Author: Peter Mechen

Beethoven and the New Zealand String Quartet – shifting the paradigm

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet: 25th Anniversary Concerts

Beethoven Quartets Op.127, Op.135 and Op.132

Helene Pohl / Douglas Beilman (violins)

Gillian Ansell (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

St Mary of the Angels, Wellington

Friday 7 September, 2012

Guest reviewer: Antony Brewer

I have been attending New Zealand String Quartet concerts since the early days and while I am suspicious of saying such things, just now it feels as if this may have been the most wonderful of all. I have heard these superb musicians playing the most technically demanding works with style, fire and finesse. This evening, however, was as befits the music, on another plane altogether.

As Beethoven’s deafness isolated him, it seems he listened more and more to his inner voices and paid correspondingly less attention to the expectations of the outside world. One will never know whether his internal processes were uniquely original in terms of form, harmony and texture and he beat them into some acceptable form, or if the deafness simply accelerated an already maturing originality.

Beethoven was known to have said to the violinist Shuppanzigh, “What do I care about your violin?” when the hapless musician begged the composer to simplify some of the parts for his instrument. Certainly, the technical demands upon the players are enormous. One has only to observe the sheer effort of concentration, the split-second timing required and the sheer mechanical skill required playing this music. And this is before the interpretive issues are addressed and they must surely be among the thorniest in the repertoire. This is a mysterious factor in play: how do four musicians assimilate the vast spiritual and emotional forces at work here?

The great pianist Artur Schnabel is known to have said that “I am only attracted to music which is greater than it can be played”. One thinks of these quartets instantly as fulfilling this requirement. No matter how wonderfully traversed, the map, as Alfred Korzybski once observed, is not the territory.

A short note about introductions. I thoroughly enjoy them. They bring me into the music and the musicians’ passion and respect for it. I find the informality adding greatly to my pleasure and hope the quartet will continue this approach in the future.

And the maturity of the quartet is quite startling. Do they feel any real nervousness? As it seems, they come onto the platform as if striding into an adventure, a profound journey which they are about to take with us, the audience.

A further mystery is for this group to have such familiarity which each other, to sense the others’ direction and subtle inflections of tempo and phrasing while seeming to lose no aspect of their individual musicianship. I find their standing to play brings forward the full expressiveness of body language and while Rolf Gjelsten sits, he is almost dancing forward on his tiptoes to join the others, shaping the music with every part of his body. I particularly enjoyed watching his smiling joy in the music.

Gillian Ansell, that nonpareil among violists, always brought out the singing and speaking voices in Beethoven’s writing, relishing every one of the numerous gifts traced into these scores

Doug Beilman is also a highly expressive artist and a perfect complement to Helene Pohl, the first violin. He addressed his violin as though it were a sentient being somehow organically connected to him and  is a powerhouse of technique and passion for the music with the ability of the truly gifted to anchor and participate at the same time, allowing his violin partner to soar into the ether as her spirit takes her.

Helene Pohl’s sense of “innigkeit” and subtle beauty of phrasing was deeply moving for me. She is an intensely musical artist able to provide the most delicate shadings of tone and shaping to the music. Dynamics and transitions between sections within movements were managed as if the works were growing before our very ears.

As a programme this worked extremely well: Op.127 is a massive work as is the Op.132. Placing the somewhat lighter, almost divertimento-like Op.135 in between acted as a slightly astringent sorbet, exciting as well as cleansing the palate. The “Heilger Dankgesang”of Op.132 was among the profound musical experiences of my life. The final five minutes of this had me feeling as if I were on another planet. Exquisite.

After many years of knowing this music I found that my understanding of it underwent a paradigm-shift under the influence of these musicians’ profound insights. One can remain sure that these interpretations will not be cast in stone and will continue to develop, fine as they are already.

 

 

 

 

Nature, Life and Love – Pepe Becker and Helen Webby

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:

Pepe Becker and Helen Webby – Love’s Nature

Pepe Becker (soprano)

Helen Webby (harps)

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 5th September, 2012

As soon as both singer and harpist made their antiphonal entrances from each side of the platform, we were spellbound, caught up in a rainbow of enchantment between the two performers, one whose contours had already begun encircling the enraptured audience. With sweet and true singing, supported by the softest, most beguiling harp-tones, the musicians conjured up sounds which gave these visual illusions substance, even if at times the tones took on an ethereal, unearthly quality that belied their worldly origins. All of this was without any help from extra-musical effects – what immediately came to my mind was that the musicians could have entered by candlelight, and/or the church’s lighting could have been dimmed at the outset, and gradually brought up as the performers advanced towards the centre. Still, the music was the thing – if one had shut one’s eyes it would have been easy to imagine those sounds wafting and undulating towards one’s ears from across the ages.

From the very outset Pepe Becker’s voice was sweet and true and Helen Webby’s harp-playing deliciously evocative. The opening music was a well-known Sequentia composed by the wondrous Hildegarde of Bingen, the eleventh-century composer, poet, abbess and mystic, someone whose music has come to define the typical sound of music-making in the middle ages, at once austere and richly-laden, simple,yet resonating with meaning – as the program note put it so succinctly, “a rapturous chant of devotion to the Virgin Mary”, O viridissima virga, the sounds as miraculous as the subject-matter. Cut from similar “old” cloth was a love-song by Guillaume de Machaut, Comment-qu’a moy lonteinne, lovely “modal-scaled” melody, the harp following the voice, but enjoying several solo-instrument sequences. The song’s triple-time metre meant that the music danced as well – and having the texts and translations in the program gave we listeners even closer proximity to the music’s actual substance and meaning.

The singer welcomed the audience to the concert at this point, talking about the places the musicians had already performed the program and where they were about to go next, describing for us the undertaking by the pair as a “road tour”. Introductions and overviews completed, bardic harp was then exchanged for a bigger, less mobile concert instrument, and the performers gave us two delightful Italian madrigals. The first by Francesco Landini, Fa metter bando (Let it be proclaimed), dating from the 14th Century, was a droll pronouncement regarding lovers’ behavior. The second, by Cipriano da Rore, Ancor che col partire (Though on departing), written two centuries later, played with the contrasting idea of lovers’ pain at parting enhancing the pleasure of reunitement. Silken vocal lines wafted beautifully over the harp’s resonances throughout, the feeling at once touching and dignified, expressed within a kind of ritual processional.

I hadn’t heard Pepe Becker sing in English for some time; and felt that, during the Purcell item If Music be the Food of Love, beautiful though her tones were, she needed to give the words’ consonants more emphasis, as the effect was a shade bland – it didn’t feel to me that the words were being “savoured” enough. Whether speakers of Italian would feel the same way when listening to her Monteverdi or (as here) Handel singing, I can’t say – but the effect of listening to an exerpt from the opera Rinaldo was, to my ears, enchanting all over again, Handel’s heroine Almirena bemoaning her fate at being captured by the sorceress Armida, and separated from her lover, Rinaldo.

Helen Webby then “wowed” us with a harp instrumental, a Fantasie in C Minor by Louis Spohr, dark, dramatic and gothic throughout the opening, and reminding one of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Piano Sonata with its recitative-like flourishes, everything modulating freely and wondrously – virtuoso stuff, right to the end. The composer wrote the work for his wife, Dorette Scheidler, a virtuoso harpist, who must have been thrilled and truly grateful at receiving something so overtly spectacular to play. From this “Sturm und Drang” outpouring, it was but a short step to the world of Robert Schumann, in an exerpt from his Requiem. Pepe Becker brought a distinctive timbre to this world of dark, romantic feeling – at first, I must confess, I thought her tones too pure, too unequivocal in colouring to convey the music’s rich darkness, in fact, too much like a boy soprano. But she sustained her line beautifully with great intensity, and some spectacular high notes, at one point blinding us with the beauty of such a sequence around a particular phrase in the middle of the song.

Again in the French settings, more particularly in the first, a song by Andre Caplet, Doux fut le trait (Sweet was the dart), I thought the voice had a purity slightly at odds with the sensuality of the experience described in the poem (but could someone then explain to me how the same instrument, when singing Monteverdi madrigals, seems to have sensuality to burn?). More suited to her voice was, I thought, the Ravel song, Chanson de la mariée (Song of the Bride), the first of the composer’s “Cinq Mélodies Populaires Grecques”, the jeweled elegance of Ravel’s superbly contrived art so exquisitely realized, here, by both singer and harpist.

After the interval we enjoyed three of Philip Cannon’s “Five Songs of Women”, with texts by the composer’s wife, Jacqueline Laidlaw. The songs exist in both in French and English versions, the latter being performed here. Pepe Becker actually tore into the first one The Angry Wife with great gusto, relishing the words and giving us virtuoso singing. Though she put across the second song The Widow with touching pathos, fining her tone down to a ghostly-voiced conclusion, I still felt she needed to give those consonants a bit of real sting in places, to give the feeling more readily of “owning” each and every word. The effect in the third song was much the same – beautifully -shaped vocalizing, the line pitched to perfection, but the effect overall just a shade bland. It occurs to me that much the same used to be said of Joan Sutherland’s singing on the operatic stage, the exquisite tones somewhat unrelieved by a lack of sharp-edged consonants, depriving each word and its meaning of a properly-contoured shape. (But, in Monteverdi……)

New Zealand composer Helen Bowater wrote Hihi in 2007, a Messiaen-like piece depicting both the call and the environs of the native hihi, or stitchbird, presented here by Helen Webby with many magical, haunting touches – the harp’s strings activated in so many different ways. Then it was Pepe Becker’s turn, with an unaccompanied setting of an anonymous Japanese text, Hoshi no hayashi, dating from the 8th Century AD, a mesmeric evocation of the workings of the skies, the effect not unlike Sibelius’s Luonnotar, in places. Still more New Zealand music was featured, with Gareth Farr’s Still Sounds Lie, vivid settings of somewhat ingenuous words by Carolyn Mills, the NZSO’s harpist, recounting holiday-inspired thoughts and impressions, and with attractively energized accompanying figurations carrying an interest of their own for the ear (Elgar performed the same kind of musical alchemy for much of the poetry in his song-cycle “Sea Pictures”).

The concert concluded with a section devoted to folk-song, arrangements of both traditional Irish and Scottish tunes, featuring the talents of such luminaries as Josef Haydn and Hamilton Harty. Helen Webby told us, by way of introducing the segment, of Haydn’s generosity towards an impecunious English music-publisher, William Napier, the great composer gifting his arrangement of a number of Scottish songs to the hapless Napier, who had been threatened with debtor’s prison. Singer and harpist put across both of the Haydn settings, Secret Love, and On a green day with a winning mix of art and spontaneity, as did Pepe Becker’s realization of Hamilton Harty’s arrangement of the Irish air, My Lagan Love. Before this, and the singer’s wonderfully plaintive delivery of another Irish song, Black is the colour, we got a couple of “harp jigs”, then afterwards an arrangement of Sting’s Fields of Gold made by Helen Webby and an older “jig” by Machaut obviously connected to the song heard earlier in the concert, as it shared the same name, Comment qu’a moy.

And, to finish, singer became fellow-instrumentalist and harpist became fellow-singer in the pair’s arrangement of the Irish song The little drummer. So the harp was joined by a drum and two voices intoned the song’s final verse, celebrating the triumph of love and the joy of whole-hearted music-making. We in the audience saluted the pair with all the applause we could muster at the end, in return for an excellent evening’s entertainment and delight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brahms the Second? – perhaps Herzogenberg the First?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St Mark’s Lower Hutt Concert Series

BEETHOVEN and HERZOGENBERG

Jane Young (‘cello) / Hugh McMillan (piano)

BEETHOVEN- ‘Cello Sonata No.4 in C Op.102 No.1

HERZOGENBERG – ‘Cello Sonata No.3 in E-flat Op.94

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 29th August 20

What a lovely concert! – a wonderful idea by Jane Young and Hugh McMillan to present something of a “standard classic” in tandem with something else rather less known, to the advantage of both!

In a sense, each of the pieces represented an adventure, albeit of a different kind. Beethoven’s Op.102 ‘Cello Sonatas completed the process already begun by the composer with his Op.69 Sonata, of inventing something new – an “equal partnership” between ‘cello and piano for such an instrumental combination.

By comparison, Herzonberg’s work seemed to bravely and steadfastly explore paths already trodden by giants such as Brahms, managing, in places, to convey his own late-Romantic slant to the familiar terrain, with attractive and absorbing results.

The Beethoven Sonata opened beautifully and tremulously, as if the composer was depicting the unfurling of a flower in the sunlight – the phrasing between both players properly resonated, their full accord expressed through a sense of hand-in-glove phrasing and beautifully-modulated tones. Beethoven seemed here to be anticipating Schumann’s poetical musings, his themes at once spontaneously expressive and contained, hinting at darker feelings.

The Allegro vivace alternated freely between playfulness and purpose, only the ‘cello’s highest notes giving any suggestion of strain for the player. It all made a telling contrast with the Adagio’s relative darkness and gradual lightening of mood.

Both players timed their respective “not ready yet” figurations at the finale’s beginning to perfection, the ‘cello’s wonderful drone-notes creating whole worlds of mystery, which the piano then gently mocked with “Well,are you coming along?” phrases.

I thought Jane Young’s and Hugh McMillan’s playing gave the episode a wonderful “boys’ and girls’ own” freshness of utterance and movement. But their playing of the whole sonata was as good, at practically every point presenting their listeners with opportunities in the music for engagement and participation. I felt the musicians made practically every note of the work eloquent and distinctive.

Hugh McMillan talked briefly about our “mystery” composer, Heinrich von Herzogenberg, one whose name I knew in connection with Brahms, via correspondence between the latter and Elisabet von Herzogenberg. Brahms was on good terms with both husband and wife, though he may have harboured a secret passion for Elisabet, whom he wrote to frequently. Towards the end of his life he paid a kind of belated homage to Herzogenberg’s music, acknowledging its quality.

Herzogenberg’s ‘Cello Sonata No.3 does show the influence of his great contemporary in places, especially in the piano writing throughout the opening movement, while in other places I detected vestiges of the Mendelssohn of the Octet. The last few pages of the movement achieved a swing and flow amid a grandeur of utterance that seemed the composer’s own, as did much of the slow movement, though again the piano writing had a big-boned Brahmsian feel to it. The players readily enjoyed the contrast between the lyrical opening and the running middle section of the music, with gaily tripping piano and cello pizzicati.

The work has a kind of ‘grand finale’, a theme and variations movement which, in some circumstances might be thought a trifle long, though Jane Young and Hugh McMillan kept our interest simmering with both their interchanges and occasional “solo” sequences. An occasional moment of strain regarding the cello’s intonation mattered far less than the player’s feeling for phrases and their integration into the flow of things, which satisfied greatly. My feeling at the work’s conclusion was less of a “Brahms the Second” response to the music , and more along the lines of “Herzogenberg the First” – thanks in part to these two musicians’ whole-hearted advocacy.

Enterprising flute repertoire – Ingrid Culliford, with Kris Zuelicke

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Old St.Paul’s Lunchtime Concert Series

Ingrid Culliford (flute) / Kris Zuelicke (piano)

J.S.BACH – Sonata for Flute and Keyboard BWV 1020

MIRIAM HYDE – 3 Solos for Flute and Piano

ERNST BLOCH – Suite Modale

ROBERT MUCZYNSKI – Sonata for Flute and Piano Op.14

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon

Tuesday August 28th, 2012

It was a pleasure to encounter Ingrid Culliford’s flute-playing in repertoire different to that which I’ve heard her perform in the past, nearly always with the Auckland contemporary music ensemble 175 East. And double the pleasure was had from hearing the instrument played with such a variety of tones and timbres, the four very different pieces on the program requiring and getting properly individualized responses from both musicians.

Old Johann Sebastian’s lovely G Minor Flute Sonata (licence-plate number BWV 1020), has apparently been appropriated by certain scholars on behalf of the great man’s son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel, appearing in its Doppelgänger guise as H.542.5 – does the decimal point indicate a somewhat equivocal scholarly stance? Whoever was responsible, the work itself was a delight as presented here, the performers giving us a winning mixture of momentum and suspended beauty. This was characterized in part by the instrumental combination – the piano tripping gaily along, and the flute a more liberated spirit, choosing occasionally to mirror the piano’s busy figurations, but in other places soar untrammelled above them.

Throughout the sonata, I couldn’t help admiring Ingrid Culliford’s refusal to be victimized by the composer’s almost total disregard for his soloist’s lungs. This wasn’t such an issue in the slow movement, both players having sufficient “lebensraum” to negotiate both long-breathed lyrical lines and other-worldly, ambient accompanying modulations. There was also a hint here and there of the “echo” element between the instruments, most beautifully realized. Perhaps the finale, more than the other movements, leaned towards the rather more volatile spirit of the son as opposed to the father – occasional spurts of energy either (depending upon one’s point of view) invigorated or destabilized the music’s flow, with the performance certainly bringing out the essential character of those impulses.

Next was a work by Australian composer Miriam Hyde (1913-2005), someone whose work sounds as if it’s worth getting to know more of – Hyde was primarily a pianist, and one who had something of a performing career upon that instrument, both in Australia and overseas. She composed in all genres, except for opera, her style finding certain affinities with that of English composers of the time, subject to the same kinds of influences and inclinations. She had little in common with avant-garde trends, writing about her music at one point, “I feel my music can be a refuge for what beauty and peace can still be omnipresent…the triumph of good over evil. I make no apologies for writing from the heart”.

We heard three pieces from her work 5 Solos for Flute and Piano, a collection which the composer put together from pieces composed over a number of years, from 1949 to 1968. The earliest, Marsh Birds, was included here, as were The Little Juggler (1956) and Wedding Morn (1957). First was Wedding Morn, the opening piano chords beautifully played by Kris Zuelicke, the stuff of dreams, the flute introducing a rather more earthy aspect, as if rousing the spirit from the dreams and insisting upon some engagement. The piano evoked church bells, their figurations becoming somewhat Lisztian in places, to which the flute responded with lyrical wonderment.

Playful and gigue-like, The Little Juggler readily evoked the mesmeric nature of the activity, as well as plenty of tumbling warmth and an abrupt (perhaps unscheduled!) ending. Finally, the warmly-nostalgic Marsh Birds seemed to take one’s sensibilities back to simpler times at the outset, the middle section suggesting the extent of distances travelled in both time and space, and the birds’ dialogues striking a piquant, “song for the ages” note, the music ending wistfully. Enchanting.

To different worlds, next, with Ernest Bloch’s Suite Modale – with this, as with the Miriam Hyde work, Ingrid Culliford told us a little about the composer and the music’s circumstances. If one was expecting intensities of the order of the same composer’s Schelomo for ‘Cello and Orchestra, one would perhaps be disappointed; but what one got instead was an attractively ritualistic set of meditations, the composer refracting a lifetime’s experiences (Bloch wrote this in 1956, three years before his death) in this gently-conceived journey filled with bygone impressions. Bloch touchingly dedicated this work to the flautist Elaine Schaffer, whose playing he knew and admired from recordings, though he never actually met her.

Each of the four movements reflect a specific mood, which I thought the performers drew we listeners into. First, there was a kind of meditation expressed in polyphonic terms between flute and piano, rhapsodic in feeling, but elegant in style. Then, the players dug into the second movement, bringing out contrapuntal textures, and heightening a sense of ritual and order. The Allegro giocoso evoked youthful energies, both immediate and more nostalgically-conceived, while the finale contrasted a melancholic opening sequence with an exhilarating contrapuntal whirl of activity, one which wound down through attractively melodic piano-and-flute interactions to a strongly-poised, inwardly peaceful ending.

There remained the Flute Sonata of a composer unknown to me, Robert Muczynski, born in Chicago in 1929, who trained as a pianist, and whose works mostly involve chamber ensembles and piano. This four-movement Sonata, neoclassical in spirit, had bags of personality, which the performers obviously relished throughout – a lively, even volatile opening movement with plenty of rhythmic syncopation and dynamic contrast, followed by a Scherzo whose L’Apprenti Sorcier-like galumphings alternated with gentler, more pastoral gaieties. The musicians then gave us, by way of contrast, some rapt, almost mesmeric textures of enchantment at the Andante’s beginning, which the piano then darkened with suggestions of the abyss beneath, indicating that not all is sweetness and light in this world of ours. These were sobering thoughts which the gaiety of the finale’s Allegro con moto thankfully put aside. True, some of the music’s edges were angular and elbow-sharp, but the ride was nevertheless an exhilarating one. Both musicians brought to these things loads of spirit and sensibility, expressed by turns with unerring judgement and fine feeling. A lovely concert.

 

 

 

 

 

Strumming and fretting en masse at Old St.Paul’s – the N.Z.Guitar Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Old St.Paul’s Church -Lunchtime Concerts

New Zealand Guitar Quartet

(Owen Moriarty, Tim Wanatabe, Jane Curry and Chris Hill)

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon

Tuesday 21st August 2012

Perhaps it would have all been double the pleasure at Old St. Paul’s for Frederic Chopin, who was reputed to have said “Nothing is more beautiful than a guitar – save, perhaps two!” – no less than the New Zealand Guitar Quartet was here to put the aphorism to the test. A quartet’s worth of guitar players certainly makes a lovely, rich sound, with plenty of opportunities for all of those individual voices, both leading and in the middle, to interact with one another and create such richly-woven tapestries, in fact, small orchestras of sound.

The concert’s venue – Old St.Paul’s – exerted its customary spell over the proceedings, the beauty of the surroundings making up for the lack of adequate sight-lines for any audience member sitting more than a dozen pews back. Some elevation for the performers (as was constructed not so long ago in St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace Church) would certainly help more people to SEE the musicians, and perhaps enhance the sound-projection (the latter, however, seems perfectly adequate for all but the most distant spectators). A few of the softer passages for solo guitar seemed very quiet, but the sound in tutti made, as I’ve already said, a pretty solid, if finely constituted, instrumental ensemble sound.

Attendance at these Old St.Paul’s lunchtime concerts of late (at least the ones I’ve been to) have been surprisingly good, considering (perhaps, because of! ) the inclement weather – and today’s concert was no exception (the attendance AND the weather!). There’s obviously a loyal following for the venture, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, and in this case the music and the music-making would have contributed greatly to the delight of it all.

The ensemble describes itself in a program note bio as “exciting, dynamic and engaging” – and I’m happy to say that the concert certainly reflected these things. I’ve heard the group play before, and this time around found myself entirely caught up in what was going on, as if everybody’s focus was freshly sharpened and their energies centered right at the music’s heart. Take the opening item, for example, Luigi Boccherini’s Introduction et Fandango, a pleasant though fairly conventional evocation of Spain – or at least one might have previously thought so, until hearing the Quartet’s  full-blooded rendition of the Fandango, digging into the rhythms and accentuating the music’s light-and-dark contrasts. Boccherini? – really?

Jane Curry introduced the next item,a transcription by Owen Moriarty of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, drawing listeners’ attention to one of the players’ use of a 7-string guitar, the instrument making for a greater range and sonority. Whatever the difference, the reworking of the music (in true Baroque style) was a great success, the music’s bubbling energy carrying all before it in both the first and third movements (a pity the opportunity wasn’t taken in between these episodes for a bit of extempore “sounding” of things suggested both by what had just happened and what was to come, as sometimes happens in this music’s performance). But particularly in the last movement, the counterpoints joyously tumbled over one another in away that would probably have had old Sebastian Bach tapping his feet in approval.

New Zealand composer Craig Utting drew some of his inspiration from the Baroque world for part of a composition called Onslow Suite, using a kind of passacaglia-form underlining a kind of lyrical exchange. The music provides the contrast of a middle section that spontaneously modulates asymmetrically and somewhat remotely, before returning to the passagcaglia figurations with increased rapture, finishing with a final chord of benediction – a lovely work, originally written for two pianos, but here most satisfyingly reworked for guitars.

The group then turned its attention to a work by Andrew York, former player-member of the American Guitar Quartet, the group for whom the music was written. This was called Quiccan, a closely-knit etude for four guitars, allowing each player to explore melody, harmony, and accompaniment. The piece started jazzily, resembling the sounds of a distant festival, one redolent with Latin American rhythms and textures. A slower section allowed the players some breathing-space and a contrasted vantage-point, towards which the ensemble redirected its energies, with the help of some “percussive” effects -all very engaging and attractive. A sudden “break-off” point resulted in a chord whose single chime froze the gestural actions of the musicians and allowed the sounds to resonate briefly and depart – a kind of musical metaphor for human existence.

More familiar territories were the items by Manuel de Falla, to finish the program – two exerpts, arranged by Owen Moriarty, from Falla’s El amor brujo ballet, firstly, the Danza del Terror, plenty of repeated notes, driving rhythms and strutting flourishes, followed by the even better-known Danza ritual del fuego, a performance which brought out something of the music’s dark, primitive side at the beginning, and gave plenty of point to the cross-rhythmed accents in the piece’s middle section. Only at the end did I feel the need for a bit more abandonment on the part of the players, something slightly more animal and physical. I wonder, too, whether the emphasis on tuning the instruments is entirely appropriate during the course of these two pieces – to my way of thinking, far better to keep the impetus and atmosphere on-going between the two dances and let whatever pitch vagaries occur be part of the sweep and drive, of this primitive, elemental aspect of the music.

But, nevertheless, a great concert, nicely presented and vividly projected.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dancing in the Cathedral – Mozart and Bruckner from Simone Young and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Cathedrals of Sound – New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

MOZART – Symphony No.36 in C Major K.425 “Linz”

BRUCKNER – Symphony No.5 in B-flat

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Simone Young (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 17th August, 2012

“A Bruckner Symphony is never just another concert” declared conductor Simone Young, interviewed a few days before her scheduled pair of performances of the Austrian composer’s Fifth Symphony, in Wellington and in Auckland. Not only did she mean that, more especially in this Southern Pacific area of the globe, performances of these symphonies are fewer and further between than in some other parts of the world. It was also an affirmation by a musician who’s already a great interpreter of these works, of their special character, part of which incorporates the power within the music to transform a normal concert experience into something uniquely special and truly memorable. And those qualities were precisely what we got from Bruckner, Simone Young and the NZSO  in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre on Friday night.

For a number of reasons the appearance of Australian-born Young excited considerable interest – women conductors of orchestras are still very much the exception rather than the norm (though we’ve come some distance, I think, from the once-prevailing attitude voiced by former NZSO conductor-in-chief Franz-Paul Decker, who was once famously quoted as finding women conductors “aesthetically unpleasing”!). Young is, moreover, perhaps the most highly-regarded woman conductor in Europe, with a particularly high profile in Germany, working as she does out of the Hamburg State Opera, and as music Director of the Hamburg Philharmonic.

She’s something of a controversial figure as well, having been “at odds” with a former employer, Australian Opera, over her budgeting demands during her tenure as the company’s artistic director, resulting in her contract not being renewed after only a couple of seasons. As it turned out Australia’s loss was Europe’s gain, as her dual appointments in Hamburg followed soon after – musical director of both the city’s opera and the Philharmonic Orchestra, posts she took up in 2005. Her native country had, by then moved to make some amends for her peremptory dismissal from the Opera, appointing her a Member of the Order of Australia in 2004.

2012 is an important year for her – besides having made her debut with the NZSO, she is bringing to Brisbane the Hamburg Opera and Ballet and the Philharmonic, performing a concert version of Das Rheingold (she is a seasoned Wagnerian with several Ring Cycles to her credit, including a complete recording) and the Mahler “Resurrection” Symphony. New Zealanders who might feel aggrieved that the “Hamburg Invasion” doesn’t include these shores might consider that neither does the venture include Sydney or Melbourne, Queensland wanting “exclusive rights” to the venture – now, why does that have a familiar ring?

With all of these things in mind, expectations were pirouetting on points among the audience awaiting the conductor’s entry to begin the Wellington concert. Diminutive, but authoritative, Young took the podium, and, dispensing with a baton, launched into the concert’s first offering, the Mozart “Linz” Symphony K.425.  Of course, the geographic links with Bruckner (Linz was the latter’s birth-place) made the choice a happy and appropriate one, though there were other possibilities of programming – one being the Fifth Symphony of yet another Austrian composer, Schubert, whom Bruckner is often linked with regarding his symphonic method. I would have been as happy with either.

Thanks to my formative listening experience with the Mozart “Linz” symphony I can’t, even after all these years, get Bruno Walter’s voice on his famous rehearsal recording of this work, out of my head through that opening – “Bahnn – off! Ba-bahnn – off! Ba-bahnn – off! ….” and so on (Walter’s orchestra was having trouble with the note values!). There seemed no such problem, here, the sounds focused, crisp and precise, yet with a warmth (no didactic vibrato-less “authentic” strictures, thank goodness!) and, indeed a glow about the textures throughout the slow introduction, which informed the lovely easeful beginning to the allegro, and made a wonderful contrast with the more bumptious and high-spirited energies to follow.

It was Mozart-playing that reminded me at times of Benjamin Britten’s recordings of some of the symphonies – the same marriage of lyricism and strength, informed by an attention to detail which enriches the music’s context rather than distracts from the flow. Young conducted, it seemed, with every fibre of her being, her fingertips expressing and conveying a kind of whole-body energy which mirrored what the music was doing (as she did later in the evening with the Bruckner), her feet dancing and her knees launching the rest of her body upwards to characterize the “lift” required by the music’s rhythms.

The orchestral playing, though not without some brass “blurps” at two or three cardinal points throughout the slow movement (the players settling in more as the work progressed), produced sounds that seemed an expression of Young’s will, the strings and winds getting a lovely colour, either when “playing out” or with the more softly-lit sequences in the movement’s middle section. As for the bright, vigorous, but still elegant Minuet, Young literally led the opening dance to the audience’s delight, and then got beautifully contrasted characterizations from the winds in the Trio.

The finale again married grace and strength, the players’ articulation clear and crisp at speed, even if Young’s direction slightly “squeezed” the rhythm of the concluding downward arpeggiated figure each time, as if stressing the music’s urgency. Throughout, we enjoyed the prominence accorded the timpani, Laurence Reece encouraged to make the notes tell with just the right amount of emphasis, enhancing both the work’s texture and rhythmic character.

Back from an interval – during which it seemed the conductor’s red shoes (prominent during all those dance steps) were discussed as enthusiastically as her music-making – we settled down to behold the splendors of the Bruckner Symphony. And what splendors they were, in Young’s hands (aided by a baton for this music – doubtless due to a bigger orchestra and music with some rhythmic complexity). The rapt opening of the work recalled Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko’s way with the opening of the “Leningrad” Symphony, almost exactly a year ago in this same hall with the same players – utter concentration upon sounds whose genesis here seemed deeply elemental, like a giant slumberer’s distantly-wrought heartbeat, with those deep pizzicato notes beautifully and sensitively coloured by the upper strings’ arc-lines. What a beginning to a symphony!

During the “Listener” interview previously quoted Young stated that she thought an older school of conductors’ way with Bruckner’s music had contributed to public perception of the works being “overlong”, and that she saw the symphonies as being more direct, theatrical and emotional than they were often played. So, here, the massive brass statements which answered the quiet opening were given with plenty of declamatory force, the playing nicely poised amid pauses for the utmost effect (a magnificent brass response, here, from the orchestra) – and the allegro which followed was swiftly and urgently propelled. Young handled the transitions throughout the numerous changes of tempo in the first movement with the utmost flexibility, moulding the ends of episodes into the silences with beautifully-judged luftpauses. She also seemed ever-ready to allow the music to dance, so that the monumental, cathedral-like aspect of the work was less dominant than is usually the case.

Such was the concentration and energy of the music-making from all concerned that each of the first three movements seemed to be taken on the wing of a single breath. The sometimes problematic opening to the Adagio, with its awkward three-against-two rhythms, here flowed as mellifluously as could be, the music’s innate restlessness perfectly expressed, and the oboe solo’s emotional outpouring simple and direct. The strings’ luscious second-subject theme grew lovely, upward-reaching tendrils of sound, then joined with the brass unforgettably in a snowcapped climactic moment that filled the ensuing silence with magic. And towards the end, with the brass golden and confident, the sound-surges evoked by Young and her players created out of the spaces around us whole mountains and valleys into which the tapestried ambiences etched lonely impulses of wind tones and softly-thrummed silences.

After this came the scherzo, with its outlandish stop-go aspect, and rhythmic sequences alternating between demonic energy and heavy-footed rustic bonhomie, Young and the players (especially the brass) revelling in the quick-fire alternations. If not all of the brass detailing was entirely accurate, what was far more important was capturing the music’s quirkiness and volatility, the textures here in constant and spontaneous effervescence, in places laughter “holding both its sides”, while in others, such as throughout the trio, rustic charm prevailed, the detailing from winds and brass again treasurable (a lovely gurgling upward arpeggio from the clarinet at one point, and beautiful chording from the horns towards the end).

The opening of the finale (a similar hush to that of the symphony’s beginning) was almost spoilt by unfortunate audience coughing – as, earlier in the evening, a flurry of late audience arrivals had interrupted the Mozart Symphony’s slow movement. Fortunately the clarinet’s perky octave jumps (a precursor of the fugue to come) seemed to refocus the attention of the coughers, so that we could all concentrate on the Beethoven-like reintroduction of themes from the symphony’s earlier movements, prior to the fugue’s hugely dramatic first entry-proper. In Young’s hands, as she promised, the music was more lithe and muscular than leviathan-like, making for engaging, closely-worked arguments between voices, and advancing the music’s progress towards a promised climax or sense of fruition.

That came, of course, with those mighty closing brass chorales, which capped off the mountain ranges of music running like a spinal cord through the structures. My first reaction there was to crave a more overtly “grand” manner than Young was directing – she drove the orchestra straight into those mighty statements while keeping the music’s underlying pulse beating, risking a “more of the same” feeling rather than creating an overwhelming sense of arrival and resolution. But what her approach did do was, in the long run, elevate the status of the whole of the finale to that of a truly cosmic dance, the rhythmic drive working hand-in-glove with the “cathedrals of sound” – so that, in the midst of these mighty structures right at the end, we still felt like dancing with the music.

So – it was music-making of one’s dreams from orchestra and conductor, suitably acclaimed by a delighted audience at the end – how long will it be before we can invite Simone Young back again to make more music?

 

 

 

 

Young musicians’ mid-winter warm-up with Mozart and Rachmaninov

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra Winter Concert

RACHMANINOV – Symphony No.3 in A MInor Op.44

MOZART – Requiem (arr. Maunder)

Amelia Ryman (soprano) / Alison Hodge (contralto)

Cameron Barclay (tenor) / Matthew Landreth (bass)

Wellington Youth Choir (Katie Macfarlane – Music Director)

Wellington Youth Orchestra

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Wellington Town Hall,

Sunday 12th August, 2012

Aside from the circumstance of this being the THIRD Mozart Requiem performance offered the Wellington concert-going public this year so far (after all, it’s only August!), I thought the program of this concert by its own lights adventurous and challenging. And, regarding the combination of Mozart and Rachmaninov, a well-known French saying – “Vive la différence” can easily put it in an acceptable context.

Looking at things more closely than mere concert listings, one then discovers that, unlike with the first Mozart Requiem performance of the year by the Bach Choir of Wellington, this latest performance did feature an orchestra, and not merely an organ accompaniment. And unlike both of the previous performances (the second one being by the Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir and the Vector Wellington Orchestra), the recent one explored some different musical territories, using an edition prepared in 1986 by the scholar Richard Maunder, which largely dispensed with the attempts of Mozart’s pupil, Franz Süssmayr, to finish the work, uncompleted at the composer’s death.

Maunder’s version, completed in 1986, retains some of Süssmayr’s completions of Mozart’s sketches, but abandons what he feels are the non-Mozart parts, such as the Sanctus and Benedictus. Maunder does retain the Agnus Dei, feeling that the influence of Mozart did guide Süssmayr here more directly. But he recasts the work’s two final movements differently – Lux Aeterna and Cum Sanctis – drawing from material earlier in the Requiem. 

Like others before and since, Maunder considered Süssmayr’s work generally unworthy of Mozart’s, though many music-lovers down the years have had far more cause to thank than revile the unfortunate “johnny-on-the-spot”, given the sheer impossibility of his task. Poor Süssmayr wasn’t exactly a favourite of Mozart’s, either, the composer, in a letter to his wife Constanze, referring to his erstwhile pupil as a “blockhead”, and likening his native intelligence to that of “a duck in a thunderstorm” – but then Mozart was often almost pathologically unkind towards people he considered his inferiors.

From the singers’ point of view (as well as from that of this audience member), the dropping of both the Sanctus and Benedictus might well seem unfortunate, irrespective of considerations of greater “authenticity”. Still, both the on-going conjecture and the various attempts to render the work nearer to what the composer might have “wanted” have kept the music well away from any kind of museum mothballing. In essence, it’s very much a “living classic”, and likely to remain that way, considering that some of the work’s secrets can never be actually told – merely guessed at.

As regards the actual concert, I’ve run ahead of things, here, as the evening began with music from quite a different world. This was the Rachmaninov Third Symphony, a stern test, I would have thought, for a youth orchestra to tackle. Rachmaninov wrote this work late in his composing career, and filled its pages with contrasting and conflicting impulses and emotions. In places, the sounds and themes nostalgically evoke the Imperial Russia of the composer’s boyhood, of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, particularly the latter composer – Rachmaninov shared some of his older compatriot’s fondness for quasi-oriental themes and orchestral colorings. In other places the music snaps at the heels of contemporary trends, with enough rhythmic and timbral “bite” to suggest Bartok, Prokofiev and Stravinsky.

There are the familiar Rachmaninov trademarks, among them the well-known plainchant “Dies Irae” theme, which pulsates like an electric current through much of the composer’s music (contributing not a little to its deep, prevailing melancholy, and undoubtedly influencing Stravinsky’s famous description of his compatriot as “six feet of Russian gloom”), the brilliance of the orchestration, and the heartfelt beauty of the themes, so candidly and unashamedly expressive. It seems incredible when listening to this work to imagine anybody writing of its effect – “a chewing-over of something that had little importance to start with….” which is what one New York critic wrote after the premiere in 1936. Another, a tad more sympathetically, wrote “Rachmaninov builds palaces with his music in which nobody wants to live any more…”.

Fortunately for those of us in the audience at this concert, conductor Hamish McKeich and his young players (their numbers judiciously augmented by a handful of NZSO members, probably some of the students’ tutors) seemed to pay no heed to such agenda-driven comments, and instead plunged into and appeared to revel in what the music had to offer – a whole-hearted, sharply-etched lyricism, expressed through a brilliant and wide-ranging orchestral palette. Both conductor and orchestra leader Arna Morton seemed to me inspirational by dint of gesture and physical involvement with the music, each readily able to delineate the work’s every mood and movement and show the rest of the players the way.

Arna Morton’s solo playing was nicely turned, as were some of the many wind solos throughout the work – the horn solo at the slow movement’s beginning actually sounded rather “Russian” with an engaging “fruitiness” of tone. Then first the flute and afterwards clarinet (from where I was sitting I couldn’t actually see the soloists) made a lovely job of the third movement’s solo lines leading to the whiplash conclusion of the symphony; while, of the other instruments, Dorothy Raphael’s timpani made something resplendent of the brief but impactful crescendo at the climax of the central movement’s scherzando section.

The richly lyrical moments were what this orchestra did best – the opening soulful “motto” theme, and the movement’s luscious tunes, the second movement’s richly and exotically-wrought archways, and the finale’s dying fall, the melodies and their inspiration spent. In these this orchestra gave its all, bringing a natural, youthful ardor to the shape and intensity of those yearning lines. And the  ceremonial episodes, such as the finale’s opening, had great exuberance, a similar sense of “playing-out” and letting things “sound”. Somewhat predictably, the players found the many treacherous “scherzando” passages in the work difficult, fraught with syncopations and difficult rhythmic dovetailings, as though the bar-lines were booby-trapped and waiting to pounce. To their credit, conductor and players kept going through the squalls, celebrating the triumphs and thrills along the way as readily as coping with the spills – at the end of the day the performance’s overall effect did enough of the work justice for conductor and orchestra to be pleased with its achievement.

Orchestrally, the Mozart was more uniformly impressive, perhaps even too much so in relation to the choir and soloists, whose relative backward placement seemed to put them at a dynamic disadvantage. Of the soloists, soprano Amelia Ryman shone brightly, her lines clear and silvery and always a delight. The others lacked her projection, and sometimes had to force their tone to be heard, stationed as they were just at the foot of the choir. It’s always seemed to me that composers intended soloists’ voices to stand out, rather than be given a “solo voice from the choir” kind of balance; and here for most of the time alto, tenor and bass needed all the help they could get, not necessarily an enthusiastic student orchestra anxious to demonstrate what they could do, to accompany them.

Throughout, both the general playing and detailing of individual instrumental lines from the orchestra was of a high standard – a sonorous trombone solo at “Tuba mirum”, majestic strings at “Rex Tremendae”, and secure brass and strings throughout the final “Cum Sanctis” fugue. The choir sang truly, beautifully and accurately, even if there were times when those voices didn’t manage to get across the weight of tone required to properly dominate the sound-picture, such as in the aforementioned fugue. To fill a Town Hall with sound, after all, takes some doing. I would have actually like the soloists closer, so that I could have more readily enjoyed Amelia Ryman’s singing, and got a better sense of the voices of the other three. For each of them, mellifluous moments of singing alternated with sequences where they seemed to struggle to be heard against the orchestra. Tenor Cameron Barclay made the most consistent impression, though his voice seemed not to have quite the same command and attack that was evident when he sang in the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, earlier in the year.

Still, very great credit is due to these young singers and players for what they achieved, and to their “guiding hand” on the night, conductor Hamish McKeich, who was able to bring the different elements together and preside over their fruitful interaction. The efforts he and others inspired made for an enjoyable and heartening evening’s concert.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blistering Brahms, diaphanous Dutilleux and monumental Mozart, from Amici and Diedre Irons

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music

Amici Ensemble with Diedre Irons (piano)

MOZART – Piano Quartet in G MInor K.478

DUTILLEUX – String Quartet “Ainsi la Nuit” (Thus the Night)

BRAHMS – Piano Quintet in F Minor Op.34

Ilott Theatre, Wellington

Sunday, 12th August, 2012

Blame Captain Haddock of the “Tintin” books for my “Blistering Brahms” heading – the other descriptions are more conventional, but no less heartfelt on my part. For this was a magnificent concert, a memorable marriage of great music and music-making, very much a “gentlemen of England now abed.…” scenario if ever there was one, for we lucky people in the audience.

With Mozart in his “G Minor mood” there was drama and dark purpose right from the concert’s beginning, with the composer’s K.478 Piano Quartet. The expression on Diedre Irons’ face, ready to plunge into the opening bars with her ensemble colleagues spoke volumes, really. The musicians relished it all, the major/minor mirrorings of the opening phrases, the piquant asymmetries of the lyrical contrasts and the richly unexpected modulations of the development – all contributed tellingly to a powerful, all-pervading ambivalence of mood throughout the opening movement.

Violinist Donald Armstrong led the ensemble with a will, his tone perhaps a little raw in places, but the sound indicative of the intensity of feeling he was investing with the notes. Mozart’s usual dictum “It should flow like oil” was here augmented with episodes of intense, knife-edged focus. Diedre Irons’ piano took the lead with the development, as always with her playing the tones coloured and inflected with what seemed like a Shakespearean kind of eloquence. In reply, the strings’ long-breathed lines were gorgeous, filled with intense feeling.

The operatic Andante sang out here, melody and counter melody drawing forth lines and accompaniments of great strength, the music never sentimentalized (a beautiful contribution from Julia Joyce’s viola at one point). The finale’s opening seemed a long way from the tragedy of the opening movement’s utterances. We heard such supple, beautifully-placed dovetailing at quite a cracking pace, everything made to “bubble” and generate high spirits, though with some lurches into a darker minor mood in places – the composer obviously saying, “Just to let you know that….” with these sequences.

After these antiquarian tragicomedies, the following work, a String Quartet from 1976 by Henri Dutilleux subtitled Ainsi la nuit (Thus the night)  brought a new earth to view. Donald Amstrong spoke before the work’s performance about its “organized disorganization”, a statement which seemed to characterize most aptly the sonorities and figurations that we encountered throughout. The opening sequences certainly suggested the Nocturne of the title, with haunting repetitions, punctuated by what might be characterized as owl-cries or distant ship-horns at sea. The ambiences seemed layered, so that as skins of texture were discarded others seemed firmly fixed in place underneath. After this, the Miroir d’espace that was Movement Two irrupted with sharp impulses, before the sounds widened spectrally between a haunting violin line and  a near-subterranean cello, creating a yawning vista between, flecked with instrumental incident.

Each of two sections that follow were subtitled Litanies, the first closely-worked and claustrophobic, concerted passages interspersed with instrumental “adventures”, while the second sounded a kind of siren’s song, with elements of a lament, a sort of chromatic welling up from the depths and gathering strands of sharp focus together. I thought the players’ characterizations of these many and widely-contrasted sound-impulses vivid and compelling. Just as focused was the playing in Constellations, rhythmic, spiky and volatile, as if part of the cosmos was in ferment, the music expressing that “disorganized organization” Donald Armstrong talked about.

Such were the mesmeric qualities of the sounds, I found myself drifting into the music quite non-analytically at some points, losing my overview of things in impulses of delight, and then having to regretfully resist further blandishments. Even so, the last two sections of the work remain indissoluble in my mind, the music’s ambient world establishing such a sense of organic flow at this stage in the piece, the divisions were subsumed and everything became as one, a veritable “memory footprint” established by those sounds, one which haunts me even as I write this.

As if these whole-world-entities weren’t enough, after the interval we were given the full high-romantic gamut of emotion, refracted through the Brahmsian end of things. The composer’s great Piano Quintet had to claw its way through two separate gestations – firstly for strings alone, then for two pianos – before emerging in its finished form. I found the comments made by friends of the composer regarding each of these “tryouts” interesting – violinist Joseph Joachim found that the strings-alone version “lacked charm”, and the great conductor Hermann Levi told Brahms that he had turned “a monotonous work for two pianos” into a masterpiece of chamber music. Brahms destroyed the strings-only work, but the two-piano version still exists as the Sonata Op.34b.

What the Piano Quintet version of the music gives us is the work’s structural strength expressed in a “best-of-both-worlds” garb – and these were the musicians to do the music’s strength, colour and lyricism justice. The sombre opening was played in a way that hinted at the turbulence to come – a big, quasi-orchestral sound that reflected the word of the piano concertos, with Diedre Irons’ playing underpinning the grandeur of the music’s range and scope. The give-and-take between instruments had a satisfyingly full-blooded quality – only once did I find the playing of the strings too insistent, a repeated-note sequence towards the end of the development which dominated rather than accompanied the piano’s material. Conversely, I found the ‘cello occasionally not forthright enough in such company, though Rowan Prior’s counterpointing was invariably beautifully voiced and phrased.

Throughout the work the musicians never let the intensity flag, the slow movement enshrining the most passionate lyricism (a beautiful unison from violinist Cristina Vaszilcsin and Julia Joyce shining out at one point, and a plumbing of the depths from Rowan Prior’s ‘cello at another), with everybody else similarly “playing out” and realizing the emotional potentialities of the music. And, what could have been merely high spirits in the scherzo had a supercharged, “possessed” quality – no half-measures! I loved the players’ engagement with it all, the fugal sections swirling up into the festive, swaggering theme, making a great dramatic contrast with the reprise of the opening, after the trio.

What mattered more than the less-than-ideally-pure string intonations at the finale’s beginning was the mood the players evoked, portents of impending tragedy, to which the ‘cello and piano then moved swiftly and hauntedly. With Brahms moving from light to darkness through different sequences the music’s roller-coaster ride was exhilarating, rhythmic poise turning almost without warning to pursuit on occasions. The playing simply kept up its extraordinarily vivid and physical effect right to the end, where the 6/8 Presto whirled our sensibilities away, flinging the music’s last few notes out into oblivion. It was, I thought, afterwards, the kind of music-making that makes life worth living.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strings and winds – New Zealand School of Music Lunchtime Concerts

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand School of Music Lunchtime Concerts

NZSM String Ensemble (Martin Riseley, conductor)

MENDELSSOHN – String Symphony in C Minor

DVORAK – Serenade for Strings in E Major

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

Wednesday 18th July 2012

NZSM Woodwind Soloists  (Emma Sayers, piano)

Music by Vivaldi, Arnold, Creston, Sancan, Milhaud, Cockcroft

Old St.Paul’s Church

Tuesday 31st July 2012

It’s always a pleasure to attend and write about concerts of music featuring student performers. Somehow, there’s a unique dimension of expression involved, a kind of tremulousness which at different ends of the performance spectrum can either set things a-tingle with wholehearted enthusiasm or else undermine efforts with nervousness.

There are, of course, plenty of nooks and crannies in-between these extremes, into which inexperienced performers can slot themselves – it’s always a fascinating process to observe and experience, but essentially a heart-warming one, listening to youngsters pouring their feelings into sound-vistas suggested by great music and opened up by the performers’ own skills.

I’ve been to two July concerts recently at which students from the NZ School of Music were performing – one on Wednesday 18th, at St.Andrew’s Church, involving a string ensemble playing music by Mendelssohn and Dvorak, and the other on Tuesday 31st, at Old St.Paul’s Church, which featured individual wind instrumentalists making plenty of variety of sounds in music from different composers.

At St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Martin Riseley, violinist extraordinaire, and a tutor at the School of Music, directed the string ensemble. He got a terrific response from the young players right throughout the Mendelssohn work, the String Symphony in C Minor – at the outset the players’ precise attack and focused tones gave us a foretaste of the whole performance’s strength and clarity. Throughout the whole ensemble there seemed a similar full-blooded commitment to giving the music resplendent tones and clear articulation – the lower strings sang their lines and figurations with as much eloquence and finesse as their lighter-toned cousins opposite.

The lunchtime concert time-schedules wouldn’t permit the whole of the work which followed, Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings, so that we had to do without the gorgeous slow movement. For the Dvorak the violin sections “swopped around”, bringing some different faces to the fore for the concert’s second part. Though a lovely work, the Serenade contains many pitfalls of articulation and rhythm, to the despair of amateur orchestras I’ve heard attempt it; and so I was interested as to how these young players would fare.

It began well, the serene opening nicely floated and counterpointed between upper and lower strings, the lines relaxed in flight and with plenty of elbow-room. The second subject I found a bit beefily-played, wanting, I thought, a lighter, more quixotic touch, so as to make a telling contrast with the crescendo, and render that top note in each phrase a bit more wide-eyed with wonderment. But the divisi ‘cellos were lovely, the players able to fill out their tones and fine them down in places most sensitively, as with the movement’s end. The following Waltz-movement was beautifully done, with violas making their presence felt in those all-important middle textures – and the music’s trio-section brought out the dynamic contests with plenty of heartfelt expression.

Dvorak’s wonderfully out-of-doors manner throughout the third movement was nicely captured, the excitement built up in the opening measures as the melody spread throughout the orchestra, and the melting romance of the music’s descending theme expressed beautifully, especially by the ‘cellos. However, I wanted a bit more emphasis given to those wonderful downwardly leaping intervals at the phrase-ends during the middle section (I think they’re fifths and sevenths) – here they were all “snapped shut” too readily for me, without being properly savoured! But then there was nice work from the violins leading back to the opening “running” section, a real sense of the music riding the crest of a wave in places, even if the string-tone was a bit dogged and scrappy here and there.

Maybe the ensemble ought to have finished with the slow movement instead of the finale, the latter being such a tricky beast to bring off. The rhythms really have to be “felt” rather than “counted” (as Ken Young would have said!) – and the lines are so cruelly exposed. There’s also a lot of near “sotto voce” work which I thought the players found it hard to make into part of a coherent line – I felt we got “going through the motions” playing rather than something with sweep, drive and purpose. Better, surely for these young musicians to have been encouraged to throw themselves into things like the ferment of that famous crescendo, and make something rough but exciting and abandoned of it, rather than produce the somewhat dogged get-the-notes-right impression that we got in places here.

However, we did get a lovely transition back into the return of the work’s very opening (a heart-warming touch from the composer!), and the energetic plunge back into the allegro vivace rounded it all off with honour satisfied. Still, it was the group’s playing of the Mendelssohn which I enjoyed, nay, really took to heart on this occasion – so very engaging and exciting to experience.

 

My second NZSM reviewing assignment was just under a fortnight later at Old St.Paul’s, where a number of wind students presented their “pieces”, the exercise being part of their course requirements, to, I might say, the audience’s pleasure and delight. This concert also brought added value with the wonderful accompaniments (some of them more out-and-out partnerships than accompaniments!) by the School of Music’s Emma Sayers, whose playing invariably adds a new dimension to whatever music she takes part in presenting.

Beginning the program (with a Vivaldi concerto, rather than the Handel the program was suggesting) was Oscar Laven, playing the bassoon. Here was the instrument relishing the role of singer and romancer as well as being a “character”. Oscar Laven’s phrasing of the lyrical episodes was of bel canto quality, to which was added a strong but flexible rhythmic sense, and plenty of virtuoso verve, as withness the rapid runs towards the end of the work. This was followed by Jeewon Um’s performance of Malcolm Arnold’s Fantasy for Solo Flute, the lyrical opening enchanting and the dance-like episodes spectacularly virtuosic.

Saxophonist Sam Jones very “correctly” introduced the Paul Creston Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano, wanting to emphasize for the audience the difficulty of the Sonata’s piano part, and properly acknowledge Emma Sayers’ contribution to the performance. He played brilliantly, with a stunning command of colour and technical agility, crucial in music with as much rhythmic energy as this! As absorbing to listen to was the piano part, the two musicians triumphantly realizing the piece’s tonal variety and underlying dynamism – a great listen!

An almost complete contrast was afforded by flutist Monique Vossen’s choice of Pierre Sancan’s Sonatine, the composer’s best-known work – the opening sequences impressionistic-sounding, rather in the style of Ravel, and with corresponding fairy-tale ambiences and textures. I thought the tuning between instruments wasn’t right in places, here (no tuning of the flute  was done beforehand that we could see), but though it didn’t mask the player’s artistry the pitch discrepancy was occasionally a distraction. In other respects rapport between flute and piano was exemplary, each taking rhythmic and melodic cues from one another, everything done with an enviably light touch and expressive purpose.

Another saxophonist, Reuben Chin, played an exerpt from Milhaud’s Scaramouche, a work whose popularity had resulted in all kinds of arrangements being made of the original piano duo for various instruments, not all of them by the composer. Here, the player exhibited a lovely singing tone as the music moved from dreamscape to graceful dance, the musicians relishing the expressive possibilities of lyrical saxophone and gently rhythmic piano accompaniment. Nothing could have been further from the style of Patrick Hayes’ performance for solo clarinet of Barry Cockcroft’s “Blue Tongue” (the composer simply HAD to be an Australian to write a piece with such a title!). More decomposition than anything else, the piece involved the player gradually dismantling the instrument, while trying to keep the piece going, and unifying the music with an reiterated rhythmic note. In putting it all across, Patrick Hayes demonstrated an entertainer’s gift as well as a musician’s skills in keeping the proceedings alive and buoyant throughout.

Yet another saxophonist, Katherine Macieszac, finished the concert in fine style with the third movement of the same work that Sam Jones had earlier played part of, Paul Creston’s Sonata for Alto Sax and Piano. Bustling 5/4 beginnings and an engaging garrulity swept the opening argument along between the musicians – first we heard the sax singing songs over the piano’s toccata-like drive, then listened to the instruments swap places, the saxophone rolling the rapid-fire notes into a blur agains the piano’s melodic progressions. For respite there were a few lyrical sequences before the 5/4 rhythm reawakened, and the piece drove to its energetic, breathless conclusion.

Fine, virtuosic playing from all concerned throughout the concert, communicating in almost all the items we heard, a real sense of enjoyment in the music-making.

 

 

Jian Liu – pianist in full flight at the Ilott

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents

Jian Liu –  a “Fantasia” recital

CPE BACH – Fantasia in C Major W 59/6  / BEETHOVEN – Fantasia in G Minor Op.77

LISZT – Apres une lecture de Dante; fantasia quasi sonata  / MOZART – Fantasia in D Minor K.397

SCHUBERT – Fantasie in C Major “Wanderer” D.760

Jian Liu (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 29th July 2012

At the interval, after pianist Jian Liu’s blistering traversal of the Liszt Dante Sonata, I was approached by a piano-fancier friend, whose aspect was one of great excitement and agitation: transfixing me with an intense, fire-flashing gaze, he exclaimed, “I hope you’re going to write up this recital as the greatest Wellington has heard for years!”. Being in a somewhat euphoric state myself, after the Liszt, I nevertheless managed to remember the farmer in one of Carl Sandburg’s dialogue poems, who, in response to the question, “Lived here all your life?” replied with a laconic “Not yit!”. But I still added my two cents’ worth regarding what I’d heard so far to the paeans of praise from others who joined us, to my friend’s momentary, if not complete, satisfaction.

Certainly, Jian Liu’s performance of Liszt’s visionary exploration of the spirit of Dante’s Divine Comedy seemed like an all-encompassing display of both technical brilliance and poetic identification with the music. I had heard Liu relatively recently in recital, playing the same composer’s B Minor Sonata, and thought at the time that his Lisztian credentials were pretty impressive (the review of that concert is also on Middle C). However, in terms of overall effect, Liu’s playing here for me surpassed that earlier performance in almost every aspect. And while my allegiance to Diedre Irons’ Liszt-playing remains unshaken in terms of her incomparable variety of touch and poetry of phrasing, Liu’s more austere way with the pianistic textures was allied to a tremendous intellectual grip of the music’s overall shape and form which at the time swept all before it. It was no wonder my friend was thus transported by it all.

The overall idea of the recital – that of exploring difference composers’ treatment of the idea of “fantasia” – brought forth fascinating results, especially in the first half. In a sense, what threw the Liszt work into bold relief was the relative emptiness of the piece that preceded it, a work by Beethoven, no less, though not one of the master’s greatest compositional efforts. In fact, this Fantasia in G Minor has never seemed to me to bear out the contention that Beethoven was one of the greatest improvisers of his age, one capable of putting every other virtuoso of the time to flight in those “contests” that pianists of the early Romantic era  (and before, remembering Mozart and Clementi) seemed to occasionally take part in. It’s pretty thin stuff, really, with occasional flashes of the “Ludwig Van” of the great sonatas, placed cheek-by-jowl with handfuls of somewhat tiresome show-off stock pianistic figurations.

My feeling is that the “real” Beethoven would have improvised with much greater freedom and contrast than this piece exhibits – perhaps the “writing down” of what was meant, after all, to be a spontaneous recreation of musical thought has spoiled it. One thinks of Lady Bracknell’s description of natural ignorance in “The Importance of Being Earnest” – “Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit. Touch it, and the bloom is gone.” I thought also that the contrast with Mozart’s famous D MInor Fantasia K.397, which Liu played to open the recital’s second half was instructive regarding the compositional methods of each of the composers – Mozart, we are told, tended to “compose in his head” and then write down what he’d worked out, whereas Beethoven’s processes were far more visible in the form of scraps of motifs, figurations and sequences which filled his sketch-books, like a sculptor hewing at an ever-present shape or form, and bringing it into being. In this respect, Mozart’s work seemed finished, whereas Beethoven’s had the feel of a work very much in progress.

The recital opened with a Fantasia by another stormy petrel, CPE Bach, whose music I particularly love for its volatility and its juxtaposition of beauty with angularity. Jian Liu brough out this Fantasia’s capricious spirit with a will – here was a sense of fun at work expressed in delightfully unpredictable ways, even if the composer somewhat over-milked the repeated two-note figure which served as an omni-present watcher on all the other goings-on. Liu showed excellent “evocation” instincts in his playing of this piece, characterizing the different moods strongly and bringing to bear an enviable command of dynamic and keyboard colours. What CPE’s father, the great Johann Sebastien, would have thought of it all, I couldn’t begin to think, though, of course one remembers he was no mean fantasia-writer himself.

So, after these two somewhat frivolous explorations of keyboard capriciousness, the Liszt work hit us like a thunderbolt, and especially in Jian Liu’s hands. While I couldn’t, in the wake of hearing those two Russian women pianists, Sofia Gulyak and Halida Dinova, earlier in the year, award the palm for “the greatest recital in years” to Jian, his playing of the Liszt placed his pianism fully on their level, if from a vastly different tradition. It would be outside the scope of this review to analyze just why Liu’s playing made the impression on me that it did. But in one important respect it had what I felt was slightly lacking in the same pianist’s  earlier recital also featuring Liszt’s music – an all-pervading resonance, a sustenance of tone which here opened up whole vistas of expression, ranging from the blackest oblivion to the most shimmering and scintillating light. In terms of energy and impulse it was playing I’ve rarely heard surpassed by anybody in recital, in places. It was art which largely concealed art, to Jian Liu’s credit – throughout, one felt the presence of both Liszt and of Dante, ahead of that of a pianist making these evocations possible.

Having gotten our sensibilities properly calmed down during the interval, we felt able to return to our seats for some more music – first up was the delicious D Minor Fantasia by Mozart. I was interested in what Jian Liu would do with this work, as Mozart never finished it, and posthumous editions have “rounded off” the allegro section with a concluding flourish and cadence which I’m afraid sounds worthy but somewhat glib. A recording of this work by the Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida adopted what to my ears seemed like a wonderful solution – i.e. to return to the opening arpeggios of the work, modulate in the same way, and then conclude with a final major-key archway which ends quietly in the bass. However, Jian Liu preferred to follow the Breitkopf Gesamtausgabe’s aforementioned “completion” – and his dignified, sensitive playing made the conclusion sound of a piece with the rest. But what a charming and beautiful work it is, the ideas given plenty of “air” by Liu, preserving something of the piece’s spontaneity despite its finished aspect.

The afternoon’s concluding “fantasia” was the renowned “Wanderer Fantasy” by Schubert. Pianists themselves seem divided regarding the legendary technical difficulties accompanying this work – Schubert himself was reputed to have said, upon leaping from the piano after an abortive attempt to play the work in public, “The devil may play it, for I cannot!”. As regards Schubert’s oeuvre for solo piano, it is clearly the most technically demanding, though whether it challenges the executant difficulties of some of the other virtuoso pieces of the Romantic repertoire seems to be a matter of opinion. Called the “Wanderer” Fantasy because of the work’s direct quotation from the theme of Schubert’s own Lied “Der Wanderer” of 1816, the piece has four distinct sections, though is played without a break. It was a favorite of Liszt’s who made a transcription of the piece for piano and orchestra, and who was also inspired by Schubert’s technique of “thematic transformation” to produce works like his own B Minor Sonata.

Straightaway, Jian Liu engaged us physically with the music, making wonderful use of dynamic terracings to give the sounds  plenty of organically-conceived variation – thanks to Liu’s unfailing sense of the music’s direction, the argument always seems to be going somewhere, and never put in a rhythmic or colouristic straitjacket. Though the physical effort of engaging with those notes was made apparent, and one or two of the arpeggiated figurations sounded a bit blurred around the edges, the playing’s essential energy and liveliness carried us joyfully along, eventually bringing us to the edges of a deep, richly-layered region of dark stillness and mystery. Here, the music became all of a sudden hymn-like and entranced, almost religious in feeling (no wonder Liszt couldn’t keep his hands off it!), the initial simplicity of the lied-melody then fragmenting into a hundred eager voices, creating a ferment of activity growing from the textures of the music. Here Liu’s ear for detail meant that the dappled strands of sound impulse were kept flowing and undulating – marvellous playing.

The presto episode again had that sense of boundless energy, some elemental life-force expressing a kind of cosmic joy and high spirits, one whose voltage increased and crackled as the concluding fugue hove into view. So, the pianist might have dropped a few notes here and there! – what was far more important was that the music’s momentum was gloriously maintained, everybody, pianist and listeners caught up in a kind of trajectoried trance whose culminating wave of energy occasioned great scenes of appreciation from an excited audience. Wisely, Jian Liu brought us all back from fever pitch with a transcription of a Richard Strauss song, very Schubert-like, rapt and beautiful, a fitting conclusion to a memorable afternoon of music.