Author: Peter Mechen

Puccini’s La Boheme in Wellington – ineffably human and heartfelt

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
GIACOMO PUCCINI – La Boheme (libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, after Henri Murger)

Cast:   Thomas Atkins (Rodolfo)
Marlena Devoe (Mimi)
Nicholas Lester (Marcello)
Amelia Berry (Musetta)
Julien Van Mellaerts  (Schaunard)
Timothy Newton (Colline)
Barry Mora (Benoit / Alcindoro)
Manase Latu  (Parpignol)

Freemasons New Zealand Opera Chorus
Michael Vinten (Chorus Director)

Orchestra Wellington
Tobias Ringborg (conductor)

Director – Jacqueline Coats
Assistant Director – Jesse Wikiriwhi
Set Designer – Rachael Walker
Costume Designer – Elizabeth Whiting
Lighting Designer – Jennifer Lal

Wellington State Opera House

Thursday 4th October, 2018 (until Oct.13th)

It may seem a strange entry point for a review’s beginning – but at the opening night of New Zealand Opera’s 2018 season of “La Boheme” in the Wellington Opera House on Thursday last, there was for me, near the Second Act’s conclusion, a “great moment”, whose incredible lyrical surge and explosion of sheer theatrical energy seemed at once to overshadow and enhance the significance of everything that had gone before – this, in a production that had already stretched out before us up to this point a connected array of jewel-like moments, glowing like gorgeously-appointed lights. I’m referring to the climax of the famous Waltz-song sung by the flirtatious Musetta,  with all the opera’s characters at the street-café watching and joining in with her in aiding and abetting her reunitement with her jealous, yet still utterly besotted ex-lover Marcello, every singer holding and thrillingly intensifying their singing-lines right up to the point where Musetta falls once again into Marcello’s arms, and the orchestra thunders its approval! – a moment even experienced opera-goers would die for and at which newcomers to the goings-on would be literally transported!

It was, of course, a moment in which the expressive capabilities of every principal character on stage seemed thrown open – there had already been instances with similar “charge” that had swept things along in the story, though not to quite the same concerted extent. But for me it fulfilled the promise set up by the production right from the curtain’s opening – we were engaged, from the very first strains of the orchestra’s excited, rumbustious ascending phrases, and the bohemian Marcello’s shivering disavowal of his painting of the “Red Sea”, countered by his equally frozen companion Rodolfo’s judgement concerning the cold, idle stove! Each of the voices “sounded” the character so beautifully  – Nicholas Lester’s Marcello muscular and virile, and Thomas Atkins’ Rodolfo lighter-toned but strongly-focused in his upper registers, both characters ENJOYING the text’s wry humour and quicksilver exchanges.

The other two bohemians variously and characteristically made their entrances, the gentle, soft-spoken Colline of Timothy Newton a perfect foil for the vigorous, raconteur-like Schaunard of Julien Van Mellaerts, the four together making a boisterous and engaging quartet, combining sharp-etched individuality with string-quartet-like collaboration, their stage horseplay delightfully choreographed. The four’s concerted treatment of the intruding landlord, Benoit, desirous of his overdue rent (a deliciously self-indulgent cameo by Barry Mora) summed up a whole life-stage of youthful, “devil-take-the-hindmost”abandonment!

Left alone then, to finish an article he’s writing, Rodolfo then, of course, unexpectedly encountered Mimi, a neighbour of his wanting a light for her candle, the character shyly at first, then more impulsively portrayed by Marlena Devoe, her voice having both sweetness and energy enough to convey the often conflicting inclinations which can colour a first meeting. Each singer then “put their cards on the table” with successive arias, both shaping their various outpourings with great artistry, Atkins’ soft-grained utterances at the beginning of “Che gelida manina” gathering increasing heft as he described how his “empty place was filled with hope” (…poiche v’ha preso stanza la speranza….) with confidently ringing tones and a true command of line.

In reply, Marlena Devoe’s Mimi began simply and demurely with “Mi chiamano Mimi”, shyly inflecting her approaches to soaring passages like “that talk of love, of spring” (che parlando d’amor, di primavera…), before building up to her song-bird-like “April’s first kiss is mine….” (Il primo bacio dell’aprile e mio!…) and melting our hearts with her spontaneous-sounding nuances of line and tone. Throughout, the orchestra accompanied with the utmost sensitivity, Thomas Ringborg and his players completely at one with the onstage ebb-and-flow of incident and emotion, and making the most of even incidental-sounding sequences, such as the beautiful colourings from the wind and brass in the passage immediately following the bohemians’ teasing calls to their recalcitrant colleague, about to declare his love to his new-found companion.

Act Two exploded around and about our sensibilities, the stage and its occupants cleverly silhouetted at first then flooded with energy-inducing illumination (a marvellously incandescent effect by lighting designer Jennifer Lal), straightaway depicting a fantastical evocation of a generic nineteenth-century urban scene, which just happened to be Paris.  Director Jacqueline Coats had said she wanted to evoke a kind of timelessness about the story, paying ample attention to the story’s specified time and place, without giving her audience a “too tied up in period” kind of distraction – no small thanks due, of course, to designer Elizabeth Whiting’s unerring sense of character and appropriate costuming. What was paramount here, and something which I strongly connected with amid the colour and energy of the café and its environs, was what Coats called “the way the world is transformed when (people are) in love”. Throughout much of the scene this was poetically and idyllically expressed by Rodolfo and Mimi’s interaction, and, by contrast, tempestuously and abrasively by Marcello and his on-again, off-again sweetheart Musetta (winningly and coquettishly played by Amelia Berry), whose aforementioned “Waltz Song” built up to that overwhelming climax of emotion at the end of the act.

Here, though, as nowhere else in the opera, the chorus was a major player in the action, beginning the action before the bohemians appeared – street-vendors, shoppers, policemen, children, and the waiters and waitresses of the café – with both singing and movement whose energies seemed to fuse with the musical line and sweep everything along in a tide of festive euphoria – a tribute to the expert work of chorusmaster, Michael Vinten.  Occasionally galvanising the action were the antics of one of the vendors, a figure called Parpignol (sung and acted with great flair by Manase Latu), whose presence drew from the crowd, Pied-Piper-like, a stream of children, all following him around in excitement, each child anxious to gain possession one of the bunch of balloons he carried.

Into this plethora of activity strode Musetta, with her unfortunate “sugar-daddy” in tow, an elderly gentleman, Alcindoro (Barry Mora once again nailing” a cameo to perfection). I thought Amelia Berry’s choreographing of her song beautifully done, with the long, sinuous melodic lines accompanying her flirtatious interactions with various partners by way of teasing Marcello and annoying her companion, but also drawing from Devoe’s Mimi an affecting, empathetic vocal counterpoint. As a ruse she finally sent off her elderly swain to the shoemakers to buy a more comfortable pair of shoes, thus freeing herself up to “connect” with the (by now) all-too-willing Marcello. What a scene, and (as outlined above) what a triumph!

Alas, downhill it all went from here, of course (I mean the story-line, not the performance!), as do most “serious” operatic love-stories, firstly into a scene whose bleak, unremitting aspect of emptiness candidly expressed the narrative’s emotional contourings (director Coats paid tribute in a programme interview to designer Rachael Walker’s sense of the work’s overall feeling and her stage representations of it, deservedly so, in my opinion). The characters performed their sad charades by turns, firstly Mimi, made desperate by Rodolfo’s jealousy, and then Rodolfo, equally desperate due to Mimi’s sickness, before they became aware of one another’s presence. Eventually forgetting recriminations, and in the most affecting manner, they sang of their happy times, before agreeing to part “in the spring”, Mimi’s farewell given the most touching of performances by Devoe, voice and “presence” in focused accord. Ironically, their agreement was counterpointed by a furious argument between Musetta and Marcello, one whose resonances spilled over into the final act, as did the more poetic but no less profoundly affecting of Mimi’s and Rodolfo’s.

The reverse parallels between the opera’s opening and that of the final Act were duly and affectingly brushed in, with Marcello and Rodolfo once again alone, each trying to work, but heavily distracted this time round by memories rather than future possibilities. Schaunard’s and Colline’s arrival again occasioned horseplay, but of a more sardonic, even desperate kind, the whole being interrupted by Musetta, announcing Mimi’s arrival and then bringing her in, seriously ill. Though diametrically opposed in feeling and incident, it was here that the resonances of that overwhelming conclusion to the Second-Act came back, in the form of what it had all led to – the same characterful voices (with Devoe and Atkins, as the lovers, particularly affecting), magnificent orchestral detailing and “shaping” of the music, settings of stage and lighting, and costumings that looked so “right”. It all seemed to me at this moment a kind of natural outcome of (as well as a contrast to) that earlier outpouring of frisson during which something ineffably human and heartfelt became transcendent for a few precious seconds!

So, no sentimentality at the end, but instead a heartrending  and truly cathartic conclusion with Mimi’s inevitable, but still shocking death. A memorable and satisfying production, then, with everything in focus, and seemingly “knowing” what it was there for.  I think the production’s success came down to that sense of everything belonging, everything “told” what to do by Puccini’s music. Director Jacqueline Coats knew this when she remarked in the aforementioned programme interview “That’s the power of the music. As a director, it’s your best friend – it tells you everything you need to know”. Well done, NZ Opera!

 

300 years of riches from the NZSM Orchestra – What is it about Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto this year?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra presents:
THREE CENTURIES

BELA BARTOK – Violin Concerto No. 2 BB 117
MICHAEL NORRIS – Claro  (2015)
ANTON BRUCKNER – Symphony No.8 in C Minor (ed.Haas): Mvt.4 – Finale

Claudia Tarrant-Matthews (violin)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

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

Tuesday 2nd October 2018

Though primarily a vehicle for displaying the stellar talents of violinist Claudia Tarrant-Matthews, winner of the NZSM Concerto Competition for 2018, this concert gave considerable added value in terms of the wide range of repertoire, not to mention the quality of the NZSM Orchestra’s committed, focused and excitingly-played performances of the same. Following Tarrant-Matthews’ astonishing traversal of one of the twentieth century’s truly great concertos, we heard an evocative piece, Claro, by the recent SOUNZ Contemporary Award winner Michael Norris, and then, to finish, the finale of what many people regard as the greatest of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, the Eighth (difficult to “bring off”, but here, most excitingly played, the movement’s somewhat unwieldy structure tautly held together by conductor Ken Young’s visionary direction).

Not for a moment did I think I would hear ANOTHER live performance of Bartok’s Second Violin Concerto during the same twelve-month, much less one that was as skilfully-played and richly-wrought as an interpretation as that of Amalia Hall’s earlier in the year with Orchestra Wellington. But here was Claudia Tarrant-Matthews, fearlessly shaping up to the music with the utmost authority, putting her own stamp on the composer’s idioms and evocations, and together with a group of musicians who were prepared to follow her through thick and thin, enabling the music to come alive,  every detail from both the soloist and orchestra in the mercilessly clear St.Andrew’s acoustic finding its place and expressing its character in relation to its context in the work as a whole.

Tarrant-Matthews’ tone throughout I thought gorgeous in its sheer range of expression, maintained unfailingly throughout the most demanding sequences involving double-stopping, glissandi or rapid passagework, yet sounded always with an ear to what the orchestra was doing, giving such character to her interactions with the winds (a strongly atmospheric cor anglais, for example) or the sometimes irreverent brass. Her cadenza-like displays had a hair-raising, spontaneous quality that contributed to the “rush-of-blood” effect in many places throughout the first movement, most excitingly and satisfyingly. As well, the slow movement’s ethereal opening occasioned a beautiful cantabile from the soloist, giving the big orchestral tutti even more impact with its raw emotion, and in turn throwing into bold relief the ensuing “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” world eerily evoked by winds and percussion. Each variation brought its own character to bear on the narrative so eloquently, the solo violin’s stratospheric work illuminating pinpoints of light as the strings slowly danced, before they and the winds towards the movement’s end generated suitably celestial resonances in the wake of the whole.

The work’s finale – a reworking of the first movement, Bartok enabling the Variation form he wanted its utmost scale of expression, here – burst in upon us furiously, strings swirling about, and the soloist at first steadily and folkishly playing the earthily-flavoured melodic fragments of themes which straightaway “grounded” the music, before “taking the orchestra on” as a kind of sparring partner – most exciting! The themes were here played by the orchestra in such a heartfelt and forthright way, combining emotion and physical energy so irresistibly! – and the soloist replied in kind, before leading the way into a chromatically-flavoured kind of vortex of tightly-wrought exchanges, dissolving into sinuous, eerie utterances.  These moments made for a lovely contrast with the more raucous, “Concerto for Orchestra”-like confrontations, all of which were duly disarmed by the composer and set upon trajectories into different realms – such staggering invention! I loved the Holst-like timpani and brass towards the end, as well as Bartok’s sweetly simple reversion to a child-like folk-figure, so artlessly and innocently played by Tarrant-Matthews, before the orchestra “let ‘er rip” over the final few bars (I think the composer could have let the violinist join in with the fun, but there you go!) – a great, and much-acclaimed performance by all, and deservedly so!

After this, it almost seemed that to go on was risking an anti-climax – however this was decidedly not the case! On two counts conductor Young and his players fully justified pairing the concerto in its wake with two other pieces, both of which received riveting performances.  The first of these works was Michael Norris’s 2015 work Claro, commissioned by the NZSO for that year’s “Aotearoa-plus” concert, and well-received by my colleague Lindis Taylor in these columns, with the words “a remarkable exercise in imaginative orchestration and harmonic ingenuity”. The composer himself wanted to write a piece that unselfconsciously explored the idea of “a gradual emergence of line out of simple little points in space – of expressivity out of abstractiveness”. Admitting that Douglas Lilburn’s work exerted something of a subconscious influence in this case, possibly due partly to the commission being intended for performance with the earlier composer’s Second Symphony, Norris cited Lilburn’s awareness of space and colour as having certain resonances of sustained quality in this later work, though without exerting any direct influence on the piece’s outcome.

We heard harp, percussion, and pizzicato strings at the outset, joined by piano, the pizzicati alternating with bowed notes, the percussive sounds with “held” wind notes, these latter having an “electric current” quality, a feeling of energy being channelled and sent to various places. The sounds began to cohere and make patterns, vary dynamics and pitches, tumbling over the top of one another in a kind of awakening chaos of delight, a rolling, bristling ball of impulses, the light within the “lighter” instruments playing, bouncing and refracting, while the heavier instruments created impulses that moved and shook land masses. A high shimmering string note stimulated wonderment in all sonic directions, with instruments, in Dylan Thomas’s poetic words, doing “what they are told” in describing the play of natural forces.

An uneasy calm was coloured and flecked with a second wave of gradually animated trajectories, as kaleidoscopic scintillations and movements gradually sped up, the instruments fusing their impulses together, sometimes falling over themselves to push the animations onwards, at other times vaingloriously “fanfaring” the soundscape and stimulating challenges from other quarters. The feelings of movement spread steadily and remorselessly through the textures, the variations of texture, colour and dynamics constantly leading the ear on. As the figurations took on more and more girth the excitement from within grew – huge crescendi of sounds dashed themselves to fragments against the music’s basic pathway. In their wake the sounds seemed to settle in overlapping layers, while a solo violin sent out a raincheck call answered by winds and harp, and allowing the instruments which began the piece to re-emerge and gratefully complete the circle. In all, I thought it a marvellously-constructed “adventure” for orchestra, here patiently, fearlessly and sonorously delivered.

That last sentence would sum up almost any successful performance of a symphony by Anton Bruckner, though we were given only a movement from one of the Austrian master’s greatest works this evening, the finale of his Eighth Symphony. A much-troubled work in its genesis, the Eighth was completely revised by Bruckner after suffering the humiliation of having the piece rejected for performance by his chosen conductor, thus leaving two versions for posterity (1887 and 1890), and an ongoing argument as to the relative merits of each version, with, confusingly, a “combined” version thrown into the mix for further argument! Up until recently the edition prepared by Leopold Nowak in 1955 was the one most favoured by conductors, but the earlier edition by Robert Haas (1935) incorporated more of Bruckner’s original ideas from the 1887 version and restored certain cuts that an earlier editor, Josef Schalk, had made to ANOTHER revised edition of 1892! (At this point the reader needs to take a deep breath, and recall the late Sir Thomas Beecham’s response to news of a new edition of somebody’s (it could well have been Haydn’s) symphonies, with the words, “Are they scholarly, or musical?” – which, regarding all of this, of course, is the most important consideration!)……

After reading Ken Young’s note telling us that the edition used in this concert was that by Robert Haas, we could settle down and enjoy the music, its tumultuous beginning with apocalyptic brass and thunderous timpani! Having “cleared his symphonic throat” as it were, Bruckner then gives us an amazingly discursive amalgam of seemingly disjointed motifs, fused together in the best performances by a strongly-projected overview involving no-holds-barred playing and focused, clearly-articulated figurations throughout. Which is precisely what we got from Young and the NZSM Orchestra, with the help of certain extra players to make up the numbers required by the composer in this epically-conceived work. Young pointed out that Bruckner had set orchestras difficulties by requiring “specialist” instruments like Wagner tubas, whose parts were played here most effectively by two extra trombone and two euphonium players. The St.Andrew’s acoustic barely passed muster throughout this encounter with such gargantuan forces, further advancing the urgent need for a recommissioned Town Hall, presently undergoing “earthquake-strengthening”.

Without indulging in a blow-by-blow description of the performance, I can still remark on the “charged” playing by the string sections throughout (only in the latter “working-out” sequences did their lines occasionally register the occasional strained note in their convoluted passagework), supported by sonorous work from the winds, having to deal with equally intricate patterns of symphonic impulse from the composer’s  fertile brain, and invariably golden-toned brass, their sounds somewhat constrained in the venue, but by turns massive and richly-wrought throughout, everywhere sturdily underpinned by alert timpani-playing, the latter especially enjoying his “road-music” sequence with the strings and brasses that at an early stage takes us into the symphony’s heart.

Always of concern for players of these works is being able to keep enough strength in reserve for the massive perorations with which they invariably finish – and the Eighth Symphony is certainly no exception. Here, the monumental build-up throughout the coda, beginning in C Minor, moved inexorably in Young’s hands towards that point when the music turns on massive pivots into the all-encompassing sunshine heralded by those brass shouts of C Major, thunderously supported by the rest of the orchestra. As Ken Young had remarked in farewelling certain players who were completing their studies and appearing in the orchestra for the last time, “You can’t get a better farewell than playing in the Bruckner Eighth Symphony” (or words to that effect!), a statement that was unequivocally affirmed at the end by the music, its composer, the interpreters and the by-now-flabbergasted, but still-appreciative audience!

 

 

Too important to let go – Ashley Brown with a “new” NZTrio for Braid, a Suffrage Year concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The NZTrio presents:
BRAID – Celebrating the Feminine in all of us……Braid

RACHEL CLEMENT – Shifting States
CLARA SCHUMANN – Piano Trio in G Minor Op.17
ELENA KATS-CHERNIN – Spirit and the Maiden
VICTORIA KELLY – Sono
FANNY MENDELSSOHN – Piano Trio in D minor Op.11

NZTrio – Benjamin Baker (violin) / Ashley Brown (‘cello) / Stephen de Pledge (piano)

City Gallery, Civic Square, Wellington

Wednesday, 26th September, 2018

This is the second concert with overt connections to the recent 125th suffrage anniversary that I’ve recently reviewed, very different to the earlier one (Cantoris Choir, Wellington), though packing a similarly powerhouse punch on behalf of women’s musical creativity. It was titled Braid, and is one of three concert series given by the trio this year featuring the work of women composers, the other two being called Weave and Twine. As with Cantoris Choir’s presentation, I very soon forgot the “idea”of these sounds I was hearing having been composed by women, so caught up was I in the process of listening – reacting to creative sensibilities expressing the kind of individuality and focus which put any idea of “gender” in a proper existential context. To use less convoluted language the sounds were soon coming to me as a listener “on their own terms”.

The NZTrio has of late reconstituted in an altogether startling way, losing both its violinist (Justine Cormack) and its pianist (Sarah Watkins) in relatively quick succession, due entirely to attrition. Surviving member, ‘cellist Ashley Brown has joined forces with various other musicians in order to present the group’s 2018 series of concerts, given the titles Weave, Braid and Twine. This was the second in the series, Braid, and brought into the picture the talents of violinist Benjamin Baker and pianist Stephen de Pledge, an all-male lineup which found itself addressing the entirely female-composer essence of Braid. One article I saw concerning the concert was subtitled “The classical blokes saluting unsung women composers”, which certainly conveyed the ironies of the situations in no uncertain terms!

Perhaps it’s a “sign of the times” that both the Trio and Cantoris, mentioned above, featured works by nineteenth-century as well as contemporary female composers, allowing a comparison of contexts in which women worked to create music. Cantoris featured an 1892 Festival Cantata by the American composer Amy Beach, as well as including pieces by Dame Gillian Whitehead and Jenny McLeod, while the NZ Trio gave us chamber works by two different nineteenth-century women, both connected with illustrious male composers by blood or marriage – firstly Clara Schumann, and then Fanny Mendelssohn. Along with these we heard pieces by Australian Elena Kats-Chernin (b.1957), as well as contemporary NZers, Rachel Clement and Victoria Kelly.

To open the concert the Trio chose an attention-grabbing piece by Rachel Clement, one called Sabbia (sand) from a larger work whose title “Shifting States” referred to the process of artistic glass-making in its numerous forms. The opening sounds were flung at us by the composer, the playing positively suggesting flint-like substances with hard, sharp edges, able to change shape and form at a moment’s notice, evoking by turns long, sinuous lines, scintillations and colourings. These sound-impulses developed a certain breadth, suggesting either dreams of a substance morphing into something else, or in the hands of a glassmaker interacting with her or his artistic imagination! A certain “exotic” element in colour, texture and rhythm also evoked something of sand’s natural environment, desert vistas, long lines of unbroken space, something of a wonderous contradiction with the piece’s actual brevity. Austere and yet beautiful and startling!

In the programme Fanny Mendelssohn’s D Minor Piano Trio was next scheduled, but Ashley Brown told us that the group had done a rethink, and swopped the pieces’ order around, which meant we got Clara Schumann’s Trio first. Had the music been unannounced and simply played, then away from any programme listing, I would have hazarded a guess that Robert Schumann was the composer, right from the flowing tune that opened the work – though some of the following piano figurations seemed to push the music slightly more Mendelssohn’s way. I did like the generosity of both melody and interchange throughout, the flowing theme of the opening tempered in its seriousness by the more quixotic second subject.

I enjoyed the charming quirkiness of the Scherzo’s opening, and the “different-worldliness” of the Trio, so circumspect in its poise, equivocal in its rhythmic trajectories, and yet so passionate in its string unisons, played here with the kind of focus that made every note mean something. The third-movement Andante begins as a veritable “song without words”, with a piano solo whose “drawing-room” melody give way to vigorous dotted-rhythm exchanges in the movement’s middle section, the players digging into the forthright statements with a will. The ‘cello leads the music out of this mood and back into its opening lyricism most tenderly, with melting acquiescence from both violinist and pianist.

Again I thought the finale’s opening Schumannesque in its anxieties and suggestions of flight, the melody having a “haunted” quality, which the violinist’s chromatic descents seemed at first to take further, though the rather chirpy second subject was more of a children’s “hide-and-seek” game than anything deeper and more sinister. I liked the chromatic figuration of the fugue-like development, the players giving their various entries a trenchant quality that again took the music away from the drawing-room and into more fairy-tale realms. In the work’s coda the players found both qualities , the anxiety given more energy and punctuated with vigorous phrases that resolved as many doubts as showed their faces.

It seemed quite a quantum leap to go from these gracious drawing-room gestures to Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin’s Spirit and the Maiden – very much an “in your face” work right from the beginning, with driving rhythms and deeply-etched melodic lines creating a strongly “filmic” kind of atmosphere, the trajectories covering a lot of ground, dancing along, wildly and abandonedly, with occasional folkish touches that eventually steer the sounds into wonderment at the first movement’s enigmatic conclusion. The story involves an affair between a young girl and a water-spirit, which ends, as these things seem always to do in folk-lore, tragically – and much of the music’s course over the first two movements was wild and vigorous, as if emotion on all sides was hper-driven by both exhilaration and fear. The second movement’s dance-like course again concluded mysteriously, with added menace and unease suggested by a string tremolando whose sound seemed to dissolve into spectral-like regions.

Unlike the first two movements this concluding piece began lugubriously, with heavy sighing, gradually becoming more animated and florid, everything seemingly trapped in a great trough of despair, the ‘cello upwardly sighing with great glissandi, and joined by the violin, continuing a series of increasingly-despairing moments. The piano then ”upped” the rhythm to a march that became more and more savage until the textures suddenly started to dissolve, as it were, right in front of our ears! All momentum ceased and the sounds drifted into nothingness.

Victoria Kelly’s Sono is, literally, the stuff of dreams, in this case, it seems, a rude awakening from a dream. Not unlike Rachel Clement’s Sabbia in its initial impact, this was more obsessive an experience, long-term, the music trying to both enter into and escape a world from which the sensibilities have been, according to the composer, “untimely ripp’d”. Here, it was a superbly-sustained dreamscape, one half-lit but made altogether tremulous with possibility. As the piano picked its way through its own sound-world, the strings more and more insistently beamed their tones upon the wanderer, half-encouraging, half-mocking the figure’s progress. Depending on one’s mood one could have been wandering lost after being cast adrift, or, more passively, immersed in some kind of meditation amid an extended jazz-piano solo, the strings present either as fellow-musicians or representing a totality of listener-responses, a “did we dream you or did you dream us” scenario. Whatever the case, the music was superbly focused on states of consciousness and their waxing and waning, setting up a state of trance-like wonderment, seeming to me to be in the process of fusing outward and inward states of being.

Awakening us from such reveries was the programme’s final work, a Piano Trio by Fanny Mendelssohn, in fact her last published piece (of almost 500 separate works found posthumously only eleven found their way into print!), and one which was completed only a short time before her death. By all accounts she was as talented a performer as her more famous brother, Felix, and on the strength of her surviving compositions, possessed gifts as a composer that matched his own. In fact Felix occasionally published her songs under his own name to give them a public life otherwise denied most of her work at the time. Pianist Stephen de Pledge introduced the work to us, calling it “remarkable”, and drawing our attention in particular to the finale, in which the writing, he remarked “goes mad”, perhaps partly reflecting the composer’s urgent desire to complete the music in time to present it to her sister as a birthday gift!

I thought on the strength of this evening’s hearing, it overshadowed Clara Schumann’s work in content if not in form, its intensities reflecting what seemed an “inner life” of enormous depths of artistic feeling and imagination. That Fanny desired recognition as a composer was indicated by her decision to publish some of her works, initially without her brother’s approval, but then, in 1846, on being approached by no less than two publishers, six opus numbers of works, with his (probably reluctant) blessing! Hearing this Op.11 Piano Trio with its compelling outer movements, one gets the feeling that this was music which desperately NEEDED to be written!

The opening Allegro vivace began with a remarkably Schumannesque melody sounded by the strings over an agitated piano accompaniment, the players bringing out the music’s restlessness, which was then partly relieved by a wide-leaping melody shared by all three instruments in turn, with variants of the melodic line then tossed about among the individual players. At the development it seemed as though the music’s underlying mood had merely been waiting its chance – with the piano once again in agitated mode, the players built the music towards some wonderfully full-blooded romantic gesturings, with even the wide-leaping melody being subjected to the composer’s “sturm und drang” manner, removing all hints of drawing-room sensibility with splendidly assertive gesturings (I was going to use the word “virile”, but thought better of it!). After what appeared to be a somewhat desolate little coda, the music suddenly re-ignited and flung the last few bars at us most unapologetically!

A piano solo began the slow movement, andante expressivo, joined by the strings, the instruments in turn given ample chances to sing, not only with the opening, but a more flowing minor-key melody in the music’s middle sequence, one which is heard again later as a piquant counterpoint to the opening tune – everything is “voiced” by the players with great poetry and sensitivity. Instead of a third movement scherzo, we got a “Lied”, a brief but beautiful “Song Without Words” kind of movement requiring little comment. Not so the finale – beginning with a heroic recitative-like flourish, the piano took charge from the outset, launching into a swaggering dance-like processional, not unlike a Czardas in rhythm, and one of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies in mood. The strings entered soon enough, joining in with the dance, and helping to build up the tensions, adding weight and pace to the textures, including a forthright “strut” to the dance-rhythms – very sexy in places, with the piano contributing great flourishes. Finally, the coda galvanised the energies further, paused for a brief reminiscence of the slow movement theme, then despatched the rest with a tremendous burst!

All credit to the NZTrio for their scintillating and thoroughly engaging traversal of music which ought to be heard more often.

 

 

Exotic, rhapsodic, gruesome and tragic – Wellington Chamber Orchestra with conductor Andrew Atkins and Thomas Nikora (piano)

Posted on by Peter Mechen

GREAT ROMANTIC SYMPHONIC POEMS

BORODIN – In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880)
RACHMANINOV – Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini Op.43**
DVOŘÁK – Symphonic Poem “The Wild Dove“ (Holoubek) Op.110  B.198
TCHAIKOVSKY – Fantasy Overture “Romeo and Juliet“ (1880)

Thomas Nikora (piano)**
Andrew Atkins (conductor)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra

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

Sunday, 23rd September 2018

I thought the programme’s given, somewhat “Readers’ Digest”, title “Great Romantic Symphonic Poems” simply didn’t convey the essence of this concert, so I have invented my own, above, thinking that it ought to “grab” people’s attention more readily, even if for the wrong reasons. The adjectives refer, of course, to the concert’s contents, and by no means to the performances, which were simply riveting throughout – and what reservations I might have had concerning the latter can be self-dismissed, in any case, with the words “in my opinion”, writ in water rather than in stone!

At least the title conveys the extraordinary range of content and sensibility to be found in this assemblage of music, of which only Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” could be said to be truly standard fare. I can’t ever remember hearing Alexander Borodin’s delectable piece “In the Steppes of Central Asia” in concert, before, and we don’t get to hear “live” THAT often the most jazzy and contemporary-sounding of all of Rachmaninov’s works for piano and orchestra, the Paganini Rhapsody. As for the Dvořák symphonic poem “The Wild-Dove”, well I didn’t anywhere see any labels on the item with the words “Contains disturbing content” or “Adults must be accompanied by children” – but the material from which the composer drew his inspiration for this and several other tone-poems outdoes even some of the Brothers Grimm’s stories for malevolence and bloodthirstiness (the “Wild-Dove” actually being the least brutal of a very nasty bunch of stories by Karel Jaromir Erben, based on Czech folklore!)

So, ‘twas programming of a most enterprising kind, and its realisation was, I thought, most successful. Beginning with that most evocative of musical realisations, Borodin’s “In the Steppes of Central Asia”, a brilliantly-conceived musical picture of, for we South-Sea Islanders,  a most exotic and fairy-tale part of the world, the performance straightaway took us to a land of seemingly endless vistas, through which occasionally passed travellers from both east and west, in this case a caravan from Asia making its way westwards accompanied by Russian soldiers. Borodin’s idea was to portray these salient characteristics of two worlds in music, separately at first, and then together, all under the sway of the landscape’s vast spaces.

The strings began with a single held note, delineating the vast stillness of the steppes, with solos from firstly clarinet and then horn (beautifully played) establishing firstly the “Russian” presence, followed by the sinuous “Eastern” melody, here most evocatively sounded by the oboe, both wind choirs and brasses beautifully realising their differently-coloured and ambiently spaced-out sequences. And so came the ”big tutti”, which burst upon the scene in brazen glory, the Russian theme splendidly “rasped” by the brasses and ably supported by winds and strings alike – magnificent!

But the most splendid part of the work was to come, with the two melodies then so beautifully and nostalgically combined as the different worlds intermingled, sharing instrumentations and colours and timbres between them in lump-in-throat ways, the strings particularly affecting here as they changed from Russian” to “Eastern” in one of the sequences. A shortness of breath in one of the early wind solos, and some momentary imprecise ensemble between wind and strings in the “intermingling” of melodies did no violence to the power and beauty of the evocation by conductor and players, the horn and wind solos all heroic, the strings and flute heartbreakingly magical at the end.

Enter then Thomas Nikora, taking time out from his duties as Music Director of Cantoris Choir, to essay the soloist’s role in Rachmaninov’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” for piano and orchestra. With a flick of the conductor’s wrist, a couple of emphatic, confident piano chords, and a frisson of orchestral energy, we were away on a wild, spontaneous-sounding ride, the music very much in Rachmaninov the composer’s later leaner, more spiky mode, though with a few melting moments at one or two places. Of course, everybody was waiting for the work’s most well-known sequence, the eighteenth variation (when asked about this variation’s return to the “old” Rachmaninovian style, the composer simply replied “That one was for my agent!”) – and Nikora and Atkins and the players didn’t disappoint, giving the famous melody plenty of room to expand and fill the spaces with luscious tones – even if the strings lacked the “heft” of professional orchestras their backs were bent to the task and their phrasing of the melody fully demonstrated their depth of feeling for the music.

Elsewhere, the soloist and players relished the “cat-and-mouse” moments of the music’s interactions as much as the quieter, more reflective sequences. I was impressed with the articulateness of it all, and the fitting-together at high speed of the various impulses, drolleries, explosions and longer lines – there was only one minor derailment, early on, that I noticed (I think in Variation V), when the orchestra was in one place slightly too quick for the pianist, who adroitly skipped the hiatus and reconnected in an instant, a moment atypical of the performance as a whole, though the realignment was in fact perfectly in line with the quicksilver responses of the musicians in general.

Besides the brilliance there was atmosphere – Variation VII brought the first appearance of the composer’s oft-used  “Dies Irae” theme, with bassoon and lower strings filling out the lugubrious tread of the music, and Variation XI rhapsodised, with tremolando strings and piano recitatives bringing a stillness to the soundscapes into which was poured cascades of piano notes in quasi-cadenza fashion, followed by Variation XII, which disconcertingly turned the “Dies Irae” theme into something like a ballroom waltz, graceful and sultry. More half-lit and even sinister in places was Variation XVI, staccato strings and stealthy piano ushering in a plaintive oboe, with the harp sounding the tocsin and strings shivering with foreboding at the phrase-ends and the solo violin doing its best along with the clarinet to reassure,  despite wonderful moans from the horn and flute – everything so well characterised!

As for Thomas Nikora’s piano-playing, it was by turns brilliant, forthright, charming, poetic and ruminative, as befitted the character of each of the variations – whether scintillating with cascades of notes as in Variation XI, or emoting with elegance and poetry, as in the famous No XVIII, or in complete contrast despatching the virtuoso demands of the last three variations with strength, wit and brilliance, he seemed in complete command of the music and in accord with what conductor and players were doing – at the end of it all we felt we had been “treated” to something out of the ordinary, and responded accordingly – quite unexpectedly, we were then given by the pianist an additional gift of a delicious arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the “Nutcracker” Ballet.

After the interval we returned for some more serious, not to say grimmer, business – Antonin Dvořák’s “Holoubek“ or “The Wild Dove“ is one of four symphonic poems written in 1896  by the composer, all inspired by a collection of folk-ballads called Kytice (Bouquet) written by Karel Jaromir Eben. Dvořák had previously written works inspired by Eben’s poetry in his “Legends“ (written firstly for piano fourhands, but later orchestrated), and like both Mussorgsky and Janacek in their music sought to reproduce something of the native flavour of the texts, and make specific musical references to objects and events in the stories, in the case of the symphonic poems often using Eben’s actual speech-rhythms in his treatment of the thematic material. The influential and arch-conservative critic Eduard Hanslick, who had previously expressed great enthusiasm for Dvořák’s music, was outraged at this “descent“ into programmatic detailing (Hanslick had previously castigated Liszt’s symphonic poems for similar reasons), calling Eben’s poems “ugly, unnatural and ghastly“, adding that Dvořák “has no cause to go begging before literary texts”. Fellow-composer Leos Janacek, on the other hand, embroiled at the time in his own work on the opera Jenufa, praised Dvorak’s latest pieces, saying that “the direct speech of the instruments……has never sounded with such certainty, clarity and truthfulness”.

The story of “The Wild Dove” involves a woman who has poisoned her husband and taken a new lover, whom she intends to marry. After the wedding a wild dove appears from nowhere and lands on the grave of the former husband. Its piteous cooing reminds the woman of her guilt, and increasingly torments her conscience, so that she eventually takes her own life. Conductor Andrew Atkins and his players brought the whole doom-laden scenario to life, right from the introductory darkness of the funeral march, through the quickening of interest between the widow and her new lover, the music’s pastoral beauties burgeoning into joyful dance-like expression with the wedding celebrations, and the arrival of the dove and its piteous cooing, accompanied by sinister winds and baleful horns, with the bleakness of the scene activating guilt and subsequent suicide on the part of the murderess. Dvorak also adds a kind of “redemptive” coda, suggesting a kind of acceptance and even forgiveness NOT in Eben’s story! I thought it a strong, evocative and sharply-focused performance.

Perhaps after such a gamut of tragic and harrowing dramatic expression, Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy-Overture “Romeo and Juliet” which followed was all just a bit much of a similar mode to take in! I appreciated the conductor letting us know that the piece was special for him, and I wondered whether at times he was “loving” it all a bit too much rather than letting parts of the music simply breathe and establish a more natural flow. Ask person B for his or her opinion and the impression could well be different; but I thought in places the expression was too “full on” at the beginning of a sequence for the music to be able to “go” anywhere except where the players started from. Particularly in the case of the wind choirs at the beginning and end of the work, I thought a lighter, more air-borne texture would have given the music more life and allowed the players room to deepen the expression as the sequences developed – here, it seemed to me that everybody was trying just a bit TOO hard!

That said, the work’s other sequences provided by turns plenty of excitement and lyrical warmth – apart from a too-eager horn at the beginning, the detailing from the different instrumental strands readily and precisely  brought things to life – the timpani and the lower strings built the tension superbly just before the “fight” music, the strings’ swirling exchanges with the winds prepared the way excitingly for the brass and percussion interjections depicting the warring houses, and the combination of strings and cor anglais melted all hearts with the famous love-theme, the harp and strings sounding gorgeous together with the winds when creating a diaphanous resonance in the lovers’ wake.

The return of the “fight”music created even more tension a second time round with great work from the horns, and the strings brandishing great attack and holding tightly-wrought rhythms, so important in this music. The heavy brass made splendid sounds, while the trumpets, fallible at their first big entry, rallied and delivered, contributing to the excitement – amid the exhaustion of these energies, the conductor drove his winds and strings onward to that incredible upsurge of feeling which  flooded in with the love theme’s return, the strings giving all they had with real passion and commitment. One more frenzied upsurge of energy and the music most satisfyingly collapsed, all passions spent, everybody having played their hearts out! A pity that the brass, having done such sterling work throughout were a degree or so too loud for the timpani’s deathly, funereal drumbeats to be heard, though a friend I sat with who was an ex-brass player commented on the difficulty for the players of keeping the instruments’ tones really soft. Though I thought the winds also gave too generously at the end, I thought the strings positively celestial in their rising figure, with the thunderous timpani and powerful brass giving us a most emphatic conclusion to the concert.

I haven’t given sufficient attention to Andrew Atkins’ direction throughout – though parts of the Tchaikovsky I thought needed a lighter touch, I was riveted by his work with the players for the rest of the time – the responses he got from the orchestra throughout the afternoon’s music-making produced, to my way of thinking, a truly memorable musical occasion.

 

 

 

 

125th Women’s Suffrage Anniversary Concert with Cantoris in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Cantoris Choir  presents:
CELEBRATING WOMEN COMPOSERS

AMY BEACH – Festival Jubilate
Hymn – All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name
ELAINE SHARMAN – Works for piano solo – Fish / Rain / Icicles / Deep Water
GILLIAN WHITEHEAD – Missa Brevis
JENNY McLEOD – Sun Carols

Cantoris Choir

Thomas Nikora, Musical Director

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

Wednesday 19th September 2018

2018 marks the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New Zealand.  On 19 September 1893 the Electoral Act 1893 was passed, giving all women in New Zealand the right to vote.  As a result of this landmark legislation, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world in which all women had the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

Cantoris Choir in Wellington presented a concert of works on the anniversary of the actual legislation, a presentation intended to “bring to life and shine a spotlight on women’s achievements in music composition”. This extended offshore, with the inclusion in the programme of pieces by the American composer Amy Beach (1867-1944), reflecting a world-wide women’s movement to achieve recognition as creative artists, both in Beach’s era and leading up to the present time.

Works by two present-day New Zealand composers, Dame Gillian Whitehead and Jenny McLeod, took up the remainder of the programme, and were joined by an unassuming but nevertheless distinctive set of piano pieces by a Wellington composer and teacher Elaine Sharman (1939-2018).

In the case of Amy Beach, her music has had a complex history – fighting contemporary attitudes that women lacked the proper facilities to be creative artists (voiced most influentially, perhaps, by Antonin Dvorak in 1892, to the effect that “….they (women) have not the creative power”), Beach’s works achieved considerable success at first, seemingly against all odds – she was entirely American-trained, and became one of the first US composers whose work was recognised in Europe.

A child prodigy pianist, she made her debut in 1883, also having several compositions published that year for the first time. Upon her marriage she concentrated on composition (at her husband’s request), and produced a vast array of music, among which was her “Festival Jubilate”, a work commissioned by the World’s Columbian Exposition which opened in 1892 (celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the New World).

Cantoris’s programme notes comment that, prior to the first performance of the work at the Exposition the following year a landmark speech concerning women’s rights and equalities was delivered (by the leader of the Board of Lady Managers of the Exposition, Bertha Honore Palmer, the acknowledged Queen of Chicago Society) to an audience of two thousand people. One critic wrote afterwards that Beach’s work was then “a fitting climax to {Palmer’s} address, which was in itself a “jubilate” over the emancipation of women”, while  another wrote that the music was “a clarion of triumph – the cry of a Balboa discovering a new sea of opportunity and emotion”.

Despite this and other successes in almost all genres of composition, Beach’s music after her death was neglected until relatively recently. Because of the success she experienced in her lifetime she remained a “presence”, although the neglect was a very real phenomena – and even now her music hasn’t taken its place in the repertory alongside that of somebody like Aaron Copland’s, for example. The work of living female composers is increasingly recognised, but there’s a distinct absence from the repertory of music by women in Beach’s era and earlier.

This evening’s major work by Beach, the “Festival Jubilate” though performed by Cantoris in a version with piano, rather than orchestral accompaniment, made a splendidly full-blooded impression, giving us little inkling as to why the work might have suffered neglect since its composer’s death. A heartfelt, full-throated choral sound at the outset, splendidly sustained in slow, harmonic rhythm and bolstered by a turbo-charged orchestral piano straightaway caught and held the attentions, before the piece flowed into a fugal-like sequence, with different strands clearly and sonorously delivered. I particularly relished what seemed like a Beethoven-like moment at the sequence’s end, not unlike the anticipation created by those repeated cries of “Vor Gott!!” in the latter’s Choral Symphony finale.

Beach’s own documented performances of Beethoven’s piano sonatas occasionally seemed to have “informed” her musical fabric in places, as echoes of passages from these works “ghosted“ the piano accompaniments and transitions linking the work’s sections. Jonathan Berkahn’s playing excellently dominated the sound-picture when appropriate and gave sterling support to the singers at other times while Director Thomas Nikora’s conducting allowed the stratospheric lines of the sopranos as much space and freedom as the basses’ lowest notes which here were “sounded” most impressively. What scintillations and energies there were in the renditions of the cries of “Gloria”, the lines riding on high in suitably ceremonial fashion, with the piano adding both sparkle and energy to the mix! And how sonorously the “Amens” sang out, gladdening the hearts and thrilling the senses of listeners revelling in the composer’s mastery of her forces and presentation of the material!

The “Festival Jubilate” was followed by another work by Amy Beach, a hymn written in 1915, to words by Edward Perronet, a Missionary who worked in India in the Eighteenth Century. Obviously hymn-like, the piece was beautifully sung, with the sopranos again shining with their sweet and true tones, and receiving plenty of support from the choir’s other sections. A third verse was begun softly, in contrast to the rest, while a concluding section grandly and unexpectedly modulated to bring the work to a satisfying end.

After the interval, something completely different diverted our attentions to engaging effect – a mini-recital of pieces written by a Wellington teacher and composer, Elaine Sharman. She studied composition at Victoria University of Wellington with both Douglas Lilburn and David Farquhar, but regarded herself more as an educationalist and advocate for music than a composer or performer. Incidentally, each of the four pieces have been published in recent collections of New Zealand piano music edited by composer-teacher Gillian Bibby, three in an anthology called “Take Flight” and one in another collection called “Sunrise”.

“Fish”, the first piece, alternated quirky, angular rhythms with more smoothly-flowing sets of impulses, while the following “Rain” gave us beautifully-wrought resonances deriving from both downward and upward figurations – a simple, but strongly effective illustrative idea, Debussy-like in effect. The third, “Icicles” evoked rows of stalagtites and stalagmites, strong at the base but delicate and scintillating at their tips.The final “Deep Water” began with subaqueous sounds whose impulses occasionally broke away to represent the play of light on the watery surfaces and the downward refraction of those light-strands, beautifully connecting surfaces and depths with murmuring arpeggiations – all simple, but stunningly effective, and played with real sensitivity by a member of Cantoris, bass

The choir re-entered (from the front, a little disconcertingly, this time) to perform Dame Gillian Whitehead’s Missa Brevis, a work I hadn’t heard “live”, even though it’s one of her earliest compositions. It has been given performances in both London and Chicago, as well as by a number of groups here in New Zealand, and recorded on the excellent “Waiteata Collection” series of CDs of NZ composers’ works.

Begun by the sopranos, the elegantly-shaped lines of the “Kyrie” immediately generated a kind of ritual ambience at once timeless and redolent of medieval music – the altos followed, elaborating on the sopranos’ figurations, the effect spreading through the voices, culminating in a resonant and definite chord of a fifth. Sopranos and altos harmonised in thirds with the “Christe”, tightening the intervals as the men’s voices entered, supported by a solo ‘cello. The men’s voices finished on a unison note. Then, with the “Kyrie’s” return the altos took the lead, the music beautifully flowing from line to line, each group “handing over” the music as the flow continued, again concluding with an open fifth.

A tenor solo began the “Gloria”, reinforcing the ritual once again, before the sopranos led off, combining with anxious intervals of a second in places with the altos, the text praising God, but the music displaying some tensions in the Almighty’s presence, settling down again with long unison stretches up to “Jesu Christe”, before rising in a series of layered pleadings at “Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris” – quite beautiful!

“Qui tollis” brought forth a different kind of beauty, long-breathed, tightly-harmonised floating lines sopranos lifting upwards, basses remaining anchored, as if all humanity were inhabiting the spaces in between, the different strands resonating with a beautifully-voiced ”Miserere nobis”, with the “fifth” again in evidence at the end. As if unable to restrain their emotions, the voices burst out with the “Quoniam”, pouring energy into their tones for the three “Tu solus…” acclamations, sopranos and altos encouraging each other in the “In Gloria dei Patris”, and then beginning a lovely elongated “Amen”.

We heard the gentle pealing of bells at the “Sanctus” with the sopranos and altos overlapping to redolent effect, melismatic impulses growing from the pealing bells, and a single-strand soprano “Pleni sunt caeli” similarly rising skyward – a beautiful sequence! The “Hosannas” were more declamatory and florid, making a telling contrast with the previous tintinnabulations. The “Benedictus” featured a near-obsessive downward repetition of a phrase from altos and basses, before the “Hosannas” sprang back into hearing, even more euphoric and florid than before.

After the beauties of the “Sanctus” the “Agnus Dei” was a sobering change, the vocal textures austere and bleak at the outset, the lines together but pursuing separate courses, the music rising to despairing heights, before the voices came together once more with “Dona Nobis Pacem”, the lines huddling together at first, but gradually opening up and out and risking a unison of hope right at the work’s end.

To conclude the concert we were given Jenny McLeod’s “Sun Festival Carols”, which was a 1983 commission from the Wellington City Council for the city’s “Sun Festival” of that year. On that occasion a women’s and children’s choir performed the carols, alongside various other festivities, including fireworks, to celebrate the beginning of summer.

The piano here returned as accompaniment, Jonathan Berkhan pitching the instrument once again into the fray with the voices, this time engaging with the attractive “Road Music” aspect of the opening carol, “Vulcan”, whose trajectory wasn’t unlike the well-known “Joshua fit de battle of Jericho”. It all worked well with piano, the syncopated rhythms all the more strongly projected and counter-balanced. By contrast the second carol, “Ochre”, was more ritualised and “circular” – the different lines described circles of their own to meet other strands, not unlike “recite and answer” music. A third carol “Azure” began with brilliant piano scintillations and with sopranos and altos exchanging opening lines, with the sopranos having a gorgeous sequence in the work’s middle, singing in thirds, before joining in unison with the other sections for a final, rousing effect.

A piquant rhythmic pattern supported flowing melodic lines in No.4 “Henna”, a gentle “gospel blues” kind of a rhythm, a marked contrast to the trenchant trajectories and melodies of the following carol No.5 “Gentian” –  an attractive syncopated filigree moment signalling a contrasting sequence during which the opening was momentarily “transformed” before returning to the grunty opening manner. A single note then heralded No.6 “Indigo I” with delicate lullabic sounds, from “out of the blue” as it were, a soprano being put to the test and emerging with credit, the women’s voices combining beautifully with the music’s more “narrative” sections.

The composer’s impish rhythmic invention brought No.7, “Jade”’s beginning to life, with straightforward meters gradually attenuated, sopranos and altos having the melody and the men the rhythm. The music irradiated joy and exuberance throughout its middle section, the piano’s extended postscript giving us the chance to “climb down” from wherever, once again, perhaps in preparation for the nostalgic beauties of the final carol Indigio II (No.8). Its gentle rhythms and beautiful melodic lines were here exquisitely realised, recalling for this listener something of the wonderment of a child’s Christmas. The central section’s long-breathed lines in particular seemed to activate the gift of recollection of long ago, the piano at the end appearing to trail off into a kind of disappearing world, having worked its magic in tandem with the rest of the performers’ sterling efforts.

Afterwards, while walking back to my car I was suddenly and unexpectedly re-struck by the thought that I had been to a concert whose music had been composed entirely by women – but at the time of listening I’d forgotten entirely about that, and so, probably, had most of the rest of the audience! Our enjoyment of it all was seemingly “driven” first and foremost by the sounds themselves and their performance – a sign of the times? – progress? – even a victory? 125 years AND Jacinda Ardern later, here was this music in New Zealand roaring out its message with no inhibitions or self-conscious restraints! Notable thoughts, and not the least for this day of days!…….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inspirare’s partnership with Youth Choirs a resounding success

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ILLUMINATIONS – Inspirare Choir, directed by Mark L.Stamper

PAUL BASLER – Missa Kenya
Richard Taylor (tenor) / Rachel Thomson, piano / Shadley van Wyk, horn
Jacob Randall, James Fuller, percussion
Wellington College Chorale / Men of Inspirare

IMANT RAMINSH – Missa Brevis
Maaike Christie-Beekmann (mezzo-soprano)/Rachel Thomson, piano
Queen Margaret College Chorale / Altissimi, Samuel Marsden Collegiate School, Karori
Women of Inspirare

JOHN RUTTER – Mass for the Children
Pasquale Orchard (soprano) / Daniel O’Connor (baritone)
Orchestra – Rebecca Steel, flute / Merran Cooke, oboe /Moira Hurst, clarinet
Leni Maeckle, bassoon / Shadley van Wyk, horn / Vanessa Souter, harp
Vicky Jones, bass / Michael Fletcher, organ / Grant Myhill , timpani
Jacob Randall and James Fuller, percussion
Wellington Young Voices / Metropolitean Cathedral Boys’ Choir
Inspirare

also featuring:
Z.RANDALL STROOPE – Tarantella
Helene Pohl, violin / Peter Gjelsten, violin
Hayden Nickel, viola / Rolf Gjelsten, ‘cello

CRAIG COURTENAY – Ukrainian Alleluia
Arr.JACKSON BERKEY – Cibola
Tejas Menon, TJ Shirtcliffe, guitars / Rachel Thomson, piano

Wellington College Chorale / Men of Inspirare

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Wellington

Saturday 15th September, 2018

This second concert that I’ve attended which featured the voices of Inspirare, a choir founded by their director, Mark L.Stamper, couldn’t have been more different from the first one (an inspirational performance of Sergei Rachmaninov’s All Night Vigil earlier this year), but was equally impressive in achieving what it had obviously set out to do. In the same venue as where the previous concert had held its audience spellbound, here was something more akin to a true community event, or even a school prizegiving, but with the intent of demonstrating to all and sundry what singers of all ages could achieve in tandem by dint of hard work and inspired direction.

A glance at the credits above will give the reader an idea of the variety of forces involved in this presentation – in itself it’s a tribute to both the organising skills and the visionary scope of Stamper that the different strands worked together so well. Though the audience was made up largely of people connected with the performers, a good many, like myself, were there primarily for musical reasons, drawn by the prospect of hearing repertoire which, if not familiar, certainly looked and sounded innovative and exciting, and especially if performed with a similar level of skill and intensity to that which for me made the Rachmaninov work so brilliantly.

It took but a few seconds of the opening item, a work by Z. Randall Stroope called “Tarantella” (curiously, not the usual 6/8 “spider-dance” tarantella rhythm one usually encounters in music so named), for us to register the performance commitment of the young singers of the Wellington College Chorale, the voices arrestingly full-toned from the beginning, and maintaining the rhythmic energies of the music’s running trajectories with great excitement, aided by handclapping and choreographic body movements, reflecting the adroit angularities of the accompaniments from the string players. I especially enjoyed the singers’ synchronised nodding heads indicating canonic or fugal entries, towards the piece’s conclusion.

We then got some sombre unaccompanied alleluias from the lower voices at the beginning of Craig Courtenay’s “Ukrainian Alleluia”, the tones beautifully hued with no lack of variety – the basses rich and sonorous, the tenors sweet and true. A lovely cascading effect was to be had at certain inner trajectory points (one of them finishing with an unscheduled slamming of a door somewhere that didn’t however disturb the singers’ flow, nor ruffle the harmonic clusters of the lines in the slightest!)….

An arrangement of the song “Cibola” brought out stunning attack on the song’s first note, thrown out by the singers almost defiantly – then, to rolling guitar accompaniments, the word “Cibola” was tossed every which way with remarkable dexterity, accompanied by vocal exclamations which added to the variety of colour and texture. Altogether these three works covered a lot of ground in both vocal and instrumental spheres, reflecting the conductor’s interest in variety and innovation as a means of securing maximum involvement in the music-making.

The same group of voices then prepared to present the first of the three major works on the programme, the “Missa Kenya” by Paul Basler. The composer worked as a teacher at the University of Kenyatta in Nairobi, thus coming into contact with a Kenyan vocal tradition whose elements he incorporated into his work, fused with Western traditions. We thus had a solo singer with chorus using elements such as what theorists term “call and response” and “call and refrain”, with the soloist and chorus sometimes overlapping. One would expect African folk music in general to be rhythmically rich, with rhythms sometimes playing alongside or against one another; and so it was here, particularly so in Basler’s treatment of the “Gloria”.

Originally written for mixed choir, the version of “Missa Kenya” performed this evening was for male voices only, with the Credo and Agnus Dei omitted. A strong unison beginning which had already showed off the strength and richness of these voices in “Cibola” was again employed at the “Kyrie’s” beginning, though broken soon after into different lines, ritualistic and dance-like, and underpinned by the composer’s instrument, the horn, and piano and percussion, though concluding with a return to more declamatory vocal gestures, counterpointed by the horn writing.

The “Gloria” I thought wonderfully “jivy”, the solo tenor and the choir exchanging phrases, and interspersing more declamatory passages. I liked the idea of the tenor (Richard Taylor) being more a “voice from the choir” rather than pushed too far to the front, even if his voice was occasionally swamped – he put across a true and songful account of his phrases, and the exchanges gave a more spontaneous feel to the music’s folk-like style. More ritualistic was the “Sanctus”, here joyful and bell-like, with the voices answered by splendid piano scintillations, the horn joining in with the voices in the raising-up of tones on high, most evident and celebratory in the “Hosannas”! Splendid!

There was a “changing of the guard” for the next item, Imant Raminsh’s “Missa Brevis” being sung by various female groups, the  Queen Margaret College Chorale, Altissime, from Samuel Marsden Collegiate School, all with the women’s voices from Inspirare, along with soloist mezzo-soprano Maaike Christie-Beekmann, and accompanist Rachel Thomson. Though written for a children’s choir, the work could also be sung by women and children. Beginning with the “Kyrie”, the work opened beautifully with a canonically-repeated “Kyrie” phrase, before the soloist entered with “Christe” – all very impassioned, with the choir supporting the soloist and the top notes made by the children’s group simply breathtaking in effect! When the “Kyrie ” returned with its canon-like phrases, the mezzo-soprano sang a descant-like line in accompaniment.

Contrasting with this was the “Gloria” with its toccata-like piano introduction, generating great expectation and excitement from the voices, rising to a pitch with Glorificamus te. Christie-Beekman’s rich mezzo gave us a heartfelt Gratias agimus tibi, answered by the choir, after which the heart of the movement was laid open with the sombre processional beginning at Qui tollis peccata mundi by the soloist, accompanied wordlessly by the choir up to Miserere, where the choir repeats Qui tollis – all very dark and intensely moving, with the concentration beautifully sustained, and reaching a climax with Miserere nobis, after which the prayer occasioned a brief calm, here, blown away by the attention-grabbing Quoniam, whose agitations led to a dancing fugue at Cum sancto spiritu, the singers exulting more and more vigorously until reaching a joyous Amen!

The Inspirare women’s voices added their strength and colour to the “Sanctus” – all most mellifluously realised, other-worldly in atmosphere, with stratospheric swayings and celestial harmonies thrown into relief by a dancing Hosanna in excelsis. Christie-Beekman’s voice ennobled the “Benedictus”, with Rachel Thomson’s piano practically orchestral in its support, while at the Hosanna’s reprise the music simply “took off”, giving the church’s acoustic a proper workout!

“Agnus Dei” was a properly concerted effort, solemn at the beginning, with the idiom straightforwardly melodic, and, quite unexpectedly, what sounded like a solo oboe accompanying the voices most affectingly at the repeat of the opening. Christie Beekman led the third “Agnus Dei” into Dona nobis pacem, the children’s choir positively radiant-sounding when joining in, contributing to a resounding and moving conclusion from the whole ensemble.

In welcoming us back for the concert’s second half, Mark Stamper reiterated a request for the audience to allow the separate Mass movements of what was to follow to continue uninterrupted, and to save its applause for the end – part of the initial confusion was, I think, having the three separate pieces at the concert’s beginning, which as stand-alone works each deserved audience acclamation, but then got us into an “applaud everything” mode. The message, diplomatically worded, was re-received, and, I think, understood.

So, to the “Mass of the Children”, a work completed by John Rutter in 2003. Associated with the loss of his son in an accident in 2001, the work represented at the time a kind of “return” to the life of a composer, but also a tribute in tandem to his “formative” experience as a pupil of Highgate School chosen to sing in Britten’s War Requiem under the baton of the composer himself. Rutter wanted to create something that might replicate a bringing together of children and adult performers “in a similar enriching way”. This performance thus brought together the Wellington Young Voices, the Metropolitean Cathedral Boys’ Choir and Inspirare with two young soloists, soprano Pasquale Orchard and baritone Daniel O’Connor, and a chamber orchestra.

A radiant, Respighi-like opening to the work brought forth luminously shimmering instrumental textures, introducing the children’s voices, not with the Kyrie, as is usual in a Mass, but with lines from a seventeenth-century hymn written by Bishop Thomas Ken – “Awake my soul and with the sun”, after which the adult choir sang the “Kyrie” – here the flowing lines reminded me in their manner of Faure’s Requiem, with its fluent blending of lyricism and impassioned declamation. The children’s voices sang “Christe Eleison”, with accompaniments I found glittering, and a touch spectral, followed by the return of “Kyrie Eleison” with soprano and baritone joining with the choir, Pascale Orchard’s voice here strong and vibrant, and Daniel O’Connor’s sonorous and steady. At the end the organ made a deep, resoundingly satisfying impression.

Growing in energy and light, the “Gloria” rose from the depths, its rhythmic trajectories enlivening the performers and their words, children and then adults echoing the opening cries, then revelling in the jazzy angularities leading to Et in terra pax with its cherubic bell-like chants for the children’s voices. Soprano and baritone exchanged phrases at Domine Deus Rex caelestis with the music at Filius patris taking on the character of a floating ostinato as the music arched its way  through Qui tollis peccata mundi, the lines nicely balanced by the soloists throughout right up to Miserere nobis. A vibrant return to life came with Quonian, the music jazzy and energetic in these performers’ hands, carrying us away with its exuberance to the end.

The gently glowing wind arabesque-like solos brought in the “Sanctus” presented by the choir like a gently-tolling bell, the voices rising to impassioned tones at the Hosannas, and again from the Pleni sunt caeli onwards. What a gorgeous panoply of wind sounds accompanying the children’s singing of “Benedictus”, itself so affecting with those innocent, ethereal tones – such drama in the contrast between adult and children’s voices, here! As the soloists sang the Benedictus as a duet, the instruments provided heart-easing counterpoints to the music’s simple intensities.

If the impression thus far was of a composer who preferred light to darkness, the grimmer, haunted opening of the Agnus Dei  dispelled the notion for the setting’s duration – the organ’s tones of disquiet, the haunted strings and winds, and the chromatic lines of the voices in their Agnus Dei utterances instigated currents of lament that gradually built to great waves, reinforced by tubular bells sounding a tocsin of gloom – perhaps one might regard the introduction at this point of the children’s choir with an angelic setting of William Blake’s “Little Lamb who made thee?” as much an unsubtle contrast as a masterstroke (critical opinions vary on the topic!), but the very sound of the voices here acted like balm to the sensibilities, irradiating the gloom with light and hope, until the music again darkened as the voices took up the repeated pleas of Miserere nobis.

Came the work’s final section, the “Dona Nobis pacem”, beginning with somewhat Elgarian string-phrases, and a baritone solo (supported by beautifully-turned wind solos), Rutter setting the words of a prayer “Lord open thou mine eyes that I may see” by Lancelot Andrews (1555-1626) to a nicely-turned melody, delivered confidently and strongly by Daniel O’Connor, then enabling the soprano to affectingly carry the melody further with different words, those of a 5th-century text called St.Patrick’s Breastplate.

The work’s final section featured the adult voices (choir and soloists) reiterating the words “Agnus Dei” and  “Dona nobis pacem” while the children’s voices soared above the chant with Thomas Ken’s “Glory to thee, my God this night” set to Thomas Tallis’s well-known canonic melody, the music gently subsiding into silence at the end, everything, as throughout the work, most sensitively balanced and controlled by Mark Stamper.

There could be no doubt as to the commitment and involvement of all the musicians throughout this ambitious presentation, one whose on-going strength of purpose, depth of interpretation and skill of execution represented a resounding and well-deserved tribute to the various choirs and choir directors involved, to the soloists and instrumentalists, and to Inspirare Choir and Mark Stamper,  its “inspirational” Music Director.

 

 

 

The Borodin Quartet – rich in tradition, focused and austere in performance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music NZ presents:
The Borodin Quartet – music by Haydn, Shostakovich, Wolf, Tchaikovsky

HAYDN – Quartet in B Minor Op.33 No.1
SHOSTAKOVICH – Quartet No.9 in E-flat Major Op.117
WOLF – Italian Serenade
TCHAIKOVSKY – String Quartet No.1 in D Major Op.11

The Borodin Quartet  –  Ruben Aharonian (leader) / Sergei Lomovsky (violin)
Igor Naidin (viola) / Vladimir Balshin (‘cello)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday, September 13th, 2018

I found myself wondering how many people in the hall on Thursday evening besides myself might have been similarly “initiated” into chamber music by the Borodin Quartet via a famous 1962 Decca LP recording of the music of Borodin (the well-known Second String Quartet) and Shostakovich (the Eighth Quartet). At that stage of the quartet’s colourful history, two of its “foundation members” from 1945 were still with the group, the leader, violinist Rostislav Dubinsky, and the ‘cellist Valentin Berlinsky (actually, the young Mstislav Rostropovich was nominally the first ‘cellist, but withdrew after only a few weeks, and was replaced by Berlinsky). It’s no wonder, then, that the name “Borodin Quartet” still has the power to evoke a resonant sense of history and profound artistic achievement.

That particular recording (which I heard at a friend’s house) tumbled me into a world I knew almost nothing about at that stage – but it was a searing initiation into a form of music I hadn’t previously given much thought to, apart from regarding the idea of “chamber music” as something for people of “advanced” years who didn’t like their music to be too noisy! – rather, to be well-mannered and contained. So, the Borodin Quartet’s playing of the Shostakovich work in particular on that recording  REALLY knocked me sideways, blowing out the chamber-like walls of my youthful preconceptions in the process…….

Forty years and more later, here I am, sitting in and sharing a space with the Borodin Quartet itself – NOT, of course those same individuals whose playing on Decca SXL 6036 brought a new world to view for me, but their successors – two of the present group have been there since 1996 – leader, Reuben Aharonian, and violist Igoir Naidin, while more recently (2007), Vladimir Balshin took over as ‘cellist from the incredibly long-serving Valentin Berlinsky, and lastly, Sergei Lomovsky became the second violinist in 2011.

Though obviously possessing its own unique sound, the present Quartet members consider they have retained something of the original group’s unique identity. While not attributed to any one quartet member, a statement from the group’s “official” website pretty well sums up the on-going philosophy of maintaining that tradition, and is worth quoting at length:

As each newcomer joins, he hears the existing members playing in a very recognisable style, so he is automatically soaking up the tradition. It’s not formal teaching, as if your colleagues are correcting you. A quartet is in a permanent state of studying from each other. It’s as natural a process as could exist, learning while performing with your elder colleagues.

If tonight’s concert was anything to go by, it seemed to my ears that the group had of recent times evolved a less self-consciously expressive, and more “contained” approach in general to their music-making than I remembered from even more recent recordings. I wondered whether this had been instigated by the leader, Reuben Aharonian, whose whole aspect besides his music-making had a kind of austerity about it, with minimal physical movement and a vaguely distant manner, bordering on the dispassionate in overall effect. Away from visual impressions (in effect, listening with my eyes closed), I felt as the evening’s music-making proceeded that the playing “warmed up”, with both second-half items generously and characterfully realised – but this could have been a process of  partly “getting used to” the discrepancy between the visual austerities and the latent generosity of the interpretations!

In appearance, the other quartet members presented a kind of droll “proximity ratio” to their leader’s self-containment, with second violinist, violist and ‘cellist in turn displaying increasing physical animation – but again, this all began to “run together” as the concert unfolded. The Quartet began the evening’s music-making with Josef Haydn’s Op.33 No.1, the String Quartet in B Minor, one of six similar works known collectively as the “Russian” Quartets because of their dedication to the Grand Duke Paul of Russia – all very appropriate, of course.

A delicately wistful dance at the outset gave rise to a counterbalanced Beethoven-like thrusting passage, and an injection of major-key warmth  to the proceedings, which involved a development section that “played with” the opening theme on different modes. Haydn kept us guessing as to what the music would do next, and the players’ largely “contained” aspect did the rest! Instead of a Minuet to follow, Haydn penned a scherzo-like movement, dynamic at the outset, and gentle and sinuous throughout the Trio – the contrasting moods here made a stunning impression through being tossed off so effortlessly.

The Andante was the scherzo’s antithesis, the first violin enunciating his arching-over melody with impeccable taste, and the accompaniments bringing out further the warm gentility of the phrases – here it was the second subject group which darkened the mood with a more trenchant quality, and some intense modulations towards the piece’s end. Finally, the concluding finale movement switched nonchalantly from major to minor, with the quartet members again quizzically producing the most characterful sounds and rhythms with marked sobriety – the music’s energy, drama and theatricality was at once visually internalised and musically brought to the fore – a remarkable display!

The original members of the Borodin Quartet were contemporaries of Dmitri Shostakovich, though the composer had already forged a bond with the older Beethoven Quartet in the 1930s and subsequently entrusted the premiere performances of thirteen of his quartets to this almost-as-long-serving ensemble (the Beethoven Quartet disbanded in 1987 after fifty-six years!). However, having recorded all of Shostakovich’s String Quartets twice, with various single remakes, the Borodin Quartet could be said to have established their own kind of tradition of interpretation of these works, one which (reputedly), in the case of at least one of the quartets, “diverted” the composer’s preference for his original dedicatees’ performance.

Here we were given the composer’s Ninth Quartet, one whose first completed version the composer reputedly destroyed in a fit of depression (Shostakovich later described the incident as “an attack of healthy self-criticism”), and taking three years to complete the new work, in May 1964. From the outset, a bleak, worrying chromatic figure wove its way around and about the jog-trot rhythms, with certain figures obsessively recurring as if being held tightly for purposes of security – there came a moment when the chromatic figures rose spectrally upwards and seemed to threaten the tightly-held equilibrium of the music’s progress, but the shadows drew back and allowed the work to proceed. Soon after, without warning, the sounds unfurled deeply-hued tones which stilled forward movement, the players by turns declaiming and whispering expressions of deeply-felt emotion and pensive stillness.

The Allegretto which followed was quickly turned into a quintessential Russian dance-like episode, occasionally pre-echoing the three-note “William Tell” rhythms which the composer was to return to in the Fifteenth Symphony, but intensifying the mood and recalling the bleak, worrying figures at the work’s beginning, here far more energetic and biting, like a nightmare come true. The violin attempted some gaiety with a cheerful dancing figure, but the mood was too “danse macabre” to be reassuring!

The players seemed to unfold these transformations of mood, both abrupt and osmotic, with the minimum of outward fuss and display, but with surely-defined intensifications and yielding nuances throughout. The composer’s seeming endless invention found direct and unfussy expression,, solitary moments rudely interrupted by free-for-all-like outbursts indicating both exterior and interior conflicts and tensions. As remarkable as any of the sequences was the finale’s “whirling dervish” world of vertiginous exhilaration, whose episodes drove grimly and resolutely towards a hard-won triumph of the human spirit.

We certainly needed an interval in which to regain some composure after such an onslaught, the  first item in the second half continuing thankfully to refresh our beleaguered spirits with its blandishments of a piquant nature – this was Hugo Wolf’s “Italian Serenade”. Everywhere there was a kind of insouciance which countered seriousness, except, perhaps, as a pastime! I loved the music’s generosity of line and openness of texture, taking me out-of-doors and (paraphrasing the words of Sir Thomas Beecham) “liberating me from conscious thought”. The players’ very “straight” demeanour in fact here added by dint of contrast to the abandonment of the sounds to the open spaces that the music generated – and the ending was brought off by the deftest of touches!

After this was left the Tchaikovsky First String Quartet, with its famous “Andante Cantabile” movement that made Tchaikovsky’s name resound throughout the musical world of the time. Again the players made a virtue out of their controlled, beautifully-polished way of rendering the sounds, though by this time we were “listening through” appearances to the sounds the ensemble was making. Immediately we heard from the players that distinctive and haunting vibrancy of tone and timbre one associates with Russian music of this era, suggesting, perhaps that Tchaikovsky himself composed more idiomatically than his composer-contemporaries gave him credit for (as far as he himself was concerned his own “Russianness” in his art was never in doubt!).

The famous “Andante Cantabile” was here given a reading whose tones and resonances were so other-worldly and dream-like I was enchanted, to the point where, during the second subject’s haunting refrain I could hardly distinguish between sound and memory – so heart-easing, simple and yet so resonant. If the scherzo seemed like an intrusion after this, then that was the composer’s fault, not that of the players. There was a no-nonsense quality about the performance, strongly contrasting with what we had just heard, and the more telling for that – the “Trio” was rather more yielding, blending cantabile with staccato bowings most winsomely.

At once direct and quixotic, straightforward and quirky, the finale here set full-toned tutti sounds against more will-o-the-wisp passages, with, in places, as much spirit as substance at work, a gamut of sounds I really enjoyed for their faery-like character. There was no all-purpose fullness of tones except during a lovely cello solo – the rest was characterful in a different way, the music driven excitingly to its joyous conclusion. We prevailed with our applause and got a brief encore, a simple and touching rendition of a Tchaikovsky piece called “Morning Prayer” – all an embodiment of musical history, for our pleasure and wonderment…….

 

 

 

 

 

Dynamic, muscular and sonorous – Orpheus and Wellington Youth choirs tackle Verdi’s Requiem with Orchestra Wellington to stupendous effect

Posted on by Peter Mechen

VERDI – Requiem Mass

Antoinette O’Halloran (soprano)
Deborah Humble (mezzo-soprano)
Diego Torre (tenor)
James Clayton (baritone)

Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Wellington Youth Choir

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre. Wellington

Saturday, September 8th, 2018

Choir(s) and Orchestra alike would have been more than gratified at the audience turnout for this concert – the ensuing atmosphere reminded me of the same combination’s brilliantly successful presentation of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” of a couple of years ago. Naturally, the performance ethos in this instance was somewhat more sombre, as befitted the subject matter, but the musicians’ commitment to the task of realising the sounds was in most places just as compelling.

I must admit to initial surprise at having a lineup of soloists predominantly from offshore, with the exception of adopted Wellingtonian James Clayton – surely we could have had at least one New Zealand-born singer in the ranks? I don’t for a moment condone the idea of any kind of local “quota” in these matters, as individual merit should always be a consideration – but it often seems to me that the attitude of organisations is “imported singers are better” – or maybe even “imported singers draw the crowds” – and in my view, it’s not necessarily the case.

Yes, I admit I am, perhaps unfairly, singling out one concert, here, as Orchestra Wellington is, in fact,  usually an exemplar in this regard, as witness the recent concerts involving soloists such as pianists Michael Houstoun and Jian Liu, violinists Amalia Hall and Wilma Smith, and singer Roger Wilson.  I simply, and not unreasonably, want to make a particular point, with this occasion being, on the face of things, fair game! I had no real qualms about any of the singing performances, but still feel that it would be good for august local musical organisations to consistently demonstrate robust support for local artists. Perhaps there was a circumstance that might have forced orchestra or choir to use mainly offshore soloists in this case, but I wasn’t made aware of it.

Away from such considerations, and focusing on the performance, I thought the stand-out vocal achievements of the evening were provided firstly by the choir itself, here made up of the combined Orpheus and Wellington Youth Choirs, and secondly the mezzo, Deborah Humble. The other soloists all, I thought, gradually “came into their own” as the performance went on, whereas for me, Humble “hit the ground running” with her first extended solo, “Liber scriptus proferetur”, giving her tones  apocalyptic foreboding, and “pinging” her notes with impressive accuracy. Then, in the following “Quid sum miser” her more cantabile qualities beautifully augmented the voices of both tenor and soprano. Her ability to blend with others was as much a delight as her solo singing, as with the soprano, Antoinette O’Halloran, in a sublime “Agnus Dei”, and then with tenor and baritone in a beseechful “Lux aeterna”, delivering a radiant final “lux aeterna, luceat eis Domine” over the tenor and baritone counterpointings at the end.

As a team the quartet of soloists worked well together, none obtruding in ensemble passages, but maintaining their individual lines, almost to a fault at times where I occasionally wanted a bit more “temperament” to match something of the choir’s fervour. I’m normally a great fan of baritone James Clayton’s, but here I thought his singing in places strangely inward-sounding, as if pondering his own mortality ahead of beseeching his Maker for mercy on behalf of all humankind. An example was his solemnly-intoned “Requiem aeternam” during the “Lux aeterna”, where I was expecting more apocalyptic-like pronouncements. True, his vocal manner was perfect for “Mors stupebit”, deep and solemn, but then seemed to lack sufficient “bite” at “Confutatis maledictis”, which really surprised me, as I’ve heard him “let fly” in the past with magisterial results.

I warmed to tenor Diego Torre as the evening went on, finding his voice a touch constricted-sounding at the outset, but with his tones better-focused and more open by the time he reached his important solo “Ingemisco tanquam reus”, with those achingly beautiful winds echoing and augmenting the vocal line. After the Lacrimosa’s great climax, he contributed sensitively to the ensemble in “Pie Jesu Domine”, and in the Offertorium, sang his “Hostias” with touching inner feeling, despite the accompanying horns being a shade too prominent to my ears (the only wayward balance I noticed in the entire performance…….).

Antoinette O’Halloran’s “big” sequence was, of course the “Libera me” which I thought she addressed with just the right degree of awe and urgency (“Tremens factus sum ego  et timeo”) and lyrical sweetness (“Requiem aeternam”). Earlier she had beautifully capped off the trio “Quid sum miser” with a lovely ascent at the concluding “cum vix justus sit securus”, but seemed to me not entirely comfortable with her intonation at a comparable place place in the “Recordare”. This apart, she contributed to a generally unified ensemble of soloists, at all times ably supported by conductor and players.

Throughout, the sheer presence of the massed voices, whether singing softly or powerfully, and across the whole dynamic spectrum, made for a gripping and visceral experience. Right from the beginning, the contrast between the opening murmurings of the words “Requiem aeternam”, and the sudden, galvanising effect of the basses’ entry at “Te decet hymnus” captured the writing’s unashamed volatility and theatricality, equally drawing us in as listeners to both the hushed and the open-throated declamations, and holding us in thrall throughout.

The deservedly celebrated “Dies Irae” sections had all the weight and “bite” from the voices that the words needed, with the soft singing (such as at “Quantus tremor est futurus”) putting across an awestruck quality which most appropriately ushered in the crushing onslaught of the “Tuba mirum”. At the section’s “other end” came the cortege-like trajectories of the Lacrymosa, building in weight and intensity to enormous proportions, superbly sung by the choir and pliably controlled by conductor Marc Taddei, as were both the vocal and the instrumental “Amens” at the end, beautifully summonsed from the silences before being allowed their full exhalation of breath.

What a contrast with the urgently launched, and excitably declaimed “Sanctus” – here dancing with delight, there shouting with fierce exultation, the singing by turns full-throated and delicate, concluding with a joyful “Hosanna in excelsis!”, the ascending syncopated brass accents as startling to the ears as ever!  Again, there was yet another complete change of expressive mode with the “Agnus Dei” (a different kind of celestial outpouring!) the two women superb, and the choir floating its myriad voices like stars in the Milky Way.

As for the “Libera me” (virtually a work in itself, of course), the choir played its part to perfection – awe-struck at its first entry, immediately following the soprano’s impassioned opening, then hurling itself once again into the maelstrom of “Dies Irae”, the basses wonderfully sepulchral in their after- mutterings of “Dies Irae, dies illa”, then joining with the rest of the voices in support of the soprano’s plea for mercy for departed souls. That done, the voices again took up their cudgels and hove to with a will into the fugue, their hushed tones as spine-tingling as their shouts of terror. The tremendous climax at “die illa tremenda” over, the voices whispered the final “Libera me’s” with an indescribably moving amalgam of fear, exhaustion, hope and faith at the work’s end – a stunning achievement!

As was that of the orchestral players in support of all described above, under the sure-footed direction of conductor Marc Taddei. The instrumental detailing, especially from the winds in their various accompaniments of the singers, was characterful and ear-catching at all times, the string-playing was by turns ethereal and sonorous, and the brass and percussion simply awesome in effect, the placement of the “Tuba Mirum” trumpets at various places in the auditorium opening up the vistas and filling our sensibilities with proper wonderment. I’ve heard more consciously doom-laden performances, with more apocalyptic “grunt” in places from singers and instrumentalists alike, but this was a dynamic, muscular rendition of a work which enabled its greatness to shine forth in splendid fashion.

 

 

Richard Mapp at St.Andrew’s in Wellington – piano-playing with a quality of connection

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RICHARD MAPP – Piano Recital

J.S.BACH – Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Minor (WTC Bk.1 BWV 849)
KENNETH YOUNG – Five Pieces for Piano (2002) – No. 5
SCHUBERT – Three Piano Pieces D.946
FREDERIC CHOPIN –  Nocturne in C Minor Op.48 No. 1
OLIVIER MESSIAEN – Premiere communion de la vierge (No.11 of Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jesus)
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Seven Fantasies Op.116

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church

Sunday, September 2nd, 2018

Most intriguingly, the mere prospect of attending a piano recital by Richard Mapp gives rise to feelings within me of a kind of anticipation that I find difficult to explain, except with what seems like vague and insubstantial language, unable to properly grasp the essence of what gives my feelings any kind of actuality. But there’s a quality I’ve always felt in his playing that, in my experience of concert-going induces within the listener a more-than-usual urge to “connect” with the sounds he enables from his instrument, as if they’re given by him a certain “truth” or a whole-heartedness of utterance refreshingly out-of-the-ordinary.

Given that great music is almost  always better than it can be performed for various reasons – such as the phenomenon of musicians having to “refract” their own responses to this body of work in order to make it “sound”,  and that we all, as individuals, have unique responses to these sounds and their characteristics – there’s always going to be considerable divergence of opinion regarding the essences of what emerges from all of this, both played and heard!  These comments, therefore, are not set in stone, but as Keats observed, more “writ in water” – even so, I still find myself wanting to try and make some further sense of my impressions of Richard Mapp’s playing, which I hope will happen at least in part during the course of this review.

There’s no better way for a piano recital to begin than with the music of “Johann Sebastian – mighty Bach!!”, as writer and poet Dylan Thomas’s organ-playing character Organ Morgan declaims at one point, in the play “Under Milk Wood”. Contradictory though that statement might seem in the sense of hearing the music played on an instrument Bach didn’t REALLY know, his music does possess that quintessentially Baroque quality of ready and fluid transcription – the composer’s own work attests to that in a number of instances! Here, Richard Mapp successfully brought out all of the music’s grandeur, the opening of the Prelude unfurling all the purples and deep ceremonial resonances of the music’s solemn canonic statements, the playing at once full-toned and registering infinite shades of focus. As for the Fugue,  it steadily enunciated its shape and cornerstones before beginning its process of “growing” from what had gone before, the voices in concert seemingly very aware of one another, to the point of even “playing” for one another so as to make a concerted effort to push through the impediments and into the culminating sunlight.

The pianist somewhat wryly commented that his programming seemed to have placed the recital’s oldest and newest pieces cheek-by-jowl, but in the process had discovered certain “links” between them. This was Kenneth Young’s piece, of course, the fifth part of a work called “Five Pieces”, which was written for Michael Houstoun. A rich, chordal fabric (almost Messiaen-like) dominated the music’s opening, the progressions angular in places, but still pleasing. The music had plenty of “attitude”, but also generated something of the strength of a Baroque Master’s music, the writing severe, but coherent and cumulative, and leading to a heart-easing liquidity throughout a middle sequence, and then some swirling agitations leading to a climax of sorts. Out of the ensuing debris reappeared the opening chords, embedding themselves more deeply and richly this time around, and with a decorative counterpointing figure that rose upwards and became a kind of “landscaped benediction” it seemed, the phrases shifting and echoing briefly and chromatically. Would that we had heard the whole set…….

Recompense was, however, at hand with Mapp’s playing of Schubert’s enigmatic Three Piano Pieces D.946, works that the composer produced in a kind of “ferment” of activity during the last year of his life, 1828, along with the last three piano sonatas, the great String Quintet, and the song-cycle Schwanengesang. Arguably, too much has been romantically read into the circumstances surrounding the composer’s state of health throughout this time – though by this time syphilitic, Schubert, like Mozart, would not have expected that he would die so soon – and the moments of darkness and turmoil which are present in these works are balanced by occasional humour, quirkiness and high spirits. Each of the three pieces have disconcertingly contrasted moods, in line with the other works composed throughout this period, and present a kind of totality of emotion, an awareness of both light and dark, and a varied response to these states of being.

The opening Allegro assai conjured up some kind of dark “inner” pursuit, the music loaded with grim intent but never threatening from without, Mapp keeping the music’s swirling textures to the fore as much as he did the galloping rhythms. The music’s central sections were properly songful, but made of the same connective tissue of feeling as the opening, so that the parts related rather than contrasted, with no real “escape” from the darkness. So, when the galloping opening returned, the effect was like that of a dark dream refocused, with the pianist intensifying both trajectories and textures, filling the concluding silences with unease.

With the Allegretto which followed, we were seductively drawn further into the music’s world by Mapp’s heart-easing lyricism of expression – he gave the melodic trajectories elbow-rooms of space in which to breathe, the writing seemingly unencumbered by barlines or any other metrical considerations. Then, the central section took up a nervous energy, the disquiet of the music compounded by the exchanges of intensity between the hands, the bass having the melody and the treble hammering out the rhythms, something almost Grieg-like in the music’s “halling” aspect. A return to the lyrical opening was short-lived, the music breaking into a different discourse with pathetic, almost hallucinatory gestures, as if the sounds were a marionette’s arms flailing helplessly in a kind of claustrophobic space, almost Mahlerian in their contrasting garishness and impotence of expression. What relief the return of the opening lyrical strains gave us, after such unnerving dreams!

After this the gaiety and energetic drive of the third piece in Mapp’s hands seemed almost manic at first, though a change of trajectory brought us something resembling a “trio” sequence, a free-spirited, filigree right-hand decorative figure accompanying the second half of the passage. One learns to expect the unexpected with Schubert, however, and the music was true to form, suddenly turning on itself and galloping back into the fray of the opening energies! Here, the playing reached a kind of overdrive, whirling its way to a brilliant conclusion! I couldn’t have imagined a more rounded and multi-faceted performance as we got here, of this richly-endowed but still enigmatic work – it left me as amazed and disarmed as much as surprised and delighted.

After an interval we were treated to a performance of Chopin’s sublime Op.48 No.1 Nocturne, with its contrasted opening processional sequences, the first solitary and melancholic, the second purposeful and increasingly defiant. The differences were at first easefully and then vibrantly negotiated by Mapp, the music gathering determination and hurling out a challenge as the irrupting figures rose up and scattered order and decorum, leaving dazed, agitated impulses rallying themselves as best they could, desperately seeking to reconnect with a world dishevelled and broken – a journey ending in darkness and profound disillusionment.

Something of an antidote to this existential despair was provided by Olivier Messiaen, in Première communion de la Vierge, the eleventh piece in the composer’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus.  I had, some years ago heard Mapp in recital play all but one of these remarkable pieces, and illuminating them with his sensitivity of touch and command of resonance. Those timeless left-hand chords which began the piece threw the scintillations of light in the treble into bold relief, at first seeming as awakenings of nature before developing into gently-undulating bell sounds. This ritual of interaction suddenly exploded on both sides with joyously jazzy energies invigorating the mother-child interactions and rituals, filling us with wonderment at such celestial exchanges and with contentment at their humanity. By the piece’s end it seemed as if heaven and earth were united, as opening chords and scintillating responses became as one.

In the wake of these two second-half pieces, I found myself fighting the urge to wish we were getting some Liszt at the recital’s end – however, Brahms it was to be, even though Chopin and Messiaen had put me in a “fanciful” mood, something which the first of Brahms’ Fantasias, with its rough-hewn and fussily rhythmic writing only confirmed my misgivings. Thankfully, the second Intermezzo piece broke down some of my resistance with its opening “nature-calls” amid a magically-wrought ambience, Mapp beautifully enabling the enrichment of the textures in the piece’s middle section before the more “solitary” aspects of the music reclaimed the territories at the end.

A more combatative and angular mood was established by the third piece, Capriccio, developing a kind of vortex of agitated feeling before a more nobly-conceived middle section “rescued” the music for a few, warmly lyrical moments. “Related to some of Brahms’ songs” writes one commentator about the next Intermezzo, whose opening, improvisatory gestures resemble a kind of question/answer sequence, the feeling caught and held for us most warmly by Mapp in a beautifully romantic and wistfully expressive central flowering of emotion. In spite of myself, I thought it remarkable piano writing, sensitive and poetic.

The second of three Intermezzi “on the trot” contrasted with what had gone just before by dint of the music’s somewhat quirky chromatic figurations, something of a spectral waltz at the outset, though more flowing and softer-edged throughout a contrasting central passage. Mapp brought out both quirkiness and beauty throughout the strange, half-lit measures of the dance. The third Intermezzo in a row reverentially intoned a hymn-like series of chords by way of introduction to a more flowing kind of “trio” section in which the “hymn” tune showed increased animation,  before rhapsodising its way most beautifully over the same chordal structures, as it gave new life to the material.

To finish, Brahms returned to the opening Capriccio’s more agitated manner, the music dominated at the outset by a descending repeated three-note figure, one which was just as pervasive in a much gentler way throughout a contrastingly slower, more easeful section. With the return of the agitations, the music then cranked up even further in a coda which tightened the rhythms as the music’s crisis-points loomed, the sounds cascading spectacularly in Mapp’s hands, creating sonorous bell-like figures whose resonances were splendidly extolled by the pianist right to the last.

Though I was still left with a slight hankering at the end for something seemingly less consciously “wrought” and more transcendental of ambience, Mapp’s splendid playing had brought me a good deal of the way back “into” the music, and left me with a feeling of having experienced a satisfying whole (a Chopin Waltz played as an encore further eased my sensibilities!). Altogether, quite a journey, which we in the audience duly acknowledged with the sincerest of tributes to the pianist, as befitted a memorable and rewarding occasion.

 

 

Stroma – Iconic Sonics at the City Gallery, Wellington…..revisiting the new, along with the new

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma presents:
ICONIC SONICS – Music by Reuben Jellyman, Iannis Xenakis, Kaija Saariaho,
Witold Lutoslawski and Gyorgy Ligeti

SAARIAHO – New Gates (1996)
LIGETI – Ramifications (1968-9)
JELLEYMAN – Designs (2018 – world premiere)
XENAKIS – Aroura (1971)
LUTOSLAWSKI – Chain 1 (1983)

Stroma, conducted by Hamish McKeich

City Gallery, Civic Square, Wellington

Wednesday 29th August 2018

Eighteen years into the 21st Century a lot of music-lovers are still coming to grips with the innovators and radical figures of twentieth-century music.

It’s a process which was in some ways mirrored a century ago by the fin de siècle attitude of many people to the works of Berlioz, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Bruckner and Mahler, all of whom had to wait for a “later time”, at which stage their creative achievements were able to be given a fairer, more contextual hearing. Each of these composers achieved some degree of early success based on less challenging, more populist aspects of their output at the time, but all as well produced significant music that underwent neglect and/or earned them hostility, some of which “fallout” continues in certain cases to this day.

Each one of the offshore composers represented in this concert emulates those 19th century figures in their music of a century later, wanting to change the existing order of rules and conventions in order to discover hitherto unexplored worlds and renew human creativity. Though there continues to be something of a “divide” between traditionalists and supporters of the new, it’s by no means as pronounced or indeed as “character-assassination-like” in intent as of yore – and in fact there’s plenty more coming-and-going between the two “sides” than there used to be in the good/bad old days!

It’s possible that the music of Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006)  is the most widely-disseminated of that of the group, having, of course, been given a “head-start” by Stanley Kubrick in his iconic film 2001 – a Space Odyssey (albeit without the composer’s consent at first).  Ligeti’s music evokes the cosmos like no other, with no sounds conceivably more unearthly or far-flung than his Atmospheres, enthralling a whole generation of film-goers with his micro-polyphonic clusters piled up and intertwined like a great city’s communication-centre’s wires and cables. But he was never content to repeat himself, and though he was continually fascinated by polyphonies he strove to formulate new ways of arranging, or even “de-arranging” (deranging?) them. His Ramifications, for twelve solo strings, which we heard tonight, and which date from the end of the decade of Atmospheres, already show the composer employing “destabilising” techniques – diversifying the polyphonies by having half the ensemble tune higher than the other half, thereby heightening his writing’s tensions with built-in-dissonances.

The piece opened with “nature-sounds”, gently undulating textures pursuing separate patternings, like distant individual conversations, whose resonances seemed to gradually fuse as if organically linked, a kind of naturally-wrought beauty burgeoning towards the stratospheres and growing in intensity. The sounds clustered around and fused with a single note, before others magically “turned on” as if they were glow-worms in a dark cave. Lower instruments began their own patterned journeyings but with more volatile results, irruptions, re-stratifications, everything pursuing its own rhythmic and pitch courses – what frenzy! – what abandonment! – what devastations, as everything played itself out and tumbled down to the depths in a kind of private Gotterdammerung.

But with that, was the work finished? No, Ligeti’s fine wisps of skeletal light then quietly reactivated the “survivors” across a spectrum that reached down to things that went “bump” in the night, all of whom enigmatically withdrew, whispering ethereal blandishments into the composer’s eternities.

At this point I ought to confess that I’ve jumped ahead, as, for housekeeping reasons, the first piece Stroma presented was not Ligeti’s but one written by Kaija Saariaho (b.1952).  This work, titled New Gates was written in 1996, and was derived from a ballet called Maa, from five years earlier. The concert’s excellently-notated printed programme informed us that this ballet is constructed not around a plot as such but built out of “thematic archetypes” representing passing through into something new – gates, doors, journeyings, new worlds. Saariaho’s  sound-world here was accordingly made up of lucid, minimal gestures and figures, allowing we listeners time and space in which to connect with both finely-wrought timbral detail and larger, further-reaching ambiences and movements.

Written for just three instruments, flute, harp and viola, the music sounded a single note out of the silence of its beginning, whose pitch was bent upwards in a way that suggested a striving of impulse towards the heavens.  Throughout the music’s course the flute and violin breathed, bent and stretched their lines as the harp “texturised” the spaces and/or circumlocuted the portals of passage, often “bardic-sounding” as if accompanying a sequence of storytelling, or “fleshing out” an ongoing pulse. Those “fine timbral details” mentioned in the programme note were very much in evidence throughout, the timeless process of progressive change taking on varying forms, the most prevalent being a series of on-going exhalations which for a while gathered up energy and focus and threatened to burgeon without actually doing so, the light and movement of the impulses turning increasingly inward and gradually becoming infinitesimal.

Amid these and other compositional “heavies” stood steadfastedly the music of Reuben Jelleyman, here a world premiere of a work called Designs, written for the Stroma ensemble earlier this year. I thought the programme note, written by the composer, nicely “of a piece” with his music (which, of course, should go without saying, but at times doesn’t always seem to), having a freshness and candour regarding his youthful impressions. The music’s quiet opening belied the soundings of energies that followed from the eight instrumentalists, extremely visceral bendings, burgeonings, swayings, slidings, creakings and slippings, all very kinetic, and uncannily fluid and jagged all at once. The work unhesitatingly reacted with itself along its course, blending repetition with its composer’s reinvention of remembered things, the more extreme sonorities (an agonised screeching whose origin I couldn’t identify through sitting too far back, for example) becoming more integrated dynamically and rhythmically, as if the process of recollection had “shaken them down”. Things reached the point of tonelessness with thrummed strings, and breathed-through winds and brasses resembling ambient sighings as the ghosts drifted back to their places of origin, the harp uncannily playing what sounded like a brief reminiscence of Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro” from the midst of the sonic debris, the remaining fragments becoming as things forgotten but still forever imprinted. I enjoyed this work due to its accessibility and its thoughtful exploration of the relationship between memory and recreation.

Having always previously trod cautiously around and about the music of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), I was interested to encounter an autobiography of sorts on an internet post (words which will probably already be familiar to the composer’s fans, of course), in which he talks about the uniqueness of individual human response to music, and specifically to his own creations: – “….Whatever I place there, consciously and probably also unconsciously, is perceived by the listener in a way that is perhaps not completely different, but sufficiently different in any case that you can never immediately draw conclusions about the meaning or value of a piece of music.” Along with Stroma’s programme note for Xenakis’s piece Aroura (1971) which was also written by the composer, the two statements in their different ways emboldened me to throw caution to the winds and “think inside” the sounds that I heard throughout the piece.

Xenakis’s opening observation regarding the title being the Homeric word for “earth” itself spoke volumes, as did the “word-made-flesh” textures of the piece’s sounds, a “virtual recreation” of the earth itself as we perceive it. My notes recorded as many of the multifarious realisations by the instruments as I could (my shortcomings in this exercise obviously akin to one’s limited conscious perceptions of the world – as with life, one does what one can with music!). So this piece marked, for me, an encounter with sounds which I could not only equate at least to some degree with their composer’s avowed intentions, but also allow myself my own impressions of, with hitherto unrealised confidence.

Too many to dwell upon all in detail, here, I’ve retained, firstly, a memory of a particularly haunting sequence of glissandi that opened up most disconcertingly what seemed an ever-widening chasm between lower and upper strings, exposing mysterious and suddenly vulnerable spaces between extremes in which it seemed we lived most of our lives. Then, at the piece’s conclusion, I registered a quiet, sardonic gesture of finality which silenced the “danse macabre” bouncing of bows upon strings (difficult to distinguish between hair and wood from a distance) with a single instrument’s whisperings.

Lastly came the work of Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) whose music I was introduced to in the 1970s via the composer’s Concerto for Orchestra. This was a work entitled Chain I, written in 1983, and one of a trio of works similarly-titled, though  otherwise unconnected. As with Xenakis’s work, the composer’s comments regarding the music were reproduced in what I thought was a model of its kind for a concert’s printed programme.

Lutoslawski was quoted as saying that he thought the act of composing was a search for listeners who thought and felt the same way he did—he once called it “fishing for souls”.  He wrote his work Chain I in something of that spirit, as a “gift” for the musicians of the London Sinfonietta, whom he had enjoyed working with – he called the work a “souvenir of……common music-making”.

The form of Chains I divided the music into two strands, with sections along the strand overlapped or “staggered” in terms of their beginnings and ends, and forming the greater part of the piece, with things increasing in complexity towards the end and allowing for individual figurations played “ad libitum” forming what Lutoslawski described as a “network of melodies”.

In effect, the sounds were impactful from the word go, with opening bursts of colour and energy reinforced by reverberant brass, then contrasted with cheeky winds flecked by harpsichord and percussion sonorities. The music developed into a dream-like dance, various instruments crossing the spaces as if entranced, the ambiences ghostly or crepuscular, depending on the listener’s predilections. A series of instrumental games featured several solos dovetailed as to produce ever-changing textures containing ravishing moments, whose freely-concerted strands of lyrical expression burgeoned in intensity and energy. Things took on an increasingly martial air until the gong and cymbals sounded us all up with a round turn, the winds flurrying like frightened birds! Having briefly tasted freedom, the ensemble was then reined in, the textures dissolving hue-by-hue and strand-by-strand into the silences.

Mention must be made of the concert’s surroundings, the City Gallery’s walls featuring parts of an exhibition entitled “Iconography of Revolt”, and visually expressing something of the determined individuality and uncompromising impact of new art found in abundance throughout Stroma’s skilled and whole-hearted musical presentations.