Author: Peter Mechen

Emma Sayers – piano recital of connections, dedications and premieres

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

Emma Sayers (piano)

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

Wednesday, 22nd June 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

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

Sunday 5th June, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

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

Friday 3rd June, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander Gavrylyuk – great pianism at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents:
ALEXANDER GAVRYLYUK (piano)

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

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday 22nd May 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
William Shakespeare’s KING LEAR

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

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

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

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 14th May, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:

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

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

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hill St., Wellington

Tuesday 10th May, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Orpheus Choir and Orchestra Wellington at Sea with Brent Stewart

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 7th May, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An introductory feast – Inbal Megiddo and Jian Liu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace,

Sunday 1st May, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

Basilica of the Sacred Heart
Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 14th April 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Circa Theatre Revisits Home-Grown Chronicles

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents
“Joyful and Triumphant” by Robert Lord

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

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

Circa Theatre, Taranaki St., Wellington

playing until May 7th 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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