Author: Peter Mechen

Musicians join in with the fireworks in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
OPULENCE – Music by Tchaikovsky, Ravel and R.Strauss

Eldar Nebolsin (piano)
Michael Stern (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

TCHAIKOVSKY – Piano Concerto No.2 in G Major Op.44
RAVEL – Ballet Suite from “Ma Mère l’Oye” (Mother Goose)
R.STRAUSS (arr. Rodzinski) – Orchestral Suite from “Der Rosenkavalier”

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 8th November, 2014

Happily, the days of accepting “as Tchaikovsky’s work” the long-established truncated version made by Alexander Siloti of the G Major Piano Concerto – such grievous cuts in the second movement! –  seem to be at an end. Here, at the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s “Opulence” concert at the Michael Fowler Centre on Saturday evening last, we had, in all of its undiluted glory, the original work as Tchaikovsky conceived it. Those extended solo string lines of the Andante were allowed their full expressive voice, maximizing the movement’s dramatic contrast with the energy and vigour of the outer sections of the concerto.

This done, the rest was up to the musicians – and we got a performance from pianist, conductor and orchestra that, to my ears, simply got better and better as it progressed – perhaps a shade four-square and pompous throughout the opening exchanges (partly the fault of Tchaikovsky’s writing), but with every entry made by pianist Eldar Nebolsin creating sparks and flashes of impulse which eventually built up to the point of open conflagration. Here was, I thought, a demonstration of keyboard virtuosity which seemed to grow from right out of the music’s heart – it possessed a kind of compulsive playfulness that exuded total involvement, far removed from brilliance for its own sake.

Nebolsin seemed to take nothing he played for granted, voicing his lines exquisitely in quieter places, in dialogue with the orchestral winds, then just as spontaneously bubbling his textures up and over with delight in his more rapid passagework. Yes, that odd-sounding “ready-steady-GO!” orchestral entry (not terribly convincing at the best of times!) at about nine or ten minutes into the first movement didn’t “come off” here with any great conviction, but the orchestral winds then played like souls possessed with their concerted triplet figurations that buoyed along the string lines which followed. From then on I thought the playing really took wing, with a grandly-sprung orchestral entry immediately after the pianist’s astonishingly volatile first-movement cadenza, and some riotous exchanges leading up to the movement’s end.

It seems tiresomely cliched to say so, but the Andante’s opening conjured up an entirely different world of sensibility – firstly Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s violin, and then Andrew Joyce’s ‘cello gave us moments of aching lyrical beauty, the players’ lines mingling ease with intensity in a way that might well have caused the pianist to exclaim in rehearsal “What a pity to come in and spoil that!”…….however, Nebolsin’s real-time response was to add to the melody’s beauty with phrasings that actually brought to my mind in places the Brahms of some of the latter’s Intermezzi  – Tchaikovsky, who was ambivalent about the German composer and his music, would possibly be spinning in his grave at the audacity of such a comparison!

But there was more to it than lyrical expression – the exchanges took on a passionately operatic air in places, the piano building “Swan-Lake” climaxes with the orchestral strings, and violin and ‘cello “crossing bows” with a vengeance, before returning things to a state of equilibrium, save for that uneasy sequence shared by the lower strings and brass over tremolando violins – some remnant of a painful and poignant memory of its composer’s, perhaps?

How we all delighted at the whiplash crack of the finale’s opening! – again, Nebolsoin’s playing had such a sense of fun accompanying the brilliance! We got a superb horn-solo as a counterpoint to the second theme, and an exciting, soaring, conflagration of strings in their brief but telling flourish which followed. I thought, in fact, the whole performance seemed to be alight, with plenty of “sting” in the exchanges between soloist and strings – an example was that tricky-run-up to yet another whiplash chord at the beginning of the coda – real panache, a wonderful amalgam of impetuosity and confidence!

Had the Michael Fowler Centre been more generously peopled that evening (was that reprobate Guy Fawkes to blame on this occasion?), the response at the concerto’s end would have been simply overwhelming! We did our best, calling the pianist back for more and richly-deserved acclaim, until we could put hands together no more – Eldar Nebolsin’s was playing which made me long for the days when such a soloist’s appearance with the orchestra would usually be followed up  by a solo recital – alas, as civilizations progress, so, it seems, do they also decline……..

We had been told in an announcement before the concert that the interval would be spaced so as to allow patrons the opportunity to observe the Wellington City Council’s annual fireworks display – so, at 9pm most of us had arrayed ourselves either at a convenient window or vantage-point just alongside the building, ready for the visual scintillations and batteries of percussive retorts accompanying such happenings. It all seemed in perfect accord with what we had just heard, actually – so everybody was in a high old humour when the concert’s second half began.

Certainly, after the “double-whammy” effect of Tchaikovsky at his most extroverted and brilliant, and the full-on battery of fireworks over the harbour, we were all ready for something a shade more subtle and delicate – and Ravel’s music for his Ballet Suite “Ma Mère l’Oye” (Mother Goose) was just what the doctor ordered. A pity the whole ballet is seldom played in the concert-hall, as there’s more to enjoy – an enchanting introduction plus a series of wonderful linking episodes (rather like the “Promenades” used by Musorgsky in his “Pictures at an Exhibition”). Still, the Suite is the next-best thing, and it brought out ravishing sounds from conductor and players in all instances.

The Suite preserves the work’s original inspiration – five pieces written for piano-duet for the children of friends, each piece characterizing a favourite fairy-tale. Ravel, too kept the structure intact when he first orchestrated the pieces in 1911 – the following year he added the “extras” which introduce and then link the movements. Tonight we began with the “Pavane of the Sleeping Beauty”, the sounds like the play of vapours around the head of a sleeping child, as if guardian spirits were in attendance.  The orchestral winds had a great deal of solo work throughout, and the players performed their own and the more concerted lines with requisite beauty and character, especially in this opening piece.

Next came another delicate evocation, “Petit Poucet” (Tom Thumb), whose principal melody, played on the cor anglais, had such an aching, nostalgic quality, one could readily identify with the composer’s longing to somehow re-enter the world of childhood. The forest birds made an appearance in this tale as well, a solo violin joining various winds to emulate their wild, plaintive voices. What a change of ambience with “Laideronette, Empress of the Pagodas”, the pentatonic figurations creating bustling, excitable movement before a gong evoked the splendour of an Oriental Monarch! How the composer must have loved writing this!

One of the most famous of all fairy-tales, “Beauty and the Beast”, got truly graphic treatment from the orchestral instruments, the story’s two characters clearly demarcated at the beginning, bright-eyed, almost questing wind-playing depicting Beauty’s attractiveness and open, enquiring mind, and then louring percussion supporting the hideous tones of the contrabassoon to portray the unfortunate Beast – a wonderful noise! Then when the lighter winds and the deep-throated Beast got together, the synthesis was breathtaking in its audacity and clarity – a kind of “vive la difference” to savour and remember.

In fact, the only, very slight criticism I could find to make of the playing was of places in the final movement, “The Enchanted Garden”, whose episodes I thought unfolded beautifully, but a shade (just a shade, mind you!) too glibly – the sequences could have done with a touch more breathless wonderment at some of the phrase-ends and harmonic turns, as a child might experience when exploring some kind of wonderland – places where the music’s hymn-like progressions could have caught and held the flow for split-seconds of poised, ecstatic delight, a “registering” of certain moments, one might say. Still, the final peroration very satisfyingly gathered all together and opened up the vistas to the oncoming sunshine, a triumph of light and good and happiness over the dark, the orchestral harps properly drenching our sensibilities with warmth and excitement.

I hadn’t read the titles of the items as carefully as I should have, thinking that we were going to get the “Rosenkavalier Waltzes” at the concert’s end – which I do love! But instead I found myself enjoying the opera’s notoriously orgasmic Prelude – perhaps there’s something about an unexpected pleasure! – before the music went  on to explore various episodes of the drama. A quick look at the item’s listing clarified what was happening – this was a proper “Suite” from the opera, with an opus number, no less!

The programme note implied that the Suite had been made by the composer together with the Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski, in 1944. But the conductor was in New York at the time while Strauss was in war-besieged Germany, suggesting that the Suite was actually Rodzinski’s work, as he gave its premiere with the New York Philharmonic that same year. Strauss must have eventually approved the work, because it was published in 1945 with its present Opus number.

I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Stern’s conducting and the playing of the orchestra throughout this exercise – I wondered in places whether the work was a couple of sequences too long, but the reaction of the audience at the end certainly dispelled that impression! Parts of it I thought were particularly magical, notably the moments which featured the haunting wind-chord figurations that accompany Octavian’s presentation of the Silver Rose to Sophie at the beginning of Act Two; though I thought some of the opera’s vocal lines lost some of their intensity and focus when played by groups of instruments instead of a single instrumental voice – Sophie’s ecstatically soaring response to Octavian’s presentation here somehow didn’t “tug” the heartstrings as it always does on stage, the impact a bit too generalized from a body of strings or doubled wind lines.

What worked superbly well were the waltzes, particularly the gold-digging Baron Ochs’ lascivious “With me, no night for you too long” tune, which Strauss presents, as here, using, first of all a solo violin (gorgeously played by Vesa-Matti Leppanen) and then, with the orchestral throttle fully open – great moments! But one doesn’t really blame either Rodzinski or Strauss for favouring a kind of good old whizz-bang concert-ending to the suite, instead of going with the prevailing emotions of the opera’s conclusion, and replicating that ambience at the finish.

So, after some heartfelt and beautifully-phrased playing by gorgeous strings (plus some lovely high trumpet work) of the opera’s final “eternal triangle with a difference” Trio, we got the haunting wind arabesques once again along with Octavian’s and Sophie’s final duet – and then the music roared into Ochs’ “Leopold! We’re leaving!” orchestral riot, with great horn whoops sounding above the exuberant rhythms, and a properly-gradated payoff at the end. Everybody seemed to love it! – and as an orchestral showpiece it certainly demonstrated what conductor and players could do, in spadefuls!

 

Ballades, Songs and Snatches – singer and piper at Futuna Chapel

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Colours of Futuna Concert Series

Songs, instrumentals and duos

Rowena Simpson (soprano)

Kamala Bain (recorders)

Futuna Chapel, Friend St., Karori, Wellington

Sunday 2nd November, 2014

If there’s anybody reading this who hasn’t made the mini-pilgrimage to the exquisite Futuna Chapel in Karori, Wellington, I would strongly recommend to whomever that action be urgently taken. The building alone is worth the visit – an award-winning architectural design by Hawkes Bay architect John Scott, commissioned in 1958 by the Catholic Society of Mary, and built by the brothers of the Society themselves as a place of spiritual retreat and contemplation.

Alas, the chapel’s original setting amid native bush stretching back to the hillsides has been besmirched by development, a process which threatened to gobble up not only the land and the bush, but the chapel itself, until a Trust was formed to negotiate with the developers to save the original building, at the very least.

Part of the Trust’s fund-raising efforts to maintain the chapel is the establishment of this concert series, something that happens to be both worthwhile and instantly rewarding for all contributors to the enterprise. While virtually nothing of the original setting remains, it’s possible, once inside the chapel, to shut out the ironies of the cultural despoilations around and about, and experience something of the place’s original purpose – John Scott’s design continues to resonate and overwhelm, simply and quietly utilising light and space in a timeless and unforgettable manner.

So, Futuna Chapel has been, thanks to sterling efforts on the part of people for whom such things have a transcendence beyond material gain, more fortunate in its preservation than, say, another historic Wellington venue, Island Bay’s Erskine College, much older, but as beautiful and distinctive and as worthy of preservation. Alas, efforts to instigate restoration of Erskine have encountered attendant problems which come with ownership, age and costs that I suspect may well require the attentions of some arts-loving, community-minded millionaire for anything lasting to be achieved.

Back in Karori, the “Colours of Futuna” concert series provides the Sunday afternoon visitor to the chapel with added value, a fusion of light, space and sound for which the building might seem to have been purpose-built.  Of course music has always been part-and-parcel of most expressions of spiritual faith, and the venues constructed for this purpose have usually enhanced this propensity for supporting “voices raised in worship” – though hardly cathedral-like in size, Futuna Chapel certainly supports and fulfills this state of things according with and in addition to the building’s original purpose.

For the latest Sunday concert we were delighted by a programme that could have been called “ballades, songs and snatches”, given by soprano Rowena Simpson and recorder-player Kamala Bain. Spanning centuries and continents, the two musicians moved easily between different musical forms and styles, sounds and languages, observations and emotions, enough variety without neglecting deeper feelings, and including both familiar strains and in places, newer, ear-catching sounds.

I’ve encountered both of these musicians revelling in presentations with more than a whiff of the theatre about them – so it seemed entirely natural that each should comfortably utilize the performing platform as a kind of “stage”, especially such one as this, whose light and space would suggest any kind of naturalistic or dramatic vista – Rowen Simpson began the concert with an unaccompanied setting by English composer Michael Head of poet Bronnie Taylor’s “The Singer”, a piece with some haunting major/minor key alternating, and some beautiful vocal ascents, such as at the words “and the sound of fairy laughter” right at the end.

Right at the song’s end Kamala Bain’s recorder took up the melodic threads, the player remaining at the back of the chapel for an antiphonal effect, one which further opened up our vistas appropriate to such an out-of-doors song, bringing a touch of ritual to it all with an anonymous 14th Century Italian ballata “Lucente Stelle’ – even more distant antiquities were shaken and stirred by the next settings, two exerpts from the Exeter Book of Riddles, the work of contemporary English composer Nicola LeFanu.

The soprano read us the riddles first, not to spoil the game, but to clarify the texts – the first, Siren, had a lament-like aspect, a wide-ranging vocal line, part ecstatic, part tragic, in places almost “Queen-of-the-Night”-like in its melismatic demands – complementing the singer, the recorder sounded a kind of birdsong obbligato, underlining the ‘nature-piece’ aspect of the music. The second riddle “Swan” not unexpectedly proved smoother-toned, calmer of movement, the recorder dulcetly reflecting the waters, the vocal line again soaring, but very gracefully, briefly trilling ecstatically with the recorder, before the latter returns to those long watery lines.

One could have been excused for imagining we had been transported to an aviary for the next item, Australian John Rodgers’ “Three Short Pieces”, featuring the movement of the recorder-player to a different location for three different birdsongs, very effective and naturalistic. From evocation we were taken to invocation, with Lyell Creswell’s “Prayer to appease the Spirit of the Land”, a work dedicated to Tracy Chadwick, a New Zealand soprano who died young, from leukemia. This was original a Maori text rendered into English, sung gently, with floated lines over a very “earthy” recorder accompaniment, with breathy tones and pitch-bending suggesting wind-notes – altogether a moving tribute to a young singer.

Another New Zealand work, by Dorothy Ker, was a setting of a poem by Ruth Dallas, “On the Bridge” for soprano solo, a folkish setting, sounding in effect like a spontaneously-conceived improvisation from the singer, the impulses at first high-flying, then trailing off gently.  And then came the next item, a work by the Dutch composer Karel van Steenhoven, one called “Nachtzang”  (Night Song). Recorder-player Kamala Bain “warned” us about this piece beforehand, stressing the necessity for we listeners to “use our imaginations” – it was a bit like the musical equivalent of a “Government Health Warning”, but at least we were prepared!

The soprano’s wordless line floated long-breathed notes over the top of an agitated molto perpetuum figure, before singer and recorder wove their lines around one another in bird-songish fashion, producing some extraordinary unison and intervalled passages. In places the singer “vocalized” the lines, occasionally breathing agitatedly, at other places crying out like a baby – the recorder contributed ghosty tremolandi to various episodes, with the outside wind occasionally contributing a naturalistic counterpoint!  The sounds certainly took us “out of ourselves” and into more uncertain worlds somewhat removed from our comfort-zones.

Such were the contrasts and drastic changes of sounds and moods wrought by the performers throughout the afternoon that we were beginning to expect almost anything could happen at this stage – and it did, with the presentation of several Scottish Songs from the eighteenth-century “Orpheus Caledonius” collection made by the singer and folk-song enthusiast William Thomson. Kamala Bain brilliantly caught the “snap” of the rhythms of Auld Rob Morris, and was then joined by Rowena Simpson for the second song, Lady Ann Bothwel’s Lament, which had a lovely high vocal tessitura in places and a droll drone recorder accompaniment. The music of the third song, Sleepy Body, seemed to belie its title, the soprano turning instrumentalist and playing a glockenspiel to assist with the delightful recorder-tones.

“This brand new work” began the sentence introducing the programme’s next item, “Night Countdown” by Wellington composer Philip Brownlee (present at the performance). Setting the words of a poem by Peggy Dunstan, the music explores the state of being that exists “in the space between wakefulness and sleep”. to quote the composer’s own words. The sounds weren’t necessarily literal reproductions of the poem’s images, but were used in an attempt to encourage different interpretations of the words’ meanings. The singer read the poem before the music began, to give us an idea of the word-terrain to follow. Rowena played the glockenspiel and Kamala the largest of the recorders, the latter encouraging some amazing timbal variation from the instrument, including a kind of simultaneously-produced array of harmonic/overtone sounds.

The vocal line moved lazily and sensuously at first, but arched confidently towards more ecstatic regions as the night’s multifarious elements were “banked up” in an impressive catalogue. Singer and recorder-player enjoyed the “chorus of barking”, before joining voices for the last few phrases of the poem – the climactic “one me” was sung and spoken together as if by a chorus. A lovely work, the words and music having more than a whiff of the power of those “A Child’s Garden of Verses” poems by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Jacopo da Bologna’s 14th Century madrigal Non al su’amante featured the story of the Goddess Diana bathing in a mountain stream and being observed by a passing hunter – what beautiful singing and playing lines, here!  Especially telling was the blend of lyrical voice and excitable recorder figurations. The story didn’t appear to have a happy ending, judging by the melancholia that seemed to grip the piece over its last minute or so’s duration! A happier, more energetic outing for all concerned was provided by an anonymous 14th Century French ballade, “Constantia”, a dancing, tintinabulating expression of joy from voice and instrument that makes one wish one could be a time-traveller!

This was a great concert for home-grown music, as next was Helen Fisher’s setting of Lauris Edmond’s poem I name this place, one of the verses from a collection “Scenes from a Small City”. As befitted the occasion for which the piece was written (the wedding of friends) the music has a renaissance-like feel, a ritualistic elegance to its lines and counterpoints, flavoured also in places by a “folkish” quality – the concluding flourishes by singer and player towards the end underlined the celebratory nature of the occasion. And to bring things to a close on a further optimistic note, we heard “Sumer is icumen in”, an appropriately cheerful and sonorous farewell to the afternoon’s evocations.

 

“Nature, Life and Love” for our time, from the NZTrio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

City Gallery Wellington presents:
NZTrio Art3

Justine Cormack (violin)
Ashley Brown (‘cello)
Sarah Watkins (piano)

Salvatore Sciarrino – Piano Trio No.2
John Zorn – Amour Fou
Leonie Holmes – ….when expectation ends (premiere)
Arnold Schoenberg (arr. Steuermann) – Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)

City Gallery, Wellington

29th October 2014

I did like the NZTrio’s characterizing of its most recent Wellington concert at the City Gallery as “an edgy international exploration” – though further linking the concert to the Gallery’s October exhibition of the work of William Kentridge, a multi-media presentation called “The Refusal of Time” was frustrating, as I hadn’t had the chance to see the latter – apparently a truly “immersive” amalgam of cinematic methodology – animation, live action and pixelated motion. After listening to the NZTrio’s playing in the concert I wished even more that I’d seen the exhibition as well!

With music from the USA, Europe and New Zealand packed into an eventful eighty minutes, the Trio certainly gave value for money. The musicians have played in this venue before, though against the wall behind this audience, last time round that I remember. On that occasion I remembered being partly enchanted, partly distracted by the floor-to-ceiling artwork on the said wall behind the Trio – but this time the art gave out a rather more circumspect aspect, both in itself and its presentation!

But what musicians these people are! Chamber groups vary enormously in terms of what and how they “give out” to their audiences – an obvious example to hand would be a comparison between the present group and the Borodin Quartet, who visited Wellington earlier in the month. While the latter group remained physically undemonstrative while transfixing us with its sounds, the players’ aspect and posture as a group magnificently “contained” as they regaled us with the most superbly-focused tones, the NZTrio musicians compelled as much as by their body language as their sound. There’s something to be said for marrying musical efforts to appropriately organic gestures – within reason, a kind of performance choreography – and the NZTrio thus engaged our attentions on a visceral as well as musical level.

For this reason I never tire of watching the group perform, in particular pianist Sarah Watkins, who throws herself into whatever she’s doing, metaphorical boots and all! A far more connective comparison than with the Borodins, in terms of performance style, would be with the Austrian ensemble, the Eggner Trio, a group that’s frequently visited New Zealand, and which has a similarly engaging concert platform manner.

So, onto the “edgy international exploration”! First up we encountered Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino’s Piano Trio No.2, music by a composer who’s known for his music’s evocations of silence and transparency of texture, with occasional irruptions of loud sounds – contrasts which demonstrate that a state or condition can be defined as much by its antithesis as by itself.

The hushed, almost ghostly whoops and descents of the communing strings at the outset contained to my ears a number of impressions, amongst them acts of impulse defying darkness, in space, or in the near-impenetrable gloom of great forests or vast oceans – at one point I imagined nascent reminiscences of the Latin plainchant “Dies Irae”; while the violin’s ascents towards stratospheric harmonics again evoked a similar kind of scalic chanting (what else had I been listening to of late?)…..Every now and then the ghostly voices’ mix was “stirred and shaken” by piano interpolations, which led to galvanic descents from the strings, “silvering” the ambience, into which the piano again intruded, with ever-increasing dynamism and coruscation. But the strings kept their energies in check, conversing in glissando-like mode, rather like spent meteorites falling from the sky – it was afterwards that I read the programme annotations which mentioned “ancient whale song and crystal meteors” wondering whether or not the words were the composer’s own……

Whatever suggestions of “bumt-out energy” might have been gleaned from these ambiences were belied by the piano’s “this is it!” reaction to the Dali-like suspensions of energy in time – great shooting-star glissandi and scintillations poured our of the instrument, with the sustaining pedal throwing open the cosmos, rather like a Black Hole operating in reverse! As for the strings, each instrument was transported by frenzied ecstacies/agonies, the work’s concluding exchanges hearkening back to those opening silences by default, the sounds appearing to “blister” from within the very beings of those far-away beginnings, a realization the listener is usually able to savour rather more tellingly via the silence at the end of a recording, than in a concert, with its intrusive(!) applause – now there’s a performance conundrum! – but it’s one that frequently comes to mind, as, of course, we all have our lists of pieces of music which we think really shouldn’t be applauded when they finish……..

Interestingly, both Ashley Brown and Sarah Watkins provided us with some “byplay” at the end of the Sciarrino piece, Ashley Brown explaining that he had to make some “unbeautiful” sounds, i.e., activate his bow to remove excess resin accumulated during the Sciarrino, in order to be able to then make further beautiful sounds. But because I was sitting in a “last-minute-arrival” seat I wasn’t ideally placed to ascertain whether Sarah Watkins was putting on or removing from over her hands protective glove-like covers, “to stop blood from going all over the piano keys” as she put it – certainly the intensity with which she addressed Sciarrino’s keyboard writing towards the end of the Trio suggested that something might well have suffered some attrition as a result!

The Trio reversed the printed program order of the next two pieces, putting John Zorn’s Amour Fou ahead of, rather than following, Leonie Holmes’ …when expectation ends. In retrospect I felt it was to spare our sensibilities rather than the composers’ – instead of having two shortish pieces together, followed by two relatively lengthy ones, the dimensions were alternated. Stylistically, too, Zorn’s discursive explorations of the abysses between impulsive attraction and reflective confusion in love was more appropriate as a counterweight to the abstract brilliances of Sciarrino, than as an equally weighty cheek-by-jowl partner to Schoenberg’s “dark night of two souls”.

Away from the piece’s name and the programme’s suggestion of a universal discourse on love’s nature, I would have given Zorn’s music a dream-like title upon first hearing and characterized the sounds accordingly – it seemed to me that the sounds were presenting realities formulated in spontaneously-occurring ways, viewed in many instances through different lenses of perception or chartered on grids which showed different interpretations, like maps of the same area in an atlas showing different characteristics. But of course the title pushed my receptive sensibilities in a certain direction, and, as the composer probably intended, allowed me some traction in “interpreting” the sounds.

What a beautifully poised, expressionist opening! – plaintive piano chords sounded beneath a shimmering dream-like violin line, whose figures were then acted upon in surreal ways, accelerating, caught in ostinati, haunted by eerie tremolandi – everything seemed dream-like, not of this world. The piano for a while seemed to maintain the line, as the string-characters came and went, piquantly, quixotically, mysteriously, like the sultans in Omar Khayyam’s “batter’d-caravansarai”. The music frequently used repeated notes, chords and figurations  in a hypnotic way, simultaneously creating moving and frozen imagery, indicative of the overall ambivalence of perception/reality. And there were startling contrasts, both of dynamics and of movement – like a world of first impressions and immediate, rather than considered responses, as if consciousness was utterly at the mercy of involuntary impulse. If, as the title suggested, the piece was about love, then the sounds were clearly giving tongue to philosopher and cynic H.L.Mencken’s maxim that it was all “a triumph of imagination over intelligence”.

As the music  continued its fascinating peregrinations the piece seemed to me to increasingly cohere – it felt as though the figurations were extending their impulses and trying to form partnerships, reach out tendrils and forge bonds between groups of material, however disparate. I thought it an endlessly fascinating web of sounds, in places clearly demarcated, while in others characterized by fierce, intense interactions, even if the repetitive nature of a lot of the material still suggested that impulse and spontaneity rather than sense and intellect were driving the responses. And, interestingly, almost right up to the end there was that ambivalence of those disparate forces, presenting alternative states of reality – the cross-rhythms between piano and cello pizzicati hardly displayed a sense of hearts beating together. And was the violin’s final flourish some kind of “cri de coeur”? – John Zorn wasn’t telling!

Earlier this year I had greatly enjoyed reviewing an Atoll CD of Leonie Holmes’ orchestral music for radio, and as a result was looking forward to her new work (a world premiere performance, in fact), called “…when expectation ends”. As with her orchestral writing, Leonie Holmes here demonstrated a feeling for the instruments’ characteristic ambient voices – firstly, a plaintive violin solo, which was answered by widely-spaced piano figurations followed by ‘ethereal ‘cello harmonics – some lovely “cluster-chords” for piano further enabled a “floating” kind of atmosphere – one could imagine the sequence as a state wrought by the mind, which then began to unravel in the face of sterner realities – the instrumental lines started to pursue their own individual ends, occasionally clashing and creating discordant combinations. With the piano as peacemaker, order was momentarily restored, and a second lovely episode sounded out for our pleasure – even if the music’s inherent impulsiveness couldn’t be subdued for long. A string unison led to vigorous and even volatile points of instrumental contact, swirling colourings and textures, in fact excitingly orchestral in effect – marvellous, stirring stuff!

Finally, a sober, dark-browed ‘cello solo was duly comforted by violin and piano, the strings singing of times past, and the piano allowing the stillness to “surge softly backwards” at the end – these were gentle but hard-won tranquilities, stripped of illusion and enjoyed for what they were. Something of the same process in a deeper, darker, rather more fraught form was found in Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which concluded the program. Written by the composer originally as a string sextet, the work has been more often performed by a string orchestra (the composer’s own arrangement), but there exists also a transcription for Piano Trio (which I had never heard) by the composer/pianist Eduard Steuermann, a pupil, and later a colleague of Schoenberg. Most enterprisingly, it was programmed by the NZTrio for this concert.

Two things above all others surprised and delight me regarding the transcription and its performance here – firstly, the effectiveness of the piano as a protagonist in the work, not only rendering the music of the four displaced strings with absolute surety, but using its own special resonance to bring additional interest to the scenarios. The instrument’s voice created a distinctive ambience in which the two main protagonists, the man and the woman of the original poem by Richard Dehmel, could clearly and unequivocally interact as ‘cello and violin respectively, their thoughts, feelings, words and actions given a unique focus instead of having to compete with additional string textures.

Secondly, though Brahms and Wagner have always been cited as Schoenberg’s major influences in the writing of this work, the transcription’s keyboard writing interestingly brought out the influence of Liszt on the work. Quite apart from Schoenberg’s tendency to put melodic phrases in repeated pairs and near-pairs (as Liszt does throughout most of his orchestral symphonic poems), the figurations assigned the piano bore the stamp of Liszt in a number of sequences. I thought I also detected some of Franck’s influence in Schoenberg’s chromatic leanings when delineating the woman’s confessing to begetting a child with a stranger (and never before have I heard the “theme of reconciliation” sounding so much like that beatific second theme in the opening movement of  Franck’s Symphony!). As well, there are reminiscences of Chopin and his B Minor Piano Sonata’s slow movement, shortly afterwards, during the quietly ecstatic exchanges of accord between the couple.

For these reasons alone I simply loved this version of Verklärte Nacht that we were given – all of it presented with such an amalgam of varied feeling and intensity by the Trio. The work’s final paragraph, depicting the man and woman walking together through the transfigured dawning of their new life together, brought us textures suffused with love, joy and hope, those heartfelt strings floating upon ecstatic piano figurations, before all became as windblown wisps of sound at the end. We were left replete, aglow with warmth but also breath-bated at the fragility of the remaining silences…..

 

 

High Mountain Flowing Water – theatre, poetry and music

Posted on by Peter Mechen
Dong Fei - dancer | Gao Ping - piano | Wu Na - Qin | Evan Li - photographer

The Confucius Institute, Victoria University, Wellington, presents:
High Mountain Flowing Water (Gao Shan Liu Shui)

An ancient Chinese tale with guqin, piano and Kunqu opera
Music-drama settings of poetry ancient and modern

Gao Ping – piano
Dong Fei – actor/singer/dancer
Wu Na – guqin (qin)

Director: Sara Brodie
Visual design: Jon He
Text arrangement: Luo Hui
Production curated by Jack Body

Massey Concert Hall, Wellington

Wednesday, 22nd October, 2014

Encounters with exotic art-forms and performance-styles which are unfamiliar can have profound consequences – one thinks, for instance of the effect upon the composer Claude Debussy of the Paris International Exhibition of 1889 with its displays of art and music from places like Java, in particular the sounds made by the gamelan orchestra. Earlier the prints of Japanese artists such as Hokusai had reached Europe and inspired a whole generation of French and English painters to emulate the characteristics of Japanese art, an influence that extended to the art-nouveau movement of the early twentieth century. It was the sheer novelty and force of an encounter with a new tradition which both delighted creative people and caused simultaneous havoc with Euro-centrist sensibilities – and the process dealt a long-overdue body-blow to the hegemony of those over-familiar western traditions, a revitalization whose effects are still felt in artists’ work everywhere today.

Of course, even in the here-and-now one doesn’t have to be a creative artist to be shaken up by encounters with other cultures and their art-forms. In fact, such occasions can return the humblest of beholders to the tremulous realms of formative experience, no matter how seasoned or experienced a “normal” event-goer she or he might be. So it was with me at the Massey University Concert Hall on this particular evening, sitting amid the steeply-raked rows in darkness as if suspended mid-air, watching and listening to the work of the three on-stage performers, presenting an ancient Chinese tale “High Mountain Flowing Water”. The chiaroscuro of darkness and light powerfully focused my attentions upon the performers, and transformed my sensibilities at certain moments into those of a child’s, enabling the full force of delight and wonderment to flood through my opened doors and windows and set me awash with that precious excitement of reimagined reality, cut adrift from all expectation save for the unexpected.

For this was something quite out of the ordinary – a retelling of an ancient legend concerning a musician and a woodcutter, and what passes between them via the musician’s playing of the guqin (or, simply “qin”), an ancient Chinese 7-string zither-like instrument. It’s really an exploration of transference of understanding and empathy, using acts of music-making and -listening as metaphors for the process. Taking part in this theatrical retelling of a musical friendship, which the accompanying program note called “the shared spirit of understanding” was pianist Gao Ping, whose music is well-known to New Zealand audiences, having for a while been resident in this country, alongside Wu Na, an acknowledged “young master” of the qin, on which she was performing for the first time in New Zealand with this production.

With these two musicians was an actor/dancer/singer Dong Fei, an exponent of Chinese Kunqu opera, and who specializes in the traditional “Nan Dan” kind of operatic roles – those in which a male actor performs female characters. A sometimes collaborator with Wu Na in productions in China, he too was making his New Zealand debut with this presentation. His fully theatrical and exquisitely-appointed role, that of characterizing through speech, song and movement the full force of rapport between the cultured musician and the simple, intuitive woodcutter, made a profound impact of contrast with the austere, relatively neutral figures of both musicians, who spoke almost entirely through the sounds of their instruments.

The production was directed by Sara Brodie, whose stage-work I had encountered a matter of days previously in an entirely different theatrical context, that of “Don Giovanni” at Wellington’s St.James Theatre. “High Mountain Flowing Water” was certainly a different world, more in scale with works I had seen her direct in similarly confined places (Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Victoria University Memorial Theatre, and “Kreutzer Sonata” at Bats’ Theatre, for example), but still removed in a sense of style, gesture, language, music and overall ambience. Of course, the very human emotions displayed by the characters in the Chinese story had something of that universality with which one could readily connect, even if certain of the nuances remained, to an extent, behind a mask. As with learning a new language, literal meaning goes only so far – deeper currents of expression take longer to explore and even longer to understand.

What mattered most was that I was, along with others I spoke to afterwards, entranced by what I saw and heard. I’ve already mentioned the hypnotic effect of the lighting, which used simplicity and suggestiveness to direct our attention towards the significant places at which the drama unfolded, note by note, gesture by gesture, movement by movement, and silence by silence. From the very beginning a sense of ritual was all-pervading – a performer (Gao Ping) entering and making the motions of washing hands, after which came the sounding of a soft bell as a kind of summons or invocation, as much a sense of an unseen presence as anything else. Gao Ping the sat at the piano and played Ravel-like figurations which led beautifully into the first section of the work, Landscape, featuring three poems whose words described the scene and introduced its main players.

The English words of the poems were projected onto a screen as Gao Ping played – delicate and evocative at first, the music occasionally stepped outside its ritualistic mode, plunging for a short time into agitation and anxiety before recovering its poise and introducing a costumed figure turning around in the darkness as if free-falling in space, then transfixing us with his “Xiao Dan” (young female) falsetto voice, singing the poem’s words, which firstly describe the ambient world of the music-making and -listening rituals performed by the two friends – “Beyond the bamboo, the plane trees are dry….” the vocalizing haunting, with sharp timbres and a wide vibrato. This was Dong Fei, whose appearance was the stuff of dreams, a kind of exotic angel come down to earth, his arms fluttering like wings with the movements augmented by wondrously long sleeves, to almost hallucinatory effect.

Dong Fei spoke in his normal voice the words of the second poem (I confess, for me not as interestingly as with his “Xiao Dan” tones!), which characterized the stillness of the outside world and the tremulousness of the rapport between the seven strings of the gaqin, and the readiness of the ears and the heart of the player to explore the timeless quality of music-making – “The heart quiets the sound – in it, no difference between now and then….”. With the entry of the qin-player Wu Na, the dramatis personae lineup was completed – the words of the poem filled out the symbolism – “The qin player sits, resembling the qin: the listener the strings….” We sensed a moment of readiness, and it came with the first notes of the qin, making us even more aware of the concentrated focus of the player and the stillness of both singer/dancer and pianist/listener, as the instrument played its spacious, meditative music.

And so the stage was set for the extraordinary unfolding, via music from both qin and piano, and music with poetry from the singer/dancer, conveying the story – firstly the communion of playing and listening – “Not until today do I hear music….”, followed by the realization of the musician that his quintessential artistic partner has died – “My heart gone, without a trace / Tears pour down like rain….”, and most affectingly, the wordless (but still graphic) breaking of the qin and its strings, a gesture of existentialist despair, which an epilogue attempts to interpret in a more cosmic context of continuation.

My notes, scribbled in the dark, the phrases criss-crossed and overscored, tell me only of fragments of impressions along the way of this journey, frustrating to now try and decipher. What I remember are things like the gentle dance-like music from the qin in the “Not until today do I hear music” sequence, an ancient melody Liu Shui (Flowing Water) supposedly composed by the actual musician of the legend, Bo Ya himself. As a counterpoint to this the singer either turned dancer or vice versa, alternating the haunting “Xiao Dan” singing tones with sinuous movements sillhouetted against a screen. Gao Ping at the piano then joined with Wu Na’s conjuring of exquisite delicacies from her instrument, the intermingling sounds expressing that “famous first encounter” between musician and woodcutter.

I remember, too, the pianist doing different kinds of timbal adjustment to his instrument’s sounds, such as “dampening” his bass notes in conjunction with those of the qin, the tones resonating as much as initially sounding at first, but then changing character, as each instrument’s player allowed excitability to creep into the dialogue, exuberance growing from the communication in the most organic way. A more consciously symbolic act was that of dancer Dong Fei slowly, almost ceremonially “unwrapping” his body from a kind of winding sheet, beginning his circling peregrinations on one side of the stage and crossing to the other side, leaving behind a tremulously-quivering vertical wall of unwound fabric, a poised, beautifully-controlled sequence!

The instrumental combination really showed its range and mettle over the sequence “The One Who Knows My Name”, which described and delineated the growing joy and exuberance of both player and listener at their musical communion. With Dong Fei using his haunting “Xiao Dan” voice to recite the “Nothing, not this body, nor even the clouds” verses, the instrumentalists embarked on an extraordinarily varied exchange, beginning with soft, sitar-like slides from the qin and answering resonances from the piano, playing a measure behind (like a living echo – very effective!), then developing from these sounds a “walking” motif, underscored by more “doctored” bass notes from the piano. Slowly, the rhythms grew in strength and confidence, Wu Na’s playing becoming fiercely exultant, and Giao Ping’s response mirroring the fierce joy of the mood.

How dramatic and impulse-arresting a moment it was when everything stopped! – the piano sounded a few resonant notes, and the qin spoke in a disembodied kind of voice, with the use of a metallic stick applied to the strings, itself a kind of symbolic act of severing the human touch from the music-making. Dong Fei’s ordinary voice actually needed a bit more projection, here, more “quiet” emphasis, perhaps more gestural support for the hushed tones – but the projected on-screen words helped tell the story and convey the tragedy of the musician’s shock and despair – “My heart gone, without a trace – Tears pour down like rain…” – as did the desperate, grating sounds made by the metal on the strings of the instrument.

Portentous and agitated piano sounds summoned the dancer, moving like a disembodied spirit through the air, feet seemingly transformed into wings! The movements suggested to me a kind of injured bird coming to earth, accompanied by disoriented, aimless musical sounds, moving those long sleeves firstly as great feathered extensions, then as quivering, protective shields, displaying pitiful tremolandi of grief, all of which was caught and bound up in a frenzied whirling, as the music shouted and screamed aggressively, the instruments struck and beaten rather than played. This was the breaking of the qin, the silencing of the voice, the end of the perfect union, leaving only darkness.

Had we in the audience been left with nothing more at that point, our spirits would have taken some time to recover – however, from out of the gloom came the qin’s soft notes, echoing fragments of memory, reviving the fallen dancer/singer, who listened to the gently resounding qin notes and then, in a kind of Sprechgesang consisting almost entirely of glissandi, uttered the words of the final poem: – “Dressed in green silk, plucking in vain, I let my sorrow flow….” – the qin player continued to quietly “sound” the instrument strings as the singer’s “Xiao Dan” voice continued to the end – “….Never think that, after High Mountain Flowing Water, all bosom friends must part…” The darkness slowly enfolded the qin player, and, eventually, the music – here was closure, enough to cover and soothe the rawness of the life-wounds, both real and imagined.

It seemed to me that the spaces, the lighting, the screening of text translations, the placement of figures and of instruments, and the various movements were all used to work to the presentation’s best advantage. The overall pacing and ambience of the story drew us unerringly into a world wrought of both delicate sensibility and powerful emotion. I for one felt “captured” by what I saw and heard, right through to the story’s concluding silences.

I hope these poor, uninformed words can convey something to the reader of the unique character of my experience of “High Mountain Flowing Water”, as well as express my appreciation of the efforts of director Sara Brodie and the incredible “trio” of performers, Wu Na, Gao Ping and Dong Fei, who worked with her to produce something so distinctive and special.

 

Wellington Youth Orchestra’s final, tumultuous concert for 2014

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.7
WAGNER – Overture “Die Meistersinger”
J.STRAUSS Jnr. – On the Beautiful Blue Danube

Wellington Youth Orchestra

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

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

Tuesday 21st October 2014

Richard Wagner described Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as “the Apotheosis of the Dance”, referring to the dominance of rhythm over melody throughout much of the symphony’s duration. Yes, the tunes are there, but, apart from some lyrical sequences in the work’s introduction, and throughout the trio of the third-movement Scherzo, the melodies are constantly dancing, stamping or galloping about!

If ever a work by Beethoven demonstrated the composer’s own euphoric description of his art – “I am the Bacchus who presses out this wine which makes men spiritually drunk!” – it’s this uninhibited riot of a Symphony – though not as epic as the Third or Ninth Symphonies, nor as heaven-storming as the Fifth, the Seventh Symphony gives an elemental display of god-like exuberance that leaves its listeners exhilarated and its performers spent through giving their all.

It had an enthusiastic contemporary reception, even though most of the acclaim that followed the very first concert in 1813 went to the composer’s gimmicky “Wellington’s Victory”, with which it shared the program. But once the novelty of the “battle piece” had worn off, the symphony began to assert its well-nigh irresistible appeal, with the second, Allegretto movement in particular capturing its listeners’ imaginations – this movement was in fact played alone for a time more often than was the complete work.

Beethoven’s efforts did not, however, find favour with some commentators, whose sensibilities were obviously affronted by such unseemly demonstrations of raw energy! Friedrich Wieck, father of Clara (Schumann), was present at some of the rehearsals and observed that the composer of such music must have been in a “drunken state” when writing the work. And Beethoven’s great contemporary, Carl Maria von Weber, thought that parts of the first movement alone qualified the composer as “fit for the madhouse”. Even a decade later, a London critic wrote of the work, “Often as we have heard it performed, we cannot yet discover any design in it, neither can we trace any connection in its parts.”

Posterity has reversed these opinions, though a dissident echo was provided by the legendary conductor of more recent times, Sir Thomas Beecham (no great lover of Beethoven’s music, even though he recorded several of the symphonies) – after giving a typically riotous performance of the Seventh, Beecham drolly commented, “Well, what can you do with it? – it’s like a lot of yaks jumping about!”

Such criticisms and comments missed the point of the “excessive” nature of the work’s rhythmic character, one which Beethoven had touched on more generally with his “I am the Bacchus” comment, and which the work brought to a kind of apogée in terms of constant energy and momentum. And these qualities were at the heart of what Hamish McKeich and the Wellington Youth Orchestra players were able to achieve in their recent performance.

The players clearly felt the import of the symphony’s “introduction” here – no mere symphonic throat-clearing, or “getting the pitch of the hall”, but a statement of intent containing the seeds of what was to follow – thus the tensions were built up via the strings’ dovetailing of the scales, the lower echelons “digging in” with point and focus on each occasion, the winds and brass intensifying the harmonic ambiences, then nicely terracing the tensions, keeping us in a suspended state for what was to break forth. Something much more than Viennese “gemütlich” was obviously on the agenda.

The allegro was taken at an urgent clip – the flute led the way magnificently, well-supported by the strings, while the first big tutti was a riot of energy and colour, the brass a bit approximate in their note-pitching, but the impulses were right where they ought to have been. Early on, a feature of the playing (as it needed to be in this symphony) was the work of the orchestra’s timpanist, whose command of both propulsion and dynamics right throughout was, I thought, exemplary. But everybody hove to – the winds were sonorous, the brass exciting, even when fallible, and the strings kept the rhythms a-tingling.

The beginning of the development brought some anxious ensemble moments with those treacherous dotted rhythms, the winds further unnerving things by being temporarily awry with an entry. But they made amends by steadying the rhythm leading up to that wonderful, exhilarating reprise, together with the brass getting those shouted dotted interjections bang-on! By this time the interactive support between the sections was kicking in nicely, so much so that there was a wonderfully delighted squawk from a young child in the audience during one of the pauses before the coda!

What followed was like an encounter with the elements – the lower strings caught the “vortex” aspect of those incredible “churnings”, from which the rest of the orchestra, by a sheer act of will gradually pulled us upwards from and into the light – though the horns struggled a bit with their triumphant “whoopings” the rhythms had oceans of momentum, and caught the exhilaration at the movement’s end.

I thought the second movement arresting at the outset, the lower strings purposeful, the violins sharing theme and counter-theme, stoically supported by the winds, brass and timpani. The trio, too, was nicely focused, the theme by turns tender and expressive, with lovely clarinet work. A somewhat weedy start to the pp string fugato broke the spell momentarily – the strings seemed happier when playing with fuller tones. But apart from the surprise of the clarinets seeming not to enter with one of their phrases right at the end, the movement’s gravitas was strongly maintained.

Which was the last thing that sprang to mind with the explosive beginning of the scherzo! – instead, boisterous fun was the order of going, the music’s triplet rhythms a whirl, and the winds and strings managing their “giggles” at the end of each of the sections. By contrast the trio’s solemn lay rang out lyrically (winds) and then majestically (strings and brass), with the timpani again a tower of strength in conjunction with the latter.

I confess that I momentarily gaped at the hectic pace the conductor adopted following the finale’s two opening flourishes – this was a REAL allegro con brio and the young players certainly bent their backs to the task, whether exuberantly stamping the rhythms out or whirling through the figurations. Conductor and players kept the momentum going splendidly through the lighter passages, and made a great fist of things like the leaping string unison exchanges and the whooping brass calls – hair-raisingly exciting in places, as were the timpani’s splendidly focused and detailed energies.

And so it continued, through the powerful thrustings of the last big orchestral build-up before the coda, and into the furious vortex of scarily shifting, droning harmonies from winds and lower strings, leading up to what Sir Donald Tovey called the “Bacchic fury” of the work’s coda. Perhaps the winds might have lost their footing momentarily with their tricky angular entries and syncopated harmonic shifts amidst the maelstrom of sound and fury that the composer was building up, here – but somehow, it added to the effect of this elemental, inchoate material being imbued with energy and propulsion as to burst out with unparalleled power and splendour, everybody pulling together to bring off those final, whiplash chords in properly thrilling and conclusive fashion.

We needed an interval after that! – so, having enjoyed a breather, everybody was back for the second half’s intriguing mix of Wagner and Johann Strauss. FIrst up was Wagner’s Overture “Die Meistersinger”, an item I was looking forward to immensely, because I had played the cymbals in a performance during another life, many years ago!  Here, the brass rang out the first four notes gloriously, setting the scene for a carnival atmosphere of polyphonic largesse, the same players getting slightly ahead of the rest of the orchestra in one place in their eagerness to impress. Hamish McKeich favoured fairly brisk tempi, even through the transitions containing fragments of the opera’s more lyrical moments, which made for a breathless effect, as we were quickly plunged into the “entry-music” for the Mastersingers from Act Three, which, incidentally, went with proper pomp and ceremony.

I thought McKeich could have relaxed a little with the central section’s lyrical sequences – the playing wasn’t allowed to expand vocally, in the way that the tunes do in the opera itself, though perhaps the conductor wanted to keep the ensemble “tight”! However, the winds trotted in merrily during the “apprentices” section, managing a cheeky trill at the end of their sequence, as did the strings in places, the odd precarious-ensemble-moment smartly manoeuvered back into place within a few measures!

As for the famous “trio of themes” at the end – well it was a joy! The tuba sounded terrific, especially his concluding trill, while the brass gave warning of their “en masse” arrival in sonorous fashion, helped by the timpani the second time around. It all came across as properly festive, even if I felt the cymbal player was a little overawed by the occasion and didn’t “sound” his instruments as resplendently as they could have been.

After such rumbustiousness, the Johann Strauss piece was lovely! – it was really the waltz “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”, but played in a way as to imitate a loosely-strung set of waltzes – I suspected it was also to enable the players to turn their pages comfortably!  A gorgeously-played horn at the beginning presided over magical ambiences, passed adroitly by some moments of hesitant ensemble, and, gathering in a solo ‘cello, led us into the dance. To my delight the players made a great fist of the Viennese “lilt”, obviously well-schooled by their conductor, the ensemble sounding in places for all the world like a well-drilled Viennese dance-band! Another surprise for me was the repeat of the opening “waltz-sequence”, which I’d never heard done before. Right up to the nostalgic coda, with its trumpet solo and trilling flute, the players caught the idiom of the piece with great style, readily communicating to us their pleasure of performance.

But there was more! – in fact the final item set the seal on the afternoon’s music-making brilliantly, via a tremendously exciting performance of the “Waltz King’s” well-known “Thunder and Lightning Polka”. It was put across with such panache, such energy and exuberance, with the percussion having the proverbial field day! At one point in the work’s middle section I wanted (once again!) the cymbal player to bash his instruments more vigorously, but it must be said the player made up for his reticence in the closing measures of the work. I would have loved to have taken part in such a performance myself – what a blast it seemed to be for all concerned!

Very great credit to the inspirational Hamish McKeich, and to his hard-working, talented instrumentalists. To my mind conductor and players can look back on some singular achievements this year, their successes auguring well for seasons yet to come. On their showings throughout 2014 it’s my opinion that they’re becoming an orchestral force to be reckoned with, a stimulating and valuable contributor to the capital’s enviable array of orchestral concerts.

 

 

Yvette Audain and friends “in the groove” – a new CD

Posted on by Peter Mechen

YVETTE AUDAIN
GROOVES UNSPOKEN

Featuring Yvette Audain (saxophone)
With: Hong Yul Yang (piano)
Katherine Hebley (‘cello)
Damon Key (soprano sax)
Donald Nicholls (tenor sax)
Nicola Haddock (baritone sax)
Zyia-Li Teh (tenor sax)
Andrew Uren (baritone sax)
Anthony Young (conductor, “bulletproof petals”)

Tracks: Grooves Unspoken / Hazine (Treasure) / Meditations upon Nasreddin Hoca
Hold Fast / An Irksome Vengeance / bulletproof petals / A Charleston Kick With Steel Caps

The CD launch at “Meow”, Edward St., Wellington

Featuring Yvette Audain (soprano sax, clarinet, recorder, Irish whistle)
with Jonathan Berkahn (piano and accordion)

Sunday, October 19th, 2014

Yvette Audain modestly commented beforehand that what would make her night would be at least TWO people in the audience for the launch of her CD “Grooves Unspoken”. Well, she got her wish and more, besides – not a great deal more, but those of us who were there were caught up in the creative and recreative web and waft of the music and its performance. And with the surroundings and amenities available at “Meow” in Edward Street in Wellington, we wanted for nothing as we listened to and grooved along with both Yvette and her fellow-performer Jonathan Berkahn – the latter had told me before the performance that he was still getting to grips with some of the material, but to my ears this wasn’t evident in his playing, versatile musician that he is!

The two musicians pretty well replicated the first four tracks on Audain’s CD, Jonathan Berkahn “filling in” more than adequately for the pianist featured on the CD, Hong Yul Yang in the title piece “Grooves Unspoken” and also the lovely “Meditations Upon Nasreddin Hoca”. The other two tracks featured the composer herself, demonstrating her versatility in playing both saxophone and clarinet. The former instrument evoked plenty of exotic ambience and colour in a piece called “Hazine” (Treasure), while the latter’s tones paid homage to Audain’s own part-Scottish ancestry in “Hold Fast” (the McLeod family’s motto!), mixing plenty of melodic fluidity with equal amounts of rhythmic vitality.

Hearing these four tracks “live” gave oceans of extra atmosphere to my later listening to the CD – the choreography of interaction, the physical gesturing and the direct contact with the tones and timbres of the instruments in question came back readily to my subsequent listening sessions. The CD had been planned beautifully as regards order, the sounds  of each track seeming to effortlessly give way to each instance of organic flow or marked contrast as it happened. Most appropriately the album (as did the evening) began with a piece of unashamed homage to a past giant, whose music Audain acknowledged as a formative experience – this was Dave Brubeck, whose signature album “Time Out” had obviously made a telling impression, judging by the “echoes” present in Audain’s beautifully-constructed piece, very appropriately named “Grooves Unspoken”.

From this we were taken elsewhere, to places replete with Middle-Eastern flavours and gypsy-like impulses. This was the aforementioned “Hazine”, a patient, measured and evocative creation whose character gradually shed its rhythmic carriage in favour of freer, more ambient sequences of figuration – spaces opened up via long-breathed notes and occasional pitch-bending, all of which conjured up a real sense of time passing, almost Omar Khayyam-like, into oblivion.

Not quite as overtly exotic, but as suggestive regarding different moods and realms was “Meditations Upon Nasreddin Hoca”. The work was made up of a number of ritualistic exchanges between piano and saxophone (again, Hong Yui Yang was the CD’s excellent pianist) – voices striving to unite but separated by distance or circumstance. A wide-eyed opening evoked a soul contemplating “the inverted bowl we call the sky”, one that was partly delighting in, partly despairing at the star-clusters and their loneliness. Whatever answer it was that came from the lonely spaces took the form of an invitation to dance and exult, which piano and sax did, revelling in the interchanges, before again seeming to part company. I loved the smoky lower register of Audain’s instrument, even if she very briefly seemed to lose her line to breathiness on a single high note, but recovering almost immediately and taking up with the piano once again. Throughout the two instruments would contrive to separate, join and separate again, bringing something new to each exchange after tasting their individually-wrought moments of disjointedness. The final exchange, an Eastern-flavoured dance, by turns sinuous and angular, re-established the “together but different” character of the interactions throughout, concluding with an exciting and confident flourish.

“Hold Fast” took its name from the motto of the Scottish McLeod clan, to which the composer’s grandmother belonged. The opening sounded a kind of clarion call, perhaps a summoning of the said clan, replete with Scottish snap and pipe-skirl, the declamations occasionally giving way to startling moments of rhythmic impulse, complete with occasional foot-stampings. One of Audain’s earliest compositions, the piece aptly honoured a tradition of both song and dance.

I loved the title “An Irksome Vengeance” and thought the combination of clarinet and ‘cello most splendidly explored the ensuing timbral concoctions, as well as staying true to the composer’s aim of keeping a basic pulse to the fore. I can’t really speak for musical currencies such as “post-grunge” and “progressive rock”, but thought that the music’s dynamism and knees-and-elbows angularities were, to say the least, arresting. And I thought the liveliness of the exchanges didn’t let up, even through the more lyrical sequences. Fantastic playing by both Audain and the ‘cellist Katherine Hebley – the ending itself was a treat, a masterpiece of po-faced comedy. One assumed the “vengeance” in question had by that time been wrought, or, alternatively, tossed aside as too “irksome” for any further consideration!

All three of the final trio of pieces on the CD seemed to me to particularly command the attention – the second piece, “bulletproof petals”, scored for a quartet of saxophones, sounded an outlandish note at the beginning, before taking a five-note figure and “deconstructing” it with no little glee. A wistful phrase was solemnly passed around the group, though like children told to be serious, splutters and giggles ensued. The wistful phrase returned, this time more formally and contrapuntally, and just as it seemed something imposing and grand was welling up out of the growing confidence, the splutters and giggles returned – one was left with unanswered questions, such as, “Was the “thick skin” of the composer’s explanation of the piece too easily penetrated?” and “Did the creative resolve buckle under the weight of derision too soon?”

But my favorite piece on the album had to be the final one, “A Charleston Kick with Steel Caps”, a piece that never let up in its “swing”, through different tempi and rhythmic trajectories – in fact, so involved was the CD’s “live” audience with the performance that they were ready to applaud at the first hint, midway through, of a final cadence, all too ready to deprive themselves of a wonderfully raucous buildup to a characteristically upbeat throwaway ending. I thought the music had the spirit of the times – a trifle Kurt Weill-ish in places, even, as well as its composer’s fingerprints on things like the derivation of the accompanying rhythms of the final section of the dance from earlier in the work – organic thinking which involved all of the instruments in melodic, or motivic as well as harmonic contributions to the whole.

Briefly, I thought the disc’s contents a happy amalgam of “entertainment” and “provocative” pieces – in this respect I thought particularly well of the last three works on the CD, culminating in, for me, a piece that seemed to sum up Yvette Audain’s achievement in making her playing such a gift to all kinds of sensibility. This is not to under-appreciate the other, earlier pieces, just as bagatelles, divertimenti and serenades are the sunnier sides of deeper purposes. “Grooves Unspoken” is a delight, an uninhibited and unashamed self-portrait of creative impulse that Audain can be justly proud of.

(Visit Yvette Audain’s website at www.yvetteaudain.com for further information)

Music in evocative spaces – Diedre Irons at Wellington Cathedral

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul presents:
EVOCATIONS – Piano Recital Series at the Cathedral

Diedre Irons (piano)

BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata No.23 in F Minor Op.57 “Appassionata”
SCHUBERT – Moments Musicaux 1-6 D.780
CHOPIN – Ballade No.1 in G Minor, Op.23

Wellington Cathedral, Molesworth St., Wgtn

Friday 17th October, 2014

“Piano music in a vast space” read the heading on the programme sheet which we were given at the concert – and it certainly was that! In fact, I had wondered beforehand regarding the efficacy of performing a piano recital at all in such an environment, and certainly in respect of some of the repertoire – the “Appassionata?…..how on earth?….all those notes!……

As well, I remembered reading about some wag coming up to a young composer whose new work was being performed in some cavernous place like London’s Royal Albert Hall, clapping him on the back and saying, “Well done! – most new works these days are heard only once – but at least getting your work played in here means…..” To be honest, it was a bit like that in Wellington Cathedral for Diedre Irons’ masterly performance of one of Beethoven’s most titanic works – we were able to hear – and hear – and hear……

To a newcomer to Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, the experience of the recital in the Cathedral would have, in places, been enchanting, an awakening of hitherto unsuspected ghost-voices, perhaps those of the work’s interpreters down the years, come to the concert to add their particular tones to those of the “live” pianist’s activations. The work’s very opening had that same haunted acoustic quality, as did much of the slow movement’s theme and variations. In fact, by a process of gradation our ears attuned themselves to the gradually agglomerating sounds, coping with this state of things better than with the sudden and precipitate dynamic contrasts whose inherent violence was made thunderous in those reverberant spaces.

Quicker passages soon became jumbled on a superficial level, though even there, Beethoven’s direct harmonic style of writing meant that there was often a kind of cumulative harmonic effect set up, making for resplendent cadences! Nowhere was this more so than in the final pages of the work’s coda, where the F Minor harmonies cascaded towards us with the force of a dam breaking apart and flooding us with sound.

As for the performance, I was freshly riveted by Diedre Irons’ dark, brooding and big-boned approach to the music throughout the first movement. From the start she set out to use what seemed to be in theory an intractable acoustic to its best advantage – creating a halo of resonance around the misterioso-like opening, then evoking the thunder-gods from the cavernous spaces with black, implacable piano tones. One still noticed a wealth of detail from the gentler sequences, like patches of mountain flower between the imposing crags – details were not so much obscured by the reverberation as elongated and amplified, the result being a plethora of revisited tones and figurations, all contributing to what seemed like an ever-burgeoning effect.

It was a performance constantly awash with harmonies, oceanic rather than granite-like – in a sense it was a kind of reversal in effect of Liszt’s renowned piano transcriptions of the composer’s symphonies for solo piano, an amplification rather than a reduction. The pianist made the most of the richness of sound in the gentler major-key sequences, with gorgeously orchestral left-handed murmurings beneath the arpeggio-like melody. The lovely right-hand trills here sounded like rippling cascades, the playing unhesitatingly picturesque and pastoral-like, creating whole worlds in between the outbursts of fierce energy and dark purpose.

Just before the first movement’s coda, the pianist took her time with the emphatic, tumbling figurations, allowing the reference to the contemporaneous Fifth Symphony to clearly make its effect, before the concluding section exploded urgently and excitingly, but quickly running its course and returning to a kind of brooding, unsatisfied state of things. No time was wasted before the second movement began, the theme rich and alive, the tones not sculpted, but beautifully sung, the melody given all kinds of dynamic shadings and emphases. The “alternating chords” variation was nicely shaped, while the sweetness of the figurations of the following section became something so gratefully, almost sacramentally grasped at the end – heart-warming playing!

Only the final variation seemed to suffer from the reverberations, the playfulness apparent but the detail often lost in the swirl of tones – one had to listen first-time to the notes and not reflect on them, because the acoustic often got in first again with the echo-effect! At the climax everything properly “peaked”, and then was so easefully “knitted back” to the opening theme, the playing very Schubertian, I thought, in the way that the pianist made the bass theme “talk” with the treble – such a sense of inter-connectedness! After this, the finale was a molten whirl, though Diedre Irons’ incisive touch allowed plenty of thematic detail to get through, even if the middle voices tended to be swamped by the sound-torrents.

I liked the pianist’s reliance on strength and momentum rather than speed, the phrasings spaced out within the music’s pulsing, giving the notes plenty of space and emphasis, but keeping the focus taut, making for an incredible cumulative effect – understandably in the present context, the final repeat was not taken, the pianist instead resolutely driving the music towards the presto coda. Here it seemed the very elements were at work, the swirling figurations of the treble furiously sweeping up and down over the sonorous, clanging bell-like grandeur of the lower tones, strong and implacable. And what a release those final arpeggiated figures achieved here, the stuff of molten power and implacable presence.

Great programming, here, with the next piece! – I often think of Schubert as being a kind of foil to Beethoven, the former’s music seeming to say to the latter’s, “Yes, but you might also look at things this way…..”. Completely different to the “Appassionata” in scope and mood, Schubert’s work “Six Moment Musicaux” amply demonstrates an alternative way of treating and and presenting thematic material. Those bold, angular yodelling figures at the very beginning of the opening C Major piece are handled by their composer with a droll, occasionally quirky touch that largely maintains the music’s individual character – as opposed to Beethoven’s assiduous hammering-out and moulding of his themes. As for the performance, there could have been an entirely different pianist at work, here, in the Schubert – much of the opening was played by Diedre Irons in a spontaneous-sounding recitative-like manner, everything coloured and shaped by her playfulness and lightness of touch.

The piece’s “trio” section saw ease and grace kept to the fore, the “echoing” calls floated with utter nonchalance across what I’ve always previously thought of as crepuscular landscapes – here the playing seemed to suggest morning hues and gentle country sports, the various fanfare-like figurations far less laden and more contented in character. The Andantino worked beautifully, here, the ambience both supporting the pianist’s legato phrasing and enhancing her subtle weightings and colorings. And the Hungarian-like third-movement’s limpid, dance-like motions were enchanting, particularly the smile on the music’s face at the change to the major just before the end.

I did think the acoustic all but defeated the busy detailings in the Moderato which followed, though the piece’s middle section established its Janus-faced character strongly, particularly the furrowed-brow minor-key sequence. As for the stormy Allegro Vivace, Irons “went for it”, filling the Cathedral’s spaces with sound and fury with broad brush-strokes of agitated tones. Compensating for these tempestuous outbursts was the final Allegretto, a proper envoy-like piece, rather like “The Poet Speaks” in Schumann’s “Kinderscenen”, here most eloquently phrased and sounded, but also in places drawing parallels of figuration with Schubert’s great B-flat Sonata’s first movement.

This hour-long recital (all too brief a time!) was concluded with some Chopin, his Ballade No.1 in G Minor – fascinating to be able to experience the work almost cheek-by-jowl with the “Appassionata”, albeit wryly and fancifully separated by the Schubert. As big-boned and demonstrative in places as was the Beethoven sonata, Chopin’s piece seemed here to revel in its romantic associations with literature and history, the music bringing out Diedre Irons’ natural story-telling instincts as surely as the Beethoven had demonstrated the expressive power of her organic thinking. Her performance recalled for me her stunning playing of Liszt’s first Mephisto Waltz in the Ilott Theatre in 2004, shortly after she first came to Wellington to live.

Right from the declamatory opening one was drawn into the composer’s world of drama and spectacle – the opening melody so beautifully buoyed along by the left hand’s colourings and dynamic impulses, occasionally illuminated by flourishings that still managed to glint amid the laden acoustic – somehow, the pianist contrived to “float” details rather than allow them to submerge, an example being the repeated-octave note towards the melody’s end – enchanting! Though the more vigorous passages often got caught up in their own reverberations, the drive and focus of the initial phrases carried our receptivities through – again Irons used the weight of sound to hers and the music’s best advantage in places, opening up the throttle in places where the music’s harmonies had follow-through, and creating powerful results.

At the end I found myself thinking that it had all worked better than I thought it would, though I couldn’t help making a kind of “list” of pieces whose qualities would, I thought be beautifully enhanced by the cathedral’s ambience – parts of Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sure l’enfant Jésus” for instance, or the B Minor Prelude and Fugue from Book One of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” – thanks, however, to Diedre Irons’ marvellous playing, we got what we were given, literally with bells on! – a truly memorable experience.

PS. – Jian Liu is giving the next piano recital at the Cathedral on Friday 14th November

Borodin Quartet in Wellington – Old-World elegance, universal beauty

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
THE BORODIN QUARTET

MYASKOVSKY – String Quartet No.13 Op.86
SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No.11 in F Minor Op.122
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in B-flat Op.130

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday 16th October, 2014

Mention the name “Borodin Quartet” and the average classical music-lover’s eyes will either take on a dreamy, far-away look as if contemplating whole histories of music-making in every prestigious place imaginable, or else flash with sudden excitement at the prospect of encountering this world-renowned group’s playing. Last week in Wellington, chamber-music enthusiasts had the chance to indulge in either or both reactions, as the Borodins (their 2014 lineup of players, of course) gave a concert in the city as part of a Chamber Music New Zealand tour.

The group was formed in 1945, though with a different name, the Moscow Conservatoire Quartet (all of its members then and since, have been graduates of the Moscow Conservatory) – interestingly, the first ‘cellist of the group was none other than Mstislav Rostropovich, though he left shortly afterwards to concentrate on his solo career, his place being taken by Valentin Berlinsky, the group’s ‘cellist for the next sixty-two years!.

In 1955 the group adopted its present name, in homage to the composer Alexander Borodin. Since then the quartet’s personnel has changed entirely and repeatedly, with violinist Ruben Agharonian (the present leader) and violist Igor Naidin joining in 1996, ‘cellist Vladimir Baishin in 2007 and violinist Sergey Lomovsky the most recently recruited member, in 2011. This was the quartet’s sixth visit to New Zealand, the first (with four different players) being in 1965, and the most recent prior to this present one being in 2010.

The ensemble first encountered its great compatriot Dmitri Shostakovich in 1946 – though Shostakovich’s favourite quartet remained the Beethoven Quartet (who premiered all but two of his fifteen quartets) the Borodins also worked with the composer on each of the individual works, giving their interpretations a unique flavour and insight. The Quartet actually recorded two complete cycles, the first at the time when only thirteen quartets had been written by the composer, and the second following the latter’s death in 1975.

On tour this time round the group brought the Eleventh String Quartet, written just after the composer’s Thirteenth Symphony had been lambasted and banned by the Soviet authorities, on account of its controversial subject-matter, the setting of texts by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The Eleventh Quartet is, by comparison an essentially “private” work, made up of seven shortish, continuously-played movements. Though not as powerfully-projected a work as some of its fellows, the music throughout cast its own darkly-fscinating spell in the Borodins’ hands.

Beginning with a melancholic, somewhat elegiac opening, the music quickly and sure-footedly moved through its various sequences. There were ironic exchanges between an obsessively repeated figure and upwardly-mocking glissandi, which were abruptly interrupted by explosive, and energetic outbursts producing the most amazingly resonant chord-dissonances. Everything was suddenly whirled away by molto-perpetuo violin figures which did their best to ignore shouts of disquiet from the other strings – the composer ironically gave this section the tiltle “Humoreske”!

Perhaps the “dark heart” of the work came with the “Elegy” section, where Shostakovich quoted the Funeral March from the “Eroica”, a section of the work written to commemorate the death a year before of the Beethoven Quartet’s ‘cellist, Vassily Shirinsky. After this, an epilogue quoted from material heard right at the opening of the quartet, by now, seeming a world away. As performed this evening by the Borodins, the work was, in places very much a memorable “Fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?” kind of listening experience.

The Shostakovich quartet had been preceded on the program by a work from Nikolay Myaskovsky, born in Poland to Russian parents in 1881. I’d not heard a lot of his music, with the exception of his Symphony No.21, dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and recorded with the orchestra by Morton Gould.  Myaskovsky’s String Quartet No.13 Op.86 was his very last work to be published, and was in fact dedicated to the same Beethoven Quartet that had championed Shostakovich’s music.

The music actually won the composer a posthumous Stalin Prize, in marked contrast to the reception a few years earlier accorded his 26th Symphony, denounced by the infamous “Zhdanov decree” in 1948 (along with fellow-composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev), for “formalist tendencies” – i.e. music “inaccessible to the people”.  But I thought it was interesting that a friend I talked with during the concert’s interval found the Myaskovsky work “bland and ordinary”. I must record that, after some discussion, we begged to differ on that point!

Certainly in comparison with the Shostakovich work, Myaskovsky’s music wasn’t difficult or challenging – instead, it was evocative, colourful, energetic, and quixotic, in places even volatile in its unexpected changes of metre and contrasts of mood. The quartet’s opening made me think of Pasternak and his “Doctor Zhivago”, a vein of melancholy informing the music that the Borodins kept taut and sharply-focused, never allowing over-indulgence of tone or phrasing. The “presto fantastic” of the second movement was very much that – urgent and unsettled, interchanging dotted rhythms with whirling triplets, before precipitously plunging into a dark, slow waltz, like a kind of lament – we were kept on the edges of our “listening-seats” throughout by the composer’s quixotic sensibilities and the deftness of the Borodins’ playing.

The richly-melodic Andante which began the slow movement brought an unashamedly nostalgic ambience to the fore, the music’s development reiterating the same themes but with different voices and different kinds of emphasis – very lovely. The finale’s emphatic opening “bounce” introduced the first of many sequences, all too rapidly “crowding-in” to do full justice to in print, but tossed off with great élan by the musicians, complete with a wonderful “surprise” ending.

So, with two very different “Russian” evocations behind us, each fascinating in its own individual way, we squared up after the interval to the Borodins’ playing of one of the “great” Beethoven quartets. This was Op.130 in B-flat, which the New Zealand String Quartet had “spoiled” us with in concert a couple of years ago by playing the composer’s original ending to the work, the astounding “Grosse Fugue”. We had to content ourselves here with Beethoven’s revised ending, a substitute finale whose cheerful and disconcerting garrulity the Borodins were able to temporarily reconcile me to.

And the Quartet’s performance of the remainder of the work brought handsome rewards.  Throughout the concert one noticed how the players had the knack of creating tension and focus without apparent external effort – it all seemed to be coming from the instruments rather than from the players’ use of them, to a disconcerting degree, in places, though the sounds certainly conveyed all that the music carried. If less involving on a visceral level than, say, the playing of the NZSQ, the Borodins made up for this with their surety of application of musical values.

So, the first movement of Op.130 was poised, balanced and aristocratic, making the following Presto movement more spectral and agitated than usual, the triplet section dispatched with astonishing virtuosity, and the reprise of the opening like a devil pursuing and snapping at a pair of heels! The Andante con moto had an incredible lightness of utterance, seeming to rise above its usual bucolic ambience, instead enjoying the lightest and most sensitive of touches.

The Quartet played the German Dance (Alla danza tedesca) with the same swiftness of movement and lightness of touch, the violin’s central running figurations briefly evoking the fairground before returning to the lyrical atmosphere of the first part – everything easeful and without a trace of heaviness. As for the exquisite Cavatina, its “hymn to life” aspect in the composer’s gallery of human impulse touched our hearts, the syncopated melody appearing to float freely during the piece’s almost hallucinatory middle section, before returning to earth and anchoring our spirits safely once more.

As for the finale, the problem with the music  is obviously mine, as the group lavished as much care on its droll jog-trot rhythms as anywhere else in the whole work. In all, it was “old school” music-making of the highest order – and the players rewarded our extended appreciation of their efforts with a short transcription of a Tchaikovsky song, performed obviously to the manner born, for our delight.

 

Orchestral spectaculars from the NZSO – and a 2015 sneak-preview

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:

JANÁČEK – Sinfonietta
BRETT DEAN – Trumpet Concerto
MUSORGSKY (orch. Ravel) – Pictures at an Exhibition

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)
Dima Slobodeniouk (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Wellington

Friday 10th October, 2014

I thought it happy and appropriate that the second half of the NZSO “Bold Worlds” Wellington concert on Friday of last week was prefaced by several of the principal players telling us something about the 2015 orchestral season (details of which had just been released), and specifically what each of them was particularly looking forward to taking part in.

So we were able to hear concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppänen telling us about the various 2015 concerts involving violinists, including reappearances by Hilary Hahn, Baiba Skride and Anthony Marwood, plus a concert featuring the first appearance of Janine Jansen with the orchestra. Vesa-Matti also talked about Sibelius’s Four Legends, conducted, naturally, by Pietari Inkinen – and mentioned that he would also, at some stage, be revisiting Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending”.

Principal flute Bridget Douglas then took over, expressing her delight at having played all the Beethoven Symphonies, and at the prospect of taking part, with pianist Freddy Kempf, in performances of all five piano concertos next year. She told us about us about her scheduled performance of the Ibert Flute Concerto with the 2015 National Youth Orchestra, along with a new work by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, Salina Fisher. She also mentioned the return of Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, with the Mahler Fifth Symphony, as another highlight.

Then it was the turn of Principal Trombone Dave Bremner to wax enthusiastic about his favourites from the coming season, naturally enough focusing upon his eagerly-awaited partnership with the world-famous trombone virtuoso Christian Lindberg, the latter conducting Jan Sandström’s Double Trombone Concerto “Echoes of Eternity”, Bremner citing the exercise as “proof that men CAN multi-task”, then afterwards drawing our attention to the orchestra’s centenary tribute to the work of Douglas Lilburn, via his Second Symphony.

Having suitably whetted our appetites for the coming season the players returned to their places to await the arrival of guest conductor Dima Slobodeniouk. How fitting it was that, having told us about some of the orchestral highlights of the coming year, the players then pulled out all of the orchestral stops in giving us terrific performances of two favourite orchestral showpieces and a spectacular new concerto for trumpet and orchestra, the latter with one of the world’s great soloists, Håkan Hardenberger!

First on the  evening’s program was Leos Janáček’s grandly festive and excitingly virtuosic Sinfonietta, a work that’s as exciting to watch being performed as to hear, thanks to the writing for brass choir which begins and ends the music, and which is often delivered by players placed either antiphonally or (as here) in a group separated from the remainder of the orchestra. Janáček began writing music for a gymnastics festival at Brno, in his native Moravia, intending to compose a number of fanfares to mark the occasion – but his imagination gradually took charge of the original idea, and he found himself overwhelmed by a mixture of patriotic fervour (the work was dedicated to the Czechoslovak Armed Forces) and parochial feelings (apart from the opening fanfares, each section of the work celebrates a landmark in the town of Brno).

Also informing the music is the composer’s incredible native exuberance, additionally fuelled by his late-in-life infatuation with a married woman, Kamila Stosslova, almost 30 years his junior – many of his important works come from the period of his “idealized” relationship with Kamilla, who was obviously a kind of “Beatrice” to the composer’s “Dante”, an archetypal Muse.

All of this would have gone for very little had the performance by the orchestra, directed by their striking current guest conductor, Dima Slobodeniouk (a name which led me to make wild and inaccurate first-guesses as to his nationality, which was Russian!) faltered or hung fire in any way. Placed in the gallery at the rear of the main orchestra, the brass consort began the work, pinning back our ears with some fantastic playing, bringing out that hint of barbaric splendour which, alas, is sometimes smoothed over in performance. This all took place in tandem with Larry Reese’s thrilling, on-the-spot timpani contributions, the sounds ringing around the proverbial rafters most excitingly and satisfyingly.

The rest of the work brought in the main body of the orchestra, each movement vividly characterized by instrumentation which, in Janáček’s characteristic way, often exploited the extremities of tonal and timbal characteristics of the groups – thus the treble instruments of the orchestra often shrieked and squealed most excitingly, while the lower reaches menacingly loured and rumbled. Performances which don’t bring out this sense of striving to push of the sounds in certain places simply don’t do the composer or his music justice – and thankfully, Dima Slobodeniouk seemed to understand and readily engage Janáček’s particular demons in that respect.

So, in the second movement (The Castle at Brno), the strings joyously chirruped their vigorous figurations over brasses that muttered and rumbled, in between sequences of great lyrical beauty. Similarly demonstrative was the fourth movement (appropriately titled “The Street”) with its festive trumpet-calls, invoking all kinds of responses from the rest of the orchestra, involving gruff, big-boned bass strings dancing heavy-footedly and orchestral bells ringing out almost in alarm at the summons. I liked, too, the boyish “tumble-down” orchestral phrases, winds squawking in roguish pleasure at the unseemliness of it all, energy and laughter paramount.

These two movements were such a marked contrast to the third, middle movement (evocatively called “The Queen’s Monastery”). At the beginning all was melancholy, the tuba mournfully intoning a pedal-note over which the strings and then the winds sang what seemed like a lament, broken only by extraordinary flourishes from the winds in a handful of places – when questioned about these by a worried flute-player, the composer apparently emphasized that the irruptions need to sound “like the wind”. But the most marked contrast came with the music’s middle sequence, the pent-up energies firstly hinted at by the brass, and then, after a brief restatement of the opening by the strings, suddenly unleashed, to the alarm of the strings and the orchestral bells – what larks were here! – riotous goings-on amongst the brasses, with whooping horns, bumptious heavy brass and scintillating trumpets making the most of their “moments”, despite the frightened squawks of the winds!

A gentler, more folksy beginning to the final movement from winds and strings gradually built in strength and tension towards the great moment when the brass at the rear, summonsed by a clarion call and a cymbal crash, rejoined the orchestra with the work’s opening fanfares, this time underpinned by whole-orchestral counterpoints. I confess that I did want the conductor to broaden the music slightly as it drove towards its resplendent final chords, but he chose, just as excitingly, to maintain the momentum until the very final peroration – what a noise, and what an overwhelming effect! Even the somewhat ungrateful acoustic of the MFC was activated, shaken and stirred by all of this, with the players’ efforts and their conductor’s magisterial direction receiving justly-deserved acclaim.

Straight after Janáček’s far-flung ambiences, our ears were freshly-syringed by the opening of Brett Dean’s Trumpet Concerto, an evocation, it seemed, of huge machinery being activated piece-by-piece, begun by woodblocks and metallic scintillations, and building through an enormous crescendo, a cavernous bass line underneath the more superficial figurations suggesting some kind of gigantic ship being launched. Having activated his orchestral forces, the composer introduced the trumpet, played here by Håkan Hardenberger, by repute one of the world’s best on the instrument. He was the “superhero” of the composer’s conception, his music brooking no interference, and very much “in charge” of things until his downfall, delineated by the dying flight aspect of the lines at the movement’s end.

The second movement, given the title “Soliloquy”, presented a more meditative mood, the “draining away” of energy and colour reminding me of some of Salvador Dali’s paintings of melting objects. The trumpet played long lines trying to stem the downward flow, but was itself caught in the torpor of it all – all seemed decay and disillusionment. The trumpeter’s attempts to energize his world – last-ditch attempts at rallying fanfares – seemed to fall on deaf ears, as the orchestral basses take up the chromatic downward figurations. All the soloist seemed to be able to do was salute the passing of things, and wait for some kind of redemptive force to appear.

It came with a muted trumpet call which seemed to awaken a distant response in kind from within the orchestra, one which grew in detail and resonance – rather like the opening of Respighi’s “Appian Way” sequence from “The Pines of Rome” the voices were distant and representing mere possibility at first, remaining muted and disembodied, but with impulse and ambience beginning to mushroom into something. As the interactive dialogue between trumpet and orchestra began to flourish and establish itself, a distant march-like rhythm suddenly began, beautifully “placed” by the composer from with the existing textures. This quickly took on a course of its own, set in opposition to the trumpet and orchestral discourses, the music building up to an incredible climax, most theatrically brought to an unexpected close by a stratospheric note from the trumpet and a dismissive whip-lash phrase played by the solo violin – what an ending!

We need an interval to doubly realign our ears after those two works! – In that respect the “sneak preview” of the 2015 season was doubly welcome, as it helped “close off” what had been before, in preparation for Ravel’s take on Musorgsky’s tribute to the work of one of his dearest friends. It’s a work that’s too well-known to have to comment on each section, here, but the “pictures” and their interspersed “promenades” were again notable for their sharply-etched characterizations, the conductor seeming to me to pay particular attention to the nuancing of the string lines in places, to the point where the textures exhibited all kinds of characterful fibres, enough to remind one of human speech – one of the composer’s obsessions, of course.

My only criticism of the conductor was that he seemed to elongate many of the pauses between the pictures, breaking the continuum of the voyage. Yes, the pictures are self-contained – but Musorgsky himself abruptly “butted-together” pairs of them, sometimes incongruously, as one would experience when disparate pictures in galleries are hung next to one another. The composer also “filled in” some of the pauses between the pictures by the use of “promenades” music derived from the work’s very opening, a melody that changes in mood and feeling in relation to different parts of the gallery. Elsewhere, pictures aren’t linked by anything except silence – and I found the silences in some cases stretched by the conductor so far as to take us away from the experience. A pity, because I found myself having to re-establish myself in the gallery a number of times instead of simply being taken from picture to picture, in what should have been a sequence of unbroken enchantment.

But as for the orchestral playing – well, it was of a vividness and impact that meant that one was very quickly returned and imbued with the pictorial and emotive force of whatever music was being performed – it was the best possible advertisement the orchestra could have devised for its up-and-coming programme next year. And I do hope to encounter both conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger again in concert, before too long. It was wonderful to experience an evening of music-making so distinctive and engaging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soloists add distinction to NZSM Orchestra concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī NZ School of Music presents:
FROM GENEVA TO KNOXVILLE

BRAHMS – Tragic Overture
TCHAIKOVSKY – Violin Concerto in D
BARBER – Knoxville: Summer of 1915
BARTOK – Dance Suite

Xin (James) Jin (violin)
Amelia Berry (soprano)
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)
Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Thursday October 2nd, 2014

In the wake of a couple of crackingly good recent concerts given by the NZSM Orchestra and its intrepid conductor, Kenneth Young, I found myself eagerly looking forward to this particular evening’s presentation. The programme followed the orchestra’s policy of mixing the familiar (Brahms, Tchaikovsky) with the less-frequently performed (Barber, Bartok), the repertoire obviously designed to present the student musicians with a wide range of technical and stylistic challenges.

For a number of reasons, it seemed a nicely-balanced choice of items. The documented love-hate relationship between Brahms and Tchaikovsky as personalities gave the concert’s first half an extra frisson of contrasted expression. Then, the excitement and exhilaration of difference continued throughout the second half by a shift of focus twentieth-century-wards, with Barber and Bartok.

The prospect of hearing an exciting young soloist  Xin (James) Jin play a popular work like the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto would have drawn many people to the concert; and while Samuel Barber’s music (apart from his ubiquitous Adagio) wouldn’t have perhaps quickened pulses in the same way, the presence of ANOTHER soloist (soprano Amelia Berry) would, I’m sure, have been enticing – a singer or instrumentalist performing with an orchestra has a theatricality which is always of interest, in addition to whatever it is they’re performing.

Well, as it turned out, the concert was fabulous in parts – and interestingly enough the “soloist-and-orchestra” sequences stole the show! The concerto got one of the most exciting performances of the solo part I’ve ever heard from Xin Jin, while soprano Amelia Berry’s rendition of Barber’s achingly nostalgic setting of childhood memories “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” touched our hearts in a completely different way.

Neither performance was perfect in all respects – in the concerto, the orchestral support for the soloist was heartwarming in the lyrical passages, but didn’t really ignite in some of the more vigorous “brandy-on-the-breath” parts of the finale. In the Barber work the unfortunately overbearing acoustic of the venue meant that Amelia Berry’s words were often hard to decipher, the very “up-front” tones of the orchestral playing working against vocal clarity, gorgeous though her singing “sounded” throughout.

As for the two other works on the programme, the playing was in places spectacularly fiery, but again, thanks in part to the acoustic, had an uncomfortable “unrelieved” quality – I found the Bartok, in particular, hard going in places for this reason, the orchestral sound too confrontational for comfort, to my ears. A pity that both of this orchestra’s recent concert venues, the Cathedral and St.Andrew’s Church, are simply too “tight” – both acoustically and physically! – to accommodate orchestral performance easily,  and full-on works like the Bartok Dance Suite exacerbated the problem.

The experience reinforced my feelings of frustration and anxiety regarding the present non-availability of the Town Hall for orchestral concerts of this kind. These musicians’ efforts deserve far better than having merely makeshift venues in which to perform, in short, places in which they can be heard to their best advantage, instead of being compromised.

So it was that I found the performances hard to accurately judge in some aspects – for example I found the central section of the Brahms “Tragic” Overture too insistent-sounding, missing that sense of quiet, stricken numbness, an almost spectral tread of growing unease which swings like a pendulum between despair and dignity, and which provides a contrast with the outer parts of the work. I did think that Ken Young pushed it along dangerously quickly as well – the results were certainly tense and knife-edged, but any “inner” reflection of tragedy wasn’t brought out, and the music for me lost some expressive breadth as a result.

The acoustic wasn’t so much of a problem in the Tchaikovsky work, as the composer’s orchestral writing is relatively lean in any case, allowing his soloist’s tones to readily come through – although Young and the orchestra certainly took pains to facilitate this quality throughout most expertly. I thought the first two movements brilliantly successful, the excitement generated by all concerned towards the end of the first movement positively scalp-prickling, and deserving the spontaneous burst of applause at the movement’s end!

We got some beautiful solo playing in the slow movement from both the violinist and the accompanying wind players – but when it came to the last movement, I thought Xin Lin’s astonishingly expressive energies and spontaneous irruptions weren’t sufficiently matched by the orchestra, though I did appreciate Ed Allen’s horn-playing in the “Russian Dance” sections. Somehow the whiplash timing of the orchestral interjections didn’t come off with enough élan, and that cumulative tutti just before the soloist’s final entry unfortunately hung fire – it’s all rhythm and timing, the players needing to throw themselves at the notes and be damned to the consequences! Still, the response of the audience to it all (and particularly to the soloist) was rapturous at the end, and deservedly so.

The Barber work, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” is something of a concert rarity, here – I know Leontyne Price’s recording, but had never before heard the work live. It’s a setting of passages from author James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family”, depicting a small boy’s recollection of summer evenings at home with the family. Barber described his work as a “lyrical rhapsody” and dedicated the music to his own father, who was ill at the time the piece was being written. It was premiered in Boston in 1948 by the singer Eleanor Steber.

I caught some beautifully vocalized sequences from the soprano, almost all in the quieter passages – the opening descriptions of people sitting on their porches, rocking gently, the gentle depiction of the night as “one blue dew”, and the very wind-blown Elgarian orchestral passages  during which the singer describes the family spreading quilts and lying under the stars. We clearly heard the heart-rending “May God bless my people”, and, at the return of the lullaby the comforting “Sleep, soft, smiling, draws me to her”.

Throughout the rest I registered the music’s emotions but couldn’t hear what was being sung – Amelia Berry’s voice, sweet and bright as it was, simply couldn’t couldn’t free itself from the orchestral fabric whenever the dynamics increased. We needed those words! – they would have fitted onto a single program page, avoiding any kind of disruptive turn-over – or else they could have been projected onto a screen. It would have increased our enjoyment of the performance hugely, even though the general nostalgic mood of the piece was movingly caught and held by soloist, conductor and players.

Bartok it was, to finish, and it certainly made an impact! The orchestral playing in places was some of the best of the evening – just as well, because when projected outwards with any kind of force it was a pretty unrelenting sound-picture! The first piece had more of a droll aspect, dark, galumphing rhythms alternating with big, blowzy textures, reminiscent of the “drunken peasant” depictions in the same composer’s “Hungarian Sketches”. The infamous second movement, with its laser-beam brass glissandi, nearly lifted the cathedral’s roof, an onslaught relieved only temporarily by the harp in conjunction with strings and winds. I liked the “Hungarian hoe-down” aspect of the third movement, and appreciated the respite afforded our sensibilities by the “molto tranquillo” fourth movement, with its nicely-realised exotic, almost Iberian atmospheres.

But golly! – what a riot of a finale! As I’ve said, it was almost too much in places, though undeniably exciting, the rhythms, textures and colours changing without warning, the overall mood of the piece capricious and volatile. It left us a bit winded, I think, everything in the sound-picture a bit claustrophobic in effect, but still exhilarating, in between gasps! There was no doubting the commitment and skill of the players, spurred on by Ken Young’s boundless energies – perhaps it wasn’t the most elegant finish to a concert, but the sounds were those which stirred the blood most satisfyingly. In all, great stuff from the NZSM Orchestra!