Peter Mechen – Page 39

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

Posted on 19/09/201504/11/2015 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 06/09/201520/09/2015 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 05/09/201513/09/2015 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 30/08/201517/09/2015 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 28/08/201502/09/2015 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.

Clik the ensemble – you’ll be glad you did….

Posted on 22/08/201531/08/2015 by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Chamber Music presents:
CLIK THE ENSEMBLE

John Chen (piano) / Natalie Lin (violin) / Edward King (‘cello)

ENESCU – Prelude and Fugue for solo piano
BRITTEN – Suite for Violin and Piano Op.6
GARETH FARR – Shadow of the Hawk
SCHUBERT – Piano Trio in B-flat Major D. 898

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 22nd August 2015

What a lovely idea for a concert! – each member of the “Clik the ensemble” trio was given the chance to shine more-or-less as a soloist in different works during the first half, while the second half featured all three musicians playing the programme’s major work. It’s almost certainly something that’s been done before, but surely no more enjoyably and successfully as happened here.

“Clik the ensemble” is a group made up of young soloists who were members of groups that won previous NZ Community Trust Chamber Music Competitions – John Chen in 2001 and both Natalie Lin and Edward King in 2005. All have since successfully participated in further competitions, and have now come together to share their love of chamber music for the benefit of audiences throughout the country, Welington being the mid-point of their tour for Chamber Music New Zealand.

The concert began with John Chen as soloist, playing the music of Roumania’s most famous musician, Georges Enescu. While more widely known as a violinist, (he was actually Yehudi Menuhin’s teacher, and in 1949 made a famous recording of Bach’s solo violin Sonatas and Partitas in 1949) he was obviously no slouch as a pianist (Alfred Cortot thought highly of his playing), and actually produced several works for the keyboard, including two full-scale sonatas.

John Chen played the Prelude et Fugue, which was written in 1903, when Enescu was just 22. It seemed to me to be a kind of neoclassical work (along the lines of Grieg’s “Holberg Suite”, though more harmonically discursive), one owing a great deal to Bach’s keyboard example. The Prelude’s festive character was brought out with the music’s middle section’s celebratory and clangorous sounds, the sounds then reaching sideways and outwards to harmonic realms that gave the music a wonderful, exploratory perspective. The bell-sounds eventually “morphed ” into slow, pendulous cadences with time almost standing still in between each chord – a breath-catching effect.

The fugue stole into this world via a distinctively ornamented figuration, one which rhythmically put me “off the scent” for a while until I got the music’s “schwung”. It all then took the form of variations which again felt celebratory, mirroring the first movement’s festive atmosphere. John Chen played the piece in a masterly fashion – of course he’s well-versed in music of contrapuntal nature, having performed the Well-Tempered Clavier in concert with great distinction. Such neoclassical interweaving held no terrors for his educated fingers and his lucid, far-reaching grasp of the overall structure.

The pianist didn’t, I think, overdo any particular aspect of the work’s character, but kept things ever so slightly enigmatic – we were left pondering as to whether the music was an act of homage to Bach (a kind of pastiche in the word’s best sense?), or a determinedly neoclassical work, one which unashamedly uses baroque music as a kind of “springboard” to revitalize present-day creativity (as Stravinsky was wont to try and do)? Chen didn’t nail the music’s colours to any particular mast, playing it as he would any of the “48” and letting the composer’s own piano writing suggest what it might – a masterly performance.

Benjamin Britten’s Op. 6 Suite for violin and piano followed bringing Natalie Lin to the platform with John Chen. Britten wrote this music partly in Vienna and then in London – he had won a scholarship to travel in Europe during 1934 and (as one would) spent some time in Vienna. The work had some success, being selected for performance at a contemporary music festival in Barcelona by none other than Anton Webern and Ernest Ansermet, two avant-garde “toughies” – which would have been powerful encouragement for a composer still in his early twenties.

I was really taken with Natalie Lin’s playing of this work, in particular the movements which allowed her acute sensitivity and infinite variety of bowing and mastery of subtle coloring to “speak”. It wasn’t commanding, big-boned playing, but she had all the technique required to front up to the opening abrasive declarations (Britten showing his youthful compositional muscles) – however, she came into her own in the more intimate parts of the work, especially the third-movement lullaby. Elsewhere, her playing had a wry alertness, a precise delineation which missed nothing, and which matched John Chen’s elegance and quickfire responses, their partnership making the concluding waltz movement an absolute delight.

One of New Zealand’s most high-profile composers is Gareth Farr, whose 1997 work Shadow of the Hawk, was written for the partnership of James Tennant and Katherine Austin. Like a lot of Farr’s music, it’s a high-impact, extremely physical piece to play “requiring considerable stamina” as the composer put it. One hears the influences of both the composer’s experiences in the percussion sensible “Strike”, and the impact made on his sensibilities by the gamelan orchestras he played in as a student. This work has wonderfully-wrought contrasts – heart-stopping ascents to other-worldly realms, violent hammerings and tightly-worked motoric passages, states of drifting reverie and long-drawn crescendo leading to spectacular climaxes. It proved a marvellous “work-out” for both performers.

The young ‘cellist Edward King took to these things like the proverbial duck to water – his playing impressed with its spontaneity and enjoyment of physical engagement. He and John Chen made the most out of each of the music’s sequences, their playing drifting with the music’s inwardness in the more dreamy sections and winding up the tensions to maximum effect for the physical outbursts whose volcanic irruptions caused much excitement, right through the mighty crescendo taking all of us to to the music’s galvanic tumble-down finish.

Having “showcased” the individual talents of these musicians the concert now presented their corporate abilities as “Clik the ensemble” – and in this work by Schubert the combination resulted in the most beautiful performance of this music I can remember hearing. Right from the opening the music’s lyricism and sense of well-being was strongly in evidence. I’ve heard performance of this music delivered heroically, lots of muscle and strongly-advanced cadences, making a thrustful and forthright impression, which I really enjoy – and I though that “Clik” , being of an impetuously youthful persuasion, would similarly tear into the music at the outset. So, it was with some surprise that I registered the playing’s poetry in motion, delivered with sufficient energy to advance the music’s cause, but not allowing a single kind of character to unduly dominate.

Later in the movement there were moments of energized excitement which of course stood out all the more, rather than being ongoing episodes in a kind of big-boned epic technicolour drama – here instead was both playfulness and poetry, the irruptions of impulse as delight in first sensations. What a good thing for us all that music is always more “complete” than it can ever be actually realized at one time, so that, however satisfying a performance, one can always look forward to something else being brought out and enjoyed the next time round.

This was an approach which allowed the players’ individuality to speak at certain points, with Natalie Lin’s soft playing once again an absolute joy, and providing the perfect foil for Edward King’s freshness and vitality. And John Chen’s infinite variety of touch and phrasing seemed endlessly responsive to what both of his partners were doing, creating a mellifluous “exchange of equals” for our constant pleasure.

Perfection? – well, the Scherzo might have been a bit more bucolic, a tad more rustic, merely as a more marked contrast to the beauty of the trio section and the sheer urbanity of the rest of the music. Having said that, in some performances I’ve felt the music of the finale actually borders in places towards the end on garrulousness, but there was none of that, here – one didn’t dare stop listening for fear of missing some felicitous detail, some sigh of remembrance or impish impulse of pleasure.

One will relish the opportunity, whenever it presents itself in future, to “Clik the ensemble” – the pleasures of doing so this time round alone will long be remembered.

NZSM Students’ operatic double bill moves and delights

Posted on 13/08/201524/08/2015 by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
PURCELL – Dido and Aeneas
RAVEL – L’Enfant et les Sortilèges

Students and Staff of Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music,
Victoria University of Wellington

Casts and supporting musicians

PURCELL – Dido and Aeneas
Dido – Alicia Cadwgan / Aeneas – Declan Cudd / Belinda – Ester Leefe
Handmaidens – Hannah Jones/Rebecca Howie / Sorceress – Olivia Marshall
Spirit – Luana Howard / Witches – Shayna Tweed / Elyse Hemara
Sailor – Luka Venter / Covers – Olivia Sheat/Griffin Nicholl

Conductor: Donald Maurice

RAVEL – L’Enfant et les Sortileges
The child (Katherine McIndoe) – Cover (Pasquale Orchard)
The mother (Luana Howard) / The sofa, The cat (Daniel Sun)
The armchair, The shepherd (Emma Carpenter)
The clock (Luka Venter) / The teapot, The little old man (Declan Cudd)
The fire (Hannah Jones) / The Chinese cup, The shepherdess (Olivia Marshall)
The princess (Olivia Sheat) / The tree (Joseph Hadow) / The dragonfly (Olivia Marshall) The nightingale (Esther Leefe) / The bat (Shayna Tweed)
The squirrel (Rebecca Howie) / The frog (Griffin Nicol) / The owl (Elsa Hemara)
The footstool (Bethany Miller) / Cover (Julian Chu-Tan)

Conductor: Kenneth Young

Chorus: Julian Chu-Tan, Nicole Davey, Alexandra Gandionco, Sophia Gwynne-Robson, Joseph Haddow, Elizabeth Harré, Sally Haywood, Canada Hickey, Emma Cronshaw Hunt, William King, Eleanor McGechie, Bethany Miller, Griffin Nichol, Garth Norman, Pasquale Orchard, Nino Raphael, Karishma Thanawala

Musicians from Te Kōkī NZSM and guest players from the NZSO

Director: Frances Moore / Design: Alexandra Guillot / Talya Pilcher (lighting)

Memorial Theatre, Victoria University, Wellington

Thursday, 13th August, 2015

One has come to expect a high standard of performance, interpretation and artistic creativity from students at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, based on the success of some of their recent activities. This latest production was, in effect, “double the pleasure”, as it brought to the stage two works so utterly different as to turn our sensibilities on their heads, yet capture our sympathies as strongly in each case.

Beginning the programme was Henry Purcell’s most well-known work for the stage, Dido and Aeneas – a story featuring a whirlwind romance which ends in despair and death, one whose description sounds like verismo opera! Rather than seek to reinforce the “grim reality’ scenario with a companion-piece like, say, Puccini’s Il Tabarro, the School most enterprisingly went instead for Maurice Ravel and his setting of Colette’s whimsical tale-with-a-moral L’Enfant et les Sortilèges.

Each of the works had its own particular set of qualities and disciplines, making the choice of the two a happy one from both the performers’ and the audience’s point of view. Conductor and orchestral players were different but many of the singers appeared in both productions. Unlike Purcell’s work, which sported more-or-less full-blooded operatic characters, Ravel’s featured a single leading singer in tandem with a kind of “parade” of colourful characters, personifications of both animals and normally “inanimate” objects come to life.

From this point alone it could be gleaned that the experience for all of us across the two halves of the evening was different and wide-ranging on many counts, but for this listener at least, extremely satisfying. There were one or two moments which lacked sweetness and grace, mostly in the Purcell work, where at the Overture’s beginning the players’ determinedly vibrato-less tones were straightaway laid bare, and took time to generate warmth and ease. As well, there was a slight stage hiatus during Aeneas’s deer-hunt, later in the piece, those on stage seemingly “stranded” by the action – or rather, its disappearance – for a few moments.

Otherwise, the presentation throughout both works flowed hand-in-glove with the music, a state of things by no means a “given” in contemporary opera production, but one here fruitfully and organically upheld throughout. Director Frances Moore mentioned in a programme foreword the capacity of both operas to go beyond a naturalistic storytelling setting, and this was beautifully achieved by simple means – powerful, direct staging, ramps and platforms made in an instant into castle ramparts, assembly halls, forest glades, witches’ dens, child’s nurseries and scented gardens. Costumes, props and lighting also played their part in evoking these wide-ranging scenarios created by the stories and the music.

I thought the “girls’ school” origins of Purcell’s work nicely delineated by the production’s directness – simple, striking modern-day costumes of white, two handmaidens to the Queen “filled to the brim with girlish glee” in their movements and interactions , and Dido herself spectacularly clad in red, regal and dignified as befitted a monarch. In the best sense a student-ish enthusiasm informed the work of those on stage, exemplified not only by the singing but by lovely touches such as the aforementioned horseplay between the Queen’s handmaidens, and the endearing goofiness of one of the witches during the “coven” scenes. It all enhanced the presentation’s theatricality, both liberating and ensnaring our sensibilities and interest, and putting them all the more deeply at the service of the story.

Properly dominating the stage was the Dido of Alicia Cadwgan – right from her first, heartfelt protestations, her voice resonated with queenly sorrow, her character poised precariously between imperiousness and vulnerability. With both voice and “presence” she was able to bring out all of the character’s greatness of heart and implacable sense of truth unto herself, making her eventual betrayal by her suitor Aeneas the death-blow to her own existence. Her delivery of “Your Councel all is urged in vain” here threw Aeneas’s irresponsible protestations into boldly-exposed relief, making us truly believe that death, for her, was the only course, “the only refuge for the wretched left”. It was, for me, a beautifully-wrought portrayal, in every way.

No other character in the opera matches that of Dido’s in depth or breadth of utterance – but her serving-maid, Belinda, played by Esther Leefe, and the two handmaidens, Hannah Jones and Rebecca Howie, respectively, sang and acted with both spirit and sensitivity, the duet “Fear no danger to ensue” making a lovely sound, as well as amends for an earlier, slightly out-of-kilter “The greatest blessing Fate can give”. And Esther Leefe’s “Pursue thy Conquest, Love” made an excited, and not inappropriately breathless an impression, as Belinda urged her Queen towards her wooer, the Trojan hero, Aeneas.

Declan Cudd as Aeneas, the all-conquering hero, cut a very dapper figure in his dress coat and scarf, ready to charm the uncertain Dido with honeyed words. He sang accurately, if somewhat drily – one suspects his voice has yet to properly “bloom”, though having to be, as the role decrees, more politician than lover in utterance didn’t help him generate very much romantic feeling. It’s certainly not the most grateful of characters to play, and in the Second Act he’s reduced to “talking up” his pursuit and shooting of a deer to make the venture sound more heroic, though he made the most of the declamation “Yours be the blame, O Gods”, after being sent a bogus message, allegedly from Jove, to sail for Rome immediately, thus abandoning his recently-wooed Queen.

I liked the use of the theatre’s aisles to throw open the vistas of the hunting throughout the forest’s glades, and enjoyed the amusing, slightly tongue-in-cheek representations of Aeneas’s quarry, in stark contrast to the “Monster’s Head” which the hero makes a meal of describing. But even more fun with the space’s entrances and exits was had by the Witches who introduce the Second Act, the “Wayward Sisters” with their “dismal Ravens Crying”. Olivia Marshall made a gleefully nasty impression as the Sorceress, striking in appearance while bent upon evil, aided and abetted by a “Mutt-and-Jeff” pair of cohorts (Shayna Tweed and Elyse Hemara), one goofy, the other sharp and impatient, but each in their different ways nasty pieces of work. Together with the chorus assuming “coven camp-followers” roles, the grisly wraiths danced and cavorted throughout their ensembles, limbo-rocking beneath a piece of “infernal cloth” during “But ere we this perform”, and then using both stage and aisles for the wonderful echo effects throughout “In our deep-Vaulted” cell”, the reddish lighting backdrop appropriately suggesting the context of infernal forces.

Much was made of the contrast between the bustle and contented confusion of “Haste, haste to town” at the onset of rain, with the chorus sporting umbrellas and making a wonderful job of the pre-Handelian-like ensemble, immediately before the visiting of Aeneas by the spirit of Mercury. Both Luana Howard as the Spirit and Declan Cudd sang steadily and pointedly throughout, and managed to convey the essence of the exchange, involving Aeneas’s confusion and uncertainty, which resulted in his downfall. His plight and betrayal of Dido had already been rather cruelly lampooned in anticipation by the Sailor’s song (lustily delivered by Luka Venter), calling his shipmates to take their leave of their “nymphs” on the shore, promising them they will return though never intending to do so.

It remained for Aeneas to be sent packing by Dido amid all of his bluster, and for the latter to deliver perhaps baroque opera’s most famous farewell aria, “When I am laid in earth”. Again, Alicia Cadwgan was equal to the task, “pinging” her high notes thrillingly (the first a little more comfortably than the second, though, dramatically, the slight faltering on the later ascent wasn’t inappropriate!) and imbuing her more meditative lines with wonderful pathos and finality. By this time the orchestral playing had long “found” its voice, and the aria and final chorus was most sensitively and eloquently accompanied by the strings. Altogether an excellent performance of a great and difficult work, with the singing-lines everywhere exposed and merciless (a case of “only the very skilled need try this music”) – and these musicians brought enough skill and sensitivity to the task, working fruitfully with conductor Donald Maurice to produce a memorable result.

After this was a case of “vive la difference!”, even if Ravel’s delightful adaptation of Colette’s cautionary tale L’Enfant et les Sortilèges seemed, next to Purcell’s tragic masterpiece, more of a divertissement than usual. Of pleasure, however, there was no less, as the performers (this time with a different conductor, Ken Young, and a new set of instrumentalists) transformed the performing-spaces into a child’s world of wonderment, accompanied by those characteristically magical sonorities we associate with the composer of Ma Mere L’Oye and Daphnis et Chloe. All credit to director Frances Moore and designers Alexandra Guillot and Talya Pilcher for effecting such a convincing contrast between two very different kinds of realities.

Central to this child’s world is the character of THE child itself, the role here so very wholeheartedly acted and sung by Katherine McIndoe, and nowhere more touchingly than during those moments of “growth towards empathy” on the character’s part. After being scolded by its mother and rejected by its “first love”, the storybook heroine, the child seeks solace at being in the garden, but is traumatized by the fruits of previous misdeeds, which caused the tree’s “wounds” and the dragonfly’s loss of its mate, caught by the thoughtless miscreant and pinned to the wall. In the midst of the resulting melee of acrimony, the child finds itself almost involuntarily bandaging the wounded paw of a baby squirrel, an act which brings about its eventual rehabilitation.

From the willfulness of the opening exchanges with “Mama”, through the despoliation and subsequent recriminatory interaction with the objects in her world to her remorse and eventual rehabilitation, Katherine McIndoe fully engaged our imaginations, and, towards the end, our sympathies. She was supported by a series of brilliant character portrayals whose range and detailing provided constant and “rolling” entertainment on the way to bringing about the story’s “uncovering of the self” at the heart of the matter – in this case, the underlying human desire for love.

It would be unfair to single out individual performances of these roles, as, despite the “one-after-the-other” aspect of the interactions, the opera SEEMS an “ensemble piece”, due to the production’s pace and cumulative tensions, which drew the characters unswervingly together for the final denouement. Suffice to say that the characterisations brought the objects and animals readily to life, either with great tenderness and pathos or with plenty of bubbling, roaring energy. Throughout they were supported by conductor and orchestra with alert, on-the-spot instrumental detailings, augmented at certain points with great washes of ensemble sound – all told, a splendid achievement from all concerned.

With productions such as these to the School’s credit, one hopes for further operatic delights in the not-too-distant future – as well as invaluable performing experience for the students (of a kind our home-grown singers don’t get as readily as they might in certain quarters), these efforts, always eagerly awaited, bring to our local operatic scene some much-welcomed enterprise, in the form of repertoire that we wouldn’t otherwise get to see. More power to Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music!

Rarities and a classic of Russian music from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on 08/08/201523/10/2015 by Peter Mechen

MUSORGSKY (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov) – Night on a Bare Mountain
SCRIABIN – Piano Concerto
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.3 in D Major “Polish” Op.29

Michael Houstoun (piano)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 8th August 2015

This concert presented the third in Orchestra Wellington’s inspirational series featuring the numbered Tchaikovsky Symphonies in tandem with well-known Russian piano concertos. I was unlucky to miss the second one, in which both the gorgeous “Little Russian” Symphony and the epic Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto were played – what a “buzz” that presentation must have been!

But amends were handsomely made by this latest concert, even though two of the three works, by Scriabin and Tchaikovsky respectively, couldn’t by any imagination’s stretch be called “popular”. It didn’t matter a whit, as each of the pieces got a performance that brought everything to life, the kind of response we’ve come to expect from this particular ensemble in recent times.

By way of righting the popularity balance, the concert actually began with one of the most famous pieces of Russian music ever to be written – Musorgsky’s Night on a Bare Mountain, an orchestral description of a Witches’ Sabbath. It would perhaps have caused bemusement had the orchestra’s assistant conductor Vincent Hardaker chosen to present the composer’s seldom-performed “original” version of this score, instead of the usually-heard Rimsky-Korsakov “edition”. In fact Musorgsky himself never heard his work played, partly the result of his composing colleagues’ reactions to what they considered “flaws” in the composer’s work, and their desire to “correct” their comrade’s creative miscalculations.

Despite the moderating influence of Rimsky’s editorial hand, the piece still comes across with plenty of power and atmosphere, and especially if, as here, it’s played full-bloodedly and with sharply-focused attention to detail. So, the percussion made its presence felt in the opening paragraph, the various irruptions underlining the spookiness and grotesquerie of the scenario. I liked Vincent Hardaker’s shaping of the whole, with the various crescendi nicely judged and their pay-offs expertly delivered. And the players’ ability to “point” and colour their individual phrases was exemplary, emphasizing rhythmic detailing rather than merely speed to generate excitement (for which, full marks to the conductor!).

I wondered whether the Scriabin Piano Concerto which followed would be “right” for Michael Houstoun, whose strong, focused playing might seem on the face of things perhaps too abrupt or sharply-etched for this composer’s inimitable mix of mystical hues and diaphanous textures. In the event, both Houstoun’s playing and the composer’s music confounded my expectations, the pianist at his most responsive, tempering his strength with sequences of yielding grace and romantic feeling, going “with” the music’s freshly and directly-expressed turns of manner and mood.

This wasn’t the Scriabin of the Poem of Ecstasy, all flickering, shimmering hues and laden with intensely-pulsating mystical impulses – it was, instead a relatively uncomplicated, beautifully-crafted, in places somewhat Chopinesque work, but with something of its own free-wheeling spirit, less “structural” than improvisatory and in places impulsive in its unfoldings. Some harsh things have been written about the work over the years, but I found it a delight to listen to in concert, and particularly in this instance. Michael Houstoun’s playing seemed to me very much “from the inside out”, following the music’s contourings and filling out the composer’s sound world with romantic tones and pliant rhythmic gestures, delighting in the work’s wide-eyed innocence.

The work’s slow movement made a particularly lovely impression, the strings alone setting the scene with gorgeously rapt tones, to which piano and winds then added their distinctive touches. Then, how we so enjoyed, by way of contrast, the piano’s exuberant dancings throughout the next section, with the high-jinks abetted by shrieks of mock alarm from the winds! – perhaps these squawks of alarm were meant to alert our sensibilities to an abrupt submergence into a few “dark moments of the soul”, before our spirits re-emerging, glittering and sparking on the music’s surface to the piece’s end. It would take a hard heart indeed to resist such blandishments and mutter things about “faded romanticism” – I loved it, but, as the saying goes, to each one’s own………

The main interest of the evening for me, however, was the rarely-heard “Polish” Symphony of Tchaikovsky, numbered as the Third, and dating from 1875. In a number of ways it’s an unusual work for the composer , the only one firstly, in a major key, and secondly, in five movements. On most recordings I’ve encountered, I’ve thought the principal melody of the first movement rather tiresome in places because of its rhythmic squareness, the dotted note at the end of each phrase seeming to “nail the music down” rather than give it some much-needed “bounce”. Conductors seem mostly to get their players to “sit” on the dotted-note phrase heavily, instead of encouraging them to touch the figuration lightly and swiftly in passing, keeping the music pulsating and alive.

On an elderly Decca mono LP I had recently picked up from somewhere, the remarkable maestro Sir Adrian Boult and his London Philharmonic players do the latter, and the music thus takes on more of an irresistible forward surge. I’m happy to report that this is just what Marc Taddei and his musicians did, with brilliant results, creating a frisson of excitement with each ascending progression towards the final pair of notes – incidentally, this effect anticipates both the “polonaise” rhythm in the work’s finale and THAT melody’s even more exciting series of surging “ascents”, which Taddei and the orchestra literally sent into orbit with some spectacular playing.

The middle movements of the work are a complete contrast to all of this, as they are to one another – and in each case the “character” of the music was vividly conveyed. The excitement and sheer noise of the first movement’s coda done with, the second movement here seemed to gracefully float into the soundscape, as if quietly singing “Après le déluge, moi!” – with delicious counterpoints between the winds and soaring romantic feeling from the strings. More folk-like was the following, bassoon-led movement, the mournful, quintessentially Russian melody beautifully delivered by the winds and the solo horn, the strings then taking us to the world of the young girl Tatyana in Eugen Onegin, at her window composing a letter to her lover – gorgeously but also sensitively delivered.

Then, completing the trio of movements, came the elfin, Ariel-like Scherzo, the sounds mischievous and magical, but kept nicely grounded by the “Volga Boatmen-like” melody which eventually answers the alluring call of faery. We enjoyed superb, diaphanously-wrought playing from all concerned, and great control from the horns maintaining their ambient “held” note throughout the trio right up to the brief reminiscence by the composer of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy before the reprise of the scherzo.

After this, the finale’s dance whirled our sensibilities through both exhilarations and refurbishments to the work’s exuberant conclusion. Marc Taddei kept the contrasting sequences nicely on their toes, the first one’s syncopations dancing rather than dogged, as was also the case here with the fugue (Tchaikovsky so much more assured of touch than in the First Symphony’s finale). The return of those snowballing dance-reprise episodes finally led up to an astonishing peroration (such a great, air-piercing moment for a piccolo player!) with real abandonment and visceral excitement in the work’s coda.

Afterwards, all I could think of to say to friends was, “What a performance!”

Orchestra Wellington’s policy of using a presenter to introduce the concert continued with the charming and bubbly Clarissa Dunn of RNZ Concert firstly welcoming us to the event and then talking with conductor Marc Taddei – as with Nigel Collins’ completely different but equally personable approach to the task at the first of the orchestra’s 2015 concerts, the idea’s effect brings forth Tennyson-like responses from this reviewer-cum-ordinary-concert-goer, which will be discussed at greater length at the season’s end. Meanwhile, one is left waiting eagerly and impatiently for the next in the series, the “fateful” concert number four!

HOME-GROWN SOUNDS OF CHARACTER

Posted on 31/07/201507/08/2015 by Peter Mechen

Piano Music by Douglas Lilburn
(2015 – Lilburn 100th Anniversary)

Works and performers

Sonata (1949) – Jian Liu
Prelude (1951) – Gillian Bibby
Sonatina No.1 (1946) – Gabriel Khor
Sonatina No.2 (1962) – Louis Lucas-Perry
Three Sea-Changes (1945-81) – Jian Liu
Nine Short Pieces (1965-66) – Richard Mapp
Chaconne (1946) – Xing Wang
From the Port Hills (1942) – Gillian Bibby

Adam Concert Room, Kelburn Campus
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music

Friday 31st July 2015

Robert Hoskins’ typically perceptive programme notes for this concert quoted a significant remark made by painter Toss Woollaston to Douglas Lilburn, which the composer later recalled. Talking specifically about work by New Zealand artists, Woollaston stated that “environment should give it character”. Lilburn seems, on the showing of some of the most important of his piano pieces in this concert, to have taken Woollaston’s remark to heart.

One is tempted to suggest that this wasn’t music for the city-dweller by inclination – as with most of the work by one of Lilburn’s compositional heroes, Sibelius, these sounds consistently evoked a more-or-less solitary interaction with nature, evocations of wild, uncultivated spaces, with detail wrought by natural, rather than man-made forces. It’s a world that the average New Zealander still “knows”, even though many such environments are increasingly coming under threat of compromise by various hermetically-sealed variants of so-called “progress”.

However, in the Adam Concert Room, listeners were invited by the composer through his music and the excellent performances by different pianists, to re-explore and enlarge their experiences of and attitudes towards these worlds – here were works whose structures connected us with familiar, mainstream frameworks and procedures, but whose language brought those techniques into a more localized context of relevance and meaning. Tones wrought vistas of all kinds and characters known to us, while rhythms illustrated detailing of lines, textures and sounds readily associated with these places.

As with the music of Vaughan Williams (a tutor of Lilburn’s at the Royal College of Music in London), the pictorial and atmospheric qualities of these works were merely the beginning for the listener – it was the distillation of feeling that came of the interaction that mattered more, one that surprised by its depth (as Schumann said of listeners to his music) for “those who listen secretly”. All music has a “face”, supported by underlying flesh and bone, and more deeply, with a brain in behind – and here, Lilburn’s music, like any other composer’s when investigated properly, responded in its own unique and powerful way, with what pianist Margaret Nielsen, perhaps this music’s greatest interpreter, would undoubtedly call “character”.

Whatever one’s interpretation of the interpretative and listening processes, it became obvious as the evening went on that the music’s unique world was here responding to the enormous care and attention to detail demonstrated by each of the pianists called upon to pay homage to the composer to mark his hundredth anniversary birth-year. The performing line-up was indeed impressive, as much through its range and scope of age and experience as its remarkable consistency of executant skills and strongly-focused individual variation of interpretation.

Jian Liu, Senior Lecturer in piano at the NZSM, welcomed us to the concert, readily conveying both his delight in being able to celebrate such an important centenary with an event such as this, and his great respect for the composer’s work, before beginning musical proceedings with the Sonata (1949), music whose innate strength was here given a kind of tensile quality, played as it was with enormous thrust and volatility. The sounds have a geographical quality – the sky above, the earth below, the hills all around – and Liu’s “glint” of tone and spring” of figuration made certain utterances leap forward, while imparting great strength and depth to more reflective passages.

I’d forgotten how uncannily reminiscent this music was in places of Schubert’s A Minor Sonata D 784 (no great surprise, really, as Lilburn was a devotee of the composer), the sounds similarly resonating around great octave statements, and ringing with bell-like tones amid the more urgent figurations. However, being rather less concerned than Schubert’s work with human sorrow and solace, the lines here readily “wreathe” around and about the shapes of each of the landforms, drawing in and impulsively intertwining the human spirit with the strange wildness of it all. Liu’s playing generated pangs of loneliness at the slow movement’s opening, though he also caught the grace and ease of those rhythmic trajectories which beautifully leavened the tensions for a few precious moments. And he gave full play to, the granite-like sounds which welled up towards the end , and just as quickly dissolved.

The finale begins almost like a ritualistic Spanish dance, before presenting us with a kind of “song of the high hills”, the wanderer perhaps giving vent to energetic exuberance (and in the process disturbing rabbits who seem to scamper across tussockland in mock fright!). Expectations, doubts, fears and satisfactions cross the wanderer’s face as the journey is launched further into unknown regions, and the journeyman is left to go on alone.

Gillian Bibby was next, giving us the Prelude (1951), and demonstrating an entirely different quality of sound to Jian Liu’s, richer, mellower and deeper-voiced, not, I feel merely a matter of different music, but of the pianist putting all of herself “into” the sound-spaces with great feeling. Especially resonant were the great chordal passages in the piece’s middle section, the warmth and feeling of those rolled chords an almost palpable experience for the listener!

To Gabriel Khor was entrusted the Sonatina No.1, another piece which for me evoked the spirit of Schubert at the onset with a running octave figure, the mercurial lines punctuated with powerful chords, delivered with, by turns, poise and energy. In this music sounds of birdsong alternated with sterner realities, the throwaway ending of the movement a portent of further austerities (the work of an intense young man!). After this I thought the second movement’s ritual-like opening a kind of paean of praise of creation, the movement’s wonderful contrasts of tone and dynamics fully realized by the young pianist, with an especially sensitive, beautifully ambient stillness in places. Then, what quirkiness the finale surprised us with! And how cleverly the composer maintained the obsessiveness of the rhythmic patterning, while managing both lyrical and declamatory sequences woven into the textures – here, it was all given a creditable and accomplished performance.

How interesting to experience so many different pianists in a concert! For here was another young player, Louis Lucas-Perry, ready to tackle the Sonatina No.2. proclaiming his own way of doing things by promptly changing the piano stool, and then embarking upon the “rhapsody of natural immersion” which informs the work’s ringing, singing opening, the music seemingly living upon impulse, as if in the grip of a “bright dream”. Louis Lucas-Perry’s playing took us into this world of ambient entrancement, the music’s peregrinations coloured by impulsive nature-rhythms and textures rising out of the composer’s much-cherished “then-and-now”identifications, something of a “landscape and memory” realization.

Jian Liu returned after an interval with the well-known Three Sea-Changes, the title containing an oblique tribute to Shakespeare and his magical oceanic evocations. The music draws from different times and scenarios in the composer’s life, the first bright and lyrical, recalling a mood of exultation, obviously a feeling he associated with Brighton, near Christchurch, one which Jian Liu “orchestrated” magnificently at the piece’s climax – how different to this “exuberant and sunlit” view is the second evocation, that of Paekakariki, which Lilburn called “a more expansive view”, one with much longer lines and swirls of impulsive energy, Debussian in their impressionistic colour, and creating far more of a solitary view than the opening piece. Finally the last piece is more of an inscape, here played with great sensitivity by Liu, mingling an inner tenderness with ceaseless oceanic murmurings. Margaret Nielsen has said that these three, independently-written pieces were brought together by the composer as a kind of commentary on the three stages of human life.

The next item, Nine Short Pieces, brought the all-too-infrequently-heard Richard Mapp to the keyboard to play parts of a collection once famously characterized by the composer to Margaret Nielsen as “Crotchety at 51”. She chose nine of the pieces the composer had given her, and put them in what seemed to her like an effective sequence. Robert Hoskins sees these pieces as a kind of extension of the “Sings Harry” song-cycle, Lilburn’s settings of Denis Glover’s poetry. Even without analyzing the music, one can hear things like the self-deprecation of “Harry” the hero of the poems, in sequences such as the mock-Gothic opening of the first piece, the speech-like exchanges of the third (the piano writing recalling Musorgsky!) and the spiky, almost twelve-tone character of the fourth – “Soliloquies for piano” would have suited these pieces as a title equally well, especially as reflections of the thoughtfulness of the composer’s other music and the wondrous results of parallel homegrown artistic activities wrought by his contemporaries.

Richard Mapp played them with characteristic insight, all such evocations and angularities delineated for our pleasure and wonderment. In his hands the opening piece rumbled and resonated amid punctuating shrieks, alarms and other surprises, suggesting a kind of “savage parade” to follow – an expectation completely disarmed by the quirkiness of the following “question answered by a question” exchanges, and after that, a twelve-tone-like series of impulses bristling with abrupt agitations. I enjoyed his lovely “voicings” in pieces like No.5 with its tenor-and-baritone duetting, the lines long-drawn and resonant Denis Glover’s “Harry” in full philosophical flight, perhaps?), and similarly relished his skilful treatment of the different “characters” of No.6 – cool, crystalline and sharp-edged lines set against wonderfully resonant and vibrant ambiences filled with light.

Set amid such characterful performances of the rest of his music, the great Chaconne here became a larger-scale version of Lilburn’s established preoccupations – the way into this music had, in other words, already been well-prepared. PIanist Xing Wang brought out those attendant resonances and after-glowings in her beautifully-shaped exposition of the work’s opening, giving the sounds plenty of space, and allowing the music’s shape to guide her in places. Here she encouraged the many celebratory cascades of sound to take on a kind of free-fall aspect, before rounding out our trajectories and leading us more circumspectly into the heart of what resembled a pulsating organism, her playing tracing the sounds along delicate lines reaching out to distant realms, as if defining the work’s spaces.

In general terms hers was a whole-hearted engagement with all of the piece’s requirements, were they massive, deeply-rooted chords, steadily-pulsed outlines of melody arching over great spaces, or skitterish irruptions of impulse scattering their energies like unexpected sunshowers. And at the end she made a virtue of the abrupt challenge of Lilburn’s Sibelius-like coda to the work, giving us a direct, straightforward statement of arrival, reminiscent of the final moments of the Finnish master’s Tapiola.

Finally, what better way to conclude this composer-tribute than to have one of the pieces performed by a fellow-composer? The task fell to Gilian Bibby, who gave us a rendition of the 1942 piece From the Port Hills, the surviving item from a collection of five Bagatelles written during Lilburn’s Christchurch years. One responded immediately to the pianist’s warm, beautifully-rounded tones, which imparted a Brahmsian feel to the textures in places, the sonorities at such times deliciously rich and deep at appropriate points, but serving to highlight the delicacy with which some of the secondary material was floated so freely and radiantly.

At the end one’s impression was of having experienced a truly significant and unique body of work – music whose sounds draw their inspiration from the places we ourselves know, and which we can justifiably claim as our own. Very great credit to Jian Liu, to the NZ School of Music, and to all the pianists who contributed to the concert. One feels certain the composer wouldn’t have wished for a better-organised and more satisfyingly-realised tribute in this “marvellous year”.

Mellifluous reeds hold sway at St.Andrew’s

Posted on 22/07/201530/07/2015 by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series
NZSM Clarinet Students’ Presentation
Tutor: Debbie Rawson

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

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2015

Having recently enjoyed the concert given by the NZSM’s saxophone students, I found myself looking forward to hearing their “wind cousins”, the clarinettists, do their stuff.

On the way to the concert I found myself thinking of what one would call a group of clarinettists – of course, players themselves may well have devised their own unilaterally-accepted collective term, of which I’m unaware. Nevertheless I had fun turning over words in my mind such as “colony” or “chorus” (both rather humdrum), before more enterprisingly (and more naughtily) entertaining descriptions such as “conundrum”, “coven” or “calamity”.

Whatever the case, and whatever the reality, there was certainly nothing calamitous about the playing of these young musicians. Right from the very beginning there was delight to be had, beginning with Laura Brown’s sensitive and flowing performance of the third Movement Andante Grazioso from Brahms’ First Clarinet Sonata. Especially winning was the player’s delivery of the Trio, beautifully withdrawn tones shaped convincingly into a whole, and with lovely support from the pianist, Hugh McMillan.

A different kind of sonority was presented to us by bass clarinetist Patrick Richardson, relishing the chance to demonstrate the distinctive tones and timbres of an instrument whose raison d’ete seems little more than to “double” other instruments’ lines in orchestral works.

I was delighted to encounter a work I’d never heard before, Vaughan Williams’ Six Studies in English Folksong. Written originally for ‘cello and piano, these pieces have been transcribed for any number of instruments, the bass clarinet being particularly suited to the composer’s original choice in terms of range and colour.

Patrick Richardson played these short pieces with such evocation as to banish thoughts of winter and take our sensibilities to times and places that seemed like a world away. I was particularly taken by the beauty of the playing in the fourth study, featuring a tune I didn’t know but which nevertheless seemed to open my “nostalgia floodgates” – this despite the somewhat quirky title of the original, “She borrowed some of her Mother’s Gold”. Again, there was support of great sensitivity from the pianist, this time Kirsten Simpson.

The relationship between clarinet and saxophone was underlined by the next item, featuring saxophonist Genevieve Davidson – an Etude (No.3 from a set of 15) written by Frenchman Charles Koechlin (1867-1950), a prolific composer who was a contemporary of Debussy and Ravel, and who associated with and influenced people like Poulenc, Roussel and Mihaud but whose music has been since overshadowed by theirs.

The études (written in 1942, for saxophone AND piano) are less “display virtuoso” pieces than “examinations” of the former instrument’s resources – and Genevieve Davidson’s gorgeous, seductive alto-sax tones brought out all of the music’s tender and contrastingly energetic characteristics. Her playing captured both the waltz-rhythms’ graceful manner and the livelier polka-like mid-section’s insouciance – a delightful performance.

Laura Brown returned with a small but heartfelt 100th birthday gift for composer Douglas Lilburn, in the form of the second movement from his 1948 Sonatina for Clarinet and Piano. We were told by Brown to “listen for the morepork during the music’s middle section”. Beginning with characteristic pianistic sonorities, the music allowed the clarinet some opening declamation before requiring from the player some deeply-wrought, withdrawn tones, pushing back the work’s vistas with every utterance – the morepork’s voice chimed clearly in the piano part. Apart from some difficulty in voicing one or two high-lying notes, Laura Brown’s sounding of the movement was as ambient, flowing and lyrical as one could wish for – a birthday treasure, indeed.

Came the colony/chorus/what you will onto the platform next to perform a different kind of delight – an arrangement for clarinet quintet (if I remember rightly, Debbie Rawson thought possibly by New Zealand composer Ken Wilson) of the allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Op.10 No.2 Piano Sonata. Joining Laura Brown and Patrick Richardson for this exercise were Jess Schofield, Rebecca Adam and Brendan Agnew.

Well, whomever “Anon” was, or is, the arrangement worked splendidly, in my opinion. Beginning with the bass and B-flat clarinets, the music’s purposeful opening gestures grew gracefully upwards to their flowering-points (with double-note figurations for Beethoven’s octaves when the passage was later repeated – a deft touch), the lighter-toned instruments nicely “opening out” the sonorities. The players beautifully observed the more “relaxed” aspect of the Trio section, giving the phrases time to breath, and affording some relief from the ever-so-slightly vertiginous swing of those opening ascent

The group sprung a nice surprise upon us at the piece’s conclusion – we were treated to an ungazetted performance of Bach’s famous “Air on a G-string” , again, an arrangement that fell most gratefully on the ear, the players sensitively augmenting the dynamics in places, which served to confirm something of the music’s inner strength and indestructibility.

Back to Genevieve Davidson and her saxophone, for a performance of music by another lesser-known French composer, Florent Schmitt (1870-1958), whose music is regarded in some quarters as “the greatest that nobody has ever heard of” – among the laudatory critical appraisals of his work that I found was the following: – “it (the music) shimmers with bold conviction, elemental intensity and and a fearless harmonic vocabulary”. Given that there’s nothing like a “cause” to bring out shoals of enthusiasm for a neglected genius, on the basis of the short but intensely beautiful work we heard, the rest of Schmitt’s output would be well worth investigating.

Songe de Coppelius was a work inspired by a well-known tale of E.T.A.Hoffman, one also used by another French composer Leo Delibes as the story for a full-length ballet, Coppelia. Brief, but in places hauntingly beautiful, the music’s depth of feeling was here expressed by both players, Genevieve Davidson coaxing from her soprano sax a beguiling variety of colours and dynamics. The music’s sense of mourning at the outset was gently interspersed in places with more rhapsodic languishment – it all further demonstrated the innate musicianship and judgement of this gifted young player.

Finally we were treated to the distinctive timbres not merely one reed but two, in the form of a work for oboe, the instrument played by Annabel Lovatt. This was a piece by Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda (1801-1866) yet another prolific but neglected composer whose work was “given an airing” by people involved with this concert. Incidentally, “Kalliwoda” is the somewhat unfortunate Germanised version of the composer’s “proper” native Bohemian name, Jan Kalivoda, which I’ve actually never seen written as such on recordings or in reviews of his music.

Unaccustomed as I normally am to such things coming my way, I was pleased to be able to indulge in some one-upmanship regarding Kalliwoda’s name, as people I spoke with after the concert had never heard of him (I must, however, shamefully admit to not having heard any of his music!). Annabel Lovatt told us that at the time this work was written, pieces for solo oboe were rare indeed, and that she would “do her best” to bring it all to life for us. She was too self-deprecating, as she gave a terrific performance of what turned out to be a full-blooded virtuoso work.

Entitled “Morceau de Salon”, the music began gently on the piano, the oboe joining in with melancholy tones, here intoned beautifully, and confidently dealing with technical hurdles such as wide leaps and exposed phrasings with admirable fluency. As the piece proceeded the virtuoso demands made of the player seemed to crowd in, as if jostling one another out of the way – there may have been one or two notes missed in the florid hurly-burly, a phrase or two snatched at a little too eagerly – but Annabel Lovatt certainly engaged with the music, and emerged at the piece’s conclusion triumphant, having obviously given her “all”.

A highly entertaining and informative concert, then – expert playing and presenting of some highly diverting and fascinating music.