Author: Peter Mechen

Zephyr – breaths of fresh air

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand

Zephyr Wind Quintet

Music by Elliott Carter, Gareth Farr, Carl Nielsen, Darius Milhaud, Ross Edwards, Gyorgy Ligeti

Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 23rd September

What a joy when one literally stumbles across a piece of music that then becomes a favorite! I didn’t even know wind quintets existed when, way back during my formative music explorations in the Palmerston North Public Library (what an Aladdin’s Cave of a place!) I chanced across an LP recording by the Philadelphia Wind Quintet. “Nielsen”, it said on the cover – and “Barber” as well, if I remember rightly. The Nielsen was, of course, that composer’s Wind Quintet, the very first music of his I ever heard – and I loved it right from that first bassoon phrase, with those chirpy, out-of-doors responses tumbling over one another, as if for the sheer joy of being breathed into life and set in motion.

Since then, I’ve acquired several wonderful recordings of the Nielsen, my favorite being the Melos Ensemble’s characterful 1960s performance for EMI – but live performances have, until this concert , eluded me. I can imagine being more than content had the Zephyr Wind Quintet played only the Nielsen work at their recent concert, as it was such a benediction to hear it “live”, let alone played so magnificently by the ensemble.

However, it was my good fortune to have the work “framed” in concert by a number of attractive and contrasting pieces by other composers , who also seemed to know a thing or two about writing for winds. Beginning the program was a work by Elliott Carter, the music having a similar kind of instant appeal to that of Nielsen’s – perhaps busier and more densely-textured, but  just as inclined towards lyricism. As with Nielsen, a droll sense of humour was never far away, with strongly-characterised episodes in the music used as “foils” for one another, deep tolling bells at one point enlivened by birdsong, with subsequent wind-flurries setting the cat among the pigeons.

A second part, allegro giocoso, clicked some even higher voltage-switches on, setting in motion rapid-fire momentums which delighted the ear, whether settling upon an individual instrumentals line or registering the contrapuntal dovetailing. The music argument seemed to intensify, as if a lot of people at a dinner-party were shouting at one another, trying to make individual points at all costs, before the host, with a shrug of the shoulders and a disarming word or two, defused the argument and bade everybody goodnight.

Gareth Farr’s Mad Little Machine which followed was a Zephyr commission for the group’s current tour – aptly titled, the piece brought out bags of “attitude” from each of the instruments, expressed both in individual and concerted ways. Right from the opening cavortings of the bass clarinet, which both astonished and alarmed everybody else, there was energy and bite as flourishes of impulse from all the different voices were tossed between the group.

The near-constant motoric, syncopated rhythms generated crackling energy, unexpectedly allowing a”luftpause” mid-work before setting off again even more mad-headedly, the figurations wild and angular, and the combinations amusingly bizarre  (piccolo and bass clarinet amusingly “spooking” one another, at one point). It all came to an abrupt end, not with a bang, but with a squeak, to everybody’s great delight. Wonderful, too, that the composer was present, applauding the performance as enthusiastically as HE himself was being applauded!

After these exertions, the Nielsen work seemed to come from another world, lyrical, spacious and bracingly “outdoor” in feeling. The composer wrote the quintet for the Copenhagen Quintet, with the individual characteristics of each player very much in mind. In fact, had he lived longer, Nielsen might have completed his promise of writing individual concerti for each of the Quintet members – as it was he finished only two of the larger works, for flute and then for clarinet. We have left only the Quintet to give us the barest of glimpses of the remaining three players’ personalities.

Apart from one or two vagrant notes and a slight ensemble hesitation when beginning the final grand statement of the first movement’s ascending opening melody, the playing was spick-and-span, flexible and alert, throughout the work. The performance, I felt, concentrated more on the music’s fluency than its occasional quirkiness and pungency – those evidently characterful and volatile personalities who helped inspire the work were mostly on their best behaviour this time round.

I wondered whether the Town Hall acoustic told against some of the work’s immediacy, the sounds integrated almost to a fault, so that we were denied some of the spikiness of Nielsen’s writing. Beautiful details, such as Ed Allen’s first solo in the opening movement, were wonderful, but the strands of colour and texture in ensemble seemed “tamed” in those voluminous spaces. In a smaller hall we would undoubtedly have enjoyed a more flavoursome sound-picture.

The finale, with its frequent solo and duo passages, here most tellingly enabled the players to be themselves, the “wandering in the wilderness opening” featuring plenty of wind-blown freedom and acerbic calling-to-order, while each of the variations following the beautiful hymn-tune (Nielsen’s own setting of a chorale “My Jesus, let my heart receive thee”) created its own intense colour-and-texture experience to wonderfully expressive effect. This tune first appeared in a sing-song 3/4 rhythm, but its reprise at the very end was as a grandly processional 4/4, at once celebratory and humbly moving. (The interval, immediately afterwards, allowed me and others plenty of space to savour it all further!).

Back afterwards for Darius Milhaud’s entertaining suite La Cheminée du roi René, a seven-movement work originally written for a film about an historical ruler from Milhaud’s own Aix-en-Provence, one which brought out the composer’s own piquant response to evocations of earlier times. The movements were all very short, but each made a distinct impression of specific things, processionals, morning songs, entertainers and entertainments. The musicians successfully captured and brought to life these charming vignettes, concluding with a Madrigal-nocturne, whose dream-like rituals gradually faded with the sounds of ancient fanfares at the end.

Strange to hear echoes of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony in Ross Edwards’ work Incantations, with calls sounding across a crepuscular landscape at the outset. Wild horn-whoops and all, the atmosphere captured by the players set the scene for the second movement’s insect-like molto animato, one whose repetitive figurations tightened into a kind of naturalistic ritual chant, to almost claustrophobic effect – whew! As for the finale, the sounds seemed almost filmic to me, primordial at the start, then developing mesmeric rhythms that gathered up hymn-like strands whose oscillations continued in my brain long after the actual music had stopped.

Rounding off this concert’s wonderfully discursive explorings were Gyorgy Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles, pieces which belie their “trifles” classification. The pieces are arrangements by the composer of movements from a series of piano pieces called Musica ricercata, which he wrote in the 1950s. Listening to Zephyr’s brilliantly vivid realizations of this music I found it hard to imagine the pieces in any other guise than for wind ensemble. From the “Keystone Cops-like” opening movement, through the ebb and flow of lament, folksong and energetic dance, Ligeti’s pieces whirled us through whole worlds in microcosm, leaving us almost as breathless as the players by the time the final Vivace capriccioso had “done its dash”.

We were a none-too-sizeable audience when put in the relative vastness of the Town Hall, but we roared and clapped our appreciation as whole-heartedly as we could at the end – a great concert experience!

 

 

 

 

Wellington Community Choir – delights both human and animal

Posted on by Peter Mechen

LAND, SEA and FRIENDLY CREATURES

Wellington Community Choir

Directed by Julian Raphael and Carol Shortis

Diedre Irons (piano) / Simon Burgess (bass) / Sarah Hoskyns (mandolin)

Nino Raphael (guitar) / Ukulele Ensemble

Opera House, Wellington

Friday, 21st September, 2012

Two years ago, I spent a rollicking, richly-conceived evening in the Town Hall with the Wellington Community Choir, on the occasion of its 5th birthday. This latest concert, in the very different surroundings of the Opera House had a separate and distinct buzz of its own, the contrast underlined by a photograph from that memorable, multi-layered 2010 event reproduced in this year’s programme.

This time round, the performing focus was less on diversity and more on specific repertoire, with two very different and captivating musical strands plucked and resonated for our great enjoyment. We had a “Pasifika” first half, put together under the title “Songs from Oceania”, and then a distinctly “Northern Hemisphere” second half, courtesy of that redoubtable duo Flanders and Swann – with one exception, not the well-known “At the Drop of a Hat” items, but songs from a less-known collection “The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann”.

One registered that, even before the singers took the stage the Opera House atmosphere had created something rather more theatrical than in 2010, aided by back-lighting and a proscenium arch “framing the magic” as it were. But just as strong was the community aspect of it all – as the singers and instrumentalists came on their audience connections were underlined by shouts and waves of greeting, bringing stage and auditorium cheek-by-jowl, as it were. So, we had the best of both worlds by the time conductors Julian Raphael and Carol Shortis made their appearance.

The first song, from Tonga, Malimali Mai, had one of those rhythmic trajectories that has the effect of catching up up whole bunches of people in some kind of mesmeric spell, and getting them to move, think, act as one. The choir sang with plenty of gesturings, and conductor Julian Raphael invited us audience members to clap the rhythms – so we were involved from the outset. Various members of the choir introduced each item during the first half, which heightened the sense of “performer ownership” of the proceedings.

The opening item from Tonga had occasioned a lighting backdrop of the most delicious mango-like hues, underlining the sweetness and warmth of the song’s “place” in our minds. For two songs from Samoa which followed, the intense blue of the sea was emphasized instead; while the songs, firstly Falealili Uma, and then Fa’afetai I le Atua featured richly-harmonised repeated refrains, the second in particular real a cappella stuff. The NZ Maori Wairua o te puna Aroha which followed brought in a strong instrumental beat, and a pronounced swaying motion from the choir, underlining a sense of one people moving in accord.

An old favorite was The Wellerman, an early New Zealand whaler’s song, describing struggles between man and beast relieved occasionally by the “Wellerman” with fresh supplies for the whalers. Here I thought the song’s tessitura too low for the men’s voices to be able to clearly enunciate the tale, compounded by a tempo that was too fast for those same singers – as well as clarity, something of both the melancholy and the drudgery of the whalers’ situation wasn’t for me put across strongly enough. More securely grounded in effect was a New Zealand Lullaby from a slightly later period, early in the 1800s, apparently composed as a joint venture by two women, Maori and Pakeha, its attractive, faintly exotic melodic line accentuated in a Russian-sounding direction by the balalaika-like ukulele accompaniment!

I had to get my atlas out to find Boigu Island – its song Waiye here sounded suitably “ethnic”, which wasn’t surprising considering the island’s proximity to the Papua-New Guinean mainland – instrumentalists gathered around two impressive-looking and -sounding drums which punctuated the ends of the song’s phrases in fine style. The singing had that peculiary “open-throat” sound one associates with Polynesian cultures, slightly raw and very exciting, the men’s lines harmonizing with those of the women’s. More westernized, though still with exotic elements such as rhythmic chanting, was the Australian Soul Wind, the melody line and harmonizing very bluesy in places. Both of these were conducted, spaciously and most expressively, by Carol Shortis.

Two contrasting “Pasifika” items concluded the half, the first Tagi Sina, from Tokelau, dramatic and mournful, with a heavy rhythmic drumbeat underpinning the women’s plaintive melodic line, and the feeling of a whole community expressing sorrow taking up the whole company, the whole intensifying then concluding with a resounding crash. A perfect foil to it all was the concluding Sipaio from Niue, introduced as “Happiness”, with open, long-breathed melodies, accompanied by exuberant hands-and-arms movements suggesting joyful overflowing of feelings. The “tropical” lighting of the very first item returned as well to bring things to a kind of full circle.

From largely oceanic climes and vistas, we were taken by the concert’s second half to different worlds inhabited by non-human creatures, courtesy of one of the greatest musical comedy duos of them all, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. World-famous for their “At the Drop of a(nother) Hat” shows” they also created a collection, “The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann”, less popular, but just as high in literary and musical values. We were given eight of these, five arranged by Julian Raphael for choir, and three sung as either solos or duos by Julian, Carol Shortis and a character called Lambton, who was also the “compere” for the second half, in which role I thought he often became tiresomely wordy, his humour mostly of the heavy-handed W.S.Gilbert variety. Fortunately he was able to redeem himself with a spirited solo performance of “The Rhinoceros”.

Julian Raphael’s similar turn for “The Elephant”, augmented with a pair of elephant ears, brought out all the droll humor of the words concerning a pachyderm who has lost his memory, to the audience’s delight – while his “Warthog” duo with Carol Shortis gave both performers and their audience plenty of fun at the tale of Warthog Wallflower’s neglect at a party, until the arrival of Mr Right Warthog saved the day.

The rest of the songs featured the choir, supported by some superb piano-playing from Diedre Irons, the “guest accompanist” for the evening (occasionally doing a “Donald Swann” and adding an extra voice to those in the choir). The Whale sang and sneezed its way through Seas Antarctical, while the choir, although resisting the temptation to sing while standing on their hands, still evoked the world of the Sloth with words like, “The world is such a cheerful place /when viewed from upside-down / It makes a rise of every fall; a smile of every frown.”  Other wonderful rhyming couplets came in the song “The Armadillo”, in the wake of the unfortunate creature falling in love with an armoured car- “I left him to his singing / cycled home without a pause / never tell a man the truth /about the one that he adores…” music filled with droll, regimented rhythms and ironic gentleness, soft-hearted beneath the armour-plating!

As happened with every one of the actual Flanders-and-Swann concerts, the show’s climax came with the concerted singing of the “Mud, mud, Glorious mud!” chorus from “The Hippopotamus”, a ritualized celebration, indeed. Though there was an encore song with audience participation, called “Midnight makes up its own mind”, our hearts and sensibilities mostly stayed with the Hippopotami on the banks of the cool Shalimar, taking the song and the other spirited evening performances from choir, pianist and conductor happily with us with us out into the evening air.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pirates, policemen and patriotic persuasion in, er, Penzance? – no, Wellington!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington G&S Society presents:

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN – The Pirates of Penzance

Cast :  Colin Eade (Major-General Stanley) / Derek Miller (The Pirate King) / Keith Hobden (Samuel, his lieutenant) / Jamie Young (Frederic) /  Lindsay Groves (Police Sergeant) / Tania Parker-Dreaver (Ruth, a piratical Maid) / Hannah Jones (Mabel) / Megan McCarthy (Edith) / Laura Dawson (Kate) / Pasquale Orchard (Isabel)

Choruses – Pirates, Policemen, General Stanley’s other daughters.

Music Director: Matthew Ross

G&S Orchestra and Chorus

Chorus Master: Hugh McMillan

Stage Director: Gillian Jerome

Wellington Opera House

Wednesday 12th September, 2012

It wasn’t the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last – the thought “what terrific tunes these are” struck me freshly with resounding force as I listened to the Wellington Gilbert and Sullivan Society Orchestra’s neat and stylish playing of “The Pirates of Penzance” Overture, which began one of the season’s performances of the work in the Wellington Opera House.

As with all great music, one never seems to tire of hearing those melodies, in this case expertly brought into being by the orchestra under their Music Director Matthew Ross.  I remember being impressed with his direction of last year’s “HMS Pinafore” by the Society, and hearing “Pirates” this time round confirmed the impression I got that musically, at any rate, these performances were in reliable, well-considered hands.  The opening Pirates’ chorus went with a swing, as did Keith Hobden’s enthusiastic singing as Samuel, the pirate lieutenant, an occasional approximately-pitched note notwithstanding.

Tanya Parker-Dreaver made a characterful Ruth, her diction in particular an absolute delight throughout her tale of woe relating to her confusing the words “pilot” and “pirate”. Other characters such as Jamie Young’s Frederic and Derek Miller’s Pirate King looked impressive, but sounded happier and more at ease during their songs than with the dialogue, which in places came across as rather too sing-song. However, considering that Frederic was supposed to be “the Slave of Duty”, Jamie Young’s engagingly whole-hearted delivery of his dialogue fitted the ingenuousness of the character, even if his post-bevy-of-beauties dismissal of Ruth’s claims upon his affections could have been put across with a bit more Verdian gusto.

The agents of Frederic’s initiation regarding truly feminine charms – the Major-General’s beautiful daughters – were themselves delightful, moving and singing with engaging girlishness (I particularly liked the sound of Laura Dawson’s Kate), though a disappointment at the conclusion of “Climbing over Rocky Mountain” was the loss of intertwining-melody at the end, where we expected to hear the opening tune counterpointing with “Let us Gaily Tread the Measure” – I could only hear the latter, admittedly sounding forth splendidly and sonorously.

Though Frederic needed a bit more spunk when first confronting the girls, his appeal to their hearts for love was nicely sung, apart from some strain at the song’s highest notes – the sudden arrival of Mabel, the eldest daughter, was well managed, Hannah Jones properly owning the stage and her part on it, despite a soubrettish tone that hardened whenever she pushed her voice – her soft singing was simply lovely.

From the sudden arrival of the pirates, intending to kidnap the girls, through the Major General’s own entrance and patter-song, up to the pirates releasing the girls in response to their father’s falsely-constituted plea for mercy, the action went with a hiss and a roar. Particularly impressive was the Major-General, Colin Eade, whose energy, focus, delivery and general bearing associated with the character compelled attention from his first entry. His near sotto-voce reprise of the famous patter-song, prompted by the Pirate King, caused much merriment, innocent and otherwise!

But director Gillian Jerome’s stagings whirled the story along nicely as the end of the Act loomed, the often/orphan sequences amusingly dealt with, and the Major-General’s “orphan-boy” song filled with Victorian pathos, the perfect foil to the “I’m telling a terrible story” asides. The ritualistic splendor of “Hail, Poetry!” made its proper impact, and the final ensemble conveyed a happy amalgam of exuberance and relief.  Again, only Ruth’s final dismissal by Frederic lacked sufficient sting, an important exchange in view of Act Two’s change in Frederic’s fortunes.

Act Two’s “ruined chapel” scenario I thought could have been used more theatrically in places, especially the frequent comings-and-goings of both pirates and policemen leading towards the story’s would-be murderous climax – I thought some entrances and exits too literally applied, with opportunities for amusing juxtapositionings of the adversaries not really taken – when the police sang, towards the end, “Yes, we are here, though hitherto concealed!” one did something of a head-scratch, as they had been in full view for some time. Lacking weight of numbers the Policemen were somewhat disadvantaged right from the beginning, though vocally they made a good fist of their “We cannot understand it at all” recitatives. And, as the Police Sergeant, Lindsay Groves led his constables with nicely equivocal authority, readily displaying a soft-hearted interior, and a none-too-convincing bravado.

In places throughout the Second Act I thought music director Matthew Ross’s tempi a tad hasty, denying the characters the chance to fill out their tones and fully savour their words – The Pirate King’s and Mabel’s vengeful “Away, away!” upon hearing of Major-General Stanley’s deception I thought too rushed throughout the “Tonight he dies” sequences, the words gabbled instead of being spat out vividly – somehow the murderous intent of Sullivan’s grand-opera parody at that point was lost in the urgency. As well, the on/off stage exchanges between pirates and policemen at “A rollicking band of pirates, we…” were pushed too hard to my ears, the words suffering as a consequence – we lost something of the delicious antiphonal perspectives of “We seek a penalty – fifty-fold…” And I thought the Major-General’s paean of praise to nature “Sighing softly to the river” ought to have been more expansive, allowing the pirates to make their ironic interjections such as “through the trees” really tell.

Production-wise as well, the whole on/offstage interaction between pirates and policemen that dominates this Act didn’t for me have quite enough dynamic spark – I wanted more knife-edged comings and goings between the adversaries in the lead-up to the final conflict – more “shared” entrances with appropriate “double-takes” and sudden surges of adrenalin. And the “moment of truth” for the pirates, the Police Chief’s appeal to their loyalty to Queen Victoria, cried out for something cathartic, some kind of patriotic knife-thrust or body-blow! – perhaps with the police at that point baring their chests superman-style to reveal Queen Victoria t-shirts? – well something along those lines. The outrage of the appeal required some outward sign, similarly outrageous, for the sequence’s climax to really strike home.

Both hero and heroine grew in stature in this Act, Hannah Jones’s Mabel truly affecting in “Ah, leave me not to pine”, and with plenty of youthful exuberance in the superb “O, here is love”. And while Jamie Young couldn’t quite nail Frederic’s highest notes, his wonderfully sappy response to Mabel’s entreaties warmed all audience hearts, creating a truly “Brief Encounter”-like moment of frisson before the lovers’ parting. Another pair whose stage-presence took on deeper dimensions were Ruth and the Pirate King, whose “Paradox” song was delivered with wonderfully cat-and-mouse relish, to the bemusement of their intended victim, Frederic.

So – if not quite as consistently satisfying as last year’s “Pinafore”, this “Pirates” properly entertained, with generally high musical values, some vivid character assumptions and a number of memorable moments – the people I managed to speak with afterwards all reckoned they’d had a jolly good evening in the theatre.

Organists and Festival Singers bring Vierne to the fore

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Festival Singers and Wellington Organists Association present:

FRENCH DELIGHTS

Festival Singers / Rosemary Russell (director)

Paul Rosoman (organ) / Jonathan Berkahn (organ/piano)

James Adams (tenor) / Linden Loader (contralto)

VIERNE – Messe Solennelle / Suite Bourguignonne (exerpts) for solo piano

Organ works by Vierne, Becker, and Guilmant

Songs by Hahn, Massenet and Faure

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Sunday 9th September 2012

A glance at the programme and the list of performers at the head of this review will give the reader an idea of the range and scope of this undertaking – a fascinating, and, as it turned out, extremely rewarding concert.

Centred firmly around the music of Louis Vierne (1870-1937) the presentation included also organ pieces and songs written by other French composers. To begin with, organist Paul Rosoman seemed to put the foundation-stones of the building to the test with a resounding Praeludium Festivum by Rene Becker (1882-1956), from the composer’s First Organ Sonata, music that in any language would make a truly splendid noise.

It occurred to me that this was the first time I had heard the main organ in Sacred Heart Cathedral played at what sounded pretty much like “full throttle” – it was definitely attention-grabbing stuff, stirring and resplendent. I loved the particularly “grunty” figurations in thirds during the fugue, just before the reprise of the opening of the Prelude – all very physical and engaging.

Vierne’s music then made its first appearance of the afternoon with two works for choir and organ – an Ave Maria and a Tantum Ergo. Both stand-alone works, the first, a prayer to the Virgin Mary, had a beautifully seraphic opening, sensitively handled by organ and sopranos, and then featured the full choir bursting in for the second part of the prayer, the “Sancta Maria”. Then, the Tantum Ergo, a prayer accompanying the veneration of the Blessed Sacrament, inspired some finely-crafted singing from all parts of the choir, with the sopranos rising to the occasion at the words “Sensuum defectui” halfway through, and again at “Compar sit laudatio” at the end.

Paul Rosoman again took his turn at the organ, playing this time two of Vierne’s own compositions, both from a set Op.31 containing twenty-four pieces “en style Libre” – I found the first piece “Epitaphe” exuded a strongly Catholic atmosphere, meditative tones, reedy timbres, and harmonies exploring “inner” realms. This was followed by a Berceuse, curiously unrestful –  rather “beefy” for a Lullaby, I thought, to begin with, but then sounding troubled, even angst-ridden, though it seemed as if, again in the best Catholic tradition, rest was eventually achieved at the end of tribulation.

Tenor James Adams was one of two singers who chimed in with heart-warming contributions to this concert, the other being contralto Linden Loader. Songs by Reynaldo Hahn and Jules Massenet were chosen by the tenor, and performed in reverse order to the program listing – so we first got Des Grieux’s heartfelt plea to Manon from Massenet’s eponymous opera, winningly and meltingly floated by the singer, and accompanied sensitively by Jonathan Berkahn’s piano playing. After this we heard the remarkable Si mes vers avaient des ailes (If my verses had wings), written by the thirteen year-old  Reynaldo Hahn. James Adams’ performance of this seemed somewhat inert in effect to begin with, after the radiance the tenor gave the Massenet aria, but the words then seemed to focus more sharply as the song ran its brief but beautiful course. The afternoon’s second singer, contralto Linden Loader, appearing during the second half, brought a rich, velvety voice to two wonderful songs by Gabriel Fauré, the well-known Après un rêve, here lightly and sensitively vocalized and accompanied, and the other, Fleur jetée (Discarded flower), a more dramatic outpouring, singer and pianist relishing the amplitude of Fauré’s writing and putting it across splendidly.

However, for the moment – and keeping a firm focus on the music of Louis Vierne – Jonathan Berkahn returned to the piano to give us two attractive moments from a Suite Bourguignonne, the whole consisting of seven pieces. The “Légende Bourguignonne” owes something to Fauré’s similarly elusive harmonic evocations, not unlike a Barcarolle in effect, with a kind of “rowing” rhythm, here beautifully played, the rather sweet shift into the major suggesting perhaps a journey’s end? Afterwards, a bright and energetic “Aubade” conjured up rolls of pealing bells awakening the new day – we heard a few clangers amid the clamour, but all to great effect, as well as enjoying the piece’s coda, rumbling upwards from the bass and bursting into festive mode once again at the conclusion. Exhilarating!

Rather akin to a musical version of “tag wrestling”, Paul Roseman then took back the reins at the organ console, for a performance of a “Scherzo” from Alexandre Guilmant’s Fifth Organ Sonata (the composer’s dates, 1837-1911). Again the piece immediately caught the ear, an atmospherically “serpentine” kind of opening suggesting some sort of “dans reptilian”, filled with slithering chromaticisms, the creepiness relieved by a charming Trio into which the listener could relax, away from thoughts of “something nasty in the basement”. But a reprise of the opening also brought out a remarkable fugue whose different voicings combined with the Cathedral’s ambient acoustic to suggest the idea of antiphonal forces at play.

An interval allowed us to take stock of all these strands of musical impulse before bringing us still more delights – firstly, two exerpts from a work Pieces de fantasie by Vierne himself, played by Jonathan Berkahn (both organists certainly earned their keep throughout this concert!). To begin with came a graceful, if quirkily-harmonised Sicilienne, its modulations flavorsome, and with lovely chromatic meltdowns in the trio section. Then a lively Intermezzo brought out the composer’s awareness of what sounded like jazz elements, the piece becoming almost circus-act oriented at some points, with frequent pauses for theatrical effect! Incidentally, by way of introducing the item, music director Rosemary Russell had already made the timely point about organ improvisation being akin to what jazz musicians do.

After Linden Loader had given us her two Faure songs, mentioned above, Rosemary Russell brought her choir to the platform for the concert’s “signature item”, Vierne’s Messe Solenelle . Two organists were brought into play, Paul Rosoman upon the Grand Orgue in the choir loft, and Jonathan Berkahn playing the Petit Orgue, the latter placed next to the choir. Throughout the Mass’s unfolding the contrasting effect of these two instruments added colour, resonance and drama. A case in point was the opening “Kyrie Eleison” begun by the men,  with dramatic interpolations from the “Grand Orgue” – and most creditably, the Singers were able to match the organ’s voluminous tones with some full-blooded singing of their own. “Christe eleison” made a sweet-toned, nicely harmonized contrast, throwing the creepily-returning Gothic-like Kyrie into bold relief, the sopranos bravely arching their high notes towards the  Grand Orgue to do battle with its massive tones – spontaneous applause!

The Gloria’s jolly, bouncing opening led to some theatrical exchanges between choir and full organ throughout the “Laudamus te….Benedictus te…..”  sequences, with only a lack of numbers hampering the ability of the men in the choir to float their lines comfortably, though the tenors in particular held on steadfastedly. Full-blooded, committed work by choir and conductor brought out grandeur at “Qui sedes ad dextram Patris” from a plaintive plea at “Qui tolls peccata mundi”, and nicely colored the energy at “Quoniam” with well-registered key-changes with each “Tu solus”, before delivering the “Amens” with much joy and plenty of vigor.

The Sanctus grew nicely from its men-only beginnings, the women’s voices properly ritualizing the “Pleni sunt caeli” and adding joyous energies to the ‘Hosannas”. A plaintive note was struck by the Benedictus, with the organ accompaniments distant and magical, before the Hosannas brought back the festive splendor of it all, the men contributing a ringing “In excelsis” at the end. Finally,the “Agnus Dei” was beautifully realized, sopranos really “owning” their utterances of “Miserere nobis”, and making something enduring out of the composer’s celestial harmonies at “Dona nobis pacem”.

Very great credit to Rosemary Russell, her Festival Singers and her organists, for bringing us closer in spirit to the music and times of a remarkable composer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beethoven and the New Zealand String Quartet – shifting the paradigm

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand String Quartet: 25th Anniversary Concerts

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

Helene Pohl / Douglas Beilman (violins)

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

St Mary of the Angels, Wellington

Friday 7 September, 2012

Guest reviewer: Antony Brewer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Nature, Life and Love – Pepe Becker and Helen Webby

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents:

Pepe Becker and Helen Webby – Love’s Nature

Pepe Becker (soprano)

Helen Webby (harps)

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 5th September, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brahms the Second? – perhaps Herzogenberg the First?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

St Mark’s Lower Hutt Concert Series

BEETHOVEN and HERZOGENBERG

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

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

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

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, Lower Hutt

Wednesday, 29th August 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enterprising flute repertoire – Ingrid Culliford, with Kris Zuelicke

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Old St.Paul’s Lunchtime Concert Series

Ingrid Culliford (flute) / Kris Zuelicke (piano)

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

MIRIAM HYDE – 3 Solos for Flute and Piano

ERNST BLOCH – Suite Modale

ROBERT MUCZYNSKI – Sonata for Flute and Piano Op.14

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon

Tuesday August 28th, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Old St.Paul’s Church -Lunchtime Concerts

New Zealand Guitar Quartet

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

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon

Tuesday 21st August 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Cathedrals of Sound – New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

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

BRUCKNER – Symphony No.5 in B-flat

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Simone Young (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 17th August, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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