Author: Peter Mechen

Storms, remonstrations and resolutions from the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
INTO THE STORM
Music by Britten and Sibelius

BRITTEN – Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes” Op.33a
– Violin Concerto Op.15
SIBELIUS – Symphony No.2 in D  Op.43

(at the concert’s beginning, the orchestra played a short piece written by Jack Body, the New Zealand composer who died the previous Sunday, in Wellington – this was the fifth movement Non posso altra figura immaginarmi  of Body’s Meditations on Michelangelo for violin and strings.

Anthony Marwood (violin)
Thomas Søndergård (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 16th May 2015

Everything seemed to fall into place throughout this concert, one of the most finely-planned and beautifully-realised evenings of orchestral music-making I’ve ever heard from the NZSO.

Central to its success was the degree of rapport I felt coursing between the players and conductor throughout. Thomas Søndergård, making his debut with the orchestra, secured playing at once clearly focused, finely proportioned and satisfyingly expressive in each of the works presented.

To begin, the orchestra paid a tribute to composer Jack Body, who had recently died. The piece chosen was hardly elegiac, but had instead an appropriate vigour and energy, just as Body himself would most likely want to be remembered. This was an exerpt from a work for strings and violin Meditations on Michelangelo, the fifth movement Non posso altra figura immaginarmi (I cannot imagine another figure) – marvellously scored music, with overlapping figurations, dynamics and timbres giving the listener plenty of antiphonal and textural excitement.

A more sombre note was struck immediately by the opening measures of Benjamin Britten’s first “Sea Interlude” from the opera Peter Grimes, a sequence depicting Dawn, but with the ocean as the chief protagonist, with beautifully-projected surface detailings, underpinned by ominous swellings of oceanic power. Sunday Morning introduced a human element to the scenario, with church bells rhythmically counterpointing various people’s to-and-fro movements in between irruptions of of clamorous activity – a particularly sonorous church bell here sounded a somewhat menacing note towards the piece’s end.

I thought the conductor’s tempo at the beginning of the third Interlude Moonlight a shade brisk at the outset, taking a while to capture a nocturnal version of the opening Dawn seascape, but succeeding in delivering a sense of that oceanic power again waiting to swell up in anger and crush anything caught in its mesh of unbridled fury. This of course came with the final Interlude, the Storm, here a savage unleashing of the forces suggested in places by the previous sequences, Søndergård properly challenging the players at a frenetic, no-holds-barred tempo. From the trumpet’s shrill clamour to the tuba’s tummy-wobbling pedal point blasts, the brass timbres “spoke” with terrific presence and excitement, assisted readily by the timpani – those contrasting moments of exhausted stillness just before the final onslaught made all the greater an impression in the midst of such elemental ferocity.

What a richly-wrought work the same composer’s Violin Concerto is! – the first movement was presented here as a bitter-sweet journey into realms of great beauty and nostalgia, everything held together by the opening motif played on the timpani. I immediately thought of Walton’s music with the entry of the strings, the writing having a similar bitter-sweet quality, as with the soloist’s first “endless melody” cantilena. Though Anthony Marwood’s tone wasn’t as richly-upholstered as I was perhaps expecting, his focus and purity of line was something to savor throughout. I loved the Ravel-like fanfares played first by the violin and then, following an exhilarating downward plunge by the strings, taken up by the brass, as if a character from the composer’s ballet “The Prince of the Pagodas” was about to arrive.

How beautifully Marwood played the languorous solo that followed, gorgeously accompanied by the orchestral ambiences, leading to a deeply-throated ritualistic march, the strings soaring and the soloist playing the opening timpani motif – so atmospheric, so delicate and tremulous as the music stole to the movement’s end. And what an exhilarating change we were plunged into with the scherzo, the soloist’s Prokofiev-like ascending solo line danced over scampering rhythms, towards a “trio” section, orchestral hammer-blows leading to a more circumspect “trio” section featuring discourses between the solo violin and the winds, followed by a breath-catching cadenza, here quite superbly voiced by the soloist, and  evocatively leading into the final movement’s Passacaglia.

We were quite literally spell-bound as the theme began deeply and softly on the trombones beneath the solo violin’s rhapsodizing, then spread like the rays of a rising sun throughout the rest of the orchestra, the structures shaped like ranges of mountains. The music was, by turns stern and dark (brass and timpani), then warm and yielding (strings and oboe), a sense of ritual becoming more and more apparent, energized in places by things like rapid solo violin triplets (excitingly done!) and rapid variants of upward scales, the different sections exhilaratingly counterpointing their rising and falling lines. Having been impressed by the music’s grandeur and solemnity, we were then taken to more valedictory realms by the concluding Andante lento sequence, the solo violin rhapsodizing both sorrowfully and stoically over muted brass and wind chords whose resonances seemed to stretch forwards into the unknown – I thought the performers “held” this elegiac quality with utmost concentration and skill right into and through those heartfelt silences.

Having thus been emotionally wrung-out by the Britten, we were able to replenish our oxygen supplies at the interval in time to square up to Finnish composer Jean Sibelius’s epic Second Symphony. In conductor Thomas Søndergård’s hands the music balanced this long-breathed character with plenty of rhythmic verve and a good deal of sensitive lyricism. The first movement, notable for a kind of “hide-and-seek” game which the composer plays with his own rhythmic and lyrical fragments, was here beautifully realized, the different figurations adroitly juxtaposed, contrasted and then mellifluously brought together, making for a pastoral scenario depicting both sparkling detail and more rugged, far-flung spaces. I thought the players’ detailings of these scenarios were everywhere exemplary.

The sterner, altogether more tragic ambiences of the second movement were allowed plenty of space to unfold – the dramatic pauses that abounded in this music helped build the tension and uncertainty regarding the narrative’s direction. Sibelius was apparently inspired by the legendary Don Juan when writing this music, though the dark, foreboding moods created by some of the episodes evoked a rugged landscape as readily as a swashbuckling hero’s premonition of death. The ambiences swung from brooding uncertainty and looming tragedy to calmer, more settled ambiences and then back again. All of this was splendidly realized by Søndergård and his players, the dynamic contrasts, antiphonal figures and and rhythmic variants delivered with flair and sensitivity – in fact a single brief brass “fluff” was the only mishap I noticed throughout the music’s volatile and complex journeyings.

I enjoyed the “bristling and spilling over” aspect of the scherzo, Søndergård encouraging his strings to throw themselves and their instruments at the music and take risks by way of conveying near-uncontrollable excitement – and what a contrast was provided by the trio, with gorgeous, lyrical sounds coming from the winds and reinforced by the strings, before the sudden reprise of the scherzo’s opening shattered the repose, with the brass  this time taking the lead. Søndergård excitably pushed along the “transition music” leading towards the finale, then drove both string and brass ostinati figures stirringly towards the first of the movement’s two “big tunes”, here delivered muscularly and full-throatedly on the strings. The counter-melody, at first “teased out” of string murmurings on the winds was here rolled along splendidly, giving way firstly to some hymn-like utterances and then a fugato-ish figure begun by the ‘cellos, and building up with growing energy and force through the entire orchestra until bursting forth on the strings (wonderful horn accompaniments!) as a reprise of the first big tune! I loved it – such a splendid and pivotal moment!

But, of course, it wasn’t the work’s conclusion – and Søndergård became like a man possessed, driving his forces with even more of a will, firstly through the counter-melody’s almost Bolero-like repetitions to its revelatory minor/major key change, and then into the coda and the return of the first “big tune”, the entire orchestra here playing its collective heart out, and giving its all with its conductor and for the composer – if not the most grandly epic performance I’ve heard, it was certainly one of the most exciting ones! What really endured in my memory was the playing’s focus, its unerring direction, and the “sheen” on the sound of every instrumental section throughout the whole concert – performances that one imagines would have had the composers’ shades nodding with contented approval.

 

 

Halida Dinova – quintessentially romantic pianism

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Classical Expressions Upper Hutt presents:
Halida Dinova (piano)
A recital of words by Rachmaninov, Chopin, Beethoven, Scriabin and Liszt

RACHMANINOV – Morceaux de Fantasie Op.3 Nos.1,2,4
CHOPIN – Fantasie in F Minor Op.49
BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata No.14 in C-sharp Minor Op.27 No.2 “Moonlight”
SCRIABIN – Etude Op.8 No.12 / Nocturne for the Left Hand Op.9 No.2
LISZT – Piano Sonata in B Minor

Halida Dinova (piano)

Genesis Energy Theatre, Upper Hutt

Monday 27th April, 2014

I was thrilled to learn that Russian-born Halida Dinova had returned to New Zealand to give more concerts, as I’d been bowled over by her playing on the occasion of her last visit two years ago. On that occasion she played in Lower Hutt at the Little Theatre on a piano that had been pronounced “past its expiry date” and made it sound like one of the world’s most mellifluous instruments, giving us, among other things, particularly memorable readings of Balakirev’s “Islamey” and the complete Chopin Preludes. (For further detailing regarding this previous recital, go to my review at  https://middle-c.org/2012/05/halida-dinova-russian-soul-from-tatarstan/)

One of the things that struck me so forcibly about her playing the previous time round was Dinova’s amazing conveyance of physical engagement with the music, and specifically with the composer’s sound-world in almost every instance – I think I may have felt that one of the Debussy pieces worked less well for me, though there was another from the same set of pieces which the pianist seemed completely to “own”. I remember how Dinova’s playing at the time gave me an insight into British pianist Peter Donohoe’s remark made when I interviewed him some years ago, regarding Debussy’s music, to the effect that he adored “every note”.

Here at Upper Hutt’s Classical Expressions, though having the use of a far superior instrument, Dinova’s playing didn’t grip my imagination quite so insistently as before – though there were still whole sequences of the magnificence that I remembered. The repertoire may have had a part to play, here, as I sensed a tad less involvement on the pianist’s part with parts of the Beethoven Sonata compared with the remainder of the programme; and Dinova herself told me afterwards that she was still “exploring” the Liszt Sonata, having begun working on it less than a year ago.

I did think that, for all its excellences as a concert-hall, the Upper Hutt venue “distanced” us from Dinova’s playing as the Lower Hutt Little Theatre didn’t do at all – my chief irritation was the canned piano music which was heard in the auditorium up to a few minutes before Dinova herself came on to play. Surely one goes to a “live” music event to hear only “live music”? – and ought there not to be at least SOME aural “space” before a concert by way of preparation for the music about to be played? I would want, at best, no pre-recorded music at all before a concert, and at the very least a fifteen-minute period before the beginning where one hears nothing else clamouring for attention. If this is an overseas trend being brought here, then in my opinion, it  ought to be strangled and quietly disposed of. For me it was simply “musak” and it had the effect of reducing the impact of the concert’s actual music and the pianist’s playing of it.

Fortunately, such was the “pull” of Dinova’s presence and focus upon the music that she was able to quickly dispel all such annoyances and take us, in this case, into the nineteenth-century world of the young Rachmaninov, with three of his Op.3 Morceau de Fantasie.  Beginning with the Elegie, her very first notes explored a depth of sound, a resonance which, underpinned by a ‘tolling bell” effect in the left hand, conjured up a kind of feeling for the effect that those particular sonorities evidently had on the impressionable composer. The more agitated central Lisztian sequences excitingly took over the entire keyboard, before Dinova’s exquisite sense of atmosphere and innate timing gradually allowed the silences to “surge softly backwards”, placing the piece’s pair of final notes with bitter-sweet resignation.

Then came THE Prelude, richly-wrought, varied in utterance (how can one play those three portentous notes? – let me count the ways….) and redolent with expectation, left hand anticipating the right at every possible opportunity (something else I noticed during her previous recital at Lower Hutt), a journey which seemed to unfold rather than fall into preconceived places – amazing, tumultuous central agitations, and a properly “awed” concluding series of chords, each a world of unpredictable sensibility. After this, what better way to philosophise than to introduce the figure of Polichinelle to the discourse? – based on the well-known Commedia dell’arte character (Pulcinella, in Italian), this knock-about comedian restored our stricken sensibilities with his antics, though taking time out to savour a few moments of romantic ardour in the piece’s middle section. Dinova’s enjoyment of the character was obvious, as much through her quicksilver fingerwork as from her wry smile at the throwaway ending.

Chopin’s F Minor Fantasie brought out the “no holds barred” aspects of Dinova’s pianism to thrilling effect – a deep, rich sonority at the beginning, posing a question to which came the lyrical reply, the drama and ceremony of interchange, the spin of the storyteller, the “strut” of the processional. Out of this grew those wonderful improvisatory flourishes building up the tensions towards action, everything played with wonderful fluidity, the triplets dancing along excitedly, turning in places to little “marches”, and in other places to more declamatory utterances. The piece’s “still heart” is the prayerful central interlude which Dinova more breathed than played, voiced so inwardly and beautifully. Afterwards, the reprise of the first section was fiercely tackled, Dinova’s playing plunging the music headlong into renewed conflict, with  thrills and spills adding to the excitement.  And just as compelling was the tenderness of the poetic reminiscence at the piece’s end, that final upward gossamer run and concluding chords the stuff of storytelling.

After this I thought the first two movement of the well-known Moonlight Sonata less remarkable – all darkly and solemnly played (here, with the right hand often anticipating the left!), but still, with the pianist seeming to be an observer rather than a participant in the drama. Dinova played the second movement in a completely unexaggerated way, bringing out some beautiful dynamic variation, and in places subtly emphasizing the left hand. But the finale was something else – incredible “attack”, a strong left hand driving the trajectories and the right hand creating great roulades of sound. Here nature took a hand in the proceedings, with torrential rain drumming an accompaniment on the concert hall roof throughout the last few tumultuous measures!

Two contrasting pieces by Scriabin followed the interval, the first a favourite of the great Vladimir Horowitz, the Etude Op.8 No.12, entitled Patetico (Pathetique).  Dinova took to the music in the manner born, allowing the piece’s build-in momentum to grow and the agitations to rise like a wind from the steppes, though allowing a lovely lyricism in the Rachmaninov-like gentler middle sequences, But with the return of the opening idea, Dinova opened her the floodgates, the left hand leaping dangerously across the keys, the repeated notes growing increasingly frenzied, and the deep bells more and more clangorous, until the whole suddenly whirled upwards to a heaven-storming climax – what a great virtuoso display! After this, the gentle lyricism of the Left-Hand Nocturne from a set of two pieces Op.9 was balm to the senses, the evening’s most poetic and melting playing,the pianist’s left hand brilliantly encompassing both virtuoso and lyrical elements in a breath-taking display.

I was fortunate enough to hear Dinova play some of the items on the evening’s program twice, among them Liszt’s B Minor Piano Sonata, the second time at a house concert on an upright piano, a couple of days afterwards! Inevitably, my reactions to her playing of the pieces have criss-crossed to some extent between the occasions – but the cumulative effect is the thing, and especially with a work as all-encompassing as the Liszt. Before proceeding, I must say that I was sorry that the concert’s programme-note-writer, one whose work I normally greatly admire, made a passing reference via the work to Liszt’s “deplorable” morals, thereby reinforcing the surely-by-now-discredited legend that the composer bedded almost every female who threw herself at him – anyone who’s read Alan Walker’s up-to-date and incredibly detailed biography of Liszt will be appalled at the extent (outlined by Walker) of the “hatchet-job” done on the composer’s reputation and integrity in the past by people such as Ernest Newman, with no real evidence to back up claims of unbridled licentious behaviour other than prejudicial heresay – as Walker remarks, a case of fame and success giving rise to intense jealousy, and resulting mischief on the part of others.

Let the music speak for the man on this occasion – and one remembers Wagner (no great supporter of other people’s creative efforts) equating the man with his music, writing to Liszt after hearing the sonata for the first time with the words, “the sonata is beautiful beyond compare, great, sweet, deep and noble, sublime as you are yourself…..” Dinova’s playing of the work, while not completely “under the fingers” (on each occasion she had to break off in the midst of a piece of tumultuous passagework – in a different place each time, incidentally – and re-align her trajectories) caught the piece’s multi-faceted character – a brilliantly-conceived structure, a vivid and theatrical recreation of the “Faust” legend, a deeply-moving expression of conflicting personal emotions, a pianistic tour-de-force. Structurally, she gave the piece all the time it needed to speak, and all the urgency its figurations required to create the work’s overall shape. And her characterization of the characters and episodes pertaining to the “Faust” legend were vividly-drawn and theatrically-contrasted.

Dinova’s playing seemed to me to demonstrate a kind of innate sense of what each section of the music required as the music advanced – a powerful bringing-together of spontaneity and inevitability. She seemed incapable of playing a routine or a mechanical phrase, as every note had its own kind of quality, its own particular strength of purpose and relationship with the others. One didn’t know what she was going to do next with the music, how she was going to “voice” a particular passage, or distribute the emphasis between the hands. Her conjuring up of the music’s central nocturnal scene (Faust in the garden with Marguerite?) was as entrancing as the succeeding fugue was tense and electric – despite a dropped note or two the cumulative excitement was palpable, and the climax of the sequence sent glinting figurations skyrocketing upwards between fusillades of repeated notes. In the house concert the fugue momentarily came adrift, whereas here it was during the amazingly orchestral writing leading to the big heroic theme’s final statement when things were momentarily derailed. Neither hiatus was a fatal error – the music was picked up and driven onwards as excitingly as before.

Perhaps when Halida Dinova comes back to this country once again she will bring the work with her as a fully-fledged falcon, soaring aloft while taking in the whole of the terrain at a single glance (as somebody said once of another great Russian pianist, Sviatoslav Richter). She did enough here to reaffirm her status as a romantic pianist of outstanding quality. I managed to get a CD she’d made for the Doremi label of Scriabin’s music, which I can’t wait to listen to and which I’ll look forward also to reviewing. Meanwhile I shall cherish the memory of playing whose immediacy and excitement continue to give pleasure long after the recital’s last notes have been sounded.

St.Matthew Passion rich and dramatic from Wellington’s Bach Choir

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Bach Choir of Wellington presents:
JS BACH – ST.MATTHEW PASSION BWV 244

Richard Greager (Evangelist) / Simon Christie (Jesus)
Nicola Holt (soprano) / Maaike Christie-Beekman (alto)
Lachlan Craig (tenor) / David Morriss (bass)

Wellington Young Voices (Christine Argyle, director)
Douglas Mews (continuo)

Bach Choir of Wellington
Chiesa Ensemble (Rebecca Struthers, leader)

Peter Walls (conductor)

Metropolitean Cathedral of the Sacred Heart
Hill Street, Wellington

Sunday, 29th March 2015

When looking through various articles in search of a thought-provoking quote with which to begin this review, I found a number which set me upon my ear! – or perhaps that should be my eye! – of course I had to choose only one, for fear of being accused of using other people’s words to write most of the review for me! After some soul-searching, my choice was a statement from the 89 year-old Hungarian composer, pianist and teacher György Kurtág:

“Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying. And how can I get closer if I look at him from the outside? I do not believe in the Gospels in a literal fashion, but a Bach fugue has the Crucifixion in it — as the nails are being driven in. In music, I am always looking for the hammering in of the nails.”

The performance of JS Bach’s St.Matthew Passion at which we were present on Sunday afternoon at the Metropolitean Cathedral of the Sacred Heart seemed to me such an act on a communal scale, presenting a work of art that simply invites humanity to believe in itself and partake in its capacity to act as human beings might do when showing love and compassion for one another.

That same belief in an essential humanity informed not only the music we heard but its performance. In terms of intent, commitment and insight it was one that, in Kurtág’s words, “never stopped praying”, mirroring the actual music and presenting it in human terms through singing, playing and conducting. At every point I felt the musicians were fully taken up with the composer’s inspiration and belief, and the music’s intellectual and emotional power.

Probably the reason that what I’ve written so far sounds more like an article of humanist faith than a music review is that the work, one of the mightiest that has come out of Western civilization, made such an overwhelming effect through its performance on this occasion. György Kurtág’s comment regarding the crucifixion having “the hammering in of the nails” could have been applied in metaphorical terms to other Gospel account imagery in a hundred such places throughout the narrative, in this deeply-committed rendering.

Before the performance began, conductor Peter Walls talked about the work and some of its detailing along similar lines – he pointed out some of Bach’s particular placements of instrumentation and how they reflected the content and mood of the words. Though Bach was often criticized for what some people considered over-dramatisation of the text (“Opera in church!” one distinguished lady was heard to declare disapprovingly at the end of one of the Passion performances), he actually broke with a trend that favoured sentimental verse settings of the Gospel stories, by restoring the actual Biblical texts, sung in recitative by a tenor as the Evangelist, and by other soloists as the main characters  in the story, with the choruses representing the crowd.

Walls drew our attention to the special character given to recitatives performed by the singer representing Jesus, – how Bach underlined the idea of the character’s divinity with string-accompaniment, except for the latter’s final outburst – “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, signifying a kind of divine abandonment. The conductor also drew our attention to Bach’s frequent use of chorales which in effect represent the congregation. Their melodies would have been familiar to Bach’s congregants, who would probably have joined with the choir in singing them – the most often-recurring chorale (sung five times throughout the work, with different words and slightly varied harmonisations each time) uses a melody actually adapted from a popular song of renaissance times, an organic, if somewhat whimsical connection between great art and everyday life!

The work’s very opening made here a deeply-felt and richly-sounded impression, with both chorus and instrumentalists divided into two groups alternating with descriptions of the scene where Jesus is carrying his cross, over the top of which sounded voices belonging to a children’s choir (Wellington Young Voices) intoning the words of a gentle chorale, “O Lamb of God”. The choirs were secure and full-throated, while in support the instrumentalists enabled an enticing accompanying texture, a sea of buoyancy on which the voices sailed safely and soundly.

As the Evangelist Richard Greager brought to bear on his recitatives all of his dramatic skill at making the words leap from the page of score and take on all the elements of the drama. I was worried after listening to the opening lines that the voice might not be steady enough for the more sustained notes, but as the work proceeded and things warmed up, I found myself increasingly relishing Greager’s vivid and varied story-telling with each phrase of the text. Among the most telling moments was the Evangelist’s recounting of Judas’ appearance with the priests to betray and capture Jesus, a moment which brought forth impassioned, ringing vocalizations!  – another great sequence was Greager’s expressive retelling of the story of Peter’s denial of Christ, bringing out the disciple’s horror and shame when he realized what he had done.

Central to the drama was, of course, the character of Jesus Christ, whose words were sung by bass Simon Christie – at first I found his tone gruff and a touch abrasive around the edges, qualities which he gradually relinquished with each of his subsequent utterances. His voice’s dark quality certainly suited the story’s subject-matter, and he was able to “pull rank” with some authority, such as when he delivered Jesus’s rebuke to the apostles for their objections to Mary Magdalene washing and anointing his feet.  He also paced and inflected Christ’s  “trinket alle daraus” (Drink from this, all of you)  beautifully and sensitively, and, of course, he had the expressive power to do justice to moments like “Mein Vater”, Jesus’s supplication to His Father to spare him the oncoming agony of his prophesied death.

The other singers of course delivered all the non-Biblical recitatives and associated arias which Bach interpolated into the narrative. Written by a poet known as Picander, these meditations comment introspectively on the meaning of the Gospel events, inviting the listener to become emotionally involved with the drama, personalizing key moments in the work and giving it incredible depth of feeling. First of the quartet to appear was the alto, Maaike Christie-Beekman, who brought her richly-wrought but finely-gradated tones to both recitative “Du lieber Heiland du” (My Master and my Lord) and to the aria “Buß und Reu” (Penance and remorse), each beautifully accompanied by the flutes, with solo ‘cello enriching the aria, the instrumental figurations vividly illustrating the “Tropfen meiner Zähren” (teardrops) of the text. Throughout the whole of the work, Christie-Beekman’s voice and way with the text took me to the heart of whatever she sang, such as with the heart-rending “Ach Golgotha, unselges Golgotha!” (Ah! – Golgotha, unholy Golgotha), the oboe-playing heartfelt and stricken, and with the recitative followed by a most touching aria (“Sehet, Jesus hat die hand….ausgespannt”) (See, Jesus has stretched out his hand) with poignant chorus interjections.

Though soprano Nicola Holt was less vocally consistent, occasionally singing a tad sharp under pressure, her line nevertheless had a purity and steadiness in most places, which gave the text an almost instrumental strength, as in her opening “Blute nurd, du liebes Herz” (Bleed now, loving Heart), words chillingly and pitilessly addressed to the mother of Judas the traitor, who nurtured at her breast one who became “a serpent”. Then, immediately following Jesus’ invitation “trinket alle daraus”, came a difficult, cruelly high entry to the recitative “Wiewohl mien Herz” (Although my heart) for the soprano, which she managed with great credit, supported ably by an oboe and lower strings, though in the aria which followed “Ich will dir mein Herz schenken”  (I will give my heart to you) came one of the few passages in the work which to my ears needed more judicious balancing, where the oboes were too insistent in places for the singer’s lines to be clearly heard.

A highlight of the performance was the duet with chorus for soprano and alto “So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen” – the two soloists lyrical and sorrowful, their voices set against the anger of the chorus’s cries, the latter representing the fury of the apostles trying to resist Jesus’s capture, the choir spot-on with their entries under Peter Walls’ direction, and with the help of irruptive figurations from the bass instruments working up to and achieving a positively seismic outpouring at the climax of the chorus “Sind Blitze, sind Donner in Wolken verschwunden?” (Have lightning and thunder vanished in the clouds?) – a stirring effect!

Tenor Lachlan Craig was given his first opportunity at the point of the story where Jesus and his apostles go to the garden at Gethsemane to pray – firstly a kind of “word-melodrama”, shared by the soloist and the choir, “O Schmerz!” (O sorrow!), and then an aria whose words are also shared by the tenor and the choir, “Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen” (I shall keep watch with Jesus). This was a very bright voice with an intense, almost “pinched” tone, not unlike fellow new Zealander Simon O’Neill’s voice-quality, accurate and intense. At one or two places in the aria the solo voice was put under strain, the awkwardness of some of the writing indicating that Bach was thinking in instrumental, rather than vocal terms when writing much of this music. However, Craig made a good fist of the extremely demanding recitative “Mein Jesus schweigt zu falschen Lugen stille” (My Jesus is silent in the face of lies) and the following aria “Geduld!” (Patience!) after the first of the confrontations between Jesus and the High Priest The tenor had to work to phrase his lines at the brisk tempo set by the conductor for the aria, straining some of the highest notes in the process, but on the whole keeping his pitch steady.

Last of the singers was the bass David Morriss, whose well-rounded tones throughout his range and sense of theatrical variation of emphasis and tone-colour added a dimension of interest to everything he sang. He began with the recitative “Der Heiland fällt vor seinem Vater nieder” (The Saviour falls down before his Father), whose sinister, slithery string accompaniments well reflected the bitterness and rancor of the imagery chosen by the poet – and continued with the aria “Gerne will ich mich bequemen” (Gladly will I bring myself ), which the singer began softly, subtly varying his delivery of the repetitions of the word “gerne” and making something grow from out of the beginning’s darkness of despair, so that the words countering Christ’s suffering and death become gentle, even sensual – “his mouth, which flows with milk and honey” – words that the singer delivered with the utmost relish.

Later, in the wake of Judas’s despair and suicide, came the bass aria “Gebt mir meinem Jesum wieder!” (Give me back my Jesus) the singer’s tones soaring as the line rose, beautifully supported by the solo violin. And as Jesus was forced to carry his cross, helped by a bystander, Simon of Cyrene, whom the soldiers dragged from the crowd to assist, Bach’s bitter-sweet music consoled us, the bass recitative “Ja, freulich” (Yes, truly), accompanied by the beautifully pastoral sound of flutes, reminded us that life is a cross we must bear sooner or later; while the aria “Komm, süßes Kreuz” implored Christ to help us with carrying our own burdens of suffering – organ, bass viol and cello all supported the singer nobly, Morriss for his part handling the long vocal lines with great poise and dignity.

With the singers at every step of the way was the sterling support given by both chorus and orchestra, each group often divided, and with individual singers and players at certain points contributing vocal and instrumental solos. From the outer, the chorus’s response to Peter Walls’ direction was whole-hearted, detailed, varied and hugely satisfying. Nowhere was the concentration and focus more evident than with the grave and beautiful “Wenn ich einmal solo scheiden” (When I one day must depart from here), sung by the choir just before the upheaval accompanying Jesus’ death, the voices pointing the contrast with the ensuing chaos most dramatically with the sharply etched emphasis upon the words “Kraft denier Angst undo Pein” (By the strength of your agony and pain”). And when the full-blooded impact of the earthquake had ceased (the orchestra doing a splendidly visceral job with it all), the choir held us in thrall with its beautifully awed response “Wahrlich, dieser ist Gottes Sohn gewesen” (Truly this was the Son of God).

As one would expect from these players, and from people such as Douglas Mews and Robert Oliver providing superb continuo support, the instrumental playing throughout from the Chiesa Ensemble was a joy to experience, thanks in no small part to Rebecca Struthers’ leadership and inspirational solo playing, with, as one example, lovely violin obbligato support (what one commentator called “virtuosic pathos”) for the contralto in “Erbarme dich, Mein Gott” (Have mercy, My God). All of it was held together with such strength, patience and aplomb by the direction of Peter Walls, whose conducting seemed to me to combine the clarity and precision of recent scholarship concerning early music performance with sufficient weight, gravity and breadth of utterance sometimes given short measure by some of these so-called “authentic” realizations of such music. It made for an extraordinarily satisfying and enriching musical experience – one suspects for both the audience and the musicians, in this case – and an occasion I think the Bach Choir can justly regard as a triumph.

 

 

Quintessential music-making from the Brodskys

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand 2015 presents:
THE BRODSKY QUARTET

Music by Purcell, Britten, Bartok and Beethoven

PURCELL – Chaconne in G Minor (arr.Britten)
BRITTEN – Poeme (2nd Mvt. of String Quartet in F Major 1928)
BARTOK – String Quartet No.5 SZ 102
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in C-sharp Minor Op.131

Daniel Rowland, Ian Belton (violins)
Paul Cassidy (viola), Jacqueline Thomas (‘cello)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday, 26th March 2015

Reading about the Brodsky Quartet brings much pleasure and a few surprises: the group was formed thirty-five years ago in Manchester, and was named after Adolf Brodsky, the great nineteenth-century Russian violinist notable for premiering Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in 1881, and whose career eventually took him to Manchester, in England, where he became Principal of the Royal Manchester College of Music. Two of the original Quartet are still with the group, Ian Belton and Jacqueline Thomas – Paul Cassidy joined in 1982 and Daniel Rowland in 2007.

This is the Quartet’s third visit to this country – the group was here in 1994 for the International Festival of the Arts that year, and in 1998 toured the country with Chamber Music New Zealand. After seventeen years it was high time that the group returned – and as a result of hearing this concert I find myself hoping that I won’t have to wait for another seventeen years before encountering these remarkable musicians performing live again.

In this concert the group for me ticked the boxes which defined a well-rounded concert experience for chamber music enthusiasts – two string quartet classics, each with aspects in common, though from different centuries, were presented, along with two lesser-known, but utterly distinctive pieces, again composed in completely separate times, but linked by certain circumstances. It was programming whose connections offset the wide range of differences of the various pieces in term of style and language.

The first “pairing” came with the two opening works on the programme – first was Purcell’s Chaconne in G Minor, played in an arrangement for quartet by one of the composer’s most recent and famous devotees, Benjamin Britten. A Chaconne is a French courtly dance in which the basic harmonic pattern of the piece supports any number of melodic variations, giving rise to wonderful invention on the part of various composers who’ve written examples for various instruments.

The Purcell was followed by – indeed, actually linked to the second work on the programme, with we in the audience so completely spellbound by the music and playing to even think of applauding after the first piece – it was a magical moment when Britten’s music simply grew out of the silence that followed the Purcell. This work was a movement from an early Quartet in F Major by Britten, the material reworked by the composer into one of three Poemes for String Quartet – this movement is marked Andante. I thought it an absolutely stunning piece – a magical sound-world, not unlike the kinds of ambiences the composer created in some of his choral works to create atmosphere, such as the falling snow effect in “A Boy Was Born” – there were equally beautiful equivalents here. The music in fact gave the impression of being refracted through a dream, thanks in part to a wonderfully other-world-like ostinato figure, from the second violin.

The Brodsky Quartet’s leader Daniel Rowland, talked about the relationship between these two works, calling Purcell’s work “contemporary” in its freedom of expression, and emphasizing the inspiration the music must have been to Britten (who as a conductor made a recording of the work). The playing of the Purcell seemed timeless in its effect – because it comes into the category of “early music” the players were sparing with their vibrato in the manner that’s become accepted “period practice”, but were otherwise very free and subtle with the treatment of Purcell’s theme – very forthright voicing in places, making for great tensions, but with some magical soft playing towards the end of the piece, the final few bars creating a hypnotic effect that carried through the silences and into the beginning of the Britten which followed.

By contrast the Bartok which was next on the programme was less concerned with creating atmosphere, and much more about expressing essential elements of a distinctive musical language, strong rhythmic character, closely-worked harmonic and contrapuntal voices and cliff-face contrasts of mood and expression. The very opening of the work goes from terse unisons from groups of instruments to stamping rhythms, and then to a chromatic, somewhat eerie section played in canon – Bartok gives the listener these three contrasting ideas boldly and directly, then works them together in a full-on, abrasive way!

It seems to me that these works have a Beethoven-like quality in that they don’t employ any “padding” – the ideas are delivered straight-from-the shoulder, and in less-than-comfortable ways, making for the sort of effect that contemporaries of Beethoven used to complain about with his later music. Bartok is as wide-ranging as Beethoven, though in that he gives the listener plenty of contrast, both within single movements and in the individual movements’ differing character. In this quartet, the second and fourth movements have elements of the “night music” sounds that Bartok became known for. And in this quartet’s case in between these two movements Bartok wrote a scherzo movement as humourful and bucolic as any Beethoven wrote in a similar vein, one called “Alla bulgarese” – in the Bulgarian style. You could hear the folk-tune flavorings in the snappy rhythmic figurations – wonderful energies, at one and the same time music from the soil, yet given a kind of timeless, universal quality – which I think is a mark of greatness.

I couldn’t help thinking that same thought while going through the incredible journey that Beethoven took us in his Op.131 Quartet which finished the programme. It’s always seemed odd to me that people both contemporaneous with and in the years immediately after Beethoven simply couldn’t fathom his late music. I know there are music-lovers who still have difficulty with coming to grips with some of the works, like the Grosse Fugue and the Hammerklavier Sonata, but the general reaction even to these works is that they are masterpieces and their language is accessible. Bartok is a kind of modern-day equivalent, though perhaps not a contemporaneous one – there’s music which has been written since Bartok which is more likely to draw forth responses similar to what Beethoven’s music got from some of his contemporaries – such as fellow composer Carl Maria von Weber’s opinion upon hearing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that the latter was “fit for the madhouse”. There’s no doubt Bartok makes you work at listening – but, of course, if you’re fully engaged, Beethoven makes you work as well!

To my ears the Brodskys were lyrical and expansive in appropriate places, but dealt with the music’s more vigorous sections in a fairly straight, no-nonsense and unrhetorical way – whereas other groups of late I’ve heard tend to emphasize the composer’s “angular” quality. Basically I thought they didn’t make a “meal” out of anything, except that I did find the leader in the first movement had a tendency to slide between some of his notes in places that gave a slight sentimental air to the music which it didn’t need – the other thing is that if only one person in a group is doing that there’s a discrepancy of phrasing, of texture, of unanimity in places – he only indulged occasionally, and he “tightened” his phrasing as the performance moved through its different sequences. As for the group as a whole, I thought, their playing had a purposeful grip of the music which simply never let go – and even though the dotted rhythms of the finale were occasionally hurried, and their “snap” glossed over ever so slightly, the performance’s overall drive carried the music irresistibly forward.

During this performance of the Beethoven, I think the expression “in thrall” would have best described the audience response – as the work unfolded, with movement after movement following without a break, there was engendered a growing sense of undertaking a journey, far-flung, rich and strange, encountering all kinds of quixotic encounters and occasional difficulties and well as moments of deep and rich reflection. The effect at its conclusion was that we “snapped out of it” and reacted as if waking from a wonderful dream, but a very immediate and visceral dream. The Quartet players never overdid any aspect of the music, but kept it tailored to a greater purpose, the result being a cumulative effect of the kind which kept the music playing in my head long after the actual concert sounds had ceased. In sum, I thought, as stated above using different words, that the Brodskys gave us a quintessential chamber music experience.

Four feasts forward – Catherine McKay and Peter Barber at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St Andrew’s Lunchtime Concert Series presents:
Catherine McKay (piano) and Peter Barber (viola)

Music by Schumann, Enescu, Rachmaninov and Brahms

St.Andrews-on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday 4th March, 2015

At the beginning of the concert Peter Barber announced a change to the printed programme, one involving both a rearrangement of the existing order, and an additional item. So, Brahms’ FAE Sonata Scherzo Movement, which was to have opened the programme now became its concluding item; and an arrangement of Rachmaninov’s Vocalise for viola and piano was introduced, here put just before the Brahms.

It all seemed to work marvellously well, even if, right at the concert’s beginning I was troubled by the venue’s lively, somewhat over-insistent acoustic which blurred the lines in the first of Schumann’s four Märchenbilder”(Fairy-tale Pictures), the one marked “Nicht Schnell”. Always the most sensitive and accommodating of musical partners, pianist Catherine McKay seemed here to be made to produce a sound too richly-upholstered in places, so that the reticent tones of the viola were often lost in the exchanges.

Happily, the following “Lebhaft” seemed to restore those balances more fairly – perhaps the performers had by this time “gotten the pitch of the hall” – with more tone and presence from the viola, the piece’s “swagger” was given full play, the music’s excitement made palpable for us as a result. I still thought the “scherzando” episodes could have done with a lighter touch, as they tended to blur a little in the acoustic.

The third piece “Rasch” excitingly galloped its way into the sound-picture, with the pianist’s playing most skillfully accommodating the viola’s lines as required throughout the music’s narratives, without the music’s edge being at all lost or dimmed. What a marvellously haunted piece this was – and what balm for the senses was the “trio” section, the players beautifully “covering” their tones, wanting to make the greatest possible contrast with the spooky gallopings,  which returned to scalp-prickling effect

After all this, the final “Langsam, mit melancholischem Ausdruck” seemed like a prayer of homecoming.  We got lovely, limpid sounds, together with gently, lullabic lines on the violin – very “Brahmsian”  in effect, I thought. Despite that comment, for the most part it was music that could have been by no other composer than Schumann.

Interestingly, Peter Barber told us (wisely, at the work’s end) that the composer had noted down his inspiration for each of the pieces – the first two from the Rapunzel legend, the third from the story of Rumpelstiltskin, and the last one the Sleeping Beauty!

I didn’t know the next item, George Enescu’s Concertpiece. It appeared to be in a  single movement, but made up of two distinct sections – the first, headed, “Assez animé” established a winsome, “out-of-doors” feeling at the start, leading towards declamatory phrases (fanfares from the piano), and then followed by misterioso chromatic figurations, all of these moods coloured and characterized beautifully by the players. A return to the opening brought more celebratory flourishes, and “thrills and spills” moments which here played their part in conveying the extent of the musicians’ commitment to the task – after the energies had been spent, the viola soared aloft to a tender harmonic and a gently-plucked concluding chord.

At which point the music moved strongly and more darkly into a new “Animé”, with textures rather more stark and focused – these sequences were contrasted with passages in which the pair enchanted us with their lightness of touch and lyricism of phrasing. The tensions very satisfyingly built up amid moments of full-throated lyricism turning into energetic flourishes. Each player supported the other – the piano trumpeting and celebrating as the viola gathered momentum, and the string energies helping the piano to make a brilliant impression. As it would have been “new music” for many listeners, I thought it received wonderful advocacy.

I’d never heard Rachmaninov’s Vocalise played by a dark-hued instrument before – and the performance here was a revelation! Away from the brilliance and stratospheric freedom of the soprano voice, the piece took on the quality of an out-and-out lament, growing out of something meditative and deeply-felt, and transcending its mere “wordless song” association. Particularly telling in this performance was the interweaving of lines, with viola and piano tightly integrated and thus underscoring the intensity of it all. For one repetition of the melody the viola took its line up an octave, but it was the music’s deep-voiced intensities that in the end impressed most profoundly. After this, for me, the piece will never be the same again.

That left the Brahms Movement to “return us to our lives” – though in the event it was more a state of “separate reality” to which we were taken here, rather than any semblance of normality. What a wonderfully gutsy opening to a piece of music! And it was all fuelled by playing whose energy and incisiveness was just what the doctor ordered. I like the way the “schwung” of the opening took in both melody and rhythm without stinting, with just the right amount of skin and hair flying about to make a proper “cheek-by-jowl” contrast with the music’s relatively serene trio section.

However, the trio sequence still resonated with fragments of the opening rhythm, whose full force returned with almost Brucknerian power (what would Brahms have thought of THAT comparison, I wonder?). Music and playing fused feeling, energy and commitment into something grandly celebratory at the piece’s end – and the lunchtime audience was quick to express its appreciation of the performers. It was a good attendance, too, which bodes well for the 2015 season of one of the capital’s most highly-regarded musical series.

 

 

 

Days Bay Opera in great success with early opera, La Calisto

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Opera in a Days Bay Garden presents:
Cavalli: La Calisto

Conductor/Keyboards – Howard Moody
Director – Sara Brodie
Producer – Rhona Fraser
Opera in a Day’s Bay Garden Orchestra

Cast: Jove, King of the Gods – Robert Tucker
Mercury, his Messenger – Fletcher Mills
Calisto, A Nymph in Diana’s band – Carleen Ebbs
Endymion, a love-struck Shepherd – Stephen Diaz
Diana, adored Cult-Leader – Maaike Christie-Beekman
Linfea, one of Diana’s Maidens – Imogen Thirlwall
Satirino, a Satyr – Jess Segal
Pan, desperately seeking Diana – Linden Loader
Sylvano, one of Pan’s People – Simon Christie
Juno, Queen of the Gods  – Rhona Fraser
Juno’s Furies – Katherine McIndoe / Rose Blake
Satyr Dancers – Christopher Watts / Jack Newton

Canna House, Day’s Bay, Wellington

Wednesday 11 February, 2015, 6:30 pm

Review modified and edited by Lindis Taylor from Peter Mechen’s notes for his on-air review for Upbeat!)

In Days Bay Opera’s growing record of enterprising opera productions, this one was perhaps the most adventurous yet; it was certainly the earliest. La Calisto was first performed in Venice in 1651 – the composer was Francesco Cavalli and the libretto was written by Cavalli’s most frequent collaborator, Giovanni Faustini. For the story of Calisto he had woven together two myths – the story of the nymph Calisto and her seduction by Jupiter, and of the shepherd Endymion and his love for the goddess Diana.

Francesco Cavalli was born in Lombardi in 1602, which places him between Monteverdi, whose extant operas appeared between 1607 (Orfeo) and the early 1640s (Ritorno d’Ulisse and Poppea), and the more-or-less-known names that appeared later in the 17th century, like Cesti, Steffani (who was featured in a Composer of the Week programme last year, the hero of Cecilia Bartoli’s Mission CD), Stradella, Alessandro Scarlatti (strange that the French opera composers Lully, Charpentier, Campra, get ignored in this context), and later, Vivaldi, Porpora and many others including of course, Handel, an Italian opera composer par excellence.

Cavalli wrote forty-one operas as well as a lot of other music – church music for performance at St Mark’s in Venice, where he was organist and choirmaster until his death in 1676 at the age of 73.

A surprising number of his operas have been staged in the past half century, including Australia. This seems to be the first in New Zealand.

La Calisto wasn’t one of Cavalli’s great successes; a revival at Glyndebourne in 1970 put it on the map. Accepting the conventions of the time, the opera has proved popular: the story is by turns erotic and savage, silly and profound, the music is catchy, and the action is swiftly-moving and filled with interest.

That was certainly the case at Days Bay – the action never flagged, but was kept nicely spinning, the story of a bunch of gods behaving badly – in fact, behaving like the human beings they’re supposed to be setting an example to. The director Sara Brodie achieved a balance between music, drama and setting – no one thing dominated, which was extraordinarily satisfying.  Entertainment rather than profundity was the main concern of conductor and director, though there was a level at which serious issues were well handled; the emphasis was on communication with the audience.

Given the open air performance, diction was generally clear. Characters were sharply-drawn and entirely convincing, and an ear for wit and a lightness of touch enhanced the buoyancy and energy of it all. There were no stage designs or sets – the house, the decks and the environment served excellently – but the costumes were amusing and suggestive.

There was very fine singing from local singers and the instrumental playing – a mix of violins, cello, double-bass, harpsichord, organ with two recorders, dulcian (an early bassoon) and a theorbo, under the lively and sensitive direction of English conductor and early music specialist Howard Moody who had been a colleague of Rhona Fraser’s in England – produced textures that were coloured with a keen sense of the period.

Duets and ensembles were as important as solo moments so that no one singer dominated, least of all the lead role, Calisto. Nevertheless, from her first entrance, Carleen Ebbs as Calisto made a richly sonorous impression, producing tones that illuminated the words’ intention – for example she contrasted nicely her chaste rejection of Jove’s initial advances, with her besotted acceptance of the bogus Diana as her lover (Jove in drag and singing falsetto). Ebbs is a voice to listen out for.

Another to impress was the Jove of Robert Tucker, whom I’d seen previously as Noye in the Festival’s production of Noye’s Fludde. His rich voice was matched by wholehearted acting as Jove, the characterization thrown into bold relief by his portrayal of Diana, sung in a falsetto voice, but with irruptions of male testosterone fuelling both the excitement and the tensions of possible discovery by Calisto of the deception.

As the lovesick Endymion, counter-tenor Stephen Diaz was magnetic, with a deportment allied to a voice which occasionally generated a kind of unearthly angelic quality. The object of his desires, Maaike Christie-Beekman’s Diana beautifully and convincingly maintained the balance between public disinterest while privately besotted with her handsome shepherd, her diction allowing the words their full expression.

Imogen Thirlwell always commands attention on stage as a fine actress, and her voice has such lift and energy, galvanizing any role she takes on. Here Linfea’s thoughts ran the full gamut of the lovesick maiden’s thoughts and feelings in a totally convincing fashion. And Rhona Fraser as Juno was just wonderful – properly imperious, implacable and vengeful – a force to be reckoned with (as a hapless young male audience member found out to his embarrassment, though he didn’t entirely panic at being suddenly thrust into the limelight!).

Simon Christie and Linden Loader gave characteristically solid performances as Sylvano and Pan respectively, as did Fletcher Mills as Mercury, Jove’s occasionally libidinous sidekick!

But it was the teamwork which impressed as much as anything, the ensembles, the co-operative dovetailing of tones, the delight in gaging exactly what and how much was needed in any given situation.

 

Wellington Chamber Orchestra – a wonderful concert and a promising conducting debut

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

BEETHOVEN – Overture “The Creatures of Prometheus”
BRUCH – Kol Nidrei with Andrew Joyce (‘cello)
VIVALDI – Concerto for 2 ‘cellos
with Ken Ichinose and Andrew Joyce (‘cellos)
MENDELSSOHN – Symphony No.3 in A Minor “Scottish”

Wellington Chamber Orchestra
conducted by Andrew Joyce

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

Sunday, 7th December, 2014

This was a programme whose contents promised delight at every turn – although one listener’s favorite can be another’s aversion, there are surely pieces which have such a wide range of appeal, that even the most hardened, narrowed-down listener would find it difficult to resist their blandishments. Such was this happy assemblage – in fact I haven’t been able to find a single person who attended and DIDN’T say “What a programme!”.

Having scored with the raw materials, the Wellington Chamber Orchestra furthered its cause by engaging none other than Andrew Joyce, principal ‘cellist of the NZSO, to conduct. As this was (so he afterwards told me) Joyce’s actual public debut as a conductor, the prospect of hearing him direct the orchestra was one fuelled entirely by expectation built upon people’s awareness of his stature as a soloist, chamber player and NZSO section principal.

While orchestral players (or pianists, not to mention singers) do not necessarily great conductors make, most notable exponents of the baton have had some experience “in the ranks” as it were. As well, the “born not made” adage is trotted out fairly regularly whenever the conductor’s art comes under scrutiny of discussion. Because of the conductor’s persuasive function, there certainly has to be some kind of force of personality, however expressed, intertwined with the musical skills, one which carries (sometimes recalcitrant) orchestral players along, and achieves the necessary unanimity.

By the end of the concert’s first half, I was wanting to hail Andrew Joyce as a “natural” in the job, based on the results of the splendid orchestral playing and the focused, characterful interpretations. Because amateur orchestras play together far less often than do professional ones, there’s a Janus-faced frisson of excitement and tension surrounding every public performance – on the one side, the thrill of bringing wonderful music to life, and on the other, the precariousness of technically keeping “on the rails” both individually and as part of the ensemble.

Throughout much of this concert these excitements and tensions brought out the musicians’ best. At the very beginning we enjoyed the conductor’s  sharply-etched focus, a snappy, attention-grabbing opening to the Beethoven “Prometheus” Overture, followed by a lovely, warm cantabile from the winds, the tones and textures beautifully filled out by the strings and the horns golden-sounding. The allegro which followed used nicely-pointed rhythms rather than just speed to get the music’s character across, with everything given a real sense of shape and form. Again, the winds distinguished themselves in the perky second subject, the whole orchestra gathering up the various threads and driving the music through the composer’s varied treatment of his material with real élan.

Having impressed with his conducting, Joyce then turned to his ‘cello for the next item, Max Bruch’s adorable Kol Nidrei, whose full title includes the description Adagio on 2 Hebrew Melodies for ‘Cello and Orchestra with Harp. As ‘cellists normally sit directly facing the audience, I wondered how the performance would fare, as Joyce would ostensibly be directing the orchestra as well as delivering the not inconsiderable solo part, all with his back to most of the players! From where I was sitting I couldn’t see the concertmaster giving any “cues” to the band, as often happens in these circumstances. Still, whatever alchemic means was used to direct the musicians’ playing certainly worked, as, a touch of dodgy wind-tuning apart, the orchestra was able to deliver a well-nigh impeccable accompaniment to Joyce’s performance of this beautiful work, throughout.

It was touching to read in the programme notes of Joyce’s grandfather’s association with this piece, the latter a keen amateur ‘cellist himself, whose desire to take up music as a career was thwarted by the onset of World War II and his conscripted service as a soldier. At his grandfather’s funeral, sixteen years ago, Joyce played this piece in his memory, a circumstance that would naturally give any subsequent performance by him a special significance. Thus it was with the playing, here, though there was no excessive heart-on-sleeve emotion wrung from the music – everything seemed to flow naturally and inevitably, and with a real sense of ensemble (I need to mention the lovely harp-playing), the exchanges between the solo instrument and the orchestral strings drawing the threads of melody beautifully together.

In the past the orchestra’s enjoyed partnerships with an impressive array of soloists, and this concert was no exception – one of Joyce’s colleagues from the NZSO cello section, Ken Ichinose, joined his section-leader to play a Double-‘Cello Concerto by Antonio Vivaldi. As Ken Ichinose’s pedigree as a player includes experience with both the Philharmonia Orchestra of London and the renowned Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields, it was luxury-casting with a vengeance for this music! What gave even more pleasure was Vivaldi’s writing for a “trio” of ‘cellists at various parts of the work, giving a third player almost as much of the spotlight as the “soloists” – the WCO’s principal ‘cellist Ian Lyons held his own throughout in fine style.

But what energies this music has! – Vivaldi’s motoric impulses gave every member of the ensemble a fine old workout in the outer movements’ tutti sections – the Largo movement by comparison was almost lullabic in its effect, augmented by a harp towards the end. As one would expect in this company, the exchanges between the two soloists were spectacular in places, with the third ‘cello an impressive back-up when needed, which was often. The work’s concluding tutti threw sparks in all directions, creating plenty of edge-of-seat excitement amongst the audience, which burst out as applause at the end most enthusiastically.

Our vistas were thrown open even further after the interval by Mendelssohn’s evocative “Scottish” Symphony – its “teething troubles” (it took Mendelsson ten years, on-and-off, to complete this work – though numbered as the Third, it was the last of his five full-scale symphonies to be completed) belie what seems like its ready fluency and energy of utterance – only the somewhat “tacked-on” coda to the final movement suggests that its composer might have had certain difficulties “placing” his material in a convincing and organic manner. Certainly the composer’s “Italian” Symphony (No.4) is a tauter, more obviously “focused” work, though the “Scottish” has its own expansive and treasurably unique epic character.

Conductor and players seemed to relish the symphony’s first movement with playing by turns freshly-wrought, finely-crafted and vigorous (and, to my surprise and pleasure, even giving us the repeat!) Those distinctive, plangent wind-tones at the symphony’s beginning sang with such flavour, getting a real “out-of-doors” feeling to the sounds; and the tricky opening of the allegro was negotiated without undue mishap by strings and winds alike, the later “martial” moments splendidly ringing out. With the repeat, one felt there was more confidence among the strings as they launched into the allegro once again, though every section – winds, brass, timpani – hove to with focused, on-the-spot playing.

For instance, the cellos did well with their beautiful development-recapitulation-transition melody, singing their descant-like line over the top as if their lives depended on the outcome. When it came to the storms of the coda, the strings, though sounding undernourished of tone, launched into things with everything they had, wind and brass shouting out their support and pushing the music on as energetically as they dared. As for the winding down of the coda, the winds did a lovely job bringing us quietly and surely to those final pizzicato chords, concluding what I thought was a sterling orchestral effort from all concerned.

Alas, the tricky scherzo took its toll – the opening solos, though fluently-phrased, had difficulty keeping up with the pace set by the conductor, and the strings came adrift with some of their entries. For a while the music’s pulse was confused until the winds, with their “Midsummer Night’s Dream”-like figurations managed to pull everything back together with the conductor’s guidance – the horns also did well with their distant calls at the end. A happier impression was made with the slow movement, the strings enjoying the lusciousness of the opening, and their “tune to die for” (rather like an extended version of the famous melody in “The Hebrides” Overture) – the playing was beautifully nuanced, throughout. The dark-browed interludes made a powerful impression each time, with climaxes wonderfully capped by the brasses.

But oh! – that tune! – Though not particularly suited to “symphonic” treatment, it must still be one of the world’s great ones. As well, I learned for the first time that when the cellos’ repeat it, they’re supported by a single horn, with the others harmonizing in places. Gorgeous, as here! And the clarinets in thirds (again there are parallels with the “Hebrides” work) held up well at the end, as did the rest of the winds.

The finale’s dotted rhythms were always going to be hard to keep buoyant, and so it proved, though the very opening produced a terrific snap! Brass and wind produced a great effect with their two-note snarls, though those rhythms tended to lumber rather than dance, throughout, as well as come adrift at times. Better was the coming-together of the two-note motifs of various kinds, both repeated-note and octave-leap calls, dying away to allow the clarinet and bassoon to mellifluously return us to the symphony’s opening mood, in preparation for the aforementioned coda.

One of the horn-players had told me he was looking forward to this moment in the work – and it certainly proved a real blast for the brass, here! Though blipping a little with their calls, they certainly let ‘er rip to great effect, joined by the winds and then by the strings – a grand apotheosis, which the performance certainly made the most of, to everybody’s delight.  So, a fine way for an orchestra to finish a year, and a wonderful public debut for Andrew Joyce as a conductor – we would welcome any opportunities to see and hear him do more, though we definitely don’t want to lose him as a ‘cellist!

Bach Choir’s Stephen Rowley bows out in style

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Bach Choir of Wellington presents:
CANTATAS AND CAROLS

JS BACH – Cantata No.140 “Wachet auf, ruft die Stimme”
– Cantata No.191 “Gloria in excelsis Deo”
Traditional Carols for choir and audience

Nicola Holt (soprano)
Adrian Lowe (tenor)
Simon Christie (baritone)
The Bach Choir of Wellington
The Chiesa Ensemble (Rebecca Struthers – leader)
Douglas Mews (organ)
Stephen Rowley (conductor)

St.Joseph’s Church, Mt.Victoria, Wellington

Saturday 6th December 2014

This concert marked the conclusion of conductor Stephen Rowley’s tenure as music director of the Bach Choir of Wellington, a position he took over from Nigel Williams in 2008. A glance at the repertoire performed by the choir during this time attests to the rich variety of music experienced by the group under Rowley’s expert direction. Appropriately, his final collaboration with the choir featured the music of Bach, as well as appropriately involving the audience via a selection of well-known carols.

I had not been in the venue, St.Joseph’s Church in Mt.Victoria, since the old church was demolished in 2003 and the completely new building constructed. I must confess that the updated result feels to my antediluvian sensibilities less like a church than a concert hall, and, in fact  the acoustic amply justifies its use as such. Being a last-minute arrival at the concert I had to be content with seats that were so far to one side of the centre that I thought the performing balances would seem somewhat awry – but I was instead charmed by the clarity and warmth of the sound from my ostensibly unfavourable position.

Centrally-placed and to the back of the altar-area was the choir, with the soloists in the front row, immediately behind the orchestra, the Chiesa Ensemble (a period-performance ensemble made up of a group of NZSO players), and with the organist over to one side at the console, the conductor standing midships in front of the audience.Though the soloists and instrumentalists weren’t facing me, their tones were given sufficient ambient warmth to carry throughout the venue.

Cantata 140 began the concert, a gorgeous work, though one with the initial misfortune to have been written for the 27th Sunday after Trinity, a liturgical date which occurs only when Easter is more than usually early. Fortunately, present-day performances of these works rely far less on prompting by actual dates, even if the occasional co-incidence brings extra festivity and feeling for the occasion.

Some extraordinarily difficult part-writing in the opening “Wachet auf” for chorus in places tested but didn’t defeat the choir, and the instrumental support was glorious. The following tenor recitative, “Er kommt, er kommt, der Brautigam kommt” brought out both clarion tones and sweetly-turned lines in other places from the soloist, Adrian Lowe, after which Nicola Holt and Simon Christie undertook their aria duet “Wenn kommst du, mein Heil?” to my ears taking a few measures to get the “pitch’ of the lines, before settling down with some lovely “floated” notes.

Then came the famous “Zion hört die Wächter singen” with its much-loved melody dancing in tandem with the chorale-like step-wise utterances of the tenor soloist, the juxtaposition of the two making for a fine edge of contrasted separation which kept the contact-points open. This was a lovely, buoyant performance, giving the lie to the famous conductor Sir Thomas Beecham’s amusing but gratuitous remark about the dreariness of Bach’s “Protestant counterpoint”.

From here on the performance really fired, with the deeply-felt bass recitative “So geh herein zu mir” galvanized by another duet from Nicola Holt and Simon Christie “Mein Freund ist mein”, during which the pair really sparkled, aided and abetted by lovely oboe playing and strong continuo support from Eleanor Carter’s cello, with Douglas Mews, as always, a tower of strength at the organ. Stephen Rowley’s direction produced a full-throated response from the choir throughout the final chorale “Gloria sei dir gesungen”.

A warm sense of audience involvement was established through interspersing a performance-bracket of carols with some traditional favorites. We all enjoyed ourselves no end, being entertained in between times by the choir’s performances of Terence Maskell’s arrangements of various medieval carols. The men introduced Alleluya, a new work is come on hand in great style and with terrific verve, contrasting this with a gentler treatment of In dulci jubilee. A trio of women’s voices nicely projected There is a flower over wordless accompaniments, with well-controlled variants (some nervous “alleluias” notwithstanding), and finishing with the original threesome over gentle wordless harmonies once again.

Though these weren’t the Maori words I taught my school choirs back in the days of yore, I nevertheless enjoyed the colour-tones of the Maori-English sounds in Silent Night. I loved the choral writing for A spotless rose, all wind-blown and out-of-doors, giving the choir plenty of vertiginous lines to hold onto, though the descents into quiet concluding cadences obviously brought some relief. Everybody sounded more at home with Tomorrow shall be my dancing day, the women energetic and true, and the men’s off-beat entries nicely managed. I didn’t know the concluding Wexford Carol but it was a joy to hear the piece open up and knit together, the writing allowing men and women a varied and satisfying interaction of dynamics and colours.

Cantata 191 was one I didn’t know – or so I thought! – how wonderful, therefore, to be presented with the opening of the B Minor Mass’s “Gloria” right at the outset! This, the only cantata that uses Latin, is based on an even earlier work written by JSB in 1733, one which, in true Baroque fashion, he used in his B Minor Mass fifteen years later – but three years earlier he had put together this cantata for a Christmas Day service in Leipzig from much the same music. What a guy!

As with the opening of other “festive” works by Bach – the Christmas Oratorio, and the Magnificat come immediately to mind – this music instantly galvanizes the spirit, the thrill of those opening brass calls punctuated by timpani giving one goosebumps (especially when, as here, the pleasure was an unexpected one!). And the choir held its own up splendidly in the midst of these festive sounds, all of the voices matching the instrumentalists in exuberance at the beginning, and the women doing well with their lines at “bonae voluntatis”, the different sections handling the ensuing contrapuntal lines with aplomb.

The work’s second part is a shortened setting of the beautiful duet “Domine Deus” from the same “Gloria”, here, using a different text – this was an enchanting sequence, beautiful flute-playing at the beginning, and soprano and tenor completely at ease together, filling out their lines with winsome grace, and intertwining their voices most beguilingly, as did the flutes with and around the string accompaniments.

The choir’s vigorous attack at the finale’s beginning “Sicut erat in principio” was echoed by brass and timpani, the performers relishing both words and musical phrases, keeping the momentum buoyant and the tones festive and bright. The voices kept their trajectories on task throughout the demanding “et nun et semper” sections – Bach’s writing is characteristically challenging, and at times the ensemble lost its poise for a measure or three, though never for too long, strings, flutes, oboes and brass made bright, pungent tonal combinations, underpinned by the timpani, the music joyously driving to a heartwarming conclusion.

A presentation to Stephen Rowley from the Choir itself followed immediately after the concert – the occasion made for a happy and successful conclusion to what seems to have been an interesting and colourful era in the Bach Choir’s history.

 

Michael Houstoun’s Beethoven on Rattle

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BEETHOVEN – The Piano Sonatas
Michael Houstoun (piano)
Rattle RAT DO48 2014

Recording published by Rattle, a division of Victoria University Press 2014
(supported by Sir James Wallace and The Wallace Arts Trust)

(reviewed December 2014)

With his recently-released set of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas recorded for Rattle Records, Michael Houstoun joins a select number of pianists who have recorded the cycle more than once. And though he’s in pretty stellar company, here, alongside luminaries such as Wilhelm Kempff, Alfred Brendel, Wilhelm Backhaus, Daniel Barenboim and Friedrich Gulda, with this latest issue Houstoun can, in my opinion, hold his head up proudly in their company.

Had the pianist’s previous cycle for Trust Records, dating from the mid-1990s, been better and more consistently recorded, we would have had two “classic” performances of the works to savour and enjoy, each wholly characteristic of Houstoun’s playing at the time of recording. Alas, that earlier set remains compromised in places by variable sound, the promise of the first instalment of the Middle Period” sonatas thwarted by later production efforts which to my ears don’t do the pianism throughout the rest of the cycle proper justice.

Happily, the latest set, recorded in the New Zealand School of Music’s Adam Concert Room at Victoria University of Wellington by Steve Garden, in tandem with producer Kenneth Young and piano-tuner Michael Ashby, has caught a consistently true and (one or two reservations notwithstanding) eminently listenable sound-picture. It’s one that I can readily equate with what I heard of Houstoun’s playing in no less than three different venues during his 2013 concert performances of the cycle. I would still go back occasionally to that very first “Middle Period” Trust set of CDs to remind myself of how good Houstoun’s Beethoven was at that time, but it’s to the new set I would now almost unreservedly turn for a more far-reaching (and, of course more current) view of these works.

The presence and clarity of the sound is just one of the strengths of the new enterprise, though I would recommend that listeners to the set play the recordings at as high a volume setting as they dare, without offending neighbours, unsympathetic family members or musically recalcitrant pets. Before plunging into this “Beethovenian ocean” on my own, I had taken the set to a friend’s place to “sample” one of the discs, and the “Tempest” Sonata was chosen as a “test” piece – it didn’t impress as much as I had hoped, the sound seeming to lack both brightness and warmth as well as sufficient detail. But at home, and then at another friend’s house I listened at a higher volume – and the sound-picture was practically transformed! – now, the notes had plenty of “ring” and Houstoun’s detailing of the passage-work was opened up through being brought closer, and revealed as replete with interest.

A particular feature of the new set which I’ve really enjoyed is the arrangement of the sonatas upon each of the fourteen discs. Houstoun tells us in the accompanying booklet notes that back in the 1990s he initially resisted the idea of interfering with the published order of the works – so, by way of preparing them for his first public performance of the cycle he would play them through repeatedly “in order”. He gradually came to feel that in concert something different was needed, and so he devised seven programs, all of which featured sonatas from the composer’s different compositional periods. This proved so successful, that when it came time to repeat the cycle in 2013 the pianist made no changes to his “recital order”.

That same order is replicated on these new CDs, each of the seven recital programmes being allocated two discs. It makes for uncommonly satisfying listening, whether one decides to play any single CD or replicate any of the original recital programs. Unlike the “one-period-at-a-time” grouping of the sonatas in the previous Trust recordings, this newer project justly reflects the “holistic” way with which Houstoun conceived the undertaking right from the outset. To be fair, that first Trust set of the “Middle Period” sonatas was at the time a ground-breaking flagship venture, by no means assured of continuance after the first issue – so it was deemed necessary for each step to have a more “stand-alone” aspect.

How things have changed! – to the point where a new recording by Houstoun featuring all thirty-two of the sonatas was deemed not only possible but necessary! And how wonderful to have such a closely-associated sound-reminiscence of those actual recital programmes performed up and down the land during 2013!  So, when one turns to Programme One, on the set’s first two discs, one can begin that amazing journey all over again, with the pianist as a skilled and insightful guide. The thoughtfulness of Houstoun’s approach can be gleaned by his choice of the D Major Sonata Op.10 No.3 as the opening work, because, as he puts it “of its wonderful Largo”, what he goes on to call “Beethoven’s first truly great slow movement”.

Which brings me to mention of another of the new set’s qualities – its reproduction of the pianist’s own commentaries from the notes accompanying the live recitals, illuminating and enhancing our appreciation of what we hear at almost every turn. This was also a feature of the Trust issues, though Houstoun has rewritten these in accord with his “latest thoughts” – invariably the message is the same but worded differently, often more simply, as with the “refreshed” note about the “Waldstein” Sonata. (I do regret the omission of a footnote to the earlier set’s remarks about the E-flat Op.81a Sonata, usually subtitled “Les Adieux”, one which nicely made the point that Beethoven wanted his own description “Das Lebewohl” used in the published edition – in the new set, the traditional French subtitle stands at the head of the note once more, as if to say “Oh, well….”).

But the stylish, sturdily-bound booklet has much more – there’s a detailed, fluently-written biography of Houstoun penned by Charlotte Wilson, a true celebration of the pianist’s life and career, her account properly inclusive of all the people whose influence made a difference to the pianist’s life-course, as well as being revealingly candid in places (for example, I found the portrait of Houstoun’s relationship with his father somewhat chilling). Obviously written for local consumption (it has an engagingly first-name-parochial style), the essay provides an exhilarating, but nicely-balanced account of a remarkable career, one which, by dint of both success and setback through injury, has had its ups and downs, and emerged all the stronger.

Booklet and discs are beautifully and securely encased, with everything conveniently accessible, as per Rattle’s usual attractive standards of presentation – there’s a time-line of the pianist’s career for quick reference, a discography, and numerous photographs, both from different stages of Houstoun’s life and from his two Beethoven cycle recital series (the later ones in colour). Decorating both booklet and discs is detail from a painting by Christchurch-based artist Philip Trusttum, helping to give the issue a strongly-flavoured, uncompromisingly abstracted home-grown feel, which suits the enterprise perfectly.

As for this review, it’s obvious that to do full and detailed justice to Houstoun’s playing of the whole cycle would require a lengthy treatise that might take longer to read than it would the pianist to play through the music! But I thought that, in the midst of the inevitable generalities an examination of one of these “programmes” would give the reader something of a sense of its specific flavour, and an idea of the range and scope of the whole. With these objectives in mind I decided I would examine the first of them, and sneak in veiled references to other individual sonatas along the way of things, as opportunities  “crop up” to do so.

So, Programme One! – it begins with a hiss and a roar, as the opening declamation of Op.10 No.3 exuberantly announces its presence as would a character in an opera buffa. The music is a kind of comedy overture, replete with spontaneous energies, extravagant gestures, sly asides, quizzical looks and enigmatic smiles – and, while Houstoun isn’t a nudge-wink Shura Cherkassky kind of performer, his playing suggests something of this tumbling warmth and po-faced humour, with plenty of dynamic variation and flexibility of phrasing.  As one might expect he gives the “wonderful Largo” full measure, exchanging the comic mask for a deeply tragic one, and making the most of sequences like the wonderful ascending triplet passage which then tightens the screws on the tensions towards the conclusion, before breaking off and returning to the opening “stasis of sorrow” that frames the movement. The strength of his playing leaves a relatively dry-eyed impression at the movement’s end, but that’s in keeping with making coherent what’s still to come, the “tragedy to the mind and a comedy to the intellect” idea supported by the playfulness of both Menuetto and Finale. What marvellous music it is!

Then comes the first of the two “Fantasy-Sonatas” of Op.27 (the other one being the “Moonlight”, of course), here played and phrased a shade coolly at the outset, tempering its early romanticism, perhaps in deference to its more famous companion – though Houstoun revealingly muses in his notes that, for him, “Beethoven hasn’t quite made up his mind what to do” – and the touch of abruptness at the beginning certainly supports that view. Later in the Sonata Houstoun’s playing is less equivocal, for instance, giving full measure to the “held” chord that connects the scherzo with the heavenly-voiced third-movement adagio. In places like this one admires the connectiveness of the artist’s thinking about and playing of the music.

The bright, chirpy opening of the E Major Op.14 No.1 Sonata does emphasize the recording’s touch of dryness, though better this than too “swimmy” an acoustic – I like the slightly questioning air Houstoun brings to the first movement’s repeated ascending chromatic phrase, one whose delivery I find here more quizzical than the pianist’s description of “unsettling”, but certainly in consistent accord with what happens throughout. There’s a flexibility of response that to me suggests greater ease and circumspection than was the case with the more tightly-wound Trust performance. Something of the severity of Beethoven’s previous sonata, the “Pathetique”, does come across in Houstoun’s way with the Allegretto middle movement, a sense of sombre ritual, nicely “warmed” by the pianist during the major-key trio. But what a tour-de-force is his playing of the triplet-dominated finale, capturing the music’s “rolling-down-the-hill” exuberance and moments of quirky harmonic exploration in one fell swoop – a most exhilarating first-half closer!

An interval of sorts comes with a change of CD for the recital’s second half, opening with the Op.26 A-flat Sonata – a work which Houstoun describes as a “new beginning” for the composer’s use of sonata-form, one containing both a theme-and-variations movement, and a funeral march! The opening is the theme, resplendent and rich in its A-flat finery, to which Houstoun brings a fine nobility, before gently teasing out the variations, none of which are of the showy, flashy variety – though perhaps the last of them, with its more filigree aspect, sounds a tad more self-conscious than the rest. (Beethoven ushers it demurely out of sight at the end via a brief coda!)

Houstoun has always done well with this particular sonata, achieving miracles of finely-gradated touch in the scherzo, while relishing the music’s syncopated accents. But when it comes to the Funeral March movement, I have to say I prefer the pianist’s more expansive tempo on the earlier Trust recording. Compared with the newer, sterner reading, the former sounds more inwardly-felt, with the playing supported by a warmer and slightly more giving acoustic. This is especially noticeable in the drum-roll sequences, which, on the new Rattle recording convey to me a more dispassionate, almost abstracted impression – perhaps Houstoun was concerned that anything more theatrical and dramatic in manner might, as he put it in his notes, “sound meretricious”. Fortunately, the finale restores the music/listener relationship to a more even keel once again, Houstoun nicely realizing for us the babble of the semiquaver voices as they collect, intensify, dissipate, and then finally disappear, as abruptly as they first appeared.

Already these two discs have taken us on quite a musical journey, so to have the “Waldstein” Sonata at the recital’s end is akin to experiencing a kind of homecoming – I remember the live concerts consistently supporting that sense of completion in different ways, depending upon the works involved in the various traversals. With sonatas such as Programme Two’s Op.101 in A (No.28), Programme Five’s Op 109 in E (No.30) and Programme Six’s Op.110 in A-flat (No.31), the sense of “return” at their conclusion I found very strong and satisfying, in complete contrast to the programs that left one in wondrously transfigured worlds from which one gradually found one’s own way back afterwards! – such were Programme Three’s “Hammerklavier”, Programme Four’s “Appassionata” and (despite an overall sense of grand summation) the final programme’s stellar Op.111 – all far-reaching conclusions!

So it is, here – Houstoun’s way with the “Waldstein”, instantly engaging, nevertheless has a grand cumulative effect, proceeding from the brightly-alert opening pulsations and their contrasting lyrical counterweights to a rigorous engagement between the two in a working-out section, standpoints that are steadfastly restated at the recapitulation of the opening, but quite gloriously “worked out” by the time the movement’s concluding musings and final flourish come upon us. The deep-throated “song of the earth” that follows is beautifully voiced, the spaces as eloquently shaped as the notes, our progress through the void led instinctively to that matchless moment of impulse when the light from a single note points the way forward.

The way Houstoun takes us through all of this is an art that conceals art, one which repays the closest attention in kind. Though one feels the inevitability of the pianist’s conception throughout, there’s still an “in situ” chemistry of engagement that transfixes every moment – it’s a quality that I’ve come to associate with Houstoun, that he can persuade you of the rightness of his interpretation at the time of listening, even when, in retrospect, you might find you prefer what you’ve heard others do. Here in the Waldstein, there’s no doubt that a kind of greatness is at work, as each of the work’s episodes is characterized so strongly and sharply – one doesn’t think of isolating any particular sequence, but instead, of simply “going with the flow” and reflecting on life’s richness and diversity when the music finally leaves off.

Others that stand out for me among these recorded performances are those programme-concluding works I’ve already mentioned – and, of course, that’s the way any kind of assemblage works best, like the Biblical wine for the guests at the marriage-feast at Cana, where the “best” was also kept to last!  Each of those works speak for themselves, in a sense, though it would be true to say that they show Houstoun’s playing at his most inspired, the music’s greatness matched by the pianist’s response accordingly. It would be wrong of me to make much of one performance at the expense of others, but I thought Houstoun’s playing of the “Appassionata”, as in the recital (Programme Four), some of the most remarkably abandoned pianism I’ve ever heard from him (the playing literally brought the Wellington Town Hall audience to its feet!).

At the spectrum’s other end, of course, is the final sonata’s concluding Arietta movement – surely one of the most remarkable, inter-galactic acts of creation ever devised by a human being – while my allegiance to the young Daniel Barenboim’s first EMI recording of this work as a “desert-island choice” remains unshaken, Houstoun’s performance is a “thinking-man’s alternative” to the likes of the more visceral, spontaneous-sounding Barenboim. And, in any case, from the beginnings of those trilled murmurings after the near-manic “boogie-woogie” variation has subsided, Houstoun “has me in thrall” right to the piece’s end, as overwhelmingly as any. Yes, I know it’s supposedly all in the music, and the performer is merely the conduit through which it passes – but that’s a superficial observation. It DOES make a difference who’s sitting at the piano – and with Michael Houstoun there, that difference has its own precious distinction.

By any standards this new set is a wondrous achievement from all concerned.

 

 

 

Circa Theatre’s “Dead Tragic” a life-enhancing experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Circa Theatre presents:
DEAD TRAGIC
by Michael Nicholas Williams

Cast: Emma Kinane / Jon Pheloung
Lyndee-Jane Rutherford / Darren Young
Michael Nicholas Williams

Musical Director: Michael Nicholas Williams
Lighting Designer: Glenn Ashworth
Costume Designer: Maryanne Cathro
Set Design: Barnaby Kinane Williams

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday, 22nd November, 2014

That old wizard of stage and screen, Noel Coward, was right when he famously quipped, “….how extraordinarily POTENT cheap music is……” – that is, if the response of the “half-century-onwards” hearts that were pumping and pulsating throughout Circa Theatre’s startlingly in-your-face “Dead Tragic” collection of truly-and-tragically-dreadful 1970s songs was anything to go by.

In fact that opening sentence gives you an idea of some of the convolutions of the lyrics which my particular generation swallowed, hook, line and sinker with the syrupy tunes, while on its collective knees to the blandishments of the pop industry and to commercial radio – here were some of the most coruscating examples of the genre, come back to haunt us, just when we thought it was safe to let our guards down and peer backwards through the generational mists.

Thankfully, we are compartmentalised beings! – and so while it was, in a sense, out-and-out, long-overdue cultural death by nostalgia for some of our more superannuated neuron-clusters, other, more robust parts of us came through the experience, phoenix-like, cleansed and strengthened, ready to face a brighter and fresher generation of “the same but different” – if my teenaged son’s current “You-tube” manifestations are anything to go by.

But at Circa, after I’d squared up to the actual confrontations with these realities, and subsequently took stock of the outcomes, I found myself echoing the aforementioned, redoubtable Sir Noel in my musings – “What treasures! – what hot-wire experiences! – what visceral juices set a-bubbling! – what delight, and what laughter!” – and, finally and surprisingly – “What days they were!”

As that iconic Kiwi, Fred Dagg, might have expostulated (though not to be confused with home-brew, or some other such thing) – “Talk about potent, Trev!” – some of these songs carried their potency with the pin-pointedness of a truth serum. Despite the inevitable lampooning, some of the original associations evoked were specifically time-and-place, rather like when people are able to remember where they were when hearing the news of The Beatles breakup, or the deaths of Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Evis Presley or John Lennon.

So, these thoughts were all leapfrogging in my head as I sat in the midst of an obviously delighted Circa audience, while song followed song and joy and delight followed surprise and excitement! Here were five on-stage performers, four whose business was singing and acting (Emma Kinane, Jon Pheloung, Lyndee-Jane Rutherford and Darren Young) and a musical director (Michael Nicholas Williams), a power at the keyboard, an extra voice when needed, both solo and in the ensemble – here was so much for the entertainment of so many presented by so few!

But what powerhouses they all were! – right from the opening “Delilah” delivered by Jon Pheloung with libido-laden bodily pulsations and vocalizations impressive on both aural and visual counts, backed to the hilt with impressively harmonized chorus reprises from the supporting trio, and flailing figurations in thirds from the “backing group”, we were properly confronted with the world of “truly, madly, deeply” – and ultimately, “tragic and deadly”.

To go through each song would stretch my emotional repercharge to breaking-point and exhaust my poor stock of superlatives in no time at all! – naturally enough, there were places where all of my needles “peaked”, though I can’t remember a single item that didn’t work on its own terms. Part of the fun was  in the performers’ adroit juxtapositioning of the “straight” with the “parody”, the heartfelt with the satirical –  the mix was never predictable in its bias or degree of intensity, making for edge-of-seat expectation both prior to and during some of the numbers.

Some numbers suffered out-and-out lampooning, to everybody’s utter delight – “Seasons in the Sun”, which, admittedly, could have been played “straight” to risible effect, was here subjected to a most deservedly deconstructivist treatment, Darren Young revelling in the comic opportunities for a “deathbed farewell farce” complete with the obligatory sign from heaven in the form of a cross.

Though the songs were all American, with some of the realizations there seemed more than a touch of the home-grown haunting the presentation aspect in places  – both “Nobody’s Child” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” featured Lyndee-Jane Rutherford’s engagingly “ordinary Kiwi sheila” in the limelight, accustomed or otherwise, in the former making the most of her five minutes of plaintive fame, cross-eyed with concentrated focus, while in the latter valiantly doing without any fairy godmother in preparation for her desperately-planned bouts of adulterous acquiescence, with some excruciatingly uncomfortable bodily hair removal procedures.

A nice touch at half-time was the pushing-over towards centre-stage of the giant record-player-arm, whose head had doubled as a coffin at some stage or other (and would do so again!), signifying that  “Side One” had been completed! – set designer Barnaby Kinane-Williams deserved a pat on the back for that particular inspiration! Then Emma Kinane and Darren Young got the “flip side” away to a marvellously schmaltzy piece of quasi-ethnicity with “Running Bear” (was I hearing things, or did the audience’s toe-tapping reach hitherto undisturbed levels of intensity during this catchy number?) – whatever the case, it all impressively morphed into Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, our amusement tempered with real appreciation of the group’s part-singing harmonizing, and the imaginative staging, with the ghostly, disembodied faces.

As with all classy entertainments, there were terraced intensities – even more deconstructionist that “Seasons in the Sun” was the ensemble’s response to “Darling Jane”, a song whose scenario and lyrics were surely the stuff of legends, epitomizing as they did the most mindless banalities known to Tin Pan Alley – this was Musical Director Michael Nicholas Williams’s one real chance to shine in a starring vocal role, an opportunity nicely scuppered by the storm-tossed palm fronds manipulated by Emma Kinane and Lyndee-Jane Rutherford, mercilessly flailing the stage’s upper reaches, a space inhabited also by Williams’s head!

Against these objects of “harmless merriment” were the spectrum’s opposite-end songs, ones which, despite their understandable contextual capacity to amuse, couldn’t help but also impinge with a good deal of their original pathos, the most outstanding being “In the Ghetto”, which, for all its well-worn rhetoric remains a powerful and disturbing social statement – perhaps only “The Green Green Grass of Home” matched it for raw emotional power, however well-worn the terrain. This all-encompassing aspect of the show served only to remind us that things are because of their diametric opposites – and the definitions thus provided are of their own inverse value.

So, it was with grateful appreciation for the talents of those onstage performers, in tandem with Glenn Ashworth’s lighting, Maryanne Cathro’s consumes and Barnaby Kinane Williams’ set designs that we put our hands together and our feet repeatedly on the floor at the show’s end, satisfied with our lot, and enjoying the reactivation of all those ghostly resonances of times past, come back to tell us how important they actually are.