Author: Peter Mechen

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

Basilica of the Sacred Heart
Hill St., Wellington

Thursday 14th April 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Circa Theatre Revisits Home-Grown Chronicles

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents
“Joyful and Triumphant” by Robert Lord

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

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

Circa Theatre, Taranaki St., Wellington

playing until May 7th 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MAHLER – Symphony No.3 in D Minor

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

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 2nd April 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul,

Tuesday 15th March, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brass Poppies – ordinary people at war

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Stroma New Music Ensemble

Shed 6, Wellington

Thursday 3rd March 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Ramón Jaffé (‘cello)
Catherine McKay (piano)

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

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Tuesday 1st March 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worlds brought more closely together – the Miyata-Yoshimura-Suzuki Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music NZ and the New Zealand Festival present:
MIYATA-YOSHIMURA-SUZUKI TRIO
Music from Japan and New Zealand

Mayumi Miyata (shō)
Nanae Yoshimura (koto)
Tosiya Suzuki (recorder)

CHRIS GENDALL – Choruses
OSAMU KAWAKAMI – Phoenix Chicken
SAMUEL HOLLOWAY – Mono
TOSHIO HOSOKAWA – Bird Fragments 111b
DYLAN LARDELLI – Retracing

TRADITIONAL – Banshiki no Choshi (for shō)
Tsuru no Sugomori (Nesting of Cranes – solo recorder)
Chidori no Kyoku (for koto and voice)

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

Sunday 28th February, 2016

For a time it seemed as though the world had realigned its meridian intersects and taken St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace and its occupants north of the equator to somewhere in Japan. Woven into this enchanted web of things were a trio of musicians, a clutch of composers and a spell-bound audience, united for a brief time to wondrous and magical effect by means of exotic strains and realizations, wrought by the performers. The latter were inspired by both traditional work and present-day creativity, performing a programme of music with age-old folk-music presented side-by-side with new compositions from both Japanese and New Zealand composers.

Not for these musicians a performing world of merely antiquities, featuring only museum pieces or cultural artifacts from bygone ages – the trio has encouraged living composers to write for their instrumental combinations as well as for the solo instruments – a glance at a list of composers who have worked with these musicians indicates their involvement in music-making as a living and creative tradition, besides paying homage to the great works of the past.

All of this would be of specialist interest only, were not the actual sounds created by the instruments in this ensemble of such beauty, poignancy and atmosphere. Whether playing together or individually, the sounds and timbres brought with them such strongly-flavoured and sharply-focused evocations as to hold our attentions in thrall for timeless durations. The concert’s opening took us straight to such a sound-world, by way of Mayumai Miyata’s playing of the shō, a traditional Japanese mouth-organ, the musician giving us a traditional work, Banshiki no Chosi.

I found the listening experience arresting, if at first a little disconcerting through not being able to clearly see the player’s face (I can’t think of another instrument that’s similarly designed – the mouthpiece is at the bottom, so that the instrument’s “body”, when held up to play, almost completely obscures the player’s facial expression and any movement associated with the physical act of breathing. Still the strains made by the instrument are so ethereal and unworldly, that this “disembodied” effect given by the player isn’t inappropriate. The timbres were not unlike the highest notes of an organ played softly and sustained for great, long-breathed periods of utter calm and serenity.

Chris Gendall’s piece Choruses, which followed, was anything but serene, resembling choruses of  wild things uttering long-drawn cries, punctuated by excitable flurries of energy. The shō player.Mayumai Miyata had exchanged her instrument for a lighter, wood-grained affair, though I couldn’t discern a difference in sound-quality to that of the previous item – the instrument exhibited the same kinds of ethereal ambiences, with many variations of intensity.  I had difficulty observing the recorder-player, Tosiya Suzuki, as the composer, (Chris Gendall, who was conducting) kept getting in the way, though the sounds made by the player via his instrument certainly had a mournful and volatile impact upon the whole.

No such impediment obscured my view of the koto player, Nanae Yoshimura, who coaxed from her instrument a range and depth of expression which I found remarkable, not only in the music’s more forceful sequences, but in the sustaining resonance of the lower timbres. The music seemed to me to set different time-frames together, as if they were warring relativities – as with peace and war, calm and tumult, chaos and clarity, we experienced through the music a series of “altered states” which left its impression upon us long after the sounds had ceased. Each of the instruments contributed to the contrasting effect of these opposing realities, a point from a different view, or state of mind, one that left this listener more-than-usually sensitized to disruptive potentialities!

The trio again took the stage to perform Osamu Kawakami’s somewhat disconcertingly titled work Phoenix Chicken – the only clue to this mystery was the equally enigmatic comment in the composer’s printed biographical note: – “Kawakami is deeply interested in living creatures, and many of his works (including Phoenix Chicken) have been titled after them”. Tosiya Suzuki had exchanged his flute-like recorder for one of the largest I had ever encountered – whether a great bass, or sub-great-bass, contra bass, or sub-contra bass I didn’t know, but it impressed with its looks alone, and it made a splendid noise!

How helpful the Phoenix Chicken title was for the listener I wouldn’t have liked to have guessed at in general – perhaps some contextual reference of which I remained blissfully aware! To me the piece seemed to deal with different kinds of rhythmic complexities and tensions, building them up through interaction and then dissipating them, the recorder augmenting the textures with various kinds of bird calls, gurgling  and chuckling, as if pursuing a kind of separate internal rhythmic pulse. The koto mused over melodic figures in a cimbalon-like way, varying the figurations beautifully with strummed chords augmented by interjections from the shō, a texture through which the recorder lurched and strutted like some kind of living creature, the music’s last few measures resembling some kind of poultrified climax!

Birds of a different kind of feather then glided gently into our ambient sensibilities with the magically-distanced beginning of the folk-inspired Tsuru no Sugomori (“Nesting of Cranes”), Tosiya Suzuki here exchanging his hookah-like contraption for a recorder about the size of a clarinet. He used this new instrument to convey at once a sense of the spaces into which the birds flew to build their nests, via graceful phrasings and resonant tonguings. The music introduced new calls throughout, including one sounding uncannily to my ears like a quote from Sibelius’s “The Swan of Tuonela”, amid the diametrically different surroundings of the Japanese piece.

A similar kind of spatial experience using a very different harmonic language was provided by Samuel Holloway’s Mono, the music beginning with what seemed like a tentative exploration of a scale and octave, the instruments making their unisons and individual notes like depth-soundings in reverse, pushing gently upwards and outwards as if creating spaces in a void, energizing the inert spaces where there was nothing except the will to receive and to be impregnated with impulses. After establishing some kind of acoustic domain, and pausing to consider how best to proceed, the music then tried some semitone ascents, involving slow repetition of single notes before moving upwards, a fascinating/frustrating/despairing process of laying bare that which silence had hitherto concealed – almost like Michelangelo’s famous slaves slowly emerging from the raw marble, frozen with tremulous wonderment at having been given their freedom in any degree or part.

Toshio Hosokawa used just two instruments to express his work Bird Fragments IIIb, the shō paired with the recorder, enough to evocatively set ground-fowls against a high-fliers! The ethereal tones of the shō at the outset conjured up images of elegance and graceful beauty, until the entry of the recorder’s timbres brought an angular, at times raucous presence to the sound-picture. This intensified with the introduction of a smaller recorder, capable of the most ear-splitting squeals, until the tones of the shō finally prevailed and order of sorts was restored.

With a third traditional piece, Chidori no Kyoku, Nanae Yoshimura demonstrated to us the expressive qualities of the solo koto, a kind of Oriental dulcimer, capable of conveying a vast array of tones, timbres and colours. I was pleasantly surprised to find the piece was actually a song, which Nanae Yoshimura delivered with pleasantly plangent tones, at first activating her instrument with a brief introduction containing a flourish and a short but dignified processional sequence before beginning to sing. The music gave an impression of great depth of melancholy, the player varying the vocal line with the occasional tremolando effect, before breaking into a quicker dance tempo – one might have interpreted the sliding figure at the end as a dry death-rattle or else a strengthening of resolve to dispense with the song and go on throughout life, taking it as it comes.

It was left to Dylan Lardelli and his beautiful work, Retracing, for the ensemble plus a guitar (played by the composer) to conclude the evening’s music. At the beginning the recorder (here, played as if it were a transverse flute) and then the shō breathed on the wind to one another, the guitar adding its voice with a few low notes as the “dialogue of winds”  grew in intensity, before being joined by the softly-strumming koto. Occasionally the recorder and shō made attention-grabbing sounds, goading the guitar and koto into a response, and animating the discourse, a dynamic which all too soon reverted to those half-lit ambiences of the opening. Particularly beautiful were the guitar’s pin-pricks of light gently punctuating the firmament of sound, everything generating a sense of emotion recollected in tranquility.

Was it a kind of re-exploration of youthful impulses? – the gently pulsating sounds seemed to re-evoke memories, but at the same time surrender them to the inexorable tread of time – it was all, at once, beautiful and desolate. Still, one wouldn’t have wanted the afternoon’s music-making to end otherwise, as the musical worlds we were taken into were, for the most part, of such a delicate and fragile nature. In fact they demonstrated something we need to be reminded of occasionally, in this frantic, insistent world we’ve created for ourselves, that simplicity and understatement have a power and resonance all of their own to refresh and renew our human spirits.

Monteverdi gets keen, sharp-edged and exciting treatment

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Claudio MONTEVERDI – Vespers of the Blessed Virgin of 1610
New Zealand Festival 2016

Concerto Italiano
Rinaldo Alessandrini (director)

Michael Fowler Centre,
Wellington

Saturday, 27th February 2016

There was certainly a festive spirit around and about the Michael Fowler Centre leading up to the performance on Saturday evening of Claudio Monteverdi’s resplendent Vespers of 1610, to be given by the highly-acclaimed visiting baroque ensemble Concerto Italiano with their director Rinaldo Alessandrini.

The performance fulfilled all expectations, managing even to transcend the venue’s drab, determinedly secular vistas and ambiences. My last encounter with this music “live” having been in the atmospheric precincts of St.Mary of the Angels Church here in Wellington, it took a while for me to supersede my resonant expectations and recontextualise the sounds made by Concerto Italiano – here, a far tighter, more focused sound-picture, emphasizing clarity and transparency ahead of any layered ecclesiastical context of listening.

Of course the focus and brilliance of the singing and playing drew me into the group’s very different sound-world before too long – and even though I would still have preferred a church setting in which to experience this work, I was ultimately carried away by the beauty, wonderment, excitement and depth of feeling of it all – things which go to make up the full force of the festival experience!

Having said all of this, it’s ironic that this work by Monteverdi, regarded as one of the cornerstones of the baroque vocal-and-instrumental repertoire, and on a par with similar iconic masterpieces such as Bach’s B Minor Mass and Handel’s Messiah, was written by its composer more as a kind of showcase of his composing talents than a public expression of personal faith. In fact, it appears to have been performed only once in the composer’s lifetime, and then, not for over three hundred years afterwards.

At the age of forty-three, Monteverdi wanted a change from being in the service of the Duke of Mantua, and so arranged for the publication of his Vespers in 1610 to advertise his wares as a composer. It didn’t land him the job he REALLY wanted (Master of Music at the Papal Chapel in Rome), but it helped get him something nearly as good – Master of Music at the prestigious St. Mark’s Church in Venice. The rest, as they say in the classics, is history.

So the 1610 Vespers represent Monteverdi as a composer of a number of different styles of sacred music which he had produced during his time in Mantua, and here put in the form of a single liturgical service. The scholarly arguments over what ought to go into the Vespers from Monteverdi’s publication for whatever  structural or liturgical reasons have raged about this music for years, ever since the work was taken up once again in the 1930s.  The upshot of all this is that there seems to be no one “correct” version of the work, and that every performance is therefore, as expressed by the writer of an article in the festival program about the music’s history, “a unique experience”.

Though comparisons with the previous performance I had heard in Wellington six years ago (referred to above) are largely academic for all of the above reasons, each one on its own terms proclaimed the music a masterpiece with stunning and often breath-taking conviction. From the earlier performance I continue to cherish things such as the performances of the two soprano soloists, who remain hors concurs in my experience – good though the female singers of Concerto Italiano were, neither put across the music’s beauty, colour, sensuality and even erotic impulse, to the same extent as did Pepe Becker and Jayne Tankersley in St.Mary of the Angels, especially in the vocal concerto Pulchra es, as well as in the Psalmus 147 Lauda Jerusalem, with interactions and dovetailing highlighting what the remainder of the singers were doing most delightfully.

My other enduring memory of the earlier performance relates to its physical setting, allowing a wonderful and engaging immediacy in overall effect for we in the audience/congregation – for me, greater than was to be had in the MFC – and a more atmospheric sound-picture in St.Mary’s giving both vocal and instrumental tones splendid resonance, as well as allowing for especially stunning antiphonal effects (though Concerto Italiano’s off-stage efforts were exquisite and magical in their own way).

So now, having satisfied my urge to relive some of the more memorable aspects of the work’s previous Wellington performance, I can now at last turn to the real point of this review and consider Concerto Italiano’s stimulating and satisfying rendition of the music. As I’ve said, it took me some time to get on the performance’s wavelength, but as each section took its turn to unfold, I found myself more and more drawn into the music’s world and that of the group’s strongly-focused realizations. Throughout the particularly arresting section featuring the motet Nigra sum, words taken from the biblical Song of Solomon and pertaining to the Virgin Mary, I was spellbound – here sung by a tenor and accompanied by a pair of theorbos (instruments similar to lutes but with lengthy fretboards and strings), the music achieved an intimate, heartfelt quality, ranging from passionate declamation to raptly-voiced wonderment on the part of the singer.

Though not quite matching the élan and physicality of the earlier performance I’d heard of Pulchra es, the singers gave their exuberant flourishes sufficient energy to make a stirring impression, before throwing themselves into the complexities of the coloratura of Psalm 121, Laetatus sum, the music’s rollicking pyrotechnics concluding with a Gloria. The men’s voices then purposefully tackled another motet, Duo Seraphim, the singers relishing the piece’s fantastically rapid note-repetition, before combining with the rest of the ensemble to deliver the Psalm 126 with grandeur at first, and then energy, as the music switched engagingly to three-four time – a great first-half closer!

We enjoyed the onstage/offstage echoes of the tenors’ exchanges during the motet Audi coelum, the music having a luscious, exotic “feel” about it, a mood which the entry of additional voices and a quicker tempo set upon its head in the tumult which followed, the harmonies of the music taking on a lovely ongoing, “rolling” quality. And I so enjoyed the deftness of the music’s interweaving during the following Lauda, Jerusalem, Dominum, the syncopated figurations generating tremendous “schwung” – well, its Venetian equivalent, anyhow – finishing with a hymn-like grandeur of utterance, again, with a rolling, surging “Amen” that was a thrill to experience.

What gorgeously rich harmonies were floated, hymn-like, for our pleasure at the beginning of Ave maris stella! And how tenderly both strings and brass by turns contributed gently-voiced, dance-like reprises to the verses! This was, however, but a prelude to the splendors of the Magnificat which concluded the work, beginning with grand declamations and passages of florid vocal decoration intensifying the radiance of the opening words, and concluding with a Gloria which built upwards from an amazing “statement-and echo” sequence between two tenors into a mighty peroration from both singers and instrumentalists, effectively giving the lie to my opening impression of a certain smallness of scale from the brass. The trombones, especially, contributed a truly awe-inspiring sonority to the panoply of sounds ringing through the auditorium.

At the work’s end Alessandrini and his singers and players were treated to a standing ovation, as well they might have been – a truly festive occasion!

Messiah with the NZSO – age cannot wither, nor custom stale….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
MESSIAH (Handel)

Nicholas McGegan (conductor)
Anna Leese (soprano)
Sally-Anne Russell (mezzo-soprano)
Steve Davislim (tenor)
James Clayton (bass)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
NZSO Messiah Chorale
Mark W.Dorrell (chorusmaster)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 12th December, 2015

NZSO boss Chris Blake understandably waxed lyrical in a welcoming programme note over the orchestra’s espousal of a fourth consecutive year’s presentation of Messiah, this time round in the expert directorial hands of renowned Baroque exponent Nicholas McGegan.

In terms of audience response, the near sold-out house spoke for itself – and while Messiah seems to draw people in like no other, the presence of McGegan, star soprano Anna Leese, and a hand-picked choral group, the NZSO Messiah Chorale no less, would have in this instance fuelled plenty of extra interest.

Of course, the work itself is like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra – “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety”, a state of things partly due to the music’s inherent perennial freshness, and partly to its Baroque origins. In keeping with the times, Handel and his composer contemporaries had an intensely pragmatic attitude towards music and its performance, one which put any ideas of posterity and its judgements far behind more immediate and practical concerns.

In the case of Messiah these concerns brought into being different versions of the work based on early performances in different locations and with different performers, hereby giving the music something approaching a schizoid pedigree. No single “authentic” version of Messiah exists, the composer both instigating and sanctioning many optional settings of the individual numbers, as well as re-ordering or even suppressing certain of these to suit different circumstances.

The Handel scholar Winton Dean underlined this point in no uncertain terms in a 1967 article in London’s  “The Musical TImes” discussing two recently-published editions of the work, stating, somewhat combatatively – “There is still plenty for scholars to fight over, and more than ever for conductors to decide for themselves – indeed, if they are not prepared to grapple with the problems presented by the score they ought not to conduct it.”

For this reason every separate performance of the work is something of a listening adventure (and the same goes for almost every recording). Surprises, delights and disappointments for listeners are thus inevitable components of these experiences, as each person waits for his or her “favourite” numbers. Many of the latter are, of course, guaranteed their place, and rightly so – but there are a goodly number whose presence in any given performance simply can’t be taken for granted – and surprises of this nature do occur.

One such surprise for me happened in this performance – the removal of the central section of the aria He was despised, sung in this case by a mezzo-soprano. I didn’t notice until afterwards that the text in the programme omitted the words from “He gave his back to the smiters” to the end, so that all we got was the deep-felt, meditative opening, one described by historian Charles Burney as having “the highest idea of excellence in pathetic expression or any English song with which I am acquainted”.

Of course, what normally heightens the pathos of this whole opening is the contrast with the central section and its jagged, insistent treatment accorded the words. Not, I fear, on this occasion, the opening being left to speak for itself. Another truncation (though one not quite so injurious) was in Part Three, which brought us a tad hastily to the final “Worthy is the Lamb” and its linked “Amen” chorus – options taken in other years such as the duet “O death, where is thy sting?”, the chorus “But thanks to God” and the aria, “If God be for us”  were not on this occasion used.

Conductor McGegan was certainly no slouch, driving the music along in appropriate places, achieving, for example, with the help of his soprano a wonderful frisson of orchestral excitement in the music leading up to the Heavenly Hosts singing “Glory to God”. For me there were one or two places he could have allowed a bit more rhythmic space for his choir to “point” their words – His yoke is easy, for example, whose quicker sections were, I felt, a bit smoothed out in effect. But, at one hour and fifty minutes’ playing-time, though it was, I think, the shortest Messiah I’ve ever attended, it was nevertheless a tribute to the sheer focus and concentration of the performers that the work retained its sense of grandeur and visionary sweep right through to the end.

Throughout the orchestral playing was terrific, the faster music tingling with tensile excitement at the strength and flexibility of the melodic lines, with the various counterpoints well served by their different voices. And the slower music to my ears floated and blended some lovely hues, for example in the gentle radiance of He shall feed His flock. Individual players distinguished themselves – trumpeter Michael Kirgan’s bright and shining The trumpet shall sound, and timpanist Larry Reese’s alert, detailed, and (in the Amen chorus’s final measures) resplendent contributions, to name but two of the stand-out examples.

The hand-picked NZSO Messiah Chorale (presumably a kind of one-off assemblage of some of the capital’s best voices) made a brilliant impression throughout, obviously reflecting the quality of their preparation with Mark Dorrell, until recently the Orpheus Choir’s Music Director. Though with fewer numbers than groups we sometimes get in the work, this choir put across the text with whatever quality was required for each sequence – energy, brilliance, warmth, reverence, or sheer grandeur – and the voices certainly weren’t spared by their conductor in places, whose tempi would have, in places, challenged their capabilities to the limit.

What struck me was the sheer focus of the sound throughout all sections, a quality which came to the fore most forcefully in places like the opening of Surely He hath borne our griefs, the opening declamations in themselves resembling scourge-blows upon Christ’s body, but registered just as tellingly in quieter moments such as the opening of Since by Man came death. In this way the different “characters” of the music emerged, underlining the work’s aforementioned capacity to continually surprise and delight.

Naturally, the four soloists have an integral part to play in this process – and each afforded pleasures of different kinds with their eager responses to the words and the beauties of their singing. If I say that I thought the voice of mezzo-soprano Sally-Anne Russell seemed in places to struggle to convey enough body of tone to make her words really “live”, it’s no reflection on her actual voice and stage presence, which I enjoyed – I merely think that the low-ish tessitura of those particular numbers needs a “proper” alto voice to put them across with the force and focus the music requires. Interestingly enough, the decision not to perform the central section of He was despised  worked in her favour, as she was able to tackle those affecting opening declamations (some unaccompanied) with great feeling and presence, and not have to then “fight” to be heard over the orchestra in the “He gave his back” sequences.

Tenor Steve Davislim began with a sweetly-projected Comfort Ye, more lyrical than heroic at the outset, though his tones took on the required heft for the “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” sections. But I thought he really shone in places in the work’s Second Part, conveying pity and empathy in places like All they that see Him, and Thy rebuke hath broken His heart in stark contrast to the chorus’s brutal He trusted in God – wonderful, dramatic  stuff!  And I’ve sung bass James Clayton’s praises in this music before (though not in Middle C), and needs must do so again – he gave the impression of “owning” his music completely. I did think the music’s transition from darkness to light in For behold, darkness shall cover the earth was a little rushed under McGegan’s direction, and therefore slightly less of a visceral experience than was Why do the Nations? during which conductor, orchestra and singer nailed all of its energy and excitement, with skin and hair flying all over the place!

Wellington audiences have been fortunate in hearing sopranos of the calibre of Anna Leese and Madeleine Pierard in recent years in this work, doubly so when considering how different the experience of hearing each one is – which, of course, is how it should be! After the Pastoral Symphony, Anna Leese’s vocal purity was put to perfect use when evoking that first Christmas Night, with celestial frissons of radiant light and angelic singing scattered across the firmament. She then scintillated through the coloratura of Rejoice greatly before taking it in turns most effectively with Sally-Anne Russell to deliver the two-tiered He shall feed His flock/Come unto Him, each singer playing her part in the creation of an ambience of hypnotic beauty.

As for that ultimate declaration of faith and confidence I know that my Redeemer liveth, Anna Leese certainly delivered – the tones were ravishing, the words were crystal-clear, and the manner was assured and encouraging. In tandem with the splendidly-realised Halleluiah  the sequence generated a marvellous kind of aura of transcendence, which continued right to those apocalyptic final moments, featuring every voice, instrument and impulse at full stretch. And, of course, who would want it to be otherwise?

To sum up, it was a splendid demonstration of the power of music as a renewable force, one which all over again inspired performers to give of their best and listeners to connect with and appreciate their efforts – what a treasure, and what good fortune for all of us concerned!

A Child’s Christmas a world and time away at Circa Theatre

Posted on by Peter Mechen

A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES
Reminiscences of childhood by Dylan Thomas

Narrated and performed by Ray Henwood
Dramaturg: Ross Jolly

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Tuesday 1st December 2015

I thought I knew Dylan Thomas’s enchanting youthful evocation “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” pretty well, in the wake of numerous encounters with the work over the years. As each Christmas approached I would read the work to the class of children that were in my charge as a teacher,  a kind of ritual that extended over more years than I care to remember. And every now and then (invariably when my classes consisted of older children) I would bring out my precious copy of a Caedmon LP containing the voice of the great man himself reading the story (as well as five poems) in that unforgettable, peculiarly ritualistic sing-song voice of the kind attributed to bards of ancient times.

So, as I’d neither read nor listened to the story for some time, I anticipated with the greatest of pleasure the prospect of hearing one of Wellington’s most illustrious theatrical figures, Ray Henwood, present the work at Circa Theatre. While I assumed that it would be a one-man show, I was intrigued as to what Henwood would actually do, as I remembered the reading I did in my classes taking around twenty minutes in all – which seemed short measure for a complete Circa production.

Dylan Thomas’s own recording of this story was made in February 1952 in New York while the poet was on the second of his three “recital tours” of the USA. The LP format could accommodate far more recorded space that “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” could fill up, so Thomas recorded five of his best-known poems to include on the record as well. I wondered whether Ray Henwood was going to do a similar thing, “filling out” the evening by reciting for us some of these iconic verses, such as “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”, and “Fern Hill”.

In the event what Henwood did was even more wonderful – having been brought up in Wales in the same places as Thomas himself, though a handful of years afterwards, he spent the entire first half of the show “setting the scene” for his audience from the persecutive of his own experiences as a boy in Swansea, bringing the poet’s world vividly to life. His account was a kind of amalgam of personal reminiscence interspersed with fragments of Thomas’s own earlier writings, some of which managed to find their way into the finished story this time round.

Thomas himself regarded Swansea ambivalently, writing to a publisher about his early poems growing out of “the smug darkness of a provincial town”, and describing his cultural environment as “depressing and disheartening” – interestingly his childhood reminiscences, which appeared in various incarnations, are almost entirely free from any such depression, boredom or frustration, filled as they are with wonderment and magical reinterpretation of a child’s world. Completely non-literal, and delightfully, and in places theatrically imbued with a sense of the fabulous amidst the ordinary, the writing envelops the reader with a vivid sense of time and place in the classic storytelling manner – an example in the finished version is the way in which Thomas’s sequence “whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or…..” so delightfully evokes and disarms at one and the same time, leaving the listener/reader subsequently ready for anything.

Previous versions of the poet’s childhood Christmas memories included a 1942 radio talk “Reminiscences of Childhood” which was further developed into another talk “Memories of Christmas” for the BBC’s “Children’s Hour” – legend has it that Thomas came not to be trusted broadcasting “live” by this time, and so his talk on this occasion was pre-recorded. The story then appeared in the photojournal “Picture Post” in 1947, and then in the American “Harper’s Bazaar” in the early 1950s, during one of Thomas’s American tours. During this first-half setting of the scene Ray Henwood quoted freely from these different versions, conveying not only a sense of the poet’s reworkings of his material, but of the kind of ambience that fostered both the style as much as the content of the things we were being presented with.

So we were primed up, good and proper, for the presentation of the finished story after the interval, the stage settings (the parlour at Thomas’s family home in Swansea, on Cwmdonkin Drive) similar to that throughout the first half, helping to give the whole a kind of organic flow-on effect. How beautifully and securely the story’s opening (“One Christmas was so much like another….”) placed the happenings in that country called the past, where “they do things differently”, fancy given licence to enlarge, intensify, heighten, in the pursuit of essential truths. To my fallible ears there seemed numerous additions to the story I remembered, references near the beginning to “tobogganing on the teatray” and to “boys who have three helpings”, each of which added a jewel to the sparkling whole.

Other references which I thought enlarged the range and scope of our pleasure at both detail and overall ambience included a mention of Christmas stockings just before the inventory of Christmas presents began (we enjoyed once again the familiar “mistake that nobody could explain, a little hatchet”, and the delightful reference to “the little crocheted nose-bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us”). Another, more poignant incident recounted that was new to me was the boy’s finding of “a dead bird – a Robin, perhaps – with all but one of its fires out….”

Henwood judiciously varied his delivery throughout, not only as regards pacing or alternating sequences and characterization of different voices, but in presenting the storyteller in different guises, sometimes as a kindly grandfather reading directly from a book’s pages, and sometimes as a character from the story come to life before our eyes, with a tangible presence to boot. Again this was keeping both the homespun and the magical on speaking terms, each to the other’s advantage, as well as to ours as the enthralled audience.

Aiding and abetting the unfoldings was a judicious use of sound effects, on the one hand firemen’s bells and associated noises, and then similarly sensitive lighting variations accompanying the carol-singing episode at the story’s other end – in general these technical things were sparingly used, allowing us to focus unerringly upon Henwood’s richly-wrought voice and the poet’s own word-painting to full effect, which were, after all the two things that mattered most about the venture.

What gave me the biggest surprise, I think was something which changed the whole concluding ambience of the story – the decision to finish the presentation with lines from one of Thomas’s most well-known poems, “Fern Hill”, the verses added without a break in the narrative flow. As concluded by Thomas, the “Child’s Christmas” account has the boy getting into bed, saying “some words to the close and holy darkness”, and then falling asleep, thereby preserving inviolate the memory of the day for all time. With those few lines from “Fern Hill” included, however, a shadow is cast retrospectively over the whole work, the events of the day made open-ended and subject to the ravages of time, the poem being a meditation on the transitory nature of life, and in particular, childhood.

Though time is initially presented by the poem as a benign force it holds sway in an all-pervading way, a feeling the “Child’s Christmas” story on its own manages to avoid by encapsulating time within the framework of a single day. It’s ironic that, on my copy of the aforementioned Caedmon LP containing the story read by the author, there’s space afterwards on the same side for one of the additional poems that were recorded in the same session – no prizes for guessing which poem it was!

So, a solid personal triumph for Ray Henwood and a success in terms of dramatic focus and literary quality for Circa. If you didn’t get the chance to enjoy the show and admire the actor’s skills, the theatre’s 2016 programme has scheduled for May a new production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, with Henwood in the title role – one would imagine that, even if one saw nothing else at the theatre, such an event would come into the category of “unmissable”.