Author: Peter Mechen

A flavoursome taste of the “Baroque” at the St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
A Concert of Eighteenth-Century Chamber Music

Music by Georg Phillipp Telemann,
Johann David Heinichen, and Johann Sebastian Bach

Rowena Simpson (soprano)
Leni Mäckle (bassoon)
Calvin Scott (oboe)
Jonathan Berkahn (keyboards)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Wednesday, 13th December, 2017

These four performers, a singer and three instrumentalists, provided for this concert a goodly range of musical expression inhabiting that style we loosely know as “baroque”. The programme was framed by works from two of the “giants” of the era, Georg Phillipp Teleman and Johann Sebastian Bach, and also contained a sonata for oboe and bassoon by someone whose name was unknown to me, Johann David Heinichen (1683-1729) , a composer whose relative present-day obscurity belies the fame he once enjoyed as “one of the three important “H”s of German music”, the others being , in the writer Johann Matheson’s opinion, Handel and Hasse.

We began with Telemann’s music, an aria from a cantata written for the first Sunday of the New Year “Schmeckt und sheet unsers Gottes Freundlichkeit” (Taste and see the friendliness of our God). I wish I had known this work before hearing it performed, as I’m sure I would have relished all the more the performance given by soprano Rowena Simpson and the ensemble – alas that one’s “baroque cantata-listening” rarely has the opportunity to extend beyond the stellar creative achievements of “you-know-who”, as there are obviously treasures such as this awaiting a resurgence of appreciation – ironic that Telemann’s music, so popular in its day, is now having to undergo a kind of process of rediscovery via performances such as these.

The church’s acoustic served the music well, ample enough but still bright and focused, a bias towards treble tones enhancing the music’s clarity. As with German baroque vocal music, the voice is really another instrumental line, here sung characterfully and with the twists and turns of the figurations given plenty of vigour, even in the most demanding, breath-testing of places (no alcohol involved!), and by the agile and articulate phrasings of the instrumentalists.

Even more curious as regards the ebb and flow of fame is the case of one Johann David Heinichen, as mentioned above, something of a celebrity as a composer and theorist in his day, and obviously worthy of reinstatement as regards reputation and his music. We heard a Sonata for oboe and bassoon whose four movements provided both entertainment and thoughtfulness in contrasting ways. First, an opening Grave reminiscent in places of Purcell brought forth liquid lines from Calvin Scott’s oboe, supported by confident, well-rounded bassoon figurations. This was followed by an Allegro that sounded rather more like a “concert of equals”, the melodic figures and runs shared and alternated, and the players beautifully reflecting each instrument’s timbral character in their phrasings – Leni Mäckle’s bassoon readily demonstrating, for example, its own unique expressive world as feelingly as its more ostensibly “romantic” partner.

The Larghetto which followed had a gentle, Siciliano-like rhythm, the oboe taking the melody with plenty of light-and-shade in the phrasings and the bassoon flexible and expressive in its accompanying figures. Finally, the concluding Allegro was a sprightly, oboe-led dance, with some tricky bass repetitions and runs for the bassoon – a true and rewarding partnership indeed!

Rowena Simpson then performed a soprano aria from JS Bach’s Cantata BWV 21 “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” Bach himself was extremely partial to this Cantata, reintroducing it in revised versions on at least two occasions when applying for different cantorial posts. Bach’s conception is on a grand scale, taking as its subject the Gospel for the Third Sunday after Trinity, which contains the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:1-10). The soprano aria “Seufer, Thranen, Kummer, Not” (Sighs, tears, troubles and distress) uses a counterpointing oboe, and cello and keyboard (piano) obbligato, all of which here worked beautifully, the sorrowful oboe line working poignantly with the voice. The singer’s bright, engaging tones put the lines across to us with plenty of anguished feeling and focus, the slightly raw intonation of a couple of her notes enhancing the piece’s basic angst.

Jonathan Berkahn introduced the next item, a keyboard solo with the title “Pastorale in F”, which he played on the church’s chamber organ. He talked a little about the development of the “Pastorale” form, which was developed from the custom of the shepherds in areas around Italian cities and towns who came into the churches at Christmas time to play their musical instruments for the people worshipping before the Christmas cribs and mangers, in homage to the new-born Christ Child.

The piping style (or “Piffero”) in the first two movements imitated a drone bass and a bagpipe melody. (From this term comes “Pifa”, found in Baroque Christmas music such as Handel’s “Messiah” – and in a recent NZSO performance by conductor Brett Weymark, making splendid sense of the title by using a pair of oboes in that work’s “Pastoral Symphony”, despite Handel scoring the piece for strings alone!)

Jonathan Berkahn’s performance brought out lovely, gentle rocking rhythms at the outset, everything luminously-textured and beautifully “layered”, making an enchanting effect on the small organ. A bright-toned allegro second movement conveyed plenty of festive bustle, which contrasted with the third movement’s melancholy and solemn processional-like trajectories. Finally, we enjoyed a bright and cheerful outdoor dance, beautifully in effect and gorgeously registered, the repeat bringing heftier, even more celebratory tones, everything controlled with great aplomb.

To conclude the concert we were given an aria from the fourth part of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio “Flösst mein Heiland” (Does your name, My Saviour instill the tiniest seed….) – a splendid effect, the music steady and processional, with echo-effects at the ends of phrases, some of which were provided by Jonathan Berkahn on a recorder, in between his contributions at the piano. With singing that gracefully and easily filled out the spaces and worked hand-in-glove with the oboe and the ‘cello, besides the enjoyment to be had from the evocative echo effects, the piece made a suitably well-rounded impression. It brought the concert’s strands together in what I thought a satisfying and rewarding way.

After we had finished applauding the musicians for their efforts, a “surprise” presentation was made to the St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace concert organizer, Marjan van Waardenberg, on behalf of both audiences and performers over the years, intended as a tribute to her tireless work in facilitating such a varied and high-quality series of concerts at lunchtime for the delight of Wellington’s music-lovers during the previous decade.

The warm response of the audience to this tribute demonstrated the value and esteem these concerts have come to hold in the concert-going life of the capital.

Cynthia and Gertie go Baroque with Purcell at Circa Theatre

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre and Willow Productions presents:
CYNTHIA AND GERTIE GO BAROQUE

Written and performed by:
Helen Moulder – CYNTHIA
and Rose Beauchamp – GERTIE

Directed by Jeff Kingsford-Brown
Design/Lighting/Stage Manager – Deb McGuire
Costumes – Janet Dunn
Theatre and Puppet Makers – Struan Ashby,
Anna Bailey, Rose Beauchamp

Circa Theatre, Taranaki St., Wellington

Wednesday, 13th December, 2017

(until 23rd December)

Firstly, a note of thanks to Cynthia Fortitude and Gertie Rallentando – Thank you both, for your indefatigable energies and your irrepressible buoyancies! Together, you were as a matching pair of Courtenay Place street-lamps to our sensibilities throughout the intoxicating journey upon which you launched us, offering support as well as illumination! Your concerted efforts generated such refulgence, shining forth from within the textures of one of the masterpieces of English music, Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas”.

Cynthia and Gertrude are hell-bent upon performing a version of Purcell’s renowned work which charmingly as well as outrageously brings it all the more to life for present-day audiences. In fact one of Cynthia’s most telling and candid observations of the evening came towards the end of the show, her remark being that it was probably lucky that Purcell had been dead for four hundred years in view of what she and her colleague Gertie had wrought upon his most famous musical and dramatic work, over the course of the presentation.

Though raising a laugh, it was a piece of tongue-in-cheek repartee which perfectly and ironically accorded with the documented fact that Purcell’s librettists for many of his vocal and theatrical compositions gave him extremely rudimentary and at times uninspired material to work with – to the point where a contemporary of the composer’s, the satirist Thomas Brown, versified thus at the time:

“For where the Author’s scanty words have fail’d,
Your happier graces, Purcell, have prevail’d”.

Also, the librettist Nahum Tate, who adapted the “Dido” story from an episode in Virgil has come in for some damning criticism over the years, summed up by the following verdict of a modern-day commentator – “Little enough of Virgil remains (in the opera) – Dido is drastically simplified, and Aeneas is made into a complete booby. And the sense of cosmic forces at play is replaced by the machinations of an outrageous set of Restoration witches” (Joseph Kerman “Opera as Drama” 1988 University of California)

So, taking the advice of a literary genius who proclaimed “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, Cynthia and Gertie lost no time in cutting to the dramatic quick by adroitly revitalising the identities of the characters in the original story. Here, we encountered not Dido and Aeneas, but “Diana” and “Andy “as the ill-fated lovers, and with chaperone Amanda (rather than the maidservant, Belinda) ready at a moment’s notice to “unbottle and dispense” support and advice as if it were on tap. So, it was pretty much “instant update – just add water”, and with the help of the vernacular, away we were whirled on our dramatic journey!

But wait! – we wouldn’t have entrusted our evening’s entertainment to the unknown so easily without first assuring ourselves of the likelihood of these performers being able to “deliver” the goods, still – after all, anybody can put on costumes and don wigs and pirouette randomly around and about the stage, lip-and-finger-synching to music already being played. True, the immortal duo’s previous show “The Legend Returns” has already become a living classic, having made its way into the most distinguished annals of New Zealand’s theatrical history – but after twenty years, were the old instincts and impulses still firing on all cylinders? Did the flame still burn as brightly and energetically in those theatrical bosoms? Could Cynthia and Gertie still do it?

It took but a few moments to reassure us that all was as real and earnest, realigned and refurbished, as before – Gertie with her introductory harpsichordic displays of prestidigitation, and Cynthia with her congenitally “grand manner” and gesturings appropriate to a “practitioner of rallen-tando” swept up our sensibilities and lost no time in absorbing us in the business of their on-stage preparations . Cynthia primed her audience up superbly, charming and reassuring those whose front-row seats would normally have given their occupants grave concern at having “greatness thrust upon ’em” at any given moment and providing the rest of us with suitably inscribed flash-card response indications – you simply knew where you were with these two in charge!

So, we were given an invaluable Janus-faced view of proceedings, being party to these (sometimes surprising) preparations, as well as enjoying the pleasures of their ultimate fruition, thrills and spills included! Tempting though it is for me to here reproduce some of the choicest moments of the entertainment, it would be a pity to spoil their delightful surprise value! – without giving too much away, I might mention the highly-diverting and all-too-human use of performer-enhancement aids, with Cynthia (bless her!) in need of an occasional “pick-me-up-and-redirect-my-befuddlement” pill! – and the use of a puppet-theatre and its suitably recontextualised puppet figures to crystallise the opera’s action.

Helped further by a racy reworking of the all-too-prosaic original libretto, Purcell and his (renamed) characters were able to live again in their extremely visceral glory, thanks to the energies of our two star writer/performers, and the support they garnered from various quarters – flowing direction from Jeff Kingsford-Brown, suitably atmospheric set design and lighting from Deb McGuire, and lavishly resonating costumes from Janet Dunn. Then there was Struan Ashby’s charming puppet theatre, complete with figures  fashioned by Anna Bailey and Rose Beauchamp herself.

I should add that further support came from a suitably and skillfully-coached audience – after we’d survived a querulous “What are you doing here if you’re not auditioning for our show?” moment from Cynthia, we really came into our own in the Witches’ scene! In fact, our contributions, in the finest baroque fashion, were actually divided into parts rather than left as a kind of mindless unison!

Before concluding, I can’t resist letting slip the merest smattering of the libretto’s updated raciness, simply for sharing’s sakes! – and as the Trojan hero Aeneas seemed to come off worst as a character in Purcell’s original, it was only fitting that he was given more of his dues in this presentation – by way of preparing us for his puppet-entrance, the already-entranced Queen told us that “He’s genetically engineered /so he’ll be marvellous in bed”. Alas, as befits a modern operatic playboy, the eponymous hero, after accessing his hacked online updates, suddenly expostulated “Receivership? – I’ll have to run! I’ll have to get away! I need an exit strategy today!” Well, you get the idea!

It remained for the spurned Carthage Queen to bemoan her loss, and, bereft of love and hope, accept her time-honoured fate as one who died of a broken heart. Such were the conflicting emotions brought into play by Cynthia and Gertie recasting this scene as either one of the great comic tragedies or, alternatively, tragic comedies, I was and remain gobsmacked at the outcome’s cathartic effect! – I may even have to go the show again! What I do remember is that we in the audience, having a participatory role in the grand peroration, were caught up in it all to the extent that when the divine Cynthia indicated to us her “encore” flash-card and the irrepressible Gertie took the lead we capitulated like lambs to the slaughter!

Whoever similarly takes the plunge and “Goes for Baroque” with these two stellar performers, Helen Moulder and Rose Beauchamp, will be similarly transported, their appreciation of Baroque opera enhanced, perhaps even beyond the point of “no return”.

Handel’s Messiah – music as a living entity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
HANDEL – Messiah

Celeste Lazarenko (soprano)
Deborah Humble (mezzo-soprano)
Robert Macfarlane (tenor)
Jared Holt (bass)

The Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Chorusmaster: Brent Stewart

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Brett Weymark

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 9th December, 2017

This was a most interesting “Messiah”, containing as it did a number of interpretative and executive detailings I wouldn’t quite frankly have expected to encounter in the same single performance. Of course, for me to actually say that goes against the grain of what I’ve always felt about Baroque Music and its presentation, that its composers and musicians (and almost certainly its listeners as well) would have been intensely practical people for whom “getting the music out there” was the absolute priority, however consistent or inconsistent might have seemed the various detailings of the performances’ style or textural fidelity.

Most composers in that era were themselves performers, and for that reason were well acquainted with the practicalities of live music-making, with all its attendant thrills and spills. For this reason I’m inclined to think the average Baroque composer would have been somewhat puzzled at our present-day obsession with so-called “correct” and “authentic” performance practice, especially considering the extent to which conjecture plays a part in making present-day decisions as to how this music was played/ought to be played. There is so much we simply don’t know regarding how they did it in Handel’s time.

Some musicologists, are worried that the in-vogue HIP (historically-informed performance) movement has, by prohibiting any way of playing it except for what is deemed the “correct” way, had the effect over the years of putting early music increasingly in a museum rather than in a “living” context. This “holier-than-thou” attitude is now increasingly coming under fire, its critics declaring that HIP should be a means towards more imaginative music-making, and not an end in itself. And performers are excitingly taking more and more notice of this attitude, as witness what took place during parts of this “Messiah” performance.

It was obvious, right from the work’s beginning, that the conductor, Brett Weymark, had schooled his orchestral forces to deliver crisp, lean orchestral textures which kept Handel’s contrapuntal writing clear and exciting in its vigour and muscularity. In fact the orchestral playing throughout the work was a joy, the textures allowing the different voices to convey whatever character was needed from the context of the separate parts with clarity and focus, from the bright and forceful tones accompanying the Halleluiah Chorus, to the hushed, withdrawn atmospheres accompanying the bass’s recitative “For Behold, darkness shall cover the earth”.

What a delightful surprise, then, to encounter, in the normally strings-only “Pastoral Symphony” two oboes playing the melody in thirds – my thought was “Why didn’t Handel score it this way?” After all the oboe was one of his favourite instruments. It all sounded absolutely enchanting, and very appropriately “pastoral”, as if the shepherds were playing their instruments to their sheep.

The other instrumental contributions which need to be honorably mentioned are those from the solo violinist (Yuka Eguchi in tremendous form as acting concertmaster), solo cellist Andrew Joyce, often a supporting continuo partner to his leader, and playing as beautifully, along with organist Douglas Mews, and trumpeters Mark Carter and Michael Kirgan, the pair magical in the “Glory to God” sequences and splendid in the Halleluiah Chorus and in the final Chorus. And then Michael Kirgan’s solo in “The trumpet shall sound” made a splendid and festive impression throughout.

The chorus work matched the orchestral playing in impact, clarity, energy, colour and delicacy. In places I thought the tenors lacked the last ounce of “heft” (a common problem among choirs), but still contributed to the overall magnificence of the sound with focused commitment. Right from the opening chorus “And the Glory of The Lord” the voices grabbed and held our attention, as much by dint of the variety and colour of the different lines and by the singing’s overall strength and energy. Only briefly did the voices as a whole disappoint, when, during the opening of “Since Man came by Death” they didn’t invest the opening sotto voce murmurings with sufficient awe and despair, so that the outburst which followed had less contrasting impact. That apart, I thought the chorus work among the best I’d ever heard in a “live” Messiah performance. From so many terrific renditions of individual choruses I particularly liked “Surely he hath borne our griefs” – biting, theatrical and dramatic!

The soloists each had different strengths to offer, beginning with the engaging enthusiasm of tenor Robert Mcfarlane, with a warmly reassuring “Comfort Ye”, the voice with a slight warble under pressure, and lacking that last ounce of breath control to bring off the floating aspect of some of his held notes. Nevertheless it was a strong and characterful beginning, with qualities that he later brought to his extended sequence of recitatives and arias concluding with the vigorous ”Thou shalt break them”, a taxing succession of recitative and arias whose focus and purpose he maintained with credit.. He also added a theatrical touch during this sequence, actually turning and facing the chorus during their singing of “He trusted in God”, as if he was Christ directly confronting his tormentors.

Bass Jared Holt certainly gave his contributions everything he had, summoning up great dignity and sufficient portentousness to deliver “For behold” and its following aria “The people that walked” – while not a particularly deep bass, he made up in emphasis and characterization what his voice lacked in true heft, as he did also for “The trumpet shall sound”, later in the work. A curiosity, which I’d never before encountered, was the recitative treatment he gave to ”But who may abide” which prompted a whispered comment from my partner, “Is this the Readers Digest version?”

I thought mezzo-soprano Deborah Humble’s finest moment in the work came with “He was despised” whose opening phrases received particularly heartfelt treatment, the pauses between each statement given enough time to register and generate pity and wonderment; and then the middle section startlingly changing its character to one of great vehemence, vividly presenting the condemned man’s acquiescence in stark contrast to the pitiless and methodical cruelty and scorn inflicted upon him. Elsewhere she occasionally found, as do most mezzos, the music too low in places to be sufficiently “sounded”, though another memorable sequence was her duet with the tenor “Oh Death, where is thy sting”, both singers giving their irruptions of energy to one another and building up a sense of exultation at the victory of life and goodness.

Soprano Celeste Lazarenko used her beautiful voice exquisitely in places, playing her part in painting a wonderous scene of revelation to the shepherds in the fields, and conveying a sense of growing excitement at the presence of the heavenly host of angels – a great moment! She also made the most of “I know that my Redeemer liveth”, her voice reaching upwards with absolute security to those celestial heights in the music which convey such a sense of exultation. It was a voice whose sheer sound gave a lot of pleasure, which she used most winningly to focus on the music’s ecstatic quality.

I mentioned the performance’s capacity to surprise in places, never more so than at the beginning of the final “Amen” Chorus, when the soloists congregated together and individually began the fugue, singing the whole of the passage up to the entry of the strings. The conductor’s slow tempi gave a slightly mannered effect, which was emphasized when both strings and then the chorus came in at a faster pace – but nevertheless the idea and its execution certainly grabbed our attention. The rest was what we expected, but the point had been made – the work had been treated as a living entity in places, cocking a snoot at tradition for its own sakes and daring to reimagine some passages without doing violence to the whole. And the skill and sensibility of the performers ensured that whatever was done was brought off with style and focus, adding to a sense of wonderment and renewal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monteverdi again – at last! – The Fifth Book of Madrigals, from Baroque Voices

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Baroque Voices presents:
“The Full Monte “ (Concert 5)

MONTEVERDI – “Il Quinto Libro de Madrigali” (The Fifth Book of Madrigals)

Baroque Voices:
Pepe Becker (director), Nicola Holt (sopranos)
Milla Dickens, Toby Gee (altos)
Peter Dyne, Patrick Pond (tenors)
David Morriss (bass)

Robert Oliver (bass viol)
Douglas Mews (harpsichord)

Newtown Community Centre Theatre,
Newtown, Wellington

Sunday, 3rd December, 2017

Continuing with a concert series which began in 2011, Baroque Voices, led by the intrepid and perennially fresh-voiced Pepe Becker, performed for us on this occasion all but the final madrigal in Monteverdi’s “Quinto Libro” (Book Five), the last-named requiring a greater number of singers than the rest of the collection. The group has, sometimes, in these concerts, re-ordered the chronology of the works (Book Four, for example, was interspersed with accompanied madrigals from Book Seven), so as to give listeners a fuller idea of the range and variety of the composer’s invention. It could therefore be that the omitted madrigal from Book Five will suddenly “pop up” in another, fuller-voiced context in the series.

At the point of producing his Book Five of these madrigals, Monteverdi was putting revolutionary ideas into practice of a kind that earned him criticism from his contemporaries, not only as regards musical style but also content (for example, his madrigal “Cruda Amarilli”, featured on today’s programme, was condemned for its “crudities” and “licence” by a fellow-composer). He was certainly throwing down the gauntlet in front of traditional notions of propriety in vocal music by declaring that the words and their meanings had primacy, and the music took its cues from these – ‘the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant”.

Our proximity to the singers, plus the venue’s lively and immediate acoustic, enabled us to relish all the more these characteristics some of Monteverdi’s peers found so questionable. In fact the marriage of texts and tones wrought by the Voices gave considerable pleasure to the ear throughout the concert, aided, of course, by access to the actual words via a splendidly-annotated and informative programme booklet. We could thus appreciate all the more the group’s explorations of shade upon shade of expression in places like the opening madrigal’s lament “amaramente insegni”(love’s bitterness) and towards the end of the piece, the resigned“I mi moro tacendo” (I shall die in silence”), the intensities obviously “too close for comfort” for certain of the composer’s fellows.

Amazingly, the last of the “Full Monte” presentations by Baroque voices took place no less than four years ago, giving the present concert something of a “prodigal child” aspect, an entity wandering in some kind of wilderness before finally returning home. Over such a period of time things obviously change and people come and go, to the point here where the group’s leader, Pepe Becker, was the only “voice” common to both occasions. Happily, the group’s overall standards of ensemble, intonation and stylistic awareness seemed as well-suited to the repertoire as ever – and I thought in fact, there was a freshness about the approach which suggested some kind of renewal of energies and purpose regarding the project as a whole.

As with the other concerts in this series, the musical riches were too many and varied to document in detail, requiring more of a thesis than a review to do so. I‘ve thus contented myself with relishing the effect of the whole and pinpointing a few particular moments which have stayed in the memory for reasons of impact and resonance. I should at this stage mention the sterling support given the singers by the continuo players, Robert Oliver (bass viol) and Douglas Mews (harpsichord), their playing exquisitely underlining the felicities of the singers’ realisations throughout.

Leading from the front, Pepe Becker’s voice seemed to me in particularly fine fettle, as pure, focused and flexible of tone as ever, able to “float” her lines with as much freedom as I previously remembered. She was well-partnered by fellow-soprano Nicola Holt, their combination producing ecstatic moments throughout the concert – for instance, some amazingly stratospheric singing from the sopranos at the opening of No. 5, “Dorinda, ah, diro….”, the rest finely-chiselled evocations of despair from all voices leading towards bitter resignation at “Sarai con la mia morte” (You shall be mine as I die).

These beautifully-gradated and –realised expressions of acceptance within grief linked the work to the following madrigal, “Ecco piegando” (Here am I…”), though startling with its plea to the lover to “wound this heart that was so cruel to you” (“ferisci questo cor che ti fu crudo”). Already, there was plenty of drama and depth of feeling generated by the opening of the third madrigal“Era l’anima mia” with its sombre depictions from the men’s voices of a soul on the point of farewelling life! And what theatricality at the point when the women’s voices brought “a fairer and more graceful soul” to bear on the scenario, the light illuminating the textures and leading towards that extraordinary extended treatment of the madrigal’s last line “Se mori, ohime, non mori tu, mor’ io? “ (If you die, it is, alas, not you who dies, but I).

Further resisting the temptation to construct a self-indulgent compendium of further on-going delights, I’ll instead concentrate on the performance of the final trio of madrigals, each of which highlighted particular singers’ qualities as well as presenting the group in a true and favourable sense. No.16, “Amor se giusto sei” (Love, if you are just) is a plea to Love itself to be “just”, in making the poet’s beloved properly appreciative of his feelings for her, rather than contemptuous and scornful. It was a chance for both tenor and bass to figure with significant solo passages, each taking his turn to floridly and impassionedly voice his sorrow and frustration at his beloved’s indifference to his protestations. Here, surely were the seeds of the new “operatic” manner about to take music by storm given some of their first expressions in these works; and each of the singers here relished the opportunity to “emote” in an engaging and theatrical manner.

The following “T’amo mia vita” (I love you, my life!) featured the men replying to the soprano’s opening statement, caressing the idea of “in questa sola si soave parola” (this single, gentle word”, expressing emotion with the utmost delight, and, later  declaring “prendila tosto Amore” (seize love quickly). The ensemble skillfully caught the music’s ebb and flow between impulsive energy and rapturous languidity, conveying to us a sensual enjoyment of the lines wholly characteristic of the composer’s output.

Concluding the concert was the last but one Madrigal from the Fifth Book, “E cosi a poco a poco” (And thus, little by little”), the ensemble detailed and demonstrative at the beginning with the two sopranos especially vibrant, preparing the way for the men’s declamatory “Che spegne antico incendio” (Whoever quenches an ancient fire”), the subsequent exchanges and interactions more declamatory and conversational than melodic, the operatic spirit again spreading its wings ready to take flight. A repetition of “Che spegne antico incendio” featured the whole group, and built most satisfyingly to a resounding conclusion.

Though audience numbers were disappointingly few, the concert’s glorious sounds resounded with as much splendour as if we had been in St Mark’s in Venice. One hopes that Pepe Becker and her Voices will get sufficient support to continue their journey, helping to bring this music and its composer to a rightful place in the endlessly detailed musical tapestry of music for the ages. How wonderful to have in Wellington musicians, singers and instrumentalists, of the calibre to be able to do this incredible music justice!

 

 

 

 

 

Cataclysmic conclusion to Orchestra Wellington’s Diaghilev season

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ORCHESTRA WELLINGTON – The Rite of Spring

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.3 Op.55 “Eroica”
STRAVINSKY – The Rite Of Spring (Ballet – 1913)

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 2nd December, 2017

This concert began with two of the most famous chords in all nineteenth-century music, those which opened a thrilling performance by Orchestra Wellington of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, the work by which the composer allegedly intended to celebrate the achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte, but changed his mind, and, according to an eye-witness account, scratched out the original dedication, and reinscribed it as “composed in memory of a great man”.

Napoleon or no, the work was definitely a revolutionary statement, one which of itself proclaimed a “new era” of musical expression. Beethoven himself was obviously less concerned with the selfconscious idea of being at the forefront of any such new age, than with his own development as a creative artist. He had said to a friend at around this time – “I am by no means satisfied with my work up to now, and I intend to make a fresh start from now on”. That “fresh start” embodied the Third Symphony, the “Eroica”.

What made it revolutionary was its length – the first movement alone was longer than many whole classical symphonies. Other notable aspects were the second movement being styled as a funeral march, and the third movement being a new-ish concept which gradually overtook the idea of the Minuet, replacing it with something called a Scherzo (in Italian, a “joke”). Finally, the symphony’s finale seemed more serious than usual – a theme-and-variations movement based on some music Beethoven had already written.

Again, the composer wanted something different, not being content with the usual “light entertainment” of symphonic finales. To this end, he used music from an earlier work of his own, a ballet about Prometheus, the Titan who breathed life into a pair of statues, making them humans, before being slain for his impudence, and then brought to life again by Apollo. The theme follows the general pattern of the symphony – heroism triumphing over death and returning to life.

The thrust and dynamism of Orchestra Wellington’s playing and Marc Taddei’s conducting made the symphony’s first movement a force to be reckoned with, and the second movement a heartfelt, almost confessional piece of music, laying bare the basic emotions – joy, sorrow, exultation, disappointment, resignation – everything was characterized so strongly and directly in the playing and the overall direction of the piece.

Over the years I’ve collected a number of recordings of the work, my first purchases reflecting what used to be the “norm”when it came to playing Beethoven, very much tending towards a romantic mode of expression, with large orchestral numbers and in some cases monumental tempi – conductors such as Furtwangler, Klemperer and Knappertsbusch seemed to stress the sheer physical amplitude of the music’s range and scope, and developed what seemed like a Beethoven for the ages. Other conductors preferred to bring more dynamism to the music, notably Toscanini, Erich Kleiber (as did his son Carlos), and Karajan, while continuing to use nineteenth-century orchestra numbers. And so interpreters of the music came and went, evoking the composer’s spirit in their different ways, which nevertheless seemed virtually indestructible throughout.

However, of late, there’s been a revolution in the matter of performing music from different historical periods, with musicians wanting to realize a more “authentic” sound by means of examining earlier playing techniques and practices, included among which was a more “purist” approach to the score itself, especially in the matter of metronome markings. Whole articles have been written by different researchers into questions such as the viability of Beethoven’s own markings and tempi directions in general, not to mention the use of “authentic” instruments and playing practices different to those we had become accustomed to.

Even if conductors and orchestras don’t go as far as employing either “genuine” older instruments or copies of the same when they play eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music, there’s now a far greater awareness in mainstream concert performance of “period” practices, resulting generally in smaller ensembles playing music at faster tempi and with phrasing and tonal production which produce a “purer”, less romantically-laden sound and texture in the music. This was certainly evident in Marc Taddei’s conducting of Orchestra Wellington on this occasion, especially in the symphony’s first two movements, both of which were given urgent, dynamic tempi, and crisply articulate phrasing, with sharply-etched, largely vibrato-less texturings. There’s a roistering spirit of adventure about this combination’s music-making which invariably carries the day, and which on this occasion, for me, resulted in a performance which crackled and sizzled with blood-stirring energies throughout.

The musicians having breasted the epic traversals of the symphony’s opening two movements (the work already lengthier than any other symphony completed up to that time), they then tackled the next “revolutionary” aspect of the work, the substitution by the composer of a “scherzo” movement for the traditional minuet, a more exciting and dynamic development. Particularly striking was the playing by the horns of the “trio” section of the music, given with tremendous panache by the players. Afterwards, one might have expected a finale of more fun and games and relaxation, but the composer had other ideas, infusing the movement with references to an earlier work of his , a ballet about Prometheus, the Titan who breathed life into a pair of statues, making them humans, before being condemned to die for his impudence, and then brought to life again by Apollo.

The theme follows the general pattern of the symphony – heroism triumphing over death and returning to life. The performance here had some lovely aspects including a “solo string” treatment of a variation on the Promethean theme, one which is usually given to a larger complement of strings – here, less was made deliciously more as the solo string textures “personalized” the lines more sharply and characterfully as well as providing a telling contrast with the rest of the movement’s sounds.

A little more than a hundred years later an audience heard another very revolutionary piece of music for the first time, one from a young composer, Igor Stravinsky, the Rite of Spring, whose first performance in Paris in 1913 had occasioned one of the most famous riots in musical history. Though nothing like Stravinsky’s music had been heard before, it seems that the troubles in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at that first performance were equally provoked by the choreography devised by the principal dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, and that certain members of the audience took vociferous and even violent objection to what they saw on the stage. Stravinsky himself later described what he saw on stage as “a group of knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down”, though later still he pronounced himself satisfied with the outcome of the production as a whole, scandal or no scandal.

Despite being over a hundred years old itself, by now, I think parts of “Le Sacre” still have an incredibly “here-and-now” feel about them, a kind of innate power to sound in places modern, totally unique and original. The introductions to each of the work’s two parts are both remarkably evocative, an aspect of the work which the players brought off here to great effect, right from the plaintive bassoon note which sets the work in motion through to the ever-burgeoning sense of something from long ago coming into being. The second part begins rather more claustrophobically, chord-clusters bringing oppressive weight to the textures and underlining the thrall in which primitive peoples were held by the passage of the seasons. Everywhere, the conductor and players gave these evocations the space and weight needed to underline these powerful resonances and let them do their work.

The other aspect of “Le Sacre” which helps define its unique character is its rhythmic variety and complexity, which seems to my untrained ear to reach some kind of apogee in the final Sacrificial Dance of the Chosen One – the trajectories are so irregular, so angular, so unpredictable! For the uninitiated listener it might seem like complete mayhem, nothing but desperate irruptions of movement by a chosen victim sacrificing herself to the spring. Of course it OUGHT to sound desperate and out of control, and Marc Taddei and the players delivered it all with a remarkable amalgam of assurance and spontaneity, so that the awe of the music was maintained right up to the point of its dissolution. All were heroes, and we in the audience treated the players and their conductor as such, after we’d recovered from the final onslaught of the music’s implaccable energies.

So, from a brilliantly successful season of Diaghilev-inspired works this year we’ll be taken by Marc Taddei and the orchestra through Antonin Dvorak’s mature symphonies in 2018 – a journey which was announced this evening, and whose delights we’ll meantime savour in anticipation and without a doubt relish in their performance next year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vivante Ensemble’s Vaughan Williams and Mendelssohn set St.Andrew’s buzzing

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrews Lunchtime Concert Series presents:

VIVANTE ENSEMBLE

Violins: Yuka Eguchi, Malavika Gopal, Martin Jaenecke, Anna van der Zee
Violas: Victoria Jaenecke, Christiaan van der Zee
‘Cellos: Robert Ibell, Ken Ichinose

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Phantasy Quintet (1912)

FELIX MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY – Octet in E-flat Major Op.20

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

Wednesday, 29th November 2017

The St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series here in Wellington has over the years produced some memorable musical experiences, but surely none more exhilarating that what we heard given by the talented Vivante Ensemble on this occasion. To be variously entranced, mesmerized, captivated, energized and thoroughly intoxicated as a listener at a concert performance is to experience a “spirit of delight” which, as the poet laments, “rarely comest” to the extent that we in the audience were here able to enjoy at first hand.

What came across to us so directly was the players’ own enjoyment of the music-making, a quality which reached almost orgiastic levels of delight as the concert neared its conclusion with the finale of Felix Mendelssohn’s remarkable Octet for Strings. Earlier the players had explored and brought to fruition a different kind of rapture with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Phantasy Quintet, a work epitomizing the fruits of the English musical renaissance of the early twentieth century. In all it was a splendidly “charged” affair, with two pieces of music literally set alight in their different ways by the musicians’ whole-hearted and transported playing.

In a sense the programme encapsulated in reverse order a process by which English music “came of age” over a period of imitation of Germanic models and influences to that point where composers such as Holst and Vaughan Williams seemed to find what they were looking for in the heritage of English folksong. Though Mendelssohn never actually lived in England his influence was enormous among members of the British “establishment”, akin to that of Handel’s a century earlier, and certainly inspiring a home-grown compositional school searching for something uniquely “British”.

With works like the “Octet”, the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” music, the symphonies and the momentous oratorio “Elijah”, Mendelssohn surely set his contemporaries and subsequent imitators in England a near-impossible task, one which only Edward Elgar’s genius was able to counter on a European playing-field. But it was the rediscovery of British folk-song by Holst, Vaughan Williams and the researcher Cecil Sharp which gave other native composers a new, home-grown direction; here, it was richly manifest in the Vaughan Williams’ Phantasy Quintet, opening Vivante Ensemble’s concert.

Right from the opening viola phrases, what playing we heard! – full, rich tones, evoking a magnificent melancholy, which other instruments gorgeously enhanced, the effect like a group of folksingers with stringed instruments for voices. A vigorous 7/4 dance on the ‘cello opened the second movement, the additional voices adding stringent harmonies to the rumbustious energies, the instruments again singing out, the players’ focused sonorities creating almost visceral emotional intensities, involving and satisfying for the listener.

Surprisingly Vaughan Williams kept the ‘cello silent throughout the brief third movement, the music’s opening having a sweetness, almost North American in feeling, with hymn-like touches – the ‘cello returned for the finale with a lovely, angular striding theme, one augmented by the other instruments, before adroitly turning its rhythm into firstly a jot-trot, and then a gallop, the players keeping their energies precariously and palpably on the leash. Unpredictably, the movement intensifies, becalms, gallops again, and then concludes in wistful, melancholic fashion.

I’m aware of some commentators penchant for describing music such as this as belonging to the “English Cowpat School” – but I love it! – and, especially when, as here, it’s given with such full-blooded gusto, a kind of earthiness that “feels” authentic, stressing the kinship to Bartok’s identification with Hungarian and Roumanian folk melodies and their influence on his art-music. And, of course VW’s love for those Thomas Tallis-like modes and harmonies adds to the Englishness of it all so resonantly.

So to the Mendelssohn, for which three additional players (two violinists and a cellist) appeared, including a new leader, violinist Yuka Eguchi, the NZSO’s assistant concertmaster – another NZSO violinist, Anna van der Zee had led the quintet of players in the Vaughan Williams work. Straight away there seemed more of a bustling spirit to the venture, with the camaraderie of setting-up extra chairs and music-stands and the deployment of the additional players, even before a note of the music had sounded!

The beginning stole in beguilingly, despite the music’s urgency – the repeated notes of the accompaniment, light and gossamer-like, supported a melody which arched upwards and then subsided just as winsomely. The “thrill” of feeling the additional weight of the extra instruments in this work immediately marked it out from what we’d heard before, with a sense of additional power held in check, but ready for whatever no-holds-barred gestures were required.

Throughout the first movement the playing’s expressive range gave the music’s dynamic qualities full voice, by turns full-blooded and delicately featherweight in places, at times excitingly, almost alarmingly orchestral. The players deftly etched in the occasional touches of tragedy in the minor-key treatments of the material, while the return to the opening was beautifully poised, the group “growing” the running figurations from out of the music’s entanglements and into the full sunlight once again.

The second movement’s opening beautifully caught the vein of the music’s melancholy – the players gave the incessant throbbing triplet rhythm great power, making the contrasting lyrical sections all the more effective in their “balm for the senses” aspect. As for the famous scherzo, our pleasure at the ensemble’s knife-edged precision was breath-taking stuff, the music weaving its gossamer magic at speed, and the leader during the “trio” section performing remarkable fleet-fingered violinistic feats.

But the climax of the performance came with the finale, beginning “attacca”, the ‘cellists literally charging at the music’s opening passages and the lighter-voiced instruments following suit in a kind of fugato ferment, the lines clicking over the points with great elan. The players plunged into attenuated crescendi leading to tremendously-voiced statements of concerted intent, their enjoyment and exhilaration overwhelmingly communicated to their listeners, so that we were all swept away in the torrent of it all.

A woman whom I’d been sitting next to in the church was, like me, stunned by the brilliance and overwhelming physicality of the performances, to the extent that she said she just wanted to sit for a while afterwards and let it all wash over her. And a friend I saw on the way out had tears in her eyes at the joyous energy and commitment of the playing, and the expressive power and beauty of the music which was thus generated. I can find no previous review of the ensemble’s work on Middle C, so this is a debut of sorts for us and for these musicians – it’s a precursor, I sincerely hope, of many more splendidly committed and inspirational concerts from Vivante.

 

Peter Pan – stardust forever at Circa Theatre

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
PETER PAN – the pantomime

Adapted from J.M.Barrie’s play “Peter Pan” (1904)
and novel “Peter and Wendy” (1911)
by Pinky Agnew and Lorae Parry

Cast: Gavin Rutherford (Katie Pie) / Cary Stackhouse (Peter Pan) / Camilla Besley (Wendy)
Simon Leary (Mr. Darling, Captain Hook)
Bronwyn Turei (Mrs.Darling, Xena Lily, Tinker Bell, Areffa Plankton)
Jeff Kingsford-Brown (Winston, Smee) / Ben Emerson (Dunnie)
Manuel Solomon (Nana, Hone)

Production: Director – Susan Wilson
Musical Director/Arranger – Michael Nicholas Williams
Set Designer – John Hodgkins
Lighting – Jennifer Lal
Costumes: Sheila Hoton
Musical staging- Leigh Evans

Circa Theatre (Circa One), Wellington
Saturday, 18th November, 2017

(until 23rd December, 2017)

Now here was fun heaped up in spadefuls onto classic, tried-and-true fantasy with a splendid pantomimic treatment of J.M.Barrie’s play “Peter Pan: the boy who wouldn’t grow up”, beloved of generations over a century of years. Writers Pinky Agnew and Lorae Parry, in their first-ever pantomime, managed to give us all the trappings of the art-form – music, slapstick comedy and topical jokes – while maintaining enough of those iconic links with the original story to cast a distinctive aura over the high-speed happenings of the fantastical plot.

Barrie’s 1904 play itself had high-pantomimic aspects involving audience participation, principally to do with the fairy character Tinker Bell, who, at one stage of the story drinks poison intended for Peter, and whose survival is “thrown over” to the audience’s children, when they are told that if they believe in fairies, Tinker Bell’s life will be saved. Here, the children were invited to the stage to add physical presence to their voices in their bid to “save Tinker Bell”, with heart-warming results, doubtless generating many a precious lasting memory within those ultra-receptive minds.

Being the “state of the nation” animals that they are, writers Agnew and Parry adroitly spiced the tale’s context with a handful of social and political observations, mostly delivered by the superb Gavin Rutherford as “Katie Pie”, the pantomime Dame with a distinctly Aro Valley Girl flavour, acquainting us with her hand-to-mouth existence in struggling to cope with her landlord’s putting up the rent, but crossing the haves/have-nots divide with aplomb as a harbour-ferry-travelling nanny to the children of a Days Bay household, the Darling family, on this particular evening Mr and Mrs being dinner guests of self-proclaimed right-wing radio and TV presenter Mike Hoskings.

Intriguing separate realities kicked in with the disclosure of the identity of Katie Pie’s landlord, none other than the rapacious, wheedling Captain Hook himself, his character at one point reinforced by way of some slightly miscalculated by-play involving an eponymous right-handed appendage – “Have we “hooked” up somewhere before?” – getting caught in Katie Pie’s dress in what I thought was a somewhat gratuitously-emphasised manoeuvre ….or was the snag accidental, and the near contortionist byplay a resourceful rescue operation? – we’ll never know!

Simon Leary bestrode the thinly-veiled “divide” between quasi-respectable, portfolio-clad predatory landlord, and out-and-out pirate, his Captain Hook extravagant of manner and resplendent of garb, displaying a veneer of heroic stylishness barely concealing impulses of cruelty criss-crossed with slash-strokes of memories of ticking clocks and crocodile’s jaws!

Another byplay was Jeff Kingsford-Brown’s “Winston Tweeters” cameo, the ferryman who here silenced the imagined vocal efforts of any number of Venetian gondoliers, with his spirited ditty “Hop in the waka / and give ’em a shocker”. From such appearances, Kingsford-Brown’s morphing into the piratical Smee, Hook’s right-hand (!) man, was an utter delight, particularly his brigandish rendition of Herman’s Hermits’ ‘”I’m into something good” as the chemistry between him and Katie Pie lit up in spectacular waves of bi-partisan emotion.

Perhaps the evening’s most varied high-octane output of on-stage energies came from the multi-talented Bronwyn Turei,  introduced firstly as Katie Pie’s daughter, the warrior princess Xena Lily, but reconstituting herself as Mrs Darling, the socialite mother of Wendy and baby Michael, before slaying youthful hearts in the aisles as the jealous and possessive, but fiercely loyal and courageous Tinker Bell , in deadly danger after swallowing poison to save Peter, her only true love. It remained for her to summons a kind of mermaid chorus line as backing for “Areefa Plankton” in yet a further oceanic surge of irrepressible song-and-dance energy.

Both Cary Stackhouse’s Peter Pan and Camilla Besley’s Wendy exuded youthful wholeheartedness, Stackhouse’s wide-eyed, open-faced “child of nature” aspect made a perfect foil for Camilla Besley’s equally fresh though more feet-on-the-ground Wendy, as determined in her own way as her more artless, unfettered companion. Each required a bit more vocal heft in places, but made up in physical directness what their work was wanting in sheer volume of voice – as both were newly graduated students each could reasonably expect further developments as their respective voices matured.

Completing the cast were the two Lost Boys, played by Ben Emerson and Manuel Solomon, the latter also contributing some energetic routines doggy-style as the Darling’s pet dog Nana. These were thinly-disguised representations of recently-ousted “lost” parliamentarians, here named “Dunnie” and “Hone” respectively, their singing and dancing bursting at the seams with stylish gusto – I can’t resist enjoying once again their “moment” of confession at bringing Wendy to earth with their arrows on her arrival in Neverland, with the plaintively-sung words,”Twang! Twang! – we shot her down!”

I must confess that, for me, part of the fun of shows like these is the clever reworking of new lyrics into familiar classic “hit” tunes – somehow it contributes to the “outrageous” aspect of the show, the above instance a rib-tickling example for me. Michael Nicholas Williams’ arrangements and on-stage realizations held us in thrall throughout, however popular or otherwise the material – in one instance near the beginning we were dizzyingly tangoed, murder-mysteried and balladed through the magic portals of Xanadu in what seemed like a series of rapidly-drawn breaths, along an exhilarating musical ride.

Everything made eye-catching use of colour (Hook’s costume in particular a visual treat) mobility (the stage readily doubled as either oceanic or harbour waters on which boats could pursue their course, and crocodiles could swiftly stalk their prey) and spectacle (a wonderful cosmic realization as Peter and Wendy fly through the starry divide and into Neverland – all credit to Sheila Horton’s costumes, Jennifer Lal’s lighting and John Hodgkins’ evocative and flexible sets. With Leigh Evans’ rapid-fire deployment of the actors’ choreographic energies, and Susan Wilson’s judicious hand on the show’s pacing and dynamic variations, we in the audience were literally kept on the boil throughout.

Cast and production team deserve every success with this show – no better gauge of entertainment effectiveness was provided by my next-seat fellow audience member (a prominent Wellington composer), whose laughter rang out more-or-less continually at the moments-per-minute parade of risible enjoyment to be had from this delightful “Peter Pan”.

See also reviews at Theatreview –
https://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=10759

Orchestra Wellington out-performs the fireworks with a stunning “Petrouchka”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
PETROUCHKA

TABEA SQUIRE – Colour Lines (commission from Orchestra Wellington)*
CARL NIELSEN – Violin Concerto Op.33
IGOR STRAVINSKY – Petrouchka (Ballet – Revised 1947 Edition)

Arohanui Strings – Sistema Hutt Valley (Alison Eldredge – director)*

Andrew Atkins (conductor)*
Suyeon Kang (violin)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Saturday 4th November, 2017

Audiences can be curiously unpredictable, on occasions exhilarating and galvanizing masses of energy to be part of, caught up in the excitement of either enthusiastic or rapt responses to some performances, (especially those involving soloists) and then for no apparent reason, every once in a while, strangely under-responsive. Why this sudden out-of-the-blue observation, going a little against the grain of my normally unrelieved positivism as a music reviewer?

It was Saturday’s Orchestra Wellington concert that left me feeling a little bemused, after I’d experienced warmth and enthusiasm aplenty on the part of the audience in response to the efforts, firstly, of the youthful Sistema Strings, playing both a group of demonstration pieces and taking a vital role in composer Tabea Squire’s newly-commissioned work “Colour Lines”, and secondly, violinist Suyeon Kang, in giving us a rapturously beautiful performance of that concert-hall rarity, the Nielsen Violin Concerto, with plenty of tensile strength and winning gossamer-woven lines.

In each of these cases the performers’ energies were accorded the kind of reaction from the listeners that reflected the music-making’s outstanding and warm-hearted qualities. However, I thought that, on the same performance “Richter-scale”, the audience’s reaction to the concert’s second half, a breathtakingly brilliant realisation by orchestra and conductor of Stravinsky’s music for his ballet “Petrouchka”, by rights ought to have been something along the lines of a twenty-minute standing ovation!

That such a stunning realization of the work didn’t seem to me as forthcoming as it fully deserved could have been because (1) there had already been a lot of applause in the concert already, due to the presence of the Sistema students, (2) the remarkable violinist Suyeon Kang had already taken the lion’s share, with her gorgeously elfin-like performance of Nielsen’s Violin Concerto (including a round of spontaneous applause at the first movement’s conclusion) and (3) Petrouchka of course ends not with a Firebird-like bang, but with a subdued whimper, from which listeners have to then re-activate those glowing embers of enthusiasm and get them bursting into flame once more. So the audience response conveyed what I thought W.S.Gilbert might have described as “modified rapture”, instead of conveying (as I and a colleague afterwards were both feeling) a sense of “Did we really hear that? It was mind-blowing!”

Overall, the concert’s trajectory lent itself to a kind of “from seeds to forest giant” progression, with tremulously awakened beginnings demonstrated by the cutest brigade of junior string-players one could imagine, all under the sway of their director, Alison Eldredge. All of these were introduced by Orchestra Wellington Music Director, Marc Taddei, and included OW’s assistant conductor Andrew Atkins (unfortunately not credited in the programme for his efforts with both the Arohanui Strings, in their introductory items, and in directing the combined ensemble in the commissioned piece “Colour Lines” by Tabea Squire).

This was a work whose composer conceived as involving both the student players and the orchestra proper, by using ‘”free-time” notation in places to allow the younger players the means of continuously contributing to the music’s texture. A chorale which appears in various guises during the piece eventually blends with the younger musicians’ efforts. I was struck by the confident orchestrations throughout, a definite character emerging with each of the sequences, making for strongly-etched contrasts (scintillating upper strings are then “cooled’ by the winds near the opening, before a lovely dancing interaction develops between strings and winds beneath warm horn tones, the latter then assuming a ”stopped” out-of-phase effect which kaleidoscopes the music into yet another world of wonderment).

I recall both my Middle-C colleague Rosemary Collier and myself being delighted by Tabea Squire’s work for string quartet “Jet-lag” at a 2014 concert, a piece with something of a similar sharply-etched sense of character, obviously wrought by a composer with an ear for textures and the on-going ambiences. What mischief, and indeed, even danger, was let loose with the burble and ferment generated by the brass in their “hornets’ nest” sequence! – again contrasting with the nobility of the chorale voiced by those same instruments not long after – reminiscent of Hindemith, here, as the strings muscled up to join with the tutti in gestures of satisfying finality, snappy and definite. I thought the music most skillfully and confidently focused and blurred its edges all at once, throughout, as the title suggested it might.

Relatively unknown compared with its Nordic cousin written in 1904 by Sibelius, the slightly later (1911) Violin Concerto of Carl Nielsen’s proved equally as strong and fascinating a work, and certainly as difficult to play, if not more so. Like Sibelius, Nielsen was himself a violinist, though neither composer would have attempted to perform his own concerto, despite Aino Sibelius describing her husband’s playing of the work’s solo part during its composition as “on fire all the time.….he stays awake all night, plays incredibly beautifully,…he has so many ideas it is hard to believe it….”

Nielsen’s work, unlike Sibelius’s, turned away from the standard three-movement concerto form, the composer casting the work in two large movements, each with a slow and quicker section (some commentators alternatively describe the work as having four movements). The music began strongly, dramatic and declamatory, the soloist (South-Korean-born Australian violinist Suyeon Kang) meeting the orchestra’s initial challenge with full-throated recitative-like passages whose striking quality of tensile strength and flexibility of phrasing instantly compelled and held one’s attention throughout. I wondered whether, in the big-boned virtuoso sequences, Kang’s tightly-woven silken tones would fill-out sufficiently to provide a sufficient match for the orchestra’s more assertive gestures – but such was her focused concentration her instrument seemed able to “inhabit” the music’s dynamics in an entirely natural and unselfconscious manner. From these trenchant responses right through to the Elgar-like lyricism of the Praeludium’s final musings, she held us in thrall.

Nor did she shirk the physicality of the jolly “cavalleresco” opening of the allegro, with its vigorous exchanges, rapid running passages, and sudden moments of introspection, all leading to a solo cadenza which mirrors the quixotic moods which have gone before in the music, before dancing back to the allegro’s lively theme. And such was the breathtaking skill with which she swung into the movement’s dancing coda, and traded playful feints and gestures with the orchestra right to the end, that the audience responded with some spontaneous unscheduled applause (to which Marc Taddei, after acknowledging the soloist and the clapping, remarked “But wait! – there’s more!”).

The slow movement featured lovely playing throughout the opening sequences from the winds, joined by the horns, and some beautiful Sibelius-like accompaniments in thirds for the soloist, whose utterances seemed bent on expressing some kind of private sorrow. The horns offered comfort at various points, as did the strings, so that the music’s abrupt recourse to a kind of droll waltz seemed almost Schubertian in its stoic, at times quirky and humourful resignation, the orchestra occasionally launching into moments of mock seriousness, none of which last for very long. One thunderous episode provoked an angular cadenza from the soloist, during which, at one point, she played simultaneously a drone bass, a repeated pizzicato note and some bowed figurations, all most divertingly and unselfconsciously. It was a remarkable performance from all concerned, and fully deserved a response which matched in enthusiasm that given to another Korean musician in the MFC just over a week ago, Joyce Yang, after her Rachmaninov concerto performance with the NZSO.

We reformed after the interval to the sounds of fireworks outside, which were soon well-and-truly put in their place by a performance of Stravinsky’s eponymous ballet “Petrouchka” from Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington which I couldn’t imagine bettered in terms of precision, skill, atmosphere and overall theatrical and musical impact. Every sequence, every scene, every tableau came alive, the music-making bringing into being both dance and drama, and forming a kind of triumvirate of successful evocation of artistic achievement. At its conclusion I felt sympathy for Marc Taddei and all the players who deserved to be brought to their feet and given individual acknowledgement – but the trouble was, there were too many of them! Nevertheless I thought that all the winds and all the brass players were simply heroes, and that Andrew Atkins deservedly got his dues after all, for his superb piano-playing. Very great honour, of course, to Marc Taddei and his all-encompassing direction of the score. For all these reasons and more, I could have clapped for much, much longer!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rachmaninov – jubilation and bitterness, but sheer poetry from Joyce Yang

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
RACHMANINOV
Vocalise Op.34 No.14 (transcribed by the composer)
Piano Concerto No.3 in D Minor Op. 30
Symphonic Dances Op.45

Joyce Yang (piano)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 27th October, 2017

A beautifully put-together programme, this, devoted to the music of Rachmaninov, and in almost every way, superbly delivered! There could be no doubt, however as to who the “star of the show” was – Korean-born American pianist Joyce Yang gave what seemed to me a performance in a thousand of the composer’s fearsome D Minor Concerto, regarded by many as one of the most technically difficult works for piano and orchestra ever written. Earlier, the NZSO and conductor Edo de Waart had breathed into life a deliciously-poised orchestra-only version of the wordless song, Vocalise, in an arrangement devised by the composer. Then, following the concerto, came a performance of Rachmaninov’s very last work, his “Symphonic Dances” , written in 1940, three years before his death. The first two of the dances came off best, here, particularly the first, with its beautifully-played saxophone solo – I confess to being a tad disappointed with the final dance’s performance, feeling that it was wanting in “bite”, and needing more wildness and desperation in its execution.

The Vocalise, which began the programme is one of those pieces which has been arranged or transcribed for a variety of instruments – it began life as a wordless song which concluded the composer’s Op.34 collection, entitled “14 Romances for high voice and piano”, and was written specifically for the voice of the great Russian soprano Antonia Nezhdanova, Rachmaninov wishing to give the singer a vehicle for displaying the beauty of her voice without recourse to words. The composer was to subsequently arrange the work both for voice and orchestra accompaniment, and for orchestra alone, although more recent sources suggest that Rachmaninov originally wrote the work for Nezhdanova to perform with orchestra AFTER the rest of the songs were already written for voice and piano, the Vocalise being subsequently added to the “Romances” collection. Among the various arrangements, the most unusual is probably that for theremin and piano, arranged by Clara Rockmore (nee Reisenberg), who was the electronic instrument’s most well-known exponent during the twentieth century.

This was a gorgeously-played performance (the conductor’s very first of this work, as he tells us in the programme’s introductory note), enabling the NZSO strings to really show their mettle, and delivering all those qualities which bring out the work’s inherent tenderness, lyricism, depth of feeling and range of intensity. The strings at first had the lion’s share of the playing, but they were gradually joined by the winds, firstly seeming to merely echo-phrase-ends, but then to increasingly augment the harmonies of the textures, as well as contributing counterpointing lines. Towards the end the music becomes strongly reminiscent of the slow movement of the composer’s Second Symphony, by dint of a clarinet solo which takes over the theme for a few measures before surrendering it again to the ascending strings.

Though in some ways moving from the Vocalise to the D MInor Piano Concerto seemed like something of a “quantum leap”, the links between the two works were here more than usually stressed by the character of the concerto performance, soloist Joyce Yang giving one of the most poetic and sheerly beautiful realizations of this work I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing!  She and Edo de Waart had played the piece together at least twice before with different orchestras, so the interpretation was “of a piece”, with the give-and take between soloist and orchestra replete with understanding and fluency.

Among what marked out her performance for me from so many others was her conveyance of involvement with every note of the music she played – nothing sounded mechanical or “less important” (as either “fillip” or transitional” sequences), but all had its place in a kind of organically-conceived whole. Another thing was, as I’ve said, her remarkable poeticizing of so much of what she played – never did she seem interested in virtuosity for its own sake. Whatever “display element” was in the solo part was there because of the music, and nothing more.

In addition, neither have I heard another pianist bring out to the same extent the music’s impish, quixotic aspect – she found a spikiness in some of the figurations that I thought equated with Rachmaninov’s contemporaries such as Prokofiev,Ravel and Bartok, and even in places, Gershwin. Humour isn’t often a quality one associates with Rachmaninov’s music, but the way Yang articulated some of the filigree passage-work in places made me smile at the playing’s sheer character – this was no faceless perfection, seamless articulation, bland liquidity or pure decoration on show – every note, as I’ve said, had its own raison d’etre, in this performance.

I confess I had to go back all the way to 1993, and Peter Donohoe’s performance of this work with the NZSO under Nicholas Braithwaite, to recall the same wonderment and pleasure at hearing this work “live” – an example of such shared alchemy of interpretation was during that brief, but telling sequence just before the final first-movement reprise of the work’s opening, when the piano gently drifts a repeated bell-like sequence of notes across an ambient crepuscular soundscape enriched by soft horn-chordings – like Donohoe did, Yang drew out this passage exquisitely, once again allowing the notes to speak their character and make an indelible impression upon the listener, however brief and fleeting…..

As for the notorious “virtuoso” elements of this concerto, Yang showed us that she could certainly “finger it” with the greats, as well as match the orchestra in tonal depth when she needed to, putting all of her physical weight into the playing of the heavier chords, such as in the massive first-movement cadenza, and again during the build-up to the final peroration at the work’s very end, and letting her fingers and wrists do the work in the more scintillating passages. People expecting virtuoso thrills got an amazingly musical version of the same from their soloist, one which realized all of the work’s necessary excitement and exhilaration.

No greater contrast with the concerto could have been given to us than what Yang played as an encore – an enchanting performance of one of the most beautiful of Grieg’s “Lyric Pieces”, his “Nocturne” from the “Lyric Suite”. Though it seems heretical to say so, I could have gone home happily after hearing this, feeling as if I had heard a piano articulate all the intrinsic beauty that it was possible for the instrument to express. Of course, I stayed! – lamenting the degradations that have resulted over the last generation of years in visiting artists such as Joyce Yang NOT giving solo recitals in tandem with NZSO appearances, as used to invariably happen in the (good) old days! A modestly-resourced Music Society such as that in Waikanae, which hosts world-class artists such as Alexander Gavrylyuk consistently and successfully organizes piano recitals – why can’t the NZSO do the same with their visiting artists, any more?

Though the first half was a hard act to follow, the orchestra and Edo de Waart did their best with the composer’s compositional swan-song, the “Symphonic Dances”, which appeared in 1940, three years before Rachmaninov’s death. The composer wryly remarked, “I don’t know how it happened – it must have been my last spark!” – but upon closer analysis of the music itself one can hear alongside all the echoes of the past and allusions to previous works, a spirit determined to raise its voice not only in protest at and defiance of the critics who reviled his works, but in bitterness and anger at having lost his homeland and his sources of inspiration. Had Rachmaninov lived for another ten years and been able to work further through these feelings, who knows what else he might have achieved?

The work itself was received with some negativity on all sides – with bewilderment by some of the composer’s “fans”, who were expecting more lyricism and lush orchestrations along the lines of the Third Symphony and the Paganini Rhapsody, and with a good deal of both half-hearted enthusiasm and outright derision by the critics, some of whom by this stage had made Rachmaninov-denigration a kind of “sport” (readers should look up the critical warblings of one Pitts Sanborn for a particularly vicious example of this, in relation to the composer’s Fourth Piano Concerto).

Rachmaninov described himself to an interviewer as “a ghost wandering in a world grown alien”, not being able to either “cast out the old way of writing” or able to “acquire the new”. Despite this assertion, the Dances’ relative toughness, leanness of orchestration and rhythmic asymmetries are nowadays regarded as evidence of the composer’s very apparent awareness of what was happening all around him. This is opposed to the more institutionalized view of Rachmaninov as some sort of nineteenth-century compositional throwback almost right to the end. As Brahms would have said, “any jackass” could hear elements of the old Rachmaninov in places throughout the music, the aching, yearning lyricism, the exciting rhythmic snap of certain figurations, and the oft-quoted “Dies Irae” theme which haunted his work from his First Symphony onwards.

The first two dances were beautifully done, the highlight being the saxophone playing of Simon Brew in the first dance, Rachmaninov writing one of his most beautiful melodies for the instrument, before allowing the strings to take over and repeat the melody, to lump-in-the-throat effect. The whole was framed in sharply-accented, no-nonsense rhythmic fashion by de Waart and his players, who took just as readily to the spooky waltz-rhythms of the second movement, a kind of Russian “Valse Triste”, and gave its melodies a proper “yearning” quality most characteristic of the composer.

Where I craved some more “bite”, a tougher, harsher, more urgent response to the music was in the third dance, whose Stravinsky-like rhythms for me “sat” too heavily – de Waart’s steady-as-she-goes way with the music I thought produced more a feeling of petulance and bad-temper rather than galvanizing, sharply-etched bitterness. With the “Dies Irae” and exerpts from the Russian Orthodox liturgical Chant “Blessed is the Lord” literally “fighting it out” in the music, I wanted more sparks flying, more combustion, more sense of triumph over bitter adversity at the end. Perhaps while on tour with this piece de Waart and the orchestra will push this piece further and further to its limits, and achieve a harder-won but ultimately more cathartic and appropriately triumphal conclusion to an already momentous concert.

At last! Michael Houstoun’s Beethoven recordings for Rattle reach the Diabelli Variations

Posted on by Peter Mechen

 

BEETHOVEN – Diabelli Variations
(33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli Op.120)
Michael Houstoun (piano)

Rattle CD RAT D070 2017

Early in 1819, Anton Diabelli, who was a music publisher in Vienna, and something of a dilettante composer, wrote a waltz, and invited all of the leading composers of the time in and around Vienna to compose a single variation on his work. Diabelli’s intention was to publish the collection as a complete set, planning to raise money for patriotic and humanitarian purposes relating to the recent Napoleonic Wars.

Included among the composers Diabelli approached were Carl Czerny, Franz Schubert, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart , Johann Peter Pixis, Simon Sechter, the Archduke Rudolf, Wenzel Tomaschek , Jan Vorisek and Ludwig Van Beethoven. The young Franz Liszt, though not included in the original list, also contributed a variation, at the insistence of his teacher, Carl Czerny.

Beethoven’s response to the invitation has received fanciful treatment at the hands of his various biographers, with the much-derided Anton Schindler at the forefront of source material for the popular legend – that the composer refused to take part in the project, deriding Diabelli’s waltz as a Schusterfleck, or “Cobbler’s patch”, and only changed his mind when Diabelli offered to pay him handsomely, whereupon Beethoven determined to show Diabelli what he could do by quickly writing not one variation, but thirty-three! It’s now more readily accepted that Beethoven from the very start was interested in the idea, straightaway planning a considerable number of variations. And, contrary to what both Schindler and Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny claimed, Beethoven did not write the complete work “in a merry freak” (Czerny’s words), but worked slowly and fitfully on his sketches, completing twenty-three of the variations by the end of 1819 before laying them aside to finish both the Missa Solemnis and the late piano sonatas, then, early in 1823, returning to the work and completing the set of thirty-three (the mind boggles at the sheer creativity of all of this!).

DIabelli subsequently published Beethoven’s work as Vol.One of a two-volume set grandly titled “Vaterländischer Künstlerverein” (Patriotic Artist’s Association), the second volume of which contained the 50 “other” variations by the remaining composers! Since then the world has all but ignored the efforts of all of these but Beethoven’s, on behalf of the publisher’s modest but fruitful little creation.

Where Schindler did seem to “get it right”, in the view of most commentators, was in his remark that the composition of this work ‘amused Beethoven to a rare degree’, that it was written ‘in a rosy mood’, and that it was ‘bubbling with unusual humour’. Alfred Brendel, whose thoughts concerning the work Michael Houstoun frequently quotes in his fascinating notes reproduced in Rattle’s booklet, elsewhere cites another commentator, Wilhelm Von Lenz, a somewhat more reliable biographer than the enthusiastic but over-imaginative Schindler, Lenz calling Beethoven “the most thoroughly initiated high priest of humour” and the variations “a satire on their theme”.

To Brendel’s assertion that the “Diabellis” are “the greatest of all piano works”, Houstoun responds that he has “no argument” with such a view, and that the only comparable work in keyboard literature could be JS Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”. Houstoun comments further that for him, the “Goldbergs” deal with spiritual certainty, whereas with Beethoven’s work, all such boundaries are challenged. He makes the analogy of Beethoven trying to “punch holes in the very fabric of the cosmos” with this work, which seems to me another way of saying that the composer is taking nothing for granted, and wants to see if there’s something else beyond normal human perception.

The Rattle booklet as well contains Houstoun’s own thoughts on each of the variations, which to me seems an invaluable insight into how the pianist views not only the music as a whole, but the function of each of its parts – we are taken into the workshop of recreation, as it were, and given the chance to experience for ourselves how the interpreter’s thoughts and words relate to his delivery of the music.

To my ears Houstoun succeeds brilliantly in “making the word flesh” so to speak. With playing less “nuanced” throughout than is the case with some pianists’ I’ve heard, he gives his listeners a strongly direct reading of the music, enabling us to get to grips with the notes quickly, rather than us having to first get to grips with the interpreter’s playing of some of them! I think he’s also suggesting that we, as listeners, have to do some work ourselves on the huge range of possibilities the music is giving to us. An active, creative kind of listening rather than a passive, “washing over one” response is required, though Beethoven’s quixotic humour certainly helps keep one in thrall!

Having applied brushstrokes of wit, charm, excitement and thoughtfulness to his realisations of most of the pieces, Houstoun, with wonderful surety, then tackles the radically different world of the final five Variations, opening up realms of intensity which transcend what we’ve so far heard. The first of the group of three C Minor pieces prepares us for what follows, as the music gradually descends to the depths of sorrow and loneliness within a sound-world resembling that of the slow movement of the “Hammerklavier”, the Bach-like No.31 described by the pianist as “a searching lament” and given the title “beacon of sorrow”. After plumbing these depths, Houstoun then electrifies us with his playing of a briliant Handelian double-fugue, NOT, as an applause-garnering conclusion, but a monumental release of energy leading to Beethoven’s greatest “surprise” of all in this work – a finale in the form of a Minuet, here patiently and sublimely realised by the pianist, in his own words, “the perfect endless ending”, the music moving like planets slowly circling the sun, with cosmic, god-like serenity.

If you already have Michael Houstoun’s Rattle set of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas, you will want this disc as an essential companion – and if you don’t have any of Houstoun’s Beethoven, then what better entry-point could you have than this, arguably the pianist’s finest single Beethoven recording? In a world already replete with recorded performances of this work, Houstoun’s can proudly take its place as one of the most strongly-focused and beautifully recorded – altogether, a most satisfying issue!