Author: Peter Mechen

Stroma’s second Mirror of Time – a “Rogues’ Gallery” of Music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – THE MIRROR OF TIME – 2

Music by: Michael Norris, Jean-Féry Rebel, Thomas Adès,  Anthonello de Caserta, Heinrich Biber,

Louis Andriessen, Carlo Gesualdo, Philip Brownlee, Josquin des Prez, Arvo Pärt,

Thomas Preston, Erik Satie, Matteo da Perugia, Mieko Shiomi, Anon (14th C.)

(all arrangements by Michael Norris)

Stroma: Vesa-Matti Leppänen, Rebecca Struthers (violins) / Andrew Thomson (viola) / Rowan Prior (‘cello)

Kamala Bain (recorder(s) / Rowena Simpson (soprano)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Artistic Director: Michael Norris

St.Mary of the Angels, Wellington

Friday 26th April, 2013

With some surprise I read in the Stroma program booklet that this was in fact the SECOND “Mirror of Time” Concert presented by the Ensemble, following on from an occasion in 2012 – had I recently awakened from a kind of “Rip Van Winkel” sleep, or something? I had been to and reviewed a couple of Stroma concerts that year, but I couldn’t remember a “Mirror of Time” title, or a similar theme, even thought the expression dégustations rang a bell. Furthermore, if the first of these explorations of short but visionary, ground-breaking compositions from the Middle Ages to the present day had been as entertainingly assembled and characterfully performed as this present one, then I had indeed missed something special, while in my “sleepwalking” mode.

Having the beautiful and old-worldly church of St.Mary of the Angels available for music performance is invariably a kind of “added value” for performers and audiences alike – and so it proved on this occasion. From out of the ambience of this most atmospheric venue came the first notes of this concert’s music, the quartet of performers antiphonally placed for maximum effect, playing a twelfth-century plainchant theme “O igneous Spiritus”, written by Hildegarde of Bingen, and arranged here by Michael Norris.

Each player gave us his or her own particular variation of the plainchant tune, the effect being an awakening a kind of “music of the spheres” fancy, or, in Hildegarde’s own, if differently-contexted words, sounds “on the breath of God”. The playing, too, had a kind of other-worldly quality, heightened by drawn-out harmonics and occasionally tempered by exotic, vocal-like slides between the notes. I liked Michael Norris’ likening of the effect to “stained-glass” encapsulations of past echoes, preserved for all time. As the musicians finished playing, each one came up to the platform in front of the audience – a nice, ritualistic touch.

From then it was delight following upon delight, really, though one was never sure exactly what shape or form the delight would be presented in (which are the most exciting kinds of delights – as everybody knows!). Having properly gotten an ecclesiastical version of Michael Flanders’ famous “pitch of the hall” (from his and Donald Swann’s show “At the Drop of a Hat”), the musicians (strings joined by a recorder – well, two recorders, more of which in a moment) then proceeded to “let ‘er rip” with a shocking discord made up of a tone cluster, written two hundred years ahead of the likes of Henry Cowell and Penderecki. This came from the pen of French Baroque composer Jean-Féry Rebel, whose dates (1666-1747) make him a near-contemporary of JS Bach, though the former’s innovative experiments with rhythm and harmony put some of his music light-years apart.

As Michael Norris pointed out in the program, this and many of the pieces in the evening’s concert were arrangements of originals, rather than being “authentic” realizations, the intention being to emphasize for listeners the music’s more innovative content. Rebel’s work “Le Cahos” comes from his ballet “Les Élemens”, the full score of which has been lost in any case, leaving a “performing edition” put together by the composer for amateur use at home – so tonight’s performance was perfectly in scale with the composer’s intentions. Strings were partnered by a recorder, firstly a sopranino, whose piercing tones could be heard through the discordant opening, and then a treble instrument taken up as the music increasingly featured solo lines – it was all a bit like a rather more elemental manifestation of Vivaldi.

Leaping forward in time to the music of Thomas Adès from such radical expression suddenly didn’t feel so big a deal in this context, though in other ways Adès’ work “Lethe” made a marked contrast to Jean-Féry Rebel’s chaotic seismic irruptions. Here, Rowan Prior’s beautiful solo cello suggested the Lethe River, interwoven with eerie harmonics from the other strings, the effect not unlike a slowly revolving kinetic sculpture, or else movements from an age-old windmill out of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”. Such antiquities used by a contemporary composer helped bridge the gap to the music of one of the concert’s earliest featured composers, Anthonello de Caserta, a 14th century song “Dame d’onour en qui” featuring the soprano voice of Rowena Simpson. De Caserta’s rhythmic configurations were a delight and a tease for the ear in this sparkling performance.

Heinrich Biber’s music is better-known, of course, and we enjoyed his “Mars”, an exerpt from Battalia à 10, with the ‘cello using a sheet of paper inserted between the strings for a “snare” effect. A different kind of unorthodox instrument use was employed by the Dutch contemporary composer Louis Andriessen in his “Ende”, requiring the player to use two recorders simultaneously, Kamala Bain rising spectacularly to the occasion, tossing the pitches between instruments and giving us an exciting acccelerando at the end.

The work of another contemporary composer, Wellington-based Philip Brownlee, followed that of Carlo Gesualdo, the latter’s music employing chromatic shifts to wonderfully haunting effect, in the madrigal “Io puri respiro in cosi gran dolor”, some sequences having an almost Gothic feel to them. Rowena Simpson’s bell-like voice both enriched and wrestled with the parallel string lines throughout, voice and instruments then “finding” one another at the end of the piece’s dying fall. Not Gesualdo, however, but Giovanni Gabrieli provided the Kiwi composer with his starting-point for “Canzona per sonare: Degraded Echoes” (a world premiere), the opening tones “summoned” as it seemed from faraway places, a sombre medieval sound made of long-held lines from strings and recorder, the lines and harmonies vying with the actual timbres, giving we listeners the opportunity to think spatially, or else indulge our preoccupations. An agitated middle section, aleatoric in effect, underlined rhythmic and pitching gestures, encompassed by piercing tones from the recorder, and took us at the end to edges of known territories, where wonderment begins.

Josquin Des Prez’s brief but beautiful “Agnus Dei” from his “Missa l’homme arm super voces musicales” threw some light upon Arvo Pärt’s following Da Pacem Domine, the latter inspired by medieval plainchant, and saturating our sensibilities with its wonderful drawn-out timelessness of utterance. And to draw us briefly from these and following enchantments came a brief soupcon from the little-known 16th-century English composer Thomas Preston, an organ piece with a strangely bitonal bass-line, strings and recorder simultaneously following separate harmonic pathways, and creating lines whose relationship sounded oddly and ear-catchingly ambivalent.

Ambivalence of various sorts certainly hovers about many of the works created by the uniquely fascinating Erik Satie. We heard an arrangement of the Prelude to his incidental music to a play “Le Fils des Étoiles”, one whose use of an offstage soprano voice and muted strings underlined the general exotic mysticism of the music and its context. Throughout I kept on thinking of Shakespeare’s “Tempest” – soundscapes of air and water created from those disembodied tones were added to Satie’s preoccupation with harmonies based on the interval of a fourth. All of it made for ambiences “rich and strange”, and had a utterly captivating aspect.

The rest brought us back to solid earth with plenty of sheerly visceral fun, Italian composer Matteo da Peruglia’s fifteenth-century 3-part canon given the “treatment”with two more parts added and the original tempo given a turbocharged “take two”, and an arrangement of the anonymous 14th-century song “Cuncti Simus Concanentes”, an energetic homage to the Virgin Mary with bells and hand-clapping thrown into the festive mix. This was after the string-players had picked up and rearranged their music on the stands from which they had been ignominiously blown by a hand-held hair-dryer, Kamala Bain employing a different kind of wind instrument to disruptive effect in Japanese composer Mieko Shiomi’s “Wind Music”. Of course, had it been Stockhausen’s music, helicopters might have arrived, and there would have been an awful din – so we were grateful that the turbulence created here, though annoying for the musicians trying to make sense of their written parts, was more-or-less containable.

All in all, a terrific assemblage of inventiveness on the part of artistic director Michael Norris, and of performance skills from the members of Stroma.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homage to Britten from the Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

AROHA STRING QUARTET

with CATHERINE McKAY (piano)

BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in B-flat Op.18 No.6

BRITTEN – String Quartet No.3 Op.94

SCHUMANN – Piano Quintet in E-flat Op.44

Aroha Quartet: – Haihong Liu, Blythe Press (violins), Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

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

Sunday 21st April, 2013

For some reason I hadn’t really registered before this concert just how big a space at St.Andrew’s Church a small ensemble has to fill with sound, both behind the musicians and above them. It seemed to my ears when the Aroha Quartet began their Beethoven which opened the concert that everything was set back, as opposed to “being in one’s face”, and that the instrumental timbres were more than usually “terraced’. Once my ears got used to this, I enjoyed the extra spaciousness of it all, even if some of the solo lines sounded a bit removed, and some of the ambiences in the more rapid concerted passages were as rushing winds, having a slightly disembodied effect.

Probably the reason my ears were receiving these sounds in this way was that I had been listening to some chamber-music recordings that morning which had been given the “full-blooded” treatment, the instruments closely recorded, and with what sounded like plenty of reverberation – all a little too much, in my opinion, as if the ensemble (the Amadeus Quartet, recorded by Decca) had swelled into chamber-orchestra proportions in certain places.

Once my listening-palette had been re-aligned, I was able to appreciate the lean, lithe and joyously physical energies of the performance of the Beethoven work. These players always generate plenty of  élan in such music, and this quartet’s first movement positively bristled in places. Though intonation wasn’t absolutely perfect, the spirit of the composer leapt at us from the notes. In the second movement I loved the different voicing from first and second violins, the first silvery, the other golden-toned, both displaying heart-warming teamwork. What beautifully-tailored dynamics throughout the hushed central part of the movement – those awed, withdrawn tones! – and what light-as-feather playing throughout the lead back to the opening’s reprise!

I enjoyed the players’ joie de vivre in the scherzo, the syncopations encouraging wonderful stresses and parallel energies. The trio carried the momentums onwards, with the violin skipping among the notes out at a great rate and galvanizing the ensemble’s return to the mainstream. The finale’s introduction, “La malinconia” brought down upon the sound-world a properly sobering and despondent air before swinging into an elegant round-dance, the quartet rounding off the music’s curves with relish. We got the merest foretaste of the “Muss es Sein” of Op.135 with an exploratory interlude, before the players adroitly steered the lines back to the rounds, slowing things romantically and wistfully, before exploding with exuberance and drive over the last few bars – great stuff!

How often does one get to enjoy a Britten String Quartet live? – and if not this year, will there ever be more chances? We’re in debt to the Quartet for not only playing the work at all (à la Dr.Johnson and his “dog on its hind legs” analogy) but for giving it such a cracking performance. Here, it was nicely prepared before a note was played, with ‘cellist Robert Ibell telling us about, among other things, the links between the work and the composer’s opera “Death in Venice”. The work, cast in five movements, opened with a sequence called “Duets” reflecting the writing in pairs of instruments throughout, often haunting, ambient-toned writing creating plenty of “atmosphere” through resonating, overlapping tones, and undulating lines.

The second “Ostinato” movement had a more abrupt, machine-like character, derived from definite, energetic movements – at one point an evocative “road music” sequence forwarded the argument through unfamiliar territories, until skittering cross-rhythms from the violins contrived to bring things to a stuttering stop. Then, the succeeding movement “Solo” featured a gently-singing violin counterpointed delicately by the other instruments. Beautiful soaring lines suggested in places the violin itself in ecstasy, underpinned by atmospheric pizzicato and glissandi from the other instruments, giving a haunting kind of Aeolian Harp effect. After this, what a contrast with the earthy, vigorous “Burlesque”! – its angular effect was readily captured and confidently delivered by the players, the music in places reminiscent of the more quirky parts of the ballet “The Prince of the Pagodas”.

Britten concluded the work with a Recitative and Passacaglia, the instruments in the introductory measures quoting themes from “Death in Venice”. We heard spare, stepwise pizzicati and oscillating violin lines leading to an eloquent ‘cello solo, and thence to strangely compelling twilight-world explorations culminating in the instrumental unison “I love you” cry of the opera’s central character Aschenbach. The players then took us strongly and surely on the passacaglia’s journey, during which the ensemble seemed to me to glow increasingly with lyrical fire, as the music developed thematic material from the Recitative over a ground bass. I felt we were being presented with a world of creative sensibility which here seemed to gradually drain away with the sounds, as if it was all part of the natural order of things.

Still more treasure came with the performance of Schumann’s well-known Piano Quintet after the interval, for which the Quartet was joined by pianist Catherine McKay. I had previously heard her perform both a concerto and some chamber music with other ensembles, finding her always a positive and responsive player. Here, I wondered whether the piano was too recessed in relation to the quartet, whose members seemed “bunched together” right in front – irrespective of the sound quality, the visual effect was of a supporting instrument rather than an equal player, the latter needing to be the case in this work.

Pianos can certainly be awkward things to set among ensembles, and the situation varies from venue to venue – I would have thought a slightly more antiphonal arrangement feasible, either with the piano to the left and turned slightly backward, which would have instigated a kind of half-circle that the quartet-members could have completed, or with the quartet slightly “parted’ in the middle and the piano brought slightly forward, and “into the loop”. Further forward on the St.Andrew’s platform, such an arrangement would have been possible.

Either layout would, I think, have better integrated the sound, and possibly the performance. My ears occasionally imagined a kind of “delayed” interaction between piano and strings in some of the exchanges – this was especially noticeable in both middle movements in places. During the second movement’s central agitations, when the gothic mystery and drama of the ambience is suddenly hurled to one side, and the piano takes the lead with a number of accented entries to which the strings respond, I wanted more incisiveness from the piano, and more “schwung” in the cross-talk between the players. The same went for the roller-coaster flourishes in the third movement (Mendelssohn could have written the piano part in places!) – they were excitingly played as such, but I wanted more piano, more presence and bite given to the syncopations!

With more even balances, the performance would have, I though, really taken wing, as there were so many felicities in any case – though the first movement was more tightly-conceived in general than my excessive romantic sensibilities usually crave, I thought the players still gave plenty of heartfelt voice to the composer’s uniquely poetic outpourings. There was sensitive duetting between violin and ‘cello and some lovely, yielding, liquid tones from the piano, contrasting nicely with those swirling undercurrents of the more agitated sections. And the slow movement’s somewhat sinister footfalls made both the lyrical yearnings and the irruptions of the middle section all the more telling.

Both muscularity and delicacy were made ours to relish throughout the finale, the strings digging into the part-writing with gusto, and the piano incapable of giving us a mechanical or unfeeling phrase – in fact, such were the mid-movement excitements generated that a fire-engine turned up in the street outside to see what was going on! I especially liked how the ensemble’s full-blooded playing made the composer’s rather engagingly gauche way of reintroducing the opening theme of the Quintet work so well at the end. Despite my few reservations regarding the balances, full credit to the musicians for giving us an experience which for me underlined what live music-making is all about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Michael Houstoun – Beethoven Revisited

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:

Michael Houstoun (piano) – Beethoven ReCycle 2013  (Programme Three)

Sonata No.5 in C Minor Op.10 No.1 / Sonata No.10 Op.14 No.2

Sonata No.22 in F Major Op.54 / Sonata No.106 “Hammerklavier” in B flat Op.106

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Monday 15th April 2013

One of the highest accolades a musician can receive is to have his or her name indelibly associated in people’s minds with that of a particular composer’s music – and more than any other pianist in this part of the world, Michael Houstoun’s name has become practically synonymous with Beethoven.

It’s not been an association lightly or casually wrought – it’s grown and developed over a span of time and through the pianist’s Herculean efforts involving preparation and performance of all of the composer’s significant keyboard works. Both the passing of time and life-changing events have made their own contribution to the association, so that Houstoun is presently a different musician to what he was twenty years ago, around the time of his first Beethoven voyage through the sonatas. He himself delineates aspects of the change in his musical outlook in the excellent program booklet, an account that makes absorbing reading.

Many concertgoers attending the present series would have been there last time round, and able to remember well the impact of that first cycle, momentous in so many ways. If the present series seems not quite such a “charged” occurrence, it still generates its own storehouse of interest from the point of view of Houstoun’s own growth and development as a major artist, and the broadening and deepening of his views about the music.

I found having to choose one of three recitals from Houstoun’s first “round” of his Beethoven Re-cycle a costly experience, as there was so much to lose as well as to gain – but I finally plumped for the third programme, which had the mighty “Hammerklavier” as a kind of finale to three earlier (and briefer!) works.

Over the years I’ve worked hard at NOT becoming a total “Hammerklavier-junkie”, though it’s sometimes been a near thing – every great performance I hear of the work has the effect of pushing me close to that edge over which the way back to sanity would be a torturous process. This was such a performance, but one with a difference to some of the more “addictive” experiences I’ve gone through – it was more of a “cleansing” experience here, rather than an immersion in or partaking of something rich and strange.

Until relatively recently I’ve found Michael Houstoun’s playing of Beethoven somewhat enigmatic  –  I would sit and listen to live performances and recordings of various things and admire the playing’s obvious mastery, its strength, purpose, clear vision and command of both structure and detail. One of Houstoun’s most pronounced qualities – a kind of “greatness”, I believe – is the ability to convince the listener of the validity of his approach to any piece of music he plays at the time, however much one might find oneself holding different views in retrospect.

Of course, any musician ought to be able to similarly persuade listeners to accept the “truths” of what he or she plays, but in Houstoun’s case the force of his “in-situ” persuasion is quite remarkable. Nevertheless, I remember thinking repeatedly in those days how strange it was that the pianist’s playing, despite its obvious qualities, hadn’t really ever moved or touched me –  it was music-making I admired, but didn’t love.

After Houstoun’s debilitating encounter in the year 2000 with, and eventual recovery (2005) from focal dystonia (a process documented clearly and movingly in an article on the pianist’s web-site, found at www.michaelhoustoun.co.nz), I began to feel a kind of “thawing-out” in his playing – especially memorable for me were recitals featuring Schumann’s Kreisleriana (August 2010) and Schubert’s B-flat Sonata D.960 (July 2011), both works getting magnificent, expressive readings. My reviews, to my surprise, were punctuated with many comments referring to the pianist’s poetic sensibilities and evocation of free and open spaces – “beautifully and sensitively weighted, equivocally poised between worlds of foreboding and resignation” was some of my purpler prose.

Houstoun mentioned in his account of the FD saga his “rediscovery of a happiness in simply playing the piano” as part of his healing process – and for me that rediscovery is manifest in what sounds to me like a greater warmth and freedom in his playing. I noticed, for example, during the recent Beethoven recital how beautifully differentiated the three first-half sonatas were, each offering very different aspects of the composer’s musical personality – the “Hammerklavier” of course, was something else again!

Simply the selection of keys across the three first half works gave the listener interest and pleasure – plunging into a stormy C Minor to begin with, the recital moved to a good-humored G Major for the second work, and a brief though richly-plaintive immersion into F major for the diminutive Op.54 Sonata. At first, from the beginning of Op.10 No.1, with its terse ascending figurations hurling out a challenge to the world, I thought the Ilott Theatre acoustic would prove too dry and dull for the music to properly “speak” – but as the work progressed I realized that the sounds were bringing out both player and instrument beautifully, without need of much help from the hall at all.

Houstoun relished the operatic character of the second movement, energizing the dramatic, baroque-like flourishes that contrasted with the lyrical lines, and bringing out the playful countervoice dancing over the top of things, before the richly beautiful concluding descent. Having sufficiently expressed his ardour, the young virtuoso composer applied his pianistic spurs once again and galloped off and into an incident-packed third movement, rich with variety. The pianist took us adroitly through all of this towards the somewhat Haydnesque harmonic cul-de-sac which brought the journey to a whimsical halt, then laughingly turned us around and pushed us in the right direction to the final cadence.

The opening of Op.14 No.2 had, by contrast, a feline grace, in Houstoun’s hands, with the music’s contours finely sculptured, but with some easing at the phrase-ends, just as a singer would breathe. The middle section clouded over and giddily whirled us through various agitations to a wonderful release-point nicely held by the pianist before returning to the gentle warmth of the opening – I thought Houstoun’s tones positively glowed in places towards the end, with a kind of burnished quality. The andante stepped out with attitude, Houstoun terracing the dynamics finely and without exaggeration – I had never noticed a kind of kinship of utterance between places in this movement and the variation movement of No.30 (Op.109) before hearing this performance.

Regarding the finale, it was “and now for something completely different….” on the composer’s part. Houstoun brought out the music’s skittishness, in places as much lightly brushing-over as playing the notes – as another pianist once said to me, having just played the work, “It’s all slightly mad, isn’t it?” – and splendidly delivered Beethoven’s gorgeous growl of impulsive drollery right at the end. And from this we were taken to a world of grander, more ceremonial and ritualized fun-and-games, the enigmatic two-movement Sonata No.22 (Op.54).

Comparing this performance with Houstoun’s Trust recording of the work, made in 1994, I noted the more open and varied touch throughout the first movement’s exuberant octave hammerings. I also felt a stronger sense of narrative throughout – here, the introductory minuet-like dance was beautifully augmented on each of its appearances with grace-notes and other accoutrements, and thus transformed into a wondrously-adorned processional. The pianist allowed it a moment of glory before gracefully delivering a succession of plaintive, fading chords, and letting it all go.

As for the moto perpetuo-like second movement, Houstoun has always played this music superbly, as here. From the beginning there was a finely-controlled but burgeoning excitement, Houstoun bringing out Kreisleriana-like voices from the occasional held notes, and varying the tones and intensities throughout different episodes. I enjoyed the wonderful “lurches” into different ambiences, before the pianist refocused the music’s bearings, girded its loins for a final reprise, and made an all-out dash for the finish line, to exhilarating effect.

So – we were now “primed” as it were for that Everest of the pianistic literature – the “Hammerklavier”. The music was hurled across the firmament for us at the very start, Houstoun’s hands leaping excitingly through voids of time and space. His fingers didn’t quite encompass every note cleanly in the subsequent figurations, but the hint of strain suggested a no-holds-barred commitment, and the titanic nature of the effort required to bring those sounds into being for us. The energies generated and subsequently released throughout the whole movement in places suggested to me dancing star-clusters, forming and breaking apart, the pianist’s strength and vision of the whole keeping the ebb and flow of things together. The  fugal sequence had both vigour and weight, suggesting a human mind attempting to come to grips with something elemental and for the ages. A tremendous achievement.

The scherzo was kept “tight”, and the dynamics contained, though circumspection was thrown aside as the madly scampering trio section brilliantly touched off the volcanic climax, the sounds skyrocketting upwards and all over in a brilliant display of surging pianistic exuberance. A few obsessively-repeated chords and a throwaway ending, and we were suddenly in another world of vast spaces and far-flung thoughts, as the slow movement was begun.

When reviewing Houstoun’s recording of this work, I felt that the pianist demonstrated that he was a skilled, committed and thoughtful architect and builder, from the opening notes of this movement shaping the music into a magnificent structure, exquisitely proportioned and finely detailed in all of its parts. His grasp of the different dimensions suggested by the music made for profound contrasts of space, light, meaning and feeling which I felt readily opened themselves to the listener. It was a telling journey through these different vistas, with seemingly endless explorations in and around the music’s structures, upwards and outwards, though I didn’t ever feel I was invited or encouraged by the playing to stop and experience the depths of the stillness at the heart of it all.

Seventeen years on I felt Houstoun’s approach to this music had moved closer to this stillness, though he seemed as disinclined to take that last step into the vortex of allowing the music to direct him, of surrendering to the ineffable and feeling the full depth of the silences between some of those notes. Rather, the music was, I thought, kept on the continuum of a living pulse, with everything admirably weighted and sensitively detailed. Beethoven’s use of a slow waltz-rhythm throughout suggested in its way a kind of life-dance, whose ebb and flow underwent profound transformation, and Houstoun’s invitation to us to share in that dance pared our existence to the music’s essentials for its duration. And though this music was supposed to represent the well of the world’s sorrow, here on the opposite side of its tragic aspect was an antithesis, a kind of cleansing of the spirit and a refreshing of the indomitable will. It was on this plane that I thought the pianist’s achievement in this music was truly memorable.

On a prosaically functional level, a truly transcendental performance of the slow movement can leave one in a kind of emotion-suffused daze, creating the unforgivable solecism of wanting to turn the work into a kind of “Unfinished Sonata” by breaking off one’s listening at that point. Perhaps Beethoven sensed such a possibility, responding with a finale whose opening easeful, recitative-like gestures suddenly plunge the listener into a seething cauldron of fugal interaction, one which largely dominates the movement. Houstoun’s strength and energy really came into its own, here, and his playing vividly delineated the music’s fugal form as a wonderfully jagged cliff-face, whose relief outlines displayed things such as augmentation, retrograde and inversion (as all good fugues ought). With him we climbed that cliff-face, experiencing the stature, grandeur and beauty of the journey, and braving things like suspensions, overhangs and false steps, and pausing for breath at a certain point to take in the full extent of the terrain thus far covered, savour its beauties and terrors, and then plunge upwards and onwards.

Having gone within hailing distance of the goal, the music then intensified the order of its going, requiring the pianist to interweave some of the elements thus far encountered, before finishing with a part-defiant, part-exultant ascent of the B-flat major scale of tenths and trills to the final tonic-dominant cadences of the work’s summit. Resisting the temptation to employ Sir Edmund Hillary’s famously reported description of his and Tensing’s ascent of Everest at this point, I might instead say that Houstoun thus came, saw and on this occasion conquered. His traversal of all four sonatas (but especially the last!) justly drew forth a rapturous response from a near-filled Ilott Theatre, people almost without exception on their feet wholeheartedly acclaiming a stellar achievement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Britten, Milhaud and Tchaikovsky from the NZSM Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:

NZSM Orchestra – “Pathetique”

BRITTEN – Suite on English Folksongs

MILHAUD – Viola Concerto No.2 Op.340

TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.6 “Pathetique”

Irina Andreeva (viola)

Kenneth Young (conductor)

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Tuesday 9th April, 2013

This was a whale of a concert from the NZSM Orchestra and conductor Kenneth Young, performing with Auckland-based viola soloist Irina Andreeva. Much of the enjoyment was in our anticipation of the programme, which featured a not too-well-known Folksong Suite by Benjamin Britten, and an even more rarely performed concerto for viola by Darius Milhaud, coupled with one of the best-loved of the Tchaikovsky Symphonies, the “Pathetique”. If not quite “something for everybody” the concert certainly ranged over an impressive and satisfying stretch of stylistic and emotional terrain.

The concert’s centerpiece was the Milhaud Viola Concerto, the composer’s second for the instrument and reputedly one of the most difficult works for viola in the repertoire. Milhaud wrote it during 1954 and 1955 as a dedication to the eminent virtuoso William Primrose, who apparently found it difficult and ungrateful to perform. Upon complaining to the composer, Primrose recalled that Milhaud replied, disarmingly, “Mon Cher, all concertos should be difficult”.

To date there has been no commercial recording made of the concerto, though there are rumours that a tape of Primrose playing the work does exist. The violist was quoted as saying it (the concerto) was “the most outrageously difficult work I ever tackled, and for all the immense labour I devoted to it never appealed to the public”.

For myself, on a first hearing, I thought it lacked the charm and variety and energy of Walton’s only concerto for viola, the first rival twentieth-century work which comes to mind. Though they’re not exactly thick on the ground, other concerti for the instrument by Bartok, Hindemith, Schnittke, Penderecki and Piston do turn up in adventurous orchestral programmes – and one mustn’t forget things like Anthony Ritchie’s 1994 concerto, of which there’s an Atoll recording featuring violist Timothy Deighton. (There are also viola concerti by Alfred Hill and Nigel Keay, further off the beaten home-grown track…..).

But Milhaud it was on this occasion, and the soloist Irina Andreeva bent her back to the task with a will, meeting head-on William Primrose’s assertion regarding the music’s difficulty, and emerging triumphant at the end, though not without playing her way through some nail-biting moments. The first movement is marked “Avec Entrain” which my on-line translator rendered as “with spirit” – and as the solo instrument virtually never stopped playing throughout, spirit was certainly required on the part of the soloist!  The music consisted of a running figure for the viola which sometimes relaxed into a more lyrical mode, accompanied in a disconcertingly pointillistic way by the orchestra, with abrupt squawks in places and lovely squealings in others. And I did enjoy the frequent insouciance of the wind-playing, in marked contrast to the nervous and keeping-on intensities of the violist’s undulating figurations.

Movement 2 was “Avec Charm” which I guess didn’t need translation, though the music’s ambience was, I thought, “small-hours dance-floor” with only a few couples left. The soloist’s lovely tone amply filled out the lyrical figurations, one or two intonation sags aside, especially when under pressure from what seemed like awkward stretches – the “difficult and ungrateful to perform” ghost here hovering about the music. But there were some gorgeous low-lying passages which brought forth plenty of juice from Andreeva’s instrument, accompanied by nostalgic winds and some “last dance” harp phrases, leading up to the crack-of-doom gong-stroke which then sent the phantoms of the small-hours packing into the gloom.

My schoolboy French wasn’t up to “Avec esprit”, and I was put right in conversation afterwards by a friend who explained it was literally “with mind” [it also means ‘wit’: L.T.] – which made more sense of music that seemed extremely controlled in its expression, a tight rhythmic regime which came across like a waltz in a straitjacket – the soloist’s recurring “theme” alternated with orchestra comment whose textures supported the argument with occasional punctuations and deft cross-rhythms. And there was no let-up for anybody in the concluding “Avec gaîtè”, a slowly-lolloping jig, whose stride gathered up the soloist’s strenuous double-stopping and the marvellously detailed orchestra textures, and proceeded to generate a well-nigh unstoppable momentum towards a “fin triomphant”! Accolades all round was the richly-deserved response to a fine performance.

To begin the concert, we had another work rarely encountered in the concert-hall, Benjamin Britten’s Suite on English Folksongs, music which took a somewhat different approach to that accorded traditional airs by composers such as Holst and Vaughan Williams. Britten had written a work for inclusion in the celebrations surrounding the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1966, an arrangement for winds of the folk song Hankin Booby, and so, eight years later, included the work in his new suite. The whole work was given the subtitle “A time there was…..”, which was a quotation from a poem by Thomas Hardy, reflecting upon an age of innocence, and its subsequent corruption, something of a recurring theme in Britten’s own work.

Unlike other folksong treatments, Britten took the traditional folk-themes and developed them in pairs, subjecting the combinations to concise, but nevertheless intense explorations, finding worlds within worlds from these melodies. I noted in the very first one, Cakes and Ale, the rhythmic thrust of the writing from the very first chord – superbly delivered, here! – and the great work by the brass in carrying this forward. Interwoven with the themes were tortured, obsessive figurations, heightening tensions between both tunes and underlying accompaniments.

The second piece, The Bitter Withy, inspired beautiful string playing and support from the harp, the instrumental tones nicely gradated and the intensities well terraced, bringing sharply into relief the rustic angularities of the following Hankin Booby, the work’s “godfather” piece. What wonderful sonorities, and how pungently and wholeheartedly the orchestral winds put across their characteristic tinbres – riveting!

Hunt the Squirrel suggests as a title a quintessential English activity set to music, and the open-sounding strings brought out the essential earthiness of the fun, with some great playing from the orchestral leader, Salina Fisher. The ensemble wasn’t absolutely note-perfect, but put across a corporate verve and energy which underpinned the music’s excitement.

Again, Britten set one piece’s mood against its previous opposite, with the suite’s finale, Lord Melbourne. A tragic note hung around the music’s beginning, with its deep-throated percussion and “wandering” string and wind lines – this continued until the cor anglais solo, when conductor Ken Young suddenly stopped the orchestra and indicated to the players to start again – it had transpired (I was afterwards told) that one of the wind soloists had been ill before the concert, and had at that point gotten somewhat out of time and wasn’t “knitting” with the rest of the ensemble.

The repeat that followed seemed to present a tauter aspect to the music, if less spontaneous-sounding and “dangerous”. The piece built to a climax with the help of some intensely-focused string entries, then ebbed the tension away with birdsong-like winds and all-pervading feelings of nostalgic longing, the music expressing a touching loss and sorrow at the end. Altogether, the music was a discovery for me, and the performance presented it memorably, in an entirely sympathetic light.

I haven’t left much time or space to talk about the performance of the “Pathetique” which took up the second half of the concert, mainly because I thought the orchestra had presented the concert’s first-half items with such distinction, along with the soloist in the Milhaud Concerto. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony was also played magnificently, with a palpable sense of commitment and concentration from the very first gloom-laden notes, the bassoon and violas empowering the basses to “focus” their initial phrases a bit more securely the second time round after what I thought were a somewhat nervous first couple of notes.

Tchaikovsky’s adoration of Mozart was apparent with the violins’ opening phrases, here, the poise and clarity of the playing growing in intensity towards the brass fanfares, then erupting in agitation but called back to a state of relative calm by the lower strings – and how beautifully the violins stole in with the “big tune”, the playing expressive and plaintive-toned, with proper heart-on-sleeve emotion here, from winds as well as strings.

Conductor Young didn’t spare the players with the sudden onset of the allegro, and encouraged a terrific noise at the heart of the conflicting hubbub, timpani especially “charged” and well-focused throughout. With the big tune’s reprise at the end of the tumult, the sound wasn’t especially pure from the violins, but had great character, which I much preferred to a kind of bland homogeneity, the emotion expressed in great waves. Lovely winds and noble brass at the end, with every pizzicato note sounding as though it really meant something.

If I describe the remainder of the symphony’s performance like this I shall be here all night – so suffice to say that the 5/4 Second Movement was expressed by Young and his players with great urgency, or “a fair old lick” as they say in the classics, with the pizzicato passages a forest of plucking noises at that speed! No respite from the Trio, either, the music’s anxiety level kept near the red throughout, and the playing matching the music’s mood in point and focus. Then, the third-movement March was all urgency and angst – music of flight as much as nervous energy – with the antiphonal exchanges between the instruments thrilling. Every now and then an instrumental detail would arrest one’s sensibilities, such as a piccolo-led wind flourish, and a keenly-focused timpani crescendo.

Young gave his strings enough room to really “point” the main theme, and also deal with the syncopated exchanges between instrumental groups. The build-up to the first percussion onslaught was fabulous, even if the bass drum slightly anticipated one of its entries. And the coda was all the more effective through being kept rock-steady, allowing the winds a terrific texture-piercing flourish before the final crunching chords. How the audience restrained itself from breaking into spontaneous applause (a common occurrence with this work in concert) I’ll never know!

Sweet, regretful strings there were at the finale’s beginning, the emotion dignified at this initial stage, the phrasings given plenty of breath, wind and brass steady, apart from the occasional tiny horn burble. As the music slipped into the major, the mood took on a more hopeful aspect, the plea becoming increasingly eloquent – only to flounder against a brass rebuttal and crash to a halt in disarray. I enjoyed the subsequent ghoulish brass raspings and Wagnerian string intensities “sung out” by the players just before the second and final irruption, giving the moment of death-convulsion a truly fatalistic feeling and colour. The trombones intoned their lament superbly, as did the strings, with great, weeping swells of emotion, leading to dark, drained silences at the end.

I confess to being spellbound, throughout, by the playing’s energy and commitment – in short, I thoroughly enjoyed the concert’s two earlier (and less familiar) items, but thought the whole of the symphony was well-and-truly “nailed” by these youngsters and their inspirational conductor. Bravo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Riseley (violin) and Jian Liu (piano) – elegance plus outrageous virtuosity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:

Martin Riseley (violin) and Jian Liu (piano)

FRANCK – Violin Sonata in A Major / DEBUSSY – The Girl with the Flaxen Hair

SARASATE – Introduction and Tarantella Op.43 / PAGANINI – Moto Perpetuo

WIENIAWSKI – Scherzo-Tarantelle Op.16

Adam Concert Room, NZSM Kelburn Campus

Victoria University

Friday 5th April

The present recital, featuring violinist Martin Riseley and pianist Jian Liu, was one of a series of concerts organized this year by the New Zealand School of Music.

Martin Riseley has on at least one previous occasion given me short-term lockjaw in the open position, when he played the 24 Caprices of Niccolo Paganini at a concert I attended in Wellington a little over three years ago. Playing those works in a single performance span and making a success of the undertaking demonstrated at the time that the violinist was a virtuoso-musician of considerable stature.

This time round, Riseley again wowed us with his brilliance and quicksilver reflexes, though the “relentless virtuosity” of Paganini and a later generation of virtuoso performer-composers represented by Sarasate and Wieniawski was confined to the recital’s second half. Not that the opening part of the concert gave the musicians any great relaxation, though the demands were of a slightly “removed” order of musicianship – this was the well-known Sonata in A major by Cesar Franck, inhabiting what Robert Schumann might have called “different realms” of expression.

I found Martin Riseley’s programme notes fascinating, as much for conveying his attitudes towards and history of playing the Franck work, as for giving me certain insights into some of the different technical aspects of playing both sections of the recital. I was interested that he mentioned as his “ideal” the recording of the Franck Sonata made by the Russian pair David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter, as that performance has always been a great favorite of mine as well.

So it was with much anticipation that I settled down to await the beginning of the Franck, aware as I was of the playing and interpretative skills of not only Riseley, but pianist Jian Liu, whom I had heard and enjoyed a number of times in recital.

I thought the work’s opening beautifully voiced, having a growing focus from the first notes which flowered nicely at the first real climax. The passagework of both musicians had a lovely velvet touch in places, but had sinew and muscle in others when strength was required – the players’ detailing suggested depths as well as half-lights. Each musician nicely “wreathed” the other’s playing – still, I felt the music and its intensities slightly held back throughout, each player doubtless aware of the terrain still to be traversed.

Jian Liu’s clarity of fingerwork at the scherzo’s beginning actually reminded me more of Saint-Saens than Franck – he brought out the music’s athleticism, rather than what I think of as its erotically suggestive Wagnerian undercurrents. But both pianist and violinist beautifully integrated the “quiet centre” of the piece into the music’s pulsing, maintaining a “charged” quality throughout, and giving the growing dramatic rhetoric of the recitatives full force. The violinist splendidly brought out the soaring theme at the height of the agitations, contrasting it beautifully with its more reflective self in the quieter moments. The coda was properly hushed and expectant at the start, gathering energy and thrust and featuring the instruments really “digging into” the music, though again, the articulation was so very precise, the feeling was for me more abstracted than truly suggestive and passionate.

At the slow movement’s beginning the gestures had a truly Shakespearean eloquence, grand and declamatory, but with real “quality” in the silences. Both musicians were able to fine down their tones from those very public utterances to more private musings. Franck introduces his themes so touchingly in this movement, and Liu’s liquid keyboard tones and Riseley’s beautifully-floated lines meant that the first “suggestive” theme and later the more declamatory “unveiling” theme both had a kind of “borne along” quality, very intense, but beautifully integrated into the flow.

After this I was a little disconcerted by the finale as played here, the instruments (especially the piano), bent upon contrast instead of pursuing a continuance of “coming-out” from the previous movement’s thrall – in fact the first paragraph was simply too brightly and bouncily played for me after what had gone before. However, the contrasting episodes were voiced beautifully and sensitively by both musicians, even if I wanted the piano tones to have more “tumbling body-warmth” in places. When the slow movement’s theme was reintroduced, I thought the piano figurations which built up towards the violin’s impassioned entries too skitterish, and needing more weight of tone to match those incredible “drenched” violin tones.

Still, a committed performance can win over the most curmudgeonly listener, and thus it proved here – I found myself applauding as wholeheartedly as anybody in the Adam Concert Room when the music was all over. Perhaps in response to our enthusiastic reception the players decided to spontaneously add another item to the program, that of an arrangement for violin and piano of Debussy’s Prelude for solo piano, La fille aux cheveux de lin. This was simply gorgeous, the musicians giving the music absolute security of intonation throughout, and allowing the notes themselves to express their “quality” within the overall shape of things – the piece’s interpretation thus came from the actual “sounds” of the notes, added to which were episodes of haunting harmonics in the middle section, and dead-in-tune double-stopping towards the end.

From here on in the program there were fireworks aplenty, with the very occasional moment of repose or circumspection grudgingly allowed the musicians (well, the violinist, really!), such as the very opening to Pablo de Sarasate’s Introduction and Tarantella. Even so, there were difficulties aplenty here, such as frequent high-wire harmonics capping a whole series of finely-wrought archways of melody. But the Tarantella, when it began, astonished us all, bristling with virtuoso displays, the wonderful alternating (and then together!) left-hand/right-hand pizzicati a visual as well as an aural delight, as were the three-octave leaps along the instrument’s top string. The dance’s reprise was a breathtaking gallop, notes flying in all directions as would pebbles scatter from beneath a horse’s hooves.

More wizardry came with the Paganini Moto Perpetuo. The music resembled a rushing fusillade of notes in places, though Riseley’s playing retained sufficient poise to be able to bring out the music’s dynamic variation, and get an attractive “ebb and flow” aspect. Less gratefully written was the work by Henryk Wieniawski, in which the violinist has to constantly “reach” for the top note in the melodic line, making for more effortful results than in the other two virtuoso pieces. Yet the violinist was still able to bring out the gorgeousness of the writing with the main tune’s reprise. Throughout these pieces Jian Liu was a reliable and rock-steady support-partner, his presence the launching-pad from which Martin Riseley’s violin was able to sing, soar and scintillate to great and thrilling effect throughout the concert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A long and circuitous route from the Guildhall

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand School of Music presents:

A Guildhall Trio Reunion

Barbara Hill (flute) / Debbie Rawson (clarinet) / Donald Maurice (viola)

with Jian Liu (piano)

Music by Max Bruch, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Maurice Durufle, Alfred Uhl, Francois Devienne, Jenny McLeod

Adam Concert Room, NZSM Kelburn Campus,

Victoria University, Wellington

Wednesday 27th March, 2013

“…..a musical reunion? – ooh, yes, a lovely idea! Remember some of those things we unearthed and played, and had so much fun with? Yes, they’ll sound great, especially with a few wines, and plenty of yummy food – what’s that? A concert? You mean, the real thing? – an audience? – Ooo-er! – eh? – what was that? – No, not at all! – I’m on if you two are on! What gave you that idea? – I’m keen if you’re keen. Yeah, a couple of those things are at home somewhere, at the bottom of some pile. No, it’ll do me good! What about you? – you haven’t played that since when?……well, it won’t have gone stale, then……”

Of course one “invents” scenarios for effect – and truth is often stranger, funnier and more interesting than any fabricated exchange. But this trio of musicians, made up of Debbie Rawson, clarinet, Donald Maurice, viola and Barbara Hill, flute, were simultaneously flatmates and fellow-students at London’s Guildhall School of Music during the 1970s. During the intervening years they’d mostly gone their separate musical ways, except for periods where two members of the trio played together in different ensembles – but up until this present concert the threesome hadn’t performed together or alongside each other since their student days.

Now, along with the help of pianist Jian Liu, the three reunited for the present concert, though most of the repertoire presented involved no more than two of the group at any one time. Happily, the last item on the programme did use the whole ensemble – Jenny McLeod’s Suite – jazz themes was written in 1987 for the Zelanian Ensemble, in fact while Debbie Rawson and Donald Maurice were both members of the group. So the reunion was complete, and honour was well-and-truly satisfied.

Throughout the concert pianist Jian Liu’s playing was both the solid rock on which the different instrumental combinations stood and delivered, and the chameleon whose aspect adapted its tones to whatever was required by the music’s character at any given moment. The programme was largely a twentieth-century one, with the honorable exception of a Duo for flute and viola by Francois Devienne (1759-1803). Though Max Bruch (1838-1920), is generally thought of as a nineteenth-century romantic, his Eight Pieces for clarinet, viola and piano, four of which were played here, were written in 1910.

It was the Bruch which began the concert, Debbie Rawson and Donald Maurice joining forces with Jian Liu to give us Nos. 2, 5, 6 and 7 from those Eight Pieces. At the age of seventy the composer probably wasn’t concerned with fashionable trends in composition, drawing instead from a lifetime’s experience of his own creative impulses and other people’s music. So the Nachtgesang (No.6) which opened the concert had a mellow, sometimes Brahms-like, sometimes Schumannesque character, here beautifully realised, with the players taking turns to accompany one another most sensitively.

The short No.2 (Allegro con moto) was rather more lively, again reminiscent of Schumann, and with the piano part expressing miracles of quiet, nervous agitation (there was a delicious gurgle of appreciation from a very young child in the audience, right at the end of the piece!). No.5, the Rumanische Melodie was true to its description, the solo violin gypsy-like, and the folksy clarinet rhapsodizing by turns gaily and darkly. And what a contrast brought out by the players with the Dvorak-like No.7, beautifully setting the long-held melodic lines over infectious skipping energies, all with the lightest of touches.

Heitor Villa-Lobos’s music isn’t heard nearly enough in our concert-halls, and the composer’s brief but high-output Chôros No.2  merely whetted our appetites for more. One of a series of diverse instrumental combinations, this one threw Barbara Hill’s flute and Debbie Rawson’s clarinet together, lyrical outpourings, angularities and all, Debbie Rawson advising us at the beginning to “tighten our seatbelts” in anticipation of the same – a highly diverting and totally idiosyncratic entertainment.

No greater contrast could have been devised than with the music of Maurice Duruflé which followed, the Prelude, Recitatif and Variations for flute, viola and piano. Where Villa-Lobos’ music seemed all knees and elbows and nervous energies, Duruflé’s richly resonant sound-world conjured up depths of feeling whose surfaces occasionally shimmered and bubbled, realms of liquid and of air brought into active play, and presented for our delight and wonderment. Only during the final variations did the music take on a more physical aspect, and almost always with a light touch, though the notes were appropriately and splendidly scattered over a wide area by way of the work’s exhilarating conclusion.

I’d not heard any music previous to this concert by Alfred Uhl – by dint of the work’s title Kleines Koncert, and the composer’s Viennese connection, the spirit of Mozart seemed to be present from the start, although Uhl was very much a twentieth-century composer, with a number of film scores to his credit. Pianist Jian Liu introduced the work, emphasizing its wit and charm, and its references to the music of other composers. I thought its opening very burleske-like – crashing chords, running chromaticisms and sinuous melodies created a kind of “music for the pictures’ ambience. I particularly enjoyed the “half-lit” sequences, the eerie harmonies and half-tone shifts – all great fun! The players also appeared to enjoyed themselves greatly, moving with relish from the mordant wit of the duo-cadenza-like exchanges at the first movement’s ending to the gothic, dark-tread of the music at the slow movement’s beginning, with viola and clarinet sounding their notes like warning-bells at sea.

As if enough swirling energies hadn’t been expended by this time, the work’s finale reached new heights of vertiginous abandonment, driving the music giddily along within  the confines of closely-worked harmonies. It was a “heads down and scamper” kind of scenario among the musicians, their full-blooded playing screwing up the tensions brilliantly right to the end – all very accessible stuff, uninhibited and entertaining.

Barbara Hill was the obvious choice to tell us about the next composer’s work, as the other musicans would have been quite breathless for a while after putting across Uhl’s riotous music so engagingly. And, of course, Francois Devienne’s work featured the flute, in a duo with the viola. An eighteenth-century composer, performer and teacher in Paris, Devienne’s music isn’t well-known to concert-goers, though there’s a fair deal of it extant,  (over three hundred numbered works, mostly involving wind instruments). This two-movement work nicely contrasted an expressive style at the outset, with a more energetic Rondo, the latter incorporating a photo-finish kind of ending, which must have gone down well with the punters at the time. Barbara Hill and Donald Maurice conveyed a palpable sense of enjoyment to us of both the music and of their partnership in realising its many delights.

There can’t have been many classical music concerts which featured a musician talking about putting down a hangi on a back lawn somewhere in London, as Donald Maurice did here by way of illustrating a context for the group’s connections with the next item and its composer. Jenny McLeod’s work Suite – Jazz themes splendidly performed its dual function of entertaining its audience and rounding the concert off most satisfyingly. Debbie Rawson invited people to dance if they felt so inclined at any stage, which added a kind of physical dimension to people’s listening, even if no-one actually leapt from his or her seat during the performance.

The work’s five movements had many ear-tickling sequences, particularly the first one, Zelania, with its syncopations and “wandering stresses”. The following Chaconne lazily drifted its sounds through ambiences of memory and nostalgia, its slow dance evoking a very rural and idiomatic feeling of familiar vistas. In contrast, the perky Blue Classic had an almost “Beckus the Dandiprat” feeling about it, chirpy, droll, and very much with “attitude”, the cross-rhythms leading to a lovely throwaway ending.

The following Reverie seemed like a kind of daydream or sleep-encircled experience, sounds almost turned in upon themselves, with just touches of reverberation here and there – its taciturn aspect throwing the final Gypso into bold relief, rhythms flailing from piano and viola, saxophone lustily calling out juicy and jazzy themes and flute counterpointing merrily above it all. And to cap it all off (possibly because the hangi wasn’t quite ready out the back!) Donald Maurice insisted that the group play the final Gypso again, ostensibly because, in his own words to us, something “wasn’t quite right”.

The group’s reprise seemed more freely and energetically characterised, the different instrumental roles more sharply-focused – though being able to hear them twice in quick succession in this piece would have on its own “cleansed” everybody’s listening palette. Altogether, it made for a splendidly-delivered ending to a happy and rewarding musical occasion.

 

 

 

NZSO’s “Bolero” – well-wrought excitement and elegant ecstasy

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:

BOLERO!

RAVEL – La Valse (poème choréographique)

Piano Concerto in G major

Boléro

SCRIABIN – The Poem of Ecstasy, Op.54

Stephen De Pledge (piano)

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 22nd March 2013

What better way to begin an orchestral concert than with music that features playing of rapt, superfine concentration, sharp-edged focus and meticulous attention to detail?

For much of Maurice Ravel’s La Valse, which opened the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s Wellington Concert on Friday evening, I thought the playing and conducting among the finest and most compelling I had heard from these musicians at any time – right from the outset I found myself riveted by the sounds maestro Pietari Inkinen and his players were bringing into being. At first, everything was dark-hued, with each deeply-resonating pulsation, murmuring oscillation and faintly-shimmering texture seeming to grow organically out of what had come before, Inkinen giving his musicians plenty of time and space to properly articulate their figurations and fill out the textures. I thought it all superbly-wrought, the music’s voices resonating with inner life and shimmering with quiet allure, at once transparent and mysterious, clearly-etched and yet still suggestive and equivocal.

The music’s early climaxes came with plenty of force, each one properly “prepared” though seeming natural and inevitable. In this performance we were able to gradually conjure out of the mists of the opening the shapes and forms of dancers swirling in a ballroom, their movements caught in some kind of fantastic intoxication, drawing us into a vortex of make-believe. And so it all continued, at once dream-like and over-wrought, with tender waltz-undulations followed abruptly by upheavals and disturbances from brass and percussion, as if sounding portents of things still to come. Up to the piece’s final quarter I thought conductor Inkinen’s blending of overall movement, phrasing and detail exemplary.

However, as the sense of growing claustrophobia and desperation began to exert its grip, I wanted to “feel” the change more palpably from the musicians. Those “portents” of imminent tragedy should inevitably begin to curdle the music’s flavour, tighten the rhythms and squeeze the air from those textures – for me, the lead-up to the final reprise of the waltz was too relaxed and untroubled to herald an evocation of collapse and dissolution, which the work’s final bars come to deliver so brutally. Still, the coup de grace was expertly and tellingly done; and when it was all over I still felt grateful to conductors and players alike for so much rare and intense pleasure along the music’s way in this performance.

Interestingly, I felt pretty much the same way about the presentation of the well-known Bolero, which concluded the concert. Again, I thought the opening measures of this work here wrought of magic, sounds whose delicacy suggests something borne on air, pulsations of the spheres, the “dance” a mere impulse of distant delight to begin with. I couldn’t see the side-drummer at all (to my great surprise percussionist Lenny Sakofsky turned out to be sitting directly in front of the conductor, though he was almost totally obscured) – it sounded as though he was offstage, so gently-tapped were his rhythmic patterns, so unobtrusive, in fact that the solo flute which introduced the first of the two themes sounded amazingly full-toned by comparison. The ensuing solos and duets and combinations from different instruments were all gorgeously voiced and shaped, though the long-familiar “curse” of the piece – of which, more in a moment – did strike towards the tricky, syncopated ending of the second of the two oft-repeated tunes at one point, the players “turning” the phrase-ending too soon and threatening to throw the whole ensemble out. However, with Pietari Inkinen in charge, things were kept on an even keel, and the music rolled on and into the next sequence.

I always wait for that first massed violin entry, about two-thirds of the way through the work, playing the first tune – such a great moment! For me, those strings bring a suffusion of light and energy which begins to enflame the whole piece, to the point of near-conflagration towards the end. Here, I thought the orchestral playing expert and reliable over the last few repetitions of the tunes, but to me the intensities created by all those wind and brass combinations didn’t build further after the violins had done their thing. It seemed almost as if the conductor was keeping the brass in check towards the end, thus leaving the last-gasp, percussion-underlined sequence to properly heighten the tensions and cap off the work – perhaps those stalwart brass players had given their all during Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy a few minutes before, and couldn’t quite recapture the same level of voltage.

As to the “curse of the Bolero “, among orchestra players the piece is regarded as proverbially treacherous, due to the mesmeric nature of those many repetitions of the rhythm. I recall a radio program played on “Concert” some years back in which a number of prominent orchestral players from top orchestras in Britain and the USA described the experience of playing in the piece, and the frequency of those rhythms simply going off the rails – one player described the experience as a “double nightmare”, being the fear of (a) getting “out” with those rhythmic patterns, and (b) having to figure out how to “get back in” again. One of my recordings (featuring – sacre bleu! – a French orchestra!) bears out this phenomenon, with the side-drummer at one point getting his rhythms mixed up, but, adroitly, (perhaps with the conductor’s help) mirror-imaging his mistake and thus finding his way back in “sync.” once again! On Friday night the glitch occurred almost at the end of the melody-line, so the players merely had to keep their heads and wait for the next repetition to begin.

Within the framework of these two pieces in the concert were a couple of others as different as chalk to cheese, though fortunately separated by the interval. In the first half, after La Valse, we heard the adorable G Major Piano Concerto, with Stephen de Pledge as the nimble-fingered soloist. Though Ravel indicated his debt to both Mozart and Saint-Saens when writing this work, the first movement of this work in particular is very bluesy, and probably owes something to Gershwin, whom Ravel had met (turning down a request from the former to become his pupil, advising him to “remain a first-rate Gershwin, rather than become a second-rate Ravel”). However, there were plenty of different jazz influences at large throughout the 1920s, and Gershwin was of course just one of these – Ravel had already incorporated jazz elements into his 1927 Violin Sonata, written the year before he met Gershwin.

This was a characterful performance, the soloist not afraid to point the music’s angularities in places, getting slightly “out” with the orchestra at one point for that reason, Inkinen and the players adopting a smoother, less spiky trajectory which resulted in the combination “playing around” rather than “with” one another throughout a sequence featuring the opening tune’s reprise. Elsewhere, the accord was mellifluous, if never taken for granted – de Pledge’s spontaneous-sounding playing made for moment upon moment of great interest, his passagework never as smooth and crystalline-sounding as, say, Stephen Hough’s (a keyboard wizard, after all!), but incapable, I thought, of turning out a meaningless or mechanical phrase. I loved the horn solo, but I must say I was surprised when the normally impeccable-sounding oboe seemed to my ears to make heavy weather of a short, but awkward ascending passage in octaves – still, it’s music that certainly keeps everybody on their toes.

De Pledge made something soulful and “human” of the slow movement’s opening solo, eschewing the marmoreal coolness often brought to this passage – his shaping of the melody was taken up readily by the wind solos, which here were simply to die for.The enchantment was taken on by the strings, leading up to the music’s “dark moment of the soul” climax and the consolation of the following limpid exchanges between piano and cor anglais, the pianist again concerned with shaping the figurations rather than simply “prettifying” the textures.

The finale crashed in with great verve, not quite matched by the soloist, whose lack of real incisiveness throughout made for a more muted keyboard effect than usual, though the superb wind solos, begun by the clarinet seemed to whistle up plenty of energies, as did the whip-crack (right on the button!) and the “toy-soldier” trumpet fanfares. Though there was an uncharacteristic fluff from among the otherwise superb horns, the trombone’s sighing four-note figure was a delight, a pearl of insouciance! Conductor Inkinen held back and unleashed his forces at just the right moments, while De Pledge’s playing certainly caught the vertiginous momentum of the chase and the whirling dervish aspect of the final bars with great aplomb! – a thoroughly entertaining performance.

The “cheese” put alongside Ravel’s “chalk” (or what you will) was Scriabin’s amazing “Poem of Ecstasy”, a work requiring all kinds of extra players to come out of the woodwork in the Michael Fowler Centre, for the purposes of the composer’s requirements – quadruple woodwind, eight horns, five trumpets and two harps, as well as, alas, a pipe organ, which the MFC didn’t unfortunately have. We were informed (warned?) in advance by an enthusiastic programme note on the work that a “brilliant and exuberant finish, resplendent in C Major, makes Scriabin disciples of us all”, though as this would presumably be an internal happening, rather like the conferring of a state of grace upon believers, it would be difficult to actually verify. (A friend told me afterwards that he felt a bit nervous when reading this sentence beforehand, as he wanted neither to be made a disciple of anybody, really, and conversely, nor did he want anybody, and certainly not a dead composer, to be declared HIS disciple!).

Despite the lack of a “proper” organ, the work still managed to generate more than the usual number of decibels in performance. As sheer sound it was an awe-inspiring sonic experience, if somewhat cosmopolitan in effect. As I had been listening of late to a recording of a Russian orchestra playing this work, an incredibly exciting and volatile performance, though somewhat disconcertingly coarse in texture, I felt sure that Pietari Inkinen would bring quite different qualities to the performance this evening, and so it proved. From where I was sitting it was well-nigh impossible to pick out contributions from individual players (invariably, bobbing head movements alone gave me a clue as to which clarinettist, which flute-player, which oboist, and so on, were actually playing!) – but I understand that Acting Section Principal Jon Dante was the superb trumpet-player whose recurring motif rang triumphantly out amid the vibrant orchestral textures.

I confess that, in places here, I thought the work’s unashamed rhetoric needed a bit more of the Russian performance’s sheer animal excitement – on the recording, the raw tumult of the sounds leading up to the two enormous climaxes which conclude the work wasn’t quite replicated by the NZSO players. But such a comparison begs the question as to how music in general ought to be played and interpreted, let alone a work by a part-fin de siècle part-futurist-cum-theosophist Russian composer obsessed with mystical oriental philosophy and the phenomenon of synesthesia (in Scriabin’s case, colours linked to musical tones). What Inkinen and the NZSO did with the Poem was, I thought, play it as a musical work with enormous skill and finesse. And if, like with the tone-poems of another great musical innovator, Franz Liszt, this very abstracted, almost literal approach tended to underline the music’s repetition as well as inspiration, it still came across as an impressive and exciting performance of a rarely-played, but worthwhile work by one of the most fascinating of all composers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kronos Quartet – holding time and audience in thrall

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand Presents:

The Kronos Quartet

David Harrington, John Sherba, violins

Hank Dutt, viola / Jeffrey Zeiger, ‘cello

Music by Omar Souleyman, Ram Narayan, Nicole Lizee, Jack Body,

Valentin Silvestrov, Steve Reich, Aleksandra Vrebalov

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Monday, 11th March, 2013

The Kronos Quartet got an extremely warm reception at the end of their Wellington concert – and they responded with no less than four encores! Still, opinions among people I knew in the audience varied afterwards – simply marvellous, said one friend; while another lamented that the group played only one thing he liked, the Silvestrov Quartet. A third thought it all a bit self-indulgent, three “veterans” and a youngster, the former reliving former glories, but without the “edge” of yore. Perhaps I was one of the few in the hall who had not seen the Quartet live in concert before – after all this was their fourth visit to the country – and so for me the experience was more akin to a new discovery.

For the uninitiated such as myself the only sense that could be gleaned of a group of musicians resting on their laurels was in leader David Harrington’s laid-back-plus spoken introductions to each of the items – and such an approach could easily have signified twenty different performance attitudes for twenty different audience members. Though the quartet played a couple of established pieces, such as Steve Reich’s WCT 9/11 and Jack Body’s Arum Manis, at least three of the pieces in the concert were less than three years old, all commissioned by Kronos. That hardly constituted “resting on laurels” behaviour, I would have thought……

Considering the range and scope of the group’s stylistic forays in this concert it’s hardly surprising I picked up a few thumbs-downers from people regarding individual items – mostly it was Canadian composer Nicole Lizee’s “Death to Kosmische” described by the composer as “faded and twisted remnants” relating to a particular style of electronic music, which brought forth puzzled and negative reactions. My own feeling was that the piece perhaps needed a clearer demarcation-line between the piece and its actual source-subject – even a stylized stand-alone piece of “Kosmische” would have clarified for many listeners just what was being given the treatment. And the composer’s scheme for the piece was laden, to say the least, incorporating both “musical hauntology” and “residual perception” as currents in the argument, alongside the lampooning of a specific genre – all fascinating, but for some of us a tortured, obsessive-sounding thicket, complete with a “La Valse-like” disintegration into chaos at the end.

Brighter lights shone upon most of the other pieces for me, either by way of reactions to the sounds in a purely visceral sense (as with the two opening items by Omar Souleyman and Ram Narayan) or through an opening-up of different worlds through an interplay between intellect and sensibility. Omar Souleyman’s La Sidounak Sayyada (translated as “I’ll prevent the Hunters from hunting you”) had an instantly-catchy pop-ethnic sound, the composer grab-bagging a multitude of classic, ethnic and pop-techno-like styles. Kronos played an arrangement of his work commissioned by the group from American composer and arranger Jacob Garchick. And Ram Narayan’s interpretation of a traditional Indian raga, transcribed from an actual recording by the composer of Raga Mishra Bhairavi featured the Kronos players  combining conventional instrument textures (“bending ” the note pitches in the manner of a sitar, or more properly the “Sarangi” – Ram Narayan’s own instrument) with hurdy-gurdy-like sounds, exotic and in places filmic in effect.

Jack Body’s work Arum Manis (Indonesian for “candy floss’) was another Kronos commission, this one from 1991. Body intended for the work to have something of the quality of that particular confectionary, more air than actual substance and predominantly sweet and pleasurable. What also came across (as it does with a lot of Body’s music) is a sense of discovery, almost by “stumbling upon” something, which the composer conveys here by setting acoustic and tape sounds, the quartet’s instruments the traveller and the taped sounds the discovery. Most uncannily I visualized while sitting in the semi-darkness listening to this action/reaction process a kind of antennae drawing impulses of energy downward to earth from a starry sky – in other words I felt a pronounced flow of energetic impulses, the fragments of taped sounds somehow “finding”a focus of resonance and response – a case for me of “What, without asking, hither hurried whence?”, but without an Omar Khayyam sitting beside me to pour the next glass of wine!

Draughts of a different, rarefied sort came in abundance with Valentin Silvestrov’s Third String Quartet, premiered by the Kronos just over a year ago. Like his fellow-composer Aarvo Part, Silvestrov’s earlier, more avant-garde works got him into conflict with the Soviet authorities in the 1970s, and it wasn’t until he modified the severity of his work in subsequent years that it began to enjoy a wider acceptance, both officially and popularly. His seven-movement quartet took its time to unfold, the sounds having for me at once a sequenced and spontaneous quality. It was as if the composer was drawing from a stream-of-conscious set of memories, allowing them to call forth their own associated developments. I felt as if the group had become an instrument that was simply being played on. There were occasional angularities and impulsive thrusts of energy, but largely  the lines of the instruments were like old grandmothers’ songs, or nostalgic tunes sounded by a harmonium, themselves memories of deep, rich strains of things.

Over the work’s latter stages I felt we had been taken to a world similar to that of Sibelius’s music for “The Tempest”, everything rich and strange, and redolent of distant lights at sea and mist-shrouded surroundings. It came down to each impulse from the music sounding like a heartbeat, moving in accord with the natural world, and with our own sensibilities as audience members in the end, by this time in utter thrall to the music.

After an interval rich with discussion and disagreement, we were back for Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11, of which I found analysis impossible, so “caught up” I became in the tumultuous nature of the events of that tragic day as presented by Kronos’s assemblage of sounds and music. In three sections, the piece featured the stringed instruments in both “live” and pre-recorded guises, doubling and harmonizing the various fragments of speech patterns and repetitions, concerning themselves with both rhythm and pitch, and bringing out the inherent musicality in human voices. Section One used the voices of air traffic controllers trying to get in touch with the plane which first crashed into the World Trade Centre building, and reports by commentators of that event. The second and third sections featured voices in the aftermaths, including a ‘cellist playing and a cantor from a New York synagogue, singing Psalms and sects of the Torah.

Pushing the idea of what constitutes art-music outwards, Reich’s work emmeshed sounds of human and technological activity with tones and rhythmic patterns. It was like bringing the act of composition closer to the original source of inspiration by directly transferring sounds and patterns of sounds to a piece rather than refracting their impact through some kind of abstract instrumental expression. How fascinating it would be to hear a version of something like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or La Mer made by Reich or one of his contemporaries. In the present work’s case the effect wasn’t unlike some kind of secular Requiem, its composer using sounds as notes and contexts as building-blocks, and putting them together.

I hadn’t forgotten the programme’s final work, the quirkily-titled ….hold me, neighbour, in this storm….  The composer, Aleksandra Vrebalov, from Serbia, went to live in the United States in her twenties, and is currently teaching in New York. She wrote …hold me neighbour…in 2007 for the Kronos Quartet, who premiered it the following year. The piece seeks to fuse the different strands of folk and religious music from the Balkans region and express them using one of the Western World’s most iconic classical music institutions, the string quartet. Vrebalov wanted to characterize in music a “coming-together” of cultural and religious differences that have for centuries troubled the region – interestingly, she comments that, in some ways at the grass-roots level this fusion has already been taking place, producing something musically quite unique springing from the land and its people.

The composer pre-recorded church bell sounds, Islamic calls to prayer, sounds of children playing, lullabies, war and conflict sounds and drinking songs, an assemblage whose contributions at times pushed things into tumult, then at other times fined down to subtle murmurings.The quartet leader played an ethnic-looking bowed instrument at one point, another player thumped on a drum, and feet were stomped in time to some of the dance-like rhythms.  But then the strings would evoke the sadness of peoples trapped in conflict mode and powerless to make a difference to it all. The sounds of the work were by turns moving and exciting, and made a satisfying and varied whole.

The audience simply kept on clapping at the end, and the quartet obliged again and again with several encores. The players’ generosity accorded with the range and scope of their program – despite the nonchalant, laid-back platform manner, Kronos seemed as ready as ever to give itself as a group over to whatever the music demanded of them. The group’s forty years as an ensemble, packed with presentations of no less than eight hundred original compositions, were tonight carried lightly and gracefully, and brought to bear with wonderful ease and fluency for our pleasure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Melanie Lina – celebrating her “L’isle Joyeuse” at St.Andrews

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St Andrews Lunchtime Concert Series presents:

MELANIE LINA – a piano recital

BEETHOVEN, CHOPIN, GERSHWIN, DEBUSSY

St.Andrews-on-the-Terrace, Wellington

27th February 2013

I didn’t manage to get to hear the very beginning of Melanie Lina’s St.Andrews lunchtime concert recital, crashing in (metaphorically) at what seemed the stormiest point of the Waldstein Sonata’s first movement development section, ostensibly a good place in which to make a late entrance as an audience member!  In truth, I had foreseen that things would keep me from making the starter’s call, so had arranged for my Middle C colleague, Rosemary Collier, to record her impressions of the first movement, to “tide the review over” so to speak! It turned into what I thought was a fascinating comparative exercise – had a well-known Biblical figure been present, he would have washed his hands for a second time, and reiterated his well-known definitive mantra, “What is truth?”.

Rosemary traced the music’s course in Melanie Lina’s hands from “dark opening sonorities” to “more ecstatic sounds”. Commenting on the pianist’s technique, she said that the skills and musicianship on display were of a high order, though she felt some blurring of figuration in the early part of the sonata, due, perhaps to slight over-pedalling.  This was underpinned by the tempo set by Melanie Lina, an “Allegro con brio” with plenty of the latter, and perhaps a faster allegro than is usually the case in performances of this sonata.

Nevertheless, Rosemary found herself admiring “a good variety of tonal colours”, bringing out the music’s drama. Occasionally it was felt that the piano made a clattery sound, specifically the notes in the second octave of the treble – was some restoration of the felts on the hammers needed in that much-used part of the keyboard? She made the point that Melanie Lina’s sound was rather less “clattery” than some she had previously heard. I must confess that, when I arrived my first thought was how INVOLVING the pianist’s sonorities were, the tones bright and focused but commanding a range of emphases which nicely coloured the lines and their range of intensities.

Had I not known the pianist’s identity (rather like tuning into a radio broadcast of a performance mid-movement) I would have forwarded the opinion that she/he was Russian – I could feel a pronounced degree of what commentators have called in the past “imaging”, a quality which characterizes the playing among members of the Russian piano school. This allies the music’s sound with a poetic or narrative idea, however abstracted or disguised, awakening potentialities in listeners for equating the music with their own experiences of similar ideas and/or emotions.

So, mid-development, the music’s drama was palpably and full-bloodedly engaged. Melanie Lina then contrasted this with a “Tempest Sonata-like” sequence of charged expectancy, the left-handed pulsating of the music supporting the right hand’s playfulness, and the crescendo bringing us to a swirling pitch of excitement before setting the reprise upon its wonderfully clear-headed course once more – such characterful, involving playing! The lyricism of contrasting episodes was given its due, but not allowed to languish, impelled forwards by the playing’s drive, and giving the dynamic contrasts all that they were worth – this was Beethoven after all!

Occasional finger-slips merely added to the excitement and sense of risk-taking in this dynamic performance, the “swirling” effect just before the last, breath-catching lyrical statement of the second theme again quite Russian in its utterance (shades of Richter and Gilels), a lovely meditative moment before the concluding pay-off.

My colleague drew attention to the slow movement’s beautiful legato, creating a mood at once delightful and soulful, a judgement I agreed with – here was music which seemed to me both abstractedly poetic and unashamedly operatic, the lines a veritable love-duet, as much demure as ardent, with tones matching the music’s different characters. I particularly loved Melanie Lina’s delineation of those three obelisks of sound at the movement’s beginning, a framework around which the music then wove its poetic interactions. I thought the pianist seemed momentarily to lose a little of her poise when approaching the finale (outside, perhaps some workmen’s occasional and annoying noises off were partly to blame at this point) – the character of the sounds seemed to recede and lose its focused edge and “charged” quality.

Happily, equanimity was restored with the finale’s beautifully ambient trilled tones which opened up the vistas and gave the bell-like melody space to ring resoundingly – a great moment! Lina didn’t need to hurry the reprise of the opening, though, as the slight tempo-nudge at the reprise impaired a sense for me of heavenly bodies going about their cosmic business – there was ample opportunity within a few measures to intensify the trajectories with the recapitulation of the trills and the powerful left hand – but the broken octaves that followed were very excitingly delivered, the composer at once setting a more earthy set of impulses alongside sublime order, a dynamic of contrasts well-realised by the pianist.

“Poetic and dramatic as required….a magnificent rendition” was Rosemary Collier’s overall comment regarding the finale, commenting further that  the pianist’s tempo was a little speedy for an Allegretto, resulting in a lack of weight as a whole. I felt that the pianist successfully realized Beethoven’s characteristic fusion of serenity and volatility, encompassing things like the breathtaking plunge into a new world-view with those massive chords changing the whole colour of the music, then gliding the music along a more winsome, syncopated pathway. The reprise was joyous and celebratory, though the pianist’s tempo did make for a relative “labouring” of the triplet figurations, and a touch of hectoring tone in places, perhaps due to that problematic piano register. There came that prophetic, Schumannesque moment of recall almost at the end (a lovely “reminiscing” effect), and the post-horn-like chords to finish.

In the wake of this performance the other item which really grabbed my attention was Melanie Lina’s astonishing playing of Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse. Here, as with the Beethoven, was, I thought, something of a grand tradition revisited, the pianist’s scintillating tones at the outset instantly at one with both idea and image of something shimmering and impulsive, all contours somehow both delineated and merged into one another, with everything made beautifully liquid. The pianist’s thematic shaping of the work’s “big melodic idea” grew beautifully from out of the textures, and, like Saint Francis de Paule of medieval times, who was said to have walked upon the water, rode the swirls and agitations triumphantly. I thought Lina’s command of detail, rhythm and colour realized the piece brilliantly, with a ringing flourish at the end whose sheer élan took away one’s breath with astonishment.

These items framed the remainder of the recital, works by Chopin and Gershwin. Again, the playing was brilliant, though in places, almost too much so – I felt the effect was sometimes too unyielding, too frenetic. The Chopin Waltz (the Op.42 A-flat Major “Grand Waltz”) needed more elegance and liquid flow for Schumann’s imagined countesses, Lina’s cascades of notes delivering too agitated and insistent an effect (the piano could possibly have been part of the problem). Her playing of the first (in C Minor) of the Op.48 Nocturnes was more successful, bringing out the orchestral contrasts of the opening with the hymn-like central section, though I felt some “straining on the leash” as the pianist moved towards the agitated chordal triplets, building the mood inexorably into something of a storm – it was evidently quite a night! Perhaps for some tastes the turbulence was over-wrought, though one could just as easily regarded the intensities as part of the pianist’s refusal to take a single note for granted.

Still, I thought the Three Preludes of Gershwin’s responded better to the pianist’s unflagging energy and intensity than did the Chopin items (Lina is, after all, American-born and trained, and would have doubtless been steeped in a kind of home-grown context for this music). Her playing of the dreamy middle Prelude was particularly atmospheric and evocative, and provided some relief from her brusque, hard-edged, totally unsentimental rendition of the opening piece (Gershwin himself played his music this way, judging from existing recordings). A busy, athletic evocation of the Third Prelude’s New-World glitter and bustle completed the set on a high note.

A word about the program notes, which contained a brief “recent undertakings” bio of Melanie Lina, and notes on the music, written by the pianist – the latter were a delight, in the form of a letter to us, the recital audience, putting each of her program choices into a context explaining its appearance, and telling us a great deal about her as an interpreter in the process. She told us of her youthful experiences with the “Waldstein” Sonata, and how she recently came back to it as the result of hearing a broadcast (to our great good fortune), delighting in its orchestral range and scope. With Chopin she talked of the quality of “singing with the fingers” when playing his music in general, and of the festive delight of some of his Waltzes, including the A-flat Major one played in the recital. She called the C Minor Nocturne “deeply dramatic”, a description borne out by her own performance.

Most interestingly, in tandem with talking about Gershwin’s music as being from her homeland, Melanie Lina expressed the intention to play more New Zealand music as well (one wonders if things like Douglas Lilburn’s Chaconne, John Psathas’s Waiting for the Aeroplane, and Philip Dadson’s Sisters Dance are already in her sights).

Having an interpreter of her abilities willing to play such repertoire would be cause for great joy – which leads me to the exuberance with which she wrote about the recital’s concluding item, Debussy’s L’isle Joyeuse, telling us about her midwest childhood spent far from any ocean, and her miraculous grown-up relocation to “an island in the Pacific” which she now calls home, indeed, a “joyous isle” that for her invests Debussy’s music with a special significance.

One hopes Wellington has not seen and heard the last of Melanie Lina, after such an exciting and stimulating solo concert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delight with a sting in the tail – Cosi fan tutte at Days Bay Opera

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte at Days Bay Opera, Wellington

(Producer – Rhona Fraser / Director – Sara Brodie)

Cast: Simon Christie (Don Alfonso) / Tom Atkins (Ferrando) / Kieran Rayner (Guglielmo)

Kate Lineham (Fiordiligi) / Maaike Christie/Beekman (Dorabella) / Imogen Thirwall (Despina)

Orchestra and Chorus

Conductor: Michael Vinten

Canna House, Days Bay, Wellington

Thursday 21st February 2013

It’s presently a feast for aficionados of outdoor theatre, in Wellington – firstly, Antony and Cleopatra splendidly strutting their Summer Shakespeare stuff in the Dell at the Botanical Gardens (on until March 2nd, incidentally); and now this latest delight from the Opera in a Days Bay Garden – Mozart’s and librettist da Ponte’s most exquisitely-contrived work for the stage, Cosi fan tutte.

Cosi’s opening night fortunately caught something of the run of beautifully mellow summery days that the capital’s been experiencing of late – alarmingly, the following morning clouded and drizzled, but forecasts were better both for later in the day and the subsequent days. It seems (moustaches crossed) as though the weather gods, having had a bit of capricious fun, might be on Mozart’s and Days Bay’s side, after all.

But what better an experience to enjoy a subtle masterpiece of music-theatre, splendidly directed, sung and played, in a garden setting redolent with fragrant, easeful airs, encompassed by elements seemingly at peace with themselves and their surroundings?

The audience was here seated on the lawn, looking up to the ascending terraces on which the action unfolded, in front of the house, all beautifully framed by trees and the surrounding hills. In a pre-opening night interview producer Rhona Fraser (owner of the house and garden) commented on the advantage of having this “naturalistic” setting, with real doors, gateways and archways as entrance and exit wings, as well as sufficient spaces in which people could safely “jump around” and be “physical”. And the acoustic supported the singers most gratefully, the voices right from the outset projecting their tones readily to our ears.

It did seem to me, at the overture’s beginning, as if the orchestra might this time be too far removed from the centre of things, and their sounds more dissipated than supported by the open-air environment – the configuration was different to last year’s “Alcina”, when the audience inhabited the terraces and the action took place largely on the lawn, with the singers sounding by and large in the same “space” as the orchestra. But as the overture progressed the music drew our ears increasingly closer and focused our sensibilities on the accompanying action – and it wasn’t long before we had gotten used to the perspectives of what became the evening’s perfectly-proportioned sound-picture.

During this process the “scene” was already being set, as Don Alfonso (Simon Christie), the cynical (and here, somewhat out-of-sorts) middle-aged bachelor made his way into a cafe, in which people at other tables (recruited spontaneously from the audience, to everybody’s delight) were being attended by an attractive waitress. The atmosphere definitely had a “modern” feel, though not a contemporary one (those were the days! – not a cell-phone nor text-messenger in sight!) – perhaps late-1950s/early-1960s, underpinned by the “Navy Lark” uniforms of the two young men, Ferrando (Tom Atkins) and Guglielmo (Kieran Rayner) who arrived and greeted Don Alfonso as an old friend.

The Overture completed, the conversation between the three soon turned towards women, Ferrando and Guglielmo avowing the steadfast beauties and fidelities of their beloved ones and Don Alfonso (having already called their lovers’ steadfastness to question) parrying their indignant responses – here was excellent, energetically-delivered recitative between the three (Simon Christie particularly sonorous and characterful), and what I thought just enough umbrage taken (leavened with their brief ogling of the attractive waitress at “ah, women! – oh, women!”) by the two young men at their older companion’s cynicism. (Incidentally, Andrew Porter’s excellent English translation was the text used.)

The scene augured well for the rest – having heard that the opera’s setting would be “updated” here, my fears that director Sara Brodie might have been tempted into some kind of Peter Sellars-like mastication of the scenario (I had just viewed that director’s “take” on the opera on DVD and found the production singularly and searingly insightful, but over-wrought and ultimately repulsive in effect) seemed thankfully unfounded from this point on!  I didn’t necessarily hold with the view that, because Mozart’s was a comedy of eighteenth-century manners, the scenario should, whatever the travails of the workings, return both the characters and we observers at the end to “reason and normality”. Instead I thought that composer and librettist provided plenty of scope for any production to explore uncomfortable ironies and life-changing emotional refurbishments in the denouement – more than the literal message of the text alone perhaps suggests. But read on……

We then met the “Penelopes” as Don Alfonso wittily called them – firstly, Fiordiligi (Kate Lineham) filling her tones with artless, indolent infatuation, not every note precisely placed at this early stage, but capturing most convincingly the romantic idealizations of a young girl. And so did her sister Dorabella (Maaike Christie-Beekman), less ardent and vulnerable-sounding, a touch stronger and more “controlled” in effect – together, a near-perfect combination, as it transpired, their interaction at once a happy blend and characterful difference. At “If ever my heart should change….” I thought Dorabella’s the shade stronger counterpointing in the duet, but, again, it was a case of “vive la difference”!

Don Alfonso’s entrance into this idyll, complete with tragic mien and utterances, put a cat among the ensemble pigeons momentarily, but the feeling of disruption of peace and order was appropriate to the unravelling. In fact, throughout the performance, such was the teamwork among the singers and the obvious rapport between them and conductor and orchestra, that any brief dislodgements of ensemble (very few) had to my ears a kind of “elastic” quality, which seemed to be able to reconnect the counterpoints at a moment’s notice – very easeful, naturalistic musicmaking! This, the first “big” ensemble of the work brought out further delights, both musical and theatrical – the different “pools of emotion” stirred by each character took on a wondrously antiphonal effect, with almost the whole stage-width being employed, Dorabella to the right and Fiordiligi to the left, and their lovers filling in rather less acute symmetries, but with the focus firmly on the whole, and beautifully held together by Michael Vinten’s conducting. An especially lovely moment for the ensemble was at the words “how my heart is torn when I must leave you”, the whole thrown into occasional relief by Simon Christie’s sly but telling asides, his Don Alfonso replete with the character’s ironic satisfaction.

The lovely “Soft breezes….” trio provided a perfect extension to the sorrowful mood of the leave-taking, with the voices again being able to “separate” but remain pliable and secure in their combination, with Don Alfonso adroitly betraying a weakness for either Fiordiligi’s charms or a touch of generalized sexual gratification. Straightaway, the following scene introduced the “last-but-not-least” player in the scenario, the sisters’ maid, Despina (Imogen Thirwall), throughout bubbling with a mix of infectious energy and insouciance which made her a force to be reckoned with beneath the girlishness! Chocolate played its somewhat indelible part as well, firstly leaving tell-tale smears on Despina’s face for the sisters’ entrance, and then undercurrenting Maaike Christie-Beekman’s delightfully undone, Nabokov-like desperation as Dorabella, in thrall to despair and creature comfort (in Act Two, Kate Lineham’s Fiordiligi righted this attention-catching balance with a stunning appearance complete with plastic hair-net and portable hair-drier!).

But the action moved quickly to complete the ensemble possibilities around which the opera wove its subsequent tangles – after Despina’s pooh-poohing of her mistresses’ anguish, and her “conspiratory” scene with Alfonso, came the entrance of the “Albanians”, the supposedly departed lovers lavishly disguised and richly endowed with hair (a great audience moment!), followed by the sisters’ “getting wind” of the visitors’ presence and their subsequent confusion and embarrassment at the fulsome attentions paid them. It was all beautifully staged, with the men countering every move made by the women, like a dynamic game of chess, with Alfonso and Despina registering their “suspicious indignation” regarding the piteous squawks of the cornered women, interspersed with the sweet nothings of the exotic gentlemen callers.

By the First Act’s end all of the characters had stamped their mark on the proceedings, the sisters each performing beautiful instances of teamwork and individual characterization which would engage and fascinate our sympathies to the end. Kate Lineham’s Fiordiligi floated her tones with ever-increasing surety throughout, and made something many-jewelled of her aria “Like Gibraltar”, strong and imperious at the beginning, and with her conductor, judging the strength/energy ratio to perfection as the music reached fulfillment. As well, her softly-voiced moment of eventual capitulation to Ferrando’s attentions in Act Two touched our sensibilities, so completely drawn-in were we by that stage at her plight as a helpless plaything of emotion. Her sister’s portrayal by Maaike Christie Beekman brought out plenty of necessary contrasts of manner and vocal tone, strongly establishing a more confident and adventurous character, more volatile and playful than serious and sensible, thus more suggestible to the suitors’ flirtations. Her full-blooded, forthright singing of “Desires which torture me” in Act One made a marked contrast with her kittenish post-coital-like posturings for the benefit of her new “lover” in the Second Act.

Their lovers, real and disguised, contributed as much to the performance’s success, both together and individually – Tom Atkins as Ferrando used his true-voiced tenor to excellent lyrical effect, contributing to a true, knockabout partnership with his fellow-officer, Guglielmo (Kieran Rayner), as well as making much of moments like his Act One aria “The soft breath enchanting”, his voice having a lovely, “open” sound. His desperate and ultimately successful attempts to seduce Fiordiligi during Act Two were more effortful, in places a little breathless, but his urgency and purpose were strongly conveyed. As vivid and mellifluous-toned a characterization was Kieran Rayner’s Guglielmo, with his ardent Act One declarations of love and gently-mocking anatomical self-descriptions, more confident on the surface than his friend, but beneath more vulnerable and volatile. His encompassing of the character’s range of moods brought us great delight, from the irony of his admonition of women for their deceptions (“Dear Ladies…..”) to his anguish and bitterness at his belated betrayal by Fiordiligi.

These various couplings of friendship, love and betrayal underlined the ensemble nature of the work – and the “unholy alliance” of Don Alfonso and the maid Despina not only added to but twanged the strands deliciously. Both Simon Christie and Imogen Thirwall were compelling to watch and listen to from each of their separate entrances, and through their somewhat barbed interactions, right up to their part in the work’s unexpectedly eruptive conclusion. Christie made every one of Don Alfonso’s utterances “tell”, while conveying glimpses of a somewhat middle-aged-lecher aspect, which held a place but without exaggeration. Despina’s impersonated roles of doctor and notary were similarly treated, more characters than caricatures, and stronger as a result – her use of Dr. Mesmer’s “magnet” had the right mixture of hocus-pocus and suggestiveness, even if the trills, both vocal and orchestral, might have been a touch more outlandish.

I’ve already mentioned instances of the strengths and delicacies of Michael Vinten’s conducting, and the sterling efforts of his players throughout. Musically I took away as much a feeling of partnership and artistic interchange as individual expressions from singers and orchestra players – and I thought that, in this opera especially, it was as it should be. Very great credit, I feel, is due to both producer Rhona Fraser, and especially to director Sara Brodie, whose vision and dramatic instincts here, I think, provided a model for the idea (which I habitually shrink from) that opera production can successfully take in updated elements and “speak” directly and viscerally to different eras, without doing violence to the original. We were taken to a specific time-frame with the help of certain iconic objects and modes, but none that in appearance or use sharply contravened Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s content and style.

As to the true climax of the convolutions, it was definitely “come-uppance” time at the end for at least two of the characters, the action having wonderfully appropriate “shock value” for being so swift and focused, and a lot to take in all at once! Despina dealt to Don Alfonso with the classic “bent over double” result, and Ferrando landed a haymaker on his erstwhile friend Guglielmo’s jaw. What the two sisters did, if anything, I couldn’t say (it happened all too quickly!) – but perhaps, like me, they were too taken aback to do anything except go with the flow! No apocalyptic nihilism – merely just desserts! – and what happened to the couples then became anybody’s guess, speculation of which I’m certain both Mozart and da Ponte would have heartily approved, as they would our appreciative delight of what we had just been so generously given.