Author: Peter Mechen

Searing contribution from the WYO to “Recovering Forbidden Voices”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No.8 in C MInor Op.65
BEETHOVEN – Two Romances for Violin and Orchestra Opp. 40 and 50

Malavika Gopal (violin)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

Monday, 25th August, 2014

This concert was associated with a series of performances, presentations and discussions entitled “Recovering Forbidden Voices” –  programmes organised by Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music and the History and German Programmes of Victoria University of Wellington, and held over the previous few days (22nd-25th August) in the capital. The “Forbidden Voices” referred to music and composers who fell foul of the Nazis in Europe, resulting in many works, particularly by Jewish composers, being suppressed or banned over the period associated with the rise of Hitler to power in Germany.

The music of Shostakovich came under fire in his native Russia at the same time for different reasons – the composer had, during the 1930s, famously fallen foul of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin with his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” but had rehabilitated himself somewhat as a “people’s artist” with his Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the latter work celebrating the siege of Leningrad and the heroism of the Russian people. What the composer privately thought of the war, its effects upon his homeland and the events surrounding the conflict was more realistically delineated in his Eighth Symphony.

The work wasn’t received with any great acclaim, reviews being tinged with disappointment and bewilderment at the music’s bleak, pessimistic tone – “significantly tougher and more astringent that either the Fifth or Seventh…..unlikely to prove popular…” commented a colleague of the composer. These were prophetic words, as in 1948 the infamous “Zhdanov decree” issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party attacked the composer and his work, accusing him of “formalist perversions”. As a result, the Eighth Symphony wasn’t performed again until 1956.

The Russian view of the symphony that has endured was expressed a number of years later later by the great pianist and associate of the composer, Sviatoslav Richter, who called it “the decisive  work in Shostakovich’s output”. While perhaps not as popular in the West as the aforementioned Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, the C Minor work’s greatness and incredible  depth of tragic expression has come to be acknowledged everywhere.

While the symphony’s performance readily associated the occasion with the “Recovering Forbidden Voices” theme, the concert’s first half presented a dramatic and perhaps a welcome contrast in anticipation to Shostakovich’s conflict-torn work. This was supplied by both of Beethoven’s Romances for violin and orchestra, performed by soloist Malavika Gopal, currently a player with the NZSO, and back home in Wellington after a period of study and performing experience overseas (including a stint with the famed Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra).  However, before the concert proper began we were properly welcomed by three speakers, firstly Professor Donald Maurice representing the School of Music, and then by the Mayor of Wellington, Celia Wade-Brown, and the Government Minister for the Arts, Chris Finlayson, all of whom talked about the “Forbidden Music” venture.

Once the music got under way, Malavika Gopal’s quality as a violinist was instantly apparent, the opening solo of the first of Beethoven’s Romances as sweet-toned as one could wish for, and the contrasting middle section properly gutsier and grainier, as befitted the music. Naturally all the attention seemed to be on her, except that if Hamish McKeich and the orchestra’s accompaniments had faltered in any way we would surely have noticed!

I have a slight preference for the less ritualistic, more rhapsodic No.2 of the pair of Romances, and Malavika Gopal didn’t disappoint with this one either, if anything sounding even sweeter-toned in the music’s freer, more soaring lines.Though reluctant to pass judgement to any great extent on her musicianship after such brief encounters with her playing, I would nevertheless be anxious to hear her tackle some more extended solo repertoire, which her return to take up a place with the NZSO “firsts” will hopefully enable her to do here in Wellington.

An interval decently distanced the two very different listening experiences for us, after which it was “all posts manned (sic)” for the Shostakovich. Though feeling hopeful as regarding the capabilities of these young players (thanks in part to my hearing a wonderful recent performance by the School of Music Orchestra of Vaughan Williams’ difficult “Pastoral” Symphony) I did have reservations regarding their abilities in sustaining Shostakovich’s vast and bleak vistas of pessimism and deep sorrow, punctuated by frighteningly intense outbursts of fear and anger. And I wondered how on earth this group of young players was going to be able to generate sufficient tones to fill the spaces of the Michael Fowler Centre. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

Right from the beginning, the playing seemed galvanised by a kind of spirit akin to grim determination, Hamish McKeich getting the lower strings to dig furiously into the textures, and, together with the chilling entries of the winds and the brasses, catch the “edge” of the music. Each section of the orchestra seemed to “speak its name” and assert its character in full measure, the treble voices across the sound-spectrum by turns plaintive and shrill, the middle voices properly insistent, and the basses both brooding and massively weighty as required.

Though the upper strings occasionally had problems with their intonation when essaying those great contrapuntal passages, the players kept the intensities to the fore, keeping the argument strongly and inexorably ploughing forwards, the winds and brasses rising spectrally from growing disquiet mid-movement and brutalising both the themes and their interaction, with incredibly powerful onslaughts of sound, leaving the cor anglais and the clarinets to try and pick up the pieces. Despite the strings’ on-going struggle to hold those long mezzo-forte lines together, and the trumpet with its sudden declamatory phrase having a bad moment (probably after the player had delivered the passage  perfectly at rehearsal umpteen times!) the music’s purposeful strength was tenaciously held to the movement’s end.

What amazing, garish, full-on sonorities were hurled at us over the course of the two following scherzo-like movements! Such tremendous, playing-right-out work from the winds – and to such ghastly, ghoulish effect – in the first scherzo, Allegretto, piccolo, bassoon, clarinet, and then piccolo again, were all superb! Here, the strings occasionally had that nightmarish “wartime air-siren” aspect, which galvanised the brass and percussion into brutal sequences, harrowing ostinati torn by savage climaxes – however, Hamish McKeich took care to preserve the music’s shape with his players, maintaining a sense of ebb-and-flow, which held things in check, albeit temporarily, the contra-bassoon having a few droll soundings of its own, helping to ease the tensions.

All, it seemed, to little avail, as the savage, relentless viola ostinati which began the third movement allegro lashed out and flailed away at our sensibilities. My favourite part of the symphony (sensation-monger that I secretly am), I’ve always found the Russian recorded performances of this movement in particular streets ahead of those made in the West, with conductors like Kondrashin and Mravinsky requiring of their players such raw, unbridled attack and relentless, unequivocal savagery when addressing the music’s machine-like rhythms. I had been told by McKeich that he had studied the work with Valery Gergiev in Europe, and that he was fully aware of the special “Russian” performance characteristics, which for him informed the playing of that repertoire. In this movement, as with the rest of the symphony, his direction was as good as his word.

It actually sounded for much of the time as if a Russian orchestra was playing, so determined and up-front were the efforts of the players to give what their conductor was asking for – and for me it put some of the professionally-polished, but much-too-genteel efforts of some crack ensembles I’d heard on record in the shade. Full marks in particular to the trumpeter and side-drummer in the crude, ironic trio section – the strings couldn’t quite match the “bite” of the solo instruments here, but they made up for it when the opening returned. And the brass and percussion at the climax overwhelmed, as they ought to have done, the timpanist lashing out mercilessly, underlining the brutality of the composer’s nightmarish depiction.

So it was we were plunged into the great Passacaglia of the fourth movement, brass announcing the crack of doom and the string lines utterly despairing, the winds adding to the desolation with their helplessly-lost utterances, piccolo, bass clarinet and tongued flutes expressing the “fumbling in the despairing dark” referred to by one commentator – here it all sounded exactly like that, the impulses and gestures well-and-truly “gutted”.

Which is why the transition to the finale effected by the bassoon solo was such balm to the senses, even though the resolutions which followed remained properly haunted and bruised to the end. When questioned, the composer told a friend that the C Major transition to the concluding Allegretto had cost him “so much blood”, but that the end of the symphony was optimistic, despite the reiterate of moments of anxiety – though nothing further from the tub-thumping of the Fifth Symphony’s finale could be imagined than this work’s closing pages.

What these young musicians and their conductor gave us was a deeply-felt, incredibly-committed and stunningly-delivered emotional journey, thrills and spills all part of the human experience. It deserves to be remembered as a landmark performance by any standards, but certainly as a glowing achievement on the part of Hamish McKeich and the orchestra, and a cause for warm appreciation on the part of those fortunate enough to be present.

 

 

“The Knight of the Rose” (Der Rosenkavalier) delights at Days Bay

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Opera in a Days Bay Garden presents:
Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose)
An Opera by Richard Strauss (edited and arranged by Michael Vinten)
Libretto by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal (English translation by Alfred Kalisch)
Producer:  Rhona Fraser / Director:  Sara Brodie
Conductor:  Michael Vinten

OperainaDaysBaygarden Orchestra / Leader:  Blythe Press

Cast:  Rhona Fraser (Marshallin) / Bianca Andrew  (Octavian)
James Clayton (Baron Ochs) / Barbara Graham  (Sophie von Faninal)
Matt Landreth  (Herr von Faninial) / Imogen Thirlwall (Annina)
Tehezib Latiff (Italian Singer) / Simon Christie (Police Commissioner)
Frederick Jones  (Major-Domo / Landlord) / Marian Hawke (Marianne)
Lachlan McLachlan  (Mahomet)
also:  Bethany Miller, Coshise Avei, Elizabeth Harris, Luka Ventner,
Declan Cudd, Isabelle van der Wilt, Kahu Rolfe, Pania Rolfe, Finlay Barr-Clark

Wellesley College Hall, Days Bay, Wellington

Sunday 24th August 2014

I readily admit that I approached this Days Bay Opera production of “Der Rosenkavalier” with mixed feelings and with expectations somewhat on edge, wondering how well one of my  favourite operas would emerge from the processes of being not only shortened but also rearranged for chamber-like forces.

It’s just that a goodly part of Rosenkavalier’s appeal for me has always been its sheerly sumptuous quality, with  gorgeous late-romantic orchestral writing, and, in stage productions I’d previously seen, costume and set designs reflecting wealth and lavish display – everything, in a word, resplendent.

Counter-balancing these feelings was my previous (and it must be said) resoundingly positive experience of productions at Days Bay –  I had seen operas by both Handel and Mozart successfully performed there, on each occasion in the open air of producer Rhona Fraser’s magnificent garden, in presentations where singers and instrumentalists turned in strongly focused performances that triumphantly invigorated the music and brought the characters engagingly to life. So I was thus nicely poised between both pleasurable and doubtful anticipation as the opera’s beginning-time approached.

This time round, instead of staging the production outdoors and risking their audiences’ exposure to the cold and wet of winter, the organisers wisely took the step of securing the use of nearby Wellesley College’s beautifully-appointed assembly hall, whose harbour-view vistas served as a stunning introductory backdrop to the performing area for we in the audience before the show.

So, it was a production more-or-less “in the round”, with the orchestra at the back, and audience taking up the remaining three sides around the performing area, the singers making their entrances and exits from any of three of the corners. I thought director Sara Brodie’s use of the area beautifully conveyed both fluidity and stillness in her deployment of personages, around and about a centrally-placed bed in the first act, and across the more unimpeded spaces of Acts Two and Three.

I found to my great delight production and performances thoroughly engaging and in places enchanting – in short, most satisfying, even if I’m certain my reaction was partly due to pleasurable relief at experiencing so very much more of the work’s magic than I thought would be possible to convey under the circumstances. Of course, even in a full-scale production a good deal of the essence of Rosenkavalier as a piece of theatre can be found in the intimate exchanges between the characters and in the composer’s own chamber-like scoring of the accompaniments to these, however thrilling those big, fulsomely-upholstered moments remain.

In this sense the production’s excising of certain sequences (conductor Michael Vinten making the adjustments and rearrangements) enhanced the chamber-like nature of what we saw and heard, most definitely to this particular setting’s advantage. We lost detail here and there,  but gained in overall sweep and flow, dropped a couple of minor characters as well, but lightened the musical and theatrical textures in doing so.

A substantial cut was the lengthy orchestra-only preamble to Act Three, normally accompanying the “booby-trapping” of the room at the inn organised by the lascivious Baron Ochs for his illicit dalliance with the Marshallin’s “maid”, Mariandel (Octavian, the Marshallin’s young lover, in disguise). Most adroitly, Michael Vinten had merged Acts Two and Three together as one, so that the Baron, tricked by Octavian’s letter at the end of Act Two suggesting the “tryst” goes straight from the music of his beautifully lascivious Waltz-tune to meet up at the inn with Octavian/Mariandel.

So, all the “ghostly” irruptions intended to unnerve Ochs, and usually demonstrated during the Prelude were dispensed with, shifting the focus of the Baron’s discomfiture to the appearance of a bogus ex-wife and children, and of course, the arrival of the Faninals, father and daughter, and the Marshallin herself, to properly put the seal on Och’s downfall.

In light of these divergencies from the original the venture required a surety of focus, a kind of determination, even zeal, to bring it off – and right across the spectrum of production, of stage and musical direction, of singing and acting, and of orchestral playing one sensed this burning commitment to make it all work, a veritable glow which settled over certain moments in particular, but which for me resonated in ambient terms most satisfyingly thoughout the entire performance.

Three things got the proceedings away to a wonderful start – firstly, the playing of the famous Act One Prelude, with its bubbling energies capped by those notoriously orgasmic horn passages (Ed Allen’s playing gloriously exuberant at that point), followed by some extremely tender, beautifully-realised instrumental sounds of all persuasions, from the players.

Secondly we enjoyed director Sara Brodie’s inventive ploy for getting the lovers into the bed for their opening exchanges,  the Marshallin and Octavian entering in the midst of a flourish of bodies (a “chorus of many characters”) and quickly and unobtrusively sliding under the covers as their cohorts stood and bowed to us, by way of acknowledging our presence, before leaving as quickly as they had come.

Thirdly Bianca Andrew’s singing of Octavian’s opening lines (the opera was sung in English), had such a refulgent glow, a sound one wanted to simply bask in for a blessed time, getting the opera off to a most mellifluous beginning, voice-wise, one amply and characterfully furthered by Rhona Fraser’s dignified, worldly-wise Marshallin, Marie Therese. A pity we were distracted more than we ought to have been by the latter’s wig which seemed to be giving the singer cause for concern every now and then – the Marshallin could, at the very opening, surely have displayed her own hair as befitted the intimacy of the situation, as her young lover’s semi-clothed state certainly did!

Throughout the opening Act Bianca Andrew brought out the full gamut of her character’s youthful bravado, very much an infatuated youth prone to extremes of feeling, with great and natural exuberance followed by episodes of near-debilitating despair. And her acting when disguised as Mariandel was sheer delight, by turns engagingly gawky and irresistibly coquettish.

Equally as absorbing, but in an entirely different way, was Rhona Fraser’s Marshallin – as previously remarked, a dignified portrayal, if more than usually sober and reflective a figure from the outset, making us feel as if, perhaps even from the moment of waking she had already begun distancing herself from her young lover. The opportunities for lightness, even coquettishness between her and Octavian weren’t relished and pointed as one might have expected, in places such as her cool response to the young man’s’s angst at her hastily retracted “Once…..”, suggesting that he was by no means her first illicit lover.

So we got more of a progression in the Marshallin’s demeanour and attitude away from Octavian throughout the Act rather than a contrast before and after her encounter with her boorish, gold-digging cousin Ochs. However, Fraser’s circumspection gained full force with her “growing old” soliloquy after her cousin’s departure, as well as in the terms of her dismissal of her lover with the words “One day you will fall in love with someone younger and prettier”. She gathered in all of our sympathies throughout this scene by dint of her firmly-centred singing, and a patient, gently-etched delineation of the predicament faced by an older person enamored of somebody more youthful. And Michael Vinten’s control of the finely-woven orchestral texturings at the end, made for moments of such magic.

As for the force of rustic gallantry gone awry that was Baron Ochs, this was a part splendidly brought to life by Australian baritone James Clayton, all the more telling because of his and the production’s avoidance of excessive caricature. Clayton was a younger, more virile and physically personable Ochs than usual, whose oafishness lay more in his arrogance and sexist behaviour than anywhere else, a far more believable, and potentially dangerous figure than the usual boorish and physically repulsive character presented in the role. In his unfussily elegant eighteenth-century costume he actually cut a splendid figure, though the depiction of his attendant “love-child”, Leopold, sailed perilously close to caricature.

Act Two burst upon our sensibilities like a firecracker, the relative lack of tonal weight in the orchestra countered with plenty of “glint” and wonderfully incisive playing. Matt Landreth’s Herr Faninal wanted only a tad more metal in his tone to further resound his great excitement when announcing the “wondrous day” of his daughter Sophie’s betrothal to Baron Ochs. As for Barbara Graham’s Sophie, the portrayal would, I’m sure, have ticked everybody’s set of boxes  – she was girlish, pretty, vivacious, tremulous, exuberant and impulsive, and her singing was clear, unforced and accurate, both radiant and charming in her responses to Octavian and the Silver Rose. The actual presentation scene was as breath-catching and for me as goose-pimply as ever, those gorgeous wind arabesques cleverly supported by the piano when sounding their usual lump-in-throat progressions. Both singers “caught” and superbly held the intensity of exchange and the growing of emotional experience of each of their characters.

The reintroduction of Ochs and his father-in-law elect properly burst the scene’s romantic bubble, and the subsequent business culminating in Octavian’s wounding of the Baron in a duel went with a roar and a swing – this production “made do” with only one “conspirator” rather than the usual Machiavellian pair, Imogen Thirlwall using her comic talent and gift for characterization as Annina to great effect. She nicely teased the wounded Baron with Octavian’s “Mariandel” letter, and set him up to positively revel in his famous Waltz Song – a nice “stage-business” touch was allowing Ochs every opportunity to seize the opportunity to waltz suggestively with the nearest available female every time the music appeared!

Without the “haunted-room” aspect, the final act centered much more on the “gulling”of the Baron by public exposure of his intentions, the setting up of the bogus wife’s arrival and her children more of a comic diversion here than a significant nail in his coffin. At the end I thought the innkeeper and his cohorts standing in a group bearing their sheaves of bills could have profitably contributed to the choreography of swirling bodies around and about the befuddled would-be-Casanova, rather like an added circlet of punishment from Dante’s Inferno! – the children’s efforts, complete with their compromising cries of “Papa! Papa!” were sturdy and valiant, but more of a maelstrom of activity around the Baron would have heightened the effect even more hilariously. Still, the Baron’s penchant for waltzing to his “tune” was nicely inverted by Imogen Thirlwall as the “bogus wife” grabbing hold of him and putting him through his reluctant paces once more, for all to see!

By this time Ochs’ undoing had been well-and-truly gazetted, with all the major players plus a Police Commissioner on the stage re-aligning the situation (the latter a sturdy comprimario from Simon Christie), and Octavian having put “Mariandel” to rest, to the unfortunate Baron’s eventual and bemused realization. With his exit came the famous trio for the Marshallin, Octavian and Sophie, here sung and acted as heartrendingly as if there was to be no tomorrow, by the three principals, followed by the Marshallin’s dignified exit with Herr Faninal, and the final duet for Octavian and Sophie. It would be churlish of me to comment that I thought Bianca Andrew’s delivery of the final ascending phrase a fraction too full to “balance” properly with Barbara Graham’s, so I will conclude instead by conveying a sense of the feeling which, among other things, overtook me as we listened to the opera’s final pages of being made to feel young once again – the efforts of all concerned with this production had, for this listener, resulted in a memorable and intensely-moving outcome.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LUDWIG TREVIRANUS – at ease with the music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
LUDWIG TREVIRANUS (piano)

HAYDN – Piano Sonata in E-flat Major Hob.XV1/52
MENDELSSOHN – Variations sérieuses in D MInor Op.54
CHOPIN – Ballade No.4 in F Minor Op.52
GERSHWIN (arr.Wild) – 2 Etudes : Embraceable You / I Got Rhythm
SCHUMANN – Carnaval Op.9

Ludwig Treviranus (piano)
at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Thursday 21st August 2014

What a programme and what a performer! Ludwig Treviranus won all hearts and engaged all sensibilities besides at his Lower Hutt Little Theatre recital last week, with playing and presentations of real, flesh-and-blood character. In his hands the music sprang into life – he could well have echoed the Oscar Wilde character who  famously remarks, “…anybody can play accurately – but I play with wonderful expression…..”

But there was more to the evening than Treviranus seating himself at the piano and pouring forth the music via the instrument – we were warmly welcomed by the pianist the beginning of it all, and made to feel as though we were giving to him, rather than the other way round, by our presence. He talked a little about each of the pieces, about what we would hear and how the music came into being. It all underlined our sense of the music being for him a living, meaningful entity, whose beauties he wanted to share.

We began with a piano sonata by Haydn, the very last of his sixty-two works in that genre. There’s still a tendency afoot to regard Haydn’s productivity as a composer with some condescension, to the effect that a lot of his music is that of a somewhat “watered-down Mozart”, that those vast numbers of symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas are the result as much, if not more, of industry as of artistry.

Well, I’ve yet to encounter a symphony, string quartet or piano sonata by Haydn that I thought unworthy of its composer – of course there are “apprentice” works in each genre, as there are in Mozart’s output, but each has its particular interest and insight into one or more aspects of the composer’s writing which matured and flourished throughout many years of composing, not merely in the works of his old age.

So it was the somewhat confusingly catalogue-numbered Hob.XVI/52 in E-flat which began the evening’s music. Treviranus’s response to Haydn’s writing was typically whole-hearted and orchestral in effect – big-boned in gesture, while finely-wrought in detail. But he demonstrated the ability to maintain the line, the music’s overall coherence, while keeping a certain spontaneity, a sense of surprise and delight at what he was playing – all very engaging.

I did wish at the time that he’d played the first-movement repeat – but philosophies vary regarding this whole issue, ranging from those held by the omnivorously-inclined to the positively austere. Of course, ignoring a repeat can be like leaving something unspoken in conversation, sometimes to great effect. But it’s an attitude I’d mostly care to disregard in favour of that enrichment of the discourse, that chemistry of ripening experience which a repetition can heighten between music, performer and listener.

We relished Treviranus’s traversal of the composer’s quixotic development with its wonderfully discursive harmonic explorations. The musical flow took on a tremulous tightrope-tightening aspect in places, and there was a wobble and rhythmic stumble just after the recapitulation’s entry – but, more importantly, the rest went with a flourish!

And we enjoyed the richly-toned Beethovenian slow movement, with its anticipatory echoes of the latter’s Les Adieux Sonata, and its expressive impulses of energy – the pianist’s tones took on a warmth and glowing aspect towards the end that temporarily and wondrously stilled time, pulse and movement.  Then, the finale’s brilliant repeated notes and scintillating runs whirled us through paroxysm of pleasure – an occasional suspicion of “rattling over the points” in one or two places was countered by an overall exuberance which suggested to us a joy of recreation, served up for our delight.

Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses, next on the program, provided a perfect foil for the Haydn – at the outset, a dignified, baroque-like theme, followed by seventeen variations which energized the material in various ways, some of them remarkably Schumannesque in effect. Almost a compendium of early romantic pianism, the work brought forth both poetry and brilliance from Treviranus’s fingers, the pianist readily and wholeheartedly evoking the different character of each variation.

I particularly liked Treviranus’s playing of the parts of the work which seemed to take the composer “out of himself” – those sequences which had real glint and fire and sinew and muscle, including, of course, the Schumannesque Florestan-like bits.  These seemed refreshingly removed from the usual stereotypal image of Mendelssohn as not much more than a sentimental Victorian “Songs-without-words” composer. In fact the austere beauty of the work’s more thoughtful sequences played its own part in this revelatory “recasting” process.

Of the pre-eminence of Chopin in romantic piano music there can be no doubt, exemplified by the last of four Ballades written by the composer – each a dramatic narrative superbly sculptured, balancing heroic energy, romantic feeling and reflective poetry. The Fourth Ballade, in F Minor, is said to have been inspired by a Polish folk-tale of three brothers who, send to fight and destroy the enemy, win instead three brides – but I can testify to as much appreciation and enjoyment of the music over the years without knowledge of any such accompanying programme.

In any case, Treviaranus’s involvement with the music and the vividness of his characterization of the different episodes readily took me to a world of my own fashioning, with characters, ambiences and scenarios disconcertingly intermingling with the sounds. The playing seemed to me to convey all the right instincts for this music, the mood dreamy and tender at the work’s beginning, before darkening with resolve and quickening with energy as the narrative aspect took shape, but ever ready to entertain a remembrance of that opening tenderness at appropriate moments.

Not even a momentary derailing within a sequence impeded the music’s flow from the pianist, as the piece’s second half inexorably tightened its grip upon the music’s phrasing  and pulse, detailings and dynamics, and left us nicely breath-bated as we awaited the coda’s onslaught. A pianist friend who accompanied me to the concert admired the “coolness under pressure” of the young musician, the misdirected impulse and its retraction very adroitly making good part of the territory of live music-making.

After an interval we were treated (literally) to two delightful manifestations of the arranger’s art, in the form of a pair of  Etudes, virtuosic re-enactments of Gershwin’s songs contrived by the great American pianist Earl Wild. First came the flowing ease of “Embraceable You”, deliciously replete with arpeggiated counterpoints to the melody; and then followed “I Got Rhythm”, the music all angularity at the start, before galloping away with exuberant joy, returning for a kind of fox-trot, at which I’m sure people would have got up and danced to had there been available floor-space on which to strut their stuff.

The principal business of the evening’s music-making was, of course, Schumann’s Carnaval, a colourful collection of character-pieces depicting people both real and imagined, in the guise of revellers at a masked ball. Schumann had, in his earlier work, Papillons, produced a similar, if smaller-scale scenario, with particular reference to a novel Die Flegejahre by Jean-Paul Richter. By comparison, Carnaval is a grander design, incorporating not only character  sketches but a whole creative philosophy, embodied in the work’s triumphal finale, where Schumann’s artistic brothers and sisters, the Davidsbündler, put to flight the “Philistines”, the composer’s name for the musical reactionaries of the day.

To an extent all performances of great music represent work in progress, with artists continually and repeatedly striving to realise, unto themselves and their listeners, what these works have to offer. By turns forthright, quixotic, tender, philosophical, playful and enigmatic, this music requires of the performer a disconcerting range of abilities and sympathies for the composer’s purposes to be sufficiently activated.

Ludwig Treviranus had, by this stage of the evening, impressed with his vivid and engaging characterisations (Haydn), his concentration and strength of purpose (Mendelssohn), his poetic and dramatic instinct (Chopin) and his sense of fun and gaiety (Gershwin/Wild). All of these things were brought to bear in his playing of Carnaval, so that Schumann’s parade of colourful personalities was brought vividly to life.

Two things, each playing a part in prompting my “work-in-progress” remarks above – I did sense at the work’s beginning and end a whiff of caution in the playing in places where full-blooded exuberance (Schumann did nothing by halves!), even at the risk of inaccurate detail (a frisson of which briefly happened, to no deleterious effect whatever, during the work’s Preamble) needs to be the order of the moment. Unfortunately, in today’s chromium-plated world of piano technique, wrong notes are regarded as unforgivable – whereas a different generation of pianists knew well the value of their galvanising effect!

More importantly, I thought the decision to leave out most of the repeats throughout the episodes had a diminishing effect on the work as a whole – turning parts of it to my ears into a kind of “Visions fugitives”! Perhaps Treviranus thought that the repeats would make the piece too much of a long haul for the audience – being of the omnivorous rather than of the austere persuasion I simply wanted the music’s full measure – and my remarks regarding the enriching effect of being able to spend more time as a listener with a characterisation, an ambience, a mood, a state of being, apply here as strongly.

Enough of this carping! – the rest of my scribbled notes bear testimony to the life and colour of Treviranus’s performance, with far too many felicitous details for me to individually dwell upon. We were then prevailed upon by the pianist to applaud the piano (which we did) and afterwards help conclude the proceedings in singular fashion by singing along with the final encore “Show me the way to go home”. These Hutt Valley people certainly know how to do things properly.

Masters of whole worlds: Mozart and Mahler with the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
MOZART – Violin Concerto No.4 in D Major K.218
MAHLER – Symphony No.9 in D Major

Simone Lamsma (violin)
Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 8th August, 2014

What to play at a concert along with a Mahler Symphony? It’s a question that has diverted promoters, critics and musicians themselves over the years, and the various possible solutions seem often to complicate further rather than clarify matters.

It isn’t so much the actual music that’s the problem – it’s the awkward length of Mahler’s symphonic conceptions that makes programming with other pieces something of a challenge. At least the composer’s First and Fourth Symphonies aren’t so problematical due to their shorter durations – each can easily accommodate a “normal” first half of, say, an overture followed by a concerto, within a concert.

Not so the other Mahler symphonies, all of which are that bit too lengthy to allow anything pre-interval along the lines of the above, though, apart from the longest of them, the Third Symphony, not quite of the length that normally takes up a whole concert. Having said that, two of the works – the “Resurrection” (No.2) and the “Symphony of a Thousand”(No.8) are such spectacles in themselves that on that count they’re often played “alone” – in each case the sheer “size” of the experience comes from other considerations beside the music’s time-span.

The work featured in tonight’s concert, the Ninth Symphony, though perhaps less viscerally spectacular than either of the above, has the kind of gravitas that can make it a stand-alone piece as well. The conductor of tonight’s performance, Edo de Waart, said in an interview a day or so before the concert that he usually performed the Ninth on its own, as he felt it would overshadow anything else that’s played. If something else was chosen to be performed at the same concert it would have to be “strong”.

Perhaps Mahler himself gave a kind of “guide-line” with a remark he reportedly made to Sibelius when discussing the nature of symphonic form – in response to Sibelius’s professed attraction to the form’s “severity and logic”, Mahler exclaimed that “symphony is like the world – it should embrace everything!”.  I certainly thought that on this occasion the choice of the Mozart Violin Concerto (K.218 in D Major) presented by Dutch violinist Simone Lamsma was appropriate – it seemed to me to fulfill at once that “all-embracing” aspiration valued by the composer, while presenting two uniquely characterful works with their own clearly-defined boundaries.

As it turned out, the Mozart concerto was given a delightful performance by Simone Lamsma, her bright, silvery entry banishing for the remainder of the performance a slightly wiry-sounding beginning to the work from the NZSO strings, and her energy and élan nicely countering an initial impression of petiteness. I thought her passagework most characterful, her accented notes given plenty of emphasis, bringing out a “layered” quality to the music.

The cadenza developed these perspectives further, getting very physical and gutsy playing, the sequence sounding more like Beethoven’s voice in places than Mozart’s! We then got a heavenly “andante cantabile” at the slow movement’s beginning, the soloist’s floated notes exquisite-sounding, her silvery discourse sensitively accompanied by the ensemble, and, in conclusion, capped off by a cadenza for the violin which occasionally broke into what sounded like birdsong.

Not to be outdone in effect, the finale took us through poised, gavotte-like steps by way of introduction, and then whirled us into an allegro, the exchanges between the two sequences continuing throughout the movement. And such an exuberant cadenza! – demonstrating to us the soloist’s brilliant fingerwork, and leavened in places by pure, elevated tones. After this came a lovely, “dying fall” kind of finish to the work of the “that’s all, folks!” variety, not unlike what the composer had also done in his previous violin concerto – all very piquant and charming.

And so to the Mahler – it was true, as Edo de Waart had pointed out, that this work was perfectly capable of standing alone in concert – but having the Mozart concerto first up we felt more “tuned in”, at one by this stage with the ambience of the listening-spaces, and with the throes of our day-to-day existence put well aside, ready to face Mahler’s symphonic retelling of his life’s most profound “dark night of the soul”.

The conductor had said when interviewed that “one needs a top orchestra” for this work, so I think he would have been thrilled with the NZSO’s response to his direction throughout the symphony – certainly his demeanour at the end and his ready acknowledgement of the players indicated his wholehearted appreciation of their efforts. Each of the movements here had a surety of impulse, touch and expression, the structures clearly outlined, the emotions unlocked and ready for we listeners to square up to.

Those enormously cataclysmic first-movement climaxes which characterise the composer’s despair in the face of his all-too-pressing mortal sickness and imminent destruction were here delivered directly and swiftly, growing from the musical textures rather than over-laden, or imposed from outside – obviously the “line”, the shape and coherence of the music was important to de Waart, something not achieved lightly, but integral to the flow. I felt it was more “musical” than “psychological” in the conductor’s hands, concerned less with emotional extremes and more with soundscapes, making the throes of despair more of a human than a personal problem, with its own set of resonances.

In this the conductor was supported by a plethora of superbly-wrought orchestral detail, the occasional brass “blip” like “spots on the sun” (as someone said once about the great pianist Alfred Cortot’s wrong notes!), playing whose richness and variation of colour and texture fully realised Mahler’s love for the world and his agony at the thought of having to relinquish life so peremptorily. The word “leb’wohl” (farewell) readily came to mind in tandem with the two-note theme that dominated the music.

Both middle movements were strong on “attitude”, the Landler/Waltz by turns good-naturedly bucolic and sentimental at the beginning, with the quicker waltz-music taking on an almost manic aspect in places, before everything ground almost to a halt, leaving the rustic tune to run its course, here nicely tossed about the orchestra before cheekily ending with a piccolo phrase.

Set against this drollery was the harsh Rondo-Burleske, here a tightly-coiled set of poses and  rapier-like thrusts, purposeful and almost business-like in its insistence and cruelty. Whatever savage humour could have been lurking around corners and in alcoves, de Waart’s splendidly-maintained focus gave it no chance, though the claustrophobic mood was relieved by a trio-like section featuring a nostalgic, splendidly-played trumpet solo.

The frenetic, abyss-bound final pages of the Rondo, brilliantly delivered, were succeeded by sounds which seemed wrung from tissues of pure emotion by the strings, playing at first in octaves and then generously flooding the textures with warmly-impassioned harmonies – conductor and players here made this moment work as profoundly as I’ve ever heard it presented. But even more impressive were the work’s final few minutes, here played with such rapt beauty and concentration as I’ve rarely experienced anywhere in a concert hall – string phrases and sound-impulses that suggested all too palpably a farewell to life, a leave-taking whose silences continued to sound for what seemed like ages afterwards – for all of us present, very much the stuff of legends.

This performance’s dedication, announced before the concert, to the recently-deceased Franz-Paul Decker, for many years the NZSO’s Music Director, had no more appropriate voice than that final movement of a work that had been one of Decker’s greatest interpretative achievements. The old maestro’s shade would have sighed contentedly in tandem with those beautifully-realised, seemingly-endless silences to which we were all so very privileged to be able to lend our  presence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anniversaries, celebrations and NZ premieres – NZSM Orchestra at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
PASTORAL ELEGY
Music by Gade, Villa-Lobos, Vaughan Williams

NIELS GADE – Overture “Hamlet”
(Vincent Hardaker – conductor)
HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS – ‘Cello Concerto No.2
RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – Symphony No.3 “Pastoral”
Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)
Alicia Cardwgan (soprano)
Kenneth Young (conductor)
NZ School of Music Orchestra

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

Wednesday, 6th August, 2014

I thought this an exceptional concert in every way! – innovative repertoire choices were thrillingly and memorably supported by skilled and strongly-focused, committed playing from all concerned.

Each piece as presented had its own world and voiced its own particular character – partly the result of stylistic and contextual differences, but also  indicative of the extent to which these musicians were determined to get to grips with things, and put across the music’s differing flavours, colours and feelings.

I’d never before encountered either the Niels Gade overture or the Villa-Lobos concerto (the performance of the latter by ‘cellist Inbal Megiddo was, in fact, the New Zealand premiere). Gade may have been thought conservative in musical outlook by his contemporaries and by subsequent posterity, but I thought his “Hamlet” Overture fully worthy of Shakespeare, as regards the music’s beauty, dignity, energy and theatricality.

Conductor Vincent Hardaker and his players deftly nailed the “cat-like tread” mood of the opening, preparing the ambiences for the intense, dramatic urgencies that grew, spectre-like, out of the textures. Though not strictly following the play’s action, the music portrayed a good deal of the drama’s significant moods and character interactions.

A telling example of this came with the strings’ very Lisztian melody depicting the beautiful but ill-fated Ophelia’s love for the Prince, and the music’s gradual disintegration as the girl’s madness and death drew near, lyricism undermined and eventually overlaid by repeated turbulence and purposeful strength. A final ‘cello solo then sounded over rich brass chordings, suggesting some kind of valediction being played out, the tragedy grimly resolved. I enjoyed it all, music and playing, immensely.

After this things were somewhat re-aligned – from Shakespearean tragedy the focus morphed into Latin American intensity and exuberance. This was accompanied by a change of conductor and the introduction of a soloist to perform Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Second ‘Cello Concerto. It was Kenneth Young who took the podium, and we also welcomed Inbal Megiddo, Head of ‘Cello Studies at the School of Music, as the concerto player.

To hear Megiddo perform this work was to experience the next best thing to a direct link with its composer, as she had studied the concerto with its first performer, Aldo Parisot, for whom Villa-Lobos actually wrote the work. Megiddo described that experience for her as “exhilarating”, and expressed the hope that she might be able to convey something of that same feeling in her performance for us, by way of dedicating her efforts to her “teacher, mentor, collleague and friend”. I can only report that she certainly made good her intention in spadefuls!

From the work’s first chord, with the music’s upper registers straightaway reaching for the stars, we in the audience were galvanised anew, as much by the playing as by the music itself – the writing seemed to possess a kind of “top echelon” quality, something of an edge which constantly tingled and thrilled. We heard marvellous exchanges between soloist and orchestra, with the former’s rhythmic verve readily communicating itself to the young orchestral players, encouraging them to take up the spirit of the music’s frequent syncopated figures and impulses dancing along the ‘cello-strings.

The folky-sounding second-movement Modinha, a Brazilian love-song genre, featured a beautiful ‘cello melody, with an intensely-laden heart-on-sleeve dance-like accompaniment. Still, the music seemed always to have a slight “edge”, an astringency which put paid to any feeling of its emotion cloying, Hollywood-style. A Scherzo, dance-like and mixing the exotic with the “folky” brought forth more exciting playing – in places intense and gutteral, at other times airborne and melismatic – from Megiddo, with conductor and orchestra splendidly responding to her energies with sharply-syncopated tutti sequences.

What the cellist herself described in the notes as a “virtuosic cadenza” was here excitingly and full-bloodedly played, with wonderful near-the-bridge timbres, triple-stopping and resonant open strings, some spectacular glissandi launching us into the world of the work’s finale. Here, ‘cellist and orchestra had a terrific time with a four-note theme that was tossed about like a straw man in a blanket to exhilarating effect, right up to the sheer abandonment of the coda, complete with its breath-snatchingly abrupt ending!

After the Villa-Lobos work’s ferment of whirlwind energies and arresting sonorities it seemed on paper entirely appropriate for the concert to feature by way of contrast a piece entitled “A Pastoral Symphony”, moreover one written by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer of that quintessential English-landscape piece “The Lark Ascending”. Thinking about the juxtaposition of the two pieces made me recall a conversation some years ago with a friend who had visited London for the first time – he told me that after encountering the overwhelming grandeur and magnificence of St.Paul’s Cathedral he simply had to go back to his lodgings and lie down for a while.

True, the Villa-Lobos concerto, for all its engagingly vigorous and heartfelt qualities, wasn’t exactly grand, stupendous and cathedral-like! – but neither was the Vaughan Williams Symphony a mere exercise in English pastoral evocation (as a fellow-composer of Vaughan Williams’ dismissively remarked, concerning the work – “like a cow looking over a gate”!)  Whatever restorative qualities the symphony possessed applied to its own set of tensions and tragedies embedded within its contexts, those of its composer’s wartime service with the Medical Corps in France, a scenario fraught with death and loss. The composer, in fact referred to the work as a “War Requiem”, the Mahlerian second movement of the work with its bugle calls (played on a natural E-flat trumpet, and echoed by a natural horn) and anguished strings particularly underlining this idea.

Elsewhere, the music sang, danced and echoed with evocations of landscapes and people’s lives darkened by war and stained with blood – each movement wrought its own kind of ravaged beauty, the language and atmosphere one of lament rather than conflict and carnage. Ken Young kept the music’s pulse flowing throughout, to the work’s great advantage in this case, as tensions were made palpable by the playing’s urgency and tightly-wrought figurations. In the first movement, for example, the flowing themes were never allowed to settle, the music’s aspect having an almost haunted air, with memories of what had gone before “charging” the textures with tragedy.

The orchestral playing was, I thought, impressively focused, poised and suitably alert at all times, the textures and colours having the right mix of beauty and astringency. The winds at the beginning had tuning problems most obviously in their ensemble passages, but their individual work was outstanding throughout, with many a beautiful solo turned as the work proceeded. The brass chimed in with rich resonances when required, their ensemble capping the climaxes beautifully in places. And the work of the strings was a joy to experience, from the players’ most sensitive nuances to the most earnest and full-blooded climaxes. Conductor and players caught the ebb and flow of it all, the beauties and the sorrows.

The second movement’s nostalgic brass calls (the trumpet offstage, as indicated) came off splendidly, ably supported by contributions from the solo viola,’cello, and clarinet – but the work from the strings was again wondrous, phrases so sensitively and unerringly delivered, the players obviously right into the music’s world. Young aimed for and got a telling contrast of mood with the swiftly-delivered third movement, the tempi quicker than I’d ever heard previously – but it worked brilliantly, completely avoiding the somewhat heavy-footed quality sometimes encountered in performances of this movement. It also had the effect of sharpening the players’ responses to the movement’s elfin-textured coda, impulses striving for the greatest possible contrast with what had gone before in the bucolic scherzo.

Another off-stage “effect” in this work came with the final movement, the voice of a soprano at the very beginning and at the end. The singer’s disembodied tones have an ethereal effect, her wordless line a part-lament, part-incantation, which the strings repeat fervently at the movement’s climax – a stunning, breath-catching moment, as on this occasion. Soprano Alicia Cadwgan’s voice was ideally placed, not quite pure-toned enough at the outset of the first solo, and rushing a phrase mid-way through – but sounding far more at ease with her return at the end, floating her last few notes beautifully and hauntingly. As far as “capturing” the particular character of the movement mattered, Young’s direction and the orchestral playing was I thought, beyond reproach.

In the silence that followed we sat and allowed the resonances to fade as the tones had done, and pondered the music’s effect. I couldn’t help at that moment recalling various descriptions of the work which I’d read via my first, youthful hearings of recordings, comments which, even at that latter stage seemed to concentrate more upon the composer’s depictions of the “Corot-like landscapes” in France, and scarcely remark upon the music’s darker context of war’s grim realities. Perhaps a certain distancing wrought by time was necessary for people to re-examine the work’s and its composer’s circumstances – appropriately so, of course, as the anniversaries of that particular conflict presently loom disturbingly from out of time’s mists, carrying their warnings!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Echt-quartet experiences from the Doric String Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
The Doric String Quartet

HAYDN – String Quartet Op.76 No.6 in E-flat
BRETT DEAN – Eclipse
SCHUBERT – String Quartet No.15 in G D.887

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 25th July, 2014

I didn’t get to see and hear the Doric String Quartet on their first New Zealand visit in 2010, but on the strength of what I heard at their recent Wellington concert I’ll be keeping an eye on their schedules and things from now on. Whatever coincidences of conditions were brought to play, they were of an order which left me in a kind of trance for days after the Quartet’s concert, with scraps of the music they presented continually sounding in my head and refusing to leave me alone.

What these players seemed to me to be able to do was generate a kind of “the ordinary and the fabulous” music-making world, to which we in the audience were all invited. From the first few phrases of the Haydn (in that gorgeous E-flat Major key) our sensibilities were taken “somewhere else” by a combination of the warmth and piquancy of the writing and what I can describe only as a kind of focused sensitivity on the part of the Quartet’s players.

It was a feeling quite at odds with the cavernous spaces of the Michael Fowler Centre, a venue which was never designed for chamber music, but which nevertheless yielded on this occasion to the blandishments of the sounds brought into being by the musicians. But in a strange and alchemic way, those vistas had a part to play in the process of creating the fabulous – the quartet’s penchant for hushed tones throughout seemed to throw down a kind of gauntlet to our listening environment, as if to say “Can these spaces unlock our secrets? – or will our tones be scattered as wildflower petals in the wilderness, lost just as if we never in the first place made these sounds?”

Well, the musicians needn’t have worried – thanks to that aforementioned “focused sensitivity” everything the players did with the music registered, from the softest whisperings to the fullest, richest declamations. But I think the combination of larger-than-usual listening-distances and the quartet’s fondness for finely-wrought, inward-sounding tones resulted in a kind of focused, concentrated interplay between music, musicians and listeners that worked a potent spell throughout the concert.

Haydn’s theme-and-variations opening movement of his Op.76 No.6 quartet beguiled us right from its opening, every phrase and contrasting impulse carrying with it both spontaneity and logic. The second, hymn-like movement seemed almost like a 3/4 version of the famous Emperor Quartet’s slow movement. I liked the “breathless with wonderment” aspect of the playing, with not a note or phrase sounding mechanical or contrived – a momentary shift into minor mode at one point called forth pauses charged with expectation, before a communion-like resolution provided the only possible response.

Deftly-wrought syncopations throughout the minuet’s opening gave way to the trio’s pealing bell-like scales, sounded by the players with great delight among the combinations, by turns droll and festive in character. Then, the finale’s almost ritualistic minuet-like aspect at the beginning occasionally released an energized, scampering figure which enlivened the textures and gave a wider context to the movement’s apparent severity – the quartet dug into some wonderful modulations and danced its way through some tricky canonic interchanges, the sequences communicating to us a great deal of creative satisfaction – as the poet Hopkins wrote about his early-morning sighting of a falcon’s flight – “the achieve of: the mastery of the thing!”

Brett Dean’s work Eclipse took us to realms as far-removed from Haydn’s finely-abstracted creations as could be imagined. This work for string quartet, in a single movement but with three distinct sections, was written by the Australian composer in response to the 2001 Tampa crisis, the name referring to a Norwegian vessel whose captain’s actions saved the lives of hundreds of Indonesian refugees on board a boat which got into difficulties while heading for Australia. Though Dean in a programme note describes the work as “first and foremost a piece of chamber music”, his initial impetus to create the work would for most listeners surely seem an inextricable part of the process of listening to and understanding the end result.  I think it was Sibelius who once said “music reflects life” – and as a political statement Dean’s work is no less musically impactful – in a completely different way – than was Finlandia.

The composer described his work as “brooding, troubled and at times aggressive”, his music describing a situation in which people found themselves “riding the cusp between life and death….and entering the realm of sheer existence”. It’s certainly a tour de force of virtuosic quartet-playing, employing techniques and effects which were exploratory to an extreme degree and positively orchestral in their impact. The work’s three sections, played without a break, described in turn the sounds and ambient contexts one might have associated with a ship drifting out at sea, the naked power and terrifying effects of an oceanic storm, and finally the ensuing calm associated with feelings of both relief and uncertainty on the part of the ship’s passengers regarding their fate.

Each section made a different kind of impact, one which tended to go beyond the composer’s actual programme and draw on deeper, more archetypal feelings concerning aspects of the “human condition”.  Thus the quartet’s opening evocations seemed to me to suggest the reality of vast spaces through which we humans carry out our small business – at the outset things were only a notch or two up from inaudibility, though things gradually built up by a kind of “growing from seed” process. It became a slow coalescence of dry, spectral impulses with variegated timbral and gestural features, such as tremolandi, and afterwards pizzicati, the spontaneous, even chaotic assemblage subsiding into order as the music proceeded.

The “storm” sequence was nightmarish to say the least – extremities of textures and dynamics, between which were “roller-coaster rides” of the utmost physicality, the players extracting from their instruments sounds that readily conveyed terror, helplessness and despair by dint of their menace and vehemence. At its climax brutal punctuations vied with awful silences which were then whipped into a frenzy by vicious tremolandi passages, whose intensities gradually dissipated, leading the way to an ambience of shattered fragments, of exhausted spirits, tremulous voices, and glimmerings of hope, a solo cello’s wraith-like traceries attempting to imbue the besieged human spirit with the will to recover and continue.

In some respects Dean’s work resembled that which concluded the concert, Schubert’s equally searing G Major Quartet D.887. Both pieces inhabited realms of physical and psychological duress, presented in each case with unequivocal visceral impact, though Schubert’s work had no programme as such, rather, abstracting its dramatic qualities via sonata form. But what power there was in those abstractions – what candour! – what tragedy!

The Doric’s way with this music was to bring out a kind of rapt inwardness to the quieter, more lyrical sections, playing with the utmost concentration and refinement of tone. This approach had the effect of making us listen all the more intently to the music-making in that vast space – having captured our sensibilities thus, the music’s more vigorous moments came across with all the more impact and character. Though not as “gutsy” as the trenchant attack adopted by some groups I’d heard in the music’s more harrowing sections, the Doric’s keen focus and intensity put across the music just as strongly and tellingly, made all the more journey-like by the observance of the first movement repeat.

Equally as memorable was the stark beauty of the ‘cello-led lament which began the second movement, the players paring all warmth from their tones so as to sharpen the intensities of contrast with the trenchant second subject – here, at once tightly-focused and vastly-flung, the ambience a-tingle with anguish and grey-hued with sorrow. But then the quartet made certain we felt the touches of warmth on our faces which came with the major-key statements of the opening towards the movement’s end, Schubert characteristically putting on a brave face through the music’s tears.

The spookily elfin scherzo kept its sotto voce mode for as long as it could, the playing hinting at something diabolical darting between the shadows, with occasional szforzandi causing a scalp-prickling effect. Set against these urgencies, the long-breathed waltz-likeTrio seemed like a kind of distant dream of dancing phantoms, the shades, perhaps, of happier memories. But even more startling was the finale’s frenetic pace, its flight more psychological than physical, the notes falling over themselves in places trying to “escape” the claustrophobic crowding of those syncopations, and the brutality of the occasional szforzandi. I’ve never heard this music take on such a sinister “ride to the abyss” aspect, its energies transformed into compulsive shudderings, everything haunted with a ghostly pallor, like a rider set on galloping towards a grim and unremitting destiny.

One could conclude from the above, quite rightly, that the concert was for me a throughly engaging and richly-wrought experience – sterling testimony to the skill and musicality of an exceptional quartet of players.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jian Liu at the piano – visionary programming, extraordinary playing

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Classical Expressions 2014 presents
Jian Liu (piano)

WILLIAM BYRD – Hugh Ashton’s Grownde (from “My Ladye Nevells Book”)
SOFIA GUBAIDULINA – Chaconne
JS BACH / FERUCCIO BUSONI – Chaconne
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – 6 Variations in F Major on an Original Theme
JOHANNES BRAHMS – Variations on a theme of Paganini

Classical Expressions, Upper Hutt
The Gillies Group Theatre

Monday 21st July 2014

I missed whatever printed or spoken announcement had alerted others to the re-arrangement of the programme order – so that when Jian Liu began his Classical Expressions recital with William Byrd instead of Sofia Gubaidulina, I experienced a kind of reverse apoplexy! I had girded my loins in preparation for a Slavic onslaught of sorts, and was thus completely and disconcertingly rendered helpless by the gentle Tudor-English melancholy of Byrd’s treatment of a fellow-composer’s “ground” (a bass pattern to which melodic and harmonic variations are added).

It may have been a mere echo of my expectation of hearing Sofia Gubaidulina’s work – but in the opening theme of Byrd’s music I thought I caught more than a hint of plainchant mode, a phrase or two whose trajectory resonated like a sung phrase from an Orthodox service. Of course, as well it might have been Byrd’s own background as an English Catholic bringing out a Latin plainchant phrase or manner, however secular in intent the actual work was.

The music in this case came from a collection called My Lady Nevelles Booke, one which Byrd himself had compiled as a gift to the “lady” in question (one of his pupils). In doing so Byrd immortalized both her and (with this particular piece) his slightly older contemporary Hugh Ashton, devising wonderfully exploratory figurations and strongly-wrought harmonies and counterpoint figures to go with the older composer’s ground bass.

Jian Liu gave a predictably lucid, beautifully-voiced set of responses to the music’s different variations, though early on there were places where I thought he kept the trill-laden figurations on too tight a rein. I wanted more sense of the fantastical, more spontaneous unfolding of those trills and their laughter and sense of wonderment. Here it seemed as though the figurations were a shade too stiff in effect, and their roundings-off at times too abrupt.

It could have been that Liu was deliberately contriving this effect, feeling that the music had sufficient wonderment in itself, and needed clarity and shape, without allowing too much indulgence. As the music grew in animation and vigour, Liu’s playing seemed to relax and knit more readily with the fantastical textures, his control giving the composer’s arguments and counter-arguments great eloquence, especially in the Ninth Variation, and making the most of the welter of notes over the following two variations, and the harmonic richness of the tune’s final statement.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s Chaconne gave us the greatest possible contrast with the Byrd in terms of its dynamic angularity and overall physical impact. Liu gave the opening playing of astonishing power and girth, building granite-like structures, around which circled angular counterpoints and leap-frogging figurations. Mad boogie-woogie sequences crashed to earth, the remnants picking themselves up and dashing madly hither and thither in desperately fugal pursuits. One marvelled at the composer’s seemingly endless keyboard inventions, time and again setting immovable objects against irresistible forces, as with rampant left-hand octaves terrorizing right-handed chords into cowering submission (shades of Shostakovich, here, probably cavorting in glee!).

All of these irruptions and coruscations were delivered by Liu with strength, brilliance and fearless resolve, going to the heart of each of the variations with unerring instinct. From a sequence in which the music was becalmed grew bell-sounding impulses, both tinitinabulations and “strong gongs groaning”, the bright-voiced bells building the excitement, supported by wondrously deep-throated clamoring from the turrets and towers of cathedrals.  Then, majestically, the work’s opening returned, as jagged and angular as before, but with extra, insistent octave support from the left hand, Liu beautifully controlling the textures, and allowing the silences to drift softly backwards as the voices took their leave of us.

That miracle of adaptation, Busoni’s “realization” of JS Bach’s mighty Chaconne from the Violin Partita No.2 BWV 1004, was merely one aspect of the pianist’s veneration for the older composer and his works – he also produced his own editions of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Partitas, and the English and French Suites. With the Chaconne, Busoni thought it possible to recreate the work from a more theatrical and Romantic perspective, thereby adding to his age’s understanding of the music. I’ve not been able to find any additional evidence for the story (which I read somewhere) of Busoni touring with the violinist Ysaye, frequently hearing him play the Chaconne as part of the Partita, and eventually producing his transcription of the work, and playing it to the stupefied violinist, after cautioning him to refrain from making any comments until he, Busoni, had finished the performance!

Busoni wrote his transcription in 1892, dedicating the work to the celebrated pianist Eugene d’Albert, who apparently was not pleased – in fact d’Albert reproached Busoni for what he called “tampering” with the original, but the latter was famously unrepentant. In fact Busoni’s reply to d’Albert deserves to be quoted – “I start from the impression that Bach’s conception of the work goes far beyond the limits and means of the violin, so that the instrument he specifies for performance is not adequate.” As was his wont, Bach had left no performance instructions – dynamic or tempo markings – on his manuscript, aside from the notes themselves. The work and its possibilities remained alive in Busoni’s thoughts for many years afterwards as he revised his transcription at least three times.

Jian Liu’s playing certainly entered into the spirit of Busoni’s “theatrical and Romantic perspective” – here, expressed through his hands, was grandeur set alongside rapt intimacy, variegated pianistic colour next to simple transparency, harmonic augmentation and single voicing. Throughout, both player and instrument sounded Bach’s music-framework in full conjunction with Busoni’s creative responses to the same. At times the virtuoso charge of it all was edge-of-the-seat stuff, as with the left hand octaves thrillingly driving the tight-handed figurations with Lisztian brilliance, or both hands harmonizing cascades of pealing bells while some of the gentler musings had whole sea-changes of mood, such as the contrast of “withdrawal” from major to minor mode three-quarters of the way through the piece.

Both the interval and the Beethoven work which followed provided relief of sorts from the overwhelming weight of concentration from both music and performance, and from the orchestral weight of sound made to emanate from the piano. “Beethoven’s “Enigma” Variations” quipped a friend, upon seeing the “On an Original Theme” subtitle to the work – though not quite as far-reaching or as enigmatic as Elgar’s, Beethoven’s variations are unusual in that each piece is in a different key. This work, from 1802, marked an intensification of creativity for the young composer, what he called a “new road”, and along which he was shortly to squarely face his life’s first major crisis, the onset of his deafness. This work, however, gives little sign of impending tragedy, the theme a brief but lovely cantabile melody, the variations discursive and imaginative.

Jian Liu brought out the character of each variation with great relish, the bagatelle-like D-major, the rumbustious B-flat-major with its contrasting high and low registering, the graceful, drawing-room-like E-flat-major, the purposeful march-like C Minor, with its Schumannesque pre-echoes, and the final adroit merging into C major and then F Major, the Mozartean flow punctuated by Beethovenian muscle at cardinal points! Liu played the flowing, rippling passagework which decorated the final Adagio beautifully, the cascadings giving way to a simple, unadorned fragment of the original theme at the end.

Rounding off this evening’s presentation of virtuosic chaconne-like works came one of the most fearsome – the Variations on a Theme of Paganini, by Brahms. This work is one of the “big three” adaptations (the other two are by Rachmaninov and Lutoslawski) of violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini’s 24th and last Caprice from his set of Caprices for solo violin. And, for the adventurous, there seem to be plenty more explorations of the same work by composers employing a bewildering range of instruments, from traditional to techno-based.

At first the combination of Brahms and Paganini would seem incongruous – here, after all, was the champion of the conservatives exploring and extending the music of one of the great romantic virtuosi. Parts of the work sound also as though they could have been written by Liszt, whose music Brahms had little time for. But the common ground here was the young pianistic wizard Carl Tausig, Liszt’s favourite pupil (“When the little one goes on the road I shall shut up shop!” Liszt was reported to have said of Tausig). Refusing to align himself exclusively with either conservative or radical elements of the age, Tausig also befriended Brahms, who wrote the Paganini Variations for him, calling them “Studies for Pianoforte”. One critic described the requirements for any interpreter of these pieces as “fingers of steel, a heart of burning lava and the courage of a lion”.

Jian Liu certainly had those prerequisites, engaging the work’s difficulties, both technical and interpretative, with strength, flair and purpose. Never over-flamboyant at the keyboard, his seemingly tireless fingers, wrists and arms channelled a bewildering amalgam of complex responses and emotions into the music’s heart, realizing its brilliance, power, charm, exhilaration and tragedy. To choose individual variations for comment would seem almost churlish, as it was Liu’s overall sweep which impressed most, in retrospect, his integration of the disparate elements, making the work seem like a true reconciliation between form, technique and emotional content. One came away from this performance with a deeper appreciation of the composer, of his music, and of the times that produced such an outpouring of creative imagination.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2014 tackles showpieces with a will

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
NZSO NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA 2014

Conductor: Alexander Shelley
Assistant Conductor: Gemma New
NYO Composer-In-Residence 2014: Sarah Ballard

RICHARD STRAUSS – Don Juan Op.20
SARAH BALLARD – Synergos (World Premiere)
RICHARD STRAUSS – Also Sprach Zarathustra Op.30

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington, Friday 18th July

ASB Theatre, Auckland, Saturday 19th July

This year the NZSO National Youth Orchestra is fifty-five years young – it’s a Gilbertian kind of paradox that the orchestra seems, with each passing season, just as youthful, energetic, enthusiastic and capable as ever!  Here on Friday evening last week were some of New Zealand’s finest young musicians brought together in the time-honoured manner for a short rehearsal period, before shaping up for their first concert in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre. With two famously brilliant late-romantic orchestral showpieces on the programme plus a newly-conmmissioned work by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence Sarah Ballard, the concert was set to be something of a blockbuster.

Things couldn’t have gotten away to a more thrilling beginning with the opening of Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Don Juan, the first of the two pieces commemorating the composer’s two-hundredth birthday this year. British conductor Alexander Shelley didn’t “spare the horses”, getting from the young players oceans of vigour, colour and red-blooded commitment in realising the music’s infectious excitement and sheer bravado – impressive stuff from a twenty-four year-old composer! Romantic feeling there was a-plenty as well, with several superb solos delivered from within the opulent orchestra textures, solo violin and winds covering themselves with glory.

I wasn’t altogether surprised by the playing’s brilliant and whole-hearted qualities, having attended a number of concerts from recent years given by the orchestra, and invariably being knocked sideways on these occasions by the sheer impact of the music-making’s elan and range of expression. The 2009 performance of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, for example, remains for me an unforgettable occasion, the performance as thrilling as I’d ever previously encountered of that work, either “live” or on disc, one most fittingly marking the orchestra’s fiftieth birthday.

But this concert seemed to me to present just as challenging a prospect in a different way – from a listener’s point of view these two Strauss works appear to demand just as much brilliance and energy as does any Mahler Symphony, or orchestral work by Bartok or Debussy, but along with an additional degree of tonal weight and depth that “goes with the territory”. More so than with the other composers mentioned, Strauss’s works are, perhaps along with Scriabin’s, the most sumptuously-orchestrated of his era, requiring players to generously pour forth their tonal resources, and frequently occasioning the command “all you have!” from conductors.

I wasn’t worried by a couple of momentary ensemble spills that accompanied the thrills throughout the concert – but I was concerned that these youthful players would be able to summon up enough breadth and depth of sound to put across the sheer physical impact of this music. It wasn’t so crucial during Don Juan, whose music has for much of the time a volatile, quicksilver urgency that relies on brilliance as much as, if not more than, weight. As I’ve said, these players, guided by Alexander Shelley, threw themselves into the fray and realized all the music’s glittering energy with great elan.

Among those who acquitted themselves splendidly were clarinettist David McGregor and oboist Thomas Hutchinson – the latter in particular made a beautiful thing of his famous solo in Don Juan depicting ‘the red-headed woman, Donna Elvira”, an embodiment of the “Ideal Feminine”, making the Don’s frenetic drive towards a kind of fulfillment seem even more precipitous and his decline and death more shocking – here properly and chillingly realized!

A different kettle of fish was Also Sprach Zarathustra (“Thus spake Zarathustra”), Strauss’s response in orchestral terms to the thoughts and philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche. A more epic, and longer-breathed work, its textures every now and then pointed to the orchestra’s relative lack of both size and tonal resource. Perhaps the long string-melody soon after the very beginning of the work most obviously illustrated this shortcoming – the first few measures were beautifully negotiated by the solo strings, but the relative smallness of the sound of the full section thereafter stressed a need for more tonal weight and vibrancy.

Happily, these few moments were outweighed by the impact of the playing of the more vigorous passages in the score. The famous opening came off splendidly – despite there being no pipe organ at hand  in the MFC (whomever it may concern, please note the “veiled” reference here to the need for restoring the Wellington Town Hall to circulation as quickly as possible!) Conductor Alexander Shelley kept things moving, allowing timpanist Sam Rich his wonderful moment of glory, while not pressing too hard on trumpeter Matthew Stein and the other brass players, who helped bring off a magnificent musical sunrise. Another heartening and joyous sequence was that of the Dance Song, solo violinist Jonathan Tanner leading the dance with easeful charm (some particularly lovely individual notes from his instrument!) and infectious gaiety.

So, the Strauss works can be said to justly represent another musical landmark in the orchestra’s distinguished history. But what of the concert’s new work, the “world premiere” of Synergos, written by the orchestra’s 2014 composer-in-residence, Sarah Ballard? The short response is that I and my various cohorts at the concert thought the work a brilliant display of descriptive orchestral writing, employing instrumental timbres and colourings to stunning effect. One friend (an experienced concert-goer) went so far as to admit to me that he was prepared to patiently “sit through” the work as a way of getting back to the “real” music afterwards – but to his surprise he enjoyed Sarah Ballard’s finely-crafted collection of orchestral “noises” much more than he thought he would.

This twelve-minute work achieved a great deal in a short time, being a kind of three-part exploration of instrumental timbres and tonal hues associated with each of two colours, red and gold, and of their eventual “synergos” or coming together. I thought the opening of the work extremely kinetic, and very “edgy” as regards the instrumental extremes of timbre and tone being employed. The opening sequences were arresting – scintillations of percussion, strings playing right at the “edge” of their tone, heavy brass growling, winds in a ferment, cackling like witches – a bedlam-like orchestral canvas! Being not particularly colour-oriented in my own thinking, I found myself inclined to characterize what I heard so far as being of a vibrant, active quality – by instinct seeking and forming a “behavioural” more than an “appearance” description.

By contrast I thought the second part of the work had a more open, broader-browed manner, the string-tones seeming to resonate or widen to reveal spacious aspects, the wind notes burning like stars in the ambient firmament, the harp-notes sprinkling showers of gently-scintillated warmth. The figurations sounded at ease with themselves, ready to cohere with whatever timbres or colours might be thus activated – the effect wasn’t unlike the ambience surrounding one of those huge, slowly-revolving reflector-spheres which collect and configure as much as reflect and scintillate.

So the opening scenario drew from the composer’s set of responses to red, or, as she called it “Alizarin”, while this latter sequence explored the contrasting effects of considering gold, or “Aurum”. My younger companion at the concert was delighted at being able to recognize the contrasting features of the two “colours” (she afterwards admitted to being attuned to colour in music, and was thus receptive to what Sarah Ballard’s work was exploring). What I found fascinating was what then followed – the amalgamation of the two parts, the synergos of the piece’s title.

Individual lines, figurations, punctuations and impulses began to push their way through, up and out of the textures, the breathy, toneless brasses awakening the winds, and finding their own voices, the two different ”waves” of occupancy eyeing, shouldering and pushing one another around a bit at first, displaying the prerequisite “attitude” as part of the synergistic process, before finding their places in the new order of things. I was left with a feeling of awe at the work’s conclusion, as if I’d been of some kind of journey which defined the nature of my own temporality in the face of the timelessness evoked by the tinkling glockenspiel at the piece’s end.

Very great credit to composer and conductor and musicians for a remarkable quarter-hour’s music, one which added to the overall enjoyment and fascination of 2014’s distinctive NZSO NYO occasion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZ Opera’s LA TRAVIATA charms in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZ Opera presents:
Giuseppe Verdi’s LA TRAVIATA

Cast: Lorina Gore (Violetta) / Samuel Sakker (Alfredo Germont)
David Stephenson (Giorgio Germont) / Rachelle Pike (Flora)
Jarred Holt (Baron Douphol) / Andrew Grenon (Gastone)
Kieran Rayner (Marchese) / Wendy Doyle (Annina)

Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus (director – Michael Vinten)
Orchestra Wellington
Conductor: Emmanuel Joel-Hornak

Director: Kate Cherry
Assistant Director: Jacqueline Coats
Designer: Christine Smith
Lighting: Matt Scott
Choreography: Jesse Wikiriwhi

St.James’ Theatre, Wellington

Friday 11th July 2014

(subsequent performances 13th, 15th, 17th, 19th July)

Call it what you will – an operatic masterpiece, a tried-and-trusted favorite, or a sure-fire tear-jerker – La Traviata again exerted its considerable emotional and theatrical “pull”, this time on the hearts and minds of an appreciative audience at the St James’ Theatre on Friday evening.

This was opening night of the production’s Wellington season, the Opera Company having first taken the show to Auckland a few weeks’ previously, to a good deal of acclaim. From the moment the curtain rose during Orchestra Wellington’s playing of the properly frail and tremulously-sounded Prelude, one’s attentions were properly caught and held fast. And this was due to a production whose direct and coherent accord between sounds and imagery was brilliantly established at the outset and never seriously faltered throughout the evening.

One didn’t realize until the final act the full significance of the brief opening vignette and its setting, played out during the Prelude. Violetta, the opera’s heroine, clothed in ghostly sick-bed-like garments, rose from either sleep or death and confronted the image of herself, resplendent in gorgeous red, dressed for a party and waiting for her guests – the figures were separated by the parameters of a giant glass cube, one which served throughout both to give a theatrical kind of “shape” to the action, and to represent the boundaries confining the characters in the drama.

Here the wraith-like Violetta, next to a fallen chandelier lying at an awkward angle on the floor, was outside the cube watching herself through the glass as the beautiful courtesan she once was, the “fallen chandelier”, one supposes, representing her spent radiance, a kind of glory come to grief, and a contrast with the cube’s suggestion of a beauty in a gilded cage.

The Prelude having sounded its last few soft notes, the ghostly Violetta departed, the chandelier was slowly lifted, and the cube revolved around to its open side – the party could now begin! Throughout the evening the production demonstrated a similar sharply-etched focus on the story’s essentials which allowed the music and the text to suggest to the observer whatever elements of time and place seemed most appropriate.

For instance, I thought the cube a brilliantly-employed structure in this respect, facilitating the different “character” of each of the acts, while binding the overall story together with certain themes suggested by its physical appearance. Thanks to expertly-modulated lighting, the structure’s sparkling glitter, both in a reflective and transparent sense, at once glamourized and laid bare the shallowness of the social interactions of the First and Second Acts which defined Violetta’s world as a courtesan, while those same transparencies underlined the vulnerability of her and her lover Alfredo’s situation, their desire to start a life anew together thwarted by pressures exerted by their all-too-publicly-proclaimed union.

So, while Act One and the second scene of Act Two were all glitter and sparkle, their counterparts expressed vastly different scenarios – the opening scene of Act Two evoked a house in the country, the cube beautifully allowing a suffusion of light throughout Violetta’s and Alfredo’s living-space, via glowing backdrops of panels featuring flower patterns saturated with bright, warm orange hues. As the scene proceeded, and Violetta’s happiness was gradually turned to despair and grief the backdrop colours changed, orange fading and giving way to blue – so simple and yet so affecting!

As for Act Three, we were suddenly presented with that opening, Prelude-accompanied vignette once again, with Violetta (the real Violetta, this time, ill, and close to death) in her ghostly, sick-bed garments lying next to the fallen chandelier, this time one of several of varying sizes, the surrounding hues having no warmth, no comfort. The cube, of course conveyed the privacy of a bedroom, but also the sense of something skeletal, stripped of flesh, bare and unremitting. What radiance occasionally flickered did so coldly and mercilessly – the sense conveyed by the scene was of a place of departure (“Alone, from this world…..”).

All of this wonderful work by the “creative team” (sorry – an awful phrase) deserved to be matched by stellar musical and theatrical performances from the performers both on stage and in the orchestra pit – and by and large the singers and musicians delivered the goods. In fact, musically, I thought this Traviata very satisfyingly of a piece, with the cast, conductor and orchestra players exhibiting a kind of rapport that never lost its “charge”, and in places positively radiated across the footlights and into the auditorium. One constantly sensed a kind of fusion among singers and instrumentalists tingling along the whole spectrum of musical impulse.

This was no better exemplified than by episodes like the frisson of heartless gaiety generated by the chorus of party-goers’ farewell to Violetta in the First Act, by the superbly-realised clarinet solo accompanying Violetta’s letter-writing in Act Two, and then by Violetta’s affecting declaration to Alfredo of her love for him – soprano and orchestra at full stretch, here – at the end of that scene. Then in the following scene came Alfredo’s and Violetta’s very different but equally gut-wrenching condemnations and protestations, strongly supported by supporting voices and orchestra, and in the final scene, the chilling depth of the death-tolling basses and baleful brass when Violetta gives Alfredo her portrait as a gesture of farewell at the work’s end.

So – what about those singers, then? Again, I thought they were musically very satisfying – Lorina Gore as Violetta I fell for in almost every way, singing and acting, as she seemed to do, with every fibre of her being charged with impulsiveness and commitment. Hers were high notes which poured out emotion – not just beautiful noise – and together with her Alfredo, tenor Samuel Sakker, she brought out the music’s great tenderness as well as its raw feeling. That was what I enjoyed most about hers and Sakker’s interaction – a sensitivity when duetting, almost an innocence of interaction (more of which, shortly).

I must mention Gore’s exciting high E-flat at the end of “Semper libre”, one not sanctioned by the composer, but not inappropriate, given Violetta’s euphoria in response to Alfredo’s attentions. It’s a note that singers tend not to try, mostly wisely (in my favourite non-Callas recording of the work, conducted by Carlos Kleiber, the gorgeous Roumanian soprano Ileana Cortrubas makes a brave if squally attempt at the ascent in an otherwise beautiful performance; though I must point out that Callas herself made several all-out, heart-in-mouth launches into the vocal stratosphere at this point in her various recordings, always effective, if not note-perfect!)….in Gore’s case I thought it again not the loveliest sound but an intensely musical, intense and dramatic one, a risk well taken!

I enjoyed Samuel Sakker’s Alfredo increasingly as the evening went on – I thought his singing accurate and musical to begin with, but not especially lovely – however, he either grew on my sensibilities or his tone warmed and sweetened as the story and character developed. He certainly had sufficient vocal heft for the role, but I was especially charmed by the tenderness of much of his duetting with his Violetta – especially touching were some of those First-Act exchanges, the sweetness and slight awkwardness of the boy-meets-girl scenario nicely-caught.

Unfortunately, that was where it all seemed to stay all through the evening as regards any hint of sexual chemistry between Violetta and Alfredo – their “clinches” in the succeeding acts were, to put it mildly, too chaste by a country mile, their body language conveying to each other (and to me) little of their singing’s animal passion or any hint of mingled physical intensity. Perhaps such reserve ran in the family in Alfredo’s case, as his father, Giorgio Germont, played by David Stephenson, came across as an intense and strongly focused, upright character, but ultimately something of a dry old stick – his physical response to Gore’s heartfelt “Embrace me as if I was your daughter” was out of its time, regulation PC to a fault. To be entirely fair, the gesture was of a piece with the character’s manner, business-like and unsentimental, even if Verdi’s music for Germont père suggests layers of warm feeling left physically undisturbed by Stephenson’s accurately-sung, but dry-voiced and rather detached stage portrayal.

Without wishing productions to indulge in what seems a current penchant for excessive bodice-ripping evidenced in some recent opera DVDs I’ve seen, I do feel that Traviata is a work in which one can’t underplay a certain level of romantic passion on the stage – in this case, as the saying goes, it surely comes with the territory. Lest I be accused of making too much of this, I quote a contemporary critic of the work who wrote, “The love depicted by Verdi is voluptuous and sensual, totally lacking in that angelic purity found in Bellini’s music….” I would think that says it all, really…..a certain abandonment in the lovers’ passion, a degree of rawness in their mutual desperation as the tragedy takes hold – neither state was, for me, given sufficient expression by the characters.

However, such was the musical strength of this production, the physical coyness of certain of these stage interactions didn’t fatally spoil our delight – the chorus work, by comparison, had terrific gusto in almost everything they did, apart from one or two “wandering strays” at a couple of points – especially praiseworthy were, I thought the sequences during the second party scene where firstly the women (as gypsies) and then the men (as matadors) of the chorus had different character dances to perform while singing, both of which came off splendidly, with touches of real panache! But the more conventional opening party scene also had plenty of musical bite and energy, the groups swirling around and about most satisfyingly while singing of their life of pleasure, and making their vapid progress from party to party.

Underpinning all of the musical trajectories from the pit was Orchestra Wellington, responding to conductor Emmanuel Joel-Hornak with, by turns, sensitivity, whole-heartedness and vigour. I’ve mentioned some of the most telling instrumental touches, but must pay tribute to maestro Joel-Hornak’s pacing of the work and to his flexible and sensitive direction of his singers during the music’s many tenderly heartfelt moments – his was the kind of direction that always seemed to give the music the time it needed and the musicians sufficient space to realize the same.

A friend who’s a bit of a “Traviata-buff” came with me to the performance – “A marvellous card-game scene! – I haven’t seen or heard better!” he exclaimed, afterwards. “But those two (Violetta and Alfredo) didn’t seem to know one another terribly well!” We hadn’t actually conferred, being too busy with ice-creams and friends at half-time – but he obviously felt the same way as I did. It would be interesting to learn what other people felt – like beauty, it’s all in the eye of the beholder. But I’m sure the strength and conviction of the music-making would have, for most people by far, enabled this production to carry the day, with great credit to all concerned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gunter Herbig at Old St.Paul’s – the next best thing to a siesta……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

OLD ST.PAUL’S LUNCHTIME CONCERT SERIES presents:
Gunter Herbig (guitar)

Music for guitar from South America
Works by Reis, Piazzolla, Fleury, Barrios and Pernambuco

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon,

Tuesday, July 8th, 2014

Gunter Herbig strode into the performing-space of Old St.Paul’s radiating waves of energy and purpose, as if he was about to perform some kind of feat considerably more spectacularly death-defying than give a guitar recital of music from South America. He thanked us all for “braving the elements” in coming to the church to see and hear him play, and hoped that we would, by the end of the concert have thought it all worthwhile.

Herbig is a native of Brazil, born of German parents, who spent much of his childhood in Portugal and Germany. Having such a cosmopolitan cultural background, has, he reckoned, given his music-making an interesting and personalized mixture of influences which he treasures. He certainly gave every indication throughout  the concert of “owning” the music he played, communicating to us his regard for the sounds as having a living value.

By way of telling us both about the music on the programme and the circumstances of his getting to know it, Herbig made the works come alive both as sounds and as evocations of places and moods and ideas. His anecdotes, filled with information and spiced with droll humor, gave each work a richer context  that enhanced our understanding of the pieces. And his playing had all the character and virtuoso skill that the music required to “speak” to us.

Herbig began with two works by Dilermando Reis, perhaps the most well-known Brazilian guitarist of modern times, one who performed the compositions of JS Bach, Barrios and Tárrega, as well as his own and other works by Brazilian composers. Reis recorded many of his own works, among them the second of the pair of waltzes that Gunter Herbig played today, Se Ela Perguntar. 

First up, however, was Ternura, a lovely, quixotic work, filled with insinuation and sensuous figuration, having a kind of spontaneous, almost unpredictable course. The second work I thought rather Chopinesque, or perhaps a Latin American version of the same, alternating between physical and emotional, purpose and reflection. Both were winningly-voiced, the player always responsive to the variety between ebb and flow, movement and stasis.

Astor Piazzolla’s music, little-known outside the South American continent until the last decade of the twentieth century, has become synonymous with the distinctive voice and infinite variety of the once-infamous dance, the tango – Piazzolla’s nuevo tango was scorned at first by traditionalists, who objected to his fusion of the dance with both classical and jazz elements, but his radical style eventually won acceptance. Gunter Herbig briefly entertained us with a story of how he encountered Piazzolla’s music for the first time, before demonstrating via his playing of two of the composer’s tangos the extent to which he had been “grabbed” by this music.

First came Adios Noniño (translated, “Farewell, Father”), written in 1959 shortly after the death of the composer’s father. Percussive and timbre-driven at the work’s beginning, free and flexible in rhythm and harmony, the piece seemed to present a sensibility filled with changing emotions, a kind of continuum of instability, but one on an inevitable course towards some kind of awareness as a result of experience. The visceral aspect of the music I found compelling and in places exciting, even unsettling, though I wasn’t sure why on this first hearing, not knowing the work’s circumstances. As a piece of “pure” music it certainly made an effect in Herbig’s hands.

I thought the second tango, Verano Porteño,  a more “road music” kind of work, less inward and circumspect, more “out there” with a stronger rhythmic trajectory that seemed to cover plenty of physical ground. Again the music had a percussive element, the player required, as before, to strike the instrument in different ways, by way of underlining the pulse of things, the music’s heartbeat. Not all of the music was thus enslaved – recitative-like passages and incidental glissandi and other kinds of timbral slides punctuated the flow, the guitar used like a kind of all-purpose folk-orchestra, especially towards the piece’s end, with all kinds of deft percussive touches.

By way of contrast, Gunter Herbig played three more “conventional” tangoes, two by the eminent and much-travelled Argentinian guitar virtuoso Abel Fleury, and one by Paraguyan-born Agustin Barrios. Fleury’s two pieces sounded so “clean” and straight after Piazzolla’s far more discursive worlds of experience, a contrast perhaps akin to hearing music by almost any of Beethoven’s contemporaries next to the former;s late quartets!  However, Barrios’s work Don Perez Freire had a more personalized aspect, the listener imagining some kind of portrait of a kind of Latin American “Beckus the Dandiprat”, somebody worldly-wise and energetic, and perhaps a little garrulous but with real charm to boot – a man, one suspects, well acquainted with the pleasures of dance and movement.

A second piece by Barrios, Julia Florida (Julia Blossoming), a work dedicated to one of his students, Julia Martinez de Rodriguez, was a different kind of portrait, by turns graceful and impulsive, quickilvery and lyrical. Subtitled “Barcarola” it had moments reminiscent of the music of Faure, with a wistfully beautiful melodic line. The program was , in a sense, rounded off by the final programmed piece, written by Joao Pernambuco, a founder of the Brazilian choro style. Pernambuco’s output was virtually salvaged  by people like fellow composers Heitor Villa-Lobos, who transcribed many of the pieces, and later Dilermando Reis, who performed many and recorded several of Pernambuco’s works. We heard the latter’s Sons de carrilhoes (Song of the Bells), an attractively lyrical toe-tapper of a piece, a happy and joyous conclusion to the recital.

However, Gunter Herbig then played for us an encore, by way of sympathizing with the realities of many of us having to return to work from the concert, rather than, as he put it, “taking a siesta”! Of course, our sensibilities had been having a great time cavorting around and about imagined realms where such practices as siesta were part of the daily routine. So we were given Leo Brouwer’s Berceuse (Cradle Song) as an extra moment of magic, a gentle kind of farewelling to this gorgeous array of music.