Author: Peter Mechen

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.

Circa rumbles and dances with Roger Hall’s Jack and the Beanstalk

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre Presents:
Roger Hall’s JACK AND THE BEANSTALK – The Pantomime
Songs by Paul Jenden and Michael Nicholas Williams

Musical Direction by Michael Nicholas Williams
Directed by Susan Wilson

Cast: Hilda Hardup (Jack’s mother)/Aunty Pam – Gavin Rutherford
Jack – Barnaby Olson
Betsy the Cow/Goosey the Goose – Bronwyn Turei
Butcher Bob/Immigration Officer – Andrew Laing
Mrs Virus/Gertie Grabber – Emma Kinane
Claude Back/Postman – Jonathan Morgan
Smiley Virus – Jessica Old
The Giant – Himself
Freedom Campers – The Cast

Production: Ian Harman (set design), Jennifer Lal (lighting)
Sheila Horton (costumes), Leigh Evans (musical staging)

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Tuesday 22nd November, 2016
(running until December 20th)

Pantomime is surely one of the most life-enhancing experiences theatre can offer, and Circa Theatre’s current Jack and the Beanstalk production ticks all the boxes that matter in the genre – it wasn’t long after the show’s beginning before the harshest, most vocal critics in the audience were soon caught up in it all, making manifest their involvement in the tale’s twists and turns, to the added delight, I might say, of their rather less demonstrative, though still appreciative, older companions.

Though Roger Hall’s script had some occasional over-worn moments, it was enlivened by the unflagging energy and interactive spark of the characters, buoyed up by frequent topical references to circumstances in the “real world”, some of which of course made the stage goings-on seem eminently sane by comparison! Indigenous touches like the chorus’s opening song making references to early-morning tuis and moreporks gradually became politicised by Jack’s Mother, Hilda Hardup (Gavin Rutherford’s a superbly-sustained portrayal throughout) in her following song about the depressed state of village life – “miserable and sad”, mercilessly tagging the family’s location as “Lesterville, until recently Wade-Browntown”.

Sensibilities of all ages were further tickled by the uneasy thrill of occasional seismic “noises-off” emanating from different regions, and explanations related to the same, an audience favourite being “Gerry Brownlee suffering from a nasty bout of liquefaction” (I actually became fearful for the well-being of the person sitting next to me over THAT one!). And almost, but not quite, in the league of a “strip-o-gram” was NZ Post’s outlandish “go-go-dancer” delivery of a parcel to Mother, whose self-confessed response to social privation was to become an on-line shop-a-holic!

The age-old storytelling theme of poverty and the business of trying to make ends meet has, of course become more of a reality for a good many New Zealanders in recent times – the frequent appearances of “Claude Back” the repossession man (Jonathan Morgan a kind of surreal “trickster”, his aspect and stage movements beautifully Chaplin-esque), the nouveau-riche landlady Mrs Virus, (Emma Kinane, elegantly chirruping her personal wealth-creation agenda) and Butcher Bob, merely wanting his money for sausages (Andrew Laing, adroitly fusing touches of a “mad-butcher” manner with more pressing very real small-business concerns) entertained our sensibilities with their actions, while bringing home to us the plight of their “victims” such as Jack and his Mother, the people whom the capitalist system regards as “losers”.

Speaking of our eponymous hero, Jack embodied all the archetypal fairy-tale qualities of a young, self-effacing, lovable, if somewhat indolent and disorganised lad-about-town – someone upon whom fortune will surely and deservedly come to shine! Here, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow, Barnaby Olson’s artlessly engaging portrayal winning our hearts on all the above fronts, and engaging our sympathies in his quest to secure the affections of his would-be sweetheart, the self-regarding Smiley Virus, with actress Jessica Old’s “bouncing bimbo” selfies-saturated entrance as Smiley almost worthy of a 1930s Hollywood talkies spectacular!

Besides his mother and Smiley, Jack’s other meaningful relationship is with Betsy the Cow, here given a virtuoso performance by Bronwyn Turei which transformed the beast’s normally passive character into a wannabe starlet, desperate for her gifts to be recognised – the cow’s almost erogenous response to being milked by Jack produced great amusement as well as a surprising end-result! Later in the story Turei again made something theatrically distinctive of Betsy’s stratospheric “mirror-image”, Goosey, the Giant’s source of wealth as the producer of the famed Golden Eggs – all most enjoyable!

Throughout the action the energies, the zany characterisations and the outlandish one-liners kept our attentions stoked, with the songs and their stage realisations providing the requisite contrast with the stand-and-deliver pronouncements of the script, Leigh Evans’ on-the-spot choreography and Michael Nicholas Williams’ unflagging musical zest giving the performers’ trajectories surety and purpose. And, corny though some of the pronouncements were, the performers made both context and surprise work to the ideas’ advantage time and time again, as when the glamorous Smiley arrived to give Betsy the Cow a “makeover” in preparation for the Market – (whoops! – “show”!), with the throwaway line, “keeping up with the Cowdashians!”.

Important, too that the local environs were utilised in this process, enabling that all-important phenomenon of a group of people laughing at themselves and registering life’s basic absurdities – the second-half ascent to the Giant’s upper realms simply but most effectively realised , with mists and strange, evocative lighting employed to create a sense of “the heights” – one of the characters summed up the transformation with the words “it’s other worldly! – a bit like Stokes Valley!”

Ultimately, the show’s success depended upon palpable engagement with the audience – and this was achieved throughout most heart-warmingly, and nowhere more so than at the beginning of the second half, when the audience’s children were invited onto the stage for a kind of “rumble”, singing and dancing to the song “It’s a pantomime world”, which went down well on both sides of the footlights.

Elsewhere I enjoyed the creative inspiration, communication skills and technical know-how on show, brought out ahead of impressive spectacle and wow-factor jiggery-pokery, thus requiring we in the audience to be actively engaged rather than passively observing. Still remembering how open-mouthedly magical theatrical performance of any kind was for me as a child, I thought Susan Wilson’s direction of the revamped classic tale similarly and successfully engaged its youthful clientele, and took people such as myself back some of the way to those same realms of delight and wonderment.

Camerata – graceful and high-spirited music-making at St.Peter’s Church, Willis St.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Camerata presents:  HAYDN IN THE CHURCH

PIERNÉ – Serenade for Strings Op.7
ELGAR – Serenade for Strings in E Minor  Op.20
HAYDN – Symphony No.3 in G Major Hob.1:3

Camerata
Anne Loeser (leader)
Sarah Marten, Vivian Stephens, Emily Wilby (Ist violins)
HyeWon Kim, Liz Pritchett, Alix Schultze, Catherine Ireland (2nd violins)
Victoria Jaenecke, Hywel Williams (violas)
Jane Brown, Bethany Angus (‘cellos)
Lesley Hooson (d.bass)
Calvin Scott, Jane Bulpin (oboes)
Peter Lamb (bassoon)
Gregory Hill, Vivien Reid (horns)

St.Peter’s Anglican Church, Willis St.,
Wellington

Friday, 11th November, 2016

Camerata violinist Liz Pritchett opened proceedings by welcoming us to St.Peter’s Church, introducing the ensemble’s leader Anne Loeser and the rest of the Camerata players, and bidding us enjoy the music we were about to hear.  First up was something of a concert rarity, a Serenade by the French composer Gabriel Pierné, whose music I’d seldom heard, apart from a Piano Concerto which I’d encountered in a “Romantic Piano Concerti” series on the Hyperion CD label. After reading several thumbnail biographies of the composer, I’m left wondering why it is that his music isn’t better-known today, as it seems to have been highly-regarded in his lifetime.

I did think the programme note writer(s)’ description of the Serenade as a “charming piece of fluff” a tad dismissive – the music seemed to be beautifully crafted, the line airborne and light as gossamer, with some lovely interactive passages in thirds, and concluding with a wistful ascending valedictory sigh. In places I was reminded of a similar charmer, English composer Anthony Collins’ Vanity Fair, another piece whose simplicity evokes a world of treasurable lyrical expression. I thought the playing “caught” a good deal of this strain, the melodic line beautifully, but not overly-phrased, nor too heavily perfumed, the touch remaining admirably light to the end.

Having said all of this it was obvious within a few measures of the Elgar work that here was a far deeper and profounder vein of feeling being recreated for us, at once a sense of some private longing being held and nursed and carried with great dignity – those sturdy strides, so characteristic of the composer, grew in confidence and purpose as the lyrical lines of the work ascended and intensified, the solo violin taking the lead in places for the ensembled group to follow, phrase by phrase, layer upon layer, here achieving expressive frisson with great simplicity and lack of sentimentality. If for me the impulsive surges still seemed a shade understated here, it was all still sensitively played and shaped, right to the music’s conclusion.

How beautifully the ensemble “held” the slow movement’s first note, delicately accenting the highest note of the phrase, and making each sequence afterwards like a sigh! The melody was then given simply and unaffectedly, perhaps to a fault – I could imagine a deeper sense of “hurt” in places – but the minor-key sequences were coloured with a properly plaintive elegiac quality, the cellos articulating a lovely answering phrase at one point, and the upper strings holding back their descending tones in preparation for the opening’s reprise. At first judiciously “contained” by the players, the melody was allowed to expand, the players building up the intensities with each ascent, and then going with the music’s “dying fall” – a lovely moment was the upper strings’ rejoiner of the opening theme over throbbing accompaniments, the tones then trailing off into rapt silences.

The finale’s opening, wind-blown phrases were here beautifully brushed in, with the occasional “open-string” sound filling-out the spaces and taking the music well-and-truly outdoors. How the players enjoyed the great ascending phrases of the main theme, the music having come into its own and claimed its territories with wonderful surety. And how magically it all seemed to change mid-course, and hearken back to the first movement with a mixture of regret, resignation and after-glow, the music’s “stride” confidently returning and leading the music home to where the heart is. I thought the striding passages wanted a touch more girth and earthiness here, but the music’s “envoy” aspect was well-served at the end, with the last few chords so resonantly sounded and left to linger in the memory.

After this, we were given notice of the youthful genius of Joseph Haydn, hearing his Symphony No.3, no less, written around 1760-62 during his period of service with the Esterházy family at their various residences in rural Austria and Hungary. This was one of the first four-movement symphonies, and the addition of a dance-movement (Minuet) and something called a “Trio” (named thus because it was a sequence often played by three instruments only), would probably have intrigued those who bothered to actually LISTEN to the music at the time! Interestingly, I found a website which “ranked” all 104 Haydn Symphonies, and which contentiously relegated some reasonably high-numbered ones to the doldrums (No.85 “La Reine” comes in 97th, for example!) – while this evening’s cheery, quirky effort performed creditably in 79th place – all, of course, a matter of opinion, and, as one might imagine, occasioning numerous on-line responses of the “what lame performances were you listening to?” variety…..

Camerata’s playing, I thought, served the music’s cause splendidly – I enjoyed the crackling energy at the work’s beginning, the lines bristling with ideas, horns and oboes adding colour, and bassoon and double bass propelling the argument forward with gusto. The ensemble’s modest numbers kept the music in a kind of “authentic” scale, while the phrasing of the strings and their tonal production enhanced the argument’s clarity though keeping an ambient warmth and flexibility, and avoiding the horrid nasal acerbity of some “period” realisations I’ve encountered. The second movement’s strings-only Andante moderato brought a touch of minor-key melancholy to the proceedings, the composer’s invention beautifully conveying the music’s depth of feeling, realised here with a sure sense of character.

The new-fangled Minuet conveyed both ceremony and sentiment, the horns adding to the splendour, while the Trio sequence featured a playful, tumbling three-way interaction between strings, winds and horns, leading to a reprise of the opening dance, whose poise and elegance contrasted beautifully with the finale’s “running” opening. Though the horns momentarily “blooped” at the beginning (they were to make amends), they contributed in no uncertain terms to the remainder’s energy and bustle. Fugal in character, the music reminded me a good deal of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony (though as Brahms would have doubtless pointed out, “Any jackass could have seen that!”).

Leader Anne Loeser, after thanking us for coming to the concert at the music’s first-time conclusion, then announced that the ensemble would repeat the finale of the symphony, to make up for the paucity of repeats in the movement. It gave us the opportunity to enjoy all over again the young Haydn’s contrapuntal skills, and allowed the horns to show us what they could really do with their opening phrases, securing their notes this time round with flying colours!

Bravo, Camerata – let us hear a good deal more of you!

Tudor Consort’s 30th Anniversary Concert a selection of treasures

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Tudor Consort presents:
LOVE, DEATH, AND THE MAIDEN
(30th Anniversary Concert Series 2016)

Music by FINZI, BRUMEL, CLEMENS NON PAPA, WILLAN, RORE, LASSUS, LENNON/MCCARTNEY, GUERRERO, PALESTRINA, MOUTON, PEARSALL, VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The Tudor Consort: Amanda Barclay, Jane McKinlay, Anna Sedcole, Phoebe Sparrow,Emma Drysdale, Michelle Harrison, Megan Hurnard, Sabrina Malcolm,John Beaglehole, Jon Ruxton, Richard Taylor, Simon Christie, David Houston, Timothy Hurd QSM, Matthew Painter
Music Director: Michael Stewart

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Saturday 5th November, 2016

This concert marked something of a return to the “helm” for the Tudor Consort’s Music Director, Michael Stewart, who’s been working behind the scenes for most of the past year, preparing and pre-rehearsing the ensemble for its concerts with no fewer than three guest conductors. Unfortunately I didn’t make it to the pre-concert talk, which perhaps might have explained more about the “vive la difference” choices for this evening’s programme, though I’m certainly not complaining at the panoply of riches we were offered throughout the concert.

Basically, the first half of the programme presented music written to celebrate love, featured in both sacred and secular contexts. The “sacred” were expressions of fervent homage made to the Blessed Virgin (using plenty of pagan-goddess imagery, incidentally), while the “secular” depicted the associated joys and sufferings of human love.

Apart from the opening “Ave Virgo Sanctissima” by Francisco Guererro, which revisited the “Marian-worship” of the concert’s first part, the second half confronted love-related suffering, death and loss, again setting sacred and secular side-by side, and concluding with a ghostly visitation representing a kind of resonant echo from the spirit world.

Doubtless, the euphoric opening to the programme, with Gerald Finzi’s scalp-prickling “My spirit sang all day”, was intended as a kind of “mirror” image to the concert’s conclusion, Vaughan Williams’ “The Lover’s Ghost”, whose forcefully spectral climax seemed almost to mock any joy and happiness promised by the blandishments of love.

Any such hollow finalities were certainly far from the verdant thrustings of the voices here proclaiming the elation of joyful love, Finzi’s writing capturing the text’s delighting in a lover’s besottment in no uncertain terms. We were galvanised, caught up in what seemed like a rush of blood to the head, by the Consort’s full-throated performance.

By contrast, the performance of Antoine Brumel’s Sicut ilium, one of three items whose text was taken from the Bible’s Song of Songs, verses attributed to Solomon, and regarded as the most sensual and erotic of Biblical writings, had the effect of a gently-opening flower, with beautifully-gradated dynamics and soaring soprano lines. More elaborate, both in text and setting was Ego flos campi , by the splendidly-named Clemens non Papa (the name literally meaning “Clemens, but not Pope” – presumably, to distinguish the composer, Jacobus Clemens, from either a poet of the same era, Jacobus Papa, or even the Pope of that time, Clement VII).

Whereas Brumel’s music evoked gentle awakenings and flowerings, Clemens’ Ego flos campi brought to my mind the sensation of timeless music heard through the window of a distant world. The floating lines suggested a kind of constantly-evolving motion giving rise to a freedom of being, music not sculptured in stone or marble but spontaneously renewing. Though I had difficulty following the text (the singers’ consonants appearing to be overlaid by the interlocking lines) the performance generated an unearthly beauty, with finely-wrought tones and wondrous colours.

Veneration of the Blessed Virgin has become a sore point among Christians ever since the Reformation, with the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Eastern Orthodox churches pressing forward in their encouragement of devotion towards  Mary as the Mother of God – whatever one’s own beliefs one can’t deny the incredible flowering of artistic expression inspired by this homage over the centuries. This interaction continues to inspire art-works created in honour of Mary, an example being the Three Marian Motets of British-born Healey Willan (1880-1968), who spend most of his creative life in Canada, as “precentor” at the Church of St.Mary Magdalene, in Toronto.

Two of the motets set texts from the 8th Century, the first of which, I beheld her beautiful as a dove, matched in poetic extravagance anything from the Song of Solomon – “even as the springtime was she girded with rosebuds and lilies of the valley”, etc. – in fact the third motet, Rise up my love, was a setting of part of the latter text. The ensemble really “made” something of the first piece, finely-sculpting the opening of “I beheld her” and then building and burgeoning the vocal excitement at “Who is it that cometh up from the desert…..? – then returning to the poise of the opening. The second motet Fair in face featured similarly dramatized parts of the text, the voices emphasising the angelic “rejoicings” and contrasting these with the sweetness of the invocation, “Pray thou for us all”; while the third motet Rise up, my love seemed like a summation of the previous two, with a similarly heart-easing delivery of the last line.

We got quite a change for the next two pieces on the programme, both 5-part madrigals, resulting in most of the Consort leaving the platform. Each of the settings were anxiety-ridden pieces, containing lines such as “Amor a doppio mi distrugge e coce” (Love destroys and burns me in a double coup), and “Mon Coeur se recommande a vous tout plein d’ennui et de martyre” (My heart commends itself to you, filled with much pain and anguish), the sentiments reflected in a certain acerbicity of tone, designed, perhaps, to provoke and irritate rather than to soothe and ingratiate.

Cipriano de Rore’s Se ben il duol che per voi donna sento (If well the grief, lady, I feel for you) seemed a particularly bitter, pain-wracked outpouring, though its companion-piece, Orlande de Lassus’s Mon coeur recommande a vous (My heart commends itself to you) expressed a similarly intense, if more enigmatic bitterness, again mirrored by a degree of not inappropriate astringency in the sound-picture. The smaller group, too, exacerbated the immediacy and directness of the tones’ force and quality.

Just before the interval the musical ground shifted even further with Grayston Ives’ arrangement of Lennon and McCartney’s Michelle, an award-winning Beatles’ song. Contrived for the Kings Singers, this arrangement turned a ballade-like song into a full-blown madrigal, which the voices, solo and ensembled, made the most of, even if our particular household was afterwards “divided” regarding the end result! To its credit, and to the music’s great advantage, I thought, the Consort had a lighter touch with the material than a number of groups whose versions I subsequently tried on “You Tube”.

The concert’s second half opened with a kind of farewell-echo of “Marian-veneration”, Francisco Guerrero’s Ave virgo sanctissima, one of many such motets he composed in honour of the Blessed Virgin. Something about the music’s symmetrical structure, with beautiful internal balances between the imitative parts gave this music a quality not dissimilar to that of Clemens’ Ego flos campi, earlier in the programme, something ethereal and other-worldly, by no means lacking in spontaneity, as witness the impulsive intensifying of tones at “Maris stella clarissima” (Bright star of the sea), but resounding with a kind of inevitability of purpose – at the very least, utterances for the ages.

With Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s double-choir setting of the heart-rending 13th Century poem Stabat Mater, a work delineating the sufferings of Mary as a witness to her Son’s crucifixion, things turned towards a definite darkening of mood, which was maintained to the concert’s end. Palestrina’s music, beautifully imitating the text, covers a great deal of spiritual and emotional territory, at the beginning evoking a kind of “beauty of suffering” of the mother, before confronting the listener with plangent tones of personalised sympathy, at “Quis est homo qui non fleret….?” (Who is the person who would not weep….?), and intensifying the emotion with exchanges between the two choirs throughout.

The Consort voices relished these intensifications, such as at “Vidit lesum in tormentis, et flagellis subditum”, almost rendering a translation unnecessary in places through conveying a sense of fraught emotion to extremes of intensity. The change of metre at “Eja Mater, fons amoris” (O Mother, fountain of love) gathered up and drove the intensities onwards and into empathetic realms, reaching a kind of plateau at “Donec ego vixero” (For as long as I live), the sweep and emphasis of the word-pointing here drawing us into the emotion of it all.

The women’s voices created melismas of beauty with their interlocking phrases at “Juxta crucem tecum stare” (to stand beside the cross with you), through repeated pleadings to share the Mother’s sufferings, up to a kind of “cry for humanity” at “Fac ut portem Christi mortem” (Grant that I may bear the death of Christ), the voices bringing their full weight to the utterance. Director Michael Stewart steered his forces unerringly through these many and varied beseechments involving injury, inebriation and combustion, to the rich declaration of Christian faith at “Quando corpus morietur” (When my body dies), culminating with the glory of achieving Paradise.

Such was the quality of the singing throughout the concert I was surprised to register a brief sequence near the beginning of sixteenth-century French composer Jean Mouton’s lament at the death of Queen Anne of Brittany, Quis dabit oculis nostris (Who will give to our eyes), where I imagined, at “Et plorabimus die ac nocte coram Donimo” (And are we to weep, day and night before the Lord?) the vocal timbres were darkened and flattened to the point of being marginally off pitch. Against this were moments of heart-stopping composure at certain cadences, depicting an almost ritualistic “wasting away in sorrow” – (veste moerore consumeris?…). I enjoyed, too the performers’ dynamic control, making something distinctive out of the contrast between “Heu, nobis Domine” (Woe to us, Lord), and “deficit Anna” (for Anne), from loud to soft, the whole finding amid expressions of grief a loveliness of resolution at the end with a gorgeously-floated “Anna, requiescat in pace” (Rest in peace…).

The last occasion I’d heard the names of Beaumont and Fletcher was when I was recently listening to a recording of a revue “At The Drop Of A Hat” devised and presented by that peerless duo Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, in a monologue delivered by Flanders describing the parlous state of the English theatre in pre-Elizabethan times, and anachronistically attributing the troubles partly to the fact that “Beaumont had quarrelled with Fletcher”! And suddenly, here were those two names mentioned as co-authors of the text of a popular seventeenth-century English part-song, the words originally written for a play “The Maid’s Tragedy”, and appropriated by Robert Lucas de Pearsall for an eight-part madrigal “Lay a garland”.

Robert Lucas de Pearsall (1795-1856) was an English composer, best-known for his vocal works, which were mostly part-songs and madrigals, greatly influenced in form and style by the English madrigal school, but also as the “supposed” composer of the infamous “cat duet” (Duetto buffo di due gatti) normally attributed to Gioachino Rossini. Pearsall’s eight-part song “Lay a garland” inhabits a vastly different world to that of the duetting felines – a gorgeous outpouring of long-breathed beauty, here exquisitely realised, the Voices doing full justice to those “gorgeous suspensions and arching phrases”, as Michael Stewart himself described them for us in his programme note.

A presentation styled “Love, Death and the Maiden” couldn’t REALLY have ended on such a serenely harmonious note, which is where Ralph Vaughan Williams’ setting of an old English folksong, “The Lover’s Ghost” was brought in to do the job of unequivocally delivering the evening’s coup de grace. No more telling demonstration of the powerful influence of folk-song on English composition could have been presented us, analogous with that of folk-idioms on the work of Czech, Hungarian or Russian composers.

I thought the performers here both fully acknowledged and transcended the music’s folkish origins, delivering the narrative with absolute candour and forthright character, the first verse exuding a pale, ghostly air, with the lines having nothing corporeal about them, but keeping within the dream-like realms,  and then the billowing, well-rounded vocal lines of the second verse adding to the fantasy and drawing in the dreamer’s sensibilities. Even richer and more resounding was the third verse, the men’s voices emphasising the apparent sturdiness of the ghostly vessel, and the women’s brighter tones conjuring up the delicacy and radiance of the silken sails and golden mast.

With the fourth verse the mood suddenly and subtly constricted and hardened – a single line directly addressed the sleeper – “I might have had a king’s daughter”, before the other voices crowded in, the mood moving from the plain-spoken to the accusative, and then, suddenly, to the desperately menacing – “..’tis all for the sake, my love, of thee!” – the tones were hurled forth, their aspect conjuring up bleary-eyed and threatening images, though in a strange and tragic way, piteous to encounter. All in all, a fine piece of singing and conducting, a performance which, like the others in this splendid programme, left a definite impression ringing in our ears for days afterwards to come!

Galvanic lunch hour with the Rangapu Duo at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
LIAM & NOELLE
The Rangapu Duo – Liam Wooding and Noelle Dannenbring

LISZT – Funérailles (from Harmonies poétiques et Religieuses)
CHOPIN – Ballade in F Minor Op.52
SCHUBERT – Fantasie in F Minor D.940
DAVID GRIFFITHS – Rumba (from “Three Coquettes”)

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

Wednesday, 26th October, 2016

The names of both performers in this lunchtime concert at St.Andrew’s were new to me, each of them being Hamilton-based musicians, though I ought to have remembered that Liam Wooding was a prizewinner at Christchurch in 2015 at the National Concerto Competition. His duo partner, Noelle Dannenbring, for her part won the University of Waikato Concerto Competition earlier this year. Currently, both are studying at the University under the tutelage of Katherine Austin, Wooding having previously completed a course of study at Auckland with Rae de Lisle.

Knowing/remembering none of this, I was thus unencumbered by any great weight of expectation regarding either repertoire or its performance, when approaching this concert. So, it was, therefore, an exhilarating experience to find myself thrilled and delighted, firstly by the programme, and then by its delivery. Each pianist contributed a solo item to the programme, the pair then combining forces as a duo, where their playing proved just as richly compelling.

First up was Liam Wooding with a work by Franz Liszt, called Funérailles, one of a set of pieces named Harmonies poétiques et Religieuses. Scarcely known as an entirety, only two of the ten pieces, Funérailles, and the grandly-named Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (The Blessing of God in solitude) are regularly played – though they have claims to be the finest of the set of pieces, each of the ten has its own particular kind of gravitas which works best when heard in the context of the whole.

Funérailles, as with the Bénédiction, readily generates its own expressive qualities as a stand-alone piece; and Liam Wooding’s astonishing performance brought out all of the music’s strength, power and poetry. The proximity of Chopin’s death to the time of the piece’s completion (October 1849) has led to an assumption that the music enshrines some kind of tribute by Liszt to his friend and contemporary – but the former’s focus was firmly on his native land, Hungary, and the 1848 patriotic uprising against the occupying Hapsburgs, which was brutally crushed, with the Prime Minister and a number of Hungarian generals executed by the Austrians.

Liam Wooding’s playing most appropriately “took no prisoners”, plunging into the opening bass sonorities with monumental force, bringing out the piece’s “chromatic ghoulishness” by way of characterising a mounting sense of terror, despair and hopelessness, here reaching a point where the senses were almost overwhelmed, before breaking off and invoking a kind of funeral-like processional – Wooding’s visionary interpretation readily traversed those realms between private sorrow and public grief, casting a great feeling of solace over the piece’s soundscape, and varying the emphases as the music modulated from key to key, here grieving, and there paying homage to bravery and steadfastness.

And what a tremendous effect the pianist made with those infamous left-hand octaves! – obviously inspired by Chopin’s renowned “hooves of the Polish Cavalry” sequences in his Op.53 A-flat Polonaise, Liszt extended the idea beneath vain-glorious fanfares in the right hand, creating a kind of “freedom – or death” aura about the sounds, reinforced by the sudden breaking -off of the passage and its descent into a reprise of the funeral march. Wooding most movingly characterised this section as a dissolution into a more private and personal tragedy, one which was then mocked and savagely scattered by the brief return of the “octave passage”, concluding bleakly with a number of hollow, single-note utterances.

After such ravages, Noelle Dannenbring’s beautifully-floated awakening of the opening of Chopin’s Fourth Ballade seemed to gently open the shutters and allow our recently-assailed vistas some sunshine and gentle breezes. Less pictorial, more abstract than Liszt’s music, Chopin’s evocations here pursued a subtler, though no less telling course, mapped out by the pianist with refreshing directness, her playing giving the somewhat obsessive main theme plenty of “through-line”, and melding the subsidiary ideas, such as the contrasting chordal sequences, unselfconsciously into the flow. She made the most of certain moments, such as the return to the opening idea midway, capped off by a gentle, almost Lisztian melismatic flurry, just before the main theme’s “canonic” treatment. Towards the piece’s end Dannenbring’s playing seemed less concerned with “virtuoso roar” than clarity and proportion, proclaiming the composer’s regard for the music of Bach and Mozart.

Having demonstrated their individual skills, the pair returned as their newly-formed musical partnership, the “Rangapu Duo”, ready to present for us one of the undoubted masterpieces of four-handed piano literature, Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor D.940. Earlier this year, Wellington pianists Catherine Norton and Fiona McCabe had, during a St.Andrews concert in July, given us an even later, if less extended Schubert duet, the Grande Rondeau D.951, a work utterly charming and filled with beautiful resignation, as opposed to the forlorn anxieties and desperate energies of the Fantasie.

I loved the Rangapu Duo’s performance of this work, which, it seemed to me, “sang in its chains like the sea”, to paraphrase the words of poet Dylan Thomas. And though the players didn’t hold back from vehement expression at certain points of the discourse, the music never descended into the realms of near-dissolution, as does the slow movement of the composer’s A Major Piano Sonata D.959, which hints at anarchy and madness – Dannenbring and Wooding did the Fantasie no such violence, but made sure the music’s “fate-like feeling of necessity” was conveyed to us with all the expressive force they could muster.

We certainly needed a kind of “pick-me-up” to finish the concert, and the duo obliged in great style with New Zealand composer David Griffiths’ jolly Rumba, a piece from a work called Three Coquettes, written in 2012. Something of a polymath, David Griffiths is a performer and teacher as well as a composer – he’s composed mainly for the voice, though there’s a group of piano compositions which suggest he knows his way around that instrument pretty well – Rumba generates exactly what its title might suggest, driving rhythms, high energies and colourful contrasts. Perhaps we might hear the Rangapu Duo in Wellington again, sometime, playing the whole of David Griffiths’ “Coquettes” suite for our further pleasure!

Max Reger – The Romantic Bach? – splendid advocacy from Bruce Cash

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Triumphant Reger

Music by JS Bach, Wagner, Reger, Rheinberger and Hanff

Bruce Cash (speaker and organist)

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul
Molesworth Street, Wellington

Friday 14th October 2016

This was the second of three lecture/recitals on the life and works of German composer Max Reger (1873-1916) by organist and choral conductor Bruce Cash. On the strength of this experience with the music of a relatively neglected composer, I found myself wishing I’d gone to the first of Cash’s presentations earlier this year, and will certainly go to the third one, scheduled for March 2017.

Fashions have a disconcerting habit of changing, in music as elsewhere; and after one listens to some of Reger’s work one can only conclude that his music seems to have, for certain reasons, simply fallen out of favour. Once this happens (as it has done to a number of composer) it can take  a long time for the process to be halted and reversed. One thinks first and foremost of Mahler, whose works were regarded for many years after his death as too long, too heavy, and not worth the trouble, opinions which became so widespread they achieved currency even among those who hadn’t heard any of his music. It took years of determined advocacy on the part of a few loyal interpreters to overcome this and restore the music to its rightful place in concert programmes.

Bruce Cash is one of those working thus for Max Reger, though it’s a formidable task, especially when one considers contemporary reviews of recordings of the composer’s music that begin thus: – “Like Grandma’s oatmeal, Reger is good for you in some unspecified way, but difficult to digest….” (from a review of the composer’s Clarinet Sonatas, Gramophone, June 2016). One doubts whether almost any reader would bother to investigate further, having encountered that opening sentence. Still, as with nutrition, there will always be a hard-nosed anti-establishment vein of suppport for alternatives to any mainstream activity, though whether Reger’s music deserves to remain consigned to those marginalised realms is a topic yet to be fully investigated.

His work has had its champions, both during his lifetime and for a period following his untimely death in 1916 at the age of forty-three. He was regarded by certain critics as the chief compositional rival to Richard Strauss – “…..Reger and Strauss, and no third in opposition”, wrote the respected American critic James G. Huneker during the early years of the 20th century, though there were parallel strands of opinion. For years I’ve enjoyed the well-known story of a composer responding to a scathing review of his music by way of informing the critic in question thus: “I am sitting in the smallest room in the house, and I have your review before me – in a moment it will be behind me”.  I’ve always thought the composer in question was Richard Strauss – but it seems, through dint of frequency of reference that it was actually Reger who was responsible for the caustic riposte.

In terms of industry Reger was tireless, producing a large amount of music for the organ (roughly a quarter of his output), solo piano works, chamber music and orchestral pieces, including a piano concerto, but not a symphony. His vocal music belongs to the same German Romantic tradition as Mahler, Strauss, Wolf and Zemlinsky, and includes lieder and choral works, though he didn’t venture into opera. Despite all of this, what still registers in the public mind regarding Reger’s music is his association with the organ, an instrument far less “mainstream” than was the case during the composer’s lifetime, and therefore contributing to his “marginalisation”.

Naturally, Bruce Cash’s presentation of Reger’s life and works essentially centered around his organ music, but emphasised its accessibiity and connection with the wider world of musical activity. He illustrated Reger’s youthful obsession with Wagner by commenting on the former’s realisation of the opening scene of Die Meistersinge as a kind of organ “Chorale Prelude”, a work Cash subsequently gave us in his recital that followed the talk. We heard of Reger’s association with Karl Straube (1873-1950), the prominent German organ virtuoso, to whom the composer entrusted the premieres of his later organ music. Straube, who was appointed organist of St.Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, followed even further in JS Bach’s footsteps by becoming Kantor of the Thomasschule, and his interpretations of Bach as both organist and conductor would have had an enormous effect upon the younger Reger.  During the programme Cash played a short Chorale Prelude by Johann Nicolaus Hanff (1663-1711) in the late Romantic style of playing favoured by Straube, by way of homage to the latter, “the master interpreter”.

So, having regaled us with this remarkable and fascinating almalgam of information concerning Max Reger, Cash then proceeded to play a magnificent recital of associated music written by the composer himself, along with pieces by Wagner, Rheinberger, the aforementioned Hanff, and JS Bach. Most appropriately he began with Wagner, a wonderful realisation of the opening of the opera “Die Meistersinger”, in effect a kind of Chorale Prelude – Cash’s playing I thought extremely effective, festive and atmospheric.

A number of Reger’s organ pieces followed, the first a set of Variations and a Fugue on “The English National Anthem” (“Heil unserm Konig, heil!). Reger was fond of structural forms such as that embodied in this piece – here, the theme itself was swirling and flamboyant (its discursiveness reminding me in places of Dohnanyi’s Prelude to the concertante work “Variations on a Nursery Tune”), though in other places charming. Then came the fugue, whose first voice was the theme itself verbatim, the subsequent lines more and more atttenuated, and the music’s progress working up to a stirring climax whose final resolution got enthusiastic applause! I liked, too, the Intermezzo Op.129 No.7 (1913), its mood wistful and exploratory, and its organisation in places throwing a fascinating variety of different timbres and colours into cheek-by-jowl relationships – the contrast between the deep pedal notes and the almost disembodied reedy harmonies was thrilling!

From the same Op.129, Nos 8 and 9 constituted a Prelude and Fugue in B Minor, the Prelude questioning at the beginning with an anxious, tense-sounding descending figure, volatile in its contrasting irruptions and somewhat Wagnerian in its explorations, before thrusting solidly upwards and outwards towards a great climax. The Fugue was, by contrast, wraith-like, with voices talking with one another in whispers, and supported by a Fafner-like pedal, as if the monster was slumbering within the pipes. It provided the greatest possible contrast to the searing opening of Reger’s last published work for organ, the Siegesfeier Victory Celebration of 1916, written in anticipation of a German victory in World War One, a real paean of triumphal expectation whose dashed hopes the composer was at least spared, dying as he did later that same year.

Josef Rheinberger (1839-1901), whose organ compositions were declared by the Grove Encyclopaedia of Music (1908) as “undoubtedly the most valuable addition to organ music since the time of Mendelssohn”, represented the more conservative strain of contemporary composition, the Intermezzo movement from his Organ Sonata Op.132 played here by Cash as a kind of context for Reger’s far more rigorous explorations. More to the point were the three different versions of the Chorale Prelude Ein’ Feste Burg ist unser Gott played by Cash, beginning with Reger’s own, and followed with the aforementioned Johann Nicolaus Hanff’s, and that by JS Bach himself. As has already been noted, Hanff’s version was included by Cash by way of a tribute to Karl Straube, here played and registered in an almost Gallic way, reedy, romantic and sentimental in feeling. Reger’s take on the piece used the full-blooded organ voice, all resplendent tones and big, up-front sounds, whereas Bach’s treatment sounded more matter-of-fact, the lines augmented by a decorative bass and voices sprouting spontaneously from the lines, rather like as from a single seed – I loved the organist’s variety of colours and timbres – breathy, nasal, resonant, sharp and mellow – leading towards a magnificent blending of these lines buoyed along by a surging, pulsating pedal note.

And finally, we were treated to Reger’s full-throated Chorale Fantasy Op.27 Ein’ feste Burg, written at about the age of 25 (Bach wrote his at the same age, incidentally). We were able to “track” the music’s progress via the organist’s programme-note, which included three of the hymn’s four verses, and described the work’s programmatic aspects, here most atmospherically and in places thrillingly realised by the playing. In short Bruce Cash’s committed advocacy seemed to my ears to do Max Reger’s cause more than ample justice throughout, and no more resplendently than with this final, spectacularly-presented work.

 

Wellington Youth Orchestra and Simon Brew – playing for keeps

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
ROSSINI – Overture “William Tell”
BRUCH – Violin Concerto No.1 in G Minor Op.26
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.6 in B Minor “Pathetique”

Shweta Iyer (violin)
Wellington Youth Orchestra
Simon Brew (conductor)

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

Tuesday, October 11th, 2016

From the first solo ‘cello note of the Wellington Youth Orchestra’s performance of the “William Tell” Overture, I was spellbound – I’d never heard that opening ascending phrase speak more eloquently and poetically. Naturally, I couldn’t straight-away rustle about in my seat turning my programme’s pages to discover who the ‘cellist was – which was good, because my attention wasn’t then diverted from the playing of the other individual ‘cellists, who seemed all to have a turn at part of the melody as well (Rossini actually scored the opening for five solo ‘cellos accompanied by double basses). Though not perhaps QUITE as beautifully inflected and intoned as the leader’s, each player contributed to an overall lovely effect, the solo lines seeming to “personalise” the music more than is usually the case, and draw the listener into its sound-world most effectively.

When the music got louder, I was able to unobtrusively refer to the orchestra personnel page and discover that the ‘cellist in question was in fact Lavinnia Rae, whom I’d already heard this year playing a solo concerto (she had, in fact won the orchestral section of the NZSM/WCO Concerto Competition earlier this year with her playing of the same concerto, Shostakovich No.1) and simply hadn’t recognised her on this occasion. But her playing instantly proclaimed her skill and depth as an interpreter, and seemed to galvanise the whole ‘cello section to give of its best.

The orchestra under conductor Simon Brew then went on to give a splendid rendition of what followed – focused, stinging raindrops at the beginning of the storm, which featured fiery brass and tumultuous timpani (sounding at the climax more like the Wagner of “Die Walküre” than Rossini!), beautiful cor anglais and flute solos throughout the pastoral sequence, and scalp-prickling calls from the brass at the beginning of the final march.

One hears this music so often, it’s almost taken for granted that any performance will launch crisply and tightly into those dancing and galloping rhythms without any trouble, when it must actually be something of a nightmare for the players to achieve unanimity with those three-note figures, especially at the start. The ensemble did take a few bars to “find” one another individually and sectionally, but Simon Brew brought things together with a clear and decisive beat, allowing plenty of noise at cardinal points (the composer was nicknamed “Monsieur Vacarmini” (Mr. Uproar) by critics of the time) and bringing out details such as the piccolo flourishes during the coda – the wind-playing in general was another of this performance’s notable features. Brew spared his strings by cutting the molto perpetuo-like middle section of this sequence, and instead concentrating on its fervent, warlike aspects, giving brass and percussion their head to great effect.

Next came Max Bruch’s G Minor Violin Concerto, for many people, THE romantic violin concerto par excellence. It provided the opportunity for us to hear another winner from this year’s NZSM/WCO Concerto Competition, Shweta Iyer, who took the Secondary School prize. For a capable soloist the concerto is a gift, affording ample opportunities for both virtuoso display and poetic expression; and Shweta Iyer brought plenty of youthful exuberance and darkly passionate feeling to the first movement’s more vigorous passages, while by contrast finding plenty of lyrical sweetness in the central adagio’s singing melodies. One or two early intonation divergencies apart, Iyer’s playing felt and sounded secure and totally involved, every note invested with warmth and feeling.

Though full-blooded enough in places, much of the playing from both soloist and orchestra had an attractive pliable quality, as if the musicians were listening to what they themselves were doing and trying their best to make certain it was all fitting together. Iyer’s nimble fingerwork at the conclusion of her first-movement cadenza did seem to catch conductor and orchestra out momentarily, but this was the exception rather than the rule. I thought the Adagio in particular had everybody, soloist ,orchestra and conductor, in vibrant accord, exemplified by moments such as the beautiful counterpointed sequence between the solo violin and the orchestral horn, and the give-and-take intensities of the build-up towards the movement’s central climax. Perhaps the brass could have “capped off” the great moment even more resplendently, but in general, the music’s ebb and flow of feeling was put across with energy and sensitivity.

Playing as if their lives depended on the outcome, orchestra and soloist dug into into the finale’s opening measures, the energetic principal theme ringing out resplendently from both Shweta Iyer’s violin and the orchestral strings. Then came the second, more fully-throated theme – was there ever another concerto so endowed with romantic melody as this one? – first the orchestra, then the soloist gave this tune all the “juice” one could want, contrasting with the trenchant figurations of the “working-out” which followed, and the winding-up of energies for the coda’s exciting accelerando, brought off with great flair by all concerned. Very great credit to Shweta Iyer, for some brilliant, adventurous and heartfelt playing of one of the ‘great” concertos.

An even greater challenge faced the orchestra after the interval – this was Tchaikovsky’s final symphony, known as the “Pathetique”, and regarded by the composer himself after some initial misgivings, as his finest work. Most unusually for its time, the final movement is an adagio, marked “lamentoso”, so as to underline the music’s sombre nature – and many a concert-hall performance of the symphony has occasioned an irruption of audience appreciation after its brilliant third-movement orchestral splendours have thudded to a halt, only for the enthusiasm to be quelled by the final movement’s bleak opening strains!

The opening sequences of this symphony, while sobering to listen to, are always a delight to observe “live”, as the lower strings interact with the woodwind long before the violins get their first chances. The syncopated string entries caused the players some difficulties at first, but by the time the brass made their startling shouts of reply the strings had things under control, the players then managing the lovely ascending passage leading to the “second subject” with great aplomb, from ‘cellos to violas and then to the violins, the latter preparing to tug the heartstrings with one of the world’s great melodies.

The winds made a lovely sound throughout their see-sawing passages which followed – detailed and clearly-pointed playing which sharpened the music’s intensities, and “lifted” the violins’ reiteration of the “big tune” to an even greater pitch – but while the clarinet solo which followed held us in thrall, the bassoon, whose hands had been splendid at the symphony’s beginning, unfortunately dropped the ball with the line open, and the concentration momentarily faltered. Those tricky syncopated string entries after the music’s great thunderclap were thus at sea for a while, until the brass came to the rescue with the percussion in tow, roaring out those basic rhythms and getting the ensemble back together.

Splendidly solid support from timpanist Hannah Neman helped further support the strings with their portentous “Fate” theme, capped off magnificently by the brass, upper and lower, the music churning piteously in its despairing throes, and collapsing under its own weight of emotion. From out of the gloom came the strings with their “famous tune” once again, Simon Brew judiciously directing their course through the gloom, their tones focused like a shaft of light surveying the wreckage from the storm. Some superb clarinet playing followed, ably supported by the other winds, and so we were at the coda, the string pizzicati fitful and uncertain at first, and the brass with a frog in someone’s throat – but things came together for those last few heart-easing descents.

The 5/4 second movement, apart from a couple of disjointed rhythmic dovetailings among the strings in places, was beautifully realised, the ‘cellos at the beginning full-toned and heartfelt, the winds plangent in reply, and the upper strings catching that lovely “Italianate” sound during the following sequences, before building the intensities slowly and surely just before the trio. I thought Simon Brew’s marshalling of his forces nicely brought out the trio’s contrasting sombre, somewhat obsessive character, and encouraged the players at the end to make the most of the descending motif’s gentle poignancy.

Next was the March, launched at a sensible tempo, giving the players elbow-room in which to phrase their lines, though I thought the strings could have been encouraged to “dig into” and point these same rhythms rather more jauntily. The winds demonstrated a touch more elan in this respect, though the excitement was still effectively built up, with strings and winds exchanging splendidly “skyrocketed” fusillades of sound leading to the march-tune’s first full-blooded statement. Conductor Brew kept the tempo steady, encouraging strings and winds to swirl their figurations with ever-increasing abandonment and brass and percussion to thunder in support – the deathly silence which followed the last hammered chords spoke volumes!

The strings’ opening phrase then tore open the silence and set the final movement on its course, straightaway laying bare the anguish and sufferings of the music’s creator. Their sorrowing gesture was amplified by the wailing wind counterpoints, and even included a grim-toned solo bassoon, almost like Death waiting in the wings for its moment. Though the horns didn’t sound entirely comfortable at first with their syncopated accompaniments, the strings rallied around a sudden impulsive glimmer of hope in a new episode which was build up by Brew and his players to a magnificent, if short-lived show of defiance – fantastic intensities, which then spun out of control and collapsed, the sounds mercilessly delineating the tragedy.

I thought the playing here little short of cathartic in its effect, as were the strings’ desperate Wagner-like gestures of rebuttal, a kind of “Volga overflowing its banks” and overwhelming the sufferer’s world with torrents of despair – we could do nothing except let the emotion wash over and submerge our sensibilities in a “sea of troubles”, ponder on the inevitabilites of fate amid dark tocsin resoundings, and listen to the weeping voices recede into the darkness.

It was a number of things – the immediate, no-holds-barred proximity of the players and conductor, the intensity and full-throatedness of the playing, and the give-and-take between Simon Brew and his orchestral forces – which combined to produce such a heartfelt and, at the end “wrung-out” result. Thrills and spills alike, every note of it was extremely satisfying to listen to and be caught up in and made part of – much appreciation to all concerned!

Passage of the Soul – commemorative and reflective beauty at Wellington Cathedral

Posted on by Peter Mechen

PASSAGE OF THE SOUL
Choral Whispers of Eastern Orthodoxy

Baroque Voices
Directed by Pepe Becker

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul,
Molesworth Street, Wellington

Sunday 2nd October, 2016

It was originally intended that “Passage of the Soul”, the name given to a concert of Eastern Orthodox choral music, would take place in the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation of the Theotokos, in Wellington’s Hania Street. For those of us who hadn’t been to the venue the chance to do so represented an additional incentive to attend this Baroque Voices concert, which was evocatively subtitled “Choral Whispers of Eastern Orthodoxy”. As it turned out, circumstances prevented the Hania Street venue’s use, so at short notice the concert was transferred to the Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul in Molesworth Street.

I was able to speak with a couple of group members immediately after the concert had finished, and got the impression from them that it was a kind of swings-and-roundabouts situation regarding the different venues – yes, it would have been more appropriate in some ways to have performed the concert in the Hania Street church, but as it turned out the Molesworth Street Cathedral’s greater seating capacity was actually needed to accommodate the audience numbers who turned up! – and the Cathedral’s renowned acoustic added an extra sonic dimension to the atmosphere created by the beauty of the music and its performance.

The concert was the result of a collaboration between the Baroque Voices Ensemble, and one of its former members,  Dimitrios Theodoridis, who’s currently based in Berlin. While holidaying throughout Europe a couple of years ago he decided to stay put in Berlin for a while, eventually joining a couple of vocal ensembles and regularly performing with them. The death of his mother, Anthula Theodoridis, inspired him to write a work Passage of the Soul, and then to organise a concert in which the work could be performed. With the help of his former colleague, Baroque Voices director Pepe Becker, he was able to put together a sequence of pieces which framed his own work in an appropriate context and arrange for the sequence to be performed.

Theodoridis wanted a predominantly meditative ambience to prevail throughout the concert, so we were requested not to applaud, but let the resonances do their work. He asked us to regard the concert more as a religious service than a “performance”, in order to emphasise the occasion’s commemorative aspect. Aiding and abetting this feeling was the use of incense, which was burned beforehand in the church, and whose redolent flavour straight away elevated one’s expectations to a kind of ritualistic state, completely removed from any dynamic of performance and entertainment.

The “Choral Whispers” of the concert’s subtitle found expression in a number of pieces from different eras, by composers who were unknown to me, names such as Manuel Gazes (15th Century), Parthenios Sgoutas (17th Century), Dobri Hristov (1875-1941) and Frank Desby (1922-92). Though largely meditative, the different pieces evoked whole worlds of varied feeling through different timbres and colours, textures and dynamics.  Those pieces written by the remarkable American-born Frank Desby, who became an authority on Greek plainchant and polyphonic music seemed to express something of the on-going “flavour of interaction” between traditional Byzantine chant and Western polyphony.  Desby’s “Those Baptised into Christ” contrived to my ears to freely float between both traditional simplicity and harmonic enrichment, the whole while preserving a sense of drawing from impulses deeply rooted in the past.

An organ solo (played by Jonathan Berkahn) began the service, accompanying the placement of a commemorative candle in honour of Anthula Theodoridis, a deeply personal moment followed by a very open-hearted, public and demonstrative Alliluia from Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week (where possible Dimitrios Theodoridis rewrote the texts of these hymns and meditations in Greek). He was, he said, heartened by the example of Igor Stravinsky in his setting of the Lord’s prayer, set by the composer in Latin from Old Church Slavonic. Stravinsky most interestingly was attracted by Latin as a medium “not dead but turned to stone, and so monumentalised as to have become immune from all risk of vulgarisation”.

Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov were all represented in this concert (Stravinsky adored Tchaikovsky’s music, as did Rachmaninov!). Theodoridis interestingly reset Tchaikovsky’s Cherubic Hymn to Greek words, but not Rachmaninov’s contribution, an exerpt from his  “Vespers”, which retained its original Church Slavonic. The performances of all three composers’ music were vibrant, tremulous and deeply-wrought. Each was notable for giving the listener a different perspective on its composer to the somewhat Westernised “classical music” mode one usually hears, an outcome, perhaps, of each composer’s interaction with text and as a result “speaking“ with more-than-usual Slavic force in their musical responses.

Of other well-known composers, both John Taverner (1944-2013) and Arvo Pärt were represented by characteristic pieces, Taverner’s beautiful piece “Song for Athene” having the distinction of being performed at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997, though written four years earlier as a tribute by the composer to a young family friend of Greek descent, Athene Hariades, who had been accidentally killed. Here, the exchanges between the “Alleluia” chants and the invocations were varied and haunting, the ensemble making the most of the dramatic key-change from minor to major just before the words “Come, enjoy rewards and crowns I have prepared for you”.

Theodoridis’s own composition reflected his family’s Greek cultural and spiritual heritage, using references to the Greek Orthodox funeral service via a hymn, Eonia I mnimi (Eternal Memory), the theme from which haunted the piece’s conclusion, reiterating the prayer “May her soul rest in peace”. An alto solo (sung by Andrea Cochrane) ran like a thread through the piece, its strand resonating with an awareness of approaching death and the desire to farewell loved ones, before gradually letting go, the soul comforted by the gentle sounds of the handbells and the angelic voices inviting it to “sleep in peace”.

Arvo Pärt’s piece for organ solo “Pari Intervallo”, performed by Jonathan Berkahn immediately after this enabled us to continue our spiritual and emotional trajectories set up by what had gone immediately before, the meditative qualities of the sounds and their resonances allowing our sensibilities what seems like unlimited time and space to explore and be in touch with ourselves. This having been completed and a declaration of faith then made in the form of a 17th Century setting by Parthenios Sgoutas of the Nicean Creed,  we returned to the music of Arvo Pärt to conclude the concert, “O Morgenstern” (Morning Star), appropriately a piece whose tone-clusters and resulting harmonic tensions gave the impression of a soul striving towards the light, seeking a kind of affirmation in the onset of a new day.

The absence of applause provided ample proof of the capacity for listeners to express appreciation, awe and gratitude towards composers and performers alike in silence – at the end we were able to take away and continue to relish in tranquillity those resonances which the performers had so enchantingly crafted and brought alive for us.