Author: Peter Mechen

VECTOR WELLINGTON ORCHESTRA – whatever the weather……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Vector Wellington Orchestra Summer Concert

Soloists: Aivale Cole (soprano) / Benjamin Makisi (tenor)

Footnote Dance Company

Kate Mead (Radio New Zealand Concert) – presenter

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sunday 6th March, 2011

As comedian Michael Flanders, of “At the Drop of a Hat” fame, might have said, “If the gods had intended us to listen to music outdoors, they would never have given us weather!”. Such was the case on the weekend, when, to the intense disappointment of all concerned, the Vector Wellington Orchestra’s annual family concert sortie to the grounds of Government House had to be relocated to the Michael Fowler Centre. The smaller indoor venue meant that many ticketholders had to get their money refunded, although those of us who were lucky enough to have a transferable seat found ourselves still able to collect our picnic hamper, whose contents we sampled while pretending to be enjoying a beautiful day, sitting on dry grass, in the sun or under trees, watching the rest of the company doing the same. The ritual enabled something of the occasion to be salvaged (everything incredibly well-organised, I thought), while the wonderful music-making generated by singers, orchestra and conductor did the rest. So, despite the privations, it was a great success.

Again the Wellington orchestra’s management was able to demonstrate that, when something special was required to fit an occasion, it was delivered with aplomb (by contrast with some of the promotional efforts from the “other” orchestra in town, whose energies seem hardly to spill over from concert platform activities), inviting the Governor-General and the Wellington Mayor to speak at the concert, and properly “place” the event , albeit in its amended form. There might, actually, have been one speech too many, at the start, with the event’s raison d’être – the music – being, as it were, kept waiting in the wings a little too long. But the show’s compere, Kate Mead, of Radio New Zealand Concert, quickly put us at our ease and prepared each item with whimsical descriptions of the music’s contexts, and “humanizing” figures like the all-too-fallible Antonio Vivaldi of the “Four Seasons” fame, with stories of his being censored by his superiors for his “unpriestly” activities (some things never change…..).

Concerts such as these tend to go for the “instant appeal” repertoire, of which, naturally, there’s a marvellous store, especially in opera – interesting, really, that so many people regard the latter as a relatively “closed-book” kind of art-form, yet hugely enjoy the “great moments” upon contact. But also, making a world of difference here, were the singers, soprano Aivale Cole and tenor Benjamin Makisi, both in fine voice and having a wonderful theatrical ease and spontaneity on the stage, separately and together. As for the support from orchestra and conductor, the accompaniments were of a piece, by turns full-throated and exquisitely atmospheric – a particular joy was Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”, with Makisi’s nicely-focused tones borne aloft on diaphanous veils of floating instrumental sound, everything deliciously delicate and wind-blown. Perhaps the orchestra’s reduced numbers helped, here (I counted just four ‘cellists, for example), of a scale comparable with that of the average orchestral band in the “pit” of an opera house. What these players achieved with conductor Marc Taddei in places was spell-binding, considering they were in the same space as the singers, rather than in the recesses of “the womb of Gaia” (as Wagner called the orchestral pit). Admittedly, the reduced sound-scale didn’t help things like Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours”, which seriously lacked “grunt” during the final Galop, but fortunately this wasn’t typical.

It was a nice idea to run the three “La Boheme” exerpts together from Act One (again, the “big moments” – two arias and a duet, with the only unimportant casualties being the interjections of the offstage Bohemians), allowing Cole and Makisi plenty of theatrical as well as musical expression – while they were both impressive, I thought Cole freer, more easeful vocally, and still with something in reserve, even with the cries of “Amor!” at the end – fortunately, the largely non-opera-going audience broke off their premature applause to allow the singers these final off-stage vocal ecstasies! Earlier, Aivale Cole had demonstrated her versatility in Gareth Farr’s “Aoraki”, contributing a soaring vocal line to the largely traditional ambiences of karanga, were and putatara, supported by a typically rhythmic orchestral background. Apart from one audible Michael Laws-like comment from an audience member at the very end, not far from where I was sitting, this work got an enthusiastic reception, as did the same composer’s “Sea Gongs”, later in the program. Well, as American baseball coach Connie Mack once said, “You can’t win ’em all!”.

Dancers from the Footnote Dance Company contributed to two items. They performed rather more effectively to Tchaikovsky’s lovely Waltz from the opera “Eugen Onegin”, where the ‘ballroom swirling” was nicely captured, than for Vivaldi’s “Summer” from the “Four Seasons” (a brilliantly-played solo from concertmaster Matthew Ross), their movements I thought somewhat out-of-sync. with the music in places. The orchestra generated much more fire with Berlioz’s “Le Carnival Romain” (a nicely-phrased cor-anglais solo) than with Ponchielli, the players inspired by Taddei to produce surges of tone and flashes of brilliance as required. Again, the singers shone, Aivale Cole capturing the magic of a couple more famous operatic moments, Catalani’s “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” from “La Wally”,  and “Vissi d’arte” from Puccini’s “Tosca”; while Benjamin Makisi brought the caddish aspect of the Duke of Mantua from Verdi’s “Rigoletto” to life, tickling the sensibilities of the audience to perfection with his insinuations. And if Cole didn’t quite “nail” the fiendishly difficult penultimate note of the same composer’s “Sempre libera” from “La Traviata”, she could take comfort from knowing that many famous sopranos have also failed to totally convince at that point.  The “Brindisi” (Drinking Song) from the same opera brought the full-throated best out of both singers, a few impromptu waltz-steps from Cole and Makisi throughout the “chorus bits” again delighting the audience, and bringing an immediacy to the music’s context.

It remained for the old warhorse, Tchaikovsky’s Overture “1812”, to round the music off, which was done in quite spectacular, if unintentional fashion, when the second bass-drum player (brought in to simulate the cannon-fire at the piece’s climax) lost his grip on the drumstick at his first thunderous whack, sending it spinning across the back of the orchestral platform, to the risible delight of the audience! Wisely, I think, Marc Taddei had removed the repetitions of some of the music’s material in the middle of the piece, so that the actual battle came sooner than was expected. What astonished me was the weight of tone that the orchestra produced in places, so that nowhere did we feel sonically compromised or sold short in excitement. And the hapless percussionist who had lost his stick made up for the couple of entries he had missed while retrieving his implement by thundering away with extra vim and vigor at the height of the victory celebrations, earning himself a special accolade for his efforts at the music’s conclusion!

Menage a Trio – relishing the contrasts…

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CONTRASTS

Aram Khachaturian – Trio (Ist Movement) / Bela Bartok – Contrasts

Charles Ives – Largo / Paul Schoenfield – Trio

Menage a Trio : Julia Flint (violin) / Anna Coleman (clarinet) / Chris Lian-Lloyd (piano)

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University, Wellington

Saturday 5th March, 2011

Menage a Trio’s combination of violin, clarinet and piano vividly and triumphantly presented both contrast and fusion throughout an enterprising program. This was the Australian group’s second Wellington outing, a little better attended than the first the previous evening. A pity, as such playing as we heard on the Saturday evening deserved far more widespread appreciation.

Beginning with just a single movement of the Khachaturian Trio, the group straightaway established the music’s exotic colour and flavor, those evocative chordal clusters on the piano bringing forth a soulful response from the clarinet and a beautiful sinuous line from the violin, capturing the work’s opening ebb-and-flow character. And how beautifully the players reversed the roles of clarinet and violin, the clarinet quixotic and decorative in its figurations and the violin soulful and intense. The Trio readily brought out the music’s volatile undercurrents besides relishing its heartfelt, folky atmosphere.

With Bartok’s Contrasts, the work that gave the concert its name, the players again took us right into the music’s world, the opening pizzicato blues of the Verbukos (the so-called “recruiting dance”) with its near-cabaret rhythms, piano tintinabulations and splendid clarinet cadenza acquainting us well with the character of the instrumental interactions. Bartok’s title for the work reflected the composer’s attitude that the instruments didn’t really belong together – he wrote the piece for two prominent instrumentalists, clarinettist Benny Goodman and violinist Josef Szigeti, each part emphasizing great virtuosity, while underlining the differences between the instruments – hence the title “Contrasts”. Even so, the first few minutes of the Pihenö (relaxation) movement features beautifully interactive instrumental textures, evoking one of the composer’s nocturnal scenes with the surest of touches, the playing here etching the sounds onto the aural scenario with the utmost sensitivity.

The last movement was something else, complete with a mid-music change of violin, the composer directing that at the start of the movement the violin’s lower string be raised half-a-tone to G# and the top string lowered to E-flat, creating a tuning effect known as scordatura, one common in European modal folk-music. The player reverts to a normally-tuned instrument after thirty or so bars; but the effect at the outset was striking, not unlike the opening of the second movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony with a fiddle tuned higher than usual. It launched a proper “Danse Macabre”, with a whirling dervish aspect, conveyed with plenty of visceral impact by these musicians (echoes of the “Concerto for Orchestra” in places). A wistful, folk-flavoured central episode gradually took on a hallucinatory fire-siren aspect, out of which sprang madcap gallopings, a full-blooded violin cadenza, and exuberant shrieks from all participants, the players and their instruments dashing towards the music’s destiny amid exhilarating swirls of sound, the Bulgarian folk-rhythms adding to the excitement of it all.

Charles Ives’s Largo survived its transition from an intended, then rejected violin sonata movement to enchant us in these musicians’ hands – a dreamy, contemplative opening allowed firstly the solo violin ample opportunity to rhapsodize (difficult passagework giving rise to a strained touch in places), and then the clarinet, the latter proving a galvanizing force, goading the music into various volatile juxtapositionings, until the violin returned to call things to order and draw forth processional chordings from the piano, the dying fall of the music sweet and valedictory – a lovely performance.

The “dark horse” of the program for me was a work by the American-Jewish composer Paul Schoenfield – a Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Piano. Inspired largely by Hassidic worship, the composer wanted the music to reflect the celebratory nature of Hassidic gatherings, as well as generate an exotic appeal to classical audiences. Though drawing from the work of Klezmer Bands, the music’s high-octane energies and cutting edges impart a somewhat frenetic performance aspect that might well have left most traditionalists reeling. Right from the galloping opening, punctuated at the pauses by heartfelt glissandi and rumbustious pianistic energies, the music never let up, the first movement’s closely-argued convolutions tightening all the more throughout a final breathless accelerando, again very excitingly played. A portentous march-like opening to the second movement featured a mournful, almost drunken clarinet supported by equally doleful violin-playing, the piano, with flailing arpeggiations keeping the beat going, the players seeming to relish the grotesqueries, screeches, slurs and all – totally absorbing.

The atmospheric Nigun movement, the most meditative part of the work, was set in motion by the clarinet alone, the violin’s answering figurations rather like the impulses of two landmarks in a desolate landscape, with the piano supplying the Bartok-like night-sounds. Without a break the players plunged into the exhilarations of the finale, whose beating heart drove the music into and through celebratory rituals of both circumspection and abandonment, the last couple of pages releasing surges of energy – altogether, a demanding work, but one which these young Australian instrumentalists excitingly made their own throughout.

Winterreise at Waikanae

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SCHUBERT – Winterreise D.911

Keith Lewis (tenor)

Michael Houstoun (piano)

Waikanae Music Society

Memorial Hall,

Sunday 13th February 2011

The last five songs of this performance in Waikanae by Keith Lewis and Michael Houstoun of Schubert’s song-cycle Winterreise brought us right to the heart of this great work – that numbed, essential bleakness of spirit was tellingly conveyed by both singer and pianist, not with histrionics or gloom-laden darknesses of tone, but with a kind of other-worldliness symbolized by the traveller’s “passing-over” into the realm of the ghostly organ-grinder, a state of being completely removed from “this worlde’s joye”.

Such was the focus and concentration of singer and pianist that the performance even transcended intrusive rumblings from a nearby train, noises whose elongations did their best to spoil Im Dorfe (In the Village), shortly after the interval. But by the time Der Wegweiser (The Signpost) was reached, we listeners in the hall had ourselves gone into those “grey havens” where earthly considerations seemed no longer to matter. Lewis and Houstoun caught this particular song’s almost pre-ordained fatalism, every utterance and every note suggesting the individual’s progression from that bitterness of heart to a numbed resignation in the face of what must be.

From the start this wasn’t a reading of the cycle that sought to plumb the depths or wring out the emotions too early – Houstoun’s chordal introduction to the opening Gute Nacht (Good Night) moved at an easy, almost brisk pace, and Lewis’s singing, if strongly-declaimed in places, kept feelings on an even keel, though with sufficient tender contrast at the major-key change for the last verse’s opening, to make the moment of farewell sufficiently heart-rending.

For all that the emotions were never over-wrought in this performance, the cumulative effect of such an approach had a magical effect upon irruptions of light among the prevailing gloom, such as the sweet remembrances of happiness prompted by Der Lindenbaum (The Linden Tree). Houstoun’s introduction to the song rippled, but the echoes had little resonant warmth, in keeping with the simple, ballad-like treatment of the first verse – however, the interplay between singer and pianist throughout Verse Two, with its minor-key modulations and care-worn accompanying figurations, was most affecting, as was the recalling at the end by the singer of the leaves’ rustling, with the words “Du fändest Ruhe dort” (There you would find rest).

The following song, Wasserflut (Torrent), though in places underlining the singer’s unsteadiness on sustained notes, featured an even more heartfelt and theatrical realization, Houstoun capturing the “tolling bell” aspect to perfection, and Lewis coloring his voice exquisitely in places, nowhere more beautifully than when addressing the snow, at “Schnee, du weisst von meinem Sehnen” (Snow, you know my longing), then rising to a passionate declamation with the final “Da ist meiner Liebster Haus” (There will be my beloved’s house).

Though there were too many other instances in this performance of these kinds of interpretative insights to do justice to, here, what delighted me were the unexpected moments of frisson – such as in the deceptively straightforward-sounding Die Post, which usually trips along almost vacuously, as if the composer felt the need to lighten the prevailing gloom of the journey at this point. Lewis and Houstoun, by dint of their awareness of possibilities for contrasts of colour and rhythmic impulse, made the “scene” into a miniature tone-poem, setting the traveller’s immediate exhilaration of encountering the sound of the posthorn against a more ruminative and inward world of past remembrance, beautifully pointed for maximum effect. And if the transcendent nature of the music over the last five songs cast, as here, a mesmeric spell over both musical and metaphorical elements, there were sufficient  moments of breath-catching beauty and arresting power throughout for the performance to constantly lead the ear of the listener onwards, giving a palpable sense of Schubert’s and his poet Müller’s visionary journey.

All credit to the Waikanae Music Society for organizing such a splendid concert. A well-appointed printed programme, including texts and translations of the songs, added to our pleasure, even if it meant that the “rustle of page-turning” in places was more than palpable – though sensibly, none of the texts were printed in a way that caused a mid-music irruption – such things, albeit very briefly, were left to the Railways!

Postcards From Exotic Places – NZSO’s Chinese New Year

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Postcards From Exotic Places

SHENG – Postcards / LALO – Symphonie Espagnole

BODY – 3 Arias from “Alley” / DVORAK – Symphony No.9 “From the New World”

Tianwa Yang (violin)

Jon Jackson (counter-tenor)

Perry So (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday 29th January 2011

On paper, it somehow seemed a slightly gimmicky way for the NZSO to begin the year – and having two much-played works from the standard repertoire presented as “exotic places” came across as almost ingenuous. How could Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, which EVERYBODY knows, possibly create an “exotic” impression? And, as a friend of mine remarked, “Chinese New Year Concert? – well, if you regard Lalo and Dvorak as Chinese composers, I suppose!”

In the event, it all worked surprisingly well, not the least due to some remarkable performances from the musicians involved with the concert. Both of the “standard repertoire” pieces sounded newly-minted on this occasion, and the two more obviously “Chinese” items in the concert stimulated and delighted the ear, so that we in the audience were constantly drawn towards the music. The brilliant and evocative playing of the soloist, Chinese violinist Tianwa Yang, brought Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole alive for me in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible – I’d previously regarded the piece as vapid and long-winded, and was charmed to find myself so unexpectedly engaged by it all. As significant was the contribution of the young Chinese conductor, Perry So, who secured from the NZSO players plenty of energy and focus throughout, enabling one to fall in love all over again with Antonin Dvorak’s most well-known symphony, one whose familiarity might just as easily have prompted a routine, all-purpose makeover. Instead, here was a fresh, urgently-delivered sequence of responses which made the notes sound as though they really mattered, the first two movements in particular for me getting right into what sounded like the music’s pulsating heart.

One of the most interesting aspects of the concert was the performance of three of the arias from Jack Body’s opera “Alley”, first staged in 1998 in Wellington’s International Arts Festival. At a pre-concert-talk the composer himself charmingly spoke about the music and the figure behind its inspiration, China-based New Zealander Rewi Alley, an active and life-long supporter of Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Revolution and its aftermath. Though problematic for a number of reasons, the production at the time received a lot of acclaim, though I felt the music had been somewhat compromised by the various on-and off-stage goings-on. Here, then, was a chance to experience without undue distraction three of the opera’s musical highlights, each of the three arias belonging to the young Rewi Alley, reflecting upon different aspects of both pre-and post-revolutionary China.

Each aria was sung by Australian counter-tenor Jon Jackson, not quite with sufficient voice in his “normal” register, but crackling with electricity in his “counter-tenor” mode, galvanizing the textures with incredibly emotive tones. The first song, Two Eyes, describing the execution of a young dissident, began with beautifully-focused “exotic” textures, readily capturing a sense of a time and place at once immediate and far away. The singing, precise and controlled at first, seemed muted, in danger of being consistently overwhelmed by the orchestral textures (less of a problem, perhaps, with the band in an opera house orchestral pit), but then hurling aside all reticence in counter-tenor mode, as the victim’s fate becomes apparent. The second aria , Men at Work, featured goosebump-making antiphonal drumming, and orchestral vocalizations, the soloist more “sprecht” than “gesang” in places, describing both the power and purpose of “ten thousand men working naked”, and the near-eroticism of the sight of a young boy cooling his body with irrigation water. Finally, Night painted a visionary, in places heartbreaking set of images of sleep, involving sleepers, whispering trees and millions of “battered, joyless children” imploring, seeking comfort and love. Body and his librettist, Geoff Chapple, used texts drawn from Alley’s own poetry.

Opening the concert, Bright Sheng’s Postcards took us on a whirlwind tour of different parts of China, the composer using folk music idioms from specific regions to help characterize a particular feeling about each one. From the Mountains took listeners to remote, widely-spaced places, the wind lines exotically “bending” their melodic pitching in places and creating a peaceful sense of drifting distance in tandem with undulating string figurations. A contrast came with From the River Valley, whose Respighi-like energies, heralded by bell-sounds, featured ear-tickling sonorities from winds and a muted trumpet set against the roar of heavy percussion at climactic points. Rather more primitive and challenging was From the Savage Lands, sounding in places like a “Stravinsky-meets Britten” amalgam of rhythms and sonorities, building up to an exciting rhythmic tattooing of percussion and shrieking winds, until muted trumpet and bass clarinet led the music away from the bacchanalian frenzies to a state of exhausted afterglow, the composer confessing that at this point in his work, the final Wish You Were Here, his homesickness for his native land became all too apparent. Sheng’s music amply demonstrated at this point that peculiarly Oriental ability to evoke whole worlds with the simplest of artistic means, the restraint of the scoring making all the more telling a concluding impression of peaceful resignation.

As for the two better-known items in the concert, what I really enjoyed was the immediacy of the playing of both the soloist and the orchestra – I thought the instrumental textures were given a bit more edge and “bite” in places than has been the case with the orchestra of late, making for an exciting and involving sound. Beside violinist Tianwa Yang’s stunning playing – expressive across a gutsy-to-sweetly-rapt continuum – many of the orchestral solos both stimulated and enchanted, none more so than the superb cor anglais playing of Michael Austin throughout the New World Symphony’s Largo, though comparable magic was wrought by the front-desk octet of strings at the close of the movement. Apart from a reading of the Scherzo of the Symphony which in places relied perhaps too much on speed instead of rhythmic pointing, I thought conductor Perry So’s approach to the music constantly fresh and invigorating. And I liked the sounds he encouraged from the players, direct and wholehearted, and serving the music well.

Connecting with Sibelius – NZSO on Naxos

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Sibelius –  Symphony No.1 in E Minor Op.39 / Symphony No.3 in C Major Op.52

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Pietari Inkinen, conductor

(recorded in the Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,

March 3rd-5th 2009)

Naxos 8.572305

Interesting that Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO chose to record these works before presenting them in concert – I had thought that the orchestra’s “Sibelius Festival” of September 2009 was the occasion for parallel recordings of the same repertoire, but it appears from the dates given on the disc that the First and Third Symphonies at least were set down some time before the concerts, in March of that year. Doubtless, Naxos’s “schedules” would have been the overall consideration in the done order of things, but I would have thought it best to have tried to capture on record some of the energy and impetus generated by the “live” performances. I have to say that the music-making on this new Naxos CD represents a pretty stunning achievement by conductor and players, as were the live concerts, of course. At the time I felt Inkinen’s interpretations and the orchestral playing, though beautifully and expertly realized, hung fire in places, though while listening to both works on CD I did feel that at certain flash-points the concert performances had a sharper focus, as if the music had been lived with for a while and the structural and emotional terrain even more deeply considered.

I do remember the beautifully-presented clarinet solo at the beginning of the First Symphony – in the concert the player was Patrick Barry, and there’s every reason to suppose that it’s the same musician on this recording. It couldn’t have gotten the symphony’s performance off to a more auspicious beginning, the last few whispered notes of the solo startlingly flooded with light and energy by the strings’ entry, the playing fervent and sonorous. Everything’s nicely caught, the mood-changes profound and atmospheric, but judiciously fitted into the music’s long-term contouring. We get a vivid sense of the work’s journeying through varied territories, pizzicati strings, winds and brass building up the excitement and tension with the development’s repeated falling melodic figure, leading to the glorious flowering of the strings’ big tune and the reprise of their opening material, grander and more epic this time round, on full orchestra. Is all perfect? – Here, and again at the movement’s end I find myself wanting a notch or two more bite, more fire in the music’s belly – those stern summoning brass calls near the end for me need to sound as though they REALLY mean business!

Following are rich, dark evocations at the slow movement’s beginning – expressive strings and wind against a sonorous brass sound. As the music moves from pastoral playfulness to epic resolve, Inkinen and the orchestra take on the challenge with ever-increasing intensity. The stormy episode trenchantly rumbles and threatens, only a slight rhythmic hiccup at the top of a string phrase (a rogue edit?) momentarily delaying a sense of those rhythms and impulses spilling over and flooding everything in the way, though the elephantine brass snarls and lower-string energies are wonderfully visceral! A Finlandia-like theme (a variant of the movement’s opening phrase) calms the storm, and takes up the dark tender song of the opening once again, singing the movement to its end – beautifully played.

Good to hear Laurence Reese’s timpani so well caught in places here, but especially in this scherzo, stunningly presented by all concerned – I liked the cheekiness of the canonic episode begun by the winds and bolstered by the strings via deftly-voiced dovetailing. Then, shortly afterwards, there’s that astonishing mood-change beautifully wrought by the horns at the beginning of the trio – so magical, like revealing a secret garden whose veil is, for a few minutes pulled back to breathtaking, alchemic effect, before being peremptorily hidden from view and the opening rhythmic patterning reaffirmed. Right at the end, I thought Inkinen could have encouraged his brasses to spit out the final phrases with a bit more temperament – again, emphasizing a kind of “this is what we’re here for” attitude, which would have had the effect of more tellingly focusing the music. The finale’s opening has tragic, but noble strings, with wind-and-brass exchanges preparing the way for spirited, urgent allegro sequences, the timpani’s crisp rhythmic patterning especially well-caught as the music drives towards crashing chords and tumbledown string figurations. The hymn-like string tune is sweet and warm, keeping emotion in reserve the first time round, then blossoming more readily at its reprise – even so, I feel it’s all a bit cool, beautifully played, but held at arm’s length. “Oh, for a muse of fire!” exclaims a Shakespearean character; and likewise I crave here and there in the playing a touch of proper incandescence.

Symphony Three follows on the disc, a work more overtly classical in structure and organization, but still with Nordic overtones, by turns bracing and melancholic. Inkinen’s very “poised” approach brings out the lines and structures clearly, trusting more at the outset to the steady spin of rhythms and melodic lines than to accenting and phrase-pointing (the strings at the opening seem almost casual, with clipped phrase-ends) – though as the performance takes hold, conductor and players draw the listener into the spell woven by the music’s tensile insistence, the playing finding ever-increasing nuance and colour as one episode leads into another (whole realms of wonderment at 2’46” for example, when a great stillness draws its cloak over the skies for a few precious moments). And by the time the opening motive gathers up its impulses and returns, unequivocally, on the full orchestra, we are here swept along with the music’s tide, the triumphal march making its point and disappearing, almost as quickly as it had come. Only a strangely lukewarm-sounding final “Amen” from brass and timpani momentarily disconcerts – the rest is truly heartwarming.

But it’s the slow movement in this performance that truly enchants – Inkinen and the players manage to at once let the music unfold, as if conjuring it out of the air, while bringing a richly-wrought storyteller’s focus to each and every phrase. Winds and strings take turns to sing the melody, while brasses lay down ineffably distant pedal-points of ambience, the whole interaction of sounds here making for a listener’s  memorable distillation of imaginative possibility. I like the truly forthright wind-playing in the becalmed central section, and a sense of the air being stirred and shaken by quickening impulses from strings and winds, whose brief, impish dance sparkles like a will-o-the-wisp in the gloaming. The sunlight returns at the finale’s opening (such beguiling winds), though remembrances from the slow movement soon begin to cloud the skies and drive the energies and irruptions towards the juggernaut-like martial theme that sweeps the work to its conclusion. Stirring stuff – even if at the very end I could have imagined a grander, more celebratory sense of arrival (the live performance seemed to convey this more tellingly), with brass and timpani allowed rather more “attitude”!  Still, on the strength of all of this, I for one will await the rest of the series with considerable expectation.

NZSO – incidentally, on Naxos…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BEETHOVEN – Incidental Music to “Egmont”

Concert Aria “Ah! perfido!” Op.65 / Marches WoO 18/19

Madeleine Pierard (soprano)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

James Judd (conductor)

NAXOS 8.557264

MENDELSSOHN – Incidental Music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (complete)

Jenny Wollerman / Pepe Becker (sopranos)

Varsity Voices / Nota Bene

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

James Judd (conductor)

NAXOS 8.570794

There’s much to enjoy in both of these NZSO/Naxos recordings, perhaps more consistently so with the Beethoven than with the Mendelssohn, though the latter, for all its idiosyncrasies, still contains many felicities, especially with regard to the orchestral playing. Under the direction of its former chief conductor James Judd, the orchestra delivers highly-polished, fleet-fingered accounts of all of the music on both discs. Some will love the Mendelssohn recording, relishing the fusion of music with spoken text from Shakespeare’s play, while others may well be annoyed by the way that it’s been put together. Less problematical in that respect is the Beethoven disc, especially as the Naxos recording concentrates largely on the music and doesn’t follow the example set by its Decca predecessor from the 1970s. This featured George Szell and the Vienna Philharmonic, with soprano Pilar Lorengar, but also included several of the spoken melodramas adapted by Franz Grillparzer from Goethe’s original drama, including Egmont’s final stirring speech that precludes his execution and the “Victory Symphony”. The Naxos – rather lamely, in my view, though others may disagree – includes from the spoken drama only Egmont’s  account of his vision in a dream of the heroine Clärchen. This means that the “Victory Symphony” bursts in at the end as if out of nowhere – there’s no preamble, and certainly no sense of Egmont’s pending execution and his defiance of the forces of tyranny and repression.

So, of the two productions, it’s the Mendelssohn recording on which efforts are made to integrate the incidental music with the drama. As I’ve said, the playing by the NZSO is terrific throughout both discs, even if James Judd’s somewhat “neutral” conducting personality doesn’t deliver any great insights or searing revelations – although making the famous donkey’s calls in the overture sound more musical than asinine might be counted a good thing by some listeners. Throughout the well-known orchestra-only pieces – Overture, Scherzo, Intermezzo, Nocturne, Wedding March – one registers beautifully supple orchestral strings, both delicate and full-toned, along with nicely-flavoured winds and crisp, focused brass, with deft touches of percussion in appropriate places (though the timpani are too backwardly recorded for my taste). Especially good is the Intermezzo – superb wind-playing at the outset, and a wonderful dovetailing of parts, making for a real sense of swirling magic in the interweaving lines; and then a beguiling change of mood with the entry of the mechanicals to the strains of a march. And the Wedding March seems to gain in depth and amplification as it progresses, working up to something properly celebratory and swaggering by the end.

Voices there are aplenty, both singing and spoken – delightful and engaging are the singing voices, the two soloists both characterful and utterly different (some people are bound to like one or t’other!), and the choir voices beautifully elfin, the sounds they make as light as thistledown. Jenny Wollerman’s bright, infectiously tangy soprano has more of the solo work than Pepe Becker’s pure, relatively chaste tones, though for me it’s a case of “vive la difference!” when they follow one another in “Ye spotted snakes”, each voice creating its own “face” and character in turn. Perhaps the tempo in the latter is a bit fast for a “lullaby”, but the lightness of touch helps create a “faery” atmosphere, even if the effect is a tad breathless here and there – of course, “Through this house, give glimmering light….” conversely needs to urgently scamper, in accordance with the Overture’s bustling activity – as it does here, brilliantly.

Recordings can be curious beasts in the way the parts are put together – and this one verges on the bizarre, with the orchestra-only contributions set down in 2003, the solo and choral numbers taped in New Zealand during 2007, and the actors’ contributions two years later in England! Despite this the orchestral and vocal items have been convincingly married, and sound pretty much of a piece. A pity, therefore, that the spoken texts and melodramas don’t have anything like the same sense of integration with the whole, partly the result of being recorded by voices from the other side of the globe, with little or no thought given to creating a theatrical or dramatic atmosphere in the same acoustical space as the orchestra. Even given these discrepancies the matching of voices with music could have been managed far more sensitively – unfortunately, the actors are all too close to a microphone, and there’s no sense of interplay with the orchestral interjections (which is presumably what the composer wanted).  I quite like the voices themselves as such, though dramatically they’re a variable bunch, both Oberon and Titania getting full marks for impeccable diction and zero for dramatic evocation in their “Ill-met by moonlight, proud Titania” scene. The Puck is better, though he’s also too “present”, the voice again too close, and,like all the others, having little or no sense of being in “a wood, near Athens”.  Unfortunately, the over-riding formulas relating to international marketing of recordings probably would have told against the idea of using New Zealand actors to speak the stage roles – whereas I thought that, in this of all plays, a bit of local rustic spoken colour different to the “BBC Shakespeare” norm might well have added more interest to the idea of this disc and its conception.

Still, fascinating though the dialogues and melodramas are in their theatrical context, the music’s essentially the thing – and Mendelssohn, if not Shakespeare, is well-served by this beautifully-played and musically well-caught recording. Some people won’t, I’m sure, share my objections to those voices, either theatrically or recording-wise, while others won’t think it matters in the context of the whole. When all’s said and done, it’s a disc I’m glad to own. Speaking of context, for people who know Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, but haven’t heard any of the rest of the incidental music inspired by Goethe’s drama, the other Naxos NZSO disc here will be well worth investigating. Again, the production involves the use of spoken word, but, unlike the “completeness” of the Mendelssohn disc, here only one of the spoken melodramas  makes a brief appearance, to accompany the sequence of Egmont’s dream and his vision of Clärchen, his heroine-lover. It’s a shame that we don’t get at least some of Egmont’s final speech leading up to his execution and the final Victory Symphony – compare the Szell Decca recording at this point for a proper scalp-prickling theatrical effect at the end, with the music rounding off the drama as the composer presumably intended.

In remarking that, as with the Mendelssohn recording, there’s little “atmosphere” generated by the placement of the speaker’s voice on the Beethoven Naxos recording (again, simply too microphone-bound, and seeming not to “share the space” with the musicians), I must point out that neither does the older Decca recording capture the spoken voice with any great dramatic verisimilitude – don’t people who make these recordings know anything about theatre? Fortunately, (and again, as on the Mendelssohn disc) the orchestral sound has plenty of impact, focus and colour, and the bright, sonorous tones of Madeleine Pierard’s soprano have been well-caught by the engineers, both in the two “Egmont” arias and in the dramatic stand-alone concert aria “Ah! perfido!”

The “Egmont” Overture has, of course, one of the most arresting opening chords in all music; and James Judd and the NZSO players here achieve a fine beginning – sharp attack, then big-boned orchestral tone, followed by a beautiful woodwind rejoined, and then a renewed orchestral surge, with rich wind chordings. Judd gets a real sense of expectation in the progression via the repeated descending phrase leading to the allegro, where there’s again fiery attack and plenty of tone – though the strings don’t fix their teeth insufficiently upon the speeded-up version of the opening, repeated-note motto,and sound a bit too well-mannered (there’s even a hint of a diminuendo on one of the last notes of the phrase first time round, weakening the effect – those notes surely ought to be hurled at the listener like thunderbolts!). But Judd makes amends with the “Victory Symphony” at the end, encouraging on-the-spot attack from all departments and getting a heady rush of musical adrenalin as a result.

As Clärchen, Madeleine Pierard sings splendidly, never letting us forget that she is not actually a soldier – others such as Birgit Nilsson or Pilar Lorengar (each heard on previous recordings) might, in “Die Trommel geruhret”, depict the cut-and-thrust of battle and the pulsating of blood through the veins more excitingly and viscerally; but with Pierard we hear a young woman’s attractive and eager voice (singing a different note on the first “sondergleichen” to the singers in the other recordings, which could be in the edition she used), more feminine than Valkrie-like, in her evocation of the conflict and dreams of glory.

The following “Entr’acte” vividly delineates interactions between the citizens of Brussels, arguments leading to violence, while the succeeding episode accompanies the appearance of Count Egmont with his soldiers, to restore the peace, the music’s nobility of utterance reminiscent of similar themes in Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio” – both of these exerpts are beautifully realized by Judd and the orchestra. Madeleine Pierard returns for “Freudvoll und leidvoll”, and sings it as well and committedly as I’ve heard anybody, beautifully negotiating the somewhat treacherous vocal descent at the end. Another “Entr’acte” echoes Clärchen’s “Freudvoll und leidvoll”, before the music changes to a stirring march, again reminding us of “Fidelio” and the entrance of the tyrant Pizzaro, the drama concerned with the Dulke of Alva’s plans to arrest Count Egmont. A tragic note is struck at the beginning of the Fourth Entr’acte, where Egmont is arrested, and Clärchen attempts to rouse the citizens to help resist the Duke and her beloved’s arrest. Act V draws from Beethoven music of great melancholy and anxiety as Clärchen awaits word of Egmont’s fate, then takes poison at news of his imminent execution.

And so to the final scene, in Egmont’s prison, where the hero sends a final message to his beloved, before sleeping and dreaming of her (“Süsser Schlaf!”), uttering words of joy at her visitation to his thoughts, before calmly resigning himself to his fate at the executioner’s hands. The ensuing “Victory Symphony” sweeps in (on its own, alas – no stirring words beforehand), and the drama concludes in a blaze of fervent heroic triumph.

As if by compensation, several additional items round out the disc, two marches which the composer called “music for horses”, written for the Archduke Anton, the elder brother of Beethoven’s patron, the Archduke Rudolph; and the famous concert aria “Ah! perfido”, Beethoven’s setting of a passage in Metastasio’s drama “Achille in Sciro”, composed in 1796. Both the marches (great fun!) and the aria considerably add to the recording’s attractions – in “Ah! perfido!” Judd encourages a lean, athletic sound, and Madeleine Pierard tears into the opening declamations with intensity and gusto, carrying these qualities right throughout the first section, depicting the anger and frustration of a jilted lover, including a plea to the gods for vengeance, and then a change of heart, in favor of mercy. Perhaps the central aria-like section “Per pieta, non dirmi addio” lacks a little light and shade on the singer’s part, but when the agitations return, at “Ah, crudel!” Pierard again commands the music, her voice firing and sparking as she rails against the cruelty of fate, the coloratura giving her little signs of trouble. Though stylish-sounding throughout, I felt that orchestra and conductor could have made something more gutsy of the aria’s instrumental conclusion, the effect here being “contained” instead of properly full-blooded, more classical than romantic. Perhaps Judd didn’t want to overload the performance with anything that smacked of anachronistic force of expression, despite the overt emotionalism of the text. Something tells me, however, that the composer would probably not have minded any such “excess of feeling” in the least!

Christmas presents from the NZSO….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Wellington Christmas Concert 2010

Works by Britten, Mozart, Respighi, Handel, Corelli, Reger, Adam, Nicolai, Rutter

Aivale Cole (soprano)

Choir and Choristers of Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul

Paul Goodwin (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 9th December, 2010

Musically, this was a heart-warming “something for everybody” concert, presenting tried and true favorites from, for example, Messiah (fascinating to compare performances with what was heard less than a week previously from the Orpheus Choir and the Wellington Orchestra) along with relative concert-hall rarities like Benjamin Britten’s Men of Goodwill and Otto Nicolai’s Christmas Overture. Almost as rare was Respighi’s beautiful L’adorazione dei Magi, the second of the composer’s Three Botticelli Pictures. Another composer whose works rarely make concert-hall appearances in this part of the world is Max Reger, represented here by two Nativity settings for choir and orchestra.

Despite the musical interest of the program, and the excellence of the performances from soloist Aivale Cole, and the choir and orchestra under Paul Goodwin, I thought the event could have been made a bit more festive or Christmassy. True, the Wellington Cathedral of St Paul Choir and Choristers’ Santa-red robes did give a certain ritualistic air to the proceedings, and Aivale Cole’s spectacular dress with its energetic swirls of resplendent colour-energy was certainly eye-catching. But apart from these visual stimulations, there was nothing done or staged to proclaim the event had any more significance than just another concert. I actually felt sorry for the NZSO players, having to “deck the halls” in public not long after returning from an exhausting whirlwind European tour during which they obviously gave their all, wowing the critics and the audiences alike. One would have thought the orchestra had done enough for the year, and could deservedly rest on its laurels for a bit before facing the new challenges of 2011. But, presumably because it’s the “expected” thing to put on a Christmas concert, the musicians, or at least most of them, were there at the party, giving enjoyable and well-played performances of a mixture of interesting and standard repertoire.

What might have made a difference would have been somebody associated with or representing the orchestra actually welcoming the audience to the concert (and I don’t mean via one of those deadeningly impersonal recorded voice-overs which the orchestra uses to announce each event – was it David Pawsey who in the old days used to come out onto the platform at the beginning, and very sweetly ask us to make sure our cell-phones were turned off?). It’s the kind of thing that conductor Mark Taddei for one carries off with great élan when introducing Wellington Orchestra concerts – if somewhat gauche in effect when overdone, it’s nevertheless great to mark a festive occasion with something out of the ordinary like this. Alternatively, being a capital city, Wellington has no shortage of well-known “personalities” whose talents could be thus commandeered  (the city has a new Mayor, of course, who might have been thrilled to be asked to introduce something at the concert). And though it’s a bit of a hoary idea (but no more so than performing the “Halleluiah” Chorus on such an occasion, I might add), the items could have been introduced by one or two or more of these personalities reading something appropriately seasonal either from Scripture, or from literature. These are very basic “impulse” ideas, but doing something along these lines would have helped engender some extra atmosphere befitting the occasion.

Fortunately, the performances carried a certain sound and sense of seasonal celebration to convey an idea of Christmas, beginning with the Benjamin Britten rarity which I disappointingly missed, thanks to an unfortunate car-parking contretemps! Luckily, a reviewer colleague present described it all for me as “engaging and rumbustious, with a jolly fugal finale, played here by the orchestra with plenty of energy and feeling”. I do wish I’d heard it – apparently it was music Britten wrote for a broadcast of a Christmas speech in 1947 made by King George VI, though without the fugue on that occasion, due to time constraints. Britten never had the work published – whether he didn’t think much of it, or was too taken up with other projects, one can’t be sure – but Men of Goodwill had to wait until several years after the composer’s death before the score was made available by Faber Music.

Soprano Aivale Cole looked and sounded magnificent, even though her first offering, Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate, was truncated – contrary to the programme’s indication, she performed only the work’s opening section (my colleague thought she hadn’t sufficiently “warmed up” for the rest, hence the unscheduled departure from the platform). Next was Respighi’s adorable, orchestra-only L’adorazione dei Magi, an enchanting work, featuring orchestral winds performing miracles of rustic evocation, the strings initially held back, then allowed to interact with the winds to create a sense of wonderment and exultation at the Saviour’s birth. While very much a stylistic jump from this to Handel, Aivale Cole’s re-appearance for “Rejoice Greatly” from Messiah certainly continued the Nativity sequence, even if the singer found some of the downward figurations of the opening a bit breathless and intonation-testing – after the central “He is the Righteous Saviour’,  the reprise of the opening found her voice more settled and confident-sounding. Throughout, Cole’s wonderful diction and “ownership” of the words I found a constant delight, though she changed the unidiomatic “He shall Fe-EED his flock” to “He sha-AALL feed his flock”, about which one couldn’t really complain, especially as we even got some modest decoration of the line at the reprise of “Come unto him”. The Wellington Cathedral Choir and Choristers’ first appearance was at the end of this sequence, with a swift, lithe performance of “His yoke is easy”, the interpretation missing a bit of the ending’s irony with the word “light”, but still all beautifully sensitive and finely-graded.

Corelli’s Christmas Concerto began the second half, the opening terse and snappy, but with a lovely gravity of utterance in the slower section that followed. Donald Armstrong’s and Andrew Thomson’s duo violin work was just one of the outstanding features of a performance whose stylish textures, phrasings and rhythms helped bring the work’s pictorial qualities to life – a gorgeous “Nativity” processional sequence, for example, breathed such sweet and serene air as to make the contrasting allegro section properly “bite” before returning to the opening serenities. In both of Max Reger’s Christmas hymn settings the youthful freshness of the choir’s voices also made an incredibly sweet impression, the second of the two settings in particular allowing both men’s and women’s voices individual sequences, and contrasting the strands excitingly with the vigor of the full choir in the choruses. Otto Nicolai, best known as the composer of the opera The Merry Wives of Windsor, chimed in with a substantial overture-like piece, Christmas Overture, written for what seemed like a very large orchestra, whose size proved the choir’s undoing at the very end. But Paul Goodwin and the players captured the Schumannesque beginning of the work to perfection, with cathedral-like archways of sound, leading to episodes by turns agitated and suffused with the radiance of the chorale “Vom Himmel hoch”, the choir joining the festivities towards the conclusion, but sadly proving too “voice-light” and insufficient in number to make much impression alongside Nicolai’s full orchestral scoring.

Other highlights included Aivale Cole’s expansive and lyrical O Holy Night, whose second verse, sung in Samoan, featured a glorious high note at the end which brought the singer screams of approval at the end – and deservedly so. Again the sweet, youthful choral voices were like balm to the ears in John Rutter’s Shepherd’s Pipe Carol and the same composer’s arrangement of Away in a Manger; while a swift, excitable “Halleluiah” Chorus set one and (almost)all up and on their feet in the traditional manner – a good thing, too, because at the end everybody simply walked off the stage and the applause stopped, and that was it, no recalls, flowers, kisses or anything like that – just as if it was the end of another day in the life of an orchestra…….

Orpheus Choir and Wellington Orchestra deliver “good tidings” from Handel

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HANDEL – Messiah

Ana James (soprano) / Helen Medlyn (mezzo-soprano)

Keith Lewis (tenor) / Martin Snell (bass)

Orpheus Choir of Wellington

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Michael Fulcher, conductor

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday, December 4th, 2010

There’s no doubt about it – nothing brings in people quite like the prospect of hearing a “Messiah”. And, as when one goes to something like a rugby test, there’s a parallel sense of occasion, of impending enjoyment, of expectation that the the experience will truly resonate with an amalgam of the familiar and the freshly-minted. So, there, queued up in lines around at least two sides of the Town Hall were, I suspect, many “Messiah veterans” as well as people who would have heard, one way or another, about the “good tidings”, and come to see and hear for themselves just what it was all about.

The last Messiah I heard was given by a different choir, the Tudor Consort, in this same hall two years ago, the differences in style and interpretation between that and the present approach a cause for endless fascination. I remember then actually sitting in the auditorium behind the conductor of the present “Messiah”, Michael Fulcher, for the Tudor Consort’s performance and wondering what his reactions were to Michael Stewart’s extremely  lean, clean-cut and vigorous interpretation of the whole. Of course I was now ideally placed to glean some of those reactions by dint of the present concert, albeit two years afterwards.

So – again a full hall, the same orchestra, a bigger choir than there was in 2008 (a most resplendent-sounding Orpheus Choir), and a very different line-up of soloists. Madeleine Pierard’s vocal beauty and polish easily stole the show on the earlier occasion, but this time the quartet was far more evenly-matched. Ana James was here a silvery-toned soprano, Helen Medlyn the characterful, dramatic mezzo-soprano, Keith Lewis the lyrical, occasionally heroic tenor, and Martin Snell a commanding, richly-toned bass. Conductor Michael Fulcher took a more traditional approach to the work than we heard in Michael Stewart’s hands, with steadier speeds throughout and more “orchestrated” dynamic contrasts in places, which I thought brought out the music’s grandeur and depth of feeling more consistently.

Of course the “swings and roundabouts” syndrome meant that this time round there wasn’t in places the same knife-edged excitement around and about the textures, and one or two of the choruses seemed to play themselves rather than be infused with fresh energies. But these differences were, of course, for the listener part of the meat and drink of the experience, of hearing a familiar work freshly realized, and revelling in the stimulation and resulting discussion that such a new realization gives. As with Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, there doesn’t seem to me to be anything one can “do” to Messiah to blunt its effect – it’s one of those almost archetypal masterpieces of art which form an essential part of one’s understanding of human civilization in general.

To go through the performance and tease out every interpretative nuance would need an excess of world and time – any number of felicities could be cited as giving a sense of the whole, and the occasional frailty a timely reminder of the humanity of the enterprise. The soloists always generate great interest, and each of these performed with particular distinction. First up was, of course, tenor Keith Lewis, with his wonderfully poetic, liberally nuanced, yet still commanding, “Comfort Ye” (sounding not unlike a stylistically aware namesake from an earlier Handelian era, Richard Lewis), the voice opening up splendidly at “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness”, freely declaiming (some would call it “mannered”) in places, but for me managing to suggest a compelling spontaneity of utterance. Not a heroic performance, then, but a fascinatingly stylish one – later, his voice demonstrated some frailty at the very top, with the cruel upward leaps of “Thou shalt break them” giving him some difficulty, though he had introduced the aria with a beautifully-realised recitative “He that dwelleth in heaven”.

What Helen Medlyn lacked in sheer vocal girth she made up for in both characterful expression and grave beauty of utterance – the capacity to tell a story was always evident in her singing. Her big number, “He was despised” was heartfelt and emotional at the beginning, then vehement and theatrical in the middle section, projecting the text with her articulation rather than any great power. I liked her allowing some melodic decoration at the opening’s reprise, while keeping intact the aria’s essential simplicity. The same went for her  “But who may abide”, her voice assuming an almost Greek-chorus-like solemnity at the beginning, and then using sharply-focused diction to depict the “refiner’s fire”. Though occasionally having to force her tone, as in parts of “Thou art gone up on high”, her duet with Keith Lewis “O death, where is thy sting?” was put across with engaging energy and spirit.

Vocal girth was what Martin Snell’s bass voice had in abundance, but also great agility and splendid focus throughout. His dramatic experience was evident in his word-pointing at the declamatory “Thus saith the Lord”, though it must be said his runs on the word “shake” were more considered than really seismic. Despite the disappointingly bland orchestral introduction at “For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth”, Snell evoked the gloom magnificently, arching his voice vigorously at “glory”, and summoning the light with great surety. I thought “The people that walked” a shade quick, but singer and orchestra really made something of the words “have seen a great light”. For energy and vigour at a crackling pace, singer and orchestra again sparked from off each other at “Why do the Nations?”, while “The trumpet shall sound” has surely never sounded more assertive and assured in the hall as here on this occasion, with stellar playing from trumpeter Barrett Hocking throughout, fully matching the singing’s grandeur of utterance.

Youngest of the soloists, soprano Ana James nevertheless brought plenty of concert and operatic experience to her task, displaying a bright, silvery soprano voice which charmed at her first entrance “There were shepherds…”, quickened the listener’s interest at “And the angel said unto them….”, and brightly and eagerly scintillated at the words “And suddenly there was with the angel…” It was a sound that contrasted well with Helen Medlyn’s warmly involving tones in “Come unto him all ye that labour”, but really blossomed with “How beautiful are the feet”, the orchestra matching their soloist with beguiling instrumental beauty. Inevitably, everybody waits for two moments in Messiah, one of which is “I know that my Redeemer liveth” – here, Ana James spun her line out beautifully, surviving a touch of awkwardness at a breath-taking moment (literally) at “upon the earth” the first time round, and enchanting us with tasteful embellishments at the main theme’s reprise, with a beautiful stepwise ascent on the word “Redeemer”.

Michael Fulcher’s work with the Orpheus Choir made for many richly sonorous moments and some exciting contrasts in places – the “other” moment in the work, of course is “Halleluiah!”, which here was wonderful in every way. I confess that every time I’m taken by surprise when people leap to their feet for this chorus, and on each occasion it’s an exhilarating experience – the sudden irruptions of timpani and brass (trumpeters Barrett Hocking and Tom Moyer, and timpanist Laurence Reese on tiptop form) never fail to raise goosebumps! But conductor and choir made the most of the other big festive numbers as well, glorious soprano sounds in both “And the glory of the Lord” and “And He shall purify”, and all sections relishing their upward-thrusting lines and their concerted acclamations in “For unto us a Child is born”. I didn’t feel quite enough was made of the contrasting sections of “Since by man came death”, beautifully prepared for by the choir’s hushed opening tones, but needing a bit more attack at “by man came also the resurrection…”, though “even so in Christ” did seem sharper and better-focused. And while “The Lord gave the word” seemed to me to have a dogged quality throughout, elsewhere there was a real sense of the music invariably taking the performers and listeners somewhere. I liked, for instance, the building-up of the “Amen” chorus from tones of quiet confidence at the beginning to sounds of the utmost splendor at the end – beautifully and grandly achieved.

Working hand-in-glove with the singers throughout was the Wellington Orchestra, sounding ever stylish and rising magnificently to the occasion of those resplendent moments. There was the occasional moment where I felt the players weren’t being asked for anything special, such as at the beginning of “For, behold…”, which was more dull than gloom-laden; and some people would have thought that the string scintillations at “And suddenly” were workmanlike rather than celestial. But from the opening of Part Two, with the stern focus of the accompaniment at “Behold the Lamb of God” the concentration of the playing was palpable and arresting; and the strings’ accompaniment to “He was despised” beautifully echoed the singer’s pathos and dignity. And for energy and excitement the sizzling orchestral momentum at “Why do the nations?” really delivered the goods, underlining the contrasting grandeur of the playing throughout “Hallelujah” and during those final choruses.

The standing ovation at the end of what was a fairly long haul, was a richly deserved one – a heartfelt response to richly-committed music-making from all concerned.

Delightful Dvorak excites at St.Andrew’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

DVORAK – Piano Quintet in A Major Op.81

Cristina Vaszilcsin, Lyndon Taylor (violins) / Peter Garrity, viola

David Chickering, ‘cello / Catherine McKay, piano

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

Wednesday, 1st December 2010

At the end of the first movement of this performance of the Dvorak Piano Quintet I was flabbergasted – here was a group of musicians who had come together just for the occasion performing at a free lunchtime concert in Wellington, giving us playing and interpretation of a stature I was confident I’d not heard previously bettered in this music. I had heard the first violinist, violist and pianist play as a trio before, but within this extended configuration of performers Cristina Vaszilcsin, Peter Garrity and Catherine McKay seemed to me inspired beyond anything previously I’d heard them perform together – obviously the “enhanced” alchemy generated by the presence among the ensemble of Lyndon Taylor and David Chickering (playing violin and ‘cello, respectively) was working brilliantly.

Several things at once registered regarding the group’s playing: – firstly, the beautiful timbral focus of each instrument, at once distinctive and proportioned, each individual line a delight for the ear to follow. Then the unanimity of both attack and of phrasing, five instruments playing as one, yet each seemingly free-spirited, realized both the music’s strength and poetry. Whether one listened to each bar, or a phrase or succession of phrases, one felt the musicians had swallowed the music whole, finding both incidental delight in detail and long-term purpose and strength in the movement’s overview.

So every aspect of the music was given its place – the lyricism of the opening ‘cello-and-piano melody (beguiling tones from David Chickering and Catherine McKay, here), the vigor and point of the response, the depth of colour and texture in the middle voices, the distinctive tone of voices such as the viola’s, and the volatility with which things such as tempi, dynamics and textures would change – but it was the cumulative impact of the whole which truly galvanized our sensibilities as listeners. The quickening of tempi at the movement’s end thus seemed an entirely natural outcome of exuberant release from the energies the playing had built up throughout. Perhaps we in the audience should have forgotten our inhibitions and clapped and cheered at that point – instead we simmered with the excitement of it all, and waited impatiently for the next movement to begin.

The gorgeous viola solos in this work reminded us that the composer himself played the instrument – Peter Garrity’s open-hearted tones were set off beautifully by Catherine Mckay’s piquant piano-playing throughout the slow movement’s opening, one whose melancholy brought out the sunny remembrances of the con moto sections which followed. Here, rhythms were buoyed by enthusiastic pizzicati, with Cristina Vaszilcsin’s and Lyndon Taylor’s silvery violin duetting delightfully recalling happier times, the exuberance marred only by a brief moment of imprecision with the staccato downward phrase at the end. Although viola and violin soulfully revisited the opening, cheerfulness kept on trying to break in – there was a merry dance in whirling triplets begun by the viola, mischievously spiked by the piano in a two-against three game of chase, and a return to the con moto pizzicati impulses, with more cross-rhythms to keep the musicians on their mettle and beguile the listener’s ear – but a stoic sadness seemed to prevail and wander into lonely silence at the end.

As with Schubert’s music, tragedy often sits alongside exuberance and gaiety in Dvorak’s work – and the Scherzo of the Quintet immediately dispelled the previous movement’s sobriety with energies of the most infectious, almost unseemly kind, here brilliantly realized by the players, the “furiant” aspect readily recalling some of the most brilliant of the composer’s Slavonic Dances.  In the middle of it all, a gentle pastoral-like trio played engagingly with rhythms, suggesting a lovely ambiguity of trajection before skipping back into the dash and propulsion of the main dance. At the finale’s onset I thought the tempo a fraction too fast at first; but the players sustained both their articulation and ensemble, Lyndon Taylor’s violin getting a rare chance for its voice to shine alone by leading off the energetic fugal section of the movement, here especially relished by Catherine McKay’s piano-playing. Towards the end, the strings’ arched descent, echoing that of the piano a few bars before, gave regretful notice of the music’s conclusion, the musicians seeming reluctant to release those final graceful stepwise utterances, which grow inexorably into whirling flourishes of brilliance. These last sounds were greeted here with the utmost enthusiasm by a good lunchtime crowd, whose members seemed unanimously of the opinion that they had witnessed some extraordinary music-making.

Festival Singers delight with Rossini’s “Little, Solemn Mass”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ROSSINI – Petite Messe solennelle (for soloists, choir, harmonium and two pianos)

Lesley Graham, soprano / Linden Loader, alto / Jonathan Abernethy, tenor / Roger Wilson, bass

Jonathan Berkhan, Louisa Joblin (pianos) / Thomas Gaynor (harmonium)

Rosemary Russell, musical director

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hill St., Wellington

Saturday 20th November 2010

“Good God—behold completed this poor little Mass—is it indeed sacred music [la musique sacrée] that I have just written, or merely some damned music [la sacré musique]? You know well, I was born for comic opera. Little science, a little heart, that is all. So may you be blessed, and grant me Paradise!”

With these words Gioachino Rossini prefaced his Petite Messe Solennelle, written in 1863, and called elsewhere by the composer the last of his “pêchés de vieillesse” (sins of old age). Characteristically, the music is neither “petite” nor particularly “solemn” – but there’s little doubt as to the work’s sincerity – an expression of faith and piety from one, in his own words, “born for comic opera”.

One of the most engaging aspects of Rossini’s work is its complete lack of sanctimoniousness – nowhere does one sense a feeling, emotion or impulse that doesn’t spring straight from the composer’s essential nature. As with the Stabat Mater, written in 1842, the music unashamedly evokes the theatre in places, an example being the “Domine Deus” section of the Gloria, which featured a ringing, heroic tenor solo reminiscent of the famous “Cujus animam” aria in the earlier work. Tenor Jonathan Abernethy made an excellent fist of this, singing with flair, accuracy and plenty of dynamic and tonal variation – his work featured some lovely high notes in places such as the concluding “Filius Patris”.

Immediately afterwards, soprano Lesley Graham and alto Linden Loader took us to more sombre realms with “Qui tollis peccata mundi”, piano and harmonium setting the scene with piquant and dramatic utterances (great playing from the instrumentalists throughout) leading to further heartfelt sequences such as beautifully essayed chromatic ascents in thirds by the two singers, and a lovely blend by the two at the haunting “Miserere Nobis”, which developed into some positively theatrical Verdian duetting throughout those same words’ final repetitions.

Always one to relish his opportunities, bass Roger Wilson, in resplendent voice, splendidly delivered the “Quoniam”, at once finding the music’s lyricism and energising the sequences up to “Jesu Christe” with the help of Jonathan Berkahn’s vivid, very orchestral piano-playing. With Louisa Joblin on the second piano deliciously bringing extra “galumph” to the accompanying textures, the choral fugue “Cum Sancto Spiritu” sounded simply glorious, director Rosemary Russell characteristically finding a “tempo giusto” which brought out a polka-like “schwung” to the music that even Smetana might have envied.

I hope these descriptions of “flow” throughout just one of the work’s many sequences  will give a sense to readers of the music’s dramatic coursings from episode to episode, with  every impulse the seeming result of the composer’s instinct to speak in a language that comes naturally, with nothing contrived or laid on for a generalised effect. I loved the Britten-like energies of the Credo’s opening, vigorously ascending piano figurations answered by the choir, with the soloists’ contributions dancing in and out among the exchanges. Another treat was the almost Wagnerian “descendit de caelis”, outrageously visceral downwardly-rolling sequences for choir and piano, relished with splendid elan by the performers . By contrast, the “Crucifixus” featured Lesley Graham’s soprano movingly evoking with piano and harmonium something of the awe and pity at Christ’s own suffering in sacrificing his own life for all mankind. Although the second fugue, at “Et vitam” was initially less than tidy between voices and instruments, Rosemary Russell and her sopranos pulled things together, with the cries of “Amen” at the end a grand focal point, before a brief hiatus and final shout of “Credo” ended things triumphantly.

What the sleevenotes of my old LPs refer to as a Prélude réligieux followed, played as a piano solo by Jonathan Berkahn (my recording features the harmonium at this point) – a mesmeric fugal keyboard meditation, beginning and ending with imposing, Beethoven-like chords. In its way, it made a telling prelude to the Sanctus, whose interchanges between soloists and choir had a kinetic energy as well as drama, finely sung, with the men in the choir especially strong. Lesley Graham then made the most of O Salutaris, her equivalent operatic “scene” for soprano, a big-boned and lyrical outpouring, whose mirror image was the contralto solo at Agnus Dei, introduced by portentous piano and harmonium tones, and simply and gravely sung by Linden Loader, balancing dignity with moments of theatrical expression – her cries of “miserere”, supported by lovely chorus work, were truly supplicatory, leaving Jonathan Berkahn to complete Rossini’s piquant piano solo farewell at the end – a wry gesture, entirely characteristic of the composer.

Immense pleasure was to be had from all of this, completing a concert and a year the Festival Singers can, I’m certain, be proud of.