Author: Peter Mechen

NBR NZ Opera’s “Butterfly” – traditional and triumphant

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NBR New Zealand Opera presents –

Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly

Cast: Antoinette Halloran (Cio-Cio-San) / Lucy Schaufer (Suzuki) / Piero Pretti (Pinkerton)

Peter Savidge (Sharpless) / James Rodgers (Goro) / Richard Green (The Bonze)

Jared Holt (Yamadori) / Bianca Andrew (Kate Pinkerton) / Kieran Rayner  (Commissioner)

Edward Laurenson (Registrar) / Lesley Graham (Cio-Cio-San’s mother)

Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus

Orchestra Wellington

Conductor : Thomas Ringborg

Chorus Master: Michael Vinten

Director: Kate Cherry

St.James Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 11th May, 2013

This “Butterfly” has already flittered, swayed, dipped and floated her way down the island from most of the way up north – so quite a few people will by now have seen and heard her. I’ll go out on a traditionalist limb and declare that most of these people, I feel certain, would have been pleased to find her heart-rending story more-or-less conventionally staged and costumed, though with enough creativity and flair to make something uniquely beautiful and memorable.

How refreshing to be able to concentrate for once upon the musical aspects of a standard repertoire opera, instead of having to fight one’s way through some hot-shot director’s quirkily modernist and sometimes fatally intrusive “production take” on the well-known story (“Anything to stop it being done straight!” as comedian Michael Flanders says at one point in his and Donald Swann’s legendary revue “At the Drop of a Hat”, regarding a musical adaptation of a seventeenth century novel.)

Before the bright things of the revisionist world begin casting their barbed spears in my direction, I must emphasize that I’m not against the idea of taking a new look at any such performance-art-form, provided that its impulse to do thus comes from inner conviction on the part of those responsible, not merely a desire to be superficially “trendy” or “fashionable”. Then, of course, the conviction has to be intelligently thought through and applied, at the very least as coherently as the work would have been wrought by its original creator.

Apart from one or two brief and unnecessarily gratuitous touches, I thought, for example, the recent NBR NZ Opera production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” was a brilliantly successful rethink of the work’s original setting. As I believe many people would also, I would nevertheless be eminently satisfied with seeing the work staged as the composer himself would have had it presented. With all  the recent emphasis in the music world on “authentic performance” it’s interesting that there isn’t a parallel set of impulses to try and recreate original stage settings as faithfully as possible as well – in fact, especially in the case of baroque opera, there’s sometimes a kind of schizophrenic dislocation between what happens in the orchestral pit as opposed to the goings-on up on the stage!

It will be obvious by now to anybody reading this review that I loved this production of “Butterfly” – its predictable aspects concerning the Japanese setting somehow had a freshness which transcended any feeling of routine or tired tradition, as if the “obvious” had been completely rethought, and emerged as something original. As an example of this, I liked the uses of the sliding doors to create different spaces and ambiences, with not a single movement unmotivated by text or music.

With a set at once fixed and yet extremely fluid, lighting had an enormous part to play in the creation of a distinctive ambience, and there was a similar sense of the “expected” still being able to take us by surprise. Butterfly’s Act One entrance was suffused with light (firstly through screens, and then spilling gloriously through the opened spaces) – as it should, the music giving ample demonstration of what’s required at this point – but our senses were suitably enraptured by the whole sequence in a way that joined us with the onstage spectators witnessing this Venus-like arrival.

The Act One love-duet took us to the opposite end of the lighting spectrum, with suspended, descending lamps both literally and metaphorically signifying the onset of the mysteries of night and the consummation of ardent expressions of love at the scene’s end – again, a beautiful, uncontrived effect. In the Humming Chorus, lamps were this time carried by the watchers, and extinguished one by one, the effect of “going into the night” tellingly contrasted  with the wide-wake steadfastness of Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly), waiting for her lover, Pinkerton.

In the context of such “charged” naturalness throughout, the costumes were of a piece with the sun’s radiance and the night’s gentleness. The Japanese/European contrast was necessarily marked, the Americans’ naval uniforms and the woman’s elegant western garb at the end having a plain, almost functional beauty which contrasted with the colourful oriental styles and hues worn by the Japanese characters.

With so many visual and functional felicities in play, the stage was, as it were, beautifully set for the singers and orchestral musicians to contribute their particular magic. Happily, they responded with a wholeheartedness that I felt matched the inspiration of the work’s creators, here brought out by astute, sensitive direction. Kate Cherry and her assistant Jacqueline Coats, together with stage and lighting designers Christina Smith and Matt Scott had, I thought, between them captured a kind of essence of universal human emotion, exotically but subtly flavoured, so as to retain our audience-connections with the situations of the characters.

First to impress (and weakening my resolve to castigate the NBRNZ operatic powers-that-be for casting so many non-New Zealanders in major roles) was the engagingly-acted and superbly-sung Goro (the marriage-broker), of Wellingtonian James Benjamin Rodgers, his demeanor capturing the bumptious servitude of the character to the full and his voice impressively clear and communicative at all times. His dynamic of interaction with Butterfly’s maid, Suzuki, was flecked with delightful self-righteous impulses tempered with proper “knowing-one’s-place” decorum; and American mezzo Lucy Schaufer’s Suzuki gave as good as she got. Elsewhere Schaufer’s attendance upon her mistress, Cio-Cio-San, took her character to another expressive level, beautifully mirroring Butterfly’s hopes and fears throughout.

Overshadowed by the loquacious Goro when he first enters, Italian tenor Piero Pretti as Lieutenant Pinkerton nevertheless quietly and confidently eased his character’s presence into the scenario, from the beginning his manner hinting at a none-too-subtle disdain of things Japanese. Then with the entrance of his friend, the American consul Sharpless (sung by English baritone, Peter Savidge), both tenor and baritone had to open their respective vocal throttles, partly to cope with an accompanying orchestral fabric which I thought was too fulsome and insistent in many places throughout the scene. Thankfully, Swedish conductor Tobias Ringborg thereafter seemed to pick up on the balances between singers and orchestra more surely, getting more clarity and coherence from the stage as a result, and some beautifully sensitive work from the pit.

I thought Piero Pretti a strong, heroic-sounding Pinkerton, sounding as though he had to push his tones over the orchestral fabric during those first exchanges with Sharpless, but thereafter responding to Butterfly upon her entrance, and during the love duet, with great tenderness and ardour. As Sharpless, Peter Savidge’s baritone also struggled to make his words be heard during his first scene, and similarly benefitted from the more diaphanous orchestral textures accompanying Cio-Cio-San’s entrance. Later, in Act Two, he again needed to be more incisive at first, but then settled and deepened his voice in time for a well-acted, extremely touching letter-reading scene with Butterfly.

And so to the heroine – Antoinette Halloran was the second Australian soprano I had seen and heard sing the role of Cio-Cio-San in Wellington (Rosamund Illing was the first, back in 1990), and like her distinguished predecessor she didn’t disappoint. Butterfly’s approach and entrance, as previously mentioned, was here a wonderful moment, the character’s appearance personifying both radiance and simple beauty, aided and abetted by a profusion of bright chorus colours and sunlit tones. Like many an operatic Butterfly, Halloran didn’t look particularly Oriental, but she nevertheless presented a believable portrayal of an exotic young girl on the brink of womanhood, readily and innocently putting her trust in a man she hardly knew, but had nevertheless fallen in love with.

Perhaps her voice wasn’t always ideally steady when under vocal pressure, though she delivered the well-known “Un bel di” with just the right amount of growing intensity towards a powerful, and properly fraught conclusion. Just once I felt her acting more workmanlike than inspired (her response to the Bonze, her uncle’s angry public condemnation of her marriage) – but for the rest of the time I thought it a beautifully-wrought and deeply touching portrayal. Among a number of enduring impressions of Halloran’s Butterfly, my most vivid is of her whole person’s transfigured intensity during her all-night vigil, throughout both the Humming Chorus and the orchestral prelude to the final scene, waiting for Pinkerton’s return.

Solid, reliable work from both the chorus and singers in smaller roles rounded out the picture – though of the latter only Bianca Andrew in her brief appearance as Pinkerton’s American wife, Kate, seemed entirely at one with her character, her poised elegance barely disguising her awareness of Butterfly’s situation. And, mention must be made of Butterfly’s child Sorrow, engagingly and winsomely played by Finn Bowden.

Apart from that first-Act sequence during which I thought the orchestral playing a couple of notches too insistent and unvaried against the tones of Pinkerton and Sharpless, conductor Tobias Ringborg and the Orchestra Wellington gave us both sensitive and spirited playing, illuminating the score’s most telling moments with tones ranging from finely-crafted diaphanous texturings to deep, louring portents of the ever-resonating tragedy. The playing fully realized the composer’s fascination with and use of exotic colour and piquant harmonies, both through individual instrumentalists’ skills and finely-judged ensemble work – a “moments per minute” scenario of continuing delight.

I thought this production brilliantly (and triumphantly!) gave the lie to the idea that today’s audiences require opera to be “updated” (I use the word euphemistically) in order to be able to connect with the stories, themes and characters. This was something “whole”, its power and impact the result not of outward titillation but inner conviction.

 

Tribulation and triumph for young pianist at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents

JASON BAE – Piano Recital

BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata No.6 in F Major Op.10 No.2

RAVEL – Gaspard de la Nuit

CHOPIN – Mazurkas Op.59

RACHMANINOV – Piano Sonata No.2 in B-flat Minor Op.36

Lower Hutt Little Theatre,

Thursday 9th May 2013

Chamber Music Hutt Valley organizers must have wondered about what else was going to go wrong, regarding the chain of events associated with the Society’s much-awaited piano recital by Serbian Sonja Radojkovich. Firstly, Radojkovich had to withdraw due to ill health, and then replacement pianist Jason Bae, of Auckland, had his bag containing practically all of his personal effects stolen from the Lower Hutt Theatre while he was rehearsing for the concert.

The wonder of all this was that, despite the setbacks, the concert still went ahead and the music triumphed, thanks to the outstanding abilities of and remarkable professionalism displayed by the young Korean-born pianist, playing without his normal contact lenses, and having to rely entirely on memory throughout much of his final day’s preparations for the recital.

Jason Bae had, a week before, graduated with performance honours from the University of Auckland’s School of Music while under the tutelage of Rae de Lisle. After concluding this present tour, and fulfilling a couple of concerto engagements in Auckland with the Philharmonic, he will be heading for London, where he has been accepted into the Royal Academy of Music for a Masters of Arts in piano performance, studying with Christopher Elton and Joanna MacGregor. High-flying stuff!

On the strength of his performances in this present recital, I would say that he has all the requisite talent and all the “young-pianist” characteristics to be able to develop into a truly remarkable musician. In terms of technique alone, he was able to square up to all the contact-points of the most demanding items, while his musical sensibilities enabled him to sensitively and tellingly shape and control the ebb and flow of many different aspects of the music’s expression.

Probably the most successful performance overall during the evening was that of the Rachmaninov Sonata, a work that requires a kind of “grand virtuoso manner” with a fastidious ear for voicing individual parts and a feeling for facilitating a kind of play between impulse and poise. To my ears, Jason Bae showed that he possessed all of those qualities, giving us a proper “epic” quality in the playing, right from the opening of the work. Here were grand orchestral sonorities set against gentler melancholic strains that followed (shades of the composer’s famous Op.32 B Minor Prelude at one point), and an impressive array of keyboard textures, the music cascading from bright, Rimsky-Korsakov-like glisterings on the heights to deep-throated bells down in the valleys. Perhaps the melancholy lyricism was a bit dry-eyed in places, but so much else was achieved in impressive style, one couldn’t really complain.

The second movement’s lyrical opening seemed to form of itself out of the very air in the pianist’s hands, the composer then seeming to play with salon-like melodic sequences, but then subject them to all kinds of adventures, ritualistic, agitated and breath-catchingly melodic – the playing here amply demonstrated why it was that pianists love to tackle Rachmaninov’s music! After a brief introductory moment of reflection the finale irrupted with energy and forward drive, a kind of “boyars’ march”, delivered by the young pianist with brilliance and swagger, and maintaining a sense of excitement right through to the concluding flourishes, doing rich justice to a self-assured display of confidence by no means characteristic of a sometimes cripplingly self-critical composer.

Ravel’s formidable Gaspard de la Nuit was also impressively recreated, especially throughout the two outer movements, each of which brought out Jason Bae’s wonderful variety of touch and surety of emphasis at any given point in the music. Thus the opening Ondine shimmered and swirled most delicately, while conjuring up a growing sense of volatility born of the water-sprite’s hopeless love for a mortal man, culminating in a frisson of movement and bitter laughter which at once mocked and stung as well as filled the heart of the enraptured listener with both pity and relief.

Its shadow-side here was Scarbo , the work’s third movement, reckoned by many commentators as an exemplar of musical malevolence. The pianist’s prominent repeated notes shortly after the music’s creepily disturbing beginning did seem to me to lack true visceral bite, but Bae made amends by later conjuring up some truly awe-inspiring, necromantic figurations and textures, orchestrating the tensions and suggestively psychotic confrontation-points with dark brilliance.

Interestingly, I thought his Le Gibet  (a musical depiction of a corpse left on the gallows in the setting sun) not yet on the level of the two other realizations, macabre stillness and pity perhaps more elusive states to realize and maintain in music over long periods. Bae’s playing seemed to my ears concerned more with beauty than with desolation, his tone-gradations and texturings missing something of a “stricken” quality, a kind of underlying ghastliness that informs every chord progression, every melodic impulse, every single bell-tolling note. No tone-poem to nature’s beauties, this, but a study in gloom and hopelessness. Perhaps one ought to be heartened at the thought of a musician young in years whose mind is yet unclouded by such morbidities and their musical realization.

On a similar level of accomplishment was Jason Bae’s rendition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.6 in F Major, the work which opened the recital. The music’s opening measures were given plenty of poise and spring by the pianist, the juxtapositioning between legato and staccato passages helping to bring out the fun of the work, evident from the very first two chords. Though an early sonata, there’s already a distinctive creative spirit at work in its alternations of virtuoso display, poised, elegantly-worked figuration, and touches of humour. Jason Bae’s playing underlined the first two of these qualities with plenty of stylish gestures and technical aplomb, though the music’s humour was somewhat left to its own devices.

I thought the slow movement nicely done, if rather sectional, with the pauses between sequences of the movement feeling a bit dead instead of “thought-through”. But the pianist achieved a lovely contrast between the contrapuntal opening and the more chordal trio section, with an ear for gradations of tone in evidence. And the tongue-in-cheek nonchalance with which the finale’s presto was launched buoyed us along splendidly, even if the bumptiously ornamented key-change could have raised our eyebrows a bit more mischievously. But Bae missed, in my opinion, the biggest joke of them all (perhaps this WAS the joke!), the unexpected plunge back into the second-half repeat, as if Beethoven was saying, “AND another thing….!” It was, come to think of it, a twist of a different kind, a “That’s enough of that!” gesture, instead.

I’ve left the Chopin Mazurka group to the end, because I found it a bit of a puzzle – the individual pieces were played cleanly and smoothly, with all the pianistic dots and crosses filled in – but I didn’t feel the music’s character was sufficiently projected, via a dance-element that’s earthy and in places even spiky.  I certainly don’t think pianists should play the Mazurkas as though they’re another set of Waltzes – Schumann’s Countesses have no place in these largely rustic, strongly-accented pieces, whose rhythmic quirkiness and obsessive leading beats confounded some of Chopin’s contemporaries (there are accounts of Chopin “falling out” with people over reactions to his playing of these very individual works.

The composer’s enjoining other interpreters to “listen to Bellini” in order to play his music properly would have most likely been a directive to take notice as much of the singers’ rubato as part of the beauty of the vocal line. As with Mozart, who wanted his music to “flow like oil” Chopin’s advice to other pianists has been taken up by many as meaning to create a kind of unending prettiness, bringing to heel any more vigorous or darker aspects to the music. I’m certain Jason Bae will, as he continues to explore those Mazurkas, come to dig his fingers into them more deeply and uncover more of their “cultured earthiness”. Liszt has been practically castigated by more recent scholarship for comparing these pieces to Polish folk-music all those years ago,  but one can HEAR in the music’s characterful impulses what he meant.

All credit to Jason Bae on a number of counts, regarding an exciting and stimulating recital. We wish him all the very best for his oncoming period of study in England, and look forward to encountering his playing again, at some undisclosed but eagerly awaited time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ground – (and knuckle – ?) breaking Debussy and Ligeti

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:

XIANG ZOU and JIAN LIU

György LIGETI – Etudes for solo piano Bks 1-3 (complete)

Claude DEBUSSY – Etudes for solo piano Bks 1-2 (complete)

Xiang Zhou (Ligeti) and Jian Liu (Debussy) – piano

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Sunday May 5th 2013

Time was when many people would look at the kind of fare offered by a concert such as this and suddenly discover all kinds of other things that they simply HAD to get done instead, such as mowing the lawns. Although the Ilott Theatre wasn’t packed to the extent that it was for Michael Houstoun’s recent Beethoven concerts, I thought the attendance was a “good average” for what seemed, on paper a fairly “studied”, and perhaps slightly daunting affair.

Thirty or so years ago most people’s consciousness of the name of Ligeti wouldn’t have gone past encountering the wonderful music of his used in the film 2001- A Space Odyssey;  and one might imagine little more of Debussy’s music than things like the Children’s Corner, Suite Bergamasque,  and random selections from the composer’s books of Preludes and sets of Images being given here in recitals.

Now, thanks in part to local musicians such as the New Zealand String Quartet fearlessly tackling works of the order of difficulty of Ligeti’s First String Quartet, the composer’s music has begun to shape something of a local performance profile – and though Debussy’s Etudes would, for most people, inhabit the more esoteric realms of his output, complete performances of other works such as the two books of Preludes for solo piano have been given within these shores over living memory by people like Tamas Vesmas and David Guerin. So a way of sorts had been prepared – and now, here we were, pushing the frontiers back even further.

Two pianists had been pressed into service for this concert, the quality of their credentials suggesting that we were being treated to luxury casting. First up, playing Ligeti, was Xiang Zou, of Chinese birth, and a product of both the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in China and the Juilliard Music School in New York. He’s won various prizes for his piano-playing in various international venues over the years (he’s now thirty years old), and currently he teaches at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music. He recently gave the Chinese premiere of all three books of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Etudes, so the music one would reasonably assume, would have already been well-and-truly explored, and “taken-on-board” for the purposes of this concert.

Though Ligeti lamented his own lack of pianistic skill, his creative imagination was able to transcend any physical limitations, to produce in these pieces what could well be regarded as the twentieth century’s most Lisztian keyboard explorations (ironic that both composers were Hungarian). Despite the protean technical difficulties of keyboard works I’ve encountered by people such as Busoni, Godowsky and Sorabji, I would feel that perhaps only the piano music of Messiaen can claim to having comparable levels of both technical exploration and poetic creativity to Ligeti’s Etudes.

So – these are a few comments regarding the range and scope of the first of the books. Xiang Zou’s playing of the opening study, Désordre (Disorder), gripped our sensibilities with pincer-like force from the outset. These were sounds which instantaneously conveyed a sense of incredible force and energy, the music setting the keyboard’s white keys across the hands against the black via inexorably rapid, vortex-like movements. The effect was strangely exhilarating, at one and the same time vertiginous and claustrophobic.

Contrasted with this was the Berg-like austerity, the sparse romanticism of Cordes à vide (Hollow Chords), the second of the Etudes. Where the first piece was tightly-worked, to the point of being oppressive, here were opened-out spaces, with calm, delicate detail, impulses nudged and rippled (beautiful left-hand legato figures) rather than things muscled or thrusted. As for the third, the Touches bloquées (Blocked Touches), this highlighted a visual aspect to the studies, as towards the end of the piece the player was required to press keys already held down, the hands therefore mixing ghostly resonance with a kind of dumb-show aspect. At the start the music created an uncanny stuttering ambience, with voices seeming to cancel out each others’ tones, with the dialogue then breaking off for a trebly-voiced trio section, a kind of “noises off” musical mise-en-scène. 

Fanfares, the fourth in the set, had the player alternating and entangling brass and wind calls with roulades of connecting tones, pianist Xiang Zou breathtakingly dovetailing the separate rhythms between the hands, and nicely shaping both the music’s winding down, and the feathery flourishes at the end. Then, with Arc-en-ciel (Rainbow), a free, airy and floating ambience at the start contrasted with richer, more substantial tones that grew with the piece, as if the composer was detailing first the sky and then the earth below. Xiang Zou’s marvellous control of texture and colour enabled the music to dissolve at the end into what seemed like thin air. After such pantheistic delicacy the concluding Automne à Varsovie (Autumn in Warsaw) cruelly brought human emotion into play with the elements, as the music’s tragic, obsessive descending figure seemed to spread like inexorable darkness over everything and everybody,  Xiang Zou’s playing piling on an ever-increasing weight of gloom and despair towards a crushing conclusion at the bottom of the keyboard.

In retrospect, placing the four completed Etudes from Ligeti’s Third Book immediately afterwards was, I felt, too much of a good thing, especially as Xiang Zou’s playing of the first Book was so “of a piece”, bringing out the contrasts so unerringly placed by the composer. The Four Book 3 pieces had for me, their own ambient world, but their presence, in view what else was to follow in the recital, overtaxed the balances, in my opinion. When Jian Liu, currently Head of Piano Studies at Te Koki New Zealand School of Music, finally walked out on the stage to begin his traversal of the Debussy Etudes, we were more than ready for him.

Xiang Zou ‘s playing had excitingly met Ligeti’s demands for a kind of up-front, confrontational virtuosity head-on. Now, we were treated to a marked contrast of both style and content, with the older pianist’s rather more relaxed, less “coiled spring” approach to music that, to be fair, seemed also more inclined to persuade rather than coerce its listeners to accept a point of view. Straightaway, one registered a tonal richness and depth in Debussy’s music largely eschewed by Ligeti, writing almost three-quarters of a century onward.

Unlike with Xiang Zou, I had previously heard Jian Liu play, and his qualities were all that I remembered from my previous encounters with him – first and foremost an ease of tonal production with almost nothing unduly forced, except those strokes by composers which are all the more telling when sparingly employed; and second, a clarity and balance of tone, colour and articulation, which I thought here ideal for the composer of these particular pieces. Since the time of their composition, Debussy’s Etudes have been regarded with as much awe (one writer called the Doux Etudes  “an ultimate in perfection, an end of conquest”) as have Ligeti’s, though for different reasons –  the former create their own unique impression on the listener, for much of the time fulfilling the composer’s oft-quoted remark,”Let us forget that the piano has hammers…”, an attitude to which the performance we got from Jian Liu certainly paid its dues.

Space precludes an exhaustive discussion of every individual item’s performance by each pianist – so, as with Xiang Zou’s Ligeti, I’ll record a few specific impressions of Jian Liu’s playing of the first Debussy group. To begin, the composer’s affectionate tribute to “the five-finger exercise” courtesy of pedagogue Carl Czerny was given appropriate ambivalent treatment, nostalgia tempered by gentle mockery, as befitted a parody-piece, the swirling main idea “put up” to all kinds of antics, impulsive, absent-minded and reflective. Pour les tierces (For the thirds), which followed, placed the “exercise” at the service of the music’s poetry and visceral movement, Liu’s beautifully modulated undulations capturing a readily-evoked “play of waves” effect.

The following Pour les quartes (For the fourths) had a properly volatile character, the march-rhythm capturing the piece, exciting the figurations and carrying our sensibilities triumphantly along, before running out of steam. I like the way Liu’s beautifully brushed-in upward arpeggios at the end restored the music’s equanimities. The pianist’s elegantly-realised tones underlined Debussy’s affinities with Chopin in Pour les sixtes (For the sixths), setting down a beautiful carpet of sound whose resonances supported both feathery brilliance and tones of great stillness. The big-boned Pour les octaves (For the octaves) also demonstrated the pianist’s command of contrast between bravura and delicacy, while the rippling, scampering flat-handed finger-whirling Pour les huit doigts (For the eight fingers) set our senses spinning, glissandi and all, right up to the delightful throwaway ending.

And to think that, at the interval, there were still plenty of worlds within the worlds of these works that we hadn’t yet explored! To reproduce all my notes regarding what we heard afterwards would be to expose my poverty of description – suffice to say that each composer’s music in the second half seemed to be as excellently served by its respective interpreter as before, the two strands again creating an even wider angle of divergence from one another throughout. Jian Liu’s Debussy playing further delighted in the music’s evocations of poetic sonority, while Xiang Zou’s Ligeti continued to rage, melt, burn and whisper, refurbishing our perceptions of pianistic possibility – if the concert was for me a shade too elongated and balanced slightly off-centre, it nevertheless packed plenty of meaningful punches, both iron-fisted and velvet-gloved – a truly memorable occasion.

 

 

 

 

Uncovering the fullness of Monteverdi – Baroque Voices

Posted on by Peter Mechen

THE FULL MONTE – Concert Four

MONTEVERDI –  Madrigals Book 4 (1603) – complete

Selected Duets from Madrigals Book 7 (1619)

Baroque Voices : Pepe Becker, Jayne Tankersley (sopranos)/ Andrea Cochrane (alto)

Christopher Warwick (countertenor) / Jeffrey Chang (tenor) / Simon Christie (bass)

Continuo: Jonathan Berkahn (virginals) / Robert Oliver (bass viol)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Sunday 28th April 2013

On the face of things, this was another expertly put-together and engagingly-performed concert in Baroque Voices’ Monteverdi series, with pretty much the same underlying features as in previous concerts. But the ensemble has now reached Book Four of the composer’s nine separate madrigal collections, one which represents a crisis-point in the series.

Monteverdi was to thenceforth embark on a new path, what he called his “Seconda Pratica”, moving away from traditional unaccompanied polyphonic modes in favour of freer and bolder uses of harmony and ornamentation,including the use of continuo instruments. He announced his intentions in his written preface to the Fifth Book, published in 1605, declaring that he would make “the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant”.

So, the music of parts of this concert represented a kind of summation of an era, given that we as listeners following the series had already been well-and-truly initiated into the new age! Thanks to the group’s alternation of madrigals from both of the stylistic eras in every concert thus far, we’ve enjoyed and already marvelled at some of the expressive possibilities of the composer’s “Second Practice”. Though this may have “muddied the waters” for those wanting clearly-defined divisions in performance, for me the presentations have, in a different sense, been enriched with the use of these contrasts in the music as renaissance turns into baroque.

In any case part of the fascination for me of having the two “practices” presented cheek-by-jowl was, as with other concerts in the series, having those “window-in-time” opportunities for registering how the younger Monteverdi was always straining at the leash of compositional convention, and occasionally (to quote Franz Liszt’s famous words) “hurling his lance into the future” with unexpected and scalp-prickling emphases and irregularities which earned him the ire of him more conventional colleagues and rivals.

There were far too many moments of sheer musical illumination to catalogue adequately during the course of this concert – of course, we have become thoroughly accustomed to, indeed spoilt by the “moments per minute” nature of the presentations thus far – and so it proved here. I shall content myself with recounting my impressions of some of the more “stand-out” realizations achieved by the group, while noting the presence of a few moments which seemed to me to be less successfully achieved than the group might have wanted.

The concert began with the first madrigal from Book Four Ah delete partita (Ah, painful departure) – a spectacular unison soprano line began the piece, subsequently cleaving into two a tone apart, creating enormous intensity which was, I thought, beautifully sculptured by the singers, though Pepe Becker’s normally secure tones seemed to me a little strained and perhaps “unwarmed”, the effort more than usually noticeable.

Pepe’s and fellow-soprano Jayne Tankersley’s very individual timbres always delight in combination, their differences illuminating the lines and, by nature, the texts. The following Book 7 madrigal, featuring both singers Non è di gentil core (No-one has a gentle heart) brought out these features, the beautiful descents at “e nel foci d’amor lieta godete” (“who revel gladly in the fire of love) and the variation of impulse at “Dunque non e di gentil core” (This proves that no-one has a gentle heart) giving the more impulsive passages a wonderful “quickened by love” aspect.

Two Book 4 settings which then followed, both texts beginning with the words “Cor mio…” served to demonstrate the composer’s inclinations towards more overt expressivity and volatility than was accepted as the norm within the framework of the “old rules”. Especially the second of these, Cor mio, non mori? (My heart, will you not die?) contrasted a charged stillness at the opening with an impulsive leap forward at “non mori?”, employing volatilities and richly-wrought harmonies hand-in-hand, seeming to look forward as readily and uncannily as our sensibilities as listeners were drawn back in time as well.

The contrasts between the two styles did tell splendidly in places, such as in Book 7’s O viva fiamma (O live flame of love) with its excitable exchanges between the sopranos – Jayne Tankersley’s expression vibrant and pulsating, Pepe Becker’s more contained and poised – and its sorrowful and pitiable conclusion at “pieta vi prenda del mio acerbo pianto” (take pity on my sorrowful lamentation). The two altos, Andrea Cochrane and counter-tenor Christopher Warwick made much of their first-half Interrotte speranze (Hopes shattered) from Book 7, conveying the intense pain of unrequited love, underpinned by some deeply-felt tones from Robert Oliver’s bass viol. I enjoyed the deep, rich vocal unisons breaking into thirds, perhaps symbolizing the text’s parting of love’s way. However, in the second half I didn’t feel that the same two singers quite nailed another Book 7 madrigal,Vorrei baciarte (I’d like to kiss you) to the same extent, the piece requiring more vocal “ring” than these two pleasing, but rather soft-grained voices could muster.

There’s a barely-concealed eroticism in a good deal of Monteverdi’s music (including parts of his Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) which here bubbled to the fore in a number of places, such as Book 4’s Si, ch’io vorrei morire (Yes, I want to die of love), put across by the ensemble with great relish. Sequences like the suggestive ascending intensities of “Ahi, car’e dolce lingua” (Ah, dear, sweet tongue) and moments such as the fully-flowering “Ahi, vita mia, a questo bianco seno” (Ah, my love, to this white breast) would possibly have earned censorship strictures at less permissive stages of human history. As for the effect, visceral or imaginative, of the repeated exclamations of “Ahi…”, either way the intention could hardly be more explicit.

Rather less evident as soloists throughout, both tenor Jeffrey Chang and bass Simon Christie made exemplary contributions to the ensemble, especially prominent in Book 4’s Voi pur di me partite (So, you really are leaving me), with its male-only middle section at “Ardo d’amor, ado d’amore!” (I burn with love – I burn!). Tenor Jeffrey Chang made a good fist of stirring the emotions in Book 4’s Anima dolorosa, with his anguished tones at “Amor spire? Che spire?”  (Love, what hopes have you?) in the midst of more dignified mourning and sorrow. And Simon Christie’s rock-steady “anchoring”of the ensembles showed impeccable judgment and sensitivity in every case, his lines coming to the fore when appropriate, as in the eloquent Book 4 Longe da te cor mio (Distant from you my dearest).

Incidentally, this madrigal occasioned the only real “glitch” of the concert, Pepe Becker stopping the singers after a few measures, and starting again, presumably to “retune”. The only other untoward things were those previously mentioned very brief instances of voices sounding insufficiently warmed when straining for high notes (both sopranos and the counter-tenor), and a couple of tiny delays due to outside aeroplane noise. The rest was unalloyed delight – and with the next concert, we will presumably get the composer’s “Seconda Pratica” in full candlepower, music’s history in its making.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.