Author: Peter Mechen

Ali Harper – Legendary Diva at Circa Theatre

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
Ali Harper in LEGENDARY DIVAS

Ali Harper (soprano)
Michael Nicholas Williams (piano)

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Wednesday, July 27th, 2016

I came away from singer Ali Harper’s and musical director Michael Nicholas Williams’ “Legendary Divas” opening night presentation at Circa Theatre feeling as though I had been seduced in the nicest and yet most whirlwind kind of way – Ali Harper’s all-encompassing stage personality, supported by her own and her pianist Michael Nicholas Williams’ consummate musicality throughout, simply took me over for the duration. To bend a clichéd but appropriate phrase, I could have gone on all night, both drinking in and delighting in as much as “the diva” and her director were prepared to give me. Staggering out afterwards into “the cold night air” was, more than usually on this occasion, a salutary return to a separate reality.

The range and scope of the territory covered by Harper’s and Williams’ performance was, I thought, astonishing – Harper stated in a programme note that her performance was one “honouring all those extraordinary women who have influenced me to do what I do today”. If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, she certainly fulfilled her goal, paying a deep and rich homage to an array of amazing singers throughout the course of the evening. In a sense it was all art which concealed art, with some occasionally mind-bending, but always spontaneous-sounding juxtapositions of singers and repertoire served up to us as organically as night follows day.

We got introductory gestures of welcome, including some instantly-engaging and physically exhilarating Motown-sound sequences, and some rhetorical teasings regarding the definition of the word “diva”, including a “bel canto-ish”, affectionately-hammed-up “O mio babbino caro” (until the advent of Luciano Pavarotti’s version of “Nessun dorma”, perhaps Puccini’s “greatest hit”!) and then a “can belt-o!” rendition of parts of an Ethel Merman standard! – whew! The subject of what a diva would wear came up, and, along with the question of suitable scenery, was consigned by Harper to the realms of relative unimportance next to “the glittering presence of (I quote) the gorgeous Michael Nicholas Williams” (rapturous applause).

I was delighted that Harper gave none other than Doris Day, an all-time favourite singer of mine, the honour of leading off the starry array, with a beautiful rendition of “It’s Magic”, a song from “Romance on the High Seas”, which was Day’s film debut in 1948. Harper’s winning vocal quality and powerful focusing of each word in a properly heartfelt context allowed the material to soar and transport us most satisfyingly in doing so. Barbara Streisand received similar laudatory treatment with Harper pulling out all her full-on stops in a raunchy performance of “Don’t rain on my Parade”, though, by contrast, another of my favourites, Julie Andrews, to my great regret became the butt of some ageist humour, albeit most skilfully brought off, with some hilarious, Hoffnung-like downwardly-spiralling vocal modulations……..oh, well, one can’t have ALL one’s heroines treated like goddesses, I suppose!

The subjective nature of things had me in raptures at Harper’s devastating rendition of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”, which for me brought back something of the impact I remember made by the original singer Julie Covington’s tones and inflections. True, the singer may well have had either or both Elaine Paige and Madonna in mind – but such was the intensity of the interpretation, this became Harper’s moment more than anybody else’s. By contrast I found the normally affecting “Send in the Clowns” a trifle earthbound here, more world-weary and disillusioned than I wanted it to be, with a harder, less “floated” vocal line that I was expecting – it still worked, but in a tougher, rather more hard-bitten sense of the reality of things, with which I found it more difficult to “connect” – chacun en son gout, as they say………

Entertainments of more diverse kinds came and went, adding to the evening’s variety – Ali Harper’s “la belle dame sans merci” advancement on a hapless front-row male audience member, with a view to “dragging him up onto the performing stage”, worked beautifully, thanks to her persuasive charm as well as to the good-natured response of the gentleman involved, who seemed to gradually ‘‘get into the swing” of what was required to partner such a vibrant performer.

Another was Michael Nicholas Williams’ response to being told by Harper to “entertain the audience” while she went and changed her dress – as divas apparently do – an exercise which brought forth a couple of subsequent admonishments from the singer regarding the pianist’s initial choices of music, until Williams finally called her bluff by launching into THE Rachmaninov Prelude (C-sharp Minor, Op.3 No.2) and playing it with plenty of virtuosity, to boot! The music’s climax was interrupted by the singer’s re-entry in a classic, show-stopping way, wearing a gorgeous, close-fitting red dress and immediately launching into a bracket of songs associated with Shirley Bassey (mostly the title songs from the early James Bond movies, such as “Goldfinger”, all belted out in the best Bassey style!) – tremendous stuff!

Harper touched on the tragic aspects of some of her heroines – figures such as Judy Garland and Edith Piaf, both of whom died at a relatively early age – commenting that many seemed unlucky in love, and that a number also had what she called “image issues”, citing a quote from Janis Joplin (which I can’t remember, but was to do with her getting a rough ride from her schoolmates all throughout her college years, and never really escaping from the hurt). Though not directly referred to, there was conveyed a real sense of another, well-known Joplin quote which applied to a lot of performers and to what they did: – “Onstage I make love to 25,000 people – and then afterwards I go home alone…” Harper’s show didn’t dwell overmuch on the tragic stories, instead largely engaging the “divas” at the height of their singing and performance powers (well, perhaps with the exception of the unfortunate Julie Andrews) and conveying something of the essence of what those women did with their stellar talents.

In all, what Harper and Williams achieved was a veritable tour de force – of entertainment, involvement and enjoyment – a particularly stirring moment was the singer’s invitation for the audience to sing along with her in Carole King’s heartwarming “You’ve got a friend”, after which Harper’s chosen “friend” from the audience was recalled and promptly put in the hot seat once again, this time enjoined to help the rest of us identify the voices of eight well-known women singers – some of the “divas” whose talents and inspirational achievements lifted our own lives several notches upwards and gave voice to our innermost feelings and dreams. Ali Harper throughout the evening “owned” these women with total conviction, bringing to us the personalities through their songs – of the “eight divas” I picked the first two, Dusty Springfield and Peggy Lee, and as well I thought I caught snatches of Tina Turner and Olivia Newton-John – others with wider-ranging antennae would have “picked up” on the rest.

Thought-provoking, also, to have those images at the show’s end, some of whom I hadn’t heard of – Julie London, Etta James, Ruth Etting, and Eva Cassidy – receiving from Harper their deserved moment of glory, along with names which resonated for me, such as Patsy Cline, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Nina Simone. But despite these evocations of greatness, nothing and nobody eclipsed the achievement of Ali Harper, her incredible communicative power, her infectious élan and her magnificent singing. With her illustrious music director, Michael Nicholas Williams at the pianistic helm, she was a force to be reckoned with – in all, I thought “Legendary Divas” a must-see!

 

See also the following link to Theatreview for other reviews:

http://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=9431

“Deux du même” give considerable pleasure at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concerts presents
“DEUX DU MÊME”

Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton – piano duet

JOSEPH JONGEN (1873-1953) – 2 Pieces from “Pages Intimes”
Il était une fois (Once upon a time….)
Le Bon Chîval (The Good Horse)

FRANZ SCHUBERT
Rondo D.951 “Grand rondeau”

SERGEI RACHMANINOV  (from “Six morceaux” Op.11)
Barcarolle
Valse
Romance
Slava! (Glory)

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

Wednesday 20th July 2016

The concerts I enjoy the most, I think, are those which, in a sense, I don’t really see “coming” – that is to say, those I wouldn’t beforehand expect to enjoy as much as sometimes turns out. So it was such a pleasure to be set upon, taken over, surprised by joy and delight, and thoroughly warmed through-and-through by the duet-playing of Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton in their recent St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace lunchtime recital!

These two musicians (styling their partnership as “Deux du même” – two of the same) conveyed to us such engagement with and enjoyment of both the music and the process of bringing it to life, I for one at the end of it all felt both delighted with what we’d heard and frustrated that this wasn’t a full-length concert!  It was more than any one thing which worked this alchemy of performance pleasure – every ingredient in the mix, repertoire, technique, rapport, commitment, focus, the instrument, the venue, had something to contribute to the exhilaration and satisfaction afforded by the occasion.

Beginning with the repertoire, the choices were fascinating – here was my first experience of the music of Belgian composer Joseph Jongen (even if the name wasn’t entirely unknown to me), and a most stimulating one. From a work, Pages Intimes, originally written for piano duet and later orchestrated, came two absolutely delightful movements, the first appropriately entitled Il etait une fois…. (Once upon a time….). Reminiscent of Ravel, and none the less for that, the piece played with a three-note motif, with the music gradually becoming more filigree in character – a very atmospheric and flowing performance, flecked with currents and flashes of light.

The second movement, Le Bon Chîval (The Good Horse), demonstrated plenty of joie de vivre, as well as a good deal of “personality” in the music’s varied flow – there was nothing remotely mechanical in these trajectories, but exciting and engaging momentums, a journey punctuated by both excitements and reflections, with the music’s ending a kind of reminiscence of the ride.

The players having established their partnership, even to the extent of overcoming the irritation of a squeaky piano seat, Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton proceeded to change places for the next item, Franz Schubert’s Rondo D.951.This was the composer’s final four-hands work, published a month after his death with the title “Grand Rondeau”. McCabe and Norton brought it all to life once again, encouraging the piece’s innate lyricism to blossom while allowing the dovetailed rhythms to chatter and burble in excited conversation.

The duo’s playing also caught the different character of the sequences, such as with a prayer-like passage just before the recapitulation – it had a different dimension of manner to what had gone before, more intimate and direct, voiced as though something other-worldly had appeared and was speaking with the composer’s own tones. Schubert obviously enjoyed surprising his listeners, switching almost without warning occasionally between lyrical outpourings and passages of great declamation, and taking us on harmonic explorations of wondrous spontaneity. The duo relished these flavoursome instances of unfettered creativity, and were ready and waiting at the piece’s rounding-off, with the theme stealing back in the bass and counterpointed in an insouciant, “I know you’re there” way – marvellous playing!

Rachmaninov’s contributions to the four-handed piano literature encompass both works for duet and for two pianos – his Op.11 collection “Six Morceaux” was written in a few short months in 1896, a year before the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony. Of course, nothing of that unforeseen setback clouded the achievement of this work, in both keyboard and compositional terms the most impressive of the young composer’s efforts to date.

While one would have liked to have heard the whole set, which is seldom performed in public, Catherine Norton and Fiona McCabe earned our gratitude in presenting four of the six pieces. They began with the Barcarolle, one whose waters seemed to be the darker, more chilly Slavic kind rather than the usual indolent sun-drenched Mediterranean variety. The pair instantly established the music’s restless, volatile character, then, from out of these yearning, unsettled beginnings and the swirling figurations that followed, brought forth the impressive, cathedral-like theme in its different versions – like looking at the same structure from different viewpoints. An example of this was the way in which the theme returned accompanied by a triplet rhythm, the music wreathed in bleak harmonies before being softened by some warmer right-hand figurations, and a ray of sunshine with the final chord.

Next was the Waltz, angular and laconic, with po-faced humour, expressed by mischievous impulses punctuating the lines – the players even unintentionally went as far as losing a moment or two of synchronisation, but soon caught up with one another – all in the interests of the music’s character, of course! I liked the Satie-like timbres in places, with tintinabulating treble figures set dancing, and a delightfully throw-away ending with which to round off the piece.

With the Romance that followed, the music was all full-throated sonority, anguished declamations subjected to obsessively repeated chromatic figurations – more a “Lament” than a “Romance” I thought, on this, my first hearing. The intensities didn’t let up with the final movement, titled “Slava” (Glory), one which used the well-known Russian folk-tune employed by both Beethoven in his Op.59 No.2 “Rasumovsky Quartet” and Musorgsky in the coronation scene of his opera “Boris Godunov”. The theme emerged canonically at first, the players skilfully controlling its ever-growing amplitude before allowing it to blaze forth over the final pages – in effect it almost out-Musorgskied Musorgsky in his “Pictures at an Exhibition” mode. Sensationalist that I am, I particularly enjoyed the minor-key version of it in the bass, with shrill treble trills ringing out at the other end of the keyboard. Catherine Norton and Fiona McCabe held us in thrall throughout with their playing, building up to and delivering sonorities that threatened most excitingly to burst at the seams, and overwhelm us in great floodings of tone and energy. Exhilarating, and at the end, most satisfying – bravo!

 

 

 

Hammers and Horsehair speak volumes – Douglas Mews and Robert Ibell

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
HAMMERS AND HORSEHAIR – Period Pieces for Fortepiano and ‘Cello

Music by BEETHOVEN, BREVAL, MOZART, ROMBERG and MENDELSSOHN

Douglas Mews – Fortepiano
Robert Ibell – ‘Cello

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn Road, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 13th July

What a fascinating and splendidly-realised concept this was! With instruments able to reproduce authentic-sounding timbres and tones of a specific period, and with two musicians in complete command of those same instruments, and well-versed in the style of performance of that same period, we in the audience at St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, in Lower Hutt, were treated to an evening’s evocative and authoritative music-making.

Part of the occasion’s success was its mix of normal concert procedure with a distinctly un-concert-like degree of informality, of the kind that might well have been the case when these same pieces were premiered. Concert-halls of the kind we’ve become used to would have been few and far between at that time, and music would have more likely as not been made in private houses belonging to rich or titled patrons of the arts, often with connections to royalty.

Different, too, was the etiquette displayed by performers and audience members at these concerts. Until Beethoven famously made a point of insisting that people actually listen to his playing whenever he performed, those attending these gatherings often talked during performances if they weren’t particularly interested in the music or the performer or both, or if something or somebody else caught their fancy. Performers, too would wander into and through the audience talking to friends and acquaintances as the fancy took them, often interpolating extra items in their performances in the same spontaneous/wilful manner.

To us it would have seemed an awful hotchpotch, but audiences of the time would have relished the social aspects of the gathering, as much as (if not more so) than the music. While Douglas Mews and Robert Ibell didn’t actually encourage the people in the audience to talk or move around the church while the music was being played, each musician readily talked with us at various stages of the concert, the pianist inviting us to go up to the fortepiano at halftime and have a closer look at it.

But  before the concert proper actually began, Douglas Mews wandered up onto the performing area, sat down, and unannounced, began to softly play the opening of Mozart’s charming set of variations “Ah vous dirai-je, Maman”, K. 265/300e, whose tune we know as “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”. Audience members were still talking, and to-ing and fro-ing, while the music sounded softly, at first as background, and then, as people still arriving got themselves to their seats, and conversations gradually ceased, the music took over.  The fortepiano tones, at first almost apologetically faint and almost “miniature” in effect gradually filled the performing space as the variations grew more elaborate, and our ears became increasingly “attuned” to the instrument’s sound-world and its capabilities.

By this time the lights had been dimmed to the effect of candle-light, adding to the atmosphere of a time and place recreated from the past. Once the variations had finished, ‘cellist Robert Ibell welcomed us to the concert, encouraging us to imagine we were at a music-making occasion in the music-room of a grand European aristocratic house – though most of the concert’s music was written before 1800, Bernhard Romberg’s Op. 5 ‘Cello Sonata, published in 1803, pushed the time-frame into the early nineteenth-century). First up, however, was the winning combination of Mozart and Beethoven, being the latter’s 1796 variations on the former’s lovely duet “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” from “The Magic Flute”.

What a joy to listen to these two musicians playing into one another’s hands so winningly and expressively, allowing the instrumental dialogues such eloquence and energy!  Though fortepiano and ‘cello were made at different times (the fortepiano in 1843, and the ‘cello from an eighteenth-century maker), their respective voices blended beautifully, neither dominating or overpowering the other. The fortepiano had more elaborate detailing than the ‘cello throughout the first handful of variations, the keyboard writing showing extraordinary inventiveness – one of the sequences featured a “sighing” cello figure over an intricate piano part, while another employed an invigorating running-bass on the ‘cello beneath garrulous keyboard elaborations.

Not all was “tally-ho and high jinks”, however, with variations 10 and 11 taking a sombre, almost tragic turn, the keyboard dominating the first of these while the ‘cello’s deep-toned lament garnered our sympathies throughout the second. All was swept away by the waltz-time final variation, delivered with great panache from both players throughout, including a couple of modulatory swerves and a cheeky reprise, right up to the deliciously po-faced ending.

Robert Ibell talked about the ‘cello he was using, an original 18th Century instrument gifted to him by his teacher, Judith Hyatt, and once owned by Greta Ostova, from Czechoslovakia, who came to New Zealand in 1940 to escape Nazi oppression, and eventually became a founding member of the National Orchestra (now the NZSO). The instrument’s rich bass and plaintive treble was very much in evidence in the brilliantly-written Sonata in G Major by Jean-Baptiste Bréval (1753-1823), composed in 1783 as Op.12 No 5, one of a set of six sonatas. A ‘cellist himself, Bréval wrote a good deal for the instrument, including concertos, sonatas and duets. The sonata gave the ‘cellist a real “work-out”, requiring the player in each of the movements to inhabit the instrument’s upper registers for a good deal of the time. It was a task Robert Ibell performed with aplomb, the occasional strained passage mattering not a whit in the sweep and excitement of the whole.

Introduced by his duo partner as “Hammers”, Douglas Mews then spoke to us about the Broadwood fortepiano he was using, previously owned by a family in the Shetland Islands, and brought to New Zealand by them in 1874. Perhaps the concert’s next item, a piece not listed as being on the programme, but one entitled “Song Without Words” by Mendelssohn, didn’t show off the instrument’s capabilities to its fullest extent, though both players certainly realized the music’s essential lyrical qualities in perfect accord, moving fluently through the pieces brief central agitations to re-establish the ending’s serenitites. I wasn’t sure at the time whether the piece was a re-working of one of the composer’s famous solo piano pieces, or whether it was a true “original” – but my sources have since told me it was a “one-off” written by Mendelssohn for a famous woman cellist Lisa Christiani (who also died young).

What did illustrate the Broadwood fortepiano’s capacities was the following item, Mozart’s Keyboard Sonata K.330 in C major. If ever a performance illustrated what was often missing from renditions of the same repertoire by pianists using modern pianos, then this was it (an exception being, of course, Emma Sayers’ Mozart playing in her recent recital). It wasn’t simply the instrument and its beguiling tonal and timbral characteristics, but the playing itself – though like philosophers arguing about the essential differences between body and soul, one can’t avoid conjecture and evidence illustrating a kind of “inter-relationship” between the two. So I felt it was here, with Douglas Mews understanding to such an extent the capabilities of his instrument that he was able to inhabit and convey the music’s character through these unique tones and articulations to an extent that I’ve not heard bettered.

Often so difficult to make “speak” on a modern piano, here Mozart’s themes and figurations straightaway took on a kind of dynamic quality that suggested something instant, spontaneous and elusive on single notes, and a ‘breathed” kind of phrasing with lines, sometimes explosive and volatile, sometimes sinuous and variegated. There was also nothing whatever mechanical about Mews’ phrasings and shaping of those lines, nothing machine-like about his chordings or repeated notes. I was struck instead by the music’s constant flexibility, as if the old dictum regarding rubato (Italian for “robbed time”, a term implying expressive or rhythmic freedom in music performance) – that it was the preserve of Romantic music and musicians – needed urgent updating to include all types of music from all eras.

Some brief remarks about the individual movements – the opening Allegro Moderato was played very freely throughout the development sequence, which I liked, as it gave the music a depth of enquiry, of exploration, and even of questioning, resulting in the music taking on an elusive and even enigmatic quality, contrasting with the exposition’s relative straightforwardness of utterance. The Andante Cantabile second movement maintained a kind of improvisatory quality throughout, including a telling ambient change for the minor key episode, one whose shadows were magically dissolved by the return of the opening theme. The player took an extremely rapid tempo for the finale, skipping adroitly through the arpeggiations, and creating what seemed like great surges of instrumental sound at certain points (all in context, of course – Douglas Mews said after the concert to me that he thought Mendelssohn’s music was as far into the Romantic era as the instrument could be taken, though we agreed that certain pieces of Schumann could work, rather less of Chopin, and hardly anything of Liszt….)

Bernhard Romberg (1767-1841) featured next on the programme with his Grand Sonata in E-flat Op.5 No.1, the first of a set of three. A contemporary of Beethoven’s, whom he met as a fellow-player in the Prince Elector’s Court Orchestra in Bonn, Romberg has achieved some dubious fame in musical history by rejecting the former’s offer to write a ‘cello concerto for him, telling Beethoven he preferred to play his own music. Commentators have wryly remarked that such admirable self-confidence was partly fuelled by Romberg’s inability to understand Beethoven’s compositions, but, judging by the charm, beauty and excitement of the work we heard played here, no-one need be put off from seeking out and enjoying Romberg’s music for what it is. It would be like neglecting the music of Carl Maria Von Weber, simply because he had proclaimed, after hearing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, that its composer was “fit for the madhouse”.

In fact Romberg, judging from contemporary accounts of his playing, was one of the great instrumental virtuosi of the early nineteenth century, exerting an enormous influence on the development of ‘cello-playing techniques. HIs qualities as a performer were, naturally enough, reflected here in the ‘cello writing – my notes contained scribbled remarks like “arresting opening flourishes, with attractive floating themes shared by both instruments”, “a soaring second subject leading to exciting runs from both ‘cello and fortepiano”, and in the development, “plenty of energy and excitement”. The Andante second movement had an almost fairground aspect with its musical-box-like tune, from which came a number of variations. Then, the finale took us out into the fields and along country lanes at a brisk clip, the playing dynamic and in places hair-raising in its virtuosity, especially on the ‘cellist’s part. There were even some Beethoven-like chords set ringing forth at one of the cadence-points, along with other individual touches, Douglas Mews bringing out in another place a lovely “lower-toned edge” to the timbres.

By this stage of the evening the wind outside was making its presence felt, with its moaning and gustings, and rattlings and creakings of various parts of the church roof – all adding to the ambience, I might add, and not inappropriate to the evening’s final item, Beethoven’s F-Major Op.5 ‘Cello Sonata, the first of two in the set. Amid all of the aforementioned atmospheric effects we heard a most arresting introduction to the work, the players seeming to challenge one another’s spontaneous responses with each exchange, building the tensions to the point where the reservoir of pent-up energies seemed to bubble over spontaneously into the Allegro’s sheer delight. With the development came some dramatic harmonic exploration (probably one of the passages which made the aforementioned Romberg feel uneasy), the music easing back into the “home-key” with the resolve of a navigator picking his way through a storm, at which arrival-point Douglas Mews hit a glorious wrong note on the fortepiano with tremendous élan, one which I wouldn’t have missed for all the world! The recall of the movement’s slow introduction and its just-as-peremptory dismissal were also treasurable moments.

THe players took a brisk tempo for the Rondo, notes flashing by with bewildering rapidity, Beethoven’s inventiveness in the use of his four-note motif astonishing! I loved the “schwung” generated by both players in the second, pizzicato-accompanied theme, and the wonderfully resonant pedal-point notes from Robert Ibell’s cello a little later, in the midst of the music’s vortex-like churnings (more disquiet from Romberg’s quarter, here, perhaps?). After some improvisatory-like musings from both instruments near the music’s end (even the wind outside seemed in thrall to the music-making at this point!), the coda suddenly drove home the coup de grace, fanfares and drumbeats sounding the triumphant return.

Douglas Mews and Robert Ibell plan to take this programme for a South Island tour later in the year, having already visited several North Island venues. I would urge people on the Mainland to watch all spaces for “Hammers and Horsehair” – a delightful evening’s music-making.

Youth and experience together produce brilliant and heartfelt Messiaen

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
Olivier Messiaen: ÉCLAIRS SUR L’AU-DELÀ (Illuminations of the Beyond)

Sir Andrew Davis (conductor)
The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
The NZSO National Youth Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 8th July 2016

Elizabeth Kerr’s pre-concert talk, gratifyingly well-attended and enthusiastically received, placed its listeners right in the epicenter of things relating to Olivier Messiaen and his final completed work Éclairs sur l’au-delá (Illuminations of the Beyond), whose performance by the NZSO/NYO was to follow shortly after.

In a masterstroke of juxtapositioning she took us straightaway to an event that took place in January 1941, in a German prisoner-of war camp, Stalag 8A at Görlitz in Silesia, where the thirty-two-year-old Messiaen had been interned after being captured. It was here that he wrote a work for a quartet featuring violin, ‘cello, clarinet and piano whose first performance has long since passed into legend, the players all prison inmates, and with Messiaen himself as the pianist.

Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) was thus first heard outdoors, and in the rain, on somewhat battered instruments  which were the only ones available, before an audience of about 400 people, other prisoners and their guards. Messiaen commented, later, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention.”

The idea of beginning this talk with reference to a quartet written by the same composer fifty years earlier than the work which was to be the last he completed was to show how consistently Messiaen applied certain fundamental elements of his creativity to his music. Religious belief, birdsong ornithology, colour/synthesia, modes, and a sense of timelessness were presented as integral aspects of his output, as evidenced by the salient characteristics of both the early Quartet and this last completed masterpiece for orchestra.

Elizabeth Kerr also talked about the composer’s music having a quality of “dazzlement”, describing its manifestation in terms of a kind of supernatural experience which, naturally enough, expressed religious faith. Messiaen himself described his own antithesis to this quality, an experience he underwent while composing Éclairs sur l’au-delá – “I imagined myself in front of a curtain, in darkness, apprehensive about what lay beyond….” The “dazzlement” of what the composer was able to imagine behind that curtain helped form the basis of the work we heard played by the two orchestras later that evening.

Conductor Zubin Mehta was to conduct the premiere of Éclairs in 1992 with the New York Philharmonic, but to his intense despair, Messiaen died before he could give Mehta any guidance as to the work’s performance – “The birds in this piece are self-explanatory – everything else is not!” lamented the conductor. However, the composer’s widow, Yvonne Loriod, was able to supply some of the work’s origins of inspiration, not the least being various quotations from the Book of Revelations and the writings of both Thomas Aquinas and the Benedictine scholar Dom J. de Monleon, which prelude the individual movements. Loriod summed up for Mehta the work’s essentials in the following words (printed in the evening’s programme):

The work is inspired by the Holy Scriptures, and also by the stars (my husband was interested in the latest discoveries in astronomy), by the colours of precious stones in the Apocalypse, and by birds….this is a work of faith, a very rich work which comprises all the discoveries about rhythm, harmony and melody which my husband made in his whole life….

On the podium for this evening’s performance was one of Britain’s leading conductors, Sir Andrew Davis, lately of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Sir Andrew greeted us before the concert in the auditorium, expressing his pleasure at making his “New Zealand debut” with such a significant work. He spoke about his work in collaboration with Messiaen himself and with the aforementioned Yvonne Loriod (herself an accomplished pianist and celebrated interpreter of her husband’s piano music).  Sir Andrew talked about the work’s performing challenges, even taking us into his confidence regarding the difficulties of directing the orchestral players in the work’s aleatoric ninth movement (in which the players are directed to set their own tempi for their individual lines). He told us about what he called “one of the tricks of the trade” in keeping the “liberated” players under some kind of control – it was all very communicative and good-humoured!

These preambles completed, the two orchestras took the stage, firstly the NZSO, and then, filling the spaces next to the “normal” complement of players, the members of the 2016 National Youth Orchestra, all told a total of 128 players. From this vast ensemble came an incredible array of textures, colours and rhythmic patternings over the next hour, as conductor and players made their way through the composer’s infinite variety of expressive outpourings. Besides the massive sonorities we heard, what also became apparent was the music’s lightness of touch in places, the composer treating the gigantic resources at his disposal with both strength and delicacy, and handling the ebb and flow of contrasting sequences with great sensitivity.

The work began almost ritualistically, with solemn, stepwise brass chords whose progressions seemed at once predetermined and free-flowing, claustrophobic and outward-reaching – it was as if we were being invited to observe an imposing, solidly-built and slightly angular structure from different angles and with different illumination. This was the opening Apparition du Christ glorieux (Apparition of Christ in glory), the NZSO/NYO brasses producing granite-solidtones, multi-surfaced textures and infinitely mysterious ambiences.

The succeeding movements then took us through a cornucopia of light and colour, stillness and energy, strength and filigree impulse, each episode in its way expressing a manifestation of the composer’s vision of the world’s “beyond”, either through natural phenomena, such as birdsong or the play of light on surfaces and atmospheres, or by way of “seeing through” material constraints and into worlds further afield than this one.

In the predominantly birdsong movements we were able to enjoy the players’ skills in realising instrumental detailings of a phenomenally complex order, with winds and percussion expertly providing a central core of rhythmic and textural incident, augmented by strings and brasses with wonderful delicacy.

The third movement, L’Oiseau-lyre et la Ville-fiancée (The Lyre-bird and the Bridal City) made an astonishing effect with its angular volatilities from strings, winds and percussion, as did the following Les Elus marques du sceau (The Elect marked with the seal), which was a kind of kitchen utensil display with babbling birds in concert over ambient strings and little toccatas for percussion. As for Plusieurs oiseaux des arbors de Vie (Many birds of the trees of Life), this “chaos of delight” was superbly realized, the wind players enjoying their taste of aleatoric freedom with raucous gusto.

The movements in which birdsong vied with other instrumental groupings seemed to look outwards with a kind of barely-disguised longing, characterized by frequent upward-thrustings and frissons of agitation. The composer’s characterization of his star-sign Sagittarius (La Constellation du Sagittaire) depicted a kind of chorus of earth-bound disparates coming together and gesturing towards the heavens, while the more elaborate Les Étoiles et la Gloire (The Stars and Glory) more pro-actively and somewhat alarmingly brought together its disparate forces at the sequence’s end, resembling a kind of irresistible force of will, conductor and players bent upon goading the music to try and break through all earthly barriers towards light and enlightenment.

Even more confrontational was the penultimate Le Chemin de l’invisible (The Path of the Invisible) its strident declamations and ferocious energies recalling the composer’s “Turangalila” Symphony in places, the whole ensemble engaged in a rhythmic, colourful and cross-currented confrontation of impulses, culminating in some huge cosmos-shaking shouts of whole-hearted purpose.

That “purpose” seemed to me to be fulfilled by at least three of the movements, each of which struck me as purely transcendent, as depictions of what might be “intended” by our existence. The first, Demeurer dans l’amour (Abiding in love) featuring sweet sostenuto strings soaring and gliding above a sea of gently undulating string-tone. The musicians beautifully maintained the music’s serenities before going with its passionate intensification towards the end, so very stratospheric and unworldly for a few precious moments.

In complete contrast was the apocalyptic vision of Les Sept Anges aux sept trompettes (The Seven Angels with seven trumpets), in its way overwhelming, with brass and percussion announcing a kind of “day of reckoning”, the quote from Revelations literally set to music – I thought, here, the effect more ritualistic and cumulative than instantly terrifying, compared with, say, the all-out percussive onslaughts in parts of both Berlioz’s and Verdi’s Requiem Masses. This seemed more like ritual than theatre, impressive in its implacability, and here played steadily and relentlessly to underline that quality.

And so we came with a kind of inevitability to the work’s concluding movement, a tremulously-expressed paean of ecstatic fulfillment sounded by the strings and wreathed with the gentle tintinabulations of triangles. Here, the effect was incredible, with that aforementioned sense of timelessness allowed to drift in around and over the entire listening-space, as if the entire cosmos was imbued with this music of the spheres, which the composer characterized as Le Christ, lumière du Paradis (Christ, Light of Paradise). We in the audience were held in thrall, as much by the sound as by the silences which followed for what seemed like a moment of blissful eternity……it was all beautifully realized by the conductor and players and contributed as much as what had gone before to the strength of acclamation which followed. From the beyond, Messiaen himself would, I’m sure, have beamed his approval.

Stunning clarinet playing and a “Great” symphony courtesy of the WCO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Overture “The Magic Flute”
WEBER – Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra – No.2 in E-flat Op.74
SCHUBERT – Symphony No.9 in C Major D.944 “The Great”

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Vincent Hardaker (conductor)
David McGregor (clarinet)

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

Sunday 3rd July 2016

Mozart’s Overture to his opera/pantomime “The Magic Flute” began the Wellington Chamber Orchestra’s latest Sunday concert at St.Andrews in grand and ceremonial fashion, though it wasn’t long before the music slyly stepped out of its ritualistic garb and started to dance. Conductor Vince Hardaker kept the players up-to-speed throughout the introduction with a flowing tempo that moved easily into the allegro. Though there was obviously a “warming up” aspect to the playing, with the wind tuning taking time to settle, the ensemble eventually “found” itself, with some solid work from the individual sections, including adept solos from flute and oboe.

The brass acquitted themselves well with their noble chording in places (the three stately fanfares midway – the flute “helping out” here as well – were played “straight”, without any distancings or echo effects, as is sometimes done in performances in the opera house).  Those tricky subsequent strings-and-wind dovetailings, though occasionally loose-limbed in effect, were generally handled confidently, and conductor and players built up the music to a resplendent final tutti – great brass with rasping trombones, and imposing timpani-playing brought it all to a satisfying conclusion.

We were then introduced to the afternoon’s concerto soloist, clarinettist David McGregor, a former NZSO National Youth Orchestra principal, and a winner of the NYO Alex Lindsay memorial Award two years in succession. His studies included working at Victoria University in Wellington with one of the NZSO’s co-principals, Philip Green, and more recently at the University of Tasmania in Hobart with Sydney Symphony associate principal clarinet, Francesco Celata.

Carl Maria von Weber’s concertino works are de rigueur for capable clarinettists, though perhaps because of their extreme difficulties they seem not to appear too often in concert. I had never heard the second of Weber’s two clarinet concerti performed “live”, so was looking forward to this with some eagerness. I certainly wasn’t disappointed, as, right from the beginning the orchestral playing had a surety and sharpness of focus, and David McGregor’s solo playing was simply breathtaking, right from his first two-octave “leap into space” entrance!

Throughout the first movement, soloist and players seemed to enjoy their interactions, tossing their phrases back-and-forth with great aplomb, the clarinet-playing exhibiting a winning range of dynamic and colouristic responses to the music, capping everything off with a terrific ascent to the high E-flat just before the recapitulation. Another feature of McGregor’s playing was his breath-control – such long, liquid runs with nary a pause in which to gasp for even a skerrick of air to replenish the resources – a remarkable display!

The slow movement brought us romantically murmuring strings supporting long lines for the soloist, again, demonstrating amazing breath control – the programme-note talked about the lyrical lines having ‘the benefit of being unbroken by the breaths that a singer would usually require…” – all very well, except that wind players have to breathe sometime, too! (I did, however, look up some information about something called “circular breathing” which may well be an integral part of most wind players’ technical resource these days…). Conductor Hardaker got very settled playing from his ensemble throughout, making the theatricality of the movement’s “recitative” section all the more striking, the soloist playing as if improvising, and the orchestra following.

Came the jolly “Polacca” finale, which the players were encouraged to take at a real “lick”, in fact faster than the soloist’s fingers wanted briefly to go at one point where a flourish went slightly off the rails. The excitement, though, was palpable at that speed, and soloist and players risked all with their rapid-fire dialogues. Eventually, an exciting orchestral crescendo led to a series of “sextuplet flurries” from the clarinet, the soloist really demonstrating his mettle throughout the work’s final pages. Deserved accolades rang through St.Andrew’s at the piece’s conclusion for David McGregor’s spectacular playing and the support from orchestra and conductor.

After the interval came a differently-flavoured kind of business, a performance of one of the most remarkable of nineteenth-century symphonies. This was Schubert’s Ninth, in the key of C Major, and known also as “The Great” (the composer had written an earlier C Major Symphony, one which posterity has since conveniently nicknamed “The Little”). The music’s had a checquered history, unperformed during Schubert’s lifetime, and then rediscovered by Robert Schumann in the late 1830s, who, upon looking through the work coined the immortal phrase “heavenly length”. It received its first performance in Leipzig in the hands of Felix Mendelssohn, who appparently had more success with the work on this occasion than later on in London in 1844 where the players appparently refused to perform the symphony on account of its length and repetitive figurations.

No such strictures inhibit the work’s performance in this day and age, though along with much of the instrumental repertoire of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the symphony has been “authenticised”, or, in other words,“cleansed” of over a century of romantic “overlay” by many of today’s performers. Consequently, it simply isn’t fashionable to play the work in the manner I first got to know it, via recordings by Furtwangler, Barbirolli, Klemperer, Krips, Bohm and Boult, the great Schubert conductors of the post-war era – taking Robers Schumann’s phrase “heavenly length” at its word, those performances drew out the tempi of sequences such as the work’s introduction, and adopted a free, almost improvisatory attitude to the music’s trajectories, especially in the first and second movements.

Vincent Hardaker’s interpretation of the work reflected these revisionist trends – from the outset we heard sprightly, smartly-paced tempi, which imparted a jauntiness to the music, removing the “poetry of awakening” which romantic sensibilities invested in the opening horn-call and the answering woodwinds. There was still grandeur in the big unison statement of the opening theme, but no longer did we experience the thrill of the accelerando from a stately opening tempo to the urgency of the first movement allegro. To my ears, there were gains and losses – the music certainly took on a fresh overall urgency, but lost some of the grandeur and poetry I’d always associated it with. There was some engaging swagger once the allegro got under way, the playing a bit raucous-sounding in places (partly the fault of the confined St.Andrew’s acoustic, which doesn’t take kindly to a fair-sized orchestral tutti), but with plenty of spirit.

One or two of the transition passages sounded awkward for the players, particularly the change from the first subject’s dotted rhythm into the second subject, though a similar passage leading into the development section was negotiated far more tidily. Here the brass came into their own, the trombones lovely and noble-sounding, while the winds “ensembled” nicely with their triplets leading into the recapitulation, and the horns contributed some telling detail. Energies were gathered up most effectively as the coda was approached, with the brass again resplendent and exciting, and though the tempo was pushed hard right through the sequence conductor and players held it all together, with only the slight rallentando before the final chord catching the ensemble out.

A somewhat Charles Ives-like element was added to the music at the slow movement’s beginning, with a fire alarm sounding from an adjacent building. To their credit conductor and players continued, undaunted by the ensuing cross-rhythms, catching the music’s gait with angular but expressive playing from the winds, though clarinet and oboe seemed to have slightly different ideas as to the tuning at this juncture of the music. Brass and timpani coloured the ambiences strongly and securely at this point, as they did right throughout the movement. The oboist did a splendid job with his extended solos, as did the strings in the movement’s trio-like second subject group, violins singing and cellos counterpointing most fetchingly.

I found it difficult to really “get into” the scherzo, as it seemed the players were feeling the pulse of the music at a slightly slower rate than their conductor wanted – the music’s gait was, I thought, a fraction too rigidly applied. Thus, the second, “swinging” melody on the strings was phrased by the players at a more naturally expansive pulse than the accompaniments, which kept on getting ahead.  The trio was more “together”, if still a bit breathless (usually one of music’s most charming and lovable sequences), with the strings steadfast and the winds and brass dovetailing their rhythmic patternings patiently and accurately – a lovely horn counterpoint at one point added to our pleasure.

Amends were made in the finale by Vince Hardaker’s steady, well-controlled tempi at the opening, allowing the orchestral shouts and the answering rhythmic patternings enough space to properly tell, and, later bring out the “spin” of those repeated sequences which incensed those London players in 1844 to the point of mutiny. The winds did well with the “Beethoven Ninth quotation” episode, and the brass then took to the music with a will, followed by the strings in canonic repy, again directed with plenty of controlled energy by the conductor. And the coda’s growing excitement was unerringly detailed by the winds and coloured by the brass towards those great surges of tone which broke over the soundscape at the end so splendidly and energetically. Hard-won, but exhilarating to achieve, and a sterling effort from all concerned.

Temples on the heights and simple dwellings – Ludwig Treviranus at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
LUDWIG TREVIRANUS (piano)

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Grand Variations and Fugue for Piano, Op.35 “Eroica”
PAUL SCHRAMM – Mania
EDVARD GRIEG – Lyric Pieces Op.54
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata in F Minor Op.57 “Appassionata”

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

Sunday 26th June 2016

For three-quarters of his recent Wellington Chamber Music St.Andrew’s piano recital, Ludwig Treviranus bestrode the performing space like a young colossus. It seemed the young man could put hardly a finger, gesture or word wrong, such was the pleasure given by both his playing and his speaking to the audience. I’m aware that there are people who don’t ever want to listen to anybody speak at concerts, but nobody present could have seriously objected to listening to someone with such a charming and enviable gift for natural, spontaneous-sounding communication.

Treviranus spoke clearly and entertainingly about each of the items he was going to present to us, putting the music in the context of what was happening for its composer, after which he delivered vivid and characterful performances of the pieces in question. And though his rendition of the programme’s final work, Beethoven’s titanic Op.57 Sonata, the Appassionata, didn’t quite display the consistency of execution enjoyed by the other pieces on the programme, it was nevertheless performed with much the same whole-heartedness and engagement with the music.

Beginning the program was an earlier Beethoven work, though one hardly less epic in its way than the Appassionata. This was the piece which came to be known as the Eroica Variations, due to its theme’s subsequent reappearance in the finale of the composer’s eponymous Symphony No.3 (the Eroica), which Beethoven completed in 1804, two years after the “theme and variations” piano work. There are fifteen variations and a fugue, and , as with the symphony’s finale, the first few variations focus on the bass-line, gradually adding fragments in each succeeding variation until the “theme proper” grandly comes into being – a most exciting and satisfying process to listen to.

Treviranus took us through this process of fruition with tremendous élan and vivid detailing, at once galvanizing our sensibilities with an arresting opening chord, then deliciously playing with the bas theme’s opening notes, contrasting their delicacy and reserve with his forthright response to Beethoven’s three “call-to-arms” notes in the melody’s second half. We were thus straightaway ignited, energized, charmed and exhilarated by the music in the pianist’s hands in a way that focused our listening for what was to follow.

The Variations then took the stage, each with its own singular character, Treviranus bringing out the detail as vividly as the whole – my notes contained responses such as “I like his strut!”, “beautiful liquidity”, militaristic jog-trotting”, “amazing hammering of the bass chords”, “a murmuring, almost Schubertian left-hand”, “poised and ritualistic” ….and so on. It was like a fantastic carnival procession of different, but equally purposeful presentations.

The complex “maggiore” finale sounded very modern in places in Treviranus’s hands. The music presented us with what seemed like incredible transports of delight on the composer’s part – Beethoven speaking with the “Spirit” – before the fugue tripped its way into the picture, voices dovetailing with both charm and quirkiness. I like the pianist’s enjoyment of pianistic sonorities, conjuring up sounds that the composer may well have himself imagined, far in excess of the limited range and dynamism of the instruments he would have heard before his hearing became impaired.

Last year Treviranus gave a recital which included pieces by Austrian-born Paul Schramm, and did so here again, with a different set of works this time round. Refugees from Nazi oppression, Schramm and his Dutch wife Diny settled in New Zealand in the late 1930s, but were treated with suspicion by the New Zealand Government during the war years. Leaving his wife and son in New Zealand after the war Schramm went to Australia to reactivate his career as a piano virtuoso. However, the privations of the war years had taken their toll, and his success was short-lived. He eventually gave up music as a career and rather ignominiously became a door-to-door salesman. He never returned to New Zealand and died in Brisbane in 1953.

As if to help redress the balance of wrongs a little, Treviranus had recently resurrected some of Schramm’s compositional output for piano – most of which is still in manuscript in the Alexander Turnbull Library’s music collection. This new offering was presumably put together as a kind of suite by the composer with the somewhat disturbing title Mania. They’re rather Bartokian-sounding pieces, with hints of other composers thrown in, psychological in effect, rather than pictorial, and in the case of the final piece, oppressive and gloomy.

First up was a piece with the title Savage March, music which reminded me by turns of Gershwin and Percy Grainger – Treviranus’s playing generated real swagger and energising momentum, bringing out the angularities of a 7/4-like section and a cataclysmic csacading sequence at the end. The second piece, Gaiety, seemed ironic as a title, as the music suggested a kind of “mouse-in-a-wheel” claustrophobia, though relieved by a groovier middle section.

Two diametrically opposed opposites followed: Hilarity presented a dancing, if dogged kind of humour, with a three-note chant repeated somewhat artlessly at the end, while the black opening chords of Defeat came as a terrific shock, its grim and oppressive trajectories reminiscent of Musorgsky’s “Bydlo”. The music’s loneliness and despair was relieved only by occasional pinpricks of light, notes from a toybox kind of tune sounded as if part of a dream relieving sorrow. But it was to no avail, as the bleakness loomed up spectre-like once more, dragging the music towards a kind of oblivion.

Respite from such privations came for us with the interval, and then with some of Edvard Grieg’s adorable Lyric Pieces, the Op.54 set of six. (Incidentally, the first four of these went on to achieve wider fame when orchestrated as the Lyric Suite.) The composer said he wanted with these pieces to create “simple dwellings in which people might feel happy” – he certainly would have been charmed with Ludwig Treviranus’s playing, which caught whole worlds of flavoursome atmosphere, incident and feeling.

Beginning with the Shepherd Boy, the pianist realised the music’s gentle, solitary melancholy from the beginning, though I would have liked him to have given more air and space to those gently cascading triplet runs whose impulses adroitly modulate the music upwards and “tell” so poignantly…but this was otherwise a beautiful and thoughtful performance. The other pieces were unalloyed delight – Treviranus quite deliciously orchestrated the Ganger (March), the forward movement so easeful and redolent of its surroundings, allowing plenty of both airy textures and deeper resonances.

As for his playing of the very first note of the Nocturne, his touch proclaimed the presence of a poet at the piano, while his rumbustious approach to the March of the Dwarves forcefully brought out the piece’s “Mountain King” grotesqueries. Two lesser-known pieces remained, the Scherzo glinting with magical, elfin qualities, while the simple, but richly evocative Ringing Bells seemed to anticipate Arvo Pärt’s tintinabulations in a similarly bracing, out-of doors way. In all, I thought it a most treasurable performance which gave the music its proper stature.

And so we were brought to the granite-like entranceway of Beethoven’s imposing Op.57. Treviranus “squared up” to the opening measures with impressive gravitas, conjuring up the “elemental” nature of the sounds with great conviction. The second subject, a cleverly inverted version of the opening, was here kept on the same kind of trajectory, allowing for little false relaxation, and keeping the overall purpose in view. I did think some of the pianist’s responses to the music’s agitations more febrile than elemental, as if at times the fingers ran ahead of the notes (even losing the line momentarily during the development, but getting the argument back on the rails with real determination!)……it was as if he felt the need to “push” the music in places rather than trusting in and going with the piece’s own inner momentum.

After wrestling titanically with the first movement’s combatative aspects, Treviranus took us into the relative tranquility of the theme-and-variations second movement, which, apart from an anxious moment or two from the pianist’s fingers, flowed inexorably towards the threshold of the maelstrom to follow. The finale’s incredible swirling aspect was vividly engaged, the playing leading us square-shouldered through the flailing agitations and brooding intensities which by turns took the music over. Though a flourish was dropped through misdirection at one point, other sequences were splendidly realised – for instance, the “stamping” passages preceeding the recapitulation thrilled with their power, the music not rushed but kept steady and inexorable, allowing those cosmic impulses to speak with their own inherent force.

To my great delight, Treviranus included the movement’s second-half repeat this time round (I heard him about a year ago play the work without it). I thought a bit more right-hand assertiveness was needed from the pianist in sounding the alarm before plunging the music afresh into the development’s black-browed tumult – but still, this gesture most satisfyingly pushed out the music’s vistas, past any residual concert-hall confines that might have hung grimly onto the proceedings up to this point. From here, the performance moved into the realms of classical tragedy, the arpeggiated recitative passages charged with foreboding, the rhythms gathering power and weight with uncompromising focus, and the coda positively juggernaut-like in its relentless physicality. It was playing that risked everything and delivered for all of us a cathartic sense of coming through with the ringing out of those final, defiant chords.

Typically, the pianist then did two things which perfectly expressed both his and our somewhat rung-out state amid those magnificent resonant ruins of the music’s dissolution – he first of all announced that he was “ready for a beer, now!”, and then sat down to help us return to our lives by playing for us a beautifully expressed encore (straight after the Appassionata? – was the fellow mad?)…..this was another of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, one called Summer Evening, which gently brought our sensibilities back from wherever they’d been flung in the cosmos, so that we could all go back to our “simple dwellings” once again and feel happy.

Emma Sayers – piano recital of connections, dedications and premieres

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
CONNECTIONS, DEDICATIONS – a piano recital by Emma Sayers

W.A.MOZART – Variations on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” K.455
JACK BODY – Five Melodies (1982) – No.5
ROSS HARRIS – For Judith Clark (2011)
DAVID FARQUHAR -Telephonic No.13 (721-230) – Eve Page
DOUGLAS LILBURN – 9 Short Pieces – Nos 1,2DAVID FARQUHAR – Black, White and Coloured – (Homage to G.G.)
ANTHONY RITCHIE – Three Pieces for J.A.R. – Fanfare / Aria for Anita / Perpetua

Emma Sayers (piano)

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

Wednesday, 22nd June 2016

Emma Sayers began her recital with the Mozart Variations, then spoke briefly to us by way of welcome, outlining how the remainder of the program had come about. She had been approached by composer Anthony Ritchie to perform a set of pieces written in memory of his parents, the whole (Three Pieces for J.A.R) named for his father, John Ritchie, with one of the set (Aria for Anita) remembering the composer’s mother. Incidentally, the work was originally commissioned by (and dedicated to) Margaret Nielsen, a long-time friend of John Ritchie.

Almost straightaway the pianist was, she told us, reminded of other music written by people either associated or contemporaneous with John Ritchie, which she thought would “sit alongside well” in a larger tribute – hence the “Connections, Dedications” title of the recital. The Mozart Variations on “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” was, however, a separate goal marking a return to solo public performance, and put in an amusing context by the pianist as, in her own words, “something I couldn’t manage when I was pregnant, because my tummy kept getting in the way of the arm-crossings”.

I was surprised that it had been such a long time (May 2005) since I’d last written about an Emma Sayers solo recital – her playing of the Variations certainly underscored the things I wrote about her then, and served to remind us of what we had been deprived on in the interim. That particular solo appearance was prior to Middle C’s formation, so I feel justified in quoting from my notes for the radio review, regarding her playing of Bartok’s Op.6 set of 14 Bagatelles – “…Sayers took us on a marvellous journey through what seemed like the “landscape of a musical mind” with all its individualities and influences….” as those words applied equally to what she gave us here of Mozart’s at St. Andrew’s.

The first thing which struck me was her playing’s vivid and forthright character, contrasting the contained, tasteful treatment of the theme with the full-blooded flourishes of the first variation’s phrases, done with flair and theatricality. At the risk of thumping a particular tub of mine, I feel compelled to venture the opinion that this was “timeless” Mozart-playing in an entirely appropriate grand piano context, the piano used to “orchestrate” the music in a way that the composer could well have imagined himself, though never actually experienced as sound coming from his own instruments.

Again and again I found myself marvelling at Sayers’ ability to invest her phrasing with some ineffable impulse of characterization which compelled one’s attention, at one and the same time realizing and transcending the composer’s “classical” context and bringing into play something intensely and universally human about the music. It all seemed so “free”, so spontaneous and alive – and yet Mozart was always Mozart, even if such energy and physicality might be thought more the preserve of Clementi or even Beethoven. By way of “exploring” the theme rather than merely decorating or prettifying it, Mozart employed a range of expression here brought out by the pianist in as direct and unmannered a way as seemed possible.

If it seemed like a recital of two, or even three parts on paper, in practice there was no lessening or burgeoning of intensity in Sayers’ playing from the Mozart throughout to the home-grown items assembled to “connect with” and pay tribute to John Ritchie and his music. Beginning with the last in the set of Jack Body’s Five Pieces for Piano, we were taken by the music to a world of light and shade, its components turning and flickering like a magic kind of kaleidoscopic wheel, and bearing our sensibilities unobtrusively but gradually into different realms, from which we emerged changed, our delight replaced by sobriety at the transitory nature of things, at the piece’s end.

Ross Harris’s work For Judith Clark, was written by its composer for the 80th birthday of one of Wellington’s foremost piano teachers (and, appropriately enough, played here by an ex-pupil, who had also played the piece at her former teacher’s’s funeral, in 2014). It’s a beautiful, sonorous piece, taking shape like some kind of frozen soundscape being brought into view and explored from different points. Deeply-rooted frameworks were laid down, and set against the play of light on the various surfaces, the pianist ensuing the serenity of the hues were occasionally enlivened by volatilities, an evocation of a goddess whose aspect occasionally flashed and scintillated, giving fair warning to those in close proximity.

Next we heard a work Sun and Shadow by David Farquhar, one of a number of pieces called Telephonics that he composed for various friends and associates, using their telephone numbers as a basis for the pieces’ composition. Farquhar stressed that the pieces were intended as a series of “musical offerings” rather than as “portraits” of the people involved. This was a piece dedicated to the artist Evelyn Page, and, by association, her husband Freddie Page, who established the Victoria University Music Faculty in 1945, which Farquhar himself was to join in 1953 after his return from a period of study at London’s Guildhall. The music conjured up an impressionistic effect, with resonantly flowing harmonies and brilliantly-etched flashpoints, Sayers allowing their interactions plenty of room to “play out” and eventually subside within the piece’s enfolding silences.

The last time I heard Emma Sayers at an actual keyboard was when she gave a performance of Douglas Lilburn’s Nine Short Pieces in conjunction with Stroma, who performed responses by various composers to each one of the pieces. Here, she revisited the first two of the Nine Pieces by way of paying tribute both to the composer and to Margaret Nielsen, to whom Lilburn in 1967 gave a bundle of unpublished pieces of piano music, collectively labelled “Crotchety at 51!” along with the words “See what you can make of these”. Nielsen was, of course, Lilburn’s “preferred interpreter” of his piano music, and had given the premieres of many of the individual works, so it seemed logical that he would entrust her with the task of creating some order from the apparent chaos.

Sayers in her notes talked about the “searching quality” and the “quirky character” of the pieces, and her remarks were borne out by the performances we heard, the first piece epic, jagged and far-flung, the second impish, angular, questioning and wryful. Again, it was the “character” of each piece which was unequivocally presented to us – under Sayers’ fingers, the music in both instances seemed to know exactly what it was doing.

David Farquhar’s music again featured, this time a piece from a different collection of pieces, entitled Black, White and Coloured. This was one called Homage to G.G. (George Gershwin) – a brilliant transcription of the song I got rhythm, flavoured by the technique of writing for one hand on the white keys of the piano, and for the other on the black, resulting in some ear-catching sonorities. Sayers gave the accented phrasings just the right amount of “ginger”, bringing out the piece’s drolleries at the beginning and unerringly building the music’s trajectories towards the bluff humour of the ending.

And so to Anthony Ritchie’s commemorative Three Pieces for J.A.R. – music intended by the composer to reflect different aspects of his father, John Ritchie’s life. Before the pieces were played, Anthony RItchie spoke briefly and movingly about Margaret Nielsen’s friendship with and support of his father over the time of their association. The first part of the work, Fanfare, marked John Ritchie’s long involvement with brass players, both in bands and orchestras, using a simple, chant-like figure at the beginning subjected to all kinds of different harmonic modulations, some progressive, others all elbows and knees, harsh and abrupt. A deep-toned, briefly sounded sequence made a humourful ending to the piece.

The second piece, Aria for Anita, brought Anita Ritchie, John’s wife into focus – making reference to her soprano voice, Anthony RItchie quoted part of Solveig’s Song from Grieg’s Peer Gynt, one of her favourites. The music’s recitative-like opening suggested a high voice at first, then varied the line with an alto-like response, the phrase-ends coloured at several points with the interval of a fifth. The music seemed to accrue its own ambient warmth, figures sounded out and then left to resonate as a context in which newer motifs could appear – a deep, rich bitter-sweet climax grew out of the exchanges,  as a strummed accompaniment to the soprano/alto voice exchanges allowed the music to deepen and linger before gently disappearing.

From the silence came Perpetua, the final movement, the upward-thrusting opening shared between the hands before changing into an attitude-driven march rhythm whose insistence scintillated into cascades of figurations, the repetitions making their own rhythmic patterns in lime with the “perpetual motion” suggested by the piece’s title. Having scattered all before it, the music then irradiated the textures with Ravel-like scintillations, even-handedly defining the heavenly vistas while at the same time plumbing the depths. Anthony RItchie in his notes alluded to the old prayer which included the phrase “perpetual light”, suggesting the soul’s continuing journey through what the composer called the “starry nothingness” of the ending.

All of this was delivered by Emma Sayers with what seemed and felt like complete identification with the music’s natural, spontaneous outpourings. Nothing in the music was forced or unduly amplified, but allowed instead by the pianist its own range of mellifluous voice-soundings which readily  put across the composers’ intentions. In a relatively short time we had been taken through an exploration of some magnitude across the face of people’s lives and sharply-focused creative achievements. I felt at the end of it all we couldn’t have had a more inspirational guide at the piano throughout our journey.

Schubert’s Chamber Music Swan-Song at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SCHUBERT AT ST.ANDREW’S
Concert Four – The Aroha String Quartet

String Quartet in E-flat major D.87 (Op.125 No.1)
String Quintet in C major D.956 (Op.Posth.No.163)
(with Ken Ichinose, ‘cello)

The Aroha String Quartet
Haihong Liu, Simeon Broom (violins)
Zhongxian Jin (viola) / Robert Ibell (‘cello)

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

Sunday 5th June, 2016

It’s almost inconceivable that a “Schubertiade” of the kind organized here at St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace would not include the composer’s last and greatest chamber music work. This, of course, is the String Quintet in C Major D.958, which was completed just two months before Schubert’s death, a work he never heard performed. In fact it had to wait until 1850 for its first public performance, and another three years before it was actually published.

Despite his having completed fifteen string quartets, and numerous other chamber works besides the String Quintet, Schubert was never taken seriously by his contemporaries as a chamber music composer. He was probably inspired by Mozart’s and Beethoven’s work (both also wrote string quintets in C Major), except that Schubert chose to use a second ‘cello instead of the additional viola employed by the older composers.

Schubert’s work is therefore richer- and darker-sounding that those of his models, in a sense befitting the composer’s desperate personal circumstances at the time of the work’s writing. Of his other chamber works only his last String Quartet in G Major D.887 can compare with the Quintet in its range and scope of tragic expression – like the Quintet it was not performed in the composer’s lifetime and not published until 1851.

For this concert the Aroha String Quartet enlisted the services of NZSO ‘cellist Ken Ichinose to join with the group to play the Quintet. I had previously heard the Quartet perform the work with another NZSO ‘cellist, Andrew Joyce, and was interested as to what the ensemble’s response to the work would be like this time round with different personnel (as well as a different ‘cellist, the Quartet’s second violin had changed, Simeon Broom having taken over from Blythe Press).

I also liked the Quartet’s choice of an earlier chamber work by the composer as part of the concert, highlighting the extent of Schubert’s incredible creative advancement throughout his short life. We heard String Quartet No.10 in E-flat major D.87, written in 1813, when the composer was sixteen. Though the work lacks tonal variety (all movements being in the same key), there’s a good deal of assurance in the writing expressing itself in humourful gesture and characteristic lyricism – a perfect foil, in fact, for the later work.

In the case of each work on the programme, the Aroha Quartet’s approach took a direct, “take no prisoners” manner, which I found exciting and exhilarating in the quicker music, and incredibly intense in the slower, more lyrical and inward sequences. Right from the beginning of the earlier work, the players’ receptivity to the music’s light-and-shade was evident, mellow and relaxed for the opening exchanges, then dynamic and volatile when dealing with the development section’s agitations.

I enjoyed the palpable “squawkings” of the scherzo’s opening phrase, noting the mischievous, but also wraith-like echo of the ascending figure, sounded each time just before the players plunged back into the opening’s reprise. The Adagio brought out a different kind of earthiness to the sound, a grainy, sappy beauty at the beginning, which was transformed into something hushed and delicate when the sweet and lullabic second theme was floated on the air. After this, the finale’s tumbling energies was a kind of “hold on tight” ride in places, relaxing for the songful second melody, but plunging into the brief development section and the reprise of the opening with invigorating exuberance.

After the interval came “le déluge”, of course, in the form of the String Quintet, the players (this time with ‘cellist Ken Ichinose) losing no time in coming to grips with the work’s intentions, digging into the second brow-furrowed chord, and then relishing the fanfare-like cascadings counterpointed by the second cello’s sombre opening-theme musings. Then, the second subject sequence fell upon our ears like a lullaby, given firstly by the two cellos, and then by the two violins, both parings so very graceful and reassuring in effect, making the energies that bubbled up seem like exuberant pleasantries. The first-movement repeat brought out a sharper-focused response with a touch more theatricality, so that one seemed to notice more readily things like the second violin’s chattering volubility beneath the first’s melodic line, or the viola’s counterpoint to both of them at the same time.

A new realm came into view with the magical modulation into the middle section of the movement, giving rise to rougher, more physical textures cheek-by-jowl with the loveliness of the viola’s and ‘cello’s duetting, followed by a return to confrontation, the separate lines seeming to “square up” to one another and almost come to blows just before the recapitulation of the opening music. Only a brief lapse of poise in the upper strings resulting in a strained handful of notes distracted our sensibilities from the surety of the ensemble’s “putting things back together” and bringing the movement to a tremulous close.

The second movement (for which descriptive words seem inadequate) brought out playing which transcended time and space over those opening measures – long, flowing lines and beautifully-mirrored pulsations, the strings both bowed and plucked. Even more other-worldly were those sequences when the pared-back textures admitted only the pizzicati notes echoing across the charged sostenuto spaces, the players building the intensities with unerring purpose. In the agitated central section I admit I found myself craving more trenchant, less CIVILISED ‘cello-playing, the upper strings seeming to me to lack a deeply-disturbed enough foil for their lament. But in what seemed no time at all we found ourselves back in those opened-up sostenuto spaces, marveling all over again at the music’s strength and eloquence, the bitterness and anguished overlaid by the first violin’s sweetness of determined resignation.

What a contrast with the Scherzo’s opening, the ensemble’s performance almost frightening in its ferocity and abandonment – the intonation might not have been impeccable in places, but the music’s gutsiness and desperation was palpable – and here, the ‘cello’s counterweighted outbursts galvanized the ensemble’s energies splendidly. Just as profound was the group’s response to theTrio, those richly-upholstered downward plungings into darker regions giving us a sense of the composer’s extremities of despair and limits of privation – after the music delved as deeply as it could go, the Scherzo abruptly returned, whirling us along like some kind of juggernaut to its unequivocal conclusion.

The finale doesn’t explore the extremities of expression as viscerally as do its companions, but makes as great an overall impact through cumulative expression of a gritty determination, devoid of any self-pity. From the beginning the playing’s gait proclaimed strength and purpose, leavened by the beauty of the contrasting lyrical episodes – beautiful work here from the pair of ‘cellos, amply supported by the first violin’s lovely “thistledown” texturings and the ever-responsive ambient beauties of the middle-voices strings. In other places, the full-bloodedness of the playing brought out an occasional stridency, as if the upper strings weren’t always completely at one regarding intonation – but this mattered far less when set against the players’ whole-heartedness and sense of commitment to the composer and his coruscating vision of the fragilities of being.

Somewhere earlier I made mention of the last occasion on which I heard the Aroha Quartet perform this work, with a different second ‘cellist – having now re-read my review of that concert, I’m all the more buoyed up by this music’s renewable aspect, a sense of being “wowed” all over again by the same piece and (mostly) the same performers, but in a way that belongs entirely to “this time round”. There was nothing second-hand or reworked about the music-making, here – it all came to us with startling and invigorating immediacy, on its own terms truly memorable.

 

 

 

Schubert Concert at St.Andrews promises a weekend’s abundance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SCHUBERT AT ST.ANDREW’S
Concert One “Cornucopia”

Arpeggione Sonata in A Minor D.821
(for double bass and piano)
Oleksandr Guchenko (double-bass) / Kirsten Robertson (piano)

Octet in F Major D.803
(for strings, clarinet, bassoon and horn)
Yuka Eguchi, Anna van der Zee (violins) / Belinda Veitch (viola) / Ken Ichinose (‘cello) / Oleksandr Guchenko (double-bass) / Rachel Vernon (clarinet) / Leni Mäckle (bassoon) / Heather Thompson (horn)

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

Friday 3rd June, 2016

This was the first of what promised to be a delightful and rewarding “Schubertiade” of concerts featuring various solo artists and ensembles. The title “Cornucopia” possibly referred to the variety of instruments used throughout the evening; or else, to the range and scope of the composer’s writing for these instrumental combinations. Whatever the case, the results suited the “abundant supply of good things” description suggested by the word, regarding both the amount of interest generated by these combinations, and the quality of the music coming from its composer.

This concert began with something of a performance-rarity, that of the exotically-named “Arpeggione” Sonata which Schubert wrote originally for an instrument which had a brief period of popularity in the 1820s. This was a kind of ‘cello, played with a bow, but with a fretted fingerboard, just like a guitar. What possessed the maker to produce such an instrument is anybody’s guess, as it never really “caught on” among musicians.

Schubert’s work, in fact, was the only piece of any great significance written for the instrument. And, as if to underline this “poignancy of neglect”, the sonata was one of those works by Schubert which wasn’t published for many years after the composer’s death, by which time the arpeggione had all but disappeared. Today, the sonata is played most often on the viola or ‘cello, which made the prospect of hearing the work this evening on the double-bass an exciting and unusual prospect.

I confess to some surprise at what we were getting, as I would have thought the ‘cello more in keeping with the original instrument’s tonal qualities – and on the one recording I have of the piece, there’s a ‘cello (which had already disposed me more favourably towards that instrument in this work). However, I was, as the saying goes, keeping an open mind (and ears, of course), as we waited for the instrumentalists to take the stage and begin.

Our double-bass player was Oleksandr Gunchenko, a native of Kiev, whose early music training culminated in a professional orchestral appointment in Russia at the age of nineteen, emigrating to New Zealand in 1999 to play in the Christchurch Symphony, and then joining the NZSO in 2007. He was partnered in the Sonata by Christchurch-born pianist Kirsten Robertson, a graduate of Canterbury University and an ex-pupil of Diedre Irons, at present the NZSO’s principal keyboard player.

Used as I was to the ‘cello’s register, the first few notes of the double-bass line were a surprise, and took some getting used to – but what immediately took over from this was an impression of the performance’s fluency and musicality of tone, of phrasing and of give-and-take between the instruments. Apart from the occasional strained note in the double-bass’s highest registers the playing of both Guchenko and Robertson was impeccable, the pianist ever-mindful of her partner’s mellow-voiced instrument in helping to maintain the balance of the music’s sound-world.

The work’s middle movement gave ample opportunity for expression from both instruments, the piano beginning the hymn-like theme, then handing over to the double-bass, whose varied and characterful playing brought out the music’s sombre qualities with the help of some near rock-bottom notes! After this, the finale lifted the sombre mood with flowing, flavoursome sequences both in minor and major keys (the composer occasionally in “Hungarian Melody” mode). A particular delight was a sequence featuring pizzicati from the double-bass against the piano’s decorative statements,and the deftly-played lead-back to the flowing, dance-like passages, the music’s gentle major-key closure wrought by a mellow-sounding pizzicato chord – all very delicious.

The encore, a setting of Schubert’s “Ave Maria”, seemed at first to undo some of the beautiful work the players had done earlier – at first I found the piano too loud, the tones obscuring the double bass’s lines, which from my vantage point in the auditorium seemed to have little or no “carrying power” played in such a deep register. Things improved in that respect when the players repeated the verse with the bass up an octave higher – though more precarious as regards intonation, the balance between the instruments was more pleasing, and the string instrument seemed to find its singing voice, to our great delight and enhanced pleasure.

The concert’s second half presented us with a completely different sound-world, being Schubert’s Octet, for strings, clarinet, bassoon and horn. As with a couple of Schubert’s other works and Beethoven’s Septet, the Octet quotes a theme from an existing work by the composer, albeit a not very well-known duet from an early opera Die Freunde von Salamanka. I certainly didn’t experience any surprising and/or delightful “I know that!” reactions of the sort afforded by the “Trout” Quintet and the “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet, or Beethoven’s cheeky reminiscence in his Septet of a movement taken from his PIano Sonata Op.49 No.2.

All the musicians in the performance were either permanent or casual players with the NZSO, which accounted for the sheer technical aplomb of the music-making – this being the starting-point, the group mightily impressed with its teamwork and characterful individuality at all points. The composer certainly gives all the instruments the chance to shine, and these chances were taken most excitingly by each of the players – horn player Heather Thompson described the experience of playing the work as “climbing Mt.Everest”, which seemed to me as good a way as any of characterizing both the effort and the achievement of realizing the music in performance.

We got a beautiful, sonorous opening chord from the ensemble, the kind of sound that straightaway gives rise to unaccountable but luxuriant feelings of well-being – obviously a great beginning to the enterprise! Strings and winds played off against one another tellingly throughout, creating stores of energy and tightening tensions which the allegro then released in varied ways via exuberant ensemble playing and colourful solo lines. The music’s course was clearly-defined at all times, the essential character of the contrasting sequences of exposition and development brought out by the playing. I particularly enjoyed the adroitness of the interplay between the strings as well as the golden tones of the horn, the latter enabling a beautifully nostalgic ending to the movement after the joyously eruptive fanfares had sounded their “conclusive” bits!

The clarinet-led opening of the second movement Adagio was a heavenly sequence, continuing the pleasure with the first violin in duet, along with beautiful coloristic touches from horn and bassoon. Always the ensemble remained alive to the music’s expressive possibilities, “leaning into” the impulses of emotion which accompanied different sequences of the music, such as a splendid ceremonial-like statement from the horn, mid-movement underlined by the lower strings, and a lovely viola-supported flourish from the violin leading back to the reprise of the opening. There were, in fact, too many gorgeous solos to enumerate, each of them contributing as much to a sense of teamwork as to individual moments. And both the fateful-sounding accompaniments which towards the movement’s end pounded menacingly beneath the music’s surfaces, and the bleak, almost bone-bare moments soon afterwards were given their all-important weight as a reminder of all the things of heaven and earth undreamt in our philosophy…..

The ensemble took the Scherzo movement at a great lick, most excitingly exploring the music’s dynamic range to great effect, and achieving a whimsical contrast with the lyrical, long-breathed Trio. As much a different world was the following Andante, a “theme-and-variations” movement with some delicious moments, a lovely skipping sequence for clarinet and strings, a self-satisfied, semi-pompous sequence for horn, followed by a skipping, carefree ‘cello solo, and a swirling, minor-key variant  with strings supporting the winds. Following this was a sweet-voiced strings-and-clarinet episode whose execution was simply to die for, and then, like some kind of wind-up clockwork conglomeration, a delicious dovetailing of rhythmic patterning, allowed to run down in a lovely, child-like “is it finishing?” kind of way.

Not content with merely a Scherzo, the composer had recourse to a Menuetto and Trio to boot, the music seeming akin to a prayer, one delivered with great poise and steadfastness, the clarinet contributing a lovely counter-theme to the dance-steps, with the horn adding a sonorous variant. An extremely “gemütlich” Trio completed a sense of relaxation, or, perhaps escapism, which the opening of the finale proceeded to demolish with frightening purpose and a sense of desolation – perhaps a premonition of death? An “are you ready?” gesture, and we were suddenly off on a gloriously garrulous jog-trot, one in which good humour prevailed right through almost to the piece’s end. There was a marvellous passage mid-movement in which fugal lines tightened around and about the trajectories, maintaining the tensions until the release-point of the main theme’s reprise, which all of the players almost physically threw themselves into – most exhilarating!

But then! – after a number of energetic, but elongated lead-ins to a long-awaited coda, we were instead suddenly confronted with darkness once again, agitated tremolandi on lower strings and a whimpering, frightened violin pleading with “I told you so” winds. Fortunately it was nothing more than a cloud crossing the sunshine’s path – and the players picked up the strands and held them tightly, urging the music quickly to its conclusion, frightening to experience, but marvellous to come through! What a piece and what a performance! And what a beginning to a whole weekend of the composer’s music!

Alexander Gavrylyuk – great pianism at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents:
ALEXANDER GAVRYLYUK (piano)

SCHUBERT – Piano Sonata in A D.664
CHOPIN – Fantasy in F Minor Op.49
Nocturne Op.27 No.2
Polonaise in A-flat Major Op.53
PROKOFIEV – Piano Sonata No.3 in A Minor Op.28
RACHMANINOV – Etude-Tableaux Op.39  Nos 1, 2, 5, 7, 9
BALAKIREV – Islamey: Oriental Fantasy

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday 22nd May 2016

From the moment Alexander Gavrylyuk played the very first note of Schubert’s adorable A Major Sonata D.664 on the Waikanae Music Society’s wonderful Fazioli piano, I felt we were in for a performance which seemed more than ready to explore and convey from the outset something of this music’s whole-hearted intensity and volatility, from the lyricism of the beginning which contrasted tellingly with the “sturm-und-drang” episodes of the development, through the poetry of the slow movement, and then to the humour and energy of the finale.

It’s somewhat ironic that “modern” Russian pianists (Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and more recently Arcadi Volodos and Grigory Sokolov) seem to have taken Schubert’s music very much to heart, developing, in fact, a particularly distinctive style of interpretative response to this repertoire, when for an earlier generation of Russian pianists (Rachmaninov, for example) the Schubert sonatas were hardly, if at all, known. In fact the nineteenth century generally set great store by the composer’s lieder and certain pieces of his chamber music, while the piano sonatas were all but conveniently forgotten, and dismissed by those who knew of their existence as vastly inferior to those of Beethoven’s.

Here, in Alexander Gavrylyuk’s capable and masterful hands, was that more recent Russian Schubert tradition reaffirmed, along with the composer’s true greatness as a writer of long-breathed, beautifully proportioned sonata-form structures, as differently wrought to Beethoven’s as could be imagined, but as profound and as visionary in their own unique way. The opening C-sharp of the sonata was here sounded by Gavrylyuk with the greatest of significance, as if a world of its own, one which briefly resonated and “coloured” our sensibilities before activating a gentle updraught on which the phrase took wing, and flowed with that same sense of wonderment into the music’s opening paragraph. And the repeat occasioned an expression on the pianist’s face of such joy in anticipation, we listeners couldn’t help but be infused with something of the same feeling.

Every episode of the sonata was delivered with a similar awareness of the music’s power to enchant, to move and to disturb, as with the shock of the development’s darker-browed statements, like storm clouds bringing conflict and strife to the peace of a hitherto settled day! Gavrylyuk’s lead-back from this to the reprise of the opening was like a gentle reassurance, with the opening theme now less yielding, made more assertive by its dealings with darker impulses and threatening gestures – with all of this in mind imagine our surprise and delight at the pianist’s decision to repeat the development section, rather like a “here we go again” feeling as the dark forces gathered and plunged into our midst once more! Again there was that reassurance when all was done, with beautiful voicings and fine gradations of tone leading us to those final statements of the opening theme, where the music seemed to take comfort in the darkness as a resting-place.

The slow movement’s heart-rending chordal opening spread its wings and soared aloft, elaborating its theme with angular rhythms mid-movement, which in Gavrylyuk’s hands seemed to reach out for something unattainable before resignedly returning to the comfort of the opening. All of that done, the finale then charmed us with its artless opening, a seemingly innocuous waltz which then grew into something forthright and determined. The pianist brought out the music’s different attitudes as much with his expressions and his body language as with his fingers, such as the “strut” with which he launched into the second subject, squaring his shoulders and pursing his lips like a child on a hobby-horse – almost as if he was on a “boys’ own holiday adventure”.

The music’s development had a kind of garrulous anxiety, freely modulating but running away from new territories as quickly as finding them, and at the end charmingly and insouciantly putting it all aside. In fact the overall journey here I thought resembled something of an early attempt at a “rite of passage”, one from which the composer could break off if things got out of hand. That Schubert stayed the course and finished the work was to our inestimable benefit, especially so with somebody like Gavrylyuk on hand to enable a glorious “no holds barred” kind of performance.

Three Chopin pieces followed, the first the wondrous F Minor Fantasy Op.49, that richly-conceived improvisatory-like journey which took us through various pianistic and compositional modes in aid of unfolding an expansive musical tale of one’s own particular fancy. Each section of the piece was strongly characterized, the opening a mysterious march, a ghostly processional plumbing the depths, and taking itself away with each downbeat, into the distance and darkness. Gavrylyuk then came into his own with passionately-wound swirlings of energy, heroically-delivered melodic lines and tremendous attack upon the chords, the ferment of interaction defused by the piano’s marching away from it all, and working towards a central melody delivered like a prayer – even a reprise of the swirlings of energy and “ferment of interaction” didn’t lessen the sense of a narrative whose music gripped our sensibilities.Next was a Nocturne, the well-known Op.27 No.2, played by Gavrylyuk with complete ease and grace at the beginning, working up into agitations with the stormy central moments and dropping back from it all into a most beautiful ppp, his delicate fingerwork creating sounds resembling strings of pearls. A different kettle of fish was, of course, the Op.53 A-flat Polonaise, probably the most well-known of these particular pieces, not the least for a notorious central section of the music whose left hand octaves were said to have evoked for at least one famous pianist of former times “the horses’ hooves of the Polish Cavalry”.

Taking an heroic and volatile, rather than a brutal and weighty approach, the pianist kept the music light on its feet for the most part, allowing the music an engaging, even charming strut in places, while giving the great crescendi their due. As for the “Polish Cavalry” section, Gavrylyuk generated a great head of steam and verve without ever losing a sense of the music’s purpose, finding real tenderness in the quieter moments before the dance’s reprise at the end.

Something of a concert of two halves, the world of difference in the music was emphasized by Gavrylyuk’s full-frontal engagement with Prokofiev’s Third Piano Sonata Op.28, the opening of the work rather like the effect of somebody starting up a large motor-bike and roaring off in a cloud of blue smoke! Again, Gavrylyuk took pains to bring out not just the physical energy of the piece but its mordant wit and sarcasm as well. In the work’s central section the pianist conveyed the music’s dark, somewhat eerie character, a world where things seemed to repeatedly turn upon themselves, by the end wistfully searching for a way back to the light.

A brief irruption of energies, alternating two- and three-patterned rhythms led to a grand melodic statement on repeated chords and bell-like left hand underlinings – just as deftly, Gavrylyuk then reactivated those galloping horse impulses, driving the music towards its brilliant, near-manic climax, with a virtuoso flourish at the end.

We then got a treasurable opportunity to compare at first hand the compositional styles of Prokofiev with his older compatriot, Rachmaninov. They were creative spirits documented as being more in conflict with one another rather than accord, though according to pianist Sviatoslav Richter (who knew Prokofiev), very much “yoked together”, more than one might initially suppose – Richter was referring specifically to Rachmaninov’s Op.39 Etude-tableaux as representing a kind of “epiphany” for the younger Prokofiev, though one that was never acknowledged, except in the latter’s music.

In these works more than in any of his other music Rachmaninov certainly seems to anticipate his younger contemporary’s sound-world. Gavrylyuk launched the first of his selection, No.1, with tremendous verve and agitation, here and there bringing out the music’s unmistakable shafts of imperialistic Russian light, but subjecting them to a new, harsher reality, one seemingly pursued by demons. No.2 took us to a different, though equally obsessive world, one of watery resonances dominated by the composer’s life-long fascination with the traditional “Dies Irae” chant, Gavrylyuk building up great reservoirs of swirling sound haunted by the four-note motif, before allowing the ambiences to drift into enigmatic silence.

More in the virtuoso “grand manner” was No.5, reiterating a sombre theme against a constantly modulating background, the whole replete with swirling chromaticisms, Gavrylyuk maintaining the oppressive mood of the piece with single-minded focus, allowing us little respite, even with the alternations between minor and major at the piece’s end. Blacker still (somewhat in the manner of Liszt’s late piano works) was No.7 with its bleak chordal progressions and harsh bird-cries, music of comfortless solitude and relentless trajectories – the bell-like build-up of sonority towards the piece’s end in Gavrylyuk’s hands created for us a profoundly grim “is this salvation or oblivion?” scenario – what an incredible piece of music!

After this, the unashamedly Tsarist splendour and barbarity of No.9’s resplendent energies was some relief, those Musorgsky-like church bells ringing out defiantly, and awakening the old imperialist glories, the shades and wraiths of the past hastening to join in with the processional for a short-lived moment of affirmation.

The composer, while admitting to extra-musical associations in these works never revealed any individual programs, stating unequivocally when pressed to do so – “…let them (listeners) paint for themselves what the music most suggests”.

Concluding the recital as per programme was Balakirev’s colourful Caucasian-inspired piece Islamey, whose subtitle, “Oriental Fantasy” says all that really needs to be said about the piece. I’d thought Kazan pianist Halida Dinova’s Lower Hutt performance of the piece a couple of years ago pretty wonderful, and Alexander Gavrylyuk was certainly of her company, plunging into the music’s high-voltage rhythmic trajectories with perhaps even more free-wheeling excitement in places!

Of course there’s more to the music than speed, power and glitter – and Gavrylyuk savoured the piece’s “old song” most beguilingly, infusing the melody with all the nostalgia and sinuous charm one would have thought possible to bring out.

As for the “bucking bronco” aspect of the piece’s final section, Gavrylyuk’s playing was simply jaw-dropping, fabulous runs, flailing notes and amazing climaxes and all, complete with a touch of showmanship at the piece’s end, a wonderful “that’s all, folks!” gesture seeming to toss all pianistic difficulties to one side with terrific élan.

After this, the pianist charmingly acceded to our request for an encore (hadn’t we had our just desserts by then, though, really?) with the opening of Schumann’s Kinderscenen, (“Of Foreign Lands and Peoples”) a well-nigh perfect gesture of homecoming at the conclusion of a fabulous musical journey.