Author: Peter Mechen

Robbie Ellis – laughter, delight and provocation for lunch…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s Lunchtime Concerts presents:
Robbie Ellis (and piano) in
“Robbie’s selection of New Zealand Music”
(more laterally styled “Robbie’s Poor-Timing” Concert)

(also with Jonathan Berkahn – piano)

St Andrew’s (never-to-be-the-same) on-the-Terrace,

Wednesday 23rd April 2014

Well, I simply didn’t know what to expect! I first got wind of the concert via our Middle C “Coming Events” Calendar, and was duly and unanimously voted by our erstwhile critics’ team as “just the man for the job” re a review……preparing myself for literally “anything” (as Harry “Snapper” Organs, the resident detective-sergeant of the Monty Python TV series used to do re his criminal enquiries by reading the colour supplements) I tore myself away from my other unfinished, “bleeding at the edges” projects when the time came, and presented my somewhat dishevelled self at the outwardly respectable venue of St.Andrew’s.

On the performing platform was a piano, with a microphone of some kind set up alongside the keyboard – nothing else! As for Robbie Ellis, when I looked around, there he was, sitting among one of the groups of people making up the audience (gradually and steadily being added to, I must report), as if he was waiting for some kind of “alter ego” or doppelgänger to appear and through various alchemic gestures make the word flesh, as it were. Contrary to my expectations, which feature mental images of performers psyching themselves up to extraordinary heights of mental and spiritual intensity immediately prior to performing, here was Robbie shamelessly dissipating it all in what seemed like cheery conversation!

But the transformation when he stood up and literally launched himself at his particular fach (I’ve wanted to use that word for ages, even though it isn’t QUITE right!) with no thought for his own personal safety, was truly startling. Dispensing with social niceties in a flash he was suddenly at the piano and into a musical introduction to the concert before we all quite knew what was happening – a wonderful kind of “patter-song” in the style of “Gilbert and Sullivan meeting Tom Lehrer”, the lyrics a literal fusillade of sounds as remarkable for their energy as for their coherence –

“Overture, Concerto, Symphony –
That is what a concert ought to be!”

By way of underlining the seriousness of the venture, Robbie crowned this opening gambit with the most wondrous display of Beethovenian cadence-endings ad infinitum, a kind of horror-sequence of inconclusive conclusions, remarkable for their endless potentialities and for the energy generated by the performer. Obviously he was in primordial conflict with the creative impulse, an obstreperous Muse which fiercely fought against the impending truncation of its flow (skin and hair everywhere!), before being finally mastered. We loved him for it.

Well – that was only the beginning! – I found myself in something of a lather trying to keep up with Robbie throughout the rest of the concert – the sheer energy of the man was remarkable! For some reason I found myself thinking of the American conductor Walter Damrosch (the way people do, of course) who after conducting the orchestra in a premiere of a work by the young Aaron Copland had publicly proclaimed that the fledgling composer would, by the time he was thirty, “be capable of committing murder!”. As it was with Copland, I feel that no-one’s actual life is in danger from Robbie Ellis, but his music and no-holds-barred performances of it certainly makes its presence felt.

I won’t attempt to rival something like “War and Peace” with a descriptive saga of all the concert’s items, but will say at this point that we were whirled in the most exhilarating fashion through worlds of sentiment and satire, feeling and fripperie (Google didn’t like that word, but I kinda do), self-promotion and self-deprecation. By way of relieving the intensities of the musical outpourings, Robbie proffered at intervals news of “forthcoming attractions” alerting us to things like “Augmented Fourth” (Robbie’s collaboration with comedian Sam Smith scheduled for the New Zealand International Comedy Festival), and a “numbers-written-while-u-wait” gig called “Song Sale”, after each announcement  proceeding to illustrate the “kind of thing I mean” with the next, engrossing item.

I liked the “How Many Legs?” song, about a dancing centipede (the music suggests the Folies Bergère), its “which leg comes after which?” aspect underlined by its presto/prestissimo ending, a commission for a “Song Sale” by way of demonstration. Born of the same impulse was the hyper-impassioned “Love is a four-letter word” (an Anthony Rirchie request,incidentally), containing many a raunchy suggestive variation upon the old Mitch Miller standard “Sweet Violets”.  And Robbie’s first book-publication venture “The Eketahuna German Literature Society” was celebrated with what seemed like an impromptu performance from him of Schumann’s “Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai” from Dichterliebe, sung with appropriate raw feeling (a truly euphemistic experience!), an English “reading-between-the-lines-rendering” of the original verses which followed revealing Heine’s (and Schumann’s) hitherto unsuspected Antipodean sympathies.

Which brings me to those portals upon which are enshrined the words “Hall of Fame” through which Robbie may yet pass and join the Immortals, on the strength of heart-warming deeply-rooted utterances like “Manners Mall Emo Song” – though not quite murder, nevertheless a song of true and heartfelt geographic displacement by which no Wellingtonian, either indigenous or aspiring, would fail to be rocked, to the very core. “The City Council’s lost their Manners” here outlandishly rides tandem with “They put a bus lane through my heart”, concluding the lament with a Dennis Glover-like utterance, “Now I guess I’ll just have to go home back to Johnsonville” – perhaps not penned with quite the ease of that word-master’s evocation of penguins at Plimmerton, but along the same, heartfelt lines. Our places, our experiences, after all!

There was more – Robbie’s flailing net snagged many a passing fish, including fearsome creatures of antiquity such as the subject of “Racist Grandma Blues”, the song a bigot’s compendium of stereotypical prejudices,  whose evocations involved the performer’s right heel activating the piano keys at one point, risking apoplexy, internal or otherwise, on the part of any (other) pianist present. The unaccompanied “BASS” (actually written by Corwin Newall) enumerated the perils of unalloyed enjoyment of bass frequencies, while another song (composed in the “Disney” style, we were told) dwelt on the fleeting joys and grinding sorrows of wish-fulfilment fantasy, a “Where’s My Hero?” outpouring of tragic tones.

Robbie’s final scene brought pianist Jonathan Berkahn out from the audience to assist with the serving of “Root Vegetable Opera”, a mouth-watering description of the gestation, preparation and presentation of a meal of tubers of diverse kinds, whose peroration was marked by a throwing-open of the piano lid to allow cornucopian excess before the final sotto voce disappointment of “grand schemes unfulfilled” silenced the tumult and ended the concert with a proverbial whimper.

Delight upon all of our faces there was, as well as chuckles among conversations, and the occasional springing in the steps as we departed – so to Robbie Ellis, many more songs and gestures, grandiloquent, heartfelt and intimate – a good deal of the pleasure this time round was certainly ours!

Just for the record, this was the programme (courtesy of the composer) –

– Symphony No 1 in Eb Op π
– Wellington Jaywalkers Song
– How Many Legs (music by Offenbach, lyrics by Robbie E. and Tegan McKegg)
– Love is a Four-Letter Word (NB: commissioned at a Song Sale by Anthony Ritchie)
– Sheepdog Plainchant
– Manners Mall Emo Song
– Im wunderschönen Monat Mai (music by Schumann, lyrics by Heine and Robbie E.)
– Racist Grandma Blues
– Lollipop Socket Wrench
– BASS (by Corwin Newall)
– This Is So Hard (by Sam Smith)
– Root Vegetable Opera

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RNZ Ballet’s Coppélia – evening of delight and fantasy

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Royal New Zealand Ballet presents:
Léo Delibes’ COPPÉLIA

Cast:  Lucy Green (Swanhilde) / Kohei Iwamoto (Franz)
Sir Jon Trimmer (Dr. Coppélius) / Katherine Grange (Ima)
Joseph  Skelton (Zoltan) / Jarrah McArthur (Coppélia)
Paul Mathews (Limbless)

Royal New Zealand Ballet
Orchestra Wellington

Choreographer: Martin Vedel
Ballet Mistress: Turid Revfeim
Lighting: Jason Morphett
Conductor: Nigel Gaynor

St.James’ Theatre, Wellington

Thursday 17th April, 2014

Even if one didn’t know anything about the origins of the works involved, it’s a simple matter to figure out links between Delibes’ wonderful ballet Coppélia, and another French work for the stage, Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffman (The Tales of Hoffman) – each work contains references to mechanical dolls made to masquerade as human beings.

In fact both works drew elements of their scenarios from the same source, which was ETA Hoffmann’s sinister story Der Sandmann, written in 1816, which presented a darker side to a well-known benign character called The Sandman, who traditionally throws sand into the eyes of children to help them go to sleep. Hoffmann’s “Sandmann” is Coppélius, who fashions and conducts experiments with automated figures, which are used by the doctor to cause havoc among lovers and undermine various people’s sense of reality and identity.

Coppélia is a much-simplified version of Hoffmann’s convolutions – a village boy, Franz, becomes enamoured of Coppélia, a girl who sits every day at the upstairs window of a house owned by Dr. Coppélius, an eccentric recluse. Franz is actually engaged to Swanhilde, a village girl, but can’t help his fascination with the beautiful Coppélia, who takes no notice of him or of anybody else, whatever.

During an altercation with several of the young men in the town, Dr, Coppélius unwittingly drops his house-key, which Swanhilde then finds and, with several of her friends, sneaks into his house to find out more about the haughty beauty Coppélia. She’s followed, a few moments later, by Franz, who climbs a ladder put up to Coppélia’s window, anxious for a closer look at the girl who has captured his admiration.

The action proceeds from there in somewhat bizarre fashion, involving the doctor’s sudden return, and Swanhilde’s assuming the identity of Coppélia, who is nothing but an automaton created and assembled by Dr.Coppélius. At one point several of the other mechanical dolls created by Coppélius are activated, allowing Swanhilde in the ensuing confusion to rescue Franz, who had been rendered insensible by drinking too freely the “refreshments” offered by one of the automatons.

At the scene’s conclusion Dr, Coppélius, who had thought Swanhilde’s movements while disguised as the beautiful Coppélia were the triumphant result of his efforts to bring his creation truly to life, is left brokenheartedly clutching his lifeless mannequin as the lovers make their escape amid the chaos and mayhem. The remainder of the action is largely devoted to the wedding of Swanhilde and her – somewhat chastened – Franz.

This latest Royal New Zealand Ballet production presented something of a tale of two worlds, the commonplace, everyday village scenario of the first and third acts contrasted with the phantasmagorical world of the second act, inside the house of Dr.Coppélius. Perhaps the intention was to highlight the impact of that latter, nightmarish sequence of happenings by a conventional, almost low-key approach to the outer acts – pitting the Ordinary against the Fabulous, or some similar kind of idea.

Though effective in that respect, it did have the consequence of underplaying the edge of several of the First- and Third-Act movements and sequences, as if anything full-blooded might “upstage” the impact of that Second Act. A pity, because the music gives several wonderful opportunities for dancers to “take us places” even within the confines of ordinary everyday village life, let alone with any exotic arrivals or disruptive elements that add colour and variation.

One noticed this in places during Act One, such as during the Csardas, with the “friss” or fast section for me failing to truly ignite the smoldering embers promisingly piled up by the gypsy dancers in their opening manoeuvres. The Hungarian/gypsy contingent made a wonderful initiaI impact with striking costumes and strong movements during the music’s sultry “lassu” sections – but even so, I was particularly disappointed that little was made of the music’s numerous szforzandi written by Delibes, which surely cried out for some kind of dynamic physical gesture or response from the stage. And while I’m by no means an expert regarding gypsy-dance, I thought some of the jumps in the music’s concluding sequence seemed too buffoon-like, out of keeping with the haughty and imperious manner of the group’s arrival.

But elsewhere, it was the principals, Swanhilda (danced most winningly by Lucy Green) and Franz (ably characterized by Kohei Iwamoto) who made the most of their solo and interactive opportunities. From Swanhilde’s first entrance one noted the “inner life” of her movements, and the naturalness of her acting, with both physical gestures and with the eyes – both her and Kohei Iwamoto seemed to connect with their movements, gesturing and looks, so that their physical contact had a proper “organic” feel to it, an emotional rightness to their partnership.

Their partner-foils, Ima and Zoltan, danced by Katherine Grange and Joseph Skelton respectively, gave us some beautifully-crafted solos and pas de deux during the Slavonic Variations music. Here, the orchestra-playing, so vigorous and sprightly during the opening Mazurka and Waltz, was more variable, with both beautiful violin and wind solos and the occasional patch of scrawny string-phrasing – but the players quickly made amends with the dynamic Csardas, conductor Nigel Gaynor getting a full-blooded and exciting response from the pit.

However, Act Two, within Coppélius’ house, was another world entirely – compelling and hypnotic in its haunted, dream-like ambience and sense of a kind of “separate reality”. In the midst of the stasis was Paul Mathews’ amazingly-realised “Limbless” a writhing, physically osmotic figure whose convolutions at once repelled and compelled our sympathy for the mute, convulsive creature. The other mannequins all exuded a marvellous dual-aspect of lifeless unease, each one with its particular and distinctive potential for as-yet unactivated macabre mischief.

Central to the unreality was the figure of the doll-like Coppélia, and the half-crazed, half-calculating persona of the doctor. As Coppélia, Jarrah McArthur’s precise, automaton-like movements were expertly done, and a marked contrast to those of Sir Jon Trimmer’s Coppélius, all agitation and part-arthritic-part-obsessive impulse, a figure to be pitied as much as censured. No less remarkable was Lucy Green’s impersonation of Coppélia, completing a stunning tableaux of expressionist-like figures.

I thought that Coppélius’s attempts to draw life from the body of Franz – here tricked into a drunken stupor with the help of an amazing “mine host” automaton – and transfer to the figure of Coppélia, were somewhat diffusely rendered by the “dumb-show” transplanting which the Doctor enacted.  I imagined something more “mad-scientist-like” (using something along the lines of, say, Mesmer’s magnet) could have better-conveyed the disturbing nature, even the horror, of the idea. Still, the activation of all the automatons by Swanhilde and the recovered Franz, leaving the distraught Doctor clutching his lifeless doll-figure, produced a real frisson of anarchic activity, with brilliant and incisive orchestral-playing completing the chaotic picture of despair and release at the Act’s conclusion.

After this, Act Three couldn’t help but be somewhat underwhelming, though necessarily functioning as a kind of unravelling of tensions, such as depicting the marriage of Swanhilde and Franz. As a series of divertissements it was, however, entrancing, with exquisite dancing from the principals, and lovely orchestral detail – beautifully rustic oboe-playing at one point, festively resplendent brass at another, and a gorgeous viola solo at La Paix – though the production didn’t underline the music’s depiction of Strife and Discord with any “darker” choreographic elements – an opportunity for some colour and excitement not taken?

Small dreams of what could-have-been, these, compared with the feeling of gratitude and satisfaction at what the RNZ Ballet, together with the Orchestra Wellington, was able to achieve for us. Sterling work from choreographer Martin Vedel, Ballet Mistress Turid Revfeim, lighting designer Jason Morphett and conductor Nigel Gaynor gave us a delightful and wondrous evening’s entertainment.

 

“Body Beautiful” excites, awe-inspires, and charms as a life’s occupation is celebrated.

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Koki – New Zealand School of Music presents:
BODY BEAUTIFUL – a tribute to Jack Body in his 70th year

Saetas  (string quartet and accordion)
A House in Bali  (narrator, accordion, string quartet and gamelan gong keybar)
Yunnan Sketches  (string quartet, guitar, tape)
Songs My Grandmother Sang  (voices, piano, string quartet)

New Zealand String Quartet
Ross Harris (accordion) / Richard Greager (baritone) / Margaret Medlyn (soprano)
Christopher Hill (guitar) / Jack Body (narrator)

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University of Wellington

Monday 14th April, 2014

Jack Body celebrates his 70th birthday this year – and he’s determined to make the most of this particular anniversary, helped by warmth, acclaim and gratitude from the many people he’s come into contact with over the years as a teacher, composer, author, publisher and general advocate for the music of this country in both a Pacific and world-wide context.

This particular concert, appropriately titled “Body Beautiful” took place in Victoria University of Wellington’s Adam Concert Room under the auspices of the New Zealand School of Music. The music for three-quarters of the concert presented aspects of the composer’s fruitful relationship with the New Zealand String Quartet, before finishing, just as heartwarmingly, but in a completely different sound-world, with Body’s Songs My Grandmother Sang.

Preferring to talk with his audience rather than supply written program notes for each of the items, Body was in his usual excellent form as a communicator, giving us a real sense of process and context as well as a description of each of the “end product” in relation to the music we heard.

First up in the program was Saetas, which was a NZSQ commission dating from 2002. Body explained that he had at the time been exploring a genre of music associated with religious feasts held during Holy Week in Spain, semi-improvised, highly ornamented songs derived from the flamenco tradition. These songs, sometimes unaccompanied, sometimes using a strong drum-beat as a kind of pulse, were often associated with a quejío, or lament, a kind of cry sung as a phrase during the course of a single breath.

Body accentuated the “lament” aspect of these songs in his transcriptions in different ways. In both the first and last pieces a kind of “quejío” was exclaimed by the musicians at the beginning. But also, in the opening song Body took aspects of pieces by both Tchaikovsky and Hugo Wolf cast in a similar expressive vein and worked certain of these figurations and gestures into the music’s fabric. Fragments of both the “Pathetique” Symphony’s finale and a song from Hugo Wolf’s “Spanish Songbook” gave a strangely familiar, dreamlike flavour to the scope of the sounds, throwing their familiar contexts open to the wider world of human angst and suffering.

To my ears the music in the first piece in general seemed to take on a kind of Russian sound in places, moments featuring sweet, open-air harmonies, a sound I associate particularly with Borodin in some of his chamber music. But this could be mere fancy on my part as could also be a reminiscence I heard earlier in the piece of one of Wagner’s rising phrases associated with the flooding of the Rhine waters from “Gotterdammerung”.

The other three pieces saw ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten relinquish his normal instrument for the accordion, a change which accentuated the biting rhythmic accents of the next of the Saetas, a piece with string see-sawings and squeeze-box crunchings, the viola playing a Moorish tune in the middle of it all. The following piece had stuttering and stammering strings set against long-breathed cluster chords from the accordion. The viola played a chant suggesting something ancient, the violins echoing the notes and gradually tapering off as the viola continued, the accordion keeping in ambient touch with things.

Again the instrumentalists gave voice to the music’s feelings at the beginning of the final piece, reinforcing the anguish with foot-stampings, though varying the dynamics so as to make things antiphonal-sounding. As the strings clustered their tones around a driving, beating rhythm, the accordion played a kind of melodic counterpoint, adding to the ever-increasing texturings of the sounds – biting accents, fierce glisssandi and running scales all drove the music onwards as the players’ stamping feet beat out the pulsations to incredibly exciting effect!

Next on the program, A House in Bali combined several strands of diverse activity. First there was Jack Body himself reading exerpts from writings by Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer turned ethnomusicologist, based on his experiences in Bali during the 1930s, and describing vignettes of Balinesque village life. Incidentally, the actual house McPhee lived in was subsequently inhabited, for a short time, by the pianist Lili Kraus, before she was incarcerated for a time during the war by the Japanese.

But the piece’s chief musical feature was its “jointly-composed” aspect, Body responsible for writing the quartet and accordion contributions and the Gamelan composer and orchestra leader Wayan Gde Yudane writing the pre-recorded Balinese gamelan orchestra music. Strings and accordion (the latter played here by Body’s fellow-composer, Ross Harris) took their cues from the gamelan sounds, allowing the speaker intervals of sufficient ambient space for his words to be heard by the audience.

Body had said in an earlier interview that the rehearsals of this piece for this performance had been hair-raising, because the gamelan group in Bali seemed to him to have set much faster tempi than when it was played here previously by the New Zealand ensemble. Parts of the opening did sound rather like a kind of Balinese hoe-down, though the music’s breathless pace let up sufficiently for the mood to allow some lovely exchanges between the two quite different worlds of sounds, strings and accordion on one hand and the gamelan group on the other.

I thought the gamelan sounds extraordinary – a magic and resonant world! The scenes described by McPhee’s words were distinctive – firstly a cricket duel, with the creatures suitably prepared for the fray, like a kind of ritual battle with music. Another evocation was Nyepi, the yearly day of silence (I enjoyed the words “demons pass by, thinking the village deserted”), the seeming emptiness underpinned by lonely, isolated strands of “snake-charmer” melody from the instruments. More animated was a vignette described by McPhee of pigeons with bells tied to their legs flying around in tintinabulating flocks – the gradual diminuendo of sounds as the birds disappeared was extremely effective.

China was the focus for the next work on the program, a piece which was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet in 2007, called Yunnan Sketches. The first was Bouyi, a duet setting, using a tape Body had made of two women singing, one which the composer described as “initially discordant” but whose harmonic rigours were softened by the instrumental accompaniments. I found the results hauntingly beautiful. The other two reworkings, “Bai” and “Lahu”, were each very different – the first rhythmic and syncopated, a solo viola mixing pizzicato with arco, creating a sequence that Stravinsky would have appreciated for its angularity. Finally, “Lahu” featured Christopher Hill’s guitar, interestingly, but not altogether successfully, I thought, as the instrument almost completely lacked the plangency one associates normally with oriental stringed instruments – this sounded too much to my ears like a tourist in a foreign land who’d wandered off the beaten track….

As if further evidence of Body’s versatility as a composer was needed, the concert concluded with a sometimes piquant, sometimes droll-humoured item, made up of three of the set of Songs My Grandmother Sang, performed here by Richard Greager, Margaret Medlyn and pianist Jian Liu (with audience participation in the final song “All Through the Night” encouraged by the composer!).

The composer took the songs from an album which he recalled was a favorite songbook of his grandmother’s at the family home in Te Aroha. He spoke briefly about his youthful distaste for sentimentality and his efforts to avoid it at all costs in his own music – though he then admitted, rather like Noel Coward once remarking on “the potency of cheap music”, that he’d since discovered “something about it”. He added, a little ruefully, that, though his father didn’t really care for his arrangements of the songs, he had an uncle who did like them very much.

Tenor Richard Greager led off with “Two Little Girls in Blue”, a song whose words brought forth wry grins at the convolutions of the age-old “eternal triangle” situation – one here with a bit of a difference – “and one little girl in blue, lad / who won your father’s heart / became your mother, I married the other / but now we have drifted apart….”. Rather like Benjamin Britten’s piano accompaniments for his folk-song settings, these began by supporting the tune, but then seemed to do their best to try and destabilize it – at a previous concert at which I heard these songs performed, the pianist on that occasion, Bruce Greenfield, affectionately described the accompaniments as “quite mad”!

Having enjoyed Richard Greager we were now treated to the rich, balladic tones of Margaret Medlyn, singing Body’s setting of “Genevieve” – a wonderful “open” accompaniment took flight along with the singer’s excitingly vertiginous vocal line and the help of the string quartet, which joined in with the music throughout the last verse, the tones at the end oscillating upwards and disappearing.

With the third song came the audience’s chance to make its presence really felt – a grand, chordal accompaniment supported both singers and the quartet players, while, after each introductory couplet massed voices were raised on high with the words “All through the night”. The instrumental building blocks of sound supported the melodic line beautifully, and it was left to pianist Jian Liu to play a brief, rapt chordal postlude, which he did, before reverting to a clipped “that’s it, folks!” manner for the final chord.

Very great acclamation for the composer at the concert’s end, from fellow-performers and audience alike. There’s evidently an Auckland concert coming up (30th April) at the University, featuring different repertoire to what we heard tonight. One can only wish Jack Body all the best for this concert and for further fulfilments of exploration, engagement and completion by the year’s end.  To you, Jack, every possible satisfaction and a richly-wrought sense of fulfillment on the occasion of your 70th birthday and the completion of a remarkable year.

 

 

Splendour and Strife from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

BORODIN – Overture “Prince Igor” / BRUCH – Violin Concerto No.1 in G Minor
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.5 in E MInor Op.64

Simeon Broom (violin)
Rachel Hyde (conductor)

St Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 13th April

There’s something about Russian music which makes for a kind of instant combustion of attraction for the listener – it’s a combination of energy, colour, feeling and fantasy that intoxicates the senses, so that other, more abstract considerations seem irrelevant in the midst of all the excitement. And yet, when you force yourself to stop thinking “wow!” and concentrate on “how?” you find the music possesses its own logic of design and advances its own priorities with the kind of sure-footed certainty and vision that marks out great and distinctive art.

But there’s the case of this particular Russian composer whom I’m thinking about, where he was too preoccupied with his other interests and activities to actually get whole sections of his works properly completed –  what’s remarkable is that his music, as completed by his colleagues after his death, still possessed these aforementioned qualities in abundance, for goodness’s sakes! You’d be right in thinking that it’s Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) whom I’m referring to, though if you hadn’t glanced at the review’s heading you might have spared a thought for Modeste Musorgsky, another Russian composer for whom life even more seriously got in the way of music, with a number of compositions having to be “edited” after he died, a self-ravaged dipsomaniac.

One could say that the music of Borodin shares a lot of characteristics in common with that of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, fellow-composer-colleague, so that the effect of having the latter work on the former’s music for much of the time resembles the “rescue operation” activities of a kind of posthumous “alter ego”. But because Borodin’s music emerges from these rejuvenations sounding practically as much like Borodin as do the original, completed works, it suggests a uniquely-focused creative spirit was at work, one whose music with its distinctive harmonic and lyrical qualities has the mark of a genius.

So it is with the Overture to Borodin’s unfinished opera “Prince Igor” – both Rimsky-Korsakov and another composer-colleague, Alexander Glazunov completed the composer’s unfinished sketches of parts of the opera, with the latter taking on the job of reconstructing the Overture. Glazunov himself recorded that he composed the music “roughly according to Borodin’s plan”, using themes from other parts of the opera and from associated fragments. He modestly admitted that “a few bars at the very end were composed by me”, though, as with the rest of the reconstructions, the spirit of Borodin seems to shine out of every episode.

You could hear that distinctive voice immediately make its presence felt in the opening bars of the Overture which began the Wellington Chamber Orchestra’s first concert of the 2014 season. Conductor Rachel Hyde asked for and got a dark, rich sound from her players at the outset, the strings digging deep and the winds, though not perfectly in accord with their tuning, still bringing out that curious blend of splendor and plangency so characteristic of Russian music. I noticed that, for this concert, the brass and some of the percussion were brought out of the recessed altar area at the top of the steps, and into the more open performing-space, with a much more integrated, rounded-sound effect, to my untutored ears, than in previous orchestral concerts.

Though both winds and strings stumbled at the beginning of that trickily syncopated second subject melody, the playing brought out plenty of the music’s rhythmic excitement throughout – what a fine time the winds had with their “galloping” rhythms in places!  I liked, also, the antiphonal calls of the brass and the sheer “presence” of the tuba at crisis-points, sensationalist that I am!  As well, the horn solo was beautifully managed and the strings replied in kind with appropriate fervour. Despite the occasional spills one had a sense of conductor and players’ properly engaging with the music’s sheer physicality, a quality that’s needed for Russian music in particular to work its magic and properly stir the blood.

The orchestra has enjoyed collaborations with some pretty amazing concerto soloists over the years, and this concert continued in that tradition, with violinist Simeon Broom giving us the evergreen G Minor Concerto by Max Bruch, something of a “calling card” for virtuoso players. Broom has recently returned to New Zealand after ten years of study and performing in Europe to take up a place in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. On this showing he can certainly lay claim to considerable accomplishment as a soloist, bringing to the music here a wonderfully burnished tone and plenty of interpretative imagination – a momentary lapse of concentration during one of the double-stopped descents in the first movement a minor blip in the otherwise fluent performance flow.

I thought the orchestral support for Broom wholehearted and finely-wrought, Rachel Hyde getting on-the-spot attack from all sections and some lovely moments of collaboration with the solo violin line. Detailings such as the winds’ series of descending phrases counterpointing the solo line leading up to the “big” tutti gave particular pleasure.

The soloist’s eloquent playing of the cadenza was superbly capped off by the orchestra’s precise attack leading to the music’s gear-change into the slow movement. Broom’s lovely spinning-out of the lyrical lines here, though not absolutely note-perfect, created a lovely frisson of feeling and  and atmosphere, one which built inexorably towards the movement’s great and glorious outpouring of heart-on-sleeve emotion, a process in which conductor and orchestra played their part lyrical and nobly.

The finale was launched strongly and expectantly by the orchestra, a touch of less-than-perfect ensemble mattering not to the argument, and advanced beautifully by the soloist with some stunning upward runs. Rachel Hyde and the players held the big moments firmly and in focus, while at the same time keeping the ebb and flow of exchange with the solo instrument vibrant. The brief and exciting coda was thrown off by all concerned with great aplomb. Altogether this was a performance which gave considerable delight to we listeners.

What seemed like sterner business was afforded by the Tchaikovsky E Minor Symphony after the interval, a work whose considerable technical and interpretative demands were bravely, if not altogether easefully, tackled by the musicians. I thought the two middle movements the most successful, each featuring some skillful solo playing and some nicely dove-tailed ensemble, as well as tremendous surgings of tone and energy when required. The outer movements each had their moments, but each I felt lacked that last ounce of energy and edge in certain other places which would have suitably invigorated the music’s overall impact.

But details such as the slow movement’s tricky horn solo, and the clarinet figurations in support were beautifully done, as was a lovely “afterglow” effect at the movement’s very end, thanks to some hushed string-playing and (again) some lovely clarinet work. And in the third-movement Waltz I loved the horns’ eerie stopped tones and the wonderfully balletic string “scurryings” and other “Nutcracker-like” gestures from the winds, so characterful and colourful.

The Symphony began well, with those dark, suggestive clarinet tones so characteristic of the composer, and some deep and sonorous lower-strings support – however, despite Rachel Hyde’s suitably “energized” tempo for the allegro, the wind players seemed to let their figurations coagulate, slowing the music’s pulse down in places, to the point of dragging. Away from the step-wise rhythm, things were more animated, the strings’ marvellously expressive tune sung fervently and the brass chiming in and tightening things up when they could. But the overall pulse of the movement for me simply lacked enough underlying forward momentum to make the music work – a question not necessarily of tempo, but as much to do with accent and phrasing, and of things being kept alive and purposeful.

The “attacca” into the last movement was, however, just the job! – and, indeed, the whole of the introduction had both girth and momentum, the conductor holding things together splendidly, though the succeeding Allegro energico’s stuttering figurations and syncopated entries led a few players momentarily astray. Brass and timpani made the most of their big “motto theme” statements, pushinging the rest of the orchestra through the vortex-moments of the development section. Matters concerning ensemble did come to a head with the reprise of those stutterings and syncopations (an extended sequence, this time!), where, in the midst of the ensuing dislocations, Rachel Hyde had to very properly stop the players and start again, most resolutely at the flash-point of the troubles! But the players grasped the nettle and made the sequence work the second time through, so honour was restored.

While the symphony didn’t consistently “fire” it had its worthwhile moments – and the playing from all concerned in the other two items did both the music and the musicians proud.

 

 

Jeffrey Grice – “interprète extraordinaire” at the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī – New Zealand School of Music presents:
Piano recital by Jeffrey Grice

Gounod / Liszt – Hymne à Sainte Cécile
Lucien Johnson – To the sea (Shimmer – Scuttle – Still)
Debussy – Estampes
Jenny McLeod – Tone Clock Piece no 5 (Vive Messiaen)
Lilburn – Sonatina No.2 / Ravel – Sonatine
Chopin – 24 Preludes Op. 28

Jeffrey Grice (piano)

Adam Concert Room, NZ School of Music,

Kelburn, Wellington

 Monday 7th April, 2014

Christchurch-born Jeffrey Grice studied with Janetta McStay and Brian Sayer at Auckland University, before winning a bursary in 1976 to study in France with Yvonne Loriod and Germaine Mounier. Since that time he has mostly lived in or been closely associated with France, though he’s kept his antipodean connections humming with regular advocacy of new works by both Australian and New Zealand composers.

Grice’s recent Adam Concert Room recital demonstrated those sympathies amply, with performances of two works which had in the past been premiered by the pianist – Lucien Johnson’s To the Sea, and Jenny McLeod’s Tone-Clock No.5 (Vive Messiaen) – as well as a more “established” piece by a New Zealand composer, Douglas Lilburn’s Sonatina No.2.

Well might this recital have been called “Living Echoes” with such things in mind – but the remainder of the programme’s items took on much the same qualities of freshness and immediacy throughout what I considered to be an evening’s remarkable music-making. One had an almost palpable sense of the pianist spontaneously reliving each of the composers’ actual creative processes, so that the music leapt, burst, burgeoned, floated, trickled or resounded from the sometimes metaphorical music-pages as if for the first time.

I imagined that what we listeners experienced was akin to the kind of playing that would have proliferated in an earlier age which more readily accepted, and, indeed, expected Beethoven’s famous attributed dictum – “the idea counts more than its execution” – to be observed in performance. Not that Grice’s actual execution of the notes was in any way deficient or insufficient in quality to realize the music – in fact, the reverse was the case, with technical gestures and processes seemingly wrought by the music at every stage, rather than simply “applied” from without. It was playing which repeatedly made one ask “why?” and “why not?”, instead of “how?”

Sensing that words are beginning to fail me, here, I shall move quickly onto the content of the actual program, some of which has already been touched upon. Whether by accident, instinct or design, Grice’s first item brought us face-to-face with a composer whose skill as a performer was regarded by many as that of one of the greatest of recreative artists of all time, Franz Liszt.

Perhaps one’s initial reaction to the latter’s “arrangement” of Charles Gounod’s violin-and-piano piece Hymne à Sainte Cécile might well be along the somewhat reproving lines of “Gounod, hi-jacked by Liszt!” – but as the energies and intensities of Liszt’s elaborations upon Gounod’s music expanded and flourished, a kind of radiance began to cast its glow over the sounds and associated resonances, a veritable beatification of the rather plain original, proclaiming the process to be the work of a genius.

I thought Grice’s playing all-encompassing in its range of expression generated not only on the saint’s, but on the composers’ behalf, from the “charged” softly-brushed fingerwork of the prayerful opening, to the orchestral grandeur of the concluding declamations. Gounod himself may have never heard the work in its Lisztian form, but he would surely have approved of its new-found expansiveness and enlargement of expression.

A marvellous contrast of mood came with New Zealand -born, sometimes French-domiciled jazz composer Lucien Johnson’s three-part work from 2007 To the Sea, with its three subtitled parts Shimmer, Scuttle, Still. The opening brought both distant and more immediate kinds of sonorities between the hands, trills and repeated notes in the treble and shifting shadow-chords in the bass, the whole enlivened occasionally by scintillations of light and energy,

Scuttle was more insistent, its agitations expressed through tremolandi and ostinati-like figurations, the patternings further energizing the harmonies and and textures, with a particularly volatile, free-wheeling right hand bringing plenty of surface excitement to the soundscape. Dramatic then, indeed, was the change to Still, everything at once cut adrift amid cool, spacious chords and occasional widely-spaced leaps, rather like fish suddenly jumping from still waters – the delicious cluster-chords amid the ambient spaces gently coloured the music’s evocations of timelessness.

One could go on enumerating the manifold delights of the recital’s remaining performances and finish up with a lengthy treatise somewhat beyond this review’s scope, one perhaps taking longer to read than the pianist took to play the music! With the exception of Grice’s revelatory presentation of the Chopin Op.28 Preludes, over which I need to hover and ponder and wonder anew at the recreative daring of it all, I can content myself, however regretfully, with snatches of impressions of the Debussy, Jenny McLeod, Lilburn and Ravel items.

Debussy’s Estampes was a miracle of different evocations, the first of the three parts, “Pagodes”, delivered rapidly and mistily, seeming almost overpedalled in effect at first, but making its point all too clearly by comparison with the arresting surge of focused tone from what one imagined to be the largest of the gamelan instruments the piano was imitating. In “La Soirée dans Grenade”, the “Habanera rhythm carried all before it, but with the utmost flexibility of line and while maintaining a sultry, hypnotic atmosphere – Grice managed the mutterings and impetuous scamperings of the ad.lib. guitar passages with perfect ease and fluidity. Finally, with “Jardins sous la Pluie”, the playing resembled an impressionistic blur, the lightest of touches producing an almost alchemic effect, with pianistic detail brushed in amid the fantastic flourishes – exhilarating!

Jenny McLeod’s “Messiaenic” tribute from the fifth piece of her Tone Clock series had an engaging “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” aspect, the piece coming almost straight out of the French composer’s “Catalogue d’ Oiseaux”, and having a wonderful clamour alternating with sequences evoking nicely “charged ” silences. There were connections echoing connections when Grice played a piece by Douglas Lilburn, McLeod’s composition teacher, to follow –  this was Lilburn’s Sonatina No.2, a work whose exquisitely-voiced evocations readily bore out the pianist’s contention that Lilburn subliminally echoed impulses found in Ravel’s Sonatine – Grice played for us a particular figuration which Lilburn seemed to have uncannily “copied” from Ravel, in spirit if not exactly in letter.

In Grice’s characteristically fleet-of-finger performance of the French work, I confess to missing, in the first movement, that vein of melancholy which peers out as do eyes from behind a glittering mask, in much of Ravel’s music. The remaining two movements were, however, beautifully paced, the pianist again favouring a very “ambient” keyboard texture, whose focus cleared for the more forceful animations, with magnificently cascading passages (Grice had a second “go” at the opening of the final headlong plunge, which meant that, in the frisson of this moment we unexpectedly got double the pleasure!)…..

As for the Chopin Preludes, it took only a few seconds of the opening to indicate that the pianist was to give us something special and distinctive, his shaping of the piece’s dynamics alive with possibilities, and the upward-thrusting arpeggiated rhythms so impulsively and freely figured. Both Hans von Bülow and Alfred Cortot somewhat notoriously “named” each of the Preludes, doing literally what interpreters of this music worth their salt would do anyway, however subjectively or otherwise – draw from each piece a poetic, theatrical or dramatic idea which fuses performance and interpreter with these representations of the music’s essence.

It seemed to me that Grice took absolutely nothing for granted, neither notes nor pauses between, as if he was freshly rediscovering the pieces and expressing his delight in the process of engagement with them. Resisting the temptation to revisit my pleasure at every single one of his individual explorations, I’ll regretfully content myself with a handful of instances, remarking firstly, however, on the spontaneously-wrought fusion of many of the pieces, progressions which seemed perfectly organic and natural as they occurred.

To be absolutely truthful, singling out individual Preludes for comment from this performance feels akin to creating a Chopinesque equivalent of Wagner’s “bleeding chunks” from his operas, so organic was Grice’s thinking throughout the work. Still, I can’t abide the thought of not sharing my delight in moments such as the “dying fall” of the repeated chords in the well-known No.7 in A Major – Grice obviously siding with Cortot’s description of the music involving “memories floating like perfumes”, rather than Bülow’s “Polish dancer”. And the drama of contrast created by the following agitato suggests also Cortot’s description of an “internalized” tempest, something quite raw and gut-wrenching.

Grice brought to every piece a similar kind of “edge”, suggesting some kind of lurking fear or disturbed awareness of chaos or oblivion – even the relatively placid Preludes seemed “haunted” by either where the music had been, or what was to follow. By the time we came to the final trio of pieces we were “well-tenderised” by the somewhat fraught nature of the various exchanges, with darkness either predominating or framing the more lucid episodes. So the G Minor No.22’s sombre, agitated angularities seemed “relieved” by the following F Major’s gently-flowing fluidity, the mood reminiscent of parts of Liszt’s “Suisse” book from his “Années de Pèlerinage”.

However, repose was banished by the set’s finale, appropriately marrying the Allegro appassionato marking with the key of D Minor, and with Grice’s total involvement in the “ordered chaos” of it all underlined by the rhythmic counterpointing of his feet on the floor in front of the pedals. A great downward cascade of notes at the piece’s end and a dark, brutal sounding of the note D brought the piece, the set and the recital to a properly sobering finish….after we gobsmacked folk in the audience had taken a few moments to draw breath once again, we were able to justly acclaim the achievement of both performer and composer – truly and deeply memorable!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eugene Gienger – Dakota Pianist – more feeling than fireworks…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eugene Gienger – Dakota pianist

Piano recital at St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace

BEETHOVEN – 32 Variations in C Minor / SOLER – 3 Sonatas

SCHUBERT – Fantasy in C Major (“Wanderer”)  / William WIELAND (b.1964) – Orpheus and Eurydice

LISZT – Après une lecture du Dante – Fantasia quasi Sonata (from Années de pèlerinage)

SOUSA (arr. Horowitz) – The Stars and Stripes Forever

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

Sunday, April 6th 2014

Eugene Gienger, an engagingly self-styled “Dakota Pianist” originally hails from Streeter, North Dakota, USA. According to his accompanying publicity he is the only pianist of renown to have emerged from the Dakota region, and can therefore be counted as a kind of “local boy made good”. An international performer, he has given recitals and concerto performances in the United States, Canada, Russia and Australia. He’s currently in New Zealand, running a “piano academy” in Karori, Wellington, for pre-school children, as well as (perhaps on a less formal basis) providing tuition and guidance for older students about to study the instrument at a tertiary level.

His traversal of a number of pieces reckoned to be among the most difficult in the romantic keyboard repertoire certainly gave ample opportunity for listeners at St. Andrew’s Church in Wellington to gauge the extent of his prowess as a pianist. It was, as the saying goes in pianistic circles, a “knuckle-breaker” of a programme, with things such as Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasia cheek-by-jowl with Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata and Vladimir Horowitz’s celebrated pianistic “circus-act”, his transcription for keyboard of Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” March.

As well, not much respite was given by Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C Minor, and a work receiving its New Zealand premiere, Orpheus and Eurydice, written by one William Wieland, a contemporary American composer. Amongst these more strenuous musical realizations, three charming jewel-like sonatas from the pen of Father Antonio Soler (a contemporary of Domenico Scarlatti) provided some decibel and figurative relief, for contrast’s sakes, obviously.

I came away from the recital appreciative of Mr.Gienger’s keyboard facility, but ultimately wishing he had chosen a larger proportion of repertoire for the concert which relied rather less insistently on sheer prestidigitation and more on philosophical content. There was no doubting that the pianist could actually “play” the notes throughout, though parts of both the Schubert, the Liszt, and the Horowitz Sousa arrangement needed to my ears a more transcendentally-driven approach for the music to really ignite around its edges and properly conflagrate. I’ve previously heard both the Liszt Dante Sonata and the Schubert Fantasia (also during the same recital), as well as, on a different occasion, the Sousa-Horowitz “live” in Wellington from pianists who could REALLY stoke the virtuoso fires – and as with the Schubert Fantasia, that kind of technical response is needed to unlock certain integral essences in this super-charged music.

Make no mistake,  I enjoyed Mr. Gienger’s playing immensely, but thought that some of the claims for his playing published in material available at the concert had a rather less exalted basis on this recital’s showing – for example, to quote a review saying of his Liszt-playing in another recital that “these interpretations stand side-by-side with the most acclaimed versions of the greatest pianists” didn’t for me accord with the performance of the “Dante” Sonata that we heard. Yes, the notes were there, and the more reflective moments of the work I thought had real poetry and seemed to convey a true sense of the ethos of renaissance conceptions concerning the afterlife – but the “hollow ring” of those tritones and dissonant harmonies throughout the introduction, the implied terror and despair at the thought of eternal damnation, was under-characterised, as was the frenetic nature of the chromatic theme representing the souls in hell.

In fact Gienger’s conception of the music seemed more wrought from immutable marble and stone than from fire and brimstone and volatile feelings – in its way a valid representation, a kind of abstraction (as is every realization of a score, of course) which in this case stood slightly apart from the in-one’s face coruscations associated with the piece. I still think a certain amount of “visceral devilment” needs to emanate from the music’s figurations and textures, some Lisztian bravura of the kind that Jian Liu’s playing of the work in a 2012 recital at the Ilott Theatre presented in abundance. In that performance, pianist, instrument and music seemed all to be “possessed”, whereas here, Gienger remained our “guide”, his playing seeming to me recounting (albeit with plenty of energy and commitment) rather than actually reliving Liszt’s remarkable Dante-esque visions.

I thought the pianist more successfully carried and maintained the virtuoso physicalities of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasia – again, it wasn’t a barnstorming, sulphurously-lit performance (the composer famously and despairingly invoking the devil’s own assistance at a public performance of the work, which, alas, wasn’t forthcoming at the time!), but at least one of music certainly requiring a certain trajectory of energy in places. This force and girth Gienger was able to supply, even if he seemed to me to be taxed to his technical limits in places during the fugal finale – which circumstance in itself certainly seemed to give a kind of tension, a performing edge to the listening experience.

Earlier he’d nicely delineated the first movement’s terraced dynamics, giving the famous opening rhythmic figurations plenty of variety of voice, and summoning up a cumulative drive in places which had plenty of feeling of engagement with the music. He managed the magical transition to the “Der Wanderer” quotation with rapt wonderment, ushering in all of the writing’s entrancement and rapt, almost religious feeling. When the music’s texture fragmented in to what seemed like many voices, the pianist gave us lovely filigree work, realizing the toccata-like sequences and the reprise of the melody over a tremolando bass with equal aplomb.

With the scherzo that followed Gienger emphasized its somewhat angular charm, gradually working up a sufficient head of steam with which to launch those first portentous fugal statements that came to dominate the final section. Again, though I felt the playing throughout didn’t have the gleam and glint of truly infernal devilry, it generated its own trajectories and momentums towards a rousing finish. Earlier in the half we’d “warmed up” with Beethoven’s fascinating set of Variations in C Minor, which the pianist described as a set of etudes – an interesting way of regarding the music – and, after that, three enchanting sonatas by Father Antonio Soler, most winningly realized as examples of possibly very early music for the then-new forte-piano.

A kind of companion-piece to the Frank Stemper Sonata, which was played the previous week by Korean pianist Junghwa Lee, was another New Zealand premiere of a contemporary American work for piano – William Wieland’s six-part meditation upon the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The work seemed to divide opinion among the audience members I spoke with afterwards, but I thought the whole piece most interesting in conception and delivery – six vignette-like scenes which represented each part of the story. Mr Gienger was a most persuasive advocate of the music both as a speaker and as a player (the latter role befitting the dedicatee, of course!) and it wasn’t any fault of his that in a couple of places I found the story-sequences rather too abstracted, as opposed to other moments which were very obviously representational in intent. I wanted some of the events to receive more of their due from the music at certain points, rather as individual arias in opera suspend the action in order to enrich moments of high emotion or more vividly describe a scenario.

Nevertheless, there were marvellous evocations to enjoy, even if some of them passed all too quickly – I particularly liked the opening celebratory music depicting the wedding of Orpheus and Eurydice (entitled “Bliss”), with its festive figurations and rustic dance impulses, and thought the sudden shift into a state of shock, horror and loss when Eurydice suddenly dies of a snake-bite extremely effective. The pianist’s fingers had to conjure up three different strands of feeling – a right-hand lament, a left-hand whose deep tones suggested the Underworld, and the toll of a bell in the middle of the keyboard suggesting the inevitability of fate.

A similar kind of transition occurred after Orpheus had played his lyre to win back Eurydice from Death’s clutches, but then lost her irrevocably during the ascent by turning and looking back at her. At that point the music suddenly shed its Lisztian radiance and snatches of renewed bliss, and plunged the soundscape into darkness with harsh, bitter tones, resolving at the end with the return of fate’s tolling bell. So, a vivid and characterful retelling of the ancient story, then, even if I did want certain sections to linger more and allow more expansiveness of response and feeling.

I do hope Mr Gienger will give us another recital some time, and that he concerns himself more with music of greater poetic and philosophic substance and manner – every piano-fancier will have her/his little list of “favourite things”, including, probably, Mr Gienger.  It will be interesting to see what he inclines towards after this……conjuring a name and an associated body of work from the air, I would suggest, say, Schumann?

Bach Choir of Wellington – Faure and other delights

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Bach Choir of Wellington presents:
Music for Easter

The Bach Choir of Wellington
Douglas Mews (organ)
Stephen Rowley (conductor)

St.Peter’s on Willis, Wellington

Saturday, 5th April 2014

Despite the “music for Easter” title of the Bach Choir’s recent programme, I would imagine that most people would have been drawn to the concert by the prospect of hearing a performance in a proper church setting of Faure’s supremely beautiful and perennially fresh (as it proved here) Requiem.

Quelling an element of impatience lurking within the recesses of my being at having a “first half” to get through before the “real” business of the late afternoon, I found a pew within a reasonable proximity, and awaited the appearance of the choir, organist Douglas Mews and conductor Stephen Rowley.

By the time the concert began, St Peter’s-on-Willis had worked its usual pre-crepuscular spell on the church’s performing-space, with sunlight streaming through the large window at the back of the choir loft, to suitably beatific effect – well, anyway for we in the audience, but probably not for the choir, having to “front up” to the full-on radiance without the benefit of sunglasses!  The thought did occur to me that had the concert’s main item been Italian instead of French, the latter course could have been adopted by the singers – possibly, to somewhat startling, Mafia-like effect!

All such fancies aside, much of the ambient glow had dissipated by the time the concert’s second half had begun, though that initial impression of “Heavenly radiance” remained throughout.  Appropriately, too, because the choir’s performances of most of the items, including the Requiem, had a similar lucid and beatific quality, making for an enjoyable listening experience.

It’s a common phenomenon for performers to “settle in” to the business of establishing a relationship with both the performing space and the audience via the opening item on a program – what Michael Flanders, of “At the Drop of a Hat” fame used to call “getting the pitch of the hall” – and so it proved here, with a cautiously worthy opening performance of Orlando Gibbons’ Hosanna to the Son of David. Once the choir had negotiated that hurdle, and Stephen Rowley had welcomed us to the concert, everything, including audience responses, seemed to focus upon things more comfortably and surely.

Purcell’s Hear My Prayer, O Lord, a setting of just two lines of Psalm 102, caught in its opening tones a lovely solemn atmosphere, the choir holding its lines at a challengingly slow tempo and making a good job of things – a short, but intensely-focused experience of sound and feeling.  Darker in tone and somewhat more complex in its unfolding was Venetian-born Antonio Lott’s Crucifixus, the opening measures rising from the darkness to a starkly-lit cadence. The voices nicely conveyed surges of urgency and anguish with “‘passus” (suffered), and then tapered into long, beautifully-held lines for “et sepultus est” (and was buried).

However, the revelation (so to speak) of the first half for me was encountering the twentieth-century English composer John Sanders’ Reproaches, a work which eschewed avant-garde harmonies and drew instead on traditional modes of antiphonal settings for these texts, mixing plainsong with harmonized sequences. We heard haunting, long-breathed lines of “reproachful” utterances, varied in character and spontaneous in effect, interspersed with more assertive men-only recitatives – a marvellously theatrical, but at the same time, sublimely “spiritual” result. The final exchange was marked, at the end, by eerie modulations and a far-flung, almost cosmic effect of words sounded over endless spaces of time and distance.

It may be heretical of me to say so, but after this John Cameron’s setting of Elgar’s “Nimrod” from the latter’s orchestral Enigma Variations seemed to my ears rather cosy and sentimental – and though the choir’s sopranos made brave efforts to reach their cruelly stratospheric highest notes, the outcome in places was more uncomfortable than uplifting. Of course one perhaps ought to try these things, but I would rather have gone into the interval with the sounds of any one of the other performances of the first half in my ears. However, ’twas but a minor blip on what was a generally mellifluous soundscape.

As for the Faure Requiem, despite the performance being a “streamlined” one (no soprano or baritone, and no orchestra – which meant, alas, no horns!) the results were well-nigh enchanting throughout. Apart from having what seemed a reluctance to let his instrument resplendently roar out that wonderful horn-call in the “Sanctus”, organist Douglas Mews did the instrumental music proud, beguilingly keeping those plangent “French” textures to the fore and thrilling us in certain places with some awe-inspiring seismic pedal-points.  One soon adapted to the organ’s refracted orchestral tones, and enjoyed without reservations what the voices were doing.

Stephen Rowley’s conducting enabled the work to unfold with a kind of natural outpouring of expression, as almost nothing seemed forced or too sharply-etched – only an unexpected intensification of tempo and tension at the words “Lux aeterna luceat eis” which came to a dramatic head at “quia pius est” gave me a start for a few seconds, until I realized that what he was doing at that point was actually working. In place of each of the baritone solos, the men’s voices in the choir provided well-focused tones which kept the line steady and true; and similarly in the “Pie Jesu” the sopranos sang beautifully, in lieu of a soloist, managing the awkward moment of the melody’s reprise with ease, and allowing the final “sempiternam requiem” ample space and rapt concentration.

A mere couple of details wanted slightly firmer treatment – a slightly ahead-of-the-beat “Exaudi” in the first part, a hesitant beginning to the “Sanctus” over the tricky, syncopated accompanying figures, and a too-eager reprise of the “Agnus Dei” by the men – but these were moments of natural attrition, in their way part and parcel of the perils of live performance, and as treasurable for their purposeful intent as were other moments for their accuracy and expressive power.

Perhaps the performance highlight in the Requiem was, for me, the “Libera Me”, begun by the men’s voices, with nice shaping from the conductor, and taken further by the women, sweet-toned at “Tremens factus sum ergo” and building towards a full-throated “Dies Illa, dies ire”, startling in its impact. A thudding organ accompaniment brought back a fearful “Libera Me” reprise from the full choir, after which the piece concluded with a slightly more hopeful rounding-off from the men. Everything was kept in proportion, and the sequences vividly characterized – its spirit represented well the performance as a whole, one which the Bach Choir and Stephen Rowley ought to be proud of.

Aspects of conflict in Brio’s “Peace and War” at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s on the Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series
PEACE AND WAR

– Brio vocal ensemble

DOUGLAS MEWS – Ghosts, Fire, Water / A Sound Came from Heav’n
MAHLER – Der Tamboursg’sell (from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn”)
FINZI – Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun / BOGOSLAVSKY – Dark is the Night
LAMBERT – She is Far from the Land / IRELAND – The Vagabond
PARKER – We’ll Meet Again / KENT – The White Cliffs of Dover
TRAD. – The Minstrel Boy / Danny Boy

BRIO – Janey MacKenzie, Alison Hodge, Jody Orgias, Katherine Hodge, Nick McDougall, Jamie Young, Justin Pearce, Roger Wilson (singers)

with Bruce Greenfield (piano)

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

Wednesday, 26th March 2014

“Something for everybody who remembers the war” might have been a way of describing much of this presentation, with items ranging in emotion from the downright sentimentality of popular song to the unspeakable horrors of nuclear conflagration. As well, there were pieces with less specific associations, ranging from folk-ballads to finely-wrought meditations on life and death. Rather like everyday life, a bit of a hotch-potch – though in the course of it all we were presented with some startling and memorable moments.

These special moments came for me with the two pieces written by Douglas Mews Snr. (1918-93), his Ghosts, Fire and Water and A Sound Came from Heav’n, both written for unaccompanied vocal ensemble. It was ironic that accompanist Bruce Greenfield, whose playing in support of his individual singers gave such delight throughout the rest of the concert, had no part to play in either of the Mews items.

Roger Wilson led off the first solo bracket with a stirring rendition of one of Mahler’s “death-march” pieces, Der Tamboursg’sell (“The Drummer-Boy”), one of the last of the composer’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn settings. Though the vocal line took the singer to what sounded like the limit of his comfort-zone in places, the intensities thus generated were wholly appropriate to music and text.

One feels certain that Mahler himself would have appreciated the juxtapositioning of this bleak farewell to life with the saccharine sentiments of Ross Parker’s “We’ll meet again” which immediately followed. Though she didn’t manage to out-Vera the legendary “forces’ sweetheart” Vera Lynn, Alison Hodge gave the vocal line enough juice to help bedew the cheeks of the sympathetic listener.

Neither Jodi Orgias nor Justin Pearce had sufficient vocal girth to do full justice to either Gerald Finzi’s Shakespeare setting or Nikita Bogoslavsky’s Dark is the Night, though each singer shaped the phrases and moulded the overall line of their respective songs with feeling and intelligence – one could hear what each was trying to do even if it wasn’t always forthcoming. Janey MacKenzie fearlessly attacked the opening of Frank Lambert’s She is Far from the Land and caught the “soaring” quality of the lines, if in places with more effort than sweet ease – a nicely-floated reprise of the melody after the song’s central climax fell more gratefully on the ear to finish.

As for the second solo grouping of songs, Justin Pearce sounded more at home with John Ireland’s The Vagabond, the higher vocal line enabling some sturdy declamation and fine ringing tones in places from the singer.  Then it was Vera Lynn’s – sorry, Alison Hodge’s turn again, with Walter Kent’s The White Cliffs of Dover – a creditable performance with some heart-warming surges of impulse tugging once again at the heartstrings.

In the same key followed Thomas Moore’s setting of the traditional Irish air “The Minstrel Boy”, here given as much concentration and attention to words by Janey McKenzie as she would any song by Schubert or Duparc, and with Bruce Greenfield adding plenty of “minstrelsy” in the piano part. Another Irish ballad brought to the platform a singer I’d last heard as Frederic, in Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, tenor Jamie Young, who made a great fist of Danny Boy, complete with a hint of a sob to his high-whatever-note-it-was, just before the song’s conclusion.

All of these, however, were merely diversions compared with the two Douglas Mews items presented by the ensemble. Written in 1972, Ghosts, Fire, Water  was inspired by the poetry of British author James Kirkup who had viewed an exhibition in Britain in 1955 entitled “The Hiroshima Panels” by artists Ira Maruki and Toshiko Akamatsu, and whose subsequent verses expressed all the shock, horror and outrage at the effects of that first-ever atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city in 1945.

It was here that the ensemble really, I thought, came into its own – after Roger Wilson had recited the poem by way of introducing the work, Ghosts, Fire and Water gripped us in thrall from beginning to end. Beginning with urgent, troubled repetitions by the group of solo-voiced lines, the music’s agitations and intensities grew into stark, canonic utterances of an almost medieval nature. Bleak unisons strove antiphonally with biting irruptions of energy, the music here like splinters of rain, there like searing shafts of fire, the whole resounding in places with an Edgar Allan Poe-like clangour of angry bells.

As moving were the more elegiac passages later in the work, voices intoning beneath a solo soprano line the words “This is what you have done to us”, and other voices taking up a Latin chant as the words “Love one another” were repeated by different group members speaking in different languages. Certainly not a comfortable listening experience, then, but instead a profound and intensely disturbing one, here most convincingly realized.

In its own, very different way, Douglas Mews’ marvellously antiphonal A Sound Came from Heav’n convinced as equally and strongly. The lines were beautifully-shaped and drawn convincingly into the cadences, while the widely-spaced terraced effect of pedal points beneath the serenely floating women’s voices gave a properly celestial ambience to the Holy Spirit’s invocation. As heartfelt in its way as its companion work, it provided a necessary and more restorative foil to the somewhat harrowing listening experience provided by the latter.

All credit to Brio, whose well-schooled teamwork gave what I thought was the concert’s most important and significant music its due in fine style.

Junghwa Lee – pianistic brilliance and recreative ferment at the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī – New Zealand School of Music presents:
Junghwa Lee (piano)
French and contemporary American piano music recital

Emmanuel CHABRIER – Improvisation / Menuet pompeux (from Pièces pittoresques)
César FRANCK – Prélude, Choral et Fugue
Camille SAINT-SAËNS – Allegro Appassionato Op.70
Frank STEMPER – Piano Sonata No.2 (2013) – (world premiere)

Adam Concert Room, NZSM Kelburn Campus
Victoria University of Wellington

Wednesday 26th March

This was one of those concerts whose first item (quite apart from other, later revelations) I didn’t really see coming – true, I was intrigued at the thought of hearing how the composer of orchestral classics such as Espana and Marche Joyeuse would acquit himself in the realm of keyboard music, though I wasn’t expecting much beyond what the title suggested – “picturesque pieces” was my schoolboy French translation, which didn’t seem to suggest much more than salon music.

Thanks to an obviously alchemic combination of music and interpreter I was immediately entranced by the first of these Pièces pittoresques, appropriately titled Improvisation, by Emmanuel Chabrier. The pianist was Korean Junghwa Lee, who currently lives and works in the United States at Southern Illinois University, where she is Associate Professor of Piano, though she’s also developing a profile as an international performer.

The “Improvisation” title of the first piece sounded exactly like that in Junghwa Lee’s hands –  in fact I found it difficult to tell whether the pianist was playing the music or vice versa, so integrated was sound with gesture, rapt concentration with liquid flow. Throughout, her performance caught the piece’s play of light and colour in and around spontaneous irruptions of energy and beautifully floated stillnesses.

I thought her pianistic control superbly judged in its complete lack of self-consciousness, with everything instead put at the service of the music in a continuous flow of “interest”, the sounds quite beautifully liberated. By contrast, the other piece from the same set, the Menuet pompeux, bristled with volatile energies, whimsy set against willfulness, except for a trio section which, just as unexpectedly, sought to soothe and charm. A work to investigate further!

For much of Cesar Franck’s meditative Prelude, Chorale and Fugue I felt the same “connection” with Junghwa Lee’s playing as I did with the Chabrier items – the pianist quickly caught the opening Prelude’s distinctive flavour, its barely-contained passion alternated with tender circuspection, the whole suffused with those characteristic chromatically flavoured harmonies which can sound vaguely “spiritual”, and for some people have a kind of “sanctimonious” feeling which they then attribute to the composer! (These same people can’t have ever heard Franck’s Piano Quintet!)

The Choral which followed was underpinned by a lovely, deeply-wrought bass, the theme deftly and lightly arpeggiated, its figurations ear-catchingly varied in places, thanks to Junghwa Lee’s  ever-varied voicing of the lines and beautiful control of the music’s harmonic colourings. A questioning, then more vigorous passage ushered in the fugue, in a manner not unlike, if less angular in expression than Beethoven in his “Hammerklavier” Sonata’s finale.

Splendid though much of the playing was at this point, I did think the music needed a more “larger-than-life” aspect than the pianist was prepared to give it – towards the end I wanted an even fuller-blooded sense of eventual triumph over darkness, a more unashamedly rhetorical enjoyment of things like the return of the Choral theme as a joyous pealing of bells. But then I’m an unashamed sensationalist in these matters, and undoubtedly lack Junghwa Lee’s innate sensitivity!

Franck and Saint-Saëns were chalk-and-cheese composers and personalities, and the latter’s Allegro Appassionato Op.70 (not to be confused with the same composer’s Op.43 work for ‘cello and orchestra) has none of Franck’s other-worldliness, or sense of personal suffering – the “appassionato” of Saint-Saëns’s title is expressed simply and directly in the music, with occasional respites from the agitations having the aspect of interludes more than a different side of the same coin. As a consequence, the music in quieter places reminded me of Ravel, like Saint-Saens, renowned for his outward detachment and his concealment of deeper feelings.

Junghwa Lee brought all of her quicksilver elegance to this music’s gossamer opening, following the somewhat portentous three-note beginning. She allowed the more lyrical passages plenty of space and considerable fluidity, so that the sequences shared with the more agitated moments a certain spontaneous flow – and I liked the almost Lisztian pensiveness which settled over the music just before the allegro jumped out at us once again and whirled the piece to its brilliant conclusion.

After a short interval came my second surprise of the evening – a piano sonata (the composer’s second, in fact) written specifically for the pianist by American Frank Stemper, a colleague of Junghwa Lee at Southern Illinois University, where he is currently Composer in Residence, and a Professor of Music.

The programme notes concerning the sonata were written, not altogether surprisingly, by the composer – as befitted the occasion of this performance being the actual world premiere of the work. So, we did feel somewhat privileged at having such an event presented to us here in a part of the world somewhat removed, it seemed, from the piece’s geographical origins, even given that the dedicatee was tonight’s pianist!

I didn’t really know what to expect regarding the work. Having said this I confess that my first reading of the composer’s notes, explaining the music’s links with the concept of death, gave rise to the reaction, “Hmm, well, very American!” But when I thought about this a bit more, I thought this was a little unfair of me, because many composers throughout the ages have composed unequivocal “death-pieces” – and in some instances similarly expounded their ideas about either the music in question or the associated state of being – or non-being!

So, in a somewhat ambivalent state of part-delicious, part-anxious expectation I awaited the return of the pianist buoyed by the composer’s assertion in his notes that “Ms. Lee would go to any lengths to absorb and understand the music and then clearly interpret its web of sonic activity” – so,, you see, this was, in other words, a kind of recreative imprimatur, a word about to be made flesh……perhaps I should now begin talking about the music and its performance…….

The first of four movements was called Sonata Allegro, and sub-titled L’inizio della fine (The beginning of the end) – describing the opening as depicting the moment of death, that process of life winding down and concluding, the composer crafted suitably dark, meditative bell-tolling textures, the deepest notes building towards a brief moment of agitation in the treble, before exploring some Messiaen-like ambient spaces, the music (like Elgar’s in the second part of “Gerontius” freed from “the busy beat of time”) revelling in its liberation from pulse and rhythm.The second movement’s musica da ballo (dance music) had a mischievous, almost diabolical air, an insinuating melody singing over driving, angular figures suggesting Musorgsky-like characters whose faces kept changing. It’s the sort of music Liszt might have written had he been a twentieth-century composer.

Throughout, but especially in the latter stages, the composer kept his promise to use the entire range of the keyboard – throughout what I imagined might be the Andante e improvisatione third movement the pianist’s hands created some remarkably spaced-out sonorities between treble and bass, with repeated right hand chords set against vigorous left-handed leaps, the effect positively orchestral in places, and growing in frenetic energy and incisiveness, encouraging the right hand’s repeated notes to grow in power and insistence, resulting in some exciting toccata-like sequences.

What was remarkable about the playing at certain points was the contrast between Junghwa Lee’s sheer keyboard physicality and, within moments, her ability to hold silences unflinchingly and resonantly. It was as if her whole body continued to emanate the ambiences of the previous tumult, creating, as it were, from these tonal echoes the murmurings of voices being wrought anew – one had a sense of the music setting its own house in order before what one presumed might be something of an onslaught. And so it proved, the Sonata Rondo being the drama’s final act – the onset of alarm, which, in the words of the composer “signals the end”.

If Junghwa Lee’s playing had impressed up to this point, her full-blooded engagement with the music’s demands at this point astonished us further still – again that “playing or being played” sense of oneness with it all was overwhelming, with energies literally flying in all directions! Then, at the tumult’s height the music suddenly returned to the world of the work’s opening pages – a most eerie and engaging effect, even if, possibly, a little too much of a good thing. A final irruption from the depths – a kind of “triumph of death” – and the piece came to its end. A remarkable journey, to say the least…….

Had the pianist brought something of that concluding physicality and abandonment in the Stemper Sonata to the last couple of pages of the Cesar Franck work, I would have been at a loss for words regarding the achievement of the whole recital! As it was, I thought Junghwa Lee had treated us to performances not merely of brilliance, but of great distinctiveness and individuality, utterly compelling in their realization.

Of late we’ve been able to enjoy some pretty stunning performances of all kinds from both visiting and resident artists through the NZSM’s auspices, a happy situation that deserves the heartfelt thanks of we music-lovers to the Music School. It’s one that I sincerely hope will continue.

Ancient Mariner Rime watered-down, though stunning to look at

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand International Festival of the Arts presents:
RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

The Tiger Lillies
Martyn Jacques: Vocals, accordion, piano, guitar
Adrian Stout: Contra bass, musical saw, theremin, vocals
Mike Pickering: Percussion
Mark Holthusen: Animation and photography

St.James Theatre, Wellington
Saturday 8th/Sunday 9th March 2014

Review by Frances Robinson and Peter Mechen

This was an evening which, on the face of things, promised much, with a presentation that, right from the outset, looked terrific, but then didn’t go on to adequately develop the musical and contextual possibilities afforded by these arresting visual images. I’d not seen but had heard about the group’s previous appearance at the New Zealand Festival in 2000 with the anarchic musical Shockheaded Peter, and so was looking forward to what I hoped would be some comparably stunning realisations of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s visionary saga of a soul in torment.

Alas, past Mark Holthusen’s brilliant visual realisations, projected onto gauze screens arranged to give maximum spatial perspective, I thought the show was disappointingly bland as regards both music and literary response. Perhaps the advertising blurb unwittingly put its finger on the essence of the presentation, with its emphasis upon Holthusen’s “extraordinary animations” and its cliched description of the show as “the perfect fuel for those late-night club conversations” – I must have missed that part of it, for some reason.

Joking aside, there were sequences indeed well worthy of discussion, and indeed, argument, in the wake of it all – but they were invariably centred on the visual settings and those extraordinary projections of ships, sailors, oceanic swells, exotic places, and, of course, the ever-present albatross, the fulcrum around which the story of Coleridge’s poem revolves, both up to and subsequent to the bird’s untimely end, shot dead by the “Ancient Mariner”. In fact the  show might as well have been a silent-movie realisation of some of the poem’s events, the three-man ensemble’s textual and musical realisations a grossly watered-down version of the poet’s richly-conceived detailings.

So, throughout the evening the narrative action of the Ancient Mariner was broadly depicted by these amazing film projections that unfolded within the stage space. These spanned from the backdrop, right out to the front edge of the stage, with multiple layers often operating simultaneously, hanging in the void like a series of ethereal, translucent curtains. They were never for a moment static, as within them moved the characters of the tale like the Mariner himself, the albatross, the mermaid, the hapless cabin boy (I thought some of the suggested sexual abuse of the boy a bit gratuitous) and the ship’s crew. Across these ethereal vistas moved the jagged icebergs and drifting snowflakes of Antarctica, the listless clouds of the doldrums, the heaving stormy seas of the roaring forties, and the doomed vessel itself. Most dramatic of all were the wondrously fearful sea monsters, spiky, scaly, sinuous of tail, and hideous in tooth and claw.

The role of the three piece band was built around the vocals of Martyn Jacques, which sometimes narrated brief portions of the story narrative, sometimes commentary on the events.  They fell into two broad styles – heavy bass gig-style numbers thumped out from front of stage, with Jacques doing accordion and lyrics; or more soulful crooning cabaret-style numbers with Jacques doing piano and lyrics. In only a few instances was the diction clear, and only a few brief snatches of the Rime were clearly enunciated. The Coleridge poem provided no more than the skeletal framework for the vocals, while the sequence of the narrative was played out almost entirely by the projected stage effects.

I found this inbalance rather disappointing. I would have liked to hear much more of the wonderful tale, simply provided by Coleridge’s matchless word painting. Instead there were the booming lyrics from front of stage, with words barely distinguishable, or the keyboard numbers in a classic nightclub croon, complete with mangled American vowels which sat, to my ear, very oddly with the musings of a classic British tar.

In places I was reminded of another production I’d seen recently on DVD, that of Thomas Ades’s opera “The Tempest”, with Shakespeare’s texts disappointingly “flattened out” and the poetry’s extraordinary inbuilt resonances of ambience and rhythm destroyed. Here, the effect of the words was similarly diminished – only the predictable phrases from Coleridge were touched upon, and were rarely developed, apart from, in some instances, being subjected to endless repetition.

This may have been a deliberate intention, used to highlight the endless wanderings of the vessel and the hopelessness of the Mariner, or simply the group’s normal style of gig music. Having said that, some numbers married brilliantly with the visual effects, and particularly the finale. This comprised little more than the repeated phrase “Living Hell” thumped out numerous times, but the stage and band were progressively engulfed by leaping flames from every direction in a spectacular finish to the show. It brought the house down, which suggested that the audience came largely for a hugely entertaining production, which this most certainly was.

It was clearly not a “setting” of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the traditional sense, and this was probably never the intention of its creators. Given that, the Tiger Lillies and their inventive visual artist Mark Holthusen produced a highly creative spectacle where the visual effects were undoubtedly the standout feature.