Author: Peter Mechen

Michael Houstoun’s tribute to Judith Clark – a feast of Bach

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music
Institute of Registered Music Teachers in New Zealand (IRMT)

Judith Clark Memorial Piano Series

Opening Concert: Michael Houstoun
JS BACH – The Well-Tempered Klavier Bk.2 BWV 870-93

Adam Concert Room, NZSM Campus, Victoria University

Sunday, 21st August, 2016

A brief preamble: Judith Clark (1931-2014) was a much-respected piano pedagogue and former Head of Piano Studies at Victoria University’s School of Music in Wellington. Her years of prominence in this latter role were before my time in the capital, but I certainly remember her in retirement as an abiding presence at many a concert and recital, having the air of a “grand dame” whose attendance at whatever performance might have seemed to those who knew her to give each occasion a kind of telepathic approbation. I never got to know her or talk with her to any great extent, and it was obviously my loss – since her death I’ve come to realise the extent of her influence and importance as a teacher, mentor and administrator in the capital’s musical life. So, the instigation of this series, featuring recitals given by no less than four of the country’s leading pianists, is no mean tribute to a significant, and already almost legendary figure.

Michael Houstoun’s choice of music to begin the series certainly invested the occasion with a distinction of its own – having been captivated throughout his musical life by a number of Preludes and Fugues from Book Two of JS Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, he resolved to master those others that he didn’t know and had never played, and perform the entire set of twenty-four! In the concert’s programme notes Houstoun recounted for us how he had played some of the composer’s Goldberg Variations for Judith Clark on the last occasion that he saw her, remarking that “she loved this music”. So his choice of the music was by way of remembering and commemorating her fondness for Bach, and at the same time realising his wish to play the whole of the WTC’s Second Book.

Interesting that Bach himself never called Part Two of the work “The Well-Tempered Clavier”, but instead “New Preludes and Fugues”. Though the collection is reckoned by commentators as less satisfying an entity than is Part One, the “infinite variety” of its different characters, preludes and fugues alike, makes for as compelling a listening experience as the more “organic” earlier Book. I must say that Houstoun surprised and even delighted me no end with his brief but thoughtful annotations accompanying each prelude and fugue, printed in the programme accompanying the recital. It’s not unlike what, firstly Hans Von Bulow, and then Alfred Cortot, did by way of “prefacing” each of the 24 Preludes of Chopin, though the pianist himself cites the example of Debussy providing titles for his Piano Preludes. I’m almost certain a younger Michael Houstoun wouldn’t for a moment have considered such an undertaking – but his remarks concerning the music in an interview I heard just prior to the concert indicated in no uncertain terms his awareness of, and willingness to share his thoughts regarding the “character” of each of the individual pieces.

So, in the programme, alongside each of the preludes and fugues alike, we were given a brief (often single-word) impression of what the music suggested to the pianist. Houstoun himself alluded to the “slippery ground” that such an exercise might place beneath any interpreter’s or listener’s feet, particularly those of either a suggestible or a literal-minded bent, due to Bach’s leaving so much of the “interpretation” to the individual performer (practically no dynamic or tempo markings, for instance). What it all confirmed for me was the essential uniqueness of individual responses to art, and the validity of those responses both across the board and down the ages. Bach was obviously happy for posterity to make what it might of his music, within the cosmic embrace, of course, of his unquenchable faith in God. This remarkably unselfconscious quality is one that’s proven to be one of the music’s greatest and most enduring strengths.

Faced with Houstoun’s playing of twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, I thought I’d forego a detailed, piece-by-piece analysis of the pianist’s performance, one which would sorely try the patience of even the most avid reader of “Middle C”. Instead, I’d touch on places in the concert which would indicate the general range and scope of Houstoun’s astounding playing throughout  –  a kind of “as the twig is bent, so the tree’s inclined” approach. I must admit that, perhaps somewhat churlishly, I didn’t look at the pianist’s piece-by-piece annotations until he’d finished playing each one or a group of them – I wanted to form my own impressions of what he was enabling the music to do at the time of its sounding, and then “compare notes” so to speak.

Houstoun arranged the sequence of the pieces in four “blocks” – what he called “a feast in four bites” – placing two five minute breaks at the halfway stage of each of the concert’s halves (are you still with me?), making for what could be called in another context “comfort stops”! For me it gave what seemed like a mighty processional of pieces and associated fugues at once more overall shape and some space in which various individual delights of the cavalcade could be better savoured. Were I to choose one prelude/fugue sequence from each of these segments of the concert, the following are the ones I would single out for special comment.

The Sixth Prelude and Fugue in D Minor comes in the wake of the previous D Major pair, whose wonderful “processional fanfare” aspect at the start was a feeling regarding the music that I obviously shared with the pianist, and whose fugue seemed to me to reflect a  kind of reflection in tranquillity upon the previous outward display, a more intimate evocation of shared well-being. By contrast, the D minor pairing expressed a grimmer, more single-minded purpose, the ”real business” concerned with goals and outcomes rather than processes and posturings. Houstoun’s fleet-of-finger playing most excitingly drove the argument forward in a torrent of energy, brooking no interference. How whimsical, then, was the fugue, with its sly, deconstructionist gestures, the chromatic descents following each of the upward-thrusting figurations as deftly undoing the constructs as each were proposed – extraordinarily satisfying!

The Ninth of the set, in E major, featured a Prelude whose contourings seemed as if shaped by unearthly hands, its serenities of movement and phrasing beautifully “voiced” by Houstoun, as if in communion with other-worldly forces – a kind of “music of the spheres”, realising processes that had their own age-old logic and purpose. Its Fugue was one which grew from patiently unfolding steps ascending and expanding with a kind of inevitability and strength which, here and elsewhere, makes one marvel at the music’s (and its composer’s) visionary capacities, which the pianist brought to us with all the grandeur he could muster! Interesting, then, to read his “Angelic benediction” description of the Prelude, along with the “Holy, holy, holy” appellation for the Fugue.

Moving to the second half, I was particularly taken with the urgently-paced, attention-grabbing G-sharp Minor Prelude, its figurations having something of a relentless aspect, redeemed by a frequently-repeated three-note motif. The outlines are sufficiently varied and exploratory for the music to take on a kind of narrative quality, which Houstoun shaped and coloured as would a good story-teller, keeping our interest simmering throughout. My ear took a few measures to get the rhythmic “gait” of the fugue (three, as opposed to four, at the start!), but the music made for a fascinating journey into, through and out of different states of feeling and being, to hypnotic effect, the pianist’s concentration and far-seeing purpose never seeming to flag, and, in fact, gathering weight and strength as it proceeded, leaving nothing in its wake.

Though not the  final one in the set, I made an asterisk beside my notes for the A minor Prelude and Fugue at the time,  thinking I would want to dwell upon it further afterwards. It seemed to me to exemplify what Bach could do with the simplest building materials, in this case in the Prelude with simple alternating chromatic and “normal” scale passages, interspersed with simple intervals that move disconcertingly in and out of shadows, creating from these simple elements what sounds like a complex web of interactions (Houstoun’s annotation for this movement reads, somewhat divertingly, “Maybe….maybe not”. The Prelude’s second half seems to lift the music more into the light, which seems not only to further illuminate but also to intensify its complex workings.

As for the fugue, its big-boned gestures and massive trajectories  moved easily and majestically alongside more urgent and quicksilver gesturings as if demonstrating a kind of all-pervading pulse governing all manner of movements and actions, cerebral and emotional, structural and decorative,  cosmic and individual. The “wow!” that appeared in my notes at the end of Houstoun’s playing of the piece seemed to appear of its own volition – exactly how it got there I couldn’t even begin to imagine, let alone understand. Some things are best left to metaphysics – and it seemed fitting to leave undisturbed such a spontaneously-wrought tribute to an integral part of an occasion which will be long-remembered by those who  attended.

One of Judith Clark’s successors at the  School of Music,  Diedre Irons, will next offer a programme featuring the music of Haydn, Debussy and Liszt, to be performed at the Adam Concert Room on Sunday 18th September. The remaining two concerts will be given on Sundays in 2017, on March 26th by Richard Mapp, and on May 7th by Jian Liu, currently Head of Piano at Victoria. It’s a cause for oceans of gratitude to be given by all piano-fanciers to the organisers of the concerts, to the artists themselves, and, of course to the late Judith Clark, first and foremost, whose inspiration it was which brought about the idea for this series. Incidentally, this opening  concert was sold out beforehand, so people who are interested ought to act quickly to be sure of their places at the oncoming one.

The Don rides out again – Eternity Opera’s “other” Don Giovanni

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Don Giovanni – Eternity Opera’s “understudy” cast

Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte
English Translation by Edward Dent

Alex Galvin (director)
Simon Romanos (music director)
Sandra Malesic (producer)

Cast:
Leoporello – Nino Raphael
Don Giovanni – Orene Tiai
Donna Anna – Amanda Barclay
Commendatore/Statue – Derek Miller
Don Ottavio – Chris Berentson
Donna Elvira – Hannah Catrin Jones
Zerlina – Emily Mwila
Masetto – Charles Wilson

Dancers and Chorus: Taryn Baxter, Minto Fung,
India Loveday, Sarah Munn, Jessica Short

Orchestra:
Douglas Beilman (concertmaster),
Anna van der Zee (violin) Victoria Janëcke (viola),
Inbal Meggido (‘cello) Victoria Jones (double-bass),
Timothy Jenkin (flute) Merran Cooke (oboe),
Mark Cookson, Moira Hurst (clarinet),
Ed Allen (horn),
 Christopher Hill (guitars),
Josh Crump (trumpet),
Andrew Yorkstone, Mark Davey (alto trombone),
Hannah Neman (timpani)

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Wednesday 24th August, 2016

What a delight to be able to enjoy, within the space of a few days, a second, almost entirely different cast performing the same operatic production! Eternity Opera’s Don Giovanni had opened on the previous Saturday (reviewed by Middle C, below) and this was the single chance for the “understudy cast” members to demonstrate what they could do in public – with the exception of the Zerlina, Emily Mwila, for whom there was no understudy, and whose performance was a great pleasure to see again, in any case!). So this evening’s performance was a tantalizing mixture of deja vu with fresh, new faces and voices and characterizations, as interesting to compare with the “other” as to enjoy for its own qualities. I confess that I’m inclined towards the latter approach, though I may let the occasional counter-impression slip through the net by accident, as it were.

Firstly, though, there were the constants between the two performances – the joy of listening all over again, for example, to Mozart’s score brought forward and sharpened in focus as conducted with great energy and commitment by Simon Romanos, and expertly played by the first-rate ensemble. I was seated in a different place in the auditorium this time round, in front of the singers and further away from the orchestra, and didn’t get the “edge” of the instrumental attack to the same extent, the music seeming to having a more rounded and integrated-with-the-stage sound. I noticed a couple of dropped notes in places in the solo lines, which could be put down to fatigue, but registered just as strongly the support the players gave to one another and to the singers – at the risk of singling out certain players, I delighted all over again, for example, in cellist Inbal Meggido’s obbligato accompaniment of Zerlina’s “You are cruel, dear Masetto” (“Batti, batti o bel Masetto”), the playing at once so deliciously insouciant and having great tensile strength, signifying the encirclement and breaking-down of her jealous lover Masetto’s defences with her abundant, coquettish charms.

Of course that was just one of many felicitous detailings which we were able to enjoy, aspects of the sterling work done by the entire quintet of string players throughout. Another delight was guitarist Christopher Hill’s accompanying of Don Giovanni’s serenade to Donna Elvira, following on of course from the player’s unfailingly sensitive recitative accompaniments, which I thought worked surprisingly well. The various winds, including the horn, aided and abetted the singing throughout with gorgeously-phrased melodic introductions, counterpoints and resonating harmonies – and I loved the impact made by the introduction of those extra brass and the timpani for the Second Act’s “statue” scenes.

I was grateful to director Alex Galvin for his decision to present the show in period costume and with stage settings that reflected the composer’s time, enabling the full flavour of Mozart’s and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s partnership to play freely in a more-or-less “intended” context. The use of English greatly benefitted these interactions, the point as I saw it being not to “update” but to illuminate the story. I thought Galvin’s conception of the staging nicely took the wind out of the sails of those who ceaselessly contend that opera needs to be contextually “modernised” for today’s audiences to “connect” with. And the response of a young friend of mine who also saw the show on this particular evening was, at the end, to excitedly ask when the company would be staging its next production!

Of course, reproducing what one imagines would be anything like the settings and atmospheres prevalent in the composer’s own era is an art-form in itself, even using the libretto’s detailing as source-material. I liked very much Alex Galvin’s opting for black backdrops which couched the production in more-or-less constant darkness, one that for most of the time connects with the story’s time-of-day frame and its rather Goya-esque settings. Having said that, I thought the opening needed to be made even darker, the characters (Leporello, Donna Anna and Don Giovanni) too viscerally identifiable during the latter’s attempted violation of Donna Anna. Conversely, there were a couple of moments where the oppressiveness of the gloom might for the sake of theatrical contrast have been momentarily brightened, such as the Act One scene where Zerlina and Masetto are celebrating their marriage with their friends, and even, a little later, the meeting of Don Giovanni with Donna Anna, the woman he had attempted to seduce the night before. However, the production’s instinctive and on-going evocation of darkness served the story and its various themes well.

What colour we experienced came largely from the costumes which in nearly all cases in both performances eloquently “spoke” for their particular characters, with only the first-choice Donna Elvira (Kate Lineham) being, I thought, made to look a touch too matronly. The rest of both casts inhabited their various garments readily and easefully, allowing the essential personalities to shine forth – perhaps in the cemetery scene, the “Darth Vader” (from the film “Star Wars”) aspect of the Statue, a memorial to the Commendatore, slain by Don Giovanni, looked somewhat incongruous at first, but the apparition’s supernatural aspect logically gave its appearance a kind of “carte blanche”, stimulating, to say the least!

So, what of the cast this time round? Away from the “comparison” aspect of putting the two ensembles together role-by-role, I would say that each of the singers had something unique and tantalizing to bring to their individual parts. In some cases stage deportments and voices took time to warm up and properly activate, but in almost every case were firing and exuding energies and resonances by the opera’s end. A case in point was Giovanni’s servant Leporello, portrayed by Nino Raphael, whom I thought somewhat indolent, both physically and vocally, at the start, adopting a passive, arguably too nonchalant-sounding aspect when viewing his master’s would-be amorous exploits, and in doing so for me making his character seem uninvolved almost to a fault. As the story proceeded he seemed to gradually wake his Leporello up and bring out a sparkle more readily in both word and deed, until by the end he seemed in much greater possession of the part, or vice versa.

Something of the same languidity hung about the well-developed shoulders of the Don, Orene Tiai – his aspect seemed more happy-go-lucky than intense and predatory, an “easy-come-easy-go” attitude which didn’t develop any pronounced “edge” normally associated with the character’s efforts to pursue sexual adventures. He did at certain times convey a mode which suggested he was accustomed to getting his way, but he rarely gave a sense of having that unquenchable appetite for women which he admitted to at one point in the opera, despite the impressive statistics proffered by Leporello concerning his master’s amorous activities. His voice was by turns charming and sonorous in his set numbers, more alive and purposeful there, I thought, than in recitative, where he tended to “sing-song” rather than “point” his delivery of the lines. Still, he did well to move the action on at the beginning when “confronted” by the Commendatore, the latter either missing or failing to properly emphasise a movement or gestural cue or a vocal challenge to fight, so that the Don had to propel the action on unprovoked – or so it seemed!

The great ensemble finale at the end of the first act was a true galvanising point, which seemed from the new act’s beginning to give everybody’s stage personae more intensity – a kind of edge was raised which, in the Don’s case, carried him on something of a tide towards his confrontation with the Statue in the cemetery and fuelled their final encounter at the conclusion of Giovanni’s supper scene. Derek Miller’s Statue seemed fortunately to be able to generate more heft and power than he managed to find as the ineffectual Commendatore, which set the scene for the Don’s final despatch at the hands of a group of infernal cohorts of Hell – all women, incidentally, which seemed properly meet and just.

As for the women who were the objects of the Don’s somewhat haphazard attentions at various stages of the evening, all conveyed a distinction of character which enhanced their place in the drama – Amanda Barclay’s Donna Anna fiery and volatile, Hannah Catrin Jones’s Donna Elvira upright and dignified, mingling constraint with moments of deeply-felt grief and desire, and Emily Mwila’s Zerlina, pert, vivacious and totally winning. I did feel a little startled at the immediacy of some of Amanda Barclay’s expressions of blood-lust made in her “vengeance” duet with her hapless fiancee, Don Ottavio, but otherwise responded to her obvious involvment with the character and the story. Hannah Catrin Jones, in comparison, was more controlled in both deportment and vocal expression, wanting, I thought something of Amanda Barclay’s impulsiveness and spontaneity in her expression, but not too much! Both singers gave pleasure when shaping their longer lyrical lines with beauty and sensitivity, and not having their voices subjected to pressure from the strictures of the composer’s more intensely-wrought vocal figurations.

Victims, too, by proxy, of the Don’s predatory activities, were the men involved with these women, such as Don Ottavio, who seemed here, to all intents and purposes, practically neutered by Giovanni’s near-violation of his fiancee, Donna Anna. At the best of times, long on declamatory intent and short on effective action, Don Ottavio (sung by Chris Berentson) made a noble-hearted and dutiful, if somewhat emasculated impression as per his character. Berentson’s acting was consistent and reliable, as was his ensemble singing, but his voice needed more heft and juice when heard solo. Da Ponte and Mozart certainly got it right in ascribing desperate marriage-delaying tactics to poor Donna Anna, faced with the deadening prospect of eking out her days with a dutiful but lacklustre husband.

On the other hand, Masetto (here portrayed by Charles Wilson), the peasant lad betrothed to the pretty and vivacious Zerlina, whom the Don took a shine to in the first act, readily displayed his displeasure at the situation, railing against his partner’s coquettish behaviour and causing her great remorse, leading to some delicious interplay between the characters as Zerlina exerted her well-nigh irresistible charms upon her aggrieved sweetheart, and achieved the desired result. Though arguably not appearing robust and rustic enough for a peasant lad, Wilson’s sense of character made it work, singing and acting alongside Emily Mwila’s Zerlina with heartwarming involvement.

In both productions the chorus work sparkled (in the wedding and festive scenes) and resounded with doom-laden tones (in the opera’s final scene, where the Don is dragged down to Hell by the femme fatales turned demons!). Whatever the scene the deployment of people on stage created atmosphere, colour and excitement, and advanced the drama.

While the performance by-and-large confirmed the choice of principals for the “first” cast the performances described here enshrined for the most part viable alternatives whose realisation worked in each case, enabling the show “to go on”. I thought doing both an excellent idea, especially considering the number of people I saw who, like myself had attended the other production as well.

One is left with more-than-ample feelings of enthusiasm and goodwill towards the company and its director, with a hopeful view to there being further operatic worlds for them to conquer – on its own, the audience attendance and its response to the performances would have been heartening. The production certainly demonstrated that, if there’s sufficient energy, commitment and feeling for the art-form, it’s so very worthwhile and rewarding to have opera done in almost any performance scale, if the resources to do so can be found.

I can only echo the sentiments expressed in the final sentence of my review of the “first cast” performance in wishing Alex Galvin and Eternity Opera every future success.

Opera with energy and excitement – Eternity Opera Company’s Don Giovanni at the Hannah Playhouse

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eternity Opera Company presents:
DON GIOVANNI

Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte
English Translation by Edward Dent

Alex Galvin (director)
Simon Romanos (music director)
Sandra Malesic (producer)

Cast: Leporello – Jamie Henare
        Don Giovanni – Mark Bobb
        Donna Anna – Barbara Paterson
        Commendatore/Statue – Roger Wilson
        Don Ottavio – Jamie Young
        Donna Elvira – Kate Lineham
        Zerlina – Emily Mwila
        Masetto – Laurence Walls
        Dancers and Chorus: Taryn Baxter, Minto Fung, India Loveday
        Sarah Munn, Jessica Short

Orchestra: Douglas Beilman (concertmaster), Anna van der Zee (violin)
                Victoria Janëcke (viola), Inbal Meggido (‘cello)
                Victoria Jones (double-bass), Timothy Jenkin (flute)
                Merran Cooke (oboe), Mark Cookson, Moira Hurst (clarinet)
                Leni Mäckle, Peter Lamb (bassoon), Ed Allen (horn)
                Christopher Hill (guitars), Josh Crump (trumpet)
                Andrew Yorkstone, Mark Davey (alto trombone)
                Hannah Neman (timpani)
                   
Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

20-27th August, 2016

The name “Eternity Opera” is itself a splendid gauntlet-brandishing gesture, an assertive declaration of overall purpose and intent, reinforced by a note in the programme for Saturday night’s opening of the new company’s season of “Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”–  firstly, “to stage productions that are exciting and accessible to anyone” and, just as importantly, “to support the many talented singers and musicians in the Wellington region”. Judging by what the opening night’s performance managed to achieve in terms of immediacy and intensity, there was plenty of excitement and involvement for the audience in Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse, strange though it might have seemed for those of us familiar with the venue’s history to see opera performed there.

Whatever misgivings one might have felt beforehand along these lines, particularly regarding the venue’s relatively limited performing space for both singers and orchestra, were immediately blown away by the impact of the Overture’s opening.  The immediacy of it all seemed to me to bring one far closer to the “inner life” of the music than the somewhat distanced effect of having the performers on a vast stage and in a sunken orchestral pit. Instead, here they all were, almost, it seemed, within touching distance! The effect was, I thought, electric and energising, right throughout the work.

With the Overture at the beginning, one relished the instrumental playing’s focus, energy and infinite variety of colour and nuance. It all “clicked” as, amid the gloom, my eyes began to “pick out”, one by one, the faces of some of Wellington’s top musicians. Conductor Simon Romanos readily found the “tempo giusto” for both the music’s monumental opening and the allegro which followed, pointing up for us the opera’s Janus-faced aspect – what the composer himself styled as both a “dramma giocoso” (a mix of drama and comedy), and, in his own catalogue of compositions, an “opera buffa” (comic opera).

The performance used Edward Dent’s English translation, which came across well in the theatre’s intimate spaces. First to appear on the stage was Leporello, the Don’s servant, sung by Jamie Henare with wry, Sancho Panza-like humour throughout, understandably taking a little time to warm up his voice’s energies in this opening scene, but, a little later, making the most of the famous “Catalogue aria”, singing and characterising the words with obvious relish. Servant and master played off one another along the way with plenty of complementary panache and mordant wit, a highlight being Leporello’s “Mr.Bean cut down to size” transformation at the hands of his master, when being disguised as the latter for further nefarious purposes.

As for the redoubtable Don Giovanni himself, Mark Bobb made a personable hero/villain, conveying both the energy and underlying world-weariness of the habitual seducer – reflected, of course in the character’s almost total lack of success with the sexual conquests he pursued in the course of the opera. While his voice had its limits, such as insufficient “top” with which to clinch the hedonistic splendour of his “Champagne aria”,  his singing early on in the piece wasn’t without charm, in the first act convincingly and seductively all but completely breaking down the defences of the peasant girl, Zerlina, about to be married, and, in the second act, mockingly serenading firstly his jilted lover Donna Elvira, who’d come to town in pursuit of him and to make life as difficult for him as possible, and then switching his focus to her maid.

Sparks were effectively struck by Giovanni’s encounters with the Commendatore, the father of Donna Anna, the latter another of the Don’s would-be conquests. Both the first-act duel between the two men, and the return of the murdered Commendatore as a statue to take revenge on the reprobate worked up plenty of dramatic and musical steam. Throughout these escapades, Mark Bobb’s portrayal veered convincingly between bravado and dissipation, strongly conveying at the end both his character’s defiance of heavenly retribution for his crimes of excess, and his grim acceptance of the fate in store for him.

Roger Wilson brought sonorous authority to the Commendatore/Statue role, using his powerful voice to great effect, though thanks to his costume his “Statue” persona for me more readily evoked “Darth Vader” (of “Star Wars” fame) than anything else. Nevertheless, he and Giovanni really made something of their supernatural confrontation, building up to the “mark of doom” moment when their hands clasped, here most excitingly realized.

Don Giovanni is certainly an opera that puts relationships to the sword, as witness the ardent but largely ineffectual peregrinations of Don Ottavio, who’s Donna Anna’s betrothed and who seemed destined to remain so indefinitely, on account of his beloved’s grief at her father’s death. Jamie Young enacted what can be a thankless part, with plenty of palpable feeling for his sweetheart, best expressed in recitative, dialogue and ensembles set-pieces rather than in full-scale arias, where his voice seemed to lose its quality under pressure.

Another victim was Masetto, one of the villagers, along with his to-be-partner, Zerlina, whom the Don had already lost no time in making the focus of his attentions for a while. I always saw (or heard) Mazetto as someone essentially rustic, a “salt-of-the-earth” character with a few rough edges, which the elegant, modulated portrayal of Laurence Walls seemed to have knocked off and smoothed around, making the character appear in manner and voice more poet and philosopher than country boy. Still, his interaction with Emily Mwila’s Zerlina, his sweetheart, had a lovely innocence, beautifully delineated during her singing of “Batti, batti” (Beat me, beat me), by way of winning back his ruffled affections in the wake of her “dalliance” with the Don.

Turning to the women, the first we encountered was Donna Anna, daughter of the Commendatore and betrothed of Don Ottavio, but who had somehow aroused the interest and attentions of Giovanni – Barbara Paterson’s portrayal of Anna captured, I think, much of the character’s ambivalence regarding her attempted seduction by the Don, thus “awakening” aspects of her as a woman which the dutiful Don Ottavio might well have left undisturbed. A certain “edge” to her voice sharpened the vibrant intensity of her character, one which became almost too incisive at certain pressure-points. Still, there was no doubting her dramatic commitment and the willingness to interact with others – a well-honed sequence was the “vengeance” vow demanded of Ottavio by Anna immediately following the discovery of her murdered father’s corpse, Barbara Paterson and Jamie Young between them generating and conveying plenty of force and weight.

By contrast Giovanni’s rejected sweetheart, Donna Elvira, beautifully realized by Kate Lineham, mingled intensity of feeling for her treacherous ex-lover with anger, scorn, and despair on one hand and frustration and determination on the other. Hers was a voice that, apart from the occasional moment of pressure affecting the singing line’s trajectory, filled out the melodic contours with such beauty as to produce moments of glowing warm amidst the gloom. Her Elvira was, it seemed, a character ready to forgive and reconcile with any wrongs done by others, imparting a human dimension to the drama whose privations engaged our sympathy.

Where both Anna and Elvira were sophisticated society women, the third female role was Zerlina, whose delightfully coquettish portrayal by Emily Mwila was one of the show’s highlights, and who exuded both rude, rustic health and artfully-wound persuasive charm right from the start. Helped by a beautifully-modulated and flexibly adept voice she “owned” both music and character and brought them together with an ease and fluency that suggested here was a “natural” at what she did on the musical stage – I’ve already mentioned her winning “Batti batti” in tandem with Laurence Walls’ Masetto, and altogether enjoyed her work immensely.

Though the set couldn’t be described in any way as “lavish”, its darkness matched the atmosphere of most of the opera’s scenes, with the exception, perhaps of the first garden scene, during which Zerlina and Mazettto were to be married. The remainder framed the spherical settings with black curtains, underlining the darkness at the centre of the Don’s self-destructive impulses and the despair/fear felt by those attempting to keep in tabs on him. Costumes were more-than-usually striking against the black  backdrops, generally mirroring what we were able to glean of each character, with a few unexpected stimulations, such as the space-age statue in the cemetery scene!

In terms of purpose and intent one could safely declare that this production of “Don Giovanni” did excellently well, making what I thought were all the right gestures for encouragement of further production activities, given that, unlike the way pursued by the opera’s eponymous hero, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, for fledgling artistic ventures. One can only wish director Alex Galvin and his company every success, while at the same time encouraging enthusiasts and interested parties to get behind them with all the support an artistic community sympathetic to such a venture can muster.

Lunchtime gatherings of delight, adventure and enchantment with pianist Ya-Ting Liou

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
YA-TING LIOU (piano)

RAMEAU – Le rappel des oiseaux (“The Conference of Birds”)
SCHUMANN – Davidsbündlertänz Op.6
LIGETI – Piano Etude No.10 (Der Zauberlehrling – “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”)

Wednesday 17th August, 2016

Lunchtime concerts are strange beasties, compared with more conventionally-presented evening concerts – they’re almost always shorter, and because of their mid-day aspect catch people who attend in an entirely different frame of mind to that which would surround an evening concert. Of course many people who are there have retired from working or have a differently consitituted agenda to someone who’s midway through a working day. But nevertheless it’s still a different experience for anybody, compared with that of a concert in the evening.

As it most likely is for the artist or artists as well – one imagines any performer might well be fresher and more energetic at around noon than at the end of a normal day’s activities (though this could depend, I suppose, on the individual’s predisposition towards being either an “early bird” or a “night owl”). Still, in such matters, how a performer’s or listener’s experience might vary can be reconciled in most cases by the well-known expression “Viva la difference!”

To be honest, for me, the main difference is the concert’s length – and the reduced time-frame of the lunchtime concert means that whatever both performers and audiences do to establish lines of communication has to happen quickly, and not be gradually and patiently eased into, as with an evening concert. Of course, whatever “instant combustion” does take place, it can still feel, in many instances, at the concert’s end as if we’ve had only the first half!

I was definitely feeling these “first-half blues” at the end of Taiwanese pianist Ya-ting Liou’s recent St.Andrew’s lunchtime recital, even though the programme was tightly-packed with the kind of fully-focused performance-and-repertoire engagement which was guaranteed to give the utmost pleasure to listeners. In fact I heard a gentleman just in front of me turn to his companion at the recital’s end and say “Well, you can’t get much better than that!”, which served as a kind of “instant imprimatur” of appreciation!

The trouble was that, against all reason, I wanted more, having heard Ya-Ting previously play a full recital (which I reviewed on Middle C, here : https://middle-c.org/2013/11/ya-ting-liou-delight-and-triumph-amid-near-empty-spaces/), while knowing, of course, that my “had we but world enough and time” expectation was in this case a fatuous exercise, a kind of “conceit” of the sort practised by metaphysical poets.

But what a programme she gave to us! – on the face of things a bit of a hotchpotch, one might think, consisting of music by Rameau, Schubert and Ligeti! What on earth would make such an assemblage from far-flung eras, of disparate styles and with chalk-and-cheese intentions work together in concert? In fact the composers’ names and the music’s titles simply didn’t convey anything of the unities and affinities these pieces proclaimed when heard in close proximity.

It’s long been customary for pianists to explore in single recitals music from different eras, irrespective of how the various styles of playing and the different instruments for which the music would have been first written might have (but not in all cases!) required completely different responses from the player. One commonly hears music by any of those three Baroque giants, JS Bach, Handel and Scarlatti played on a concert grand, and often not by “baroque specialists”. Sometimes one encounters a work by Purcell, or one of the English virginalists, Byrd, Tallis or Gibbons et al. But I think this was the first occasion on which I’d ever heard a keyboard work by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) played in a non-specialist keyboard recital.

Le rappel des oiseaux (freely translated as “The Conference of Birds”) appeared in the French composer’s second collection of harpsichord pieces in 1724, consisting of two suites. This celebration and imitation of an aspect of nature isn’t merely a collection of decorative twitterings – in Ya-Ting’s hands the sounds had an ethereal quality or ritual, like a kind of other-world enactment of exchange between wild creatures in a language removed from human comprehension. The phrases were here beautifully articulated, most delightfully so when left and right hands rapidly alternated, conveying a sense of true concourse. Something of Charles Darwin’s “chaos of delight” description of New Zealand’s native birdsong was captured by Ya-Ting’s playing, in accord with the composer’s vision of such an avian conference.

Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänz Op.6 was also written to evoke a gathering, one imagined by the composer, featuring the presence of wayward and eccentric but purposeful individuals (the “Davidsbündler”) determined to carry out certain artistic principles dear to the composer’s heart. The music was inextricably bound up with Schumann’s love for Clara Wieck, whom he told that the work “contained many wedding thoughts”, including a Polterabend (a traditional German wedding-eve party, during which old crockery is smashed to bring good luck to the new marriage). Despite calling the collection “dances” Schumann wrote the music as a set of exchanges between the opposite sides of his own persona, Florestan and Eusebius, the one impetuous and passionate, the other poetic and dreamy.

Ya-Ting Liou seemed to make every one of these pieces her own, her playing seeming to soar over the entire soundscape of these eighteen pieces with complete assurance, yet take us into the visceral and emotional world of each one. Her passagework, ever articulate and flexible, combined crystal clarity with resonant warmth, never emphasising one at the expense of the other. She captured that “questioning” aspect of the music so common in Schumann’s writing (No.2 “Innig”), evoking for us a sense of the romantic artist pondering the mysteries of existence in solitude, yet was able to drive the music forward with incredible momentum and weight (Nos. 4 “Ungeduldig”, and 6 (“Sehr rasch und in sich hinein”).

Describing what I heard in Ya-Ting’s playing over each of the eighteen pieces would push the reader’s patience overmuch with my reviewer’s flights of fancy! However I must beg people’s indulgence in allowing me to at least describe the effect of her playing of a couple of “groups” of pieces. The third of the dances was given the title “Mit humor”, which the pianist presented as bluff and Teutonic at the outset, before becoming lighter and more impish in the middle section – the deftness of her touch allowed her left hand to “gurgle” with contentment at the right hand’s playfulness. Then the following “Ungeduldig” was all agitation and strife which just as abruptly changed into the graceful poetic mood of ‘Einfach” – how beautifully and delicately were Ya-Ting’s delineations between her hands, of limpid pools from which the melodic lines traced their archways.

More rumbustions were let loose with “Sehr rasch”, the playing having a tremendous physicality which belied the pianist’s diminutive appearance, the music lacking neither weight nor power in its expression. Against this came the enigmatic, improvisatory-sounding “Nicht schnell, a kind of mind-stretch, with the music seemingly wanting to grasp something just beyond reach. Each upward impulse created a beautifully-voiced roulade of sound, a marked contrast to the robust energies of the following “Frisch”, whose impetuosities were reinforced by some delightfully “grunty” left-hand rhythms – such vivid characterisations!

The seventeenth piece was titled “Wie aus der Ferne”, the music “floated” in and out of the sound-picture, Ya-Ting employing exquisite varieties of tones and colours to seductive effect. We were retuned with some poignancy to the “questioning” No.2 before the mood built up to an intense, swirling climax, our sensibilities “rescued” by the player and allowed to calm down and re-enter a pensive mood once again. Ya-Ting’s constantly shifting colour-palate made the final “Nicht schnell” a kind of “home is where the heart is”, the gentle, concluding melodic undulation having a heart-easing quality which bore out the composer’s own commentary via the words of Eusebius, who “expressed much pleasure with his eyes”. We got the feeling here of being taken right into the deep heart of things finally at rest, the “Davidsbündler” here having certainly given its all.

Perhaps it was wise of Ya-Ting to conclude her programme with something rather less other-worldly, else we might all have drifted out of St.Andrew’s under a Schumannesque kind of spell and walked into lamp-posts or through nearby shop windows or even under a bus or two! Waking us from our Eusebian reverie called for strong measures, and one of György Ligeti’s Etudes certainly did the trick. It was something of a magical transformation to boot, as the piece’s title (assigned by the composer) was “Der Zauberlehring” (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice).

Here, we wondered at and delighted in compositional and pianistic sleight-of-hand working their alchemic spells in tandem, conjuring up configurations of notes whose colours and rhythms changed bewilderingly before our very ears, galaxies of light and sensation cascading all about, the sounds sinking into a vortex-like cleft of bass-note darkness, and then magically reappearing at the keyboard’s other end, directing and steering the scintillations this way and that in a joyful cosmic dance, before dismissing the laughing, bubbling impulses with a peremptory gesture. Incredible mastery, involving both control and freedom, a sense of complete ease with either a larger order or larger anarchy in our best of all possible worlds – Ya Ting’s playing trickled, danced, and drove through it all, leaving us breathless with delight and completely refreshed. And, as I’ve already noted, I thought that the gentleman in front of me, whose remark of appreciation I overheard, couldn’t have said it better!

The New Zealand String Quartet – a “new look” ensemble….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand String Quartet presents:
Heartland Classics In Wellington

HAYDN – String Quartet in D Op.71 No.2
FARR – Quartet “Te Tai-O-Rehua” (The Tasman Sea)
SCHUBERT – String Quartet in C Minor D.703 “Quartettsatz”
DVORAK – String Quartet in F Op.96 “American”

The New Zealand String Quartet
Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins (violins)
Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Friday, 5th August, 2016

Having gotten so used to the familiar line-up of faces, performing aspects and collaborative interactions which for such a long time “were” the New Zealand String Quartet, one found oneself, to one’s surprise, initially unnerved by the prospect of experiencing a change in the order of things – especially in view of the long-term and all-round excellence of the ensemble. Of course, it stood to reason that the group, having determinedly wrought such standards of achievement, would choose a replacement for second violinist Douglas Beilman worthy of maintaining and enhancing those same standards. The thought was reassuring – one did, after all, TRUST the artistic judgements of these people!

Nevertheless, I could still feel a certain tension amid my expectations, while awaiting the appearance of the players in the Hunter Chamber Auditorium at Wellington’s Victoria University, concerning the change in ensemble which had brought Australian violinist Monique Lapins into the picture. Receptivity to individual styles of music-making is a funny thing – I’ve sometimes found myself at odds with opinions expressed by others regarding what musicians are seen and heard to do, recognising that such an individualisation is part-and-parcel of a real and personal connection with things. One can, of course, admire what a player does without feeling very much engagement or empathy with what is produced. I’d gotten so very used to being so very “engaged” with the NZSQ’s music-making, I found myself feeling anxious that such feelings would continue.

It sounds like a cliché to say that I needn’t have worried, but from the outset of the concert there seemed an uncanny “business as usual” aspect to the playing, which I suppose could partly be attributed to Monique Lapins’ undoubted abilities as an ensemble player – every concerted gesture and individual interaction between her and her colleagues had a confident, and nicely “involved“ aspect that suggested sympathy, accord, rapport – whatever one would like to call it! Naturally, I was giving her contributions more-than-usual attention, and, given that there was probably a fair degree of relief in my observations, was not being particularly dispassionate at that point in time!

So, having gotten those “concerns” off my chest, I feel now as though I can make appropriately delighted noises of welcome regarding Monique Lapins – and, as a Wellingtonian myself, wishing for her not only the enjoyment of many “great cups of Wellington coffee” whenever she gets the chance to spend time in this part of the world, but also for her and the ensemble a fruitful collaboration of many performance successes and satisfactions to come.

To the actual concert, now – and as ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten made clear in his spoken introduction to the first item on the programme, there was simply no better way to begin an evening of music for string quartet than with a work by the composer “to whom we owe everything – Josef Haydn!”. We heard the second Quartet from the Op. 71 set, written for the composer’s second visit to England after his first had proved such a great success. With these quartets Haydn took care to write more “orchestrally” than previously, as the public performance venues outside Esterhazy (where he had worked for so long) were larger, and required bigger and bolder gestures than in his previous works in the genre – hence the spacious opening chords of this work, played here with a rich, warm sound. And how richly-voiced were the interchanges between all four instruments in the allegro which followed, the music’s high spirits as much generated by the flow between the players as by the themes and rhythms themselves.

The prayerful opening to the Adagio was buoyed along by a dotted rhythm, then floated beguilingly throughout murmuring sequences, with everything shaded so subtly and beautifully, the textures almost orchestral in places as the players dug into their phrases – here, I was particularly enjoying the partnership between first and second violins, Helene Pohl’s bright, eager sounds at once matched by and contrasted with Monique Lapins’ poised, more burnished tones. Then, what delicious fun was conveyed by the players with the brief Minuet, and how much sheer delight made by Helene Pohl of the arpeggiated twist at each phrase-end, something amusingly “thrown off” by all the players at the end of the dance.

Haydn seemed to almost “leg-rope” his players at the finale’s beginning, giving the music a curious “limping” quality, which after due extended consideration suddenly animated into a “proper” allegro, the music energising players and listeners alike as all four instruments were made to scurry into and through a divertingly dovetailed latticework of lines (pardon the alliteration!), here, piling on the textures and pushing out the ambiences as they did so! It was great and engaging music-making from all concerned.

Next on the programme was Gareth Farr’s string quartet Te Tai-o-Rehua (the Tasman Sea). I liked the quote from the composer concerning the quartet – “a really interesting dinner party for four people” – though I can’t remember whether or not Monique Lapins repeated that quote for us in her introduction to the work or whether I read or heard it elsewhere. Still, it seemed entirely appropriate that the Quartet’s new member air her thoughts about the music, given its trans-Tasman associations – Farr had originally written the work for Australia’s Goldner Quartet to play as part of a co-commission between the musicians and Chamber Music New Zealand, to mark the 21st anniversary of the Wellington/Sydney sister-city association in 2013.

At the beginning we heard chant-like patterns from the second violin in tandem with more exotic-sounding elements sounded by the other instruments, mysterious tremolandi and counter-harmonics, with a wide, folksy vibrato coming from the first violin. The viola took over the rhythmic trajectories allowing the others to interact, using angular pizzicati and eerie harmonics. I thought the sonorities conjured up by these configurations and unreservedly delivered to us by the players produced a sometimes startling aural and deeply-felt experience, with the sounds ranging in effect from utmost delight of delicacy to grim and purposeful vehemence. Gareth Farr’s work has always been rhythmically driven, sometimes to the point of obsessiveness – here, in so many places I was struck by the music’s balance between rhythm and colour, and for the composer’s inventive, unpredictable deployment of those sounds, making for whole sequences of incident that lost no time in moving between the pictorial and the emotional. It all made for a darker, more volatile work that I perhaps expected to hear something which excitingly stretched one’s sensibilities.

Having remarked so frequently in the past on the NZSQ’s capacities for bringing a whole-heartedness to whatever it performs, enabling its listeners to really get to grips with the music, I was grateful to once again be transported by the experience, in particular with a work such as this, after all, conceived and written about relatively familiar territories – it was, as Douglas Lilburn once said “music about ourselves”, with as much variety and range of expression as such a quality might bring forth. I thought that, especially in a programme devoted largely to European music, the work served notice that universalities of human emotion can often be expressed just as meaningfully in local accents as in the tones of more standardised and established figures.

Gillian Ansell introduced Schubert’s Quartettsatz (literally, “Quartet-Movement”) written in 1820, after the interval. This music was intended to be part of a larger work, and would have been the first of the composer’s complete “mature” works in this genre – but for some reason – we don’t know why – Schubert abandoned the work after completing just one movement and the first few bars of a slow movement. The music was just too good to be ignored as a “failed attempt” at a complete work and so the Quartettsatz has become an often-played item at string quartet concerts. Schubert did go on to complete three further quartets, including the famous “Death and the Maiden” Quartet. Perhaps the agitated nature of the writing of this quartet movement is a clue to what might have been happening in Schubert’s life at this time. It all seemed to me to be a kind of study depicting the interaction between light and dark, with the light in this case seeming so frail and tentative, vested with a kind of vulnerability in the face of the dark’s onslaught. The tones are spectral, almost “spooked”, as if waiting for the next debilitating outburst.

Need I say more than that the Quartet in characteristic fashion threw themselves at the music, making it an intensely visceral happening. The players unhesitatingly brought out the music’s fierce and brutal contrasts, giving the entire sequence of exchanges an intensely fatalistic character, almost Tchaikovskian in places. The intensities reached such levels that one was left with the feeling at the end that it seemed somewhat voyeuristic to have “enjoyed”music which conveyed so much suffering! Still, perhaps music enables a kind of understanding of such extremes, while recognising that “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.

I was surprised when Helene Pohl told us, by way of introducing the concert’s final item, that, at a Canadian chamber music festival she had recently attended, an “audience-poll” had on that occasion identified none other than Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet as the gathering’s out-and-out favourite piece of chamber music. Having tantalised us with this piece of information, the Quartet proceeded to demonstrate why this was perfectly possible, with a performance that conveyed in the music such love of life and intensity of feeling as to enable us to feel we were hugely enjoying the company of somebody energetic, gregarious and unfailingly warmhearted.

I remember reading, long ago, a remark made by some commentator or other, to the effect that Dvorak’s music was frequently “an expression of joy that brings one close to tears” – given that human responses to art are individual, and of course subjective, I do find myself returning to that remark whenever I hear certain passages in certain works by the composer. The quartet brought out this quality both in their soft playing of the first movement’s second subject, and in some of the beautifully-poised duetting passages of the slow movement, between first and second violins. And what a beautiful sequence shortly after the Scherzo’s beginning, with the two violins in melancholy duet and Rolf Gjelsten’s ‘cello singing in reply, the viola adding a gorgeous “snap” to its rounding-off comment by way of completing the circle.

After all of this, what exhilaration there was to be had from the finale’s opening rhythms! – especially from violist Gillian Ansell’s engaging sense of “schwung” throughout the opening, one taken up readily by the other players, the music’s sense of forward movement seeming to spring from a deep-seated desire to express “this worlde’s joye”. And with what ease and spontaneity the players modulated between completely different territories, taking those measures of veiled retrospection in single, deep-seated breaths before reactivating the opening’s energies and driving the music brilliantly and vigorously onwards to its joyously beckoning conclusion!

After these outpourings of physicality, the composer’s beautiful Cypress No.3 (“When thy sweet glances on me fall”) was like the proverbial balm in places, operatic and passionate in a brief middle section, then rapt and achingly lovely at the end. It was a haunting and dream-like way to finish the concert, leaving us with a kind of fully-engaged contentment with what we’d heard throughout the evening, and, in a troubled world, some reassurance in the continuance of things that are necessary for us to go on living in it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Orchestras Unite” – a brilliant success for youthful Wellington musicians

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra and
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Orchestra
presents:

ORCHESTRAS UNITE!

Lavinnia Rae (‘cello)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra and
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

MUSORGSKY (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov) – Night on a Bare Mountain
SHOSTAKOVICH – ‘Cello Concerto No.1 in E-flat Op.107
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Symphony No.2 – A London Symphony

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Wednesday 3rd August 2016

These days I count myself proudly, if also a little ruefully, among the grey-headed majority who attend classical concerts – of course, these are the people whose loyal and continued support of our various concert series and occasional special events helps to ensure their continuance. Nevertheless it was a refreshing change to find myself sitting in an auditorium for a classical concert with what seemed like hundreds of heads of different shapes and sizes sporting youthful hues and colours of all kinds – egad, it was actually a youthful audience!

Did I say a classical concert? With such a preponderance of young people in attendance, the programme would surely have gone for a kind of “instant appeal” impact – plenty of “wow!” factor, of the kind that would make such an audience want to come back for more, yes? Let’s have a look! – er, what’s this? – Shostakovich? The First ‘Cello Concerto? – Good grief! And Vaughan Williams’ “London” Symphony? Crikey! – That’s a bit of a haul! What’s that?  Musorgsky? – Night on a Bare Mountain? Well, yes, that’ll go down well, but what about the rest?

I could go on, most tiresomely, in a similar vein, expressing further open-mouthed stupefaction at the makeup of the orchestra and the youthfulness of the soloist in the concerto, none of which has any great relevance to the business in hand, that of reviewing a splendidly-performed concert.  More seriously, what needs far more urgently to be emphasised and approved most enthusiastically is the gesture of the Wellington City Council with support from the NZSO in enabling Wednesday night’s concert at the Michael Fowler Centre to be a FREE event for the public! In my book that’s the kind of support so badly needed by the arts at present, in this case giving young people a golden opportunity to experience some wonderful music-making at first hand and at no cost!

Which is where the “Orchestras Unite!” concept worked so brilliantly in every way. Shostakovich, Vaughan Williams and all, the exercise provided one of the best possible “advertisements” for classical music and music-making that I’ve even witnessed. Under the watchful eye and inspired direction of conductor Kenneth Young, the Wellington Youth Orchestra and the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra came together, plus a number of tutor-players from both the NZSO and Orchestra Wellington, together forming a co-operative ensemble of almost 100 musicians whose amalgamation was itself a positive endorsement of music-making in the capital. With such forces it became more than possible to perform works such as the Vaughan Williams “London” Symphony, the numbers generating the requisite weight of tone which helped the piece really work.

Another motivating energiser in the scheme of things was the presence of ‘cellist Lavinnia Rae, whose performance of the first of Shostakovich’s two ‘Cello Concertos was eagerly anticipated. An NZSO National Youth Orchestra player, and leader of the Wellington Youth Orchestra ‘cello section for the last three years, she had already won numerous awards and scholarships during her studies, and is currently working under the tutorship of Inbal Megiddo at the New Zealand School of Music. Again, having a soloist of Rae’s calibre willing to tackle one of the repertoire’s 20th Century classics contributed inestimably to the programme’s lustre.

In thanking the various people and organisations that had helped get the show “on the road” conductor Ken Young himself made reference to the excitement of having so many players to work with, particularly in relation to the Vaughan Williams symphony. He cited the work as a particularly apt challenge for youthful orchestras as there was, as he put it, “plenty for everybody to do”. He didn’t keep us waiting long, as we had already heard from NZSM boss Euan Murdoch and Orchestra Wellington Music Director Marc Taddei adding their endorsements of the occasion, so after the talk had been dispensed with we were quickly and magically transported to that realm of infernal carousing immortalised world-wide by Russian composer Modest Musorgsky.

As most people will already know, Musorgsky was one of a group of composers (who came to be known as “the Mighty Handful”) who wanted to forge a distinctly “Russian” style of composition free from the somewhat more conservative, German-influenced style espoused by the establishment. Much of Musorgsky’s music was, however, considered somewhat harsh and clumsily written, even by his associates, one of whom, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, took it upon himself, after Musorgsky’s tragic early death, to “improve” and make what he thought would be more acceptable versions to the public of some of his colleague’s well-meaning but outlandish-sounding efforts. These “corrections” of Rimsky’s included an entire opera by Musorgsky (Boris Godunov) and the piece played in the concert this evening, St. John’s Night on a Bald Mountain. The programme note really ought to have read “RE-orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov” as there does exist a fascinating “original” of the piece by Musorgsky, somewhat differently constructed to Rimsky’s, and with a far more abrupt and sardonic ending.

Still, the more familiar revised version which we heard tonight continues to pack plenty of punch in places, and the players seemed to literally throw themselves at the piece’s dramatic and theatrical contrasts as if their lives depended on the outcome. It was all tremendously exciting, and expertly-played – the very opening triplet figure on the violins depicting the arrival of the infernal spirits from out of the air in all directions had a focus and a stinging quality that made the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand up in gruesome delight and anticipation!

With weighty percussion providing plenty of bangs and crashes, the brass chiming in with portentous fanfares, and the winds creating a suitably “eerie” atmosphere, the music built up through its various episodes to a suitably orgiastic ferment, at which point somebody sitting towards the back of the orchestra dropped something on the floor with a clatter, to add to the general sense of chaos and abandonment! To the rescue came the orchestral bells signalling the first indications of morning light and the gradual dispersement of the spirits into the air from whence they came. Here, the strings and winds drifted and oscillated beautifully, supporting beautiful solos from firstly the clarinet and then the flute. It was all presented most beautifully and serenely, even though the ending wasn’t Musorgsky at all, the whole of the final morning-bell-tolling sequence being that man Rimsky-Korsakov’s invention!

Lavinnia Rae’s entrance and deportment gave an initial impression of a David (the ‘cellist) pitted against something of a Goliath (the orchestra), which the music’s opening measures seemed to confirm – the ‘cello, repeating a variant of the composer’s own DSCH motif, seemed to be trying to lighten the mood, while the orchestra seemed to want to keep the soloist firmly in check. Lavinnia Rae spun her line most resolutely throughout, perhaps wanting a touch more girth with some of her more assertive figurations, but keeping her music buoyant at all times. She interacted magnificently with the solo horn, leaving the winds wailing as the music trotted away with the soloist, and leaving them to manage only a brief, petulant outburst before the movement came to a sudden end.

The slow movement was one of Shostakovich’s angst-ridden affairs, with the solo horn adding to the strings’ anguish, the mood warmed by the ‘cello’s entry – apart from a brief intonation lapse, some gorgeous playing, here, from the soloist, matched a few moments later by the strings’ chilly beauty. So many moments-per-minute in this music! – we were able to experience at first hand why the soloist in her programme note nominated this as the music from the work she felt the most emotionally connected to….the solo horn posed its question and the soloist mused on the answer amidst haunting harmonics-coloured exchanges with the celeste, the music absolutely rapt and beautiful.

The remarkable cadenza-like third movement also held us in thrall with Lavinnia Rae’s playing, a heartfelt outpouring which gradually articulated more and more freely and urgently, quoting the opening four-note theme amid the agitations, and then suddenly striding out and beckoning the orchestra to follow – keystone cops chasings, headstrong waltz-rhythms, and giant-like rhythmic angularities led to a full reconciliation with the DSCH theme, which, pushed enthusiastically along by the ‘cello’s repeated notes, blared out triumphantly on the winds at the end. What a work and what a performance!

All this, and Vaughan Williams’ “London” Symphony to follow after the interval! – as with the Musorgsky work, one felt a satisfying “weight” of tone register as the “London” began and unfolded, the fruit of having such a numbers of players, and of the composer’s scoring emphasising the potential for depth and richness of sonority. Ken Young and his players caught the music’s “living stillness” at the work’s outset, and the sense of something hanging in the early morning air about to be awakened. The Big Ben chime gradually roused the music from its slumber, leading from a crescendo to a harsh, strident outburst which seemed, on the face of things, unduly forceful and discordant a note to strike by way of introducing a great and much-beloved city – still, as other parts of the work were to demonstrate, the composer was definitely not about to regard the “flower of all cities” through rose-tinted spectacles in this work!

In the past I’ve often regarded Ken Young as a particularly no-nonsense interpreter of whatever music he conducts, sometimes to a fault in music where I’ve felt the need for a touch more spaciousness and breadth in the playing. Here, by contrast, there was time and space aplenty – and the playing of the young musicians blossomed, I thought, as a result! Every phrase, every figuration had room to sing and unfold as it should, while every surge and diminuendo of tone had the freedom to mix spontaneity with obviously well-rehearsed gestures, making for what sounded like a particularly rich and deeply-felt interpretation. The final crescendo leading up to the movement’s end was simply terrific in impact.

The slow movement was another vivid evocation, with conductor and players allowing the music all the time and space in the world to paint and colour the music’s hues and round and shape their lines and contourings, all the time giving rise to such intensities of feeling – the composer’s description “Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon” begs the question of the music’s deeper intent – things like the superbly-played trumpet solo, and the instrumental detailings accompanying the gently-jingling carriage harness sounds were, I thought, preludial to something deeply melancholic about the work as a whole – my notes read at this point, “such passionate climaxes!”, ones which seem to suggest as much tragedy as any other kind of feeling as the bottom emotional line. This was reflected in places, too, by sensitive instrumental detailing as tellingly as red-blooded climaxes – a beautiful viola solo, for example, at the movement’s end was as richly-wrought a gesture as any in the work.

Having praised the interpretation’s spaciousness I must admit to feeling, in places in the scherzo, that the music could have done with a bit more ginger in its step – a hypercritical thing to say, perhaps, in view of my enjoyment of the whole. The players certainly caught the music’s “gait” – and the short, canonical “church-bell-like” section for strings came across with great verve and “schwung”. However, I did feel the brief Trio section hung fire ever-so-slightly at its beginning, even if the more flowing tempo suited the strings’ warmth when they took up the tune just before the return to the scherzo proper. Still, one was prepared to forgive Ken Young almost everything after experiencing the visionary power of what he and the musicians were able to do with the eerie, throbbing pulsations at the movement’s end – another instance of the composer hinting at a darker side of things beneath the surface gaiety.

That “darker side of things” was certainly given full rein at various places in the work’s final movement, not least of all right at the beginning! An almost Mahlerian cry of despair flashes across the face of the orchestra, not once, but twice, before the music settles down grimly to what some commentators have called the “March of the Unemployed”, though the composer was rather less specific when characterising the music’s inspiration. Here, Ken Young and his musicians seemed to emphasise the music’s purposeful and positive energy, with playing that unleashed the magnificence of the composer’s orchestral writing, grand and ceremonial.

After this the musicians galvanised the allegro section, awakening tremendous energies marked by surging strings, roaring winds and flailing percussion, energies which  embedded themselves in the textures of the “march” theme’s return, and literally conflagrated the music – what baleful, menacing, utterly overwhelming playing! One was left wondering how a city’s image could possibly survive such savage treatment!

The answer came with the work’s epilogue, which in its turn brought out some of the evening’s most heartfelt and moving playing from the two orchestras. Vaughan Williams characterised the symphony’s ending by quoting a passage from a novel by H.G.Wells in which the writer describes in allegorical terms the passing of things as we know them via a voyage down a river – “the river passes, London passes, England passes…..” Here, it was all so moving, so heartbreaking and yet so filled with wonderment and magic – the playing caught the music’s timelessness and inevitability, its beauty and its tragedy – the somewhat Wagnerian two-note cry which began the finale was sounded once again on muted trumpets, signifying much the same kind of dissolution (albeit in a less incendiary manner) as the minor-key version of the Rheingold motif from Götterdämmerung.

Very great work from all concerned, and to those people, for all of it much gratitude and appreciation.

Oleg Marshev – pianistic pleasures at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents:
Oleg Marshev (piano)

BRAHMS – Piano Sonata No.3 in F Minor Op.5
RAVEL – Valses nobles et Sentimentales
Gaspard de la nuit

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday, 31st July 2016

This was the sort of programme that, on paper, would quicken the pulse of anybody interested in the romantic piano repertoire in general – and with Oleg Marchev’s name attached to the enterprise, would settle the issue for the majority of piano-fanciers, myself among them. And while I might not have put Brahms’ name forward as a composer whose music I would have liked to hear Marshev play ahead of people such as Liszt, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev, I confess was eagerly anticipating the chance to hear in recital that seldom-played titan among piano sonatas, Brahms’ Op.5 in F Minor.

Is there a more confrontational, cheek-by-jowl, eyeballing opening to a piece of solo piano music in the romantic repertoire than the beginning of this work? My first-ever live encounter with this music was at the hands of the great Peter Donohoe (until recently, well-known to New Zealand audiences), on a never-to-be-forgotten occasion I witnessed in a Midlands English town twenty years ago, when he too began his recital with the piece. There I felt as if the piano was in danger of coming apart out of sheer strain generated by the power and physicality of the playing! – and even with Marshev’s slightly more controlled responses to the music, I still got the impression of a fist being shaken at the heavens, though with rather more nervous energy and urgency than sheer, granite-like power and muscle.

As important as these moments were the contrasting lyrical sequences, which Marshev presented in beautifully-appointed paragraphs, building the ensuing surges of tone up into noble climaxes. What the playing might have lacked in raw visceral impact, it gained in cumulative effect, Marshev’s control excitingly let off its leash at the development’s opening, the pianistic textures jagged and attention-grabbing, leaving our sensibilities exhausted and gratefully receptive to whatever solace the music brought us in the aftermath. A noble, golden-toned major-key version of the opening reassured us for a few moments before the music plunged back into the opening, everything once again magnificently orchestrated and awe-inspiring. How wonderful it was to be again relieved by Marshev’s way with those poignantly contrasted, rolling lyrical paragraphs once again, persuading us that life’s storms are to be stoically endured rather than suffered without any hope or consolation.

The second movement of this work, Andante expressivo, has frequently provided ammunition for commentators mindful of the conflict between rival musical factions in the latter part of the 19th Century. A war of bitter acrimony sprang up between the conservatives, who upheld Brahms as their champion, and the supporters of the “New German School”, who promoted the music of people such as Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner. The reactionary critic Eduard Hanslick was a particularly virulent opponent of the latter group and their ideals, in particular the idea of “programme music”.

Hanslick at one stage famously declared that “music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.” However, here was Brahms, the darling of the conservatives, prefacing a movement in one of his works with three lines of poetry from the work of the poet Sternau: – “The twilight falls, the moonlight gleams, two hearts in love unite, embraced in rapture.” It didn’t go unnoticed in some quarters that Hanslick was strangely silent concerning this “self-indulgence” on the part of his young champion!

Leaving aside Brahms’s use of poetic imagery as inspiration, I’ve always thought a separate irony regarding this music was that it sounded so much like Liszt in places! Marshev sang it all so beautifully, seeming to echo the legendary pianist Claudio Arrau’s words, “..the most beautiful love-music after Tristan – and the most erotic”, building the piece’s amplitude to majestic proportions at the climax, and rounding off the resonances with properly bardic tones at the end. Then, again, with the mighty Scherzo that followed, bursting in on the tranquility of the Andante’s aftermath, Marshev gave the “motorcycle kick-start” aspect of the music plenty of muscle and flair without making an absolute meal of it, keeping the waltz-rhythm poised throughout, and taking care to preserve the slightly creepy, almost spectral aspect of those descending arpeggio figures.

If the Andante enshrined a kind of love-tryst, the fourth-movement Intermezzo (subtitled Rückblick -“backward glance”) seemed to negate the former’s sentiments, giving us sorrowing descending figurations and fraught declamations of despair punctuated by muffled drum-beats – again, to my ears, the shade of Liszt flitted among the music’s textures, Brahms’s utterances echoing gestures found in places in the older composer’s Annees de Pelerinage collections. As for the finale, Marshev nicely energized the angular, whimsical opening, enjoying the contrasts of the instrument’s different registers, and pointing the contrast with the warmly-flowing second subject, bringing out the cascading accompaniments and the beguiling mix of elfin playfulness and portentous gesturings which whirl the different episodes through to the celebratory coda, as festive and exultant anybody would wish for.

Despite all of these felicities, I found myself struck by the feeling, when Marchev came out after the interval and began the first few measures of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, that here was the music this man was born to play – those first sounds had a kind of insouciance which felt so right, a glowing kind of poise which instantly captured the listener’s attention and enchanted the ear. Here was a cool, spacious, limpid, completely malleable sound-world recreated before us by a master musician, completely at one with the music’s composer and his particular vein of magic.

Marshev brought out in places the links with the composer’s own orchestral work La Valse, which appeared nine years afterwards. We got a teasing foretaste of the latter in the fourth waltz, Assez animé, and again in the ninth piece, Moins vif, whose halting, hesitant steps at the beginning gradually coalesced into the most outrageous and unequivocal of dance-gestures, beautifully and commandingly brought into being. The final waltz, Épilogue, lent, was all magical, nostalgic driftings, forms delicately shaped, and colours wondrously subtle, making for a heart-rending, lump-in-the-throat experience. It was all a rare evocation of creative mastery, spread out before us like W.B.Yeats’ Cloths of Heaven – “Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams”.

Ravel himself regarded the Valses as “…le plaisis délicieux et toujours nouveau d’une occupation inutile” (“the delicious and ever-fresh pleasure of a useless occupation”) – but his 1908 work Gaspard de la Nuit by contrast seemed to have engaged his sensibilities to an unprecedented degree. A group of poems, notable for their preoccupation with the surreal world of dreams written by the French Romantic Poet Aloysius Bertrand (1807-41) and published under the title Gaspard de la Nuit provided the composer with his inspiration – Ravel chose three from a set called La nuit et ses prestiges (“The Night and its Distinctions”), the first being the poet’s version of the age-old story of Ondine, the water-sprite who falls in love with a mortal.

Having said that he wanted “to say with notes what a poet says with words”, Ravel did precisely that, evoking the world of the mischievous nymph teasing and tantalising the sleeper with a dream of delight which at the end dissolves in a shower of waterdrops flung against the “resonant panes” through which shone the moonlight. Oleg Marshev was this music’s ideal interpreter here, magically evoking the liquid playfulness of the nymph’s appearance. His playing of those repeated notes and floated arpeggiations conjured up a beguiling world of enchantment, holding us in thrall to the apparition’s beauty and beguilement before bringing dream and reality together in a frisson of alarm and confusion as the nymph mocked her would-be mortal lover and vanished – the pianist caught, in those moments immediately afterwards, those vast spaces between dream and consciousness, echoing with hints of distant laughter and/or weeping.

Just as evocative was the second piece Le gibet, after Bertrand’s bleak depiction of a corpse hanging from a scaffold in the reddening light of the setting sun. Marshev caught the mood of utter desolation with his spacious, patient unfolding of the grisly scene, his playing of the tolling bell’s ostinato pitiless and inexorable in its effect. I have heard those eerie, descending chords played even more creepily than here, somehow “prepared” even before being sounded, held back fractionally so that there’s a sense of a kind of horror whose depiction is about to take its toll on both player and listener, a feeling which Marshev’s cool and dispassionate reading didn’t explore. Instead I felt the playing had a disconsolate feeling of finality, the ending superbly wrought, with the bass notes shrouding everything in gloom.
Ravel apparently wanted the last of the three pieces, Scarbo, to surpass in difficulty Balakirev’s tone-poem for piano Islamey, thinking in terms of an orchestral transcription for the piano. Here was menace aplenty, the composer’s depiction of a demonic goblin-like nocturnal visitor, the “Scarbo” of Bertrand’s poem. Marshev’s playing conjured up real “glint” amid the gloom, bringing out the music’s volatility and unpredictablilty as per the character, and infusing the Hispanic dance-rhythms with tremendous elan. He got that “frightening nothingness behind the curtain” feeling in the music’s quieter, more louring sequences, and then magnificently orchestrated the creeping chromatic sequences that brought the piece to its overwhelming climax and enigmatic, sotto voce conclusion – “his (Scarbo’s) face pales like the wax of a candle-end – and suddenly he is extinguished…..”
As if we all needed some “normality” at the conclusion of such flights of fancy, Oleg Marshev generously gave us two encores, a beautifully-graded Chopin Prelude (No.4 of Op/28 in E Minor), and Rachmaninov’s Op.23 no 5 G Minor Prelude, the latter featuring the occasional volatile rhythm-surge in the march’s accompaniment, and some beautiful counter-voicings in the trio. Perhaps if we’re lucky enough to get a return visit we might hear from Marshev some more Rachmaninov – one of the sonatas, perhaps, or the unjustly-neglected Corelli Variations which, admittedly, I heard him play on a previous visit – but I would love to hear him play the work again…….

Ali Harper – Legendary Diva at Circa Theatre

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
Ali Harper in LEGENDARY DIVAS

Ali Harper (soprano)
Michael Nicholas Williams (piano)

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Wednesday, July 27th, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

See also the following link to Theatreview for other reviews:

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton – piano duet

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

FRANZ SCHUBERT
Rondo D.951 “Grand rondeau”

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

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

Wednesday 20th July 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Hammers and Horsehair speak volumes – Douglas Mews and Robert Ibell

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

Music by BEETHOVEN, BREVAL, MOZART, ROMBERG and MENDELSSOHN

Douglas Mews – Fortepiano
Robert Ibell – ‘Cello

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

Wednesday 13th July

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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