Author: Peter Mechen

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Friday, 14th July 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

Wednesday 12th July, 2017

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
DESTINATION BEEHIVE 2017

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

Circa Two
Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 9th July 2017
(until 5th August)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.