Author: Peter Mechen

From nothing, whole worlds – Circa Theatre’s 40th Birthday production of King Lear

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
William Shakespeare’s KING LEAR

Director: Michael Hurst
Set and Lighting: Andrew Foster
Costumes: Gillie Coxill
Music and Sound: Jason Smith
Producer: Carolyn Henwood

Cast:
King Lear – Ray Henwood
Earl of Gloucester – Ken Blackburn
Goneril – Carmel McGlone
Regan – Claire Waldron
Cordelia – Neenah Dekkers-Reihana
Fool – Gavin Rutherford
Duke of Kent – Stephen Papps
Edmund – Guy Langford
Edgar – Andrew Paterson
Duke of Albany – Todd Rippon
Duke of Cornwall – Peter Hambleton
Oswald – Nick Dunbar

With: Alex Halstead, Callum McSorley, Charlotte Cook, Connor McNabb, Hailey Ibold,
Jamie Wallace-Thexton, Jordan Murphy, Kelly Willis-Pine, Monica Reid, Morgan Hopkins,
Olivia Fox and Samantha Geraghty

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 14th May, 2016

Shakespeare got his “King Lear” story from an early chronicler, Holinshed, (who had in turn got it from an earlier source). As well as this there had been an anonymous stage adaptation of the story “doing the rounds” and performed in London about ten years before Shakespeare’s play appeared. Both of these told the story of the semi-legendary Leir of Britain and his three daughters Gonorilla/Gonerill, Regan/Ragan and Cordeilla/Cordella. In both Holinshed’s version and the anonymous play, there is a happy ending, with the aged king reinstated on the British throne by his daughter Cordelia’s arrival with her husband the King of France’s troops to defeat the armies of the traitorous dukes of Albany and Cornwall.

Shakespeare’s dramatisation, with its bleaker denouement to the story held the stage until the Puritans closed down all the theatres in 1642. With the Restoration theatres were reopened, but a new generation of playgoers found the uncompromising tragedy of the Bard’s Lear too much to stomach – this  encouraged the Poet Laureate of the age Nahum Tate to rewrite the play along the ”happy ending” lines of the earlier versions. It wasn’t until over a century later that the great actor Edmund Kean reinstated Shakespeare’s tragic end to the drama – and even then the battle for fidelity’s sake continued to be fought well into the first half of the twentieth century over heavily cut scripts, and reducing or taking out supporting roles by various managers, directors or actors themselves, wanting to emphasize the role of the eponymous leading character.

Today, people responsible for productions pride themselves upon up-to-the-minute historical research and textual fidelity, even if there’s an equally compulsive desire on the part of directors to update the context of the play’s action, ostensibly for purposes of better connecting with modern audiences. It seems that British comedian Michael Flanders’ throwaway line during the course of his and Donald Swann’s revue “At the Drop of a Hat” concerning a dissertation on Tudor England theatrical performance – “Anything to stop it being done straight!” has become true of most present-day performances of theatrical and operatic classics.

Stage traditionalists must feel as though they get a hard time of it these days, but they can take heart from the pleasure and satisfaction to be had when encountering updated productions whose creators and organizers know what they’re about. So it was on Saturday night at Circa Theatre with director Michael Hurst’s production of Lear, which seemed to me to be securely grounded in its own “time”, the ambience suggesting the Second World War era, and the context one of military conflict. Once the frisson of encountering the update’s impact at the play’s very beginning – a shadowy, almost “film noir” scenario featuring people furtively smoking and soldiers with guns checking the environs in a “put that light out” kind of way – had been squared up to, and the King and his court been introduced to us in their gloriously-arrayed mixture of 1940s military and civilian clothes, we settled down to listening “past” our visual realignments and into the heart of the business, contained of course in the language and its interchanges.

Lear’s court resembled a smartly-run consortium’s board-room, one involving both military and civilian personnel. And there, in the commanding personage of Ray Henwood was the king himself, autocratic and imperious, walking with a stick, and wielding it with complete authority. His daughters and their respective entourages awaited the King’s pleasure, Goneril and Regan, the two eldest, seeming to anticipate the demand that they declare absolute and unequivocal love to their father. The elder sisters spoke in reply first, Carmel McGlone’s Goneril honeyed of voice, beautifully modulated and completely without spontaneity, and Claire Waldron’s Regan fulsomely sing-song but mechanical, and sounding increasingly like clockwork as she proceeded – both declaring their actual feelings and intentions as clearly to all excepting their father as if they had spoken their thoughts out loud.

A marked contrast came with Lear’s questioning of his youngest daughter, Cordelia, portrayed with youthful wholeheartedness by Neenah Dekkers-Reihana, her sincerity palpable and vulnerable in manner, but steady and unswerving in effect, engendering shock among allies and antagonists alike – the King’s anger was perfectly in context with his disappointment at Cordelia’s “Nothing” answer and his “Nothing will come of nothing” warning reply. The reaction to all of this of Lear’s uniformed right-hand man, the Duke of Kent (played by Stephen Papps) I found a bit puffy and blustery of manner at first, but once his defence of Cordelia in front of Lear had earned him his banishment, and occasioned his return in disguise to continue serving his master, I thought the actor’s portrayal as a loyal retainer deeply moving, rich in truth and honesty.

Articulating his “stand up for bastards” speech while having his way on an office desktop with some acquiescent “temp” girl, was something of a virtuosic theatrical feat on the part of Guy Langford, playing the role of Edmund, illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, a loyal friend of Lear’s. Very much the young rake on the make, Edmund racily and almost engagingly outlined for us his scheme to undermine his half-brother’s legitimacy in his father’s eyes, and wheedle his way into favour with either (or both) Goneril and Regan. He made the most of his “heavenly portents” speech before convincing his brother Edgar that the latter had incurred their father’s displeasure, and that he (Edgar) had better go and hide out until further notice. I liked how Edgar (played by Andrew Paterson) convincingly presented a more rough-hewn, less “courtier’d” manner than his half-brother, credible in his despair at his father’s anger, and his bewilderment regarding what he might do to right the alleged wrong.

Edgar’s course, to take refuge in the countryside as a beggar, brought him into direct contact with the estranged Lear and his Fool (the latter a virtuoso portrayal by Gavin Rutherford of one of literature’s most powerful archetypes, the wise jester – more of him below….) at the height of a storm. In some of the most visceral language ever accorded the elements by any storyteller or poet, the words became stinging, biting, oak-cleaving cataracts and hurricanes. All of this was superbly and variedly detailed by Henwood, his character’s troubled place in the cosmos transfixed at that moment by a squared volume of rain-spattered light mid-stage, drawing our focus into the square and similarly flailing our own sensibilities – a most telling piece of interpretation and production. Having been then directed by the solicitous Kent to a hovel, Lear encountered Edgar, disguised as “Poor Tom”. Andrew Paterson’s portrayal forcibly put across the character’s deranged quality with heightened volume and dramatic gesture. Though much of his diatribe couldn’t be deciphered, his piteous sotto-voce asides kept the character’s purpose clear for us amid all the bluster.

So to Gavin Rutherford’s Fool, something of a “Billy-Bunter in an airman’s cap” Fool, but obviously a force to be reckoned with, a presence off whom Lear’s own words bounced and faltered, as when the king responded to the banter about making something from nothing with a hollow-sounding and throat-catching “Nothing can be made out of…….” And how tellingly was the Fool’s “old before thy time” jibe underscored with just enough music of derangement as to indicate Lear’s unnerving by his own fears, with “Keep me in temper! – I would not be mad!” Throughout, the characterizations of each of the actors made me more aware than ever of how both the Fool and Kent tried to protect and safeguard their lord and master, Kent from his enemies without and the Fool from Lear’s own foibles within.

As for Ken Blackburn’s playing of Gloucester, the portrayal graciously and naturally conveyed the character’s one-dimensional amiability right at the outset, along with a comprehensive lack of insight into either of his sons’ true mettle. This obtuseness led to his downfall at the hands of ruthless ambition – and only in the wake of his savage blinding by both Regan and her husband Cornwall in revenge for his continued support of the king, did the first glimmerings of truth begin to shine for him from within. The blood-drenched beginning of this process brought us into direct contact with Peter Hambleton’s single-minded depiction of Cornwall’s ugly thrust towards power, and, even more disturbingly, Regan’s naked blood-lust, Claire Waldron here most viscerally and repellently conveying her delight at Gloucester’s disfigurement. Less overtly but as slyly evil was Nick Dunbar’s beautifully-crafted Oswald, ostensibly a tool of his mistress Goneril’s machinations, his impulses at her beck and call, his manner as pragmatic as any soldier of fortune.

Small wonder, then, that Gloucester’s subsequent wanderings with his son Edgar (disguised as a beggar and becoming his father’s unidentified protector) evoked such pity and even (after his abortive suicide attempt) an almost sacramental transfiguration into a martyr-like figure, one who had paid a price for his understanding of things and for his short-lived reunitement with the child who truly loved him. His coming-together with the crazed Lear on the heath was a moment of sweetness amid the carnage, a briefly applied balm of shared understanding, here, with the flower-bedecked Lear embracing the blinded and blood-drenched figure of Gloucester, their theatrical duet beautifully voiced by both Henwood and Blackburn, a moment for the ages.

With the other treacherous sister, Goneril, and her husband Albany (Todd Rippon subtly and effectively  signalling his ambivalence as a conspirator in the scheme of things, perhaps, like his father-in-law, a man more sinned against, etc….), their dissolution seemed partly wrought by the former’s long-standing marital dissatisfaction. How cruelly and unequivocally Shakespeare characterized this with Goneril’s brief Act 4 tryst with the free-wheeling Edmund, complete with suggestive body-language and hints of impending mutual delight. As for Carmel McGlone’s transported, almost orgasmic delivery of “O, the difference of man and man!”, it ironically brought the house down, the more effectively so for its sudden, highly-modulated expression! By contrast, I thought Todd Rippon nicely judged Albany’s awakening of his own strength of character, both in the face of his wife’s intention to cuckold and usurp him as a husband through Edmund, and in his rediscovery of a sense of loyalty to his king, leading to those words of his bitterly-wrought understanding at the play’s end – “…speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”’.

Director Michael Hurst’s acute observation in his programme note that Lear “goes too far”, beyond what words can say or do, was conveyed in a myriad ways by this production, by its sheer noise, by its stricken silences, by its insensible furies, by its sardonic humour, by its grim desperations and its blazing illuminations  and by its unspeakable brutalities set against displays of equally unspeakable love. On stage were both experienced actors playing in a sense their own ripened experiences, cheek-by-jowl with various youthful players fronting up to snippets of ideas and concepts which had the potential to change, modify, augment, enrich their own as yet youthful existences – Lear’s doomed yet enduring gesture of union with his daughter Cordelia – “we two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage” spoke for this outlandish theatrical amalgam of old and young as beautifully and deeply as any other quality one might think of.  For Circa and for the people involved in this production it all seemed to this audience member as beautiful and as deep as one might have a right to receive.

Vibrant and wholehearted – Wellington Youth Orchestra and ‘cellist Matthias Balzat

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.1 in C Op.21
TCHAIKOVSKY – Pezzo Capriccioso for ‘cello and orchestra Op.62
ELGAR – Variations on an Original Theme “Enigma” Op.36

Matthias Balzat (‘cello)
Wellington Youth Orchestra
Andrew Joyce (conductor)

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hill St., Wellington

Tuesday 10th May, 2016

A joy, right from the beginning, this concert, which featured bright-eyed and bushy-tailed orchestral playing from a talented ensemble of young musicians, squaring up to a couple of well-known classics and an engaging cello-and-orchestra concert rarity.

Under Andrew Joyce’s on-the-spot direction, the music in every instance took off, the Beethoven with bright-eyed and chirpy accents, the Tchaikovsky piece with bold, impassioned wing-beats, and the Elgar with gentle, early-morning ruminations developing into gestures with warmth and strength. In the case of each piece the music’s character was quickly established and consistently maintained, the players responding to their conductor’s clearly articulated beat and guidance regarding dynamics, accents and timing.

I thought the Beethoven Symphony was an inspired choice for these players, a work by a young composer eager to make his mark upon the world, and ready to challenge conventions and established rules right at the outset. Here we got strong, almost confrontational chording from the winds at the beginning – a kind of “are you listening?” statement, designed to break into idle concert chit-chat and grab people’s attention. I liked the big-bonedness of that opening, making the following allegro all the more disarming with its light touch and cheeky aspect, and contrasting with the insouciance of the winds’ delivery of the “second subject” (what dry old terms these are!).

We got the repeat as well, to my great delight, though Joyce and his players didn’t give the “surprise” chord at the beginning of the development too much emphasis, keeping it nonchalant and droll – a kind of “Well, what did you expect?” sort of statement. The recap. came across strongly and with textures beautifully blended, with some athletic counterpoints bouncing off the strings’ bows with great élan in places, nicely rounded off by festive touches from the brass.

A poised, and patiently built-up slow movement was beautifully weighted by conductor and players, with lovely colours from the winds in the development, and great ensemble work – then at the recapitulation the ‘cellos distinguished themselves with a beautifully-shaped counter-melody. At times the high string passage-work lost its sweetness, but such lapses were only momentary. The Menuetto (really, a scherzo!) skipped along energetically, with only a lack of synchronization between lower and upper strings troubling the occasional extended phrase. The winds again made a lovely contrast in the trio, though the strings struggled with the unanimity of some of their awkwardly syncopated replies.

The finale’s droll cat-and-mouse phrases created great expectation straight after the opening chord, with the violins then running away merrily at the allegro, a little TOO smartly in places ! However, in the development section things locked together well, with the dovetailing of the rushing, see-sawing passages nicely managed. No repeat this time, but the strings were obviously relishing the cut-and-thrust of their exchanges, and the all-together orchestral banter of the coda, with everything brought together for the final, triumphant chords. Overall, I thought it a most satisfying performance.

Tchaikovksy’s soulful, long-breathed world of heartfelt expression seemed a long way from Beethoven’s, at the outset of the second work on the programme, the Pezzo Capriccioso for ‘cello and orchestra. The passionately-sounded ‘cello line was addressed with great feeling and beautifully-modulated tones from soloist Matthias Balzat, whose performance overall was, to put it mildly, both brilliant and commanding. Throughout the piece’s lively middle section, the soloist’s bow danced upon the strings and the left hand literally flew over the instrument’s fingerboard, striking the notes rapidly and truly, and making a spectacular impression.

Matthias Balzat is already a veteran of a number of instrumental competitions, at which he’s achieved a great deal of success – a first prize in the 2014 National Concerto Competition, and a second prize in the 2015 Gisborne International Competition. He’s currently studying with James Tennant at Waikato University, and is obviously a young musician who’s worth watching out for.

After the interval we settled down to enjoy Elgar’s affectionately-wrought set of musical tributes to the people he felt closest to as a man and as a composer. The work is a straightforwardly conceived set of variations on a theme, the title “Enigma” being bestowed by the composer without explanation, as if there’s a hidden theme or a kind of link between the variations that has never been explained. The different variations are more individual allusions to certain shared experiences with the composer, rather than “character portraits” as such.

At the beginning the theme itself was beautifully shaped, tenderly and lyrically delivered, with a sonorous lower-string counterpoint brought out most soulfully towards the end. The first variation (CAE), depicting Elgar’s wife Alice, featured beautifully floated interchanges between strings and winds, with noble brass at the conclusion, a complete contrast to the repetitive figurations of a pianist friend (H.D.S-P.), steadily and mechanically completed. There was pleasure, too, at the wind-playing in R.B.T., clarinets and bassoons having great fun bringing wide-ranging tones and registers into play.

Andrew Joyce kept the driving rhythm of the following variation (W.M.B.) absolutely steady following its exciting attacca beginning, a completely different kettle of fish to the romantic charm of R.P.A., the strings rich and sonorous, the winds chatty and charming, if not quite always together. Ysobel allowed the solo viola a moment of glory, which was beautifully played, while the following Troyte highlighted the timpanist’s rhythmic skills just as tellingly in a wildly swirling episode – and how well and excitingly the strings “pinged” their entries in this piece, throwing the snarling brasses into splendid relief!

Some beautiful wind playing – charming conversation and gentle laughter – during W.N. gave us some relief from these previous storms and stress, before the music took us to the centrepiece of the variations, the much-loved Nimrod. Here, the composer recalled discussions with a friend on the beauty of Beethoven’s slow movements, the players respond to their conductor’s encouragements with patient, long-breathed playing, and together building towards something majestic and visionary. Afterwards, Dorabella brought out sensibilities back to earth with finely-judged wisps of exchange between winds and strings and another graceful viola solo.

Anything but graceful and finely drawn was G.R.S., the initials belonging to the owner of a bulldog whose favourite pastime of diving into the river to fetch a stick thrown by his master, was here set to music by Elgar. As in the earlier “Troyte” the string-playing pinged and crackled with precision under the conductor’s guidance.

String-playing of a vastly different sort was inspired by the immediately following B.G.N., a ‘cello solo, played here with fine intonation and warm tones, and then repeated by the entire ‘cello section, whose fine, ringing upper notes did the players (and very likely their conductor) great credit!

The especially enigmatic thirteenth variation, with its three asterisks in place of a name or initials, famously contains a quotation from Mendelssohn’s Overture “Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage” – after a winsome theme is tossed about by strings and winds, there’s a drum roll, a clarinet quoting the overture’s theme, and the lower instruments presenting the throbbing of ship’s engines. It all came together here with excellent focus on the detail and plenty of heft given the music’s pulsating power and implacable movement.

And so to the composer’s self-portrait, E.D.U., being Alice Elgar’s abbreviated name for her husband – Joyce and his players hit their stride at a fast clip, galloping towards the first big orchestral climax with gusto, one which came with tremendous impact. Everything, including the reprise of Alice’s music in her variation, was kept moving – and if there was more ferment than finesse throughout the last few pages, the excitement and sense of the music’s arrival was overwhelming in its power and splendour. I felt that, at this point, those aspects of the performance were given priority here, and rightly so.

It all made, I thought, for a splendid concert-going experience, thanks to the repertoire, and the totally committed performances – certainly one that anybody who enjoyed skilled, vibrant and whole-hearted music-making would have similarly enjoyed.

The Orpheus Choir and Orchestra Wellington at Sea with Brent Stewart

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Orpheus Choir of Wellington presents:
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – A Sea Symphony

also – MENDELSSOHN – Overture “The Hebrides”
BRITTEN – Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes”

Lisa Harper-Brown (soprano)
James Clayton (baritone)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Brent Stewart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 7th May, 2016

Avast, me hearties!  Time to batten down the ‘atches and splice yer mainbraces, ready to lend an ear to these ‘ere tales o’ the Seven Seas, as retold by the Cap’n ‘n crew of the good ship Orchestra Wellington, with sister-vessel Orpheus ready to heave-to for the grand sail-past!…….well, that’s probably enough nautical language to give readers an idea regarding this concert (in fact I was starting to get worried as to where my next seafaring expression was coming from, so I’m happy to return to “landlubber mode” for the remainder of this review!

From the moment the orchestra launched into the opening of Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture, we were all truly at sea, our sensibilities registering the ebb and flow of the oceanic swells, the tang of the salt spray and the sense of wide open spaces created by both wind and brass, bird calls and ship signals pushing out the vistas towards distant islands and horizons.

The whole piece is a truly remarkable recreation of a maritime scenario, one which many New Zealanders will readily identify with as a result of living so close to the sea – in fact conductor Brent Stewart expressed in a program note his own affinities with the ocean as a result of various childhood experiences. As the overture proceeded one sensed his direction of the music becoming freer and increasingly “taken up” by the music’s evocations along the way, especially with those moments of deep repose in between the watery undulations, and with the contrasting excitement of his “whipping up” the canonic strings-and-winds exchanges midway through.

Things were very beautifully rounded off by the duetting clarinets (one instrument most beguilingly becoming two) towards the end, leading to a final frenzy of waves breaking over a rugged coastline, the conductor again pushing the tempo and encouraging from his players a vigorous and exciting ferment of activity, which abruptly died away, leaving the opening theme as a single distant, haunting bird-call – here, only the final note seemed to me a shade too abruptly curtailed for its distance to properly register.

More oceanic splendours were to be had with Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from the opera “Peter Grimes”.  I enjoyed the fresh, bracing tang of “Dawn” with its opening bird-cries, and was gripped by the incredible depth and dark-browed spaciousness of the lower instruments with their portentous replying crescendi. The tolling bells of “Sunday Morning” burst forth without ceremony, a true “attacca” and at a terrific pace, the counterpointing winds throaty and characterful, squawking with what seemed like native dialects!  After an angular exchange between strings and winds, the bells returned with terrific impact, even though a couple of the decrescendo-strokes didn’t through some kind of attrition quite “ring true”.

The third Interlude “Moonlight” sounded to my ears more pointillistic than atmospheric, the brass, winds and percussion notes brought out, and given a spiky-sounding character, not merely in the manner of a pretty nocturnal picture – even so, the biting incisiveness of the final “Storm” took one’s breath away with its fury and frenetic pace. The players dealt with their conductor’s pacing brilliantly, throwing fingerfuls of detail about in what seemed like an uncalculated and spontaneous-sounding way, which worked spectacularly well. A shadowy and goblin-like sequence featured spiked winds and moaning strings which were taken up by the baleful brasses and hurled down the cliff-edge onto the rocks below – shattering!

The Orpheus Choir, along with soprano Lisa Harper-Brown and baritone James Clayton, took the stage with the orchestra after the interval for the evening’s REAL business in hand – Ralph Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony. Written between 1903 and 1909, the piece was its composer’s first full-scale symphonic work, and at once placed him not only within the British choral tradition, but in the ranks of the symphonists following Parry, Sullivan, Stanford, German and, most importantly, Elgar. The work also reflected a current vogue among British composers (Holst and Delius as well) for settings of the poetry of American Walt Whitman.

During the time Vaughan Williams took to complete this symphony he spent three months studying with French composer Maurice Ravel. While the finished symphony shows certain stylistic and harmonic influences stemming from Ravel (and French music in general) the composer of the Pavane pour une Infanta defunte and Rapsodie Espagnole paid tribute to his pupil by exclaiming at one stage that Vaughan Williams was “the only one of my students that does not write my music”.

As might have been expected with a first symphony from a young composer the work has an arresting opening, attention-grabbing brass chords and a full-throated choral declamation, hurling forth the words “Behold! – the sea itself!”  Here, the choir’s voices galvanized our sensibilities right from the beginning, though for whatever reason the brasses’ attack on the initial notes was curiously soft-grained, lacking for me a certain scalp-prickling quality, both here and at the fanfare’s reprise after the first sequence concluding with “the long pennants of smoke”. Elsewhere, the playing was very much “on-the-spot” from all departments, and all sections of the choir sounded glorious from where I was sitting.

I was eagerly awaiting the contributions from the soloists, both of whose work I had previously encountered. Starting almost conversationally, with his “Today, a brief, rude recitative…”, baritone James Clayton steadily built up the energies and intensities towards “and the winds piping and blowing”, before giving us a sonorous “And out of these”, and then relishing his full-blooded exchanges with the choir at “untamed as thee!”. Soprano Lisa Harper-Brown threw herself splendidly into the swim of things with a commanding “Flaunt out, O Sea!…”, her voice strong and steady there and later with her “Token of all brave captains…..”, and riding excitingly over the massed textures just before the movement’s rapt “All seas, all ships” concluding phrases.

At the beginning of the slow movement, conductor and players caught the dark depths and charged stillnesses of the orchestral writing. I wanted at first a slightly stronger line from the baritone, whose words didn’t quite carry to me through the accompanying textures, though once the horns began their processional at “A vast similitude interlocks all” the singer’s energies found a new gear and conveyed more tonal presence and clarity. After the choir had regaled us with its sonorous “This vast similitude”, it was left to the soloist and orchestra to return us to the hushed sonorities of the opening, conductor and orchestra once again evoking the dark sounds of the “old mother….singing her husky song”.

The scherzo, subtitled “The Waves”, for chorus and orchestra, was delivered with terrific élan throughout, amid traditional sea-shanties and wind-borne spray singing and dancing above the “myriad, myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks….”. The Orpheus’ voices relished their interaction with the swirling textures of the orchestral writing, with the different instrumental groups on top form and in perfect accord. Vaughan Williams’ use of chromatic and whole-tone scales to depict the action of the waves and the spray-laden ambiences contrasted stirringly with the nobilmente striding theme depicting “the great vessel sailing”, the choir left at the end to exultantly pin back our ears with their final, unaccompanied “following!” – a great moment!

Traditionally composers have a lot of trouble with the final movements of their symphonies – but Vaughan Williams seemed here in his fourth and last movement “The Explorers” to produce his best music of the work. Conductor Brent Stewart allowed his forces plenty of space and time at the outset, floating the chorus’s brooding “O vast rondure, swimming in space” steadily, almost ritualistically, against a beautiful orchestral tapestry characterizing the “processions of suns, moons and countless stars above”. Moving to describe the “myriad progeny” of Adam and Eve as “baffled, formless, feverish, with never happy hearts”, the composer set disembodied offstage voices in a manner not unlike in Wagner’s “Parsifal” intoning the words “Wherefore unsatisfied soul?” and “Whither, O mocking life?”, here magically realized by some of the Orpheus’s female voices.

Again, each of the soloists performed wonders, from their fresh and eager interchanges at “O, we can wait no longer”, and throughout the rapt beauties of “O Soul, thou pleasest me!”, rising to an ecstatic climax at “O, thou transcendent” – the solo violin needed in places more ethereal as well as occasionally surer tones, but otherwise reliably supported the voices in tandem with the winds. Then at the chorus’s “Greater than stars or sun”, the soloists enjoined us amid a volley of nautical terms, to “shake out every sail”, without delay – “Away, O Soul – hoist instantly the anchor”, to the accompaniment of hornpipes and jigs punctuated by enthusiastic percussion crashes and cries from the chorus to “Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only” – truly stirring stuff!

After chorus and orchestra exhausted themselves declaring that they “will risk the ship, ourselves and all”, amid frenetic energies and terrific upheavals of energy, soprano and baritone brought the work to an ecstatic conclusion, equating these, the Soul’s oceanic journeyings with life and its challenges and fulfilments, and sharing with the chorus and orchestra a richly-wrought sense of continuing exploration, with all voices murmuring “O farther, farther sail”, as the music gradually disappeared. Thanks to an inspired performance from Brent Stewart and his forces, we were given, by the end, a real sense of the vastness of the composer’s vision and his determination to realise his view of things in his big-boned, full-blooded music.

An introductory feast – Inbal Megiddo and Jian Liu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello) and Jian Liu (piano)

BEETHOVEN – 12 Variations on Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte”
MENDELSSOHN – Song Without Words Op.109
RACHMANINOV -Vocalise
LAURENCE SHERR – Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano Mir zaynen dol (“We are here”)
BRAHMS – Sonata in D Major “Regenlied” Op.78
DE FALLA – Suite Populaire Espagnole (arr.Maréchal)
ROSSINI / CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO – Largo ad Factotum from “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace,

Sunday 1st May, 2016

I didn’t hear all of the introductory talk given before the concert by Jewish-American composer Laurence Sherr regarding his ‘Cello Sonata Mir zaynen dol, but what I heard was sufficient to convey the context and motivational force of the music, composed in 2014 and here given its Australasian premiere. It certainly added a unique dimension to this, the first of the Wellington Chamber Music Concert Series for 2016.

‘Cellist Inbal Megiddo and pianist Jian Liu, both in sparkling form, played a first-half programme which led most gently up to Sherr’s work, to the threshold of a world dominated by persecution and suffering, with only the music of Rachmaninov casting any shades or strains of angst over the proceedings.

The rest was grace, lyricism, wit and high spirits, tempered by some mid-course agitations in Mendelssohn’s Song Without Words piece, and the aforementioned sorrowful aspect of the Rachmaninov Vocalise, given here in an anonymous arrangement.

First was Beethoven’s homage to Mozart’s “Magic Flute” opera in the form of a set of variations on the opening of the aria Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen, sung by the simple birdcatcher, Papageno. Here were poised, beautifully “sprung” phrasings from the piano and beguiling voicings from the ‘cello, the conversation between the instruments an eavesdropper’s delight. Each musician relished the many guises of the contrapuntal lines of the later variations, from energetic (No. 8) through ritualistic (No.9) rapt (No.10) and almost sacramental (No.11) to the ebullient dance-like finale, where rapid fingerwork and occasional modulatory swerves from both soloists added to the excitement and pleasure, as did a Waldstein-like flourish near the end from the piano.

Mendelssohn’s posthumously-published Song Without Words presented a lilting water-borne aspect supporting the song of a lover serenading his sweetheart in between each indolent oar-stroke. Perhaps the wake of a passing paddle steamer momentarily ruffled the undulating surfaces of the water-course and rocked the boat, both mid-course, and towards the piece’s end – but peace and decorum was restored at the conclusion, characterized by a beautiful ascending ‘cello figure.

Megiddo and Liu drove intensely into the opening measures of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, keeping their phrases tightly-focused and allowing little relaxation – but then, their quieter, slightly less “clenched” way with the opening’s reiterated phrases allowed us some much-needed breathing-space with which to prepare for the oncoming waves of songful emotion. Though the pair did vary these intensities throughout the work, I felt more than usually “drained” by the music at the end of this performance, and wasn’t sure that I didn’t feel cheated, deprived of my usual Rachmaninovian nostalgia-trip and being given something tougher and more dry-eyed instead, even if some would have thought this was most probably to the music’s advantage.

Perhaps it was part of a subconscious “preparation” by the musicians to deal adequately with the demands of Laurence Sherr’s work, the Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano Mir zaynen dol. (“We are here”). Dedicated to the composer’s father, the work’s subtitle underlines its raison d’etre – to pay homage to those who survived the dreadful rigours of the Holocaust, and who have kept alive and passed on their traditions and memories to younger people, as a real end enduring record of “identity, resistance and survival”.

The composer came on to the platform with the musicians to help demonstrate an aspect of the Sonata’s final movement, which was the intertwining of the main themes of two of the “source songs” for the work as a whole, one a Marching Song, the other a Youth Hymn, thus bringing together old and young. This reflected the use of two other songs, one in each of the previous movements,  which symbolized the determination of individuals in ghettos, concentration camps and refugee groups to survive and tell their tales, as well as those of the lost voices, to keep alive their memory.

March rhythms and prayerful melodies by turns thus dominated the work, the first movement taking its cue from a song Yid, du partizaner (“Jew, you Partisan”) set to a Russian melody, piano and ‘cello each bringing their own stirring energies and singing tones to the rallying-calls, while a more exotic, middle-eastern-sounding lyrical section added to the flavour of the music.

By contrast, the second movement drew from both cantor-like lyrical lines, using Kel (El) mole rachamim, a Jewish prayer for the deceased, and later from a lullaby Wiegala, written by a Therensianstadt concentration camp prisoner. Both were presented with rapt focus by Jian Liu and Inbal Megiddo – at the outset long-breathed piano chords and “strummed harp” sonorities  provided the basis for the ‘cello’s prayerful melodic outpourings, leading to more dynamic interactions between the instruments. Then, in the “lullaby” section the mood became less declamatory and more personal, a beautiful cantabile ‘cello melody expressing an individual voice’s faith in and hope for a better life.

The interval gave us the space we needed to reflect upon these evocations before the concert’s second half called us back to an equally varied, if rather less emotionally fraught presentation, one that seemed extremely generous in terms of playing-time. With music by Brahms, de Falla and a remarkable piece of tongue-in-cheek homage from a twentieth-century composer to one of the nineteenth-century “greats”, the performers certainly drew from diverse sources to give us a rich and rollicking experience.

Brahms led the way, with Megiddo and Liu opting for the composer’s own arrangement for ‘cello of his Op.78 Violin Sonata, rather than one of the “proper” sonatas for the instrument. Though there were places, particularly the double-stopped opening of the second movement, during which I thought the ‘cello sounded a shade too guttural for the material, I thought the arrangement was well worth a hearing, even if my allegiance to the “original” remained unshaken. Despite the occasional high-lying melodic strand which sounded a shade uncomfortable, ‘cellist Megiddo brought her considerable expressive qualities to the music with great effect, bringing off moments like the distant “hunting call” sequences which close the Adagio movement to heart-stopping perfection.

Elsewhere, Megiddo and Liu worked “hand in glove” with the Sonata’s many delights, giving us a whole-hearted and deeply-felt impression of connection with the music, such as the agitations of the finale’s opening and the nostalgic references to the slow movement’s material along the way to the work’s autumnal, almost regretful conclusion. After these deeply-considered outpourings, what a change to be taken to a sun-drenched, more sharply-etched world of volatile emotion and exotic colorings, in the form of Manuel de Falla’s Suite Populaire Espagnole, the composer’s own suite for violin and piano re-arranged by French ‘cellist Maurice Maréchal. With plenty of “snap” and colour  from Jian Liu’s piano, and pulsating feeling from Inbal Megiddo’s ‘cello, these pictures were made to drench our sensibilities with flavours of far-away places and times devised of magic.

I confess I didn’t really see the Castelnuovo-Tedesco arrangement of Rossini’s Largo ad Factotum from his “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” coming – which probably added to its outrageous impact! Originally conceived for violinist Jasha Heifetz as an out-and-out showpiece, and devised by him in collaboration with his friend Castelnuovo-Tedesco, the work was also arranged for ‘cello and piano by the famed virtuoso Gregor Piatigorsky –  it didn’t say so in the programme, but it’s possibly the one that was used by Megiddo and Liu here, though a somewhat tart comment was made regarding a ‘cello version which was “stripped of many of the virtuosic elements”. Whomever it was who “reclaimed” these aspects of the work certainly did a good job – here was brilliance, energy, gaiety, wit, charm and coquetry, rolled into an irresistible package. Dare one say Rossini would have loved it? Whatever the case, he certainly would have admired the sheer élan of Megiddo’s and Liu’s playing, as did we in the audience.

After fifty-seven years of public neglect – Farquhar’s First Symphony from the NZSM and Ken Young

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
RARITIES AND ROMANCE

Martin Riseley (violin)
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)

MOZART – Overture “The Magic Flute”
BEETHOVEN – Romance for Violin and Orchestra in G Major
FAURE – Masques et Bergamasques
YOUNG – In Memoriam David Farquhar
FARQUHAR – Symphony No.1

Basilica of the Sacred Heart
Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 14th April 2016

At last! – the drought has been broken! – the well has been newly dug! – and the field has been freshly ploughed! So, just what, you’re bemusedly thinking, am I on about this time round? I’ll tell you! – David Farquhar’s First Symphony, performed only once previously in concert in 1959, has finally received its SECOND public performance! – that makes, by my reckoning, fifty-seven years of shameful, and never-to-be-restored neglect! Well, there’s always a “better-late-than-never” component to this sort of thing, provided that whatever it is that’s been neglected actually delivers the goods when given the chance.

That chance was given the work in truly resplendent fashion by maestro Ken Young and his redoubtable band of heroes in the NZ School of Music Orchestra at Wellington’s Sacred Heart Basilica in Hill St, last Thursday evening. Farquhar’s Symphony shared the programme with several other items, in the first half an overture (Mozart’s Magic Flute), a miniature concertante work (Beethoven’s Second Romance for Violin and Orchestra) and a suite of incidental pieces by Gabriel Faure (Masques et Bergamasques). Then, after the interval the symphony was appropriately prefaced by a work for brass ensemble titled In Memoriam David Farquhar, one written by Ken Young in 2007 shortly after the composer’s death.

The effect of all of this was to judiciously “prepare the way” for the symphony – first came the overture whose mix of gravitas, festivity and fun shook and stirred all of the venue’s ambiences to perfection, followed by the violin-and-orchestra piece which delightfully brought out solo and ripieno textures to maximum effect. Though I confess to finding Faure’s Masques et Bergamasques of lesser interest than I did its first-half companions, I was still grateful for the opportunity of hearing something not often performed in the concert-hall. The most startling precursor to the symphony was, however, the In Memoriam David Farquhar piece, one which made a splendidly sombre and valedictory impression. So, when the time came to begin the symphony, our ears were nicely primed for what was to follow.

A few comments regarding the performances – I enjoyed the rhythmic “snap” of the chording at the very opening of the Mozart Overture, and the beautiful hues of both the wind and brass amid the string figurations, leading to the allegro – the conductor’s luftpause caught some of the players on the hop at the start, but things soon settled down, with crisp ensemble and plenty of ear-catching dynamic variation from the players. The voices tumbled over one another nicely throughout the “second-half” exchanges, and the trombones and timpani made the most of their moments towards the end – lovely playing.

Violinist Martin Riseley seemed to my ears a shade tense at the very beginning of the Beethoven Romance, his phrasing a little too tightly-wound for comfort – his second entry seemed to unwind the double-stopping rather more warmly and relaxedly, and the orchestra replied beautifully, the horns sounding particularly mellifluous. I enjoyed the capriciousness of the alternating “gypsy” episode, the violin-playing sweetly leading things back to the reprise of the opening, the music none the worse for its little romantic “adventure”.

Faure’s divertissement Masques et Bergamasques (“Maskers and Revellers”) originally included a piece that became one of his most well-known works, the Pavane, but it was published separately – the suite from the original 1919 stage work consists of just four movements, three of which come from a long-abandoned (1869) symphony, and one, the Pastorale, newly composed. We heard a bright, perky Overture, a limpid, atmospheric Minuet, with a grandly ceremonial Trio, a vigorous, high-stepping Gavotte also sporting a Trio, one with a beautiful melody, and finally a Pastorale, the only newly-composed piece, a flowing tune on strings nicely augmented by winds, followed by piquant phrases suggesting touches of melancholy. I thought it all pleasant enough without being greatly memorable.

Not so Ken Young’s In Memoriam David Farquhar, a piece for brass ensemble which immediately struck a deep and richly resonant vein of serious intent, while avoiding sentimentality. Trumpets took the themes to begin with then allowed the trombones some glory, the music featuring some well-rounded solos from both instruments. Composer Ken Young sought our pardon at presenting a piece of his own music at the concert, though he was forgiven readily under the circumstances. He also introduced the Symphony, making no secret of his admiration for and belief in the work as one of the most significant pieces of orchestral music to come out of this country.

Right from the opening bars of the work one sensed the purpose and focus of the sounds coming from the players, who were obviously inspired by the occasion – the opening phrase’s wonderfully angular and whimsical falling fifth/rising seventh combination here immediately opened up the music’s vistas to a range of possibilities, such as a delicious brass fanfare which the strings took over and tossed around. Then the orchestra suddenly lurched into a syncopated, upwardly progressive theme which galvanizes the music’s trajectories, the brass taking their cue, and excitedly giving the theme a Holst-like welcome.

Ken Young imbued each of these ideas with plenty of thrust and accent, the angularities building up the music to its last great climax, and to a kind of breakthrough into a strange and resonant ambient realm – a magical moment, as if one had suddenly looked up from some all-engrossing preoccupation and discovered that it was already evening. The players, after piling on their energies in layers, beautifully enabled a kind of glowing, almost crepuscular atmosphere, a territory to where the music was obviously headed, the opening angular theme now sounding like a bugle call heralding a fulfilled purpose.

To the second movement, now, and a world of magical and disconcerting transformations – ghostly shivers, mutterings and dry-as-dust timpani at the outset suddenly were swept up by toccata-like chattering fanfares which disconcertingly broke into dance mode a la commedia dell’arte, the dancers laughingly and mockingly circumventing the phantom figures of the opening, who eventually banded together and hoarsely cried “Enough!”

Here, Young and his musicians found exactly the right blend of mystery and sharp-edged attack which this music required to “speak” and work its enchantment. They brought off episode after episode with great aplomb, especially the sequence involving the Wagner-like brasses and chattering winds which conjured up Battle-of-Britain-like scenes, Spitfires and Hurricanes bursting though the clouds like avenging Valkyries. Again the commedia dell’arte dancers appeared, with their ironic laughter echoing down the music’s passageways, putting the portentous brasses to flight with a final flourish – a sequence of delicious ironies and enigmas, the orchestral writing masterly in every way.

Equally heroic was the orchestra’s full-blooded response to the finale’s tremendous “land uplifted high” gestures and textures, right from the moment the trumpet sounded the “call” to action. No more epic and heroic orchestral writing can be found in a home-grown orchestral work than in this movement, and after a trenchant ascent with the struggle made manifest every step of the way we were taken to the heights, and left there in wonderment at the place we’d reached and the wide-reaching range and scope of the journey.

I felt at the piece’s conclusion (a deeply-felt silence grew most movingly out of the final bars) that no more thrilling and satisfying realization of this long-neglected and deservedly relished work could have been achieved than here. Very great honour to Ken Young and to the musicians of the NZSM Orchestra, who enabled this music to come to life once more with the kind of commitment and sense of adventure and occasion that would have gladdened the composer’s heart.

Circa Theatre Revisits Home-Grown Chronicles

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents
“Joyful and Triumphant” by Robert Lord

Director: Susan Wilson
Designer: John Hodgkins
Lighting: Marcus McShane

Cast: Jane Waddell (Lyla)
Catherine Downes (Alice)
Michele Amas (Rose)
Peter Hambleton ((George)
Katherine McRae (Brenda)
Gavin Rutherford (Ted)
Lyndee-Jane Rutherford (Raewyn)

Circa Theatre, Taranaki St., Wellington

playing until May 7th 2016

Something very special is being currently re-enacted at Circa Theatre in Wellington – a revival of Robert Lord’s play, Joyful and Triumphant.

First performed at Circa Theatre in 1992, in the company’s original premises in Harris Street, the play, directed by Susan Wilson, was one of the great successes of the fourth Wellington Arts Festival, winning both festival and national awards. The production then undertook a New Zealand tour and subsequently was presented in Australia and in London.

Now, almost twenty-five years later, a new production features the same director, and no fewer than three members of that original 1992 cast, each one playing a different role to that created the first time round.

Joyful and Triumphant presents a series of Christmas Day vignettes in the life of a “typical” New Zealand family over a period of forty years, beginning in 1949.

Playwright Robert Lord managed to chronicle both family history and the wider social, cultural and political history of New Zealand over the duration. Something I didn’t pick up at the time of first hearing about the play was its apposite subtitle – “An Incidental Epic”. I also didn’t know, until coming to write this review that the playwright didn’t live to see his work premiered, but died just before the production was staged – he was 46.

There was absolutely nothing glamorous, flashy, epic or earth-shattering about this play, and that was its strength – it sought to present an ordinary New Zealand family’s Christmas as it would have been in 1949 and how things developed for those same people over the years. As a new-born forty-niner myself, my memories of the opening ambiences were understandably dim, but I readily connected with all of the subsequent depictions, the characters and their attitudes, and their surroundings, as if I were a kind of Ebenezer Scrooge taken back by a “ghost of Christmases past”.

One of the actors in the original production, Catherine Downes, commented on her feelings as a present-day cast member, this time round: “Approaching it this time, a huge difference is that the entire play is set well in the past. When we first did it in 1992, it brought us up to date. Now, it’s almost a time capsule at what was going on. Not just in New Zealand politics, but social history, and what views were at that time, towards racism, religion, women’s roles.  It’s utterly fascinating, and even more so now, looking at it from a great distance.”

The dialogue kept on for me evoking memories of the television series of the 1970s Close to Home – here was the vernacular, expressed in a recognizably authentic way, characterful and wry-humoured, but free from any self-conscious cleverness. Interestingly, Downes commented that the dialogue and situations appeared to “travel” without any difficulty – when the original cast took the play to Australia and to England people who attended the performances seemed to her to enjoy the work as readily as did home-grown audiences.

In almost every instance, the actors seemed to fit their characters as hands fit well-worn gloves.  Undoubtedly director Susan Wilson’s experience both in a specific work-based sense and in general enabled her to bring out this “playing oneself” aspect in each of the characters in a richly-rounded way. Only in one case did I have difficulty recognizing and thus warming to a character in a kind of “familiar” sense, a circumstance which could well reflect my own internal struggles with like people in day-to-day situations! – but more of this anon.

The song “Blue Smoke” set the scene most evocatively for the first and earliest of the vignettes, the strains permeating the ambiences and resounding among the configurations of the times – a wonderful beginning, underpinned by subtle dialogues between characters which allow them to tell us who they are as people putting their best foot forward for Christmas, and in more unguarded moments expressing their insecurities and disappointments. Katherine McRae’s Brenda, who was the family’s daughter-in-law, for most of the time unprepossessing and embarrassingly anxious to please, undertook a “moment” in which she deliciously described her daughter Raewyn as “thirteen and too far advanced! – I did have a chest like that until I was twenty…she just grew the thing to annoy me!”

The characters developed both by osmosis and stimulation, bringing their personalities and resulting styles to the interactions – until the arrival of the youngest family member Raewyn in the second Act, the two most startling and lively figures were, on the face of things diametric opposites – George, the head of the Bishop family, and the well-to-do neighbour, Alice, a widow, who goes to church with Lyla, George’s wife. Politics spiced this particular interaction, George’s socialist beliefs occasionally locking horns in a (mostly) good-natured way with Alice’s true-blue inclinations.

Peter Hambleton’s George was a vividly-projected larger-than-life character, very much down-to-earth, apart from his romantic inclinations in kissing his wife Lyla under the mistletoe (after an accidental-cum-engineered piece of flesh-pressing with the wrong woman!), as well as his indulgence in flights of fancy, such as pretending, most convincingly, to be Bing Crosby during the course of the latter’s singing of “White Christmas”. More than a match for him throughout was Catherine Downes’ feisty, true-hearted Alice, the widowed neighbour whose circumstances over-rode any divisive political ideologies which might have kept her at a distance – her and George’s interactions when practicing their dancing steps provided a source of ever-so-slightly risque merriment for all those in attendance, especially the idea of their capturing the “Blue Ribbon for General Rhythmic Excellence” as a dance-floor team.

Opening the play was Michele Amas’s Rose, a sensitive, low-keyed but deeply-wrought portrayal of a young woman trying to generate an independent life in the wake of losing her wartime fiancee, and struggling to do so, with utterances along the way such as “I don’t know where I left my life, but it’s not here!”, and the occasional family skirmish, such as with her brother Ted (Gavin Rutherford) over the state of each other’s respective lives. Originally, Amas played Raewyn, the rebel teenaged daughter – “It was a big part of our lives for eight years, off and on. So it was like returning to a family you hadn’t seen for a long time, the family picture was there, but slightly different. Being back with the others is pure joy. We never thought we’d have the opportunity to do this again.”

Rose was originally played by Jane Waddell, who took the role of “Mum” (Lyla) this time round, her coiffure resplendent at an early point in the play via a possibly neighbour-inspired blue rinse, which would have made husband George see redder than usual! Lyla’s subsequent debilitating stroke caused as much bathos as pathos through her attempts to communicate with the family with barely intelligible squawks (the true nature of laughter disturbingly exposed, perhaps). But previously, Waddell and Catherine Downes together made something rich and strange out of their characters’ “chalk-and-cheese” neighbourly interaction – like many things in “Joyful and Triumphant”, best relished, I’ve found, in retrospect, things having continued to work and grow long after one has left the theatre.

Playwright Lord tapped into the “blood is thicker than water – but at a price” principle with his characterizations of both Ted and Brenda, son and daughter-in-law. Gavin Rutherford’s portrayal of Ted, in places so yummily gauche and self-inflated, if ready to burst like a bubble when put to the sword, excited our derision and sympathy at one and the same time. This was especially so in the context of Ted’s interaction with his father, George, the pair’s disagreement regarding the events of  the 1981 Springbok tour fuel for deeper-seated conflicts and existential angsts, especially to do with Raewyn, Ted’s and Brenda’s daughter.

Which brings me to confess my one difficulty regarding “recognizing” each of the play’s characters – this was with Lyndee-Jane Rutherford’s assumption of Raewyn, and perhaps was as it should have been, in any case, with a rebellious teenager! At first I found the portrayal alien and seeming over-wrought, as if deriving from an American television soap, and thus seeming to me not to “connect” (even in a dysfunctional way) with the parents, the wider family and the times – however, as the saga amassed the years and brought about a kind of “epiphany” for the family over the birth of a grandchild, Rutherford’s character seemed to put down roots and grow more recognizable (comfortable?) foliage. Perhaps I also grew in some ways along with her character, with each of the interactions – as one has to, willingly or otherwise, in real life!

Rich, redolent and recognizable – this was a production greater than the sum of its parts, one which Susan Wilson’s direction, John Hodgkins’ evocative sets and Marcus McShane’s oh so nostalgic lighting helped bestride the ages, giving us all a glimpse of whom, what and where we had come from, and why it all was so very worthwhile to remember.

A view of the world – Edo de Waart and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MAHLER – Symphony No.3 in D Minor

Charlotte Hellekant (mezzo-soprano)
NZSO Chorale / Wellington Young Voices
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Edo de Waart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 2nd April 2016

Gustav Mahler’s famous assertion to his fellow-composer Jean Sibelius, that “symphony is like the world – it should contain everything” is nowhere better demonstrated than in the former’s Third Symphony, significantly the longest of the composer’s essays in this form. The music seeks to acknowledge every natural creative force in the universe throughout its six movements – in fact, Mahler originally intended to go further and include a childlike vision of afterlife based on a poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn called “Das Himmlische Leben” (The Heavenly Life), but eventually thought better of the scheme, saving his setting of the poem for the Fourth Symphony instead.

To go with this symphony’s vast duration, the composer called upon a large orchestra, joined by a mezzo-soprano soloist, womens’ voices and a childrens’ choir. With such forces expounding along such lengths, one couldn’t help but feel awed by the range and scope of the experience in listening to the work – and especially when, as with the performance we witnessed on Satruday evening in Wellington, the response from orchestra players, voices and conductor thrillingly matched the composer’s vision in intensity, brilliance and depth of feeling.

I thought the key to this occasion’s success lay with conductor Edo de Waart, who, making his Wellington debut with the orchestra as its Music Director, enabled orchestral playing which brought out the work’s sheer range of expression, from rapt stillnesses and breathtaking beauties to rumbustious energies and, in places, disturbingly raw, almost panic-stricken upheavals – indeed, a performance in which, to quote the composer’s own words once again, “the whole of nature finds a voice”.

Right from the start the playing gave notice that the performance meant business, with horns vigorously awakening at first the percussive instrumental textures, and then the deep, black-browed heavy brass, their grim mutterings punctuated by upward-rushing fissures of agitated string-tone and sombre calls from the watchful trumpets, alert to all dangers. From these seismic upheavals grew the subterranean seeds of a march-rhythm, at first held in check by a superbly-voiced trombone solo (stunningly delivered by David Bremner), but then eventually bursting forth and dominating the whole movement.

My overriding impression of the opening was of elemental forces being unleashed, a process which seemed to gather focus and intensity as the music proceeded – however rapt and hushed the ambience in certain places, the weight and energy of that which had gone before was picked up in a trice, with no signs of exhaustion over an enormous time-span. Though occasionally interrupted by violent outbursts and episodes of brooding calm, the music’s course was not to be denied, with conductor and players bringing things to a kind of fever-pitch of ecstatic joy by the movement’s end.

Then came a complete change of mood for the second movement, originally titled “What the Flowers tell Me” – where there had been granite-like strength and exuberant energy, there was now tenderness and delicacy, the wind-playing properly “pastoral” (NZSO principals Robert Orr, Bridget Douglas and Patrick Barry readily evoking the composer’s beloved meadows and wildflowers), spiced with occasional details from elsewhere suggesting occasional thistles and stinging nettles, with insect life and sudden wind-flurries giving an extra edge to the pleasures in places. After some scherzando-like interactions,  everything was rounded off most romantically by the strings, with Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s violin having the last word.

Over pizzicato strings the winds again dominated the opening measures of the “Forest Creatures” movement, the clarinet perkily sounding the octave-leap call whose resonances came to haunt every far-flung corner of this sound-world. For the moment there were rumbustious triplet-rhythmed sequences jauntily bounced along by the strings and percussion and answered by shouts of glee from the brass. The transition from these good-humoured high-jinks to a state of almost “charged”, breath-held expectancy was beautifully managed by conductor de Waart, the strings beautifully preparing the way for the off-stage flugelhorn, sounded as if from the realms of enchantment by Michael Kirgan with superbly-controlled playing (from where I was sitting I thought the sounds just a tad TOO distant – but better that, I think, than their being too close!). Whatever the case, the playing and the atmosphere created was, purely and simply, to die for.

As happens at the conclusion of the scherzo movement in the composer’s previous  “Resurrection” Symphony, there’s in THIS scherzo a similarly rapid gathering-together of forces resembling an oncoming hurricane or tidal-wave, one which here broke across the orchestral soundscape, scattering all idyllic imageries and feelings, and alerting us to nature’s power and grandeur – as one commentator puts it, the presence of the great god Pan is here made manifest, and so it seemed on this occasion,  though without reaching QUITE the extremes of  elemental force that my mind’s ear could have imagined. No matter, for it was sufficiently forceful and disturbing to banish the day and evoke the deepest and darkest part of the night – the composer’s setting of the “Midnight Song” from Nietzsche’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”.

This was as great a contrast with what went before as was the second movement of the symphony to the first – we were plunged by the “Midnight Song” into the deepest recesses of our consciousness – and if the depths of those silences carried some resonances from the frenetic pop-music activities taking place adjacent to the concert hall along the waterfront, the wonder of it was (we afterwards marvelled) that  these thudding pulsations had such minimal impact upon our Mahlerian sound-world. I caught myself throwing occasional glances at the percussion to see whether the bass drummer was making a pianissimo roll of which I was unaware – but that was the only distraction, thanks in part to the compelling intensities of what OUR musicians were doing throughout.

Mezzo-soprano Charlotte Hellekant, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, brought an appropriate deep-voiced dignity to her tones, ably supported by the NZSO horns, the ambience suitably dark and subterranean, the sounds from the world’s depths – “Die Welt is tief und tiefer, als der Tag gedcht!” (The world is deeper than the day can tell). If some of her softer singing was difficult to “catch”, the sound still conveyed much of her words’ meaning – and she delivered a heartwarming surge of emotion together with the strings at “Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit” (For Joy wants all Eternity, deep and profound”), which beautifully subsided into the silence as the “Bimm-bamm” of the childrens’ choir began.

The singing from both the NZSO Chorale and the Wellington Young Voices was exemplary – I’ve previously heard no finer performance of this, either live or on record. The timbres of each choir at once blended and contrasted with those of the other so very deliciously, alternating beautifully with the mezzo’s tones; and the brighter flecks of texture and colour provided by winds, brass and percussion, including the orchestral bells, raised high above the orchestra, completed the celestial effect. All credit to the choir trainers, to Mark Dorrell with the NZSO Chorale, and to Christine Argyle and Anya Nazaruk with the Wellington Young Voices, for their performances.

To my initial alarm, Maestro de Waart kept  the choirs standing for the first few minutes of the orchestral finale – but then, having preserved the rapt mood of the whispered strings-only opening to the finale, did what I hoped he would eventually do, which was to motion them to sit at the beginning of a new orchestral “episode”.** Only Mahler could get away with a finale such as this, but the conductor’s ability to sustain the line of the music certainly helped with generating a sense of its unity and eloquence – we were aware of de Waart’s grip of the piece’s architecture throughout, and of how each section grew out of the one before it, so that there was an inevitability about the coda’s arrival which felt like a proper “homecoming”. This having been done most resplendently, the reception accorded the Maestro at the end was heartwarming – flowers, coloured streamers and a general sense of festivity and true significance helped make the occasion a festive and memorable one, and, of course, whetted the appetite most positively for the music-making yet to come.

**I mention this because I’ve never forgotten the first performance of this symphony “live” that I ever heard, given by Franz-Paul Decker with the NZSO, during the course of which he refused to allow his choir to sit down throughout the WHOLE of the finale –  instead, leaving them standing there for we in the audience to sympathize with to the point of distraction regarding the music, and thus completely negating the purpose of the exercise!

Gareth Farr’s Relict Furies – resonant and moving at Wellington Cathedral

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Festival 2016 presents:
RELICT FURIES
Music by Gareth Farr
Libretto by Paul Horan

Strings of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Margaret Medlyn (mezzo-soprano)

also:
ELGAR – Introduction and Allegro for Strings Op.47
SCULTHORPE – Sonata for Strings No.3 (from String Quartet No.11 “Jabiru Dreaming”) – 1. Deciso  2.Liberamente – Estatico
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul,

Tuesday 15th March, 2016

This concert at the Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul all but replicated the programme of an Edinburgh Festival Concert last year, performed on the 26th August at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, and featuring the premiere of Gareth Farr’s work Relict Furies. On that occasion the Scottish Ensemble was joined by well-known mezzo soprano Sarah Connolly in the performance of Farr’s piece, to great critical acclaim: – “a heart-stabbing evocation of the First World War” proclaimed one notice, while another read “fantastic music….permeated with breathtaking orchestration….” Farr’s work was a joint commission by the Edinburgh and New Zealand International Arts Festivals.

Last night Wellington heard the New Zealand premiere of Farr’s Relict Furies, in a programme which featured the strings of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra  playing (as was done in Edinburgh) music by Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Sculthorpe (the Scots, one noted, had cannily treated themselves to a truly resplendent bonus, that of Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra.). These works, it might be guessed by now, all feature string orchestras divided in some way, which certainly made for fascinating and ear-catching results throughout.

The programme’s centre-piece was, of course, Gareth Farr’s work – its title Relict Furies, came from the librettist Paul Horan, who attributed the reference to his mother’s influence. He remembered how she hated the use of the word “relict”, which meant “widow” – so that it seemed the word was employed here as a kind of “confrontation” of response ranged against situation, especially in the context of women’s writings of the period, and about the effects of the war.

The poetry by Paul Horan I found very moving, but no more than I did Gareth Farr’s incredibly receptive and sensitive identification with the words throughout. Right from the opening I was caught up in feelings engendered by those deep tones, still, rich and lovely. The first song “Onward” spoke of the conflict between public duty and private feelings, how the door dividing the two represented a welcome barrier between the cheering crowd and the privacy of life and love, and how that barrier was opened to allow the two worlds to fatally mingle.

Here were deep string tones redolent of the love between husband and wife, and the jarring counter-harmonies of the upper strings representing the strident tones of the cheering crowd – an impasse that was boldly negated in a spirit of adventure, but was, of course, to go horribly wrong, with jabbing accents attaching the music’s flowing lines as the beginning of the second song taking us right into the marrow of things.  Those eerie string harmonies hovering about the singer’s words “Tomorrow I wear my wedding shoes to your funeral….I’ll be on display on the lip of your grave…” contained echoes of the Last Post, magical and ghostly at one and the same time, as if the tragedy of death had a kind of inevitability.

Farr’s beautiful handling of the work’s contrasts confronted us with impassioned outbursts such as – “I’ll be on my own on the lip of your grave…” leading to the bleak ostinato-led transition into the third song “Remains”, a sequence which burgeoned in feeling towards the outburst at “White, dark terror”, and then exhaustedly subsiding into a wasteland of on-going resonance of loss. I particularly loved the string-writing at the work’s very end – the woman sung about “an unpitied life, picking up where we never started”, as the two orchestral halves magically evoked both the living and the dead, and kind of wreathed them all around with contrasting tones and timbres – as if the real and “ghost” worlds were linked for a while by memory and evocation…..

In general I was enraptured by the score – I thought the writing for the two sections of the strings was outstanding – the opening division of “low” and high tomes between the two groups added to the sense of dislocation and menace and impending doom. The balance between the two was never excessive or lop-sided, so that the “layered” aspect of the experience of loss, bereavement and widowhood was characterized as profound and affecting without being over-wrought and destructive.

Margaret Medlyn, called in to sing at short notice, due to another performer’s indisposition, gave a splendidly committed and impassioned performance, movingly tempered in places by a rapt sensitivity. The ample acoustic of the cathedral made it difficult for us to follow her exact words at moments of great agitation, but the sense of anguish was palpably conveyed.

As for the other pieces, I though both the Sculthorpe and the Vaughan Williams came off most successfully. The Sculthorpe Sonata was a string orchestra version of a string quartet, made in 1994, one called “Jabiru Dreaming”, in two movements, whose titles are Deciso and Estatico. This work is an entrancing depiction of the Australian outback, and uses different string-playing techniques to recreate indigenous sounds – col legno effects that bring to mind tribalistic rituals involving stick games and ceremonial dancing, and rapid repeated glissandi in the violins to bring to mind birdsong – the string-writing had a wonderfully outdoor atmosphere that put me in mind of Sibelius’s “saga” music in places, and later on, Copland’s “new land” evocations.

The Vaughan Williams work was superbly played, especially the haunted dialogues between the two string orchestras. This was a work where the ample acoustic of the cathedral worked almost totally in the music’s favour. The lines had a glow, a halo of intensity around them and a resonance that unholstered the on-going atmospheres of the work in a timeless kind of way, so that we were able to forget ourselves and luxuriate in these sounds. Throughout this and in Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for strings, the solo playing was superb, the give-and-take between the principals of the orchestra a delight.

I thought the work that came off least well was the Elgar, mainly because of the acoustic of the cathedral. Parts of the work again glowed with a refulgent beauty – the sequences which have come to be known as the “Welsh Tune” were all simply ravishingly done – but unfortunately the quicker parts of the work turned to confusion all too readily, especially the central fugue of the work. It might have been better in this context had more deliberate, more rhythmically-pointed tempo been chosen in places (I have heard such performances, and if directed with enough focus and intensity they can work brilliantly). Which leads me to state that this was the work, I think, which most missed the absence of a conductor, the guiding hand and ear which would have enabled more clarity to the textures and a bit more shape to the overall design of the performance – in places I wanted keener attention to phrasing, and less reliance on speed (inappropriate in the cathedral’s potentially treacherous acoustic)…….

But it’s for the Farr work that this concert will be most readily remembered – one that I’m sure we won’t have heard the last of. I for one would welcome the chance to hear it again and enjoy those moments of wide-ranging intensity in the context of a beautifully-constructed whole.

Brass Poppies – ordinary people at war

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Festival 2016 presents:
BRASS POPPIES (Ross Harris – music / Vincent O’Sullivan – libretto)

James Egglestone (William Malone)
Sarah Court (Mrs Malone)
Robert Tucker ( Tommo)
Anna Leese (Mary / Luck)
Jonathan Eyers (Billy)
Madison Nonoa (Joyce)
Wade Kernot (Fred)
Mary Newman-Pound (Lucy)
Andrew Glover (Turk/Patriot)
Benjamin Mitchell, Taniora Rangi Motutere (dancers)

Jonathan Alver (director)
Maaka Pepene (choreographer)
Jon Baxter (AV design)
Jason Morphett (lighting)
Elizabeth Whiting (costuming)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Stroma New Music Ensemble

Shed 6, Wellington

Thursday 3rd March 2016

Poet Vincent O’Sullivan and composer Ross Harris have collaborated on no less than eleven words-and-music works since 2002, the most recent being the chamber opera “Brass Poppies”. The work received its premiere at Shed 6 in Wellington last week, and after finishing a four-night season has gone on to Auckland’s Mercury Theatre where it will play for two more nights later this week.

Though the opera was actually completed by O’Sullivan and Harris before their previous Festival presentation Requiem for the Fallen, was given in 2014, it effectively complements the latter. Brass Poppies treats the subject of war and its effect upon people in a remarkably intimate and personalized way. While the Requiem was notable for its diversity of means (string quartet, brass and percussion, various taonga puoro, chamber choir and tenor solo), the opera, though no less telling in its impact on the listener, is more “conventionally” written for voices and chamber ensemble.

Harris commented in an interview beforehand that he thought the work had more in common with Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill, rather than with “conventional” opera. It seemed to me that there were a few such influences, consciously or otherwise applied – for example the meeting of the young soldier, Billy and the young girl Joyce at the dance I thought reminiscent of the meeting of the young lovers in “West Side Story” – and the all-pervading dance-rhythms which drove the opening scenes so surely and buoyantly seemed also to me to draw from the composer’s involvement with things like Klezmer music. Particularly affecting was Tatiana Lanchtchikova’s accordion-playing, rhythmic pulsings and harmonic flavorings which conjured up a bitter-sweet ambience that flavoured the whole ensemble’s music-making throughout.

O’Sullivan’s libretto, though an anti-war statement, never thumps a tub, or loads the scenario with suffering or horror of a cathartic kind – his words have the lightest of touches, with everything insinuated or suggested at the start, and stated simply and poetically at the end. And Harris’s music does the same, the lyrical lines and dance rhythms keeping the narrative flow on the move, and maintaining forward movement even when, in places, suggesting the gentlest of  pulsatings amid the silences. And so the sense of tragedy is heightened for us, because the lives and circumstances of the four soldiers are so very like ours, easily identifiable with – and yet somehow the monstrousness of what they and their families are drawn into is conveyed, the “snuffing out” of lives on a hitherto unprecedented scale is numbingly registered.

It’s the kind of thing that Wilfred Owen wrote about in his poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” with the words –

“The pallor of girls, brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.”

Together at the opera’s beginning, the soldiers and their families (represented by the women) are taken away from the ordinariness of their lives and gradually drawn into different worlds, each replete with remembrances of and longings for what was and might be again – at the beginning we heard rhetorical-sounding statements, deeply-felt but already with a hollow ring, such as  “This is what we’re fighting for”, and similarly-felt exchanges between the couples “What we told each other we remember”. When parted, the dialogues (via letters) took on the poignancy of  separation and the mutually-shared hope that “luck” would keep the men company and keep them safe, a spirit characterized by one of the women as a “presence” circulating among the men at Gallipoli.

Such sentiments were, of course, lump-in-the-throat in effect, as were the longings expressed for a “return to what was”‘ on both sides. One husband-and-wife exchange was shared by both singers, one taking over the words of the letter from the other; while another soldier’s letter recalled memories of walking with his girl in orchards filled with apples – he then made reference to walking under a different kind of orchard, those of the stars overhead at Gallpoli. It was all very heartfelt on a deeply personal and individual scale, with hopes, fears, sorrows and resignation gently brought together in a wholly natural way.

A jingoistic note was expressed by a British Empire figure repeating vainglorious cliches of valour and sacrifice, set against verses whose words underlined the cynicism of the “victory” rhetoric, as did the ditty about the Kings “in their counting houses, counting out their money”, making something fairytale-like from out of the turmoil and tragedy. All of this struck such hollow resonances as the soldiers, all having been killed by this time, countered these sentiments by announcing  the grim finality of their position with the words “we’re not likely to change our minds as the grass keeps growing” – and later, commenting on “the deep snows of forgetting”. Emotions ran in parallel, the women in mourning and the shades of the soldiers (sightless to their bereaved partners) in lament for what has been lost, with the women singing of the subsequent evenings as “silent as a shattered gun”. The quiet interlocking of thought and emotion, and the avoidance of overt, visceral grief gives oceans of realm for  individual feeling to well up and flood the spaces, so that we in the audience were overcome with the cruel emptiness of it all, on both sides.

Describing his words for the libretto as “only the scaffolding for something bigger” O’Sullivan paid tribute to his collaborator’s music, though to this listener’s ears what came across was a tapestried amalgam of words and music, wrought  out of similar impulses. The music, as strongly as did the words, told us who these people were – ordinary people being asked to go and perform in extraordinary situations. So Harris’s music was catchy and recognizable and readily identifiable – period pieces, such as waltzes, marches and other different dance-forms, the music of the people, so to speak. The rhythmic verve of the dance was physical in its impact, and its sudden changes of metre both ironic and volatile in its effect. I thought I heard those Klezmer touches on various occasions, the genre’s intrinsic bitter-sweet ambiences here very much to the point.

Director Jonathan Alver’s staging of the work made creative theatrical use of the ostensibly unpromising Shed 6 venue. I hadn’t heard any live music there previously, so my first reaction to encountering what seemed to be such “barn-of-a-place” surroundings was of dismay – fortunately, these concerns weren’t realized in performance. The clarity of both vocal and instrumental lines was, I thought,  exemplary, though the surtitles played their part in clarifying lines throughout the more concerted singing passages. Balance between singers and instrumentalists seemed well-nigh perfect, with conductor and players being visible “on stage” throughout, over to one side rather than down in a pit of any kind – part of the work’s choreography of movement.

The production wasn’t “in the round” as the Requiem of two years ago had been in Wellington Cathedral – this was more conventionally staged, with singers and dancers appearing on a stage via entrances diagonally placed between column-like walls on which were projected various scenes and scenarios. In this way the singers and dancers seemed to come in from the midst of whatever scheme was projected onto the surfaces of the columns, and in places return to them via their exits, which I thought worked beautifully as an idea – no more poignantly than when the soldiers took their leave of their women through exits framed by contemporary photographs of freshly-enlisted men in uniform marching down Lambton Quay in Wellington. Besides the four couples and the Turkish figure / British patriot character, there were also two sprite-like dancers whose movements expressed both gentleness and strength, delicacy and vigour, the latter sometimes combatative and warlike. Costumes were simple – khaki uniforms for the men, period dresses for the women, as expected. After the soldiers were each killed they remained as “presences” on stage, haunting their women, though not being able to communicate – very simple and powerful.

This was very much an ensemble opera, though with a number of stand-out vocal moments for individual voices. The conversations among the characters were as significant as were the individual soliloquies, each acting as a foil for the other, though the solo sequences tended to “carry” the more profound utterances. The couples interacted with admirable ease and fluency, each with a particular character, from the tremulousness of the two youngsters, Joyce (Madison Nonoa) and Billy (Jonathan Eyres), to the no-nonsense working-class codes and understandings used by Fred (Wade Kernot) and Lucy (Mary Newman-Pound). Australian tenor James Egglestone as Captain William Malone relished his occasional stentorian moments, though most memorable was his tender interaction with his wife (Sara Court), particularly during the reading of a letter home, the husband taking over from the wife halfway through with the reading  – it was all a perfectly-tailored piece of give-and-take.

Robert Tucker (as Tommo) beautifully put across his letter/song which recalled memories of the apple orchard where he courted Mary (Anna Leese), and making the most of his declaration of surprise and resignation at looking upwards at a different kind of orchard at Anzac Cove – the night sky. As for Anna Leese, her strong-willed Mary, vigorous and feisty, “morphed” this character at one point in the story with Lady Luck, a female personification of good fortune, taking it upon herself to circulate among the Allied soldiers, singing about the “mantel of luck”, in between wordless chantings, everything beautifully and lyrically sounded. Again, one got the sense of the impact made on individuals, with Mary’s description of an excursion up to Brooklyn an almost Janus-faced aspect of her “Luck” persona by association – things that ordinary men and women would think of and hold onto in extraordinary situations, and expressed in a naturalistic context. FInally, Andrew Glover made the most of his cameo-like opportunities as the ghost-like Turkish soldier and the British patriot, enigmatic figures at opposite spectrum-ends.

Every instrumental sound was vividly realized by the Stroma Ensemble under Hamish McKeich’s direction – the musical realizations played their part in enhancing the production’s consistently underplayed yet powerful inner resonances. It’s one whose message will continue to resound, and repay revisiting.

Fire, flamenco and folksong ‘cello style, from Ramón Jaffé

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Ramón Jaffé (‘cello)
Catherine McKay (piano)

CHOPIN – Introduction and Polonaise Brilliante
BEETHOVEN – Sonata for ‘Cello and Piano in C Major Op.102 No.1
JAFFÉ – flamenco improvisation
BRAGATO – Graziela y Buenos Aires
DVORAK – Piano Trio No.4 in E Minor “Dumky” (with Carolyn van Leuven – violin)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Tuesday 1st March 2016

The title given to this concert by the artists rolled off the tongue colourfully and evocatively enough – however, I confess that I found myself involuntarily drawn into slightly circumspect mode over the word “fire”, having over the years grown somewhat weary of being assailed by regular barrages of hype from major arts organization by way of advertising their oncoming productions.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried, as what followed during the actual concert was precisely what the title suggested. In fact, “fire” in its threatening, smoldering form aptly characterized the playing of ‘cellist Ramón Jaffé throughout a good deal of the proceedings, especially when he tackled those pieces related directly to a Latin American tradition of music-making, such as flamenco.

What the programme in fact described as “a flamenco ‘cello treat” was just that, when Jaffé played for us a piece which he had written in honour of flamenco guitarist, Pedro Bacán, with whom he had closely worked, and who had since died in a tragic accident in 1997. Jaffé described how he had to “begin again” as a ‘cellist when taking up the flamenco style, putting aside his classical training and learning new techniques and responses to the music, and reaching a point where he could play and improvise as if he were a folk musician.

I wrote down what I remembered Jaffé called his piece (the name wasn’t written down in the programme), which was something like Canta de Passion (in translation, Passion Sings, or Song of Passion). It was a detail which didn’t seem important at the time, so arresting were the sounds the player was drawing from his instrument. His bow danced suggestively upon the strings, the rhythms allowing pizzicati from both bowing and “fretting” hands to generate an ever-burgeoning excitement  which broke off into a kind of a kind of recitative and then developed into something almost hymnal, free and sonorous.

Rhythmic impulses reasserted themselves in the form of percussive gesturing, Jaffé knocking and slapping the ‘cello’s body and tapping his feet to the music’s pulsating, using the dancing bow on the strings once again and working things up to an intensity which carried through to the piece’s end. In both song- and dance-like sequences the music generated a good deal of impassioned feeling.

Jaffé then joined forces with pianist Catherine Mckay in a work, Graziela y Buenos Aires, by one José Bragato, an Italian-born Argentinian composer who celebrated his hundredth birthday in October last year. ‘Cellists who play tangos more often choose the works of Astor Piazolla, (most often a piece called  Le Grande Tango) but Jaffé told me after the concert that he preferred to play Bragato’s work.

Loaded with sultriness and dark-toned suggestiveness, the music began with the ‘cello following the piano’s mood-jazz lower-register evocations, occasionally giving the trajectories a “lilt” to enliven the languid atmospheres. Solos from each instrument alternated with racy, interlocked Latin-American dance rhythms, driving the music along with ear-catching timbres and hues, as when the ‘cellist played over the bridge of his instrument amid droll piano glissandi.

The piece’s concluding sequence memorably took in a long and sinuous ‘cello melody, tenderly and delicately partnered by the piano, the pair of instruments breath-holding and trance-like in their murmurings towards the music’s end.

Before either of these exotic pieces were performed, ‘cellist and pianist had given us two more conventionally “classical” works, beginning with an early work by Chopin, Introduction and Polonaise Brilliante. A lilting Andante-like beginning featured plenty of give-and-take between the instruments, though with the piano more typically forthright and decorative than the cello’s more song-like lines, after which both players launched into the Polonaise section with great gusto.

In places I was reminded of the piano writing in Chopin’s concertos, giving the player a real work-out in places, leaving the cellist to impress us with aristocratic poise and gorgeous tones. Catherine McKay balanced the virtuoso element beautifully with the poetic moments, the give-and-take between both musicians giving a strong and positive impression as to the music’s worth. Beethoven, of course, received similar advocacy in his Op.102 No.1 C Major Sonata which followed, the music’s improvisatory manner in places drawing forth finely-drawn tones from both players.

Particularly delightful were the “cat-and-mouse” sequences between the instruments in the work’s second movement, the cello’s “open fifths” and the piano’s teasing gestures subsumed into the playful allegro vivace with terrific élan, leading to the throwaway payoff.

Concluding the concert was Dvorak’s well-known “Dumky” Trio, for which Ramon Jaffé and Catherine McKay were joined by violinist Carolyn van Leuven. From what I’d heard ‘cellist and pianist do earlier in the concert, I anticipated that they would bring out this music’s expressive qualities to a point of deep satisfaction – and I wasn’t disappointed. From the tragic, lamenting opening, through to the inhibited gaiety and energy of the quicker sections of the movement, the players seemed fully engaged with the sounds and their purposes, thus conveying to us plenty of that “Bohemian lament” character for which the composer’s work was and is justly renowned.

Of course, ‘cellist and pianist were already “on fire” with the conflagrations of the concert’s first half, so that it took a little while for violinist van Leuven to find her richest voice to contribute to the textures, though her rhythmic sense instantly “kicked in” with the ensemble. The poco adagio second movement drew us in from the beginning, the violinist responding to the cellist’s eloquence with atmospheric “squeeze-box” tones, so very nostalgic and moving!  Even more so was the andante moderato which followed, the music having a “heartbroken” quality, a great longing which subsequent episodes of energy and dogged strength didn’t entirely banish.

Such moments came thick and fast during the finale, with its volatile shifts between tragedy, introspection and gaiety, the motto theme tossed almost recklessly between the instruments and spontaneously inflected as to express a bewildering variety of moods, with no holds barred – that last-named quality a defining characteristic of the concert’s overall music-making. Each of the musicians played a part in serving up this feast of creative re-enactment for our delight – we did our best to mirror their efforts with appropriately enthusiastic appreciation.