody playing full out! The march morphed into a swirling dance before the footsteps portentously return, throwing the dancers out of step and enforcing an abrupt, spectacularly sudden conclusion!

High-jinks of a vastly different kind were in evidence straight after the interval, with a welcome performance of the Piano Trio version (which I’d never before heard) of Gareth Farr’s String Quartet “Mondo Rondo”. Here, a restlessly playful spirit was at large, quixotically throughout the first movement, a recurring motif doing its job in driving us almost to distraction, the sequences all being part of the music’s persona as a garrulous but nevertheless highly entertaining guest. A second movement employed pizzicato and finger-tapping techniques to emulate the sound of the m’bira (African thumb piano), generating an intriguingly minimalist-like discourse broken by the music suddenly “crying out” and “jazzing up” in a no-holds-barred way, before subsiding into a cantabile violin solo over the pizzicato-fingertapping movement beginnings.

The third movement kick-started with high-energy gesturings, over which exotic-sounding lines were floated, these being soon “compressed”, shortened, what you will – their tensile energies thereby heightened and “sprung”. Of a sudden the violin introduced a sinuously “sliding” theme, sounding for all the world as thought the player made it up on the spot! The performance treated the themes with exhilarating “pliancy” amid the driving  rhythmic energies, bringing things up to an exhilarating full-throttled burst before the music’s quixotic and enigmatic withdrawal. All-in-all, full marks to the Piano Trio version!

I’ve loved Jean Francaix’s music ever since hearing my first recording, the Melos Ensemble playing two of the composer’s Divertissiments, one for winds, the other for Bassoon and String Quartet, on a famous HMV LP of the late 1960s featuring a triumvirate (Ravel, Poulenc and Francaix) of French composers’ music. The composer’s been criticised in some quarters for what some people consider a certain vapidity in his writing, but I love its unfailingly droll humour, and its refusal to take itself too seriously in most instances. The Piano Trio was a late work, written in 1986 when the composer was 74 years old, but it possesses the youthful energy of a creative mind in its prime, right from the very opening – a restless, exploratory 5/4 rhythm  keeping a light touch amid all the energies! The playing was superb in its amalgam of strength, delicacy and wit.

A charming, insouciant waltz danced its way throughout the ensemble, the music even-handedly sharing its charms with each of the instruments – a beautiful Trio allowed the strings to soar above angular piano figurations, generating a wonderful “singing in the rain” aspect in the music. As for the Andante, its delicately romantic, bitter-sweet modulations seemed directly derived from nostalgically-charged memories, both full-blown and diaphanously delicate! – such a gorgeously-woven web of fine feeling from these players!

The finale seemed to me straightaway to proclaim a sense of life and living – pizzicato exchanges were joined by the piano’s driving energies, the strings going from pizz. to arco almost, it seemed, at will. Francaix seemed to be able to characterise the minutae of living with sounds of variety and colour simply by opening his heart to his surroundings, finding what he needed within the arc of a few physical gestures and driven by a lively imagination. A few seconds of magical string harmonics and a peremptory gesture of finality – and the sounds were deftly released to forevermore resonate in the silences. We loved every note of it, and said so via our applause, thrilled to be able to express appreciation for such stellar performances

 

 

Side by Side with Sondheim at Circa a life-enhancing experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM
Songs and Lyrics from the stage musicals of Stephen Sondheim

Julie O’Brien, Matthew Pike and Sarah Lineham (singers)
Musicians: Michael Nicholas Williams and Colin Taylor (pianos)
Director: Emma Kinane
Musical Director: Michael Nicholas Williams
Choreographer: Leigh Evans

Circa One, Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 23rd February (until 22nd March , 2019)

I’m not exactly a veteran of live performances of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals – New Zealand Opera did a splendid “Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” in 2016 (which production AND its performance I raved about, here on “Middle C”) and both the NZ Drama School and the NZ School of Music have presented sizeable excerpts from, respectively “Company” and “Into the Woods”, each of which was deftly, evocatively done. So Sondheim is a name which resonates for me more in reputation than actual experience – though judging from the amazing range and scope of the songs presented here this evening, he’s a composer whose work would seem likely to bear rich rewards upon examination.

Here, we were given something of a whirlwind tour with no less than twelve of the composer’s stage works represented – some repeatedly (both “Company” and “Follies” contributed eight songs each to the programme), though all the others were represented by either one or two numbers. Of the two most-represented shows, I thought the selection here in each case nicely touched upon the essences of the works, the songs from Company vividly encapsulating the lyricist/composer’s rather
savage anatomising of marriage as an institution via the portrayals of various couples and their interactions at a party given for their bachelor friend, Robert. As well as the married company, the “available talent” is no less caustically depicted via a sure-fire show-stopper of a first-half closer, “You Could Drive a Person Crazy”,  a trio featuring all three singers in a tour-de-force of energy, timing and sharp characterisation, with Matthew Pike as a thoroughly convincing “middle girl” – delightful.

“Follies” depicts a reunion of former showgirls, interacting with the ghosts of their former selves, re-instigating the trappings of their former glories, and reminiscing about former lovers, both sentimentally and naughtily – two of the girls, resplendent in feather boas, recall the particular talents of a particular boy in “Can that Boy” with suitably suggestive inflections putting lead in the pencil of the word “foxtrot” with suitable relish. Later, four consecutive numbers from the show take us to the beating heart of these faded glories, a trio (once again) of beauties introduce “La Grande Dame” extolling the charms of Paris, an Al Jolson-inspired “Buddy’s Blues”, and the heartbreak of a wannabe hopeful in ”Broadway Baby”.

Some of Sondheim’s most popular individual songs from other shows are here – I knew three of them instantly, the first, “Comedy Tonight” beginning the evening, both instrumentally (some nifty work by the two-piano ensemble of Michael Nicholas Williams and Colin Taylor, with barnstorming octaves in places from the former in the best romantic piano tradition) and vocally, the singers appearing one by one, bringing their very different vocal characteristics to the presentation mix. Another was “A Boy like That” from “West Side Story” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics in tandem with Leonard Bernstein’s music, here presented as an individual number, though in a kind of medley entitled “Conversation Piece” various familiar songs from the show dominated the line-up.

But the show would have been unthinkable without the composer’s out-and-out signature tune, “Send in the Clowns”, from his work “A little Night Music”, a musical in which various relationships between people, both young and older are explored (it was based on Ingmar Bergmann’s 1955 film “Smiles of a Summer Night”. The song itself, unlike many we heard during the course of the evening, is more wry about than disillusioned with love and romance, and was presented here in suitably “Do I wake or do I sleep?” tones that also contrasted greatly with the high-octane thresholds of most of the evening’s “stand-and-deliver” excitements.

In contrast to the work of one of Sondheim’s mentors, Oscar Hammerstein, who became a kind of surrogate father-figure for the boy after his parents were divorced, most of the younger man’s stage works reflect an era of disillusionment and frustration within Western society, and specifically in the United States, presenting both the individual and whole groups of people at this time in conflict with their  expectations and aspirations, far removed from the worlds of standard fare like “Oklahoma”, “South Pacific” and “The Sound of Music”, with their “happy endings”. I remember being struck by something of this quality when encountering “Into the Woods”, at the end of which none of the fairy-tale characters get to “live happily ever after”. It’s the ambivalence about life that one comes away from Sondheim’s work feeling which matters and which is truer to life than any “dreams come true” scenarios.

Though the show wasn’t without its technical gremlins (resulting in the first half loss of a microphone for one of the singers) the performers, instrumentalists and singer/actors, threw themselves into this maelstrom of, by turns, wry and sardonic vexation and disenchantment, and brought a potent marriage of music and theatre to life. I thought the technique of getting the vocalists to “narrate” the context of each of the pieces made for an engaging, organic effect, perhaps to a fault in paces, as a few of the words were sometimes lost in an all-encompassing whirl of scenario-change activity.

It’s a tribute to the stage instincts of co-directors Emma Kinane and Michel Nicholas Williams that words, music and stage action here brought out for us all the variegated emotions and subtle detailings of Sondheim’s creations, given further ease and flow by Leigh Evans’ direct, unfussy choreography – the “clowns” were onstage in front of us at times, but they knew their place. Lisa Maule’s lighting I thought properly and stunningly “illuminated” what was important to notice and what was left to the imagination, engaging our sensibilities rather than putting things merely on a screen or in a box, enhancing the idea of our being in the same performing space.

I’ve already mentioned the almost visceral effects of the piano realisations generated variously by both players at their own instruments, with ample use of the “orchestral” effects of reducing the accompaniments in places, most movingly, to a single line. Each of the singers enhanced the songs’ individual contexts in this respect, so that we were readily taken by turns into those different, sometimes brashly-wrought, sometimes finely-delineated worlds of feeling as song followed song.

Each of the singers had their particular strengths, Julie O’Brien in particular “owning” everything she undertook, from the insanely tumbledown outpourings of “Getting Married Today” with its Gilbert-and-Sullivan-plus patter, through her naughtily teasing “I never do Anything Twice”, giving the fingers of her pianist Michael Nicholas Williams an anxious moment or two, to her ineffably moving, “imagined-out-loud” rendition of “Send in the Clowns” – throughout the latter, one could at any time have heard the proverbial pin drop most disarmingly. Matthew Pike’s gift for characterisation was evident throughout, but especially telling in “I Remember” (from the show ”Evening Primrose”),  a song requiring contrasting evocations of nostalgia, wide-eyed wonderment and spontaneous excitement, delivered here in spadefuls. And Sarah Lineham, bringing a completely different vocal quality to the mix, demonstrated a sweetness of tone and a stratospheric purity in places in her slower, quieter music, such as the opening of “Losing My Mind” from “Follies”, though her tones were more difficult to “catch” when her solo music quickened or hardened, as in the climax of the same number. However, I could forgive her anything after relishing her virtuosic solo trumpet-playing in “You Gotta get a Gimmick”.

Where Lineham also shone was in the ensembles, along with the other two – the contributions of all three in the first half’s closing “You could drive a Person Crazy” made for an absolutely delightful effect, as sharp and incisive as any “Andrews Sisters” realisation I’ve heard! The one or two stunning solo renditions apart, the overall effect of the presentation is one of superb teamwork, the only caveat being the extraneous microphone noises which made unwelcome contributions to the opening part of the first half – thankfully things seemed resolved and restored after the interval.

Sondheim fans will need no further urgings – the experience of hearing these songs so expertly brought to life has made me want to explore the composer’s work further, which I think in itself amounts to praise of a recommendable order. Many thanks to Circa and to the creative talents involved for providing such a life-enhancing experience!

NZSO’s Telemann/Handel presentation at Wellington Cathedral – spectacle before music?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
TELEMANN – Water Music
HANDEL – Water Music

Vesa-Matti Leppänen (conductor and leader)
Members of The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Wellington Cathedral of St Paul,
Molesworth St, Wellington

Friday, 1st February 2019

This was one of those concerts better described by the word “occasion” – yes, there was music, yes there were musicians, and yes, the music was played; but at every step of the way the emphasis of the event’s publicity, presentation and performance seemed to be more on the “occasional” nature of the pieces and their sounds rather than their actual substance.

Historically, this wasn’t at all inappropriate considering the performance origins of both Telemann’s and Handel’s work, each coming down to us with the title “Water Music” as a result of their indelible associations with and proximity to the stuff! Telemann’s work was written in 1723 for a banquet marking the centennial anniversary of the Hamburg Admiralty, celebrating Hamburg’s importance and success as a port on the River Elbe; while Handel’s music was composed for a “Water Party” given by King George I on the River Thames in London during July of 1717.

While Telemann’s work was played riverside but on dry land, Handel’s was actually performed “on the water” by 50 musicians on a barge for the pleasure of the King and his courtiers on another barge, accompanied by “a number of boats beyond counting” filled with people who wanted to listen! And in Hamburg it was reported that, during the playing of Telemann’s music, “….ships lying offshore did not fail to add to the festivities, some by the firing of cannon, and all by flying pennants and flags…”

It can be gleaned from all of this that spectacle and sensation were integral to both occasions – the music was praised in each instance by various reports, Telemann’s described as “admirable” and “beautiful” and “uncommonly well-suited to the occasion”, and Handel’s reported as finding such favour with the Monarch that “he caused it to be played three times in all, twice before and once after supper, even though each performance lasted an hour.”

Still, in each of these performance contexts the music seemed to have been merely part of a larger purpose, that of honouring an anniversary or celebrating a state of sovereignty. One couldn’t imagine conditions on either of these occasions being ideal for listening, purely and simply – but “listening” wasn’t the only thing on the agenda.

For myself, I would love to have been at each of these happenings, though not just for the music – I would relish the spectacle, the occasion and the sense of something out of the ordinary being enacted, as I’m sure those present both in Hamburg and in London those many years ago did. And it’s in that kind of spirit that I would go as far as saying that what the NZSO did in organising this concert worked on a certain level – it was certainly no “ordinary” affair, in a number of ways.

Orchestra Concertmaster, Vesa-Matti Leppanen, who also directed the players, was quoted in the publicity as saying, “The venues for 2019 (re baroque music) were chosen for their intimate settings, atmosphere and acoustics”……..well, I think everybody would have agreed the church had atmosphere aplenty – and it soon became obvious that there was, as well, a whale of an acoustic, however inappropriate! What was the first of the criteria again? – ah, yes! – well, the accompanying blurb stated that numerous baroque works were first performed in churches – which is true, except that many Baroque churches were in fact “intimate” venues and rarely if ever matched the dimensions of St.Paul’s in Wellington.

None of this seemed to deter what seemed a goodly crowd of spectators on Friday evening (despite the event clashing with the opening of the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson) – it was difficult to assess whether the church was actually full-to-bursting, but it appeared pleasingly well-attended. I thought the absence of any printed programme further underlined the overall “spectacle” concept, though Vesa-Matti did give us an outline of the content and order of the works after the musicians had taken the platform – which would have been particularly valuable in the case of the lesser-known Telemann.

I didn’t attend the orchestra’s “Back-to-Bach” Concert in 2018 at the same venue, but my colleague Rosemary Collier reviewed the concert, commenting favourably on the clarity of the sound from her particular vantage-point, a seat in the very front row. To my ears it seemed I wasn’t so lucky, this time round, arriving too late to get a place towards the front, and having to take one ten or so rows back.

I was well aware of the phenomenon (mentioned by my colleague) of experiencing greater sound-clarity when sitting as close as possible to the performers in such an acoustic – and, alas! – it seemed that I was too far back! –  while the slower music sounded grander and richer-toned than I’ve ever previously heard, and the quieter music was able to maintain some of its transparency, anything that was quick-moving over a certain dynamic level seemed to me to turn into confusion, the details repeatedly blurred by their own resonances.

Still, in several places the acoustic effect did work to some advantage, particularly in the Telemann suite of pieces, which employed characterisations of mythological deities and sequences of tone-painting evoking the actions of water in nature – two movements, the Sarabande (The sleeping sea-goddess Thetis) and the Menuet (The pleasant wind, Zephyr) – made a particularly ravishing effect, especially with the recorder-tones – and two others in particular ( No.7 The stormy Aeolus, and the Gigue – No.9 Ebb und Fluth, The Tides of Hamburg) created considerable physical excitement, both having crescendi that the acoustic seemed to “take charge of” and imbue the figurations with tempestuous versions of gleeful abandonment, the jumbled sounds creating even more of an impression of nature at work!

I must make mention, too, of the work’s final movement (The Jolly Sailors), the accented rhythms augmented here by timpani and then by what sounded like stamping feet, as a whole company of sea-farers seemingly joined in with the dance for the last few riotous bars! It should be emphasised that the orchestral playing under Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s direction throughout these vividly-characterised sequences was, by turns, sensitive, colourful, sharply-etched and full-blooded – one could HEAR something of the playing’s quality, even with the reverberation activated and cross-firing on all cylinders!

Much the same effect of quietly-augmented beauties alternating with rumbustiously jumbled energies marked, for me, the performance of the Handel Suites, far better-known, of course, than the Telemann work – unfortunately Telemann, unlike Handel, didn’t have a “Hamilton Harty” to further his music’s cause (Harty, a prominent early twentieth-century conductor/ composer, made popular arrangements for modern orchestra of both the “Water Music” and the “Royal Fireworks Music”, which held sway in concert halls until recent times, but are now largely ignored in favour of more “authentic” performances of Handel’s music).

For me, knowing the pieces well increased my frustration with the acoustic, as I’d never before heard such a lot of this music in such a muddle! Add to this the modern “authentic practice” penchant for choosing what seem fast-as-possible allegros as “what the composer probably wanted”, and the result was, in much of the quick music, a jolly-sounding but thoroughly confused noise! Again, for me what worked well were the more stately pieces and the quieter moments – the former acquired impressive resonance and body and sounded magnificent, while the latter engendered a “glow”, a kind of halo of ambience around the sounds which was pleasing to the ear – I thought in the former, the horns and trumpets made splendid ceremonial noises, and in the latter, the softer instruments (especially the recorders!) charmed and beguiled with their sometimes celestial, sometimes pastoral (and, one could imagine, “across-the-water”) tones.

Some brief notes about the playing, which, as in the Telemann, could hardly be faulted in terms of sheer elan in the quick music and tonal beauty and depth of feeling in the slower pieces – great work from the strings in the Overture, and beautiful playing from the oboe in both in the lead-up to the horn-dominated Allegro and the Andante interlude before he return of the Allegro, with the horns! I loved the sprightly Minuet (thrills and spills from the horns once again, and lovely minor-key wistfulness from the strings in the central section. The acoustic was also kinder to both the “jogtrot” Air (beautifully “held” notes from the horns in places) and to the quieter parts of the second Minuet, introduced by lovely horn fanfares. I feared at first for the scampering Bouree, but the acoustic imparted an almost “theatrical”air to the instruments’ rapid peregrinations, points crossed and curves negotiated with hair-raising skill!

The second group of pieces prominently featured the flute, the opening gentle and pastoral – Elgar’s remark “Something heard down by the river” could well apply here also….the “helter-skelter” aspect of the dance which followed made for too much confusion to my ears, but the “Heigh-ho, Anthony Rowley” character of the following Gigue had an infectious swing, and had sufficient light-and-shade between its sections to allow the rhythms to “tell”.

And so to the final, trumpet-led group of pieces, during which the cathedral spaces were made to rock and thunder with joy in certain places, never with enough clarity for the music’s sake, but undoubtedly rousing and properly blood-stirring in effect! As well as could be judged, the playing sounded terrific! – trumpets and horns had a fine time with their call-and-answer phrases in the well-known Hornpipe (introduced by a nifty piece of virtuoso violin-playing from the concertmaster), and the timpani made its presence felt with an arresting introductory drum-roll and some cataclysmic support for the music’s “grand processional” concluding sounds.

Wellington is struggling to find suitable places for music-making at present, with at least three major venues closed for “earthquake-strengthening” work. I’m not confident that the Cathedral is the “answer to a prayer” that some organisers seem to imagine it to be. For me, this was, as I’ve said, more an “occasion” than a satisfying concert experience, something to be truly marvelled at but not for purely musical reasons – too much of the music came out as a right, royal jumble! I’ve no wish to be a voice crying in the ambient wilderness – but there’s plenty of repertoire, and ensembles to perform it, that would, in my view, bring out the building’s marvellous qualities far more appropriately and mellifluously than what I heard here.

Camerata’s latest “Haydn in the Church” concert – joyous antiphonal splendours, heart-rending beauties and al fresco hi-jinks!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Camerata presents “Haydn in the Church”

J.S.BACH – Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, Strings and Basso Continuo BWV 1043
Soloists – Anne Loeser and Malavika Gopal (violins)

J.S.BACH – “Erbarme Dich, mein Gott” (from St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244 )
Soloist – Maaike Christie-Beekman (soprano)

Josef HAYDN – Symphony No.8 in G Major “Le Soir”

Camerata, directed by Anne Loeser (violin)

St.Peter’s-on-Willis-St., Wellington

Thursday 13th December, 2018

I couldn’t remember when I’d last heard JS Bach’s Double Violin Concerto “live” when first posting this review – thanks to violinist Anne Loeser, who reminded me of a 2012 performance by the NZSO strings, I’ve had to sheepishly modify my previous “never before live” declaration; but, to my shame, it gets worse! – I actually reviewed the performance in Middle C! Oh, dear! – I’m dumbfounded as to how I could have forgotten the occasion, particularly as it featured not only the violin-playing of the wonderful Vesa-Matti Leppanen, the NZSO’s concertmaster, but the considerable instrumental skills of the then Music Director of the orchestra, Pietari Inkinen, as his violinist partner! People who wish to revisit that auspicious occasion, in addition to confirming what seems to be oncoming decreptitude on my part may do so by clicking on the following link – https://middle-c.org/2012/11/js-bach-and-mahler-worlds-of-sensibility-from-inkinen-and-the-nzso/ – where they will find what seemed to me to be an interesting idea at the time (perhaps as befits a concert with a double concerto) a “double” review!

Nevertheless, despite my having to admit to witnessing  “twice as many” performances in Wellington of the concerto in recent times as I previously had thought, I still maintain that baroque music of this kind has, during my concert-going life, become more what one might call “specialist” repertoire, which I believe isn’t generally to its advantage in terms of dissemination to a wider audience in the concert hall. There are so many baroque masterpieces which symphony orchestras used to perform than seem now of late confined to “period performance” situations, governed by strictures which frown upon any attempts to realise the music away from certain prescribed conditions.

Of course it’s wonderful to encounter presentations which attempt to replicate actual instruments, player numbers and playing styles from this music’s era – but our attempts to slavishly reincarnate these actualities in an exclusive manner would probably be viewed with astonishment by the average Baroque composer, who might think it odd to have his or her music thus perpetuated, instead of being treated more as a “living entity” of work. For reasons too elaborate to go into here at great length, I feel that the “purist” approach to music performance of any era has its pros and cons, and that Baroque composers would possibly have been far more interested in hearing what subsequent ages did DIFFERENTLY with their music rather than merely having it religiously replicated.

In any case, one only has to look at the extent to which these people unhesitatingly “borrowed” music from themselves and from one another to pick up on an intensely pragmatic attitude to the whole business held by composers, performers and audiences alike. Obviously, getting on with the prime concern of making music was paramount – and when something new came along, such as the fledgling pianoforte, for example, people such as JS Bach were straightaway interested in it (not uncritically, it must be said), rather than bent on rejecting it as merely “newfangled”.

I’m beginning to hear the “banging a can” aspect creeping into this diatribe, so I’ll stop – but I’ve always loved the reported comment of Sir Thomas Beecham, who, upon being told of the publication of a new edition of Haydn symphonies, immediately remarked, “Are they scholarly, or musical?” In principle, my feelings exactly – and what better over-riding consideration could one apply to any kind of activity that involved music?

All of this has very little to do with Camerata itself and the group’s performances, which I found by turns, joyously, heart-rendingly and exhilaratingly musical! From the very beginning of the Bach Concerto, when Malavika Gopal’s violin brought in the lower-end instruments of the ensemble, to be thereupon answered by Anne Loeser’s like instrument together with the higher-toned players, the music fairly crackled with exuberance and open-heartedness, the playing judiciously alternating energy with warmth, and strength with subtle nuance. The St.Peter’s Church acoustic instantly gave us back an amalgam of resonance and clarity which played its part in lifting the music up towards what seemed for this listener all-too-brief transports of pleasure and contentment.

Gopal’s violin again led the proceedings in the work’s heavenly slow movement, her warm, open tones followed by Loeser’s more nuanced sounds, the latter’s flecked with half-lights and barely-concealed impulses, the pair’s combination imparting a fascination in the blending of their exchanges, highlighted all the more by the reduced accompaniments, one instrument from each section providing a sensitive supporting network.  The whole resembled a kind of celestial vision on earth, one which, as with the first movement, we all wished could have endured for longer.

Of course the composer recognised the need for a “return to life” after these transports; and the ensemble certainly took him at his word, with playing in the finale whose attack and rhythmic swing had an exhilaration, almost a risk-taking element that brought me to the edge of my pew! Though when compared with the serenity of the first two movements the trajectories suddenly seemed almost “turbocharged” (the opening three-note figure sounded almost like the gruff warning bark of a guard-dog!) the control of the ensemble under Anne Loeser was exemplary, the notes “clicking over the points” with breath-taking precision. I still thought the music as much “combated” at this speed as “relished”, the various exchanges equally daring as they were joyous expressions of energy.

No greater a contrast could be imagined as with the programme’s next item, the aria “Erbarme Dich, mein Gott” from Bach’s St.Matthew Passion, sung here by Maaike Christie-Beekman (described in the programme as a “soprano”, but variously elsewhere as a “mezzo” – the aria, incidentally, is listed as one for alto, or counter-tenor, in most recorded performances.) Despite all of these potential variables it seemed as if Christie-Beekman’s voice was one that could do almost anything, and certainly at her first entry, immediately conjure up the beauty and gravitas of delivery required by this aria. With Anne Loeser’s introductory violin solo finding a “dignified sorrow” in which to project the voice’s emotion, it was left to Christie-Beekman to float those opening phrases so very beautifully but capture also a kind of desolation of utterance – these are, of course, the words of the disciple Peter in the wake of his denial of Christ after the latter’s seizure, words which carry with them all of Peter’s guilt and shame, and here made to resonate down the singer’s long, richly filled lines to telling effect.

Throughout, ebb and flow of opposing emotions tugged at our heartstrings, here from the singer, there from the solo violin, the words pleading for mercy amid despair and sorrow – I thought Christie-Beekman and Loeser made the piece an intensely living experience, constantly and judiciously focusing and “colouring” their tones with hues that expressed these very conflicts, and thus making both texts and notes real for the listener, throughout what is surely one of Bach’s most sublime utterances.

In a different way to that which took place in the concerto, what happened next seemed like a kind of  absolution in the wake of such a deep and profound outpouring of emotion – Christie- Beekman returned to the stage after acknowledging our appreciation of her Bach performance, explaining to us that the opening movement of the Haydn symphony we were about to hear was based on an air by Gluck in his opera-comique Le diable à quatre (The Devil to Pay), “Je n’aimais pas le tabac beaucoup (I didn’t like tobacco much)”, and that she would sing it for us! She translated the aria’s words for us, to the effect that she was a young woman who didn’t like being told what to do by a husband – hence she smoked cigarettes! Her accompaniment was largely pizzicato strings, the delicacy of the sounds ironically adding to the “tongue-in-cheek” stroppiness of the character and the scenario – all beautifully characterised and absolutely delightful!

And, of course, when the Haydn Symphony began, there was the saucy minx flaunting her stroppiness all over again in the music for our delight! – (however un-PC it  may sound, I admit I ENJOYED writing that phrase!) – seriously, the music was here given a different symphonic urgency and drive than in Maaike C-B’s delicious rendering! This was, of course, the third work in the composer’s “Morning, Noon and Night” trilogy of symphonies, No.8 in G Major “Le soir”. Violins in thirds sounded the “Gluck” theme at the outset, one which went on to dominate the movement, the winds having a turn with it as well. The horns displayed plenty of flair, the instruments joining with the winds to help cap off the opening sequence most effectively. Both the bassoon and the double bass had great fun as well, counterpointing these and the development’s various goings-on with much relish, before the horns returned at the movement’s end with exuberant phrases, the spills as exciting and rustic-sounding as the thrills!

Two violins “duetted” the slow movement’s opening, answered by the lower strings and the bassoon – the  solo ‘cello relished a moment of glory before the pair of violins again joined forces, resonating their phrases across a sea of interactions, the antiphonal effects gorgeous! More melancholy strains sounded across the face of things in the development, with the gentleness of utterance led by the solo violin briefly tossed sideways in favour of some muscular unison string figurations, which just as quickly subsided – the solo cello then shared some of the crepuscular-like glory with the violin, with lovely work from both players.

A spirited, striding Minuet indicated that the evening was far from over, however, with the horns making their presence felt and the distinctive oboe sound adding colour to the mix. The brass and winds exchanged major/minor moments, with the contrasting dynamics hinting at winsome echo effects. Most engaging was the gemütlich-sounding Trio, with some fantastic solo playing from the double-bass, finishing high up on his top string – after which the Menuet returned with renewed vigour, the players taking care in sounding the repeatedly-echoing final phrase of the dance throughout as redolently as at the end.

Scampering tremolandi figures from the strings launched the excitable presto finale of the work, one depicting a storm, and inspiring tremendous energy and attack from all, complete with flashes of lightning (flute) and rumblings of thunder (tremolando strings)!  A “development” section took over the opening sequence and hurled it into a new space, joined by “whirling dervish” strings and whooping horns, and with the solo cello managing a special “moment” amid the lightning flashes and grumblings, and just before the horns raise their voices for a do-or-die concluding flourish.

At the finish, I was about to turn to my partner and say to her that I wished they’d done all of the repeats, when to my surprise and delight Anne Loeser announced that they would repeat the final movement! – just the job, I thought, as the music most satisfyingly whirled its way through the tempestuous moments for a second time, giving us an enriched sense of the piece’s infectious energy and dynamism, and leaving us marvelling at the composer’s flair and originality. What joy to have an ensemble such as Camerata performing such things for our pleasure, and in such a natural and unselfconscious manner, simply, one suspects, for the sheer delight of making music – for that, it deserves to be regarded as a “treasure” by those in the Wellington region who love live music-making, a treasure that one hopes will endure for many years to come.

A finely-wrought, light-on-its-feet “Messiah” from Nicholas McGegan with The Tudor Consort and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
HANDEL:  Messiah – An Oratorio, HWV 56

Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Kristin Darragh (alto)
James Egglestone (tenor)
Martin Snell (bass)
The Tudor Consort (director – Michael Stewart)
Nicholas McGegan (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 8th December 2018

Just for interest’s sakes I hearkened back to my “Middle C” review of an earlier Messiah here in Wellington conducted by Nicholas McGegan with the NZSO three years previously, one which I hailed as a focused and characterful performance throughout. There was plenty to wax enthusiastic about on that occasion – McGegan’s very “visceral “ way with some of the music’s more pictorial evocations, such as the frisson of excitement he and his soprano (Anna Leese in that instance) created when, in the Annunciation to the Shepherds, the “Multitude of the heav’nly hosts“ excitingly made its presence felt, the forcefulness of the scourge-blows on Christ’s body at the chorus’s “Surely He hath borne our griefs”, and the sepulchral darkness wrought by the same voices with the words “Since by man came death”, contrasted all the more by the oceanic surge of energy at the immediately-following “By man came also the resurrection of the dead”.

McGegan’s other soloists besides Anna Leese on that occasion played their part in the characterful realisations, an affecting “He was despised” from mezzo Sally-Ann Russell (though the brutal contrasts of “He gave his back” in the piece’s middle section were dispensed with, then – as this time round),  a ringing, prophetic “voice of him that crieth in the wilderness” from tenor Steve Davislim, and a blood-stirring, skin-and-hair festooned “Why do the nations?” from bass James Clayton. And though she’s already had a mention above, I can’t pass over Anna Leese’s ravishing and warmly-assured “I know that my Redeemer liveth”, which, together with a Halleluiah Chorus that really took flight as an expression of exuberant joyfulness, created what I thought felt like some kind of “transcendence” that carried the performance on the crest of a wave right to its final moments.

Lest the reader regard these words as uncritical warblings, I must emphasise that there were a couple of things I felt a tad short-changed by at the time, the aforementioned truncated “He was despised” for one, and McGegan’s non-inclusion of practically every number other than what might be regarded as “standard” fare for the work, thus ignoring two or three of my absolute favourites – “The Lord gave the word” from Part Two’s The beginnings of Gospel Preaching, along with two from the otherwise unrepresented The Victory over Death and Sin section, a pairing of the superbly-wrought duet for alto and tenor “O Death, where is thy Sting?” and its equally wonderful linked chorus “But thanks be to God”. Apart from these quibbles I found the realisation hard to fault, with soloists, choir and instrumentalists inspired by their conductor to infuse such “bare-essentials” content with music-making of “energy, brilliance, warmth and sheer grandeur”.

Three years later, and with different soloists and a smaller chorus, here was Nicholas McGegan once again, looking to not only recapture that former occasion’s “first, fine careless rapture”, but take us further along the road travelled by performers and listeners alike, all wanting to deepen our involvement with a masterpiece such as “Messiah”. Expectations were high, and anticipations brimful with promise, everything further fuelled by the presence of well-known vocal soloists, along with the highly-regarded choral group, The Tudor Consort. Of course, having a specialist “early music” choir was immediately going to make a difference to last time, when the choir was the 56-member-strong NZSO Messiah Chorale – here, with twenty fewer voices the performances’ sound would obviously be quite different – leaner, more incisive, but less grand and resplendent-sounding.

Only the most diehard “authenticist” or the most stick-in-the-mud “traditionalist” would want to hear the work performed in much the same way each time – fortunately the NZSO’s attitude seems to be one of “vive la difference”, judging by the changes that have been “rung” in the presentations of the last few years. Who knows? – though loving and appreciating the “period performance” kinds of realisations, I’m still hanging out for the day when we get a local reincarnation of the remarkable (or notorious, depending on one’s standpoint) Eugene Goosens-orchestrated version of “Messiah” that was famously recorded by Sir Thomas Beecham in the 1950s, a version that some older listeners would have been brought up on via that magnificent recording.

For now, it was the same “standard version” as McGegan used previously, leaving me again bereft of those aforementioned favourites, which included the central section of “He was despised”, and giving rise to a similar feeling of Part Three being, relatively speaking, over in almost a trice. Of course, there being no “absolute” version of the work sanctioned by the composer, one has to fall back on the idea I proposed last time round – that of the work being a “listening adventure”, with nothing about any performance taken for granted (prior knowledge excepted, of course). The other variables are, of course, the different performers – and here every single voice was a different one to that of 2015, making for fascinating and rewarding listening on that score alone.

McGegan got a gorgeous sound from his instrumentalists at the very opening, the winds prominent at first before the strings alone took the melody at the repeat  – a chirpily “pointed” but flowing allegro generated a spacious, out-of-door feeling, well-suited to the declamatory entry of the first of the soloists, tenor James Egglestone, with “Comfort ye”. His fine, ringing voice readily evoked the prophetic tones with telling emphasis at certain points – “and CRY out to her….”, for example – his “ev’ry valley” grew in exaltation with each repeat – and how ear-catching and mellifluous was the combination of harpsichord and organ here, played respectively by Douglas Mews and Michael Stewart.

Egglestone again measured up during Part Two to his almost confrontational role in close alternation with the chorus, the voice bright and sharply-focused for “All they that see him”, and imbued with sorrow and pity at “Thy rebuke hath broken His heart”. Some of the words I wanted him to “spit out” more vehemently, such as in recitative with “He was cut off”, and in the aria “But thou didst not leave” – all dramatic, angular stuff that I thought needed the consonants flung about a bit more dangerously! – however, his focus sharpened again at “He that dwelleth in heav’n” and “Thou shalt break them”, the “potter’s vessel” well-and-truly dashed to pieces by the aria’s end!

Bass Martin Snell pinned our ears back with his magnificently sonorous and arresting beginning to his recitative “Thus saith the Lord”, giving his extended flourishes on the word “shake” terrific energy and pointing his words superbly throughout – “The Lord whom ye seek shall SUDDENLY come to his temple!…”. Just as startling in a different way was his second appearance, in the wake of a  marvellously sinister introduction by the strings heralding “For behold, darkness shall cover the earth…” His voice had an awe-struck quality, which rose in a great arch at “but the Lord shall arise upon thee” before returning to the gloom to begin his aria “The people that walked in darkness”, his tones again flooding both physical and imagined spaces at the phrase “have seen a great light” – tremendous!

Snell’s later contributions were no less telling, firstly in the frenetically-framed “Why do the nations…”, the orchestral playing on fire with energy and fury, the singer venting the words’ spleen in fine style, hurling out the triplets like sparks from a firecracker in both sections of the aria, and then in the well-known “The trumpet shall sound”, the player sounding a shade tentative over the first few bars, but then hitting the proverbial straps, and the singer resplendent of voice and commanding of manner and presence throughout, the overall effect majestic!

I’d heard Kristin Darragh in smaller operatic roles up to this point, commenting then on the dark and powerful quality of her various assumptions – enough to keenly anticipate what she might do with the alto sections of this score. While I wasn’t ideally placed seat-wise for the first part (my partner and myself judiciously changing our location after the interval for a more front-on, better-balanced sound-picture), I still got a sense of Darragh’s fearlessly engaging way with the texts in “But who may abide”, consistently conveying the impression that every word truly meant something. I wished we had been seated more centrally for the “refiner’s fire” section of the aria, so as to have gotten the full impact of Darragh’s sonorous lower register – a very operatic, Verdian sound in places, also in evidence at ”Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened” and its aria, which she shared (to properly startling effect, the voices creating quite different worlds of expression) with soprano Madeleine Pierard.

But it was in one of the score’s defining numbers, the aria “He was despised” (which  I heard from a better-balanced perspective than I did those previous items) that Darragh really demonstrated what she was capable of – here the voice was decked in purple, the emotion conveyed with real pathos (to the point where one almost imagined a sob in one of the descending phrases), then the tones seriously darkened for “A man of sorrows” so that the following words “acquainted with grief” took on incredible poignancy. What a tragedy we weren’t allowed to hear what Darragh would have made of the bitterly incisive lines of the contrasting section “He gave his back to the smiters”, here, as in 2015, not given.

I fancy I’ve witnessed at least three, and perhaps even four “Messiah” performances featuring soprano Madeleine Pierard, each of them displaying the singer’s brilliance and interpretative powers in their varied contexts of the different conductors’ realisations. At her first entrance in Part One she worked hand-in-glove with her conductor in “There were shepherds”, beautifully terracing the growing realisations and excitements associated with the appearances of, firstly, the angel, and then “a multitude of the heav’nly host”, the last depicted by both soprano and players as if transported by ecstatic joy – scalp-prickling stuff! Part One as well featured from Pierard some brilliant, fiendishly euphoric vocalisings expressing the sentiments “Rejoice greatly” – high-energy music-making from both singer and orchestra, the concluding dotted rhythms bouncing notes in every which direction most excitingly! This was followed later by an easeful, soaringly expressive “Come unto Him”, the second part of an aria shared and nicely contrasted with Kristin Darragh’s more visceral, earthy tones.

Pierard was given only one number to sing in Part Two in McGegan’s schema, the plaintive and expressive “How beautiful are the feet”, Handel reserving for the Third Part in this “version” all but one instance of a lighter-toned solo voice, here winningly characterised by the singer. If “He was despised” denoted a kind of “dark centre” of the work, setting the tone for its Second Part (opinions of both such an idea and such a “moment” will vary), then “I know that my Redeemer liveth” from Part Three was surely its antithesis, Handel skilfully characterising each by the use of voices with appropriately weighted tones, the contrast between the respective singers here well-nigh ideal.

I’ve spoken before of Pierard’s absolute identification with the words’ ideas and sentiments, and the sense I get of her instinctive “inclusiveness” when singing, as if her voice and presence were “embracing” every listener in the hall. This time round I caught an emphasis I hadn’t previously noted in her performances, her exquisite colouring of the words “the first fruits of them that sleep”, right at the piece’s end, made all the more telling by her lovely ascent at “For now is Christ risen”. While not a “carbon copy” of that “Messiah” performance here in Wellington I waxed lyrical about in 2014 (in a review that was published in an off-shore online critical magazine, “Seen and Heard International”) Pierard’s singing here certainly had a comparable “charge” to my ears,  and her approach to the music demonstrated a distinctive and well-focused interpretative viewpoint, as do all great performances.

Sitting where I was for the first part of the work I could clearly see the interactive process at work between conductor Nicholas McGegan and his various forces, choral and orchestral. I didn’t care for the conductor’s physical placement of the soloists when not singing, as they seemed somewhat “removed” from the action, two each on either side, sitting in a kind of divided “limbo” outside the orchestral forces, less able to give each other support and acknowledgement and seem “part of the whole”. It did, I suppose, enable McGegan to interact even more directly with the orchestral players, but I thought it gave less physical and psychological”unity”to the performance in general.

Still, The Tudor Consort voices responded to his direction with focused, detailed lines and plenty of variegated tones to their singing. The silvery tones of the sopranos was always a sheer delight, by turns part of a diaphanous web of sound in hushed sequences, and then gleaming throughout the more forthright passages. But each of the sections possessed a similar ability to spin finely-wrought lines, and maintain an “elfin” ambience, as with some of the long runs and contrapuntal passages  in “And He shall purify”.

McGegan encouraged the music’s dynamic contrasts, as with the “For unto us” opening lines and the climactic shouts of “Wonderful” and “Counsellor” in the same chorus, as also with the contrasts in “His Yoke is easy”. But the chorus that electrified me more than any other with its performance was “All we like sheep”, its convivial exchanges and dovetailings of the words “We have turned” making for sheer delight, until suddenly the music seemed to grow a black brow and a grim aspect, as the voices quietly but intensely “loaded” the hushed ambiences with the crushing weight of the world’s own iniquities, the effect being one of profound shock and dumbfoundment – so very theatrical and psychological! It had the same effect in reverse as the Part Three chorus “Since by Man came death”, here also done with great theatrical flair and atmosphere. My preference in the work would still be for a bigger choir, but despite the relative “lesser” numbers the “bite” required in places like “Surely He hath borne our griefs” was still palpable, as was the splendour of the “Halleluiah” and the final choruses.

In conclusion, no praise can be too high for the orchestra players, who responded to their conductor’s every gesture. I thoroughly enjoyed the instrumental characterisations throughout the whole of the “Annunciation to the Shepherds”, the proceedings reaching a frisson of real excitement at the appearance of the “heav’nly host” with its ecstatic “Glory to God in the highest”, and, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, the sepulchral tones of the introduction to “For behold, darkness shall cover the Earth”. Though strings and wind bore the brunt of the workload, the brass and timpani came into their own at the “Halleluiah” – I loved timpanist Laurence Reese’s crescendo roll at “King of Kings” at one point! – and in the two final choruses, the “Amen” in particular being more-than-usually expansive and exploratory, requiring a “filling-out” of measures and tones from all concerned. Players and singers alike delivered in spadefuls what conductor McGegan asked of them, and for our delight brought the work to a rousing finish!

An “Enchanted Evening” from The Virtuoso Strings with Jonathan Lemalu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Virtuoso Strings presents:
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING
(with Grammy award-winning bass, Jonathan Lemalu)

Music by JS BACH, MOZART, MASCAGNI, BELLINI, VAUGHAN WILLIAMS, COPLAND, BARBER, GERSHWIN, and RODGERS

Introduction: James Faraimo, Virtuoso Strings Charitable Trust Board
Opening Address: Justin Lester, Mayor of Wellington
MC: Luamanuvao Dame Winifred Laban

Jonathan Lemalu (bass)
Toloa Faraimo (violin)
Concertmistress (Avril Stil)
Virtuoso Strings Players and Guests
Kenneth Young (conductor)

Wellington Opera House, Manners St.

Monday 3rd December, 2018

It had all the makings of a large and vital extended-family affair, with the usual concert rituals and parameters given a relaxed and informal spontaneity that readily brought musicians and audience together. I liked the buzz of excitement in both the foyer and the auditorium, one growing out of a sense of being in a friendly crowd and anticipating the delights to come!

This was “Some Enchanted Evening”, a presentation by The Virtuoso Strings, a group drawing its members from young musicians in the Wellington and Porirua areas. The ensemble’s Concertmistress, Avril Stil, put things succinctly in her welcoming note printed in the programme, referring to the group’s determination to “change the classical music landscape of New Zealand and the world”, by dint of “hard work, dedication and a lot of practice and perseverance”. The results of what she was talking about spoke for themselves this evening.

Central to the operation was bass Jonathan Lemalu, the ensemble’s Patron, and the soloist in the vocal numbers performed in tonight’s concert. Inspired by the visionary zeal of the group’s organisers, Lemalu readily agreed to assist the venture in all possible ways, resulting in his patronage and his inspirational presence as a performer with the group. The singer paid tribute to the group’s principal sponsors in his welcoming programme note, the Deane Endowment Trust, and the Wright Family Foundation.

Beginning proceedings was an “official” welcome to everybody from James Faraimo, representing the Virtuoso Strings Charitable Trust Board, followed by an address from the Mayor of Wellington, Justin Lester. This prepared the way for the evening’s opening item, James Faraimo introducing the evening’s Musical Director Kenneth Young by way of inviting him to the podium to direct the first movement of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto. This was quite a work-out for the strings, but under Young’s “steady-as-she-goes” guidance the players bent their backs to the task with great spirit, keeping their rhythms buoyant, attacking the beginnings of the lines fearlessly and “terracing” the dynamics so that the sounds had ear-catching ebb-and-flow. Though the intonation sounded a bit raw in places, especially the exposed, single-line sequences, other parts were strongly and vigorously characterised, such as the famous “descent” through the orchestral sections, finishing with the engagingly “growly” double-basses!

James Faraimo then introduced the MC for the remainder of the concert, Luamanuvao Dame Winifred Laban, Associate Professor and Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Pasifika) at Victoria University of Wellington.  After greeting us she then in turn introduced the evening’s soloist, bass Jonathan Lemalu, inviting him to take the stage and perform for us some more Bach, this time the beautiful “Mache, dich, mein Herz rein“ (Make my heart pure) from the “St Matthew Passion”. Lemalu treated the music reverentially, almost to a fault in places where it was difficult to hear him – his tones came through more readily to the ear during the less heavily-accompanied middle section of the aria. However, his capturing of the music’s spirit was extremely moving, as was the players’ rendering of the “lullaby-like” quality of much of the music.

Completely different in character was the following item, from Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro”, the aria “Non piu andrai” (No more will you go), during which Figaro gleefully describes to a young lovesick boy, Cherubino, how life in the army and in the thick of battle will make a “man” out of him! Lemalu’s acting skills came to the fore, here, characterising the words with glee, and gently mocking the boy’s amorous inclinations by presenting him with the grimmer realities of a soldier’s life! Though some of the vocal detail was hard to pick up, the more “martial” bits were put across by Lemalu with great relish!

Another great Mozartean “character” followed, that of “Papageno”, the bird-catcher from “the Magic Flute”. Lemalu lost no chance to “act up” to the audience while describing his living and his longing for a pretty little wife – the recurring flute-call here made the singer check his cell-phone, to the amusement of us all in the auditorium. After this, we heard a strings-only item, again operatic in origin, the beautiful “Intermezzo” from a much later opera than Mozart’s, a one-acter by Pietro Mascagni, called “Cavalleria Rusticana”. The lines were sweetly and sensitively realised, the phrasing kept simple and direct, Young resisting the temptation to inflate the piece’s overt emotion in any way.

The changes were rung again for the next operatic excerpt, again from Mozart, and this time from one of the most famous of all operas, “Don Giovanni”. Lemalu gave us an Act One aria from the Don’s servant Leoporello, who recounts to one of the Don’s abandoned female conquests the extent of his master’s sexual proclivities, a piece popularly known as the “Catalogue Aria”. Here, Andrew Atkins’ piano-playing helped out with some of the wind-parts of the original! Lemalu’s voice, though not ideally clear against the busy orchestral background during the first half of the aria, nicely caught the mock-serenade mood of the slower second part, with its naughtily-characterised final phrases.

I didn’t know the next aria, from Vincenzo Bellini’s “La Sonnambula”, one which sounded to me very like Rossini in places, but had heard and knew the splendid Vaughan Williams song “The Vagabond’ from the composer’s “Songs of Travel” – here most energetically sung and with great and forthright out-of-doors orchestral playing!

After the interval came the first of two items during this half of the programme that moved me almost to the point of tears, the first of which again being by Vaughan Williams. This time the soloist was a violinist, sixteen year-old Toloa Faraimo, giving us a performance of the composer’s orchestral rhapsody “The Lark Ascending” which was received throughout its duration with the kind of awed silence one associates with truly heart-stopping performances. For here was a beautifully-realised, exquisitely-sounded evocation of a world of loveliness and natural order and simplicity, played with exquisite timing and sense of atmosphere, soloist and orchestral accompaniment mindful as much of the silences as of the notes. Only one or two slightly “drooped” ascending note-tunings from Faraimo caused any sort of “blip” on the radar of the bird’s celestial peregrinations, the rest (including confidently-addressed double-stoppings and diaphanous cadenza-like warblings near the piece’s end) addressed with a serene patience and surety of focus that belied the violinist’s young years. Naturally the audience erupted at the end of it all, the reception all the more tumultuous in the wake of such rapt interweavings of beauty and stillness from the youthful player and his sensitively-wrought orchestral support.

We needed to come back down to earth after this, and Jonathan Lemalu gave us just the thing in the form of three of Aaron Copland’s “Old American Songs”, the first the well-known “Simple Gifts”, here sung in simple, ballad-like fashion. The more declamatory “Zion Halls” I thought suited Lemalu’s gentler voice less than did the lovely “At the River”, the latter sung with ineffable longing and sense of quiet faith.

Samuel Barber’s “Adagio”, originally a movement from a string quartet, has long since found another “life” in a later, string-orchestra guise, as a much-loved and often-performed elegiac piece at times and occasions marked by great sorrow. Ken Young got a beautiful performance of this from his young players – after a lovely, inward-sounding opening, the cellos “opened up” the music’s expressive qualities, stimulating ever-burgeoning feeling and intensity which reached a climax, then quietly retreated , returning to the deep well of hushed emotion awakened by the piece’s opening.

All four remaining items in the concert (including the encore) were sung by Lemalu with a “to the manner born” kind of style, firstly Gershwin’s “I got plenty o’ nuttin’” from “Porgy and Bess, put across with plenty of swagger in the more forthright places, including a properly uninhibited “No use complainin’!” parlando utterance that summed up the spirit of the song in an instant!  I would still have liked more tonal weight from the singer, but by way of compensation got here and in other places some wonderfully alive responses from Lemalu to words and their evocations.

The most affecting were two whose strains instantly took me back in time to childhood experiences of hearing these performed “live” on stage, particularly so in the case of “Some Enchanted Evening” from Richard Rodgers’ “South Pacific”, but just as strongly (through being more richly-voiced in performance) the concert’s encore, a performance of the famous song “Ole’ Man River” from Jerome Kern’s “Showboat”. Here the singer’s deepest resonances were brought into play most effectively with the song’s lowest notes being caught well and truly, and used as the basis of building up intensity of feeling towards the climax – overwhelming in its effect, and a marvellous way to end this truly heart-warming concert.

Creative, thrilling and heart-warming conclusion to Orchestra Wellington’s 2018 season

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents “New World”

MOZART (arr. Busoni) – Overture “Don Giovanni”
MICHAEL NORRIS – Violin Concerto “Sama” (World Premiere)
DVORAK – Symphony No. 9 in E Minor Op. 95 (B.178) “From the New World”

Amalia Hall (violin – Michael Norris)
Andrew Atkins (conductor – Mozart)
Marc Taddei (conductor – Michael Norris, Dvorak)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 1st December 2018

Well, it was quite a night for Orchestra Wellington! – in front of an enthusiastic and appreciative audience at the Michael Fowler Centre on Saturday evening the musicians put everything they had into making the final night of the orchestra’s 2018 concert season one to remember. We were presented with a line-up of pieces which, if perhaps not all sure-fire crowd-pleasers, perfectly expressed the desire of the orchestra’s organisers to provide a rich and varied concert experience! There was a fascinating arrangement of one of Mozart most famous operatic overtures, along with the first-ever performance of a New Zealand work, a violin concerto by Wellington composer Michael Norris, both counterweighted after the interval by what is certainly one of the most popular symphonies of all time, Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony in E Minor, best known by its subtitle “From the New World”.

Before the actual music-making began, Marc Taddei, the orchestra’s Music Director, warmly thanked the audience for its support throughout the year, promising that the about-to-be-launched 2019 programme would continue to deliver the excitement and enjoyment of past seasons – in fact, even more so this time round by, in Taddei’s words, “pulling out all of the stops!” The 2019 season sported the title “Epic” by way of indicating something of the range and scope of the presentations, the conductor remarking that in each case the work or works featured in that particular concert introduced something “important” and “pivotal” to music, significant to the art-form’s development.

As an example (I thought this a particularly mouth-watering prospect!) the opening concert in April of next year was to feature both Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” AND Its rarely-performed sequel, “Lelio, or Return to Life”. Even on its own this choice of repertoire amply indicates the innovative spirit that informs the orchestra’s work in general and pays tribute to its enterprising music director and his supporting musicians and artistic management. A further innovation came with the display of a special recording of the orchestra playing a couple of Beethoven Symphonies (these are “live” performances from previous concerts….) captured on both CD and “180 gram vinyl”, the latter especially striking regarding colour and packaging, giving it extra distinction for a collector, though for some people the former at a mere $16.00 (as opposed to $40.00) might be perfectly viable a souvenir of the orchestra.

So, the 2019 season having been “launched” and associated things been given honourable mention, the concert began, Taddei at this point handing over the “conducting reins” to his Assistant Conductor, Andrew Atkins, who was scheduled to conduct the first item. With gestures whose flowing aspect often reminded one of a bird in flight, but which secured as finely-honed and dramatically-sprung a performance of the music as one could wish for, Atkins got a properly dark-browed aspect from the players at the work’s beginning, followed by an engagingly buoyant rendering of the music’s “giocoso” manner – in fact, Mozart himself interestingly styled the work as both a “dramma giocoso”, a dramatic comedy, and an “opera buffa” (comic opera).

Opera overtures are often linked by their composers to the ensuing stage action, Mozart’s music in the theatre in this case flowing seamlessly into the story’s beginning. However, to be performed like that in concert with no opera to follow would result in a kind of unresolved cadence at the piece’s end – so either the composer or a subsequent editor would “recompose” the concluding sequence to make a satisfying conclusive ending to the music. This time round, however, the orchestra played a version I’d never encountered before, one arranged by the brilliant Italian pianist and composer Feruccio Busoni, and which seemed to me to successfully incorporate more of the opera’s whole “flavour” for concert-hall performance. Busoni, at the Overture’s end returns us to the opening, darkly monumental “Stone Guest” music, reminding us of the Don’s eventual fate, and follows this with the music accompanying the opera’s “epilogue” (which Mozart added to the opera AFTER the premiere) – here, the Don’s adversaries, plus his much-maligned manservant, Leoporello, entone a moralistic conclusion – “This is the evil-doer’s end – sinners finally meet their just reward, and always will”, the sentiments (as befits a “dramma giocoso”) delivered with something of an ambivalent twinkle in the eye, a feeling conveyed here by the energetic, high-spirited playing.

By way of providing something of a contrast, next up was Michael Norris’s new Violin Concerto (an Orchestra Wellington commission), one which the composer had subtitled “Sama”, the Arabic word for “listening” and the name given to a Sufi ceremony involving different ritualistic elements. This work was expressly written for Amalia Hall, the orchestra’s Concertmaster, who, though still in her twenties has already developed an international reputation as a soloist, going on from competition successes in New Zealand to win various international awards in various parts of the world. Of coursed she’s already appeared as a soloist with Orchestra Wellington this year in a stunningly-delivered performance of Bartok’s formidable Second Violin Concerto (see the review at https://middle-c.org/2018/06/orchestra-wellington-a-golden-beginning-to-its-2018-season/), so we were thoroughly spoilt by having this second opportunity to enjoy her magnificent solo playing of music that was, to say the very least, extremely challenging. Incidentally, the Orchestra Concertmaster for the evening was none other than Justine Cormack, ex-APO Concertmaster and NZ Trio violinist, obviously happy to “help out” her conductor-husband and his orchestra in their time of need!

In three movements this concerto evoked a world of exotic ritual inspired by the “Sama”. We were straightaway transported into a mystical realm via “tolling” undulations from the harp and the orchestral winds, joined by ambient strings and then by the solo violin, entering quietly at first , but constantly responding to different aspects of the “Ard” expressed by the orchestral textures and impulses – it seemed to me a kind of “rite of passage” for the soloist and her instrument, both here in accord with the orchestral happenings, and there ostensibly “assailed” by overwhelming forces, which the solo violin did its best to combat, either by accordance or stoic defiance. Perhaps the orchestral irruptions were more manifestations of life-force than they were adversarial, though I still thought there were some baleful moments! However, these were balanced by writing for both violin and orchestra which expressed a gamut of illustration and incident characterising what Norris called “life and growth” throughout the movement, with variety, colour and energy abounding.

The second part, Fada, came cataclysmically into being via a hugely reverberant opening chord, the solo violin exploring the ensuing resonances in the manner of a spirit inhabiting a strange, almost surreal world in a trance-like state of being. There was as much “incident” as stillness throughout, the impulses mostly contained within the parameters of the dream-like writing, though the brasses stirred uneasily at one moment and roused one another in an outburst of disquiet before leaving the violin to join with the harp and the gently-thrumming strings, connecting as much by the sound of breath as by actual tones with the music’s cosmic heartbeat.

Perhaps the solo part’s “display element” was manifest more consistently in the final movement “Semazen”, the composer commenting on the “constant state” of “vortical force” expressed by the music, a reference to the well-known “whirling dervish” aspect of Sufi worship. Beginning with trance-like ritualistic invocations both ruminative and forceful, both soloist and orchestra gave us a rollicking parade of interactive impulses involving quicksilver figurations, galloping drums, galvanising irruptions from the winds and brass, and energetic underpinnings from the strings. The violin seemed “central” to the ritual, obviously a “Master of Ceremonies” but very much an integral thread in the work’s “one among equals” tapestry. The composer used his manifest musical forces with both elan and discretion, not least of all at the work’s very end, with the violin, having decided that its work is done, ascending and disappearing into the silence of the stratospheric spaces – what a work, and what a performance!

The final act of the orchestra’s 2018 season – the performance of Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” – was preceded by a touching tribute made by Taddei to his Principal Second Violin Leader, Pascale Parenteau, who was stepping down from the position after a number of years, though still intending to continue in the orchestra as a rank-and file player. And then it was all hands to the pumps for the Symphony, though the quiet opening of the work was here lightly and fluidly played by the strings, like something almost airborne. A stentorian horn call awoke an answer from the winds, before strings and timpani flexed their muscles and strongly announced their intentions, moving the music on more urgently to and through the allegro molto.

Tempi were kept swift and straight, and the rhythms incisive, Taddei relaxing the trajectories just a little for the more lyrical wind-led themes of the second subject group, allowing the flute enough space in which to phrase most beautifully the famous “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” sound-alike theme, repeated just as sweetly by the strings. What a pleasure to be able to hear all of this again, courtesy of the first-movement repeat (not always played), with the players generating just as much rhythmic excitement and lyrical feeling the second time through. Throughout these more lyrical episodes I loved the prominence given to the wind counterpoints, obviously encouraged by the conductor to “play out”, giving the music such a winning and distinctive “al fresco” feeling.

Dvořák went to a lot of trouble to get the opening of the Largo slow movement right, indicated by the variants of the “chord progressions” in the composer’s sketchbooks – he also thought seriously about using a clarinet for the famous main theme before finally turning to the cor anglais (and in doing so, of course, ensured the instrument’s immortality!). As with the symphony’s opening, the brass kept things moving throughout their richly-wrought introductory chordings, allowing the cor anglais player Louise Cox to follow in kind, the playing lyrical without overt sentimentality, her tones beautifully-rounded while still suitably plaintive-sounding. Her playing was nobly supported throughout, the winds just as feelingly framing the soloist’s melody, the strings echoing the strains with rare beauty and the brass and timpani adding touches of grandeur to it all.

From the rapture of the slow movement’s conclusion we were plunged into a different mindset by the Scherzo, a tighter and more “symphonic” affair than any in the series of symphonies by the composer we’d heard thus far this year, though Dvorak had in mind a passage in Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” that the composer called “the feast where the Indians dance” and thus builds the excitement of the dance’s opening rhythmic gestures into something wild and forceful, contrasting this with charming interludes, including a Trio whose spirit seems more akin to his Czech homeland. I thought the playing outstanding in all aspects, feeling that the wind players, particularly in these interludes seem to “inhabit” the composer’s evocations, via the out-of-doors character of the playing. And Taddei and his players delivered the “surprise” coda, with its reminiscences of the symphony’s first movement, in a properly exciting and dramatic way, the brief (and uncharacteristic) moment of untogetherness by the horns mattering little in the drama of the exchanges.

This same energy carried over and into the finale’s opening, delivered absolutely without rhetoric, directly and powerfully, the brass resplendent, the strings intense and full-bodied, and the trajectories with their cross-rhythms between the sections most exciting! I loved the flexibililty of Mark Cookson’s clarinet solo, and the cheekiness of the winds later in the movement, answered in almost Mahlerian style by the brasses, who built up their opening statement magnificently. And what a resonant and heartwarming exchange between strings winds and horn which followed afterwards!

At this point I thought the whole ensemble imbued with a kind of “playing for keeps” spirit, which of course befitted the last few moments of the season – and out of it came the last charge towards the work’s stirring peroration, begun by the winds, galvanised by the horns, and flung skyward by the strings and the brass, unable to contain their excitement during the final measures until Mark Taddei and the players farewelled us with the last wind chord, held so beautifully and resonantly. It was a moment which will, I’m sure, sustain the orchestra’s many followers over the time before the band again picks up its instruments for the aforementioned new and tumultuous 2019 season!

 

 

Beautiful, visceral, hypnotic, disconcerting – Stroma’s “essential experimental” at Wellington’s Pyramid Club

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
ESSENTIAL EXPERIMENTAL
An intimate evening of song, water, glass, harmonics, beat frequencies and vases

Music by John Cage, Peter Ablinger, Antonia Barnett-McIntosh,
Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, Chiyoko Szlavnics

Stroma: Michael Norris (sponges), Barbara Paterson (soprano, voice), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
Antonia Barnett-McIntosh (voice) Rebecca Struthers, Kristina Zelinska (violins)
Reuben Jelleyman (accordion), Emma Barron (viola), Matthew Cave (double-bass)

Venue: The Pyramid Club, Taranaki St., Wellington

Thursday 29th November 2018

The venue really brought it all alive, in a way that I thought a more conventional concert-chamber-like place wouldn’t have done. In the most positive way we in the audience seemed to be “put at ease” by the “late-night club” surroundings at Taranaki Street’s Pyramid Club, and, rather than attending a concert, were instead made to feel we were “eavesdropping” on the ongoing creative processes constituting and shaping each item. It was a feast of visceral interaction between performers, media and audience; and even if the results at times gave rise to as much bemusement as illumination (speaking for myself, here!) I felt these moments pulled our apertures further apart and teased our sensibilities with even more of the workings and their trajectories.

This was the first of two performances scheduled that evening, and the venue was packed in the most encouraging and atmospheric way possible. Stroma’s presentations, under the leadership of Michael Norris have constantly sought to stimulate, engage and challenge audiences, and have steadily earned the group a loyal following based on its remarkable set of capacities for renewal in the form of fresh explorations and bold, and compelling performance practices. This evening’s programme, entitled “Essential Experimental”, was no exception, the items generating sounds from sources and practices in some cases far removed from conventional means, even when a number of familiar instruments were involved in the process.

Michael Norris called the outcomes of these presentations “unusual but beautiful sound-worlds”, and the first of these, featuring a 2002 work by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger called Weiss Weisslich 31e, certainly made good that description by way of a most intriguing and diverting set of procedures. Norris himself was cast in the role of “performer”, with the title given in the programme of “kitchen-sponge hanger-upperer”, his function being to fix a number of wetted sponges to places along a line strung over a number of amplified glass tubes laid on the ground, allowing the drips of water from each sponge to land on corresponding individual tubes. Because the “operator” can only hang or remove one sponge at a time, the acceleration and deceleration of “drip incidence” from each sponge takes place at a different time from each of its seven fellows, making for complicated “canonic” results involving different tones from the amplified tubes. Norris further varied the interplay of the drips and their sounds by rehanging the freshly-wetted sponges in a different order a second time round! Magical!

At times the very slow drips found themselves “paired” with rapid ones – and with the different amplifications directed through speakers placed in different parts of the room, both the different speeds, pitches and physical placements of the speakers made for some atmospheric antiphonal effects. Interestingly I found that in sequences where many different drips were sounding, I often noticed specific ones ONLY when they stopped or the sponge was removed, indicating that it was as much my subconscious as my conscious hearing that was “registering” the drips. The composer himself wrote that his material here “was not sound but audibility” and that he could “set audibility then inaudibility”, further explaining that “inaudibility can arise through…too little occurring, but also through too much occurring…” The drips created pulse, melody, counterpoint and texture at various times, ranging from altogether what one commentator somewhere called “a turbulent polyrhythmic forest”.

From these abstractions we were taken to John Cage’s 1958 composition Aria, originally dedicated to one of the most renowned performers of contemporary vocal music, soprano Cathy Berberian, and here performed with remarkable assurance by Barbara Paterson, her voice dealing most adroitly with the work’s many changes of mode, style, timbre and character – at certain points I was in fact reminded of composer/pianist Donald Swann’s virtuoso rendering of his similarly exploratory song “Korkoraki” (part of the well-known Flanders and Swann “At The Drop of a Hat” presentation). Here were far more divergencies from the conventional “art-song”, including words from different languages and rapid fluctuations between different styles of delivery – the emotional effect of Paterson’s cornucopian rendering was not unlike witnessing a performer attempting to piece together some kind of coherent message while in the process of either suffering from a kind of schizophrenia, reliving a series of traumatic experiences, or giving us the full gamut of what any singer’s physical and vocal equipment is put through in performance, most of which the performer has ordinarily been taught to suppress! – an incredible display!

Continuing to ring the changes, the concert next featured a work by Alvin Lucier, featuring the ‘cello-playing of Ken Ichinose, performing in tandem alongside a number of empty, differently-sized vases, all amplified – somewhat literally, the work was called Music for ‘Cello with One of More Amplified Vases.  The cellist was required to begin with his lowest note and slowly play an upward glissando, right up to halfway along his top string. At certain points along this journey, the resonances created by the notes reverberated within the empty jars and created an additional “presence” surrounding the tones already being sounded by the player. To my surprise I thought I distinctly heard the nostalgic “drone” of the engines of a distant DC3 taking off from Milson Airport in Palmerston North, a regular occurrence for me when a small child. Sometimes the vases seemed to be “duetting” or “quartetting” with the soloist, while at other times the effect was that of a companion ghost or guardian angel. Perhaps the work ought to be retitled “Unlocked…” or “Liberated” Voices………..

I must confess to the readership that I found the next piece, by Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, the current composer-in-residence at the Lilburn House in Thorndon, a REAL challenge! This was a work given the title yesterday blocks, and one to which the term “composed” seemed to me, for some reason, an inadequate description of the process! In Barnett-McIntosh’s own words, her work is described as presenting “the specificity of sound gestures and their variation, translation and adaptation, often employing chance-based and procedural operations.” As with John Cage’s Aria the only instrument in evidence was the voice, here the composer’s own voice in tandem with that of Barbara Paterson’s. The two “artists” produced narratives that seemed at several degrees’ removal from one another, though towards the end of the different discourses there seemed to be glimmerings of TS Eliot-Waste-Land-like attempts at communication, of the “Speak to me – why do you never speak?” kind of impulsiveness. Up to then, the composer’s disjointed narratives had run teasingly and tantalisingly alongside the other speaker’s half-conversation with what seemed like unheard inner voices. Was it delineating a fragmentary relationship between thinking and vocalising, an out-of-phase attempt to bring together recall and the present, or a conversation between parts of the same personality? – somebody playing with/being played by their alter ego? I found the crossover aspects involving both spoken theatre and music fascinating, as the voices seemed to me to increasingly coalesce, as if they were starting to “decode” one another – in effect very daring! – but for me very confusing!

More “conventional” (if such a word is allowed ANY currency pertaining to this concert!) was the next piece, Canadian composer Chiyoko Szlavnics’ Triptych for AS, written in 2006 for two violins and an accordion (“AS” is the composer’s mother, incidentally). Described as a “visual artist” as well as a composer Szlavnics is credited by the programme note with an “idiosyncratic” method of working, something about converting lines on a drawing to glissandi that exactly replicate the drawing (to say the first thought that came into my head, which was “Oohh, what about the “Mona Lisa” in sound?”, is to trivialise the concept, which I won’t!) What I also thought (hardly rocket-science!) was that there would be three “somethings” in all of what we were about to experience, as per the title.

The sounds were to be produced both acoustically (Rebecca Struthers and Kristina Zelinska the violinists and Reuben Jelleyman the accordion-player) and electronically (a bank of five sine tones). The opening chords straightaway had an “electric” quality, the upward glissandi generating incredible intensity, sounds with long, burgeoning lines, reminiscent of Ligeti’s “Atmospheres”. They seemed cyclic in effect with the strings re-entering the fusion and working their glissandi gradually upwards again. Both the second and the third pieces seemed to use higher pitches with a more intense result and a clearly augmented string-sound, the “quality” agglomerated by the electronic resonances. I liked the growing tensions, and the uncertainties of the points where the lines for the individual instruments “crossed” and the sounds “reared up”, Then, at the third piece’s conclusion, the accordion was suddenly left to carry the thread, a lone plaintive and isolated voice.

So we came to the final presentation in this hugely enjoyable panoply of creative innovation, a work by American James Tenney that’s part of a multi-movement piece called “Glissade”, in fact the first movement of the work, itself called Shimmer. Its three instrumentalists (Emma Barron, Ken Ichinose and Matthew Cave playing viola, ‘cello, and double-bass respectively) shared the sound-stage with ”delayed” computer-recorded reminiscences of what the strings played, the ensuing “womb of resonances” the agglomerated and on-going result of this five-second delay.

The viola began with a drawn-out repeated note, before moving into harmonics in a repeated arpeggiated pattern, before the ‘cello did the same, as did the double-bass – with all three instruments contributing plus their overlaid recorded echoings, I found the effect uncannily similar to parts of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” Prelude, hypnotic and compelling, drawing one’s listening into the web and waft of it all. The discernible flecks of colour and tone added to the ongoing magic, as did the ever-increasing prominence of the glissandi, the sounds eerily ascending, before becoming like impulses of sunlight dancing on cloud-tops! As the tones gradually surrendered their intensities we became aware of being returned to a “place of origin”, eventually reaching a point where the players ceased, and allowed their own resonances to continue for a brief further moment in time, a treasure as much in the hearing as the letting go……what better a way to end such an absorbing collection of sound-adventures?

 

 

Baching at the Moon – ‘Cellist Raeul Pierard at St.Peter’s on-Willis, Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

J.S.BACH – Six Suites for solo ‘Cello
Raeul Pierard (‘cello)

St.Peter’s on-Willis, Wellington

Friday 23rd November 2018

Long and involved stories or series of tales have always attracted me – I’m a sucker for sagas, an enthusiast for epics, a connoisseur of chronicles. In music there’s nothing I like better to involve myself with than something that covers a wide span of time, incident and characterisation. I’m a completist who’s in seventh heaven when about to embark upon things like Bach’s “forty-eight”, Haydn’s “Salomon Symphonies”, Liszt’s “Transcendental Etudes” or Albeniz’s “Iberia”. I could go on, but don’t want to run the risk of getting side-tracked and losing my bearings……

Still, I mention these things because it seems to me that people are presently being encouraged in artistic matters to do the opposite to what I’ve just described – to skip in-and-out of encounters and experiences rather than cast themselves into the heart of things, body and soul, and especially so in music. One has only to tune into Radio New Zealand’s Concert Programme in its present form to experience the increased fragmentation of musical presentation that’s being served up as a kind of “standard” – lately, more often than not we get ”movements” rather than whole works and a preponderance of shorter pieces which suggests an inclination to merely “entertain” on the part of the powers that be, rather than to invite listeners to push back boundaries and undergo any kind of in-depth exploration.

I could go on about this trend as well, so that readers would soon give up on the prospect of my ever getting to the business in hand, that of reviewing a performance of all of JS Bach’s six Suites for solo ‘Cello – but what’s interesting in the framework of what I’ve just been talking about is the reaction of a number of people to my having gone to the performance of these works – things like “Oooh, that’s a LOT of solo ‘cello!” and “Didn’t it all start to sound like the same, after a while?”……..to be fair, there were many comments of the “wish I’d been there” variety, as well…..

As far as the player, Raeul Pierard, was concerned there was obviously no problem, having been inspired by one of his teachers to make a point of regularly performing the complete cycle. Accordingly, Pierard had entitled his concert “Baching at the Moon”, equating the regularity of his performances of these works with the lunar cycle, thus calling each of them a “full-moon event”. It wouldn’t be inappropriate to link the two occurrences as different manifestations of life-forces, bringing together cosmic and human patterns of behaviour as a way of contextualising a significant kind of co-existence, Bach’s music speaking for humanity in tandem with celestial processes.

So, to the concert, given in the remarkably beautiful interior of the Church of St.Peter’s-on-Willis:  a number of things came to my mind as I registered work following work, movement following movement and phrase following phrase – first and foremost was the sheer intensity of the experience, by way of both the music’s amazing variety and depth. I had listened with the utmost interest to Raeul Pierard’s spoken introduction to his playing of these works, taking to heart several points he made which for me further “opened up” both the music’s structural and emotional content, one of them being that his feeling was that the music was “autobiographical”, especially when considering that Bach’s life had ample potential for both joy and sorrow, having two wives, one of whom died; and twenty children, ten of whom did not survive him. Of the six Suites, two of them are set in minor keys and result in “darker” sounds than the other four, while the works numbered as fourth and sixth in the authorised “edition” of the composer’s works are more angular and exploratory of expression than their major-key fellows.

Not that it’s possible to “date” any of the works, Bach’s own autograph manuscript of them being lost, the most ostensibly reliable copy being that made by Anna Magdalena Bach, the composer’s second wife, with no details as to the origin of the works regarding time or place. The other three extant eighteenth-century copies are just as unhelpful, with further confusion arising from their differences, resulting in none of them being regarded as “the” authentic version. Instead, the ‘cellist wanting to play these works has a choice of over a hundred different “editions” offering different solutions to the discrepancies. It would have been interesting to have asked the cellist regarding “editions” and whether he had any particular “models” for his own playing style and/or interpretation (so many great names, from Casals onwards….) – however, I found myself at the end wanting to bring away the “sound” of the music in my head unadulterated by such detail, and so never got to actually talk with him…..

There being a smallish audience (the concert clashed with a sell-out performance of the Beethoven “Choral” Symphony from the NZSO that same evening!) Pierard invited all of us to sit up closer to him, freely talking to us at various places during the recital, but requesting that we restrain from applauding until the conclusion of each of the “halves” of the presentation – we actually got in first at the end of the First Suite and applauded, but no real harm was done! I could understand what he meant, though, and especially in the case of the minor-key works and those in the concert’s second half, where the act of listening seemed in itself a sufficient response to such sounds and the applause a superfluous, almost trite act juxtaposed with these evocations of something ineffably precious and timeless.

The First Suite’s opening allowed us to appreciate the St.Peter’s acoustic to the full, the instrument’s tones rich and focused, and “answered” by the surroundings in an enriching rather than confusing or blurring manner by an ambient glow. The Prelude unfolded under Pierard’s fingers with the utmost simplicity and natural-sounding freedom, followed by an Allemande which seemed to almost extend the opening with added whimsy and divergency, the repeat further deepening the explorations. These being “Suites” the movements were, of course, all dances of various kinds and nationalities (whose characteristics Pierard outlined for us), the following Courante rhythmically engaging from the very opening note, the trajectories impish and impulsive! Then came a Sarabande, a slow dance of (according to the ‘cellist) Turkish origin, one often given considerable gravitas by Bach in his various works, Pierard here bringing out the music’s meditative quality, the sounds having moments of deep wonderment. There’s usually a marked contrast with the following Minuet, though less so, here, the ‘cellist enabling the music’s “more than usual” circumspection of feeling, more poetic of motion than physical of impulse – as was the contrasting minor-key Trio section of the dance. A change came with the Gigue (English – “jig”), which was far more precipitate and impulsive in phrasing and overall movement.

From the very opening, the Prelude of the Second Suite seemed to suggest tragedy, with the three opening notes defining the mood and the following figurations exploring it. Pierard’s tone spoke volumes of eloquence throughout, especially in the piece’s second half where the intensity built to great depths of feeling before suddenly retreating, allowing the emotions some space to realign, the feelings as intense, though incredibly “inward” at the piece’s end. The Allemande brought a different kind of energy to what sounded like a purposeful journey, the Courante even more so with its vigorous phrases and its forthright display passages. Again, the Sarabande was played “con amore”, allowing the measures time and space to indelibly fix their phrases on the listeners’ sensibilities. This time the Menuet broke the spell, with purposeful, energetic playing at the onset on the part of Pierard helping to make really “something” of the shift to the major for the second Menuet. The Gigue was more angular and serious, using a drone in places to both “ground” the music and delineate the intensities with great characterisation, especially over the last few bars before the final ascent flung the music out into the cosmos with a defiant gesture.

After the grittiness of the Second Suite the Third came as a kind of bucolic relief, the drone-notes this time creating an earthy, pesante effect during the Prelude, while the figurations were made by Pierard into something organic and even theatrical at the end, involving elongated cadences and lots of trills! – in other words, quite an adventure. The Allemande here sounded almost like a rock-climbing exercise, delighting in scaling heights and plumbing the depths, Pierard conveying both the music’s vertiginous whimsy and its exhilaration. The Courante, too, was energetic and playful, the music featuring lots of antiphonal jumping about and “call and response”, with the second part even wilder and more varied in dynamics. This time the Sarabande was declamatory and theatrical, its repeat bringing more thoughtfulness and a touch more ambience, the lines drawn throughout with the utmost nobility.

A Bouree made a nice change from a Menuet, the trajectory a bit freer and more spontaneous, less prone to seriousness. The contrasting minor-key section had a kind of absent-minded melancholy, wistful and attractive. The Gigue had one of my favourite “moments” in all of these works, an almost grinding drone voice creating a tense moment before the music nonchalantly skipped away and upwards, illustrating the composer’s sharp sense of humour and mastery of mood, the sequence here strongly played and wryly characterised.

Raeul Pierard compared the Fourth of these Suites to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” – something embodying both comedy and seriousness, light and darkness. To begin with we heard the Prelude’s gorgeously leonine tones, the music curiously “mirroring” the First Suite’s Prelude by a series of descending gestures anchored by the final note of each of the phrases. Breaking up the pattern were “flurries” of impulses at the music’s halfway point and again at the end. The Allemande brought playing that brought out the music’s inclination to swing and soar, in contrast to the somewhat volatile Courante, with its “scampering” figure that launched each phrase. But it was the Sarabande which, if anything, brought the “What You Will” feeling to mind – beginning with a long-breathed three-note harmonised declamation that dominated the first part, the movement’s second half then further darkened and intensified the discourse with increased “weight” from the harmonisations, relieved only by a wistful ascent right at the end. Quixotically, the Bouree played with our sensibilities with a four-note flourish instigating each of the dance’s phrases, both ascending and descending, then switching to a portentous, tongue-in-cheek Trio section. In the Gigue we got an almost outlandish “rolling-ball” juggernaut from out of whose path our sensibilities nimbly leapt as we listened, Pierard adroitly bringing out both the claustrophobic and exhilarating alternate characters of the music!

For the Fifth Suite (in the key of C Minor), the ‘cellist needed to retune his instrument, not because of intonation problems, but because Bach used a different kind of tuning for this work, the A string lowered to the note G (a practice termed scordatura). This was to enable certain chords to be played which, on a normally-tuned instrument, would be too awkward to manage. Straightaway this deepened the work’s general sonority, then further so by the composer’s use of harmonies weighted with lower notes – very impressive and imposing-sounding! In this case the Prelude was followed by a fugue, played here with amazing steadiness, implaccable in aspect, but with a lot of variation in dynamics and tone, Pierard’s bowing having a flexibility and variety that brought to my mind qualities associated with the voice of a great singer or actor.

The Allemande was also declamatory in style, but considerably more expansive in manner, after the Prelude, almost like an “inward” version of the music’s outer journey thus far. And the Courante seemed far more severe of mien than those we’d heard already this evening, with lots of dark-browed mutterings, closely-harmonised phrasings darkening the textures. The Sarabande had a different kind of austerity, the music single-voiced and alone in the wilderness, Pierard seeming very much at one with its dark, plaintive quality. After this almost confessional outpouring the Gavotte seemed almost reluctant to dance, the measures awkward and hesitant, with the accompanying Trio almost reptilian-sounding in its slithery, ground-grabbing aspect – one almost breathed a sigh of relief at the dance’s return! Even the concluding Gigue’s exuberance was muted, a kind of expiation of energy rather than a joyous outpouring, with almost uncomfortably intense moments – terrific playing from the ‘cellist here, alive to all of these possibilities!

Of course, what was retuned had to be “detuned” (untuned?), which the ‘cellist then did before tackling the final Suite of the six, in D Major. As might have been expected, the music’s mood was markedly different, with horn fanfares beginning the Prelude in a festive, out-of-doors fashion, and the SOUND of the music brighter and more open, with the player’s hands working higher up on the fretboard than in the other works – properly exhilarating, high-wire stuff! Bach wrote this work for a five-stringed cello, with an E string tuned a fifth above the A string – no wonder the music sounded brighter and more open! As well Bach provided the player with ample opportunity for display over the Prelude’s concluding measures, with sixteenth-notes flying everywhere! The Allemande was declamatory and long-breathed, Pierard making the sounds a pleasure to experience with his command of legato, everything very “viola-sounding” with its higher tessitura. After this the Courante sounded almost “normal”, with its high-energy racing moments, contrasting markedly once again with its companion, a Sarabande, whose opening section gave the ‘cellist a brief moment of uncharacteristically strained intonation, one which Pierard was “waiting for” the second, sweeter-toned time round! The higher-pitched lines gave the music a different kind of intensity which here seemed somewhat removed from the world of the first three Suites. The familiar Gavotte was played with the “scooped” chordings that imparted a colourful, almost “orchestral” character to the music, splendidly setting off the “fairground hurdy-gurdy”quality of the Trio, Pierard subtly softening the phrasing of the dance when the Gavotte proper returned. Finally, the Gigue seemed to return us to the fairground, with earthy energies abounding in the cellist’s ”caution-thrown-to-the-winds” manner, the music’s characterful rhythmic trajectories given their head in a performance that brought out the writing’s buoyancy and daring, leaving us properly exhilarated at the end – bravo!

We thought it was the end, but Raeul Pierard wanted to play us something completely different to us as a kind of “encore”, a piece composed by an ex-pupil of his who was at the concert, one Elise Brinkeman, who had written a piece called “Sad Song”. This was a long-breathed, resonating piece made up of chords of different colours and intensities, sounds which initially reminded me of great tolling bells via a long-limbed swaying rhythm that briefly allowed a melodic line to make an appearance before being overwhelmed by the return of the resonating chords. The figurations intensified, creating an anguished climax-point wholly saturated by the bell-sounds, before dying away and ceasing, more abruptly than I for one was expecting – perhaps part of the piece’s considerable impact was, however subconsciously, reinforced by this relatively rapid plunge into a silence. Though having little ostensibly in common with Bach’s work, the piece certainly had an epic quality which perhaps suited the reflectiveness inevitably generated by the former, and equated with a certain timelessness often attributed to the older composer. It made for an unexpected but powerful postscript, having a “quality” of its own,  and was thus an inspired choice with which to end a remarkable concert.