Author: Peter Mechen

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.

“Puss in Boots” Pantomime gives delight for young and old alike at Circa Theatre

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
Puss in Boots – the Pantomime, by Paul Jenden

Directed by Susan Wilson
Musical Director / Arranger – Michael Nicholas Williams
Set and AV design – Lisa Maule
Lighting – Marcus McShane
Costumes – Sheila Horton
Choreography – Leigh Evans

Cast: Gavin Rutherford (Camilla Miller)
Simon Leary (King Justin/Citizen)
Natasha McAllister (Martha/Citizen)
Jeff Kingsford-Brown (Mr.Brown/Troll/Citizen)
Jonathan Morgan (Puss-in-Boots/Citizen)
Carrie Green (Ms Green /Troll/Citizen)
Ben Emerson (Arthur Miller/Citizen)

Circa Theatre
Taranaki St., Wellington

Sunday 18th November, 2018

A director’s note in the programme from Susan Wilson paid tribute to the late Paul Jenden 1955-2013), actor, dancer, director and author of this and several other pantomines performed by Circa over the years, describing his presence as “sadly missed”. One of his most successful pantomime adaptations was of the well-known story of “Puss-in-Boots”, based on the European fairy-tale known in Italy as Il gatto con gli stivali, and in France as Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté (“The Master Cat” or “The Cat with the Boots”). The story tells how a cat uses his wits to gain power and riches for his poor, lowly-born master. Jenden’s pantomime, first performed by Circa in 2012, was here revamped and updated to catch the current drift of events and personalities that make Wellington the ideal on-going setting for such fairy-tale goings-on!

With recent Circa pantomimes “Peter Pan” (2017) and “Jack in the Beanstalk” (2016) having set positively vertiginous levels of expectation, I was thrilled to here find myself just as freshly “caught up” in the time-honoured fairy-tale theatricality of larger-than-life characters palpably becoming flesh-and-blood for a few precious hours of make-believe. I did struggle a bit at the very outset, finding it difficult to take in all the words of the very first musical number, despite the best efforts of the otherwise superbly characterised trolls of Jeff Kingsford-Brown and Carrie Green, my ears obviously adjusting to the acoustic – what English comedian Michael Flanders once called “getting the pitch of the hall”. Still, the gist of the characters’ intent (evil and mayhem! – naturally enough!), came across strongly in the dance movement, depicting the pair bent on taking the “Well” out of Wellington by being the spanner in the works of all recent disruptions such as the chaos caused by changed buses, bus routes and timetables. The Wellington settings and references continued throughout the show, giving it all a truly home-grown flavour and striking regular chords of approval with the audience.

The appearance of the remarkable Gavin Rutherford as the show’s “Dame”, in this case Mother Camilla Miller, established an immediate rapport with a sympathetic audience, Camilla losing no time in articulating to us her plight as a poor, lonely widow woman in the Aro Valley, “ruined” by the activities of her late husband, whose feckless behaviour had squandered the family fortunes. She then introduced her son, Arthur Miller (played by Ben Emerson with plenty of boy-next-door goofy appeal), the name  immediately occasioning the remark by Camilla “Google it, kids!”, first of a goodly number of wry references, including the priceless remark “Can you see Arthur Miller getting married to a rich and glamorous woman?” Social positioning in a “desirable” suburb – “Hataitai? – or Naenae? – or even Karori?” gives the song “Movin’ on up” its chance, as  we catch a glimpse of the eponymous cat for the first time – though Jonathan Morgan’s character lacked an ounce or two of voice-projection when singing he made up for it in sheer puss-onality, his dance leading to the entrance of a bevy of cats for a number inspiring a near show-stopping fusillade of cat-calls!

Adroitly evading both Mother Miller’s Trade Me “Talking Cat” schemes and the “Gareth Morgan” bogeyman threats, the Puss inherited the late Mr.Miller’s boots (along with his “hippie gear”), and lo! – we were suddenly in business! The cat was magically empowered and empowering, galvanising Arthur’s sensibilities with the suggestion that he could, with the Puss’s help, become “The Marquis of Makara” and then cementing their partnership with a song “Stick with me kid”, one whose positive vibrations countered the reappearance of the Trolls and their avowed goal of the city’s ruination, little by little, troll by troll!

Where would a modern scenario of Wellington be without a leader? – enter King Justin (Simon Leary a wonderfully “fairy-story-obsessed” monarch), here heralded at first by his feisty, kick-boxing daughter, Marilyn/Moana/Martha, whom he wished “was more like the princess you are!” while easing the patience of “a poor, lonely widower man”, taking time out from his troublesome affairs of family and state with a lavish picnic.  Marilyn (played beautifully by Natasha McAllister as a tomboy with simple-life, anti-princess yearnings) encounters Arthur, who, of course, falls in love with her – but she will have none of the “wooing of a princess” rigmarole, introducing herself to him as “Moana”. All of this was to the chagrin of Puss, who tells Arthur in no uncertain terms that he “deserves a princess” and to that end has been setting up the well-known “duckpond” scene for his master to make the happy transition from commoner to aristocrat, courtesy of King Justin and his daughter.

The fast and furious action involving all of the characters heading for the duckpond, with the Trolls, Mr Green and Mr.Brown (Carrie Green and Jeff Kingsford-Brown in scintillating and energetic song-and-dance form), embodying delight in mischief and malice, Marilyn/Moana/Martha rejecting the hapless would-be Marquis, Camilla Miller and King Justin disconcerted by each other’s presence, and the Cat pronouncing the ensuing mayhem a “cat-astrophe”, closes the first Act with the kind of gusto that leaves a quivering mass of unresolved tensions awaiting the best possible outcomes, which of course are realised in suitably quirky and post-happily-ever-after ways by the time the Second Act runs its breathless course.

Buoyed along by the music, a mixture of old and new (one particularly heart-warming number I’d forgotten that I knew!), contemporary and generational, with absolutely delightful word-adaptations in places, the show is a tribute in itself to the skills of musical director Michael Nicholas Williams, who accompanied most of the songs and joined in the vocalisations on occasions. Cheek-by-jowl with these energies was the engaging choreography of Leigh Evans, brilliantly tailored to fit both songs and situations, and performed with real panache by the cast members.

Pantos need “add-water” audiences to work, and this one was no exception – I found it at least as entertaining and involving from my “relatively sedentary” point of view as the other Circa productions along the same lines I’ve seen, with Gavin Rutherford’s command of blandishment and persuasiveness as potent with grown-ups as it is charming with children – the “bringing-onto” the stage of younger audience members is always a highlight of the proceedings, particularly the ensuing “out of the eyes of babes” expressions on some of the faces, immersed as they are in such a wondrous and magical land of flesh-and-blood make-believe! The range of jokes and gags covered all ages and sensibilities, with nothing too obviously risqué though still sufficiently “naughty” for the outrage to be funny. I thought the costumes and set designs and props deliciously colourful and beautifully lit (two highlights being the “cups” sequence performed by the King and Martha/Moana/Marilyn as they sang “When I’m Gone”, and the entrance of the royal carriage, with wondrously inventive horses providing a visual feast of spectacle and movement.)

In short, I would lose no time finding a jolly soul-mate (ideally along with one child at the very least!) with whom to go to this presentation. Susan Wilson’s direction and collaboration with her “creative team” has produced both a winner and a worthy memorial to the talents of the show’s original creator, Paul Jenden.

At Circa Theatre to the 23rd December 2018, and then from the 2nd to the 12th of January 2019.

 

Eternity Opera sings triumphantly once again at Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse – Puccini’s Madam Butterfly

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eternity Opera presents:
PUCCINI – Madam Butterfly (Opera in Three Acts)
(libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa – sung in English)

Cast:  Butterfly (Cio-Cio-San) – Hannah Catrin Jones
Pinkerton – Boyd Owen
Sharpless – Kieran Rayner
Suzuki – Laura Loach
Goro – Declan Cudd
The Bonze – Roger Wilson
Kate Pinkerton – Jess Segal
Mother – Ruth Armishaw
Cousin – Tania Dreaver
Aunt – Sally Haywood
Imperial Commissioner – Minto Fung
The Registrar – Chris Berentson
Yakuside – Garth Norman
Bridesmaids – Milla Dickens / Beatrix Poblacion Cariño
Butterfly’s son – Leo McKenzie

Orchestra:  Claudia Tarrant-Matthews (leader), Vivian Stephens, Emma Colligan, Sofia Tarrant-Matthews (violins),  David Pucher (viola), Brenton Veitch (‘cello), Jessica Reese (double-bass),  Tjaša Dykes (flute/piccolo), Merran Cooke (oboe/cor anglais), Mark Cookson (clarinet), Leni Hoischen (bassoon), Shadley van Wyk (horn), Bruce Roberts (trumpet), Madeleine Crump (harp), Natoko Segawa (timpani/percussion)

Conductor: Matthew Ross
Director: Alex Galvin
Producers: Emma Beale and Minto Fung
Designer: Jennifer Eccles
Costumes: Sally Gray
Lighting: Haami Hawkins
Repetiteur: Bruce Greenfield

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Friday 16th November 2018

Eternity Opera’s presentation at Wellington‘s Hannah Playhouse of one of the most famous of all grand operas, Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, used a reduced orchestral accompaniment, a “rhyming” English translation of the Italian, and cut one of the more colourful episodes in the work’s Second Act, albeit involving the brief appearance of a “lesser”character. And yet, despite these diminutions of the original, the piece worked its usual theatrical and musical magic, thanks to a production which incorporated the visceral energies and sharply-etched focus of the orchestral playing under conductor Matthew Ross’s clear-headed direction, and the direct, openhearted involvement of all the singers, principals and chorus. Director Alex Galvin’s clear and unobtrusive shaping of both detail and completed picture ensured that the singers gave us the essentials of the piece and consistently and powerfully brought their characters to life, musically and theatrically.

From the outset we got incisive, involving playing from the musicians, conveying these essences as much through sheer will and imaginative purpose in the absence of the usual “weight of numbers” which give the piece such power at the climaxes. In fact I can’t recall a moment during the performance when I found myself longing for the thrill of a full Puccini orchestra doing its “thing”, so involving was the presentation of the fabric of sounds in its more intimate context here.

When it came to the arrival of the characters on stage I was struck by the vivid quality of each of the voices, the opening exchanges between Goro, the Marriage-broker, and Pinkerton, the U.S.naval officer putting across their phrases easily and distinctly. Boyd Owen’s Pinkerton had instant surface-engaging “well-met, fellow” quality of utterance, while Declan Cudd’s Goro was as much “real-estate agent” in his characterisation as anything else (reflecting the production’s 1950s setting), his tones having the suavity one associates with that profession, but less of the spiky, Goro-like busy-bodyness we usually enjoy from the character. Laura Loach as Suzuki, Butterfly’s handmaid, vocalised beautifully at the outset, nicely mingling the character’s awkwardness and deference with a singer’s clarity and warmly-expressed tones.

It took me a while to register that the English translation was a ”rhyming”one, so readily did the words seem to flow without any overtly self-concious “striving for effect” that renderings in English of opera libretti often have – the discourse between Pinkerton and his friend Sharpless, the American Consul (played and sung sensitively and sonorously by Kieran Rayner), flowed easily and naturally throughout, and led up to Pinkerton’s jingoistic “America forever” declaration with irresistible exuberance. Both Owen and Rayner differentiated their characterisations with many a telling remark, response and gesture, even if the “full-on” aspects of their singing tended to emphasise at cardinal points the somewhat “cheek-by-jowl” nature of our listening-space!

This lack of spaciousness in the acoustic made for a slighty different problem in regard to off-stage voices“, notably the entry of Butterfly’s retinue (“heard from the path outside”, says the direction in my libretto) which to me sounded much too close at their first entry, reflecting the lack of backstage space – though I thought using the stairs leading up from the lower level in the foyer might have done the trick, instead….we lost that initial sense of fragility in Butterfly’s character, having her voice so immediate from the beginning. However, despite such strictures, the scene then unfolded beautifully and touchingly, with the “ordinariness” of Butterfly and her cohorts underlined by the modest 1950s  garb worn by the various relatives, all at that point in history, presumably, trying to be “Western”.

As Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly), Hannah Catrin Jones looked and sounded the part, the fragility of the instrumental accompaniment serving to underline her self-effacing quality, though her vocal personality was extremely well-focused throughout. Only when the voice was put under any kind of pressure did I register a vibrato which she soon managed to incorporate for me into her “sound”. I thought her portrayal believable and sympathetic, her rapport with whomever she was on stage warm and wholehearted, and her solo scenes stamped with a touching amalgam of vulnerability and strength that enabled the listener to take on a sense of her life-blood coursing the whole time through her being.

The Bonze’s startling entry (Roger Wilson wondrously menacing of voice and manner, almost Commendatore-like, in fact, as Butterfly’s uncle), come to condemn her for renouncing her “true religion”, effectively tore Cio-Cio-San’s world apart, alienating her from her family and placing her almost completely in the hands of Pinkerton, who, despite the intensity of feeling generated between him and Butterfly during the ensuing “love-scene”, subsequently abandons her. Cio-Cio-San’s isolation was here underscored in a different way, of course, by the excision of that aforementioned Second-Act scene in which she is wooed by Yamadori, a rich Japanese Prince, eager to add her to his coterie of wives, and which offer she rejects, remaining faithful to Pinkerton, despite his callous behaviour.

In a similar fashion to that in Verdi’s “La Traviata”, the opera’s core is found in the exchange between the heroine and a friend or associate of her lover, in this case, Sharpless, the American Consul (Kieran Rayner), who’s sceptical of Pinkerton’s intentions towards Cio-Cio-San from the beginning. The scene of his interaction with Butterfly came almost in the wake of the latter’s magnificently-realised “Un bel di” (sorry, I mean, “One fine day”!), Catrin Jones giving her all in thrilling fashion, with again, the relatively lightweight orchestral support delivering oceans of intensity in support of the singer. One would think that whatever followed would be something of an anti-climax, but Catrin Jones and Rayner exhibited such warmth and flow of feeling towards one another’s characters, that we were soon caught up in the interchanges and “moved on”, more than ready for the next stage of the drama.

This came, of course, with Butterfly’s fear and anxiety at the thought of being abandoned, mingled with the hope that hers and Pinkerton’s child (born and raised in secret) would bring them together again. The sudden arrival of an American warship, denoted by a cannon-shot, sent everything into a state of frenzied suspension, Butterfly commanding Suzuki to strew every flower about the house “as close as stars about the heavens”, and bringing the child to wait with her for Pinkerton’s arrival. I thought Catrin Jones’ interaction with the young Leo McKenzie as Butterfly’s little son simply charming and warmly whole-hearted on both sides, the heroine in the process excitedly and determinedly setting up her “welcome” to her long-absent husband, and preparing to wait for “as long as it takes”.

My one disappointment of the evening was the staging of the beautiful “Humming Chorus” which followed – I thought its enchanting, if bitter-sweet effect underdone by uncharacteristically fulsome stage-lighting. It seemed to me the waiting figures were “transfixed” in a strained and uncomfortable state of rigidity at odds with the music’s organic presentation of  an overnight vigil spent amid a mass of conflicting impulses shaped in the direction of somebody’s long-awaited arrival. In the context of the production’s whole, the sequence was something that for me didn’t knit music and stage together with the same sure-footed focus as the rest did.

Still, the final act was, in a word, terrific! – though at times for us in the audience almost claustrophobically so in that small space! Pinkerton’s arrival, with Sharpless, and with Suzuki as Butterfly’s would-be “protector” created enormous tensions and outpourings of emotion, Boyd Owen’s remorse as Pinkerton pushing against the threshold of pain, albeit expressing HIS anguish rather than any real concern for the hapless Butterfly, leaving Sharpless and Suzuki to do what they could for Butterfly instead – the somewhat thankless part of Pinkerton’s American wife, Kate, who accompanied him to the house, was expressed in dignified and graceful fashion by Jess Segal, her presence adding to the almost palpable psychological torture inflicted on Butterfly as she realised, upon entering the room and encountering her visitor, the truth of her situation.

Again, though wanting in sheer tonal heft, the playing of the orchestra in support of Butterfly’s final scene was properly overwhelming in its capacity for generating tension, helped immeasurably by the singer’s fearlessness in addressing the writing’s full-throated outpourings of unmitigated despair. These were the moments where nothing needed to be held back, and Catrin Jones certainly carried our sensibilities along with her towards the inevitability of that moment when she plunged her character’s life into existence’s oblivion.

Altogether, I thought the production a remarkable demonstration of the power of heartfelt and concentrated focus from limited resources to conjure up whole worlds of feeling and imagination. Very great credit to Eternity Opera and all associated with the production, for making opera’s star shine so very brightly once more at Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse.

(Until 24th November)

 

 

World Premiere in Palmerston North of 216 year-old work by English composer Samuel Arnold

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Renaissance Singers of Palmerston North presents:

A NEW CREATION – Music by Josef Haydn (1732-1809) and Samuel Arnold (1740-1802)

HAYDN:  Oratorio “The Creation” (1798) – Part Three
ARNOLD:  Oratorio “The Hymn of Adam and Eve” (1802) – World premiere performance
(edited and realised by Robert Hoskins and David Vine)

Pasquale Orchard (soprano) , Shayna Tweed (soprano), Jennifer Little (soprano),
Nigel Tongs (tenor), Lindsay Yeo (bass-baritone)

Renaissance Singers (Music Director – Guy Donaldson)
Schola Sacra Choir, Whanganui (Music Director – Roy Tankersley)
Manawatu Sinfonia (Leader – Gillian Gibb)
Conductor: Guy Donaldson

Regent on Broadway, Palmerston North

Saturday 10th November, 2018

Musical history was made on Saturday evening at Palmerston North’s Regent on Broadway, when local forces (the city’s Renaissance Singers and the Manawatu Sinfonia, plus a clutch of home-grown/nurtured vocal soloists) combined forces with Wellington soprano Pasquale Orchard and neighbouring Whanganui’s Schola Sacra Choir, under the inspired direction of conductor Guy Donaldson, to bring into being a world premiere with a difference.

New Zealand being geographically as far away as one can get from Europe, and the UK in particular, it’s surely something of a red-letter occasion when a significant musical work written by an English composer is given its first-ever performance in this country. Last year, an original manuscript, long thought lost, of an orchestral work by Gustav Holst was discovered in a music Library in Tauranga, and given its first performance anywhere for 111 years (since the 1906 premiere), by local musicians to considerable amazement and acclaim – but this present work, “The Hymn of Adam and Eve”, composed by the little-known Samuel Arnold in 1802(!) trumped even that circumstance, having never previously been performed.

There’s more than a whiff of romance and intrigue surrounding Arnold’s birth and heritage, certain sources suggesting he may have been the illegitimate son of one Thomas Arnold, a commoner, and Princess Amelia, daughter of George II and Queen Caroline, a princess who remained unmarried, and was known for her independent spirit. Arnold was educated at the Chapel Royal, making rapid progress in his music studies, and soon earning his living writing both instrumental and vocal works for performance at various London “Gardens”, including operas and oratorios for Covent Garden and other theatres. He eventually became organist and composer to the Chapel Royal, and afterwards organist to Westminster Abbey, as well as becoming the conductor (so early in the history of that profession!) of the Academy of Ancient Music.

Along with all of this Arnold found the time to compose for cathedral service, producing a four-volumed adjunct to William Boyce’s 1790 Cathedral Music, and to undertake the first collected edition of the works of Handel, of which he completed forty volumes, a copy of which Beethoven received during the last weeks of his life, reputedly declaring that “Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived”. Judged by modern standards Arnold’s scholarship was wanting in places (the edition comprises only three-quarters of Handel’s output), but was for its time a notable and ground-breaking enterprise.

While searching for further pieces of information regarding Samuel Arnold to counter my lamentably skimpy knowledge of him I came across a couple of references to his activities as a musician which I thought significant, the first being the touching occasion in 1773 when Oxford University requested a performance of Arnold’s oratorio The Prodigal Son to mark the appointment of a new Chancellor for the institution, in return for which favour the composer was offered an honorary degree. Arnold at first declined, wanting to “entitle himself to it” by the usual academic course, to which end he submitted an exercise for examination – but his score was returned unopened by the music professor, assuring Arnold that it was “quite unnecessary to scrutinize an exercise by the author of The Prodigal Son.”

The other reference I thought telling in that it probably shaped whole generations of opinion concerning Arnold’s music was the entry on the composer in the 1900 edition of Grove’s “A Dictionary of Music and Musicians”, written by Edward Francis Rimbault, to the effect that “Dr. Arnold wrote with great facility and correctness, but the demand upon his powers was too varied and too incessant to allow of his attaining great excellence in any department of his art”. One recalls a similar “put-down” kind of treatment meted out half-a-century later to the music of Rachmaninov by the same publication, words that ring hollow in the light of THAT composer’s subsequent status and popularity.

Dr. Robert Hoskins, former Associate Professor of Music at Massey University and the New Zealand School of Music, “rediscovered” Samuel Arnold’s final and unperformed work “The Hymn of Adam and Eve” while researching the life and work of the composer in the early 1980s. Hoskins’ subsequent judgement of Arnold’s complete oeuvre takes issue with the aforementioned comment in Grove’s Dictionary regarding the composer’s lack of “excellence in any part of his art”, and attests to the best of his music attaining “a certain individuality” resulting in “attractive and dramatically vivid music”. Hoskins also makes mention of the documented popularity of Arnold’s works, which rivalled and perhaps even surpassed that of any of his English contemporaries throughout the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

Arnold composed much of his music in an environment that was very much under the combined spell of two creative “giants” – Handel, whose oratorios had won the hearts of the English public fifty years previously, and, more recently, Haydn, whose “Salomon” or “London” Symphonies had, along with the composer’s own visits to London, stimulated enormous interest in the (by then) venerable composer and his music. Arnold had become steeped in the music of both men – and at the time he was writing “The Hymn of Adam and Eve” he conducted performances in London of  both Handel’s “Messiah” and Haydn’s “The Creation”. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Arnold’s work comes across in places as a kind of “amalgam” of the two, almost as if he was unconsciously paying homage to each of them.

It was entirely fitting, therefore, that we heard as a kind of prelude to Arnold’s work the third and final part of Haydn’s “The Creation”, the two works sharing a similar theme courtesy of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” – in Haydn’s case, the poetry translated and adapted by Baron Gottfried Van Swieten (who had also provided Haydn with his libretto for “The Seasons”), but here, translated back into English! Conductor Guy Donaldson however began the concert most appropriately with the final Chorus from Part Two, “Achieved is the Glorious Work”, giving the evening’s music-making a most auspicious and stirring beginning, the choral strands strong and firm in their fugal exchanges, the instrumental support full and energetic, with plenty of “schwung” in the rhythms, the whole capped off by wonderful timpani flourishes!

The Part three opening-proper was exquisitely-realised, the flute-playing limpid and “dewy”, and the horns “touching-in” the first rays of sunlight with real poetic feeling. Tenor Nigel Tongs kept a true line for “In rosy mantle”, his tone a tad wheezy in places, but steadily maintaining the musical shape of every phrase, giving his instrumental support plenty of beautiful “echo-material” to relish. Soprano Pasquale Orchard as Eve floated her first ascending phrase beautifully at “By thee with bliss, o bounteous Lord”, her Adam, baritone Lindsay Yeo counterweighting her line strongly and securely, and the oboe completing the “early-morning” scenario with a properly sylvan accompaniment– and how beautifully the chorus “stole” in with almost subterraneous murmurings, almost like the awakening of an “earth-noise”, underpinned in places by the timpani.

It took a little time for the orchestra to “bring together” the catchiness of the rhythmic gait leading up to the baritone’s “Of stars the brightest”, which the singer “opened up” securely – the chorus’s energy at “proclaim throughout vastness” seemed to galvanise the players somewhat, and the soprano’ s “And thou, the solace of the night” was more sturdily supported. Chirpily alert winds decorated the baritone’s next entry, and both soprano and chorus contributed to the infectious excitement and growing energy, finely controlled and gloriously released by conductor Donaldson, as all living creatures were enjoined by the singers to “praise the Lord” throughout crescendo after crescendo.

The singers’ rapport was evident in their exchanges throughout the recitative and duet that followed, both pointing their words and “relating” their trajectories and impulses to achieve a sense of true dialogue. The tenor returned, Nigel Tongs again reliably focused of line and elegant of phrase in his admonition to the couple to be content with what they have, before giving way to the splendour of the concerted forces’ concluding hymn of praise to the Almighty. The choir did itself and its conductor proud in its focusing and dovetailing of the fugal lines with the orchestral punctuations, the brass, winds and timpani suitably splendid of utterance, backed by the strings’ energy and colour – everybody at the piece’s conclusion giving their all, most satisfyingly.

After an intermission came the “real business” of the evening, the “public birth” of Samuel Arnold’s similarly-themed work for soloists, choir and orchestra, the “Hymn of Adam and Eve”, whose emergence from obscurity into the limelight had been lovingly enabled by Robert Hoskins as a result of his researchings. The performance was to also mark the retirement from the music directorship of the Renaissance Singers of conductor Guy Donaldson, after thirty years’ service in the role – so, altogether, the occasion promised a uniquely distinctive combination of a beginning and an ending, with each circumstance adding extra gravitas to the other.

Samuel Arnold fully intended his work to be performed shortly after its completion in January of 1802 – in fact he had planned the work for the Lenten concerts at the Haymarket Theatre Royal that year. His principal soloists were hand-picked for their roles by the composer – the soprano was to be German-born Gertrude Elizabeth Mara, one whose voice had been described as “remarkable for its extent and beauty”, as well as “its agility and flexibility” – it was for her particular abilities that Arnold had written the fiendishly difficult vocal bravura parts we were to hear in tonight’s performance. The baritone was the well-known singer Thomas Welsh, renowned for his voice’s  richness of tone. All was set to begin rehearsals, when the composer was stricken with ill health and was forced to cancel the proceedings.

Arnold died that same year in October, his oratorio unperformed and neglected, and eventually forgotten – fortunately the manuscript was given to the Royal College of Music in London, there to be rediscovered and reconstituted for the present performance, a premiere delayed for 216 years!

Arnold had set the “Morning Hymn” from Book 5 of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, a passage describing the sequel to a dream of temptation experienced by Eve, and to Adam’s reassurance that she can overcome any such thoughts in her waking life. After an orchestral introduction, the soprano’s (Eve) is the opening voice, praising God and enjoining all creation to do the same – As Part One proceeds the pair join with the Seraphs to address the heavenly entities, beginning with the angels, the “Sons of Light” and including Venus, the brightest star. Adam then attends to the sun, and Eve the moon and the planets, each urging these entities to acknowledge their Creator. In the Second Part, the singers (predominantly the soprano) then turn their attentions to the earth and its attendant elements and various forms of life, concluding with a salutation from Adam to the “universal Lord” and a plea that whatever evil is concealed will be dispersed “as now light dispels the dark”.

I thought, in general terms, the performance was terrific, and largely because of the musicians’ willingness to make the commitment required to address the challenges of some of the writing. In particular, the soprano part (written for the illustrious Mara) was of an order of difficulty that almost beggared belief, and which was tackled by Pasquale Orchard with near-tigerish intensity in places – the only possible response that could have made it really “work”. There was no holding back – we all felt “engaged” by her utter vocal fearlessness, even in the one or two places where the outcomes seemed angular, almost awkward in effect. It all seemed to go with the territory, the visceral stimulus veritably coursing this listener’s blood through the veins at what seemed at times like breakneck speed! – most exhilarating!

In parallel, I did think that Arnold’s writing seemed particularly attuned to the pieces featuring the soprano – which, of course applied to a staggering thirteen numbers out of nineteen! By my count baritone Lindsay Yeo had, in comparison, only three solo opportunities throughout, which did seem a little curmudgeonly of the composer. And, despite some challenging and skilfully-realised writing for the horn, I felt Arnold’s invention wasn’t quite on the same ecstatic level for the baritone in the aria “Sound His praise”, though Yeo did his best to make it “sing”. Better was the final “Hail, universal Lord”, the singer bringing vigour and accuracy to the opening and making a good fist of the difficult coloratura passages.

The work began with an orchestral Symphony, sturdy and Handelian, followed by an appropriately lustrous opening declamation from the soprano, “These are thy glorious works”, Orchard projecting the sound of her voice with radiant character both here, and in the aria “Speak ye, who best can tell”, accompanied by lovely work from the horns and winds, the bassoon-playing particularly eloquent in its support of the singer. The Seraphs’ Duet which followed featured mellifluous teamwork between Shayna Tweed and Jennifer Little, supported faithfully by oboe continuo, and sturdily framed by an orchestral response which worked triumphantly through one or two shaky dovetailings. The somewhat tricky triplet passages were boldly tackled by the singers, with lovely teamwork at the repetitions of “And with songs”. If a strenuous quality occasionally “grabbed” a phrase or two of the figurations, it added to the excitement and colour of the singers’ work.

The Quartet and Chorus “Ye in heaven , on earth join all ye creatures” was introduced somewhat tentatively on the strings, who then seemed to warm to the task in support of the fugal passages, the choral work enlivened by timpani and brass in the middle section, and made very dramatic and theatrical at the end with portentous pauses! A complete contrast came with the delicate play between the flutes wreathing delicacies around and about the recitative “Fairest of stars”, and the soprano making the most of her words – again, with the aria “Praise Him in thy sphere” the winds set the scene most charmingly alternating with the voice, the long-breathed phrases contrasting with the brief, shooting-star-like cadenza at the end.

Adam’s recitative “Thou sun” brought vigorous phrases from the strings and sturdy singing from Lindsay Yeo, which carried over into the subsequent aria – the singer held his line, and gave of his best with the cadenza, even if I sensed a severity about the writing that didn’t quite take flight. What a difference with the following recitative “Moon, that now meet’st the orient sun“, singer and instrumentalists working with their conductor to evoke the grandeur of the “wandering fires that move in mystic dance”, before energising the sounds in praise of the Lord and Giver of Light – the soprano casting caution to the starry firmament with her vocal pyrotechnics and the chorus dramatically plunging into the ferment of excitement, each relishing the exchanges and banishing the darkness with their energies, the singer’s coloratura gripping and breath-taking in its effect.

With Part Two, things “came down to earth”, the opening recitative almost scientifically delineating the biosphere as the starting-point, life deriving from and nourished by “air” – the aria, “Let your ceaseless change”, that followed (both sung by Orchard as Eve, who dominated the proceedings from here on) sounded to me particularly Handelian, the flowing lines steadily and purposefully flowering into realms of great beauty, wrought and relished by the singer and her conductor, with the help of some lovely liquid clarinet phrasings. Even more visceral in effect were the instrumental evocations of the following Recitative “Ye mists and exhalations”, the overtly descriptive texts finding the composer’s imaginative powers equal to the task of rendering the words’ descriptions, culminating in bursts of magnificence from brass and timpani hailing the sun and gentle pizzicato strings suggesting delicate rain.

Again, Handel’s spirit rose majestically skyward in Arnold’s “Rising or falling”, firstly with Orchard’s utterly uninhibited vocal pyrotechnics, culminating in a “knockout” of a cadenza that bordered on the outlandish – what commitment to the cause!! – and then followed by a chorus using the same text to   put across majesty and might with great relish. Arnold’s gift for word-painting came to the fore once again in “His praise, ye winds”, the strings deployed most exquisitely and ambiently, both here and in the subsequent aria, “Fountains and ye that warble”, along with some fetching wind contributions, the singer’s voice floating her line across the gentle dotted rhythms. Next, it was the choir’s turn, a confidently joyous rendition of “Join voices all ye living souls”, the wind writing decorating the voices’ counterpointed lines, the latter sometimes in strongly-shaped thirds and in places very Handelian, the former an absolute delight, and to that end, most mellifluously played.

From things airborne we were then taken to things “that in waters glide” and “that walk the earth” – here was an intensely beauteous declamation, Orchard never letting up the intensities of her expression, just momentarily pushing her tones a shade sharp, but always with a vibrancy that infused the words and notes with a quality of engagement that characterised her work throughout the whole evening – a magnificent performance. She was supported by string playing whose quiet energies brought out something of the music’s own life-force, which I felt was partly derived from the concert’s overall spirit, one which enabled something challenging but within reach, and in the process generating considerable delight and satisfaction.

The work’s final act came with “Hail, universal Lord”, Lindsay Yeo’s Adam managing to get a word or two in at last, singing his lines with vigour and making a splendid thing out of the difficult figurations. Then came a truly overwhelming “all-in” flood of energy and colour from all the musicians throughout the work’s final pages which set the spaces of the venerable Regent Theatre aglow “as now light dispels the dark”. It was all, in a word, magnificent! – and both maestro Guy Donaldson and editor-extraordinaire Robert Hoskins would have been well-pleased with the musicians’ efforts and the audience’s response – as would the shade of Samuel Arnold, after more than two hundred years, able to finally proclaim his “last compositional will and testament” as fulfilled.

Exuberance and poetry from pianist and conductor Lars Vogt with the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
LARS VOGT PLAYS MOZART

BEETHOVEN – Overture “The Creatures of Prometheus) Op.43
MOZART – Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K.467
WEBERN (orch. Gerard Schwarz) Langsamer Satz
MOZART – Symphony No. 36 in C “Linz”

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 26th October, 2018

Review for “Upbeat” RNZ Concert (with David Morriss)
Monday 29th October 2018

There’s always great interest whenever somebody decides to take on the dual role of soloist and conductor in the performance of music – we had Freddy Kempf here with the NZSO a few years ago playing the entire cycle of Beethoven Piano Concertos, for example, which, from all accounts , was a great success. And now, with even more historical precedent in the case of Mozart’s Piano Concertos, here was Lars Vogt demonstrating his skills in that respect with one of the most famous of all Mozart’s concertos, popularly known as the “Elvira Madigan” concerto, due to its use in a 1970s Swedish film of the same name. How did his playing and conducting of the concerto come across for you?

He is obviously a brilliant pianist and, on this showing, a talented and exciting conductor. In fact I found more interest in what the orchestra was doing under his direction than I did with what he was doing at the keyboard – his playing was predictably brilliant, but at times I thought the passage-work became a bit mechanical – he would ever-so-slightly race the figurations faster than I wanted them to go, giving the music in places a “machine-like” quality, I wanted him to “savour” the music more, and allow it a bit more light and shade.

Of course other people will have “heard” the music somewhat differently – simply where one is sitting in the hall makes a tremendous difference to how one “hears” the music, and the microphones placed over the top of the orchestra will pick up a different kind of “quality of sound with anything we play to that which I heard on Friday evening. I thought, for instance, that from where I was sitting the violins seemed to be dominated by, even sound underpowered next to the wind and brass instruments in tutti – but others could well feel different, depending on where they were sitting. Music, as we know, evokes very subjective responses, and it would be a very boring world if we as listeners all felt the same way about everything we heard.

The slow movement we’ve just heard part of had a silken, light-as-a-feather quality throughout, but with plenty of variety in the exchange of phrasings between piano and orchestra. The only thing was that, at this tempo it was all over so quickly! – It came across as more divertimento-like than as a serenade, beautifully done though it was.

All-in-all, do you think he was able to successfully combine the functions of both soloist and conductor in this performance? We know that Mozart did this – conduct his own concertos from the keyboard – and most successfully, by all counts. 

I find myself wondering whether these people who direct from the keyboard need to be so demonstrative in their direction of the players. I was speaking to someone from the orchestra who had played in the Freddy Kempf performances of the Beethoven concerti shortly after, and I remember this person saying that they wished Kempf had simply sat still and directed the players from the keyboard and not jumped up and down from his seat all the time. I imagine it varies from musician to musician what they feel is necessary to do to achieve control when conducting, but I still found it distracting, as I did Kempff’s movements.

I wondered whether there was an element of anxiety in Vogt’s playing, wanting to get to the next orchestral entry to bring the players in, or trying to keep an “edge” to the overall performance. The playing in the slow movement we’ve just heard was lovely – but for me, the finale was the most successful movement, because it had an overall “bubbling exuberance” spirit from everybody that was extremely well-captured, as was a slightly more wistful sequence in the music’s alternate minor-key sequence from the opening

Also in the concert there was a real rarity – an early work by Anton Webern which I’m sure most people on hearing would never associate with the actual composer! Rather like a piece of early Schoenberg, do you think?

This was Webern’s single-movement work “Langsamer Satz”, which I thought was a beautiful piece! I found myself thinking, “How could this have been written by Webern?” – because it was so romantic-sounding, which is the antithesis of what most of the music by Webern I’ve heard sounds like! I thought this piece had the makings of some kind of modern classic, like Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, or Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Of course Webern’s original, written in 1905, was for string quartet (Webern himself never heard the work, incidentally). It was the only movement he completed of a planned string quartet, and was lost for well-nigh 60 years.  After being rediscovered and played, the piece came to the attention of American conductor and composer Gerard Schwarz, who thought it would sound more effective if transcribed for string orchestra, with a bass part added. This was done and first performed in 1982.

Concluding the concert was Mozart’s “Linz Symphony  – one of a trio of Symphonies named after cities the work had a particular association with – the “Paris”, the “Linz” and the “Prague”. Mozart was supposed to have composed this work in four days – does it sound like a “rush job to you?

Not even slightly – of course Mozart was renowned for his ability to put things together inside his head before they’d even been committed to paper – and this symphony seems as though it almost “wrote itself” in that respect – he must have been truly inspired by his surroundings or put in a frame of mind that gave his imagination full reign, because the work has a wonderful “spontaneous” quality right throughout. The only detail in the playing I found difficulty in “placing” in an overall sense was the conductor’s somewhat abrupt way with the opening chords, before the music relaxed in the quieter sections which followed. I found it hard to marry the two sections together, because the music has always seemed to me to continue in the same rhythmic vein, albeit muscular and arresting at the beginning and suspenseful and charged in the subsequent passages. I thought it could have all been done in one tempo. Apart from this, I thought the overall conception of the movement beautifully brought out the music’s different characters in a flowing and unified way.

The name “Linz” (after the city of Linz) suggests something with a certain “public ” character, as if drawing attention to the characteristics of a city as a whole, something, of course representative of a great number of people, something easily identifiable with a place’s particular set of characteristics.

Yes, you’re right – it seems to be a very “public” statement, doesn’t it, especially compared with other symphonic works like the two G Minor symphonies. The very opening is a “call to attention”, with a kind of rumbustiousness that follows, driving the music forward, the second movement is dance-like rather than ruminative and deep, and the third movement – well, the third movement is an out-and-out invitation for people to kick off their shoes and join in the Minuet. It was so infectiously played, here, that in the trio section, one could almost imagine the dancers’ impatience to get back to the dance when the Minuet finally returned!

There used to be a famous rehearsal recording of this symphony available, one conducted by the great Bruno Walter in the 1950s – 1955 I think….. It illustrates how much Mozart interpretation has changed over the years, as you can hear if you own Walter, Klemperer or Karl Bohm recordings of these works – and yet Mozart remains the same spirit in the hands of each conductor.

I was sitting close to John Button, the DomPost critic, and asked him at halftime whether he remembered the Walter rehearsal recording – he immediately said, “Yes, especially Mr Bloom, the oboe player!” Walter talks a lot with “Mr Bloom”, the oboist in the orchestra, whose name was hereby captured for all time on these records! I believe this recording was from 1955, which is pretty old, now – and yet the chance to hear a famous conductor painstakingly rehearse a work that he knows and loves is one I wouldn’t think anybody interested in music and music interpretation would want to miss.

What would you say unites those different styles of playing so that you could say – yes, it still sounds like Mozart? What did you hear on Friday evening that bore a relationship to those older performances we know?

Well, after the somewhat abrupt start, with those assertive, swiftly-played chords I’ve already mentioned, I thought the playing and conducting brought out a sense of “line” that I hear on those older recordings – and that was what I think gave Lars Vogt’s conducting of the symphony such overall strength. It was a consistency – a kind of “connective tissue” – which I felt was made up of things such as the feeling of the players being encouraged to “own” their musical phrases, so that this sense of “caring” about the music was constantly being presented to us  – that’s what I mean by “line” not everything played legato, or anything like that, but, as I’ve said, a consistency.

The other prevailing sense for me was Vogt’s bringing out the music’s character – and I felt this was better, more strongly achieved in the symphony than in the concerto because the conductor was free to conduct and “focus” the music’s on-going consistencies, generating a truly infectious exuberance and not just note-spinning, which I thought parts of the concerto weren’t entirely free from. Again, there are parallels with an older style of music-making, the best of the modern performances just as concerned with the music’s overall feeling as with some kind of so-called “authentic” way of playing it. This came to full fruition, I think, in the symphony’s finale, which seemed to engage every player and bring out the music’s essential joyfulness.

 

“Hammers and Horsehair” (joined with birdsong) enchant an Aro St audience in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HAMMERS AND HORSEHAIR –

Romantic Music from Bohemia, Austria and Germany

JAN KALIVODA – Three Songs for voice, ‘cello and piano
Der Schöne Stern (The Beautiful Star)
Die Abendglocken (The Evening Bells)
Der Wanderer (The Wanderer)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Sonata in A Major for ‘Cello and Piano Op.69

ROBERT SCHUMANN – Kinderscenen (Scenes from Childhood) for solo piano Op.15

FRANZ SCHUBERT – Two Songs for voice and piano
Suleika 1
Im Haine (In the Wood)

Song for voice, ‘cello and piano (originally for voice, clarinet and piano)
Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (The Shepherd on the Rock)

Rowena Simpson (soprano)
Robert Ibell (‘cello)
Douglas Mews (square piano)

Aro Valley Community Centre Hall,
Aro St., Wellington

Thursday, 25th October 2018

We sat amid soft lighting on comfortable, homely furniture, talking softly with our fellow audience-members while listening to pianist Douglas Mews “tuning up” his square piano and then “playing us in” with music that I for one didn’t know – it actually sounded, appropriately enough, like a kind of improvisation, perfect for warming up player, instrument and our increasingly attentive ears, until all was ready. ‘Cellist Robert Ibell having by then “tuned up” his own instrument, it was time for soprano Rowena Simpson to welcome us to the concert on behalf of all three musicians.

I had previously heard singer and pianist performing together (also in the Aro Valley, as it happened!) as long ago as 2013  in a most entertaining soiree-like presentation entitled “Lines from the Nile”, an evocative, if fanciful slice of local music performance history, cleverly devised and written by Jacqueline Coats. If there were fewer opportunities this time round for Rowena Simpson to demonstrate histrionic as well as vocal and musical abilities, the repertoire itself plus the singer’s glorious song-bird-like tones made up for any possible lessening of overall effect upon the concert’s audience.

More recently, I’d encountered the “Hammers and Horsehair” combination of Douglas Mews and ‘cellist Robert Ibell, in a splendid 2016 concert at St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, playing repertoire from a similar period to this evening’s, though with no actual repetition of repertoire. I commented then on the “rightness” of their use of period instruments for this music, and was delighted all over again this evening at the musicians’ continued ability to make their beautiful instruments speak with what sounded to my ears like voices “belonging” to this music. Modern instruments can, of course, “do it” as well, if the interpreter is sensitive and visionary enough, but here we had performers and their instruments sounding so integrated as to take themselves right into the various worlds of the pieces played – an extraordinary fusion of sensibilities.

The musicians presented occasional readings which linked the music performed to either its era, or to its mood, or sometimes to the contributions made to New Zealand’s musical life by various German speaking musicians.  However, we began the concert with three songs by Czech-born composer Jan Kalivoda (sometimes spelt as “Kalliwoda”) who lived from 1801 to 1866 – the  German texts of the songs were translated and the words reproduced in the concert’s written programme, enabling us to savour all the more the pure, bell-like tones and exquisitely-floated phrases brought to the music by Rowena Simpson’s lovely soprano voice.

The beautifully-tailored accompaniments gently brought out the flowing triplet rhythms of the first song “Der Schöne Stern” (The Beautiful Star), making the perfect “sound-cushion” for the voice’s solicitous expressions of hope and comfort to a fearful, despairing heart. The following “Die Abendglocken” began with a beautifully-voiced ‘cello solo, the arco phrasings demurely turning to pizzicato when accompanying the voice, both ‘cellist and pianist complementing the soprano’s rapt exploration of the song’s varieties, in places hushed and atmospheric, in others radiant and full-throated. Finally, a brisk ¾ rhythm brought in “Der Wanderer”, the music enthusiastic and urgent as the singer waxed lyrical about “strange lands where unfamiliar stars shine in the heavens”, Robert Ibell’s cello-playing giving weight and colour to the surge of rollicking energy at the music’s end.

Beethoven’s ‘Cello Sonatas were the first written for that instrument which gave it proper “soloist” status. Rowena Simpson told us that the manuscript of this particular work was headed “Amid tears and sorrow” (Inter Lacrimas et Luctum), though the impression given by the work itself doesn’t really accord with such sentiments, possibly prompted by the composer’s thwarted interest in one Therese Malfatti, who eventually married one of the composer’s aristocratic patrons, Baron Ignaz von Gleichenstein, an amateur ‘cellist and the dedicatee of this sonata.

Simpson then told us briefly about Maria Dronke, a German-born Jew who came to New Zealand with her husband John and their two children in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. Maria, who had been a well-known actress in Berlin, began teaching drama and voice production in Wellington, while John, a Judge whose legal training was not “recognised” in New Zealand, worked in menial jobs until he was able to secure a position as a double-bass player in the National Orchestra. Maria eventually became well-known as a play producer, drama and poetry recitalist and teacher, and included New Zealand poetry in her recitals – she helped lift the levels of acting and production of local theatrical ventures, as well as enlivening the cultural and social climate with her presence. According to Edith Campion, a former pupil, she was “volatile, brimful of temperament and never tepid….” She died in Lower Hutt in August 1987.

The Beethoven Sonata seemed the perfect “rejoiner” to the tale, the music’s personality as distinctive as that of the subject of Simpson’s brief anecdote. From the cello’s questioning opening phrase and the piano’s “raised eyebrows” reply, the music played with our sensibilities through minor-key agitations, and succeeding phrases whose ascents seem never-ending, everything capturing the composer’s whimsical fancies and cast-iron sense of overall direction, so that the music’s “character” sang out with all of its volatilities and overall purposes given their due. The jovial scherzo’s skipping energies were brought out with both tremendous fire and playful humour, right up to the movement’s unexpectedly throwaway ending.

I thought the brief but heartfelt slow movement demonstrated the players’ melting rapport, the phrases and colourings beautifully varied, making the most of the sequence’s interlude-like brevity, before the finale scampered in from out of nowhere, the irruptions of energy resulting in the occasional finger-slip or strained intonation, but more importantly adding to the fun and excitement of the music, the players challenging our capacities (and their own capabilities) to keep up with the rapid-fire figurations and their variants. I was astonished at the sheer transcendence of sound generated by these instruments via their own particular timbral and tonal qualities, a tribute to the skill of the players in making their instruments “speak” with such overall impact and specific focus on detail, and to their bravery in taking “risks” in aid of getting the music’s spirit across to us.

The instrument Douglas Mews was using had its own colourful history which I fancy I had heard something of at a previous concert, if it was, indeed the same instrument, one brought to New Zealand from the Shetland Islands in 1874. The next item on the programme certainly showed off the instrument’s characteristics in a way appropriate to the music, its capacity for expressing both intimate and assertive feeling, and its characteristic colourings in different registers and with contrasting dynamic levels – a “way more” volatile instrument than the average grand piano! It seemed perfectly suited to convey the worlds within worlds aspects of Robert Schumann’s exquisite pieces collectively known as “Kinderscenen”, all but two of its thirteen pieces performed by Mews for us.

A reading of Katherine Mansfield’s poem “Butterfly” set the scene for the music – sequences of deceptive simplicity containing as much reflection as movement, but just as liable to “irrupt” in forthright ways as each succeeding “picture” was brought into view. Though the most popular of the set of pieces, “Traumerei” (Dreaming) here made an unforgettable impression under Mews’s fingers, played with song-like expression, giving each note its own distinctive, but still organic, inflection. The middle section conveyed moments of urgency, with impulses momentarily creating micro-tensions that dissolved as simply as they were wrought, the whole then rounded with a lump-in-throat ascent that caught us in thrall for the briefest of moments before allowing the dream to drift away.

The “Knight of the Rocking-Horse” which immediately followed came as a bit of a shock, as the usual “At the Fireside” ( which Mews chose to omit) is a somewhat gentler “waking up”! After this tempestuous number, and the volatile “Frightening”, we were reclaimed by gentler forces and gradually becalmed, the concluding “The Poet Speaks” here properly eloquent and reassuring in Mews’ hands, and altogether part of a memorable musical journey.

Rowena Simpson then read for us a couple of extracts from a diary kept by Anna Dierks (b.1856), the daughter of a Lutheran pastor who married a missionary in Upper Moutere, later living in Waitotara and then Wooodville. She was obviously musical and when in Nelson was distressed at the lack of quality in her local church choir – an 1875 entry mentions “terrible singing”. She had obviously decided she would attempt to rectify the situation, but it wasn’t an easy task, as an entry a couple of years later (1877) indicates, re choir practice – “It is not easy to lead such a choir – but the Lord will give me strength!”.

Singing of an obviously different order from Simpson concluded the evening’s programme, three of Schubert’s numerous songs, the first, Suleika I, with a text written by Marianne von Willemer, a contemporary and friend of Goethe’s, whose poetry was actually published by the latter under his own name. Willemer and Goethe had had a kind of literary “relationship”, taking pseudonyms and trading poems under the names of “Suleika” and “Hatem”. It all made for a particularly potent amalgam of impulses, a “gift” for a composer to render as music!

The opening of the song recalled the composer’s earlier setting of the same poet’s “Gretchen am Spinnrade” in its agitations, adroitly modulating between major and minor as the singer poured out the music’s intensities, Simpson carrying the feeling of the words so beautifully, doing well with the stratospheric intensities of the vocal line. These highly-charged feelings subsided into  a touching concluding sequence, conveying “the heart’s true message”, drawing forth tender phrasings from the singer and pulsing chords from the pianist, leaving the “infinite longing” of the setting to ceaselessly echo in the silence.

The second song was “In the Woods” (Im Haime), a song the programme notes described as “a bitter-sweet Viennese waltz-melody. I thought the performance most successful, with soaring vocal phrases supported by a beautifully-lilting accompaniment, and each verse of the song sounding like a true exultation of the forest’s capacities for inspiring feelings of well-being.

Before the final item ‘cellist Robert Ibell thanked the audience for “braving the elements” to attend the concert. Referring to the group’s recent twenty-concert tour of the country he recounted the experience of connecting here and there with certain people who had, in turn, a previous association with the instruments the musicians took on the tour. He also quoted from the writings of Julius Von Haast, geologist and explorer, who came to New Zealand from Germany in 1858 with a view to providing information regarding the country’s “suitability for German emigrants”, staying on in New Zealand and eventually becoming the first curator of the Canterbury Museum. Haast was a violinist and a singer, and his wife was also a singer, enabling them to take part in musical events in Christchurch, where they lived. Ibell quoted from Haast’s words – “geology during the day, and music in the evening” which the latter had written to a fellow-geologist, by way of imploring him to come and visit!

The final item was Schubert’s “The Shepherd on the Rock”, his resplendent setting of words by Wilhelm Muller and Karl August Vanhargen von Ense, a work that the programme note called something of “a mini-cantata” in its range and scope, written by the composer during the final months of his life for the soprano, Anna Milde-Hauptman. She wanted a display piece with an especially brilliant conclusion. Schubert never heard it performed as he died just weeks after the work’s completion. Notable also for its inclusion of a clarinet part, the work was here performed with the ‘cello taking over the former instrument’s role.

At first, to hear the ‘cello playing the lines one normally encountered on a clarinet sounded odd; but as the work proceeded I came to enjoy the contrasting timbres and tones, in the sense of a completely different kind of relationship, more of a “real” partnership than the original singer/clarinet echo scenario. Here the soprano’s delivery was radiant in every way, following the long, sinuous ‘cello lines throughout the opening, and awakening the “echo-impulses” from the music’s textures. It was the piano’s turn to shine during the melancholic middle section, with liquid, fluid tones, underlining the loneliness of the shepherd amidst the quiet and empty vistas, illuminated most beautifully by the soprano’s stratospheric ascent and the cello’s introduction of more hopeful impulses, taken up and flung further on high by the soprano’s bell-like exultations, here an exhilarating effect of joyful release, with caution tossed to the four winds! We all loved it to pieces!

We didn’t let the musicians go until we had extracted what we could out of them, so intense was our pleasure at what we had heard. In reward for our appreciation we were given as an encore some music by Louis Spohr, a charming duet between a girl and a bird, in which (so we were told) the bird sang of spring and the sun, and the girl sang of love! Singer and ‘cello both played their parts winningly, the trio enjoying the conventional but still effective ecstasies of the music, before concluding the piece with some delicate, exquisite-sounding phrases. It was music-making that gave rise to thoughts of how fortunate we all were to have witnessed and enjoyed it all.

No better way of concluding a year’s worth of glorious music-making! Ensemble LTJJI at Hutt Valley Chamber Music’s final 2018 concert.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Hutt Valley Chamber Music presents Ensemble LTJJI

Vesa-Matti Leppänen and Andrew Thomson (violins)
Julia Joyce (viola) / Andrew Joyce (‘cello) / Diedre Irons (piano)

MOZART – Piano Concerto No.12 in A Major K.414
(arranged by Mozart for string quartet and piano)
DVOŘÁK – Piano Quintet in A Major Op.81

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Monday, 15th October

Undoubtedly a mouth-watering prospect on paper, this concert nevertheless had some surprises in store, almost entirely in the realm of the transcription of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K.414 for piano and string quartet, made by the composer himself to increase the music’s likelihood of being played in whatever form.  He obviously had very little faith in the extent of his audiences’ musical sensibilities, describing in a letter of December 1782 to his father the difficulties of pleasing audiences of the time :  – “…in order to win applause one must write stuff which is so inane that a coachman could sing it, or so unintelligible that it pleases precisely because no reasonable man can understand it…”

In this same letter, quoted by the writer of this present concert’s excellent programme notes, Mozart talks about this work being one of a group of three concerti (K.413-415) “from which connoisseurs alone can derive satisfaction”, but which those listeners less knowledgeable could still enjoy “without knowing why….”, a gentle sideswipe at the conservative Viennese tastes of the time. The original concerto was scored for oboes, horns and strings, though Mozart himself sanctioned the work’s performance without winds, and obviously went from there to recasting the work as a piano quintet.

Transcriptions of any work involving an orchestra for smaller forces are often revelatory, as anybody who’s familiar with Franz Liszt’s recasting of all the Beethoven symphonies for solo piano will know (and, frustrated with the limitations of a single keyboard when dealing with the “Choral” Symphony, Liszt reworked that particular transcription and produced an additional version –  for two pianos!). For some people such activities remain anathema – to entertain or consider anything but the original is regarded as a misguided effort, a corruption and even a betrayal! Others, including myself, prefer to think of transcriptions (skilled ones, of course!) as a kind of  “added value”, even when “reduced” forces are used!

Such people of the former persuasion ought to thank their lucky stars they weren’t born in the Baroque era! – there, (and afterwards for a good while) transcriptions abounded, as musicians lived and worked in a far less self-conscious and more pragmatic performing environment than today’s. In fact our era’s obsessiveness with “urtexts” is a relatively recent phenomenon, as witness the rise (and fall) of once-common performances of things like Hamilton Harty’s arrangements of both Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” and “Water Music” – what it means is that symphony orchestras don’t get to play this music in any form except the original version(s), any more – which they’re too big and wrongly constituted instrumentally to attempt without criticism – talk about cutting off noses to spite faces!

Back to Mozart, and to the performance of the “Quintet” version of the Piano Concerto in A Major K.414 – the missing wind parts were responsible, in the original version, primarily for “colour” rather than thematic content, and thus able to be practically dispensed with on that score, though to enjoy what one remembered of the music’s full flavour one had to have recourse to one’s imagination at times! Still, I found this transcription a fascinating curiosity, however much I might have missed those colours and timbres – and with musicians of calibre the playing offers delights over and above such considerations, as was certainly the case here!

From the work’s beginning one registered the care and responsiveness of the players to the different dynamics and nuances of the lines, the writing here so sensitively and subtly detailed, one felt treated like a guest at a delicious supper, the piano adding to the repast its own special flavour under Diedre Irons’ sensitive fingers. To the strings’ lovingly-caressed lines during the development the piano contributed a discourse which in itself was a miracle of declamation, Irons’ playing (as I’ve often noted) unfailingly articulate, her every touch a delight, every trill, every ornament a unique experience for the listener.

The strings’ rich cantabile at the slow movement’s beginning was raptly taken up by the piano, the ensemble producing a typically Mozartean amalgam of rarefied loveliness expressed with both tenderness and strength. And we were made aware of a darker side to existence, as the strings’ heartfelt answer to the piano’s lyrical musings was immediately succeeded by a brief but telling sea-change towards anxiously-shadowed realms, before the opening calm was restored.

The players relished the fanfare-like whoops of glee shortly after the finale’s jog-trot beginning,  before worrying a repeated three-note descending figure almost to death, pursuing it in its various incarnations right throughout the music’s course! Eventually, the strings cranked up some concerted excitement and “surrounded it with their wagons”, leaving the piano to explain it further in a cadenza, one which became amusingly interactive, the to-ings and fro-ings between piano and strings allowing the tiny tune to escape and scoot to safety, amid some “oh well, what a great adventure!” concluding statements from the ensemble!

As it turned out, the evening’s fun was just beginning, the Dvořák Quintet being given what I would describe as “the works” by this gifted ensemble. Right from the deceptive, gently-rocking introduction, the music was projected with enormous volatility involving both eloquence and energy, the lyrical phrases spaciously articulated, and the contrasting rhythmic thrustings startling in their dynamic force! I loved the sweetly-laden quality of the players’ lyrical lines, as well as the players’ focused attack and sustained energy during the more agitated sequences.

Along the way the individual contributions to the music’s ebb-and-flow were delivered with distinction, Andrew Joyce’s eloquent cello solo at the movement’s beginning matched by Julia Joyce’s similarly sonorous viola solo which introduced the second subject. The violins’ work in thirds – a characteristic Dvořákian fingerprint – perfectly demonstrated the qualities brought to tone, line and ensemble by leader Vesa-Matti Leppänen  and second violin Andrew Thomson, as Dvořák put his themes through their various paces, the whole melded together by Diedre Irons’ strong, flexible playing at the piano.

The second movement was a Dumka, originally a kind of epic Ukranian ballad of a melancholic nature, but appropriated by Slavic composers to characterise music that typically changes its mood abruptly, alternating between melancholy and gaiety. Dvořák certainly made this form his own in many instances throughout his music, most profoundly in his famous “Dumky” Trio, where each of the movements is a “dumka” in its own right. Here, it was the music’s melancholy which straightaway set the mood, the piano’s extraordinary poignant lament answered by a deep-voiced viola solo, the playing from both musicians straightaway touching the heart! True to its penchant for volatility, the dumka then set the sounds bustling along energetically, pizzicato strings and piano relishing their rhythmic criss-crossings! The ‘cello, soon afterwards joined by the viola, then returned to the opening theme, a sequence of great beauty, though again the discourse was interrupted by a more vigorous section, a physical and exhilarating scherzo-like episode! And so on….interestingly, a reviewer writing in London’s “Athanaeum” magazine in 1888 found this movement all too much: –  “ It is difficult to regard the form of the “Dumka,” or elegy, as satisfactory. Two themes are presented several times, each with various modifications, but without any regular development. The movement, therefore, gives the impression of patchiness, despite the beauty of the melodies.”  Chacun à son goût!

Described as a “furiant” (though nothing to do with “furious” or “fury”, as the Czech word means “loudmouth” or “unrestrained person”) the third movement lightly skipped its devil-may-care way through the world, the performance here dancing between moments of feathery brilliance and rollickingly good humour. The players pulled back for the heart-easing trio section, the viola giving voice to a lullabic version of the main theme, one which lulled our senses before suddenly accelerating back into the high-spirits of the opening dance.

And so to the final movement, beginning with a call to attention and a summons to the dance, a joyful rustic-sounding celebration of a delight in living! I remember reading a commentator’s words many years ago, written in regard to the same composer’s Fifth Symphony (which we heard Orchestra Wellington play, earlier this year)  – “…an expression of joy so intense that it brings tears…” – a thought that could have applied just as well to these players’ exuberance and delight in bringing us such joyous music. What visceral engagement with the allegro’s rhythms! – what charm, and insouciance they brought to the folkish second subject, with its touches of melancholy – and how deftly they launched the fugato’s mischievous excitement, tightening the interactions almost to combatative point before winding the music down, allowing the viola to steer things back to the music’s second subject, and the piano to grandly give the signal that the threads must be gathered up and set in order!

So it was that the music becalmed in order that heads be counted and everything else put right with the world – the strings repeated the piano’s signaling gesture in agreement, and everybody turned for home, with the meandering steps through the gloaming gradually quickening and turning to a playful race, carrying all before it in a last frisson of playful excitement. And when we had finished acknowledging these splendid musicians’ efforts with our applause, it seemed to all of us that there would have been no better way than what we had heard to finish Hutt Valley Chamber Music’s 2018 concert season!

 

 

 

Circa Theatre’s “Under Milk Wood” a vital and rumbustious celebration of “LLareggub”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
UNDER MILK WOOD
A play for voices by Dylan Thomas

Featuring: Kathleen Burns, Jeff Kingsford-Brown, Simon Leary,
Carmel McGlone, Gavin Rutherford
and the voices of Jeffrey Thomas and John Bach

Directed by Ross Jolly
Music composed by Gareth Farr
Audio-Visual design by Joanna Sanders
Costume design – Sheila Horton
Lighting Design – Marcus McShane
Set design – Andrew Foster

Circa One, Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday, 13th October, 2018

People who grew up with the sounds of the voices of either Dylan Thomas himself, or of Welsh actor Richard Burton, as the “First Voice” on any of the two recordings of Thomas’s verse-play “Under Milk Wood” that were available in New Zealand from the 1950s, were given the work pretty much as its author would have expected it to be performed – as a play for voices, to be read and “acted” with voices alone, the parts distributed in live stage performances among five readers (though the Burton recording used instead over twenty individual voices with only a few duplicated actor-roles, every one a distinctively “Welsh” voice).

A later, 1988 recording, featuring this time Anthony Hopkins as the principal narrator, also used a near- entirely Welsh cast, mostly one-voice-to-a-part, the producers taking the opportunity to employ several “star” entertainers  in certain roles to add prestige to the venture – though this had the unfortunate effect of bringing into play commercialised singing-styles and accompaniments completely at odds with the play’s rural village setting and its homespun characters, tempting one into labelling the production (complete with its soupy symphony orchestra-played sequences) as “Over-Milked Wood”.

I hadn’t previously seen (or heard) any “live” performance of the play, read or staged, before encountering this production, and so it took me a while to get into its “swing”, though my initial reaction was delight at both the imaginatively-conceived video backdrop settings in tandem with the use of Gareth Farr’s sensitively-contrived music, light-years from the all-purpose sugary sounds that for me helped to disfigure the Hopkins recording! But I was dismayed by the use of recorded voices for the two principal narrators,  neither of whose voice was captured with any great “personality” –  whether this was the fault of the recording process (which seemed to lack any real immediacy – ought not at least the “First Voice” have a quality of dream-like music sounding inside one’s head?) or the somewhat unvaried tones of the readers, I’m not sure.

Whatever the case, things “came alive” with actor Jeff Kingsford-Brown’s evocation of the blind sea-captain, Captain Cat, the production wisely leaving the recorded voices behind for significant periods and giving much of the accompanying narrations to the actors themselves, sometimes speaking their own introductions, sometimes working in tandem with others. Kingsford-Brown’s calling up from the dead of his dream-ghosts gave us a wonderful “Samuel Beckett” moment, the figures rising from the depths of the subconscious (i.e. behind a screen), an effect which conveyed the other-worldly quality of the writing most hauntingly.

To go meticulously through the whole play, sequence by sequence, would be to suffocate some of its wonderment and spontaneity – even now when listening I find certain sequences “come upon me” as if by surprise, either in wraith-like fashion or with rude, cut-to-the-chase vigour. On the Circa stage the five actors maintained a tireless fluidity of movement and characterisation, in a sense “reinterpreting” the playwright’s original conception as something heard which then stimulated the imagination. Here, much more than sounding the words was done for the listener/observer, the actors literally embodying their roles, characterising at least as much with gesture, movement and costume.

I feel impelled to get this off my chest early, so as to concentrate on what the production and its actors DID do. Presenting the play with actors in costume moving about a stage gave people like myself a vastly different experience to that by which we first encountered the work. I thought it a true “swings-and-roundabouts” scenario, with the “stage movement” approach externalising the characterisations, giving them a vivid, readily accessible quality, the drawback being for me that the playwright’s words lost a lot of their power and beauty.

With speakers using the words to convey every inflection, emphasis, variation and colour of Thomas’s richly-endowed language, one was literally swamped with sensation of a kind that engaged the listener’s imagination, and worked in tandem with it to recreate time, and incident. Here, by contrast, were actors, by dint of being able to convey so much with their physical presence, far less meticulous and more cavalier with the words’ potential for evocation. The “Welsh” flavour of the voices, too, was a hit-and-miss affair, being at times something of an amalgam of British rural accents,  for me somewhat blurring the dimension of the scenario’s at once lyrical and earthy exoticism.

That said, under director Ross Jolly’s fluid guidance, the “dramatis personae” of the town of Llareggub wholeheartedly launched themselves into our imagined village-world with gusto and elan. Following Captain Cat’s evocations we found Kathleen Burns and Gavid Rutherford as Myfanwy Price and her lover, Mog Edwards dreaming of one another. Rutherford’s focused blandishments were a delight, such as “I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster”, and Burns played to her lover’s obsession with money with “a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the money, to be comfy”. The couple’s final meeting at the play’s other end was also heart-rendingly brought off with a beautifully-staged misalliance of bodies as Mog turned to hug his money instead of his disappointed but always-hopeful Mfanwy.

Rutherford also gave us a superb Mr Waldo, the voice savouring the words spoken to his disapproving late wife – “Hush, love, hush – I’m widower Waldo, now”, and the subject of  gossip which I thought less effective delivered by a couple, than, in Thomas’s original, a pair of gossips – the reproving “Using language” was but one example of somewhat bland characterisation, which should have reminded us all of our old-fashioned maiden aunts, but didn’t quite, here. But later, the naughtiest, most suggestive song of the evening had to be Waldo’s reminiscing “Come and sweep my chimbley”, sung by Rutherford with engaging “nudge-wink glee” in the Sailor’s Arms with an actively participating audience!

Kathleen Burns also winningly played the susceptible Polly Garter, loving anybody back who will give her the babies she adores, but reminding us constantly of her one true love, “little Willie Wee who is six feet deep”. While singing Polly’s music, Burns’ voice did drift perilously close to an Andrew Lloyd Webber-like singing delivery at times, a manner at odds, I thought, with a rural Welsh village ambience – but she remained on the side of the Llareggyb angels when not forcing her tones and allowing us to properly “eavesdrop” on her singing.

Her versatility produced a winsome Milly Smalls beautifully at odds with herself when looking in the mirror – “Oh, there’s a face! – Where’d you get that hair from? – Got it from an old tom cat!”, a querulous and volatile  Mrs. Cherry Owen, an ingenuous Mrs Dai Bread One, especially so in the lovely “crystal ball” scene with her “menage a trois” partner, Mrs Dai Bread Two (McGlone), and a “martyr(ed) to music” Mrs Organ Morgan, dealing with her “head in the clouds” organ -playing husband (Simon Leary) who turns a deaf ear to her gossip, while thinking of Bach and Palestrina!

Leary’s most riotous undertaking was that of the insouciant Willy-Nilly Postman, who opened everybody’s mail (with the help beforehand of the scheming, steaming Mrs Willy-Nilly), telling Mr Mog Edwards that Miss Mfanwy Price loves him with all her heart, and Mr Waldo that he’s getting another paternity summons, and afterwards spreading the gossip accordingly. By contrast, the same actor’s shifty, shameless Nogood Boyo appeared and disappeared as mysteriously as the Cheshire Cat, even taking us out rowing in the bay with him at one point, and then treating us to a sublimely delivered, profoundly ultimate existentialist statement of being.

As Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, asleep with two dead husbands at her side, Carmel McGlone gave the character a sweetness which masked her character’s determination that occasionally bubbled to the surface – her “Tell me your tasks, in order” was steeled ever so subtly by reminders such as “And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes!” From such a benign dictatorship with her two deceased subjects Gavin Rutherford and Jeff Kingsford-Brown, both in thrall to her and her directions, McGlone moved easily to the controlled viciousness of Mrs Pugh, whose husband, Mr Pugh, played by Kingsford-Brown enacted a Doctor Crippen-like double game of surface imperturbability and secret murderous passion – it wasn’t his fault that he found himself telling us he was taking the breakfast UP to his wife while walking DOWN the onstage stairs! – the onus was on we in the audience at that point, to reimagine the world!

Kingsford-Brown’s most moving “Captain Cat” moment, of course was his realisation that the memory of his “one great love”, Rosie Probert, was receding into the dark, Rosie (Carmel McGlone) herself telling the old man “what he already knows” – a superb piece of tragic writing from Thomas. While I still prefer the plainer, starker spoken version of the exchange between man and ghost, the “semi-sung” treatment of “What seas did you see” given here was beautifully “choreographed” by both Kingsford-Brown and McGlone, causing “water to come in me eye”, at the end of it all.

There were as many such vignettes I haven’t commented on, merely wanting to convey with the above descriptions something of the presentation’s flavour. Johanna Sanders’ Audio-visual designs and Gareth Farr’s music I’ve already described on as evocative and appropriate, while Sheila Horton’s costumes struck me as entirely apposite to the characters’ situations. Andrew Foster’s set gave the character’s movements plenty of helpful levels to work at, as well as wry concealments as required, while the different atmospheres were beautifully evoked by Marcus McShane’s lighting.

So – a beautiful, and in places funny, quirky and moving, realisation by Ross Jolly with the help of his team, a venture well worthy of attention.
(Circa One, until November 10th)