Author: Peter Mechen

Camerata’s beguiling “What’s in a name?” concert of Haydn and Mozart

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Camerata, with Diedre Irons (piano)
HAYDN – Symphony No.6 in D Major, Hob. 1:6 “Le Matin”
MOZART – Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat Major, K.271 “Jeunehomme”
Concertmaster: Anne Loeser

Adam Concert Room, NZSM
Victoria University of Wellington

Thursday, 31st August, 2017

Founded in 2015 by the late and lamented Ian Lyons with colleague Liz Pritchett, Camerata is a group of musicians dedicated to the idea of making “high quality, joyful chamber music, accessible to aficionados and newcomers to classical music”. Led by Anne Loeser, a violinist with the NZSO, the group consists of an amalgam of NZSO,Orchestra Wellington and Wellington Chamber Orchestra members, including in this evening’s concert a number of NZSM students and graduates. In accordance with its objective of accessibility, Camerata performs for audiences in return for koha, or voluntary contributions from its listeners.

This was the second occasion on which I’d heard the group perform, the first being in the very different surroundings of St.Peter’s Church on Willis St., whose resplendent qualities included a rather warmer performing acoustic that what we heard this time round in the Adam Concert Room. Each venue brings its own qualities to a performance, of course, and here the instrumental clarity of the different textures and timbres sang out readily during both the symphony and concerto performances. Considering that Camerata has to “realign” its textural and tonal characteristics for each new concert because of the changes in personnel (I compared the two lists of players in each of the concerts I’ve attended, and there were quite a few different names this time round) I felt gratified that the playing seemed to inherit so many of the previous concert’s positive characteristics – no doubt a tribute to both leadership and consistency.

I can’t help but echo my Middle C colleague Lindis Taylor’s amalgam of delight and concern regarding the presence of some early Haydn symphonies in Camerata’s concerts – if only such a group as this would go on and give all of these early works the expert hearing in public performance they’re not likely to get under the auspices of any other local ensemble! To paraphrase a well-known wartime politician’s words, “Never in the field of human creativity was so much attributed to one (Haydn) who had wrought so many (symphonies) but was known by so few” – and so it remains in concert-going circumstances with these Haydn works!

Camerata’s is a start, of course, and despite the non-appearance (as far as I know) of Nos. 2 and 5 of the composer’s symphonic canon in the group’s presentations, this one – No.6 in D Major, Le Matin (The Morning) is significant, in that it’s the earliest of the composer’s symphonies that ordinary concert-goers are likely to know about, almost certainly because of its nickname! – (Quick Question: Name the earliest of the Haydn Symphonies…..Answer: Easy! No.6 in D Major, Le Matin…..I’ve got a recording of it, along with 7 & 8!)…..so, this is an important factor with these symphonies, as without the suggestive evocative titles these particular ones probably wouldn’t ever be regarded as special: – but ah! – the “Philosopher ” (No.22), “Lamentatione” (No.26), the “Hornsignal” (No.31), “Mercury” (No.43), and “Trauer” (Mourning) No.44 – and these are all before we even reach the famous “Farewell” Symphony (No.45)! What Camerata’s long-term plans regarding these works of Haydn’s are have yet to be revealed, but as Lindis Taylor ruefully remarked, for the group to get through all the symphonies, he would, at the present rate, “need to live till at leat 2050!”

This was the first symphony the twenty-nine year-old Haydn wrote for the Esterhazy court in Eisenstadt, near Vienna, shortly after being appointed the Prince’s Vice-Kapellmeister. It’s not certain from where he derived his inspiration for a triumverate of symphonies on the “morning, noon and night” themes, though his employer, Prince Paul, was known to be fond of programmatic Italian baroque music, and may have requested the scheme of the composer. Whatever the case, the music impresses more by dint of its highlighting the skills of the orchestra’s individual players, rather than the programme element as such. The Prince had recently employed some additional musicians for his orchestra, whom Haydn would have recommended – and so the composer saw to it that their skills were very much to the fore in the new work.

So, a new day dawned, and off we went on our musical journey! Despite the dryness of the acoustic, the playing itself generated plenty of “atmosphere” and stood up well to scrutiny. After the first glimmerings of light turned into fully-formed sunbeams, the flute cheekily began the allegro, filled with gorgeous interchanges between instruments, buoyed along by irrepressible energies. The development modulated the music freely and daringly, and the horn’s cheeky pre-Eroica “early” entry in front of the flute’s “recapitulation” entry broadened the smiles even further!

The slow movement, beginning Adagio, gave us a quietly ascending scale on the strings whose “minor’ inclinations were thwarted by the solo violin’s interruption in the major key! after some soulful duetting between violin and ‘cello, the music began to dance a graceful minuet-like measure, violin and cello exchanging decorative flourishes, both Anne Loeser and cellist Andrew Joyce enjoying themselves hugely! A couple of sforzando chords and the Adagio briefly returned, rich with experience, and more than ready to give way and sink into silence.

The players gave the Minuet a vigorous stride over characterful, held wind notes, straightforward enough until the begining of the Trio, when bassoon and double bass took charge, allowing some comment from a viola to punctuate their quirky exchanges, a kind of get-together of gruff, characterful voices, rather like a favourite uncle’s oft-told “joke” at a family party. By contrast, the flute’s light, airy presence launched the finale with gossamer grace, a gesture immediately imitated by the violin and then thrown into the midst of the orchestra – Haydn has such fun with his different resources, creating such a sense of variety through his use of different textures and timbres, and challenging the skills of the players, none more so than the leader’s, whose playing in this instance was appropriately virtuosic!

After the interval we were treated to a performance of Mozart’s first “big” piano concerto, and an acknowledged masterpiece, the so-called “Jeunehomme” Piano Concerto, No. 9 in E-flat Major K.271 – the work’s nickname, though apparently incorrectly spelt, refers to the young girl who first played this concerto, Victoire Jenamy. Alongside a “named” Haydn symphony, the concerto’s title seemed more than appropriate for this concert.

Diedre Irons, whose Mozart playing I’ve long admired, was the eagerly-awaited soloist for Camerata on this occasion. Possibly, some kind of technical hitch with her “tablet” from which she played the score caused a breakdown just after she’d re-entered the discourse after the opening orchestral tutti. Whatever the case, it was one which she duly sorted, realigned with the orchestra, and began again from just befor her re-entry, with no glitches the second time round.

Once we’d weathered the break in transmission and all been reconnected, we were able to turn our attention to the actual music-making, which had a quality of “presence” I can only put down to the immediacy of the venue and the smaller-than-usual number of instrumentalists. These conditions meant that, whatever even a single player in the ensemble did, the effect was noticeable, giving everything that “happened” a specific and meaningful focus, as opposed to the often generalised feeling which can take away the “edge” from normal-sized orchestral performances. Added to this was the pianist’s life-like inflection of the piano part, enabling the notes to speak with real feeling – listening to her playing put me in mind of encountering a warm-hearted and insightful conversationalist, as responsive to others as she herself was engaging and thoughtful.

The slow movement immediately reminded me for a time of the parallel movement in K.364, the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola. The musicians evoked a remarkable depth of feeling via their exchanges, the ensemble contributing its darkly-based string-tones and beseeching winds, and the piano its theatrically tragic recitative-like manner. The cadenza-like solo took these feelings to even greater depths, evoking what seemed almost like late-Romantic gesturings in its explorations of sorrow, and drawing a demonstrative reaction from the ensemble in response.

All of which was swept away in the finale’s spring tide of joyous energy which gambolled, chattered and tumbled every which way from the pianist’s fingers through and over the orchestral players, the music irrepressible in its bubbling and chatting character, sweeping all before it – as befits, of course, a release from darkness and strife! Irons showed her mastery of articulation in marrying recitative with the music’s trajectory of abandonment, before plunging into a transitional flourish which led the music to a world of gorgeous incongruity, pizzicato strings and all, in the shape and form of a minuet. Again she impressed with the timing of her articulation in gathering up our sensibilities before we knew what was happening, and giving our exuberances their heads in company with the music, taking us all to the final flourishes of the music’s brilliant conclusion. Bravo!

Very great credit to the Camerata players and those who help keep this particular ship afloat – already a group generating much interest, the ensemble will, I’m sure, grow and prosper artistically. Repertoire-wise there’s plenty of potential, and I’ll be interested to see in what direction the group inclines – doing something a bit different is often scary, but with whole-heartedness and the skills to back the ventures up, Camerata is likely to go places!

P.S. (from September 5th) – a message just to hand from Camerata’s Liz Pritchett has answered my queries regarding earlier Haydn symphonies and the ensemble’s plans for more: – Symphony No.2 appeared in Camerata’s very first concert programme, in April 2015 (unfortunately not reviewed).  Symphony No.5 hasn’t yet been played by the ensemble, but there are plans to do more of the earlier symphonies – hopefully the “missing link” will eventually get its dues, also!  (Many thanks to Liz Pritchett!)

BEETHOVEN Violin and Piano Sonata Series – a feast for Wellingtonians!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BEETHOVEN – The complete Sonatas for Violin-and-Piano
A Lunchtime Series of five concerts from Chamber Music New Zealand

Bella Hristova (violin)
Michael Houstoun (piano)

Concert No.1 – Monday, 28th August, 2017
Violin Sonata No.1 in D Major, Op.12 No.1
Violin Sonata No 6 in A Major Op.30 No.1

Renouf Foyer, Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas don’t span the composer’s creative output as imposingly as do his efforts in some of the other genres – within the short space of six years (between 1797 and 1803) he was to write nine out of the ten completed works for violin and piano, and the final single work a decade later. However, he had attempted a work for the two instruments as a fledgling composer; and he was also to produce both a set of Variations on “Se vuol ballare” from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and a Rondo in G WoO.41 before the publication in 1799 of his first sonata for the genre. So he wasn’t exactly a beginner at the duo-writing task when he tackled this exuberant D Major work, the first of his three Op.12 sonatas.

The Sonata’s opening movement was an excellent way for violinist Bella Hristova and pianist Michael Houstoun to begin their traversal of the cycle – we were treated to a heady plunge into a vein of buoyant energy and confidently-wrought lyricism, the lines of communication between violinist and pianist here clearly outlined in a somewhat dry acoustic, happily emphasising the rapport between the two, via the music’s beautifully-dovetailed sequences of ebb and flow.

After enjoying Hristova’s and Houstoun’s playful assertiveness throughout the opening, I liked the touches of mystery they encouraged with their phrasings of the development’s music, the piano weaving long, sinuously running lines and the violin more elusively reiterating its opening figure in tandem with the piano, after which, by way of some beguiling exchanges the instruments re-explored the opening territories, Hristova playfully emphasising a visceral quality in her phrasing in places along the way which added to the music’s excitement.

The slow movement’s enchanting cantabile theme, heard firstly on the piano, and then reiterated by the violin, was given some inventive variation treatment by the composer, including a lovely gambolling sequence, the violin’s running lines deliciously augmented by the piano’s gurgling arpeggios, followed by an assertive, dramatic treatment involving both players digging into their notes and releasing irruptions of energy. A final variation took the music into more fanciful territories, each instrument appearing to occasionally stop and listen to the other’s increasingly discursive variant on what had gone before, the sounds seeming to pay little heed to time and place outside the realms created by the music.

As for the finale, its infectious energies immediately reawakened my earliest memories of discovery involving these works, Houstoun’s rhythmic trajectories giving the music tremendous elan, and thus encouraging from Hristova a similarly charged feeling of excitement, throughout. Both players relished the composer’s teasingly divergent modulation near the end, which airily ascends back up to the home key after its ear-catching harmonic adventure, with great self-satisfaction and aplomb – for Hristova and Houstoun, then, a dream start to their cycle!

With the Sixth Sonata, Op.30 No.1, Hristova and Houstoun moved into different territories of musical expression from a composer whose world had shifted to a state of ongoing existential crisis, one dominated by acute awareness of his growing deafness. Consequently, the music moves through its varying moods with a curious mixture of studied self-awareness and spontaneous exploration, a mood whose volatility was here beautifully realised by both musicians.

Hristova and Houstoun seemed to be able to “go with the flow” while dealing with interactions between the instruments which appeared in a kind of conflict/challenge with the other, assertive flourishes often met with questioning, withdrawn phrases, each speaking the phrase “what then?” Each player seemed acutely responsive to what the other was doing, balancing and co-ordinating sparkle and surge with introspectiveness in a way that led the listener’s ear continually on – a frisson of rapt intensity just before the recapitulation sounded particularly heartfelt and characteristic, as did the movement’s final flourish, with its quiet concluding rejoiner.

What a beautiful slow movment this work has! – the pianist’s gently rocking dotted rhythm supported the violinist’s cantabile line, before the instruments changed thematic roles, before the music took a breath-catching modulatory turn in a new direction, one filled with musings, spontaneous impulses of energy and thoughtful redirectionings, all of which were delivered in an entirely spontaneous and recreative way by the musicians.

Again, Beethoven took a by now familiar recourse to variation form for the finale, the resulting sequences characterised by the programme’s note-writer as “ranging from waggish to whimsical”. Certainly the expressive modes seem at times almost like cryptic clues for concealed messages, the musical flow alternating between great fluency and terse encodings! I particularly enjoyed the “hide-and-seek” variation mid-way, which set the whispered against the emphatic with po-faced theatricality, as well as the final capering energies of the concluding variation, whose winding-down meanderings towards the end kept us in thrall right up to the re-energised concluding gestures. What teamwork! – what timing! – and what a sense of identification with a composer’s world! It all augurs well for further instalments of the Hristova/Houstoun combination – a feast for Wellingtonians!

Mahler, Berg – and Salina Fisher, from the NZSO – music of innocence and experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SALINA FISHER – Rainphase
BERG – Violin Concerto “To the memory of an Angel”
MAHLER – Symphony No.1 in D Major “Titan”

Karen Gomyo (violin)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 11th August, 2017

Spectres, once they’re established, can haunt the world of music for decades, for oceans of time, during which certain attitudes and values can be gradually eroded, or else further entrenched. The fact that each of this concert’s three items might well have reawakened specific “ghosts” lurking among the sensibilities of the NZSO’s many loyal supporters might well have accounted for the relative paucity of attendance (by my reckoning the hall was no more than two-thirds full).

In fact, two of these so-called “spectres” probably contributed far less to the numbers or empty seats than the one which I’ll come to in a moment. Time was when programming a piece of New Zealand music at a concert would ensure that a certain number of music-lovers stayed away. Nowadays, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that home-grown music, partly by dint of sheer persistence (thanks to various staunch advocacy from certain musicians and listeners) and partly due to its intrinsic attractiveness no longer “scares off” people to the extent that it used to do.

As for the music of Gustav Mahler, the composer was famously quoted at some point as saying in response to shafts of critical disapproval “My time will come”, a prediction which appears to have come true wherever Western symphonic music is regularly performed. It did take more than a decade after the then National Orchestra of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service was founded in 1946 for the ensemble to tackle a Mahler Symphony (the Fourth with conductor John Hopkins in 1958), though since then all the others, including the unfinished fragment of the Tenth, have been more-or-less regularly performed.

It’s interesting that Hopkins, according to Joy Tonks’ 1986 history, “The NZSO – the first Forty Years” – Reed Methuen), had to fight the Assistant Director-General of the then NZBC, John Schroder, to programme what the latter called “this long and boring music”…! – an indication of the extent at that time of the composer‘s “spectral” aspect in people’s minds. Now, it seems, concert audiences can’t get enough of Mahler, even though the presence of the First Symphony on the occasion of this concert didn’t help to make up for what appeared to be more potent misgivings on the part of a goodly number of patrons.

So maybe it was the presence of music by Alban Berg which could have been the crucial factor – though Berg was in many ways the least “hard-core-radical” of the famous Schoenberg/Berg/Webern trio whose work popularly defined the “Second Viennese School” of composition, his music is still regarded as “difficult” by association with his two contemporaries, enough, perhaps, to put off people of a less adventurous inclination from attending the concert. One woman sitting just down from me lasted ten minutes into the Berg Violin Concerto before she was gathering her things and was off – but at least she was prepared to give the music a try!

But what riches there were for those of us who stayed, firstly to marvel at the finely-wrought and freshly-contrived super-detailings of instrumental textures, timbres and tones of Salina Fisher’s miraculous new work Rainphase, and then to luxuriate in the miraculous contrivance of acerbic twelve-tone structurings interlaced with russet-coloured afterglowings throughout Alban Berg’s last completed work, his Violin Concerto. Both works required active listening of a kind which occasionally confronted rather than soothed the ear – and perhaps the Concerto might have attracted more people had there been a pre-concert talk of some kind, helping to shed some light in advance on some of the music’s ebb and flow. It was certainly a work which richly illustrated Berg’s teacher, Schoenberg’s dictum about there being “no such things as dissonances – merely more remote consonances!”

Beginning with Salina Fisher’s work, the first sounds were Keatsian in their “Fled is that music? – Do I wake or sleep?” quality, harmonic-like tones so ethereal and other-worldly – in point of fact, not unlike those at the very opening of the Mahler Symphony we were to hear later in the concert. The tones then multiplied and harmonically “clustered”, and seemed to initiate the process of a giant organism gently breathing, with still more textures and timbres joining in with the wonderment, and with percussion gradually becoming more prominent. The lower instruments provided a foundation while the lighter-toned sounds clustered, glowed and scintillated before receding into an almost transcendental world of gestural sonorities, for all the world becoming “naturalistic” in their textural and timbral explorations, sonorities best described by the words “swishing” and “murmuring” and “breathing” and “rippling” – all water-words describing both activity and aftermath.

Gentle string pizzicati turned the processses into a kind of promenade or dance – a “gavotte of the stormwater pipes”, or some such activity – with as much happening on the ground as there was in the air. Winds found their characteristic voices and intoned a kind of nature’s hymn, individual lines finding one another and growing in intensity, reaching what felt like a kind of fruition of a natural process, most satisfying to experience. Fisher’s assured instrumentation throughout these sequences made for breath-catching results in places, no more evocative than during the piece’s long drawn-out diminuendo, flecked with motifs of valediction. As strings and winds found a commonality and the textures dried slowly out, the piece magically returned to its origins, the ending surviving even the oddest irruption of vocalised noise from (one presumed) some audience member somewhere, made for whatever reason, accidental or intentional…….

Last year I had the good fortune to both hear and review a performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto here in Wellington played by Wilma Smith, well-remembered in Wellington as a former leader of the New Zealand String Quartet, as well as an ex-concertmaster of the NZSO, before her relocating to Australia in 2003. On that occasion Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington were the musical collaborators, so this time it was the NZSO’s and Edo de Waart’s turn, with the superb violinist Karen Gomyo, whom I’d previously heard playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the NZSO and Pietari Inkinen in June 2015. On that occasion Gomyo was a substitute for the newly-pregnant Hilary Hahn, and captured my interest with a reading of the great work which provided a distinctive and memorable experience.

Throughout the work’s opening Andante movement one would think that there was little the average concertgoer would find troublesome or unpalatable. It wasn’t music which “played itself”, and did require some concentration – but the rewards for listeners were considerable. Berg began the work with a series of open fifths alternated between the solo violin and various orchestral instruments such as the harp and the clarinet, Gomyo keeping her higher tones exquisitely pure, while squeezing more emotion from on the lower notes. After musing on the opening in exchange with muted brass, the soloist connected with the orchestral winds, taking part in both gentle, bitter-sweet exchanges, and a couple of trenchantly-delivered arched lines, throbbing with feeling.

Out of this the clarinets began the dance that ushered in the second movement. A somewhat angular figuration in places built up to some vigorous to-ings and fro-ings, with the peasant-like dance-steps tossed about, and the violin taking charge of the rhythm for a “this is how it goes” sequence. As if it had been playing quietly for a while and nobody had noticed, the solo horn suddenly introduced an affecting counter-melody which the muted trumpets then picked up – like a memory of long ago suddenly coming into focus! The composer when young had had an affair with a peasant girl, which produced a child and it was believed that this tune was a reference to that particular memory.

As well, Berg had already begun the concerto when he heard of the death from infantile paralysis of Manon Gropius, the daughter from a second marriage of Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, a girl he knew as Mutzi. The violin’s quixotic dancings in this movement seemed like the composer’s attempt at capturing for all time a young girl’s vivacity and sweetness, the music lightly evoking fond remembrance and nostalgic sadness, and watched over by guardians such as the stern tuba and a wraith-like pair of Sibelius-like clarinets. As the trumpet hauntingly sounded the folk-tune once again the soloist suddenly danced away, as if wanting to preserve the impulses of memory which brought happiness and escape from what was to follow.

Whereas the music had thus far been vivacious and volatile on the one hand, and thoughtful and nostalgic on the other, the third movement’s opening produced a shock with its harsh ferocity – the stuff of nightmares come into the midst of contentment. Gomyo’s playing bit deeply into the music’s textures like a wounded animal, then withdrew into hiding, accompanied by spectral tones from the oboe and flute, the music feeling “cornered” and subdued, the textures slightly “ghoulish” , the lines from the soloist suspended in space. With another irruption welling up from below, the music appeared in utter turmoil, the solo violin screaming in agony and despair, and the brass in ghoulish-march mode. The soloist’s tones were overwhelmed by the orchestra’s sheer weight and harshness – such horrible, merciless music!

Out of the vistas laid waste by the turmoil Gomyo’s violin sang resolutely to herself a strongly sustaining ascending line, one which the clarinets then took up and played with such beauty and poignancy – this was the chorale used by JS Bach in his Chorale “Es ist genug”, one which soloist and orchestra here made their own, playing it warmly and tenderly, resisting attempts by the individual instruments to drag the melody back to earth. As the strings sang the last vestiges of life, the soloist beautifully ascended the melody, to a point after which the winds and brass broke into radiant support of “the angel” of the music’s title, the silences at the work’s end carrying with them only her memory.

After these somewhat overwrought utterances, the opening of the Mahler Symphony which followed the interval seemed to take us back to the world of childhood, of first impressions of consciousness and the wonderment induced by nature and creation. De Waart and his players gave the music an almost timeless quality, the sounds here seemingly conjured out of the earth’s elements.The work’s many moments of reflective beauty brough out this performance’s most distinctive quality, an incrediby rapt, breath-holding sense of listening to the silences and the soft sounds in between. Writing this now, it all comes back to me so vividly – playing and conducting of the utmost concentration and refinement.

The work’s more bucolic passages were also rendered with an ease of utterance (more elegant than earthy, I felt, probably because the MFC isn’t renowned for its warmth and richness of sound). Apart from a brief (and uncharacteristic) first-movement woodwind slip, the orchestral playing was simply to die for, so much of the detailing heavenly in effect (the off-stage trumpets, for instance)! Had it all taken place in the Town Hall I’m sure this performance would also have heaved, grunted and roared all the more readily. As it was, the exquisite refinement of those soft passages (onstage brass performing miracles of quiet, withdrawn playing) gave the first movement’s peformance a distinctiveness of its own that won’t easily be forgotten.

De Waart’s second-movement country dancers moved briskly and easily, encouraged by the winds lifting the bells of their instruments as directed by the composer, and by the string players bouncing their bows on the instruments’ strings, adding to the rustic effect. A solo horn most elegantly called the dancers indoors for a more genteel waltz, the playing rich and velvety in effect, and the string-wind counterpoints to the dance a delight. The return of the countryfied Landler brought forth, among other things a splendid cymbal crash and, to the heads of all the dancers, a fine rush of blood at the end.

Timpani strokes, both eerie and purposeful, ushered in the third movement, a double-bass solo voicing the instrument’s spectral tones throughout a minor-key version of the folk-song Frere Jacques (apparently always sung that way in rural parts of Austria), counterpointed by a piquant oboe line, before giving way to the strains of a small klezmer band, almost offstage and passing by, in effect. Again, conductor and players achieved wonders with the quieter sections of the score, most notably the rapt, break-of-day beginning of the trio section of the movement with its near-heartbreaking quotation of the song “Die zwei blauen Augen” from the composer’s own Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen – here, the play of different emotion, the surge of hope and the minor-key pang of anguish from the original song was as affecting as with the original.

Out of the movement’s deathly hush at the end came a blaze of ferocity from the brass and a crash from the percussion that made everybody jump, launching the finale in no uncertain terms! Though the hall doesn’t give much back, the percussion section did a great job, Lenny Sakofsky punishing the cymbals for all they were worth and both Larry Reese and Thomas Guldborg fetching up great roaring avalanches of tone from each of the two sets of timpani. The movement’s ebb and flow was strongly characterised – the tumultuous flare-ups of excitement and agitation were tellingly counterweighted by the more inward, lyrical sequences, each mood in a sense “overtaken” by another in what seemed like an inevitable and organic progression of things. As for the final all-together, it most spectacularly featured the horn sectio “standing and delivering” as the music roared forth, driven by the timpani and upholstered by every orchestral section singing and playing its heart out.

As I’ve said, in the Town Hall we would have been overwhelmed by these sounds, perhaps even too much so for some people – but not for this writer. Conductor Edo de Waart made an interesting gesture with his actions immediately after taking his bows in front of an enthusiastic audience, by giving his bouquet of flowers to the double-bass player, Joan Perarnau Garriga, in acknowledgement of his restrained but telling contribution to the performance – maybe for de Waart those rapt, inward-looking sounds were the ones that enshrined the true soul of this remarkable music.

Eternity Opera’s “Figaro” produces the goods at Welllington’s Hannah Playhouse

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eternity Opera Company presents:
MOZART – The Marriage of Figaro (sung in English)

Cast: Figaro – Jamie Henare / Susannah – Emily Mwila
Marcellina – Marian Hawke / Dr.Bartolo – Roger Wilson
Cherubino – Elisabeth Harris / Count Almaviva – Orene Tiai
Don Basilio – Mark Bobb / Countess Almaviva – Kate Lineham
Antonio – Nino Raphael / Barbarina – Shayna Tweed
Chorus – William McElwee / Pasquale Orchard / Laura Loach
Richard Dean / Olivia Sheat / William King
Peter King / Hannah Catrin Jones / Minto Fung
Alexandra Woodhouse Appleby / India Loveday
Dancer – Jessica Short

Conductor: Simon Romanos
Director: Alex Galvin
Producer: Emma Beale

Orchestra: Douglas Beilman (Concertmaster)
Malavika Gopal, Alix van Schultze (violins)
Victoria Janecke, Brian Shilito (violas)
Lucy Gijsbers (‘cello), Lesley Hooson (d-bass)
Tim Jenkin (flute), Calvin Scott (oboe)
Mark Cookson (clarinet), Leni Mackle (bassoon)
Greg Hill, Shadley van Wyk, Dominic Groom (horns)
Christopher Hill (Spanish guitar continuo)

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Saturday 5th August, 2017 (until 12th August)

Having so very much enjoyed Eternity Opera’s “Don Giovanni” here in Wellington a year ago, I was looking forward to some replication of the experience with this new production of another Mozart masterpiece, “Le Nozze di Figaro” – or, to put it in the performance’s English-language context “The Marriage of Figaro”. A large part of the attraction of both productions for me was the intimacy of the Hannah Playhouse venue, enabling what seemed like for we audience members the chance in this case to “eavesdrop” on the goings-on in the household of Count Almaviva. Not only did the stage seem to “grow all around and about us”, but the reduced-in-size orchestra also appeared to be playing in the same room (rather than relegated to a submerged space (aptly-named “the pit” in most opera-houses!), the players and their sounds suddenly seeming part of the cut-and-thrust of the action.

Any thought that this close-up aspect might magnify the performance’s shortcomings and spoil the experience was effectively countered by the quality of the work done by singers and players alike. For this was, by and large, a splendidly-sung and expertly-played rendition of the great work, whose characteristics played nicely into the context of domestic intimacy and subtefuge highlighted by the venue’s settings. Risks of exposure were taken and squared up to rather than avoided, making the presentation all the more real and red-blooded.

To begin with, the Overture gave us orchestral playing of poise, energy and variation, with every section affording the ear great delight. Conductor Simon Romanos allowed plenty of ambient space for the players to sufficiently clad their phrases with tones that enabled Mozart’s phrases and melodies to both sparkle and sing – and the balances afforded by the reduced numbers allowed so much exquisite detail to figure throughout in a fresh and disarming way. Mention must be made especially of Christopher Hill’s wondrously-realised guitar-continuo-playing, which I thought added a most atmospheric dimension to the opera’s general ambience.

I noticed only one mishap which momentarily stranded both Figaro and Susannah during their opening scene, though things were quickly gotten back onto the rails in true professional style (though, was it this, I wondered, which led to the performers by-passing the duet “If by chance Madame should call you at night” (Se a caso Madama la notte te chiama) which I realised later hadn’t happened?).

The honour of opening the season’s onstage activites went to singers Jamie Henare and Emily Mwila, as Figaro and Susannah, respectively, each understandably taking a little time to “warm up” (the process of what comedian Michael Flanders once called “getting the pitch of the hall”), but conveying to us both the shared excitement and individual purpose of preparing for their oncoming marriage. Particularly vibrant, both vocally and dramatically, was Emily Mwila’s Susannah, the quicksilver nature of much of Mozart’s writing for her voice deftly and exquisitely realised, both in partnership (her duetting with Kate Lineham’s Countess brought forth some gorgeous passages, including an uncanny forerunner of Leo Delibes’ “Flower Duet” at one moment during Act Three!) and when singing solo (her teasing of a jealous Figaro with a beautiful and disarming “Come now, lovely joy” (Deh vieni non tadar), ostensibly to lure the Count to her side in the garden). Even in an “ensemble opera” like “Figaro”, moments such as those almost stole the show.

Jamie Henare’s Figaro took longer to emerge as a character, though his voice certainly had the heft and agility required by the role, as was evident as early as his famous “If you would dance, my pretty Count” (Sei vuol ballare). His was a somewhat “stiff-upper-lip” portrayal, which at first didn’t readily emote, though in Act Four he seemed to finally break out of his emotional constraints with a vigorous and impassioned “Open your eyes for a moment” (Aprite un po’quegl’occhi), enjoining all men to regard women as deceivers. His portrayal needed more of that kind of out-going expression much earlier in the piece.

Susannah’s and Figaro’s aristocratic equivalents were, of course, the Count and Countess Almaviva, each imposingly presented on stage by Orene Tiai and Kate Lineham. As the Count, Orene Tiai looked every inch an aristocrat, his dignified portrayal lacking, I thought, only that mixture of a certain hauteur of manner and self-confident swagger in both his movements and his singing to convey the requisite “born-to-rule” aspect which goes hand-in-glove with the character. By contrast, Kate Lineham’s Countess seemed to me to achieve just the right amalgam of self-assurance and vulnerability needed to bring to life her character’s essential tragic nobility. Only in the treacherously taxing Act Three “Where are the golden moments” (Dove sono) did her line occasionally show signs of strain (Mozart here both kind and cruel), and these moments were offset by her beautifully-modulated sequences in duet with Susannah, and her finely-crafted and achingly moving words of forgiveness to her husband right at the opera’s end.

As the amorous page-boy, Cherubino, Elisabeth Harris, I thought, completely “owned” her character, taking risks, both dramatically and vocally, in pursuit of love, and triumphing with a flesh-and-blood realisation that, to my way of thinking, won everybody’s heart. She captured that testosterone-laden “out-of-control” feeling almost to perfection, while credibly maintaining both theatrical and musical viability – I can’t recall seeing a Cherubino on stage more whole-hearted and lovable. She (he) was nicely-partnered by Shanya Tweed’s truly, and brightly-sung Barbarina, her “lost pin” aria touchingly voiced, and her overall character generating something of a matching physical and emotional impulsiveness to that of “the page”, able at the end to put the love-struck boy in his (her) place.

Artfully and engagingly complicating the plot’s machinations in different ways was the trio of Marcellina, Dr. Bartolo and Don Basilio, each presenting here as a delightfully formidable character. I thought Marian Hawke’s Marcellina vocally and dramatically splendid, her almost Katisha-like resolve to marry with Figaro in her sights making the situation’s Act Three denoument all the more deliciously poignant! Her sidekick was Roger Wilson’s waspish Dr. Bartolo, still smarting over the loss of his ward Rosina (who has become the Countess) and swearing revenge – a wonderfully spiteful aria “I’ll have vengeance” (La Vendetta) – for Figaro’s part in the affair (all in the previous Beaumarchais play, The Barber of Seville). His character’s delightfully rueful reaction to the same unexpected turn of events in Act Three added greatly to the comic poignancy of the scene.

The odd one out was Don Basilio, convincingly played here with sly wit and unctuous tones by Mark Bobb, his extremely mobile face putting various expressions to good use in pursuit of his master the Count’s favours, while using his voice in remarkaly varied ways – Oscar Wilde would have undoubtedly characterised him as the archetypal cynic. By contrast, Nino Raphael’s “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” portrayal of Antonio the gardener amusingly presented humanity at its most basic, tipsy for most of the time, and when sober, with a rustic’s eye for the main chance.

The chorus for each performance consists of the “other ” cast in alternation – as well as being a nice idea, one which would also enhance the feeling of a company or ensemble really “involved” with a show. Here, the chorus’s singing and dancing had plenty of properly rustic enthusiasm, and the various groupings adroitly enhanced the stage action. Alex Galvin’s direction made the most of the spaces and saw to it that the action’s main points were delivered in a clear and often delightfully whimsical way. A great success, I think – and I shall read my colleague Lindis Taylor’s review of the follwing evening’s performance by the “second” cast with interest and plenty of vicarious enjoyment!

Beauty, poignancy, energy, focus – Kenneth Young’s CD “Shadows and Light”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Shadows and Light
Symphonic Compositions by Kenneth Young

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)

Atoll ACD 216

Over much too protracted a period I have lived with this disc of Kenneth Young’s music, playing single tracks at times when opportunities arose, and, in random-step-wise mode very gradually familiarising myself with the music’s sounds. It’s only recently that I’ve had the oportunity to tease it out from my constantly-attenuated “must-hear” collection of recordings, and given it the uninterrupted attention I’ve felt it deserves. Playing a track at a time, I remember being caught up in each one’s very different version of an intense experience, though in isolating my listening to the pieces I had little sense of “carry-over” from one world of intensity to another – it’s as though I was “beginning again” with each piece, and therefore having to re-establish my relationship with the composer’s sound-world before properly taking in any specific content.

Of course, away from recordings, and the luxury of repetition they provided, this was the old way of things, by which listeners got to know any “body” of work from a single composer – a public performance here, followed by another one there, and so on, except on those red-letter occasions when a concert featured a number of that same composer’s works! So in due course came my first chance to get a decent and protrated “listen” of Young’s new CD from beginning to end. What can I say as a result of it all? – just that the experience has had an overwhelming effect on me, putting me in no doubt as to the cumulative beauty, poignancy, energy and focus of the composer’s achievement over the span of this disc’s contents.

I had previously reviewed another all-Young CD, one from Trust Records which appeared as long ago as 1998, again featuring the composer as conductor, with the NZSO. I was, on that occasion, extremely taken with the composer’s “skilful and evocative way with orchestral colour”, and expressed admiration for “Young the executant as much as Young the composer”, who, to my ears had “so admirably controlled and balanced…..the sounds, even in the most heavily-scored passages”. At the risk of repeating myself, I can’t help but reiterate my pleasure at Young’s executant skills in relation to the more recent Atoll disc, along with, of course, his creative abilities. If anything, the touch is even surer, and the results honed with even clearer and more focused distinction.

Right from the beginning of the new recording, Young the composer takes his listeners to a place one feels is exactly where the composer wants us to go – he alludes as much to this feeling in his own words, reproduced in the booklet – “….it (Remembering) is the one work I’ve written in which I would not change a note”. From its drifting, evocative opening, in which NZSO concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppanen’s solo violin sings its “lone soul” melody, through sequences of quixotic interaction and constantly-shifting textures (Debussy’s Jeux occasionally comes to mind), to its cumulative and enriched “return” to tranquility, the music weaves its compelling amalgam of detailed re-engagement and visionary oversight in a richly compelling, and properly “memorable” way.

If Remembering seems very much the stuff of “things past”, then Lux Aeterna works on a much wider canvas, an amalgam of some kind of deeply-ingrained awareness of things past with a conscious present, and an exploration of various connective pathways between the two. Only a handful of minutes longer than Remembering, this second work at once seems to dwarf its predecessor, the chant-like unison melody mysteriously sounding as if from ages past (like the opening of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture) before a kind of “opening up” of the world, winds and strings filled with wonderment at the vast, colourful incomprehension of it all.

What impresses me is how Young manages to create sound-vistas which express these visions with the utmost clarity and conviction – the first section of Lux Aeterna sets a whole world of motoric activity in a backdrop of vast spaces that expresses an age-old question, that of life’s purpose and destination. Then after the chant-like melody reaffirms its continuum of consciousness, more vigorous impulses spread across the spaces, galvanising the textures and reactivating the “here and now” voices, until the solo ‘cello seems to patiently transcend such worldly preoccupations, dissolving their substance into a strange alignment with those greater, more transcendent spaces, the recurring chant encouraging the string textures to gater around and suffuse thew whole scenario with a kind of “peace that surpasses understanding”, its long-breathed lines trailing into a kind of eternity…..

Symphony No.2 came from a 2001 commission which marked the beginning of Young’s full-time career as a conductor and composer. A First Symphony had been written in the 1980s while Young was still an orchestral player, a somewhat Mahlerian “symphony is like the world” utterance, things paralleling further with the earlier composer when Young himself took up a conducting post (Conductor in Residence) with the NZSO. The new Symphony followed in the wake of Young’s active involvement in performing and recording seminal New Zealand works, along with fulfilling the occasional commission for an original work. Slow in its gestation, but enriched by experience both creative and recreative the Symphony came when it had to, and was finished in 2004.

With a phrase resembling a bird-call a solo clarinet began the work, setting up a world of dialogues with different variants and textures, the heavy percussion adding both scintillation and deep, spaced-out ambience beneath the chatter of the instrumental comings-and-goings. Urgent brass-calls brought forth eloquence from individual instruments – a solo violin, a bassoon, and a ‘cello all took their opportunities, separately and together, as the rest of the instruments tossed melodic and rhythmic scraps around, at times in the manner of a “concerto for orchestra”. An irruption of intent heaved upwards and energetically resounded among the brasses as string ostinati pattered like rain on the roof, and the winds squawked like ruffled birds, before the vigorous musical argument was becalmed by strings and tongued winds, and something of a new world brought to view.

Throughout, the music evoked a kind of volatile biosphere of activities, the instruments and their groupings skilfully and characterfully employed by the composer to interact, contrast, oppose and throw into bold relief. Always there was a characterisation involving declamation or interaction, brought about by Young’s well-honed instrumentation skills, the sounds enjoying a coherence of intent and/or effect, the silences bringing forth breath-catching moments of further tremulous expectation.

The concluding sequences presented a kind of nocturnal world, bolstered by tight brass harmonies, and ennobled by an extended ‘cello solo threading its way through ambient orchestral textures, soft percussion scintillations, and celeste-like colourings. After the energies and volatilities of the work’s central sequences, these defty-wrought impulses (including a delicious “tuba dreaming tuba dreams” passage) came across partly as very much a “recharge-batteries time” tempered with undercurrents of unease – nothing lasted, tranquility least of all, and the “we want to go home” statements grew in agitated frequency and intent to the point of anarchy until the detailings surrendered as quickly as they had thrust themselves forward. What had been fractious and abrasive became conciliatory and accommodating, as the end approached, and all things gave way to the silences.

Invocation, written during Young’s “Composer-in Residence” period with the Auckland Philharmonia during 2014 highlighted the skills of the NZSO’s principal oboist, Robert Orr, here playing the oboe d’amore, a slightly larger and mellower version of the standard orchestral oboe. At first the melodic line was free and exploratory, and inclusive of other lines, sometimes in tandem, at other times in a hand-over sense, but as the music continued a fantastic sense of tumult broke out as if across an overhead sky, stunning the watcher into silence. The agitations filled out to what seem like cosmic proportions, both overhead and from underneath, deep percussion seeming to activate the very ground beneath the observer’s feet – as with the symphony, the sounds seemed to reduce human proportions to a size which seems insignificant, were it not for the return of the oboe d’amore’s plaintive voice, suggesting a kind of steadfastness and strength amid those vast, self-sufficient spaces, a place in whatever scheme of things might be. Commentator Roger Smith’s description of the piece, reproduced in the booklet, spoke aptly of a search for light, life and positive energies through music.

The disc’s final work, Douce Tristesse, inhabited a much gentler and readily inhabitable world, the music inspired by what Young calls “an idyllic Bay of Plenty holiday spot” much visited and enjoyed by his family. Confessing that an “English pastoral zephyr” gently moves through the music, Young mentioned the names of Finzi and Butterworth as two of the shades of the friendly ghosts peering out from copses, hedgerows and water-shaded willows, perhaps delighted at being asked to cast illumination upon Antipodean vistas for a change! Perhaps at times these found themselves a little disconcerted by the relative intensities of the light, which, however broughts out its own unique versions and sensibilities.

Whatever attention I’ve given this disc over the duration, I’ve found it pays back most handsomely, be it a “one work at a time” experience or as a representation of a “single concert”. The latter experience is something to aim for, as the works are judiciously placed to have a kind of cumulative effect, with the Symphony as the great central crossbeam, before the final two shorter works return us, as it were, to our lives. On all counts to my ears – compositional, performance and recording quality – the disc makes a compelling case for the cause of Ken Young’s music.

Xenia Pestova – an interpreter for all ages, at St.Andrew’s, Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
THE GREY GHOST – Xenia Pestova (piano)

DEBUSSY – La cathedral engloutie (from Preludes 1910)
ED BENNETT (b. 1975) – Gothic (2008)
SCARLATTI – Keyboard Sonatas in D Major (K.9) and D Minor (K.10)
PATRICIA ALESSANDRINI – Etude d’apres Scarlatti (2002)
DARIA DOBROCHNA KWIATKOWSKA (b.1969) – After Brin (2000)
BERIO – 6 Encores: Brin (1990) / Feuerklavier (1989) / Wasserklavier (1965)
JS BACH – Sechs klein Praeludien BWV 939: No.6 in C Minor
GLENDA KEAM (b.1960) – Mind Springs(2016-17)
ANNEAR LOCKWOOD (b.1939) – RCSC (2001)
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier BWV 933
No.5 in E Major / No.6 in E Minor
HEATHER HINDMAN – Two and a Half Miniatures 1 (2005)
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien BWV 939: No.4 in A Minor / No.6 in C Major
ARLENE SIERRA (b.1970) – Birds and Insects (2003-15) Painted Bunting – Cicada Sketch – Titmouse
JS BACH – Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier BWV 933 No.4 in D Major
CLARA WIECK SCHUMANN – THree Preludes and Fugues, Op.16: No.3 in D Minor
MIRIAMA YOUNG (b. 1975) – The Grey Ghost (2017)

Xenia Pestova (piano)

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

Sunday, 30th July 2017

Xenia Pestova’s programme in itself commanded a good deal of interest, with its many and varied juxtapositionings of old and new adding adventurous touches to the concert’s overall excitement along with the anticipation of many individual delights. I’d not had any previous encounter with the pianist’s playing, but read with interest her “artist’s bio” resume as per programme, which outlined a goodly number of notable artistic achievements, enough to whet the appetite for what might come of the afternoon of music-making about to be set before us.

The pianist readily and eloquently talked with us throughout the concert, introducing each of the items and giving it a context which I thought enhanced the effect of her performances – though she spoke freely, everything seemed to the point, and in fact enhanced the helpfulness of the programme’s written notes without excess point-making. No doubt that some people would have preferred that she simply played the programme without spoken introductions – I found her direct and brightly-focused manner refreshing and, in instances where I wasn’t familiar with the composer or the music, generally helpful.

In her own programme-note, Pestova spoke of the interconnectiveness of existence, and how this is expressed in music, citing her presentation of works by eight contemporary composers which offer “personal commentaries on the past”, and how their music can be heard “sharing with us their unique visions of the music yet to come.” Certainly, in this context her performances for me almost invariably “struck chords” across time-frames, opening the pores, it seemed, of my listening, to register those resonances and almost “feel” the inter-connective tissue. Even so, I suspect there was more to this process here than mere “cheek-by-jowling” the pieces in question.

What delighted me was that, in the instances where I knew the music, Pestova’s actual playing seemed to me to completely inhabit the work and its evocations, physical, intellectual and spiritual, so that her performances had a “stand-alone” quality which satisfied in their own right, and not merely served as forerunners of “x” or resonances of “y”. Here was a remarkably sensitive, thoughtful and totally involved interpreter at work, whose understanding of the there-and-then of each piece seemed as potent as her awareness of its connections with the past or the future.

Her playing of the concert’s opening work, Debussy’s La cathedral engloutie, for instance, brought a potent amalgam of clarity and atmosphere to the evocation of this subterranean miracle – the tolling bell at the work’s outset at once focused our sensibilities amid a spacious ambience charged with mystery. Right through the work Pestova seemed able to balance all kinds of like exclusives, with, in places, breathtaking results, no more so than during the aftermath of the main climax, where the playing became suffused with a quality akin to an interior world of sound, quite unearthly – her control of both dynamics and tone-colour I thought remarkable, both in forward movement and, as here, in retreat. I found the ending very Lisztian, resonant and beautiful.

Pestova’s interpretation was then further enriched by her programming of the next work, an uncannily different-but-similar piece called Gothic, written by Irish composer Ed Bennett who just happened to be present in the St.Andrew’s audience! Prior to the work’s performance, the composer came forward to tell us of his fascination with the atmosphere of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, and of his attempts to recreate something of that unique resonance, particularly when those spaces were near-empty, and the building itself could “speak” without interruption.

Big, jagged chords alternating with the pianist’s vocalisations created uncanny echo effects, while repeated note passages brought forth echoes of Musorgsky’s Con mortuis in lingua mortua (With the dead in a dead language) from Pictures from an Exhibition. Generally the composer used the piano itself as an enormous cathedral interior space, using a variety of dynamics and textures, and creating sounds which were left to resonate over these same spaces, augmented by the pianist’s vocalisations – which actually had the last word.

Domenico Scarlatti’s music was the starting-point for the group of pieces that followed – two keyboard sonatas which again highlighted Pestova’s skills as an interpreter, her performances gently and cooly activating the music’s textures and colours rather than setting sparks flying, and clearly contrasting the middle section of the D Major work with its outlying territories, generating a real sense of exploration of the differences.

American-born contemporary composer Patricia Alessandrini’s “response” to this same D Major Sonata took the form of an Etude after Scarlatti, beginning with a pensive kind of dialogue set up by the pianist between the direct activation of exterior keys and interior strings, straightaway creating wondrously spacious atmospheres and amazing Cage-like silences! Pestova’s note on the music talked about “the changes of colour between (the gestures)”, evident in the “charged atmosphere” wrought by what framed these silences, a kind of dichotomy between focus and distance, resulting in something I found magical and elusive.

The pianist then, I think, played the Luciano Berio piece Brin (1990) before another work After brin (2000) by Daria Dobrochna Kwiatkowska, a Polish-born UK-based composer. Berio’s piece was one of a set of six encores, of which Pestova gave us three. My unfamiliarity with the music resulted in a modicum of confusion regarding the programme’s actual order, here – but it seemed to me that we heard the first Berio encore and the Kwiatkowska “response” to that piece. Berio’s work featured repeated notes played with the intensity of searchlights, alternated with single notes that were sounded here as if they were bells – the contrasts of different registers and ambiences of these groups creating a heightened response to each one, as well as to the phenomenon of what Daria Dobrochna Kwiatkowska beautifully characterised in the Berio work with the words “Music happens between the notes”.

Kwiatkowska’s piece After brin was a student exercise involving a response to Berio’s work, the younger composer seeking to capture a certain diffusiveness of Berio’s same pitches and note-positions, but with clusters of notes rather than isolated tones. I thought it echoed the original inspiration in slow-motion, with Debussy-like colourings irradiating the stillnesses, and billowing the intensities upwards and outwards – a most attractive piece.

Returning to Berio’s work with the remaining two “encores”, we heard Feuerklavier (1989) and Wasserklavier (1965), each of the pieces “saying its name” in performance, Pestova’s playing again seeming in both cases to reach into the music’s substance and activate those same particular qualities – thus Feuerklavier rumbled, bubbled chattered and fermented, with occasional irruptions of energy, the figurations darting about, seeking everything out, and tumbling in all directions, while the Wasserklavier was all limpid textures, almost Debussy-like in its liquidity and subtlety.

JS Bach’s Little Prelude” BWV939 in C Minor flowed and chattered its course up to the cusp of Auckland composer Glenda Keam’s new work Mind Springs, a piece which began explosively, resembling the sudden onslaught of a nightmare in a scenario which might have promised order and structure. Keam’s programme notes spoke of water in bubbling, babbling mode, accounting for the piece’s moments of whimsy, though these soon found themselves besieged by ever-insistent figurations, becoming in places trenchant and demanding – the music’s title kept the listener waiting for the next leap into a different mode, be it textural or gestural. Our kaleidoscopic listening journey took us to a number of these expressionist realms, filled for example with murmuring insect activity in, around and between mystical chords whose trunks rose from leaf-laden ground, then without warning transfixed by the onset of supercharged birdsong, strident, jagged-edged outcrops and liquid ostinati – amid a raft of suggested influences the composer gave significant prominence to “distorted echoes of JS Bach”.

The interval brought with it the opportunity to re-establish our bearings in the wake of the variegated candour of what we’d encountered so far in the recital – so much full-fronted creativity and recreativity, perhaps even awakening echoes of T.S.Eliot’s words, “human kind cannot bear very much reality” in its direct impact. Having girded our loins we awaited what was to follow – pieces by two New Zealanders, Annea Lockwood and Miriama Young, and by two more off-shore contemporary composers, and still more from an iconic nineteenth-century performer who happened also to compose, if well-and-truly in the shadow of her more illustrious composer-husband.

So, our sensibilities refreshed, Xenia Pestova welcomed us back to the crucible of experience that we’d embarked on earlier in the afternoon and were about to continue, beginning with a piece by Annea Lockwood, called RCSC, the combined initials of American composer Ruth Crawford Seegar and pianist Sarah Cahill (who commissioned the work in 2001 as one part of seven pieces in honour of Seegar.) Annea Lockwood achieved fame bordering on notoriety for a work she wrote to parallel the achievements of Christian Barnard, the world’s first heart transplant surgeon – Lockwood called her 1960s/70s work Piano Transplants, one which involved submerging, burying and/or setting alight defunct, irreparable, and unwanted pianos. The instruments were in many cases abandoned, most of them along London’s Thames River. Pestova assured us that she would not be setting fire to the piano on this occasion, when playing Lockwood’s work!

It wasn’t what I expected – I’d read enough about Lockwood’s music to imagine her work as anarchic and uncompromising, and featuring all kinds of unconventionalities – and it was to my utmost surprise that this work came across to my ears as ambient and beautiful, spacious and thoughtful. At the beginning, Debussy-like sonorities were contrasted with the metallic tintinabulations of string-plucking, augmented by the use of dampeners for a contrasting effect.Widely-spaced chords conjured vast spaces into which the dampened notes “drubbed” as if the music was trying to dance while in sacks – and yet another section featuring slides and glissandi from string manipulation brought to mind the mysteries of the col legno sections of the Introduction to Stravinsky’s Firebird.

Then followed two sections which depicted responses by contemporary composers to older and more established musical realisations, each of the latter being the music of JS Bach.A third “parallel presentation” featured a less-than-contemporary but profoundly of-its-time work by none other than Clara Wieck Schumann, whose creative efforts were for many years ignored as being of little worth compared with those of her husband, Robert, and of far less importance than her skills as a pianist! Concluding the recital, then, was a new work by Australian-based New Zealand composer Miriama Young, a work called The Grey Ghost, more about which below…..

Demonstrating once again her characteristic feeling for the essences of the recital’s “older” pieces, Xenia Pestova gave us some more JS Bach – firstly, a cheerful, propulsive E Major Prelude BWV 933 No.5, bringing out the music’s ceremonial qualities, and highlighting the contrasts with the companion BWV 933 E Minor Prelude, a lovely, piquant “stroll” whose trajectories enabled the music’s world of feeling to sound right up to the last note and beyond, to my ears totally avoiding the new-age “authentic-performance” tendency to rattle through pieces such as these, leaving the trampled-on fragments on the floor in the playing’s wake.

Then came Canadian composer Heather Hindman’s 2005 work for solo piano Two and a Half Miniatures, a piece chosen by the ISCM (International Society of Contemporary Music) to feature in a recent (2012) World New Music Day. The music’s more overt aspects – vigorous single-note declamations which spanned and then distended octave-leaps, hammer-blow cluster chords and spectacular glissandi, repeated rise-and-fall figurations punctured by more hammer-blow chords whose accelerated repetition resembled a giant steam locomotive attempting to move off – appeared to be “haunted” by an ambient background kept alive and resonant by the sustaining pedal, and to which the composer referred as the “underneath” – besides the resonances there were string-activated glissando-like voices towards the piece’s end reminding one of Schlegel’s comment re Schumann’s Fantasia in C – “the soft note for one who listens secretly…..”

Two more Bach pieces followed, a brief, questioning A Minor Prelude (No.4 from the Sechs kleine Präludien BWV 939), and a graceful C major Prelude (No.6 of the same set), music in which Pestova seemed to bring out its exploratory instincts, the player enjoying the music’s modulatory impulses, and pensive,”somewhere-else” ending.

For any musician, performing a piece of music dedicated to and written specifically for them must be an experience like no other – and though Xenia Pestova wasn’t giving a “world premiere” here, it was at least a New Zealand “first” for American-born composer Arlene Sierra’s Birds and Insects, in this instance three of the ten individual pieces that make up the entire work. The first of these three pieces, Painted Bunting, was dedicated by the composer to Pestova, something of a compliment in more ways than one, the bird itself (albeit the male!) having been described as the most beautiful in North America, accounting for its nickname “nonpareil” (without equal)!

The pianist, not unexpectedly, greatly relished the motifs, textures and energies of the eponymous bird’s music – characterful, attention-seeking treble scintillations set the silences tingling, in the midst of which disturbance was set a somewhat mournful mid-range call. Gradually the lower voice energised and became more insistent and mirror-like in relation to the scintillations, creating definite and formidable synergy, there – a stunning display of avian personality.

Sierra’s other two portraits, Cicada Sketch, and Titmouse, were no less evocative in effect, the first featuring solitary ambient calls over dark landscapes, impulses that resisted any underlying agitated irruptions, suggesting spacious, dogged persistence. As for the Titmouse portrait, it seemed like a sound-sketch of a supremely-determined obsessive, Pestova’s playing remarkably split-second in its dovetailings of detail.

The more Bach Pestova played, the more I wanted her to continue! – here, it was another from Sechs kleine Präludien für Anfänger auf dem Klavier, the fourth Prelude in D Major of BWV 933. While listening and enjoying, I kept on making mental notes of parts of the Well-Tempered Clavier I wanted to hear her interpret! However, such mental wanderings on my part seemed singularly unhelpful regarding the job in hand, which was to express and relate the music to that timelessness of being which Pestova herself alluded to in the recital’s introduction.

Interestingly, the third of Clara Wieck Schumann’s Op.16 set of three Preludes and Fugues seemed to me almost uncannily like a minor version of the Bach piece we had just heard. Pestova brought to this work the same qualitites that had illuminated the previous work. I would make a guess that the shade of that great Bach interpreter Franz Liszt would be nodding its approval at the ear-catching amplitude of the music’s different voices as presented here on the piano. The Fugue began from a quiet and simple place of origin, and proceeded with remarkably-inflected eloquence to the point where it had given its all – no wonder that I wrote, while spell-bound by the music’s revelatory progress, “she (Pestova) makes fugues make sense”!

Though Pestova’s recital seemed to have the subtitle Gothic, as per programme, I preferred the title of the work by Miriama Young already referred to, The Grey Ghost, which was the final presentation of the afternoon. This was described by the composer, who was present, as “a meditation in piano and electronics drawing on the ancient song of the once prolific North Island Kokako”. The actual “Grey Ghost” of the title refers to the South Island Kokako, a sighting of which was last recorded at Mout Aspiring National Park fifty years ago, and unfortunately not  seen or recorded since then.

Speaking with us about her work, Miriama Young confessed to us that this presentation was the fulfilment of a dream of hers regarding involving an audience with sound performance. She had prepared what people who know about these things call an “App” on her website for people to download and play on their smartphones as part of the overall performance of the work. We had a brief tuition session from the composer regarding what was necessary for us to do, and it seemed to bear fruit and effectively “sound” in some quarters of the auditorium. Needless to say, my technophobic efforts with my own smartphone were unsuccessful, but it left me able to properly take in the concerted efforts of the pianist and her cyber-cohorts to recreate Miriama Young’s work “The Grey Ghost”.

Those of us who had managed to secure the “App” had ‘phones poised ready for Xenia Pestova’s downbeat – the bird’s song came out of the ‘phones extremely softly and atmospherically, a haunting, ambient environment through which the piano could sound, the figurations rolling and resonant, with occasional declamatory tones seeming to echo the bird’s tessitura. Gradually the piano built up towards a climax not dissimilar to that of the “Engulfed Cathedral’s” which had begun the programme. after this, the piano itself seemed to become like a bird, rather than a resonator – the pre-recorded sounds were assisted by being played through the church’s sound system as well as the individual ‘phones. As the piece gradually subsided the piano contented itself with resonantly-produced fragments of the figurations we heard in the piece’s first half, everything having a deep and almost magical presence, the various “sources” of the sounds creating a beautifully diffuse and ultimately elusive atmosphere.

We were all thanked, pianist, listeners and sonic artists alike, at the piece’s end by the composer, who was obviously thrilled and moved by the happening and its effects. A brief encore later – a Chorale for something quiet,  written by Wellingtonian Thomas Liggett (who was present) – slow, deep rich and meditative music, whose privacy and inwardness was breached at the end by the merest pinprick of light – and this remarkable recital was over. That this review’s been a long time in coming is indicative of the spell cast by Xenia Pestova’s playing of old and new items alike, making this listener think afresh about what was familiar, and ponder deeply (and at great length) over the new and introduced works and their thought-provoking realisations. Bravo!

Close-up Janáček an operatic delight from NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JANÁČEK – The Cunning Little Vixen (opera)
presented by Te Koki New Zealand School of Music
Victoria University of Wellington

Cast:
Sharp-Ears, the Vixen: Pasquale Orchard / Forrester: Joe Haddow
Forrester’s Wife: Sally Haywood / Schoolmaster: Daniel Sun
Priest, Badger: Nino Raphael / Gold-Spur, the Fox: Alexandra Gandionco
Poacher: Will King / Dog, Pasek: Garth Norman
Rooster: Eleanor McGechie /Crested Hen / Jay: Emma Cronshaw Hunt
Woodpecker: Elizabeth Harré /Grasshopper / Frantik: Alexandra Woodhouse Appleby
Frog, Pepik: Sinéad Keane / Cricket, Owl: Jessie Rosewarne
Mosquito: Jessica Karauria / Young Vixen: Beatrix Cariño
Forest Creatures: Micaela Cadwgan, Ellis Carrington, Isaac Cox, Teresa Shields

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra: Players – Claudia Tarrant-Matthews (leader),
Sophie Tarrant-Matthews, Grant Baker, Lavinnia Rae, Jandee Song, Anna Prasannan, Annabel Lovatt, Harim Oh, Breanna Abbott, Shadley Van Wyk, Vivien Reid, Toby Pringle, Andrew Yorkstone, Dominic Jacquemard, Hannah Neman, Andrew Atkins, Gabriela Glapska
Kenneth Young (conductor)
Director – Jon Hunter
Designer – Owen McCarthy
Lighting – Glenn Ashworth
Costumes – Nephtalim Antoine
Hannah Playhouse, Wellington,

Friday 28th July, 2017

 

It wasn’t until he was almost fifty that Moravian composer Leoš Janáček began to show the world what he could really do, with the appearance of the first of his operas, Jenufa, in Brno in 1904. Up to that time a lot of his musical activities were devoted to researches into folk music, determined as he was to create from Moravian and other strains of Slavonic folk music a properly original, modern musical style.

Jenufa’s subsequent success at Prague in 1916 was a breakthrough for the composer, leading to performances in both Austria and Germany and later, as far afield as New York in 1924. After Jenufa’s success came others – Kata Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Macropolous Case and The House of the Dead, all of which are now considered part of “the standard operatic repertoire”.

Perhaps the most approachable of the more established works, even given its own brand of unconventionality, is The Cunning Little Vixen, written by the composer from a serialised version of a novel by Rudolf Tesnohlídek which appeared in Brno’s local newspaper in 1920, along with line drawings by artist Stanislav Lolek. Both story and illustrations seemed to have completely enthralled Janáček, who toyed at first with the idea of an opera-ballet, and then as a kind of pantomime, as he crafted his scenario. He did, in the process, extend the original story’s scheme to include the Vixen’s death and the appearance of one of her cubs as a symbol of the cyclic nature of life. In this final scene the animal and human worlds seem to come together as the Forrester muses on the constant renewal of all things as part of a kind of hymn to creation – this “from death comes life” finale manages poignancy without sentimentality.

Unbelievably, it’s all of eight years since I saw Vixen in Wellington last, a production by Nimby Opera at the Salvation Army Citadel, which most splendidly made use of both the venue’s limited spaces and reduced instrumental forces, drawing we in the audience right into the world of Janáček’s drama. Here, at the Hannah Playhouse, space was equally at a premium, though with a differently-configured and more clearly-defined “stage” and orchestral areas – nevertheless the production, like its predecessor, was able to generate a similarly compelling theatrical immediacy.

Right from the beginning we found ourselves in thrall to the composer’s evocation of the forest, underlining the use of the orchestra as a kind of “character” in the story – the opening is given entirely to the instruments, who then drive the ensuing action and colour the characterisations of the singers. I know of no other composer so adept at simultaneously combining sharply-focused rhythmic patternings with heart-easing lyrical outpourings, each enhancing the flavour and atmosphere of the other.

I thought Kenneth Young’s control of this ebb and flow of sounds had a naturalness which kept the theatrical flow alive while appearing to give both his singers and players ample space in which to allow their music its full value. Yes, there were isolated instances of rawness of tuning and out-of-synch chording, but I found the playing astonishing overall in its physicality and energy, and in the beauty and piquancy of both its corporate and individually-focused characterisations.

While I struggled with making sense of some of the aspects of the production (the scenes which took place in the clinical-like “upstairs” part of the set meant little or nothing to me in terms of the story or its overall setting) I delighted in the inventiveness of the more down-to-earth (literally) depictions of the scenario, with a backdrop whose many apertures could conceal or disgorge figures at will and suggest with appropriately varied lighting, both the beauties and concealed mysteries of the forest and the convolutions and crudities of simple human dwellings and their trappings.

What I think the production was able to suggest and put across (without needing those obtrusive white coats) was an engaging connectiveness between the lives of the story’s “ordinary” human characters with the overall flow of nature and its plethora of possibilities for all life-forms in a world that’s both caring and pitiless. The composer’s desire to remove the “happily-ever-after” aspect of the original story was. I think, a reflection of this desire for a wider integration. We observed the various roll-plays of parallels between urban and rural, domestic and untamed, enslaved and free throughout, and found ourselves in disarming sympathy with the disadvantaged, the disappointed and the dispossessed.

To that end, the individual characterisations of the student performers were, I thought, outstanding in their commitment, understanding and level of theatrical and musical skill. Very rightly, the stunning performance of Pasquale Orchard as the Vixen herself, though the centrepiece of all that took place on the stage, was still always very much part of an interactive ensemble, as quick to engage with as to respond to the other characters. Her gestures and movements perfectly mirrored her dramatic intent, which was all to the good, because though I thought her vocal production strong and filled with variety, it suffered diction-wise during the “big” moments. This was the case for most of the time with the other singers throughout the production – opera in English can be a frustrating experience for this reason, leaving one wondering at times whether the exercise is worth the while, and accordingly, longing for surtitles!

As the Forester, Joe Haddow’s was the first voice to be heard, announcing an oncoming storm (consulting his smart-phone, presumably in search of a weather-forecast!) and reminiscing on things like his wedding-night, the voice strong and sonorous, and a trifle world-weary, but conveying a character capable of appreciating life’s beauties and ironies – his extended, “full-circle” soliloquy towards the opera’s end was for the most part richly delivered (the brasses accompanied him magnificently), though just occasionally the melodic line’s intensity strained his voice – somebody who knows of life’s joys and disappointments, and can ride along with them.

The other male characters in the story also relished their depictions, Daniel Sun as the lovesick schoolmaster, somewhat tremulous of tone but pitching his voice accurately and evocatively, Nino Raphael as the disgruntled (and evicted) Badger (a scene augmented most excitingly by violin and ‘cello), and then as the equally disconsolate priest (“I’m just a dried-up mop in a bucket”) reflecting on his loveless life; and Garth Norman, properly morose as the Forester’s Dog, as well as a suitably business-like Innkeeper. Most vagrant-like of all (apart from his laboratory-coat-like garb) was Will King’s Poacher, free-spirited and romantic in places (his entrance a love-song) and impulsive in others (his clumsy pursuit of the Vixen), all delivered most convincingly with a suitably engaging voice and appropriately gauche movements. Together, these characters made a suitably and evocatively rustic line-up!

An additional “male” character – Goldspur, the Fox – was depicted most handsomely and suavely by Alexandra Gandionco, whose voice blended most beautifully with the Vixen’s during their meeting/courtship scene, nicely presenting a “gentler” vocal personality than the Vixen’s more volatile, less suave manner. Alternately, the two “wives” in the story, the Forester’s and the Innkeeper’s, were alternately given properly no-nonsense personas by Sally Haywood, energetic and gossipy. Too many to enumerate, the supporting animal roles brought out enactments with both individual and concerted presence, for the most part beautifully co-ordinated – the Act Three “forest-sneak-up” game, for one, was a delightful highlight.

Had the words been clearer in places, our pleasure would have been more than complete – still, as it was, we were captivated by what we’d seen and heard. The music, its vocal and instrumental performance, allied with the setting and (for me) its discernable, dramatically-defined action, made for all I had the chance to speak with afterwards an absorbing and satisfying operatic experience, one for which the stewardship of the NZSM here at Wellington’s Victoria University deserves considerable praise.

Adventurous, quirky, energetic – a musical-life experience for the 2017 NZSONYO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2017 presents:
YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA

CELESTE ORAM (NYO Composer-in-Residence 2016)
Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra (World Premiere)
JAMES McMILLAN – Veni, Veni Emmanuel*
REUBEN JELLEYMAN (NYO Composer-in-Residence 2017)
Vespro (World Premiere)
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell Op.34
(The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra)

*Colin Currie (percussion)
James McMillan (conductor)
NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2017

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Friday, 14th July 2017

Thank goodness for Benjamin Britten’s variously-named The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra / Variations and Fugue on a theme of Purcell Op.34! At the recent pair of NZNYO concerts in Wellington and Auckland it was music which, unlike the works making up the rest of the programme, was reasonably familiar to the audience. As such, the piece provided a benchmark of sorts with which the youthful orchestra’s playing could be more-or-less assessed in terms of overall tonal quality, precision of ensemble and individual fluency and brilliance. These were qualities more difficult to ascertain when listening to the players tackle the idiosyncrasies, complexities and unfamiliarities of the other three programmed pieces.

I’m certain that the NYO players relish the opportunity every time to give a first performance of any piece written especially for them, even one as unconventionally wrought as was Celeste Oram’s piece The Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra, which opened the programme. In this instance, however, there were TWO new works by two different composers, awaiting a first performance, presumably due to last year’s concert being wholly taken up with a collaboration by the orchestra with the NZSO to perform Olivier Messiaen’s Eclairs sur l’au-delà (Illuminations of the Beyond) – obviously, a thoroughly exhilarating experience for all concerned, youthful and seasoned players alike.
So as well as the 2016 composer-in-residence’s work having yet to be performed, there was also a work by this year’s composer-in-residence, Reuben Jelleyman, waiting for its turn. In the event, putting all the possibilities together made for an interesting programme of symmetries and contrasts – a percussion concerto and a work inspired by an older classic, with each of these in turn regaled by a separate “guide” to the orchestra, the two latter having interesting “corrective” capacities in relation to one another!

To be honest, there was a considerable amount of speculation expressed by people I talked with at the interval as to whether the first item on the programme could be classed as “music”! Celeste Oram’s piece The Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra, far from being an updated version of Britten’s celebrated instructional work, took a kind of “field” approach to experiencing music instead, refracting a history of many New Zealanders’ initial contact with orchestral music as conveyed by radio (as the composer points out, the first permanent orchestra in this country was initially known as “The New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation Symphony Orchestra” – actually it was “the National Orchestra of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service”, with the word “Corporation” first appearing as part of the orchestra’s name in 1962). This phenomenon was depicted through transistorised recordings from what sounded like a number of largely out-of-phase broadcasts of an announcer’s voice from smartphone-like devices sported by the orchestra players, sitting onstage waiting for their “actual” conductor to arrive.

I hope the reader will forgive this relatively literal (though not exhaustive!) account of these happenings, linked as they seemed to the composer’s intentions! Still conductorless, the orchestra players then took up their instruments and launched into the first few bars of Britten’s work, an undertaking lost in the cacaphony of distortion emanating once more from the radio-like devices. As “Haydn Symphony No.25” was announced, the conductor, Sir James McMillan, arrived, waited courteously enough for the announcer to finish, and then directed a somewhat Hoffnung-esque opening of the Britten which then morphed into all kinds of wayward musical illusions in different quarters, fragments that were constantly being broken into by the announcer’s voice introducing other various classical pieces, a somewhat “catholic” section including the Maori song “Hine e Hine”, Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique”, and so on.

After Beethoven’s “Tenth” Symphony (“the Unwritten”) had made a static-ridden appearance, the announcer stated portentously, “Having taken the orchestra to pieces, the composer will now put it all back together again”, then promptly tuned us into the National Programme 5 o’clock news beeps and prominent newsreader Katriona McLeod’s voice. Some orchestra players at this point appeared to get fed up, and go for walkabouts down from the platform and into and through the auditorium, ignoring the efforts of their conductor to keep the music going. Soon, all the players were standing in the aisles of the auditorium, even the concertmaster, who was the last to go, leaving her conductor waving his arms around conducting a very loud, and out-of-phase-sounding recording of the Britten work. At the music’s end, we in the audience applauded him, a bit uncertainly, then watched him sit down and pull out a newspaper and read it, while the players standing in the aisles began to paraphrase parts of the music, and the radio continued to blare, the voices largely unintelligible – some sort of impasse was reached at which point it was unclear what would happen next, if anything!

From this sound-vortex Concert announcer Clarissa Dunn’s voice sounded clearly, with the words, “….and you have NOT been listening to Radio New Zealand Concert!…..”, and that, folks, was it! – a rather lame conclusion, I thought, but perhaps that was the point! It seemed to me that the piece lost its way over the last five minutes – but perhaps THAT also was the point! Celeste Oram explained the ending to her “piece” using a quote attributed to Gaetano Donizetti, who wrote in an 1828 letter that he wanted “to shake off the yoke of finales”. The determinedly “non-ending” ending of Oram’s work did seem to put the concept of the “symphonic finale” to rout!

Thoughtful, innovative, provocative, incomprehensible…..whatever characterisation one liked to give Celeste Oram’s work first and foremost, I felt it should be in tandem with descriptions like “entertaining”, “absorbing”, “spectacular”, “engrossing”. It seemed to me that the composer had achieved, by dint of her explanation printed in the programme, what she had set out to do – and what better a way to attain satisfaction by means of what one “does” as an occupation?

After this, Sir James McMillan’s own work, the percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel would have seemed like a kind of relief-drenched reclamation of normality to some, and something of a “safe” and even predictable example of what Celeste Oram was criticising with her work, to others. Percussion concertos have become extremely popular of late, thanks partly to the skills and flamboyant performing personalities of musicians such as Evelyn Glennie and Colin Currie, who’ve had many works written for them. For some concertgoers they’re thrilling visual and aural experiences, while for others (myself included) they seem as much flash as substance, in that they seem to me to rely overmuch on visual display to sustain audience interest to the point of distraction from the actual musical material.

Perhaps I’m overstating the case, but after watching Colin Currie indefatigably move from instrument group to instrument group, activating these collections with their distinctive timbres, my sensibilities grew somewhat irritated after a while – one admired the artistry of the player, but wearied of the almost circus-like aspect of the gestures. I began to empathise as never before with Anton Bruckner, who, it is said, attended a performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth, his eyes closed the whole time so as to avoid being distracted by the stage action from the music!

I wrote lots of notes regarding this performance, which certainly made an effect,in places spectacularly so – the opening a searing sound-experience, with shouting brass and screaming winds, and the soloist moving quickly between instrument groups for what the compser calls an “overture”, presenting all the different sounds. My gallery seat meant that the player occasionally disappeared from view! – rather like “noises off”, a sound-glimpse of a separate reality or disembodied state! In places the music became like a huge machine in full swing, which appealed to my “railway engine” vein of fantasy, while at other times the sounds seemed to drift spacewards, the winds playing like pinpricks of light, and the soloist at once warming and further distancing the textures with haunting marimba sounds. I enjoyed these more gentle, benediction-like moments most of all, the gently dancing marimba over a sea of wind and brass sostenuto tones – extremely beautiful.

At one point I wrote “All played with great skill, but everything impossibly busy!” At the work’s conclusion the soloist climbed up to the enormous bells at the back of the orchestra, beginning a carillion which built up in resonance and excitement, aided by individual orchestral players activiting their own triangles. A long, and slowly resonating fade – and the work came to a profound and deeply-wrought close. While I wouldn’t deny the effectiveness of certain passages in the work I found myself responding as to one of those nineteenth-century virtuoso violin concertos the musical forest obscured by trees laden with notes – and notes – and notes……..thankfully, my feelings seemed not to be shared by the audience whose response to Colin Currie’s undoubted artistry was overwhelmingly warm-hearted.

So, after an interval during which time I was engaged in discussions concerning the nature of music (in the light of Celeste Oram’s piece) in between wrestling with feelings that I perhaps ought to give up music criticism as a profession through dint of my inadequacy of appreciation (the result of my response to James McMillan’s piece), I settled down somewhat uneasily for the concert’s second half, which began with a work by Reuben Jelleyman, who’s the Youth Orchestra’s 2017 composer-in-residence, a piece with the title Vespro, deriving its inspiration from Monteverdi’s famous 1610 Vespers.

Describing his work as akin to a restoration of an old building “where old stone buttresses mesh with glass and steel”, Reuben Jelleyman’s piece at its beginning reminded me of a basement or backroom ambience of structure and function, where solid blocks and beams were interspersed with lines and passageways, the whole bristling with functional sounds, much of it aeolian-like, (whispering strings and “breathed” winds and brass) but with an ever-increasing vociferousness of non-pitched sounds.

Great tuba notes broke the spell, underscored by the bass drum, like a call to attention, one igniting glowing points in the structure, with each orchestral section allowed its own “breath of radiance”. A repeated-note figure grew from among the strings, spreading through the different orchestral sections, the violinists playing on the wood of the bows as fragments of the Monteverdi Vespers tumbled out of the mouths of the winds and brass – such ear-catching sonorities! As befitted the original, these reminiscences contributed to ambiences whose delicacy and sensitivity unlocked our imaginations and allowed play and interaction – a “fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?” sense of amalgamation of present with past, the new music, centuries old, continuing to live…..I liked it very much.

To conclude the evening’s proceedings, James McMillan got his chance to show what he could REALLY do as a conductor with Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, a performance which brought forth from the youthful players sounds of such splendour and brilliance that I was quite dumbfounded. Each section of the orchestra covered itself in glory during its own introductory “moment” at the work’s beginning, the four sections (winds, brasses, strings, percussion) framed by a tutti whose amplitude seemed, in the classic phrase, “greater than the sum of its parts”, which was all to the good.

Singling out any one section of the ensemble for special praise would be an irrelevant, not to say fatuous exercise under these circumstances. McMillan’s conducting of the piece and interaction with the players seemed to bring out plenty of flair and brilliance, with individual players doing things with their respective solos that made one smile with pleasure at their ease and fluency. I noted, for instance, the bassoon’s solo being pushed along quickly at first, but then the player relaxing into an almost languorous cantabile that brought out the instrument’s lyrical qualities most beguilingly. The musicians seemed to have plenty of space in which to phrase things and bring out particular timbres and textures, such as we heard from the clarinets, whose manner was particularly juicy and gurgly!

A feature of the performance was that the “accompaniments” were much more than that – they were true “partners” with their own particular qualities acting as a foil for the sections particularly on show – in particular, the violins danced with energy and purpose to feisty brass support, while the double basses’ agilities drew forth admiring squawks from the winds. The brasses covered themselves in glory, from the horns’ rich and secure callings, to the tuba’s big and blowsy statement of fact – trumpets vied with the side-drum for excitement, while the trombones arrested everybody’s attentions with their announcements, the message soon forgotten, but the sounds resounding most nobly. Finally, the percussion had such a lot of fun with the strings, it was almost with regret that one heard the piccolo begin the fugue which eventually involved all the instruments, and was rounded off by a chorale from the brass choir featuring the theme in all its glory.

I’ve not heard a more exciting, nor skilful and involving performance of this music – an NZSO player whom I met on the stairs after the concert agreed with me that, on the evidence of playing like we had just heard, the future of music performance in this country is in good hands. Very great credit to the players and to their mentor and conductor Sir James McMillan, very much an inspirational force throughout the whole of the enterprise. Not, therefore, a conventional concert – adventurous, quirky, energetic and idiosyncratic – but in itself an experience of which the young players would be proud to feel they had made the best of and done well!

Brahms for lunch at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BRAHMS – Sonata for Viola and Piano in F Minor Op.120 No.1
(transcription by the composer of the Sonata for Clarinet Op.120 No.1)
Zwei Gesänge Op.91 (Two Songs for Voice, Viola and Piano)

Peter Barber (viola)
Linden Loader (mezzo-soprano)
Catherine McKay (piano)

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

Wednesday 12th July, 2017

 

As a counter to the day’s wintry woes, the music of Johannes Brahms provided an interlude of gentle autumnal rest and refreshment, with the first of the two late clarinet sonatas (here performed in the version for viola made by the composer), and the two songs which make up Op.91, Zwei Gesänge for voice, viola and piano. Both compositions occasioned interestingly flavoured associations, if of a diametrically opposed nature. One of the Zwei Gesänge in particular became intertwined with goings-on involving accusations of illicit amatory activities and a threatened marriage breakup on the part of friends of the composer.

Brahms had formed a student relationship with the brilliant young violinist Joseph Joachim, through him meeting the Schumanns, Robert and Clara, an association well-known to music history. In 1863 Joachim married Amalie Schneeweiss, a well-known mezzo-soprano, a marriage which produced six children, among them a son named Johannes, for whom Brahms wrote a cradle song Geistliches Wiegenlied (Spirits’ Lullaby). Things continued in this vein, with Joachim’s continued support for Brahms reflected in the dedication by Brahms of his 1878 Violin Concerto to Joachim, until the early 1880s, when Joachim accused his wife of having an affair with Fritz Simrock, a well-known music publisher. Alarmed by his friend Joachim’s paranoia and believing Amalie to be innocent, Brahms rewrote the lullaby as a new song Gestille Sehnsucht (Stilled longing), presenting it to the couple in the hope that it would help repair the rift.

Joachim persisted, however, and filed divorce proceedings against his wife, forcing the composer to write a letter testify on Amalie’s side, one which she used in court as evidence of her innocence. The incident cause a rift between Brahms and Joachim, one that was healed only when the composer wrote his Double Concerto for Violin and ‘Cello, in 1887. Undaunted, Brahms published the two songs as Zwei Gesänge Op.91 in 1884.

The other work we heard today came of a later, somewhat happier series of encounters Brahms had with the most remarkable clarinettist of his day, Richard Mühlfeld. Brahms had, by this stage, declared he would compose no more, but Mühlfeld’s playing awoke within the composer such ecstasies, that no less than four works involving the clarinet flowed from his pen. Brahms thought Mühlfeld the finest wind player he had ever heard, describing him to Clara Schumann as the “Nightingale of the orchestra”.

These works included the two Op.120 Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano, composed in 1894, of which we heard the first here, but played by the viola! Just why Brahms chose to transcribe both sonatas for viola after waxing so enthusiastically about Richard Mühlfeld’s playing is a subject open to conjecture – possibly, he felt no other player could do the works the same justice on the instrument, and therefore sought an alternative. The transcriptions are done with such skill that no-one need feel short-changed by the experience of having the clarinet replaced – except, perhaps for clarinettists!

Violist Peter Barber and pianist Catherine McKay, who took part in both of the concert’s offerings, began proceedings with the F Minor Viola Sonata Op.120 No.1, the piano beautifully preparing the way for the stringed instrument’s wide-ranging lines, both instruments then settling into the warmth and reassurance of each other’s company before girding their loins and attacking the terse dotted-rhythm counter theme with plenty of dynamism and risk-taking, the violist preferring to strive for the notes with a flourish at phrase-ends rather than take a safer, somewhat meeker course. After these agitations, the epilogue-like return of the viola’s opening theme, modulating briefly into F major before reasserting the more sombre ambience, was treated with wonderful inwardness by both musicians, making the most of the music’s dying fall.

Such lovely, long-breathed lines flowed from both instruments at the slow movement’s beginning, the viola not entirely comfortable with one of the upwardly reaching gestures, but making amends a second time round. How beautifully the piano led the way further INTO the music’s tremulous world and then through the exploratory modulations that led to the opening’s reprise, both players dovetailing their phrases beautifully, allowing the composer’s lyrical vein full expression before softly whispering the music’s end. Out of the silence the following movement’s dance-like exchanges seemed at first to slowly waken from a dream-like state before kicking in with trenchant tones and plenty of girth, making a fine contrast with the Trio, the piano delicate and watery, the viola nicely withdrawn and circumspect until the reprise of the dance.

An excited piano flourish and a shout of viola exuberance launched the finale – the playing was at times orchestral in energy, at other times questioning and circumspect, with a gorgeously Haydnesque “dead-end” passage at the halfway point that hung its head in embarrassment before a return of the opening sounded a regrouping, this time a light-footed skipping through textures with autumn leaves flying and fields and forests echoing with glad cries and excitable whoops of joy – surely one of Brahms’ happiest creations!

Rather less familiar to me were the two Op 91 songs, which proved as amenable lunchtime companions as did the Sonata. Mezzo-soprano Linden Loader joined Peter Barber and Catherine McKay in richly ambient performances, the singing and playing giving the first part of the opening Gestillte Sehnsucht plenty of space and stillness in which to whisper the world’s slumberings, before expressing the singer’s ceaseless longings with animated voice-and-instrument interplay, sentiments to which the players give plenty of life before allowing thoughts and words to rest.

The second song Geistliches Wiegenlied seemed less lullaby and more admonition of the elements, including a plea to the holy angels, the “winged ones” (Die ihr geflugelt) to “silence the treetops” and counter the “fierce cold” so that the sleeping child might not be disturbed. A parent’s angst was refected in the agitations, though the singer took comfort and strength in the child’s sleep – here, piano and viola most beautifully augmented the singer’s tones, which were fraught once again at “Fierce cold”, but again appeased by the instruments’ gradual “rolling away” in great roulades of tone and generous phrasing all the parent’s anxieties, the players giving us at the end a gently-wrought postlude of gentle peace.

Very great appreciation of all this was shown by a smallish but attentive and grateful audience.

Destination Beehive 2017 at Circa Theatre – too serious to be taken seriously

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
DESTINATION BEEHIVE 2017

Written by Pinky Agnew and Lorae Parry
Directed and choreographed by Jan Bolwell
Music played and directed by Clinton Zerf
Lighting and Set Design by Lisa Maule

Circa Two
Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 9th July 2017
(until 5th August)

Legend has it that American songwriter and political satirist Tom Lehrer gave up satire when American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s perhaps just as tempting for any present-day satirist to take a similar stance in the face of the antics of those real-life dodgers, shysters, con-artists and masters of illusion we know as politicians – why bother, she or he might argue, drawing attention to their absurdities when they themselves do it so much better simply by BEING themselves?

Fortunately for us here in Godzone, that intrepid duo of Pinky Agnew and Lorae Parry, having tasted blood in the run-up to the 2014 election with their expose of the goings-on in the “swinging seat” of Port Nicholson give these personalities even MORE rope with which to hang themselves from various vantage points on the brand-new electorate of “Tinakori Heights”. By way of the “Kiwi Media” Show, driven (flailed?) along at a great lick by personalities Katrina Coleman (Lorae Parry), Tina Fisher (Pinky Agnew) and Bryce Allen (Tom Knowles), we are brought close-up and personal to this year’s power-hungry hopefuls, ready and willing to try and fool all of the people all of the time!

The authors themselves seemed well aware of the danger of being outflanked, at any given moment, by their moving targets’ next unscripted moves – a case of “expect the unexpected” thus prevailed, both onstage and out there in cloud-cuckoo Beehiveland, a flux which kept our ears pricked, our toes stretched and (thanks to newly-developed rear-end surveilance methods installed, so we were informed, in our audience seats) our buttocks ready for lateral activation – left, or alternatively right, for you-know-who, blurring ideological divisions and all! Like the redoubtable election-night coverage “worm” of a few rounds ago, one was mesmerised by the process, whatever the outcomes!

After the cinematoscopic hype of introduction from Katrina, Tina and Bryce, the whole cast launched into a bubbling, energetic “Hokey-Tokey” – sorry, make that a “Votey-Votey”! – giving the well-worn adage “turning the other cheek” a whole new lease of theatrical and political life. Throughout the show music and movement was a constant delight, with old, seemingly played-out numbers (eg., “I will follow Him”, “Anyone who had a Heart”, “I got you, Babe” and “Santa Baby”) springing back to life with freshly-worked words , messages delivered with dangerous feistiness that delightfully belied the original banalities.

This was just part of a show which featured nine singers/actors (with stage Manager Neal Barber sometimes roped into the goings-on) playing over thirty characters between them and delivering over a dozen songs, the whole co-ordinated by director/choreographer Jan Bolwell with tremendous energy, vision and authority, and backed up by musical director Clinton Zerf’s brilliant and fluid keyboard realisations. Together with co-authors Pinky Agnew’s and Lorae Parry’s effervescent and outrageously provocative dialogues and song-lyrics, it makes for an “everything you wanted to hear” entertainment package which ticks all the appropriately risible boxes.

Of the actors, the doyen is of course Dame Kate Harcourt, celebrating her real-life status as a nonagenarian by conjuring up a populist tide of electoral enthusiasm (motorised chair “bestriding” the stage) as the Tinakori Heights NZ First Candidate, Maude Hornby. In what seems a remarkable “coup”, she was introduced by none other than a pre-recorded Winston Peters, appropriately scripted, and joining in the fun with a will, – with such advocacy, one was prepared to surrender all to the visceral jungle-drum rhythms of an updated “I will follow Him”, sung by Harcourt and her entourage with Messianic conviction!

Dame Kate’s fellow-thespians are a mixture of familiar and new, the former including the show’s two aforementioned writers, both of whom assume the trappings of a bewildering array of personalities in very different ways – Pinky Agnew is the shapeshifter of the two, effecting breath-catching transformations from TV show host to none other than the resplendently red-clad Hillary Clinton, adroitly re-aligning her geographical surroundings with the help of flash-card prompting , before morphing into the Mrs.Mopp-like Faye McFee, who’s the ACT Party candidate’s campaign manager, and then (most stunningly of all) reclaiming the international limelight as Angela Merkel, complete with anti-Trumpery antennae.

By comparison, Lorae Parry’s no less able assumptions involve relative micromanagement of appearances, mannerisms and pronouncements enabling simple, strongly-etched portrayals of personalities such as her alter ego Helen Clark (here to introduce a “surprise” Labour candidate, who’s already been mentioned), a co-anchor of Foxy TV, Parris la Touche, the “gnat-in-a-bottle” Lynette Scott who’s the Tinakori Heights ACT candidate , and then none other than Theresa May, still a force to be reckoned with, and here with Angela Merkel to help further the cause of the local pussy-hat brigade by confronting the actual cause célèbre in person.

Carrie Green’s another election veteran with a couple of long-(self?)serving characterisations such as “born-again centrist” Metiria Tureia, along with a somewhat addled-value Paula Bennett with resplendently fluid thigh-support, a sequence that Green herself wrote. She also gave us a scary Marama Fox (who scatters the National sympathisers like chaff in the wind), as well as partnering Lorae Parry as the “other” Foxy TV anchor, Felicia Fanning, and is the centre of focus for the Justin Bieber take-off “Youth Song” – high energy input, here, with exhilarating results.

Similarly traversing the spectrums of ideology and character with versatility and elan was Tom Knowles, one of the three “Kiwi Media” presenters (Bryce Allen) at the start, and then by turns an opportunistic Grant Robertson (I’ve got you, Labour”), a platitudinous National candidate Dick Webster (“We aim to make our rivers WATERSKIABLE! – by 2040!), a feline-phobic Gareth Morgan with a feline-phobic moustache, and (Trumping everything else!) the world’s No.1 pussy-predator on a fake-news-finding visit to Godzone, involving “your President English!”, with riotous outcomes!

And then, there were the newbies, four student actors from the “genius tutelary” of Whitireia, whose song-and-dance skills added considerable “schwung” to the proceedings and whose characters all hit the ground running! – Molly Weaver relished both her TOP candidate Jilly Caro-Cant and a starry-eyed Jacinda Ardern in thrall to Labour’s latest “recruit” with style and surety, while Alexandra Taylor’s alarmingly abandoned Jekyll-and-Hyde take on United Future candidate Celine Smith rivalled in effect the legendary Salome’s besottment with the head of John the Baptist in her all-but-visceral orgasmic reaction to images of a bemused-looking Peter Dunne!

Shawn Keil traversed the interchangeable credibility gap between Green (“May the Forest be with you”) and ACT party personalities with schizoid skill, drawing from both Bizet’s “Carmen” and the late, lamented Trevor Rupe, in a rose-between-teeth realisation of David Seymour as a fantasy figure to Habanera accompaniment, augmented by Agnew and Parry in their vociferously operatic “Seymour!” – an equally far cry to Keil’s “always-going-somewhere” Bill English take, bouncing between put-downs by various world leaders. And the elegant Charles Masina as Dr.Riki Te Rapa, the Māori Party candidate, made the most of his advocacy from Carrie Green’s Marama Fox and his expedient coming-out reaction of “I’m bi!” to questions regarding ethnicity.

In all, a show which elevates politics to the status of love in terms of its sufferers – a tragedy to the heart and a comedy to the intellect! Those who saw the 2014 version of the show and enjoyed it (and how could anybody not?) can take heart that it’s more of the same but very different. And for those who are first-timers – well, along with everything else one expects from entertainment, it’s also something of a healing experience!

See also reviews by Ewen Coleman (The Dominion Post)
https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/stage-and-theatre/94551736/theatre-review-destination-beehive-2017
and John Smythe (Theatre Review)
https://theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=10397