Author: Peter Mechen

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Worlds of experience and sensibility – the Antipodes String Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts Series:

Antipodes String Trio

LARRY PRUDEN – String Trio (1953-55)

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI – String Trio (1991)

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART – Divertimento for String Trio in E-Flat K.563

Antipodes String Trio:
Amalia Hall (violin) / Nicholas Hancox (viola)
Sarah Rommel (‘cello)

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

Sunday 18th August, 2013

This was a concert that looked interesting enough on paper, but then really caught fire in performance. Its disparate parts came together simply and directly to produced the kind of combustion whose glow remained long after the last notes had been played.

The Antipodes String Trio has changed its personnel over the last couple of years –  the 2011 line up which toured New Zealand included Christabel Lin (violin) and David Requiro (cello), along with the present violist, Nicholas Hancox. The group was originally formed as a result of connections between students who were attending different various music conservatories and institutes in New Zealand and the United States.

The present group has a different violinist, Amalia Hall, and ‘cellist, Sarah Rommel, who met while attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where both are currently doing postgraduate studies. Previously, Amelia Hall and Nicholas Hancox had played together in the NZSO National Youth Orchestra. Nicholas Hancox is presently based in Germany, as principal viola of the Lubeck Philharmonic Orchestra.

For a group whose members spend much of their time pursuing individual career pathways, their playing demonstrated a remarkable unity throughout. Undoubtedly a good deal of this “esprit de corps” comes from an avowed commitment to help promote what the group calls ‘‘the under-utilised repertoire of the string trio, which many great composers throughout music history have contributed to’’

To my ears they realised much of the essential character of each of the works they performed – the breezy, out-of-doors angularity of Larry Pruden’s work, the contrasting ferocity and ghostliness of Penderecki’s piece, and the noble energies and fluid graces of Mozart’s Divertimento.

The programme note for the Pruden work cited Bartok as one of the chief influences, though I kept on hearing Tippett-like impulses in places. Not that the composer borowed consciously from other music, as it’s entirely natural that resonances of past encounters with various works from other sources would crop up in anybody’s music.

Here, I enjoyed the first movement’s restless energies, with the few moments of repose allowing the shades of a marching song to peep around the corners in places, and bringing forth a lovely alternating interplay between violin and viola. The second-movement Serenade (separately transcribed by the composer for string orchestra, as “Night Song”) featured beguiling open-air harmonies and delicate, watery pizzicato sequences, including a full-throated,  superbly-focused mid-movement “tutti”, filled with feeling.

The third movement’s delightful interchanges again brought the Tippett of the Double String Orchestra Concerto to mind, high spirits giving way to beautifully inward-sounding ambiences, almost Aeolian in effect in places, thanks to the rapt, concentrated instrumental soundings from these players. I also liked the Trio, with its viola-sounded echoes of the opening Vivace, poised here to perfection.

Continuing the mood-contrasts, the finale’s Lento tranquillo brought austere beauties from each instrument, the slow, fugal character of the music allowing the intensities to build systematically and inexorably – perhaps more “tragico” than “Tranquillo” in places, though the purer, more “ritualised” tones of the strings after the full-throated lines had run their course did suggest a kind of “home is where the heart is” aspect at the end. I thought these players gave of themselves so wholeheartedly throughout – so much so that we in the audience felt the “wrench” at the end when the sounds were broken off and all spells ceased.

What a contrast with the ferocity of Krzysztof Penderecki’s slashing chords at the very beginning of his String Trio! These brutal, hammered-out episodes alternated with lyrical and whimsical sequences for each solo instrument making for an ambience harsh, volatile and surreal in effect, after the Pruden work. The players threw themselves and their instruments into these sequences with playing of great verve, relishing the contrasts of colour, tone and emphasis, and creating as powerful and telling an atmosphere with their muted, spectral realisations as during the more forceful moments.

Viola, then violin by turns introduced the fugue-like second movement, the intensities leading back into the ferocious chords of the work’s opening, the music motoric and insistent, like some of Shostakovich’s, expressed most excitingly with some trenchant playing.

When it was over, I thought of the worlds of difference between the two works we had just heard. I found myself thinking of Douglas Lilburn’s telling descriptions of Penderecki’s music in his landmark “A Search for a Language” talk, prompted by thoughts regarding the relationship of musical language to experience. And Lilburn goes on to point out that other creative minds have stressed the importance of finding universal truths in our own lives’ framework. The result? – a telling contrast here between the respective worlds of two composers.

A kind of synthesis of universal truth, life-experience and innate genius can readily be found in the music of Mozart, whose Divertimento for String Trio in E-flat K.563, which took up the programme’s remainder, seemed to somehow enrich the contexts suggested by both of those first-half works. Written in 1788, in the wake of financial difficulties for the composer, and from the same period as his last three symphonies, it’s a more serious and profound work than the title “Divertimento” suggests.

I thought the Trio’s playing had real “girth” throughout the first movement, bring out the music’s nobility – for me, only Beethoven, in works such as the “Eroica”, approaches Mozart in his wondrous “E-flat” mode. The group took us on a true voyage of exploration with the music’s development – from the golden, sun-drenched strains of the opening we were suddenly plunged into realms of mystery and unpredictability, the figurations containing such a variegated set of emphases – beautiful work, especially, from viola and ‘cello in thirds in places.

A dignified, heartfelt Adagio was followed by a “kicking-up-its-heels” Minuet, with each instrument given the chance to bend its back to the dance, then engage in expressive, even volatile exchanges with a partner in the Trio, before returning to the dance. The players enjoyed the Theme-and-Variations Andante, as well as the rather more rustic second Minuet, one with a delicious waltz-like first Trio – its “ready-steady-go” beginning was here pointed most engagingly – and a pretty, very feminine second Trio, again delightfully characterized.

Apart from a surprising single mis-hit from the violist at one point, the group’s delivery of the Allegro Finale was excitingly spot-on in terms of accuracy, flow, expression and interchange. It was playing that brought out the quote from musicologist Alfred Einstein, reproduced in the program – “Every note is significant – every note is a contribution to spiritual and sensuous fulfillment in sound”….the Antipodeans’ performance  here embodied that comment, playing into each other’s and into our hands, so that we in the audience were able to partake fully in the musical feast.

I do hope we shall hear much more from this talented and engaging trio of musicians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Endres wows ’em at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents:
Michael Endres (piano)

SCHUBERT – Impromptus Op.142 (D.935)

CHOPIN – Barcarolle Op.60

RAVEL – Pavane pour une infante defunte / Jeux d’eau

GERSHWIN – Rhapsody in Blue (solo piano version)

Memorial Hall, Waikanae

Sunday, 2:30pm, 4th August 2013

The biographical note on pianist Michael Endres, reproduced on the back of the progranmme for his Waikanae recital, contains a number of critical responses from various parts of the world to his playing. Two of these judgements concurred exactly with my own reactions to Endres’ playing that afternoon – from a Boston newspaper came the comment that he was “one of the most interesting pianists recording today”; while the English Gramophone magazine declared that he was “an outstanding Schubert player”.

By the time Endres had finished the first of the four Impromptus Op.142 (or D.935) I was already inclining towards endorsing both statements. His playing for me gave a “freshly-minted” feel to the sounds, the music’s opening dramatic but not heavy, and the subsequent explorations a spontaneous flowing, by turns winsome and sombre.

What I particularly enjoyed was that he seemed like anything but a “right-hand” pianist. I felt he regarded the music as a tapestry whose strands at any place that was appropriate could be teased out and highlighted and given primacy in terms of the piece’s overall flow. He also brought out the wonderful “road music” quality of certain of the episodes, able to spin the melodies over long archways, with beautiful “lullabic” sounds.

Quicker with the opening of the A-flat Impromptu than either Kempff or Brendel on their respective recordings, Endres gave it a kind of folk-song-quality  rather than that of a hymn, one with a lusty, forthright chorus! – a beautiful flow was managed in the middle, like water coursing through rivulets, all nicely unmetrical and impulsive.

The third Impromptu was very like the same composer’s  Rosamunde music, playing with a real sense of listening to itself, and the variations following one another so naturally and organically. The fourth of the set was spiky and tangy, very Hungarian, I thought, characterful and flavoursome, with some wonderful “lurches” into different moods and atmospheres – incredible  swirlings, called to order by quasi-military fanfares! Endres’s playing certainly took the pieces out of the drawing room and set them in the wider, far more variegated world.

A similar kind of energy activated his performance of the Chopin Barcarolle, though I confess to preferring a more epic approach to the work than we got here – his was light and generally swift-moving, the figurations restless and volatile. I always like this music to generate a sense of journeying, of the prospect of great spaces to traverse, and of thus leaving something in reserve over the first few measures to grow into and enlarge.

However, Endres’s way was a very “here-and-now” experience, instead – the central section was swift and dramatic, splashy in places, in a way that went with the pianistic territory, of course. The agitations were even more oceanic at the opening’s return, leading up to and in the wake of the great cadential point – I thought it all too stormy for a Barcarolle, even one as epic-browed as this.  I wanted more spacious textures, moments which one could go so far as call poetic – but the pianist’s vision was of different things, which he certainly recreated with conviction.

I did like his Ravel – the famous Pavane was very boldly-presented, with a wide dynamic range and sharply-terraced contrasts (some people might have found it a bit too “iron hand in velvet glove”-like in places. He did, I thought, keep the music at arm’s length, showing little “hurt” in the sounds he made – I always think Ravel’s music much more “vulnerable” than Debussy’s in that respect. Whenever I hear this music I feel the presence of eyes looking out at the world from behind the mask, concealing the feelings; and there were the faintest touches of that tenderness here and there. By contrast, Jeux was all brilliance and no emotion, which is the ethos of the piece in any case, only the “laughter of the river-god” disturbing the equanimity – great virtuosity on the pianist’s part!  How interesting to think of Liszt’s fountains in his “Villa d’Este” piece next to Ravel’s evocations, and how much more feeling wells up from THOSE waters……..

Unexpectedly, the most disappointing item in the concert for me was the piano-only Rhapsody – it came across as somewhat “Jekyll-and-Hyde”-ish, because Endres seemed to take definite pains from the outset to differentiate between the solo piano part and the transcription of the orchestral parts. This was a good idea in theory, but in practice it resulted in his occasionally taking the music by the scruff of the neck and shaking it until bits fell off (and some did, in places!)….so, while the intent was perhaps laudable, its execution was too brusque, the music’s poetry too squeezed and its brilliance much too garbled in places.

Much of his playing, I thought, belied the title “Rhapsody” – here, some of the episodes suggested the piece ought to have been called “Toccata” or “Bacchanale”. I realise that Gershwin had to improvise some of his part at the first performance because he hadn’t finished writing it out, and so the element of spontaneity was authentic – but this was simply too ham-fisted and pugilistic an approach for me, I’m afraid, with, as I’ve said, bits dropping off the music when the going got really tough!!

But, who am I to criticise? – at the end of it, the pianist got something of a standing ovation! And I heard someone sitting near to me happily chortling, “Well, I’ve never heard Gershwin played quite like that before!” – obviously the hell-for-leather approach had as many admirers as it did doubters, if not more! It just goes to show how differently people actually HEAR music.

For myself, I’m happy to report that Endres played some more Gershwin at the concert’s end, and the results here were wrought of magic – these were, I think, exerpts from the “George Gershwin Songbook” for piano solo. Included in the selection was “The Man I Love”, “Lady Be Good” and “S’Wonderful”, plus another whose title I didn’t know. Michael Endres gave them everything that was missing, I thought, from his playing in the “Rhapsody” – here was charm, sentiment, fullness of tone, plenty of impulse and variety – so winning! – thus we ended the concert on what was, for me, a high note!

Nikolai Demidenko at Upper Hutt’s Classical Expressions

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Classical Expressions, Upper Hutt presents:
Nikolai Demidenko – Carnivals and Sonatas

SCHUMANN – Carnival Jest from Vienna (Faschinsschwank aus Wien) Op.26
Carnaval – Scenes mignonnes sur quatre notes Op.9
SCHUBERT – Sonata in A D.664 / Sonata in A Minor D.748

Nikolai Demidenko (piano)

Classical Expressions Upper Hutt

Monday 29th July 2013

It was an occasion which brought home to me the refreshing reality of live music-making as opposed to the ethos presented by presentations of the artist “on record”. I had not previously heard Nikolai Demidenko in the concert-hall (though he’s been to New Zealand before), encountering him only through recordings.

It wasn’t so much what I’d heard that surprised me, as what I imagined the artist would be like. Photographs of the pianist seemed to suggest some kind of wild, intense, volatile spirit, aloof, uncompromising and ultra-romantic in a kind of “Wuthering Heights” sense. And, of course, the music he seemed to carry a particular torch for – that of Nikolai Medtner’s – itself had a similar aura – enigmatic, exotic and slightly out of the mainstream.

So, I was preparing myself for the entrance of some kind of Dostoyevskian figure, when a dapper, bearded, bespectacled man walked quickly, even a little nervously, onto the platform and bowed courteously to his audience – he had a somewhat ruddy complexion and his hair was reddish-brown, or appeared so in the light. Surely – surely not? – was this my wild, uncompromising, romantic artist from the land of the endless steppes? How could this be? It wasn’t long before Demidenko’s actual playing restored some of my equanimity, conveying to me (in a way that his initial appearance certainly didn’t) plenty of the volatility, energy and grand manner that I was expecting.

He began, at first none too commandingly, with Robert Schumann’s Carnival Jest in Vienna (Faschingsschwank aus Wien), ever-so-slightly smudging the treacherous opening flourishes; but his playing soon settled – his tones deepened and his focus sharpened. In between the fanfare-like reprises of the opening were beautifully-contrasted interludes, one of which was a delicious “strutting” rhythm, which eventually built up to a defiant quote of the opening of La Marseillaise (the song had been banned by the Austrian censor) – Demidenko hurled the tune forth with the greatest of gusto.

The suite of movements has plenty of variety; and Demidenko gave us essences of each one in turn – the fanciful dream-world of the Romanze was followed by the gaily-spirited, repetitive “skip” of the Scherzino, with its alternations of playfulness and pageantry. Then came the darker purpose of the Intermezzo, all swirling agitation at the outset, but with the pianist superbly delineating the individual currents so as to allow the embedded melody to sing forth – great playing!

After this the finale’s opening exploded with energy, causing Demidenko’s fingers to momentarily “jump the rails” (it all added to the excitement!) – it was, like Sviatoslav Richter’s playing on his famous “live” Italian recording of the piece, extremely forceful, “free-wheeling pianism” as one might put it, but exactly what the music itself suggested – Schumann at his most exuberant.

There was more of the same kind of excitement and enthusiasm throughout Demidenko’s playing of Carnaval, that fantastical procession of characters, both make-believe and from among the composer’s own friends and colleagues. Demidenko’s view of this “portrait-gallery” was as absorbing as any I’ve heard, right from the beginning, with his grand and rhetorical Préambule, and – playing for maximum contrast – fascinatingly halting and nervous Pierrot, leading to a teasing, mercurial (if none too accurately-played) Arlequin!

To go through the work and give Demidenko credit for every single moment of illumination of Schumann’s wonderful writing would tax the reader’s patience to excess – nevertheless, one must make mention of the pianist’s ghostly evocation of the rarely-played Sphinxes, a brief kind of “appendix” to the Coquette/Replique sequences, which Schumann didn’t intend to be performed, even if luminaries such as Rachmaninov, Cortot, Horowitz and Gieseking chose to include it in their recordings, for our delight.

Usually it’s the final section of the work, the Davidsbundler putting the Philistines to flight, which guarantees plenty of keyboard thrills – but Demidenko cut loose earlier with Paganini, Schumann’s tribute to the violinist’s overwhelming presence and virtuosity – a veritable onslaught, with cascades of notes, leaving us all open-mouthed with astonishment! The Davidsbundler triumph at the end thus had a slightly less “death-and-glory” and more ritualistic aspect to its energies, as much a summing-up as an actual coup de grace stroke, the piano tones properly rich and satisfying.

In the second half, Schubert’s A Major Sonata D.664 was balm to the senses after Schumann’s invigorations! Here was another side of Demidenko’s pianism, one of lyrical poetry, the player bringing out both the music’s weight and its weightlessness, the contrasts bound together with the same ease of flow. Schubert was able to bear us away upon the wings of whatever mood he chose to explore, sometimes setting tranquility and anxiety cheek-by-jowl, as in the first movement’s sounding of bass figurations beneath the filigree treble ones at the recapitulation, and the second movement’s melancholy darkening after the rich loveliness of the opening.

Demidenko brought out the “bigness” rather than the drawing-room aspect of the finale, contrasting the prettiness of the opening theme with great rolling colonnades of sound serving as flourishes between the lyrical moments – these purposeful energies dominated the central section of the movement, and playfully vied with the melodic impulses right at the end – an approach which arrested and held, rather than stretched out one’s attention, right to the final chords.

In some ways the previous work’s antithesis, the A Minor Sonata D.784 which followed began as it meant to go on, with furrowed brow and grim forward motion, then plunging into agitated figurations involving cascading octaves and heart-stopping sforzandi tremolandos.

Demidenko preferred urgency to portentousness throughout, but wonderfully controlled all of the different dynamic levels of the various statements, so that each had a slightly different “weight” of character. In places I thought he pushed the music too fast, as with the arrival of the resplendent fanfares at the climax of the development, where the effect was a shade brusque rather than truly climactic – but the agitato element was certainly maintained, if at the expense of some of the music’s “haunted” stillness.

The pianist gave us an exquisitely-voiced melodic line at the slow movement’s beginning, before allowing the shadow of the twisted chromatic figure to darken the ambience and hold it in thrall. I liked the heartfelt surge of feeling mid-movement, as well as the lyrical response, the opening theme taking flight as it were, trying to escape those chromatic growlings in the bass – all very exploratory and wonderful!

As for the finale, under Demidenko’s fingers it became a whirling dervish of a movement, weaving together strands of panic, nervousness, determination and wide-eyed exhilaration – the pianist got plenty of glint in some of his flourishes and a real “ring” on the tone of his topmost notes, making up for some occasional fumbling of the syncopation in the midst of the excitement. The music’s second subject was a poor, consoling thing, easily swept away on the recurring tide, its uneasy calm already “spooked” by the music’s sudden irruptions of desperation, which die as quickly as they appear.

After the return of the wretched, consoling theme the music erupted for the last time, with extra weight and emphasis, perhaps the most desultory ending of any of the composer’s sonatas for piano. What strife, what trouble, and what grim resolve! Fortunately Demidenko redeemed our troubled spirits with a couple of encores, firstly a Chopin Nocturne, giving its melody a deliciously wayward trajectory, and then a stirring piece by Medtner – whose music the pianist has magnificently and resolutely championed over the years. The music sounded like it was a first cousin to one of the Rachmaninov Etude-Tableaux – and Demidenko’s playing of it brought the house down.

The Royal NZ Ballet’s Swan Lake – classic and freshly-minted

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Royal New Zealand Ballet presents:

the Vodafone Season of –

TCHAIKOVSKY: Swan Lake – Ballet in Four Acts

Cast: Gillian Murphy as Odette / Karel Cruz as Siegfried

Paul Matthews as Baron von Rothbart / Rory Fairweather-Neylan as The Jester

Laura Jones as The Queen Mother / Sir Jon Trimmer as Wolfgang

Royal New Zealand Ballet Company

New Zealand School of Dance

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra / Conductor: Nigel Gaynor

Choreography: Russell Kerr

Design: Kristian Frederickson

Lighting: John Buswell

St James Theatre, Wellington

Thursday 18th July 2013

This was opening night of the season, and I had not seen a performance of Swan Lake in the theatre for many years – so I was, one might say, on this occasion, energized, expectant and attuned. It was a special occasion in a much wider sense as well – sixty years ago Danish emigre Poul Gnatt, who had been a principal with the Royal Danish Ballet, set up the present New Zealand Company, and actually staged Act Two of Swan Lake in that first season of 1953. So this 2013 Swan Lake was fittingly the Company’s sixtieth anniversary production.

The Company first presented the full ballet in 1985, but in 1996 choreographer Russell Kerr, together with designer Kristian Frederickson, staged a new production, revived for this present season’s celebrations. Happily this “aging, arthritic choreographer” (as Kerr described himself) was able to join the performers on stage for a curtain call at the end, and receive due acclaim from the audience.

The evening’s program as well contained a message dedicating the Wellington performances of this production to the memory of Richard Campion (1923-2013), the founder of the New Zealand Players in the 1950s, and an original trustee of the Ballet Company. All in all, the event carried an impressive assemblage of history and achievement over the Company’s years of existence.

I have to register some surprise and disappointment that more New Zealand-born dancers weren’t used, in both principal and supporting roles, on such an occasion as this. As was also the case with the Opera Company’s recent “Butterfly”, I was left wondering to what extent our own home-based artistic institutions make as a priority the development of our own performers, and, following on from this, our own particular home-grown performance character and standards.

To my mind there’s something lost as well as gained by all too readily “going global” and using off-shore performers as a matter of course (and my concern extends to the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s recruitment trends as well) – can we afford long-term to so markedly take the “New Zealand” out of our performance makeup? I don’t mean to sound isolationist, or anything like that – it’s all a matter of degree – but I think it’s important to have some regular access to what our own performers can offer over a range of artistic endeavors, in tandem with rather than supplanted by artists from overseas.

But back to the performance in hand, and to the immediate joy of having the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in the pit at the St.James. Right at the beginning, I was struck by the wind playing – beginning with the oboe, and continuing with the clarinet, those plaintive instrumental sounds sparked off a welling-up of emotion, one which overwhelms me no matter how often I hear this music – all of it with the curtain still down in the theatre, the raw feeling of the scenario laid bare in pure sound for us to experience for ourselves.

Of course, the “orchestra pit” scale of the band isn’t to be compared with what one hears in the concert-hall or on record, so that the instrumental agitations have rather more of a sharply-focused than an epic quality. But the playing got from the orchestra by Nigel Gaynor made for some sublime sounds.

When the curtain opened on the beginning of Act One, I was transfixed by a feeling of then-and-now, akin to what I felt when watching the Company’s stunning revival of Russell Kerr’s and Raymond Boyce’s production of “Petrushka” a couple of years ago – here, part of me immediately became a small boy once more, taken to a place of youthful enchantment, an exquisitely-detailed and beautifully-lit forest glade.

Siegfried was danced this evening by Karel Cruz, originally from Cuba, and currently a principal dancer with Pacific Northwest Ballet in the USA. Very tall and possessing both incredible grace and astounding cat-like reflexes, he was able to command the stage in the time-honoured manner, though without diminishing the presence or impact of any of the other characters. I thought this “giving to others” quality seemed to come from the complete easefulness and naturalness which he exuded as the Prince.

This allowed the character roles, such as Rory Fairweather-Neylan’s enthusiastic and amusingly gauche Jester, and Sir Jon Trimmer’s affably urbane Wolfgang (the Prince’s tutor) plenty of “leavening-room”, heightening the contrast with the story’s darker, more serious aspect. Yet another dimension, that of the Royal Court, was splendidly highlighted by Laura Jones’s dignified Queen Mother, her character using both the entrance music and regalia in a totally convincing manner. This splendor was thrillingly caught in the mighty Polonaise, whose strains seemed to set the whole theatre dancing – Siegfried and the men matched the music’s energies as characterfully as did the Pas de Trois dancers a sequence or two earlier, expressing the scoring’s exquisite delicacies.

Act Two seemed to be upon us before we knew what was happening, introducing us to the lakeside, the swans and their enchanter, Baron Von Rothbart. But what a wonderfully-contrived entrance of the swans! – perfectly mirroring the composer’s cunningly-written canonical figurations. From their first encounter I thought that Gillian Murphy’s Odette made the perfect foil for Karel Cruz’s Siegfried. Supported by orchestral and solo instrumental playing to die for, both principals seemed to dance right into one another’s characters, registering the tensions and impasses of their situation as much as their yieldings and intertwinings. The cygnets then charmed us with their twinkling synchronizations – I enjoyed the gradual burgeoning of their movements throughout, delicacy eventually becoming overlaid with vigour and “attitude”. And Odette’s final solo of the Act, slow, sensual and tremulous, wrung out oceans of feeling with each movement – a superb performance.

Von Rothbart at the lakeside I confess I couldn’t quite “get”. I thought Paul Matthews danced the role with plenty of energy and focus, though I felt that neither his costume nor the staging throughout this sequence greatly supported what he was trying to convey – especially in a post-Harry Potter world a somewhat drab owl costume isn’t in itself going to help generate any great malevolence or a properly-telling sense of a sinister “creature of the night”. I would have thought something more lurid – either more striking makeup, or a kind of infernal colouring worn underneath the owl’s feathers – would have helped the dancer suggest a force more baleful and dangerous than the “bad-tempered scoutmaster in drag” kind of cameo evoked by the unfortunate bird regalia.

One had, in fact, only to compare, by way of contrast, the same dancer’s properly menacing portrayal of the Baron in Act Three, dressed as a nobleman, and accompanying his daughter to Prince Siegfried’s ball, to get a sense of what could have been suggested at the lakeside as well. Add to this Gillian Murphy’s particularly bright and sharp-edged depiction of the daughter, Odile – made to look like Odette, to deceive Siegfried – and there was evil personified most satisfyingly, by both father and daughter.

Earlier, the third act had burst into life richly and resplendently, the colours of both decor and costumes a burnished gold, befitting the family’s obvious importance. Odile’s and Von Rothbart’s entrance galvanized the party just before the Spanish Dance, throwing the Prince into confusion at the girl’s likeness to Odette. Of the national dances the one I thought came off best was the Neapolitean Dance – we heard some terrific trumpet playing from the pit and enjoyed some spirited dancing from Adrianna Harper and Mehdi Angot.

This, however, was decorative stuff compared with Siegfried’s and Odile’s pas de deux – Gillian Murphy’s freedom and fluidity of movement was incredible, her Odile bringing into bold relief the previous Act’s “imprisoned” state of being suffered by Odette. And all the while Karel Cruz’s Siegfried was captivated, so directly and intensely focused upon his strange new partner. What I thought was the tiniest of forward stumbles right at the end of her concluding solo, from the super-confident Odile, didn’t detract from a fine, tautly-drawn performance. The “real” Odette, on the wrong side of the window and trying to warn Siegfried, was here danced skillfully and plaintively by an unnamed dancer.

Like many symphonic finales, Swan Lake’s final Act goes for broad brush-strokes, with well-worn but effective storybook themes, this one suggesting a kind of “redemption through love” scenario, which in slightly varied forms has served the ballet’s purpose well over the years. Some judiciously-applied mist concealed Odette along with her grief at apparently being betrayed by Siegfried, as the act opened. Again, the beauty of the wind-playing which opened the slow,affecting dance of grief added to the pathos of it all.

As the darkness gathered the lovers decided upon their fate, bringing the vengeful Von Rothbart into the open – back in his owl form he again seemed far less menacing, but the music, via some truly splendid climaxes led the way through the lovers’ sacrificing of their own lives in the waters of the lake and the evil sorcerer’s death – we were left with a striking diagonal array of ex-swans in a “farewell flotilla”, saluting the liberated spirits of the drowned lovers, as the curtain slowly fell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mellifluous flute and piano at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace Lunchtime Concerts presents:

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY FLUTE WORLD

Music by Georges Hüe, Sigfrid Klarg-Elert, Ian Clarke, Robert Aitken, Alfredo Casella

Hannah Sassman (flute) / Robyn Jaquiery (piano)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace

Wednesday, 10th July, 2013

A thoroughly invigorating music-listening experience! – most appropriately for a middle-of-the-day concert, this had an engaging “borne-on-air” quality, as much to do with the playing of two consummate artists as with the instruments and repertoire.

Hannah Sassman plays flute with both the NZSO and Orchestra Wellington as a freelance musician, and teaches the instrument to a number of advanced students. She’s currently a music librarian with RNZ Concert, and recently completed her Master of Music degree at the University of Colorado in Boulder, USA.

Her partner today at the piano, Robyn Jacquiery, is a well-known and highly-regarded accompanist, working with solo singers, instrumentalists and choirs.

Their combination here brought an assemblage of generally little-known repertoire to life for us, beginning with a Fantasie by French composer Georges Hüe, a contemporary of Gounod and Franck, and a winner of the Prix de Rome.

Known during his lifetime mainly for his operas and choral works, Hüe wrote this Fantasie in response to a commission by the Paris Conservatoire’s professor of flute, Adolphe Hennebains, to whom the piece is also dedicated.  Originally for flute and piano (which latter part was subsequently orchestrated, according to my researches) it’s a delicate and charming work, with that unique kind of bitter-sweet amalgam of “French Catholic” sentiment and late-romantic astringency that, to my ears haunts French fin-de-siecle music.

As engaging a communicator when talking about the music as when playing it, Hannah Sassman gave us just enough “background” to each piece in a way that nicely complemented the program notes. And with her playing of such things as Karg-Elert’s Chaconne for solo flute, she demonstrated how, in the hands of a gifted performer, music can indeed take up where words leave off – the Chaconne ranged from evocations of meditative calm to episodes of impulsive excitability.

The most recently-written works on the program were Ian Clarke’s Hypnosis and Sunday Morning, pieces which stemmed from the composer’s work in rock groups in the 1990s, the latter piece suggesting to Clarke a connection with Lionel Ritchie’s “Easy like Sunday Morning”, and giving the work a title. Hannah Sassman demonstrated for us some of the special “flute techniques” used by the pieces – things like slides and “timbral trills”.

More esoteric, perhaps, was Canadian composer Robert Aitken’s Icicle, written in 1977, a piece using microtonal techniques and nuances. Parallel to the rigorous intellectual aspects of all of this was the piece’s wonderful atmosphere, its figurations and the instrument’s timbre readily suggesting birdsong.

Music by Italian composer Alfredo Casella concluded the programme – an attractively written Sicilienne et Burlesque dating from 1914, lots of fun to listen to, and obviously, judging from the spirited nature of today’s performance, to play.

I enjoyed the music’s ritual-like opening, with its suggestions of both chant and folk-song, the piano’s graceful, rhythmic progressions creating different ambiences for the flute’s peregrinations.  The time-honoured progression from slow to fast worked brilliantly here, with the energetic Burlesque – in places intense and dark-browed, but in others lightened by an attractive insouciance. Both players handled the many changes of time and tempo with considerable aplomb – we listeners found ourselves caught up in the music’s trajectories, and enjoyed the excitement both musicians generated at the finish. Splendid!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Capital Choir – joys and travails through Solstice and Winter

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Capital Choir presents:
Sing the Measure of Solstice and Winter

BEETHOVEN – Mass in C
A Selection of New Zealand Songs
Felicia Edgecombe (director) / Belinda Behle (piano)

Soloists (Beethoven):
Belinda Behle (soprano) / Ruth Armishaw (alto)
Chris Berentson (tenor) / Rhys Cocker (bass)

Janet Gibbs (organ)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill Street,

Sunday 7th July 2013

There’s such a lot of pleasure to be had in singing, and especially if one is musical but doesn’t perhaps command any experience or great expertise on an instrument other than the voice.

And for people like myself who can hear music and enjoy it but would seriously baulk at the thought of making individually-exposed sounds themeslves, there’s safety in numbers in the shape and form of membership of a choir.

Recalling my own short-lived but enjoyable experience as a choir member, I’m sure I would have liked singing with this group in repertoire such as we heard throughout the first half of this concert – a collection of songs, some of them written by the choir’s own director, Felicia Edgecombe, and in one instance with the words written by another choir member, author and poet, Rachel McAlpine.

These were, for the most part, simply-conceived songs, featuring a good deal of strong, well-focused unison sounds, with some differentiation between men’s and women’s voices and enough angularities in the lines (plus the occasional harmony) to pose sufficient of a challenge.

I fancy I would also have appreciated the focused, but always flexible direction of the group’s director, Felicia Edgecombe, being made to feel secure and well-rounded in matters of breathing and phrasing by following her visual example.

And as an intensely private pianist myself, I particularly relished the songs’ piano accompaniments, each sounding so beautifully modulated and flexibly phrased (oh, to be able to play like that!) by Belinda Behle – whose name I couldn’t at first see anywhere in the program relating to the first half of the concert, but whose identity was revealed when I saw she was the soprano soloist in the Beethoven Mass as well! – she is, I believe, the choir’s regular accompanist.

I imagine it would have been a source of pride to have sung those items written especially for the choir by Felicia Edgecombe – the “Nation Prayer”, a kind of New Zealand ballad, a lovely setting of a gorgeous Gerard Manly Hopkins poem, complete with a final, affirming “Praise Him!”, and a setting of a poem “Once in a While” by Brian Turner, which featured the choir’s bass voices steadfastly holding their line throughout the first part.

Most interesting of these was, I thought, the setting of Rachel McAlpine’s lines throughout a work entitled “World”, words which the poet herself read before the performance. With bells pealing at the start, the women launched into the setting splendidly, then supported the men’s verse following – perhaps the voices didn’t quite have the “oomph” necessary to bring off the climax of the last verse, though the subsequent upward modulation seemed to give the choir more “heart”, and strengthen everybody’s resolve.

Part of the fascination of singing in a choir was, I remember, marvelling at the confidence and skill with which any soloists present would deliver their lines – so exposed, and yet so focused and purposeful. In this respect the Beethoven Mass would have been a real treat – four very different voices, beginning Beethoven’s “Kyrie” confidently, and shaping their lines throughout the “Gloria” with plenty of musicality.

In general, this was a performance of the Beethoven work by the choir that started strongly, but seemed to lose its choral focus as the work progressed. Throughout the Kyrie and Gloria, my notes contain comments such as “Women very strong – hold their lines well” and “Enthusiastic – a little strained, but nicely shaped” – and at one point where the accompanying organ unaccountably stopped, towards the end of the Gloria, the choir continued as if its life depended the outcome, holding its tone firm and its ensemble truly (I understand the organist was taken ill, hence the momentary lapse).

However, from the Credo on, the performance seemed in places under-parted – in particular, the men were often tentative-sounding, though lack of weight of numbers certainly contributed to the weak, non-upholstered body of choral sound in places.

By dint of having the most resplendent-sounding solo voices the alto Ruth Armishaw and bass Rhys Cocker were able to fill out their tones with ample variation of intensity and colour. Though plainer and more subdued by comparison the sweet-toned soprano of Belinda Behle and Chris Berentson’s true-voiced tenor managed to maintain their respective lines and hold their own in ensemble passages, achieving an attractive blend in places. And towards the end of the Gloria,in that typically Beethovenian build-up of tensions, the singers seemed inspired, led by the soprano, keeping their lines steadfastly to the end.

I would have thundered as loudly as I could at the beginning of the Credo, had I been singing – I felt tempted to join in anyway, as there didn’t seem enough power in those voices at this point. It was left to our soloists to “focus” the music, which they did at “Et incarnatus est” – again both bass and alto shone during their respective solos, at  “Et resurrexit” and “Et in Spiritum Sanctum”  How amazingly like the Missa Solemnis  this music is in places – obviously a kind of preliminary run on the composer’s part!

I don’t think I would have liked to sing the Sanctus, much – all that chromatic writing! But I did wonder as to whether there had been sufficient rehearsal though these sequences, because they sounded to me as though they were being sight-read, here. Again, the soloists came to the rescue in the “Benedictus”, Ruth Armishaw in particular a tower of strength, despite the briefest of stumbling over an ending to “In Nomine Domine” – and, the final lines of the ensemble were simply heavenly!

The choir rallied itself for the final Agnus Dei, achieving the “cry of anguish” at the beginning,and establishing a coherent sense of ebb and flow through to the end. For me, the music had a wonderful kind of dark “Gothic” feeling about it in places, which the choir was able to sustain, and which the soloists were able to work their contrasting “Dona nobis pacem” passages against to good effect.

So – a mixed bag, with the warm, heartfelt choral singing throughout the first half and the work of the soloists during the Beethoven Mass the most notable features. Even the undernourished choral singing during parts of the Mass didn’t for me negate the work’s glory, so, all-in-all, I was grateful to have heard it done, this “little brother” of the great Missa Solemnis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beethoven from Houstoun Concert 4 – recycle plus renewal….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:

Michael Houstoun (piano) – Beethoven ReCycle 2013

Sonata No.20 in G Op.49 No.2 / Sonata No.3 in C Op.2 No.3

Sonata No.24 in F-sharp Op.78 / Sonata No.16 in G Op.31 No.1

Sonata No.23 in F Minor Op.57 “Appassionata”

Town Hall, Wellington,

Sunday 30th June 2013

Those of us who are regular concertgoers can’t really help ourselves – as we get to know the work of certain musicians whom we’ve heard at various times over the years, we form opinions of them as artists and of their work. And, contrary to the popular axiom, if this work is of a consistently high standard, it’s a case of familiarity giving rise to admiration and respect, and invariably to a desire to hear still more from these same people.

Consider, for instance, pianist Michael Houstoun, who’s had thus far a most distinguished career in this country, and who’s presently engaged upon his second complete public performance cycle of the Beethoven piano sonatas. Through these and many other performances and recordings, Houstoun has impressed a positive, strong and clearly-etched artistic profile in the minds of the musical public. He would, I’m certain, be widely regarded as this country’s foremost classical pianist at the present time.

Houstoun has consistently and single-mindedly worked towards the highest standards as a musician – to the point where, some years ago, his intensities contributed to a kind of physical melt-down in the form of focal dystonia, a dysfunctional phenomenon which has, over the last quarter-century, afflicted a number of instrumentalists. It says much for the pianist himself that he was able to work towards a recovery, with the help of a number of skilled specialist practitioners.

So, up to that particular crisis-point in his career, and with stellar achievements under his belt such as two complete Beethoven sonata performance cycles – one in public, the other commercially recorded – his reputation as a pianist had been well-established.  Now he’s come down to us having gone through what he himself has indicated was a redefining set of experiences associated with his debilitating disorder and gradual return to playing health.

I’ve heard him perform on a number of occasions of late – and for me, each experience has persuaded me to rethink my opinions regarding a pianist whose playing I thought I knew well. This latest concert, the fourth in the new “Beethoven ReCycled” series, pushed out the parameters of the pianist’s art for me in a way that was as exhilarating as it was unexpected. It wasn’t a Wordsworth-like scenario of pleasure and understanding recollected in tranquility – this was a here-and-now experience, one which took its time to grow and flourish during the recital’s course, but with its flowers growing cannons towards the end, to overwhelming effect.

For whatever reason we were located in the Town Hall for this particular recital – and the venue I think overawed the musical content of the opening sonata on the programme, the second of the two “student’ sonatas, Op.49, the one in G Major. Houstoun also chose to play the music in a very simple and unprepossessing way, as if his abilities had been marshalled and concentrated for the purposes of simply realizing the score. I could have imagined more character given to each of the movements – the first chatty, even garrulous in places, volatile and explosive in others, and the second homespun, quirky and angular, by turns – but the pianist might have reckoned that such treatment would have overlaid the music’s simplicity. And Houstoun’s playing graciously made me feel that my own feeble attempts at playing the second movement weren’t perhaps altogether worthless!

The C Major, Op. 2 No. 3, was a different story, the irruptions of energy positively orchestral in their impact, though the melodies were kept on a fairly tight rein, as was the right-hand work – more power than “tumbling warmth”, but none the less impressive for that. The slow movement’s opening, with its stepwise left-hand theme and filigree right-hand figuration here beautifully stilled the busy beat of time, making the great mid-movement outbursts all the more telling, Houstoun bringing out almost Goethe-like vistas of huge spaces and great contrasts.

Tumbling warmth there was a-plenty in the scherzo, with the canonic-like voices having a marvellous time, falling head-over-heels together and landing in satisfyingly tangled heaps at the bottom of each descent – by contrast, the trio was all swirling, vertiginous impulse, making the return of the “Jack and Jill” opening a relief, even if the ending did suggest that the Jack indeed “fell down and broke his crown”. And the finale, deceptively graceful in places (and, I thought, quite Schumannesque in the lyrical second subject), released great surges of energy, with a fierce young virtuoso’s joy in the final presentations.

Before the interval we were treated to one of the composer’s loveliest and most distinctive creations, the two-movement Sonata No.24 in F-sharp Op.78, subtitled “For Thérèse”, the dedicatee, Thérèse von Brunswick, being one of those on the “short list” of candidates for the composer’s enigmatic “Immortal Beloved”. The music here had a lovely ceremonial opening, with Houstoun giving the subsequent unfoldings plenty of time and flexibility to allow a sense of something naturally expressed.

Beethoven gives us certain surprises in the form of sudden remote modulations, and a playful whimsicality as the exposition repeats (lovely to hear!), not to mention the abrupt, enigmatic ending. As for the second movement, its sophisticated humour was given just the right amount of insouciance by the pianist, though we did all enjoy those dynamic “lurches” from major to minor and back again, in those toccata-like passages. If the music is indeed something of a “character-study”, Thérèse must have been both a bit of a thinker, and a lot of fun!

Enjoyable though the first half was, I thought Houstoun’s playing really began to spread its wings after the interval, beginning with the exalted playfulness of the first of the Op.31 Sonatas, No.16 in G Major. Gone was much of the severity and brusque treatment of detail found in the pianist’s recording of the first movement of this work, made for Trust Records in the mid-1990s – here was playing still of great virtuosity but tempered by touches of humour. In between the exciting, energetic runs, the syncopations were given time to register their drollery, so that the listener had a sense both of action and reflection, and their give-and-take in the music.

The second movement’s aria-like aspect here properly had a singer’s amplitude, the textures richly and gorgeously upholstered with both trills and related figurations – I liked the “duetting” middle section, a lovely foil for the more ritualized solo lines, while the “coming together” of the simple and decorative at the end was given by the pianist, by turns, a rich ambience and a wistful, open-ended feeling of space. And the fleet-of-finger finale similarly played with contrasts, Houstoun readily and easefully bringing out the music’s expansive, very Schubertian figurations and textures, but adroitly returning us to a Beethoven-like presto at the end, a drawing-together of the discourse’s threads and patches.

And when this was done, Houstoun proceeded to launch into a performance of the “Appassionata” Sonata, No.23 in F Minor, Op.57 – one of the most famous of Beethoven’s works – with an almost frightening sense of purpose and determination. I remember the pianist in an interview describing how his youthful encounter with a gramophone recording of this music all but overwhelmed his sensibilities  – and it seemed that, on this occasion he was able to recapture the essence of that initial impression and convey its full force to those who were present.

No other work by Beethoven expresses a sense of the elemental more insistently, not even the “Grosse Fugue”. The music’s incipient darkness never fully relinquishes its grip, even if there’s some relaxation of tension throughout the “theme-and-variations” form of the middle movement. Houstoun’s powerful playing had all the “grip” this music needed, bringing into play a living and volatile feeling for the piece’s dramatic ebb and flow, great command over a tonal spectrum that gave the piano’s treble plenty of ring and glint and the bass what seemed like oceans of depth, and the enormous reserves of power and stamina needed to do it all justice.

Two things about this performance will abide in my memory long after other details are forgotten – firstly, the sense of the pianist playing that opening phrase, and in doing so somehow enveloping us completely and utterly into the music’s world, as if we were suddenly taken to a vantage-point and could see it all from where we stood at a single glance – by no means removed from the storms but instead placed in the very eye of them! Thus every irruption and every lull swirled around and about our heads, having both an immediacy and an inevitability which stimulated body and mind, emotion and intellect.

When Houstoun observed the finale’s repeat of the development and recapitulation (some pianists don’t, which, for me, always leaves a kind of undressed, bleeding wound in the music at that point!) I had to restrain myself from rising from my seat and thumping the railing in front of me for sheer excitement! I’ve never been able to understand how any pianist with genuinely red blood coursing through his or her arteries could omit this passage, or any analysis could put forward the premise that the repetition is problematical for the movement’s overall structure (significantly, Houstoun also played this particular repeat on his 1995 recording of the work for Trust Records).

The other thing I’m not likely to forget was how Houstoun played the Presto coda of the Sonata’s final movement and what happened straight afterwards. He delivered those opening coda sequences not “as fast as possible” but at a tempo which enabled him to keep the following swirling figurations at a similar pulse, thus avoiding any sense of “slowing down” again, and maintaining the music’s momentum right to the end – such involving, scalp-pricking stuff! And then – the pianist rose from his seat and, amid tumultuous acclaim, seemed almost to scowl at the applause, before turning and practically stalking off the platform, occasionally giving his head a mighty shake, like a lion tossing his mane! He seemed fired up with what he’d just done, and we simply adored him for it! Incredible!

By the time he returned, to renewed applause and a standing ovation, he was ready to smile again! But after a performance such as he gave us of the “Appassionata” he could have made whatever gesture he whatever he wanted, and we would have roared our approval. For myself, I was glad I was there – to see a musician seemingly transported by the emotion of the music he or she is performing so mightily, is certainly something to remember.