Author: Peter Mechen

Worlds of Music – Lilburn, Vaughan Williams and Mozart from the NZSM Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
MOUNTAINS AND MOZART

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Norfolk Rhapsody No.1
MOZART – Piano Concerto No.20 in D Minor K.466
LILBURN – Symphony No. 1

Xing Wang (piano)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 1st October, 2015

So, what on earth has Mozart got to do with Douglas Lilburn? By a happy coincidence, the concerto (Mozart’s K.466) with which the brilliant soloist Xing Wang earlier this year won the NZSM Concerto Competition First Prize was again performed by her during this concert, to stunning effect. But alongside Lilburn? Mountains and Mozart?

Anybody who has read Lilburn’s beautifully-wrought treatise on being a composer here in New Zealand (first given as a talk at the 1946 Cambridge Summer Music School, and subsequently published as “A Search for Tradition” – Douglas Lilburn : Lilburn Residency Trust, 2011) will recall the sequence describing a journey made by the young composer on the night train northwards from Wellington, and his thoughts upon experiencing a clear, moonlit night’s view of the central North Island mountains on that journey and the vivid aromas of the surrounding bush country – particularly resonant are the words concluding his description……

At that moment, the world that Mozart lived in seemed about as remote as the moon, and in no way related to my experience.

It struck me, therefore, as a fitting kind of resonance from those words to have a concert which is part of the “Lilburn 100” centennial presentation we’ve been enjoying so much this year featuring his music cheek-by-jowl with none other than Mozart’s. And to add flavour to the situation, Lilburn’s work took the form of a symphony, constructed along the lines of principles known and used by Mozart in his own works of that genre. Rather than signalling a capitulation to any kind of un-New Zealand way of doing things, Lilburn’s treatment of and provision of content for symphonic form both acknowledged the precedents and instilled a genuine, home-grown flavour of newly-minted discovery to the sounds allied to the music’s structure.

Another, more direct connection to Lilburn and his music was provided by the presence of a work by Vaughan Williams at the concert’s beginning, the Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1. Readers who either attended the Wellington Chamber Orchestra’s concert of less than a fortnight ago, or read my subsequent review of the event, will recall that the Vaughan Williams Rhapsody and the Lilburn Symphony were played then as well (possibly creating a “shortest duration” record for the time between two public performances of any Lilburn Symphony by different artists!). Vaughan Williams was, of course, Lilburn’s composition teacher at London’s Royal College of Music.

So, by either chance or contrivance, the NZSM concert was flavoured with interlinks of various kinds between the items, themselves, of course, making a splendid programme per se. And what a beautiful job the players made, under Ken Young’s guidance, of the opening of the Norfolk Rhapsody!  I couldn’t help thinking, as the music unfolded via haunting strings and winds, how wide of the mark that oft-quoted jibe “the English cow-pat school” is in many cases, particularly in relation to Vaughan Willliams (one also thinks of Peter Warlock’s dismissive comment  “a cow looking over a gate” regarding the older composer’s work in general).

Here, the melancholic beauty of the opening, with the strings and winds stealing in from afar, and welcomed by harp, lower strings and clarinet, lost no time in building up the music’s intensities, richly-coloured by a beautifully-played viola solo. As the sounds of winds, brass and timpani dovetailed with the strings and Ken Young allowed the orchestral throttle some juice, the music galvanized our sensibilities, the strings taking on that “anguished” quality on also finds in the same composer’s Thomas Tallis Fantasia, with full-throated support coming from the brass and timpani at the music’s passionate extremes.

By contrast, the “sailor-dance” central section was great fun, having plenty of swagger and roistering intent, before the jog-trot rhythms are effectively squared off amid swirling string-tones intent upon returning us to the opening, the brass managing a beautifully-voiced farewell reminiscence of the “dance” as the mystery of the piece’s opening surged softly backwards – so finely-controlled, and with the sounds beautifully floated by all the players. No cow-pats, and no cud-chewing eye-ballings over wooden gates – instead, a treasurable evocation of different kinds of ecstasies, some of them lump-in-the-throat, thanks to the beauty and focus of the playing.

It’s possible to feel that Douglas Lilburn may have been a little hard on Mozart’s music in suggesting its essential remoteness from certain aspects of the New Zealand landscape, though it would be fair enough to consider that the latter’s D Minor Piano Concerto K.466 (the work next on the program in this concert) is more about the world of the opera “Don Giovanni” than anything else. However, I could imagine certain Adagio movements from other works like the Wind Serenade K.361 wouldn’t have gone amiss as an ambient backdrop to moonlit mountainous slopes amid native bush – and if grandeur was wanted, the opening of Symphony No.39 would do very nicely, there being plenty of majesty and upward thrust in that music (however, NOT in one of these so-called “authentic” hell-for-leather performances afflicted upon us during more recent times, I hasten to add!).

Still, the concert triumphantly achieved a coming-together of both composers’ worlds and time-eras, demonstrating that differences can happily co-exist and be savoured, when there’s a will. In fact Mozart’s K.466, together with the C Minor Concerto K.491, made the greatest impression on nineteenth-century sensibilities, which “connected” with the music’s dark urgency, stormy tones and volatile character, rather more than with some of the composer’s more rococo-like utterances. The works were, in fact, seen as a precursor of romanticism, and were both greatly admired by Beethoven.

At the piano was the 2015 NZSM Concerto Competition winner, Xing Wang, whose focused and totally committed performance seemed to me to wholly “own” the work. From where I was sitting (over to the right-hand side – I had no view of the soloist’s hands but was able to “read” the music in her face most enjoyably, as she played) the piano in this particular acoustic – a carpeted floor – seemed mellow-sounding almost to a fault, so that the soloist found it difficult to generate a truly assertive tone in places. Still, the exchanges with the orchestra had real tension and purpose, amid all those dark D Minor tones and syncopated rhythms! I thought the violins were occasionally inclined to “stretch” their phrasings a bit more than the other orchestral sections, but the effect amid Mozart’s tense, anxiety-ridden dovetailings simply added to the music’s danger, without ever letting chaos get the upper hand.

The first-movement cadenza, dynamic and Beethoven-like, allowed Xing Wang to bring out the instrument’s colouristic qualities, the concluding phrases excitingly matched by the orchestra’s attack at its re-entry, keeping the sombre mood. Pianist and conductor then kept the music moving during the opening exchanges of the slow movement, seeking to keep the tempo of a piece throughout, rather than romanticize the lyrical opening and over-dramatise the turbulent middle section. Only my critical conscience prevents me from commenting that I actually prefer the movement with greater contrast between the two “faces” of the music, however stylistically correct Xing Wang’s and Ken Young’s (and Mozart’s!) way with it all might have seemed to most listeners.

Most importantly, at this flowing tempi nothing dragged, and the strings’ phrasing of the melody had in places a most attractive lissome grace. Yes, some of the “surprise element” was lost, with the central section plunging in at the same basic pulse – but the winds did so well to keep their long-breathed lines steady throughout. I did feel the “return” to the opening couldn’t help sounding a little perfunctory at this speed – but there I go again! I think I missed being reminded of the ending of “Figaro” here, where the warmth of the opening’s return seems to engender a sense of reconciliation of characters in conflict, Mozart’s music tugging at one’s heartstrings as the slow movements of these concerti so often do.

At the finale’s beginning Xing Wang kept the music’s momentum steady rather than “breakneck” with her upward flourishes and rounding-off phrases, trusting in her ready ability to phrase and point the music to generate excitement. Ken Young and his players echoed her trajectories with beautifully-timed responses that caught a sense of things spontaneous erupting, the exchanges reflecting the enjoyment and exhilaration all around. After an assertive and exciting cadenza (which I didn’t know), the “coming out” into the radiance of the major key was a great moment, all sunshine and happiness after the journey’s shared travails.

Mozart having been given his dues, we thus came to the proper “mountains” part of the concert, Douglas Lilburn’s first-ever symphony, completed in 1949, and given its first performance by the National Orchestra under their conductor Michael Bowles in 1951. It was the first-ever performance of a symphony by a native-born New Zealand composer, and received a lot of attention of the “not bad for a New Zealand composer” variety, most commentators obviously cautious regarding their own abilities to make a judgement concerning a work by a fellow-New Zealander, though one notice discussed the work’s “shortcomings”, such as the “abstruse” and “discursive” principal themes. Critic Owen Jensen probably gave the work its fairest appraisal at the time, praising its “originality and vitality” regarding the themes, and their integration and working-out, while commenting that the symphony “contains nothing that is startlingly new”.

A remark rather more of the “seeing ourselves as others see us” variety came from British conductor Sir Charles Groves, who directed a performance with the National Orchestra on a visit here in 1988, and made the observation “Lilburn seems to me to have captured the natural genius of the landscape”. This attitude, which is where the mountains loom into significance, was largely borne out by Dr.Robert Hoskins of Massey University in an illustrated talk about the symphony given just before the concert’s second half began, and in which he made reference to “the nurturing forces of nature”, a statement in accord with what Lilburn himself called “the naive, generous country that gave one its joyous force.”

As I’ve mentioned before, this was the second performance of the work I’d heard within a fortnight, making amends for some long fallow periods of neglect. Lilburn’s Second Symphony has definitely found more favour with the critics, regarded as a less derivative, more home-grown manifesto of one creatively “standing upright here” and being counted – but the presence of this later, more monumental work ought not to deny us opportunities to enjoy the young composer’s exuberant energies in his earlier symphonic outing. After all there are plenty of similarly youthful works in the established repertoire which pay audible homage to older music without their effectiveness being compromised one jot.

Taking his immediate inspiration from Christchurch’s Port Hills, the composer immediately throws open the vistas at the beginning, everything taken in at a glance and straightaway acted upon by the music’s confident forward momentum – here, the opening trumpet call was clear and purposeful, the winds fresh and out-of-doors, and the strings athletic and vigorous, a mood celebrated by brass and timpani in no uncertain terms – a great opening from Young and his players! Their playing brought out both the majesty and the isolation of the scenarios, encouraging the lines’ occasional striking out on their own, evoking the skylarks’s songs, and demonstrating, in Lilburn’s own words, the “well-nigh bewitched” feeling of “that air so far up with that view before and that music above”.

Yes, there were energetic Coplandesque moments and Sibelian-like evocations of the processes enacted between air, land and water, but time and place nevertheless seemed securely set, here in this performance, the dying echoes at the end nicely-judged and resonantly-voiced. The second movement’s hymn-like ruminations steadily unfolded at a pace that allowed air and space but maintained the work’s overall momentum – conductor and players enabled the music’s amalgam of physical strength and ritualistic transcendence, unerringly building both outward and inner intensities towards a tutti of almost pantheistic splendour, before horns and violas quelled the strings’ anguish – how lovely, and elegiac an atmosphere was wrought at the end!

That wonderful unfurling of the textures at the finale’s beginning had its full effect, here, the composer seemingly drawing, however subconsciously, from Sibelius’s Tapiola in places, with dark, brooding string phrases and wood-sprites darting between the trees, though there always seemed more light and warmth than gloom in this particular wanderer’s heart. And though we also experienced great Oceanides-like swells from the strings, there were recognizably “Aotearoa” brass calls which drew us out from the darknesses, evoking thousand-ton building-blocks of majestic rock, the fanfares energizing the strings and similarly inviting our spirits to rejoice and dance – a great moment, reinforced by the lower strings’ climbing the heights to join with the other voices in the celebrations!

As it all unfurled at the finale’s beginning, so the music then suddenly called itself to order, and took stock of where it had come to, taking us along as well – those last pages of the work then built into a kind of consecration, a merging of spirit and surroundings, an expression of hope in our eventual achievement of oneness with our surroundings, and of a heritage that those “born in a marvellous year” will be able to claim as their own. In that sense, how appropriate it was for an orchestra of youthful players such as these to be able to give sonorous and assured tongue to this visionary message.

Youthful, exuberant virtuosity – Jason Bae at St.Andrew’s , Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
JASON BAE (piano)

CHOPIN – Four Scherzi
No.1 in B Minor Op.20
No.2 in B-flat Minor Op.31
                   No.3 in C-sharp Minor Op.39
                   No.4 in E Major Op.54
BRITTEN/STEVENSON – Fantasy on Peter Grimes (1977)
LISZT – Venezia e Napoli – Gondoliera / Canzone / Tarantella

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

Sunday, 27th September, 2015

I remember hearing for the first time New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell’s recording of Chopin’s First Scherzo, and being bowled over by the playing’s youthful verve and exuberance.  Similar to Farrell’s in brilliance of execution and youthful élan was the performance of this same work by Jason Bae which opened his Wellington Chamber Music Series recital at St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace on Sunday. For me, in fact, the “shock” of the recital’s opening generated by this young pianist had the effect of a sudden electric charge sent tingling through one’s being, which, of course, was exactly what the composer would have intended.

Jason Bae continued on as he had begun throughout this work, his playing capturing the compulsive “churning” aspect of the figurations, and bringing off the transitions between sections with a fine sensitivity – the central lyrical theme remained slightly “charged”, unable, it seemed to me, to completely relax, brought here, as it had been, in a veritable whirlwind, tempestuous and unnerving!  When it came, the pianist’s reiteration of these agitations heard at the opening simply renewed our astonishment at the fieriness of both music and its performance.

Following this, the tense “question-and-answer” opening phrases of the Second Scherzo were beautifully contrasted, the reply to the darkly-covered beginning ringing and resounding in great style. When repeated, this dialogue took on for me an even more spectral aspect, as if death had made a spoken gesture and been recognized, though Jason Bae’s sensitivity and nimble fingers also kept the passage’s melodic quality stoically to the fore. I liked the pianist’s rich, mellow plunge into the middle sequence’s world – and he did so well with that alchemic transition from those reverential tones back to the recapitulation – a wonderful mini-adventure! Then, in his hands the return to those first exchanges brought out a more rueful, even a somewhat “old friend” quality, after which the interplay of growing tensions culminated in a blistering coda, startling in its power and velocity!

The third Scherzo’s opening was less spectral and sharp-edged than grim and unremitting, dark, terse mutterings followed by angry octaves, delivered with incredible panache! Jason Bae caught the nobility of the contrasting episode, with its beautifully-weighted chords, but seemed to me somewhat at a loss to know what to “do” with the descending filigree figurations, treating them, I thought, as if they were purely decorative. Even when those same noble chords re-emerged decked with darker hues, beautifully voiced by the young pianist, the downward cascadings still lacked, to my ears, any kind of discernible character – strange, when his responses to the music’s other episodes were so sharply and/or richly focused.

After all of this grim, tight-lipped stuff, the relative genialities of the Fourth Scherzo were more than welcome, though Bae seemed more concerned with bringing out the elfin brilliance of the piano writing at the outset more than its good humour. There was breathtakingly delicate playing, with amazing right-hand work in places, the figurations at times just “brushed in”, everything clear as crystal, but light as air and swift as thought.  And the lyrical heart of the work was expressed with legato playing of such loveliness, it seemed churlish to wonder what it was that was in the young pianist’s mind other than the desire to make a beautiful sound. A friend I conferred with immediately after the concert felt much the same thing – that the virtuosity of the playing was breathtaking, but the lyrical moments needed more “character”.

Chopin reputedly said, once, that “if you want to play my music, go to hear Pasta or Rubini” – two of the stars of the opera at the time. Chopin loved the female voice as an instrument (though, surprisingly, he wrote fewer songs than did, say, Liszt), attended the opera regularly,  and befriended opera singers such as Pauline Viadot and Jenny Lind. Though his Nocturnes are celebrated as the most markedly lyrical works in his output, singing lines occur almost everywhere in his other compositions, as witness the central sections of these Scherzi. And just as a singer inflects the melodic lines he or she sings, according to the texts of the songs, so do Chopin’s melodies suggest appropriate dynamic and rhythmic nuance and a range of colour, according to the music’s overall character.

Throughout these Scherzi performances I thought Jason Bae readily captured a sense of the music’s excitement and dynamism, giving the works a wonderful volatile aspect, and a real sense of danger, of encountering the unexpected, and of conquering in places incredibly complex strands of creative impulse and making their intertwining cohere. He was able, as well, to display a gift for realizing a beautiful legato, one which was possible in many instances to enjoy as pure sound (as Chopin was reputed to have enjoyed the female voice or the sound of a violin). Still, in places in these performances I felt the need for more than beauty per se, for a stronger identification with the music’s expression that would give those sounds real intent.

The subjective nature of listening to music enables nine people in a room to add each of their very different impressions of a piece of a music to that of the musician playing it! – ten different reactions to the same piece of music! But I feel that what stimulates this process is the initial recreative thrust given by the performer – without that kind of interpretative commitment  on the part of a player, music can sound incredibly bland, for all the accuracy or surface beauty of its performance.  Bae himself demonstrated such a level of interpretative focus and skill in bringing to us, immediately after the interval,  the programme’s next item – this was Ronald Stevenson’s Fantasy on Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten’s most famous opera.

Ronald Stevenson (whom I think of as Scottish, but who did have an English mother) died earlier this year at the age of 87. Called by commentators one of the great composer-pianists, his output was considerable, including both large-scale works, a huge body of transcriptions, and hundreds of miniatures. Though he’s credited with writing the longest single-movement work in the piano literature (his Passacaglia on DSCH, inspired by Shostakovich), his songs and piano transcriptions are the best-known of his works. Among the transcriptions for solo piano ( the style of Franz Liszt and his operatic transcriptions or “Reminiscences”) is this Fantasy, written in 1977, the year after Britten’s death.

Not dissimilar to Liszt’s Don Juan Fantasy, which recreates for the listener Mozart’s Don Giovanni through elaborating upon a number of scenes from the opera, though not in theatrical order, Stevenson sets about recreating certain subject-themes from “Peter Grimes”, and, unlike Liszt with “the Don” more-or-less following the design of the opera. Crashing chords with plaintive replies immediately evoke angry voices calling the outcast fisherman’s name at the opera’s beginning, followed by agitated, energetic figurations representing rumour and heresay swirling around Grimes’s head, suspected as he is of causing the death of one of his apprentice boys.

We heard the tumult of the storm and in its desolate wake an extended recitative with softly-whispered scintillations of stars in the firmament overhead, piano writing that staggered with its brilliance, sensitivity and sense of evocation. Jason Bae’s performance caught it all, revelling in the tumultuous piano-writing, but then recreating great vistas of silent, pitiless wonderment, as Grimes took the inevitable, tragic steps towards drowning himself at sea. All that was left at the end was the dawn, which the pianist magically brought into being by plucking the piano strings directly, sounding the “Daybreak” theme from the opera in doing so – a few evocatively-sounded Liszt-like chords, and the piece was over – what a work, and what a performance!

To conclude the recital, Jason Bae chose Liszt’s Venezia e Napoli, music composed as a kind of sequel to the composer’s second Années de Pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) collection, consisting of impressions from his sojourns in Italy. There are three separate pieces in the work, the first two relating to the Venice (Venezia) part of the title, and a final Tarantella associated with Southern Italy (Napoli).

Beginning with a kind of introduction in which we heard the rhythm of the gondolier’s oar and the rippling of the water, the music intoned a popular song “La Biondina in Gondoletta”, Liszt most interestingly casting the opening music in the same key (F-sharp) as Chopin was to use in his Barcarolle for solo piano. Jason Bae gave us some exquisitely-sounded, shimmering textures throughout this section, voicing the gondolier’s song with great sensitivity, and making the accompanying arabesques scintillate all around the melody, perhaps not with gossamer ease in places, but certainly with sheer youthful delight! I loved the reminiscence of Berlioz’s “March of the Pilgrims” from his Symphony Harold en Italie at the end of the gondolier’s song, Liszt’s chiming notes recalling something of the dying echoes in Berlioz’s work.

The agitated Canzone which followed gave us the darker side of this picture, the music actually based on another gondolier’s song, this time by Rossini as used in his opera Otello – Bae plunged himself and his instrument into this scenario of darkness and despair, leavening things a little in places with some resigned moments of light in the gloom before rechannelling his energies for another irruption which seemed to come out stamping and snorting! – to then immediately break into a tarantella, the “wildest of dances”, the pianist’s fingers flying over the keys, alternating strength and power with delicacy. Respite of sorts came with the cantabile theme, though as the piece gathered momentum, and the “swirl of the girl gone chancing, glancing, dancing” became wilder, some of the melody’s accompanying trajectories began to sound as hair-raising as the tarantella itself. The ending? – it was pure, unadulterated panache on both composer’s and performer’s part, and earned Jason Bae an enthusiastic and well-deserved reception.

We were returned to normality of a sorts by a couple of encores (yes, really! – and I’m obviously showing my age by remarking “and after all that expenditure of energy!”) – neither of the pieces I knew, though I laid bets with a friend afterwards as to their respective identities – the first, I thought sounded like Liszt, the second Rachmaninov! Thus far, neither of us has collected any winnings from the other, though I’m sure it’s only a matter of time……..

Teacher and Pupil for the ages – with Ludwig Treviranus at the piano

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Hutt Valley Chamber Music presents
Ludwig Treviranus (piano)

Teacher and Pupil – Josef Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven

HAYDN – Piano Sonata in C Major Hob.XVI/50
Andante with Variations Hob.XVII/6

BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata No.3 in C Op.2 No.3
Piano Sonata No.23 in F Minor Op.57 “Appassionata”

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Thursday, 24th September, 2015

One of the Wellington classical music scene’s great communicators, Ludwig Treviranus, gave an entertaining and thought- provoking recital, “Teacher and Pupil”, featuring music by both Haydn and Beethoven, as the final concert in Hutt Valley Chamber Music’s 2015 season.

With this recital the young pianist completes his second year of a three-year term as Performer-in-Residence for Hutt Valley Chamber Music – his aim throughout his tenure is to present varied and interesting concert experiences for audiences, and share his own joy in performing music that he loves.

As with his Lower Hutt recital about a year ago, he realized these objectives in great spadefuls, which were heaped up for our delight with characteristic gusto. Not for him the obligatory bow to the audience at the beginning, followed by the plunge into the music without ado – his attitude was that here was a group of like-minded people (including a number of children) to whom he could express his thoughts, ideas and feelings convening the music he was about to play.

Opinions will vary among concertgoers as to the efficacy of Treviranus’s friendly, easeful and communicative manner. I know there are people out there for whom ANY talking at a concert by either the artists themselves or the concert organizers is unacceptable, while others welcome the informality and “humanizing” process such an approach instigates. For myself, I’m of the feeling that a little talking , especially when done well, goes a long way, considering that we listeners are at the concert first and foremost for the music.

Ludwig Treviranus was, however, nothing if not determined. Having confessed that his recital’s overall theme was one that interested him greatly through having himself been both teacher and pupil in his music studies and activites, he talked about one of the most famous of these relationships, that which took place between Haydn and Beethoven. For the benefit of both teachers and pupils in the audience, he wasted no time in drawing parallels with what continues today when youth encounters experience.

Each of the concert’s halves was devoted to a particular aspect of the Haydn/Beethoven relationship, the first illustrating the respect Beethoven would have had at first for his venerable master via one of the pupil’s works. Beethoven’s C Major Op.2 No.3 Sonata was a perfect choice, as Haydnesque touches abound in the music, even if there are passages where the youthful Beethoven is palpably demonstrating that he already knows his own mind.

Before this was a demonstration of Haydn’s composition mastery via his wonderful C Major Piano Sonata Hob XVI/50, completed a year or so before Beethoven’s work. Ludwig Treviranus used the word “dazzling” to describe the work in his programme notes – and one really couldn’t do better than that. His performance brought out all that was in the music – its simple quirkiness, energy, humour, strength, subtlety, colour, and great dynamic range. And throughout the first movement the playing gathered up all of these qualities in beautifully-crafted spans, paragraphs of adventure which carried us along, right up to the final chords.

At the slow movement’s strummed, almost bardic beginning I thought I detected a pre-echo of a similar gesture which occurs in Beethoven’s “Tempest'” Sonata – the pianist brought out the music’s attractive melancholic vein with some deft detailing, bringing out, in the music’s “development”, some beautifully discursive touches. By contrast, the finale’s spiky, staccato manner played up the music’s humour, as did the pianist’s body language and (in one or two instances) facial expressions (a wry “where is this music taking me?” look that I thought was of a piece with the playing and interpretation.

So it was, when we moved to Beethoven’s Op.2 No.3 Piano Sonata, it seemed all very much of the same world at various points of the discourse, the “ready to pounce” aspect of the opening bars, the melancholy vein of the contrasting second subject and the skitterish lead-back to the opening mood. I noted Treviranus’s disinclination to play repeats in his concert a year ago, and it was the same throughout this concert (to my regret, in places).

Nevertheless there were compensations in the pianist’s seizure of the mood in the development section, the sense of striving towards something unattainable, the lovely legato which followed, and the élan in moving between these contrasts. The recapitulation kept us nicely guessing for a while as to what the music was about to do, Beethoven following Haydn’s example in playfulness and dynamic surprise – a wonderful modulation at the top of one of the runs sending us all tumbling down the other side of a hilltop into freshly-hued territories (a most magical use of the sustaining pedal!) which, when we picked ourselves up, seemed to uncannily “morph” back into the place where we were (this was all very impressively realized by the young pianist!)

The remainder of the sonata’s performance was of a piece – rich contrasting of the slow movement’s broken-phrased opening with its richly-hued middle section, the playing catching the stillness of it at magical moments, and then the “rolling-down-the-hill” fun of the scherzo, with the all-too-visceral “bump” at the bottom, followed by the lurching, bristling trio, the pianist’s sense of enjoyment reflected in his occasional “riding” of the piano stool! Somewhat more poised was the opening of the finale, Treviranus relishing its touches of insouciance whilst setting out to charm us with grace and style.  And so he did, encouraging the beautiful hymnal middle section to dance, and setting the song-birds trilling full-throatedly up to the unexpected (and rather Haydn-esque!) modulation into other realms, before the final and emphatic payoff.

So to the concert’s second half, which demonstrated in no uncertain terms the divergence of the two composers’ pathways. Haydn’s work was a finely-tailored Andante with Variations in the anguished key of F minor, a kind of “double variation”, beginning with two themes (one in F Major as well) and with variations on both of them. Though “contained” in a structural sense, the music’s expressive qualities lingered in a melancholy way long after the last notes had been sounded, the parameters of feeling imparting a distinctive character to the work.

However, turning from this to Beethoven’s “Appassionata” F Minor Piano Sonata, Ludwig Treviranus took us into what seemed like a completely new world of expression – though written as early as 1805, and while Haydn was still alive, here at the keyboard was sound and fury of hitherto undreamed power, a creative force which threatened to burst through walls and overflow structural confines in its quest to convey what it wanted to say.

Beethoven himself was immensely proud of this work, describing it as a “brilliantly-executed display of emotion and music”. I can’t think of another piece of music that displays a more single-minded and remorseless feeling of pursuing a definite goal, even throughout the work’s less stormy passages – perhaps this is due to the first movement’s second, more lyrical subject actually deriving from the sonata’s opening, and the second movement’s theme-and variations resembling more the resonances of a coiled spring rather than a lyrical outpouring, one which, at its end suddenly unleashes its pent-up energies.

Passages in Ludwig Treviranus’s performance came off magnificently – the opening, for instance, immediately created a dark, brooding ambience whose cataclysmic outbursts – immediately after the portentous Fifth Symhony reminiscences – made someone sitting just in front of me in the auditorium visibly start from their seat! A pity the pianist then had a momentary lapse of memory, omitting several of the jagged ascents before the appearance of the second subject – he seemed to hesitate for an instant, but recovered splendidly to give us a beautifully-coloured second subject (unlike in usual sonata-form practice up to that time, a simple ascending variant of the work’s opening three notes).

Throughout the rest of the movement he was at one with the music’s dynamism, drama and relentless, obsessive spirit – only in the great mid-movement tumultuous keyboard descent did the repeated figurations seem to me a touch mechanical (in fact, his upward-thrusting approach to this passage I had thought splendidly prepared – I simply felt the need for a bit more interpretative “grunt” as the music cascaded downwards – it was one of those moments that didn’t seem quite in accord with the idea that in this work Beethoven was shaping the music’s form rather than allowing form (or, in this sequence, simply gravity) to shape the music…….

Still, the ending of the movement conveyed the creative spirit’s force with more-than-sufficient abandon, the last few notes of the coda leaving us properly agape with breathless astonishment! Very properly, the pianist then brought out the warmth and depth of the slow movement’s tightly-wrought theme, the variations allowing us to breathe again more easily, and enjoy the decorative versions of the theme, albeit atop its fettered energies. But there was no escaping the inevitable – Treviranus caught the eerie, brooding darkness of the unexpected modulatory chord at the end of the movement, again transfixing us with a lightning-flash, and hurling the same notes at us like a “horror fanfare”, before the music was plunged headlong into the swirling depths – what drama and excitement!

It wasn’t a performance of the finale which maintained a crackling voltage from first note to last (as was Michael Houstoun’s in Wellington during 2014 – the most INVOLVED playing I’ve ever witnessed from the latter) – Treviranus gave us intensities in great surges, rather than depicting the music as a remorseless torrent. Even if I felt his overall focus “came and went” through this approach, he managed to re-imbue the music with its essential momentum, bringing the tensions splendidly to a head with the coda.

Opinion is divided among commentators regarding Beethoven’s inclusion of the repeat of the development and recapitulation in the finale – having been “brought up” with a recording that observed this repeat, I always feel as though an essential part of the music has been torn away (including a few transitional bars one wouldn’t otherwise hear at all) if this sequence is cut. Treviranus didn’t play it – one does sympathize with any performer of this music in a live recital on purely physical grounds! – it’s a decision which I regretfully record here, but philosophically accept as part of the interpretation, in this case (adding, perhaps a little unfairly, that for me it was the INCLUSION of this repeat that helped contribute to the success of Michael Houstoun’s aforemetioned magisterial performance of a year ago).

Not wanting to finish a review lamenting something that the performer DIDN’T do, I need to emphasize that Treviranus’s heroic, devil-take-the-hindmost way with the fast and furious coda made for a stirring show of defiance and all-out resolve at the end. And so that we wouldn’t emerge TOO ashen-faced from the recital hall, the pianist gave us a beautifully-breathed palate-cleansing encore in the form of the opening of Schumann’s Kinderscenen.

JS BACH since the time of Bach – Michael Houstoun

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
INSPIRED BY BACH – Michael Houstoun

JS BACH – Partita No.1 in B-flat BWV 825
ROSS HARRIS – Fugue (for piano)
DOUGLAS LILBURN – Chaconne
SERGEY RACHMANINOV – Suite from Violin Partita (after JS Bach)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Prelude and Fugue No.24 in D Minor Op.87
FRANZ LISZT – Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor (after JS Bach)

Michael Houstoun (piano)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Wednesday, 23rd September, 2015

Many people regard Johann Sebastian Bach as the greatest composer who ever lived – he’s certainly one of those “elect” few whose creative musical achievements have in their time and/or since drawn forth the highest and most frequent praise from performers, scholars and ordinary music-listeners. But as such judgements involving creativity are prone to subjectivity and influenced by fashion, it’s impossible to verify “greatness” in any pure, abstract or objective way. More to the point, perhaps is to assess Bach’s “greatness” by the range and scope of his music’s influence upon other creative artists.

The old saying “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” comes well-and-truly into its own when considering Bach’s influence upon music in general. Even during the period immediately after his death, when his works fell into obscurity and his fame was temporarily eclipsed by his sons, most notably Carl Philippe Emmanuel, connoisseurs remained aware of “Old Bach’s” music, and kept it alive – people like the Viennese aristocrat Baron Von Swieten, one of Mozart’s patrons, who urged the composer to transcribe some Bach fugues for string ensemble; and Beethoven’s teacher Christian Gottlob Neefe, who put the eleven-year-old Ludwig onto the Well-Tempered Clavier as part of his tuition.

Bach’s skill as a contrapuntist doubtlessly informed Beethoven’s renowned use of fugal passages in his music – Beethoven reputedly remarked that Bach (whose name translates as “brook”) ought to have been called “Meer” (which means “ocean”). In both his and Mozart’s later music the fugal style a la Johann Sebastian B’s example plays a significant role. Though Chopin never composed any fugues he was a devotee of Bach’s keyboard music, as reflected in the  beautiful clarity of his counterpointed passages (the fourth Ballade containing particularly lovely examples). Liszt and Schumann, also both devotees of Bach, did compose fugues, besides writing numerous passages in their works directly linked with a contrapuntal style (parts of Schumann’s Second Symphony present one example, while the fugue in Liszt’s B Minor Piano Sonata provides another).

Michael Houstoun’s “Inspired by Bach” presentation for Chamber Music New Zealand, sent such spheres of Bachian influence spinning into the 21st century, with Ross Harris’s 2015 work Fugue (for piano), premiered on this very recital tour, and presented cheek-by jowl with another Kiwi’s homage to baroque forms, Douglas Lilburn’s Chaconne (written in 1946). Also in the program was the last and greatest of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and fugues for piano, a work directly inspired by Shostakovich’s hearing of his compatriot Tatiana Nikolayeva’s playing of (you’ve guessed it!) the ubiquitous Well-Tempered Clavier. We heard, too, from composer-pianist Sergey Rachmaninov, who, besides writing a set of piano variations on a theme of Corelli, transcribed several of the movements from Bach’s solo violin Partita in E for piano.

Of course, the “prince” of transcribers was Franz Liszt, whose tireless activities produced works for the keyboard drawn from almost every genre of music of his day. Though known for his “fantasias”, freely-wrought representations of themes and sequences from works by other composers, Liszt also devoted enormous energies to faithful transcriptions of works such as the nine Beethoven Symphonies, simply for the purpose of being able to perform the music in places which had no orchestras. A more-than-competent organist himself, Liszt devoted much attention to the work of Bach, writing original works based on Bachian structures (such as Weinen, Klargen, Sorgen, Zargen, for solo piano), but making transcriptions for the instrument of the Six Organ Preludes and Fugues BWV 543-548, and a slightly “freer” transcription of the Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor BWV 542,  the latter work played here.

It can be seen by all of this that the programme as devised was filled with interest and potential excitement – and most fittingly, Michael Houstoun began the evening with the great progenitor’s own Partita No.1 in B-flat  BWV 825. Straightaway we were treated to brightly-focused playing, with trilled ornaments relished to the full, the trajectories steady, but subtly varied, the implied orchestrations apparent but organic – and there was a lovely, romantic-sounding ritardando at the Praeludium’s end. I enjoyed also the chatty, energetic Allemande, with its full-throated voicings, as well as the bumptious and characterful Corrente, the piano’s slightly nasal left-hand register giving this music an attractively varied timbre in places.

Often a form containing great feeling and profundity in Bach’s music, the Sarabande here emanated poise and majesty the first time round, then found a shimmering resonance on its repeat – so very lovely! As for the two Menuets, the first  was given a sturdy, forthright character by Houstoun, who then moved to the second as if in a trance, allowing the music to dream its course, and then returning most tellingly to the opening to complete the ABA structure, thus enabling each dance to highlight the other’s attributes. So to the final Gigue, which has never seemed to me like a Gigue (or “Jig”) at all, lacking that skipping, dotted-rhythm aspect – though in Houstoun’s hands liveliness it certainly had, a kind of molto perpetuo character in fact, breathless and exhilarating!

Ross Harris’s piece Fugue (for piano) seemed to me to “scintillate” fugal form from its insides, the seeds of impulse to my ears growing, sparking and shooting forth notes and their configurations, and creating rich and strange worlds of variegated beauty. It was a soundscape that seemed to constantly reinvent itself, by turns haunting itself with its own ambiences, and providing reassurance through sequences of echo and inversion. The piece spread its amplitude almost by stealth, the figures tightly-woven, but expansively-placed, beautifully resonant bass notes reflecting the light from stars tumbling in the firmament, the irruptions of energy in places almost “Hammerklavier-like” in dynamic effect, and contrasting with the pinpricks of sound softly illuminating moments of stillness. Metrical contrapuntal lines broke free of confines and seemed to cosmically open up the music’s vistas, similar in feeling to those in Beethoven’s Bach-inspired Op.111 Piano Sonata’s finale. Such infinities of space between the sounds! The composer’s “three fugue subjects” certainly brought forth a rich panoply of both connective and otherwise exploratory tissue, the whole given an extraordinary range of strength, transparency and colour by Michael Houstoun’s assured playing.

A chaconne’s musical form is variation over a repeating bass line or harmonic sequence – it was a popular form for Baroque composers, one of the most famous examples being Bach’s  Chaconne from the Partita in D Minor for unaccompanied violin. Douglas Lilburn’s use of the form reflected not only his admiration for Bach’s music but his desire to produce some kind of “testament of faith”, stimulated by a combination of South Island landscape and the composer’s belief in the idea of expressing his feelings in music, putting, as he later described it, “an enormous amount of myself into the notes”.

Originally called “Theme and Variations for Piano”, this work had to wait for its premiere for eight years before ex-patriate New Zealander Peter Cooper took it up and made a broadcast recording of the work from London (he subsequently re-recorded it in the studio for Pye Records during the nineteen-sixties). Since then it’s received several more recordings, including one by Michael Houstoun.

As with the recording, I thought this performance was a tremendous achievement! Houstoun’s playing seemed to me a shade tauter here in concert, compared with the studio reading, more “direct” and outwardly energized, though recognizably the same interpretation, with its bigness of heartbeat and awareness of surroundings set amid the forward momentum. The performance established strongly- focused purpose, but also allowed great wonderment in places, registering the world’s stillness and processes of renewal, so that the strengthening of resolve that welled up out of the visionary moments had plenty of engaging surface excitement plus a treasurable sense of well-being. The playing seemed to me to readily evoke both the observer’s spirit and the essence of what was experienced, however sharply contrasted – now strong and purposeful, now dreamy and ruminatory.

Perhaps the work’s “home stretch” could have done with a touch more rhetoric, a few moments’ added tonal and figurative extension – the ending of the work always seems to me to, in a sense, “ambush” the listener, like a homecoming that’s just around a corner, rather than one glimpsed or sensed from a long way off! – but Houstoun, as he tends to do by sheer dint of focus and concentration in all of his performances, made it work in its present context, leaving us replete at the end with our journeys’ revelations.

Sergey Rachmaninov’s regular complaint was that he had neither time nor inclination to compose, having to live the life of a travelling virtuoso pianist. On the strength of his transcriptions of parts of Bach’s E Major Violin Partita, it’s a pity he wasn’t able to turn his hand to more such transcription work (obviously for his own use as a performer, but for our inestimable benefit as well!). His work demonstrates a composer’s awareness of content as much as a feeling for display, so that in these works the spirit of the original in many places shines triumphantly through the virtuoso brilliance. Each of the three movements were characterfully realized, Houstoun relishing in particular the “Gavotte”, with its mischievous, even suggestive impulses, the music seeming in places to wink knowingly at us before artlessly moving on…….

What a contrast was provided by Dmitri Shostakovich’s monumental conclusion to his Op.87 set of Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues, a set directly inspired by the Well-Tempered Clavier! For many people at the recital whom I spoke with afterwards,  Houstoun’s performance of this D Minor pairing of Prelude and Fugue was was the highlight of the evening’s music-making, so overwhelming it was in its cumulative impact. Particularly impressive, both music- and performance-wise, were the contrasts between and the coming-together of the work’s disparate elements, such as the imperious, organ-like opening of the Prelude, and its tolling-bell conclusion, out of which grew the Fugue’s beginnings, the counterpoints in places so very rapt and ecstatic, like a bird singing at dawn, yet leading to a massive, angst-ridden build-up of interactive splendour. The sounds here at once transcended the solo instrument’s range and scope, yet in context felt as all-encompassing as was obviously intended by its composer – stirring stuff!

In a sense the Liszt transcription of Bach’s G Minor Fantasy and Fugue BWV 542 was the recital’s “return” to the world of the master – though the transcription of this work featured some additional melodic embellishment and harmonic filling-out of the Prelude, the Fugue is more-or-less as Bach wrote it (albeit with Liszt’s dynamic markings). After the Shostakovich had overwhelmed us all, I was wondering how this item would actually stand up, in (to “corrupt” a phrase, somewhat) an “Après le deluge, moi!” sense – but transcriber and performer between them ensured that full justice was done to Bach – an act of “double homage”, really. And when it was all over, Houstoun returned to the platform to assist all of us to “return to our lives” with a serene rendition of the Siciliano movement from Bach’s Flute Sonata BWV 1031, a transcription, incidentally, by another great master, pianist Wilhelm Kempff. I confess I had to afterwards seek assistance regarding the identity of this piece, knowing the melody” but not its actual name!                                                               

Welllington Chamber Orchestra – significant, important, moving……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:
LILBURN AND VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

LILBURN – A Song of Islands / Symphony No.1 (1949)
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Concerto for Tuba in F Minor / Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1

Naomi Christensen (tuba)
Ian Ridgewell (conductor)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra

St Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 20th September, 2015

A significant, important and moving concert. Significant? – with two works by Douglas Lilburn included, the orchestra splendidly commemorated the composer’s 100th birthday year. Important? – the concert included in the programme Lilburn’s First Symphony, one that ought to be in our main-centre orchestras’ regular concert repertoire, but is hardly ever played – see “Stop Press” below, however. Moving? – the concert was dedicated by the orchestra to the memory of one of its members who had recently died, the well-known luthier and ‘cellist, Ian Lyons.

Besides the actual concert, two of Ian Lyons’ close friends, Chris and Anna Van Der Zee, together with the NZSO’s Alan Molina and former principal ‘cellist of the same orchestra, David Chickering, played, at the beginning of the second half, the slow movement from Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major Op.20 No.4. – a beautiful and appropriate gesture.

Conducting the orchestra for the concert proper was Ian Ridgewell, English-born with a background in tuba-playing, composition (he studied with with Sir Malcolm Arnold) and conducting, both of brass bands and symphony orchestras, currently living and working in the Wellington region as a teacher of music. And, to add to the concert’s interest, one of the items was none other than a Tuba Concerto by Vaughan Williams, played by Naomi Christensen, who was awarded “Brass Player of the Year” for 2014 at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music here in Wellington. We were told, in a brief biographical note in the program, that her “journey with the Tuba” began at aged ten, “from atop a pile of ‘phone books (allowing her to reach the mouthpiece)” – presumably not just the telephone’s, judging by the skill and ease with which she handled her instrument.

For the orchestra it seemed no easy task to tackle not merely one, but TWO challenging pieces by Lilburn. Though the Symphony is the later work, it seemed to me that the “Song” was in some ways just as difficult a nut to crack, both technically (it contained some extremely difficult string-writing) and interpretatively (needing a strong and secure “overview”, without which the music would have simply wandered and become shapeless and confused). To both the players’ and the conductor’s credit these things were well-attended to, the playing focused and detailed, the overall view purposeful and clearly laid out as the piece progressed.

The music opened strongly and emphatically, given enough space to allow the rolling phrases plenty of room and the brass plenty of time to expand. I enjoyed the prominence given to the finely-crafted appearances of those warm, golden harmonies which seemed to impart a glow over the vast oceanic spaces and the ruggedness of the terrain. Importantly the conductor maintained tight rhythmic control, designed to keep the music’s underlying pulses alive, while capturing detailings like the oceanic swells and the contours of the freshly-discovered landscapes.

Throughout the strings and winds had a somewhat volatile interaction, each having a turn at being either thematic or rhythmic – in some places the debt by Lilburn to Sibelius was palpably demonstrated,  but invariably with a South Seas accent. These exchanges were punctuated by moments of great splendour on the brasses, sounding the composer’s “song” while the rest of the orchestral textures kaleidoscopically energized and interacted with great volatility. The ecstasy of fulfillment at the end as strings and then brass “humanized” the orchestral textures brought out some great playing from all concerned.

Something completely different was the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto, a work which has provoked divided responses among listeners and critics ever since its composition in 1954, but which has steadily increased its following and popularity, having since been recorded over a dozen times. It’s a fine, jovial work, rumbustious in the outer movements and surprisingly expressive in the central Romanza movement. What a performance here from this young musician! With on-the-spot support from conductor and orchestra, Naomi Christensen and her alter ego of an instrument brought out all of the music’s character, to begin with bluff good humour, and then plenty of swagger and wry rhythmic agility both in the second subject section, and throughout the jaw-dropping cadenza.

That legendary tuba-playing raconteur Gerard Hoffnung would have , I’m sure, enjoyed her playing immensely, both here, and in the nostalgia-tinted central movement, where the soloist “partnered” the string melodies at the outset, later adding occasional piquant touches, rather like what an observer would do while walking through the midst of a glorious landscape. As for the last movement, the solo instrument was hardly silent, leading the bucolic romp with great élan, the orchestra allowed only a tiny moment of self-contained glory just before the final cadenza – again, masterly playing from the soloist, wryly-expressed rhetorical gestures with wonderful trills, and a cataclysmic “all fall down” finish. Glorious and memorable!

And what a lovely contrast the same composer’s Norfolk Rhapsody No.1 made in the concerto’s wake – At first the single lines of the opening (oboe and strings) sounded a little raw, but with the clarinet’s entry and the string harmonies warming the textures, the sound sweetened and began to glow – the principal viola, Stephanie van Dyk, deservedly singled out afterwards for a beautiful bit of solo playing, with the clarinet closely in support. I thought the ambient vistas were captured most effectively by the winds, both solos and concerted work with the strings, the oboe especially coming into its own here and delivering some lovely lines. An almost Delian sweep was achieved, the tutti delivering the rhapsodic aspect of the music splendidly and richly.

The maritime-like tunes which launched the allegro section came together after a slightly ragged start, establishing a characteristic gait and building, with brass and percussion, to a stirring climax, before the sounds began taking their leave of us, gradually returning to the solitary ambiences of the opening, winds giving us a valedictory version of the opening melody and the brasses softly chiming in with a slower haunting reminiscence of the central dance. At the end the oboe and strings, now thoroughly acclimatised, gently and sensitively sounded those opening strains as if it had all been a dream.

After the interval it was to the business of the Lilburn Symphony that we all turned. It began most promisingly, a bright, breezy trumpet call activated the echoes and ambiences, allowing a lovely Copland-esque feeling (I had, I confess, the previous evening, heard the NZSO play the Four Rodeo Dance Episodes!), with the dancing rhythms kept steadily on the rails. There’s such great brass writing in this work and the players here did so well, even if the St.Andrew’s ambience made them sound too uncomfortably close in places. The movement abounded in tricky dovetailings which conductor Ian Ridgewell and his players brought off so well, some sticky moments apart. The brass and winds were mostly right “on”, the wind lines in particular very tangy and earthy, while the strings strove mightily, recreating those characteristic tightly-knit tensions that make up the Lilburn sound.

So I was disappointed that, after maintaining such strong and secure trajectories for his players throughout and up to this point, the conductor then, I thought, pushed the slow movement along too quickly – the players seemed unable to settle, to properly hook into that obsessive rhythmic pattern, with the slight lack of synchronization producing a somewhat raucous result in places. Fortunately, once the brass were given their heads the rhythm seemed to steady – the horns were particularly steadfast, here, and things seemed to come together – how bleak at its centre some of this music is! And why don’t our orchestras play it more often?

The finale excitingly and abruptly unfurled, like a vast curtain being thrown suddenly open! – dark, almost Tapiola-like statements from the strings created a brooding, expectant atmosphere, the winds and brass soundinging particular “northern”, with moments of sunlight breaking through the clouds and just as quickly disappearing. When the rhythmic explosion suddenly drove detail into a frenzy, with warning shouts from the wind and brass, I was afraid that, again, the tempi would be too quick for these players – and indeed, some of the articulation was a blur at this speed – but mixed with the scrambling aspect was a certain edge-of-seat excitement, which saw the music through. Everything was excitingly capped by the brass and timpani, even if I felt the strings in particular were put under a lot of pressure in places.

The music’s sudden plunge back into the void of the movement’s opening was splendidly done – strings were angsting and winds were skirling in fine style – and those great building-blocks of sound which grew out of the built-up energies were here most satisfyingly sounded by the brass and timpani, a mighty and well-deserved sense of arrival, one which we in the audience truly relished. So, in all, warmest congratulations to conductor Ian Ridgewelll and his band of sterling musicians!

STOP PRESS: I’ve beaten my breast a couple of times in this review as to the relative neglect of this music over the years, but am equally excited to report that the Te Tōkī NZSM Orchestra’s planned Lilburn concert on Thursday October 1st at the Basilica in Hill Street, ALSO features this same First Symphony (as well, incidentally, as – you’ve guessed it! – Vaughan Williams’ Norfolk Rhapsody No.1!) So, as a change from famine conditions, it’s good to be able to enjoy, in the case of this remarkable symphony, a feast!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Popular for the best reason – the NZSO’s Classical Hits Concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
CLASSICAL HITS

Music by ROSSINI, COPLAND, OFFENBACH, J.STRAUSS Jnr.
TCHAIKOVSKY, ELGAR and WAGNER

James Judd (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 19th September, 2015

Appropriately enough from my point of view, this concert began with the very same music that enthralled me almost fifty years ago, at the beginning of my very first concert-going experience in Palmerston North’s Opera House. I still recall, at the start of the “William Tell” Overture, the beauty of those two NZBC Symphony Orchestra solo ‘cellos (played by Wilf Simenauer and Farquhar Wilkinson), and the thrill of the orchestra “opening up” for the ensuing storm, before the cor anglais (I can’t remember the player’s name) and Richard Giese’s flute flooded us with sunlight and dried us out in time for the excitement of the concluding march. No better introduction to the capabilities of a symphony orchestra could have been devised by anybody, I thought, and especially when the conducting was to my youthful ears as exciting and volatile as was Piero Gamba’s on that occasion.

So, almost as much fond memory was activated as was “here-and-now” sensation and stimuli when Saturday evening’s “Classical Hits” concert got under way in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre with that very same overture, conducted on this occasion by James Judd – Andrew Joyce’s opening ‘cello solo and his duetting with section colleague Ken Ichinose did full justice to the example set by those aforementioned illustrious predecessors – and the rest of the overture literally went like a train, taking time out in between excitements for the pastoral pleasures of shepherd’s pipes and birdsong. Michael Austin and Kirstin Eade most beguilingly did the honours as shepherd and songbird respectively, causing me to fall in love with the music all over again. The rest (not forgetting the Lone Ranger!) is, as they say, history!

A pity that the opportunity wasn’t taken to insert a home-grown classical hit in such a programme – any of David Farquhar’s Ring Round the Moon dances surely qualify with flying colours by now – but at least European hegemony was challenged by Aaron Copland’s exuberant, so out-of-doors Rodeo (well, even rugby stadiums are practically indoors, now!), four foot-tapping “dance episodes” whose “Hoedown” concluding number brought forth at one stage a full blooded “YEE-HA!” from an audience member simply doing what his conductor had told him to do! Incidentally, I thought James Judd’s spoken comments welcoming us all to the concert and explaining aspects of each of the pieces throughout were just right – there was nothing patronizing nor over-modulated about what he said, but simply the conveyance of a message inviting us all to have lots of fun, with both listening and in one or two instances getting physically involved with the music-making!

In the light of such invitations from the conductor, I was half-expecting at least one or two adventurous souls to leap to their feet in the aisles during Offenbach’s famous “Can-can” from the Orpheus in the Underworld Overture – but perhaps Judd’s tempi were a shade too quick for comfort – a bit more weight and “point” to the rhythmic trajectories and textures might have otherwise tempted those who could have felt rushed off their feet at the music’s frenetic pace. However,  no-one could complain regarding the delicious rhythmic subtleties wrought by the conductor and players during Johann Strauss Jnr’s Blue Danube Waltz – right from the pianissimo magic of its opening on the strings, over which sounded those so-familiar horn calls, one was simply entranced – and each episode of the dance, here, had its own particular brand of beguilement, the music’s “character” allowed plenty of variety throughout.

Mirroring Copland’s “Rodeo” Dances before the interval, the second half also included a more extended work, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture. Beloved of concert audiences world-wide because of its instant appeal, the piece still doesn’t “play itself” – and James Judd certainly didn’t allow a single moment of anything but committed, characterful and sharply-focused music-making, right from the opening wind chords (so rich, grainy and redolent of “once upon a time in a place called Verona”) to the full-throated passion of the string-saturated utterances at the piece’s climax. Along the way, we heard the most beautifully-shaped phrasings from both strings and winds in the piece’s first section, and plenty of sound and fury from brass and percussion throughout the conflict sequences. And the voicing of the “big tune” by the violas in unison with the cor anglais produced a sound to die for, as did the answering phrases from the other strings, sounded here with such breath-bated tenderness.

I loved the idea of introducing the often-played “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations with the piece that precedes it in the complete work, the lovely “W.N.” (the initials of Winifred Norbury) – Elgar, though happily married, obviously enjoyed the company and friendship of  a number of women, some of whom are “enigmatically” represented in this set of variations. So we got the graceful G Major portrait of Winifred and her sister Florence in their beautiful eighteenth-century house, before the music magically modulated down into a rich and noble E-flat, the key of “Nimrod”, a word-play on the German surname of Elgar’s publisher and friend August Jaeger, and supposedly enshrining discussions between the composer and his friend on the slow movements of Beethoven. As in the complete work, the grace and charm of “W.N.” became the perfect foil for the profundity of the noble “Nimrod”.

After this Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries was a near-perfect choice, even if I always feel somewhat cheated in the concert-hall when the “Hoyotoho! Hoyotoho!” isn’t there, though for people not familiar with the music in an operatic context it obviously doesn’t matter. I did wonder whether there might have been a spontaneous irruption of Valkyrie-like shouts from some off-duty Valkyrie in the audience carried away by the excitement of the moment! Had I been the concert organizer I would have been tempted to try and “plant” a few such people (dramatic sopranos in mufti!) in antiphonal places in the gallery, just for the sheer fun of it! This was a swift and lightish performance throughout, James Judd keeping his forces “airborne” right to the end, unlike some of the weightier realizations of famous Wagnerians like Hans Knappertsbusch, whose concert performances on record of the last few bars of the work have to he heard to be believed!

And so we came to the orchestra’s final programmed offering, a spirited rendition of the younger Johann Strauss’s Polka “Thunder and Lightning”, Judd positively exhorting his audience to “make a noise”, which we did, albeit a little inhibitedly. It did the trick, however, as conductor and players rewarded our efforts with one of the classic encores from the famous Viennese “New Year’s Day” concerts, the elder Johann Strauss’s most famous work, the Radetsky March, during which, to everybody’s delight, the conductor “directed” the audience’s clapping, taking particular care to secure the correct dynamic levels for each sequence! The item brought a most successful concert to a bubbling and exuberant conclusion, an antidote for a blessed couple of hours to the dreadful weather which we encountered when making our way home. One wonders which of the tunes we heard during the evening would have made “top of the pops” amongst the satisfied patrons! Thank you, James Judd and the NZSO!

 

 

 

 

 

Going for it at St.Andrew’s – Te Kōkī Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Te Kōkī Trio

Music by BEETHOVEN, CLARA SCHUMANN and RAVEL

Martin Riseley (violin)
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)
Jian Liu (piano)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace,

Sunday, 6th September

This was a mighty concert experience – here were three musicians bent upon drawing all that they could out of the music and of themselves, resulting in performances of great excitement and intensity. The thrills and spills that inevitably came with such an approach simply added to the visceral nature of the experience, so that, at the end, we all felt we’d seen and heard something alive and real.

In making these opening remarks I’ve no wish to draw any comparisons with any other concerts I’d recently been to, all of which had their own particular qualities and delights. It’s just that, right from the opening measures of the Beethoven Trio with which the Te Kōkī Trio began their concert we were engaged, cheek-by-jowl, with the intensity of it all, right from that first, forceful opening chord. And while Jian Liu’s piano playing was spectacular in its adroitness and velocity, my ear was caught in particular by the detail of the varied dynamic observations and interactions between the players, all patently “listening” to one another, delighting in the observance of the first-movement repeat, and plunging us into a development featuring both dynamic irruptions and lovely harmonic explorations, beautiful colours glowing through the sounds.

The slow movement’s opening brought to mind a number of like themes from the composer’s piano sonatas, a beautifully languid contrasting episode begun by the ‘cello and joined by the violin working its continued magic before the piano took over the reins once more – a subsequent minor-key variation became very orchestral in these players’ hands, after which the piano returned with a more decorative recap of the opening, before a lovely pizzicato-quiet chordal ending. These players then truly relished the scherzo’s high spirits, with its skipping rhythms and strong accents, the performance generating incredible momentum in places (almost a precursor of the Op.135 String Quartet’s near-manic scherzo), tempered by occasional “drone” effects, and a brief, but attractively lyrical “swaying” trio.

That Haydnesque leaping piano figure at the beginning of the finale set the tone for what was to follow – energy, great good humour and lots of surprises (even a suggesting of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody at a couple of points!). The development section involved even more skin and hair flying in places, tempered by more sostenuto string passages – just for a bit of a breather! As for the surprise modulation towards the end – one can imagine the contemporary astonishment this would have caused (“Fit for the madhouse!” exclaimed Carl Maria Von Weber, at one of Beethoven’s similar symphonic divergences), this was tossed off with such easeful nonchalance, that it was the return to the home key which brought forth from us the grins and knowing winks – with the players’ hands and fingers flying over keyboards and fingerboards alike, the music roared to its joyous conclusion.

Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio seemed at the outset very much modelled upon her husband Robert’s manner, the work’s opening theme sombre and tense in true “Schumannesque” style. But thereafter it was Mendelssohn I kept on being reminded of throughout the opening movement, albeit with rather more adventurous modulations – the performers responded to the assured string-writing with strength and focus, the ‘cello often taking the lead, and the piano part never over-dominant (as one might have thought would be the case, from a composer regarded as one of the finest pianists in Europe). A wistful, piquant Scherzo followed, the rhythm rather like a dotted-note waltz with a Scotch snap, somewhat “teashop” in manner – I liked the group’s way with the Trio’s hesitant angularities, and how the string lines were floated so gracefully overhead.

Again, the finale’s sombre, somewhat anxious opening melody recalled Robert, the cello playing counterpointing the violin’s and piano’s presentation of the theme, before the piano picked up the tonal weight of the music and launched into a fugal passage, most convincingly “grown” from what had come before – the players really dug into the textures, before the piano again took the lead, returning to the opening, catching once again the music’s sobriety, but allowing a second subject some Mendelssonian grace and charm. These musicians also knew how to generate physical excitement, throughout a coda which gathered together and built up a mood of defiant certainty and even triumph at the end – a most attractive work, as presented here.

Rarely has one composer so openly acknowledged another’s influence on a specific work as Ravel did of Saint-Saens regarding his Piano Trio. The younger composer greatly admired his older compatriot’s resourceful use of the differing qualities of each individual instrument, and strove to emulate his example. Unlike many of his contemporaries such as Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok and Prokofiev, all of whom found the Piano Trio medium posed too many difficulties, Ravel was determined to tackle its challenges. He planned the work well in advance, and at one stage told a friend that he had “finished the Trio, except for its themes”! – which meant that he had worked out the piece’s architecture and structure before focusing on the actual content.

Right from the beginning there could be no doubt as to the identity of the composer – such a distinctive sound-world, however in thrall the latter might have been to anybody else’s example!  Jian Liu’s magical playing of the “Basque” theme straightaway evoked Ravel’s characteristic other-worldliness, the strings in octaves adding strands of atmosphere to the ambience while keeping the textures tightly-focused. Even the tumble-down agitations had a light, feathery quality, as did the beautifully floated second subject, begun by the violin and limpidly accompanied by the other instruments – so lullaby-like, ethereal and tender. The players brought out the music’s ritualistic beauty, a dream-like ceremony, underlined by magical arpeggiations from the piano – gestures of transformation by wonderment! And, the movement’s end was pure enchantment, with sostenuto strings singing over softly chiming piano notes – the music here almost bewitching itself.

A playful, piquant scherzo movement alternated between surging impulses and more-or-less even-keeled trajectories throughout, the title Pantoum, somewhat obliquely referring to a type of Malayan poetry used by Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, rendered by Ravel in terms of musical structure (too hard to grasp for a bear of little brain such as I!) But the sounds! – by turns colourful flecks and scraps of phrases, and then exuberantly sweeping dance-steps in 3/4 time, followed a wonderful central section where firstly the piano, then the strings fitted themselves into the same rhythmic pattern with a graceful 4/2 chorale-like melody.  What freedom! – what colour!  – and what abandonment in the performance!

And what a contrast with the following Passacaille, Jian Liu’s  deep-throated piano-only opening building gradually to a rich and ritualistic outpouring of dignified emotion from all three instrumentalists, before the two string-players were left to take the music back to the depths from whence it came, handing the sombre lines back to the piano for a kind of return-to-the-source conclusion.

This having been buried deeply the finale straightaway found its antithesis in light and air, a wonderful kaleidoscope of impressions at the beginning, filled with those characteristic Ravelian impulses of colours and distinctive ambiences. From these beginnings the musicians drove the sounds unerringly through episodes of confluence and contrast – in places, tremendous attack from both Martin Riseley and Inbal Megiddo, along with great and forthright playing from Jian Liu. We thrilled, for instance, to those ringing mid-movement declamations from the keyboard, and were nonchalantly disarmed by the most beautifully murmured string trills, their dovetailing building up once again to some tumultuous tumblings of energy and well-being that carried us along in a Rimbaud-like “savage parade”.

At the end we were overwhelmed by a sense of these three musicians having risked all to bring about the music’s fruition, and triumphed – a great experience!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breaking the concert mould, with fateful results – Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents :
FATE

RODRIGO – Concierto Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra
SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Concerto No.2 in F Major Op. 102
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.4 in F Minor Op. 36

Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Andrey Lebedev (guitar)
Michael Houstoun (piano)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday September 5th 2015

Breaking the mould, as Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington have done repeatedly and successfully over the last few seasons, this concert presented no less than TWO concertos, and for different instruments! The orchestra could have gone the whole hog and asked Michael Houstoun to play the Tchaikovsky Second Piano Concerto after the interval (the one with the concerto-like parts for violin and ‘cello) – but the name of the concert would have then had to be altered, from “Fate” to something like “Concertomania”, or something.

Wisely, no such deviation was allowed, and so we were given the next Tchaikovsky Symphony in the composer’s numbered series, one whose theme was responsible for the concert’s “fateful” title. And, after the success the orchestra had achieved thus far with the first three of these works (I can testify to the excellence of the performances of No.1 (“WInter Daydreams”) and No.3 (“Polish”) – to my chagrin I missed that of the “Little Russian” – it was necessary that “the big three” (as Marc Taddei referred to them) needed to be tackled, and put across with the same kind of verve, brilliance and sensitivity as we’d already heard.

But the concert introduced a new and somewhat geographically removed element, a work which has nothing whatever to do with Russia – Spanish composer Joachim Rodrigo’s world-famous “Concierto de Aranjuez”. Wonderful though the music is, it was a slightly unnerving choice, followed immediately as it was by works associated with that part of Europe as far removed from the Iberian peninsula as it’s possible to get.

All was explained by a brief note in the programme leaflet available at the concert’s beginning – the presence of Rodrigo’s “Orange Juice” Concerto (as it was amusingly referred to by none other than Marc Taddei, speaking as part of a “between-the-items” presentation by Radio New Zealand Concert’s Clarissa Dunn) was part of a promotion by the Orchestra presenting winners of the Gisborne International Music Festival. This competition has certainly done its work in promoting the careers of many musicians well-known to New Zealand audiences, and others who have established themselves in musical careers overseas.

The 2013 winner of the Gisborne Competition was Australian guitarist Andrey Lebedev. I’m not sure whether he performed this concerto at Gisborne as one of his winning performances – but the work has certainly become the defining piece for any guitarist wanting to break into the “big time” world-wide. There are other concertos for the instrument – but none so popular and instantly recognizable. And yes, the ‘big tune ” of the slow movement has been made a hit in its own right, arranged for all different kinds of solo and ensemble combinations (the spoken presentation made reference to a well-known film “Brassed Off” in which the music was played by a solo cornet with a brass band accompaniment).

In a purely conventional context, players of the cor anglais everywhere have a lot to thank Rodrigo for, along with Dvorak in the “New Word” Symphony, of course – it’s a real gift of an orchestral solo, and was beautifully played, here – Marc Taddei got the player up for some well-earned applause at the concerto’s end. Rodrigo’s is actually a remarkable piece of composing – the concerto’s popularity has highlighted the luscious Hollywood-like tunes, but I think at the expense of some inventive treatments of the theme and parts of the theme, culminating in a very beautiful epilogue – a rhapsodic exchange between orchestra and soloist before the music just drifts into the ether – and straightaway, the march-like theme of the final movement begins, with again, inventive and endlessly beguiling treatments of the theme and harmonic variations of it, lots of piquancies and evocative guitar-like figurations from the orchestra.

The solo guitar was given a degree of amplification – expecting an acoustic guitar to make any great impact next to an orchestra in a concert hall like the Michael Fowler Centre is unrealistic, so it’s accepted that the instrument will, in some circumstances have some “help”. It must be a very hard thing to judge technically,and especially when one has to take into account the difference the presence of an audience makes. To my ears, it was here slightly overdone – it put the instrument slightly “out of scale” with the orchestra, and also into a different kind of acoustic regime – and it also made it difficult for the soloist to play really quietly in places, most notably in the “sotto voce” endings.

But I got used to the sound-picture, as one’s ears do with almost anything. One certainly didn’t miss any detail (including what sounded like a false entry – quickly corrected – from the guitarist during the slow movement!), and even within that slightly amplified sound-world there was a lot of light and shade in his playing, which was what I enjoyed. In some of the exchanges between guitar and the wind instruments, it was obvious that the guitar was in its own electro-acoustic world – but the difference was more realistic, for some reason, with the solo ‘cello in its lovely solo. Having said all of this, Andre Lebedev I thought brought out everything that was in the music for our absolute delight. I thought his playing really relished the piquancy of Rodrigo’s harmonies, and served notice to us that there’s a lot more to this music than the “big tune”, however important that is in getting people interested in the work in the first place – it’s really only the beginning!

The orchestra was a sensitive accompanying body – the playing, from both single instruments and from different sections nicely echoed the “guitar-style” manner of the work, much the same as most Spanish music for orchestra (and for solo piano) does. By contrast, in the work which followed, the orchestra found itself much more of an active protagonist, far more feisty and combatative in its interactions with the soloist. This was, of course, Michael Houstoun, playing his fourth Russian concerto in the concert series, and seemingly relishing every note. His brief on this occasion was the second of Shostakovich’s two piano concertos. Here, the transition from Rodrigo to Shostakovich wasn’t quite the schizophrenic experience it might have seemed on paper, because each work was in its way, merry, witty, festive and romantic.

Shostakovich wrote the concerto for his son Maxim as a nineteenth birthday present (the sort of things composers do “for” their children, one supposes!). One of Shotakovich’s first biographers, commenting on the music’s high spirits and sense of well-being, wrote “it was as though the composer’s youth had returned to him”, which puts the work’s dedication to Maxim in its appropriate context, far removed from the existentialist anguish of the symphonies, such as the recently completed Tenth. It’s no accident that the makers of the 2000 version of the Disney film Fantasia chose the first movement of this concerto to tell the animated story of the steadfast tin soldier, who goes into battle to defend a ballerina’s honour against the attentions of a malevolent jack-in-the-box, and after various heart-stopping adventures is able to return to reclaim his place beside her in the toy nursery.

We didn’t need the Disney film to “fill out” the scenarios, as the performance had all the energy, humour, theatricality and sentiment one could ask for. The orchestral winds which opened the concerto were spot-on with their perkiness, which Michael Houstoun’s piano lost no time in taking up. And though the Shostakovich fingerprints were soon in evidence – motoric energies and rising tides of harmonic ambience – it was all in the cause of generating high spirits and well-being, enormous washes of orchestral tone giving way to a cadenza from the soloist which picked up the energies again and whirled the movement to its exciting conclusion.

But it was then that the music would have REALLY raised the eyebrows of people familiar with the “usual” Shostakovich – we heard begin one of the most tender, lyrical and romantic pieces of writing for piano and orchestra imaginable. “It was like – well, like Chopin!” I heard one person say. And it was indeed, with bits of Rachmaninov thrown into the mix – in fact, one sequence sounded SO like the latter’s Second Piano Concerto, it was almost disorienting!  (I nearly said “disconcerting”, but thought better of it……). And then, out of these romantic ambiences came a chirpy-voiced piano figure, which returned us to the bright-eyed character of the first movement, summoning all the exuberance that was waiting in the wings onto the stage! This was the movement whose performance set everybody talking at the interval – I kept on hearing comments like “breathtaking!” “exciting!” “hair-raising!” and other expressions to that effect. It was all of those things, but especially the 7/8 sections where the missing “beat” tightened the music’s momentum and gave it a kind of headlong, unstoppable quality, firstly for orchestra and then the piano – it  was “Russian Dance” material with a twist, one that made it even more exciting and exhilarating.

So then, the “grim business” of the evening swung into play, with Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Marc Taddei said, when introducing the work, that he had asked the orchestra to play the “Fate” theme as broadly and darkly as he could get it to go, and the orchestra brasses certainly delivered the goods, right from the start – first the horns, then the heavy brass underneath snarling down the scale, and finally, gleaming at the top, the trumpets – and it all sounded fantastic! In short, the brass players did an incredible job, providing tremendous weight and brilliance. I must admit, any “live” performance of the opening of this symphony I hear puts me on edge, ever since my experience of hearing in concert, over forty years ago, Antal Dorati conduct the then NZBC Symphony in this work. At the rehearsal on the morning of the concert (so I was told by a friend who was there) Dorati walked out on the orchestra after telling the brass players they were incompetent – and so that evening the brasses were out to prove him wrong, which they did, a cracked note or two notwithstanding……..but the experience, though very exciting, was also, for those in the “know”, too razor-edged to be comfortable!

Well, Dorati would, I think, have been pleased with the Orchestra Wellington brass players – they did as good a job with this work as did the NZSO players the week previously with the Bruckner Eighth Symphony. The first movement of the Tchaikovsky seems to me to be one of the composer’s most demanding works, because it carries so much tension over such wide spans of music – and even the more lyrical bits sound as though they’re stepping gingerly upon coiled springs, which could go off at any moment. It all requires tremendous reserves of physical and emotional stamina to do the music proper justice – in fact the only other thing Tchaikovsky had written up to that point that was remotely as wild and full-blooded as this symphony’s opening movement was the tone-poem “Francesca da Rimini”, the previous year (1876). The players did the music and its composer proud – if the most tremendous moments seemed the preserve of the brass and timpani, the strings and winds also played their part. At the movement’s conclusion there was a sense of things being wrung out and exhausted, of having to pick things up once again from all over, and gradually rebuild and refurbish the spirit once more.

The two middle movements certainly did that – firstly by way of a typically Russian folk-song-like slow movement, and then a very exciting pizzicato-strings dance interspersed with droll interludes for wind and brass – all part of the “refurbishment of the spirit” whose devastation by fate had been presented to us by the opening movement. Again, the orchestra played marvellously (especially in the pizzicato-ostinato movement), and only a few bars of imprecise ensemble during the slow movement, caused by a late entry from one of the players, disturbed the brilliance and sheen of the playing (the sort of mishap that probably didn’t happen at the rehearsal!). As for the finale it was overwhelming in its impact, no more so than when the “Fate” theme returned unexpectedly, announced by no less then three sets of hand-cymbals (a spectacular sight!). From this “stroke of fate” Taddei and the orchestra gradually and patiently built up the “return to life” impulses, banishing all caution and plunging into frenzied expressions of excitement with great panache – “taking pleasure in the joy of others”, as the composer succinctly put it.

Onward to the remaining two symphonies – and, amid the on-going delights of this series with Michael Houstoun and Tchaikovsky, one wonders what Marc Taddei and his orchestra have got up their sleeves for 2016?

 

 

 

 

Aural (and visual) feast from Stroma at the Wellington City Gallery

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma, Wellington’s contemporary music ensemble, presents
INTERIORS

Music by Alison Isadora, Michael Norris, Jeroen Speak and Jack Body

Stroma
Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Wellington City Gallery,
Civic Square, Wellington

Sunday 30th August, 2015

Contemporary music ensemble Stroma performed at the Wellington City Gallery, in a space flanked on three sides by images created by photographer Fiona Pardington, whose exhibition “A Beautiful Hesitation”, brought an additional resonant and interactive context to the “sounded out” work of the composers. As the images suspended objects in time for us to register our thoughts and feelings about them, so too did the music seek to impinge its sound-impulses upon our sensibilities and memories – each a process of entrapment, display, re-evaluation and judgement, fascinatingly juxtaposed.

Stroma’s artistic director Michael Norris might well have been making reference to the visual exhibition as much as to his own work in the concert, when he wrote in his programme note regarding music and human memory,  and how it depends on “both the long-and short-term storage and recall of “aural echoes” of past events which might have occurred in the recent ….or distant past….”.  It’s a view of the process that accords with Fiona Pardington’s idea of photography’s power “to suspend time and interrogate our memories”.

On the programme was a world premiere – Jeroen Speak’s Eratosthene’s Sieve, written last year (2014) while the composer was the Creative New Zealand/Jack C.Richards Composer-in-Residence at Te Koko New ZEaland School of Music – and two other relatively recent works, Alison Isadora’s 2014 Point of Departure, and Michael Norris’s 2012 Time Dance. The fourth work was written by Jack Body, his 1987 piece called Interiors, which, as can be seen, gave its name to the concert.

Alison Isadora’s Point of Departure eponymously deserved its poll position in the concert, the music creating an “exotic” feeling of scene-setting for the listener’s delight and pleasure, with a string quartet’s distinctive timbres augmented by gong strokes and muffled drum-beats. The composer included lines from a work “Falling” by a Dutch Poet, Remco Campert, which I found singularly evocative:

In memory’s long fall
I seek the essential moment.
Above becomes beneath
and the earth comes swinging up.

She also pinpointed in her notes the “ferris wheel” idea, which, in the music is expressed as a feeling of ascending and then falling back, with throbbing pulsations underlining the sustained tones. So we got the occasional frisson of impulsive energy amid sostenuto likes, quite Debussy-like in effect, hence the slightly Oriental atmospheres generated, and an accompanying philosophic feeling that things are constantly in a kind of change, but return to their origins and begin, perhaps differently, all over again.

Amid the layerings and the explorations of these worlds in between, Alison Isadora’s disclosure of the circumstance of a colleague’s accidental death and how it coloured the piece’s second half added a whole new strata of response to the sounds for us, and deepening the ritualistic sense of it all – the percussive effects (snare-like drum beats and wood-block sounds were stinging, disruptive phrase-end punctuations which played their part in what the composer called the process of moving from anger to acceptance.

Michael Norris’s Time Dance, which followed evoked a markedly different kind of response from me, intrigued as I was by the prospect of the composer’s “deconstruction” of one of my favorite pieces of Baroque music, JS Bach’s Second Orchestral Suite (the one featuring the solo flute). The transformation was indeed a radical one – we were duly warned in the programme note as to the “subliminal” nature of our experience of the original piece’s essence!

This was a condensed concert version for piano quartet, presumably taken from Norris’s score for a 40-minute film “Time Dance”, a collaboration between the composer, choreographer/filmmaker Daniel Belton, and Good Company Arts. So we had four movements from the Suite, beginning with the Sarabande, followed by the Polonaise, Menuet and finally the Bandinerie. The Sarabande featured delicate piano figurations at the beginning, which strings turned into obstinate, enlivening the textures with pizzicati, the music resembling a mechanical device performing idiosyncratically, in places reverting to a “teashop” manner, with gestures resembling quasi-Viennese swooning.

Sustained arpeggiated notes from the piano began the Polonaise, the strings eagerly overlapping their figurations, the piano beautifully colouring each phrase’s flourish – the music’s phrases looped around, strung along, echoed and drew out, going into the stratospheric regions, giving us a sense of something suspended for all time. A contrasting response to this was provided by the Menuetto, the music busy, burrowing and motoric in the bass beneath sustained upper harmonies, the piano kaleidoscopically changing its chord-colours, and the phrases ending with upward-thrusting exclamations. The ‘cello kept the main rhythm going, but even its strength waned at the end as the music drooped and lay still.

The solo violin roused everybody in time for the Bandinerie with a cadenza-like sequence, everybody else joining in the ambient fun, the piano’s phrases and the strings’ tremolandi passages giving us a “lift” with their emphatic phrase-endings, and leading our sensibilities into and out of the thickets with their wonderfully unpredictable harmonic changes, everybody playing at their instruments’ extremities – as unpredictably, the music broke off into “other realms”, with harmonics and tremolandi from the strings, and curtain-opening-and-closing arpeggios from the piano. Bach may have been there subliminally, but I was too caught up in the here-and-now of it all to notice him!

Jereon Speak’s work Eratosthene’s Sieve was the evening’s world premiere, performed by an assorted ensemble of strings, flute, harp, accordion and percussion. The composer’s starting-point was the Greek philosopher Eratosthene’s “Sieve”, a device by which any prime number could be easily recognized, the music representing an attempt by its composer to similarly “sieve” his musical creations and constructions, and in the process discovering hitherto uncovered presences within this existing material.

Such a splendid array of instruments! – and how tellingly it all began, with breath (no tones) given by the accordion as a “gift of life” to the rest of the ensemble, whose initial pointillistic touches gradually became more animated with each succeeding wave of sound, the marimba, harp and vibraphone resonating magically. The music seemed to me to resemble an organic process at work (and, of course, maths, like music, is digitally, or step-wise organic), the coalescings seeking cues from their shared ambiences, and thus generating a definite sense of mutual expressiveness which informed each gesture.

Some Archimedian excitement then irrupted between ‘cello and percussion, stimulating what seemed like random, isolated responses from other instruments at first, all generating great excitement. The flute seemed to have a role of peacemaker towards the end of this sequence, as the energies dissipated, and a kind of “melting-down” of tones and their timbres, a “draining away” of energies, with the harp’s sustaining notes lengthening the shadows. Only the occasional flute scampering remained towards the end as a final act of impulse, the accordion’s breath evoking a dried leaf blowing across desolate desert sands at the piece’s end.

I was interested in the significance of the title Interiors given by Jack Body to his piece – he made many transcriptions of pieces of music from exotic places such as different regions of China, wanting in particular to capture some of the music from ethnic minority groups. These were undertakings that involved the making of “in situ” field recordings, and devising various instrumental “backdrops” to these recordings, to enhance the listener’s appreciation of the original music’s “interior”.  The work we heard tonight involved three separate recordings of ethnic performances, two instrumental and one vocal. The largest instrumental group of the evening was on hand to contribute various augmentations of these sounds.

First was that of a long-ge, a Sichuan version of a Jew’s harp, the recorded instrument’s easy, loping rhythm reinforced by clarinet and flute and joined by violin and ‘cello, with the piano adding its own excitement to the mix. Then, in contrast with the dance rhythms, the pianist “activated” the piano’s interior, the percussionist “bowed” the vibraphone and various scintillations held time and its passing in abeyance, leaving long exhalations of melody to drift lazily away. A lovely contrast to this was afforded by a recording of three women from Guizhou singing a forthright melody, the instrumentalists supporting and colouring their singing lines with lovely, long-held notes, and continuing to play over the spoken exchanges between the singers recorded on the tape in between verses.

Something of this “anecdotal” re-enactment technique also coloured the final recording, that of an ensemble, no less, of lusheng, the instrument a six-pipe bamboo mouth-organ common in the south of China, and throughout South-East Asian in various forms. A plastic westernized version of one of these was used by one of the ensemble, as the other instrumentalists supplied various counterpoints to the mouth-organ ensemble, and occasional hand-clapping, adding to the festive character of the piece – and we in the audience enjoyed (and joined in with) a delicious and spontaneous-sounding bout of giggling on the tape after the music finished! What a concert!

Cathedrals and landscapes – delight and awe with the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
CATHEDRAL OF SOUND
Sibelius and Bruckner

SIBELIUS – Violin Concerto in D Minor  Op.47
BRUCKNER – Symphony No.8 in C Minor (original version)

Baiba Skride (violin)
Simone Young AM (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 28th August, 2015

Sibelius and Bruckner on the same programme? – bracing cocktails of icy spring water, followed by restorative draughts of schnapps, or, perhaps, aromatic coffee? (that is, to say, their musical equivalents!)……..an intriguing prospect, one that didn’t arise the last time Simone Young was in New Zealand to conduct Bruckner with the NZSO. Paired with his mighty Fifth Symphony on that occasion was the music of Mozart, Bruckner’s fellow-countryman. The choice of the two composers seemed impeccable, logical and simple.

This time the works were Sibelius’s Violin Concerto and Bruckner’s even more imposing Eighth Symphony – and what was more, Simone Young was to present the original version of the Bruckner, the first time it had been given in this country. Interestingly enough, each of the two works, for all their inherent differences, had birthing difficulties, both undergoing extensive revisions at the hands of their respective composers, though under vastly different circumstances.

Sibelius’s original work was performed, none too successfully, and then withdrawn by the composer, who altered the work greatly, in particular simplifying the difficulties of the solo part. A year later, the work was freshly performed, and was received with enthusiasm, this revised score being the one which is used by performers to this day. (Incidentally, the original version – fascinating to listen to – has been recorded on the BIS label.)

In Bruckner’s case, the composer’s agony began even before his new work was performed – after finishing the symphony in 1887 he was downcast at the response to the score from the same conductor, Hermann Levi, who had achieved such a success with the composer’s Seventh Symphony. Declaring in a note to the composer that he found the music “impossible”, Levi suggested “a reworking” of the piece, and Bruckner, ever willing to comply, spent until 1890 revising the work, which, however, had to wait a further two years before its first performance in Vienna, in 1892.

If never the popular success that was its predecessor, the Eighth Symphony in its revised form is today frequently performed, though a handful of conductors (Young is one of them) have insisted on championing the original version. The differences are too numerous to discuss in a review of this size, though there are instantly noticeable features which demarcate the two editions – the ending of the first movement (blazing in the original, but deathly hushed in the revised version), the trio section of the scherzo (no harps in the original version, and with whole sections of the music recomposed in the revision), and the slow movement’s great climax (six cymbal crashes in the original version, reduced to a single stroke in the revision) – and so on.

Asked in interview why she preferred Bruckner’s original versions of his symphonies (she has recorded them all with her Hamburg Orchestra, to great acclaim), Young talked about these first attempts as “honest visions of a complex and very introverted man, whose first versions of the works were monumental structures, which some musicians of the time felt were impossible to cope with.” She also recounted the response of present-day players in different places to these original works, their enthusiasm and excitement regarding the challenges of being pushed out to extremes, particularly in this symphony, taking the opportunity to praise the NZSO’s work in rehearsal in these respects as well.

So we were set to witness great things, not the least when violinist Baiba Skride stepped out onto the platform to play the Sibelius with Simone Young, in front of the NZSO. I had heard the violinist a few years before, playing Tchaikovsky with the orchestra, and remembered a distinctive “way” she had with the concerto on that occasion – and so it was, in a different manner, with the Sibelius. She began the work in a rapt, inward way, her tone incredibly sweet and magically ‘floated”, her line with little of the nervous intensities or throbbing anxieties that we usually hear – instead, this seemed to be the voice of a soul communing with nature. A brief double-stopping intonation “edge” apart, her playing was free and pure, the touch as light as air, and the orchestral support (a lovely viola solo) properly restrained, dark and richly detailed.

Throughout the movement soloist and orchestra “played off” one another most engagingly, from moments of supporting songful utterances, to exhilarating hide-and-seek impulses, the violin dancing like a wood-sprite through the orchestral tree-trunks, laughter sounding amid the occasional baleful snarlings from darker places. The slow movement beautifully poeticized these soundscapes at the outset, except I found the horns became too insistent in places, the conductor’s bringing-out of the “middle textures” too much of a good thing, submerging the soloist’s heartfelt lines and overbalancing the textures. Still, the violinist was able to recapture the serenity of the music over the final pages, which were beautifully sounded.

More appropriate was conductor Young’s bringing out of those same middle voices in the polonaise-like finale, including the timpani, whose crisply-articulated figures added to the music’s exuberance – the soloist also really “dug in” here, giving the music a kind of “dancing on an ice-floe” character, while the orchestra’s nature-sounds literally buzzed and rumbled all about her – I loved the muted horns’ feisty “buzzings”, in particular! And what great blazing-up of orchestral weight there was mid-movement! – as if all nature was joining in the dance! I particularly enjoyed Baiba Skride’s crystalline upward runs, the final note of each ascending impulse “pinged” with such exuberance and joy!

While Skride didn’t perhaps “command” her instrument with the absolute totality of a Janine Jansen (whom we had heard earlier in the year), I thought her performance no less committed to the music and as fully attuned to its particular character in a pleasingly individual way. The music and playing certainly cleared our musical sinuses in preparation for the copious draughts of symphonic argument that were to follow, courtesy of Anton Bruckner and his greatest symphony.

Having lived for some time with Simone Young’s Hamburg recording of this piece in its original form, I knew something of what to expect from her – she had spoken in her interview of a previous era of Bruckner interpretations featuring “heavier, more laden performances”, and how she had worked to energize and lighten those textures in her own readings. Such was the case here – with every phrase, one sensed the music moving in a purposeful, far-sighted, and clearly-focused manner, intently set upon goals which would take the time they needed to be achieved, and no more. One noticed throughout the first movement the perfectly-graded dynamics, the ebb and flow of impulse and the sense of some vast scheme unfolding as it should.

And what a splendid sound the orchestra made! If Simone Young was right, then the NZSO’s recent excursions into Wagner’s music with the recently-departed Music Director Pietari Inkinen were here paying off most satisfyingly. Though not producing quite as “rounded” a sound-fabric as one might hear on recordings from Vienna or Berlin or Amsterdam from the great resident orchestras in those places, the players seemed to be committing every fibre of their being to delivering what their conductor wanted – a warm, rich, but always transparent sound, through which plethora of tones all the instruments could “speak”. In any performance of any Bruckner symphony the brass need to be out-and-out heroes – and so it was here, with two full rows of players (including a group playing those beautiful instruments we know as “Wagner-tubas”) making sounds which brought all the magnificence of Bruckner’s scoring to glorious life for our wide-eared and open-mouthed pleasure.

So it was that the first movement mightily ran its course, Young never making overmuch of any great upheaval, nor lingering too fulsomely upon any contrastingly lyrical sequence, but keeping the underlying pulse of the giant organism throbbing (despite dropping her baton at one point in the excitement!) – in this way, the sudden outburst at the movement’s end (which Bruckner later excised, and over which circumstance the otherwise excellent programme note was misleading) seemed like a naturally-expressed on-going expression of defiance, a “serving of intent” for what was to follow. Of course, straight away, this was the scherzo, perhaps Bruckner’s mightiest among other titanic utterances, a true “gods at play” display of divine exuberance. This was the movement which “led me into” the work in my student days, and which never fails to stir the blood most satisfying.

Bruckner later thought better of some of his bolder harmonic shifts in his rewriting, and of the exuberant extent of his hammering ostinati patterns, some of which he cut from the scherzo’s main body. But he also reworked most of the trio section (I heretically confess to a sneaking preference for the harps the composer added to the later version of this sequence – first loves are not easily let go! – though I appreciate that the use of those celestial tones at this point detracts from their heart-easing impact upon the slow movement’s yearnings….) which here represented a kind of unveiling of a statue of great beauty, its impact far-reaching and profoundly moving in an austere, even visionary way, amid the madness of the cosmic dance. Afterwards, what joy and abandonment there was, when the dance returned, with brass and timpani hurling their tones back and forth among the mountaintops.

But this was mere play compared with what followed – the symphony’s slow movement, the composer’s most heartfelt utterance to date in his creative career, more so, even, than his lament at Richard Wagner’s passing in the slow movement of the Seventh Symphony. Bruckner’s original conception has his own sensibilities on the rack in places, aspiring, hesitating, crying out, falling back and beseeching, before finally risking all and bringing his very being’s fibre into prominence in the grandest possible way (underlined by six mighty cymbal crashes!). Though his revision of the movement is tidier and less discursive, its spontaneously-wrought essence isn’t by comparison nearly as flavorsome, its relatively cumulative course more abstract than truly heartfelt – though, undoubtedly (as with all great music) there’s a “take from it what you will” dynamic very much for the picking of any listener.

Here, with Simone Young and the intrepid band, the music’s course unfolded as organically as any set of common impulses harnessed to a purpose – I was lost in admiration of the brass’s playing, and absolutely in thrall to the composer’s juxtaposing of the horns with the Wagner tubas, having it laid out before my eyes, so to speak – and with the rest of the orchestra as eager participants in the ritual of sound, creating the “cathedral” alluded to in the concert’s publicity. From Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s occasional solo violin strands, through individual and ensembles wind utterances, richly-wrought string passages and noble brass chorales to tumultuous tutti passages with everybody playing their hearts out, the performance made its way to the music’s summit, before basking in the afterglow of the journey’s achievement, during which a trio of horns (and later the Wagner tubas) exchanged long-breathed phrases by way of bringing forth one of the most sublime codas known to symphonic music of any era – such a privilege to be able to sit in the hall with those musicians during that special moment in time and listen to this music being realized so beautifully.

However, this wasn’t an “unfinished” symphony – and the finale burst in, carrying all before it, the timpani sounding off like gunshots in response to the opening brass fanfares. In many ways this is the most demanding movement of the symphony as it’s so discursive and wide-ranging – heroic, romantic, pastoral, anguished, tender, ruminative, in fact every mood jostling for a place in the scheme of things. Simone Young gave the different strands enough leeway to be able to express their concerns while keeping the music’s momentum firmly set upon the symphony’s great concluding peroration, asking for and receiving full-blooded responses from the players right through to the work’s final shouts of homecoming and fulfillment. At the end the audience’s reception accorded conductor and orchestra whole-hearted and richly-deserved acclaim and appreciation.

The NZSO is repeatedly proving itself as an orchestra which delivers what’s required for such big occasions – and now that Young has left Hamburg to pursue a freelance conducting career, we wish her continued success, while hoping that she includes this country as a regular port of call, particularly as there are several more Bruckner Symphonies whose first editions await their premieres in this particular part of the world. She and the NZSO would on Friday evening have certainly put a girdle around the earth along which the composer’s shade, from his resting-place in Austria, would have danced in joy.