Author: Peter Mechen

Listening to ourselves: Voices New Zealand

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents

VOICES OF AOTEAROA

Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir

Karen Grylls (director)

Horomona Horo (taonga puoro)

Music by Hildegard of Bingen, David Childs, Douglas Mews, Morten Lauridsen, Christopher Marshall,

Helen Fisher, David Griffiths, David Hamilton, Benjamin Britten, Henry Purcell (arr. Eriksson)

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday, 19th November, 2011

The concert was brought into being by the sounds of a trumpet played by Horomona Horo, creating both a ceremonial and a haunting effect, and thus suggesting limitless possibilities. One of these, appropriately resembling a voice from long ago, was a Sequence composed by Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century abbess, poet, composer and mystic. Growing beautifully from out of the expectant silence, the text O viridissimi Virga sung the praises of the Virgin Mary, hailing her as the “greenest branch” from which sprang “harvest ready for Man, and a great rejoicing of banqueters”. Hildegard’s unison lines were then interspersed among the choir’s voices, Pepe Becker’s beautifully stratospheric soprano tones prominent amongst them, to which was added the gentle counterpointing of another of the taonga puoro, on this occasion a flute. The presentation seemed like a kind of ritual of birth, of bringing the music into being by awakening the spirit within each and every voice – and on this occasion calling up a creative impulse to speak to us from half a Millennium away – all very impressive in a quiet and undemonstrative manner.

David Child’s lyrical Salve Regina followed, the vocal lines baroque-like in their detailing and deployment – solo, small group and whole ensemble interacting as a living organism, conductor Karen Grylls achieving with the voices a great haunting beauty at the concluding words, “O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria”, aided by a mesmeric repetition of the word “Maria” at the end.

From “Saints and Angels” (the works were bracketed thus throughout the concert) we moved to “Voices of Fire”, beginning with the coruscations of Douglas Mews’ Ghosts, Fire and Water,a work which made a huge impression on me when I heard it performed some years ago. Written in 1972, it was inspired by a poem by British author James Kirkup, his response, in turn to a series of paintings which became known as the “Hiroshima Panels”, and whose subject was the dropping of the first atomic bomb on that city in 1945. The opening lines “These are the ghosts of the unwilling dead” sets the sombre tone of the work, the stark vocal lines having no warmth, expressing only horror and shock at the effects of the carnage, sometimes bleak unisons, sometimes irruptions of biting repetitions of figurations. Spoken voices are powerfully set against the singing in places, the phrase “Love one another” in different languages over a hymn-like backdrop, the silence at the end as eloquent as the last utterances.

A different world of feeling, indeed, from Morten Lauridsen’s Madrigali, which followed – six settings of Renaissance verses by various poets, all in praise of “love’s fire” – hence the Six “Fire Songs” of the work’s full title. Each setting is informed by the composer’s initial “fire-chord”, a cluster of intensities, sizzling and coruscating, impulses that recur throughout the cycle. I liked the contrast between the lively and capricious No.3 “Amor, Io Sento L’alma”, a depiction of a growing conflagration of love, and the tearful despair of the following “Io piango”, the weeping underpinned by a mournful bass line. And the concluding “Se per Havervi, Ohime!” set a ground-swelling clustered-harmonied hymn at the beginning through to a rapt, rich sinking conclusion, enlivened by a brief upward impulse at the end, everything beautifully and robustly characterized by the voices.

Then came “Voices of the Earth and Sea”, Karen Grylls talking with us briefly about the works in this bracket being a “collage of landscape”. Helen Fisher’s Pounamu was the one that made the deepest impression on me, the flute-sounds conjured up by Horomono Horo in haunting accord with the long-breathed vocal lines, the Maori text a proverb from Tainui, beginning with the words “May the calm be widespread…..” and later evoking “the shimmer of summer” with constantly undulating lines and the flute’s cry riding the skies like a falcon in watchful flight – all of this was so beautifully realized.

Christopher Marshall’s Horizon 1 (part of a larger cycle of settings) briefly but effectively set words by Ian Wedde from a poem “Those Others’, referring to the Maori view of creation, and sounding the unceasing “breath of life” behind the alto’s beautiful but austere line. Then, David Griffiths’ two vignette-like pieces from the work Five Landscapes took us firstly to Southland’s Oreti Beach, and afterwards to Mount Iron, a Wanaka landmark – the first characterized by ceaselessly complaining winds, and the second filled out with hugely imposing blocks of tone, punctuated by quieter harmonic clusters.

A new and stirring work by David Hamilton rounded off the local content of the program – Karakia of the Stars. Here, voices were used instrumentally, along with Horo’s koauau patternings, the sounds of tapping stones, and the Arvo Pärt-like tintinabulations of little bells – the singers and instrumentalists having evoked the starry firmament, the chant welled up from terra firma, the mens’ voices counterpointing the womens’, underpinned by stampings and gesturing and resounding through the spaces. A note from the composer told us that the chant was part of a longer invocation to the stars “to provide a bountiful supply of food for the coming year” – a ‘between-the-lines” election-year message for our politicians, perhaps?

Lastly, “Voices of Nature” presented music from two of England’s greatest composers, Britten and Purcell – firstly, Britten’s beautiful Five Flower Songs, all but the last settings of English poetry, the exception being the traditional “Ballad of Green Broom”. From the madrigal-like realization of the opening “To Daffodils”, through the angularities of “Marsh Flowers” and the rapt hymnal of “The Evening Primrose”, these songs brought to our ears a wonderful synthesis of creative imagination and stunning performance evocation, ending with smiles at the wry wit of the composer’s “Green Broom” setting. Normally, such a bouncy, good-humored number would nicely round off a concert, but the ensemble chose instead to enchant us further with Purcell’s Music for a While, a song written for John Dryden’s tragedy “Oedipus”, here arranged for choir by Gunnar Eriksson. Pepe Becker’s pure, focused tones were very much to the fore, here, delivering the melody with searing beauty, the lines harmonized in places by women’s voices and the ground bass patterns vocalized by tenors and basses. It seemed for a few intensely lovely moments to tell us just why it is we listen to music and go to concerts.

Georgina Zellan-Smith – fond piano memories

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REMEMBRANCE

– and other favorite piano pieces

Georgina Zellan-Smith (piano)

 Ode Records CDMANU 5101

I must confess my first reaction upon receiving this CD was of surprise that so gifted an executant as Georgina Zellan-Smith would expend so much of her energies on “faded trifles” such as these. Especially in the wake of the same pianist’s excellent Beethoven/Hummel CD, whose interesting and unique compilation of repertoire “enlarged” the piano-playing world for me, I thought this collection seemed, by comparison, somewhat surplus to requirements, replicating many such “Great Piano Melodies”  or “Gems of the Piano Repertoire” kind of presentations.

What I didn’t take into account was the pleasure to be had from listening to a sensitive and insightful interpreter cast fresh light on these pieces. Being the child of a piano teacher, I had every note, every phrase of both “Remembrance’ and “The Robin’s Return” indelibly etched upon my musical memory, albeit refracted through the all-too-fallible fingers and youthful sensibilities of my mother’s piano pupils. I fancy she would occasionally have pushed them off the piano stool in frustration and actually demonstrated how certain passages would go, which would account for my having more-or-less musically coherent memories of each piece – and in the case of “Remembrance’ probably augmented by performances on the radio of people like Gil Dech.

Georgina Zellan-Smith plays each of these opening “flagship” pieces with what I can only describe as exquisite taste – she fuses a judicious amalgam of bright-eyed clarity with occasional dollops of ambiently-yellowed sentiment; and in each case the result is, for me, well-nigh irresistible. Apart from a slight mis-hit in “Remembrance” she makes every single note tell. The same goes for the following item, the ever-popular “Rustle of Spring”, one of the great “light” pieces of piano music, here conjuring up even more childhood memories, so that, like Dylan Thomas’s boyhood self in his story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, I’m forced to plunge my hands into the piece’s snowfall of notes and come up with whatever I can grasp – such is the compulsion of the resonances unlocked by this music.

Christian Sinding’s lovely seasonal piece reminds me, along with Edward McDowell’s “To A Wild Rose”, of other miniature works whose elegant craftsmanship has ensured their immortality – another example, though not on this recording, is Debussy’s “Clair de lune”. In all of these pieces the music’s intrinsic qualities reward in some way even the most interpretatively bland performances. “Rustle of Spring” in particular has a certain “layered” quality beneath the exquisite harmonies, allowing different performances to uncover whatever their interpretative capacities can realize. Sinding cleverly plays with both major and minor modes throughout, knowing when to flood his textures with sunbeams and when to drift the mists back through the sound-vistas – it may be unashamed emotional manipulation, but I dearly love it. Georgina Zellan-Smith’s performance of Sinding’s piece takes its time at the outset, gradually allowing the Spring’s impulses to awaken the textures, though her unhurriedness meant that some of the left-hand figurations lack the occasional touch of volatility and energy. Still, if pressed I would state a preference for her way to the rather more superficially exciting, but often somewhat mechanical renditions by other pianists I remember hearing.

Grieg’s “To the Spring” evokes seasonal change more ritualistically, though the piquancy of both textures and harmonies can’t help but exert a gradual spell upon the listener. A casual hearing suggests that Zellan-Smith plays the notes “straight” at the outset, but if one listens and breathes the phrases with the pianist, one feels their varied pulsations, sensitively and subtly delineated. Even more abstracted is the same composer’s “Papillon”, or “Butterfly”  as it’s called here, the angular delicacies of the creature’s flight being less quicksilver and gossamer, and more studied under Zellan-Smith’s hands, like an oriental etching on a screen or fan, exchanging volatility for grace and elegance.

There are too many pieces to fully comment upon individually – some are predictably engaging as performances (Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” and Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca”, for example), while others lie in wait to snare the unsuspecting in nooses of delight (Liadov’s “A Musical Snuff Box” for one). Albert Ketelbey’s “In a Persian Market” is a rip-roaring success, here, its quaint chocolate-box exoticism given a bit of extra grunt by the pianist in places with strongly-etched rhythms and glowing harmonic colorings. Another success is Handel’s eponymous “Largo”, here completely avoiding the treacly ooze generated by numerous Victorian arrangements for organ and orchestra, in favor of a clearly-etched cavatina-like outpouring of lyricism, far more in keeping with Handel’s original, from the opera “Serse”. And I loved hearing the Paderewski Minuet again (I used to listen to Jose Iturbi’s 78rpm recording of the work, which was on the “B” side of Iturbi’s recording of THE Prelude by Rachmaninov). Zellan-Smith’s delight in the dance comes across as sprightly as with any polonaise.

In short, far from sounding like “faded trifles”, a lot of the pieces re-emerge as glowing gems in Georgina Zellan-Smith’s hands, with everything nicely characterized and differentiated. From the sultry indolence of Mendelssohn’s G Minor Gondola piece we’re taken to the scented elegance of the Russian night with Anton Rubinstein’s Romance, for example; and while the third of Franz Liszt’s Consolations creates whole vistas of refined romantic sentiment, its old-worldliness sets off Kiwi composer Douglas Lilburn’s bright, breezy, out-of-doors Prelude which follows, to perfection. While I thought Auguste Durand’s Waltz a bit of a long haul, I was delighted with another old friend, Gabriel Morel’s Norwegian Cradle Song, amply prepared for with a beautifully-modulated performance of the Adagio from Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata.

A beautiful and simple rendition of Princess Te Rangi Pai’s “Hine e Hine” leads to the disc’s final item, “Love’s Old Sweet Song”, by James L. Molloy, one of these songs whose main tune is familiar, but which brings with it a verse-refrain that I don’t recall, possibly through not having ever heard it. The music’s delivered with the poise and grace that distinguishes the playing throughout. Touchingly, Zellan-Smith has dedicated the CD to the memory of long-time music retailer Murray Marbeck, whose idea instigated this project, but who died before its completion. Recorded in the Music Theatre at Auckland University by Wayne Laird, and released by Ode Records, the excellently-caught piano sound rounds off a venture whose artistic success has, I freely admit, set my ears attuned to the strains of an oven-timer, about to signal that my humble pie is cooked and ready to be eaten.

 

Stop Press: Georgina Zellan-Smith is giving a recital in Wellington at a house-concert on Tuesday 22nd November: seating is limited, so e-mail mgeard@windowslive.com for booking information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Douglas Lilburn’s “Winterreise” twice-told by Roger Wilson and Bruce Greenfield

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Flowers of the Sea :  A Celebration of New Zealand Music

LILBURN – Sings Harry (words by Denis Glover) / Elegy (words by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell)

DOORLY – The Songs of the Morning

FREED – The Sea Child (words by Katherine Mansfield) / War with the Weeds (words by Keith Sinclair)

BODY – Songs My Grandmother Sang

Roger Wilson (baritone)

Bruce Greenfield (piano)

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn Rd., Lower Hutt

Wednesday 5th October 2011

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

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 

One should never underestimate the power of headlines as attention-grabbers! Experience suggests that some of these printed declamations are blatantly untrue, some patently absurd, and still others somewhat far-fetched (the few that are left have the merest grain of verisimilitude).

In the present case, equating Douglas Lilburn’s 1951 song-cycle Elegy with Schubert’s Winterreise might be an impertinence for some people – in which case they will qualify the heading of this review for one or more of the three counts listed above – but at least they’ll have read this far, and might be tempted to go on, ready to “pounce on the howlers”, on further absurdities and exaggerations. I take full responsibility for the said impertinence.

Whatever the reader’s thoughts might be concerning the relative merits of both Schubert’s and Lilburn’s similarly “well-weathered” cycles, the parallels between each composer’s work are fascinating. Certainly, the theme of anguish through loss expressed over the course of a number of songs is not uncommon in the European art-song tradition, something that Douglas Lilburn, being no mean Schubertian as suggested by some of his own compositional inclinations (especially in his piano music) would have been well aware of.

Grief to breaking-point – that is what we encounter in Schubert; and the grief of loss is all too palpably expressed in Lilburn’s settings of Alistair Campbell’s Elegy poems as well. These were written by the poet to commemorate the death of a friend in a mountaineering accident among the Southern Alps in 1947. It’s true that the consequences for the poet in the latter are rather less injurious in mind or body than the death and derangement depicted in the Schubert cycles – possibly because in Elegy a young man’s death is the work’s pre-given starting-point – and a good deal of the grief and anger seems to be “shared” by the rugged New Zealand alpine landscape, dramatically beset by elemental storms, enabling a fierce and harrowing process of reconciliation in the face of a harsh natural order of things.

Giving rise to these thoughts was a pair of performances I heard recently of the Elegy cycle by baritone Roger Wilson, with pianist Bruce Greenfield. The first occasion, in Lower Hutt’s Church of St.Mark, Woburn, was apparently a hastily-organised affair in response to a cancellation of an already-scheduled concert; while the second took place in Wellington under similar circumstances, as a “filler” for another cancelled concert, this time at St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace. Incidentally, Bruce Greenfield was a last-minute ring-in at Lower Hutt, as pianist Gillian Bibby, who’d performed most of this program with Roger Wilson earlier in the year in Wanganui, had commitments elsewhere. Singer and substitute pianist had performed some of Elegy together before, but the pair had never collaborated in Lilburn’s “other” song-cycle, Sings Harry, (a 1953 setting of six of Denis Glover’s eponymous poems). As well, there were two other brackets of works, each of which had a “family connection” with the singer, and, in conclusion, Jack Body’s quixotic Songs My Grandmother Sang.

(At this point I ought to warn readers that this is going to be a longer-than-usual review – the two Lilburn song-cycles are of such importance, to “pass lightly” over them seems to me a near-criminal offence! So, I’m recording my impressions of both works and comparing the two performances as best I can.)

Having recently made a study of Lilburn’s Elegy for a radio programme I was thrilled to be able to hear the work performed “live”, especially from an artist who hadn’t recorded the cycle. Just as fascinating was the context of the performances, in each case paired with Sings Harry, a combination of contrasts that I’d discussed in conversation with a number of singers and pianists. Here, I thought each work the perfect foil for the other, both stronger and more sharply-focused by juxtaposition, as it were – even if the effect of the pairing underlined the lightweight nature of the remainder of the programme’s music.

Wisely, the pair began in each case with Sings Harry, Bruce Greenfield’s piano-playing salty and pungent from the beginning, the notes of that opening strummed like those of a guitar. Roger Wilson’s voice was of a balladeer’s of old, the words self-deprecatory but intensely noble, deserving of the moment of stillness at the end. The following “When I am old” glinted with droll humour and defiance of age, the rollicking rhythms suggesting flashes of past energies and impulses (“Girls on bicycles turning into the wind….”). I thought the Lower Hutt performance of this a little more “buccaneering” than the Wellington one, the latter seeming more wry and even detached, the mood slightly more resilient.

Pianist and singer arched “Once the days were clear” beautifully, emphasizing the writing’s structural integrity, very Bach-like in its fusion of strength and poetry. The lines rose and fell with a spacious and noble grace, though the singer’s phrase-ends in both instances seemed to be given not quite sufficient “breath” to sustain a floating quality on the last couple of notes. By contrast, energy and confidence abounded throughout the performances of”The Casual Man”, a kind of “credo” of the free spirit, the singer’s aspect very masculine and devil-may-care, voice and piano managing the “throwaway” mood to perfection.

Occasionally performed on its own as an “encore” item, the achingly beautiful “The Flowers of the Sea” sets the “then against now” of the hero in a context of timelessness. The voice points the contrasts of youthful strength and aged compliance, and the volatile passions of former times with the resignation of experience; while the piano delineates the omnipresent rise and fall of the tides and the calls of the sea-birds throughout. Roger Wilson made much of the “youth-and-age” progressions, every line’s meaning given its proper emphasis and gravitas. In the Lower Hutt performance the voice’s final sustained note sounded to my ears a shade flattened throughout “….for the tide comes and the tide goes, and the wind blows…”, whereas in Wellington, the line seemed truer-toned, but not quite as emotionally charged.

For a long while the only commercial recording available of Sings Harry was on a Kiwi Records EP featuring tenor Terence Finnegan and pianist Frederick Page; and that performance burned itself into the collective musical consciousness of New Zealand music aficionados, retaining people’s affection (and allegiance) for the last fifty-odd years, notwithstanding the subsequent appearance of one or two competitors. Despite some idiosyncratic touches on the part of both singer and pianist, their performance of the final song, “I remember” seemed to me to capture not only the childhood reminiscences of a still-vigorous old man, but the ambiences of those times and since – “…and a boy lay still, by the river running down – sings Harry” – if a more matter-of-fact delineation of the passing of childhood than Dylan Thomas’s in his poem “Fern Hill”, it’s one that’s just as telling in its own way.

Like Frederick Page was able to do, Bruce Greenfield observed the staccato patterning of the piano part without sacrificing its warmth and resonance, the notes “hanging together” rather than picked out drily and unatmospherically. The golden tones this song sets in motion always remind me of a Don Binney painting, “Sun shall not burn thee by day, nor moon by night…” the light and heat warming the far-off days brought to mind by the poetry, sparking further memories of uncles leaving the farm to go to war or look for a place in the sun elsewhere. Roger Wilson’s “My father held to the land” had a stirring “Where are the Yeomen – the Yeomen of England?” kind of declamatory force, contrasting this with a boy’s delight in growing up “like a shaggy steer, and as swift as a hare”, both sentiments vividly and first-handedly realized in each performance. How affecting, then, the singer’s distancing of his tones at “But that was long ago…” on each occasion both musicians drawing us into the world of dreams and “child of air” evocations, and leaving us there, a cherishable moment inviolate in the memory…….

Roger Wilson introduced each of the cycles at each recital, thoughtfully sparing us some of the end-to-end impact of contrast between the two. Lilburn’s earlier setting of Elegy is anything but elegiac at the outset, a savage, biting evocation of a storm, the piano angrily preparing the way for the singer’s declamations, the voice here wonderfully sepulchral in places such as the line “whose colossal grief is stone”. The following “Now he is dead’, funeral-march-like at the outset, builds the rugged landscape rock by rock, the voice rolling majestically up and over the phrase “the storm-blackened lake” (somehow making a more visceral impact at Lower Hutt, though the scene’s wild grandeur was vividly presented on both occasions). Similarly, the brooding wildness of “Now sleeps the gorge” grew inexorably towards the majestic “O this bare place…” both musicians drawing on elemental energies and impulses, and washing the sounds over our sensibilities like an ocean wave over a swimmer.

There’s little physical respite for both singer and pianist throughout the cycle – though “Reverie”, with its JS Bach-like opening (as pianist Margaret Nielsen pointed out to me, with a pair of prominent oboes in thirds in the piano part) plots a course through rivulets of uneasy calm, briefly rising at the end with “wind’s disconsolate cry”. Roger Wilson again delivered the great surgings whole-heartedly, though the voice sounded curiously disembodied at the beginning, seemingly reluctant to “fill out” the tones, and making for a somewhat bleached effect. Incisive, glittering tones from Bruce Greenfield’s piano introduced “Driftwood”, all energy and volatility at the beginning, the singer’s diction clear but avoiding self-consciousness, making the poetry really work instead of over-pointing its slightly “arch” quality. The low notes really told, driving the energies inward to dark, almost sinister places, establishing a properly tragic mood at the end.

The last three songs move us more closely to the spirit of the young climber whose life was lost so tragically – though still making reference to landscape features, the language integrates the setting more readily with aspects of a personality – “a storm-begotten grace /and a great gentleness” in “Wind and Rain”, for example, and “the mind like the spring tide / beautiful and calm” in the final “The Laid-out body”. And if opinions differ regarding the implications of “bright flesh that made my black nights sweet”, the overall abiding impression is of a youthful intensity of feeling radiating through Campbell’s language – one that Lilburn’s overwhelming and full-blooded musical response to matches most appropriately.

There’s something ritualistic about key episodes in each of these final songs – there’s the quiet resignation of “Wind and Rain”, the remarkably agitated “Farewell”, whose pianistic convolutions repeatedly dash themselves against a steady, remorseless vocal line, and the noble declamations of “The Laid-out body” (the latter something of a poetic “conceit” as the young climber’s body was unfortunately lost by the recovery team down a crevasse). Throughout these and their contrasting sequences, the music’s beauty, nobility, anguish and resignation was conveyed in rich quantities by both musicians, each of the two performances carrying its own particular distinction. Surprisingly, I found the earlier Lower Hutt occasion more involving, despite (or perhaps partly because of) the vicissitudes of the venue, such as the less-than-responsive piano. But, especially in the case of Elegy, each performance did ample justice to a work whose stature, for me, grows with every hearing.

Had the concerts presented only the two Lilburn song cycles, I would have had no complaint – but we were generously treated to some lighter fare by way of contrast to the coruscations we’d just experienced, which was a reasonable enough scheme. The first of two groups of items with which the singer had a family connection was called The Songs of the Morning, referring to a collection of songs written by Roger Wilson’s grandfather, Gerald Dooley, intended for performance during a sea voyage to the Antarctic in 1902, on a ship (the SY “Morning”) upon which he was the 3rd Officer.

The ship’s engineer, J.D.Morrison wrote the words for most of the songs, two of which, “The Ice King” and “Yuss”, were performed for us here, with considerable gusto. The first, very British and patriotic-sounding, redolent of Sullivan, went with a fine swing, pianistic drum-beats and all; while the second “Yuss” was a proper British Tar’s song, complete with sailor’s accent, and quirky, almost Schumannesque piano part.

Dorothy Freed (1919-2000) a prominent music librarian and composer, was the aforementioned Gerald Doorly’s daughter, and therefore Roger Wilson’s aunt. Her song The Sea Child won an APRA prize in 1957, and some time later was recorded by Margaret Medlyn and Bruce Greenfield, on Kiwi-Pacific SLD-110. Compared with what I remembered of Medlyn’s lyrical-voiced rendition, Wilson’s voice on both outings seemed to me too dark and earthy, and even occasionally unsure of pitch (the vocal line is beautiful but challenging). Better was the second song, Freed’s setting of Keith Sinclair’s War with the Weeds, a stirring march redolent of endless combat and eventual compromise with nature. I found the words not ideally clear, but the singer conveyed enough of the sense of things for the work to make an appropriate impression.

To finish, we in the audience were given the opportunity to fill our lungs afresh and join in with a few choruses from three of Jack Body’s Songs My Grandmother Sang. Before we began, Bruce Greenfield cautioned the audience not to take any notice of his accompaniments, describing them for us as “quite mad” – though anybody familiar with Benjamin Britten’s folksong settings wouldn’t have been too perturbed by Body’s “exploratory counterpoints”. I think we enjoyed the third song, “Daisy Bell” the best, as much because of hearing the rarely-performed verses belonging to the chorus that most people would readily recognize, thus:

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,

I’m half crazy, all for the love of you;

It won’t be a stylish marriage – I can’t afford a carriage!

But you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two!”

But ultimately it was the pairing of the two Lilburn works that I thought gave these concerts such distinction – especially as they were performed with the kind of conviction that makes the stuff of musical history. Is that yet another headline I can feel coming on?……..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A bevy of intensities – Ensemble Liaison with Wilma Smith

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand 2011

HAYDN – Piano Trio in G Major “Gypsy Rondo”

BRAHMS – Clarinet Trio in A Minor Op.114

MESSIAEN – Quartet for the End of Time

Ensemble Liaison:

Timothy Young (piano) / Svetlana Bogosavljevic (‘cello) / David Griffiths (clarinet)

– with Wilma Smith (violin)

Town Hall, Wellington

Saturday 29th October 2011

Contrast was very much the going order for this concert, given by the Australian group Ensemble Liaison, with violinist Wilma Smith, in the Wellington Town Hall. The group made light of the rather over-generous acoustic and voluminous spaces of the venue, with some extremely focused and well-projected playing throughout the varied program. As well, the ear soon adjusted to the prevailing ambience, so that the sounds soon became as “normal” as at any concert.

One comes to expect certain levels of musicianship and technical proficiency from visiting artists, and the members of Ensemble Liaison delivered handsomely on all counts. Timothy Young’s piano-playing combined a soloist’s presence and focus with a chamber musician’s sensitivity throughout the evening. He was admirably partnered in all three works by ‘cellist Svetlana Bogosavljevic, sonorous and supple-toned, from the largely continuo-like underpinnings of the Haydn Trio to the fractured intensities of Messiaen’s work. And clarinettist David Griffiths charmed us at first with his expressive sensitivities in Brahms, before pinning back our ears with playing of searing surety in the Messiaen Quartet.

Joining them for this series of performances in New Zealand was Wilma Smith, well-known here for her work as concertmaster with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and as leader and a founding member of the New Zealand String Quartet. She brought what a friend of mine described at the interval as “warmth and clarity” to the music, as well as an experienced chamber musician’s sensibility to the interactions with her colleagues.

Before the concert began Chamber Music New Zealand boss Euan Murdoch welcomed the audience and highlighted some aspects of next year’s programme, making particular reference to the visit by illustrious Italian ensemble I Musici, as well as that by the equally renowned Takács Quartet. A further announcement came from Wilma Smith, telling us of her wish to dedicate the concert to the memory of a recently deceased former colleague of hers from the NZSO, veteran trumpeter Gil Evans.

Haydn’s well-known G Major Piano Trio, named “Gypsy Rondo” on account of its exotically-rhythmed finale, enabled musicians and audience to”get the pitch of the hall”, the resonances bringing out Haydn’s delightful “al fresco” echoes of the forest and the hunt throughout the first movement’s variations – I wanted the opening major-key sequence repeated, so felicitous was the playing and the sense of delightful rapport between the musicians. Though the ‘cello had practically nothing thematic to do throughout, Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s playing warmed the harmonies beautifully, enabling the violin to sing and the piano to sparkle with even more sweetness and élan. Only in parts of the finale did I feel the acoustic robbed the playing of some of its finesse of detail – some of the rapidly moving figurations were but a blur, though the skin-and-hair “gypsy” sequences came across with plenty of temperament, the whole delightfully paprika-flavoured.

From rustic exuberance we moved to a more autumnal mood with Brahms’s Op.114 Clarinet Trio, the first of several works written for the famed clarinettist Richard Mühlefeld, whom the composer had heard play in the Meiningen Orchestra. David Griffiths introduced the work, making reference to Mühlefeld and his skills, and to the beauties of these later works. On the showing of his subsequent playing in the Trio I would have been happy to have heard Griffiths play all of them, including the two sonatas, in a single concert – perhaps another time! What impressed me was the beautiful transparency of his tone, the playing catching the music’s “wind-blown” quality in a number of places. With Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s dulcet ‘cello tones leading the way into many of the melodic contourings, the music’s emotive impulse was constantly maintained, Timothy Young’s piano-playing contributing a nice sense of fantastical suggestion to the proceedings.

The Adagio here delivered a beautifully-voiced dialogue between clarinet and ‘cello . Griffiths had pointed out beforehand that he and the ‘cellist were a married couple – but even Oscar Wilde, with his “washing one’s clean linen in public” remark, couldn’t have helped but approve, with such felicitous music-making on display! As well, the third movement’s ritualistic waltz-like impulses produced in this performance something at once stirring (those wonderfully ‘”arched” phrases, like uplifted festoons of roses) and surprisingly tender. True, there were passionately-expressed moments in the finale, here given full voice by the performers, but the over-riding impression was one of light-and-shade, the composer seeming more readily to trust his lyrical instincts in these later works than in much of his earlier chamber music. Upholder of the classical tradition he may have been, but the aspect and mood of some of Brahms’ later works present more lines of connection with Romanticism than perhaps the composer himself might have cared to admit.

Naturally most of the concert’s focus fell on the second half’s single work, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Though by now a twentieth-century chamber music classic, the work had eluded me up to the time of this concert, so I had no previous experiences, save some knowledge of the composer’s other music, to bring to the occasion. Reading some of the background to the work’s composition certainly heightened my expectation of hearing something that was uniquely special – and on that score I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Even so, there was for me something unsettling about it all which took me a while to come to grips with, more of which anon.

As is well known, the work was written while Messiaen was interned in a German prisoner-of war camp in Görlitz, in the Eastern German province of Silesia. Thanks to a fortuitous amalgam of humanity and circumstance on the part of both the composer’s fellow prisoners and some of his German captors, Messiaen was able to write a work that gave a lasting voice to both his own creative personality and to a representation of a moment in time interwoven by numerous strands of indomitable human spirit. In later years the composer tended to “mythologize” the circumstances surrounding the work’s first performance, exaggerating the audience numbers and the parlous state of the musical instruments. Evidence from other sources suggests that the work’s gestation and completion was as much the result of collective co-operation as of individual genius. In fact the composer’s German captors went out of their way to facilitate the work’s composition and performance, giving the music a kind of wider reference to collective human empathy, alongside the composer’s own purposes.

The “End of Time” reference by the composer in the title, while relating to to the Apocalyptic imagery contained in the Revelations of St.John seems also to illustrate in musical language the composer’s own attitude towards time – “…not as flow, but as pre-existing, revealing itself to human temporality in a series of brilliant unalike instants…”. We therefore got not a Berlioz-like or Verdi-like Apocalypse, but a more abstractly-conceived and quirkily-expressed outpouring involving elements of plainchant, birdsong and ambient resonance. In between episodes of transcendent stillness and beauty there were occasionally fierce irruptions, and dances that swung along irregular rhythmic trajectories in disarmingly unexpected ways.

It was challenging as a “long-music” concept – ironically, perhaps less so in today’s world, where the constantly-changing mini-byte is the expected mode of communication – but especially to those of us brought up on Aristotelian-like unities of dramatic action and narrative flow within a time-framework. This music simply didn’t do any of that – each of the Quartet’s eight movements had an almost stand-alone independence which had little to do with flow within time. To me there seemed at the time (!) an undermining lack of ostensible organic unity about the piece, completely at odds with the idea of the whole being greater than the sum, etc….later, after my brain had had time to catch up and reorganize its expectations, I began to feel more comfortable in retrospect with what I’d heard, accepting more readily the composer’s idea of time as “pre-existing being” encompassing our “human temporality”.

What I instantly appreciated was the playing of each musician – true, my being able to say that I thought the third-movement clarinet solo “Abyss of the Birds” was a performance highlight, in a sense defines my problem with the piece’s overall unity, but perhaps it equally points to a deficiency of analytical brain-power on my part. In any case, the movement seemed the “dark centre” of the work, the solo instrument contrasting the deep “sadness and weariness” of the ages with the “stars and rainbows and songs” of the birds. Incredible playing from David Griffiths – his instrument produced sounds from the bowels of being, as it were. Comparable moments included the fifth movement ‘cello solo, “In praise of the eternity of Jesus”, Svetlana Bogosavljevic’s beautifully rapt ‘cello playing matching intensities with her husband’s, right to the piece’s held-note conclusion. And though a couple of Wilma Smith’s violin notes weren’t pitched at exactly their mark, her playing’s overall purity and sweetness carried the day to breathtaking effect throughout the work’s final “In praise of the immortality of Jesus”. Here, as in the other movements requiring piano, Timothy Young provided all the delicacy, energy and deep sonority the music asked for.

We in the audience were, by the end, properly caught by the music’s power of communication and enthrallment, and showed our appreciation of the ensemble’s achievement accordingly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delight and surprise – Piers Lane at Upper Hutt’s Classical Expressions

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Piers Lane at Classical Expressions

FIELD – Nocturnes: No.5 in B-flat H. 37 / No 10 in E Minor H.46B / No.11 in E-flat H.56A

SCRIABIN – 24 Preludes Op.11 / CHOPIN – Waltzes 1-17

Genesis Energy Theatre,

Expressions Arts and Entertainment Centre, Upper Hutt

Tuesday 25th October 2011

Though Piers Lane has been a frequent visitor to New Zealand I’d not heard him play before attending this recital. Naturally I was keen to confirm in my own mind the good things I’d heard various people report about his playing; and the recital’s first half seemed amply to confirm this impression. In the case of each composer (I knew some of Scriabin’s Piano Sonatas, but not his Preludes) the music was new to me, and the pianist’s unfailingly beautiful touch and richly-wrought inner voicing throughout each of the pieces seemed by turns to suit their character to perfection. But as can sometimes happen, the concert’s second half proved somewhat disappointing, compared with the first, as if by some strangely alchemic means everything had been altered. We were given seventeen of the Chopin Waltzes, the pianist breaking them up into groups and talking to his audience about salient points in the music before each bracket. To my surprise, Piers Lane took what appeared to me a kind of gung-ho approach to the music, somewhat at odds with the quote by Schumann reproduced in the program – “Aristocratic from the first note to the last”. Whatever was in the pianist’s mind, it was only intermittently aristocratic – some of it was presented with what seemed like an air of over-familiarity, even impatience in places, as if the music’s jewelled elegance had worn thin, exposing a kind of rough-and-ready base metal.

As Piers Lane worked his way through his groupings of the waltzes (I thought his spoken commentaries before each bracket interesting but made too frequently), the music’s elegance and poise seemed to gradually creep back into some of the playing, especially in the slower, more melancholic waltzes. Occasionally, one of the quicker ones, too, would “go” with a hiss and a roar, justifying Lane’s very direct approach – though I got the feeling that in such instances that particular item had been better “prepared”. An example was the famous “three-against-two” Waltz in A-flat Major Op.42, where Lane actually captured a lovely gossamer quality at speed, and delicately brought out the cross-rhythms in a thoroughly “finished” way, characterizing both quicker and slower sections of the music with enviable fluency. Another instance was the famous “Minute” Waltz, again played with plenty of technical aplomb, enabling the piece’s vertiginous quality its head while keeping its poise – lovely playing. Yet another success was the Waltz I’d first encountered in the ballet “Les Sylphides”, the C-sharp Minor Op.64 No.2, the sinuous melody of the “answering” measures replying to the wistful opening with ever-increasing energy and suggestiveness.I liked also the recitative-like middle section, very “juicily” characterized, before the pianist returned us to the world of doubt and gentle resolve which began the piece.

It will be gleaned from all of this that, punctuating my general air of disappointment throughout the second half of the concert there were occasional delights. Still, my overall impression remained of a kind of generalized and in places insufficiently-honed response to the music. However much an interpreter plays these pieces they ought not to sound routine, or, alternatively “beefed up” energy-wise at the expense of elegance. This was what seemed to happen with some of the better-known Waltzes, such as the much-loved Op.Post.E Minor work, the agitations conjured up by the pianist resulting in an unseemly scramble through the opening episode (Chopin wrote plenty of musical agitation into the notes themselves, which speaks when the piece is played with precision and clarity). The G-flat major Op.70 No.1 which followed I thought skittery and charmless, as though the pianist feared any charge of sentimentality in his approach, while the E Major Op.18 (another “Les Sylphides” introduction for me) suffered from the same brittleness of manner – energies generalized and details insufficiently polished.

Far better to concentrate on the first half of the pianist’s recital, which I thought was splendid, both as a conception and in execution, from beginning to end. Beginning with music by the Irish-born virtuoso pianist John Field, the man credited with writing the first “Nocturnes” for solo piano, Piers Lane played three such pieces, each of which seemed to strongly anticipate the more famous Nocturnes by Chopin. The pianist gave us a short spoken introduction to the music and to its composer, after which he delighted us by illustrating his remarks with playing of the utmost sensitivity. His sound-world for this music seemed to be one which was perfectly wrought between the hands, a richly-sonorous bass working in tandem with a singing right-hand line.

While not as adventurous harmonically as Chopin’s, Field’s pieces certainly had a “stand-alone” quality, the first (No.5 in B-flat) beginning with a melody which could have easily been written by the young Schumann, as Chopin, and featuring also a gentle sequence of Mendelssohn-like chords – a true precursor of the Romantic Age. The second Nocturne, No.10 in E Minor, featured a guitar-like accompaniment of a Chopin-like melody, with gentle flourishes at the end, Lane creating a nicely atmospheric soundscape. No.11 in E-flat brought the hands more closely together, melody and argpeggiated accompaniment almost merging as one in places, except where the melody ascends an octave. The music has a middle section which borders on heroic emotion, the right hand’s strong, deliberate line briefly courting glory, and then becalming again. Field’s intensities seemed to me on this showing to be melodic rather than harmonic, the line curved and shaped over the trajectories of endless arpeggiations, progressions which a lesser pianist might have responded to with some impatience – instead of, as here, sounded by Piers Lane with an ebb and flow of subtly-varied intensities.

The earliest music written by the Russian symbolist composer Alexander Scriabin (born in 1872) owes a good deal to Chopin – though Scriabin’s set of 24 Preludes Op.11 wasn’t completed until 1896, No.4 in E Minor dates from 1888, and is among the earliest of the composer’s surviving works. Scriabin organized his set along the lines of Chopin’s Preludes, a cycle of successive major tonalities a fifth apart on the sharp and flat side of the key of C, each piece paired with its relative minor. While a number of the pieces suggest allegiances to various influences upon the composer – Schumann in a number of the pieces, such as the questioning Allegretto A Minor (No.2), Chopin in the Lento E Minor (No.4) and the Andante Cantabile D Major (No.5), Liszt in the Misterioso B-flat Minor (No.16), and Rachmaninov in the massively grand Affetuoso E-flat Major (No.19) and the final D Minor Presto (No.24) – there are occasional precursors of the mature Scriabin, such as the ecstatic outpourings found in the opening Vivace C Major (No.1)and the Andante D-sharp Minor (No.10), and the pictorial contrasts of calm and storm which characterize the Andante G-sharp Minor (No.12).

I couldn’t have imagined a more atmospheric, richly-conceived performance of these works as Piers Lane gave us – what impressed me most of all (confirmed by a friend sitting elsewhere in the audience whom I spoke with at the interval) was the unerring focus of the pianist’s touch throughout, creating tones whose translucence allowed both clarity and colour at all times. Looking through my notes recalls my constant delight at the SOUND of it all, and the ease with which Lane evoked the music’s myriads of characterful moods, and, just as readily, let each one go in favour of newly-formed impressions.

There were too many moments worthy of specific mention, except that, as stated above I was struck by how his beautifully-coloured musical focus brought out in Scriabin’s youthful pieces what seemed to be something of the spirit of Schumann’s quixotic world, echoing the latter’s questioning, ambivalent vignettes of emotion in places such as the B-flat Major Andante (No.21) and its companion, the Lento G Minor (No.22). But the important thing was Lane’s ability to sustain the musical argument throughout the whole of the set, like a journey through an intensely poetic landscape, with a guide whose sensibilities enabled the music to speak with its full range of expressive force.

I understand Piers Lane has recorded all of Scriabin’s Preludes (he wrote numerous sets of them following this one, totalling nearly ninety individual pieces) on a two-disc Hyperion issue, which, in the wake of this recital, I shall be sorely tempted to investigate. The pianist’s Chopin-playing remains a puzzle, to my mind, but one I’m happy for the moment to put aside in favour of my recollections of his Field and Scriabin, which for me were this recital’s very great pleasures.

Stimulating Bach – and others – from the Wellington Baroque Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CAFFEINE AND CONTROVERSY

Music by Vivaldi, Handel, Hellendaal and J.S.Bach

Amelia Ryman (soprano) / James Adams (tenor) / Roger Wilson (baritone)

Anna Newth (flute)

Wellington Baroque Ensemble

Martin Ryman (director)

Gregory Squire (leader)

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

Saturday 1st October, 2011

As they say in the classics (and these pieces of music were themselves, for the most part “classics”), a happy occasion, brought about by skilled performances and innovative presentation of some extremely felicitous music – the reception given to the performers, both singers and instrumentalists, bore out the evening’s enjoyment and pleasure.

In the “old days” this event might have been styled merely as a “Baroque Concert”, from which the prospective listener would take what she or he would – very likely featuring Vivaldi, Handel and J.S.Bach, as here (though Pieter Hellendaal’s name would almost certainly have caused head-scratching among the punters). However, there’s a new presentation spirit coursing through the veins of classical music promoters these days, and the epithet “Caffeine and Controversy” seemed to promise the kind of titillation one might get from any reputable (or disreputable) “show and tell” publication.

I’m all for this kind of thing, with the proviso that the flash doesn’t get in the way of the substance, and is thus kept obligatory – in other words, at the end of the day it’s the music that is seen to provide the real thrills, rather than the accoutrements (unlike the case with many performances of opera one witnesses in this day and age, either filmed or “live”, well-and-truly subverted by ego-ridden directors).

Not that the first half of this concert had much to do with anything other than the music that was being played, to one’s relief – although Handel was certainly something of a controversial figure, Vivaldi was rather less so (despite what might seem to male sensibilities the latter’s good fortune in working at a so-called orphanage for young women), but around and about the Dutch-born, English-domiciled Pieter Hellendaal (whom I had never heard of, to my shame) there seemed nary a trace of trouble or scandal.

It was that pillar of the music establishment of the Western World, Johann Sebastian “Mighty Bach” (as Dylan Thomas once called him) who provided the “ginger” which enlivened the concert’s second half, in the form of the well-known “Coffee Cantata”. This work was possibly a semi-autobiographical treatise on the part of the composer about interactions between older and younger generations, the catalyst here being (in Bach’s case) a contemporary craze for coffee-drinking. Bach’s librettist was Christian Friedrich Henrici (better known as Picander, the author of many of the composer’s texts, including those for the St Matthew Passion and the Christmas Oratorio), though it’s thought that Bach himself added the words for the work’s final trio – sentiments which any parent will empathize with in a general sense!

So, a well-constructed program began with Vivaldi’s “Goldfinch” concerto for flute and strings – Anna Newth was a skilled and long-breathed soloist, coping with some of the composer’s more demanding extended utterances with flying colours, and readily conveying both pictorial and stylistic aspects of the work. Though her musical interaction with the group was splendid throughout, I was distracted by her placement slightly “away” from the half-circle of musicians so that the ‘cellist (the excellent Katrin Eickhorst-Squire) had to constantly turn around in her seat to make contact with her (if she’d stood in the middle, out the front, there would have been no problem). I found also that both harpsichord and viola, though beautifully played by Martin Ryman and Leoni Wittchow, respectively, seemed to take the concept of “tasteful accompaniment” to extremes, so that they were in danger of being inaudible at times – though a concerto, I wanted the supporting lines to have their proper say, as well!

Each of three singers then gave us a well-known aria from Handel’s different oratorios. Amelia Ryman’s bright, agile, soubrette-like voice readily and characterfully conveyed a young girl’s excitement at her impending marriage, with “Oh, had I Jubal’s lyre” from “Joshua”. A telling contrast was made by James Adams’ heartfelt and true-toned “Waft her, Angels, through the skies”, the diction beautiful and the phrasings naturally and easefully unfolded (a slight shortness of breath at “forever reign” forgiven amid the rapt loveliness of the reprise).

Roger Wilson seemed in excellent voice throughout his clarion-like traversal of “Revenge, Timotheus cries” from “Alexander’s Feast”, the singer particularly relishing the horrors of the “Furies” with their reptilian hairstyles. Perhaps the coloratura figurations of “and the sparkles” creaked and groaned a little, first time through (they flowed more easily during the reprise), but the energy and excitement carried the day. As for the ghostly middle section, Wilson’s sepulchral tones conjured up real pathos at the evocation of the ghosts of unburied warriors haunting the plain on which their remains still lay. Appropriately grey, sombre string-playing most vividly underlined the scenario.

Vivaldi’s Op.3 No.4 Concerto for four violins enabled us to enjoy the contrasting tones of the instrumentalists, each projecting a differently-characterised kind of sound, though often playing in pairs, an antiphonally delightful effect. Again, I thought the harpsichord sound self-effacing to a fault, beautifully played though everything was, minimizing a dimension of baroque interaction which I’m certain the composer would have wanted to be heard.

Pieter Hellendaal’s Op.3 No.2 Concerto Grosso made quite a dramatic effect, dark and stormy at the beginning, setting a grave, strong-chorded opening against an energetic allegro. I enjoyed the bird-song carolling during the Affettuoso; and if the Presto had a slightly shaky beginning here, its reprise after a “mirror-image” episode had a more confident trajectory. The concluding “Borea”, a sturdy, but still lively dance in what sounded like 4/4 time cooled the passions and most tastefully restored equilibriums.

I liked the way the second half’s beginning was activated, with the musicians moving to the side of the platform and tuning up somewhat curmudgeonly, as both stage and auditorium got their respective selves prepared for the music’s commencement. Before we realized what was happening, James Adams (a kind of servant/retainer) was admonishing us to be silent, duly announcing the arrival of the master, Herr Schlendrian “growling like a honey-bear”, and his charmingly willful daughter, Lieschen. Roger Wilson’s Herr Schlendrian (translated variously as “Humbug” and “Jogtrot”) grumped away entertainingly, with wonderful ‘cello-and double-bass (Malcolm Struthers) playing in tow, while Amelia Ryman’s Lieschen was enchanting of both voice and manner, deliciously aggravating her father’s obvious frustrations. Despite a slight stumble at one point in the reprise, Ryman’s forthright and open singing of “Haute noch” was for me one of the evening’s many highlights.

Costumes and staging helped bring Bach’s and Picander’s mini-drama to life – Steven Anthony Wilding’s direction brought out the best of each of the singers’ obvious theatrical gifts, despite one or two places where the music’s distinctly undramatic progressions caused a hiatus or two – conversely the trio’s coming together for the final cadence had a slightly hair-raising “just-made-it” quality.

But these were minor quibbles when set against the whole – a rattlingly good evening’s musical entertainment, with great credit to all concerned.

 

 

 

 

 

Of conflict and tragedy – New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

IN REMEMBRANCE –

BORIS PIGOVAT – Requiem “The Holocaust”

70th Anniversary Concert remembering the Babi Yar massacre

ANTHONY RITCHIE – Remembering Parihaka / ERNEST BLOCH – Schelomo – Hebraic Rhapsody

JOHN PSATHAS – Luminous

Donald Maurice (viola)

Inbal Megiddo (‘cello)

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Kenneth Young (conductor)

Town Hall, Wellington

Thursday 29th September 2011

I’d only recently been introduced to Russian-born Jewish composer Boris Pigovat’s Requiem, via a recording of a previous Wellington performance which also featured the solo viola of Donald Maurice – so it was with those sounds echoing in my ears that I eagerly awaited this anniversary concert. Of course, we in New Zealand have no comparable history of human tragedy to match the terrible Jewish experience, but the two local works chosen to complement this program presented different kinds of human conflicts in a New Zealand context, also resulting also in on-going grief and loss.

As I read through the attractively presented program (with what looked like a resplendent Ruapehu skyline adorning each page – though perhaps Taranaki’s distinctive contourings might have been even more appropriate), I couldn’t help thinking how surely and comprehensively the whole purpose of the concert’s presentation had been addressed by the NZSM – though a tad long, Professor Elizabeth Hudson’s welcoming speech certainly underlined the occasion’s gravitas and worldwide significance (the programme’s running-order suggested that the Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage, the Hon.Chris Finlayson would say a few words as well, but he didn’t appear on stage). We were left in no doubt as to the importance of the occasion – a process and outcome that other music performance organizations in the capital might well look at and learn from.

The attendance didn’t quite match the average Vector Wellington Orchestra concert turn-out, though the Town Hall “felt” to me reasonably well-peopled. Perhaps this was a concert whose contents were just that bit too far off the beaten track for some of the “regulars” at subscription concerts. Whether the prospect of listening to a performance by a “student orchestra” was another attendance-inhibiting factor, I’m not sure – as it turned out, no-one would have possibly felt short-changed by the skill and commitment of the young musicians (their ranks judiciously augmented by some  VWO and NZSO players) in bringing these wide-ranging, colorful scores to life, under the guidance of the inspirational Kenneth Young.

Anthony Ritchie’s Remembering Parihaka began the concert, music inspired by the story of a Taranaki episode of Maori resistance to the land-grabbing antics of the Pakeha settler-dominated NZ Government during the final quarter of the nineteenth-century. The “New Zealand Gandhi”, Te Whiti O Rongomai was, with a relative and fellow-protestor, Tohu Kakahi, imprisoned without trial as a result of each man’s passive protests, and tribal lands were confiscated. Ritchie’s music throughout the opening had a quality reminiscent of Shostakovich’s ability to generate tensions from lyricism – foreboding pedal-point notes alternated with lyrical string-and-wind choir lines, interrupted by warning calls from the flute and oboe. Pizzicato urgencies ushered in angular motoric percussion-reinforced energies, Young and his players keeping the textures jagged and sharply punctuated. I loved the music’s inclinations towards using  timbres, textures and colours to engender growing excitement rather than employing sheer weight and force – eventually the sounds did gather, and propelled themselves in the direction of a climax capped by cymbal crashes. The aftermath was elegiac and noble-toned, a solo horn surviving a brief stumble and nobly reaching the top of an echoing phrase of resignation – music, and playing too, I thought, of great understatement and subtlety.

Next came an old favorite of mine – Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo, for ‘Cello and Orchestra, subtitled a “Hebraic Rhapsody”. This was volatile, blood-coursing stuff, music that expressed the composer’s despair at what he considered the parlous state of the human condition. Inspired by the words of King Solomon from the Book of Ecclesiastes, the passage beginning “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity….”, Bloch was further moved to sorrow by the horrors of World War I, and sought to give voice to his feelings. After toying with the idea of writing for voice and orchestra he quickly took up the suggestion of the cellist Alexander Barjansky that the solo instrument could be just as expressive as a voice, and, working quickly, finished the piece in 1916. The piece is simply a wonderful outpouring of pure emotion – moments of brooding introspection ebb and flow throughout with full-blooded utterances, the argument tossed skillfully between soloist and orchestra.

Right from her very first note, I was held by the actual sound of Inbal Magiddo’s ‘cello – tight and focused, slightly nasal and exotic, extremely “laden”, with a distinctive “voice-quality”. Even if her attack on one or two of her high notes was slightly astray, the intensity of her sound I found gripping. In full support of her, Ken Young’s student orchestral players gave their all, producing at the first big-boned tutti a remarkably weighty body of sound, and remarkably keeping the level of intensities ongoing. Those big recurring lyrical climaxes I found most satisfying throughout, though equally compelling was the cello’s eloquent focusing, no prisoners taken, no difficulty shirked, everything gathered up and swept along irresistibly. I scribbled things down furiously throughout the performance, some of which I was able to read afterwards – words like “cinematoscopic!” and “incendiary!”, though lest the reader gain the impression of my being some kind of sensation-junkie, I also noted things like the lovely oboe playing of the chant-like figure which the other winds take up and exotically harmonise, and the rainbow-like radiance of the orchestra’s responses to the soloist in places away from the coruscations.

The string-players, I thought, did especially well, digging into those tremendous lyrical outpourings which well up from the depths of the composer’s soul at regular intervals. From where I was sitting I couldn’t help being taken with the contrast in styles and deportment of the two front-desk first violinists during the Bloch Rhapsody, the leader strongly upright, dignified and contained, her partner expressive, fluid of movement, choreographing the music’s every contour with her whole body. The pair, I thought, by turns mirrored their soloist’s vocabulary of intensities beautifully, the trio together expressing the overall flavour of the youthful orchestra’s fully-committed music making.

John Psathas’s Luminous was one of the Auckland Philharmonia’s Millennium Fanfare commissions. It’s not one of the composer’s rhythmically “charged” pieces, but understandably so given that Psathas wished to dedicate the music to the memory of a friend who came to live in New Zealand from China, but wasn’t able to survive the impact made on her by two very different sets of cultural and spiritual values. More like a meditation than a depiction of events, the music grew by osmosis, strings clustering their lines more and more intensely, until broken up by a chiming horn, after which solo winds led the way back to the strings and further deepening intensities – the music reminded me of Ligeti’s Atmospheres, its rise and fall of timbres and tones and intensities, leading to an enormous climax which suggested as much a transfiguration as a surrendering up of life.

It was natural that all of these things seemed but preludial to the evening’s raison d’être, Boris Pigovat’s Requiem “The Holocaust”. This performance of the work commemorated the victims of an event during World War II that had taken place at a place called Babi Yar, near Kiev, in Russia, 70 years ago to the very day when a systematic massacre of Kiev’s Jews by the Nazis left over thirty thousand people dead. Due to official Soviet anti-Jewish policy, the Babi Yar massacre wasn’t acknowledged until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but in 1991 a lasting memorial to those Jews who had died was finally constructed on the site.

This was the Requiem’s second New Zealand performance, on both occasions with viola soloist Donald Maurice (who, incidentally, will take part in another performance of the work in Germany next month, the first in that country). Though I didn’t attend the earlier (2008) concert in Wellington, the recording made on that occasion by Atoll Records seemed to me to capture oceans of the work’s visceral and emotional impact, thanks to Donald Maurice’s strong and heartfelt viola-playing, and Marc Taddei’s no-holds-barred approach to the music, brilliantly realized by the Vector Wellington Orchestra. After listening to the recording my predominant memory was of the fearful coruscations of the second movement, the “Dies Irae”, during which the sounds seemed to rip apart the fabric of human existence and leave it in shreds. This latest “live” performance had a different focus, the “Dies Irae” episode being given by these young players rather more audible instrumental detail but less crushing overall weight at the climaxes, to my ears less “apocalyptic” in effect than the Vector Wellington orchestral response. This was the only aspect of the performance which I wanted to call to question, having found it difficult as a listener to establish a true point in the movement to which all perspectives ran and from which all energies dissipated.

The other three movements, Requiem Aeternam, Lacrimosa and Lux Aeterna, were, like the Dies Irae, all familiar titles to people accustomed to the standard concert requiems of Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi and Faure. The sounds of the opening Requiem Aeternam (Eternal Rest) evoked vibrant spaces into which were drawn various tensions, solo clarinet expressing an overall feeling of uneasy peace, together with the strings setting the scene for the solo viola’s appearance. chant-like lines at first eloquently ruminating, urging calm, faith and hope, while aware of darker, more threatening impulses.  Young got lovely orchestral detailings along the way, here, beautiful string sonorities, underpinned by brass both muted and warm-toned, with everything gradually curdling into weirdly-clustered string-and-wind grotesqueries, the music’s shadows looming threateningly and frighteningly, the menace all too palpable.

After the incendiary “Dies Irae”, whose last few pages brutally depicted the stilling of the composer’s “pulse of a human heart”, we were suitably transfixed by the Lacrimosa’s cry of anguish, the playing of both soloist and orchestra conveying all the bewilderment, anger and grief of the composer’s words; “It is possible to shout with strong anger or to groan powerlessly, or to go mad, and only then appear tears….” The viola rejoined the orchestra, helping to rebuild a context in sound from which a life-force could once again be heard to begin to flow – I noted the strings’ beauty of resignation, supported by bleached-sounding winds and secure solo horn-playing. Kenneth Young’s direction sure-footedly led the players through these osmotic rebuildings without a break into the transforming ambiences of the final “Lux Aeterna”, Donald Maurice’s instrument again “speaking volumes”, with dark tones and grief-stained astringent strands, but also with an encouraging surety, echoed and reinforced by an instrumental backdrop of heartfelt voices that maintained strength and purpose right up to the concluding phrases.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZSO concludes its Sibelius Symphony cycle on Naxos

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SIBELIUS – Symphonies: No.6 in D Minor Op.104 / No.7 in C Major Op.105

Tone Poem: Finlandia Op.26

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Naxos 8.572705

Sometimes, when listening to performances of music one knows and loves, one has to try to come to terms with interpretations markedly different to one’s own ideas. Common sense suggests that this is a healthy process to take part in – and, after all, to expect uniformity or even conformity of music-making or listening across different performances would be unrealistic, let alone undesirable. And music-making which goes against the grain of one’s expectations or particular tastes surely adds to the fascination of the whole business. 

So, am I writing a music review, here,  or some kind of philosophical rant? It’s just that, in as many instances as there are recordings, I’ve recently worked my way as a listener through performances of all of the Sibelius symphonies from Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO which have, by turns, delighted and frustrated me. Therefore, before inflicting yet another maddeningly ambivalent set of opinions upon Middle C’s readership, I think it’s about time I addressed the issue of the reviewer’s sensibilities before dealing with the intrinsic qualities of the music-making.

My own formative experiences with music criticism were with 1960s issues of the magazine Gramophone; and once I’d gotten over my period of unquestioning and unshakable faith in the opinions expressed throughout those erstwhile columns, I began to develop some independence as a reader and consumer of these opinions. There were some reviewers whose judgements I invariably trusted, finding instances where my experiences with recordings they reviewed seemed to me in accord with what they’d written. But I soon began to feel (youthful arrogance?) I could think critically for myself; and even reached the stage where, with two or three of the  reviewing “regulars”, I would unhesitatingly investigate the things they didn’t like and studiously avoid those they heaped praise on. In other words my sensibilities seemed attuned to some opinions, and in conflict with others.

But, like Pontius Pilate in the Gospel stories, who declared to Jesus Christ at one point, “What is Truth?”, I’m now inclined to shy away from absolutes – any comment I might dare to make as a critic is assigned no more status than that of “opinion” regarding music performances – and so it is with my remarks concerning these Inkinen/NZSO Naxos recordings of Sibelius. As for the particular disc under review, containing the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies of the Finnish Master, as well as his considerably earlier work Finlandia (Naxos 8.572705), I find myself, as with the others in this series, liking most things about the performances, but having to scratch my head and ponder the reasons for the music being expressed in certain ways at particular points.

By way of making further confessional gesturings, I ought to declare that I’ve been violently in love with the Sibelius Sixth Symphony even since encountering, more than forty years ago, Anthony Collins’s 1950s Decca recording (in glorious mono) with the London Symphony Orchestra. The Seventh Symphony I intensely admire, but don’t love as passionately, except when listening to Colin Davis’s amazing Boston Symphony performance; but I admit I never tire of hearing rattlingly good performances of Finlandia (my benchmark being the flamboyance of Sir John Barbirolli and a fired-up Halle Orchestra). So – in vying with these noble resonances, how do the new performances sound? And could I imagine them working equally well on their own terms?

The opening of the Sixth Symphony on the new disc sounds to my ears as if the instruments were recorded a shade too closely, the textures distractingly “edgy”, with insufficient space around and about the different strands – it makes for a slightly claustrophobic effect, one also very brightly-lit. I did get used to the sound, partly because there was so much else to enjoy – the tempi are beautifully paced by Inkinen, nicely-breathed throughout the opening, and infectiously propelled with the arrival of the allegro (the “molto moderato” allows the music time to speak with sufficient resonance). The various “pedal-notes” from winds and brass accompanying the strings’ “endless figurations” throughout the movement make for wonderful ambient colour-changes as the music surges forwards, towards a darkening of the textures as the lower strings dig into what seems like the very ground underfoot. I was hoping Pietari Inkinen would get his brass at the end to gradually intensify their ascending phrase-notes to imitate a crescendo, which, however, they don’t do – but the sounds are nevertheless nobly wrought.

At Inkinen’s beautifully-measured tempo the slow movement is for once just that (often there’s confusion over metronome markings, here), gradually unfolding with beautiful dignity and gradually-burgeoning textures, as things turn from air into water and finally into solid earth at the climax (the brass allowed some welcome “attitude” here which they’re unfortunately denied in other places in the symphony) – but this is a beautifully-realised performance. So, too, at the beginning, is the bucolic scherzo, even though I thought its dotted rhythms a bit too tightly-clamped in places – and, those delicious interactions between strings and wind need, alas, sterner interjections from the brass, I feel, than those we get here – Sibelius did talk abut the work’s “rage and passion”, which Inkinen, it seems, will have little truck with, both here and at the very end of the movement, where I feel the brass ought to be able to properly snarl, giving warning of what’s still to come (Collins’ LSO brasses from the 1950s are wonderfully goosebump-forthright, here!).

Again, Inkinen finds the “tempo giusto” at the finale’s beginning, at first a wonderful feeling of some kind of ritual unfolding, followed by a hitching up of garments and dancing at the allegro molto, Inkinen managing the music’s occasional swirling crescendi beautifully, though for my taste not allowing timpani and brass enough scope for expressing the exuberance and energy that the cadence-points cry out for – even that final vortex-like dissolution of energy and impulse could have done with a bit more snarling force (the composer’s “rage and passion” again needing a proper voice). But Inkinen makes eloquent amends with his players throughout the movement’s epilogue – the lines sing, the rhythmic patterns dance and the textures glow, with the final string phrases almost sacramental in their expressive beauty and purity.

A longer pause between the two symphonies on the disc would have been welcomed – however, in just a few seconds, the Seventh Symphony’s opening timpani-strokes (prefiguring the opening of the later tone-poem Tapiola) sound, followed by those giant’s upward steps into the “different realms” of a world-weary composer’s imagination. A wide-ranging work, despite its single movement and relatively compact structure, it contains music of both sunlight and shadow; and Pietari Inkinen’s patiently unfolding way with the first episode balances the pastoral with the epic,allowing the hymn-like themes to sing as if from the mountain-tops. Then comes the first of three majestic trombone statements (a commentator called them “peaks along a mountain range”), and though beautifully voiced, I thought the player’s sound not sufficiently “epic” – too smooth, too “civilized” to conjure up vast spaces, real or imagined. But Inkinen’s grip on things doesn’t falter, moving with impressive surety from the bleak despair of the trombone tune’s aftermath to the playfulness of the scherzo-like scamperings which follow.

The second trombone statement suggests something more baleful and threatening, introduced by swirling strings and supported by forthright echoing brasses and winds. There’s an almost heroic restraint about the playing at first which holds the listener back from being plunged immediately into a maelstrom of doubt and darkness – but there’s a powerful cumulative effect at work, so that by the time horns and timpani voice their defiance the threat of chaos is met head-on and for the moment, overcome. It’s almost Ein Heldenleben country we now find ourselves in, strings and horns echoing heroic-like motifs that speak of valorous deeds and triumphal homecomings, of romance and rest for the weary (all in a bracing Nordic C Major, of course, instead of a glowing Straussian E-flat!). But triumphs are short-lived for this Sibelian hero – Inkinen and his players vividly plot the ever-increasing urgencies and agitations (marvellous playing from both strings and winds, here – although I did wish for stronger timpani at one point), taking us to the huge crescendo that ushers in the final trombone solo, again nobly played, but I thought still needing just a touch of “bite” in the phrasing, to truly ring out. However, orchestral support burgeons promisingly, the textures both jagged and epic, building to what ought to be the composer’s most intense cry of pain in all of his music – ah! – not quite, as it turns out, here…..still, the anguish is sufficient to strongly register and release waves of resonant poignance to the resignation of the coda.

Right at the end Sibelius recovers his strength and resolve sufficiently to voice a final gesture of defiance – a kind of “Finnish Amen”, darkly launched and heroically wrought. Inkinen and his musicians give it heaps of dignity and nobility, making a sonorous conclusion to a finely-conceived performance.

I would have put Finlandia elsewhere on the disc, preferring to sit in silence at the symphony’s end. But there it is, waiting, ready to cheer us all up once again, we who’ve been immersed as listeners in oceans of Sibelian reverie, angst and stoic resignation. The performance takes its time to do so, Inkinen possibly hearkening back to the work’s original title “Finland awakes”, by way of demonstrating a kind of “sleeping giant” at the beginning (compare the startling opening attack of, for one, Barbirolli’s Halle Orchestra brasses, on a famous 1960s recording). Timpani and snarling lower brass help matters, and the strings dig into their first phrases with a will.  Matters energize once the stuttering trumpets galvanize the work’s introduction into action (I liked Inkinen’s  bringing out of the lower strings’ “seething” textures shortly afterwards), and strings and timpani give plenty of initial impetus to the music’s driving force.

This reviewer’s niggardly opinion apart, people will perhaps enjoy being “cleansed” at the disc’s end by such a life-affirming expression of joy and energy. And this Naxos recording, the last of Pietari Inkinen’s and the NZSO’s Sibelius cycle, needs, I believe, to be investigated – though the expression “Vive la difference” isn’t Scandinavian, it’s entirely apposite. For these are performances that may not completely satisfy all listening sensibilities, but they will certainly fascinate and engage, and might even (as in my case) win you over.

Dream team together on record – Trpčeski, Petrenko and Rachmaninov

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RACHMANINOV – Piano Concertos 1-4 / Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini

Simon Trpčeski (piano)

Vasily Petrenko (conductor)

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Avie Records

AV2191 (Concertos 1, 4 / Paganini Rhapsody)

AV2192 (Concertos 2, 3)

Avie Records and its NZ distributor Ode Records will have pleased Wellington concertgoers enormously with a recent pair of CD recordings (available separately) featuring pianist Simon Trpčeski and conductor Vasily Petrenko in the music of Rachmaninov – all four Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on Theme of Paganini. Of course, both Simon Trpčeski and Vasily Petrenko have been recent guest artists with the NZSO, though not performing together – Trpčeski gave us Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, and Petrenko conducted the orchestra in a recent concert featuring Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Michael Houstoun as soloist. So the CDs represent a “coming-together” of different strands of impulse from these concerts, pianist, conductor and composer. While the absolute stand-out performance of the set is that of the Fourth Concerto, these musicians bring plenty of feeling and enviable skills to each of the works on the two discs, if not quite emulating the performance-intensity levels which I enjoyed at each of the concerts I attended.

Trpčeski and Petrenko approach the First Concerto as though they’re making no allowances for its status as a relatively youthful work (Rachmaninov was 18 when the concerto was completed, in 1892, though he revised the work extensively in 1917, expressing some latter-day astonishment at the Concerto’s “youthful pretensions”). In fact Rachmaninov soon realized he couldn’t remain in Russia with the Communists in control, and therefore had to face the prospect of earning a living in exile as a virtuoso pianist – so reworking his concerto’s “youthful pretensions” gave him an extra piece to add to his projected concert repertoire.

Right from the start, Trpčeski and Petrenko stress the work’s big-boned contrasts – those boldly stated flourishes from orchestra and soloist at the beginning have real “bite”, throwing into bold relief both the liquid flow of the opening theme, and the rapid scherzando-like passages which follow. Trpčeski‘s playing has plenty of flint-like brilliance, if not as volatile and alchemic as the composer’s on his recording (but nobody else’s is!), and Petrenko conjures from his Royal Liverpool Philharmonic players gloriously Russian-sounding tones, rich and resplendent in one episode, elfin and volatile in the next, heart-rending and melancholic in a third. One senses, too, a piano-and-orchestra partnership of equals, with all of the creative interactions and tensions that such a relationship implies.

I liked Trpčeski‘s Scriabin-like fantasizing on the slow movement’s first page, the playing creating sounds borne upon the air, with Petrenko encouraging his players to evolve the sounds almost by osmosis, allowing the soloist to climb through the textures with his figurations. And scenes of Imperial Russia come to mind as the music’s rhythmic trajectories kick in with the clipped horses’ hooves, the jingling harnesses on the sleigh and the wind-flurried snow-flakes skirling as the string sing a soulful melody. Only in the finale did I feel Trpčeski‘s playing a trifle under-voltaged in places, lacking some of the electricity of Stephen Hough’s blistering fingerwork on a rival Hyperion set of the concertos (Hyperion CDA 67501/2). Petrenko’s is a darker orchestral sound for Trpčeski than Andrew Litton’s is for Hough, though the romance of the second subject group is beautifully realized on the newer recording, the canonic dialoging between instruments as tenderly lyrical as any. Finally, some whiplash-like irruptions of energy from the orchestra galvanize the soloist as the music races to its brilliant conclusion.

After the resplendent performance I heard Petrenko conduct of the Fourth Concerto with Michael Houstoun and the NZSO, I was surprised and fascinated to encounter a somewhat leaner orchestral sound from the Liverpool Orchestra as recorded by Avie – what remnants of romantic sweep Rachmaninov allowed to remain in his composer-armoury by this stage of his creative career were certainly brought out full-bloodedly in Wellington, but seem less in evidence on record. Instead, Petrenko keeps things lean and tightly-focused in Liverpool, details very much to the fore, the result being a steady steam of interactive dialoguing between orchestra and soloist, the attention on the musical thoughts and ideas rather than any guide’s exposition of it. It did make the big moments in which the soloist did dominate more telling, such as the archway of the big central climax, with its gorgeously bluesy Gershwin-like tune on the strings, though the subsequent mocking laughter of the brasses resonated all the more in such a climate of restraint. Trpčeski‘s playing throughout is of a piece with the orchestra’s, focused and flexible, taking a partnership role as often as seeking to dominate. The result is a strongly-balanced exposition of the music, the sensitivity of Trpčeski‘s dialoging with the winds in the melancholic epilogue to that big middle section a clue to the stature of this performance as a powerfully expressive partnership of equals.

Pianist, conductor and orchestra build the haunting, melancholic tread of the slow movement towards a climax whose pain and sorrow, though momentary, pierce the heart of the listener, as much for the heartbreak of the subsequent bars as for the shock of the sudden onslaught. As for the finale, again Trpčeski‘s playing may yield points to Stephen Hough’s performance in sheer vertiginous brilliance, but here it’s the interplay with Petrenko’s ever-responsive Liverpool players that catches the ear again and again. Critics who damned this music at its premiere on the grounds of Rachmaninov’s “old-fashioned” style must have made up their minds about the work before they even heard a note – for this is a composer who, despite his own distaste for the avant-garde and his omni-present inner resonances of Imperial Russia, was certainly listening to what was happening around him. Bartok, Stravinsky, Gershwin and Ravel are all there at the finale’s feast, even if the fare remains bitter to the taste, flavoured to the end with the composer’s own anguish in exile from his beloved native land. Rachmaninov’s trauma at the work’s reception by the critics was such that he cut the Concerto heavily, rewriting some passages and (ironically) lessening the work’s “new look” aspect – it’s worth tracking down either Alexander Ghindin’s or Yevgeny Sudbin’s recordings of the Concerto’s original version (respectively, on the Ondine and BIS labels) to experience the extent of the composer’s thwarted achievement.

By the time he came to write the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini for piano and orchestra, Rachmaninov had, I feel, come to terms some of the way with his situation. His frequently-expressed grief at his refugee status had become less overt in his music than, perhaps by way of compensation, a delight in brilliantly sardonic, in places almost diabolical accents,  though he would still produce incomparable episodes of melancholic lyricism (his Third Symphony, completed two years after the Rhapsody, is a kind of emotional counterweight in this regard). The Rhapsody was the first work he wrote in a new home, the villa called “Senar”, on the shores of Lake Lucerne. As befits its virtuoso leanings it uses a similar theme to that used by Brahms in HIS “Paganini” Variations, albeit for solo piano. Unlike the hapless Fourth Concerto, the work was an instant success with the public, the composer’s pleasure at this tempered with the worry of having to perform it. Oddly enough, there’s a tenuous New Zealand connection with this work through the famous choreographer Michel Fokine, who wrote to the composer from Auckland in 1939 (Fokine was touring the country with the Covent Garden Russian Ballet at the time) asking permission from Rachmaninov to adapt the work for a ballet to be called “Paganini” – the composer subsequently agreed, and “Paganini” received its first performance at Covent Garden that same year.

Trpčeski and Petrenko play the score, it seems to me, with ears for its structural qualities, rather than its surface brilliances and coruscations. Up to the first appearance of the “Dies Irae” theme (Variation 7 – Meno mosso,a tempo moderato) the music treads steadily, the orchestral colours dark and weighty, the piano having more “glint” than out-and-out brilliance – something of a contrast with Stephen Hough’s more elfin volatilities, matched with a brighter, more effervescent orchestral presence from Andrew Litton and his Dallas Symphony players. Trpčeski is chunkier and earthier, and his accompanying orchestral colours to my ears more Shostakovich-like (a nicely guttural clarinet in Variation 12, having more time, at Petrenko’s tempo, to “colour” its melody). One could hazard the comment that Trpčeski and Petrenko give the music a more Russian-sounding outlook, very like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar Saltan music in the splendidly swaggering Variation 14, though Stephen Hough again finds extra sparkle in the succeeding piano-only Allegro. I like the homage Rachmaninov pays to Prokofiev in Variation 16’s Allegretto (straight out of the latter’s ballet Romeo and Juliet), Andrew Litton encouraging particularly spectral shudders from his strings, while Petrenko’s Liverpudlians are robuster, fuller-bodied phantoms. In the lead-up to the famous Eighteenth Variation, I found myself preferring Hough’s and Litton’s rather more atmospheric Allegretto, more spacious and Gothic, the sostenuto winds almost ghoul-like, not unlike Respighi’s Catacomb phantoms in his Pines of Rome, though honours are pretty even when the big tune comes around (the “Paganini” theme simply inverted and slowed down, can you believe it?).

And so it goes on – Hough and Litton bring out the glitter and volatility of the concluding sequences with more quicksilver than Trpčeski and Petrenko, whose energies have a darker, more elemental quality. But both rides to the finish are madcap ones, risk-taking ventures, with alarming accents and angularities aplenty, as well as passages whose harmonic explorations leave those of the worlds of the Second and Third Concertos far behind. At the beginning of the last variation of all, Trpčeski and Petrenko out-point their rivals in deliciousness, but as the patternings intensify, it’s simply neck-and neck at the finish. Trpčeski throws away the last phrase deadpan, like a good poker-player, while Hough etches it in with just a hint of a raised eyebrow.

Turning to the second of the Avie discs, containing the aforementioned remaining concertos, the listener enters a world filled with multitudes of ghosts of past performances, whose resonances are liable to rise up and haunt and even overwhelm all but the most intrepid and determined new interpreters. Happily Trpčeski and Petrenko are adventurers of that cut and cloth, and the opening paragraph of the C Minor Concerto (No.2) is a strongly-wrought statement of intent, couched in deep, rich tones, and propelled with striding energy. Vasily Petrenko loses no chance to support his pianist with emphatic touches from his players that stress the depth of feeling and purpose of it all – his lower strings, for instance, sing a rich counter-line to Trpčeski‘s simply-voiced second subject melody, echoed beautifully by the oboe shortly afterwards. The musicians tend to make the music’s transitions flow, rather than go for high-contrast changes of tempo and mood  – but the excitement nevertheless builds up impressively towards the movement’s “great moment”, the return of the opening theme on sweeping orchestral strings, the soloist reinforcing the music’s trajectories with a triumphal counter-melody.

The second movement opens enchantingly, strings, Trpčeski‘s piano and the winds taking turns to weave undulating patterns of finely-spun emotion, the music’s ebb and flow and brief irruption of energy easily and naturally brought into being.  After Petrenko’s terse opening to the finale the music expands with explosive energies towards climaxes, furious piano playing initiating steadily growing momentums which the strings-and-piano fugato gathers up and races towards the release of the big tune’s reappearance.The scherzando passage is galvanized by Trpčeski each time he joins the fray, culminating in a spectacular keyboard flourish and a grand and forthright final statement of the tune – glorious!

And so we come to what many people regard as the greatest of all Romantic piano concertos, the “knuckle-breaker”, as pianist Gary Graffmann used to describe it – otherwise known in the business as “Rack 3”. For a time the territory of only the boldest and most fearless of pianists (the likes of Horowitz, Janis, Gilels, Malcuzynski, Lympany and Van Cliburn, as well as New Zealand’s Richard Farrell – but, unaccountably, NOT Sviatoslav Richter), the general rise in technical piano-playing standards (though not in actual musicianship) has seen many more pianists than one could have ever imagined taking the piece on, with, alas, generally unmemorable results – given that the work still remains an enormous challenge, so that anybody who actually attempts the piece really deserves Brownie points for trying.

At first, Trpčeski‘s and Petrenko’s way with the music seems small-scale, their delivery of the opening episode emphasizing the first theme’s beauty while playing down its rhythmic undercurrents.  However, it’s part of the longer view – when the lower strings take up the tune, Trpčeski‘s increasingly insistent accompanying figurations awaken the music’s urgencies. And what a glorious sound Petrenko encourages from his strings, and how subtly both musicians build the music through the first appearance of the concerto’s most memorable melody, shared by the piano and the orchestra, in turn, to the grand, romantic sweep of the moment’s climax.

The central episode again relaxes the tension surrounding the opening tune’s reprise – those underlying energies are kept down by Petrenko, allowing chattering winds to interact with the pianist’s nervous utterances, and only encouraging the music’s pulses to beat with any edge and force when rising out of the ambient detail to match and contour the piano’s combatative intentions – impressive control, but lacking, I thought, that suggestion of abandonment which would have brought out the encounter’s sense of the participants risking all and plunging into the fray. Trpčeski chooses the heavier, more chordal of the two cadenzas Rachmaninov left, and builds up a splendidly majestic weight of tone and fury of purpose. Beautiful wind-playing answers the soloist’s near-exhausted ruminations, and my only real disappointment is that pianist and conductor don’t make something more “charged” of the “bells across the meadow” episode before the opening tune’s final reprise brings the movement to its expectant close.

At the slow movement’s beginning, I’m always reminded of my first recording of this concerto, Byron Janis’s with Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony – still memorable for Janis’s coruscating pianism and for Munch’s fervent encouragement of his strings at this point in the work. Petrenko’s players sound just as committed, the dying fall as the strings awaken the piano one of the work’s most expressively full-blooded moments. Trpčeski‘s and Petrenko’s account of the dark waltz-like episode is poised and veiled, as though concealing feelings too candid to fully display, though the strings subsequently stress the underlying heartache just before the finale’s electrifying opening flourishes. Trpčeski is suitably volatile and impulsive, here, and the steady-ish pace adopted for the “galloping horse” motif allows the orchestral tutti more weight and cumulative force. I’ve heard the scherzando episode played more delicately and impishly by other pianists, but Trpčeski brings out its nocturnal aspect nicely, and the lead-in to the great moment of the first movement’s memorable second subject is as charged with emotion by the players as one would want – for me, a definite performance highlight.

Apart from what I thought sounded like a strangely “clipped” reprise of the orchestra’s “galloping horse” motive, the remainder of the concerto gets the utmost romantic treatment, with all the proverbial stops pulled out – Trpčeski‘s pianism has all the weight and brilliance required, and Petrenko draws from his players the full panoply of orchestral splendor, the sounds making handsome amends for those momentary “lean-and-hungry” equestrian impressions. In sum, though I didn’t find the music-making throughout these discs as consistently “electric” as I did in the concert-hall from this pianist and conductor, that’s as much a commentary on the nature of the “live-versus-recorded” music-listening experience. It’s one I’m glad to have had both ways with these truly splendid artists, here together playing such marvellous music.

Boris Pigovat’s Requiem – a stunning CD presentation

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REQUIEM

Works by BORIS PIGOVAT

– Requiem “The Holocaust” / Prayer for Violin and Piano / Silent Music for viola and harp / Nigun for String Quartet

Donald Maurice (viola)

Vector Wellington Orchestra / Marc Taddei

also with Richard Mapp (piano) / Carolyn Mills (harp) / Dominion String Quartet

Atoll ACD 114

This recording commemorates the first performance outside the Ukraine of Boris Pigovat’s Requiem, given by violist Donald Maurice, with the Vector Wellington Orchestra conducted by Marc Taddei, on November 9th, 2008 at the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington. The composer, whose grandparents and aunt were victims of the Babiy Yar tragedy in 1941, when thousands of German Jews were massacred in cold blood by the Nazis, had wanted for a number of years to write a work dedicated to the Holocaust, thinking originally of the standard Requiem format, with soloists, choir and orchestra. Then Yuri Gandelsman, the then principal violist of the Israel Philharmonic asked Pigovat to write a work for him, and the composer decided he would tackle a piece for viola and orchestra, writing in the style of a Requiem. He completed the work in 1995, but it wasn’t premiered until 2001, as Gandelsman, who intended to give the first performance, was prevented by circumstances from doing so. However, the situation was eventually resolved, most appropriately, by a concert planned in Kiev commemorating the Babiy Yar tragedy, to which Pigovat successfully offered his score for performance.

The composer regarded the cancellation of the original performances in Israel as “the will of Providence”, as it meant the work would be performed for the first time in Kiev, near the tomb of his family members who were killed at BabiyYar. Added poignancy was generated by the co-operation between the Israeli Cultural Attache in Kiev and the city’s Goethe Institute which resulted in the famous German violist, Rainer Moog, being asked to play the solo viola part. This concert took place in October 2001. Eight years later, the work was performed here in New Zealand at a “Concert of Remembrance” (commemorating the 70th anniversary of “Kristallnacht” – The Night of Broken Glass – a pogrom carried out against German and Austrian Jews in retaliation for the assassination of a Nazi diplomat by a young German/Polish Jew in November 1938). The concert featured, along with Pigovat’s work, a performance of Brahm’s German Requiem, and was sponsored by a number of groups, among which were the respective Embassies of the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel. As well, Boris Pigovat himself was able to attend the concert, thanks to the support of the Israeli Embassy.

Now, there’s a further chapter in what has become an ongoing story – this features the recent invitation made to violist Donald Maurice to give the work’s first-ever performance in Germany, on October 15th at the final gala concert of the International Viola Congress in Wuerzburg. The performance commemorates, in turn, the 70th anniversary of the Babiy Yar massacre, and will be given by Maurice with an orchestra from Duesseldorf.

However, before making this journey, Maurice will again perform the work on the actual day of the tragedy, September 29th, in the Wellington Town Hall with Kenneth Young and the New Zealand School of Music Orchestra.  Also performing will be Israeli ‘cellist Inbal Megiddo, playing Bloch’s Schelomo. As well, John Psathas’s Luminous and Anthony Ritchie’s Remember Parihaka will give a New Zealand flavour to this commemorative program. I believe the concert is included under the umbrella of a “Rugby World Cup Event” – if so, one salutes the organizers’ enterprise!

Atoll Records deserves the heartfelt thanks of people like myself who weren’t able to attend that Wellington performance of the Requiem in 2008 for making the recording commercially available. It was at the time splendidly captured by Radio New Zealand’s David McCaw and his engineer Graham Kennedy – as one might expect, the music generated plenty of visceral impact, all of which comes across with startling force in Wayne Laird’s transfer to CD. It presents soloist Donald Maurice, with conductor Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra  working at what can only be described as white heat – the coruscations of parts of the Dies Irae movement are searing, to say the least – and the effects upon listeners in the hall must have been profoundly disturbing in their impact.

The Requiem has four movements, each of them given Latin subtitles, a ready context, despite their non-Jewish origins, for listeners accustomed to pieces which use similar kinds of headings for individual movements (works by Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, and Faure for example) – the four movements are Requiem Aeternam, Dies Irae, Lacrimosa and Lux Eterna. Pigovat considered these parts the most suitable for his overall purpose in writing what he called “a tragic orchestral piece”. Despite his work being completely instrumental, some of the composer’s motifs and themes in the work are derived directly from the words of texts – for example, the first theme of the Dies Irae on trombones fits with the words of the first verse of this famous thirteenth-century Latin poem; while the Jewish Prayer, Shma Israel, Adonoi Elokeinu, Adonoi Ehad inspired a recurring theme in the work, first appearing in the epilogue of the Dies Irae, and in subsequent places, such as in the viola solo at the very end of the work.

The opening measures of Requiem Aeternam bring about vistas of space and eons of time, into the centre of which swirls an irruption of dark, threatening unease. But the solo viola takes up the chant-like line, by turns declamatory and meditative, its discourse supported by various orchestral motifs and atmospheric textures. Donald Maurice’s solo playing vividly captures the music’s gamut of supplicatory emotion, while Marc Taddei and the orchestra provide an accompaniment richly-mixed with ambiences of faith and trust, doubt and fear. From Ligeti-like string-clusters come sudden intrusions of light and energy, menacing, gutteral-throated strings and ghoulish figures on what sounds like a bass clarinet. Deep, seismic percussion ignites an outburst that galvanizes the whole orchestra, and brings the solo viola into conflict with forces of darkness. A portentous, doom-laden motif rises in the orchestra, challenged further by the viola, which is soon overwhelmed by a rising tide of pitiless-sounding, all-enveloping brutality, reinforced by crushing hammer-blows. Stoically, the viola remains steadfast, giving vent to its anguish, but still raising its voice to heaven at the close.

There are some famously apocalyptic settings by composers of the “Dies Irae” poem, and Pigovat, though not employing the actual words, certainly aligns himself with the movers and shakers of heaven and earth, such as Berlioz and Verdi. Slashing string lines introduce the “Dies Irae” movement, leading to orchestral outpourings whose force and vehemence will, later in the movement, readily suggest the imagery suggested by the term “holocaust”. After the initial maelstrom abates, the solo viola attempts to plead with the forces of darkness, but is repeatedly beaten down, its desperate energies to no avail. Pigovat was strongly influenced by a novel Life and Destiny by the Russian-Jewish writer Vasiliy Grossman, containing passages describing Jews’ last train journey from imprisonment to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Some of Shostakovich’s more harrowing motoric orchestral sequences come to mind in places, over the top of which the brass shout cruel repetitive utterances. Out of a searing, incandescent chord-cluster thrusts a beating rhythm, the composer suggesting the pulsing of a great number of human hearts, a rhythm which loses strength and dies.

Harsh, strident bells sound the beginning of Lacrimosa, the viola sharing in the pain and horror of what has just been experienced. The composer notes, most appositely, that “It is possible to shout with strong anger, or to groan powerlessly, or to go mad, and only then appear tears……” and Maurice’s virtuosic playing at this point conveys all of these feelings and more besides. A timpani-led processional begins the process of ritualizing the grief, somewhat, but underlines the bleak nihilism of the scenario, reinforced by a doom-laden tam-tam stroke. Then the orchestral strings offer consolation amid the despair, horns as well paying tribute to those destroyed as well as acknowledging those left behind. As the music slips without a break into the Lux Eterna, lights softly begin to glow amid the sound-textures, and there’s an almost lullabyic feel to the music’s trajectories.The viola speaks again, its voice dark-toned and grief-tainted, but calling for a renewal of faith in the human spirit, and a rekindling of hope for the future. The instrument re-establishes connections and interactions with various orchestral voices, their tones no longer expressing fear, hate, and cruelty, but intertwining with the soloist’s voice in search of a better, more understanding place for everybody in the world (the final exchanges between viola and dark-browed brass and percussion speak volumes, as the work closes).

The three pieces accompanying the Requiem on this disc all have connections or commonalities of some kind with the major work. The first, Prayer, for viola and piano, probably has the closest relationship with Requiem, as it was written when the composer had finished the latter’s Lacrimosa and was preparing materials for the fourth part, Lux Eterna. The music thus breathes much the same air as does the Requiem, with one of its themes actually used in the Shma Israel section of Lux Eterna. Donald Maurice again plays the viola, and, together with pianist Richard Mapp, gives an extraordinarily intense reading of the work. Its opening measures are meditative and hypnotic, the piano resembling a tolling bell at the outset, beneath the viola’s quiet song of lament. From the darkest depths of their interaction spring impulses of lyrical flow, gentle and undulating at first, then more impassioned, Maurice’s bow biting into his strings and Mapp’s monumental chords imparting an epic quality to the mood of grief and suffering. The undulations return, their tones gradually dissolving into mists of quiet resignation and fortitude – altogether, a beautiful and moving work.

Silent Music is scored for viola and harp, a felicitous combination of complementary tones and timbres, one I’d never before imagined. Written in 1997, after the Requiem, the piece commemorates the practice in Israel of people lighting candles for burning at places where there have been fatal terrorist attacks, one such occasioning this piece. The music’s beauty almost belies the composer’s sombre intent, though towards the end of the piece some repeated agglomerations of notes on Carolyn Mills’s harp grow through a disturbing crescendo towards a moment of intense pain, whose feeling resonates throughout the concluding silences.

Intensities of a different order are unashamedly displayed throughout the final work on the CD, Nigun, for String Quartet, though the piece finished far more quickly than I expected, due presumably to an error of timing recorded with the track listings (instead of a nine-minute work, the music came to an end, a tad abruptly, at 5’00”.  Boris Pigovat originally wrote this work for string orchestra, the string quartet version appearing for the first time on this CD. The composer’s intention was “to give expression to the tragic spirit which I feel in traditional Jewish music”. It’s certainly not a happy work, being, in psychological terms, assailed by anxieties at an early stage in its progress, the composer using the quartet’s antiphonal voicings to create a kind of overlying effect, as textures pile on top of, or slide beneath, other textures. Figurations and tempi intensify as the piece proceeds, the Dominion Quartet’s players “blocking” their sounds together for some marvellously massive-sounding chords, before continuing what feels like a fraught interaction, mercifully worked-out in the time-honored manner, but leaving one or two sostenuto voices to gradually expel their last reserves of breath and melt their tones into the stillness of the ending.

Not only does this recording deserve to be heard and savored, but the oncoming Town Hall concert (September 29th – see above) featuring the Requiem, should be an entry on everybody’s calendar. If something of the spirit of this recording can be replicated (albeit with a different orchestra and conductor) the occasion will be stunning, unmissably spectacular.