Author: Peter Mechen

Melanie Lina – great playing reaching all too few ears at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace presents PIANO +
A week of concerts in support of the proposed new Welcome Centre

Concert No.4 – Melanie Lina (piano)

SCARLATTI – Sonatas: E major K.380 / D Major K.29
BEETHOVEN – Sonata in E-flat Op.81a “Les Adieux”
PSATHAS – Waiting for the Aeroplane
BRITTEN – “Early Morning Bathe” / “Sailing” (from “Holiday Diary” Op.5)
ALBENIZ – El Puerto / Cordoba
RAVEL – Alborado del gracioso (from “Miroirs”)
CHOPIN – Waltzes: E Major (Op.Posth.) / A-flat Major Op.42 / Piano Sonata in B Minor Op.58

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

Friday, 15th November 2013

How unfortunate that, in the wake of Michael Houstoun’s extended weekend of Beethoven Sonata performances at the MFC, which was followed immediately by this present Piano+ series at St.Andrew’s in Wellington, the capital’s music-going public seemed to have “run out of steam” after three of the five nights of concerts.

It was probably a case of event overload, but each of the two remaining occasions, both of them notable piano recitals, were so poorly attended as to induce a degree of actual embarrassment on the part of those who were there. It left me with the not wholly comfortable feeling that the city’s reputation as an arts and cultural centre (which we Wellingtonians all keenly look to espouse) might not be such a “given” as presumed.

Whatever the case, Shakespeare’s immortal lines from Henry V “And gentlemen of England now abed…….”  applied in spadesful to both of these concerts, as the few who attended heartily agreed (we all readily bonded as a group on each of the evenings under these conditions!). There were chalk-and-cheese differences as regards repertoire, though each had a definite link with the aforementioned Houstoun/Beethoven series concluded a few days previously – Melanie Lina’s recital featured the composer’s “Les Adieux” Sonata, while Taiwanese-born pianist Ya-Ting Liou gave us the Op.126 set of Bagatelles the following evening.

The “Les Adieux” Sonata was given by Melanie Lina as part of a first half whose general theme expressed aspects of human dislocation/relocation in places away from homelands, both temporary and lifelong. So, along with Beethoven we had music by (Italian-born but Spanish-domiciled) Domenico Scarlatti, the much-travelled Catalan-born Isaac Albeniz, and the Basque-born Maurice Ravel, whose lifelong affair with Spain is well documented in his works.

Bringing the idea “closer to home” for listeners was John Psathas’s evocative Waiting for the Aeroplane, along with excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s rarely-played but highly entertaining Holiday Diary.  An all-Chopin second half seemed in accord with the dislocation/relocation theme, though the works presented here were more cosmopolitan than nationalistic in outlook.

I felt, perhaps, that the program was over-generous – a pianist friend with whom I attended the concert also thought the recital too long by a couple of items, though remarking that she herself had been “guilty” of a similar largesse of performing spirit in her younger concertizing days. Just one of the Albeniz/Ravel “Spanish” works would, I think, have sufficed, providing sufficient contrast with the rest, and leaving us pleasantly hungry for more…..

Beginning the recital, Melanie Lina gave us Scarlatti – two beautifully-crafted Baroque sonatas here exquisitely rendered by the pianist on a modern concert grand. Throughout the opening E Major (K.380) I loved Lina’s “imaging” – that sense of fantasy with which she so readily infused the music, her tempi and phrasing allowing the music to blossom and live within each bar. I could hear throughout the “twang” of the guitar resonating within a vividly-wrought ambience, one infused with her rich command of keyboard colour.  She revelled also in the more extrovert D Major (K.29), the great toccata-like whirls of sound at the opening conjuring up something very pictorial and dramatic, followed by fingerwork which propelled the music’s thrust with Horowitz-like crystalline clarity.

The pianist very properly alerted us to the correlation between the German word “Lebe-wohl” and the opening of Beethoven’s popularly-styled “Les Adieux” Sonata – the heartfelt three-note motif led to a full-blooded exposition of grief at a friend’s departure, both vigorous and reflective (both elements superbly delivered by Lina – some brilliant toccata-like chording in places, as well as a brief development hiatus which she quickly recovered from), while at the movement’s conclusion the farewell motif (also evoking a posthorn-like ambience) reinforced the sense of loss most vividly.

After this I wanted a shade more stillness from the second movement, a more “stricken” feeling – though Beethoven writes “andante”, he intensifies the feeling with “expressivo” – but Lina’s playing I thought a shade dry-eyed, perhaps registering the impatience of one who awaits the return of a friend more than the sorrow of that person’s absence. Theoretically, a classicist would approve of her structural organization of the whole, whereas a romantic might bemoan the lessening of feeling and atmosphere.

The finale very properly burst upon us with a mighty flourish, and though the pianist didn’t always carry a kind of underlying momentum across some of the sequences there were some thrilling moments. I particularly relished Lina’s repeated right-hand upward triple-flourishes (again, crystalline fingerwork) and, following the reprise of the opening, the hair-raising juxtaposition of left-hand octaves and right-hand dancings which when done, as here, with confidence and élan, produced an exhilaration of physical excitement! And though it was a case of thrills and spills at another point, the pianist prevailed in the face of some Haydnesque “dead-ends” and wrestled back the musical argument, to the great relief of all concerned.

A different kind of ambience informed John Psathas’ bitter-sweet Waiting for the Aeroplane, by turns nostalgic, visionary and jazzy, and here evoked with great surety. It made the perfect foil for two movements from a work I didn’t know, Britten’s piano suite Holiday Diary, written in 1934 and dedicated to his piano teacher, Arthur Benjamin. The first piece, entitled “Early Morning Bathe” nicely delineated the energies required to set the process in motion, the angularities of the opening giving way to the swimmer’s strokes and the water’s undulations.Had I not known the music’s title I would have plumped for a horse-ride of some description, complete with the feel of the wind on the rider’s face!

In the second piece, “Sailing” the playing caught a warmly sostenuto singing mood over gently shifting chords, the line’s water-mark shifting the sonorities to brighter realms in places, when suddenly the music energized and danced in a quasi-Musorgsky mood, the phrases spiky and fragmentary. Then, as quickly, the opening mood returned, this time with a deep tolling bass line underpinning the lyricism – a gorgeous performance of some lovely music.

As for the three “Spanish” pieces, I enjoyed most of all Melanie Lina’s astounding playing of Ravel’s Alborado del gracioso – when she began, I thought her tempo was too fast and that everything would degenerate into a garble of smudged notes – but she made it work with such tremendous zest, buoyancy and clarity, the repeated notes both clear and resonant, and the flourishes full-bodied and properly theatrical. Then, the recitative took us into the ambience’s heart, with pliant yet focused rhythmic impulses, the storyteller’s art coming to the fore, here – Lina was able to throw off the flourishes with such amazing “glint” while still making the melodies sing, spreading the chords as if she was strumming a giant guitar, and launching into the dance-rhythm of the opening once again with exquisite timing – those glissandi completed their mesmeric spell and helped whirl our sensibilities into paroxysms of delight at the end.

Neither of the Albeniz pieces was quite on this exalted level – El Puerto was given plenty of zest and physicality, and Lina did as well as any I’ve heard to keep the piece coherent and varied amid the composer’s veritable torrent of notes. And Cordoba started well, the pianist capturing during the introductory bars the ambivalence of the Spanish night, with its luminosity and fragrance set against darker rituals of purpose, but later, I thought relinquishing too much of the depth and mystery in rhythms which never really dug in – for me, a bit too picture-postcard a response to this soulful music.

The remained of the program was given over to Chopin – firstly, two waltzes stylishly and charmingly performed, the first the Op.Posth. E Major beautifully gauged as regards an appropriate mix of strength and poetry, and the second, the Op. 42 A-flat “Grand Waltz” variously whirling us around the ballroom and encouraging us to snap our heels to attention with the music’s engaging “strut” – all delightful and invigorating stuff.

Then came the “grand finale” – the Op.58 B Minor Sonata – a difficult assignment for any pianist, but especially at the conclusion of a demanding program. Despite some “crowding in” of detail in places, making for a slightly rushed and breathless intermittent effect, I thought Lina’s delivery of the first movement of the work very fine, wanting only in some light and shade here and there, which would have given Chopin’s classically-oriented piano writing a touch more air and space. And I admired her gossamer delivery of the Scherzo’s fleet-fingered opening, and the on-going “tingling” effect of the intermezzo-like passages which followed, more agitato in places than I expected, but nevertheless effective.

But it was the slow movement which truly captured my imagination, here – after emphatically delivering the opening’s dramatic and rhetorical gesture, Lina brought both of the movement’s contrasting lyrical episodes to warm-hearted fruition, with whole vistas of contrasting feeling and colour deftly applied to a poised, easeful change from B major to E Major. I thought the pianist’s tone was”centered” in a way that focused sensibilities on the here-and-now qualities of the music’s emotion – a treasurable sense of something unique to the moment that would never be recaptured.

Impressive, too, in some ways was Lina’s playing of the turbulent finale – except that I thought in places she pushed the “presto” so fiercely that the “ma non tanto” dropped off!  I couldn’t help feeling in her phrasing and articulation a degree of anxiety driving the music ever onwards – as though she didn’t trust the music’s own in-built momentum – which gave the performance as much a sense of breathlessness as of motivation and purpose. I found it all a bit unsettling – perhaps in accord with its composer’s state of mind at the time.

However, these few points aside, this was a splendid and enjoyable recital by a pianist whose musical and communicative skills deserved oceans more than our few hands and voices could give her. I do hope she gives Wellington another chance, before too long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering Katherine Mansfield 125 years on

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MUSIC AND FRIENDSHIP

Katherine Mansfield and Arnold Trowell

A concert to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Katherine Mansfield’s birth

Music by Dvořák, Popper, Goltermann, Trowell and Boëllmann

Martin Griffiths (‘cello) / Eleanor Carter (piano) / Fiona Oliver (speaker)

Saint John’s in the City

Te Aro, Wellington

Friday 11th October 2013

Music and Friendship was a commemoration of the 125th anniversary of author Katherine Mansfield’s birth, an evening of music and recitation, held at St.John’s Church in Wellington Central. Welcoming people to the event was Marion Townend, whose obviously sterling efforts regarding the funding, organization and promotion of the concert had brought it all about. Joining her in the venture were two talented musicians, Martin Griffiths (cello) and Eleanor Carter (piano), along with Alexander Turnbull Library curator Fiona Oliver, who read exerpts from Mansfield’s letters, journals and stories.  As Mansfield was also a keen amateur musician, it seemed appropriate to intermingle music and words by way of commemorating the anniversary.

Further linking Mansfield with music was her friendship with members of the Trowell family, prominent in Wellington music circles at the time of the author’s early years – as seemed to be the norm with Mansfield’s interactions with people in general, the picture is a complex one. Mansfield’s ‘cello teacher in Wellington was Thomas Trowell, whose sons, Arnold and Garnet, the impressionable and impulsive Katherine became variously involved with. Arnold, the younger son, left New Zealand when aged sixteen, becoming a successful ‘cellist and teacher in Europe – he seems to have rejected all of Katherine’s advances towards him, eventually marrying someone else.

On first going to London Katherine became involved with Arnold’s elder brother Garnet Trowell, and the pair planned to marry, though parental opposition helped put a stop to their plans, despite Katherine becoming pregnant – an attempt by Katherine to “normalize” her pregnant state by marrying someone else also failed the last minute, and Garnet by this time had rejected her (as a commentator remarked, “Never trust a man whose name resembles a bejewelled garden utensil”)!

A recently-discovered story by Mansfield, “A Little Episode” actually mirrors the tragic triangle Mansfield had constructed around herself at the time, Garnet Trowell characterized as “Jacques St.Pierre”, a musician with “a pouting, eager mouth”, and herself as “Yvonne”, self-characterised as “a bruised, trembling soul”. At this point I forget who first observed that “truth is stranger than fiction”, but the lives of people such as Mansfield certainly bear this observation out.

Anyway, to the concert! The music consisted of pieces that either Mansfield herself or Arnold Trowell had played at various times. Trowell himself built up an enviable reputation in Europe as a performer, his ‘cello-playing having been described by one critic as comparable “with the greatest virtuosos of the present time”. Consequently some of his own music makes exacting demands upon the soloist, evidenced by the occasional rawness of the ‘cello-playing in places tonight,  such as throughout the difficult Waltz-Scherzo – which, incidentally, sported the impressive cataloguing legend Op.52 No.1.

Beside Trowell’s music there were pieces by other composers – first of the musical contributions to the program was Léon Boëllmann’s Variations Symphoniques Op.23, a rhapsodic work with some lovely Elgarian-like sequences and a juicily Edwardian “theme”, though with some tiresome “standard-variation” note-spinning passages as well, and plenty of tremolando passages for the pianist (who coped splendidly, incidentally)! There was a polka by a Georg Goltermann, which seemed to try and be a polonaise for most of the time, and then Dvořák’s haunting Silent Woods, the score of which was given to Mansfield as a present by a member of the Trowell family.

Another piece was by David Popper, one with the Schumannesque title “Warum?”, a piece that Mansfield had played while studying at Queen’s College, London in 1904. Difficult for the ‘cellist at the outset, with the music in the higher reaches of the instrument, the piece”settles down” and provides the player with some lovely, flowing runs, and a beautiful harmonic note at the end, which Martin Griffiths played to perfection. In places, as with Trowell’s Op.20 Barcarolle, the piano part sounded more interesting than did the ‘cello writing – and in the latter work Eleanor Carter readily demonstrated her fluency and poetic touch at the keyboard, for our delight.

The pair finished the musical part of the evening on a high note, with what I presumed to be a relatively early work by Trowell, his Op.3 No.2 Le Rappel des Oiseaux – a piece framed by exciting and restless molto-perpetuo writing underlined by constant piano tremolandi, with a salon-like middle section complete with sentimental melody – in places I thought of Rimsky-Korsakov, which probably tells the reader more about me than about the piece!  The duo made a great fist of it, bringing out plenty of colour, energy and, in places, sentiment.

In between these glimpses of a musical world there were readings which focused and intensified the character of the evening’s subject – frequently music was mentioned or characterized, either by the writer herself or by those writing about her, as in an obituary called “Broken Strings” written by a friend, Millie Parker, in 1923, and which was read by Fiona Oliver.We got an exerpt from an early novel, “Juliet”, written when eighteen, and on which Mansfield herself scribbled when twenty, “foolish child”!

Some journal entries, made in 1907, vividly described her understanding of and love for music, a well as describing her disengagement from Arnold Trowell and her passion for the voice of a singer she had recently heard. Finally, we heard “Mr Peacock’s Day” a story from 1917, in which Mansfield mercilessly lampooned her music-teacher husband George Bowden, the scenario, complete with disapproving wife, producing a kind of paean to the “marry in haste, repent at leisure” principle. The story deliciously exposes the fragile vanities and insecurities of a music teacher who considers himself a success from a society point of view and yet seems out-of-sorts with his wife.

Fiona Oliver’s readings drew us nicely into this unique and idiosyncratic world of a great and complex creative spirit, amply colored and flavored by the musical performances. Though I felt the presentation probably needed a theatre rather than a church, to have a more “focused” impact, the evening’s happenings made a warm-hearted and occasionally piquant tribute to Mansfield’s memory on her anniversary.

Brilliant and rousing finale to Wellington Chamber Music’s 2013 concerts

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts:
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin) / Andrew Joyce (‘cello) / Diedre Irons (piano)

BEETHOVEN – Piano Trio in E-flat Op.70 No.2
DEBUSSY – Violin Sonata / ‘Cello Sonata
SCHUBERT – Piano Trio in E-flat  D.929

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

 Sunday 6th October, 2013

I’m sure that one of the most effective advertisements for a symphony orchestra is when its principal players appear in other spheres as soloists or chamber musicians and nobly aquit themselves. A week before at St.Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace concertgoers had the good fortune to experience the wonderful playing of Hiroshi Ikematsu, section leader of the NZSO double basses, performing a Bottesini concerto . Now, here in the same venue were not one but two more principals from the orchestra joining forces with one of the country’s finest pianists to present a programme featuring both instrumental sonatas and piano trios.

Even though the term “luxury casting” normally refers to the phenomenon of gifted artists taking supporting rather than leading roles in performances, it was the phrase that came to my mind most readily when considering who was playing in this concert – none other than Vesa-Matti Leppänen, the NZSO Concertmaster, and Andrew Joyce, the orchestra’s principal ‘cello, along with the highly-regarded Diedre Irons at the piano.

There’s a feeling that an “ad hoc” group of musicians joining forces to play chamber music might not have the innate teamwork and long-established understanding of each other’s playing needed to fully explore whatever repertoire is presented. Countering this is the idea that one-off partnerships such as these create “sparks” by dint of the creative spontaneity of it all, and bring a newly-minted sense of discovery to the music and its interpretation.

It seemed to my ears that this combination had the best of both worlds – the give-and-take between the players in both the Beethoven and Schubert piano trios was such which one might expect from a well-established combination. On the other hand there was nothing of the routine, nothing glib or mechanical about the playing – instead, a sense of wonderful spontaneity, everything sounded by the musicians as if being heard and sounded out for the very first time.

As one might have expected, St Andrew’s Church was well-filled, with no seats to speak of near the front (my preferred place for reviewing). Boldly and resolutely I decided to go up to the choir-loft for a change, as I’d previously heard fellow-reviewer Lindis Taylor speak favourably of the acoustics from that vantage-point. His judgement was proved correct, as, to my surprise, the sounds of the instruments had plenty of  clarity, amplitude and tonal warmth.  At first I found myself missing something of the visceral contact with the music-making one gets from sitting  somewhere in the first few rows –  but in its place was a kind of all-encompassing sense of  the music, more of an overview, if you like, of the proceedings.

The ear being the infinitely adaptable mechanism that it is, I was soon as involved with the sounds as I’d ever been at a concert – first to be performed was Beethoven’s second  and lesser-known of the two Op.70 Piano Trios (the more famous one being the “Ghost”). This music was a rather more amiable affair than its darker, more intense companion, though its E-flat key gave the music an appropriately romantic ambience throughout.

We got a treasurable moment right at the start –  ‘cello, violin and then piano serenely brought the music into being, creating  a kind of “the gods at rest” scenario at the outset, then rousing themeslves with what seemed like playful Olympian energy through the movement’s  amalgam of  warmth, spaciousness and vigour. I thought the three players seemed like a kind of musical “Trinity” each distinctively individual, but essentially at one with the musical flow – in what seemed like no time at all we were at the movement’s “reprise”, the instruments entering in reverse order to the opening,  glowing with the joy of their interchanges and poised for a final flourish and calm closure to the movement.

The Allegretto’s teasing dance at the opening threw into exciting relief the group’s playing of the stormier minor-key episodes –  in a “Russian” or “Hungarian” mode. At the movement’s somewhat questioning end (a tentative restatement of the opening dance measures) the players took up the composer’s enjoiner to grab those same measures by the scruff of the neck and give them a good shake! I loved the more flowing movement (another Allegretto) that followed – a Schubertian theme (yes, it’s the wrong way round to put such things, I realise) with an oscillating accompaniment and a linking refrain with haunting “flattened” harmonies – here the playing brought out the gentle romance of the music and its reflective, “letting go” of the moment at the end.

After this the finale restored something of the first movement’s sense of energetic fun to the work, the players relishing  both the music’s invigorating forward thrust and the startling sideways modulations at various points, all encompassed within a trajectory of  wonderful natural ebullience, and here brought by the trio to a pitch of effervescent excitement, to which we all responded instantly and whole-heartedly.

Two Debussy sonatas gave the concert variety in both voice and manner,  firstly for violin and then for the ‘cello, both with piano. Debussy had intended to write six of these instrumental sonatas, but sickness and premature death overtook the composer after only three were finished – the Violin Sonata was in fact his last completed work.

Vesa-Matti Leppänen and Diedre Irons were the players – the work began with evocative piano chords, joined by the violin and standing time on its head for a few moments (as certain passages in the composer’s music are wont to do)  before leaning forwards and into the allegro vivo. There were passionate utterances alternated with more veiled sequences, and some magical changes of harmony –  both musicians handled the composer’s many variations of rhythm and dynamic emphasis with completely natural voices. Debussy’s violin played a haunting, chromatic phrase at one point, echoed by the piano as well, and sounding like something heard at an Arabian bazaar –  later, a fuller-throated  variant of this phrase abruptly ended the movement.

Violinist and pianist brought to life the spontaneous, improvisatory irruptions of the second movement’s opening, and then enjoyed the piquant and impish “Minstrels’-like” mood of the succeding sequences – the piano danced while the violin mused, then both rhapsodised and harmonised – such lovely, free-fall playing! The finale’s few “lost in the wilderness” opening bars were dispersed as mists by the violin’s energetic flourishes, though the music’s “anything goes” spirit then  plunged our sensibilities into a sea of languidity –  such suffused richness of tones, here! And then, what elfin dexterities both violinist and pianist summoned up throughout the final pages as the sounds were roused from from their torpor and flung to the four winds as liberated energies – an amazing utterance from a terminally sick composer!

Now it was ‘cellist Andrew Joyce’s turn with the ‘Cello Sonata– in response to Diedre Irons’ opening declamations at the sonata’s beginning, the ‘cello replied in kind at first, then more wistfully – in fact, from both players there came some beautifully-voiced withdrawn sounds.  By contrast, darker, more agitated passages revealed another side to the music, the players switching to and from irruptions of mischief to more melancholy utterances. The pizzicati-dominated opening to the second movement gave a brittle, pointilistic quality to the music, haunted in places by eerie harmonics. The finale maintained the same enigmatic face until bursting into  energetic life with a near manic-dance theme, whose pentatonic character immediately brings to mind Fritz Kreisler’s “Tambourin Chinoise”! Debussy wanted to call the sonata at one stage “Pierrot angry at the Moon” – and certainly the playing of Andrew Joyce and Diedre Irons had that detailed, pictorial storytelling quality which gave the music a  strong theatrical dimension, parallel to its essentially abstract quality – how one hears the work depends upon what the listener is actually LISTENING for…..

Where Debussy’s music was concentrated, volatile and elusive, that of Schubert’s which concluded the concert was expansive, consistent in mood and warm-hearted. This was the second of his two full-scale piano trios, the one which listeners of my generation would refer to by way of differentiation as the “Barry Lyndon” trio, the Andante of the work having been used extensively in the 1970s Stanley Kubrick film of the same name – and extremely effectively, as I remember.

Having dwelt at length on the concert’s other items, I’m not going to unduly anatomise this well-known work or its performance, except to say that the musicians played each and every note as though they loved them all dearly – each turn of phrase, every gradation of dynamics, and each and every tone and colour expressed both individually and together all had the kind of meaningful purpose given by gifted speakers or actors to great poetry or to Shakespearean prose.

And yet nothing was over-laden or emphasised out of context or proportion – both of the middle movements were, for example, rather more dry-eyed at their outset than I wanted them to sound, but in each case convinced through a gradual accumulation of intensities as the music unfolded – the concluding major-to-minor statement of the “Barry Lyndon” theme (excuse my “period” association!) had as much tragic weight and dark portent as that of any performance I’d previously heard, for example.

As for the finale, the music represents Schubert in an ebullient mood, in most places, with episodes of extreme abandonment given to the hapless pianist in particular, who has whirls of notes to contend with in places towards the end, as do the rushing strings at times as well. The return of the aforementioned slow movement theme in the finale allowed the composer to change the expressive outcomes of the music by adroitly reversing previous arrangements and giving the melody a minor-to-major course – a great moment, and a display of optimism and faith in existence wholly characteristic of its composer.

I was going to say it helped “bring the house down” at the work’s tumultuous end, but in fact the house did the reverse, and rose to give the musicians a standing ovation at the concert’s conclusion.  Time was when we would have had to look to visiting artists to give us live performances of such calibre – but here were three local musicians delivering the goods for our delight in no uncertain terms. The response would have gladdened the heart of David Carew, chairperson of Wellington Chamber Music, who had earlier welcomed us to the concert and announced his decision to step down as chair at the end of this year – a most successful concert with which to bow out! This was indeed, for all concerned, a truly memorable occasion.

 

 

Wellington Chamber Orchestra – after the First Cuckoo……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

DELIUS – On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring / La Calinda (from “Koanga”)
BOTTESINI – Concerto No.2 in B Minor for Double-Bass
BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.7 in A Op.92

Hiroshi Ikematsu (double-bass)
Vincent Hardaker (conductor)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra

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

Sunday 29th September 2013

A comment from a friend at the interval helped answer my unspoken query “Why isn’t this
gorgeous music more often played?” which I’d been posing to myself while listening
to the two Delius items at the concert, before voicing it out loud to her – “Oh, it’s such
dreary, shapeless, formless stuff! – I can’t bear it!” was her response. It reminded
me that music-lovers world-wide can be readily divided into two groups – those who
like Delius’s music and those who don’t.

For the admirers there was plenty to like about these two performances, once the players
had roused their  instruments’ true “voices” from sleep at the start of each piece. After the
lovely “awakening” chords beginning the “First Cuckoo” piece, the upper strings had some
initial difficulties accurately pitching the rocking notes sounded thoughout their opening
sequence, though they settled down subsequently to give us some lovely playing. The winds
made some delightful contributions, the flute a bit too eager to begin, but still managing a
lovely solo – the strings’ increased confidence showed with a beautifully silvery entry,
answered by secure horns and winds. Of special distinction was the cuckoo itself,
beautifully and hauntingly given voice, the clarinet notes having a properly “recessed”
quality. It’s music that needs the utmost delicacy – and in places such as that lovely
moment of “frisson”between strings and winds just before the reprise of the main
theme, conductor and orchestra achieved that, to our delight (well, to the delight of
half of us, that is…)….

The programme note named Delius’s amanuensis Eric Fenby as the arranger of “La Calinda”
the lovely dance from the opera “Koanga” – however, this was one which was new to me,
beginning with some introductory string chords, presumably lifted from the opera. All I can
say is that there must be as many “arranged Fenbys” as there are recordings of the piece,
because they all seem to be different (some adaptation may have been done by
the conductor or whomever to fit the orchestra’s available players on this occasion)
– still, the essentials of the music were here,  the lovely oboe solo, the beautiful and mellow
flute-sound, and the ever-growing confidence of the strings as the piece unfolded,
despite some occasional spills. I did register a strange counter-melody from the lower
strings towards the end, which wasn’t on any of the recordings I owned – but it was all
part of the “not knowing what to expect next” scenario…..

I did so enjoy the Bottesini Double-bass Concerto, as much for the playing of the star
soloist, Hiroshi Ikematsu, as for the music, which was new to me. How wonderful for
the Chamber Orchestra to be able to draw upon soloists of this calibre for concerto
performances! – one thinks of some splendid instances at various past concerts, and
this one had a similar kind of distinction. HIroshi is, of course the current leader of the
NZSO’s double-bass section – and during his tenure he has noticeably galvanised those
players, whose unanimity of tones and deportment give great pleasure at any orchestra
concert. It was therefore distressing to read that he intends to return to Japan next year –
in a number of ways, our great loss.

Though I was sitting too far to the side to be able to fully enjoy the soloist’s range of
tones, I was assured by people in closer proximity that the experience of listening to
such playing was a kind of feast for the senses. I could register his more vigorous work,
but was able only to guess at the quality of some of the softer passages, all of which he
seemed to play with the agility of a ‘cellist, despite having to stand and hold up what
looked like an extemely cumbersome instrument to manage. We were able to fully enjoy
his technical capabilities in the first movement’s cadenza, which featured plenty of double-
stopping, rapid runs and virtuoso leaps, the orchestra coming in “on the hoof” as it were,
to deliver an excting conclusion to the movement.

Having in mind some of those interminably vapid virtuoso violin concerti which sprang
up like weeds through out the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I rather thought
this music might turn out to be a “contrabass” version of the same kind of thing – but in
fact I found the work a stimulating listening experience with its composer tossing us
some unexpected twists and turns. The slow movement began with some raw tuning from
the wind and brass but soon settled down, the soloist firstly  counterpointing a warmly
romantic string tune, then “swapping roles” with the orchestra later in the piece, and
finishing with a graceful and winsome ascending line.

It all contrasted excitingly with the finale’s opening, the orchestra bursting in with heroic
gesturings, and the soloist setting off on his journeyings with a spirited kind of “road
music” theme. The players found it hard to keep together with some of their interjections,
and some of the exchanges were raucous, but the enthusiasm was evident, and the
soloist’s playing astonishing in its technical and expressive range. At the end of the piece
he got a warm and properly appreciative reception from all of us present.

After the interval it was time for Vince Hardaker and the players to confront Beethoven!
I remember reading, years and years ago, a review in “Gramophone” of a recording of the
Seventh Symphony made by a fairly prestigious orchestra and a well-known conductor.
The reviewer, who had himself conducted the work with amateur groups, commented on
what he called the “orchestra difficulty” posed by the incessant dotted rhythms of the first
movement, noting some lapses in ensemble on the recording.  Although Sir Thomas Beecham’s
well-known rehearsal comment on the music – “What can you do with it? – it’s like a lot of yaks
jumping about!” referred particularly to the work’s scherzo, a similar kind of boisterous spirit
informs much of the other quick music in the work.

True to expectation, it was the first movement which here caused the players the most
difficulty, the strings in particular having to bear the brunt of those obsessive rhythms. As
well, the ascending scale passsages after the opening chords caused some momentary grief
among the strings before the trajectories “found” one another and started to jell between
the players. Set against these purple patches were some splendid sequences, the lyrical lines
nicely handled by the winds and the brass chiming in at climactic points with great gusto,
contributing both thrills and spills.

The lower strings got the second movement processional off to a great start, with the violas’
counter-melody and the violins’ shaping of the main theme brought out nicely by players and
conductor. I liked the warm, reassuring tones of the major-key section – lovely clarinet and
horn solos – and the ensuing string fugato, though a bit seedy at the outset, developed into
something determined and powerful.  As for the Scherzo I thought Vince Hardaker’s tempo
just right for these players, giving them sufficient spaces in which to fill out the rhythms.
The Trio was a highlight, with the strings sustaining the oscillating theme while the winds
and brass notes rang out splendidly.

To my surprise the calls to action at the finale’s beginning were articulated crisply and
excitingly at the outset, with the momentums strongly kept up – a bit later, I liked the
leaping-figure exchanges between upper and lower strings (even if I thought the lower
strings could have “held onto” their final note a bit longer each time), and enjoyed the
wholehearted plunges back into the mainstream of the music’s flow after each divergence.
If the fearsome vortex-like passage towards the movement’s conclusion had an extra hint
of desperation about the playing, then conductor and orchestra’s achievement in pulling
themselves out of it all made the mighty brass-led homecoming all the more exciting,
the horns at the end sounding the triumph with gusto.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

China meets New Zealand in music – the NZ Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Confucius Institute at Victoria University of Wellington presents:
JOURNEY TO THE EAST – Concert One: Between Strings

NZ Trio (Justine Cormack, violin / Ashley Brown, ‘cello / Sarah Watkins, piano)
Chen Xi-Yao (guzheng)

BRIGHT SHENG – Four Movements for Piano Trio
CHEN YI – Tibetan Tunes
CAO DONGFU – Celebrating the Lantern Festival
FAN SHANG’E – Spring Morning in the Snow Mountain
DYLAN LARDELLI – Between Strings (NZ Trio commission)
GAO PING – Su Xie Si Ti (NZ Trio commission)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University

Saturday, 21st September, 2013

Some years ago there appeared a famous LP recording entitled “West meets East”, featuring violinist Yehudi Menuhin and the famous sitar-player Pandit Ravi Shankar, which was a kind of “ear-opener” for people who hadn’t been exposed to any kind of eastern “classical” music. A quick search through the chaos of my collection failed to locate the actual album, but I do remember the presentation being a mixture of “genuine” Indian music with improvisaions featuring the violin/sitar/tabla combination, coupled with a performance by Menuhin and his pianist sister Hepzibah of a violin sonata by Enescu.

This recording, and the interest it generated in Eastern music throughout the West (at roughly the same time that the Beatles were writing for and using a sitar in some of their songs) came to my mind at various moments throughout this “Journey to the East” concert featuring the NZ Trio and the Chinese guzheng player Chen Xi-Yao. Of course such collaborations between diverse musical traditions are far more common now than they were in the 1960s, and here in Aotearoa we are occasionally enthralled by the sounds of Richard Nunns’ presentations of taonga puoro, often in tandem with groups like the New Zealand String Quartet.

I found it an enthralling listening experience, and one not without its challenges – though, ironically, it was the work of New Zealand composer Dylan Lardelli which most markedly bent my listening sensibilities in divergent directions. Without being steeped in the actual sounds of traditional Chinese instruments and their unique expressive modes I found myself adopting the attitude of an explorer coming across a wondrous new country, enjoying things for their novelty and exotic manner. So, even when instruments familiar to my experience were being used, such as in Bright Sheng’s Four Movements for Piano Trio,  I encountered many sounds whose motivation and effect I could only guess at, while enjoying the composer’s acute ear for a range of sonorities.

Bright Sheng drew the material for this work from a solo piano piece My Song written in 1988, the music stimulated by the composer’s interest in evolving a “tonality” relating to his experiences with both Oriental and Western music. On a superficial level the sounds resembled a catalogue of “effects” which the players realised on their instruments with great aplomb, Chinese folk-fiddle-like melodic progressions and glissandi from both violin and ‘cello, and resonant and evocative activations of the piano strings from “within” by the pianist. The preludial, folkish first movement was followed by two more vigorous movements, firstly a bright and vigorous treatment of an actual folk-song, involving some extremities of instrumental timbres, and then a more primitive sound-world of crunching, Bartok-like piano notes, driving, gutteral strings, and savage punctuations of the textures from all sides, pushing the expressions of energy to the point of exhaustion. The composer called the final movement an evocation of “a lonely nostalgia”, one whose beauty and quiet manner cast a spell over we listeners, and obviously activated a kind of impulse to communicate with us from elsewhere, as the piece’s concluding silences were broken by the anxious tones of a cell-phone!

We then heard music by Chinese-born American-based Chen Yi, whose work for piano trio Tibetan Tunes similarly fuses Eastern and Western modes. Her writing seemed to me to almost ‘take over” the timbral characteristics one normally associates with a piano trio, readily evoking something outside the Western ethos. The first of two tunes was called Du Mu which is the name of a god in Tibetan Buddhism, and which the composer wished to depict “in a serene mood”. She did this by writing in a very open, evocative way at the piece’s outset, contrasting held notes and gentle rhapsodisings from the strings with the piano commenting at the phrase-ends – and from this she led the instruments into a kind of simpatico canon (one whose widely-spaced textures allowed  the northerly wind which was gusting outside to add a kind of rushing, evocative counterpoint!). Again the solo instruments reflected individually upon the god’s all-encompassing serenity, with the piano having the last brief word – beautiful, sensitive playing from the Trio.

The second piece, Dui Xie, was inspired by Tibetan folk-ensemble music featuring bowed and plucked strings with bamboo flutes. Some lively, cheeky and angular piano sounds underlined the singing, duetting strings, before a more motoric section brought forth driving piano figurations and slashing string pizzicati – some arresting string harmonics called a halt to such brash displays of energy, before returning to the opening, the piece all the while presenting us with a sound-world of focused delicacy, suggesting a kind of informed beauty in the mind of its composer.

Thc concert’s guest artist was Chen Xi-Yao, one of the world’s foremost performers on the guzheng, a Chinese stringed instrument resembling a zither. Chinese-born, he’s currently resident in New Zealand, and is based in Hamilton, working as a teacher and performer. He performed two solo pieces for guzheng, one of which, Celebrating the Lantern Festival, was written by (and dedicated to) his grandfather, Cao Dongfu. The work began like a folk-song fantasia, then spectacularly erupted with great flourishes and strummings and quickening bass-note rhythms, generating great physical excitement. The second work, Spring Morning in the Snow Mountain, was a nature-piece, written by another Chinese guzheng master, Fan Shang’e, the sounds inspired by her memory of a Tibetan spring morning. A long-time resident of China, she now lives in Canada.

Both of these solo pieces were, not unexpectedly, given masterly performances by Chen Xi-Yao, who then turned his attention (in tandem with the NZ Trio musicians) towards a piece by New Zealand composer Dylan Lardelli, Between Strings, a work commissioned by the NZ Trio. The title gently suggests that music is as much about the spaces in between as the notes themselves, and the kinds of gestures and sonorities resulting from this idea encouraged me to imagine a possible set of voicings suggesting these spacings while the  work was played.

What resulted was mind-enlarging stuff, the sonorities right from the outset having both angular and disparate characters – a bowing ‘cello set against “plucked” textures from the other instruments, for example – these kind of contrasting wrap-around sounds explored the ambient spaces, with sustained notes leading the more abstracted staccato figurations onwards. The violin mused with harmonics as the ‘cello emitted windmill-like sighs of generated impulse, around which the piano resonated with single notes sounding over vast spaces. Chen Xi-Yao’s guzheng maintained its zither-like character, but occasionally the player opened up its timbres with great flourishes – an invitation for the piano to explore its extremes and invite our sensibilities into the spaces between. There is, of
course, such an inherent stillness about music in general, which we as listeners don’t often acknowledge, and which this work encouraged us to explore without flinching, a “sounds in the air” outlook whose outwardly spontaneous ambient adventurings made my natural instincts work overtime to help try and accept as such.

All of which I found hard, if rewarding, work – and so it was with some relief that I turned to the programme’s final item, another NZ Trio commission, this time from Gao Ping, currently  the Visiting Lecturer in Composition at the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington. The work was called Su Xie Si Ti, or “Four Sketches”, which the composer described as “short and concise”, and each possessing “one single mood” – he also likened the pieces to “snapshots of moments in memory”. To me this seemed almost Mahlerian in spirit, with one of the scenes in particular an almost visceral evocation of a Chinese folk-funeral, complete with an off-stage violin for antiphonal effect, playing “happy music” in tandem with the lamenting ‘cello, who remained on-stage – the composer’s title for this piece, Dui Wei, or “Counterpoint”, set both moods in play together. Justin Cormack and Ashley Brown seemed to relish the theatricality of it all.

Another of the pieces called whimsically Cuo Diao (“Split Melody”) sounded like a couple of Aeolian-like harps attempting to coalesce their sounds, a combination which resulted in some gorgeous sonorities, and occasionally strange “alien” notes, with some wonderful, short-lived diversions from the home key of the piece. The work had begun with a piece called Xiao, or “Boisterous”, music which lived up to its name, a muscular, closely-worked, rather Janacek-like piece, spare and energetic.

The afternoon’s final piece was called Shuo, or “Shining”, a musical evocation of sparkling light, with gamelan-like piano patternings and pizzicati underpinings from the strings – a lovely long-breathed melody brings a contrasting mood and texture, though the rhythmic drive of the piece never goes away, the excitement in places augmented by instruments’ individual “accelerandi”. As the piano continues the forward drive, the strings sing a kind of threnody, a passionalte utterance which abruptly stops at its peak – as we in the
audience were left tingling by these momentums, we gladly continued the tumult of sound with noises of great appreciation – very great honour to the NZ Trio (and to Guzheng player, Chen Xi-Yao) for enabling us to experience such a richly-conceived journey.
 

 

 

NZ Opera’s Dutchman redeemed by love and music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
Richard Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman”

Cast: Jason Howard (The Dutchman)
Paul Whelan (Daland, a Sea-Captain)
Orla Boylan (Senta, Daland’s daughter)
Peter Auty (Erik, a hunter)
Shaun Dixon (Steersman)
Wendy Doyle (Mary)

Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus
Chorusmaster: Michael Vinten

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Wyn Davies

Director: Matthew Lutton
Assistant Director: Andrew McKenzie
Designer: Zoë Atkinson
Lighting: Jon Buswell

St.James Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 14th September 2013

Aidan Lang, New Zealand Opera’s General Director, put it well in his welcoming foreword to the programme for this production – it’s been much longer than the mandatory seven years since the Flying Dutchman last “came ashore” here in New Zealand in search of redemption.

In fact, it’s been thrice that number of years since the 1992 Auckland Opera production which featured none other than Sir Donald McIntyre in the title role, and was conducted by a fellow-New Zealander with an international career in opera, John Matheson.

By all accounts that was a creditable production, an artistic, if not a financial success. New Zealand Opera would have been hoping to emulate that occasion’s artistic achievements, while having the advantage of working in partnership with Opera Queensland to assist the present undertaking’s considerable cost outlay.

Photographs of the 1992 production suggest that the conventionalities of the story – the sea, the ships, sailors, coastal townspeople – were pretty well in evidence. However, twenty-one years later, the Dutchman returned to an almost complete contrast of scenario –  and both the elements and the means of traversing them were here abstracted to the point of alienation. On the stage of the St.James Theatre, not a drop of seawater nor flurry of salt spray  actually registered – all of the oceanic turmoil was confined to the the orchestra pit from whence it welled up fiercely and splendidly.

The high-and-dry cell-like enclosure of the Norwegian sailors’ shelter at the very beginning suggested more a state-of-mind-siege than a ship, or even a touch of post-nuclear-strike refuge in appearance and human use. As for the Dutchman’s ghostly vessel, it hove to simply as an oncoming, imposing black wall from which mysteriously emerged the legendary figure, bearing more of a sinister Nosferatu-cum-Twilight-novels aspect than that of a tragic, romantic sea-faring character.

Underlining this was the figure’s use of what appeared to be a form of supernatural power over the sailors, to the point of causing one of them to cough up blood. Earlier, during the Steersman’s homesick love-song, just before the arrival of the Dutchman’s ship, an alluring naked woman eerily materialised among the Norwegian crew, disappearing as mysteriously as she appeared – a rather more “story-wise” event, I thought, than the gratuitously haemorrhaging sailor.

But the production’s application of these detailings throughout had a similar in-and-out-of-focus aspect, some telling touches rubbing shoulders with what seemed a “trying-too-hard” spirit born of wanting to be innovative for its own sake. I did like how the Norwegian sailors  sudden “found” treasures in their own pockets as part of the bounty promised by the Dutchman in return for some hospitality – it was a good way of dealing with what’s always seemed to me a rather gauche, tinsel-like “baubles, bangles and beads” transaction, here given a much more powerful, less pantomime character.

Act Two began with the famous “Spinning Chorus”, here sublimated into a kind of erotic wish-fulfilment ritual on the part of the women who assembled, polished and partly dressed a number of bare male mannekins – maybe psychologically apposite but visually incongruous, and somewhat at odds with the “spinning” music. Interestingly, the picture of the Dutchman was an ample piece of unframed canvas pop-art rather than an image presented to suggest any great antiquity. Although this was something Senta could literally “wrap herself up in” while singing the well-known “Ballad”, the image, in this medium, had an almost clip-art, “throw-away” quality, hardly designed to engender any sense of legend or mythology.

I thought the Ballad itself, by way of compensation, might have been theatrically framed by some kind of ambient intensification, lighting or staging depicting the storms and emotions described by Senta’s narrative. But no – music plus imagination triumphed, as there were no externals bringing about any kind of startling “picture come to life” metamorphosis when the Dutchman in person entered the room.

Blood figured yet again in the exchanges that followed – blood from the inside of the Dutchman’s coat which Senta had dreamily picked up and put on, then relinquished, leaving her bare arms almost sacrificially smeared – a tangible warning, perhaps, of the fate accorded to vow-breakers?

Whatever the case, singers, conductor and orchestra drove the music excitingly towards the Act’s conclusion, and straight on into Act Three without a break in the music, though the curtain allowed plenty of music-only space for a scene-change – here were the Norwegian crew’s homecoming revels, and the imminent marriage of the Steersman presumably to the girl whose charms he conjured up in his Act One night-watch song.

First the sailors and then their womenfolk attempted to rouse the sleeping crew of the Dutchman’s ship – their figures to one side, in full view, sitting asleep with bowed heads, as still as death, splendidly resembling pre-Raphaelite spirit-wraiths. I thought the moment of their awakening a gripping and effective piece of theatre, the figures instantly shedding their somewhat androgynous quality and generating real deadly menace, even if the singling-out of the Steersman for some extra “treatment” became a bit schoolboyish in effect.

However, such was the power generated by this scene and its music (off-stage voices sang the Dutch crew’s music while the on-stage wraiths choreographed its demonic character most threateningly), that the sudden unscheduled technical “glitch” which brought about a reassuring announcement of continuance after a down-curtain luftpause actually gave us all a breathing-space with which to prepare for the final scene.

Again it was left to the orchestra to conjure up the oceanic furies as Senta and the Dutchman drove towards their intertwined fates. Senta “summonsed” a chasm in the raked floor with a blow from a chair and ritualistically flung herself into oblivion, followed by the ecstatic Dutchman.  At this point the massive wall representing the ghost-vessel dramatically and spectacularly collapsed towards the audience, making for a wonderfully visceral effect of dissolution.

I’ve begun this review and discussed these points at some length, not because I think production the most important aspect of opera, but because these days a lot of people involved with opera do seem to give it over-riding importance, to the point where putting a new “update” upon any work seems to have become a priority. As comedian Michael Flanders prophetically said regarding a proposed musical setting of the sixteenth century play Ralph Roister Doister, in his and Donald Swann’s comedy revue At the Drop of a Hat all those years ago – “Anything to stop it being done straight!”

I’ve tried to fairly balance what I thought “worked” and what didn’t in this process, though I couldn’t help thinking some violence was done to the opera’s libretto and music by inconsistencies and contradictions between words and music and stage action. For example, removing from right at the beginning any visible trace of the ocean’s presence and direct influence  from the stage, however clever an idea on paper, sapped from the work, I thought, much of its inherent sense of elemental power and human interaction with such forces.

At the beginning of Act Two the chorus of “smart young misses” in the clothing factory called all the shots (and, despite the evocative music, not a spinning-wheel, or even a sewing machine, was within coo-ee!). But then, part-way through Senta’s Ballad a regressive thrall seemed to remarkably grip these bright, worldly-wise young things. I thought their sudden wide-eyed interest in and fascination with the legend at odds with their initial hard-bitten mode and deportment at the outset – perhaps it was more demonic trickery from the Dutchman?

If the stage action and design characteristics had their challenging aspects, far less equivocal was the quality of both individual and group performances. Incongruities of placement and manner apart, the choruses were wholly committed dramatically and superbly full-voiced musically right throughout, reaching a thrilling and incisive level of interaction throughout the opening sequences of Act Three, when the Norwegian sailors and their women attempt to rouse the ghostly, slumbering Dutch crew, to alarming effect.

Though perhaps a tad too youthful of appearance, Paul Whelan sang a rich and satisfying Daland, the Norwegian captain, his manner emphaisising the character’s goodness of heart alongside his eagerness for the chance of wealth in marrying his daughter to the Dutchman. I felt sorry for him having to sing the redundant line, near the beginning, to his Steersman “Am Bord bei euch, wie steht’s?” (How’s everything on board?) – when in this staging he had left his crew for what seemed less than a minute, simply going up a ladder and putting his head out the hatch for a look around!

His Steersman, Tokoroa-born and Auckland-trained Shaun Dixon, made the most of his lovely solo while on watch, his voice strong, focused and romantic,  floating his phrases heroically and mellifluously through the stillness – the singer is this year’s Mina Foley Scholar, and on this showing, a credit to the award. His tones sharply contrasted with those which broke the eerie quiet in the wake of the ghostly ship’s arrival – the tortured, and in places harshly-sounded voice of the Dutchman, Welsh baritone Jason Howard.

This was a Dutchman whose business was tragedy and grim desperation more than romantic heroism. His opening monologue set the tone, his voice accurate and incisive, though in places gravelly and uningratiating. Resembling in appearance more a silent movie villain than a seafaring sea-captain, his brief demonic-like gestures did less for me than his consistently haunted demeanour, and fiercely-focused vocal quality when duetting with Senta – not beautiful sounds but filled with an anguished mix of hope and despair that dramatically carried the day.

His rival for Senta’s love, the poor, infatuated hunter, Erik, was sung by English tenor Peter Auty (remembered for an intensely-portrayed Turridu in NZ Opera’s 2011 Pagliacci), here richly interacting with Senta and  conveying all the frustrated passion of doubt and uncertainty regarding his love for her, singing and acting with great conviction.

The role whose character I thought got little chance to make anything coherent and meaningful from was that of Mary. Normally Senta’s nurse, she was here relegated to the thankless position of superviser of the “smart-set” factory-girls, and whose contribution seemed to centre around an attitude of petulant disapproval of Senta’s obsession with the picture, and not much more. Wendy Doyle did what she could with the character, but she was placed rather too far back onstage for some of her contributions to make their real vocal”point” –  which could account for some of her gesturings towards Senta coming across as a shade over-emphatic.

Which brings me to the heroine, whose voice and demeanour both had a somewhat wild and undisciplined quality, but whose commitment to the role of Senta was never in doubt. Irish soprano Orla Boylan took a no-holds-barred approach, one which I thought gradually came into focus and sharpened as the Ballad ran its course. I thought at the scene’s beginning she was too much the odd-ball, dressed differently to the other women, and distracted in manner and movement to the point of serious disturbance, obviously feeling the oncoming presence of the “pale man” in the picture.

The famous Ballad generated considerable musical excitement, the singer working thrillingly with conductor and orchestra to evoke the Dutchman’s tragic scenario and her own involvement with the legend. The voice wasn’t consistently attractive, spreading when under pressure, but at all times conveying great immediacy and character.  I thought she was a “giver” on stage regarding whomever she interacted with, firstly the anxious and despairing Erik, and then with her ghostly wanderer – in fact her dealings with each would-be “lover” were both whole-heartedly and satisfyingly contrasted, the effect deeply-felt rather than contrived.

Though the impression given by Senta’s plunge into the newly-created abyss  seemed more of an abandonment to the “bowels of the earth” rather than to the depths of the sea, the singer’s unflinching physicality and emotional desperation made the gesture work at the end. Again, it was the orchestra whose efforts under the baton of conductor Wyn Davies created the elemental fury of oceanic context, as they had been doing throughout the evening – if (like Anton Bruckner was supposed to have done on his visit to Bayreuth to hear “Parsifal”) we had shut our eyes throughout the performance, the music alone would have here given us what we needed to become caught up in Wagner’s drama.

Whatever one’s reaction to the provocative stagings and the different, and thought-provoking emphases thus given to the presentation by director Matthew Lutton and designer Zoë Atkinson, one could feel unequivocally that justice was done on this occasion by singers, musicians and conductor to this thrilling work’s inspired composer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZ String Quartet – Britten alongside his heroes

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand String Quartet presents:
BRAVO! BRITTEN (Programme One)

STRAVINSKY – Concertino for String Quartet (1920)
BRITTEN – String Quartet No.1 in D Op.25
BRIDGE – Idyll No.1 / Pieces Nos 2 and 3
MOZART – String Quartet in B-flat K.589 “Prussian No.2”

The New Zealand String Quartet:
Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman (violins)
Gillian Ansell (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Friday 13th September 2013

The New Zealand String Quartet concluded their epic New Zealand Bravo! Britten tour with two Wellington concerts on the weekend, featuring separate programs, of which I was privileged to hear the first one on Friday evening. I feel almost abashed to admit that I would have gone to both concerts had I not been scheduled to attend the opening of Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman’ the following evening!

Of course both Britten and Wagner are linked by birth centenaries this present year, give or take a hundred years’ difference. Britten was naturally aware of Wagner as a composer, but drew little from the latter’s work in his own music. Far more influential upon Britten and his creativity were the composers whose music the NZSQ chose to represent in each of their Bravo! Britten concerts this year.

In the first concert, which I heard, the quartet featured music by Stravinsky, Frank Bridge and Mozart, to partner Britten’s First String Quartet. The choices were largely predictable for anybody with an interest in Britten’s music – for example, the accompanying composers for Concert No.2 featured Purcell, Schubert and Ravel. I would have thought either or both Mahler and Shostakovich might have gotten a look in as well, and certainly had there been a third program.

The effect of juxtaposing these influences, at any rate during the first concert, was quite extraordinary – the other composers’ music suggested worlds that were both separate from and linked to Britten’s, and had a cumulative effect on what we heard of his own music. It was a kind of “Show me a person’s world and I will show you that person” kind of phenomenon – and as can happen in real life, some of the similarities were quite uncanny when things were brought together.

The concert began with Stravinsky’s shortish but characterful Concertino for String Quartet. Leader Helene Pohl introduced the work and talked about Britten’s youthful fascination with Stravinsky’s music, quoting the instance when the young Britten arrived on his first day at school to be greeted by the music master with the words, “Ah, this is the boy who likes Stravinsky!” More telling was the playing by the group of two musical exerpts, one from the Stravinsky and the other from the Britten Quartet, demonstrating the uncanny rhythmic similarities of the two fragments.

The Stravinsky piece itself was one of the composer’s relatively spare, neoclassical works, written in 1920 for the Flonzaley Quartet, who wanted to add a piece of contemporary music to their repertoire. The music is, by turns, terse, angular and tightly worked, then whimsical and lyrical – the quartet chose a phrase or two from the driving rhythmic sections that frame the music’s brief lyrical interlude for their composer-comparison. The title Concertino comes from the use of the first violin as a “solo” instrument throughout this lyrical sequence. There’s a brief Andante coda, which the composer directs the performers to play “like a sigh”.

After this came Britten’s First String Quartet, introduced by Douglas Beilman.  This work was written in 1941 in the United States, at the request of a prominent patroness of the arts, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and first performed there by the Coolidge Quartet. The quartet actually won Britten an award at that time, a Library of Congress Medal for services to Chamber Music.

Having gotten to know this work only from recordings I was anxious to hear what it sounded like “live”, and I was astonished at how much more varied and detailed the NZSQ’s playing was, compared to the rather more austere performance on record that I had gotten used to.

The opening consisted of lovely, haunting, ethereal lines played Andante sostenuto by the two violins and viola, a theme punctuated by recitative-like arpeggiated pizzicati notes from the ‘cello, and strongly contrasted with an explosive driving allegro vivo sequence, before the ethereal ambiences of the opening return, again with the violins and viola underpinned by ‘cello pizzicati.

A more subdued version of the allegro vivo included some attractive “folkish” figurations rising and falling, before the ethereal mood settles once again on the music, the instruments amazingly playing a couple of phrases an octave higher, heightening the other-worldliness of it all. There’s a brief flurry of the allegro and then a few spectral gestures of closure before the sounds disappear.

The NZSQ’s playing of the following con slancio movement again seemed much less “beefy” than what I’d gotten used to on record – with much more light and shade and variation of colour and texture, though still with plenty of “attitude” in the strutting rhythms, cheeky triplet sequences and running figures. The players relished the Peter Grimes-like “Moonlight” atmosphere which grew the third movement magically from out of the silences, the solo violin taking up the line from the opening ensemble, and joining with the second violin. I loved the fanfare figures begun by the ‘cello and then brought forth from each solo instrument, with the ambient echoes of these resonating beautifully. More hymn-like solo lines and more fanfare-like passages took the music to gentler, more ruminative realms and nicely-built cadence-points – from which the music sank to a crepuscular conclusion.

After this, what fun the finale was in these players’ hands! The cheeky opening figure was tossed around the group with a will, a two note motif played ducks and drakes with a repetitive rhythmic motif, and the music raced through the various twists and turns to its invention-strewn conclusion. For me this was again a performance of great enhancement of my perception of the music, one that demonstrated its enormous capacity for surprise, delight and fresh appraisal.

Gillian Ansell then told us a little about English conductor, chamber musician and  composer  Frank Bridge’s tutelage of the young Britten, repeating the story concerning Bridge’s encouraging of his pupil to “make every note count” in his composing. Britten certainly took Bridge’s advice to heart, judging by the fastidious “weighting” of his harmonic and colouristic textures at all times.

We then had an opportunity to hear some of Bridge’s own, seldom-played music, in a bracket of three items called “Idylls and Pieces”. The first, an Idyll by both name and by nature, oozed dark melancholy, but offered a consoling viola tune at the end. The second piece, a waltz with a lovely sighing melody, and the third, a brisk-rhythmed marching song with a beautifully sentimental trio section restored our equanimities. Throughout, Bridge’s music certainly seemed to know exactly what it was doing, and presented itself to us simply and concisely.

It fell finally to the Quartet’s playing of the music of Mozart to appropriately complete the evening’s commemorative picture of our composer. This was one of the three great “Prussian” Quartets, the second in B flat Major K.589. The Quartet’s ‘cellist, Rolf Gjelstan, enjoyed informing us that the King of Prussia, for whom Mozart wrote these works, was himself a ‘cellist, hence the profligacy of wonderful solo lines for the instrument.

By popular legend, Mozart was also a composer for whom not a note was wasted, though we have a more reliably-documented quote from this amazing genius regarding performance-style – namely, the words “It should flow like oil”. That’s what it did here, the players responding to the music’s uncanny quality of satisfying at many different levels of appreciation. Mozart himself was aware of this, writing to his father regarding a newly-composed set of piano concerti that “there are passages that will give pleasure to all, but only the connoisseurs will understand why”.

Though somewhat more gently and circumspectly configured as works of art than Beethoven’s comparable quartets, Mozart’s are as richly- and characterfully-wrought in their own way. These players had the knack of engaging and satisfying the gamut of our emotional responses to the music, coursing over a vast range of aesthetic impulses and spiritual responses. As with the Britten work earlier in the programme, I had never heard the music of this quartet projected in quite so detailed a way as with the NZSQ, and was grateful for such “enlargement” of a work’s range and scope through such an insightful performance.

If pressed to name a playing highlight from the latter work, I would here choose the Minuet and Trio movement, music filled with challenging incident for performers to surmount and listeners to take in. Not the least of this is a “Trio within a trio” kind of structure, complete with a few bars that actually reminded me of the music for that long-defunct television series “Doctor Finlay’s Casebook”!

Less self-indulgent and more pertinent an observation is that the composer’s mastery ensured that every detail which contributes to the complexities of the music literally “flowed like oil”, and that the NZSQ met the composer on common ground here and throughout the rest of the work, to give us a richly-wrought experience – one that enhanced my own appreciation of both Mozart and his devoted Benjamin Britten.

 

Fancies and realities from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents
LA DONNA IDEALE

BEETHOVEN – Leonore Overture No.1 Op.138
Symphony No.8 in F Major Op.93
LUCIANO BERIO – Folk Songs
JULIET PALMER – Three Pop Songs “Solid Gold”

Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

The Opera House, Wellington,

Sunday, 8th September, 2013

Restricted as to performing venues on account of the capital’s various earthquake-generated strengthening projects, Orchestra Wellington triumphantly made good in the Opera House on Sunday afternoon with its most recent concert, La Donna Ideale, whatever difficulties might have arisen from having to make music in relatively unfamiliar spaces.

By covering the pit and extending the floor area of the stage to well out in front of the proscenium arch the organisers had given the musicians a surprisingly immediate acoustic for its audience to enjoy. Though a smallish orchestra, the sounds in the purely orchestral items packed plenty of punch, with clear (almost too clear) detailing – the string passages which began the Leonore Overture No.1 had great intensity, but moments of less-than-uniform intonation, a glitch which receded as the players “found” one another.

For me the concert’s venue recalled my first-ever orchestral encounter in a similar kind of space – the Palmerston North Opera House in 1969.  Maestro Piero Gamba conducted the then NZBC Symphony Orchestra in an evening of music-making that rocked my socks off, especially with Ravel’s La Valse as a rousing finale. Here, the fireworks at the concert’s end were Beethoven’s, Marc Taddei leading a performance of the composer’s Eighth Symphony that emphasised the music’s dash, drive and excitement, though somewhat at the expense of wit, charm and good humour.

It was Beethoven’s music also which led this latest concert off. Here was a further instalment in a survey by the orchestra of the various Leonora Overtures written by the composer for his opera “Fidelio” – the composer wanted “Leonora” as his opera’s title, but Beethoven was persuaded eventually to make the change, as at least three other composers had previously used that name for their operatic settings of the story.

Leonore No.1 was thought for many years to be the original version of the overture  – but recent research has established it was written after the other versions, specifically for a Prague production of the opera in 1808 which apparently never actually took place (hence the Overture’s somewhat “academic” high opus numbering). Though not as overtly theatrical in its layout as the other “Leonora” overtures, the music still has a pleasing and satisfying overall shape – a sombre introduction, giving way to determined energies followed by lyrical yearnings, the whole completed by a surging, all-conquering conclusion.

Having the players, specifically the strings, brought foward of the proscenium arch made for a more-than-usually analytical sound-picture, sharply-focused, but lacking the bloom of the Town Hall’s ampler ambience. However, the smallish number of strings survived the sound-spotlight with considerable credit, a couple of previously-mentioned ensemble and intonation inconsistencies aside, during the slow, recitative-like opening passages.

Once the allegro got under way the full orchestra’s extra weight and immediacy of sound was thrilling to experience, the music’s syncopations and energies here, and at the conclusion of the work, done with verve and dash. Conductor Marc Taddei managed the music’s contrasts beautifully, the horns and other winds giving great pleasure with their handling of the famous yearning theme sung in the opera by the imprisoned Florestan.

The following work on the programme indirectly gave the concert its overall title, “La  Donna Ideale”, which was the title of the sixth of a collection of eleven Folk-Songs composed and/or transcribed from other sources by avant-garde Italian composer Luciano Berio. Of course, Beethoven’s eponymous heroine celebrated in the concert’s opening music had already ticked the requisite boxes suggested by the title!

Berio wrote these songs for the celebrated singer Cathy Berberian, whom he was married to for a number of years. Today’s singer was our own Madeleine Pierard, resplendently pregnant, and as engaging in voice and platform manner as ever. I could imagine Berberian’s voice having a bit more “edge” and feistiness in places compared with what we heard, but not any more charm, wit and heartfelt directness which Madeleine Pierard gave to us so generously.

The singer’s focused diction enabled us to hear every word of the two American songs which opened the set, and her fully-vocalised engagement with the changing moods of the others brought each one to life. From song to song one marvelled at the differences
of ambience and energy and the range of emotion.

Particularly telling were the contrasts across the final sequence of four songs, the eerie, almost spectral quality of the singer’s “bleached” tones in Motetu de tristura, the out-of-doors chirpiness of Malurous qu’o unno fenno, the folksy, tongue-in-cheek exchanges between singer and solo ‘cello in Lo fiolaire, and the verve and energy of the concluding Azerbaijan Love Song – it sound as though those people in the final song were playing for keeps!

Supporting and matching Pierard’s artistry was the quality of the orchestral playing throughout, both in ensemble and across the many solo lines, making the whole a heart-warming experience.

What a contrast with the world evoked by ex-pat Toronto-based Kiwi composer Juliet Palmer – unlike the often more rarified, prescribed work of many of her contemporaries, her Solid Gold presentation drew directly from mainstream culture, namely, those of pop lyrics associated with music.

Juliet Palmer used only the texts of various pop songs to gather the shards of material she needed to make into a kind of distillation of impulses concerning  love – the composer declared her aim to “unearth the heart of the love song”.  A lot of the time the singer was using the word I – beginning with “I am, I said” which was about the closest to a direct quote from an actual song – but elsewhere it sounded as though Palmer was actually reassembling  the sounds of the words. Other reconstructions brought forth phrases beginning with such words  as “I wanna be” –  according to the composer, echoing a 1984 hit song “I wanna know what love is”.

As she was inspired by pop music’s “distinct sound world” her own music here mostly courted pastiche, (I scribbled the phrase “Disney-like accompaniment” at one point) primarily a kind of springboard for those deconstructed/reconstructed lyrics to bounce along before taking and relishing their brief individual moments of glory. But there were also abnormalities and angularities in places, diverting horn glissandi notes during the work’s introduction and a clustered, Ligeti-like accompaniment to the words “I am” and their subsequent development, sharp Stravinsky-like chords  contributing to the faint underbelly of edginess in certain places in the work.

Enjoyable, but intriguing – and sung by Madeleine Pierard with a richly-wrought relish that brought to mind Noel Coward’s comment  regarding “the potency of cheap music”.

After this we pleasurably anticipated a different kind of delight – the rich, robust humour of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. It’s always seemed to me a work of enormous verve and assurance, one which appears to confidently sum up a whole cosmos of symphonic achievement on the part of its composer. Though outwardly it appears something of a classical “throwback”, the music constantly confounds expectation and is filled with dramatic surprises and rhythmic angularities.

Alas, in this performance, the “rich, robust humour” was a sometimes thing. Brilliantly though the orchestra played the work, I thought Marc Taddei’s frantic pacing of the music took away some of the work’s capacity to delight and confound as Beethoven probably intended. For every sequence that impressed with its near-breathless brilliance, there were two which caused me to lament the over-riding impression of excessive haste  – with such deliciously-contrived humour and droll charm to be savoured, I’m at a loss to understand why these things seemed to be put to the metronomic sword.

To be entirely fair, the parts of the work which I thought did come off well were certainly exciting to listen to – the first movement development evoked a kind of tense game of chase between groups of instruments, the horns in particular bringing out their accents tellingly at one point, though the crescendo leading to the reprise had little chance to register at such a pace. And the finale, too, had its best moments mid-movement, the music’s driving force giving an extra vertiginous quality to the “giant’s footfalls” and their hair-raising harmonic lurches.

The middle movements seemed to me far less happy with so much detailing being made to rush by at speed – the Allegretto scherzando movement lost some of its droll contrasts between delicacy and girth, while the canonic passages between winds and strings had little chance to properly register at such a tempo. Similarly, the Tempo di Menuetto sounded too businesslike and regimented here, as if all the dancers had personal trainers as their partners, keeping things up to speed. And the delicious triplet accompaniments for the horns and winds in the Trio went almost for nothing for me, despite the wonderfully alert playing.

One person’s meat, they say – but even so, a thing of beauty is surely to be savoured and not merely efficiently despatched. There were enough good things about the symphony’s performance here to divert the harshest critic, if only momentarily – but I felt that, if more time had been given for notes, phrases and paragraphs to properly “own” and relish their allotted spaces, a good performance of the work would have become a great one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stroma – the Elemental and the Fabulous

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Stroma New Music Ensemble presents:
GODDESS AND STORYTELLER

Music by IANNIS XENAKIS, GAO PING, and DOROTHY KER

Nicholas Isherwood (bass baritone)
Thomas Guldborg (percussion)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Stroma New Music Ensemble

Hunter Council Chamber,
Victoria University of Wellington

Sunday 1st September 2013

Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned (those of us who read the program note before the concert, that is….)….short of resorting to an official rubber-stamped, or publicly-broadcast Government Health Warning, the accompanying note did made it quite clear regarding the salient characteristics of the two items written by Greek-born, French-naturalised composer Iannis Xenakis which framed this extraordinary Stroma concert: “….these works are unprecedented in their raw power and violence”.

Both pieces were late additions by the composer to an opera inspired by the classical Greek story known as The Oresteia (a work by Aeschylus, about Orestes, the son of Clytemnestera and Agamemnon, and the series of tragic events involving these characters). The first of these additional pieces was called Kassandra, and featured a series of dialogues between the Prophetess of the same name who had forseen these tragedies, and a chorus. The second, titled La Déesse Athena (The Goddess Athena) took the form of an accompanied monologue of declamation, the text a series of directives by the Goddess to the people of Athens to establish courts of law.

Despite each piece having a “stand-and-deliver” appearance on the part of the musicians that one might associate more with the concert platform than the stage, both made the kind of visceral impact one would expect from raw, graphic theatrical depictions of brutal violence and conflict. The theatricality of each piece was underscored by the remarkable vocal virtuosity of American bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood, required to sing throughout both works alternating (sometimes rapidly) between baritonal and falsetto pitches. It was, one might say, a vocal tour de force.

In the first piece, the two differently-pitched voices represented both Kassandra, the Prophetess, and her exchanges with the chorus of elders. The singer’s voice was amplified (in both pieces), which for me contributed to the immediate “all-pervasiveness” of the sounds –  in Kassandra,  biting, dramatic exchanges between the prophetess and the chorus. Solo percussionist (Thomas Guldborg) activated both drums and wood-blocks, advancing both the declamatory style of the exchanges and remorselessly driving the trajectories of the narrative forward as the prophetess graphically described how Agamemnon would be murdered by his wife and her lover. As well, the singer occasionally activated a kind of psaltery, the sounds imitating an ancient Greek lyre (actually, the instrument was described as an Indian siter).

Just as engaging/harrowing was the second of Xenaxis’s pieces, La Déesse Athena, which concluded the concert – if anything, it was even more blistering an experience than was Kassandra, with the resources of a chamber ensemble put to immediate and confrontational effect. Everything was shrill and hard-edged, with the singer frequently changing from falsetto to baritonal pitch and back again, underlining Athena’s dualistic, male/female nature, and emphasising the implacable, all-encompassing nature of the directives.

From the stark, harrowing pterodactyl-imagined cries of the opening winds, through to the piece’s end, the intensities never really let up, the exchanges between the singer’s dual-voiced utterances and the raw insistence of the ensemble groups expressing sounds of the most elemental and uncompromising kind. Not for nothing was Xenakis quoted by the programme notes as saying that he felt he was born too late, and had nothing to do in the twentieth century – these sounds seemed at once ancient and anarchic, a kind of screaming and moaning from the underbelly of human existence. The archaic Greek texts of both pieces “placed” to an extent the composer’s creative focus, but the classical or pre-classical “statues” referred to in the excellent notes, and here given voice seemed to me, to “speak, sing and scream” to all ages.

The only thing that perhaps could have further advanced these sensational, no-holds-barred performances was to have performed them in a properly theatrical setting. As it was, the presentations were as confrontational and uncompromising as I think they could have been in normal concert surroundings – and, in a sense, the “neutrality” of the concert situation enabled we listeners to focus purely and directly upon the music, to memorable effect.

Thankfully, both Gao Ping’s and Dorothy Ker’s pieces inhabited somewhat different, less harrowing realms, although each had its own distinctive way with sonority and with its organisation of material. I thought Gao Ping’s work was the more overtly discursive and exploratory, as befitted the composer’s title for the piece – Shuo Shu Ren – The Storyteller. Naturally enough, as well as the stories themselves, the storyteller’s own personality and distinctive way of putting across his material were here presented, for our great delight.

One could extrapolate the scenario’s different elements from the sounds – the first section of the music strongly redolent of a “Once upon a time….”, with jaunty, angular winds setting the trajectories at the beginning, but giving way to a whole inventory of textural and rhythmic variations, the lines and timbres engaging us with the idea of a kind of “exposition” of characters, situations and contexts at the conclusion of the work’s first section.

Something of the composer’s idea of myth blending with reality seemed to haunt the wistful, remote opening of the second section, like impulses of a cold memory being stroked and brought back to a state of warmth. Lovely cello-playing by Rowan Prior helped give the sequence a Holst-like austerity, augmented in places with oriental-flavoured intervals and harmonies. The music then re-established its narrative flow, with many imaginative and interactive touches, incorporating both the storyteller’s entrancement and the listener’s rapture.  These interactions brought about a two-note figure of resolution, almost a shout of triumph and fulfilment, brought back by the solo ‘cello to the meditative realms .

A third section gave the wind players plenty of scope to galvanise the narrative and “flesh out” the protagonists – from birdsong beginnings, the figurations grew in animation and girth, underpinned by strings and harp.The kaleidoscopic texture-changes kept the pace keen and listener-sensibilities guessing, culminating in alarm-sounding squeals(winds), acamperings (strings) and flourishes (harp) – very exciting!

The epilogue began with dreamy responses to a perky oboe, strings and winds drifting their lines into harmonies which dovetailed into a cadential trill, then delicately sounded again, to gorgeous, somewhat disembodied effect, with notes sounding across silences and dissolving into them. We readily experienced the composer’s idea of the storyteller dispersing fragments “ephemeral as light”.

An even more interesting-looking assemblage of players trooped out for Dorothy Ker’s work (…and…11), continuing a kind of mushrooming of numbers effect with each succeeding item. Where Gao Ping’s descriptions of his music drew largely upon his childhood memories, Ker’s less overtly personalised language in her programme-note focused intently upon metaphor and imagery describing what she called in her music a “wave-like morphology”, and the resulting “cycles of accumulation and decay” stemming from her use of the word “and” in the piece’s title.

More concentrated, terser and in a sense “tougher” a work than Gao Ping’s, (…and…11)  held our interest in a more immediate, less hypnotic sense, rather as I remembered old radio serials of decective stories used to do, with music soundtracks generating as much imagined expectation and incident as did the voices. I liked Dorothy Ker’s use of a repeated kind of what I immediately thought of as a “radio chord” whose focal-points repeatedly interacted with instrumental incident – percussion rumbles, scintillations, breath-sounds and mutterings, rock-bottom brass sonorities – sequences to create, in the composer’s words, “anticipation, followed by a release energy”.

As with Gao Ping’s work, the sonorities led the ear ever onwards through these sequences – disparate sounds included slashing pizzicati, with strings stinging the fingerboards, chords eerily made by breath-sounds in tandem with deep brass,and recitative-like solos from flute, clarinet and trombone. And the concluding episode was entrancingly done, the dance all-too-briefly suggested before leaving the outcomes to the realms of our imagination.

One was left, at the concert’s end, marvelling at the range and scope of the Stroma musicians’ skills under Hamish McKeich’s clear-sighted direction, bringing into being such a far-flung range of musical realisations with terrific aplomb and conviction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pianist Sonja Radojkovic at Lower Hutt – tempestuous, erratic, inspirational

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:
SONJA RADOJKOVIC – Piano Recital

BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata in C Major Op.53 “Waldstein”
BRAHMS – Variations on a Theme of Paganini Op.35 (Book Two)
SCHUMANN – Etudes Symphoniques Op.13
DEBUSSY – Excerpts from “Children’s Corner” Suite

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Tuesday, 22nd August, 2013

I’ve deliberately let more than a few days pass before attempting to set down my thoughts regarding what I heard at Serbian pianist Sonja Radojkovic’s recent Lower Hutt piano recital. Even now I’m not sure of being able to do the event full justice, but the Law of Diminished Returns will undoubtedly kick in and play havoc with memory if I wait too much longer.

The pianist was supposed to play in Lower Hutt earlier this year, but ill health intervened, causing her to cancel her scheduled visit.  Radojkovic had visited New Zealand before in 2003, and caused something of a minor sensation, judging by the reviews she received from various quarters – hence the initial disappointment at her cancellation this time round. She was obviously determined to come and make good her original intentions, however, so that, some months later, here she was, as promised.

Given the somewhat impromptu circumstances it wasn’t surprising that the Little Theatre at Lower Hutt was only half-full – but it was a good enough assemblage to raise a suitable response to an artist who’d obviously taken time and trouble to get here to play. I’d heard her interviewed on the radio beforehand, though perhaps because of her Serbian origins the exchanges seemed to be mostly about the political situation in Central Europe rather than exploring in depth any musical or pianistic philosophies.

I did get some idea from the interview of her avowed devotion to the music of Chopin – even though the promised program contained none of his music. As it turned out, her identification with that composer’s works made a significant, even vital contribution to the evening’s music-making, more of which in due course. At the outset we were anticipating the very different worlds of Beethoven and Brahms, with an interestingly-contrasted Schumann-and-Debussy bracket after the interval.

From the beginning Radojkovic’s imposing physical presence seemed to dominate the piano and the stage – just a few notes into the Waldstein Sonata’s opening and we found ourselves plunged into a world of “Sturm und Drang”, playing which had an urgency and a drive, even if the figurations were occasionally uneven, with notes scattered, Schnabel-like, across the spectrum in places (pianist Artur Schnabel (1882-1951) was an inspirational interpreter of Beethoven who frequently pushed the music to realms beyond his technical capabilities, to thrilling, if occasionally chaotic effect!).

Frequently Radojkovic’s left hand simply drowned out the right in a torrent of sound, though perhaps the piano’s definite lack of “ring” here could have been partly to blame for the inbalance. It also seemed part and parcel of her interpretation – very misty and romantic, exciting but unpredictable, with accents unexpectedly “barbed”, and snapping at you without warning.

Obviously something of the thunder and wildness of the old piano gods still lurked in this woman’s being – elegant it was not, but instead proclaimed itself as unashamedly fiery and romantic. Interestingly the slow movement in Radojkovic’s hands was brooding and restless, the theme never becoming song, but remaining charged and declamatory, pushed along to the point of what felt for this listener like impatience in places, though others might have relished the on-going tensions.

It was in the finale that I simply had to part company with her – again, her left hand frequently near-submerged the right, which often exhibited a tendency to snatch at the phrasings and move them along faster than her technique would stand – the big exchanges between hands in triplets against the octave theme went almost completely off the rails, and there was no mood-change when the grand, should-have-been-majestic A-flat statement of the finale’s theme came – here it was unceremoniously moved through as part of the same all-purpose whirlwind, to hectoring and ill-tempered effect. And the recapitulation of the opening was the same – Beethoven’s music, I thought, was here given an overdose of haste, incessant drive and marked impatience.

With the aforementioned Schnabel’s occasionally erratic playing, there was nevertheless, at all times, a feeling of shape and form and differentiation, even amidst the most hair-raising episodes of technical carnage. Here in the Waldstein’s finale I felt Radojkovic simply rode roughshod over much of the music – in fact to the point where she sounded, purely and simply, insufficiently prepared.

How on earth, I thought, was she going to cope with the far more out-and-out virtuosic keyboard writing in Brahms’s Paganini Variations? Well, the quicker variations were all stormily and splashily played, while the more poetic and introspective ones were extremely characterful, winsome, flowing and lovely. Occasionally she used too much pedal to generate great washes of sound, reminding me in places of the kind of effect got by the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, heard ”live” when having one of his less technically secure days.

Conversely, I loved her lilting way with the fourth, major-key variation, and also with the delicately-etched-in No.8. She kept her best playing, I thought, for these more lyrical, poetic episodes, the twelfth variation being another example of her ability to rhapsodize in a completely natural and flowing way. But much of the rest was an amalgam of grandeur, excitement, agitation, and just plain noise, with an alarming number of mis-hits – surely too many for a player working at this performance level?

I had been looking forward to the prospect of hearing one of my favourite sets of romantic piano variations, Schumann’s Op.13 Etudes Symphoniques, before the concert – but was now not so sure! Radojkovic did begin promisingly, playing the theme at the beginning with great freedom, the chord progressions elastic and spontaneously-sounded, with the bass sonorities again emphasised.

However, once the variations began, the same disfiguing elements which had bedevilled her playing up to that point in the recital were unfortunately revisited. In the case of each variation she played no repeats, which for me reduced the work’s stature and grandeur – moreover, she tended to “clip” phrase-notes, and hurry through figurations in places where I was expecting her to expand, which further compressed the work’s scale. And that tyrannical left hand began to cause me to wince every time it threatened to obliterate the right hand’s thematic lines.

It was only the slower, second-to-last variation that gave me any pleasure throughout the rest of the work – my notes instead contain remarks such as “an unholy scramble!”, or “All bluster and thunder”, and “Bashes through and approximates wildly!” I couldn’t believe the extent to which I was writing these things about a professional musician. One expects a smattering of wrong notes from a performer in any public piano recital, but Radojkovic’s “hit-and-miss” ratio felt simply too high for comfort.

Parts of Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite responded to Radojkovic’s freely impressionistic way with the music, though the very opening theme of “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum” had no sense of shape – its dreamy middle section was, however, beautifully realised, even if the concluding accelerando became something of a scramble, with pile-driven final chords.

More successful were “Jumbo’s Lullaby” and “Serenade for the Doll”, each in its own way delicately played and nicely contrasted. “The Snow is Dancing” also had its moments, though surely its repeated-note sequence was far too vehemently presented. And “The Little Shepherd”, despite some lovely touches, sounded, to my ears too fast, too volatile, in places – why would one want to play such music so impatiently?

As for the subject of the famous “Golliwog’s Cakewalk”, I thought, here, a more unpleasant ruffian never trod the boards – sharp-toned and aggressive-sounding, the music made a thoroughly bad-tempered and out-of-sorts impression.

And that was that – or rather, it would have been had not Radojkovic announced that she would like to play some Chopin for us as an encore, telling us in heavily-accented English that he was her favourite composer. We had barely settled back down in our seats before the opening notes of the well-known Op.66 Fantasie-Impromptu rang out from the keyboard – and suddenly, the music-making was transformed.

Here was much of the same impulsiveness and volatility that we’d heard throughout the evening, but with the melodic lines and counterpoints having a shape and coherence hitherto obscured – now, the music seemed properly lived-with, and completely under the pianist’s fingers. The sounds readily conveyed a real sense of excitement contrasted with repose, and effectively characterising by turns the music’s portrayals of both adventurer and dreamer.

This was playing which brought to my mind the grand manner of some of those famous old pianists of the 78rpm recording era, giving us something unique and treasurable, and making complete sense of whatever. I confess to being startled by the transformation – with Chopin’s music acting as a kind of catalyst, Radojkovic had suddenly created order from the previous chaos before us.It was like the turning over of a new leaf, something almost alchemic in effect, and perhaps beyond understanding (I’m trying, here, to work my way towards at least a modicum of the same!)…

After gob-smacking us with her playing of the Fantasie-Impromptu, Radojkovic then delighted us with the Waltz in C-sharp Minor (Op.64 No.2), again giving us a strongly-characterised reading, the music’s melancholic and quixotic elements rendered with tingling immediacy and near-perfect detailing. We even forgave her a touch of showmanship at the final reprise of the “running down the stairs” sequences, here tossed off  at speed with the nonchalance of any old-time pianistic “great” one might care to name.

So, honour was at least in part restored at the recital’s end by this remarkable pianist – whether her playing throughout much of the evening was the result of being less-than-properly prepared, or plagued by non-musical pressures such as jet-lag, I found it difficult to decide.

What’s certain is that, on the strength of that Chopin-playing, I would like very much to hear Radojkovic again, either in an all-Chopin recital, or in music that draws from her the same intensities of ownership and identification and attention to detail – here, for just a few minutes, those kinds of intensities took us with her into realms inhabited by beauties and profundities associated with things treasurable and unforgettable.