Author: Peter Mechen

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!

Tests of character – Wellington Chamber Music recital from Ludwig Treviranus

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music 2014 presents
Ludwig Treviranus (piano)

PAUL SCHRAMM – Nine Preludes
MAURICE RAVEL – Miroirs (Reflections)
SERGE PROKOFIEV – Three Pieces from “Romeo and Juliet”
MODEST MUSORGSKY – Pictures at an Exhibition

Wellington Chamber Music Concerts 2014
St Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 28th September

Midway through pianist Ludwig Treviranus’s recent St.Andrew’s recital I was ready to tell anybody who would listen that this was shaping up to be a concert in a thousand – the Paul Schramm Preludes represented for me a major pianistic discovery, and I’d never heard parts of Ravel’s Miroirs played better by anybody, in concert or on record.

Of course, I needed at that stage to bear in mind one of the exchanges in Carl Sandburg’s anecdotal poem The People, Yes – the one where the city slicker asks the farmer, “Lived here all your life?” and the farmer replies “Not yit!” – that there was, at the half-way point, still a lot of musical  water still to pass under the pianistic bridge, and that I had better, like Carl Sandburg’s farmer, remain circumspect until all had run its course.

As it turned out, I thought the young pianist wasn’t able to recapture the “first fine careless rapture” of those first-half items after the interval – in  contrast to the elegance, finely-wrought detailing, deep evocation and well-tempered exuberance of the Schramm and Ravel items, neither the  Prokofiev “Romeo and Juliet” pieces nor Musorgsky’s epic traversal of an intense friendship, “Pictures at an Exhibition” seemed to my ears  sufficiently “owned” by Treviranus, despite some wonderful moments in each of the works.

So, I thought it was very much a “concert of two halves”, with the pianist seeming to give his all right from the start, and then, faced with the  complexities of the programme’s second half, perhaps running out of steam a little. It appeared also as though the post-interval items were  here prepared less thoroughly and meticulously than were the Schramm and Ravel works. The Musorgsky in particular lacked surety in places –  not only were there a number of finger-slips and lapses of memory but some of the sequences weren’t focused, weren’t “held” with enough through-line to fully transport us into the world of the particular impressions of time, place and the composer wanted to convey.

I was somewhat surprised that “Pictures” didn’t have the whole of the second half to itself, as it’s of reasonably “stand-alone” length and has a wide range of expression, needing nothing to act as either filler or foil. Generous though Treviranus was in giving us the scenes from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet, I thought their back-to-back positioning with “Pictures” actually detracted from our concentration and focus upon the latter. It’s a work that, I think, cries out for “stand-alone” placement in any concert, especially as it’s really a kind of ritual, with an inevitability of advancement shared by all great works of art. Part tragedy, part celebration, it’s a unique amalgam of descriptions and emotions, gathered together by the circumstance of one individual’s painful and debilitating loss of a friend.

Enough! – various pianists of my acquaintance have testified as to their own love of excess when young, armed with energy to burn, with generosity of nature, and with oceanfuls of delectable, mouth-watering repertoire to play and enjoy. As the conductor Sir John Barbirolli once said, referring to ‘cellist Jacqueline du Pre’s whole-hearted, super-charged music-making – which he loved, but which some critics found too fulsomely expressed: “When you’re young  you should have an excess of everything!” Sir John adding, “you have to have something which you can pare off and refine as you grow older….”

So – there we were at St.Andrew’s Church, in the company of the personable Ludwig Treviranus, smilingly welcoming us to the recital and telling  us his thoughts about each group of pieces he was about to play. This was all very much of a piece with his music-making, delivered as if it  were the most natural thing in the world to do. Particularly interesting to hear about was his discovery and advocacy of the Paul Schramm  Preludes, a project derived from his involvement with a collection of New Zealand piano pieces in a volume “Living Echoes – The First 150  Years of Piano Music from New Zealand”, researched and edited by Wellington teacher Gillian Bibby.

Paul Schramm, along with his wife, Diny, arrived in New Zealand in the late 1930s as refugee émigrés from Germany. Making their home in the  capital, they brought considerable musical skills to Wellington, Paul as a performer and Diny as a teacher – activities which the war years all but curtailed, treated as they were like aliens by the establishment for the duration. Paul left New Zealand for Australia after the war, where he died  in 1953;  but Diny remained in Wellington and continued to teach here for many years afterwards.

Schramm’s Nine Preludes reflected his own musical tastes, influenced as the writing was by Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, and  Scriabin. It seems the pieces were conceived as a set of nine, or perhaps even ten, though “Number One”  was missing when the original discovery of the music was made in the Alexander Turnbull archives. A later search turned up another Prelude – perhaps the missing one, perhaps another altogether – so that today we got the original number of pieces, whatever the origins of the first of the set.

Though derivative in style and content, each of the pieces, with Ludwig Treviranus’s vividly-projected and sharply-focused advocacy, sparkled with the glint of rediscovery and impinged their essences upon the memory. Analysis of each piece and its performance  would fill a book, so I’ll content myself with remarking on a couple of the pieces and their juxtapositionings. First came the the imposing and  impressively-wrought “Biblical rhetoric” of the writing in the opening Prelude “On the Death of a Great Man: FD Roosevelt 12th April 1945”,  complete with echoes of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. It was a piece whose direct appeal to the emotions contrasted immediately with the  following “Satyr’s Dance”, a mischievous, spikily-harmonised part-waltz-part-scherzo, the pianist making the most of the interplay between  massive, Prokofiev-like momentums and Ravelian delicacies.

I particularly liked the “Ritual Dance of a Javanese Warrior”, a dark-hearted waltz flecked with glinting colours, cruel in its “snapping” figurations  and remorseless harmonies, its effect made all the greater in retrospect through being followed by “Hommage a Scriabine”, with its  shimmering textures and insinuating modulations. Perhaps along with the Debussy-like “Glittering Thirds” it’s the most unashamedly imitative,  as Schramm’s titles, of course, do readily suggest. I admit I did wonder about Treviranus’s performance of the Seventh Prelude, “Distortion of a Viennese  Waltz”, though, as Schramm’s original subtitle for the piece (quoted in the programme) was “arrogantly performed by a German General Staff  Officer”. As played here, I thought the pianist largely ignored this directive – the performance was far too musically sympathetic and lilting in  manner to evoke any kind of arrogance or brutality!

From these marvellous pieces we went on to Ravel’s “Miroirs”, where more pianistic riches awaited our ears! – Treviranus brought out almost  everything one could wish for in the music – the opening of “Noctuelles” (Night Moths) all impulse and feathery excitement, the textures wrought of magic, and the subsequent evocations of night sublimely realised, the darkness suggestive rather than sinister. “Oiseaux tristes” featured a different kind of ambience, the pianist able to tellingly “place” the birds’ calls in the silences, stressing the solitariness of the listener’s experience.

But I thought the performance’s most sublime moments were in the following “Une barque sur l’ocean” (A boat on the ocean)  – Treviranus conjured from his piano some of the most beguiling keyboard sounds imaginable, the playing suggesting as readily the oceanic depths as the surface play of light and air on the waves, everything – even the glissando – gorgeously “touched in”. He brought out Ravel’s utterly seductive interplay of melody and figuration in a finely-activated liquid flow, and with almost lump-in-throat delicacy as the ship passed by, leaving only impressions on the memory.

That same delicacy of utterance and feeling for atmosphere was evident in the final piece of the set as well – “La Valée des cloches” (Valley of the Bells). Pianist Robert Casadesus was quoted in the programme notes as having been told by Ravel that “the piece was inspired by midday bells in Paris”. However,  the music has never seemed that way to my ears – nor, I think to those of Ludwig Treviranus, judging by the almost crepuscular ambience he wove with and around the sounds. These bells were more nostalgic and dreamlike than real, middle-of-the-day angelus-bells, activated by deft stroke-making on the part of the pianist, the oscillations continuing to enchant the imagination’s ear long after the actual sounds had ceased. I thought it simply lovely playing.

No, I hadn’t forgotten the jester and his morning song (Alborada del gracioso)! – we got some exciting playing from Treviranus, just missing, I thought, the last ounce of rhythmic “swagger” through a shade too quick a tempo, but still capturing plenty of thrust and volatility of the opening, and enabling a great flourish at the end of the first section. But the expressif en recit of the middle section was where I would have liked a more marked contrast with the livelier outer sequences, a freer, deeper, canto-jondo-like feeling of a singer caught and held by some deep emotion, interrupted by the physicalities which come back at the piece’s end. But I realise that I’m quibbling, here – it really was marvellous playing!

Still, after these stellar feats of re-creation, I sensed that the pianist had begun to tire, and his focus lose its edge. Prokofiev’s famous “Montagues and Capulets” sequence from the “Romeo and Juliet” ballet certainly strutted its stuff with real menace, arrogance and swagger, and the ghostly ambience of the trio section was well-caught, as the disguised Romeo and his friends sneaked into the Capulets’ Ball. But the impish fun of “The Young Juliet” needed a lighter touch throughout to REALLY scintillate, and the opening “Folk Dance” had some untidy figurations in-between the episodes of young-braves’-bravado from both of the warring families.

Following this came Musorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” – and there were moments from Treviranus of brilliance and rapt insight into a unique world of contrasted expression. These were flung, teased and dragged across the surface of a creative canvas with great panache – the opening picture, Gnomus, for one, gave off a gorgeously volatile and unashamedly malicious aspect, one whose acerbities set “The Old Castle” into rich, darkly-lit relief. I also thought “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle” a pair of vividly characterized gentlemen, one assertive and overbearing, the other wheedling and pathetic. And, as a double-whammy kind of crowning conclusion to the work, the witch Baba Yaga’s wild rides were savagely and outlandishly celebrated, her music spectacularly disintegrating against the bulwarks of “The Great Gate at Kiev” with its pomp, splendor and introspective moments of ritualistic piety.

However, it was, I thought, for the pianist, still a work in progress – a number of uncertainties inhibited the kind of breathtaking identification with the music that had characterized Treviranus’s earlier playing of “Miroirs” and the Schramm pieces. Just to take one example – I’m certain he will, in time, delve more deeply into and relish the stillness that marks the transition from those stark, remorseless structures of “Catacombs” to the mystical revelations of “Cum mortuis in lingua mortua” – the place where the composer was, for a few moments, reunited in quiet ecstasy with the spirit of his dead friend, Victor Hartmann, the artist of the “Pictures”.

Of course, Musorgsky’s tragedy was that, even while celebrating his friend’s memory he was on a downward path to an alcohol-soaked oblivion which put a premature end to his own life and creative career – sobering (sic) thoughts indeed, and especially with which to conclude this celebration of a major pianistic talent here in Wellington.

 

SMP Ensemble – Sound Barrel a “lucky dip” for this listener!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SMP Ensemble presents:
SOUND BARREL

Music by:
CHRIS CREE BROWN, HIROYUKI YAMAMOTO,
JASON POST, GIACINTO SCELSI,
BEN GAUNT
Graphic Scores by:
TOM JENSEN, LYELL CRESSWELL,
SCILLA McQUEEN

Special guest artist:
KANA KOTERA (euphonium)

SMP Ensemble:
Karlo Margetic, Richard Robeshawe, Reuben Jellyman
Cordelia Black, Tabea Squire, Sam Vennell
Chris Wratt, Anton Killin, Jason Post

Adam Concert Room,
Victoria University of Wellington

Friday 26th September 2014

That enterprising and congenitally provocative performing group, the SMP Ensemble presented a characteristic program for our delight and fascination at the Adam Concert Room last Friday evening.

Every piece on the program brought its own specific amalgam of spontaneity and thoughtfulness to bear on both the recreative process and the audience’s receptivity – a kind of “expect the unexpected” ethos whose attendant challenges, bewilderments and satisfactions truly “spiced up” the evening’s music.

I must admit to a certain level of self-generated bravado in writing these words, gobsmacked as I was by the effect of some of the sounds that I heard, experienced and watched being made throughout the evening. Particularly thought-provoking were the items featuring graphic scores, each of which was displayed clearly and spaciously (excellent and audience-friendly visual displays were a feature of the concert), giving us some unique insights, both cerebral and instinctive, regarding that mysterious, often nebulously wrought “womb of interactivity” that exists between composer and performer – and, of course, by extrapolation, each listener.

It was very much a case for me of being faced with music for which I had relatively little previous reference in terms of being able to make judgements and draw conclusions based on what I saw and heard. I found myself going back to points of revisiting of my own “formative responses” to sounds, well before my current ostensible crop of expectations relating to conventional classical music. I was reminded, again and again, by what I heard the SMP players do, of my first encounters with things that were world-enlarging, both in terms of timbre and colour and texture, but also in terms of structure and organization and juxtapositioning.

In short, I was “undone” to a large extent by the concert, and this is a record of the ensuing impressions I received from the music while in that partly delightful, partly precarious state.

The concert began with a piece by UK composer Ben Gaunt, one whose basic idea interestingly “resonated” within me – that of “Sympathetic Strings”, ambiences created by material that resonates as a consequence of other materials being “played” – of course stringed instruments do have this very particular on-going quality, whether intentional or incidental. Gaunt carried this idea over to having sounds generated by performers whose creative imaginations “resonate” as a result of what they hear other performers do. The performance was directed by Jason Post, whose own music was to make an appearance in the concert’s second half.

The Ensemble’s formation at the beginning visually expressed a kind of Newtonian “action” and “reaction” process, with clarinet, double bass and violin to the right of the performing area, and an accordion, violin and percussion set antiphonally to the left. The music began with beautifully-floated, nocturnal-like lines from clarinet, double bass and violin, occasionally punctuated by irruptions from the left, as if worlds were colliding and rubbing along each other’s edges. Of a sudden all hell seemed to break loose, in particular from Karlo Margetic’s clarinet, which seemed to be expressing some kind of musical apoplexy, a process which led to the player actually collapsing and having to be revived by a violinist – was this a mere theatrical touch, or an organic consequence of the “sympathetic” pressures brought to bear on the performer by the music?

Christchurch composer Chris Cree Brown’s “Sound Barrel” gave its name to the concert, but amply characterized the music we heard, scored for euphonium and fixed media playback. We were first introduced to the guest soloist, Japanese-born Kana Kotera, obviously a virtuoso of her instrument, judging by the timbal and coloristic command she was able to exert upon the euphonium’s sounds, ranging from cavernous, tuba-like grunts and galumphings to honeyed-tone croonings. “Elephantine Dreams” could as well have been the piece’s title, as the fixed media playback gave a definite “narrative” context for the soloist to muse upon Quixotic-like adventures, alternating between the fantastical and the extremely visceral.

Poet and composer Cilla McQueen’s work “Rain” added a graphic visual element to the evening’s proceedings, the ensemble “playing” two of the composer’s semi-abstracted “graphic scores” – works of art in themselves, of course! It was a colourful assemblage of instruments indeed! – a ukulele played with a painted stick, a double-bass, bongo drums played with sticks that had soft felt heads, a violin and an accordion – and some kind of tube with a piece of chain attached. The composer/artist’s  second score had a more recognizable kind of contouring, in the shape of a fern frond about to unfold. More obviously rhythmic at the piece’s beginning than was  the first realization, this piece seemed to me more ritualistically or ceremonially conceived than the first one – perhaps a more public as opposed to a previous private acknowledgement of the psychology of weather. Instruments such as a gong advanced a feeling that the second graphic score invited a more structured and kinetic approach to the composer’s own inspiration

Wellington is currently playing host to composer Hiroyuki Yamamoto, from Japan, here on a three-month composer residency – his piece “Ginkgo biloba”, written for solo euphonium set the player a number of technical challenges and difficulties, designed to show off the particular qualities of the instrument, and the virtuosity of the player. Beginning with a kind of definitive euphonium statement of declaration, Kana Kotera seemed to “own the work” – she adroitly moved from her opening “calling card” mode to the piece’s “real” business, setting sostenuto lines against staccato impulses, the music’s momentum gradually building, the animation increasing and the ratio of introspection diminishing.

Some of the composer’s explanations I understood – microtones and multiphonics, for example – but “half-valve” defeated me! – I assumed it was some kind of “shortening” technique used to alter pitch and timbre, and would have been used by the soloist as part of the extraordinary array of speech-like intonations throughout the piece, in which mouthing and tonguing would have had a significant part to play. Her timbral and coloristic capabilities on the instrument were in fact astonishing, the potentialities she unlocked for expression fulfilling almost to excess the prescription expressed by the composer that the sounds needed the kind of inherent ambiguity which suggested and demonstrated their basic instability.

More graphics accompanied Lyell Cresswell’s “Body Music” – appropriately dedicated to Jack Body (who was present at the concert) at the time of his fiftieth birthday (how time flies!) – here were great flourishes of exuberance, the sounds fluid and dynamic, the liquidity of the textures advanced by the use of a celeste. I took from it a kind of celebration of human physicality and impulse, the music shaping form and characterizing movement in sound. The actual graphic score appropriately displayed a human shape packed tightly with notes, a depiction of a truly musical being!

Giacinto Scelsi’s 1976 work “Maknongan” brought back Kana Kotera, eager to explore with her euphonium the Italian composer’s refined, somewhat austere world of limited notes inflected with microtones. Called by one commentator “the most focused and abstract work Scelsi ever composed”, the piece was also one of  the composer’s very last works. The euphonium’s rich sound seemed to me to “humanize” the composer’s characteristic austerities (well, as with the ones I’d previously heard, anyway!), the soloist furthering the process by employing a stylish hat with a paper rose in the hat-band as a kind of “mute” for the instrument! As these things often do, the mere sight of the hat performing this function enhanced the aural effect!

The work, true to the composer’s style, revolved around a single note, the music’s explorations of associated notes (octave-plus-one leaps, various microtonal “shifts”  and numerous timbal contrasts) creating a kind of centre for the work upon which we listeners could focus. As with any sound, constant repetition alone gradually changes the ambient receptivity – this, together with the numerous variants, aural and visual, made for a kind of  micro-journeying of transformation within the piece’s surprisingly short span. The piece was written for “any bass instrument”, thereby inviting further conjecture regarding what kind of sound-world a string bass, for instance, would create – all very intriguing!

More work for Kana Kotera and her trusty euphonium, with Jason Post’s “yatsar”, a work for the instrument and electronics. The composer alerted us to the meaning of “yatsar”, a Hebrew word for fashioning or shaping, as would a potter fashion a vessel from clay, which is, of course, a well-known biblical metaphor for God’s creation of man. This idea was expressed by breath to begin with, the player blowing tonelessly through the interment, while the electronically-contrived ambience suggested pulsations of rhythmic movement amid a kind of “white noise”. The euphonium’s notes seemed to my ears to be recorded as well as played “live” – whether or not “looped” I wasn’t sure. I imagined that the interaction between “real” acoustical sounds and the electronic ambiences might have represented a kind of relationship between creator and the fashioned object.

What to make of Tom Jensen’s “What is it?” which followed, a piece for solo violin played by Tabea Squire? – perhaps the rhetoric of the title is its own best description, given the composer’s own quasi-nihilistic notes regarding (a) the initial creative urge, (b) the self-characterised “chaos” of mind from whence the impulse sprung, © the resulting graphic score, (d) the title-question which arose from the score, and (e) the doubt as to the actuality of that same question (and by extrapolation, every previous step in the process)! And was the work a suitably portentous, grandly-conceived, groaning-under-its-own-weight, aesthetically convoluted series of existential sound-structures, unerring in its progress towards self-annihilation? – after all, JS Bach’s Chaconne from his D MInor Partita, a work also for solo violin, was able to create a whole universe of structured sounds and potentialities.

Perhaps, in direct opposition to Bach’s “order in the midst of chaos” sublimities, Tom Jensen took us on a journey via Tabea Squire’s violin, into the dark heart of disorder – the “toneless tones” of the opening section was almost an “all is vanity” exposition of sounds left to cohere in the minds of the listener, with no direction from the composer as to how this “ought” to be. The sotto voce middle section brought to ear wraith-like voices, whose conflagrations of approximate pitch suggested an order and structure on the edge of day-to-day conventions, the occasional irruptions of tone like flint-sparks in the darkness. This all seemed to intensify in a concluding section whose “do I wake or sleep” disembodied ghostings had, I felt, taken me into the throes of my subconscious – an extraordinary evocation.

It needed John Adams to come to my rescue at the concert’s end, by way of a work called “American Standard” – a deconstructionist approach to popular American music forms. This was the first movement of that work, a March, called “John Philip Sousa” but with none of the celebrated March King’s wonderful tunes and swaggering rhythms – instead, the composer instructs that the musicians employ “a plodding pulse, with no melody or harmony”, in fact the inverse of what Sousa would have intended. The program note quoted Adams as saying that the piece sounded “like the retreat from battle of a badly-wounded army”. So it was a kind of subversion of original intent (like all good parodies, of course), this one being particularly disconcerting in effect, due to its dour, non-celebratory aspect, and its brief displays of angst (the occasional groan/shriek).

As TS Eliot observed, “not with a bang, but with a whimper” came the concert to its end – extraordinary stuff, and definitely not for the faint-hearted in places! I thought the playing used a kind of “unvarnished” quality to an engagingly spontaneous effect. Also effectively managed were the technical aspects of the presentation – I thought the screening of the graphic scores was a marvellous thing to do, indicative of the ensemble’s willingness to put itself out there and communicate its stuff – food for thought for all of us!

 

 

 

 

 

New Zealand String Quartet – soirée in a salon

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet presents:
SALON SERIES 2014

Programme No.1
JS BACH – “Air” from Orchestral Suite No.3 / MOZART – String Quartet in C K.157
TCHAIKOVSKY – Andante Cantabile (from String Quartet No.1)
SHOSTAKOVICH – Polka (from “The Golden Age”) /CHOPIN (arr.Balakirev) – Etude Op.25 No.7
GARETH FARR – Mambo Rambo (from String Quartet “Mondo Rondo”)
PUCCINI – Crisantemi (Chrysanthemums) / SCHUBERT – String Quartet in E-flat D.87
BARBER – Adagio, for String Quartet / DVORAK – Waltz Op.54 No.2
bonus item: NATALIE HUNT- Data Entry Groove

New Zealand String Quartet
Helene Pohl, Douglas Beilman (violins)
Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Prefab Hall Cafe, Jessie St., Wellington

Sunday, 21st September, 2014

I’ve reproduced above the entire programme played by the New Zealand String Quartet at its second Wellington “Salon Series” concert, to give readers who weren’t there an idea of the range and scope of the music performed – there was, literally, something for everybody, as the group’s intention was to put together a presentation that would charm the ear of the newcomer to chamber music as well as intrigue and delight the devotee with some out-of-the-ordinary arrangements for string quartet of repertoire from other genres.

I thought that, on all counts – content, style, ambience, setting and (not least of all) performance – the occasion was a great success. The venue – the Prefab Hall Cafe, in Wellington’s Jessie St. – helped give the venture the informality which the musicians wanted (Helene Pohl compared the occasion to the soirées which regularly featured at the salons of the early nineteenth-century). Things were further enlivened by the presence of significant numbers of young children accompanying parents and caregivers. The youngsters wriggled a bit during the more abstracted pieces, but their attentions were captured and delightfully ignited in places by the Quartet’s engaging delivery of a number of roisterous, ear-tickling items.

In overall terms the “bill of fare” had a pleasing lightness of touch, countered only by the seriousness of Samuel Barber’s well-known Adagio (as Douglas Beilman pointed out in his introduction to the piece, here played in its original form for string quartet!). Elsewhere, there was dignity (Bach’s G Major Air), charm (Dvorak’s Waltz Op.54 No.2) and romance (Balakirev’s arrangement of Chopin’s Etude Op.25 No.7, Tchaikovsky’s “Andante Cantabile” and Puccini’s “Crisantemi”), with some gorgeous high-jinks by way of contrast, from Shostakovich, Gareth Farr, and a late addition to the programme, a piece by up-and-coming New Zealand composer Natalie Hunt.

Two extended works completed the picture, both extremely happy choices, in each case the product of youthful exuberance and flourishing creative powers. In the first half, from 1772 came the third (K.157 in C Major) from a set of six string quartets by the seventeen year-old Mozart, called the “Milanese” Quartets through the young composer being in that city at the time, and simultaneously working on his opera Lucia Silla. After the interval we heard another complete quartet (which, to my surprise, I knew well) by the sixteen year-old Franz Schubert, dating from 1813 but published posthumously – it’s known as No.10 in E-flat, and by the Deutsch catalogue as D.87.

So, from the moment the players descended the stairway of the cafe’s mezzanine-floor, 1930s motion-picture style, we were enveloped in a veritable glow of contentment, and then, after quartet leader Helene Pohl had warmly welcomed us to the “salon”, held in thrall to the music-making. What better way to begin than with JS Bach at his most beguiling, the famous “Air” from the Third Orchestra Suite responding beautifully to the ministrations bestowed by four solo instruments? – the expressions of delight and wonderment upon the faces of some of the children sitting close to the musicians amply mirrored the enchantment of the sounds.

Being by this stage some way from childhood, the seventeen year-old “Wolfie” obviously knew what he was about – his C Major Quartet which followed featured a spirited and energetic set of first-movement exchanges, followed by an Andante whose deeply-felt beauties hinted at greater things which would follow in later works. It was here I noticed, especially in the work’s slow movement, that all the “bloom” of tone came more from the instruments themselves and not from the room – though not impossibly so, the ambience was dry-ish, and underlined by a “roomful of bodies” soaking up the sounds as gratefully and greedily as they could manage.

Once our ears got the “pitch of the hall” we could work and interact with the instruments at where they were and what it was possible for them to do. We were actually sitting so close to the musicians that such considerations mattered less that they mighty have in more “normal” concert surroundings. Thus the fun and gaiety of the Mozart quartet’s finale completely took us over, no small thanks to the playing’s infectious energies, conveying almost medicinal doses of enjoyment.

Tchaikovsky’s “Cantabile” is, like Samuel Barber’s aforementioned “Adagio”, also part of a complete string Quartet, in this case the first of the Russian composer’s three completed works in this genre. As with Barber’s work, this single “Andante Cantabile” movement has taken on a life of its own, most often in a string orchestra arrangement. Gillian Ansell, when introducing the work, told us how the great novellist Tolstoy was reputedly moved to tears by this music, disarmed by the composer’s clever alternation of a Russian folk-song with one of his own original melodies.

The same Tolstoy was to later famously rebuke the youthful Sergei Rachmaninov for writing music that was “not needed by anybody” – goodness only knows what the musically cranky author of War and Peace would have made of Shostakovich’s work! The Quartet’s inspired rendition of an arrangement for strings of the “Polka” from the ballet “The Golden Age” was a kind of show-stopper, instruments (and instrumentalists) taking up the composer’s invitation to “let their hair down”! To choose one instance – I’ve never heard a viola make the kinds of guttural utterances that at one point came from Gillian Ansell’s instrument! Younger audience members especially were agog throughout, relishing every outlandish squawk, crash, rustle and roar!

Still more surprise came with Mily Balakirev’s setting of a Chopin Etude (Op.25 No.7), Rolf Gjelsten’s ‘cello greatly relishing being given the piece’s original left-hand melody, and the other three instruments the right-handed figurations – all very Baroque-ish in spirit, if more Romantic in character. After this came a return to “original” string-quartet material, with Gareth Farr’s wonderful “Mambo Rambo”. The last movement of a String Quartet titled “Mondo Rondo”, the music has a definite exotic flavour – the composer has described the music as “like a drunk at a dinner party”, ie, continually falling over itself. Given the marked Middle-Eastern ambiences of the piece, the music certainly sounded if not drunk, at least high on hashish!

An interval allowed us some pleasant breathing-space before we were summonsed back to listen to Puccini’s lovely “Crisantemi” (Chrysanthemums). Written in 1890, the writing readily evoked the world of operatic duetting between soprano and tenor – in fact Puccini reused some of the material in his opera Manon Lescaut, written three years afterwards. More cheerful and lively was Schubert’s youthful String Quartet D.87, a work that I happened to know well, with its lovely opening echo-like phrase-endings and lyrical sequences which followed. The Scherzo featured a po-faced opening octave-plunge, and a cheeky, single, vagrant Haydnesque note, a kind of “ready now?” gesture, just before the beginning of each new paragraph, as well as a gorgeous “gondola-song” trio, filled with feeling.

I thought the “father of the string quartet” had a hand in the gorgeously played slow movement as well – here, elegance combined with song over the opening paragraphs, while repeated-note sequences tightened the piece’s tensions over the central sequences. But the finale capped off the pleasure for me –  a wonderful “cross-country chase”, with all kinds of terrain, gentle and angular, making its mark on the music’s rhythmic trajectories – in this performance the repeated-note sequences had real “point”, a physicality that readily suggested the character of that rhythmic progress, its territory and attendant delights and surprises.

Came the Barber “Adagio”, with the Quartet’s playing bringing forward as much angst as sorrow and reflectiveness – here, I felt the solo-part individual voices somehow had more tension and focus than in the more “cushioned” string orchestra version that I’ve gotten used to. Only with those searing near-stratospheric lines at the climax did I remember the sound produced by a string orchestra having anything like the intensity of a performance such as this. At a concert it was the kind of thing which required something else to come to our immediate emotional rescue (as Helene Pohl said immediately afterwards – “Well we can’t leave you feeling like that!”) – and Dvorak’s music was just the job.

This was a Waltz, listed as Op.54 No.2, a rousing, declamatory violin solo at the beginning getting the dance under way with an energetic whirl and a flourish! – what charm, what gaiety! – “an expression of joy close to tears” wrote one commentator of the Bohemian composer’s music, and this waltz was no exception, one to which the players gave their all, and roused our spirits to a state of joyous exhilaration. But that wasn’t all! – what Helene Pohl called a “bonus track” was thereupon served up to us for our “outward bound” delight, a piece by Natalie Hunt called “Data Entry Groove”, music which required the players to undertake certain stretching exercises while waiting for their turn to play, just as computer programmers would periodically do to avoid stress, fatigue and repetitive strain injury!

The piece was quirky, jazzy and entirely therapeutic, and a gift for Rolf Gjelsten, whose “star turn” on the ‘cello was acknowledged, jazz-solo style, by Helene Pohl, and by appropriate and responsive  applause. It left all of us in an excellent and energized frame of mind, perhaps putting back a lot of what the previous day’s General Election would have drained away, one way or another. Thank goodness for music in times of national crisis – but more to the point, thank goodness for the New Zealand String Quartet! – we were truly appreciative of the various skills and communicative warmth of the players, bestowing on us what seemed like a string of exquisite gifts, entirely for our pleasure.

 

NZSM’s “A Night at the Opera” generates a feast

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Arias, Ensembles and Scenes from Opera
performed by the NZSM Classical Voice Students

Katrina Brougham, Alicia Cadwgan, Emma Carpenter, Declan Cudd, Georgia Fergusson
Jospeh Haddow, Elyse Hemara, Jamie Henare, Rebecca Howan, Luana Howard
Rebecca Howie, Hannah Jones, Brooks Kershaw, Aluapei Kolopeaua, Priya Makwana
Olivia Marshall, William McElwee Katherine McEndoe, Nino Raphael, Tess Robinson
Olivia Sheat, Daniel Sun, Christian Thurston, Shayna Tweed, Luka Venter.

Director: Frances Moore
Music Director: Mark Dorrell
Repetiteur: Heather Easting
Designer: Alexander Guillot
Lighting: Lisa Maule

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

Friday 19th September 2014

Earlier last week I had the good fortune to catch Radio NZ Concert’s “Upbeat” interview with Margaret Medlyn, one of the tutors of Classical Voice at the NZ School of Music in Wellington. She spoke about the then oncoming “Night at the Opera” presentation involving the voice students and featuring arias and ensembles from well-known operas and operettas. She said that the concert’s semi-staged aspect with costumes and lighting was especially valuable for the younger students, as it gave them a chance to experience a theatrical context in which to perform and to put into practice what they had been studying. But she also thought that all the performers as well as the audience would relish the theatrical aspects of the presentation, adding value and interest to the musical experience.

The presentation was in the capable hands of director Frances Moore, a former first-class-honours student at the School of Music here, and subsequently a Fulbright Scholar at New York University, while working as an assistant director with the Manhattan School of Music’s Summer programme. She’s returned to New Zealand to continue studies at Toi Whakaari, and pursue a career as a director of opera. Here, she certainly made the most of the depth and diverse range of talents among the student performers, encouraging them to relish their opportunities by singing out and giving themselves up entirely to their characters and their interactions. She was aided and abetted by Alexandra Guillot’s inventive set and costume designs, and Lisa Maule’s very appropriate, on-the-spot (sic) lighting, both helping to bring the different scenarios of each item to life.

I’d recently attended and much enjoyed “Der Rosenkavalier” in a “scaled-down” performance edition out at Days Bay, courtesy of music director Michael Vinten, so I was more than usually receptive to the similar treatment accorded tonight’s items – the normally orchestral accompaniments were by turns brilliantly realized by pianists Mark Dorrell and Heather Easting, giving the singers, whether solo or in ensemble, complete security of support at all times, the playing’s energy and sense of fun creating many delightful and alchemic moments. I couldn’t see the pianist(s) from where I was sitting in the Adam Concert Room, but I understood that Heather Easting provided the Britten, Mozart, Donizetti and Puccini accompaniments.

Technically, the items went with a hiss and a roar, with only a handful of unsynchronised ensemble moments disturbing the flow, and which the performers simply pulled together again with confidence and élan. The concert began with an excerpt from Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, sung in English, and designated as “Act One – finale” in the programme – as I later found, trying to pinpoint that same sequence on a “complete” recording I had of the operetta led to all kinds of discrepancies and confusions which suggested that the work had been mercilessly “hacked about” over the years, and with all kinds of “performing editions” emerging from the fracas. Comparing notes on this matter with Mark Dorrell a day or so later considerably relieved my confusion, and restored my faith in my ears!

The gods as presented here were a rum lot, indeed, with delightfully ungodlike characteristics shining forth for all to savour – each singer relished his or her opportunities, most notably Alicia Cadwgan’s delightfully kittenish Diana and Christian Thurston’s suitably machoistic Jupiter, the perfect foil for the suave Pluto of Declan Cudd, whose manner, apart from his highest notes, was easeful and insinuating, causing a sonorous and forthright rebellion among the ranks of Olympus’s celestial inhabitants! It made me long to see and hear a performance of the complete work, whatever the edition and its corruptions and inconsistencies!

From the fripperies of Offenbach’s satire to the stark realities of Britten’s “Peter Grimes” was a quantum leap for the sensibilities, a “plunge-bath after a sauna” effect, whose marked contrast worked extremely well. This was the quartet sequence “From the gutter” from Act Two of the opera, showcasing the voices of Olivia Marshall, Hannah Jones, Rebecca Howan, and, as Ellen Orford, Katherine McEndoe. Olivia Marshall in particular, as Auntie, impressed with the beauty and steadiness of her line, ably supported by her nieces Hannah Jones and Rebecca Howan; while Katherine McEndoe as Ellen engaged our attention with her strength and focus of utterance. The voices in ensemble readily conveyed that stricken, passionate quality called for by the music – beauty of a disturbing, intensely-wrought kind.

Intensities of a different order were generated by the Act One “Padlock” Scene from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, leading to those exchanges between Tamino and Papageno and the Three Ladies that must be among the most beautiful of all operatic moments. First we had Luka Venter as Papageno with his powers of speech bound by enchantment, his frustration and eventual relief at being released warmly and amusingly conveyed. The Three Ladies, Shanya Tweed, Elyse Hemara and Georgia Fergusson, were terrific! – in fact, a little too much so, in fact, as they needed more light and shade, more ease in their singing – but they were still admirably focused, direct and transfixing in their impact.

Declan Cudd as Tamino, along with Luka Venter, his Papageno, gave us a bit more of the lightness of touch that the music needed – but I was waiting (as I always do) for that lump-in-throat moment begun by the wind instruments in complete performances of the opera, when the women sing about the Three Boys who will guide Tamino and Papageno along their appointed journey. Here, I thought the utterances from all concerned were too rushed, wanting the air and space which would generate a certain “charged” quality, as if, for a moment, creation had paused to witness here a kind of celestial laying-on of hands. The scene still worked its magic – and I did like the appearance of the three “Knaben” high up in the balcony at that point, opening the vistas in a way that the music so beautifully suggests.

I was delighted that we got the chorus “Comes a train of little ladies”  from Sullivan’s “The Mikado” as well as the “Three Little Maids from School” – in the opening chorus the voices truly caught that sense of rapturous wonderment at the words “And we wonder, how we wonder….”, with marvellous surges of tone, and a beautiful dying fall at the end. It was the perfect foil for the “three little maids”, Hannah Jones’s Yum-Yum strong and focused, but the others (Katherine McEndoe and Rebecca Howan) closely in attendance. Their three-pronged exuberance  mischievously nudged and poked at the figure of the bemused Pooh-Bah, who declined (perhaps by way of protesting a little too much!) to “dance and sing” as the three girls confessed (“So, please you Sir, we much regret”) they were, by nature, apt to do. Jamie Henare, strong-voiced as Pooh Bah, had a fine time not quite completely evading their clutches!

The first-half closer, appropriately enough the finale of Act One of Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia”, was an ambitious piece of singing and staging which, thanks to plenty of energy, wit and engaging vocal characterisation, backed up by strongly-focused direction and presentation, came across to us most entertainingly. William McElwee’s Count Almaviva was delightful, dramatically outlandish and vocally sweet, if just a bit coloratura-shy in places, while Brooks Kershaw’s Bartolo/Barbaro/Bertoldo responded with plenty of appropriate puzzlement and stupefaction at the count’s appearance as a drunken soldier. Alicia Cadwgan’s Rosina charmed us from the beginning with her quicksilver responses regarding the “letter business”, the characters readily catching the “spin” of the composer’s interactions in their adroitly-dovetailed ensemble.

The arrival of Figaro (Christian Thurston), along with Don Basilio (Jamie Henare) and Berta (Tess Robinson) properly galvanised things to the point where the police were called, and an exciting, tarantella-like ensemble swept us all along, emotions bubbling, simmering and seething with everything ranging from pleasure to bewilderment, ensemble thrills and spills treated as part of the experience. As its riotous way unfolded we were thoroughly engaged by the goings-on – I don’t think the most polished professional presentation could have given us more pleasure than we got here from these exuberant and fearless young performers!

A different kind of sophistication awaited us after the interval with Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music”, the scenario allowing Emma Carpenter’s voice to shine as Anne, both solo, and combining nicely in duet with Alicia Cadwgan’s Petra. Hannah Jones turned in an alluring Desiree, while as a couple Christian Thurston’s robust Carl-Magnus and Tess Robinson’s stratospheric Charlotte also gave pleasure. The performance caught the piece’s essentially “chic” surface nature while allowing us glimpses of the characters beneath the precarious facades – most enjoyable.

“Donizetti’s wonderful Don Pasquale” read the programme-note, and the music certainly lived up to the effusive introduction – this was a committed, no-holds-barred performance of the duet “Tornami a dir” (Tell me once more), which the composer styled as a “nocturne”, performed by Declan Cudd and Olivia Marshall. The former’s tone was freer and fuller in his lower register, though none of his high passages were shirked – while his opposite, Olivia Marshall, brought a confident and secure voice to the music given Norina, his sweetheart. For me, at any rate, the couple’s fervour and commitment easily carried the day.

Back to Mozart and his “Magic Flute” we went, this time with the Three Boys (Olivia Sheat, Luana Howard and Rebecca Howie) very much in vocal focus, delightfully attired in “Davy Crockett from Bavaria” style hats, and turning their tones in well-wrought ensemble towards dissuading Pamina from taking her life over her Prince Tamino’s apparent rejection of their love. As with the excerpt from “Peter Grimes” Katherine McIndoe impressed upon the memory with her focused commitment to the character, conveying her confused emotions with plenty of force and immediacy.

I thought the Rossini ensemble as we saw and heard just before the interval would be hard to beat, but the company at least matched its earlier achievement with the evening’s concluding item, a colourful and heartfelt delivery of the Waltz-Song and Soldiers’ March from Act Two of Puccini’s “La Boheme”. It all came vibrantly together – Tess Robinson’s appealing Musetta floated the insinuations of her melody quite irresistibly, at first angering her estranged lover, Marcello (Christian Thurston), and then winning him back over, to the annoyance of her elderly escort  Alcindoro (a lovely cameo from Nino Raphael), and the amusement of the watching Bohemians.

Though there wasn’t much for them to do as spectators, William McElwee’s Rodolfo and Hannah Jones’s Mimi looked and sounded lovely together, while Luca Venter’s Schaunard and Jamie Henare’s Colline amply completed the Bohemian contingent. Then as the military band approached, it was indeed “half the population of Paris” which seemed to be milling around on the stage as if on holiday, the contingent then marching off to the concluding bars of Puccini’s music in grand style.

All credit to the NZ School of Music’s Classical Voice Faculty and to the students whose performances this evening would have richly justified their tutors’ efforts – it was a great show, whose creative flair and sense of occasion lifted it far above the conventional hotch-potch method of random assemblage of  “vocal gems”, and produced something really worthwhile and memorable. I’m sure Margaret Medlyn, for one, would have been delighted.