Author: Peter Mechen

Orpheus Choir’s “Chichester Psalms” concert terrific! – but James MacMillan has the last word……..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Orpheus Choir of Wellington presents:
CHICHESTER PSALMS

JAMES MacMILLAN – Seven Last Words From The Cross
LEONARD BERNSTEIN – Chichester Psalms

MacMillan: Pasquale Orchard (soprano) / Alexandra Woodhouse Appleby (soprano/alto)
Karishma Thanawala (alto) / Giancarlo Lisi, Peter Liley (tenors)
Stephen Clothier, Minto Fung (basses)

Bernstein: Liam Squire (treble) / Pasquale Orchard (soprano)
Alexandra Woodhouse Appleby (alto) / Giancarlo Lisi (tenor)
Joe Haddow (bass)

Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Brent Stewart (Music Director)
Thomas Gaynor (organ)

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul

Saturday, 29th April 2017

As with music and art in general, people’s responses to matters of spiritual belief seem to vary enormously from individual to individual. Despite what seems like an ever-increasing secularisation of everyday life, we’re still can’t help being either active or passive observers of institutionalised calendar commemorations based on matters of belief in God which affect various human activities – we’re regularly made aware of certain historical frameworks and structures brought forward from times when people in general rendered to a Deity things that were regarded as belonging to that Deity, with few questions asked. A pivotal event in this history is without doubt the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, one which continues to exert significant influence in the Western World along any point of the spectrum of faith, on believers and non-believers alike.

Still, however much belief and spirituality in general takes up people’s lives in the 21st century is well-nigh impossible to gauge, except in the most generalised of terms – it would seem far less than, say, a century ago, and that the unprecedented horrors of the previous century, including the escalation of the human race’s own self-destructive potentialities might suggest a growing crisis of belief in any kind of omnipotent being who might allow or oversee such universal catastrophes, from which advancement of humankind towards any kind of future seems increasingly unlikely.

Creative artists these days seem to me to either mirror or confront these present-day actualities in their work – a case in point regarding confrontation is the Scottish composer James MacMillan, whose compositions actively reflect an active and securely-held Christian faith – at the opposite end of such motivations (to contrast the work of two utterly different “visionaries” I’ve encountered recently) is British playwright Caryl Churchill whose latest work for the stage (Escaped Alone, recently performed at Circa Theatre, Wellington) presents frighteningly dystopian scenarios of the future, one in which God as he/she is presently known seems non-existent. Of course both the dystopian prophetess playwright and the social-justice-driven Catholic composer advocate in different ways strategies for countering certain trends before a point of no return is reached, and so in some respects there’s common ground. Perhaps a basic difference between MacMillan and Churchill is that, for the former, there’s always a sense of optimism for the future amid the struggle – whereas for the latter the proposed scenarios and nihilistic attitudes given voice in her most recent work seem matter-of-factly pessimistic.

As was the case with the great French composer Olivier Messiaen, MacMillan’s creativity is inextricably tied up with his religious beliefs – “For me, religious faith is rooted in the mess of real life” he once said in an interview. And though he may no longer be the Marxist revolutionary of days of yore, his work still has an occasional “firebrand” quality, a confrontational edge which sets him apart from the new-age “Holy Minimalist” school of composition, whose preoccupation is a kind of transcendence set largely above conflict. By contrast, music such as MacMillan’s “Seven Last Words from the Cross” expresses great swathes of anguish and explosions of anger, alongside a sense of grief and sorrow, all of which suggests that its creator is well aware of the pain and suffering of all mankind as articulated by the sacrificed Christ. MacMillan’s text in this work is somewhat more than merely the seven “scripture-gazetted” utterances of Jesus on the cross, but takes also from sources such as the Good Friday Responsaries for Tenebrae which quote from the Book of Lamentations: “All you who pass along this way take heed and consider if there is any sorrow like mine……” – an impassioned call across the ages for human empathy.

This 1993 work for voices and strings (performed here with the instrumental parts transcribed for organ) came across with considerable force within the vast Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul spaces – it was a fairly no-holds-barred setting of the seven finally-reckoned gospel-recorded statements uttered by Christ as he hung on the crucificxion cross in Jerusalem. I’m aware that my comments below are as much descriptive of the music as analytical of the performance – perhaps even more so the former! I hope the reader will forgive such self-indulgence at my delight in coming across such a magnificent piece of relatively “new” music for me, and be reassured that my descriptions inherently recognise the abilities of the musicians involved to “articulate” the music to the point where it was able to make the impressions on me that it did!

There were times when the lush ambiences of the Cathedral told against the music’s clarity, places which I’ve tried to pinpoint as best I’ve been able to. However, as there are usually roundabouts at hand where there are swings, the up-side of the venue was its incredible resonance, which in places “enlarged” the music’s expressive scope to awe-inspiring extents! With a work like MacMillan’s containing both grand and intimate statements, no one venue is going to be ideal, and Wellington Cathedral was certainly no exception. Conductor Brent Stewart certainly brought out the best of the venue’s interaction with the music, and the performers did the rest with their, by turns, sensitive and full-throated music-making.

The organ opened the work with a simple plaintive note, the sounds of deep and inward mourning – as the choir intoned the words “Father forgive them”, the organ became an enormous swinging pendulum over which movement the voices rose and climbed, the cathedral’s spacious acoustic allowing the voices to “float” and soar. As well the cavernous spaces gave the organ’s deepest notes enormous girth, the combination of “space above” and “depth below” making for an amazingly cosmic sound-experience. Much of the plainchant-like agitated exclamations which followed were unintelligible as words from where I sat, at about the halfway mark within the audience – those sounds jumbled in the huge spaces, but the choir’s magnificently-sustained intonings filled the building’s ambience with urgently prayerful impulses and piteous beseeching.

A raw, monumental quality resounded from the voices over the repeated statement “Woman, Behold thy Son”, the utterances underscored with great silences “surging softly backwards” in between each tumultuous command – at first a soft organ pedal measured the depths of the sea of each silence, stirrings and sproutings of energy which grew into sequential melodic patterns, and finally burst forth with bravura-like outpourings of a fantastical nature. Everything was superbly controlled as the voices continued to repeat the phrase, with the organ accompaniments becoming more frenetic and desperate-sounding until a kind of exhaustion-point was reached, the instrumental sounds whimpering and imploring, searching for some kind of resolution or answer – in the throes of these agitations the voices spoke to and for the son, naming the woman as his mother. With fewer words to decipher I found this movement simply overwhelming in its direct, almost confrontational attitude, and in its sense of journeying stepwise towards depictions of a spirit in extremis.

Beginning the third section, the men intoned in Latin a tribute to the wood of the Cross – “Ecce Lignum Crucis” – (Behold the Wood of the Cross..) – accompanied by a singing melody the men sang “Venite Adoramus” – “Come, let us adore him”. Women’s voices at first sounded earthier, almost medieval, as they repeated the “Ecce Lignum” salutation, then rhapsodised more freely with the organ, the voices overlapping and suffusing the acoustic with richly-upholstered tones of adoration.

A great outburst of agitation from the organ ( with the conductor, Brent Stewart, “conducting” the organist!) prepared the way for two women soloists, their voices positively stratospheric, giving voice to Christ’s radiant invitation to the “good thief” to join him in Paradise. Deep organ meditations followed (eight speakers and a sub-woofer, doing the “honours” with a smaller organ, I was told, proudly, before the concert began, by one of the organisers – I can vouch for the effectiveness of the arrangement as the result seemed even more sonorous and wide-ranging as we in the audience had a right to expect!), with the soloist, Thomas Gaynor, skilfully managing the transition from inchoate murmurings to full-blooded transcendent intensities of light and colour, as the men sang, with increasing agitated feeling “Eli, eli lama sabachtani” – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Again, I found it difficult to decipher some of the words in that cavernous acoustic, though such was the intensity of the music’s rise and fall and the musicians’ control, I was content to be borne along on a tide of pure emotion, unsure of exactly where I was going, but confident in the musicians’ ability to keep things afloat and buoyant. Whether slow or swift-moving, such was the fascination exerted by music and performance, that specific words mattered less than the sense of being caught up in somethingsignificant and deeply felt – The “I thirst” section featured men’s voices barely “registering” against a background of women’s voices by turns, whispering, chanting, and singing, in Latin “I gave you to drink of life-giving water….”, before organ and voices suddenly erupted, flooding the vistas with sonorous urgencies, and then withdrawing into the agitated resonances once again.

Jagged organ chords slashed their way across the sound vistas, occasioning a sudden lighting change, as if the world was suddenly drenched in blood – most effective! Over the agitations the women’s voices began a flowing passage based on the Good Friday Responses for Tenebrae, “My eyes were blind with weeping” joined by the rest of the choir, developing a sombre meditation on sorrow.

The instrumental slashings returned, but couldn’t quell the impassioned cry from the voices of “Father”, which the organ supported with a heartfelt meditation, generating some Janacek-like intensities in places before slowly allowing resignation and a kind of tingling tranquility to drift back and settle all around for what seemed like moments outside time. The performers requested before the concert that no applause should follow the performance, and this strange sense of something continuing to resonate stayed with us throughout the interval – a most telling strategy, and one that worked brilliantly!

The Cathedral’s voluminuous spaces brought out the arresting attack of the voices and the wonderfully percussive scintillations at the opening of the second item on the evening’s programme, Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms”, even if the resonances played havoc with the music’s more incisive, quick-moving sequences.
A dancing organ solo brought the soloists briefly to the platform, before some gently exotic percussive touches introduced the boy soprano, Liam Squire, singing the words of Psalm 23 – “The Lord is my Shepherd – I shall not want” – the melodic line characteristically mixed its composer’s penchant for sentimentality with slightly “grainier” sequences, bringing forth moments of rapt beauty from the young man’s voice, along with passages that seemed more effortful, perhaps too low-lying in places for the voice to properly expand and take flight.

Bernstein’s setting of Psalm 2 “Why do the nations” (the words familiar from Handel’s “Messiah” of course), galvanised the ensemble, with rhythmic passages that seemed to come straight from “West Side Story”, along with exciting percussion effects – even in this acoustic the trajectories of the music danced and enlivened the textures to spectacular effect.

A “grunty” organ solo with harmonic sequences and progressions reminding one of Reger’s music introduced the third section “Adonai, Adonai” (Lord, Lord), sung in the manner of a ballad, the melody graceful and warming, wrapping itself around and about one’s sensibilities, especially so in the wordless sections. The soloists tenderly and sensitively extended the mood with variants of the melodic line, until the sound’s “dying fall” imparted a rapt and devotional sense of valediction to the proceedings, the composer striving to impart the text’s sentiment of “brethren…together in unity” at the work’s very end.

Coming after James MacMillan’s direct and uncompromising exploration of grief and pain in “Seven Last Words From The Cross”, Bernstein’s far less demanding work might have been regarded by some people as a kind of emotional refurbishing in the wake of a series of debilitating meditations, and, in contrast, by others as something of an anticlimax. I inclined more to the latter than to the former view, thinking I would have preferred to leave the concert with those heartfelt gestures of compassion and empathy resounding in my head and playing on my sensibilities. Still, each of the pieces spoke its own particular truths and left the other more-or-less intact – and the performances by solo singers, instrumentalists and the choir, under Brent Stewart’s inspired leadership, along with organist Thomas Gaynor’s brilliant playing, certainly delivered the goods, enabling each work to make its own particular impact in grand style.

Bach père et fils, and antipodean Baroque resoundings, from Ensemble Paladino

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Hutt Valley Chamber Music presents:
ENSEMBLE PALADINO

James Tibbles (harpsichord), Simone Roggen (violin),
Martin Rummel (‘cello), Eric Lamb (flute)

JS BACH (arr. Lamb/Rummel) – (re) Inventions, for flute and ‘cello
WF BACH – Trio No.2 in D Major Fk 47
LEONIE HOLMES – With strings attached
J.S.BACH – ‘Cello Suite No.1 in C Major BWV 1007
CPE BACH – Trio Sonata in B Minor Wq 143
JS BACH Trio Sonata (from Musikalisches Opfer) BWV 1079

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Friday 28th April, 2017

Auckland-based Ensemble Paladino’s intentions, as stated in an introductory note to this concert, were “to present uncompromising, diverse and fearless chamber music on the highest level”, an exciting and challenging statement of intent which, to my ears was fulfilled most expertly and mellifluously at Lower Hutt’s Little Theatre on Friday evening. It was interesting that, with the ensemble’s sound still resounding in my ears, I unexpectedly found myself comparing their presentation with that of another group of baroque musicians whom I heard “live” on a broadcast from RNZ Concert a day or so later.

This was a group called the Chiaroscuro Quartet, recorded at a concert in, I think, Ireland, performing, as per their publicity, with “period instrument practice to the fore, playing on gut strings, with minimal vibrato and tuning to the lower pitch of A430” (modern concert pitch is A440 or higher). It’s probably heretical of me to admit this, but I found myself somewhat repelled by the sounds made by the “period instrument” group brought to me “on air”, the distinctly unlovely timbres of the instruments and the almost complete lack of warmth and ease in the musicians’ phrasing. Yet this group, too (so we were told by the radio continuity announcer, was well-known for its “fearless and uncompromising approach to authentic performance practice” – that was all very well, but after a few minutes’ listening I found myself wanting to turn off the radio!

Yes, what you’re thinking could be right – perhaps had I been there, I would possibly have been one of those reactionary Parisians rioting in the theatre while howling for the composer’s blood, at the premiere of “Le Sacre du Printemps” in 1913! Of course, one never knows how these things might turn out – I might well come in time to replicate my present feelings about Stravinsky’s work (total and utter exhilaration every time I hear it!) in relation to the Chiaroscuro Quartet’s version of “fearless and uncompromising”, and come to think it wonderful! But for now, I’m firmly of the opinion that period instrument groups surely don’t have to sacrifice and/or brutalise beauty and graceful expression in the name of “authenticity”; and I find myself wondering why groups would want to pursue that course anyway.

So, I was grateful that Ensemble Paladino seemed to emphasise “authentic” qualities like clarity, flexibility, tonal variation and timbral character, and put across these same aspects of presentation with unselfconscious ease and grace, hand-in-glove with plenty of energy and focused intensity at appropriate moments. I never felt the music’s more startling or innovative qualities were underplayed or blunted in any way, even though the music’s tones and phrases consistently fell gratefully on the ear , and drew us readily and willingly into any intricacies or niceties of either harmony or articulation, instead of causing us to “duck for cover” amid laser-lines of searing vibrato-less tones or fusillades of jagged accented sforzandi notes!

Not that there weren’t challenges of different kinds to enjoy in this presentation – the first item took us outside the square a little way with a transcription by two of the ensemble’s members, flute-player, Eric Lamb, and ‘cellist Martin Rummel, of the “Fifteen Inventions for Keyboard” BWV 772-786, for (you’ve guessed it) flute and ‘cello! Though a didactic work (as the composer makes clear in an introduction to the score, with his wish that “amateurs of the keyboard – especially those desirous of learning – are shown a clear way…to learn to play cleanly in two parts”) its realisation always sounds a lot of fun, and more so on this occasion with two very differently-accented voices involved. This was the first time ensemble members had undertaken such a transcription, and it shouldn’t, in my view, be the last – the music’s “ownership” shone forth in the playing!

I hadn’t realised the extent to which Wilhelm Friedermann, the eldest son of JS Bach, was highly thought of as a composer, and the Trio Sonata Fk 47 which we then heard made the best possible case for his standing in this regard. We enjoyed the Vivaldi-like opening of the work with its pictorial birdsong figurations for the flute, and the subsequent duetting with the violin, lovely imitative effects as well as concerted “transports of delight” involving soaring lines and widely-traversed terrain. Set against these were closely-worked trio exchanges involving exciting instances of give-and-take between the musicians. A sombre Larghetto and a jig-like finale completed a work whose achievement ought to have been replicated more often by its composer, had it not been for his reputed idleness stemming the flow and making his name even better known.

Auckland composer Leonie Holmes’s new work “With strings attached” was, in her own words, characterised as “a joyful, whimsical and whirling encounter” – just the kind of thing a composer might write to celebrate a positive and fruitful association with colleagues and/or contemporaries. Commissioned by the Paladinos, the intention of the group was to have a contemporary work exploring the sounds of “historic” instruments. Given the burgeoning interest in “period” performance on the part of many musicians, the idea of having a contemporary composer write for such instruments seemed an alternatively thoughtful and attractive means of injecting some “living” creativity into their work.

“With strings attached” began not with a bang, but with – well, not exactly a “whimper” but with the composer’s self-avowed “tentative approach”, gentle pictorial and visceral evocations generated by pizzicato strings and harpsichord peckings, perhaps drops of rain, perhaps birdsong. Came the cello, and then the flute joining in the instruments’ conversation, very much a discourse of individuals with lines doing precisely as people do, as liable to go off on individual tangents as to join forces and generate plenty of common motoric energy. Alternatively the energies were contrasted between groups, with strings at one point holding fast to sustaining notes as the harpsichord cantered off enlarging the world in a different direction, or with the violin “speaking to its spirit” in the form of eerie harmonics and generally ghostly ambiences.

This was the composer’s “exploration and discovery of common ground’, which involved various ear-catching sequences – winsome, long-breathed chordings between flute and strings over running harpsichord figurations, not unlike a droll episode of silent-film accompaniment, followed by flute “sparrings” with the strings’ angular pizzicati, while the harpsichord played a kind of “noises off” role – so very atmospheric! Having explored these possibilities the instrumental sounds were then gradually dovetailed, voices overlapping and augmenting one another to a point where all the strength and sweetness was rolled up into one ball and bounced towards us with a joyful “Come and play!” gesture, bringing the work to an emphatic close – joyful, whimsical and whirling, indeed! We in the audience certainly enjoyed the adventure.

Disappointment immediately followed the interval at the news that violinist Simone Roggen would NOT be playing the great Chaconne from JS Bach’s D Minor Violin Partita, due to a back injury – so to restore equanimity, into the breach stepped the ‘cellist, Martin Rummel, with a lean, lithe and flavoursome performance of the composer’s first ‘Cello Suite in the key of G Major. Interestingly, the player talked about this first suite being more of an “introduction” to the world of the six individual suites than an entity in itself, a “whole being greater than the sum of its parts” kind of idea, but especially in relation to the G Major work.

I wrote too many comments regarding the ‘cellist’s playing to reproduce here, except in shortened form – the Prelude was sounded swiftly and lightly, but with the kind of articulation that invested such “character” into each note that one could relish the timbral differences between registers unreservedly! The Allemande combined a freely-expressed improvisatory air with well-tempered momentum, while the Courante seemed to draw from an endless reserve of energetic spontaneity to whirl the music onwards. After a satisfyingly profound and thoughtful Sarabande, the two Minuets brought the lightest of touches and the most flexible of pulses – not music to dance to, but instead to activate flexibility of thought and action. Finally, the jig’s joyous and uninhibited dance gave the music’s physicality full expression, leaving we listeners properly energised and fully content.

Carl Philippe Emmanuel Bach, possibly the most innovative and certainly the most distinctive of JS Bach’s composer-sons, was his father’s true successor, while able to forge his own distinctive musical language, for which success he always gave credit to his father’s teaching and example. The Trio Sonata in B Minor Wq 143 performed here by Paladino demonstrated the new galant style of composition which Emmanuel Bach made his own, while paying homage to elements of the baroque still in favour in some quarters.

The Sonata’s first movement took on a serious, even sombre aspect at the start, which some feathery exchanges between flute and violin helped to disperse, with some superbly adroit playing. I particularly enjoyed the musicians’ warmly rounded tones, with none of the bleached-out, colour-averse quality which hardens textures and reduces lyrical warmth in some “authentic” performances. The Andante was a graceful tread, with the flute and violin doing very nicely without the cello at first, but requiring its depth of voice for some mid-movement measures. A jig-like figure for violin and flute had the finale dancing with rapid figurations, the cello more a continuo instrument, though the music developed an exhilarating whirl towards the end – a great pleasure!

It was left to “old Bach” himself to round off the concert with a Trio Sonata of his own, one instigated by his encounter with Frederick the Great while visiting his son at the King’s court. Frederick requested that Bach improvise a three-part fugue on a theme the King provided, which the composer did (all present were “seized with astonishment” at Bach’s skill, according to an eyewitness) – but the King then set Bach the task of improvising a 6-part fugue on the same theme, which the composer begged the King to be allowed to take home and work on his task – from this came the work we know as “The Musical Offering” BWV 1079, which included a Trio Sonata with a flute part – the flute was, of course Frederick’s own instrument.

This, then, was that very work, for which the ‘cellist placed himself in the middle of the ensemble instead of to one side, indicative, perhaps of the more integral involvement of his part in this music. The work’s opening Largo balanced beautifully languid and tightly-wrought figurations, the players enabling the notes to “speak” with subtle voicings and colours, whether open, or busily interactive. Bach seemed to be showing his son that there was “life in the old dog, yet” in the following Allegro, with its brilliant violin part and, in places assertive bass line; while in the Andante, the instruments pursue a long-breathed theme with rising utterances that seem to build to some kind of revelation, before finishing with a gratefully lovely dying fall.

Again Bach seemed to get his dander up and pull out all the stops with the Allegro finale, the cello instigating exciting running passages with tightly-woven, complex interactions, fantastic to follow and engage with, the playing generous and inviting in its involvement and physicality. It was, I thought, all truly and uncompromisingly joyous and interactive!

And now for something different – another song recital at St.Andrew’s!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
Song Recital : Megan Corby and Craig Beardsworth,
with Catherine Norton (piano)

Works by Grieg, Debussy, Brahms, Verdi,
Kurt Mechem, Paul Bowles, Kurt Weill and Larry Grossman

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

Wednesday, 26th April, 2016

Such is the range and scope of song as an art-form that daily programmes such as this beautifully-designed compilation might easily be put together without duplication for eons of time to come. Two of the items presented here could be said to have some kind of well-known currency – Edvard Grieg’s “Jeg elsker dig” (I love you), and Giuseppe Verdi’s duet “Dite alla Giovine” from the opera “La Traviata – the other items may have been familiar to aficionadoes, but seemed less well-known in general, though no less attractive and entertaining for all of that!

So, full marks to these musicians for giving us such an unhackneyed programme, whose content was here put across with the utmost conviction -though I thought their performance of the duet exerpt from “La Traviata” which concluded the presentation almost surprisingly inhibited, after what had gone before – for me the performance somehow lacked the sympathetic glow and sharpness of dramatic focus that I suspect a more theatrical context would have straightaway provided, but which I felt eluded them here.

The rest of the items, though, crackled with dramatic commitment – in fact, just occasionally too much so, as neither singer held back when emphasis and forcefulness was called for, causing some hardening and spreading of their tones at some of the climaxes. I enjoyed more the subtleties both singers brought to the quieter passages of their various songs, and the obvious enjoyment of both word-pointing and sequential phrasings evidenced by both in gesture and facial expression as well as in voice.

Remembering how condescendingly Debussy had put down Grieg’s music at some stage (“a pink bon-bon stuffed with snow”) I thought it revelatory to hear the music of these two composers cheek-by-jowl as it were, with neither having to “draw back” from one another with embarrassment in the other’s company – even if the latter’s name reverted to its Scottish origins as per programme on this occasion!

Craig Beardsworth floated his lines exquisitely at the beginning of Grieg’s “Ein Traum”, supported by beguilingly liquid phrasings from Catherine Norton’s piano, which were flecked most exquisitely with occasional impulses of light – some raw vocal production at the song’s climax didn’t spoil the music’s overall effect, as was also the case with Debussy’s Romance, the singer conveying to us the text’s “celestial sweetness” in the sensitivities of his word-pointing and the jewelled focus of his tones.

Though Megan Corby’s voice was apt to spread when put under pressure, she demonstrated a beguiling sensitivity during the introductory phrases of Grieg’s well-known “Jeg elsker Dig” (I love you), and again during some of the sex-soaked musings of Debussy’s “Le Jet d’Eau” during which the pianist’s colourings and insinuating phrasings couldn’t help but draw one into a kind of sensual trance. An even quieter ecstasy, I felt, from the singer, in places, would have further heightened the suggestiveness of the words and their setting – her pianist was consistently “showing her the way”, opening up the vistas to new and wider musical worlds.

Occasionally Craig Beardsworth’s softer, ultra-focused tones evoked a Gerard Souzay-like vocal quality, which the Brahms “Von ewiger Liebe” particularly brought out at the song’s beginning – the line, the ebb and flow of emotion, and the hint of vocal colouring gave one a lot of pleasure, even if, as the song’s more declamatory sections took over the tones became too harsh to fully enjoy.

I thought both singers revelled rather more in the programme’s more “upbeat” second half, beginning with the heartfelt “Dear Husband, come this fall” from Kirke Mechem’s 2008 opera “John Brown” – Megan Corby’s singing delved deeply into the aria’s world of desperate uxorial devotion, risking hardness of tone with her impassioned delivery, but getting the message across to us with considerable force. The “Blue Mountain Ballads” by Paul Bowles, required less force and more gentle lyricism, which enabled those qualities to come through in Corby’s performance of “Heavenly Grass”, while another song “Sugar in the Cane” responded to rougher, more earthy treatment well.

Craig Beardsworth gave us the other two Ballads from the set, affecting a droll mid-west accent for “Lonesome Man”, his laconic manner abetted by the piano part’s rag-time inclinations, and then relaxing into a more ballad-like style for “Cabin”, wry and nostalgic. Next was Kurt Weill’s “Lonely House” from his stage work “Street Scene”, also given an atmospheric, backward-musing air of decadent old-world charm, supported by a sultry, wryly sentimental piano.

Not so the brash, up-front “Where was I when they passed out luck?” aria from Larry Grossman’s “Minnie’s Boys, which was brilliantly acted out by Beardsworth – “experienced” as much as “sung”, I thought – the almost painfully-insistent tones at the end not inappropriate to the song. As I’ve said, the Verdi duet was, after these energetic outpourings, a bit of an anti-climax – I thought it needed, as I’ve said, more patiently-poised intensity from both the singers and from a strangely inert accompaniment – difficult, of course, to “catch”, away from the through-line of its stage-context.

Moments of delight, then, from all concerned, making for an entertaining and thought-provoking lunchtime sojourn.

Duets and other lunchtime delights at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Music by Brahms, Ravel and Britten

Linden Loader (mezzo-soprano), and Roger Wilson (baritone),
with Fiona McCabe (piano)

BRAHMS – Four Duets for Alto and Baritone Op.28
RAVEL – Histoires naturelles (1906) – words by Jules Renard
BRITTEN – A Charm of Lullabies Op.41

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

Wednesday, 19th April, 2016

Here was a particularly happy marriage of music, performance and occasion, the repertoire engaging, balanced and varied, and the performances idiomatic, focused, and whole-hearted. Serving up the music of Brahms with firstly that of Ravel seemed to me to somehow underline the impishness of the former with the ironic wit of the latter, so that each of the worlds resonated and sparkled all the more.

And secondly, the choice of Britten, to whom Brahms’ music was anathema, further tantalised the enjoyments of the presentation, by way of demonstrating that each composer’s sensibility had more in common with the other’s than Britten’s own attitude would initially suggest – and, in any case, Brahms’ acquiescences towards conservative circles in the nineteenth-century now seem to our viewpoints far less polarising, whatever polemic was being enacted (mostly to injurious effect) at that time.

Both of the singers, Linden Loader and Roger Wilson, sounded in excellent voice, properly “inhabiting” their various texts and conveying to us their distinctive characters with great aplomb. And the venture’s success owed much to Fiona McCabe’s sensitive and evocative piano-playing – I was particularly entranced with the exquisite detailings she conjured up in various places during the Ravel song-cycle, and how readily she caught the composer’s characteristic bitter-sweet ironies in response to the singer’s words.

The concert began with two of Brahms’ Op.28 Duets, the first an archetypal German Romance from the world of heroic poetry, a setting of Eichendorff’s tale of a ghostly visitation of a woman by a knight, perhaps once her lover, perhaps already dead – a marvellously sombre evocation, the woman’s voice deep, rich and beautiful at the opening, the knight’s high, but strong and focused. Mostly in ritualistic dialogue form, the lines occasionally intertwined, and the music in places became more animated – but the mood of wonderment was sustained throughout, with the woman having the last word. The following “At the door” made a playful contrast, featuring deft and impish interactions between the voices and the piano, everything nicely and most amusingly thrown off.

Roger Wilson introduced the Ravel song-cycle, remarking most interestingly that the composer himself fell foul of the infamous Académie française, for daring to set words whose style infringed the guidelines of “correct” usage set by the Academy – Ravel himself was no stranger to institutionalised disapproval, having by this time (1906) attempted on a number of occasions to secure France’s then-respected Legion d’Honneur Award for his work, and been rejected. Each of these songs vividly evoked both character and atmosphere, with the sentiments of the text expressed often in mercilessly razor-sharp musical detailings.

The opening “Le paon” (The peacock) presented the bird’s haughty aspect along with its petty querrulousness, something of an Ozymandias in its arrogance, but perhaps masking a deep-seated anxiety in its “diabolical cry” – startlingly-voiced by the singer, on this occasion. By contrast, the sounds of “Le grillon” (The cricket) were all meticulousness and order, ruled by the prevailing intimacy of small things – both voice and piano painted the smallness of the scene with the finest of detailing.

In line with the well-known “Le Cygne” from another French work, “The Swan” glided amid watery textures with the vocal line arching like the bird’s neck over delicately dancing piano scintillations. Reflecting the poem’s text, the music evoked clouds as readily as it did water, underlining the “coming-together” of both in reflection, the “fleecy” clouds and the “cushion of feather”, before debuncking the poetry of the scene with a visceral description of the bird catching a worm in the mud!

I enjoyed the crepuscular atmospheres of “Le martin-pecheur” (The kingfisher), admiring the evocation of stillness in which even the kingfisher’s pecking seemed to have a ritualistic place. Singer and pianist wrought an almost breathless rapture through words and music on the part of the fisherman at his “close encounter” with a wild creature. Finally, “La pintade” (The Guinea-fowl) presented a more angular, quirky and fractious side of nature, Ravel’s music almost Musorgsky-like in its raw, idiomatic raucousness, the piano writing filled with vivid point-making and story-telling in support of the singer’s colourful discourse – such a compelling traversal of a fascinating sequence of personalities and situations!

Linden Loader then introduced the Britten work “A Charm of Lullabies” written for mezzo-soprano Nancy Evans, who first performed the work in January 1948. As a member of the English Opera Group, Evans had taken part in several first performances of Britten’s stage works, which included sharing the title role with Kathleen Ferrier in the composer’s opera The Rape of Lucretia, and Britten wrote the song-cycle in acknowledgement of her abilities and support. As with the “Serenade” which he’d completed in 1943, Britten chose a theme involving night and sleep, bringing together texts from different poets which expressed various aspects and ideas about the subject, some droll and amusing, others disturbing and even frightening.

The opening “A Cradle Song”, a setting of words by William Blake, presented singer and pianist in serene, yet separate accord, Linden Loader having warned us that voice and piano are “not really together”, however lyrical and well-intentioned are the music’s beginnings!The second lullaby “A Highland Balou” seemed more of a “tiring-out” song than a “soothing-to-sleep” lullaby, with a mother telling her child that he/she is a Highland brigand, who will grow up to become an outlaw and “bring hame a Carlisle cow”! Voice and piano filled the music’s “outdoor spaces” with terrific energy and enjoyment, if hardly sleep-making stuff!

Unsettling contrasts characterised “Sephestia’s Lullaby”, with its lamenting opening – “When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee” set against rhythmic, almost skipping-rhyme or round-dance passages, though with words that hinted at tragedies overshadowing any joys. As for “A Charm”, the frenzied, volatile energies underpin a text whose words are threats which could have come from Dante’s Inferno, filled with nightmarish classical references to monsters and witches – “Sleep, or thou shalt see / the horrid hags of Tartary”. Again the performers threw themselves into the turmoil, bringing out the volatilities and instabilities of the setting with many deft touches.

By the time we came to the final lullaby, “The Nurse’s Song”, with its prayer-like soothings, both unaccompanied and then with both chordal and canonic support from the piano, I was reflecting on the picture of parental exasperation which this collection seemed to underline ( a fable for our time, perhaps, with childcare agencies commonly “kicking in” at an early age in the lives of many children, for various reasons) – Britten’s setting also made me think of that passage in one of Hillaire Belloc’s “Cautionary Verses” , which gave the warning “And always keep a-hold of Nurse / for fear of finding something worse”. So, fascinating, and in places beautiful – but also disturbing!

A kind of contextual sanity returned to the programme to finish the concert, with the remaining two Brahms duets from the composer’s Op.28 – as with the first two, these made a nicely contrasted pair, the first a setting of Goethe’s “Es rauschet das Wasser” (The rushing of the waters), in which each singer characterises the movement of water as a metaphor for love, before setting its freedom of movement against the constancy of stars and equating love of “the true kind” with that same constancy. The performers vividly brought out these different “characters”, before adroitly dovetailing the sentiments and the modes in conclusion, complete with a grand piano postlude.

As for the final “Der Jäger und sein Liebchen”, both singers relished the opportunities for argumentative engagement, and brought home the age-old conflict of opposite personalities and their preoccupations with plenty of tongue-in-cheek dramatic gusto – a welcome frisson of interactive sanity which we all recognised and enjoyed! In all, a very great pleasure, thanks to the concert’s thoroughness of preparation (even the printed programme was a joy!) and the elan and focus of all three performers throughout.

Magisterial performances from Siyu Sun (piano) and the Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
RACHMANINOV – Piano Concerto No.2 in C Minor Op.18
ELGAR – Symphony No.1 in E-flat Op.55

Siyu Sun (piano)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Rachel Hyde (conductor)

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

Sunday, 9th April, 2016

A great programme and an equally great occasion! Particularly in the case of the Rachmaninov Concerto, there was a commonality of sorts between the work itself and the circumstances surrounding this particular performance, in each instance a sense of “coming through” against the odds. It’s well-known that the composer wrote the music as a kind of “therapy” by way of recovering from the depression which overwhelmed him after the debacle of his First Symphony’s premiere; and in fact he dedicated the work to his therapist, Dr. Nikolai Dahl, a man otherwise practically unknown to history! Of course the concerto went on to become one of the most popular and enduring of Rachmaninov’s works.

In the case of today’s performance, the pianist, Siyu Sun, was asked to play at short notice due to the indisposition through illness of the scheduled soloist, Liam Wooding. Happily, the outcome’s success mirrored that of the Concerto’s, with difficulties overcome and the results bringing their own unique rewards. I had already seen and heard Liam Wooding play, and was most disappointed at the news of his cancellation – but I was surprised and, indeed, thrilled at the quality of Siyu Sun’s playing, in fact astonished that the services of such an outstanding player could be procured at all, let alone in what seemed like a moment’s notice!

The concert had another, more sobering circumstance to address, which was the recent death of one of its most prominent regular players, the flutist, Derek Holland. His services to the Wellington Chamber Orchestra as a player, section leader and committee member were com-memorated via an illustrated note in the written programme, as well as with a brief recording of his playing, introduced with a few words from conductor Rachel Hyde just prior to the Elgar Symphony which began the concert’s second half.

But to begin proceedings, it was the concerto – and we were pleased to welcome the soloist, Siyu Sun to the platform, along with her conductor, Rachel Hyde. Currently, a pupil of Rae de Lisle in Auckland, Siyu Sun earlier this year won the joint first prize in the National Concerto Competition in Christchurch, playing this same concerto with the NZSO and conductor Hamish McKeich. Later this year she will be performing with the Auckland Philharmonia as part of their Haydn Staples Piano Scholar programme for 2017. She’s also played the French Horn as a second instrument since the age of nine, and was actually a member in 2014 of the National Youth Orchestra.

Though Siyu Sun was in effect repeating her National Concerto Competition success with this same work, there was no hint of routine or sense of anything “second-hand” about her playing on this occasion. The work’s famous opening piano chords were finely gradated, Sun shaping the configurations with a slight “roll” (the notes are practically impossible for all but the largest hands to play without some degree of arpeggiation) and building towards a thunderous sonority prior to the strings’ trenchant entry. The violins dug in strongly, letting the theme soar over the piano’s agitations with full-throated fervour – an arresting beginning! – after which soloist and orchestra melted hearts with a tenderly-phrased second subject, aided and abetted by some sensitive oboe playing.

Siyu Sun demonstrated as much command of the quicksilver filigree passage work as she did the weightier, more assertive chordings during the movement’s agitated development sequences, while conductor Rachel Hyde finely-controlled the great orchestral surges leading up to the return of the opening theme in tandem with the soloist’s great and magisterial chordal passages – tremendous stuff! Only a slightly-too-early horn solo broke the spell momentarily – the player recovered some poise towards the end of the solo as the music moved through those sequences of peculiarly Rachmaninovian melancholy, piano and winds conversing with real sympathy. The movement’s coda was taken easily, establishing the rhythm clearly before excitingly building the crescendo to its no-nonsense conclusion.

How beautifully the orchestral strings caught the music’s “colour” at the slow movement’s beginning! With delicately-wrought support from the soloist, both flute and clarinet did beautiful things with the theme (derived most adroitly by the composer from those great piano chordal passages in the first first movement), before it was the piano’s turn, winds and strings murmuring their support. Sun varied her articulation of the theme in its more rapidly-moving guise so beautifully, ably supported by the orchestra, controlling the growing excitement before finally “going with” the crescendo and taking the ensemble with her (conductor and players sticking to their soloist resolutely!). The pianist’s scherzando figurations spread out naturally and easily, and with conductor and players, bringing off the sudden sforzando cadence with absolute unanimity. A big-boned cadenza-like piano passage later, the movement’s opening theme returned, this time with the strings wringing out the emotion, and the soloist matching gesture with gesture.

No time to relax! – an attacca, or as near as one could get to one, began the final movement, the scherzo-like rhythms a bit loose at first, but then strongly pulled together. What a fantastic entry from the pianist! – as commanding and surely-focused as her unashamedly rhetorical introduction to the entry of the famous tune! – here, oboe and strings delivered the goods ably supported by the horns and echoed beautifully by Sun’s glowing tones. Those “mysterious” passages came off well, with deft percussion touches adding to the ambience, which were thereupon tossed to one side by the piano in an irruption of great energy, though not taken in too helter-skelter a fashion! The orchestra stayed with its soloist throughout the fugal passages which followed, if not always with spick-and-span unanimity, though Rachel Hyde’s control of her forces kept everything in touch. I enjoyed the “ring” of the piano’s tones just after the chattering toccata-like passages with the brasses, and the confident elan of the players throughout their syncopated tutti statements, just before the second subject’s grand return.

The strings did well with the melody, allowing the piano plenty of space in reply, playing in big, deep-breathed paragraphs which expanded fully and naturally, contrasting markedly with the winds’ reiterations of the agitated theme – none too together the first time round, but tighter with their exchanges on repetition. The piano continued the agitations, triplet figurations helping to build towards that great entry-point of the tune’s final statement with crashing orchestral chords and a ringing, scintillating cadenza from the soloist. Then, it was such a great “all together”, the horns doing so well and everybody playing fully out! With Siyu Sun’s final spectacularly vertiginous sweepings up and down the keyboard, the final payoff was achieved by all in great style! – I think we in the audience were stunned by it all for a second or two, before recovering our senses and bursting out with our appreciation of what the musicians had achieved – most gratifying!

If further proof of Sun’s abilities were needed, it came with an encore, which she announced as the “Little Red Riding Hood” Etude by Rachmaninov – actually No.6 of the composer’s Etude-Tableaux Op.39. Normally reticent about his “sources”, Rachmaninov let it slip that this exciting and disturbing piece was inspired by the famous fairy-tale; and Sun’s scintillating, razor-edged playing certainly brought out the music’s dark predatory menace set against the victim’s tremuous vulnerability, with little doubt regarding the outcome – certainly more Brothers Grimm than Charles Perrault, I would think!

Then there was the Elgar Symphony! It had, from the moment I first saw the programme, seemed to me as if it would be a difficult assignment for the orchestra – but these players were, by this time, on a kind of “high”, and were more than ready for “the beast” by the time everybody had come back for the second half. Once the very moving tribute to flutist Derek Holland had been completed, the players began the symphony without further ado, giving the opening motto plenty of gravitas first time round, then upon repetition according it the full ceremonial treatment, a truly magnificent sound. Rachel Hyde than launched the allegro with plenty of “swagger”, encouraging the players to characterise that Elgarian “stride” which for me defines the great performances of this music, and which was here given enough space and weight to really tell.

Another defining character of Elgar’s music is its vulnerability (a quality that one of the finest of this music’s conductors, Barbirolli, used to call the “hurt”), one which manifests itself in the symphony’s more lyrical passages, no more so than in the winds’-and-strings’ repeated “sighing” motif, and which Hyde, bless her, gave her players plenty of elbow room to properly articulate and resound. Though there were moments of imprecise ensemble, it mattered far less than the engagement by conductor and players with the “character” of these qualities, the “grunty” aspect of the brass as telling as the “dying fall” of strings and winds in other places. A memorable moment was towards the movement’s end, when, after the triumphant re-statement of the motto theme, (wonderful harp flourishes, here!) the strings gently cascaded downwards over the stealthily tread in the bass and the woodwinds’ rounding-off mutterings, the players fully “at one” with the sequence’s different strands of expression.

The second movement’s dark, impulsive thrustings were here kept steady, the momentum unflagging and still dangerous-sounding, with the players’ concentration giving the sounds real “attitude”, the percussion giving extra “fizz ” at the top, and underlining the swagger of the march tune. How lovely, then, the change of character for the episode the composer called “something you would hear down by the river”, with its touches of Sibelius on the clarinets! After these energies began to wane, the transition to the slow movement was beautifully controlled by Hyde, aided by spot-on playing from the winds in their off-the-beat descents, allowing things to “wind down” and gently open up into the most gorgeous of Elgarian melodies on the strings, playing with real “innigkeit”, before blossing into a warm “nobilmente’ feeling. Throughout the rest of the movement the music seemed to capture a drifting, nostalgic quality, from shadow to sunlight and back to shadow, until the strings entered with the ‘new” tune, playing with even more tenderness, before rising to realms imbued with delight – a final statement from the strings, and a haunting reply from the brasses, the timpani, and finally the clarinet.

Mutterings and dark statements evolved a sinister bass tread at the finale’s beginning, as scraps of the motto theme and a nervously fluttering figure expressed the “agitation within” – the allegro let it loose, with the violins doing well to keep the uprushing opening together, and later, the rolling theme whose “three” against the accompaniment’s “two” (or so it seemed) was managed with aplomb! The sped-up version of the movement’s “sinister” opening then built towards a terrific tutti, before everything disintegrated – I mean the music, of course, not the playing! – and then (oh, the genius of the man!) morphed into a different treatment of the melody, noble and heartfelt, which spread through the entire orchestra! From here, I thought the last few minutes of the work featured conductor and orchestra lifted onto a kind of plane of involvement and execution which did full justice to the composer’s effusive and exuberant mood, delivering the final statement of the motto with terrific conviction and excitement. Everybody could, I thought, at the very end be justly proud of such a heart-warming afternoon’s music-making.

Adams and Mozart (and Martin Fröst) inspire de Waart and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN ADAMS – Shaker Loops
MOZART – Clarinet Concerto in A Major K.622
BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.6 in F Major Op.58 “Pastoral”
Martin Fröst (clarinet)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Edo de Waart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Friday 7th April, 2016

John Adams (b.1947) has for some time been popularly regarded as one of the “big three” of minimalist music composition, along with Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The term “minimalist” was used to describe a specific creative aesthetic involving the reduction to the bare essentials of whatever medium the creative artist worked with – in music this involved using repetition of melodic and rhythmic ideas to express minute gradations and subtle alterations of the original material, in order to “grow” something new.

Adams’ work “Shaker Loops”, first on the programme in tonight’s concert, was originally conceived as a string quartet, before the composer decided, after a less-than-satisfactory first performance, that he needed “a larger, thicker ensemble”, and so re-scored the piece for a string septet, completing the work in 1978. Whether it was through further dissatisfaction, or merely a desire to extend the performance possibilities of the piece, Adams then reworked the septet for string orchestra in 1982, in which form it has become one of the composer’s most well-known works.

The title of the piece draws from the name “Shakers” given to an American Puritan sect whose intense ecstasy of worship resulted in their physically “shaking” while at prayer – while the term “Loops” refers to the minimalist technique of splicing and repeating segments of pre-recorded tape, to give a sense of endless repetition. The composer described his intention as summoning up an “ecstatic frenzy of a dance that culminates in an epiphany of physical and spiritual transcendence”.

Edo de Waart has previously recorded Adams’ piece in its string orchestra version with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, one of a much-acclaimed series of recordings of the composer’s works by the conductor, made while Adams was composer-in-residence with the orchestra. Little wonder, then, that the performance by the NZSO strings in Wellington shimmered and crackled with a sure focus and intensity at the outset, a “knowing what was what”. De Waart’s leadership inspired a living, breathing realisation of the music’s closely-knit moods over four continuous movements, bringing out both continuums and contrasts, which led the ear on right to the work’s spacious, reflective conclusion.

That was the culmination of a journey which began with “classic” minimalist gesturings in the opening “Shaking and Trembling”, the patternings and texturings undergoing modifications of a sort that suggested different kinds of motoric response to traversals of varied terrain. As these scurrying notes gradually retreated and became the “ambient background” of the second movement’s “Hymning Slews”, some beautifully wind-blown Aeolian-like harmonies created an eerie, almost ritualistic atmosphere, with chord-clusters glowing through the textures like soft lights, certain figures lazily slurred, while others sounded harmonics which led to bewitching bird-song-like trills, the vistas thrown open and the silences enlivened, an almost Copland-esque feel imparted to the proceedings.

A stealthy, new harmony brought on an awakening of the lower strings, with Berlioz-like irruptions from the basses, and ascending ‘cello motifs, the playing “digging in”, bringing out a glowing intensity and enlivening energy, the “Loops and Verses” of the music’s third part, the ensemble patiently blowing smoke-rings around the persona of a great engine, whose powerhouse was driving its rods and pistons faster and faster, desirous of achieving a result. But almost as quickly, these motoric energies seemed to peak and flag, as if the impulses seemed to catch a whiff of something greater and more lasting overhead, pinpricks of distant light contrasting with the occasional rumbling of the basses – we were left at the end with the firmament overhead, and the earth below, in worshipful and luminous accord. As a realisation of a journey’s full circle, this seemed to me a great performance of a great work!

Following this was the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, which brought Swedish clarinettist Martin Fröst before us, a musician acclaimed world-wide for his peerless instrumental skills and his thoughtful, soul-enriching interpretations. By way of welcoming their distinguished soloist, Edo de Waart and the orchestra began the concerto with a finely-wrought introduction, imbued with both strength and delicacy, one whose warmth and fullness of tone seemed happily removed from any didactic stylistic mode which might have proclaimed any kind of “authenticity” (oh, dear! – that just slipped out! – sorry!)….

Martin Fröst instantly took up and furthered these utterances with exquisitely-turned phrases expressed in tones that, true to the composer’s dictum, “flowed like oil”, but also seemed to value each and every note as something with its own distinction. At first I found his playing stance unduly distracting, with its somewhat “praying mantis-like” aspect (at times he appearing to be almost “stalking” his conductor as a likely victim!) – but once I’d gotten used to these quasi-choreographic poses, I began to relish the endless variety of his playing, suggesting a wealth of human experience and sensibility.

I read somewhere (not in the programme notes) that Fröst used for another concert performance of the work a modern replica of a “basset clarinet”, an instrument which was in vogue in Mozart’s time and which the work’s original dedicatee, Anton Stadler, probably used – the basset enables the player to use lower notes than are found on a conventional instrument. To me it sounded as if certain passages of Fröst’s playing were lower than usual, indicating that the basset replica was being used here. It extended the expressive range of the performance, having extra depths in the instrument’s lower register.

What a distillation of pure beauty was the opening of the slow movement! – the orchestral response matched the soloist’s rapt tones at the outset with a heartfeltness of its own. Fröst played some gorgeous flourishes at a couple of the cadences, moments which held fast for a few precious seconds the beauty of the discourse between clarinet and orchestra – a very slight earthquake during the latter stages of the movement failed to garner much attention, such was the spell cast by the performers with this music.

Mozart concerto finales often play “cat-and-mouse” between the soloist and the orchestra – this one, though more poised and genteel than in a lot of the piano concertos, still provides a sense of fun – the ensemble’s forthrightness contrasted beautifully with the clarinet’s moments of introspection, though the discourse wasn’t all one way, with the soloist’s lines occasionally rich and strong, and the orchestral phrases in more sober, supporting roles. While the applause at the end was primarily for Fröst, conductor and orchestra deserved much of the credit with their well-rounded and ever-alert contributions to the ebb and flow of one of the composer’s most sublime creations.

Predictably, the extended (and well-deserved) audience applause brought Fröst back out for an encore, though by no means a conventional or predictable one – this was a work called Klezmer Dance No.3, written by Goran Fröst (Martin Fröst’s brother) for clarinet and ensemble (the NZSO players were obviously well-prepared!). The music’s freewheeling energies were brilliantly delivered by all concerned, leaving the status quo of clarinettists being the most spectacular solo performers with the NZSO in recent times (Finnish virtuoso Kari Kriikku being another recent candidate for this award) undisturbed, even if last year’s star ‘cellist Johannes Moser ran these two close in his NZSO concert.

After this, further delight awaited, in the form of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony – but whether it was because the performance of the Mozart had left my sensibilities little room for additional wonderment and rapture, or because conductor and orchestra were at the end of “playing out” after an arduous tour (since March 30th, from Hamilton to Dunedin), I felt the performance didn’t quite “go on” from the first movement’s beautifully-sprung rhythms and lyrical outpourings. A pity – because De Waart and the players here caught the music’s many currents and eddies, finding, I thought, sufficient balance between incidental delight and on-going purpose to make Beethoven’s paean of praise work both as a kind of tone-poem and a symphonic journey – the conductor didn’t particularly “point” the minimalist-like repetitions of the first movement’s development, but they still made their impact, resonating all the more in the wake of the Adams work we’d heard earlier.

Though the orchestral playing, especially that of the winds, made for some beautiful sequences in the “Scene by the Brook” I missed here a sense of true rapture, of “giving over” to the music’s spell to the point where I felt uplifted and entranced by it all – I wanted to experience those murmuring water-currents, and to sing with the lullabic melody-lines, but it all somehow remained earthbound for me – and a momentary lapse of ensemble between strings and winds at one point didn’t help the music’s cause. Unlike with the first movement’s beauties, I coudn’t find a proper “way in” to the evocations, despite the sterling work done by the winds – and why the cuckoo-calls at the end of the movement were played in so perfunctory a manner to my ears, I couldn’t fathom (usually such a magical moment).

But again, the orchestral detailing in the third movement’s “Peasants’ Merrymaking” was superb, with horn-playing to die for, and droll interactions between oboe and bassoon which properly caught the music’s rusticity, though I felt the strings could have been encouraged to roughen up the textures just a little, during their “knees-up” sequence, which for me was a shade too “polished” in effect. As was the introduction to the storm, which (sensationalist that I am) I wanted to spit and rumble and moan more pointedly, just before the first great outburst – still, there were marvellous roarings from the timpani and, later, some anguished cries from the piccolo, answered with unequivocal elemental force from brass and timps in the time-honoured manner.

Re-reading my notes returns me more readily to the performance’s incidental beauties and delights, especially so with the finale – clarinet and horn exchanging calls so beautifully at the finale’s beginning, strings and brass building up the hymn-like song of thanksgiving to the point of fervour, and, after the nature-gods have received their dues, the sound of the horn solo at the very end, sealing up the music’s magic, and evoking Tennyson’s words, “answer, echoes, answer – dying, dying….” These were treasurable sequences, though I was still left at the end wondering why I didn’t feel (as I DID during the Mozart concerto performance in the first half), that continued presence of something “casting a glow over the proceedings”, which de Waart and the orchestra also achieved in their Mahler and Elgar performances last year. Modified rapture, then, but certainly enough to eagerly await what lies in store for us throughout the orchestral year’s remainder, here in Wellington.

Purcell’s “happier graces” prevail in concert of improvisations

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
L’Arpeggiata – Music for a while
Improvisations on Henry Purcell

L’Arpeggiata – the Musicians:
Christina Pluhar (director – theorbo)
Céline Scheen (soprano)
Vincentzo Capezzuto (alto)
Gianluigi Trovesi (clarinet)
Doron Sherwin (cornetto)
Veronika Skuplik (baroque violin)
Eero Palviainen (Baroque guitar / archlute)
Sergey Saprychev (percussion)
Boris Schmidt (double-bass)
Francesco Turrisi (piano)
Haru Kitamika (harpsichord)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 18th March 2017

This was a concert whose music-making seemed to connect with practically everybody who sat within coo-ee of me in the Michael Fowler Centre, judging by the warmth and enthusiasm of the reception for the musicians at the end of the evening. While I must confess I wasn’t as obviously enamoured of some of the concert’s offerings as most people were, I certainly registered the individual and corporate skills of the musicians of the ensemble L’Arpeggiata, who delighted us with their virtuosity across a fantastic range of playing styles.

The concert’s title “Music for a while” suggested that we would be treated to an evening of music owing its inspiration to that of Henry Purcell, England’s greatest Restoration composer. Only two of the eighteen individual pieces were by composers other than Purcell, the “Ciaccona” by Maurizio Cazzati which opened the concert, and “La Dia Spagnola”, another instrumental-only item which followed soon after. The rest was written by, derived from or inspired by Purcell’s music.

The two “odd ones out” were Maurizio Cazzati from Mantua and Nicola Matteis, a Neapolitean, both seventeenth-century composers, and both almost forgotten today, though each was prominent in the musical world of their time. Cazzati’s composition was a Ciaccona (Chaconne), begun by the ensemble in conventional baroque fashion until the da capo, at which point the double bass and piano improvised bluesy lines and catchy rhythms, inspiring Gianluigi Trovesi’s saxophone to contribute swinging, sultry utterances to the mix. Matteis’s “La Dia Spagnola” began with the lute and violin setting up a definite harmonic round-like pattern before the cornetto counterpointed with what seemed like an improvised line, joined by the clarinettist, and then the drummer, the latter chalking up a percussive moment of glory.

These items framed two Purcell songs, firstly the “Music for a while” exerpt from the composer’s settting of Dryden’s adaptation of Sophocles the King, soprano Céline Scheen’s singing of the words (atmospheric and true-toned, but difficult to hear and make sense of the words) preluded and postluded by a bluesy clarinet line, voice and instrument conveying some of the context’s ghostly ambience, a voice from the Underworld. Then came a contrasting jolly number “‘Twas within a furlong of Edinburgh Town”, from a play called “the Mock Marriage”, featuring the group’s second singer, alto Vincenzo Cappezzuto – again the vocal means produced a generally mellifluous result, but the words were often lost. Had the group been performing in the Town Hall I’m certain the impact made by the singers would have been more sharply and pleasingly defined.

Next was “A Prince of Glorious Race Descended” taken from his Birthday Ode “Who can from joy refrain”, written for the Young Prince William, Duke of Gloucester (all part of the duties expected from a Court Composer, which Purcell had become at this time) – another Birthday Ode (perhaps the most well-known) was “Come Ye, Sons of Art” from which the vigorous “Strike the Viol” was taken, both sung by Céline Sheen – though sung with by turns, proper ceremony and spirit, I thought the instrumental accompaniments tended to stylistically “generalise” the music, so that we found ourselves having to reinvent its context, one far removed from its origins and with its own set of rules.
In places throughout the concert I found myself feeling unsure of just what these rules were – yes, the voices had affiliations with jazz and blues which I recognised, but I found it difficult to go further and focus the sounds on specific feelings. I’m sure it was my particular problem, because the audience response was generally rapt and responsive to whatever these musicians did.

I related much more readily to the recognisably (for me) Purcellian moments of the concert, specifically Céline Sheen’s moving rendition of Dido’s final aria from the composer’s eponymous opera “When I am laid in earth”, introduced by a wistful, atmospheric piano, the music drifting in a forlorn manner, and commented on by clarinet and double bass, with the percussion further colouring the ambiences. The singer’s beautifully-shaped way with the melody reached impassioned heights at “Remember me”, with the cornetto adding its sorrowing voice, before the double bass, then clarinet, then piano all commented with great sensitivity on the tragedy, in the singer’s wake.

Earlier, I’d thought the ensemble’s treatment of “Ah Belinda” also from “Dido and Aeneas” had a counter-intuitive effect in terms of its accompanying the words “I am pressed with torment” with cool-sounding jazz textures, suggesting liquid serenities rather than mental anguish, which the pianist’s subsequent improvisatory meditations similarly ignored. Still, the later “Here the Deities Approve” was good fun, the note-spinning aspect of the music given plenty of shared energy from singer Vincenzo Capezzuto and the ensemble, before adroitly morphing into a kind of calypso rhythm, with a saucy clarinet solo – here, Purcell was, I thought, really “jazzed up”, with exhilarating results!

I got myself confused over the relationship between the “Curtain Tune on a Ground” and the extended percussion solo with preceded it (I think!) – be that as it may, the percussionist Sergey Saprychev showed extraordinary skill throughout his display, involving first one then two tambourine-like instruments, passing the single drum from hand to hand while rhythmically activating its surface over an astonishing variety of pitches and timbres. With the use of two drums the performance tensions sharpened to the point where the player spun one drum on the floor, creating both a visual and sonic counterpoint to the rhythms played on the other – a tour de force!

After Vincenzo Capezzuto’s entertainment of us with the racy “Man is for Woman made”, where amongst the players’ madcap instrumental textures the word-clarity was less important than gesture, expression and overall insinuation, we eventually arrived at its antithesis, the heartfelt “O let me forever weep”, with Céline Sheen’s voice supported by lute accompaniment in counterpoint with Veronika Skuplik’s baroque violin, the conception close to Purcell’s own, especially at the beginning, but with no dilution of or distraction from the essential feeling of the music – here, instead was an appropriate intensification, with everything beautifully played.

We were helped return to our lives by the performance of the final listed item in the programme, “Hark! How the songsters of the groves”, the infectious running rhythms brought out by the instruments allowing the singers’ duet to take wing (figuratively as well as literally), the piece a celebration of the union of music with nature in the form of birdsong.

An extremely poetic duet version of “Pokarekare Ana” sung by soprano and alto further delighted the audence at the end, most of whom stood and applauded after the final programme number. We actually got TWO encores, the second one being a lively song-and-dance item during which the singers indulged themselves in a few measures of hip-hop rhythmic contrast and conveyed to us huge enjoyment of it all.

As I’ve already indicated, the audience response to the concert was little short of rapturous – I was sorry not to “go along” with the many heartfelt expressions of enjoyment breaking around and about me, but reflected that there was “something for everybody”” in the evening’s presentation. I liked the extremes of it all – mostly the almost cheek-by-jowl realisations of sequences from Purcell’s work, but also some of the more outlandish and abandoned flights of creative fancy from the various musicians – if I didn’t respond as wholeheartedly to the gentler, more middle-of-the-road adaptations, it’s because I often found myself wishing I was hearing Purcell ‘s own voice instead of what sometimes sounded to me like paler imitations. But of the musicians’ individual and collective skills there could be no doubt – and I joined in with the accolades on those counts unreservedly.

Ordinary heroism – four women bare their lives in Circa Theatre’s new Caryl Churchill play “Escaped Alone”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Caryl Churchill's Escaped Alone Circa Theatre 2017

 

 

 

 

Carmel McGlone, Irene Wood, Ginette McDonald, Jane Waddell

Escaped Alone
by Caryl Churchill
A play in One Act

Circa Theatre, Wellington
Directed by Susan Wilson
Music by Gareth Farr
Set by John Hodgkins
Lighting by Marcus McShane

Ginette McDonald – Mrs Jarrett
Carmel McGlone – Vi
Jane Waddell – Lena
Irene Wood – Sally

NZ Premiere, Circa Theatre, Wellington, Saturday 11th March 2017

– this performance Tuesday 14th March

Back in days of yore, I remember taking part in a one-act play written by Irishman Brian Friel, called “Lovers, Winners”, a scenario involving two actors and two narrators. The former were the eponymous “Lovers”, who enacted a single day’s events, their interchanges filled with hopes and plans for their future, while the two narrators (I was one) took turns to counterpoint the stage action with a matter-of-fact commentary informing the audience of the tragedy that was to shortly befall the happy pair.

At the time I thought it extraordinary how so undynamic and indeed almost absurdly pre-emptive a theatrical scheme could generate such emotional heft. It was the cool, pitiless rending of the fabric of the lovers’ dreams and expectations in direct parallel with their expressions of hope and future delight which gave the piece its clout, the wrenching away of one’s ongoing identification with something beautiful and touching in the light of cold, cruel facts. How more theatrical a situation was that? – having to arbitrate in situ between emotion and intellect, warm action and cold narrative, and processes cheek-by jowl with outcomes?

Something akin to those parallel processes which so captivated me about Friel’s work all those years ago hung potently over a different theatrical scenario, Caryl Churchill’s latest work “Escaped Alone”, which received its NZ premiere in Wellington on Saturday (11th March), and which I saw on Tuesday evening at Circa Theatre. From a disjointed sequence of backyard exchanges between a group of women, three friends and a passing neighbour built up sinewy strands which gradually grew from beneath the myriad of topics brushed onto the dialogue’s canvas like so many wisps of paint. We weren’t allowed to let any detail slip, however trivial or elliptical, as something which seemed incidental at first would occasionally be opened up like a door or a window, becoming a view of or portal towards something hitherto concealed, something which threatened to fill the vistas with a private fear or near apocalyptic horror.

For the four women the talk centred on trivialities and circled around unspoken things, as if all were like friendly, domesticated jackals probing unseen carcasses, very occasionally showing teeth, but mostly keeping on the move. From this spin of interaction, the first to break cover was Sally (played by Irene Wood) who suddenly freeze-framed at the thought of cats, airing her fears in mounting waves of compounded horror. After this came Jane Waddell’s Lena, who bravely and resolutely chanced her all, broke out of her shell and fronted up to her own depressive state of fearfully-burgeoning inactivity – and finally there was Carmel McGlone’s Vi, squarely eyeballing her friends’ not altogether supportive raising-up of a ghost bearing the trauma of a violent domestic incident between her and her husband resulting in his death at her hand. Thus exposed, these individual strands multi-tasked as trip-wires, gallows-nooses, anchor-chains, life-lines and jungle vines, as each woman wrestled with or swung from each in turn, dealing with their private struggles and displaying fear, resolve and strength as required.

Seemingly not quite “in the swim” of things at first, but making an effort to get to the pitch of the exchanges was Mrs Jarrett, the passing neighbour, part-invitee to the gathering and part-spontaneous gate-crasher (laconically played by Ginette McDonald). But then, without any warning or invitation she silenced the talk by standing up and stepping across and into a kind of gloom-induced vortex of oracular space lit by mysterious patternings. In matter-of-fact “voice of history” tones she began to recount descriptions of the most catastrophic upheavals and dystopian societal behaviours surpassing all previous instances known of “human inhumanity’ in their horror and cold-blooded uncaring cruelty.

These utterances became increasingly bizarre over each of several episodes, as worst-case scenarios joined forces with absurdities, relished all the more by McDonald’s “and that’s not the worst of it….” delivery. Eventually even Mrs Jarrett herself was momentarily transfixed from within, but by nothing that seemed to cohere, except what was suggested by the words “terrible rage” repeated by the character in a frightening crescendo. What prompted this could have been anything – and in the light of the apocalyptic atrocities she’d described as the oracle, her incoherence as her “normal” self was, somehow, even more disturbing than were the phobic and/or traumatic scenarios outlined by her companions.

By this time my initial, fetched-up memories of the parallel time-frames of my long-ago Irish play were well-and-truly overlaid by the complexities of Churchill’s view of the human condition, individuals besieged by foes without and within, and consciousness visited by “ghosts of Christmasses to come” bearing unpalatable tidings of civilisation’s impending dissolution. But as Brian Friel designated his doomed lovers as “Winners” in that aforementioned one-act play’s title, so here in “Escaped Alone” do the four women each emerge, albeit painfully and experience-ravaged, as “winners” by their own lights. They’re all obviously survivors, and their achievement even has a group anthem, here a slickly-harmonised rendition of the 1960s pop-song “Da Do Ron, Ron”, which completely dominated a whole swinging, foot-tapping sequence of the play! Elsewhere, Gareth Farr’s cool, anecdotal music fitted the production’s ambiences hand-in-glove, as notable for the silences it framed as for its own aural wallpaper voice aiding and abetting the mood of lives some of whose sequences seemed like rhythms measured out by coffee-spoons.

Both the playwright and the people involved with this production of “Escaped Alone” nailed fast my sensibilities, adroitly handling the balance of what seemed “real” alongside what seemed “imagined”, and presenting the contrasts between the two as symptomatic of the puzzle proposed in Pontius Pilate’s famous question to Jesus Christ – “What is truth?” And though Caryl Churchill wrote this play before the triumph of Trumpery and the burgeoning worldwide crystallisation of the concept of “fake news”, the character of Mrs Jarrett in her “oracular mode” seemed equally as potent as a receptacle for the promulgation of untruths served up as titillating sensation by way of rendering news as “entertainment” – certainly Ginette McDonald’s character while in these pronouncement modes seemed to drift into a space on the stage without proper substance, as if she had become an image on a computer or tv monitor.

Susan Wilson’s production in Circa Two’s intimate spaces was as confrontational as it needed to be within an “ordinary/fabulous relationship” of outward everyday functionality and concealed terror/agony/grief. Each character’s individual mind-spaces of trauma could have been further intensified by technical means (lighting, sound effects), especially Mrs Jarrett’s mind-boggling prophetic/absurdist sequences – except that this may have fatally estranged those relativities of order and chaos – they needed to be held in touch rather than become ends in themselves; and the direction and the acting performances adroitly kept those unities, those multi-faceted strands, connected.

We warmed to each of the personalities and took heart at their grit and determination to go on with their outwardly routine and inwardly desperate lives – like Voltaire’s Candide, making sense of life by simply making the garden grow – and the play’s final scene, an almost pantheistic appreciation of a beautiful late-afternoon seemed a kind of heart-warming apotheosis of ordinary existence, one to put alongside the “Da Do Ron Ron” anthem in its “We know what it’s like for you as well” message. Be it as a Cassandra-like prophetess, a Candide-like homespun philosopher, or a Tin Pan Alley girl-group balladeer, Caryl Churchill’s voice speaks volumes in “Escaped Alone”, the play’s moments per minute delivered tellingly and sure-footedly by Circa’s all-star cast and director.

Caryl Churchill’s “Escaped Alone” plays at Circa Theatre, Wellington until the 8th of April.

NZ Opera’s Mikado contentious but “not to be missed”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Mikado
Libretto by W.S. Gilbert
Music by Sir Arthur Sullivan
(New orchestrations by Eric Wetherell)

Director: Stuart Maunder
Conductor: Isaac Hayward
Production Designer: Simone Romaniuk

Cast: The Mikado (James Clayton)
Nanki-Poo (Kanen Breen)
Ko-Ko (Byron Coll)
Pish-Tush (Robert Tucker)
Pooh-Bah (Andrew Collis)
Yum-Yum (Amelia Berry)
Pitti-Sing (Anna Dowsley)
Peep-Bo (Barbara Graham)
Katisha (Helen Medlyn)

Freemasons NZ Opera Ensemble Chorus
Orchestra Wellington

Wellington Opera House

Saturday, 25th February (evening)

When W.S.Gilbert’s ornamental Japanese sword fell off the wall of his study while he was turning over in his mind ideas for his latest operatic collaboration with Sir Arthur Sullivan, The Mikado was born – or so all the G&S history books tell us. In fact, there happened to be a vogue for japonaiserie in England at the time Mikado first hit the stage, instigated some years before by artists like Whistler and Rosetti with oriental prints on ricepaper, and images of beautiful Japanese women, a fascination that reached its height in the 1880s. In fact, London’s Daily Telegraph proclaimed at the time that “We are all being more or less Japanned,” and commented on the phenomenon of “the quaint art of a strange people who are getting rid of their national characteristics as fast as they can……..receiving from us that form of homage which the proverb describes as “the sincerest form of flattery””.

It can be seen from this that whatever “cultural appropriation” of oriental styles, fashions and objects d’art by the West was taking place, the process was being reproduced in reverse, with a rapid and efficient “Westernisation” of Japan in particular. But it’s a process that, if anything has burgeoned in recent times, with the all-pervading influences of globalisation in practically every country in the world to a greater or lesser extent. It’s difficult to ascribe any kind of judgement of “cultural exploitation” to situations whose characteristic mode seems like some kind of “boots-and-all” exchange, which makes the recent comments in the press and on radio regarding NZ Opera’s allegedly “racist” current production of “The Mikado” seem to me more like instances of PC imploding in certain people’s sensibilities rather than reportage of shock, horror and outrage on a widespread scale.

Of course, individuals are entitled to their own opinions – and questions of cultural piracy and associated exploitations have a fascinating fluidity of application when it comes to the question of boundaries deemed generally desirable by society at large. But what a recent article in the Washington Post called “the new war on appropriation” highlights the problem for people from one culture who would like to “experience” or even participate in aspects of another, and risk criticism in doing so from what are called “the new culture cops”……see: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/21/to-the-new-culture-cops-everything-is-appropriation/
(alternatively, read the same article reproduced at the foot of this review)……

Mikado has, at certain earlier times, been a bit of a hot potato, actually – as long ago as 1907 the show was temporarily banned in Britain by the Lord Chamberlain, for fear of offending the newly-assertive Japanese government, whose military forces had freshly and successfully fought a war with Russia, and whose representative, one Prince Fushimi, was visiting Britain at the time. The then-touring D’Oyly Carte Company decided to defy the ban and perform the opera in Sheffield, an event to which the newspaper “The Daily Mail” with a canny eye on the interest of prospective readers, invited one Mr. K.Sugimura, the visiting special correspondent of a Tokyo newspaper, Asahi, who was reporting on the Prince’s tour, to attend the performance, and criticise the show “as frankly as possible”. Below is part of the correspondent’s report:

“I am deeply and pleasingly disappointed. I came to Sheffield expecting to discover real insults to my countrymen. I find bright music and much fun, but I could not find the insults. I laughed and laughed very heartily.I enjoyed the music: I envy the nation possessing such music. The only part of the play to which objection might be taken by some is the presentation of the Mikado on the stage as a comic character. This would be impossible in Japan, where my countrymen regard the person of the Emperor as too high for such treatment. Yet, even with us, one of our most famous novelists, Saikaku, of the Genroku period, did treat the figure of the Emperor humorously, describing one of his characters as the Emperor Doll. That novel is still circulated in Japan. It has not been prohibited there…….
Of course the play shows quite an imaginary world, not in the least bit like Japan. I had a pleasant evening, and I consider that the English people, in withdrawing this play lest Japan should be offended, are crediting my country with needless readiness to take offence…….”

In recent years there have been charges levelled against both various productions and the show itself of “catering to fetish impulses which reduce the Japanese culture to an object of curiosity”, of “dehumanizing an entire race of people through yellowface stage and screen portrayals”, and of “laughing downwards at a voiceless minority ‘other’, using the Japanese setting as an excuse for cheap gags.” My feeling about the current NZ Opera production in relation to these charges was that, in the first instance it used the staging’s quasi-Japanese culture settings to create colour, atmosphere and a sense of unreality in a way that perfectly served the original dramatist’s intentions, that of attractively and exotically underlining the powerful satirical element of the show’s message.

As for the much-maligned “yellowface” aspect of oriental depiction, there was more “whiteface” than anything in the very overtly Japanese portrayal of Helen Medlyn’s Katisha, the Mikado’s “daughter-in-law elect”. However, for me the stylised makeup reflected the age-old technique of a “mask”, temporarily concealing a character’s more covert characteristics and attitudes, attributes which were demonstrated all too humanly and powerfully in this present portrayal. Finally, the charge of ridiculing a “voiceless minority” seemed to me blunted by the production’s clear delineation of various empowering and insightful chorus lines such as “If you think we are worked by strings…..You don’t understand these things…….” in the opening scene, and the schoolgirls’ whimsical wonderment at the mysteries of the world in their opening chorus “We wonder, how we wonder, what on earth the world can be….”,, and, finally, the choruses’ knowing and whimsical responses to the three commentators describing the execution of the hapless “criminal” to the Mikado – no mere parroting of the refrains, here, but knowing and gently mocking ironies: e.g – “This haughty youth, he speaks the truth, whenever he finds it pays….”

Away with all of this polemic, and its all-too-subjective arguments! – time now for some all-too-subjective analysis and appreciation of the performance!

Straightaway the opening sounds engaged our sensibilities, with conductor Isaac Hayward plunging us straight into the opera, and doing away with the Overture (not by Sullivan in any case, but merely a “stitching together” of the work’s favourite tunes by his assistant, Hamilton Clarke). As well, there were various orchestral retouchings throughout, the work of ex-BBC conductor Eric Wetherell, designed to scale down the orchestral ambiences and make it easier for the singers to be heard. As befits the standards of orchestral execution we’ve come to expect from Orchestra Wellington, the playing, both in general terms and in the matter of individual detailing, was an absolute delight throughout!

For the rest, the work was presented pretty well complete, EXCEPT that the production seemed to regard a couple of Act Two vocal ensemble numbers as “fair game”, to my intense disappointment, cutting the second verse of “Brightly dawns our Wedding Day”, and, what was worse, completely excising the equally wonderful “See How the Fates”, with its wonderfully contradictory lines “Happy, undeserving A!” and “Wretched, meritorious B!” – oh well, as Gilbert himself wrote for Nanki-Poo in the first Act – “Modified rapture!”……..

I thought the chorus work just superb – from the resplendently-garbed men (old-fashioned waistcoats with Japanese-styled hakama (pants) we got everything the words had to offer us from the opening “If you want to know who we are”, matching their word-pointing with both movements ands attitudes in a wholly delightful way. More controversially, the women were garbed in what seemed like the Harajuku, “Hello Kitty” style currently in vogue in Japan (representations far more deserving of feminist-influenced eyebrow-raising, I would have thought, than of heavy-handed, “holier-than-thou” cultural appropriation responses), but their response to the text certainly made the most of its formative, rite-of-passage word-images – “Each a little bit afraid is, wondering what the world can be…”, and later, relishing the prospect of one of them, Yum-Yum, taking those first steps into womanhood, in this case via the age-old ceremony of marriage – “Art and Nature thus allied, go to make a pretty bride…” – beautifully and richly voiced.

As for the cast, we were galvanised at the start by director Stuart Maunder’s announcement that, due to New Zealand tenor Jonathan Abernathy’s sudden indisposition, his place in the role of Nanki-Poo, the Mikado’s disguised son, was to be taken at extremely short notice by an Australian singer, Konen Breen. As it turned out, this “Lord High Substitute” performed the role (after ONE rehearsal, so we were told) with tremendous aplomb, as if he had been doing a run of fifty-plus performances! – I thought his somewhat gauche, nerd-turned-superhero portrayal thoroughly engaging, even if there still seemed some vestiges in his tones of the character we were told he’d recently been playing, which was Mime in Wagner’s “Ring” – his voice had more of an “edge” to it that I would have liked in the role’s more lyrical places. But what a trouper! – hats off and full marks!

It’s a classic “ensemble opera” though, and no one character is allowed to dominate to an extent that they’re a “diminutioner”, though pride of place at the curtain-call was rightly given the Ko-Ko of Byron Coll, known for his various character roles both on stage and screen. He made the most of his comic opportunities in portraying a classic “Chauncey Gardiner-like” figure making good through corrupt practices of local government. His British regional accent added a different kind of exoticism to the production’s ambience ( certainly an amusing foil for Andrew Collis’s hilariously toffee-nosed Pooh-Bah!), and his delivery of the lines had for me an attractive whimsicality which highlighted the droll humour, though on one or two occasions his words were too rushed to capture the essence of the jokes! His interaction with Helen Medlyn’s Katisha throughout the “Tit Willow” sequences was sheer delight.
Andrew Collis’s aforementioned Pooh-Bah brought just the right mix of gravitas and pomposity to a role whose lines are among the best written by Gilbert – “I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmic primordial atomic globule” – and which lay bare the covert, world-wide processes of bureaucratic and political corruption – “I also retail State Secrets at a very low figure”…..Collis’s sonorous baritone brought to life vignettes such as his description of the behaviour of a criminal’s severed head post-execution – “It clearly knew the deference due to a man of pedigree….”

I also enjoyed the bustling, vigorous and full-voiced pragmatism of Robert Tucker’s Pish-Tush, both in his articulate explanation to Nanki-Poo of the rise to prominence of “Ko-Ko, a cheap tailor”, in “Our Great Mikado, virtuous man”, and for his part in the wonderful trio “I am so proud”, in which the agitated Ko-Ko contemplates the alarming prospect of having to cut HIS OWN head off to appease the wishes of the Mikado! This trio, incidentally, was one of several places where I thought the production needed to bring the singers right up to the footlights so we in the audience could have gotten more of the individual flavours of the number’s separate but wholly intertwined thought processes – unfortunately it all happened, for me, too far back!

Completely commanding the stage in his scenes was James Clayton’s Mikado – one of the best I’ve encountered. Seemingly echt-Japanese in his regalia, he looked and sounded the part with utter conviction, speaking and singing every word of his role with razor-sharp clarity, and transfixing the ensemble with his gittering eye (the exception, of course, being the fearsome Katisha, his “daughter-in-law elect”!). But what a pity we weren’t able to also enjoy his contribution to “See how the fates”, as much for his stellar voice-quality as for a corrective of the omission’s further reducing his already sparse singing-role!

Though in accordance with their “college-girl” status at the story’s beginning I thought the somewhat gauche, “jolly-hockey-sticks” manner and deportment of all “Three Little Maids from School” dramatically at odds with certain of their later interactions, such as Anna Dowsley’s determined and forthright portrayal of Pitti-Sing bravely confronting the vengeful Katisha in search of Nanki-Poo, her betrothed. And as Yum-Yum, Amelia Berry’s singing of “The sun whose rays” was so outstanding in its outpouring of beauty and sensitivity it all seemed a world away from the sensibility of the giggly schoolgirl whom we first encountered, even if she quickly “grew up” in her “Were you not to Ko-Ko plighted” scene with Nanki-Poo. Of the Three Little Maids, the dipsiest was, I thought, Barbara Graham’s gloriously vacuous Peep-Bo, who made the most of her relatively few chances to shine with a deliciously artless reference to her sister’s wedding-day being “happiness in all but perfection”, followed by a reference to it all being “cut short” (alluding to the bridegroom’s eventual fate at the hands of the Public Executioner!)

Finally, there was Helen Medlyn’s assumption of the role of Katisha, the elderly would-be bride of Nanki-Poo, bent upon vengeance for her loss of happiness, but finally settling for the life-sparing blandishments of the (by then!) desperate Ko-Ko. Not quite as voluminous of tone as I might have expected from previous encounters with her singing, Medlyn was nonetheless able to still command the stage on each of her entrances by dint of her sheer presence, be it as a kind of fearsome oriental harpie, or as a momentarily crushed and defeated woman – for all Gilbert’s reputed cruelty regarding his theatrical depictions of older women, his portrayal of Katisha evinces real sympathy in places and accords her with no little dignity in the throes of her “defeat” at the hands of “pink cheek, bright eye, rose lip, smooth tongue…..”

I felt there were sequences in which she (and in a particular instance, Ko-Ko) were placed too far back on the stage for the voices to really “tell”, a case in point being throughout the marvellous “There is beauty in the bellow of the blast” – the words are again so delicious, both from Katisha – “There is eloquence appalling when the lioness is roaring, or the tiger is a-lashing of his tail” – and from Ko-Ko – “There’s a fascination frantic in a ruin that’s romantic – do you think you are sufficiently decayed?” Still, Medlyn’s greatest moment, for me, was her truly affecting “The hour of gladness”, sung in response to the news that her would-be lover Nanki-Poo, was going to marry Yum-Yum. Medlyn’s singing, along with the sensitive instrumental accompaniments and the rapt attention she garnered from the entire onstage company, made for a beautiful and treasurable charge of emotion which brought a lump to this listener’s throat, even after so many hearings of this much-loved piece over the years.

So! – rather than be regarded as a dismissal of the objections raised to this and to other productions of Mikado, particularly those of recent times, I would prefer this review to be a constructive addition to a reasoned dialogue concening the issues. A number of the articles by the “dissenters” to their credit contain assertions that what is needed in this situation is awareness, understanding and sensitivity by way of discussion and expression of thoughtful opinion, whatever the individual “stance”. I hope my thoughts on the issues, be they ever so opinionated, fulfil those criteria.

Meanwhile, to all of those awaiting my final verdict concerning the show – it’s this – get to the Mikado if you can, because (as Ko-Ko might say) it’s too good to be missed!

(Wellington: Wednesday 28th February (6:30pm), Ist March (7:30pm), 2nd March (7:30pm)
Christchurch, Isaac Theatre Royal: from Tuesday 7th March (7:30pm) to Saturday 11th March)

* * * * * * * * * * * *
The Washington Post
Democracy Dies in Darkness
To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation
Their protests ignore history, chill artistic expression and hurt diversity
By Cathy Young August 21, 2015

“A few months ago, I read “The Orphan’s Tales” by Catherynne Valente. The fantasy novel draws on myths and folklore from many cultures, including, to my delight, fairy tales from my Russian childhood. Curious about the author, I looked her up online and was startled to find several social-media discussions bashing her for “cultural appropriation.”

There was a post sneering at “how she totally gets a pass to write about Slavic cultures because her husband is Russian,” with a response noting that her spouse isn’t even a proper Russian, because he has lived in the United States since age 10. In another thread, Valente was denounced for her Japanese-style LiveJournal username, yuki-onna, adopted while she lived in Japan as a military wife. In response to such criticism, a browbeaten Valente eventually dropped the “problematic” moniker.

Welcome to the new war on cultural appropriation. At one time, such critiques were leveled against truly offensive art — work that trafficked in demeaning caricatures, such as blackface, 19th-century minstrel shows or ethnological expositions, which literally put indigenous people on display, often in cages. But these accusations have become a common attack against any artist or artwork that incorporates ideas from another culture, no matter how thoughtfully or positively. A work can reinvent the material or even serve as a tribute, but no matter. If artists dabble outside their own cultural experiences, they’ve committed a creative sin.

To take just a few recent examples: After the 2013 American Music Awards, Katy Perry was criticized for dressing like a geisha while performing her hit single “Unconditionally.” Last year, Arab-American writer Randa Jarrar accused Caucasian women who practice belly dancing of “white appropriation of Eastern dance.” Daily Beast entertainment writer Amy Zimmerman wrote that pop star Iggy Azalea perpetrated “cultural crimes” by imitating African American rap styles.

And this summer, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has been dogged by charges of cultural insensitivity and racism for its “Kimono Wednesdays.” At the event, visitors were invited to try on a replica of the kimono worn by Claude Monet’s wife, Camille, in the painting “La Japonaise.” The historically accurate kimonos were made in Japan for this very purpose. Still, Asian American activists and their supporters besieged the exhibit with signs like “Try on the kimono: Learn what it’s like to be a racist imperialist today!” Others railed against “Yellow-Face @ the MFA” on Facebook. The museum eventually apologized and changed the program so that the kimonos were available for viewing only. Still, activists complained that the display invited a “creepy Orientalist gaze.”

These protests have an obvious potential to chill creativity and artistic expression. But they are equally bad for diversity, raising the troubling specter of cultural cleansing. When we attack people for stepping outside their own cultural experiences, we hinder our ability to develop empathy and cross-cultural understanding.

The concept of cultural appropriation emerged in academia in the late 1970s and 1980s as part of the scholarly critique of colonialism. By the mid-1990s, it had gained a solid place in academic discourse, particularly in the field of sociology.

Some of this critique was rightly directed at literal cultural theft — the pilfering of art and artifacts by colonial powers — or glaring injustices, such as white entertainers in the pre-civil rights years profiting off black musical styles while black performers’ careers were hobbled by racism. Critics such as Edward Said offered valuable insight into Orientalism, the West’s tendency to fetishize Asians as exotic stereotypes.

But the hunt for wrongdoing has gone run amok. The recent anti-appropriation rhetoric has targeted creative products from art to literature to clothing. Nothing is too petty for the new culture cops: I have seen them rebuke a Filipina woman who purchased a bracelet with a yin-yang symbol at a fair and earnestly discuss whether it’s appropriation to eat Japanese, Indian or Thai food. Even Selena Gomez, a Latina artist, was assailed a couple of years ago for sporting a Hindu forehead dot, or bindi, in a Bollywood-style performance.

In some social-justice quarters, the demonization of “appropriative” interests converges with ultra-reactionary ideas about racial and cultural purity. I once read an anguished blog post by a well-meaning young woman racked with doubt about her plans to pursue a graduate degree in Chinese studies; after attending a talk on cultural appropriation, she was unsure that it was morally permissible for a white person to study the field.

This is a skewed and blinkered view. Yes, most cross-fertilization has taken place in a context of unequal power. Historically, interactions between cultures often took the form of wars, colonization, forced or calamity-driven migration and subordination or even enslavement of minority groups. But it is absurd to single out the West as the only culprit. Indeed, there is a paradoxical and perverse Western-centrism in ignoring the history of Middle Eastern and Asian empires or the modern economic and cultural clout of non-Western nations — for instance, the fact that one of the top three entertainment companies in the U.S. market is Japanese-owned Sony.

It is also far from clear that the appropriation police speak for the people and communities whose cultural honor they claim to defend. The kimono protest, for instance, found little support from Japanese Americans living in the Boston area; indeed, many actively backed the museum’s exhibit, as did the Japanese consulate.

Most critics of appropriation, including some anti-kimono protesters, say they don’t oppose engagement with other cultures if it’s done in a “culturally affirming” way. A Daily Dot article admonishes that “an authentic cultural exchange should feel free and affirming, rather than plagiarizing or thieving.” A recent post on the Tumblr “This Is Not China” declares that “cultural appropriation is not merely the act of wearing or partaking in cultural symbols & practices that do not belong to you, it’s a system of exploitation & capitalisation on cultural symbols & practices that do not a) originate from b) benefit c) circle back to the culture in question.”

It makes sense to permit behaviors that encourage empathy and genuine interest while discouraging those that caricature or mock a sampled-from culture. But such litmus tests leave ample room for hair-splitting and arbitrary judgments. One blogger’s partial defense of “Kimono Wednesdays” suggests that while it was fine to let visitors try on the kimonos, allowing them to be photographed while wearing them was a step too far. This fine parsing of what crosses the line from appreciation into appropriation suggests a religion with elaborate purity tests.

What will be declared “problematic” next? Picasso’s and Matisse’s works inspired by African art? Puccini’s “Orientalist” operas, “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot”? Should we rid our homes of Japanese prints? Should I take offense at other people’s Russian nesting dolls?

And while we’re at it, why shouldn’t a wide range of cultural minorities within Western society demand control over access to their heritage, too? Can Catholics claim appropriation when religious paintings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary are exhibited in a secular context, or when movies from “The Sound of Music” to “Sister Act” use nuns for entertainment?

Appropriation is not a crime. It’s a way to breathe new life into culture. Peoples have borrowed, adopted, taken, infiltrated and reinvented from time immemorial. The medieval Japanese absorbed major elements of Chinese and Korean civilizations, while the cultural practices of modern-day Japan include such Western borrowings as a secularized and reinvented Christmas. Russian culture with its Slavic roots is also the product of Greek, Nordic, Tatar and Mongol influences — and the rapid Westernization of the elites in the 18th century. America is the ultimate blended culture.

So don’t let anyone tell you that there is art, literature or clothing that does not belong to you because of your racial, ethnic or religious identity. In other words: Appropriate away.”

Cathy Young is the author of two books, and a frequent contributor to Reason, Newsday, and RealClearPolitics.com.

Days Bay Opera does it again with Handel’s “Theodora”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HANDEL – Theodora (Oratorio in Three Acts, 1749)
(libretto by Thomas Morell)

Daysbaygarden Opera Company
Director: Rhona Fraser
Conductor: Howard Moody

Cast: William King (Valens, Roman Governor of Antioch
Maaike Christie-Beekman (Didymus, a Roman officer)
Filipe Manu (Septimus, a Roman, friend of Didymus)
Madison Nonoa (Theodora, a Christian noblewoman)
Rhona Fraser (Irene, a Christian)
John Beaglehole (a messenger)

Chorus: (Heathens/Christians) Emily Mwila, Emma Cronshaw Hunt, Sally Haywood,
Alexandra Woodhouse-Appleby, Lily Shaw, Luca Venter, Isaac Stone,
Hector McLachlan, William McElwee

Orchestra: Anne Loeser (Violin, leader), Rebecca Struthers (violin),
Victoria Jaenecke (viola), Eleanor Carter (‘cello), Richard Hardie (d-bass),
Merran Cooke, Louise Cox (oboes), David Angus (bassoon),
Mark Carter (trumpet), Howard Moody (organ)

Canna House, Day’s Bay, Wellington,
Saturday, February 11th, 2017

(Next and final performance: Thursday 16th February, at 7:30pm)

One of the pleasures of reviewing for me is fronting up to performances of music which I simply don’t know, and subsequently asking myself (sometimes in tones of amazement and disbelief) why it is I’ve never encountered this or that work before, finding it so beautiful / profound / thrilling /whatever! Thus it was with this often compelling production of Handel’s oratorio Theodora, a work the composer wrote towards the end of his creative life, and regarded it as one of the best things he’d ever done!

It didn’t get off to a very good start in 1750, the year of its first performance – the consensus of opinion is that Londoners found less favour with the idea of the martyrdom of a Christian saint than with the Old Testament stories which Handel’s previous oratorios had presented. Whatever the case it was played only three times that season, and just once during 1755 before being dropped from the repertoire for well-nigh two hundred years.

According to the work’s librettist, Thomas Morell, the composer himself declared parts of Theodora superior to anything to be found in Messiah, particularly the final chorus of Act Two “He Saw the Lovely Youth”. Naturally Handel was disappointed in the work’s poor reception, though he himself had remarked (again, according to Morell) that his rich Jewish patrons ,who had flocked to hear Judas Maccabeus a few years previously, would probably not be interested in a presentation with such “Christian” themes and characters.

Amazingly, it wasn’t until the famously provocative Peter Sellars’ revival of the work at Glyndebourne in the UK in 1998 that Theodora made a proper “comeback” to the repertoire. It ought to be remembered that this was, of course, an oratorio rather than an original stage work which was inspiring such acclaim/alarm amongst enthusiasts for both genres. Sellars’ production simply put new wine into old bottles, relating the work’s themes of religious intolerance and persecution to contemporary tyrannical practices enforced by certain modern states and rulers.

Perhaps Rhona Fraser’s Days Bay Opera production didn’t generate quite the intoxicating charge of that Glyndebourne affair, but in places it may have effectively “trumped” it! The production’s reduced scale meant the adroit use of a multi-identity chorus whose members at appropriate times merely changed their garb, which here, I thought, worked really well. The staging proclaimed its intentions during the Overture, with chorus members echoing the recent political upheavals in Europe by carrying Brexit-like “Resist” placards, before being moved on by the commando-like armed guards.

The Overture’s grand-gestured opening turned into a nicely-sprung allegro, the players delivering plenty of energy and focus which easily filled-out the performing spaces (unlike with previous Days Bay productions, we were actually inside the house this time). The first solo voice we heard was that Valens, the Roman Governor of Antioch, whose entrance was rapturously augmented by his black-leather-clad brigade, some supporters carrying signs containing the unequivocal message “Make Rome great again”, as well as the more sinister legend “Torture really works”.

William King as Valens delivered a sonorous, strongly-characterised decree, commanding that all citizens commemorate the Emperor’s natal day by taking part in Jovian rites of worship, before similarly dismissing the plea of one of his soldiers, Didymus, for tolerance towards those people who professed a different faith. King brought the same strength and sonorous tones to his threatening “Racks, gibbets, sword and fire”, underlying the contrast of intent with that of Maaike Christie-Beekman’s Didymus, whose dissenting voice expressed all the warmth and pliability of tolerance and concern for those who might fall foul of the Governor in her aria ”The raptured soul defies the sword” – Christie-Beekman threw herself with abandonment into the incredible vocal melismas of the music, despite a couple of occupational spills along the way, emerging with great credit.

I thought the contrast well-drawn between the deeply-felt conviction of Christie-Beekman’s portrayal and the divided emotions of Septimus, a fellow-soldier, sympathetic to dissent, but loyal to his duty as a soldier. Filipe Manu’s assumption of the latter most effectively expressed the character’s inner conflict, his voice securely filling out the phrases of his aria “Descend, kind Pity”, with only a pinched phrase or two drying out the voice in places, not inappropriate to the character’s feelings of stress and conflict.

Theodora’s first entrance, featuring the bright, sweet voice of Madison Nonoa, was accompanied by markedly exposed string lines, suggesting the character’s purity and even isolation in the strength of her belief. Her aria “O flatt’ring world, adieu” carried this idea into even more beautiful and rarefied realms, the singer’s tones full and fresh, voiced accurately and sensitively. Supporting her was Rhona Fraser’s Irene, and the chorus in its Christian garb (having changed sides!), with a serene and radiant “Come, Mighty Father” accompanying the ritualisting lighting of candles.

Not even the entrance of a messenger (John Beaglehole) with his warning of impending arrest of any dissenters from the governor’s edict shook the resolve of the group, with Rhona Fraser investing Irene’s “As with rosy steps the dawn” with plenty of strength and security, emboldening the chorus to give of their best in the canonic “All Pow’r in Heav’n above”, which built to radiant climaxes. The group’s defiant mood disconcerted and frustrated the arriving Septimus, whose recitative “Mistaken wretches” and subsequent aria “Dread the fruits of Christian folly” were given plenty of energy and momentum, Filipe Manu managing the difficult runs with plenty of aplomb and appropriate bluster.

In the exchanges between Theodora and Septimus which followed, each singer “caught” their character’s crisis of moment, Theodora, the captive devastated by her enslavement into prostitution at “Venus’ Temple” as a punishment for her defiance of the Governor’s edict, and Septimus, her captor, torn between sympathy and a soldier’s duty. Madison Nonoa’s reply was to pour all of her artistry and beauty of voice into her character for one of the composer’s most beautiful arias “Angels ever bright and fair”, aided by sensitive and radiant instrumental support from conductor and players – a treasurable and memorable scene.

Didymus’s shock at being told of Theodora’s fate culminated in his resolve to rescue her, in a brilliant show of recitative “Kind Heav’n, if virtue be thy care” combined with aria “With courage fire me”, Christie-Beekman’s more vigorous sequences excitingly counterpointed a florid violin obbligato solo, generating tremendous excitement. It remained for the chorus to invest Didymus with the Almighty’s blessings (a wonderful “Go generous, pious youth”, as he changed his garb for that of a Christian, before setting off to rescue Theodora.

So ended Act One – to go through and “fine-tooth-comb” the rest of the performance would bog the reader of this review down in largely repetitive detail. Each singer by this time had amply demonstrated what they could do and how well they could”flesh out” each character, and no-one disappointed in those terms. While the production was in many ways “abstracted” by dint of its intimacy and confined spaces, Rhona Fraser’s direction firmly held to the essentials of dramatic interaction, allowing the singers sufficient theatricality to flesh out their characters in a totally convincing way. I did feel the chorus members seemed rather more “at home” with the pagan revels than with the Christian rituals, though that seemed a Miltonian problem as much as anything else, a matter for human nature to answer to!

Enough to say that the playing out of the drama was convincingly achieved, with a fine show of orgiastic revelry from Valens’ leather-clad entourage at the beginning of Act Two, the excesses of which were finely counter-balanced by the same singers’ in their opposing roles as the Christians at the “changeover”of Acts Two and Three (the composer described the lamenting chorus “He saw a lovely youth” as belonging to Act Two, though here the sequence in what the group imagines at first to be the death of Didymus was placed at Act Three’s beginning – but no wonder the composer himself had a high opinion of the piece!

I was puzzled by a curiously inert chorus response to the appearance of Theodora, disguised in Didymus’s uniform, in which she had escaped – however, the ensemble roused itself sufficiently to convey most effectively both the Heathens’ wonder at the dignity of the lovers’ response to their own deaths (“How strange their ends, and yet how glorious”), and the final Christian affirmation of the work – “O Love divine, thou source of fame”. here a properly and appropriately moving conclusion.

Each character brought a comparable intensity to his or her role in this playing-out of the story – William King’s Valens, drunk with power during the revels of Act Two, remained an imperious and implaccable presence in the face of pleas from various quarters to spare the lovers’ lives. The agony of Didymus’s soldier friend Septimus became more and more apparent as the denoument approached, from expressing his support for Theodora and Didymus in Act Two, to pleading to Valens for their lives in the final scene. Filipe Manu here brought a full and heartfelt outpouring of tones in “From virtue springs each generous deed”, ennobling his character further in doing so. And the Irene of Rhona Fraser, though following a less tortured moral trajectory, rewarded her part with steady, well-rounded vocalising, readily conveying her real human sympathy and conviction of faith in “Defend her, Heav’n”, sung over Theodora as a prisoner in Act Two, and her freshly-wrought and unquenchable hope in her release in “New Seeds of joy come crowding on” in the final Act, just before the final tragedy’s enactment.

Ultimately it was left to the two main protagonists to properly “carry” the essence of the story’s dramatic and emotional weight, with the help of all those mentioned, along with the instrumentalists and conductor. Maaike Christie-Beekman’s Didymus’s journeyings through what seemed like an entire gamut of emotion to a fulfilment of love reunited in death was classic operatic stuff, comparable in impact to other, later versions of the same, such as that of another soldier, Radames, in Verdi’s Aida, or the love-death of the knight in Wagner’s Tristan, each of these characters confident of progressing towards a loving reunion in another life.

Madison Nonoa’s Theodora was the object of Didymus’s desire, though less passive than that description suggests, her character embracing the idea of salvation in tandem with her once-heathen lover, for whom she was ready to sacrifice her life alone. Handel responded to these characters and their situations with some of his greatest music (he himself thought so too!), nowhere more exquisite than throughout Act Two where the lovers are reunited after Theodora’s arrest when Didymus with his friend Septimus’s help finds her in prison. Didymus sings his enamoured “Sweet Rose and Lily”, then tells Theodora he has come to help her escape though Theodora would rather Didymus kill her and release her unto “gentle death”. Didymus rejects her plea – “Shall I destroy the life I came to save?” and urges her to trade places with him and take his clothes and escape – but Theodora laments “Ah, what is liberty or life to me that Didymus must purchase with his own?” – such heartfelt stuff, and here, by turns, so gutsily and sensitively articulated, voiced and, above all, sung!

The pair’s subsequent duet in which their absolute trust in one another and in the mercy of a Higher Power, enabling them to meet “again on earth” or “in heaven” brought forth an exquisite intertwining of impulse, here full-blooded and forceful, and then rapt and breath-catching, an interaction that came full circle in the final scene of Act Three with their farewell duet “Thither let our hears aspire”. It was singing, and playing, which truly for we in the audience “woke the song and tuned the lyre”, and left us marvelling at the seeming endless invention of its composer. It just went to show that, for our delight, the joys of such music and, as here, its sensitive and whole-hearted presentation, are endless. In the midst of that realisation I felt truly grateful to be there, to Howard Moody, the conductor, to Rhona Fraser the producer, and to all who made the presentation of this glorious music such a profound and for me unforgettable experience.