Author: Peter Mechen

Jeux, Debussy’s quiet revolutionary, steals Orchestra Wellington’s show

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
The Impresario – Concert 2

DEBUSSY – Jeux – poème dansé
MOZART – Piano Concerto No.20 in D Minor K.466
BRAHMS – Piano Concerto No.1 in D Minor Op.15

Michael Houstoun (piano)
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday July 7th, 2017

This was the second of Orchestra Wellington’s 2017 series of concerts containing works commissioned by the renowned impresario Serge Diaghilev for the dance company he had formed, the Ballets Russes, regarded by many performance historians as the most influential dance company of the 20th Century. It was the Ballets Russes company which, thanks to Diaghilev’s commissions, was to premiere three of Igor Stravinsky’s most famous ballets, the Firebird, Petroushka and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), along with numerous others in their 30-year history.

Another of the commissions was a work called Jeux (Games), written by Claude Debussy. At first the latter rejected the proposal after receiving Diaghilev’s scenario for the work – a game of tennis between two women and one man, involving lost balls, suggestions of amorous interactions and an aeroplane crash on the court (Diaghilev’s initial idea was for the dancers to be three young men – but he thought better of it). Debussy described it all as “ludicrous”, though when Diaghilev offered to double his fee for the work, the composer relented, on the condition that the concluding “aeroplane crash” idea be dropped! – he got his way, and the resulting work has come to be regarded by commentators as one of the century’s most significant and seminal pieces of music.

For a good while, though, the impact of Jeux on the musical world in general was overshadowed by the sensational premiere of another Diaghilev-inspired ballet only a fortnight later, that of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps. Unlike Le Sacre, Debussy’s Jeux produced no riot, no furore, no scandal of the stuff that legends are made of, but neither were there plaudits and rave reviews. In fact the music seemed scarcely to be noticed by the critics, who reserved their bemused reactions for dancer Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography. Debussy himself had called his work “music without legs”, and was thus appalled by what he saw, derisively commenting, “…the man adds up demisemiquavers with his feet, and proves the results with his arms….it is ugly…” It was actually the first known ballet to be performed in contemporary dress, being actually announced by the Ballet Russes as a “plastic vindication of the man of 1913”.

Debussy at this time was suffering from the cancer that would eventually kill him, so the commission was a timely one, providing him with a much-needed income, and engaging his sensibilities to an extent that even he was surprised at – he wrote “How was I able to forget the cares of this world, and manage to write music that is nevertheless joyous and alive with droll rhythms?” It took him a mere three weeks to write, and only the ending, with its hint of the suggestive, gave him difficulty – “…the music has to convey a rather risque situation – but of course, in a ballet, any hint of immorality escapes through the feet of the danseuse and ends in a pirouette….”

It took until the 1950s to be recognised as a masterpiece, and in the concert-hall rather than in the theatre. Though the score readily suggests each choreographic movement of the action – one critic reviewed a performance making full use of the tennis association, writing sentences like, “…a vulgar forehand drive from the string section is deftly turned by a mysterious lob from the solo flute……” – what is most striking about Jeux is its organically elusive quality, with each episode “growing” out of the other in an entirely spontaneous and unpredictable way – “every theme is the child of the one before” as one commentator put it. Debussy himself intended such a continuous renewal, what he called “a drawing together and separating of poles of attraction”, and constantly achieving new ways of balancing the same material. He wrote to a friend, “I would like to make something inorganic in appearance and yet well-ordered at its core” – and that seems to be the essence of Jeux.

I thought Marc Taddei’s and Orchestra Wellington’s performance of the work miraculous and sure-footed, bringing all of the piece’s inherent characteristics to the fore – the mystery at the work’s beginning (mysterious, haunting whole-tone chords at the beginning, sounding like the passage of consciousness through magical portals into wondrous dream-like realms), the constant ebb-and flow of the rthythmic trajectories, the endlessly varying treatment of melodic fragments, and the kaleidoscopic shifts of colour and texture brought to us as the work unfolded. A friend said afterwards that he thought the performance wasn’t sufficiently “ravishing” – but he admitted he had heard Pierre Boulez conduct the work in London with the BBC Symphony! For my part I had recently played and listened to FOUR different versions from recordings, and found them all very different! Orchestra Wellington’s playing under Marc Taddei wasn’t quite the most warmly ravishing of those I heard, but the detailing was superb throughout, and the piece’s sensuality at times was given an edge which for me gave the music a tingling, vital quality.

To my ears, the Michael Fowler Centre acoustic doesn’t give much added warmth or body to the sounds made by orchestras, something which I thought was apparent during the programme’s other items as well. This relative leanness of sound suited the Mozart Concerto better than it did the Brahms work, both of which were played with exemplary clarity by the soloist, Michael Houstoun, and supported by incisive playing from the orchestra. I enjoyed the “attack” from the players – very “whiplash-like” in the MFC acoustic, giving the performance plenty of “edge”. It was an interesting idea to “bind” the two concerto performances by key and see what came of the treatment given D MInor by two different composers. Most obviously, both showed their classicist leanings, Brahms, writing sixty years after Mozart, being, of course, the “chosen one” of the conservatives in their struggle to uphold traditional principles against the onslaughts of the “new music” of the radicals of the nineteenth century, most prominently Liszt and Wagner.

In each composer’s concerto, there’s the same inherent D Minor darkness, reflecting in a shared “ambience” between the two works of sombre mood, of struggle, of gritty determination and of aspiring towards the light of resolution or victory over forces of darkness. Each uses the language of his time, so that there’s no mistaking which of the works are from what era – Mozart’s motivation in writing such a dark work remains unclear, and in any case his habit of writing his piano concerti in pairs often produced diametrically opposed emotional results (this one was written at roughly the same time as the bright and sunny C-Major work K.467, confounding any “biographical” revelations in either piece).

In Brahms’ case, however, the young composer’s accompanying personal circumstances definitely influenced the heartfelt character of HIS D Minor Concerto in more ways than one – a situation brought about by his champion, Robert Schumann. Originally the work was intended to be a symphony, and its composer encouraged in the venture by Schumann, until the latter was tragically committed to an asylum after an attempt at suicide. By way of maintaining his creative spirits in parallel with his continuing support for Schumann, his wife Clara and her children, Brahms first toyed with the idea of turning the failed symphony into a work for two pianos, but after considerable angsting, created what became this, his first Piano Concerto – but not a fashionable “virtuoso concerto” as a vehicle for star soloists! This sounded more like a symphony with piano obbligato – and what a piano part!

Michael Houstoun has performed this work in living memory at the Michael Fowler Centre with the NZSO, as part of a Brahms festival a number of years ago. Worthy though that performance was I had high hopes of the combination of Houstoun with Marc Taddei, whom I thought would give the orchestral contribution to the proceedings plenty of energy and dynamism and be more of a “match” for Houstoun’s pianism. In the event, I don’t think anybody could say that Orchestra Wellington didn’t bend collective backs, strain sinews and manipulate muscles to the nth degree to help bring off this work – it’s just that I felt the ensemble seemed ultimately to lack the numbers of strings to give the performance the sheer weight it needed in places throughout the work, given that the venue was, predictably, not much help in terms of orchestral warmth and amplitude.

What did surprise me was Marc Taddei’s slowish tempi throughout the concerto’s first movement – fine if one is conducting an orchestra with a full-strength complement of strings, and in an acoustic which gives something back to the musicians! – but here, the players sounded to my ears pushed to fill out their tones in order to properly saturate and sustain those bar-lines with sound. The result at times were tones that, from where I was sitting in the hall didn’t have enough heft for me, in certain places. In the past Taddei had invariably chosen quick tempi when conducting the classics (sometimes bordering on the excessive, but always with exciting results), but on this occasion asking for a truly big-boned maestoso in the first movement and a long-breathed treatment of the lines in the second movement seemed to me to put the players under a lot of pressure.

Where the combination of soloist and orchestra began to conflagrate as expected was during the third and final movement, after the brief fugato-like passage for strings and winds, and piano and orchestra had swung into the reprise of the opening theme. The exchanges between soloist and ensemble began generating more and more excitement, with the cadenza adding to the music’s resolve and the contrasting whimsical playfulness between the instruments (lovely work by the horns) suddenly bubbling over and releasing surges of energy which brought about a satisfyingly triumphal conclusion. In the Town Hall the impact of the whole would have been mightier, but here the musicians by sheer determination brought it all off for the finish and made even the MFC resonate with glad sounds!

So, roll on to the next Orchestra Wellington impresario concert (Saturday 5th August) – masked balls (Schumann) and Hellenic pastorales (Ravel) await our impatient pleasure!

Magical Mendelssohn and tempestuous Tchaikovsky from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
MENDELSSOHN and TCHAIKOVSKY

MENDELSSOHN – Overture “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Op.21
Violin Concerto in E Minor Op.64
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.4 in F Minor Op.36

James Jin (violin)
Andrew Atkins (conductor)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra

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

Sunday 2nd July, 2017

First impressions are, as they say, important, although they can sometimes be misleading. If one took the opening few minutes of the Wellington Chamber Orchestra’s Sunday concert, featuring Felix Mendelssohn’s adorable Overture “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and peremptorily judged the concert’s music-making by the short-winded and unatmospheric opening chords, and the somewhat unseemly scramble of upper string lines attempting and failing to co-ordinate their rhythmic patternings right throughout this sequence which followed, one would then be completely confounded by the real and heart-warming quality of the remainder of what we heard that afternoon.

It was as if the fairies of Shakespeare’s (and Mendelssohn’s) wood had somehow gotten themselves into all sorts of momentary bother at the outset before Oberon, their King, imperiously called for order with the first big unison chord, one which was delivered with tremendous authority (and probably some relief!). Conductor Andrew Atkins would have had none of such a ragged beginning at rehearsal, of course, but as this was a “real” performance he kept things going and, to his and the players’ credit, pulled the errant woodsprites and their out-of-synch connivings back into line!

With the return of these same elfin scamperings at various places throughout the Overture, things greatly improved and confidence was gradually restored – and, happily, there was as well more to enthuse about regarding other aspects of the performance. All of the orchestral sections pulled their weight admirably – the winds, especially the clarinet, contributed some strong individual work as well as some secure ensemble, as did the horns after some opening-note hesitancy with their descending, dovetailed calls. I loved the contribution of the tuba there, particularly redolent and imposing at the bottom of the scale. The brasses in general, though a bit hit-and-miss with some of their atmospheric calls in the work’s middle section, gave things plenty of wonderful “grunt” in tutti, especially leading up to the famous braying ass’s “hee-haws”!

Something I thought worked well was moving the timpani to a place centre-back, instead of the usual place to one side – in this venue it seemed to work wonders for the tones of the individual notes, the sounds made by the player far more clear and focused than I can recall in previous concerts.

The strings sounded rich and warm and suitably romantic in their “singing” of their lyrical lines, though I regretted the conductor’s refusal to allow the players to”indulge” in that glorious descending-scale melody at the end, just before the final wind chords (I once heard Yehudi Menuhin in rehearsal at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London do exactly the same thing with that theme at the end, stopping the orchestra at that point, and insisting that the players observe the “a tempo”, which I thought “unmagicked” the music, making it suddenly sound a bit routine and dull!).

So, having gotten things properly back on the rails, conductor and orchestra then joined forces with Auckland-based soloist James Jin for a performance of a perennial favourite, Mendelssohn’s E Minor Violin Concerto. Here, the orchestral playing was, I thought, beautifully-paced by the conductor at a steady tempo, and proving the perfect foil for the silvery tones of the soloist. At times one might have thought his playing, for all its sweetness and dexterity insufficiently commanding of tone and lacking in proper physical heft, but when it came to some of the opening movement’s big flourishes, James Jin “took over” the notes in properly commanding fashion, though without ever “barnstorming” or appearing to hector the music.

I thought the first movement beautifully shaped by both soloist and conductor, and deftly played by the ensemble. The winds survived a glitch at the beginning of the second subject group (and made amends with the passage’s repetition after the cadenza), and the strings generated real “schwung” in the tutti just beforehand, digging into the notes and keeping the rhythms buoyant under their conductor’s direction, right up to the single held bassoon note (beautifully sustained) that without a break transported the music most marvellously into what Robert Schumann might have called the”other realms”of the slow movement.

Here we heard a subtly-nuanced singing line from the soloist and steadfast support from the strings, their voicing of the poignant second subject episode evoking all the feeling one could wish under Atkins’ direction. Despite a slight rhythmic stumble with his accompanying figurations at one point Jin kept his poise, replying in kind to the orchestra’s lyricism before adroitly responding to the finale’s “call to arms” from the brass with a couple of impish flourishes. Quite suddenly the ambience sparked and crackled as Jin’s violin danced into the allegro molto vivace a half-step ahead of the ensemble, who made valiant attempts to catch up with his fleet-fingered progress, occasionally getting within heel-snapping distance, with thrills and spills aplenty – all tremendously exciting!

It didn’t really matter that the winds came to grief during the brief exchange with the soloist near the music’s end, with only the flute maintaining its poise – the players then rallied and danced their way to the end amid coruscations of excitement, violinist and orchestra taken up with the music’s spirit to engaging and invigorating effect – most enjoyable!

Having recently heard these same musicians bend their backs to the task of making a splendid job of Elgar’s great A-flat Symphony, I was looking forward enormously to hearing how the ensemble would take to the equally formidable task of realising Tchaikovsky’s mighty Fourth Symphony, in particular the wave-upon wave intensities of the work’s opening movement. So it’s with very great pleasure that I’m able to report that these musicians threw themselves unflinchingly into the fray and gave a most exciting and memorable performance of the work.

Any fears I might have had regarding the players’ ability to “find” the notes at cardinal points were put to rest by the opening fanfares, delivered firstly by the horns and lower brass with sonorous weight and energy, and then by the trumpets, gleaming with brilliance and excitement! Then, added to this was the melancholic gravitas of both winds and strings as the allegro proper got going, conductor Andrew Atkins giving the players enough elbow-space to find their notes and make something of their phrases without losing momentum or tension.

In fact, throughout the first movement each climax-point was so unerringly built, so strongly-focused and shaped, that I was able to “feel” the full force of the composer’s singular genius as a symphonist, with every section of the orchestra playing its part – the wind solos introducing the second subject group of themes, the strings, timpani and winds building the excitement with the same material, and the brasses literally playing for keeps, with the horns in particularly sonorous form. All the while there was patience and steadiness from the podium, Atkins allowing the music’s natural momentum to gather both weight and tension, so that the “fate” theme heard at the work’s opening seemed a natural outcome of the process at various flashpoints along the way.

The slow movement was nicely launched by the oboist, heartfelt and melancholic in effect despite one or two hesitant moments, and then with strings and winds carrying the mood over to the gorgeous second theme, here given rich and generous treatment typical of the performance as a whole. A nicely-played Borodin-like sequence from winds and horns, led to the somewhat droll second subject, one from which only a genius like Tchaikovsky could create something so intense and radiant in feeling. Again the conductor’s patient direction gave the players the space they needed to catch and fill out the “dying fall” atmosphere, as the opening theme returned, piquantly decorated by the winds with first the clarinet, and then the bassoon especially lovely – and how beautifully the horns, clarinet and bassoon wound things down at the end!

The scherzo provided another instance of steady, unrushed direction paying dividends, the string pizzicati lines “finding” their places and tumbling playfully over one another, as the composer intended. The oboe melody was characterfully pesante here, with the other winds, including a gloriously shrill piccolo, chiming in, and then squawking all the more energetically as the brass marched in, quick-step-style! Towards the movement’s end they all congregated again, with strings and winds exchanging words, and the brass quick-stepping into the fray only to find, quite suddenly, that everybody was friends again!

A glorious welter of sounds ushered in the finale, which continued with great surges of upward-thrusting and downward-tumbling energies from all quarters, providing the greatest possible contrast with the delicacies of the first winds-and-triangle sequences – though had I been the conductor I would have encouraged the player to sound the triangle a bit more assertively. Snarling brasses and crashing cymbals built up the excitement, the performance catching the music’s see-sawing emotions, with the motto theme’s eventual return calling a halt to the exuberant revelries, before the music’s unquenchable human spirit reasserted itself and roared out a kind of joyous final defiance. All of this came across with plenty of well-directed energy and focus, with these musicians giving Tchaikovsky’s music the amplitude it needed to make a resounding impression. Thrills and spills included, it was, I thought, a most successful concert, then, for both orchestra and conductor.

Schumann and Barber – adventurous and absorbing sounds from the NZSO, with Daniel Müller-Schott

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The NZSO presents:
SCHUMANN AND BARBER

BRAHMS – Tragic Overture Op.81
SCHUMANN – ‘Cello Concerto in A Minor Op.129
BARBER – Adagio for Strings / Symphony No.1

Daniel Müller-Schott (‘cello)
James Feddeck (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 17th June 2017

Poor old Brahms was left out of the title for this concert, despite his “Tragic Overture” opening the programme, though therein lies a rub – I thought in a sense it was apposite this time round, as the NZSO’s performance under James Feddeck for me lacked any real sense of tragedy – rather it came across as an intermittently “worried” piece of music trying its best here and there to put a brave face on things. Brahms is, I think, partly to blame – if he had called the work something like “Overture to a Tragedy” one might perhaps more easily accept a narrative or scenario which includes contrasting biedermeier-like cheerfulness. It is a difficult piece to bring off in a specific programmatic sense, requiring in places a determined, sharp-etched focus which ought to be taxing to perform as well as to listen to – here a combination of compositional abstraction and all-purpose performing intent made for me a pleasant, if somewhat remote listening experience.

In theory, of course, Brahms was an appropriate choice of composer to introduce a late work of Robert Schumann’s, the latter’s beautiful, whimsical ‘Cello Concerto, here given the kind of performance by the players that fully enabled the music to fully express its unique character. Perhaps it would have been better to have introduced Schumann’s work with either his “Manfred” or his “Genoveva” Overture, though such was the involvement and sense of direction of the playing, we found ourselves transported to the composer’s strangely troubled world with the first orchestral chord. I’ve always thought it remarkable how this composer’s music in particular identifies itself within a few seconds, whatever the work – so “confessional” in one sense and yet so elusive in other respects.

Soloist Daniel Müller-Schott gave a masterful performance, never over-indulging the whimsicality or vain-glorious gestures in the music, but giving full voice to the poetry of utterance that informed the discourse, handling the awkwardness of some of the composer’s writing for the instrument with great fluency. The work took on the character of an extended meditation upon aspects of existence, with snatches of impulse and wry reflection tossed between the solo ‘cello and the orchestra with apparent ease, if occasionally demonstrating near-dogged obssessiveness – a Schumann characteristic, very much an “I’ll say it again, in case you didn’t hear me the first time” kind of thing. These musicians, however were able to vary the emphases and flex the occasionally four-square rhythms in a way that maintained our interest throughout.

Orchestrally there was nothing of the occasional all-purpose blandness that had neutralised some episodes of the Brahms work – in response to the soloist’s first great utterance, Feddeck and the orchestra gave the first great tutti spadefuls of forthright character, and another leading to a solo interjection from the ‘cello that magically transformed the music into reverie and poetry which marked the slow movement’s beginning. A beautiful, rapt opening from soloist and orchestral winds developed into a rich “sighing” passage, like a giant squeezebox or harmonium gently “breathing” the harmonies, the orchestra’s principal cello duetting with the soloist.

Only when the concerto’s opening theme returned did the magic of the sequence give way to sterner realities, as soloist and orchestra briefly sparred for primacy, before the finale’s theme gathered up both combatants and propelled them into the movement’s opening, by way of a perky three-note motiv that seems to find endless opprtunities for exchange and elaboration. Daniel Müller-Schott’s playing worked hand-in-glove with the orchestra’s, everything kept buoyant and supple, the exchanges having an almost wind-blown quality, like leaves blowing about in an autumn breeze, making a strong and definite contrast with the great orchestral tutti delivering the three-note theme with terrific conviction.

The final moment of magic came with the soloist’s cadenza, the lines climbing out of the depths, getting the occasional hand-hold from widely-spaced orchestral chords, while musing and rhapsodising in between, until the bow began gently dancing upon the strings and the music activated and stirred the blood for a final show of trumpet-like triumphal energy from both ‘cello and orchestra. How wonderful to have such playing put at the service of music which responds so rewardingly – for many people in the audience, the occasion would, I’m certain, have marked a particularly happy discovery of a hitherto unknown or unfamiliar work, one to place alongside the composer’s far better-known A Minor Piano Concerto.

Daniel Müller-Schott returned to give us a movement from a Bach ‘cello suite, one which began with big-boned, grandly-arpeggiated chords, their improvisatory nature suggesting some kind of rich, meditative exploration of sounds that speak in ways which transcend what an eminent musician once described as the “tyranny of conscious thought” – timeless utterances that continue to delight and fascinate, centuries after their inception. I’ve since learned that it was, in fact, the Sarabande from the Third ‘Cello Suite BWV 1009.

After the interval came a similar kind of pairing of works to the concert’s first half, that of the familiar with the not-so-known – though this time round only one composer was involved. American composer Samuel Barber wrote his only String Quartet in 1936, later that same year rescoring the Adagio Movement for string orchestra. This single work has become the composer’s most often-played music, heard most frequently in tandem with events of a sombre or tragic nature. In this commemorative respect it could be said to parallel Elgar’s “Nimrod” from the English composer’s “Enigma Variations”.

It was a tribute to both the strength of the composer’s original inspiration and the inspired playing of the NZSO strings most ably directed by James Feddeck that Barber’s work once again exerted its considerable emotional “tug”. There was certainly absolutely nothing routine about the performance, the opening B-flat as sonorous and withdrawn at one and the same time as any sound could have been, the accompanying strings providing the foundation for the melody’s arch-like progressions. The constantly varying time-signatures created a kind of improvisatory feeling as the violins, and then the violas and ‘cellos presented their “versions” of the arched sounds, the piece gradually and inexorably building towards four intensely-focused, feeling-suffused chords before suddenly breaking off, allowing the resonances time to mingle with the silences, and then finish on an unresolved chord after a final statement of the opening theme.

From around the same period of his compositional life Barber wrote his First Symphony, the product of a sojourn in Rome after he had won, in 1935, at the age of twenty-six, the coveted American Prix de Rome. In fact the work was premiered in that city and its immediate success helped earn for the young composer a performance of his work in the United States six weeks afterwards. Further to this came a performance of the work at the 1937 Salzburg Festival, one which drew the attention of conductor Arturo Toscanini to Barber’s work. In response to Toscanini’s request for some more music, Barber sent him the as yet unperformed Adagio for Strings, thereby sealing that piece’s (and the composer’s) fate!

Barber was to revise the symphony five years later, in which form it was to remain. Written in a single movement, and lasting about twenty minutes, the work has been compared with Sibelius’s one-movement Seventh Symphony which, like Barber’s work, moves in a single, continuous arc through its different moods and aspects towards an inevitable conclusion. Rather more volatile in aspect than Sibelius’s nature-inspired grandeur, Barber’s work hits the listener with titanic force at the outset, in places bringing to mind a Hollywood epic scenario, but one convoluted with angularities and tortured-sounding progressions, with strings and brasses vying for supremacy in a sound-world where anything might happen.

Throughout this opening I thought the orchestral playing simply magnificent under James Feddeck’s direction, the physical momentums and the thematic thrusts both coherent and larger-than-life in a properly dramatic way, the first movement both impressive and bewildering in its variety of orchestral incidence. The titanic conflicts and interactions having spent themselves for the moment, the scherzo movement, Allegro molto, allowed the elves and fairies to dance out from the gaps in between ravaged textures and revitalise life’s enjoyment and sense of fun, the winds in particular colouring the textures in beguilingly varied and unpredictable ways – gradually the strings and brasses added their voices to the orchestral games, until the whole orchestra took up the pounding synopations, rather like the Nibelung’s anvils in Wagner’s Das Rheingold!

After this the oboe introduced a heart-easing theme, with strings murmuring a richly-wrought accompaniment, a solo cello furthering the beauty of the sequence as did the clarinet – the strings took up the music’s thread with passionate advocacy, stimulating great rolling swathes of sound from the brasses, and building into an epic climax! – from the ensuing resonances came the first notes of a passacaglia, the strings continuing to pour out endless torrents of emotion, until winds and brasses flung themselves into the fray with wild, angular cries, returning the music to the apocalyptic turmoil of the opening, a cosmos of reiterated incident over which human kind seemed to have little or no control!

What a work, and what a performance! Evidently conductor James Feddeck thought so, too, as he took some pains at the music’s end to acknowledge the contributions made by individual players, too many of whom to list here. The Brahms Overture apart, I thought the whole concert a triumph – of programming, and of performing. A pity the hall was somewhat less than full (the Barber Symphony too much of a “wild-card” for some patrons, perhaps?) – this venture deserved every success and every gesture of public support.

More power to String Trios – the Aroha Ensemble at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Concerts presents:
The Aroha Ensemble
Haihong Liu (violin), Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

BEETHOVEN – String Trio No.3 in G Major, Op.9 No.1
PENDERECKI – String Trio (1990-91)
MOZART – Divertimento for String Trio in E-flat K.563

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

Sunday, 11th June, 2017

There’s no doubt that the string quartet as a genre has dominated the world of chamber music since the time of Josef Haydn – the repertoire is astonishing in its depth and diversity, and together with the sheer number of ensembles, both historical and contemporary, constitutes almost a world of its own. The effect of this has, I think, tended to downplay the “presence” in the chamber music firmament, of differently constituted groups, and possibly their “status” in the minds of many music-lovers, as being somehow lesser or slighter in content or importance.

Of course there are exceptions which have pressed their claims to greatness as profoundly as most string quartets have – the Piano Trios of Beethoven and the String Quintets of Mozart along with Schubert’s magnificent String Quintet come first and forement to mind. But most String Trios (for example) wouldn’t for many people, I would think,”quicken the blood” at the thought of them being peformed as would be the case with the average string quartet by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, etc….

Well, if anybody thought, with the present programme put together by the Aroha Ensemble (ironically, all three players are members of the well-known Wellington group, the Aroha Quartet!), that the music offered would somehow be of a lesser quality or importance than a like programme of string quartets, he or she would have been most pleasantly surprised and stimulated by the afternoon’s music-making (I shamefully confess to being covertly one of that number, and am forced here to publicly recant my previously-held elitist and somewhat “superior” attitudes towards string trios!).

All three works on the programme gave the utmost pleasure, thanks of course to the advocacy of the players and the immediacy of the venue’s acoustic, as well as the efforts of the respective composers. I was particularly taken with both of the first-half pieces (those by Beethoven and Penderecki) and thought the programme-order made for a satisfying concert of two halves within a diverse single world of expression.

So, we began with Beethoven, and the first of three String Trios published in 1799. One could immediately imagine why this work in G Major is regarded as the most energetic of the set, due to its magnificent opening – a forceful, sonorous declamation (remarkable for three players!) with quirkily suggestive impulses immediately following, in a way that reminded me of Haydn’s humourful style. The tempo then teasingly nudged rather than plunged forwards, with the individual instrumental voices so characterul and full-bodied in their expositions (trialogues, rather than dialogues!) , able to encompass both the lyricism of the second subject themes and the dancing lines which united the sequences.

Darker-browed mutterings heralded the development which plunged into different harmonic realms, touching upon varied texturings and timbres, before the recapitulation of the opening included for us some surprising “lurches” into hitherto unexplored nooks and crannies, the playing consistently conveying a sense of great and biosterous fun, almost Rossini-like with some of the scampering figurations, building up enough momentum for a rousing finish. By contrast, the Adagio’s gently-throbbing lines established a kind of hpynotic dance, varying between dovetailed detailing and strongly purposeful direction, the players seeming to relish the composer’s occasional harmonic waywardness, capturing enough of the listener’s wonderment to make a rich and satisfying journey.

A fleet-of-finger scherzo emphasised gracefulness rather than physicality, a four-note figure used with much imagination, the product more of whimsy than wilfulness – the players saved their energies for the fast-and-furious finale, which they launched with great elan, but also with impressive dynamic control, so that the textures and tones seemed infinitely pliable, pulled back and allowed to fill out at will. But what terrific physical attack in places! The boisterousness took the form of a village dance at one point complete with drone bass, before reverting to an even more breathless pace – completely exhilarating!

Bearing in mind that some of Beethoven’s music sounded bizarre and unmusical to some nineteenth-century listeners, one could hazard an opinion that parallels could be drawn with the effect of parts of Polish composer Krzystof Penderecki’s String Trio upon some present-day sensibilities, even though the latter work is now over a quarter-of-a-century old! (Actually, my favourite off-the-cuff adverse reaction to Beethoven’s music is, I think, a very belated comment by John Ruskin, who, in 1881, observed that what he heard “sounded like the upsetting of bags of nails, with here and there a dropped hammer”.)

As my own music-listening capacities were immeasurably changed by a first encounter with Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps”, so might Penderecki’s ferociously-charged episodes of confrontation which begin the Trio have similarly stimulated other listeners’ reactions and imaginations. At the outset, each “slashing chord” outburst was followed by expressive solo passages for a solo instrument, a lament-like episode for the viola, its melodic line by turns chromatic and angular, followed by a more capricious and dance-like ‘cello solo, and lastly an effortful, almost claustrophobic outpouring from the violin – superb playing from each instrumentalist!

In their exchanges the instruments varied their textures and timbres almost obsessively, suggesting at once widely-ranging and sharply-focused traversals of feeling and imagination, in places somewhat spectral, while in others imbued with the warm physicality of “tumbling down a hill”. To me the music conveyed a sense of experience hard-earned and painfully worked-through, the string textures adopting all kinds of different-characters, from the warmly-resonant legato-sounding to the dried-out “col legno” dryness.

In places I was reminded of Douglas Lilburn’s reference to Penderecki’s music in the second of the former’s iconic treatises regarding creativity in this country , “A Search for a Language”. Lilburn emphasised the character of the Polish composer’s experiences, shared with numerous contemporaries, in what he called a “crucible of European suffering” by way of remarking on the relationship between language and experience, and about how such experiences ought to be “earned”. While acknowledging this creative uniqueness, what I found thrilling was how the Aroha Ensemble seemed to bridge the gap between creativity and execution and realise their own version of the music’s strength of character with plenty of force and surety – a terrific performance!

There remained, for our utmost delight, the Mozart Divertimento, reckoned by many commentators to be the greatest example of the String Trio genre. Originally programmed as the opening work, the Ensemble thought better of the order, and decided to get the huff, puff and bluster out of the way first, clearing the decks for Mozartean sublimity. As it turned out, I would have coped with the order as originally mooted, thanks to the Ensemble’s ability to take their listeners right into the centre of things in the case of each work, and create enduring stand-alone memories of each creative world.

Mozart opens his work gently, but with the music’s pulse hardly missing a beat as it explodes and resonates with energy – a couple of momentary raw tones simply added to the pulsating excitements of the interactions, though the exposition repeat I thought sounded more settled, the tones not as forced, as if the music had found its stride. A mysterious and exploratory development shed new light on things, the players keeping their focus tight and sharp-edged, and bent on getting back to the expositions – I so enjoyed the ensemble’s dovetailing of the lines in the recapitulation, so very conversational and complementary as to warm listeners’ hearts (mine included!)….

A warm, richly-toned Adagio was gorgeously-phrased, bringing to mind the words “music of heaven”, however fanciful they might seem. Some of the poised sequences of this music made it seem as if creation had stopped to listen to the sounds which were being created, while the more energetic passages exuded a fierce ecstasy at the loveliness of everything.

The urgency of the first Menuetto kept the flow of exchange and the trajectory of experience studded with incident, while the walking-pace of the following theme-and-variations Andante, allowed expressions of both lyricism and strength, inwardness and quasi-operatic outpourings, in a kind of ritual of varying textures.

Another quick and sprightly Menuetto followed, with two Trios, firstly a charming sequence that sported some circus-like touches, and later, a lovely, jauntily striding manner. These different aspects and their individual delights were fully relished by the musicians, with the hunting calls at the movement’s end nicely colouring the argument. As for the graceful 6/8 Allegro at the work’s conclusion, the Aroha players caught the music’s god-like “sporting” character, the opening motif like a “call to play” and the delicious scampering sections giving of their energies to the whole, leading to joyous trumpetings and answering affirmations at the end.

NZ Opera’s 2017 Carmen surprises, disconcerts and delights

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
BIZET – Carmen – Opera in Four Acts

Cast: Carmen – Nino Surguladze
Don Jose – Tom Randle
Escamillo – James Clayton
Micaëla – Emma Pearson
Zuniga – Wade Kernot
Moralès – James Harrison
Frasquita – Amelia Berry
Mercédès – Kristin Darragh
Le Remendado – James Benjamin Rodgers
Lillas Pastia – Stuart Coats

Freemasons New Zealand Opera Chorus
Orchestra Wellington
Francesco Pasqualetti (conductor)
Michael Vinten (chorus director)

Lindy Hume (director)
Jacqueline Coats (assistant director)
Dan Potra (designer)
Matthew Marshall (lighting)

St.James Theatre, Wellington
Thursday, Ist June, 2017

(other peformances: Tuesday 6th June 6:30pm,

Thursday 8th, Saturday 10th June 7:30pm)

There’s almost always a lot to like in any production of Carmen. On the face of things the opera has everything that any theatre-goer-cum-music-lover could wish for – like the Shakespearean character who says “four feasts are forward”, one can say Carmen has the four things which ensure operatic success – spectacle, drama, compelling characters and memorable tunes. Of course, these things don’t make or play themselves, and, despite this review’s opening assertion, I still shudder inwardly at the thought of the most depressing night I’ve ever spent at the opera, in 1994, at Covent Garden, of all places, witnessing a second-rate production of – you’ve guessed it! – Carmen.

Happily, Carmen was one of the New Zealand Opera’s great successes in the still-fledgling company’s 1960s years – opera company founder Donald Munro used to regale us in later times with stories of the Company’s first “Carmen”, the outrageously sexy English soprano Joyce Blackham, whose portrayal of the eponymous heroine was by all accounts extremely “up front and personal”, emphasising her own physical allure and the character’s flirtatiousness – she alone would have been a drawcard for the public, one would imagine.

Fifty-plus years onwards, and from the Wellington Opera House a few metres further down and across the road towards Courtenay Place, relocated at the St.James Theatre, the company presented its latest 21st Century version of Bizet’s out-and-out masterpiece. With a leading soprano from Georgia whose career trajectory listed all the “great” contemporary opera houses, a strong, mostly Australasian supporting cast, marvellous playing and direction from the pit, and a director and designer with interesting and strongly-wrought production ideas, this presentation simply couldn’t help but make a striking and resonant impression, very much on its own terms.

It began with what seemed like some kind of conceptual challenge, austere and confrontational, with the chorus arriving on stage before the opening Prelude began, and “eyeballing” the audience unflinchingly – the contrast between the music’s near-vertiginous energies and the disengaged demeanour of the figures was almost Brechtian in its sense of alienation. Director Lindy Hume had referred to gestures such as these in her director’s notes which the programme carried, while admitting the ideas stemmed directly to her very first production of Carmen for West Australian Opera, 25 years ago! – she explained that her thoughts concerning the opera at that time still seemed to her valid and applicable in broad terms, reflecting her pride in that particular production’s achievement.

That opening gesture set the mode for the first two acts, whose set pieces were treated in like manner, creating in places what Hume herself referred to an “almost surreal and unnatural style”, and setting them apart from the more naturalistic exchanges. As an idea in itself it was interesting and impressive, but for me it drained a lot of the dramatic life out of places in the work, as it stylised these sections almost to the point of inertia, and invariably didn’t match the musical flow of things. The opening soldiers’ chorus had nicely built-in indolence, but I thought the children’s chorus lacked real exuberance and dynamism, their “mock-execution” play with the soldiers too “stagey” and contrived, conveying insufficient spontaneity.

As for the “smoking” chorus, marking the entrance of the “cigarette girls” parading before the admiring glances of the young men, I felt the scene was choreographed to over-calculated effect, wrung dry of any of the sultry insinuation of aspect and manner suggested in the text’s utterances – “…. we will follow you, dark-haired cigarette girls, murmuring words of love in your ears” – and pared down to a kind of slow-motion synchronised walking exercise, viewed dispassionately by the women perched (I’m tempted to use the word “stranded”) on narrow steps and landings, who conveyed the visual impression that they’d seen it all before hundreds of times, and in any case vastly preferred their cigarettes!

Things took a long time to get going at Lillas Pastia’s, as well, with the opening instrumental strains of the Gypsy Song getting little or no stage response until Carmen herself took charge of things – up until then, a languour seemed to hang over the proceedings, a disinclination of the production, it seemed, to convey atmosphere and spontaneity in places that seemed to me to call for it most urgently. With the help of Carmen’s friends Frasquita and Mercédès, the stage action did eventually energise sufficiently to match with the orchestra – but it took a while! A turning-point was the arrival of Escamillo, the Toreador. His was no bloodless, over-stylised character – instead, a truly galvanising force!

Afterwards, the Quintet with the Smugglers rattled like a train over the points in an exhilarating fashion – indeed the whole Act seemed to energise itself with its sense of dramatic weight, from Escamillo’s entrance right to the end – a splendid three-way confrontation between two of Carmen’s prospective lovers and the Smugglers saw the ill-fated corporal Don Jose forced to desert the army against his better judgement, and join Carmen and her bevy of contrabandists on their adventures.

As for Acts Three and Four I found it far easier to assimilate the “stylistic” treatment of the various tableaux, such as the smugglers’ approach to their hideout at Act Three’s beginning – black landform shapes morphing slowly into moving figures, betrayed by an occasional glint of forward movement, the “word made flesh” marriage of action and music superbly realised. Only the transition between the last two Acts, with Carmen left lying on the floor in the wake of an altercation with Don Jose seemed to me to lose some dramatic momentum, leaving we in the audience uncertain of a response as the set numbers clicked over. Fortunately, the remainder of that final Act pulled out all the visceral and dramatic stops, even if poor Escamillo never got to show off his glittering Toreador’s costume!

The production, despite the early-on stage action’s stop-start trajectories, maintained plenty of on-going atmosphere by dint of its imposing settings and evocative lighting. With the costumes we found ourselves mingling with ordinary Seville citizens and its soldiery, with the exception of Escamillo, who was something of a swell in his elegant gentleman’s garb. But from the start here was the proverbial Spanish glare of day throughout the opening scene, gradually giving way throughout Lillas Pastia’s to the all-enfolding darkness, which reached its apogee at the Third Act’s beginning, and its antithesis with the explosions of colour among the crowd at the bullfight scene, before returning us to that pitiless opening light at the opera’s end.

Central to the atmospheric charge of the presentation was the brilliant, rich and evocative backdrop of sound recreated by the playing of Orchestra Wellington under its Music Director Francesco Pasqualetti – both in the numerous instrumental detailings (the horn-playing deserved special mention, as did the various characterful wind solos) and the power and colour-suffused textures of the full orchestral passages, full justice was, I thought, done to the composer’s miraculous scoring. And how supple and sonorous was the chorus’s singing throughout! – the aforementioned languour of the soldiers, the vocal ardour of the young men and the sensual insouciance of the young women factory workers in their “C’est fumee” utterances – then the infectious vigour of both the smugglers in their descriptions of the hapless customs-men, and the rip-roaring excitement of the bull-ring crowds – again, the figures up-front and confrontational, but this time abandoning their emotions to the music, to overwhelming effect!

So to the figures towards whom all of these different elements were directed – the cast of characters! – this was a strong, if interestingly constituted ensemble, the “odd one out” for me being the unfortunate soldier Don Jose, here played with an unrelieved sort of tortured awkwardness throughout, rather like a French Wozzeck, by American tenor Tom Randle. I admit to finding it difficult to understand how such an overtly dysfunctional personality as depicted by Randle would have had any appeal for the character of Carmen – but there was no doubting the disturbing undercurrents and frighteningly insistence of this Don Jose, a besotted individual completely out of his emotional depth with the new-found object of his desire. Randle’s voice, though used most intelligently, was notable more for its raw power than any honeyed tones, except in the couple of places during the “Flower Song” when he sang phrases quietly and affectingly.

Playing opposite him as Carmen was the magnetic Georgian-born soprano Nino Surguladze. Though somewhat cramped by the staging for her very first entry, she was a liquid, mercurial and volatile presence throughout, making the most of the “Habanera”and its detailings with her easeful spontaneity and ready (though never over-modulated) physical allure. Only what I thought was some unnecessary, protracted business with handcuffs at the expense of the commanding regiment officer Zuniga detracted from her sultry, disarming focus. For the rest she was magnificent, even with her back turned towards the audience when first held captive by Don Jose, after the skirmish among the factory girls – her playful seductiveness throughout the Seguidilla completely ensnared her hapless captor, whose doom was sealed from that moment.

So it was in exalted terms for the rest of the drama – Carmen’s initial infatuation and subsequent disenchantment with Don Jose, her playful and resonant encounter with the celebrated Escamillo, her darkly-modulated acceptance of her eventual fate during the fortune-cards scene, and the final, defiant and destructive encounter with Don Jose at the end. Surguladze obviously shared and fully participated in director Lindy Hume’s vision of the heroine as a woman who believes utterly in herself and her values, even in the face of death.

Though she was Carmen’s opposite in diametric ways, Don Jose’s would-be sweetheart from his own village, Micaëla, was here portrayed with admirable character and fortitude by a sweet-toned Emma Pearson, whom I remembered most warmly as an affecting Gilda, from a NZ Opera Rigoletto some years before. She similarly melted our hearts here with her touching rendition of “Et tu lui diras que sa mere” (You’ll tell him that his mother..) from her Act One duet with Don Jose (one of Bizet’s most affecting melodies), and, later in the work, her heart-in-mouth “Je dis, que rien ne m’epouvante” (I say, that nothing frightens me) when looking for Don Jose at the smugglers’ mountain hideout.

Completing the quartet of would-be-lovers was the Toreador, Escamillo, played and sung with predictable verve and compelling vocal authority by James Clayton, who, somewhat surprisingly, as I’ve said, never got to impress the punters in his Toreador get-up (usually a feature of the last few moments of the work when he bursts onto the scene of Carmen’s murder by Don Jose, too late to save her). Along with great self-assuredness, Clayton refreshingly brought out a good deal of the character’s suave, debonair and charming aspect, a change from the sometimes excessive arrogance and macho pride by singers wanting to impress and nothing much else.

The lesser parts were given with all the apparent surety and confidence of those in the leading roles, all New Zealand singers (one feels certain there could, for New Zealand Opera, one day be another New Zealand Carmen)……..Don Jose’s commanding officer, Zuniga, was played imposingly by Wade Kermot, his voice and aspect conveying great authority when in control of the barracks, and face-saving dignity when put in a compromising position at Lillas Pastia’s by the smugglers. James Harrison doubled the roles of Morales, the cool-as-cucumber soldier who first notices the arrival of Micaëla at the barracks, looking for Don Jose; and of the smuggler Le Dancaire, the latter portrayal set alongside that of James Benjamin Rodgers as Le Remendado, the two men a force to be reckoned with as gun-toting contrabandists. They were more-than-likely the partners in the story of the two women, Frasquita (played by Amelia Berry) and Mercédès (played by Kristin Darragh), the pair becoming the smugglers’ secret weapon in the latters’ dealings with the customs officers.

The two women did a splendid job in various contexts, supporting Carmen in the Act Two Gypsy Dance, and the smugglers in the Quintet Nous avons en tete une affaire (We have a scheme in mind), but most tellingly in the famous “Card Scene” Trio, Melons! Coupons! during which Carmen foretells her own death. Amelia Berry’s Frasquita was brighter-toned than Kristen Darragh’s darker, more powerful Mercédès, the two intertwining their voices to perfection in the lively interplay that framed Carmen’s grimmer soliloquy.

With all of its idiosyncrasies and compulsions, the production certainly created a distinctive and memorable compendium of impressions, which I thought gathered force and consistency as it progressed. Even if one takes issue with certain aspects, what can’t be denied is the conviction with which the individual roles were brought to life, and with which the drama as a whole was presented. For my money there was a very great deal to like and to admire, and, by the end of the show, to find convincing and satisfying.

NZSM Piano Students show their mettle at St.Andrew’s, Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand  School of Music, Victoria University presents:
Piano Students 2017

Nick Kovacek (Brahms: Rhapsody in B Minor Op.79 No.1)
Jungyeon Lee (Mozart: Sonata in F Major K.332)
William Swan (Debussy: Preludes Bk II – No.12 Feux d’artifice)
Matthew Oliver (Chopin: Etudes Op.10 – No 9 in F Minor)
Mitchell Henderson (Medtner: Sonata Reminiscenza Op.38 No.1)

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

Wednesday, 31st May 2017

 

A pity that the printed programme gave no information about any of the piano students, which would have “fleshed out” each of them a bit more, a smidgeon of biographical information and a comment regarding repertoire preferences in each case, for instance – nothing more than a couple of sentences akin to what each might write on his or her CV. While I thought the Acting Director of the School of Music, Dr. Dougal McKinnon’s written summary of the Music School’s activities interesting, if understandably promotional, I would have welcomed some additional focus on these particular students and their presentations, who and which, after all, were who and what we were actually there for.

I’m presuming these people were graduate students, judging from the interpretative depth I felt each brought to his or her performance, allied to the level of technical skill displayed in each case. What truly impressed me was that each of the five pianists brought with them a strongly-defined sense of how they thought and felt their pieces should go, so that there was no vapid note-spinning or empty display for its own sake, but concentrated and involved musical impulses behind each note, phrase or sequence. Even when fingers in a couple of instances ran ahead of the music and momentarily lost their poise and articulatedness, there was evidence of feeling at the mishap’s root and was quickly picked up and the notes propelled forwards once again.

I don’t wish to imply that each performance we heard had a sameness of either interpretative manner or technical finish – the pieces were too broad in their range of requirements for such an assertion to be made, for one. and the musical personalities of each pianist too individual, for another. I’m merely reporting that each player gave pleasure on his or her own terms with how his or her chosen piece was articulated. First to perform was Nick Kovacek, who chose to play the slightly lesser-known of Brahms’ two Op.79 Rhapsodies, No.1 in B Minor. The playing caught the music’s latter-day “sturm und drang” feeling right from the opening, and nicely integrated the mood-change of the subsequent lyrical musings into the overall flow, before plunging back into the fray with great urgency. Occasionally, the four-note “motif” sounded splashy, with the player attempting too much velocity, though the effect still caught the excitement of sparks flying as the hammer hit the rock. The central lyrical section was voiced beautifully and tenderly, and the pianist made a good deal of the upward-rushing flourishes, especially the second of each pair. After a properly frenetic climax, the pianist pulled us by the heartstrings into the grey vortex of the coda with real feeling and a nice sense of atmosphere.

After a (possibly unscheduled) luftpause, the diminutive figure of Jungyeon Lee appeared, ready at last to play, without the music, Mozart’s F Major Sonata K.332. Whatever doubts the reluctance of her appearance might have engendered among us in regard to the music-making proved completely unfounded. From the very first note I was drawn in by her characterisations of each episode of the music, everything lyrically voiced and beautifully weighted, the opening strikingly contrasted with the energy and anxiety of the following sequence in a well-rounded, never over-emphatic manner. I would have liked to have heard the repeat in which to enjoy it all again, especially as Mozart’s development section in this movement is so compact, to the point of terseness. I liked her dynamic control of the contrasts, again making them tell without undue force, and her nicely po-faced lead-back to the opening, with, apart from a little choppiness with the sforzandi chords, her music-making obeying the composer’s dictum that it should all ‘flow like oil”.

In the slow movement she brought out the music’s operatic lines with real character, such as her lovely, yielding treatment of the melody. She will, in time, find even more varied emotion in the descending right-hand thirds which followed, and increasingly let the figurations just before the reprise of the opening relax and “play themselves” – the music has more tenderness than she was wanting to show, in those places – but everything else had a naturalness of expression which I found fresh and engaging.

The finale was begun with a fine opening flourish, exhibiting the pianist’s sensitive dynamic control, with each phrase given something special. Occasionally the rapid figurations got the better of her fingers – I felt this movement hadn’t “settled” in performance to the extent the first two had, but as a “work in progress” the playing showed great promise, with my interest held over every bar. Many young pianists find Mozart a puzzle, and skate over his music’s surfaces with brilliance and very little else, so it was good to encounter one who articulated the music with such feeling.

Though Debussy was reputed to have admired Mozart’s music, it still seemed like some kind of quantum leap for a listener to make the transition from the above to the world of the French composer’s music, particularly that of Feux d’artifice (Fireworks), the last of the second set of Preludes, here played with considerable brilliance and evocation by William Swan. Indebted to Liszt, whose playing (particularly his pedalling) Debussy thought a great deal of, the music’s opening encompassed mystery, and growing anticipation, before looming excitingly into brilliance and dazzling momentum. William Swan seemed to have both technique and sensibility aplenty in bringing out these qualities, his traversal of the piece evoking in places something of the sensation of riding a particularly lively rodeo horse, though the piece’s quieter and deeper resonances were also well-served by the playing. We heard some beguiling sotto-voce harmonies murmuring their mysteries, but then were galvanised by sudden irruptions of energy and bright iridescence, with a dying drift of drollery at the piece’s end, the echo of a melody amid the burnt-out ambiences of past glories. I thought it an assured and masterful performance.

If Chopin’s Etude No.9 in F minor Op.10 made a less overtly spectacular effect, the music’s strong, purposeful flow at the outset soon established a world whose darkness was largely unrelieved by any extraneous effects. Pianist Matthew Oliver generated plenty of focused energy in maintaining something of the piece’s grim, obsessive character, tempering the gloom with piquant calls which he nicely differentiated, as if voices were calling to a passing traveller from various places high and low, near and distant, and in doing so creating a sense of spaciousness and isolation. The player brought out the wistful delicacy of the ending, a brief chorus of distantly tinkling voices left behind in the darkness. I thought the young man did well to establish the piece’s character, considering its brevity and elusiveness.

The concert’s final work was the most substantial length-wise of the students’ offerings, and probably the least generally-known, though I think pianist Mitchell Henderson was surely overemphasising the composer’s relative obscurity in stating that nobody in the audience would have heard of him! Nikolai Medtner, like his friend and slightly older colleague, Sergei Rachmaninov, was something of a throwback as a composer, one who determinedly clung to traditional modes of composing and professed an anathema to “modern schools”, in his writings repudiating the beginnings and early developments of twentieth-century music.

Born in Moscow, Medtner didn’t leave Russia until during the 1920s, eventually moving to Britain in the 1930s. Unlike Rachmaninov, who as a pianist developed a varied recital repertoire, Medtner didn’t help his own career as a performer by refusing to perform the music of other composers – he found support for his music only in England, but was famously supported by the Maharajah of Mysore, who was a music enthusiast and a gifted amateur pianist, and who, fortuitously for the composer, had developed a great liking for his music. Thanks to the Maharajah’s sponsorship, recordings of Medtner’s works were made, with the composer at the keyboard (concertos, chamber music and piano sonatas, as well as a collection of his songs recorded with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf!), which resulted in a grateful composer dedicating his Third Piano Concerto to the Maharajah himself.

The work we heard was the single-movement Sonata Reminiscenza Op.38 No.1, part of a larger “suite” of pieces which made up Op. 38, also including 3 dances, 3 canzonas, and a “coda alla Reminiscenza.” – the latter uses the work’s opening theme, hence the title. The piece was written during the first years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and published in 1922. It’s “strolling” opening had a kind of wistful, “nostalgic journey” feeling, taking the listener to a more purposeful sequence of thematic exposition and development, perhaps less Russian and more cosmopolitean in flavour than Medtner’s friend Rachmaninov’s music. Mitchell Henderson delivered this opening sequence with an admirable sense of ebb and flow, characterising with focused intent the different moods evoked by the opening theme and its occasional motivic reappearance, in between highly chromatic sections of, by turns, restrained lyricism and agitated feeling. His playing took us right into the heart of the music’s varied textures, stressing the music’s essential independence of spirit in its wonderful “structured discursiveness”, while never shirking even the most dissonant of the composer’s’s harmonies – in all, here was a wonderful and absorbing quarter-hour’s music-making!

Something of a feast of both repertoire and piano-playing, then, from Mozart to Medtner – spadefuls of gratitude, therefore, to the musicians and their teachers and to the NZSM for enabling such a presentation for our pleasure!

Baroque Voices pay rich homage to NZ “Masters”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Baroque Voices presents:
Alleluia: a newë work! – “Memories of our Masters”

Music inspired by medieval/ancient songs or texts
by Anon, Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay –
Music by Jack Body, Ross Harris, and David Farquhar,
and some of their past students – Helen Bowater, Alison Isadora,
John Psathas, Pepe Becker, Mark Smythe, Michael Norris, and Ewan Clark

Baroque Voices: Pepe Becker (director), Jane McKinlay, Anna Sedcole, Katherine Hodge, Phillip Collins, Kenneth Trass, Jeffrey Chang, Timothy Hurd

Adam Concert Room, NZSM, Kelburn

Sunday, 28th May 2017

This concert was the eighth in the “Alleluia: a newë work” series by Baroque Voices, the idea being, in director Pepe Becker’s own words, to “present works from the early music era alongside modern compositions”, an undertaking which the group first instigated as long ago as 1995. Though the presentations have been consistent in their overall approach, the ensemble has managed to maintain an ever-fascinating and invariably rewarding range of repertoire for the delight of audiences over the duration, this latest undertaking being no exception.

In Pepe Becker’s programme note, she gave a brief resume of the group’s characteristic presentation aims and explorations, by way of reminding us of music’s capacities for both connectiveness and renewal in remarking on audience responses to what she calls “ageless connection” of old and new music in Baroque Voices’ past concerts.

Simply looking over the list of instrumental resources used at various times by a vocal group suggested to me the omniverous inclinations of its performing philosophy! The list’s diversity (hurdy-gurdy, didgeridoo, taonga puoro, electric guitar!) reminded me of similarly far-flung impulses expressed recently in her “Lilburn Lecture” by New Zealand composer Jenny McLeod, talking with her audience about what constituted her “creative heritage”. For her, it was practically a case of “anything goes!”, a kind of “all experience is valid” way of working, a statement of unique truth. If not from exactly the same cloth, the work of Baroque Voices demonstrates a similarly exploratory set of inclinations, a “this is who we are” way of performing and communicating.

Here in tonight’s concert were examples of most of the above performance principles – settings by contemporary and slightly older composers inspired by and set alongside “ancient” works, the latter from sources as diverse as Medieval Europe and 8th Century Japan, as well as creative responses to “modern” works (twentieth century poetry). While most of the works were “a capella” , two were piano-accompanied, and one was flavoured by strains from medieval instruments.

Where the concert’s “official record” above requires further elaboration is in the human inter-connectiveness of it all, a quality which Pepe Becker took some pains to set out in her written notes. It suggests a remarkable collegial quality among local (New Zealand) composers, one I’ve heard remarked upon in the past by people visiting this country, a willingness to interact, with all the teaching and learning that the process implies.

Of course there are and have been notable exceptions, here and there – but the rule is reflected in the willingness and readiness of the concert’s younger composers to pay tribute through their music to their teachers and colleagues, who were mentors and friends. One of the “teachers”, Ross Harris, was quoted as saying that “In the 80s with Jack (Body) and David (Farquhar) teaching…….it was a very good time to be a composition student”. Elsewhere, other tributes were paid to “the inimitable Jack”, as well as to Ross Harris himself.

There were too many “moments per minute” throughout the evening’s music-making for a reviewer to try and do them all full justice – enough for my descriptions to try and convey something of the music’s expressive range in tandem with the performers’ manifest skills and focused intensities. The concert’s first half seemed to me to have a slightly “older” feel, due, perhaps to a predominance of works from the “teachers” and “mentors”, as well as music from two of the earliest “named” composers featured on the programme, de Machaut and Dufay. After that, by and large, it was the pupils’ turn to pay their deeply-felt homages to the teachers.What better way to begin the evening than with a spirited and deeply-rooted rendition of the 15th Century carol Alleluia: a newë work! , a performance which combined beauty and earthiness in its purity of sound and heartfelt vocal energies.

Those same qualities informed the infectious Nowell: sing we, also from the 15th Century, with the vocal concertino/ripieno contrasts between smaller and larger groups characterfully differentiated in both dynamic and tonal variation. The group chose to bracket with this Jack Body’s Nowell in the Lithuanian Manner (1995), featuring four singers in pairs placed diagonally across the platform, singing “phrase-and-answer” in intervals of a second, the voices “leapfrogging” one another (to use the composer’s expression) most effectively.

Guillaume de Machaut’s Kyrie from La Messe de Nostre Dame was sung most sonorously and beautifully by the full ensemble, the lines concerning themselves for most of their contourings with the opening syllables of the words KY-rie and CHRI-ste, resolving each word’s remainder only towards the ends of the sequences – an extraordinary “suspended” effect, generating some tension as one waited for each contouring’s resolution, thus heightening the pleadings for “Mercy”.

This was followed by Pepe Becker’s own composition, Mass of the False Relation,  which I’d heard before, though not in such a context – the opening “Kyrie” featured two voices set at an interval of a second , before the textures were opened, to pleading and beseeching effect. The sequence had something of a “lyke-wake dirge” atmosphere, unsettling and unpeaceful, with high soprano lines effectively putting one in mind of a cry for mercy from an abyss! A calmer, more circumspect “Christe” gathered increasing emotional momentum, before reverting to a differently constituted “Kyrie” to finish, the singers clustering their lines together with great aplomb and considerable emotional focus – brief, but effective!

Relief of sorts was afforded by the beautiful hymn Ave Maris Stella, sung in its original unision throughout verses 1 and 3, but adopting Guillaume Dufay’s setting for the second verse in which the women’s voices break into three parts and beautifully and gracefully explore the firmament. Composer Ross Harris’s response to the original chant followed, originally a 2009 commission by Baroque Voices, here making a welcome and sonorous reappearance.

A striking opening featured a tenor solo soaring above a pedal-point, joined by other individual lines awakening their own impulses to soar, float and beautifully elaborate on the original. Thanks to the intensity and focus of the performance’s individual voice-strands, I felt a real sense of those lines filling their own spaces, but also wrapping their resonances around a kind of central impulse of thought and intention as the work unfolded.

The ensemble at Virgo singularis (Virgin all excelling), generated a tremendous upsurging of intensity, to dramatic, scalp-prickling effect, as did the salutations to the Trinity of the last verse, particularly those invocations to Spiritui Sancto (the Holy Spirit), a display of visceral intensity which contrasted tellingly with the hushed resignation and peace of all things at the final reiteration of the words Ave Maris Stella.

Further back in “teacherdom” than either Jack Body or Ross Harris was David Farquhar, whose 1990 setting of a characteristically quirky set of verses no one and anyone by American poet ee cummings was commissioned and first peformed by Jones and Co., the Australian vocal ensemble. Farquhar described cummings punctuation-less (!) poetry as “slow-moving and lyrical” and “ideal for singing”, and his own quirkily responsive set of creative impulses proved a fitting foil for the poet’s idiosyncrasies of expression.

The “once upon a time” introduction floated the words “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, with a dancing wordless rhythm augmenting the poet’s metre at “he sang his didn’t he danced his did”. Then there were gorgeous harmonies at “she laughed his joy she cried his grief”, and lovely differentiations of rhythm with the different groupings of “sequence” words, such as “sleep wake hope and then”, which danced; and “stars rain sun moon” which was spaced-out, the singers creating limpid pools of light floating over deeper-hued pedal points.

The somewhat matter-of-fact “one day anyone died I guess” began as something angular and dry, which slowly amplified into something more heroic and deeply felt, Baroque Voices splendidly resonating the lines “no one and anyone earth by april” with great stepwise progressions of singing. I loved the crepuscular feeling evoked towards the end, with the ensemble gorgeously resonating evening bells at “women and men (both dong and ding)”, etching detail along the lines to beguiling effect – definitely a work I would like to hear performed again, sometime!

Very different to the featherlight play of ee cummings word-music was Pepe Becker’s heartfelt, almost Tristanesque text for her 2010 work Remembering Now – “a reflection upon love and loss – personal and universal”. Two singers performed the work alongside a piano with its sustaining pedal activated, the instrument thus providing a sympathetic resonance activated by the sung tones, especially when the dynamic levels began to rise. The vocal lines of the singers had, to my ears, a pronounced medieval intertwining in places, with elsewhere, some great vocal leaps to characterise the extremes of emotion – “Eternal depth, exquisite pain, secret union, keep me safe”, and some tightly-woven intervals reflecting in certain places the pain of loss and the jarring tensions of uncertainty.

Known more of late as a film composer, Ewan Clark had previously written works in a wide range of genres, among which was this ballad-like setting of James K.Baxter’s poem Never no more, dating from 2007. With voices accompanied by two pianos, the music and words created a flow of detailed and varied remembrance, a plainer-spoken New Zealander’s version of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” with its aching lament for lost youth, the music here responsive to incident and ever-ready to wrap its evocations of “golden lads and lasses” in swathes of deep mourning and oblivion. Particularly desolate was the final “never no more never no more”, playing out to something hollow and empty.

Part Two of the concert began with rather more sardonic, grim-humoured tones, an energetic dance of death Ad mortem festinamus, a 14th Century composition linked to the time of the Black Death, and expressing fatalistic sentiments very much in accord with what must have been an everyday experience for many people. The dotted dance-rhythms had a kind of horrid glee, allied to an almost festive quality enhanced by the ambient instrumentations, a dulcian, drum and “shruti box”, the latter a kind of harmonium which supplied a drone, altogether creating a wry ritualistic statement.

Ritual of a different kind coloured the work of Michael Norris, a setting of a poem by one Pierre Reverdy, described by the composer as ‘a lesser-known French proto-surrealist’, whose creative work involved a “sublime simplicity of reality”, and whose words suggest a kind of transcendence of substance towards abstraction – for Norris, a process suggesting “an inevitable movement from presence to absence”, very much an underlying theme of this concert (for which this work was written).

To the names that have left is a line from the poem “The traits of the sky” which Norris used as his piece’s title, a reference to whom the composer described as “some important men in my life who left us in the last few years”. It was obviously a piece which suggested feelings of loss in its juxtapositioning of long-held tones and sudden, sharply-etched irruptions of either violent noise or silence – characterisations of the unexpected, either explosive or insinuating. We heard sliding (glissando) notes, voices overlapping, unison and harmonies, some magnificently rich modulations, then textures cut to pieces by confrontational thrusts. There were yelps, breathings, elongated word pronunciations, almost didgerie-doo-like textures. Eventually the voices seemed to gather girth and vocalise as with long slow breaths, until we became aware of the “dying fall” of the lines, a sense of something “running down” or drifting away. Women’s voices imitated high, sustained bird-calls (farewells?) after which the singers put their hands over their mouths to mute their tones at the end.

An anonymous 15th Century English Carol Lully, lullay: I saw – was next, featuring two groups of two voices placed opposite one another, immediately sounded its time, helped by some lovely singing, mostly interactive of phrasing, greating a gorgeous effect. The same text was then re-enacted in a work by John Psathas, entitled Baw my barne, an old favourite of Baroque Voices, having been commissioned and premiered by the group in its first “a newë work!” concert in November of 1995. Beginning with richly-wrought note-clusters over which the soprano soloist’s voice hovered, the clustered lines were reiterated one-by-one, depicting in sound a kind of burgeoning of motherly bliss with a newborn allied to a sense of “a blissful burd, a blossom bright” as creation wondered at the Saviour’s coming.

Helen Bowater’s setting of a Japanese poem from antiquity (found in an 8th-9th Century AD collection of Japanese poetry “Man’yoshu”) hoshi no hayashi (in the forest of stars) gave us some gorgeous word-painting, with some particularly evocative, almost other-worldly singing from Pepe Becker – as with the poetry, the impression of the music was a kind of “stream of consciousness” which belied the precision of the craftsmanship to remarkable effect. Something of the same spontaneous and on-going outpouring of tones characterised Jack Body’s fifth Lullaby from the set of Five Lullabies, a work which was first performed in full by the Tudor Consort. Having watched the performance by Baroque Voices on You Tube given at Jack Body’s memorial service, I thought this evening’s performance was less contained and reverential, more flowing and intense, with a more clearly-delineated shape of rise and fall – again, very beautiful, with the dreaming especially vivid.

I liked Eve de Castro-Robinson’s comment, quoted, and indeed affirmed, by Alison Isadora, the composer of the programme’s penultimate work Blessing (in memoriam Jack Body), regarding how memorial pieces often write themselves. Isadora described her work on this occasion as “the output of a grieving process”, by way of expressing her tribute to Jack in three languages, plus the translations, Maori, Latin and English. After expressing Maori, Latin and English texts in turn, the piece combined elements of all three blessings, in places bringing out contrasts whose different characters produced extraordinary sounds – insistent lower voices setting the Latin plainsong against the bell-like women’s voices with their Taize chant, and colouring the textures differently as the music moved forwards, the differently-constituted textures surging and breaking like ocean waves, before the sopranos guided the intensities towards gentler cadences and brought the music to a close.

A kind of “return to our lives” was in order at the point of conclusion, here supplied by Mark Smythe’s 2007 Alleluia, one which Pepe Becker described as a “signature tune” for Baroque Voices, while very much a stratospheric soprano display piece, with both singers, Pepe and Jane McKinlay in sure touch, even at the end of a long and demanding concert, resounding their “Alleluias” as steadily and ambiently as ever. Very great credit to the whole ensemble, both for the works which have been encouraged into “being”, and for the group’s inspired performances of them.

“Firebird” from Orchestra Wellington an incendiary experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.1 in C Major Op.21
JOHN ELMSLY – Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
STRAVINSKY – The Firebird – (Ballet Suite 1911 – arranged by Jonathan McPhee)

Jun Hong Loh (violin)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 14th May, 2017

This was, in this best of all possible worlds, the best possible start to Orchestra Wellington’s “The Impresario” season, a beautifully-devised concert whose centrepiece was Igor Stravinsky’s 1910 Ballet “The Firebird”. This piece, commissioned by the Russian-born artistic entrepreneur Sergei Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in Paris, began a collaboration between composer and impresario which was to produce three of the most famous ballets of the 20th century, the other two being “Petrushka” and “Le Sacre du Printemps” – both, incidentally, to be performed by Orchestra Wellington as well, during the year.

This concert had other unities, however, which brought the evening’s other pieces into play, the first being the direct influence of the master-pupil relationship on the works we heard. In the case of “Firebird” the pupil was Stravinsky and the master was his teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Renowned as one of the great orchestrators, the latter’s influence upon Stravinsky’s score was everywhere apparent, with the “pupil” obviously keen to exhibit his inventive prowess in that aspect of creation. In later years Stravinsky was to deride his own youthful largesse, calling his orchestrations “wasteful”, and, in the various “suites” for concert purposes that he compiled, significantly “paring down” the scoring.

Joining this work on the programme were two others, one by Beethoven and the other by New Zealand composer John Elmsly. Beethoven was represented by his First Symphony, a work which owed a great deal to the influence of HIS teacher, Joseph Haydn, in terms of the music’s irrepressible energy and adventuresome spirit. The words of Count Waldstein – that Beethoven would “receive the spirit of Mozart from Haydn’s hands” were certainly made flesh in this symphony, even if the implication of the Count’s remark seemed to play down Haydn’s influence upon the young composer compared with Mozart’s. Certainly the most startling of the music’s features – its “wrong key” opening on wind instruments, its dynamic, scherzo-like Minuet and its teasingly playful finale – are indubitably Haydnesque touches.

As for John Elmsly’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, here was music by a seasoned composer who presently enjoys a reputation second to none in this country as a teacher of composition at the School of Music, at Auckland University. The process of the master-pupil relationship was thus presented here in reverse, with Elmsly’s music a focal point for what his students past and present could aspire towards in their work and creative thinking.

Another commonality shared by two of the three pieces was one of “breaking ground” – neither Beethoven nor Stravinsky had produced anything up to that time as significant or self-proclaiming as each of their works – Beethoven, his first symphony, and Stravinsky, his first full-scale ballet. Each was announcing to his respective world that he had truly “arrived” as a creative artist – and in each case the world sat up and took notice. Critical reaction to Beethoven’s work was invariably positive, with the words “masterpiece” and “originality” figuring prominently, though one critic complained of hearing “too much wind”, a remark the composer obviously reacted to strongly, as he increased the incidence of writing for winds in his Second Symphony!

Stravinsky’s work, according to dancer Tamara Karsavina, who danced the title role, met with what she called a “crescendo” of success, with both public acclaim and critical reaction at one – for one critic, the “shimmering web of the orchestra” reflected the “fantastic” stage-setting and the brilliant dancing. “Mark him well,” Diaghilev was reputed to have told his leading dancer – “he is a man on the eve of celebrity”. Another critic hailed Stravinsky as “the legitimate heir to the “Mighty Handful” – that group of Russian nationalist composers which included the composer’s former teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov.

What impressed most regarding the performance of the Beethoven Symphony we heard was its sheer focus, conductor Marc Taddei inspiring his players to produce direct, pin-pointed energies that brought out the essential “character” of each of the pieces movements. Everything was very up-front with clearly-terraced dynamics, the vigorous movements especially fast and challenging, and played with terrific point.

The timpani and brass were superb, making their presence felt throughout, and bringing their importance into prominence, rather than seeming merely like “extra reinforcements” as is sometimes the case. For some sequences the tempi were faster than I would have wanted – some passages, for me, took on a certain relentless aspect – but conductor and orchestra nevertheless made them work brilliantly. And the slow movement had a dance-like quality, but a singing kind of dancing! – the strings played their fugato-like passages as beautifully and crisply as one would want. The timpani came into its own during the scherzo-like Minuet, and then the Finale made us firstly hold our breath at the opening, with the “teasing” aspect of the strings’ scale passages, and then smile at the chattering, garrulous strings-and-winds exchanges elsewhere.

John Elmsly’s new Violin Concerto (2016-17) was given a spacious, free-spirited reading by the gifted Jun Hong Low, winner of the 2016 Gisborne International Music Competition. Certain parts of this work I loved unreservedly, practically the whole of the first movement, whose spacious, out-of-doors feeling was mirrored by the soloist, with his leaping and arching phrases, the music in places silky and sensuous (a quality that really appealed to me) and then leavened in other places by some playful vigour. But the music’s “lightness and delicacy” (to quote the programme note) with ambiences given breadth and depth by bell-chime sounds made the listening experience for me at once airborne and profound. The chimes sounded as if they could have been a kind of call to observance, something ritualistic and exotic and resonant.

The other two movements I enjoyed, but not as wholeheartedly – I didn’t feel a comparable oneness regarding the contributions of either the drum kit in the second movement or the bongo drums in the third, despite Brent Stewart’s advocacy in both cases. I’m sorry to say that I just didn’t “get it” – I couldn’t “connect” the percussion sounds with what the rest of the orchestra was doing. I continued to enjoy the soloist’s playing, and thought the orchestral strings and winds created some beautifully limpid textures in places during the “Meditation” movement – but I found the percussion “effects” something of a distraction. Obviously I needed to hear the work again , and “work harder” at aligning the different sound-spaces of each instrumental group, specifically that of the percussion. Having heard various raga over the years I thought I might respond more positively to the bongo drum rhythms as a variant of a tabla taal (rhythmic pattern) in the piece’s finale – but again I thought the sounds too disparate, even, to my ears, alienating – on the other hand the string- and wind-writing I greatly enjoyed, and was thrilled by the soloist’s response to the music’s intensities, especially during a somewhat trenchant cadenza, from which Jun Hong Loh emerged the victor!

The soloist obliged his audience with an encore which sounded familiar but ultimately eluded my recognition. I found out later that the piece was written by a friend of the violinist, a composer called Charles Yang, whose intention was to quote and rework a number of passages from various well-known violin concertos into a single piece for a solo violin – hence my “fled is that music – do I wake or sleep?” reaction to the material! The playing was virtuosic-plus-plus from Jun Hong Loh – spectacular double-stopping passages, fingerwork at breakneck speed, and counterpointed melodies in different registers between arpeggios. It was obviously a kind of “calling-card” for a virtuoso violinist, and as such enabled the performer to mightily impress!

After the interval came the Stravinsky work, here performed in a “reduced” version by the conductor/composer Jonathan McPhee. There’s obviously a demand world-wide for such versions, as I was able to read various on-line testimonials of praise for McPhee’s work made by artistic directors in various far-flung places. Usually the situation was that, without using McPhee’s “reductions”, these groups wouldn’t have been able to afford to hire extra players to be able to perform works like “Firebird” and “Le Sacre du Printemps” both of which are scored for larger-than-usual orchestras.

I was hard-pressed to notice much difference between the original and McPhee’s edition as performed here, even after my having heard several previous performances of the former “live” as well as a number of recordings. I hadn’t picked up from the programme anything concerning the “edition”, the only thing surprising me being the appearance of the spectacular brass glissandi during the “Infernal Dance of Kastchei’s Subjects”, which wasn’t in the original ballet score but which Stravinsky himself had added for one of the “suites” – but it could well be in the McPhee edition anyway. Obviously, when a performance is as intensely-focused and fully-committed as was this one, whatever reductions of numbers there are to orchestral personnel makes little or no difference to the outcome!

Thanks to the conductor’s and orchestra’s attention to detail and their expert pacing of the story’s ebb-and-flow, both the colourful and characterful theatricality of the ballet’s series of “tableaux” and the grip of the drama’s darker undercurrents kept our attentions riveted throughout. We were able to relish all the more the composer’s contrasting of the more folksong-like diatonic themes and cadences for the story’s human characters (Prince Ivan, and the thirteen captive Princesses) with the more chromatic and spectacularly iridescent music characterising the “supernatural” characters (the Firebird herself, and the ogre, Kastchei, and all of his followers.

It was certainly among the most spectacularly-realised performances by this orchestra that I’ve heard over the years, akin to that unforgettable concert a number of years back when Marc Taddei and his players almost lifted the roof off the Town Hall with their performance of Leos Janacek’s Sinfonietta. Whilst not absolutely note-perfect in places, the glitches were like “spots on the sun”, and there were many more moments to figuratively die for, such as the horn solo beginning the final “General Rejoicing” concluding sequence, magically realised by a guest player, Shadley van Wyk, substituting for an indisposed Ed Allen.

This, and so much else seemed to unfold in Marc Taddei’s hands at what seemed to us like a completely natural pace, the players confidently at one with the sheer wealth of orchestral detail and bringing off its stunning realisation with tremendous elan. Roll on the remainder of Orchestra Wellington’s Diaghilev Season! – at present it promises to be a truly momentous and memorable undertaking!

Aotearoa Plus from the NZSO set alight by Gareth Farr premiere

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
AOTEAROA PLUS

PIERRE BOULEZ – Mémoriale (….explosante-fixe…Originel )
GARETH FARR – Cello Concerto “Chemin des Dames” (world premiere)
JOHN ADAMS – Naive and Sentimental Music
Sébastien Hurtaud (‘cello)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 5th May, 2017

A concert with the name “Aotearoa Plus” begs the question of how an orchestra might best support and present the music of native composers – the title is one which, in my artless way, I thought might have fairly been expected to accompany rather more homegrown examples of composition than were allowed for here.

Thank goodness, then, in my view, for Gareth Farr’s work, and its performance, which delivered a kind of visceral wallop and emotional candour that dominated the evening’s listening, putting even the quasi-Brucknerian symphonic-in-situ explorations of John Adams which took up the second half, in the shade. Before all of this, opening the concert was an ambient, beautifully-breathed work of Pierre Boulez’s, which might have surprised many people with its accessibility, considering the composer’s reputation as a once “stormy petrel” of the contemporary music world.

Boulez was a creative musician whose career followed a kind of predictable pattern – a firebrand in his youth, he presented an uncompromising anti-establishment series of stances marked by outrageous aphorisms seized upon by the media, such as “All opera houses should be blown up”, and “Anyone who has not felt the necessity of the dodecaphonic (12-tone)system is OF NO USE!”. Some of his contemporaries weren’t spared, either, when he remarked on a contemporary composition style that it “amounted to frenetic arithmetical masturbation”. Music for him had a “tainted past”, necessitating the creation of a “new world” of musical expression. As he got older Boulez seemed to mellow, and acknowledge that works like his own Le marteau sans maître DID owe a great deal to music of the past that he had previously railed against. He also forged a new career as a conductor, becoming known for his interpretations of Wagner (he actually directed Bayreuth’s own Centenary production of The Ring in 1976, to the musical world’s astonishment), Mahler and Bruckner, acknowledging the music of the last two composers as having a “real influence” on his own work.

There may have even been some kind of convoluted disappointment in the minds of some people expecting to be repelled by anything written by Boulez, invariably something which would be angular, discordant and downright unpleasant to listen to. We were, instead drawn into a world of beauty and whimsicality, rather like birdsong with many different variants (Bridget Douglas demonstrating her complete command of the flute’s textures and timbres, here). These variants were a series of exhalations, in which the solo instrument, the strings and two horns here and there breathed the most delicate and finely-wrought impulses, in between advancing engaging short-term rhythmic trajectories.

Basically the piece came about through the composer’s habit of re-working scores, and in the process generating what the programme note liked to call “a constellation of related satellite pieces”. In 1972, Boulez produced a work honouring the memory of Igor Stravinsky who had died the previous year, a work called explosante-fixe…Originel (“Exploding-fixed…original”). Written for solo flute, chamber ensemble and live electronics, the E-flat pitch with its German notation Es signified Stravinsky. In 1975 parts of the music resurfaced as a tribute to composer Bruno Maderna, entitled Rituel – and ten years later another reworking of the piece was published as a tribute to the flutist Laurence Beauregardflute, with whom Boulez had worked. The composer seemed to lose faith with the electronic-tape component of the piece due to the unreliability of the technology, and went on to produce an “acoustic” version of the music, one in which the flute dominated, and the accompanying sounds either mirrored or ambiently complemented what the flute did.

One of these “complementations” I really liked came from the horns, playing what I like to think sound like “electric lines,” an idea which came from my fascination with those marvellously evocative railway lines and accompanying lights, besides and along the main road just north of Huntly and between Meremere and Mercer. These lines and lights always seemed to me to “hum” their held notes with vibrant accord as if impulses were coursing up and down those tracks, watched over by those solicitous single-note sentinels. By way of variation, there were occasional flashes of increased prominence, but really little more than micro-versions of triple-time tip-toeing. And, just when things seemed to be getting more involved, the composer called a halt to the piece’s quiet irruptions, on a long, somewhat resigned note.

As the performing area needed to be re-organised for the increased numbers of players required by the next item on the programme, conductor Hamish McKeich took the opportunity given by the hiatus to bring its composer, Gareth Farr, onto the stage and talk with him about the oncoming performance (a world premiere, incidentally). This was a ‘Cello Concerto dedicated to three of Farr’s great-uncles who were killed in the First World War in France at a place known as “Chemin des Dames”, in 1917. Farr wanted to commemorate both their deaths and the effects of the loss of so many young lives upon families such as theirs. The name of the battle-place “Chemin des Dames” (Pathway of Women) underlined for Farr the involvement of women in such conflicts, both as casualties themselves and as bereaved sweethearts and wives, mothers and sisters, with their ongoing loss and grief over the years that followed.

It was an interview with “moments per minute” rather than the other way round, profound regarding the work’s subject matter, but also entertaining with Farr’s quicksilver responses to McKeich’s focused enquiries concerning the writing of the work. Farr praised his soloist, Sebastien Hurtaud, for the latter’s collaboration, telling us in no uncertain terms that, for this reason, a concerto was far easier to write than would have been a purely orchestral work because of the vibrancy of such an exchange, and the relief for the composer afforded by this “working together”, instead of the latter having to be a “dictator” with the musicians.

McKeich raised the question of Farr’s music being regarded as “loud”, which the latter agreed with! – stating by way of explanation that, as a percussionist, he had come from “the loud end of the band”! Again, Farr emphasised that when writing a concerto, the music is about the soloist and his/her instrument – in this case the ‘cello, whose tones approximated those of a baritone! Rather than make an impression via loudness, Farr sought to make a kind of “hole” in the orchestral texture for the soloist to fit into, therefore negating the possibility of any orchestral “loudness” cross-cancelling the soloist’s tones, and therefore preserving the musical argument’s clarity – most interesting!

I would have happily listened to these two conversing for longer, but things were obviously now “set to go” regarding the performance! – so, with the word about to be made flesh, the orchestra entered, followed by the soloist and conductor, and the work was begun.

A brief subterranean percussion rumble, followed by soft strings and arpeggiated keyboard (celeste?) notes prepared the way for the solo ‘cello, singing, lament-like around a single note, like a weeping voice in the middle of a barren landscape. Various orchestral detail – a brass chord, soft, chirruping winds, and longer brass notes led up to a huge percussion crescendo, music of devastation in the wake of some terrible event.

I was struck by the way the solo ‘cello dug into the notes in much the same way as at the opening of another work lamenting the tragedy of war, the Elgar “Cello Concerto, the solo intstrument here expressing a similar kind of amalgam of anguish and anger. Another composer evoked was Shostakovich, with a solo trumpet and side-drum suggesting militaristic activities – these evocations of other works didn’t, however, sound contrived or “tacked on”, but instead set up a thoughtful resonance of reference to similar responses to human conflict.

The work expressed so many different emotions, delineated by a number of figures which seemed to recur as motifs – determination and bravery (the ‘cello soaring upwards, answered by the strings and echoed by brass and percussion), excitement and fear (the ‘cello agitatedly playing running passages punctuated by energetic pizzicati and tremolandi, and the occasional roar of full percussion), and homesickness and nostalgia (tender, ruminative explorations from the ‘cello, lyrical birdsong-like figures from the winds). Then there was what sounded like music of conflict – the ‘cello energised with running, toccata-like figures, picked up by horns and winds, and augmented with motoric driving strings, and occasionally baleful brass, pushing a three-note figure repeatedly and mercilessly, with what sounded like woodblocks and tambourine sounds adding to the driving fray.

Then there were passages where conflict and lament seemed to coexist, as if the privations of warfare and grief seemed to intermingle and become as one single tragedy – the ‘cello agitations brought to my mind parts of Bloch’s “Schemolo” anguishing and lamenting amid the tumltuous orchestral irruptions, a relentless onslaught whose struggles left the soloist momentarily exhausted, though still imbued with sufficient life-force to renew the lament via a cadenza-like passage, filled with extremes of bitterness and deep sorrow, at the end of which the orchestra returned us to the work’s beginning, to a world where the futility of what had happened was demonstrated, and the cost was laid bare for all to experience.

I’ve given more attention to the work than to its performance, but with the proviso that, in this case, the work WAS its perfomance, very much so with the soloist and the orchestral and conductor being the ones the composer specifically had in mind when writing the work. Its overwhelming impact was a tribute to all concerned.

At this point, going back in my mind over the concert, I remembered asking myself both at the time (and beforehand), why, in a presentation entitled “Aotearoa Plus” the orchestra had then programmed so much non-New Zealand work…..had I read the programme’s title incorrectly? – Was it in fact “Aotearoa Plus-PLUS”? What was more, what we were about to hear was the SECOND work programmed by the orchestra of this particular contemporary composer’s work this season! Given Resident Music Director Edo de Waart’s historically significant association with American composer John Adams, I’m certainly prepared to accept that we might hear more than usual of his music….but why should so much figure in the one programme the orchestra specifically tags as having New Zealand content, one not even directed by de Waart?

In any case, after hearing Gareth Farr’s piece given such stunning advocacy, I really felt like connecting further with something else that was home-grown, something whose sound-world had been wrought from similarly cultivated and nurtured material, if of an earlier milieu. I thought of several works which would have easily fitted that prescription, music which deserves to be know better and played far more often (in one case almost embarrassingly so!). To tackle the mooted “embarrasment” first-up, I would have plumped for programming one of the finest pieces of exploratory orchestral writing (after all, THIS was the raison d’etre of the John Adams work we heard – Naive and Sentimental Music – parts of which, in my opinion, flirted with over-inflated bombast) to come out of this country, David Farquhar’s First Symphony. The awkward part is that the NZSO, after giving the public premiere of this work (and, most ironically, subsequently recording it TWICE!) has never performed it again at a concert. I wish somebody who knows would quietly take me aside, sit me down, and explain to me just why this remarkable music hasn’t been played by our National Orchestra in public for nearly sixty years!

Still, ours is not to reason why, or lament what didn’t happen, but, instead, as reviewers, to report on what actually took place when Hamish McKeich stood in front of the NZSO and set in motion this astonishing piece of music created by John Adams – Naive and Sentimental Music? Just what did the composer mean by it all? In a programme note, Adams himself outlined his self-described “tortured” reasonings, drawing from an eighteenth-century essay by Schiller, “Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung” (“On Naive and Sentimental Poetry”), in which all creative activity was characterised as either “naive” (natural, direct, unselfconscious, brought about for its own sake), or “sentimental” (seeking to restore something that has been lost, indulging in self-analysis in order to “find” an ideal, or resorting to parody or satire as a means of demonstrating the “chasm” that had opened up between sense and sensibility in artistic creation).

Adams further cited Anton Bruckner as an inspiration, when contemplating his approach to symphonic form in writing this present work, shortly after hearing a live performance of that composer’s Fourth Symphony. Of course, Bruckner was and still is popularly regarded as something of a “naif” in the ways of the world, though it’s a label the composer seems to triumphantly ride above with his music. I can’t imagine how anybody but a genius of staggering intellectual capacity could recast his symphonic material so readily in response to critical vituperation, which in itself would have poleaxed a lesser man! However, maybe Schiller in theory (and Adams in practice!) would each ascribe a “naive” set of impulses to the composer’s unique processes, thus keeping Bruckner on the side of those creatures of pure impulse, the angels!

So, in short, we got from Adams a symphonic work of near-Brucknerian proportions in three movements, one in which the composer seemed to use as a kind of creative theoretical workshop for processing different kinds of musical ideas. I found the journey pushed my sensitivities to their limits in places, most obviously in the first, eponymously-named movement, which for me outstayed its welcome in the long run, falling back upon itself towards the music’s end and reworking veins of exhausted paydirt. Up to a point I thought the music charming and fecund in how it treated the lyrical theme, which began the work, with the utmost freedom and variety of means. The orchestra most expertly dealt with everything Adams threw at the players, apart from an untypical “did we dream you or did you dream us?” sequence of uncertain syncopation between brass and strings at one point. Conductor Hamish McKeich was like an experienced campaigner controlling the ebb and flow of the various arguments, one minute encouraging a lyrical blending of strings and wind, and the next minute riding the footplate of what soulded like a great machine coming to life and moving onto the main line out of the siding!

The second movement “Mother of the Man” featured, along with murmuring strings and haunting percussion harmonics, a guitarist contributing piquant sounds to gentle, patient unfoldings and oscillations. I imagined flecks of light falling in gentle shoals onto a landscape, the players under Hamish McKeich’s firm control “drifting” their sounds with the utmost delicacy, creating miracles of stillness. Such was the rapt atmosphere that when the strings began their series of crescendi, the sudden change in dynamic intensity was almost knife-edged, repeated rising scale motifs piling on the upward pressures to a point where the strings suddenly silenced the tumult and allow things to wind down.

Church bells rang out over a galumphing bass at the finale’s beginning, the volatilities building through great glow-ball-like swathes of sound and strings and scintillating percussion racing along together, rushing up to the feet of great off-the-beat percussive crashes, and the heavy chortlings of big-boned brass. As the instruments took up the patternings and add their particular accented notes, the patterns kept changing, giving the listener the feeling of something beginning to cohere and fragment at one and the same time – so many voices, so many syncopations. One couldn’t think a composer could go any further – and then the rockets of sound began shooting up! Pandemonium! What a guy!

Very great credit to Hamish McKeich and the NZSO players for bringing such a saga off so resplendently – not so much in terms of length but of relentlessness of musical argument, the piece taking no prisoners and giving the performers nowhere to hide! Even so, I would have liked to have heard the work in a different context – it should be that, in our orchestral programmes, we don’t have to sacrifice our music to get to hear the rest of the world’s.

NZTrio at St.Andrew’s in Wellington – and homage to Justine Cormack

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concert Series presents:
The NZTrio – Justine Cormack (violin), Ashley Brown (‘cello) and Sarah Watkin (piano)

PIAZZOLLA – Tangos
CLAIRE COWAN – Subtle Dances (2013)
PENAFORTE – An Eroica Trio (1998)
SCHUBERT – Piano Trio No.1 in B-flat D.898

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

Sunday, 30th April, 2017

Outside of the brilliant performances of the music, the most stupendous revelation for some at the NZ Trio’s recent Wellington concert would have been the announcement, made at the concert’s end by local chamber music organiser Julie Coulson, that the trio’s violinist Justine Cormack would be leaving the group mid-2017 – of course for people who “keep abreast” of things like this by reading newsletters and the like (a particular failing of mine, I admit!), this wasn’t a surprise, as the Trio’s own newsletter had already published a February press release breaking the news.

So, after fifteen years of performing together, the group will be looking for a new violinist at the end of the current tour and after visiting and playing in China – the remaining players, ‘cellist Ashley Brown and pianist Sarah Watkins are promising us “some surprise guest violinists in the chair” as they cast around for somebody to fill the position on a more permanent basis. Meanwhile Justine Cormack is looking forward to some “space” in her life for the next little while, and, while waiting for whatever “new things” might arise, will be focusing on fulfilling what she has described as a “dream”, that of returning to the South Island to live, in particular to Central Otago, somewhere “close to Wanaka”.

Obviously nothing stays the same forever; and the group is confident that the next period will be “an extremely exciting one”, not the least feature being a re-establishment and continued development of “the legacy that Justine has helped establish”.  Evidence of that legacy as a living entity was in plentiful supply throughout the afternoon’s music-making at St.Andrew’s on this occasion, with Justine Cormack herself remarking how good it felt for her and her colleagues to be back and playing in the venue after so many years’ absence – in fact the last time the Trio had performed there was in 2002, at the very time the group was first established!

One of the hallmarks of the NZTrio’s activities over the years has been its espousal of New Zealand music – and this concert was no exception, featuring a work which had been commissioned by the group in 2013, Subtle Dances by Claire Cowan, and was now being taken on this final tour. Also included in the afternoon’s line-up was music whose roots had sprang up from a different tradition to that of Western classical music, though, thanks to one composer in particular, a genre finding more and more favour in concert halls. This was the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla, and his work Tangos, featuring two vastly different examples of the form, was performed to great effect, the two dances diametrically opposed in manner, mode and mood, if not in overall effect.

Piazzolla always seems to employ plenty of variety in his music by way of depicting both the essence of the dance-movement trajectories and atmospheres, and the interaction between the dance-partners (at times extremely physical) – I thought the instrumentations dovetailed most deliciously, here sensuous and sultry, the ensuing interactions smokily suggestive. Along the way, the opening Primavera Porteria yielded for a few luscious moments to the Oblivion sequence (one perhaps needs the wit of a Beecham to properly characterise THAT sequence in words!) before the opening energies returned – thrusts and counter-thrusts built upon one another and brought the piece to almost fever-pitch by the very end.

Claire Cowan’s music has always appealed to me – perhaps it’s the “intuitive ” nature of her writing (which she speaks of in a programme note concerning this recent (2013) work, Subtle Dances) that connects so readily – what she conceives is always a “touching on all points” scenario, with impulses that always go somewhere. Described as “three short mood pieces”, the first, eponymously-named “subtle dances” began with deep pizzicati from the ‘cello and furtive impulses from the piano coming together, creating a shadowy, mysterious atmosphere of dark business which showed its hand only when sufficient momentum had established a kind of flywheel trajectory – the cellist knocked his fingerboard for a percussive effect as the vistas lightened and the road opened up, the strings pizzicato-ed, and the piano sang a song of freedom – the dance element swung along with the music, while the violin intoned an insinuating melody, before everything just stopped, allowing the echoes of those incredible rhythmic patternings some resonance-room, like the reverberation of a mighty chord.

The second dance “Be slow and lie low” was cool and dreamy, with a bluesy piano holding lovingly to its introductory notes before declaiming as if reading poetry – the strings rounded off the sentiments with some delicately-wrought harmonies and ambiently-floated sounds, into which world came “Nerve lines”, like something disturbing sleep, ostinato patterns from Sarah Watkins’ nimble fingers mirrored by the strings, both repeated notes and held lines, like nerve-pulsations, almost minimalist in accumulated effect, and occasionally exotically-flavoured, such as the two-note “sighing” motif from the ‘cello. The ebb-and-flow of string-tones here built up to fierce and fraught levels as the piano continued to chime its motifs in the bass, reaching a kind of apogee with a final, long-breathed note. At every stage of this work, I seemed to imagine and catch a kind of tingling quality, with each note, and every gesture having a resonance which continued in the memory long after the piece had run its course.

Where Claire Cowan’s work was interior, subtle and intensely psychological, Raimundo Penaforte’s work for piano trio was “out there” in full-blooded, visceral terms right from the beginning. Called “an Eroica Trio”, the work was intended by its composer to pay a kind of homage to three of his formative musical influences by way of sub-titling each of the movements with a name – “Astor”, the first, paid tribute to Piazzolla, and celebrated the iconic tango composer’s influence with big, physical gestures at the music’s start, set against sultry and romantic violin-and-‘cello sequences which followed, with numerous “cross-references” intended to bind the structures together – a nice idea, but one I thought towards the piece’s end crudely and repeatedly over-applied, as repetition seemed to follow repetition. Though the slow movement “Maurice” (inspired by Maurice Ravel’s “passacaglia” movement from his Piano Trio) began promisingly as a kind of phantom dance from a dark dream, and explored a number of evocative variations on the opening sequence, I again thought the music too lengthy and discursive for its material.

Only the finale seemed not to outstay its welcome, the lively and scampering piano figurations enlivening and setting a-tingling the textures, provoking strong, slashing chords over the scamperings, and even varying the mix with moments of delicacy! But for the most part it was the “wild side” of things which prevailed, establishing connections with “Capiba”, the nickname given to da Foncesca Barbosa, a fellow-Brazilian composer, and his music. The sequences leading up to the movement’s conclusion resembled a riot of physical movement, which got from the NZ Trio the full-blooded response it obviously needed – everybody at full stretch and convulsed with excitement and (speaking for myself!) exhaustion at the end.

Pianist Sarah Watkins introduced the Schubert work to us, quoting the familiar but entirely apposite epithet “smiling through tears” as a helpful characterisation of the composer’s work – though this B-flat Trio is perhaps more lyrical than tragic compared with its companion (No.2 in E-flat D.929). The Trio gave us a well-rounded opening, more ceremonial than big-boned, the gestures large in lyrical expression rather than physicality. The lines were all given full-voice, varying their dynamics when the contours required, everything bright-eyed and alert without being percussive – exuberance tempered by overall resolve and clearly-focused direction.

The musicians allowed the more lyrical episodes plenty of time and space, without sacrificing the kind of intensity that made one want to listen to their every delineation – some of the phrase-ends seemed to pivot for an instant on moments of cosmic stasis, making one hold one’s breath! – and this, cheek-by-jowl with music whose rhythmic trajectories can in places sound like young gods sporting in the Elysian Fields!

I thought the slow movement’s performance simply outstanding, with Ashley Brown’s ‘cello tones inflected so affectingly that one couldn’t imagine the notes better played, and Justine Cormack’s violin phrasings mirroring and further enriching the composer’s “divine utterances”. And Sarah Watkins bringing out of the “Hungarian” touches in the central section’s piano part gave the music a welcome touch of contrast, allowing a more flowing exchange between the instruments, and some exquisitely-wrought modulations – a beautifully-voiced return to the opening, for example, this time with Justine Cormack’s violin leading the way. After this, the scherzo provided even more contrast with its playful nonchalance, though the rhythms were never “square” or rum-ti-tum, but had enough crispness to their attack so that we were always kept on the move.

Schubert’s finales can be a shade garrulous in places if “let go”, but the NZTrio’s sweeping paragraphing of the different episodes carried all before it, allowing plenty of insoucient trotting of the piano figurations beneath the droll string lines, but constantly nudging this and that detail in a constantly engaging way, keeping the urgencies alive but on slow boil, along a kind of kaleidoscopic journey of different impressions – the coda, when it came, exploded almost orchestrally and caught us up in its exuberance in a most satisfying way.

No better finish to a concert and no more appropriate summing-up of fifteen years of a group’s committed and beautifully integrated music-making could, I think, have been devised.