Author: Peter Mechen

Freddy Kempf’s Gershwin with the NZSO – poet-pianist with a brilliant orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NEW ZEALAND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA presents FREDDY KEMPF PLAYS GERSHWIN

GERSHWIN – Second Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra / BERNSTEIN – Prelude, Fugue and Riffs

GERSHWIN – I Got Rhythm Variations / An American in Paris / SHOSTAKOVICH – Tahiti Trot

GERSHWIN  – Rhapsody in Blue (orch. Grofe)

Freddy Kempf (piano)

Matthew Coorey (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, 7th December, 2012

A splendid program, expertly delivered, with the qualification that, to my mind pianist Freddy Kempf’s playing was notable more for poetry and introspection than glint and incisiveness, particularly in the “Rhapsody in Blue”. There were places where I wanted the piano to assert itself to a greater, somewhat brasher extent, particularly as the orchestra, under the energetic direction of Australian conductor Matthew Coorey, was “playing-out” in the best American style.

As with the players’ response a couple of months ago to Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s direction of Bernstein’s West Side Story Dances, here was a kind of untramelled spirit unleashed which took to the music with a will and realized much of its essential energetic joie de vivre. This came across most consistently throughout a vividly-projected rendition of An American in Paris – I wanted the motor horns at the beginning to “honk” more stridently, though it became obvious as the performance unfolded that the conductor was purposely “terracing” the score’s more overtly vulgar aspects to telling overall effect.

It seemed to me that any orchestra that could whole-heartedly “swing” certain music along in such a way that the NZSO players could and did on this occasion (as happened also with the Bernstein work I’ve mentioned) would be capable of bringing those same energetic, colourful and expressive qualities to any music it cared to play. Under Matthew Coory’s direction, the music’s story of the homesick traveller struggling to regain his emotional equilibrium in a foreign land, and eventually making the connections he needed, was here, by turns, excitingly and touchingly recounted, enabling the work to “tell” as the masterpiece it is.

Of course the brass has to carry much of the music’s character via plenty of on-the-spot ensemble work and virtuoso individual playing – and the solos delivered by people such as trumpeter Michael Kirgan delivered spadefuls of brilliance and feeling (even the one or two mis-hit notes had plenty of style and élan!). Not to be completely overshadowed, both winds and strings contributed soulful solo and concerted passages, balancing the blues with the brashness of some of the energies, though horns, saxophone and even the tuba also had episodes whose sounds tugged at the heartstrings.

What was caught seemed to me to be the “rhythm of the times”, putting me in mind of memories of watching some of those 1930s American films with their amazing song-and-dance sequences. Obviously this spirit had world-wide repercussions, as evidenced by Shostakovich’s contribution to the evening’s entertainment, via his Tahiti Trot, which was nothing less than a thinly disguised orchestral setting of Vincent Youman’s Broadway hit Tea for Two, completed by the composer in 1928.

Where Shostakovich’s work delighted with the wit and delicacy of its setting, Leonard Bernstein’s raunchy Prelude Fugue and Riffs from over twenty years later pinned the ears back with its percussion-driven brass declamations at the outset, irruptions alternating with echoes, and its in-your-face burleske-like gestures. It was all by way of preparing for a jazzy fugue whose peregrinations seemed to follow its own rules of expression, before returning to the all-out burlesque posturing and an ensuing “riff” whose manic energy threatened to sweep away the whole ensemble. It was the solo clarinet which finally called a halt with a single note. Again, I felt awed at the energies released by these normally straight-laced, classically-disciplined musicians, all of whom were suddenly demonstrated impressive “crossover”-like skills, and producing performances that to my ears sounded and felt creditably idiomatic.

A few further words about the concertante Gershwin items – the most interesting, by dint of being the least familiar, was the Second Rhapsody, first played in 1931, seven years after the original Rhapsody in Blue was first performed. Originally written as part of a film score, Gershwin set out to portray the bustling, concrete-jungle character of a big city (specifically New York), with a particular emphasis on the city’s upward-thrusting building activities, leading to the film-sequence being dubbed originally “Rhapsody of Rivets”. Gershwin’s later expansion of the score as a concert-piece retained the original music’s energy and rhythmic drive, but added and developed a contrasting lyrical character in places. The result was a work which its composer described as “in many respects….the best thing I’ve ever written”.

Freddy Kempf’s performance again delivered the more soulful moments of the score with plenty of heart-on-sleeve feeling, and he seemed here more into the “swing” of the energetic moments – also, his concertante approach seemed to me to suit this more sophisticated work better than with the first Rhapsody’s more “blue-and-white” character. While not as richly-endowed with memorable themes, this later work has a much more “interactive” spirit between soloist and orchestra, more like the later Concerto in F, the tension of the exchanges towards the end here magnificently terraced. I particularly enjoyed the chromatic, Messiaen-like orchestral lurches leading up to the final “all-together” payoff.

The I Got Rhythm Variations, perhaps the most lighthearted of the three, made a sparkling mid-concert makeweight, Kempf’s deft touch and whirlwind tempi for his solos reminiscent of Gershwin’s own, very unsentimental playing-style preserved on a few recordings. Again the orchestral playing under Matthew Coorey’s direction sounded right inside the music, by turns pushing, coaxing and simply letting it out there. How wonderful to have an orchestra in Wellington which can “swing it” just as whole-heartedly as it can deftly turn a Haydn or Mozart phrase, or rattle the rafters with a Brucknerian or Wagnerian climax. Well done, pianist, players and conductor, for giving us such a great concert.

Worlds Old and New, from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

WELLINGTON CHAMBER ORCHESTRA PRESENTS:

PRUDEN – Westland: A Back-Country Overture

MENDELSSOHN – Violin Concerto in E Minor  / Symphony No.1

RITCHIE – Remember Parihaka

Michael Joel (conductor)

Kate Oswin (violin)

Wellington Chamber Orchestra

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

Sunday 2nd December, 2012

There’s nothing quite like an encounter (preferably “live”) with an unfamiliar piece of music that rocks one’s socks off! This happened for me right at the beginning of this Wellington Chamber Orchestra concert, with Larry Pruden’s Westland: A Back-Country Overture, a work I’d not heard before. True, the rather cramped St.Andrew’s venue heightened the music’s (and the playing’s!) raw impact, not altogether helpfully; but there was no denying the impression made by all these factors of orchestral writing which brought out the South Island’s rugged landscape grandeur in this music.

Right from the very beginning, vibrant and spacious Vaughan-Williams-like opening chords and figurations blew out the building’s walls, opened up the textures, and suffused our senses with all the trappings of the great New Zealand Outdoors. The playing had both energy and vision, giving the music’s alternating episodes plenty of room to establish their different characters and place themselves accordingly, cheeky wind episodes rubbing shoulders with gracefully melodic strings and epic gestures from the brass and percussion. The fallible orchestral moments tended to be in the quieter, more exposed sections of the score, where a few vagaries of pitch and some mis-hits sun-spotted what were generally sterling efforts by the winds and brass throughout.

Ultimately, the performance by conductor Michael Joel and his players caught what seemed to be for me the music’s essentials – a big-boned kind of “wild places” character festooned with detail and artfully shaped to make the most of contrasts of mood, reflecting in turn human response ranging from excitement and awe to quiet contemplation of beauty.

Pruden’s music made quite a contrast with the Mendelssohn that followed – no less than the E Minor Violin Concerto, played by Kate Oswin, whose playing of this work I had previously encountered in sections, with piano accompaniment.  I thought her performance on this occasion sweet-toned, accurately pitched in all but the most demanding places, and graced with moments of what came across as deep feeling alternated with a true sense of the music’s classical proportions. Michael Joel’s accompaniment featured orchestral playing of whole-hearted commitment, and strongly-realised melodic and rhythmic expression, supporting the soloist at every turn.

For her part, Kate Oswin’s approach to melodic lines and vigorous passage work sang and danced with the orchestra’s throughout – not all of her exposed lines were pitched absolutely truly, but she would make amends a few moments afterwards with some particularly felicitous detail.  An example was in the cadenza, when she teetered precariously going up to one of those high notes which the composer uses so affectingly to cap off several phrases, only to then give us a top note of the utmost beauty at the climax of the following ascent. I liked also the way she “dug into” the phrases leading up to the coda, her concentration and energy surviving a mis-hit high note, and carrying the day with great conviction through the music’s agitations and into the bassoon-led slow movement.

Strangely, a slight lack of poise seemed to unsettle the violinist’s opening phrase here, but she quickly settled down, and subsequently handled the reprise of the opening far more mellifluously. Altogether, the slow movement was a delight, the orchestra again and again reminding us of the same composer’s “Scottish” Symphony by dint of the music’s ebb and flow of like-textured intensities. By contrast, the finale’s opening brought out the fairy-like delicacies of the music, beautifully realized, with stunning fingerwork from the soloist and charming detailing from the winds. The movement’s counter-subject which flowed beneath the music’s impish scampering at the reprise of the opening was here realized with fine judgement, and Kate Oswin and the players caught the music’s growing excitement as the ending approached, with plenty of élan and a sense of a journey being completed.

Enterprisingly, the orchestra had programmed two New Zealand works for this concert, the second being Anthony Ritchie’s Remember Parihaka. As with the Pruden work this was music of considerable evocation, if more emotional and psychological than physical and pictorial. Ritchie wrote the work in response to his feelings about the incidents which took place during the 1880s at Parihaka, in Taranaki, when the iwi and followers of the paramount chief Te Whiti were forced off tribal lands at gunpoint by soldiers acting on Government orders, in response to European settlement demands. Te Whiti and many of his followers were subsequently imprisoned for their “passive resistance” to the Crown in this matter.

Though there was a raw quality to the wind-playing in the piece’s early stages, the tuning a shade or two awry during the more forceful moments, the ambience wasn’t inappropriate to the music’s theme of unease and burgeoning conflict. Different strands of feeling were represented by chanting winds, supported by thrumming strings, as opposed to the sounds of a folk-fiddle accompanied by a field-drum. MIchael Joel and his players brought these opposing strands together in conflict with great skill, the orchestral string playing in particular impressing with its power and incisiveness. The players also realized the numbness and unease of the aftermath (helped by a beautifully-presented horn-solo), the strings allowing their ambient tones to gradually dissolve and disappear. A very satisfying performance.

So to the concert’s final work, the Mendelssohn First Symphony, its place in the composer’s output (rather like Bizet’s similarly early C Major work) deceptive, as parts of the work are extremely demanding to bring off well. This was something of a curate’s egg of a performance, with the somewhat relentless technical demands of the music producing in places a rawness of sound that seemed at odds with the work’s classically-conceived lines. I was reminded of a phrase from JC Beaglehole’s notorious review of the National Orchestra’s first-ever concert in 1947 – “the playing was notable for enthusiasm and vigour rather than refinement”. The first movement was sturdy, no-nonsense “sturm-und-drang” stuff that took no prisoners, and the strings seemed to be struggling in places to keep their tone amid the rushing plethora of notes. It was all somewhat dour, I fear.

Better was the Andante, with great work by the winds at the outset (a lovely second subject, nicely-phrased). Though the ‘cellos had trouble keeping their tone in places when playing high in their register, the rest of the strings warmly came to the rescue. Some doubtful tuning took the shine off some of the close-knit wind harmonies towards the end. However, I liked the big, black scherzo, with the strings revelling in the music’s  physicality, the players bending their backs to the task in realizing these swirling, energetic sounds. Though their sounds were a bit raw in places (and they also had to put up with a strange repeated extraneous noise outside the church, completely unmusical in effect!) the players fronted up wholeheartedly to the trio’s long, lyrical wind lines and sinuous string figurations.

The finale fared better than the work’s opening movement, the orchestra’s vigorous, enthusiastic playing driving the music forward, while allowing some felicitous detailing – some poised pizzicato playing, and a lovely clarinet solo. I thought the strings made a good fist of each of the fugal passages before the end, and I suspect the celebratory joy which came across at the music’s sudden change to the major key for the brief coda was infused with as much relief on the players’ part – certainly not an easy work to bring off!

This was the final concert of the Orchestra’s fortieth anniversary season – I would guess that orchestra members and associates can look back on what has been presented and achieved during 2012 with several degrees of satisfaction. And since the band occasionally presents repertoire that no other local band has tackled of late (eg. the Larry Pruden work we heard today) the value of what it does is greatly enhanced and appreciated all the more. I look forward to another year’s stimulating music-making from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra throughout 2013.

Rain, wind and moonlight – Stroma’s “Pierrot Lunaire” and more……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA presents PIERROT LUNAIRE

Madeleine Pierard (soprano)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Kirstin Eade (flute/piccolo) / Phil Green (clarinet/bass clarinet)

Blas Gonzalez (piano) / Megan Molina (violin)

Andrew Thomson (violin/viola) / Robert Ibell (‘cello)

HANNS EISLER – 14 Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Fourteen Ways of depicting Rain)

AMNTON WEBERN – String Trio Op.20

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG – Pierrot Lunaire

Ilott Theatre, Wellington

Sunday, 25th November, 2012

Stroma brought up the 100th anniversary of Arnold Schoenberg’s landmark creation Pierrot Lunaire in unique style at Wellington’s Ilott Theatre, as part of a program featuring the music of both pupils and contemporaries of the composer.

Naturally, the concert’s focus centered firmly on Pierrot Lunaire, with the advance publicity’s imagery suggesting a theatrical presentation, one featuring the extremely gifted singer Madeleine Pierard. This performance took up the second half of the program, with Hanns Eisler’s Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Fourteen Ways of depicting Rain) sharing the first half with Anton Webern’s String Trio.

The Hanns Eisler work was played here in accordance with the composer’s original intention, in tandem with a film. Dedicated to Schoenberg on the occasion of his 70th birthday and scored for the same instrumentation as the master’s Pierrot Lunaire, the music was a manifestation of Eisler’s fascination with and study of music’s relationship to the medium of film. The composer “set to music” an existing silent film, Regen (Rain) made in 1929 in Amsterdam by filmmaker Joris Ivens.  Its montage-like construction featured scenes whose placement suggested a kind of understated interplay between natural elements, mostly rain, and people going about their business in a city.

Completing the first half was Anton Webern’s String Trio Op.20, to the uninitiated, a work presenting the wonder of new sensations, especially the lyrical explorations and variants of the same throughout the first movement, then with the second movement introducing what felt like a more “physical” kind of engagement, stimulated by greater contrasts of timbre and rhythm. Interesting that the performance was “conducted” by Hamish McKeich, something that, for me, added a kind of dimension to the sounds, almost like a life-pulse beneath the contrasting plethora of surface incident.

As for “Pierrot”, it has always been regarded as “new”, even a hundred years after its creation. After the premiere in Berlin in October 1912, with the composer conducting and Albertine Zehme as the vocalist, the musicians took the work around Germany and Austria. A critic after a performance in Augsburg the following month suggested that, in order for people to “understand, enjoy, or at least feel” the work, they would need to grow “ears of the future” – a statement with particular relevance for concert-hall audiences.

It’s a truism that in almost any creative sphere things which seemed like daring, almost anarchic cutting-edge first-up presentations can in many cases become absorbed by the main-stream of forward movement, and their edges rounded-off for more general consumption. Where “shock value” was and is an integral part of a work’s message, this can place extra stress on contemporary performers to try and replicate that essential sense of outrage and anarchy, public or private.

Of course, in a world all-too-accustomed to daily presentations of atrocity and carnage as television news entertainment and much worse (so I’m told) awaiting mere mouse-click activation via the Internet, it’s perhaps the performance-context that then becomes all-important for art-music.

I believe that’s why the “refined order” of the concert-hall and its age-old associations continues to allow music of all eras their specific kinds of impact and impressions. And, with reference to this present concert, even though our ears may have gotten “used” to the relative astringencies of the sounds produced by members of the “Second Viennese School” (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, et al…), in performance situations certain impulses activated by intensities unique to that performance will always have an impact.

Also, one doesn’t underestimate the increased familiarity and better-developed understanding of any work that comes with repeated exposure, a kind of “roundabout” that makes up for the loss of the shock value’s “swing”. This concert afforded us plenty of food for reflection along these lines, the items able to engage us in all kinds of ways and at different levels of receptivity, from surfaces to inner recesses.

Regarding the opening work by Hanns Eisler, I loved the combination of film and music on this occasion (being normally a last-ditch opponent of add-on visual accoutrement to music presentation). Of course, this was different to that, the film being the composer’s original inspiration for his music. On the face of it, fourteen musical vignettes stitched together would, one might think, produce a disjointed hotchpotch of impressions in sound, with no guarantee that the whole would be greater, etc….. But for a variety of reasons we as listeners seemed to be taken out of ourselves and ‘put in touch” with a kind of synthesis of sounds and images throughout, in places cleverly dovetailed, and in others interestingly contrasted in terms of feelings produced.

I could detect no strain, no discomfort or lack of co-ordination regarding the musicians’ performance (expertly duetted, cross-media-style, with the on-screen happenings through Hamish McKeich’s direction). It all seemed as one, the music-making reaching back from its immediate “face” to make the connections, as any piece of music might similarly fuse with aspects of a listener’s previous experience.

In the wake of Eisler’s work Webern’s Op.20 String Trio promised a potentially less immediate and engaging experience for the listener, an expectation that for me was confounded by the austere beauty of the sounds made by the trio of violinist Megan Molina, violist Andrew Thomson and ‘cellist Robert Ibell. Originally intended by the composer as a three-movement work, the surviving two movements seemed complementary, a kind of “air and dance” pairing. A commentator whose analysis I read called the work “jagged and severe”, qualifying the judgement with “yet strangely beautiful and lyrical”. The latter statement came out more readily with these musicians’ playing.

Here were finely-wrought exhalations of breath at the beginning, a gentle flow of movement, angular in places, and flecked with little irruptions and pizzicati impulses. Its companion movement seemed more impulsive, volatile in line and figuration as well as in dynamics, each player in this performance seeming both singer (in places more like “sprechgesang”) and listener, such was the playing’s interactive spirit throughout.

The interval done, Madeleine Pierard took the platform, dressed and made-up as Pierrot and accompanied by Hamish McKeich and the ensemble. She was stationed to one side, well-lit, while the musicians and conductor were in the centre. Immediately behind the group was a backdrop of a screen on which titles, translations and images were played, giving the audience plenty of help regarding the texts of the poems. First impressions were of an immediacy and clarity of utterance from both singer (beautiful diction) and players (beautifully-focused, transparent lines and atmospheric tones). The voice encompassed a frequently startling dynamic range, wonderfully mirrored by similarly explosive accents and contrasts from the players.

I confess I was transfixed by the clarity and focus of it all throughout the first couple of numbers. It actually took me until midway through Part One’s grouping of seven songs to regain my critical senses sufficiently to realize just why it was that Madeleine Pierard’s performance sounded so much more lyrical, wistful and engagingly human than any other singer I’d heard on record (I had never heard the work in concert before). She was actually SINGING a great deal of the text and sustaining many of the pitches of her notes to a greater extent that any other exponents of the role I’d encountered. There was, of course, variation in what I’d previously experienced, to the extent that, without a score it was impossible to plot precisely where Schoenberg had intended his “singer” to sing and where to break into speech, or at least “bend” the note pitches. But this performance was, to my ears, “sung” like no other I’d heard.

The effect was to “humanize” many of the poems’ utterances, and play down the more grotesque, often deranged-sounding modes adopted by the singer. Whether this was how Madeleine Pierard “saw” the work, along with her conductor, Hamish McKeich, or whether it was due partly or wholly to a lack of experience in performing it, resulting in more conventionally accepted modes of utterance being used, I’m not sure. Schoenberg himself was undoubtedly influenced when writing the work by the vocal capabilities of the first person to “create” the role of Pierrot, the actress Albertine Zehme (who, incidentally, chose the poems for the work). I came across a fragment of the correspondence between composer and singer-actress which was revealing:

The singing voice, that supernatural, chastely-controlled instrument, ideally beautiful precisely in its ascetic lack of freedom, is not suited to strong eruptions of feeling…..Life cannot be exhausted by the beautiful sound alone. The deepest final happiness, the deepest final sorrow dies away unheard, as a silent scream within our breast, which threatens to fly apart, or to erupt like a stream of lava from our lips…..We need both the tones of song as well as those of speech. My unceasing striving in search of the ultimate expressive capabilities for the “artistic experience in tone” has taught me this fact.

There was no doubting Madeleine Pierard’s considerable skills in bring this work to life, and her ability to make the words of the poetry pulsate – only in one or two instances did I feel that she hadn’t freed the music completely from the page, partly due to her playing-down the grotesque, spectral element which the sprechgesang mode would have helped emphasise – in Der kranke Mond which concludes the first part, she didn’t quite match the ambience of her flutist Kirsty Eade’s wonderful solo, her voice a shade earthbound, without the suspended gleam of the moonlight’s focus. But what a contrast, then, with her almost primordial, pitch-dark rendering of the following Nacht! – her deep-throated tones redolent of the abyss, as it were. She also captured the out-and-out horror of the Rote Messe, with its “gruesome Eucharist”, though I thought the sound of the words of Die Kreuze, the final song of Part Two, needed more of a certain spectral, “blood-bled” quality, something that more focused sprechgesang would have possibly given. But certainly there was vocal energy and finesse from this artist to burn.

The singer’s costuming and make-up was first-class, as was the organization of the backdrop screen and the timing of the text translations. I did wonder whether her lighting-pool was too unrelieved – some shadow on the face at certain angles would have given some contrast and allowed her a bit of freedom – as it was, every glance and every flicker of expression was laid bare, throughout. Make-up and costume suggested a theatrical statement was being made, and I felt it could have been followed through more strongly and consistently. Again,I don’t know whether Madeleine Pierard’s presentation was “directed” as such by anybody, but she could have been encouraged to incorporate what glances she did give her conductor (understandable in a score such as this!) into a kind of pattern of derangement or moonstruckness – something theatrical, or at least cabaret-like. And I would have liked her lighting to have had SOME shadow, a dark line allowing some facial contouring which she could have used for some respite along with more covert purposes.

Enough! Hang these comments, which matter far less than the fact that Pierrot was here a “tour de force”, a work whose stature was overwhelmingly conveyed by singer, conductor and players. Each of the instrumentalists did splendid things, conductor Hamish McKeich was the music’s flexible but unbreakable anchor-chain, and Madeleine Pierard’s voice gave us its beating heart. Performers and everybody associated with the Stroma team deserve our gratitude for giving us the chance to share so graphically and tellingly in a great work’s hundredth anniversary.

 

Gospel Truth – great singing from Gale Force Gospel Choir

Posted on by Peter Mechen

COLOURS OF FUTUNA – Concert Series

Gale Force Gospel Choir

Carol Shortis (conductor)

Futuna Chapel,

Friend St., Karori

Sunday 4th November, 2012

In a world where hype of all kinds relating to every sphere of activity seems to be piped into our houses with our drinking water, it’s refreshing (ha!) to encounter publicity for an event that turns out to be nothing but gospel truth – announcing this concert by the Gale Force Gospel Choir at Karori’s Futuna Chapel, the blurb read, “……a non-stop blast of foot-stompin’ mad-clappin’ gospel classics that will have you joining in before you know it..” Exactly so, and in the interests of maximum impact I could dramatize further by announcing that I was “throwing down my cyper-pen because that was all that needed to be said!”.

However, such was the pleasure afforded by this  cheek-by-jowl experience, It’s entirely fitting that I relive a few impressions in order to bask in the resonance of the occasion a little more, and perhaps encourage those who didn’t attend to seek out any subsequent occasions at which this group is performing and get similarly caught up with it all.

One of the things that gave the concert real distinction was the venue. Futuna Chapel, situated in Karori, was known to me from times past in an entirely different context, as a place of worship and spiritual retreat. My own experience was a “once-been-there-never forgotten” three-day residence while a callow, 1960s schoolboy, at what I thought at the time was this (still) magnificent place. The chapel, designed by the architect John Scott, and acclaimed in its day and since, has fortunately survived the ravages of time and greed intact, and is now available for our pleasure as a concert venue. The building enjoys protection as a Category 1 Historic Site, but the once-beautiful surroundings, which incorporated a good deal of native bush, have unfortunately been taken over and, for me, besmirched by “development” of the usual rapacious kind we’ve unfortunately come to expect these days. One gets an impression of individual housing units mercilessly jammed together for what imagines would have been maximum financial return for the developers.

Inside the chapel one is fortunately able to leave behind any such temporal preoccupations, and allow oneself to be transported into another world, in which light and colour play an integral part. I thought that the space seemed one in which almost any chamber-like performance of anything would bloom, through taking on the air, space and light of the ambience. Its character seemed at once abstract and personable, austere and warm. We could as well have gathered waiting for a string quartet to emerge to give us a performance of Bach’s “The Art of Fugue”, or for an actor to take the stage and read to us TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, as much as welcome the performers of the Gospel Songs we were expecting.

To begin the program conductor Carol Shortis brought different sections of her choir into the space antiphonally, making for a “surround” effect which enclosed us in a continually-changing sea of sound-hues, caused by the different harmonic strands keeping on the move until the altar-steps were reached. The choir’s singing of Way By and By while congregating on these steps, plus the backdrop of colour as the sun activated the stained-glass windows made a wonderful show of sight and sound.

All of the songs were taught to the group by Auckland composer and arranger Tony Backhouse, whose deployment of the rhythms and harmonic strands among parts of the group made for ear-catching effects in places. Carol Shortis welcomed us to the concert before setting the following I’m Glad to be in the Service, a song with real Gospel swing, one whose beautifully-harmonised control was allied to the kind of spontaneous outpouring of energy which made it sound as though its performers were truly imbued with the “spirit”, and , at the song’s end, unwilling to let go. An old slave-song Steal Away was no less heartfelt, the first unison note flowering into closely-knit harmonies, and opening into an almost militant middle section with the words “My Lord, He calls me on the Thunder”. Only slight lapses of tuning towards the softly-sung ending served to demonstrate to us the difficulty of some of this repertoire.

 

Keep so busy praisin’ my Jesus was begin by the men’s voices, the women lifting the song harmonically upwards to exciting effect, with plenty of dynamic variation in places like “If I don’t praise Him the rock’s gonna cry out!”. I’ve been in the Storm too long was another slave song, this one harmonically adventurous to the point of discomfiture in places, with disconcerting key-shifts capturing some of the raw desperation of the slaves’ plight. Some relief was afforded us with Ezekiel saw a Wheel, the tenors enjoying their downward glissandi on the word “Wheel”, and also with the following Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho, a song which dynamically ranged from opening whispers to great maestoso-like utterances, and a spectacular chromatic descent on the final “down”.

 

The catchy “ba-dum – ba-dum” rhythms of That’s All Right  used an arrangement by Stephen Taberner, a Melbourne-based Kiwi choirleader, one which nicely varied the “dynamics” of interaction between the different voices. More wayward was Nobody’s Fault But Mine, the concert’s final listed item, and one that featured three solo voices from the choir, the first of which was particularly outstanding, confident, true-toned and stylish! To our delight, we were treated to a brief reprise of this first voice at the end, a solo line answered by the full choir. In between times there were lines, counter-lines, clapping and minimalist-like repetitions, the rhythmic and melodic patternings of which seemed to move everybody’s spirit as one – then, to finish the concert Carol Shortis taught us, the audience, some of the patterns of the very first song, Way BY and By, so we could then join in with the choir’s encore – it was a great way to finish the concert and sent us all babbling happily out into the sunlight, thoroughly energized by what we’d heard – Gospel truth!

 

NZ Trio at Wellington City Gallery – beautiful assemblages

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZ Trio presents ART3

JOAQUIN TURINA – Piano Trio No.2 in B Minor Op.76

ALEX TAYLOR – burlesques méchaniques (2012) KARLO MARGETIC – Lightbox (2012)

ANTONIN DVORAK – Piano Trio No.4 in A Minor “Dumky”

NZ Trio

(Justine Cormack – violin / Ashley Brown – ‘cello

Sarah Watkins – piano)

City Gallery, Wellington

Civic Square

Wednesday 31st October 2012

An inspired choice of venue! – Wellington’s City Gallery is a place that has flexible space enough to play host to chamber music and instrumental performances whose ambiences then take on added dimensions due to their surroundings.

In this case, the performers were Justine Cormack, Sarah Watkins and Ashley Brown of the NZ Trio. On the program were works by Turina and Dvorak, but, significantly with two new compositions by New Zealand composers Alex Taylor and Karlo Margetic. These were not world, but Wellington premieres – Alex Taylor’s burlesque mécaniques was given its first public performance in Akaroa earlier in the month by the NZ Trio, and Karlo Margetic’s Lightbox in July in Auckland, by the same musicians.

Each of the new works seemed like “hot property” especially in the hands of the original performers, and in such close proximity to their world premieres. A different, but no less telling kind of proximity, gave the music’s edge and point greater and bolder relief – on the wall immediately behind the performance platform was artist John Reynolds’ painting Numbering Waves, part of the “Kermadec” exhibition currently on show at the Gallery.

This particular work (commented on as “inspirational” by Justine Cormack during her spoken introduction to the concert) made considerable play with our senses as we listened, a kind of creative enhancement of our experience of four very different pieces of music. And, of course it seemed to evolve as a world for us with each succeeding item, as well as with the changing light over time.

Beginning the concert was a piece I thought of as “high class teashop music” with an Iberian flavour, a Piano Trio by Joaquin Turina. A flowing sigh began the piece, something from the exotic distance but nevertheless engaging, followed by a flowing, Schumannesque melody, the playing taking us from light to light, shade to shade along the way. The second subject made me think of childhood holidays, nostalgic memories of innocent excitement conjured up by the sounds made by these splendid musicians. I was wanting more when the movement seemed to end somewhat abruptly!

Ghostly scampering began the second movement, here put across with plenty of élan, strings and piano nicely cross-rhythmed, then joining momentarily for a biting unison climax – again the salon-like feeling informed a languid interlude and a beautifully-flowing aftermath – gorgeous playing. The third movement’s opening found ‘cellist Ashley Brown steady on the high-wire, in a very violin-sounding register, the opening lento giving way to a variety of episodes throughout, characterful and quixotic, the musicians unlocking and opening every mood for our delight.

Alex Taylor’s piece, burlesques mécaniques was described by the composer as “a rather extroverted collection of grotesque miniatures, whose characters are not people or animals but dances”. Rather like a updated and extremely kinetic “Pictures at an Exhibition” in effect, the piece’s ten sections explored a kind of rhythmic dysfunctionality, whose expression, as the composer suggested, tended to confound rather than conform to the dance element. So the rhythms were often in conflict, and the piano played almost a devil’s advocate, often disruptive role in the proceedings.

The Prologue, which opened the piece, began as the whole intended to go on, the piano abrupt and volatile, the violin spectral, and the ‘cello relievedly holding onto a single note – interestingly, this state of things was reiterated in amplified form in the tenth and final section, which features a violent, confrontational opening, out of which the ‘cello emerged again holding an ambient note, while violin and piano fought a do-or-die battle for supremacy. No wonder that, at the end, pianist Sarah Watkins told us that the work was “wonderfully invigorating to play!”

As well as rhythmic desynchronization, the piece also explored a vast range of instrumental timbres – my notes were filled with descriptive exclamations regarding ear-catching timbres, “strangulated ‘cello tones”, “disjointed, pointillistic violin jabbings”, “piano a flash of colour across a page”, “melting, Dali-esque notes from strings”, and “growling cello voice”. The figurations, too, contributed to the pieces’ different characters, the violin’s and ‘cello’s cross-purposed rhythms in the fourth piece “A Spanner” (guess what rhythms!), and a “toccata trapped in a tunnel” aspect of the following “tumbledry” both extremely well-etched for effect.

And the last movement but one “Chain” even briefly took on humanoid characteristics, with the piano arpeggiating exploratory figures and the strings holding their notes, the effect like breathing or perhaps a heartbeat, certainly a pulse of some kind – for the composer an “alternative, interior world”, and for the uninitiated listener, a case perhaps of “where there’s life, there’s hope”?

So, here was engaging, and in places challenging music – I found it good that all of those individual ear-tickling moments were incorporated within clearly-defined sections giving the first-time listener both sequence and shape for the work as a whole, in fact making a virtue of the stop-go aspect of the piece. With Karlo Margetic’s work Lightbox, the challenges for the listener were different, as the music seemed longer-breathed and more deeply-layered, despite the irruptions and volatilities having a similar kind of timbral and colouristic flair to those of the previous piece.

Perhaps a clue to the music’s individual character was the composer’s statement in the program comparing a piano trio to a “transparent interplay of lines”, suggesting creative impulses and imaginings wrought in longish spans, and having outcomes that reflect these long-term evolutions. Lightbox had a number of these kinds of sequences, such as the gently rocking rhythms at the piece’s very beginning, with figurations turning in on themselves as if reconstituting on the spot, or so it seemed. Another was the piano’s ambient interlude-like sequence, perhaps two-thirds way-through, the sounds gently kaleidoscoping in a slow dance, an mood replicated later by the strings in Aeolian-harp-like mode, an almost ritualistic interaction of the three lines, the composer’s “strangely beautiful assemblage”.

But embedded in these beauties were tensions, the strings near the start finding ever-increasing “edge” in opposing counterpointed figures, before buzzing like angry bees when dive-bombing the piano’s slow, ceremonial dance. Warmth turned to spectral chill as the players resorted to col legno-like gestures, gradually tightening their figurations to breaking-point and dissolution in a sea of piano ambience. Someone made a remark at one point that a youthful audience member at the Auckland performance of this work had exclaimed that the music reminded him of transformers (toys which can change their appearance and character by swiveling and inverting different constituent parts) – and this “out of the mouths of babes” aspect of the remark certainly hit the spot in that particular aspect.

In both works the players of the NZ Trio made the notes sound like “their” music, with committed playing by turns trenchant and lyrical, sharply-focused and delicate. What a joy it must be for composers whose works enjoy such advocacy!

After the interval came Dvorak’s “Dumky” Trio, a work whose wonderfully layered intensities seemed perfectly in accord with what had gone before it in the concert, music with both vigour and lyricism, heartfelt utterance and gaiety, practically a whole world’s contrasting emotions knitted together in a whole. ‘Cellist Ashley Brown introduced the piece, his playing underlining as eloquently as his words the music’s near-tragic yearning at the opening, ‘cello and piano direct and full-throated in their outpourings, the former then singing as one with the violin before veering sharply into a complete contrast of character with a vigorous dance-rhythm, a precursor of the frequent mood-swings that permeate this attractive work.

I came away from this concert with renewed appreciation of the Trio’s compelling and wholehearted response to everything the group performs, and of the skills, energies and sensitivities the three players readily convey to their audiences – a wonderful occasion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Music-making with virtuosity, beauty and energy at Wellington Youth Orchestra’s last 2012 outing

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra – Final 2012 Concert

Music by Thomas Goss, Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms

Louis van der Mespel (double-bass)

Bianca Andrew (mezzo-soprano)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Wellington Youth Orchestra

Town Hall, Wellington

Sunday 21st October 2012

My second encounter of the year with a Wellington Youth Orchestra concert was in its way as pleasurable and invigorating as the first one  – and in fact I thought the orchestra played more confidently and assuredly this time round throughout the entire programme, in repertoire that posed a number of interesting and diverse challenges.

Hamish McKeich was again the conductor, and as was the case during the previous concert, demonstrated a feeling for a range of repertoire I’d not before associated him with. It seemed, on the face of things, a far cry from the fare I’d usually heard him direct, mostly with the contemporary music ensemble Stroma, to the worlds of both Rachmaninov and Berlioz (to name but two of the composers whose music the orchestra played), but he seemed just as at home with each of these respective worlds of sound and feeling as with any “modern” composer’s music.

Of course, present-day composition assumes an enormous stylistic and aesthetic range of expression, as the evening’s first concert item illustrated. This was Thomas Goss’s delightful Double Bass Concerto, written in 2004 and premiered the following year in Santa Rosa, California. It was played here brilliantly by Louis van der Mespel, his performance marking the young soloist’s success in winning the WYO Concerto competition earlier this year.

This work was intended by the composer as a kind of showpiece for the instrument, making use of its “natural” characteristics such as warmth, depth, resonance and available range of pitch and dynamics. In his program note Goss talks about the instrument’s “alternate view of virtuoso string playing” – and van der Mespel’s performance realized these unique characteristics with considerable aplomb.

I found the music had a kind of “English pastoral” feeling, predominantly lyrical and rhapsodic, a style assumed by the double-bass as well, with a few startling extensions to what one would expect from something like a viola or ‘cello! Particularly striking was the instrument’s high register under this young soloist’s fingers – his playing may have had the odd patch of edgy intonation, but such were few and far between.

Goss’s writing for the orchestra was lovely in places where one felt a kind of “outdoors” ambience, the wind-blown string phrases readily evoking open spaces, though ready when required to explore emotional responses to the same, whether reflective or passionate. Among other ingratiating moments were were sequences of dialogue between the soloist and, by turns, the respective leaders of the violin seconds and firsts.

The soloist was given a cadenza-like recitative towards the work’s end, splendidly expressive and wide-ranging, and especially notable for some beautifully-managed harmonics, contrasted with great growlings on the lower strings! A reflective mood dominated the work’s last pages, leaving a poetic, almost elegiac impression at the end. Splendid work from all concerned, and especially from the young soloist!

From double-bass to mezzo-soprano seemed a truly radical tonal focus-shift, but the rich and radiant beauty of singer Bianca Andrew’s opening phrases took us more-or-less immediately into Hector Berlioz’s world of turbo-charged sensibility, though hardly that, it must be said, inhabited by the same composer’s wonderfully hallucinatory “Symphonie Fantastique”.

Instead, with these songs Berlioz found a rather more finely-honed expression perfectly suited to the poetry of Theophile Gautier, the result being a sequence of settings at once sensuous, poetic and elegiac. We were fortunate to hear singing that was more than ready to respond to every inflection of the line and every colour suggested by the text, catching and holding the flavour of each setting so beautifully.

It seemed, too, the instrumentalists were inspired by Bianca Andrew’s radiance and focus throughout – though often not particularly glamorous in effect, the strings kept their intonations nicely in accord with their soloist, and the winds made some lovely accompanying melismas in places. Le spectre de la Rose was distinguished by a range of expression from the singer which conveyed all the bitter-sweet sense of fulfillment in death, raptly accompanied by conductor and players; and the contrasting dark passions of Absence here washed over us with telling force, the repeated cries of “Oh!” like searing sword-strokes to the heart, making the desolation at the end all the more hurtful to experience.

Though the text of the following Sur les lagunes spoke also of loss and desertion, the mood was somehow more radiant, more elevated, with eyes seemingly turned heavenward rather than downcast (“Above me the immensity of night spreads like a shroud”), the music’s grief almost transcendent in its upwardly-reaching outbursts, the highest notes countering the bitterness of those which transfixed the previous setting, Absence. Surely Bianca Andrew was born to sing this music, conveying such a heart-warming sense of release in the cycle’s final song L’Ile Inconnue (Berlioz’s fifth setting, Au Cimetière, was omitted) using her face as well as her tones to delightful effect, and conveying such a generosity of spirit with these heartfelt outpourings. Orchestra and conductor, too, seemed hardly able to contain their pleasure in realizing such beauties, earning the audience’s gratitude and appreciation at the end.

And then, after the interval, there was Brahms! – the Fourth Symphony, no less, a strong, dark, and in places melancholy work, relieved by a giant’s playground of a scherzo (in this and in other instances the most Brucknerian-sounding of all of Brahms’ music) and then capped off by a passacaglia whose heights and valleys, grandeurs and storms resemble those of a mountain range. Youthful energy and confidence kicked in beautifully at the start of the symphony, the occasional phrase snatched a little uneasily, but with most things nobly unfolding, as my notes attest – “conductor gets his strings to “ghost” their figurations nicely” – “big irruptions have plenty of energy, raw in places but spirited” – and “passionate strings – the strain on some of the high notes a sign of their sheer commitment”.

Despite some slightly awry ensemble as strings vied with winds to bring the movement’s coda together, the excitement was palpable, Hamish McKeich spurring his players on and concertmaster Arna Morton leading by vividly-projected example from the front of the strings as was her usual wont. Though the words ‘better to travel than to arrive” had some point in this context, there were apparent feelings of great satisfaction among the players in achieving their opening destination.

Though relatively dry-eyed and light-footed at the outset, the slow movement’s tender beauty was well-chartered, clarinets especially lovely – and I liked the work of the lower strings, violas and cellos who had the theme against the wind counterpoints later in the movement. Though not as “Brucknerian” as I’ve heard, the strings still put everything into their big chorale-like tune, a favorite sequence of mine within the movement, when it returns after a previous outing on the winds. What was Brahms thinking of when he wrote this music? – such regret, and (at the end) almost utter desolation, with only the final wind chord for solace.

The orchestra did its best to cheer the composer and us up afterwards with a rollicking performance of the scherzo, Hamish McKeich encouraging plenty of bucolic girth of texture from the strings and brass, and lovely swirlings from the winds – the music’s “schwung” came across in great waves of energy, contrasting beautifully with the trio’s noble horn tones and lovely string detailing.

As for the finale, with its monumental structures and huge vistas of contrast, the players faced the opening head-on, with full brass tones and sterling timpani work. Though the strings occasionally lacked pin-point attack through their syncopated figurations, they dug in splendidly elsewhere, unfailingly supported by conductor McKeich. The flute solo was gorgeous, and the dovetailing between winds and lower strings went particularly well. When the great mid-movement outburst came, the strings excelled themselves with steady ensemble and full, committed tones – the softer passages a bit further on posed more of an ensemble challenge, but the more stentorian bits were driven home with terrific conviction, the brasses punching out the cadences and the rest of the players making their instruments sing right to the very end. Through thrills and spills alike, it proved a very exciting and satisfying performance from orchestra and conductor.

Michael Houstoun at 60 – divining the depths of the Diabellis

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:

Michael Houstoun – 60th Birthday Recital

BEETHOVEN – 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli Op.120

Michael Houstoun (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Saturday 20th October 2012

It was probably pianist Artur Schnabel’s droll wit (documented elsewhere) which gave rise to the remark he made in a letter to his wife regarding the audience at a performance he gave in Spain of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations – “I am the only person here who is enjoying this, and I get the money – they pay, and have to suffer!”

A once-fashionable thought was, of course, that suffering was good for the soul; however, in Beethoven’s music, and especially in these variations, the moods are so varied and wide-ranging that any discomfort would surely be just a small part of a myriad of emotions, each with its own particular kind of nourishment for the spirit.

At Michael Houstoun’s Ilott Theatre birthday recital of these variations on what the composer called a “cobbler’s patch” of a tune, it seemed that things such as enjoyment, excitement, bliss, profundity and humour were paramount, rather than any hint of suffering. From those very first utterances, Diabelli’s garrulous little waltz seemed at once deftly placed and somehow ennobled – under Houstoun’s fingers the repetitive banalities grew a sequence of arches, through which the first of Beethoven’s variations then proudly and imposingly made its way.

Throughout this parade of wonderfully quirky characterizations Houstoun’s playing kept certain unities alive and flowing –  as per usual with him, nothing was fudged or ill-defined, the focus always sharp and bright, no matter how varied the touch or wide-ranging the dynamics. And at once his clarity of expression kept the structure taut and seemed to enlarge the music’s parameters of utterance.

That for me was Houstoun’s great achievement in this performance, making something distinctive and memorable of each of the individual variations, but keeping each within a greater, underlying flow of overall purpose. I would be prepared to stick my neck out a bit, here, and suggest that a younger Michael Houstoun would have unequivocally made his listeners aware of the music’s eventual destination, but allowed each of the variations less individual character, lest any of them stepped out of line or broke ranks. Here, the pianist’s maturity and understanding allowed us to experience the best of both worlds.

As commentator William Kindermann points out, these variations harbour great tensions of complexity which arise between Diabelli’s commonplace theme and the unlimited possibilities unleashed by Beethoven – and performances which attempt to “smooth out” or “call to order” the extremes of firstly banality and primitive impulse, and then profundity and intellectual severity don’t seem to me to completely “chart the course” of Beethoven’s achievement.

My notes on Houstoun’s performance suggest anything but a smooth ride or a regimented display – I’ve already described that feeling of some kind of opening grand processional by the composer into the world of the “cobbler’s-patch” waltz, which the pianist’s playing suggested; and other impressions were quick to follow – for example, Variation Four (Un poco piu vivace) was here beautifully sculptured movement, somehow finely-chiselled strength and liquid flow at the same time, while Variation Six (Allegro vivace) hurled out the trills both in treble and bass, the instrument in places roaring excitingly! By contrast Variation Fourteen (Grave e maestoso) brought before us a rich cortege with beautifully augmented resonances and nicely-terraced dynamics.

As to the underlying flow, Houstoun took us from this quasi-orchestral realization through the following five variations to the nineteenth’s Presto with nicely theatrical timing that made the most of both continuities and contrasts. The grave e maestoso was energized with the military strut of the following presto scherzando, which stimulated ensuing high-spirited scamperings, hard on its heels, of both of the succeeding Allegros, and then fell into a kind of “Well, thank goodness THEY’VE gone!” poco moderato interlude that resulted in a “That’s what YOU think!” rejoiner with Variation Nineteen’s aforementioned Presto.

Notes scribbled during a performance can take up an awful lot of space, as here – in the pages of his Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik journal, Robert Schumann could as a critic indulge his fancy freely in describing fleeting, spontaneous impressions suggested by both his own and other people’s music – those of us less endowed with insight have to be rather more circumspect! But reading these in situ thoughts of mine brought back the concentration and purpose that Houstoun brought to his traversal of the music, truly making it his own.

Our feelings concerning the pianist’s identification with Beethoven’s world were nicely activated by a short film before the recital, in which Houstoun talked about his lifelong relationship with the music, beginning with an account of a very specific “moment” for him involving a recording of the great “Appassionata” Sonata (educationalists will recognize a well-documented learning phenomenon, the “readiness” principle, here). The film valuably caught something directly and very naturally expressed, the beginnings of a musician’s journey whose progress up to and including the performance which followed had obviously reached a stellar plateau of achievement.

Rounding off the event was a presentation to Michael Houstoun at the performance’s conclusion by June Clifford, former Chairperson of the Chamber Music New Zealand Trust Board, marking both the pianist’s birthday and the extent of his artistic achievements in tandem with Chamber Music New Zealand over the years. There was no doubt in anybody’s mind regarding the appropriateness and significance of such an award – we in the audience felt both thrilled and honoured to be present at both music and history being made so very resplendently.

 

 

 

 

Organ recital at St.Peter’s on Willis – musical and ambient enchantment

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St.Peter’s Church on Willis, Wellington

Spring Organ Concert Series

Ian Webb (organ)

Music by JS BACH, BUXTEHYDE, SWEELINCK, VIERNE, ALAIN, GIGOUT

Sunday, 14th October, 2012

What an enchanting place in which to listen to music, I thought, while waiting and looking around from my pew-seat in St.Peter’s Church on Willis St. in Wellington. My reactions were undoubtedly fuelled by the afternoon’s sunbeams, whose wan and wintry outside effect somehow took on a transcendental quality, refracted through the west-facing windows of the church, immediately behind the congregation. The light came streaming in, bathing the whole of the space in front of the nave with a kind of refulgent glow, suggesting a kind of illumination from within as much as from without.

This was an effect I well remembered from a radiant performance of the Mozart Requiem given by the Bach Choir in this same church earlier in the year. And although there were fewer performers (one, in fact) this time round, the ambient light was still working its magic on the spaces and atmospheres, warming the hues and tones of the organ pipes and the surrounding structures.

It made for a kind of hushed expectation about the occasion, a performance from British organist Ian Webb, temporarily living and working in New Zealand not primarily as a musician but as a cardiologist at Wellington Hospital. He was, before leaving Britain, Organ Scholar and Director of Music at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.His activities in Britain indicate the extent of his skill as an organist, and what we heard him play this afternoon confirmed that status.

He began his recital with the Fantasia in G Minor BWV 542 by JS Bach, a performance which had plenty of “grunt” at the beginning, and then relaxed, richly and lyrically, throughout the quieter, more meditative sections. The instrument seemed to have plenty of power as required, without overwhelming, the reverberation having a blooming rather than a confused and muddying effect. Even in quicker, complex contrapuntal passages, the clarity of the player’s figurations was astonishing.

After talking a little about the remaining items on his program Ian Webb then gave us Vierne’s  Berceuse, subtitled “Pieces in free style”), his registrations creating a world of feeling away from Bach’s teutonic textures. The sound wasn’t unlike a wheezy harmonium, so very affecting and nostalgic (obviously tapping into my early memories of listening to my mother play our church’s organ). The textures here were beautiful, piquant and flavorsome, spare and sharply-focused, never weighty – for some reason I thought, “so very Catholic”, which may have been an heretical thought to have in an Anglican Church! Vierne’s “lullaby” theme lent itself to considerable evocation, with a withdrawn section towards the end redolent of oncoming sleep.

Johann Sebastian “Mighty Bach” (as Dylan Thomas’s Organ Morgan called him) returned with the well-known chorale Wachet auf, ruf ins die Stimme BWV 645, the familiar tune underscored with a deep-throated pedal accompaniment, the playing refreshingly sprightly rather than lugubrious, with the counter-chorale making its appearance on a divertingly raspy reed – all very physical and agile and serene at one and the same time.

I didn’t know very much about Jehan Alain, whose Litanies Ian Webb next played – the organist emphasized in his introduction Alain’s “Catholicity” and the composer’s attitude to prayer as a “burst of energy”. The forthright opening bore out the idea of a kind of irruption, the ensuing Allegro celebratory and festive, with a ear-catching “echo” effect, seeming at one stage to bounce and then rebound from the church’s walls. More meditative episodes were after a while broken into by enormous unisons, grand statements of the theme and its variants, bearing out Ian Webb’s description of the piece as “obsessional prayer”. Bach came to the rescue of our finer sensibilities with the following piece, An Wasserflussen Babylon BWV 653, a gentle, lyrical, quietly-meditative piece with wondrously sepulchral pedal notes!

Ian Webb then gave us some music by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, a modest piece with the grand title Variations on “Mein junges Leben hat ein End”, a dignified standard Protestant hymn-tune subjected to piquant changes of mode, registration and rhythm, at one point sounding a little like the “Coventry Carol”. The organist then seemed to literally pull out all the stops for the following piece by Bach to give the grandest possible contrast, the A major Prelude and Fugue BWV 536. The brief Prelude with its swirling toccata-like figures was splendidly realized, and the Fugue dignified and gently-moving at the outset, featuring chirruping piccolo-tones at one point, before gathering increasing girth and energy – Webb’s fingers falling over themselves in excitement at one point, but delivering the pay-off impressively.

I did know that Bach made a famous journey of over a hundred miles on foot to hear Dietrich Buxtehyde play, but Ian Webb assured us that Bach’s journey didn’t include paying court to Buxtehyde’s daughter, who was more than usually homely of appearance. That diverting thought was a secondary consideration to the music we next heard, the Chorale Prelude Nun bitten wir den Heiligen Geist, one of two Preludes written by the composer, and instantly proclaiming him as a creative force on a different plane to the more limited Sweelinck, the chorale melody ornamented freely and elegantly.

Concluding the recital, Ian Webb chose a piece from the French repertoire, Eugène Gigout’s Grand Choeur Dialogue, another grand, festive and wonderful piece which would, I think, have the effect of drawing the casual listener to further exploration of the French repertoire, especially when presented, as here, with such great flair. Gigout obviously knew how to build tensions within a piece in both predictable and unexpected ways. The music featured gradually tightening antiphonal exchanges between voices, but then would break off from such interactions to lead the ear along more contrapuntal pathways mid-exchange, before reverting suddenly to the give-and-take with heightened energies. I loved the conclusion of the piece – great chords, modulating in all directions, but somehow finding a single note to finish the music on – bravo! – as much for the player, Ian Webb, as for the composer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nicola Benedetti and the NZSO show their class

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents                                                                                               FORBIDDEN LOVE

YOUNG – Dance / BERNSTEIN – Symphonic Dances from “West Side Story”

TCHAIKOVSKY – Violin Concerto / Francesca da Rimini

Nicola Benedetti (violin)

Miguel Harth-Bedoya (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 13th October 2012

This NZSO concert was a show made up of various classy acts – perhaps the sum of its parts were greater than the whole, but those classy parts alone made it all memorable, if not perfect.

One of these classy acts was violinist Nicola Benedetti’s – she gave a beautifully warm and richly-toned performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Another was conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s inspired music-making with the orchestra throughout almost every moment of the evening. The latter were perfect partners for Benedetti in the concerto, and readily captured the warm nostalgia and heady exuberance of Kenneth Young’s Dance at the concert’s beginning. As for Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, the energy and brilliance of the playing was staggering, sounding as if the NZSO had been a pit orchestra for years in one of the Broadway music-theatres.

Only Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini didn’t for me exert its usual grip, though the winds and strings played their hearts out to wondrous effect throughout the work’s lyrical middle section, describing the awakening of attraction and deepening of love between the ill-fated, adulterous couple. I thought that, immediately after the Bernstein work, with its wonderful “instant-wow” quality, its tremendous exuberance, colour and visceral engagement, most nineteenth-century romantic music would sound terribly old-fashioned (as here), rhetorical and bombastic. We were being asked to suddenly take our sensibilities back a century, and to my ears the juxtaposition didn’t work, and especially in the case of poor old Francesca.

Had the order of the pieces been reversed, things would have been quite different – without the very twentieth-century jazzy excitement and cool sophistication of the West Side Story music in our ears, we could have more readily gone back to Tchaikovsky’s (and further back to Dante’s) worlds of sensibility and been more properly and deeply moved by the horror and pity of Francesca’s and her lover’s plight. The darkness of Tchaikovsky’s opening sequence, an evocation in music of the inscription over the Gates of Hell – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”, and the ceaseless buffeting of the roaring tempests which engulf the damned souls who sinned adulterously, would have had sufficient ambient room for the music to establish itself on its own ground and properly take us there. The work is, I believe, a masterpiece of nineteenth-century romantic tone-painting – but it needed to be played in a more appropriate context than here, where it seemed a bit like a “tack-on”.

I would have had an all-Tchaikovsky first half had I been programming the concert (what better context than that for a composer’s music?), and in the second half would have ended the evening with Ken Young’s beautiful and brilliant work. I did wonder to what extent the orchestra management might have been influenced in their choice of program order by having extra players involved in the Bernstein work (extra percussion and brass players), not wanting them to be sitting around waiting for their turn to play. Interestingly, I thought the brass and percussion players who did remain for Francesca, after playing so brilliantly and with such wonderful energy during the Bernstein, came across as a bit flat and lacklustre in the vigorous parts of the Tchaikovsky – there were a couple of wrong percussion entries in the latter work, which suggested that the musicians had, in fact, given their all during the “West Side Story” Dances.

I don’t think any change in order would have impaired the “Forbidden Love” idea of the program’s theme. As to that, such promotions I think tend not to be taken too seriously by people with a real interest in music, and therefore don’t really “impinge” deeply – I do recognize their value in attracting people who might be new to or unfamiliar with classical music and who like the feeling of having some kind of unifying idea to go with a single concert. Having said that, immediately after the concert I bumped into a friend (who would readily align with the “not really familiar with classical music” description) who asked me first up what the event’s title “Forbidden Love” had to do with the music that was played! – “res ipsa loquitur” (the thing speaks for itself), as my Latin teacher used to say.

As I’ve already indicated, apart from the order of saying the music and its performance were pretty wonderful – Ken Young’s Dance began with beautiful wind solos (what a gorgeous tone Michael Austin’s cor anglais has!) and the most luscious of violin solos played by concertmaster Donald Armstrong with just the right strain of nostalgic feeling  flecked here and there with astringent impulses. These awakened the music’s rhythmic undercurrents, which rose up to throw back the floodgates of joyous abandonment, suffusing our sensibilities with crackling energies. I always think of Messiaen in places in this music, and wonder to what extent Young’s own conducting of performances of that composer’s Turangalila Symphony influenced the outcomes of this piece. It’s by no means a carbon copy, but the uninhibited spirit of it all reminds me of both Joie du sang des etoiles and the finale from Messiaen’s wonderfully outlandish work.

Nicola Benedetti came, saw and conquered – from her very first note there was a beautiful and distinctive tone served up for us, rich and supple, and able to be fined down when required and still be heard. She played the work very sweetly and romantically, preferring to keep the line smooth rather than really point the dotted rhythms – her articulation was seamless in places, but always characterful and filled with nuancing, never bland and all-purpose – and she also had this quicksilver ability with the faster music, which really energized those passages that needed a higher voltage. Her performance of the finale wasn’t of the kind which evoked some sort of peasant folk-fiddle with all of the wild abandonment and raw, rough-edged excitement of that kind of playing; but it was exciting in a more aristocratic, finely-honed sort of way. You would be hard put to equate critic Eduard Hanslick’s famous put-down of the music after its Vienna premiere with what we heard Nicola Benedetti do – Hanslick complained that “the violin is not played, it is yanked, torn, beaten black and blue – we see savage, vulgar faces, we hear violent curses, we smell bad brandy – for the first time we are able to image music that stinks to the ear!” I somehow think Hanslick wasn’t terribly sympathetic to Tchaikovsky’s music.

Another thing that Benedetti did was open up the cuts which have plagued this work over the years and especially on record – they’re mostly in the finale, and they’re pretty pointless, a remnant of an age of cavalier treatment of music by violinists who actually thought they were “improving” the composer’s work. All these cuts did was make the music slightly shorter and throw the balance out between the orchestra and soloist during the finale’s opening – I think Tchaikovsky knew what he was doing in the first place (though like many composers, anxious for people to like their work, he possibly agreed to the incisions made by those first performers at the time). Anyway, Benedetti, as do most modern virtuosi (but not all!) restored these several passages of figurations for the soloist, and played them brilliantly.

As for the orchestra under Miguel Harth-Bedoya, the playing was exciting, committed and brilliant, beautifully sounded and nobly proportioned, finding that balance between elegance and excitement that makes the music work. It was no wonder that, at the first movement’s exciting conclusion, the audience simply couldn’t help itself and burst into spontaneous applause, all seeming very natural and emotion-driven, so that no-one could possibly make a fuss of the “Oh, no, you don’t do that sort of thing at a concert!” variety. It would have seemed very unnatural to have sat there and done nothing in response to such fabulous music-making.

So, immediately after the interval we were taken to the world of the Jets and the Sharks and the hopeless love of two people torn apart by racial strife, all realized brilliantly and colourfully in Leonard Bernstein’s music – a set of Symphonic Dances from his 1957 Broadway show West Side Story. Right from the beginning Miguel Harth-Bedoya’s direction of the music had what sounded to my ears like an authentic rhythmic swagger, a mixture of “cool” and intensely physical, which underlined every moment of the score, even the quieter, lyrical moments. The original show has, of course a strong dance-drama aspect anyway, enabling some sequences to be lifted straight from the stage action – though some of the dances were complete “makeovers” by the original orchestrators, Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, of famous tunes like “Somewhere” and “Maria”.

Harth-Bedoya and his players produced veritable oceans of galvanic energy, here, which caught all of us up in its excitement. It demonstrated what musicians such as those in the NZSO could produce when encouraged, or when avenues  slightly outside the paradigm of classical performance were explored, to everybody’s advantage – with, of course, the proviso that one needed to be careful how one arranged programs with entirely different types of music in them. I loved the energy and exuberance the players brought to the Mambo, complete with finger-clicking and shouts of “Mambo” – so exhilarating.

Despite my reservations concerning the concert’s last item, Tchaikovsky’s Francesca, already discussed above, the performance generated enough visceral excitement right at the end to provoke enthusiastic shouts and plenty of applause – incidentally, I’ve always felt a bit ashamed regarding my enjoyment of the all-too-obvious orchestral thrills at the end of this work in the concert-hall, considering the pity and horror of the subject-matter (Dante, in his Divine Comedy writes, at the conclusion of Francesca’s tale of adulterous love, murder and eternal torment, “While the one spirit thus spoke the other’s crying / wailed on me with a sound so lamentable / I swooned for pity like as I were dying / and, as a dead man falling, down I fell.”). Shouldn’t one perhaps feel similarly horror-struck by it all at the end, instead of leaping to one’s feet cheering and applauding virtuoso orchestral playing?  But let’s be reasonable about this – if somebody’s at fault here, it’s probably Tchaikovsky!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stroma’s beautifully “luminous horizons” at Ilott

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – LUMINOUS HORIZONS

Music by SCIARRINO, PESSON, CLEMENTI, TAÏRA, SAARIAHO, CAVALLONE

Roberto Fabbriciani (flute)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Stroma

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Thursday, 11th October 2012

Five of the six works in this Stroma concert were New Zealand premieres, and one of these was a world premiere (Paolo Cavallone – Hóros). The odd one out was Yoshihisa Taïra’s highly theatrical and dramatic Synchronie, a kind of “Duelling banjos” for two flutes, which one imagines being readily enjoyed by all but the most conservative listeners. For that reason, I wasn’t surprised to find that it’s already been heard here.

Such a high proportion of unfamiliar music in a concert might be an an enticing prospect for some listeners, and a somewhat daunting outlook for others. Still, it would be fair to say that audiences who attend contemporary classical music concerts are generally pretty dauntless, being well used to having their ears pinned back by the originality of the sounds.

This concert would have thrilled the regularly adventurous ones, but on a number of counts had qualities which would have readily furthered the cause of contemporary music for people who might not have been “regulars” but in this case were attracted to its novelties. While one could have questioned the absence of a New Zealand work, the presentation’s title “Luminous Horizons” suggested an attractively exotic, far-from-here quality about the content which worked throughout superbly well.

A drawcard for aficionados was the presence of legendary flute-player Roberto Fabbriciani, whose virtuoso playing and interest in “new” sounds inspired various European composers from the 1970s onwards to explore what was initially a radical world of microscopic sonorities and nuances in music – what Stroma director Michael Norris called in his illuminating program note “this fragile, transient world”.  At least two of the evening’s works had direct connections to Fabbriciani, with the most recent, Paolo Cavallone’s  Hóros, including in its reference of dedication the Stroma players and artistic directors.

Straightaway Roberti Fabbriciani showed his credentials by opening the concert with a performance for solo flute of Salvatore Sciarrino’s eponymously titled L’orizzonte luminoso di Aton. Aton (sometimes spelt “Aten”) is a manifestation of the sun in Egyptian mythology. This was music born “on the breath” as it were, the sounds eschewing normal tones and pitch and concentrating instead on their edges and undersides, their parameters and foundations. The program note drew a parallel between sound and light in the respect that the latter suggests, defines and obscures its own shadow, the two states indivisible.

Sciarrino’s work created a world of suggested light, activating our imaginations with those aforementioned parameters, and setting in motion what Tennyson described in a different context in his poetry: – “our echoes roll from soul to soul / and grow forever and forever….” Fabbriciani’s evocation of Sciarrino’s world was, for this listener, spellbinding, with player and instrument seeming firstly to fuse before our very eyes and ears, breathing as one. But then sprang up what seemed like in places a fiercely intense dynamic between musician, flute, music and listener, with sounds and gestures constantly varying the focus of attention.

Gerard Pesson’s Nebenstücke was a kind of rumination by the composer on musical memory, focusing in particular on Brahms’ B Minor Ballade Op.10. I liked the composer’s description (reproduced in the programme) of his memory of the piece having “gradually corroded like an object that had fallen into the sea”, but augmented by the same process as well, “encrusted with elements that my own musical works had added to it”. Pesson’s work established a skeletal rhythm at the start, with muffled timbres sounding either waterlogged, or decrepit with age, the piece’s movement causing bits here and there to fall off. Perhaps I was influenced by the composer’s programme-notes, but I did tune into what sounded throughout this opening section like the shades of a ghostly Viennese waltz.

A trio-like sequence desynchronized the music for a bit, a warm string chord coming to the rescue and inspiring the clarinet to breathe some life-blood into the proceedings, the violin accompanying and the ‘cello counterpointing. Ghostly memories paraded before our ears, strings swelling and receding, playing a combination of arco and pizzicato – while the strings consorted thus with the clarinet, the viola explored the stratospheres, until the concluding impulses left us with something of a shadow-world, toneless clarinet-breath and soundless string-bowings putting the dream to rest.

There was more than a whiff of theatricality about Aldo Clementi’s 1983 Duetto, featuring partnerships within partnerships – two clarinets and two flutes, everybody taking up antiphonal positions. Clementi’s “variation on a theme” scenario was begun by Bridget Douglas’s flute, with the others following canonically, but each sounding as if pursuing a kind of improvisatory course, a slightly “curdled hall-of-mirrors” prescription. I found the textures and juxtapositionings wonderfully claustrophobic in places, especially when the clarinets were closely intertwined – at one point they were playing in seconds, and their timbres seemed to completely crowd out the ambiences – by comparison the flute intertwinings had the opposite effect, opening the sound-vistas up and suggesting far-flung spaces.

Roberto Fabbriciani amusingly drew our attention to a squeaky floorboard on which he had to stand while playing Yoshihisa Taïra’s Symchronie opposite Bridget Douglas, armed with her own instrument – this highly combatative piece arose from its composer’s imaginings of Japanese warriors in battle, leaping across clouds in the sky (a scenario somewhat reminiscent of a particular Japanese computer-game my teenaged son went through a recent phase of playing, and which the music also reminded me of), and manifested itself here as a kind of confrontational show-down between two players and their instruments.

Throughout this extremely theatrical and volatile piece I was amazed as to how aggressively-toned the sounds made by a flute could be. Every sound it seemed possible to make on the instruments, and then more besides, seemed to be fetched up by these players, along with occasional normally-vocalised shouts and yelps. But the over-riding feeling at the end was that of some kind of ritualized conflict, with certain protocols observed, despite the unbridled nature of some of the utterances from both instruments.

A piece by Kaija Saariaho followed, Cloud Trio, a work for strings alone, played here by violinist Rebecca Struthers, Andrew Thomson (viola) and Rowan Prior (‘cello). The composer’s own note about the music evocatively described the different instruments’ pictorial and structural functions in the piece – the upper (violin) and lower (‘cello) instruments evoking reverberation and shadow respectively, in between which the viola created the substance related to these effects. Saariaho indicated she was inspired by cloud formations over the French Alps, and her writing during the opening section of the work had what seemed like an intensely “analogue” character, lines filled with curves, bends, stretches and dissolutions, which suggested constant, gradual evolution.

The players beautifully caught both the energies of the second part, with the process of formation and dissolution sped up to a frenetic pace, and the toccata-like asymmetric patternings of the brief third movement with its follkish-dance suggestions. And the instruments beautifully coalesced throughout the lazily unfolding final movement, its melodies and figurations beautifully dovetailed by the composer, everything drifting in a similar direction overall while maintaining a kind of impulsive independence.

Roberto Fabbriciani returned with the ensemble to finish the concert with Paolo Cavallone’s Hóros, written this year for Fabbriciani and the Stroma ensemble, and here given its world premiere. This work was practically a flute concerto, and, like Aldo Clementi’s work earlier in the evening, took an existing piece of music as its starting-point, in this case, Chopin’s E Minor Prelude. This time, though, we actually heard a recording of the Chopin, played in the darkness immediately after the reading of a poem by Cavallone, the text of which was printed in the program – a meditation concerning spaces, distances, and boundaries.

From the darkness of this extremely theatrical opening came light and the sounds of instruments being activated by breath and bow, and developing a rich spectrum of colour and texture. Confrontations and re-inventings followed, the solo flute playing Mercutio to the ensemble’s Romeo, leading and teasing, light-fingeredly suggestive and gently mocking, the music opening and narrowing spaces between lines and timbres as did the Chopin Prelude. Over the last few pages the composer took us to different realms, the ensemble “reinventing” the ambient space of the opening, and making peace with the soloist.

So many notes, all of them unfamiliar ones! – but thanks to some judicious programming and excellent playing, and bags of individual and ensemble personality from flutist Roberto Fabbriciani and the Stroma players, I found this concert a stimulating and warmly intense listening experience.