Author: Peter Mechen

Eyal Kless in Wellington – have violin….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eyal Kless (violin)

with Catherine McKay (piano)

and Vesa-Matti Leppanen (violin)

Mozart  Sonata in B flat for piano & violin KV 378

Prokofiev – Sonata for 2 Violins in C Major Op.56

Grieg Sonata No. 3 in C minor for piano & violin Op. 45

Aleksey Igudesman – The Crazy Bride

St Andrew’s on the Terrace

Friday 9th July 2010

Wellington’s lunchtime concert enthusiasts were given a real treat by visiting Israeli violinist Eyal Kless, who combined forces with both pianist Catherine McKay and fellow-violinist Vesa-Matti Leppanen for what seemed almost like an impromptu and all but unheralded concert, one which certainly deserved more advocacy that it actually received. With sterling support from both his partners throughout the concert, Eyal Kless readily demonstrated the qualities suggested by the snippets of publicity which came my way – “a dynamic and versatile musician” for example – and gave his audience a real sense of his “rich recital and chamber music career”, which involves performing in many places around the world. Eyal currently teaches in Manchester and in Tel Aviv, and besides concerts he gives lectures and masterclasses involving such diverse topics as stage-fright, as well as violin technique. He’s also a sought-after jurist for various international competitions.

The varied programme began with a Mozart Sonata for Violin and Piano KV 378, a work of richly-wrought textures and and wonderfully interactive detailings. Pianist Catherine McKay’s expressively nuanced playing of the very opening of the work drew a like response from the violinist, and cast an aura of contentment over the listening spaces, both musicians relishing their opportunities to fully explore the music’s strength and subtle elasticity. For our pleasure (and presumably for their own) the musicians observed the first-movement repeat, after which there was tension and excitement aplenty generated by the development’s minor-key mood, with the pianist’s forthright attack during the great outbursts matched by the violinist’s equally-focused playing. After this, the recapitulation of the sonata’s opening measures brought from both instruments rich and glowing B-flat colourings to the final bars.

Although the piano seemed at first to take the melodic lead in the slow movement, the violin judiciously added a countervoice, sometimes a simple sustained note colouring the phrase. Then it was the violin’s turn with the second subject, very operatic in effect, with a beautifully flowing accompaniment from the piano, both of the instrumentalists through all of this registering and delivering the music’s ebb and flow. The finale wasn’t at all rushed, the players pointing the rhythms nicely to keep the momentum going, but generating a lot of “schwung” in the minor-key episode. Some fairy-light triplet-playing scampered deftly to the treble-tops before returning the music to the rondo-theme with a nice “rounded-off” sense of homecoming.

Vesa-Matti Leppanen then joined Eyal Kless for a performance of Prokofiev’s Sonata for 2 Violins, written by the composer in 1932, and described by Prokofiev’s son Sviatoslav as “lyrical, playful, fantastic and violent, in turn”. The players brought out the music’s exploratory, improvisatory character at the beginning, the harmonies very bittersweet, and the lines in places ethereal and stratospheric, happily with Eyal Kless’s playing in particular fully up to the challenge. Both musicians dug into the pungent rgencies of the second movement, dovetailing their lines skilfully, and enjoying the canonic interplay throughout a trio-like section of the music. The third movement’s graceful, “other-worldly’ melancholy provided a telling contrast with the dance-like opening of the finale, with its rapid-fire exchanges between the players – if intonation occasionally slipped under pressure, such as during parts of the “whirling dervish” conclusion, it mattered not a whit to the spirit of the dance.

Violinist and pianist rejoined forces for a performance of Grieg’s C Minor Sonata which certainly flung down the gauntlet at the opening with passionate, full-blooded utterances, even if I imagined those melismatic phrases at the beginning sounding somewhat earthier, with stronger, more “dug-in” articulation. Throughout, the music’s episodes of great agitation were contrasted well with moments of wonderful stasis, the performers having the ability to “fuse” both the lyrical and dramatic moments into a coherent shape. The composer’s characteristically piquant harmonic shifts were again evident at the slow movement’s piano-opening, here beautifully played by Catherine McKay and richly rejoined by her violinist-partner. They captured the gypsy-volatility of the music’s middle section, before delivering the big tune’s reprise with melting sweetness, and a burst of great emotion throughout the double-stopped octave violin passage almost at the end, the violinist unfortunately besmirching his final note in some way and looking annoyed with himself as a result!

The concert concluded with another violin duo work, Kless joining forces once again with Vesa-Matti Leppanen to bring an entertaining piece of almost music-theatre to life, a work by Aleksey Igudesman called The Crazy Bride. The music worked in tandem with a number of racy spoken descriptions by Kless of a Jewish wedding at which the people and events are somewhat larger-than-life!  Consequently, there was never a dull or drab moment, the music seeming to delineate a run of events where crisis followed crisis (I’m told, however, that weddings tend to bring out extremes of whatever in people), the whole akin to having a dramatised wall-to-wall sequence of Monteverdi’s most emotionally candid madrigals. Kless and Leppanen enjoyed themselves hugely and conveyed such a strongly-flavoured sense of occasion that the archetypal characters in the scenario came to life before our eyes. Even though most of the audience was probably outside the tradition looking in, what seemed like the “Jewishness” of it all, music, movement, gesture and feeling was conveyed with strength, vigour, humour and ultimately, affection. Best of all I liked the Wedding Dance, with its gradual accelerando style set against an emotion-laden middle section whose poise and depth of feeling spoke volumes amid all the hilarity and showmanship.

Martin Riseley and Diedre Irons – a partnership of substance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts Series

Martin Riseley (violin) / Diedre Irons (piano)

Music by SCHUBERT, STRAVINSKY, CORIGLIANO and KREISLER

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Sunday 4th July 2010

I’d hoped initially that Martin Riseley and Diedre Irons would give us Schubert”s heartwarming C Major Fantasia for Violin and Piano – the one that liberally quotes from the composer’s song “Sei mir gegrüsst” – but instead we got something darker and leaner, the Rondo in B Minor, D.895, a work whose intensely-focused moods and organically-motivated transitions throughout present a highly-concentrated dialogue between equal partners, at once demanding and rewarding to play and to listen to. Right from the beginning the performers plunged into the fray – Martin Riseley and Diedre Irons are both “big” players, chamber musicians who can think orchestrally when the music requires a large-scale declamatory response, while keeping the overall picture in mind – so we enjoyed the opening’s stern, imposing piano chords, and the agitated string figurations, and how the tensions seemed to mould themselves most naturally (though not completely) into a more lyrical, somewhat introspective mood. Riseley and Irons kept an undertow of unease going, so that we sensed the inevitablilty of things returning to come to a head – strong exchanges, again, very “orchestral” and full-blooded, the moment of dancing liberation into the Allegro a treasurable frisson of hesitation overcome by impulsiveness (I would take issue with the writer of the otherwise excellent programme-notes using the expression “seamlessly” to characterise that gorgeously teasing transition!).

Throughout the Rondo section, Riseley and Irons never shirked the music’s dynamic contrasts, realising the work’s volatility, the violin writing in particular requiring repetitive figurations of almost obsessive intensity in places, and the piano part visited with its own demands involving rapid alternations of poise and vigour, lyricism and exhilaration. I loved the composer’s surprising “false ending” at one point, the music seeming to deliver penultimate cadences before dancing away on its voyage of recapitultion, with a few variables thrown in a second time round, pianist and violinist equally relishing the opportunities to revisit and revitalise the experience. The occasional strained intonation in Riseley’s playing served to define the interpretative limits to which he was prepared to push the music to get the message across, and certainly helped convey the work’s ever-burgeoning excitement and sense of ultimate arrival – thoroughly invigorating!

Stravinsky’s Divertimento for Violin and Piano comes largely from the music for his own ballet Le baiser de la fee (The Fairy’s Kiss), which is, in turn, a reworking of music by Tchaikovsky, mostly from his songs. Throughout, the music’s fragmentary, spiky character was given a no-holds barred response from both vioinist and pianist, the moments of lyricism and melancholy associated with some of the Tchaikovsky originals spiced with Stravinsky’s fondness for both pesante rhythms and accents and increasingly complex neo-classical metric changes and dynamic contrasts, the formula roughing up the music no end. What came across most strongly in this performance was a sense of story, of rich descriptive detail, of expression and narrative taking centre-stage, so that even if some of the music’s angularities produced a performance effect outside one’s listening-comfort zone, the end result was at the service of the composer and his music.

After the interval, the first movement of John Corigliano’s 1963 Violin Sonata seemed in fact to continue the ascerbities of the Stravinsky, though perhaps with a more tongue-in-cheek commedia dell’arte flavour – plenty of 5/4 rhythms, string harmonics and double-stopped octaves, and tricky syncopations between violinist and pianist, tough and angular, but approachable.

Relief came with the almost Cole-Porter-like Andantino, nostalgic and reflective, with both musicians controlling the tones and dynamics most expertly – passages of melting sweetness set off against more forthright episodes, a 7/4 rhythmic section suggesting nostalgic “road music”, the trajectories engendering a lovely, spacious ambience all around. Riseley and Irons then opened up the music operatically, everything romantic and big-boned, even becoming ritualistic in the manner of Mussorgsky’s “Great Gate at Kiev”, before the quieter 7/4 passages brought the music home once more, floating the violin cross-rhythmically against the piano, the string tone stratospheric and celestial. The Lento third movement brought big “grim reaper” chords from the piano, set against gypsy-style rhapsodisings from the violin –  Martin Riseley at full stretch here, first with fiendish Paganini-like double-stoppings, then launching into a cadenza-like recitative that finished with ghostly high notes over a forlorn piano accompaniment, and  some elfin pizzicati resolving into a somewhat bleak sostenuto for both instruments.

Finales can defuse tensions, or else find ways to break an impasse; and so it was with this one, the music playful and teasing between the instruments at the beginning, the violin in molto perpetuo mode against the piano’s spiky angularities (the composer asking for slashing violin chords amid the restless figurations), and a couple of interludes bringing respite from the energies. Amazingly, both musicians were right on top of the music’s incredible exuberance over the last few pages, abandoning all caution, and leaving their audience tingling with excitement at the end. After these almost Dionysian excesses it was a good thing for all concerned that Martin Riseley and Diedre Irons took us to the Vienna of Fritz Kreisler to finish the concert – the great violinist’s pastiche-like compositions inhabiting an old-fashioned charm-suffused world of sentiment, with every brilliant violinistic touch matched by a melting moment of lyricism (and some of the brilliant bowings in the second piece La Clochette having certain Paganini-like whiffs of sulphur about them). Beginning with a set grandly titled Variations on a theme of Corelli after Tartini, and concluding with one of Kreisler’s favourite encore pieces, Schön Rosemarin, the musicians were able to bring to a conclusion an engaging and somewhat tumultuous afternoon’s music with more relaxed tones and accents, very much appreciated.

A Good Time Not A Long Time – SMP Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

A Good Time Not A Long Time

New short piano and solo works by New Zealand composers

Music by LILBURN, WHITEHEAD, RITCHIE, PSATHAS, ROZEMOND, ELLIS, SHORTIS, KILLIN, NOWICKI, HEXTALL, BECKER, HOADLEY, SQUIRE, TAYLOR, MARGETIC, AUDAIN, CARTER

Sam Jury (piano)

The SMP Ensemble

Adam Concert Room,

New Zealand School of Music

Sunday June 27th 2010

The SMP Ensemble, a Wellington-based contemporary music performing group, has gradually become a welcome “presence” upon the local music-making scene. Formed by clarinettist Andrzej Nowicki, the group draws upon the skills of various freelance and New Zealand School of Music performers. Like its longer-established  “big brother” equivalent Stroma, it has a wondrous flexibility in terms of performance, both in playing existing music and in commissioning new works, being able to call upon the services of so many talented musicians. Although this recent concert “A Good Time Not a Long Time” was advertised as featuring mainly solo piano, there were other instrumentalists involved at various times, making for a few diverting surprises throughout the evening.

The bulk of the performance responsibility was borne by pianist Sam Jury, an extremely capable and talented player, who was able to encompass the diverse worlds of the compositions for solo keyboard with quiet, undemonstrative confidence, and (very importantly) what seemed like considerable enjoyment. His programme included a number of established contemporary piano classics by Douglas Lilburn, Anthony Ritchie, Gillian Whitehead and John Psathas, a recently-composed work by Pieta Hextall, and some highly diverting miniatures by various composers, written as submissions for a concert performed at the 2010 ISCM World New Music Day Festival in Sydney.  So, the solo piano component of the concert alone was diverting enough, but the occasional alternatives served to refresh eyes and ears – french horn, strings and contrabassoon all played their part in this process of bringing to audience ears new and thought-provoking sounds.

The concert actually began with a work for French horn, Deux Grand Fanfares by Karlo Margetic, a composer whose work I find constantly stimulating and often surprising, not least of all for his droll sense of humour which occasionally makes a telling appearance. After Alex Morton had gurgled, breathed and grunted his way through an opening fanfare notable for its player’s physical gesturings and the sense of antiphonal spaces created by the contrasting timbres and “exit-points” of the sounds, the composer appeared with a bucket, presumably suggesting either that the musician either was or would shortly be in need of a receptacle of some kind! The second fanfare was delivered with the mouthpiece removed from the instrument, creating what might be thought of in some quarters as an uncanny visual reminiscence of the cartoonist Hoffnung’s depiction of an oboe player. The “plumbing” sounds took us past such visual and aural conventions into a different cosmos of chain reaction involving impulse, player, instrument and listener, a cobweb-cleaning process for our receptivities if ever there was one.

Sam Jury’s first appearance was to give us some Lilburn, beginning with the Four Preludes from the years 1942-4, ritualistic pieces with characteristic rhythms drawn from melodic impulses. A lovely Grieg-like descending sequence marked the first piece, while the second was a sombre and subtly-inflected processional. The third Prelude alternated repeated-note patterns with deep, rich shifting chords, while the fourth was more energetic, a Toccata-like energy driving the music through darkly rich realms, with a lovely, treble-voiced throwaway ending. Two Christmas Pieces for L.B. from 1949 followed, the first singing a gentle, wistful song, and the other depicting distant carollers and resounding bells floating in an ambience of nostalgic harmony. These pieces were dedicated to the composer’s friend, the artist Leo Bensemann, and reflect a shared perception of ritual and natural order in the world. The last piece, Rondino, has the composer’s characteristic repeating note-patterned melodies, the obsessive treble set against a shifting bass to winsome effect.

A number of shortish pieces followed, written by various composers for the 2010 ISCM “Momentary Pleasures” concert in Sydney, works that had to be written in one day. Justus Rozemond’s Humoresque had a quirky, accelerando character, using a triplet rhythm to generate momentum, before contrasting the mood with a nocturnal-like melody, and returning to a skittery scherzando before finishing with a fortissimo chord. Carol Shortis called her piece Momentary Pleasures, creating wistful spaces between treble and bass at the start, the sounds agglomerating into a sphere of rolling triplets, before the energies dissipated once again, a final whimsical phrase suggesting a poem’s words “a caress of momentary pleasures”. Anton Killin’s After Clive Bell evoked a great stillness, into which was hewn a great resounding forte, the music moving and tolling like an earth-clock – very evocative! By contrast, Andrzej Nowicki’s Resonate seemed to reverse the previous piece’s process, massive chords resonating, whispering fragments of melody building up to monumental blocks of sound, saturating the ambiences and gradually dying away, the music for me strangely evocative of dreams. The final ISCM piece was Drying Music by Robbie Ellis, a piece that achieved the distinction of being selected for the actual concert in Sydney – a brief and instantly memorable evocation of a laundrette dryer, a bass ostinato driving a motif that petered out along with the money.

Gillian Whitehead’s Lullaby for Matthew, dating from 1981, and dedicated to the composer’s nephew, worked its well-known enchantments, from the opening’s dynamic contrasts through the lull of the ever-diminishing repetitions, and to the point of sleep. Something completely different was provided by composer Tabea Squire, a work for violin and viola called Reto Doble, a Spanish expression meaning “double challenge”, the piece played by the composer on violin and Greg, her father, on the viola, the work suggesting an interaction not unlike that of bull and bullfighter. The two instruments began by musing on a single note, violin holding the note and viola decorating around and about it, before generating rhythmic repetitions with a Spanish flavour, the players taking turns with the melodic and accompaniment roles of the music’s advancement. What developed was a musical dance of confrontation between combatants, the intensities screwed up ever-tightly to the point where the “coup de grace” was held and savoured, and then delivered. Most enjoyable and compelling!

More “Momentary Pleasures” followed the interval (wonderful refreshments! – prospective SMP concert-goers, please note!), pianist Sam Jury returning to do each composer’s brief but telling conception proud with sensitive, well-focused responses. I loved Pepe Becker’s Snoozing, the sounds having all the colour, ambience and feeling of my own doze-dreams, with the awakening depicted as a couple of involuntary, regretful murmurings. Ben Hoadley’s Ben and T at the Puriri Trees together with Shirin’s Music began as another meditative, Debussy-like soundscape, with sensibilities shaken and stirred by violent irruptions and exotic-sounding declamations, the music crowding around and about the centre with clusters of melismatic figuration. I wasn’t too sure regarding the division-point between the two named sections, but I guessed that Shirin’s Music was more ritualistic and processional, the music’s progress decorated by exotic-sounding ornament and irrupted by flashes of temperament and agitation. Cascades of figurations allowed these energies to run their course, the music returning to the opening processional aspect, the ending wide-eyed and widely-spaced.

Alex Taylor’s somewhat elliptically-titled work alt. generated, like Ben Hoadley’s piece, a world of wonderment at the outset, gathering increasing weight as the widely-spaced arpeggiations vied increasingly with what its composer called “glacial phrases”, the effect dramatic and visceral, and in almost complete contrast with Yvette Audain’s Upon attending a performance of “The Wizard Of Oz” , which readily brought to mind a child’s wonderment at the magic of a theatrical experience, the music infused with treblish brighness and enthusiasm. To achieve true closure of the ISCM bracket of piano pieces, Hayley Roud brought out her wondrously large contra-bassoon to play a piece by Tristan Carter entitled Lilith. Such demonic associations were suggested more by default than by the serpentine sounds conjured from what seemed like a sleeping being, a monster slowly aroused from slumber, the player viscerally choreographing the soundscape with breathiness and impulsive vocalised exhalations, the instrument’s voice abstracted through gesture as it were.

Three piano pieces remained, one a new work by Pieta Hextall, and two other, more established pieces by Anthony Ritchie and John Psathas. Pieta Hextell’s 2010 piano piece Planet Vandal was described by its composer as “a musical impression of a confrontation between whalers and activists on the Pacific Ocean”. The writing has both pictorial and narrative elements, the opening redolent of the vast spaces of a seascape, with tones clustering and reforming, and fragments of a song sounding. As the music’s manner becomes more dynamic, first figurations and then chordal passages begin to generate agitations, leading to syncopations, hammerings and downward cascades of notes, a mood which runs its course and returns the music to the mood of the opening, the song taking the character of a lament, as the sounds gradually disappear. This was the work’s second performance in public, and one hopes it will be heard again before too long (via William Green in Auckland, perhaps?) – in Sam Jury’s capable hands I found it a moving listening experience.

Anthony Ritchie’s attractive Birds and a Steam Train in the Caitlins was written for Ann Saslav for performance in schools, but surely deserves wider currency, perhaps as New Zealand’s answer to Heitor Villa Lobos’s world-famous steam-train evocation. The composer gets it right throughout, taking the listener to the heart of the native bush via rich and verdant harmonies and insistent birdsong, before stimulating gentle locomotions, generating less steam and smoke than atmosphere and nostalgia. Of course, John Psathas’s well-known work Waiting for the Aeroplane is a quintessential nostalgia-trip, having what pianist Dan Poynton once described vividly as a “goosebump-sick” quality, the drifting resonances generating powerful equivocations of presence and distance which never fail to touch deep places within. Sam Jury kept the ambiences together, moving the arpeggiated melismas along, and knitting more closely the agitations of the central section with the overall rhythmic pulsings of the piece, rather than going for maximum contrast – more Stravinsky-like than Schumannesque in his approach. His playing of the piece made an appropriately resonant conclusion to the evening’s music, a sense of something ongoing, despite the immediate sounds dying away…

Witchcraft, Romance and Nostalgia from the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

DVORAK – The Noonday Witch Op.108

TCHAIKOVSKY – Piano Concerto No.1 in B-flat Minor Op.23

PROKOFIEV – Symphony No.7 in C-sharp Minor Op.131

Freddy Kempf (piano)

Alexander Lazarev (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 25th June 2010

Each of conductor Alexander Lazarev’s two recent concerts with the NZSO has featured repertoire which, although not obscure, doesn’t often appear in our orchestral programmes. Both Glazunov’s ballet The Seasons and Dvorak’s spooky tone-poem The Noon-Day Witch are in what I would call the “somewhat neglected” category of orchestral works – I was therefore interested to read NZSO CEO Peter Walls’ description in the programme’s welcoming foreword of the Dvorak tone-poem as “ever-popular”. I would have thought that, for most people, it simply wouldn’t rate in the popularity stakes next to works like the Carnival Overture and the Scherzo Capriccioso. And as for calling the concert series “Russian” – well, I feel the good Antonin would have had something to say about that, Slav or no Slav.

Nonetheless, the second of the “Russian Romantics” presentations by the NZSO was as resounding a success as the first (Glinka, Rachmaninov, Glazunov) with all credit due to the musicians involved. I compared the NZSO’s performance of the Dvorak piece with a recording I own featuring the redoubtable Czech Philharmonic under the directorship of the worthy but relatively lack-lustre maestro Vaclav Neumann. Even allowing for the extra frisson generated by a live performance, conductor Alexander Lazarev and the NZSO’s players brought to the music whole oceans more colour, atmosphere and energy, so that the macabre story of the disobedient child whose life is taken by the pitiless witch at the unthinking invitation of the child’s mother really came to life. Every phrase counted as part of either atmosphere or narrative, the story’s unfolding episodes so very vividly characterised – the opening’s rustic folk-dance, the oboe’s depiction of the disobedient child, and the mother’s anger and frustration leading to her unwitting invocation of the witch were all brought unerringly into focus in varying ways. What incredibly sinister pianissimi Lazarev conjured out of his string players, for example (the conductor involuntarily shooting an accusing glance out into the auditorium at a hapless cougher, at one point), by way of depicting the arrival of the witch and the fear and horror of the mother at her impulsive threat’s nightmarish realisation. Then, how baleful the brass, how wonderfully angular the string-playing, and how brutal and whip-lash the final orchestral payoff!  Despite such full-blooded advocacy, I still didn’t feel as though the work hung terribly well together – it somehow lacked the surety and focus of some of the composer’s other shorter orchestral pieces, such as the two mentioned earlier.

Concertgoers who had heard pianist Freddy Kempf’s poetic Rachmaninov Third a fortnight ago in Wellington would have revelled in the chance to hear him tackle another of the most famous concert war-horses of all time, the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. I may sound perverse, but after having remarked in a review of the previous concert that the pianist seemed never to completely COMMAND the Rachmaninov Concerto despite the moments of great poetry and depth of feeling, I thought on this later occasion that it was the orchestra which in places wasn’t quite (literally) up to speed in relation to the playing of its star soloist. Conductor Lazarev adopted an expansive approach to the famous opening tune, one which I thought didn’t quite “knit” with the more forthright playing of the pianist. Kempf in fact seemed determined to prove that he could make the most of the biggest virtuoso moments, though to be fair, his playing of the more lyrical and limpid passages as well never missed the chance to generate washes of poetic feeling. But two of the most exciting pieces of interplay between orchestra and soloist in the first movement didn’t quite come off for me because of the conductor’s reluctance to match the pianist’s terrific head of steam, resulting each time in a kind of sudden upward gear-change as the music spurted forward in the soloist’s hands – I was surprised, considering what I’d witnessed of Lazarev’s energy and volatility on the podium and the exciting results he got from his players elsewhere.

What did emerge (as it did during the Rachmaninov concerto performance a fortnight previously) was the music’s narrative aspect – one felt that a story was being told, both by the orchestra (a gritty, dogged build-up to a flailing piano entry reminiscent of similar orchestral textures in the same composer’s Fourth Symphony) and the pianist (a lovely dialogue between the hands, the same phrase tossed back and forward with different emphases and textural qualities, before dialoguing (so operatic at this point) similarly with the orchestra. The cadenza was played with a volatile mixture of poetry and bravura, even if the pianist seemed to momentarily tire towards the movement’s end. Somebody’s rogue hearing-aid interrupted the beginning of the slow movement, which, when conductor and pianist agreed that they would press on anyway, featured the most delicately-voiced string-playing I’ve heard for a long time, allowing Kirstin Eade’s flute to shine through untramelled. Freddy Kempf’s elfin playing suited the central section’s scamperings to perfection, though in the finale (played “attacca”) I felt he could have “roughed up” the music’s textures a bit more, in keeping with the roisterous energies of the orchestral tutti. Still, his scherzando-like playing wove wonderful arabesques of energy, and he certainly unleashed a jaw-dropping torrent of octaves by way of announcing the final “all-together” statement of the finale’s big tune – thunderbolts and whirlwinds indeed! – earning him a momentous ovation at the end. Some people I spoke to thought the encore (Vladimir Horowitz’s amazing transcription of Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever March) inappropriate after the concerto, but I didn’t think so – I loved its outrageous excess, and thought Kempf’s performance was positively Horowitz-like in its power and brilliance (I’m SURE I counted only two hands at that keyboard!).

Before the second half began, an endearingly human touch to the proceedings came with Associate Concertmaster Donald Armstrong’s warmly-expressed farewell to one of the orchestra’s longest-serving violinists, Jane Freed, playing in her last concert. Then it was the Prokofiev Symphony’s turn (the composer’s seventh and last) beginning with an unusually forthright piano note, its resonances colouring the string-playing that followed with whole skyfuls of nostalgic feeling, floating like terraced banks of clouds. Alexander Lazarev was in his element with this work, encouraging great surges of string-sound within expansive orchestral paragraphings, but then keeping the percussion-led “other voices” dance-like reply strictly in tempo, ensuring a seamless flow of engagement from all concerned. He brought out the accompanying piano figurations to the big tune’s reprise at the movement’s end in a way that opened our vistas even further and dug more deeply into the terrain’s soil. In the second movement, begun gracefully, but then gathering momentum and pointed articulation, Lazarev galvanised his forces during the motoric percussive episode, cranking up the tempo most excitingly, then slowing again for the strings’ return. Throughout, the players’ instrumental detailing was a delight – I couldn’t see the trumpeter from where I was sitting, but his (her?) waltz-tune was played with just the right amount of delicious vulgarity, for example.

Conductor and players caught the crepuscular, lump-in-throat expanses of the third movement’s opening with great sensitivity – those tunes sung over the music’s dark abysses (Robert Orr’s oboe-playing a constant delight) engendered such a flavour, a bitter-sweet sense of remembrance and loss and resignation throughout. Of course, Lazarev is an “attacca” musician with a vengeance, and the symphony’s finale was no exception, its first note here searing through the ambiences of the previous music’s dying fall and creating a great stirring of blood and breath, ready for the propulsive urgencies that followed. The orchestra equally delighted in the fairy-tale gallop episodes and the gawky gavotte sequences, nicely playing up the music’s contrasts and angularities, the brass players covering themselves with glory along the way, especially during the lead-up to the reintroduction of the first movement’s “big tune”. Lazarev seemed occasionally to want to bring the audience in as an optional chorus during this section, turning his body towards the auditorium with some of his sweeping arm-gesturings, as though the entire space within the MFC had been given over to conductable music-making. I had thought that we were going to get both endings of the symphony, as written by the composer (the authorities objected to Prokofiev’s original elegiac ending to the work, requesting that he write an alternative coda with a happy, boisterous ending!) – but instead of setting this “clip-on” piece in motion at the end, the conductor brought the symphony to its conclusion with a single pizzicato chord as per the original. And that, as they say in the classics, was that! Rapturous responses from all sides at the end, with appreciative plaudits for Alexander Lazarev and more salutes to Jane Freed, bringing a memorable concert to a satisfying conclusion.

Violin Dances – Kurt Nikkanen and Rosemary Barnes at Expressions

Posted on by Peter Mechen

VIOLIN DANCES

STRAVINSKY- Suite Italienne  /  TCHAIKOVSKY – 2 Pieces from Swan Lake

KHACHATURIAN – 3 Pieces from Gayaneh  /  GLAZUNOV – 2 Pieces from Raymonda

SARASATE – Carmen Fantasy Op.25

Kurt Nikkanen (violin)

Rosemary Barnes (piano)

Genesis Energy Theatre

Classical Expressions, Upper Hutt

Tuesday 22nd June 2010

“Violin Dances” the concert was called, and “violin dances” was certainly the case throughout the evening –  and in the manner of true dancing, the violin was partnered by piano-playing whose music-making trod just as sprightly and gracefully a measure. Violinist Kurt Nikkanen and pianist Rosemary Barnes enlivened everything they played, bringing together melody, colour and rhythm in a winning amalgam of various dance music drawn from several well-known ballets. Their command of these basic elements was so assured, and their playing so vivid that we in the audience never once wished for the weight and colour of an orchestra, and were left fully satisfied with the music-making’s flavour and energy.

Beginning the recital with Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne was a particularly engaging piece of programming. This was a work that began as Pulcinella, a ballet score for a commedia dell’arte scenario proposed by the impresario Diaghilev, and based on music attributed to the 18th-century composer Giovanni Pergolesi. Stravinsky rearranged (and recomposed) the music for orchestra and solo voices for the original ballet, then dispensed with the voices for an instruments-only suite, before transcribing the music further for violin (or ‘cello) and piano. The original Pulcinella was one of the earliest examples of neo-classicism, and has retained its popularity in all forms to this day. Kurt Nikkanen and Rosemary Barnes danced into the world of the work with a flourish, varying the opening theme’s cheerful insouciance with lovely sotto voce episodes, bringing out the Russian melancholy of the Serenade, and tearing into the Tarantella with skin and hair flying, finishing with a nice touch of throw-away po-faced wit.

There was both elegance and theatricality on show during the Gavotte and Variations sequences and throughout the Menuet’s ever-growing pomposity, followed by a sudden dash into the helter-skelter finale. Nikkanen and Barnes demonstrated plenty of virtuosity and great teamwork, here, exchanging and countering irruptions of energy and exhilaration right to the end. Before beginning the next item, Nikkanen talked with his audience regarding his own early love of music that had plenty of rhythmic vitality – Stravinsky and Bartok, for example. Ironically, the first exerpt from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake that followed demonstrated more the composer’s infinite capacity for melody than for rhythmic excitement. Still, the beautiful playing of both the violinist and pianist in the famous Act Two “Pas de Deux” was utterly captivating, with the piano taking the original ‘cello part, and duetting with the violin, to indescribably expressive effect. The Russian Dance, from Act Three of the ballet, brought out that indigenous folk-quality which Tchaikovsky exploited so fruitfully in his music, the performers responding to the deep melancholy of the opening before springing into the whirl of the concluding dance with great energy and physicality.

Kurt Nikkanen talked about being inspired as a young man by hearing the Russian violinist Leonid Kogan play music by Khachaturian on the radio, in particular a dance  from the ballet Gayaneh. We got a gritty, no-holds-barred rendering of Aysche’s Dance, Nikkanen and Barnes giving the effect of digging into something directly and deeply, playing with an intensity that also informed the Nocturne and the succeeding Sabre Dance, the piano adding to the music’s wild abandon with flailing note-repetitions alternating with the violin’s stinging pizzicati. The interval allowed a breather from such full-on engagements, as did the second-half’s opening bracket of items from Glazunov’s ballet Raymonda, firstly a waltz whose “teashop charm” evoked something of a bygone era, and a Grand Adagio which allowed the performers to dig a little deeper into the emotions, Nikkanen delighting us with some deft melismatic flourishes and even the occasional touch of elfin wickedness, admirably supported at all times by his pianist.

But I can pay no greater compliment to Kurt Nikkanen and Rosemary Barnes regarding the concert by avowing that they managed to make even Pablo de Sarasate’s tiresome Carmen Fantasy work its magic (I must confess to an aversion to virtuoso violin arrangements, pot-pourris, medleys, etc. of this ilk). Even when content became thoroughly subservient to display, as with the second-movement Habanera, the playing had such style and panache that I was thoroughly absorbed by what they were doing and how it was being achieved. Rather more than the obvious pyrotechnics elsewhere, I liked the ghostly insinuations of the lento assai third movement, the music accompanying Carmen’s sexy taunting of Don Jose when being taken by him to prison.

By dint of audience appreciation we got two encores from the pair, firstly Moussorgsky’s Gopak from his unfinished opera Sorotchinsky Fair, a raunchy folk-fiddle-fest with brandy on the breath of the music (to paraphrase another far more famous and far less approbatory critical remark about Russian music), followed by what seemed like its antithesis, Elgar’s charmingly wistful Chanson de Matin, a piece which the violinist told us reminded him of his recent explorations of Wellington, walking around amid the beautiful sunny weather. It made for an elegant finish to a consistently stimulating concert.

NZSQ and Richard Mapp – Wellington Chamber Music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MOZART – String Quartet in D Major K.575 “Prussian”

CHINARY UNG – Spiral III for String Quartet

SCHUMANN – Piano Quintet in E-flat Op.44

The New Zealand String Quartet : Helene Pohl, Douglas Beilman (violins) / Gillian Ansell (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

– with Richard Mapp (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 20th June 2010

The very opening of the Mozart quartet fooled me into thinking the NZSQ was for some reason playing the music in E-flat. I sadly fear that part of my confusion was due to my ever-declining ability to precisely recognise note-pitch; but in my defence I ought to state that the quartet’s playing of the opening paragraph of Mozart’s wonderful K.575 in (wait for it!) D Major was so warmly and richly expressed, the music SOUNDED momentarily as though it was in the higher, mellower key. I thought the players’ combination of warmth and focus quite captivating, with both the ensemble and the solo instruments drawing on a full range of tones that took Mozart’s music out of the drawing-room of taste and decorum and into the world of pulsating human interaction. Even if intonation wasn’t absolutely perfect at all times (more in the softer, throw-away phrasings than in any of the leading lines), the group’s interplayings of different strands, and ready command of colour and texture, ever led the ear onwards through a fascinating amalgam of narrative and interaction.

The players darkened the textures beautifully with the lead-in to the development, whose dynamic, almost confrontational mode was achieved by great attack, especially from the ‘cellist – playing which gave the music all of its emotional range and expressive force. All the more joie de vivre was generated, then, with the return to the opening, the quartet’s energy and brio culminating in final flourishes of great elan at the end. The slow movement’s full-throated tones fragment beautifully into individual voices, here characterised by each player with piquant expression, drawing the listener into the world of both sounds and gesturings, whose combination makes live music-making such a pleasure, as was the case this time round. The daintily tripping Minuet enjoyed its occasional angularities, the players again not hesitating to get “physical” with the music, their bodily movements frequently choreographing the sounds in a way that suggested their total involvement in the ebb and flow of things. The quartet made an adventure out of the finale as well, the viola-and-‘cello exchanges decorous and ritualistic at the beginning, but with poise occasionally giving way to high spirits, a dancing triplet theme dominating the middle section, and archways of dotted rhythm figurations and melismatic impulses adding to the festivities – the players here emphasised the energies of the music more, I think, than the moments of circumspection which every now and then glanced furtively outwards at the world.

In between two more-or-less “standard” classics the NZSQ presented a contemporary piece which they discovered through Jack Body. The composer, Chinary Ung, born in 1942, in Cambodia, went to the United States in 1964 to study at the Manhatten School of Music, winning a number of prizes and honours for his music, and teaching at various institutions – he’s currently the Professor of Composition at the University of California in San Diego. His music combines the worlds of South-east Asian music and western art-music, resulting in works such as Spiral III (as the name suggests, the third of a series), the one programmed for this concert.

Helpfully, the players, prompted by Quartet leader Helene Pohl, demonstrated some of the work’s most prominent features, a couple of distinctive themes (one sounding as though it could have been written by Gershwin), and a few examples of the music’s wide variety of texture (plenty of ponticello, or playing close to the bridge – and its antithesis, bowing at the other extreme, over the fingerboard). The work itself made a remarkable impression – a forthright opening, with the “traditional music” ambience quickly evident through those exotic sounds created by the ponticello technique, the bluesy pitch-slides and colours seamlessly fusing with the South-East Asian folk-sounds, the melodies lovely and the accompaniments spidery. More rhythmically volatile and rhapsodic episodes reminded me in places of Janacek’s music, the language in places almost disjointed and whimsical, but whose overall effect is something strong, vital and deeply-rooted. And as well as this ground-based folkish feeling, there’s also an other-worldliness whose beauties can curdle without warning – one is taken away and then suddenly re-confronted with more immediate and pressing realities as part of a continual process discovery and rediscovery. I look forward to the Quartet’s projected CD of this work, as part of a project featuring works by Asian composers, the others being by Toru Takemitsu,Tan Dun, Gao Ping, and Zhou Long, in a recording to be undertaken over the coming month.

After the interval Richard Mapp joined the quartet for a performance of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet, a timely act of homage to a composer born, like his great contemporary Frederic Chopin, two hundred years ago this year. Right from the beginning the players caught the work’s “stride” with a resounding flourish, then moving easefully into those soulful lyrical utterances that could be by no other composer – ‘cello and viola introduced a beautifully-weighted second subject, as beautifully answered by the piano, the whole episode then “swung” back to the beginning with great relish for the repeat. The piano’s introduction to the ensemble showed up the distinctly unglamorous Ilott Theatre sound, very precise and focused, but with little warmth and resonance – thus the rather “Gothic” descent into the world of the development lacked the ultimate in romantic atmosphere, but through no fault of the performers. This also affected the opening of the slow movement, the sound having a curiously “dead” quality in between each muffled drumbeat, though the contrasting flow of the major-key sequence worked better, with lyrical, song-like playing from all concerned. The Sphinx-like transition to the agitato passages created a frisson of tension, from which burst forth terrific energies, before subsiding into a more troubled lyricism, Gillian Ansell’s viola tones conveying the retreating march theme’s sombre character in tones of grey and purple. A pity, then, that the quiet concluding chord’s treble voice sounded, to my ears, slightly under-the-note.

The Mendelssohnian energy of the scherzo danced and fizzed with plenty of spirit, the players capturing the darker-browed drive of the contrasting trio, piano and string pizzicati properly angular and prickly; while the finale, beginning gruffly, drives the argument forward with resolute purpose. One senses the composer looking for ways of resolving inner conflicts through music, those characteristically sombre themes being fought with and eventually conquered, here with great rhetorical gesturings by use of the work’s very opening theme, introduced by the piano, and developed fugally by all the instruments, against the counterpoint of the finale’s opening theme – as with the Fourth Symphony’s finale, a heart-warming “working out” is driven by tremendously buoyant rhythmic energies, the musicians here bringing out that sense of resolution and homecoming in the music that makes the work’s journey such an invigorating experience.

La Vie…..La Mort – from the Tudor Consort

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Motets of life and death

by Jean Mouton, Nicolas Gombert and Josquin Des Prez

The Tudor Consort

Director: Michael Stewart

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Saturday 12th June 2010

Perhaps it was because I’d arrived with only a few minutes to spare before the concert began; but inside the cathedral was an almost unnervingly ambient worshipful silence – I almost expected to be “shushed!” if I had even dared try to exchange pleasantries with either of my seated neighbours, so I gave myself over instead to contemplation and furtive observation. A large image-screen had been placed just to the right of the performing area, which suggested that there would be “visuals” employed during the concert; and so it proved, with each item having one or two associated images (all very striking) drawn from the art-works of the music’s period, details of which were in the programme alongside notes concerning the item. I hadn’t had enough time to properly “scan” the programme before the concert began, so I was surprised when, after the first motet had been sung, two Consort members stepped forward and began speaking, the first in French and the second translating into English, practically in canon. The poetry, very beautiful-sounding, turned out to be that of Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585), whose verses featured several times during the concert, each poem with different speakers and translators, all of whom conveyed both sound and sense of the words most attractively.

The concert’s title testified as to the music’s somewhat elemental subject-matter throughout, finding expression in motets by Jean Mouton (1459-1522) and Nicolas Gombert (1495-1560), with a work by Gombert’s teacher, Josquin des Prez (1450-1521) thrown in for good measure. Opening the programme was a composition by Mouton, O Christe redemptor, a piece he wrote while composer at the Royal Court, judging by its reference to the Queen, Anne of Brittany who was married to no less that two French monarchs. Beginning with the resplendent, beautifully-balanced tones of the full choir, whose focused lines gave the composer’s “smoothly flowing and consonant” style such character, the piece allowed the mens’ voices to shine in places, notably at “Largitor virium”, while giving the women’s voices plenty of melismatic beauties.  The first of Ronsard’s verses was then delivered by two speakers, the intermingling of French and English texts creating a sense of something conveyed through time and reawakened for our pleasure – the poem Je vous envoie spoke of human beauty withering as does that of flowers, with the passing of time.

A Magnificat by Nicolas Gombert followed, one of eight written by the composer while in exile as a galley slave (for what one account calls “acts of gross indecency” – evidently, while working as a composer in the court of Charles V of Spain, he had sexual relations with a choirboy). How the composer managed to write music at all while he served his time on the galleys has not been made clear, while the story that the Holy Roman Emperor commuted Gomberg’s sentence upon hearing these works (which the composer called his “Swan Songs”) is similarly shrouded in conjecture. Whatever his proclivities and resulting indiscretions his work as a composer happily transcended such misdemeanours of the flesh, his mastery of vocal polyphony evident throughout this beautiful work. Especially attractive was Gombert’s use of plainchant to introduce each episode, creating beautifully atmospheric effects of depth and antiphonal contrast. After a less-than certain beginning, the Consort’s tenor voices that began each episode with the plainchant grew in confidence and surety of tone, the contrasting body of varied responses sustaining and building our interest throughout. Less extended, but even more complex was Mouton’s Nesciens Mater, an intensely-worked canonic masterpiece, drawing forth from the Consort great intensity of tone (a shade raw at the high-voiced clustered climax, but all the more involving) set against more celestially-floated textures – an amazingly-sustained outpouring of great beauty. Ronsard’s spoken verses which followed, entitled “Chanson”, were similarly intense, comparing the characteristics of the seasons and the multiplicities of nature with the depths of the poet’s sorrowful feeling for a lost love.

Conjecture has it that Gombert studied with Josquin des Prez, though details of their association are sketchy – nevertheless, the older master exerted considerable influence on the younger composer. The inclusion of Josquin’s motet Inviolata demonstrated the tightly-worked canonic style and direct word-expression for which the composer was renowned, with duetting between different choir-voices, the most extended being that for tenors and basses during the second section at “Nostra ut pura”. Then, the corresponding altos/tenors passages in the first part beautifully brought out the words “O Mater alma”, as did the sopranos/basses combination with their phrasings towards the end, which resulted in pleasingly-contrasted open textures. Ronsard’s poem that followed, Sur la mort du Marie, made a typically sobering effect, the poem a variation on the theme of youthful beauty withering at the hands of fate, again nicely “sounded” between the languages. We were thus prepared for Gombert’s incredibly intense lament for his great predecessor on the occasion of Josquin’s death, the motet Musae Jovis occasioning a marvellous display of controlled outpouring of emotion, the “plangite” given full and sustained expression.

More obsequies were observed with Mouton’s tribute to Queen Anne of Brittany, Quis dabit oculis nostris, sung at the various places where her funeral rites were performed. I liked the fine surge of major-key emotion at the composer’s rhetorical declamation “Britannia, quid ploras?”, throwing into stunning relief the hushed repetitions of “defecit Anna”, the energy of life drained, the full-throated song now muted at “Conversus est in luctum chorus noster” (Our song has changed to mourning). But I thought the different invocations to the various groups of people to “weep” not as “pointed” as I expected them to be, rather more dry-eyed in effect than I imagined was possible. Significantly, Michael Stewart also kept the final “Anna, requiescat in pace” in check, eschewing a more obvious outpouring of emotion in favour of a longer-lasting subtlety. After such whole-heartedness, Ronsard’s somewhat droll characterisation of the body’s farewell to its soul (in translation, somewhat reminiscent of Robert Burns’s poems) lightened the mood, even if the delivery of the speakers emphasised the matter-of-factness of utterance more than thehumour.

Concluding the concert was Gombert’s affirming “Tulerunt Dominum”, a setting of the Gospel verses describing Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the angels in Christ’s empty tomb on Easter Sunday morning. Dramatic and emotional, the setting captures the desolation of Mary’s feeling of abandonment at Christ’s disappearance with the words “Tulerunt Dominum meum”, and the reassuring words of the angels in reply, the composer establishing an almost lullabyic aspect in the motion of the lines, the insistent, but beautifully-pulsed voices creating an almost minimalist precursor of style in places. Angelic voices floated the lines with intense purity, while the “Alleluias” grew from out of the performance’s ever-burgeoning emotion to resound like ringing bells, in minor-key mode, but secure, strong and exultant to the end.

A word regarding the projected images of largely renaissance art that accompanied the items – I confess that for the most part I didn’t register them strongly, which isn’t to say that that they shouldn’t have been used. I certainly didn’t find them distracting in any way, though my attention was taken up so overwhelmingly by what I was hearing, I was conscious afterwards of having failed to “connect” the visuals significantly with the music. The idea was employed with such welcome simplicity as to render the images almost as part of the venue’s decorative and functional detail. I’m sure that people attuned to art history and/or better able than myself to synthesize sight and sound would have greatly enjoyed the enrichment of the Consort’s lovely singing with these obviously beautiful and significant works of visual art.

Warmth amid the cold – Song Recital at Old St.Paul’s

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Music by A.Scarlatti, Pergolesi, Marcello, Durante, Vaughan Williams, Poulenc and Copland

Janey MacKenzie (soprano)

Robin Jaquiery (piano)

Old St.Paul’s Church, Thorndon

Tuesday 8th June 2010

Despite the rain and cold doing its best to dampen people’s concert-going inclinations, soprano Janey MacKenzie got a heartening and enthusiastic attendance of determined music-lovers at her lunchtime recital with pianist Robyn Jaquiery at Old St.Paul’s Church.

The performers very quickly made up for the inclement weather through their communicative warmth and whole-hearted enjoyment of what they were presenting for their audience’s grateful pleasure, an interchange evident from the response to the very first item, one of four early Italian songs by various composers. Janey MacKenzie had instantly disarmed our reserve at the beginning by brandishing what she called “the dreaded book” of Italian art-songs, a volume which she contended every vocal coach had worked their students mercilessly through for good or for ill. Whatever associated traumas were suggested by her reference to the tome were nicely dispelled by her performances of the songs, all sung in attractively-nuanced Italian. To begin with, we were given an evocation of an exotic land by Alessandro Scarlatti, “Già il sole dal Gange” (The sun above the Ganges), filled with delight and wonderment of the scene’s romance and colour, followed by a love-song “Se tu m’ami, se sospiri” (If you love me, if you sigh) by Pergolesi, one in which the singer used the occasionally florid passagework to great expressive effect, elsewhere catching the song’s melancholy.  Doubt exists regarding whether Benedetto Marcello actually wrote “Il mio bel foco” (My joyful ardour), but the song is a great one, tricky to negotiate, with plenty of judicious breath-control needed. Both singer and pianist realised the work’s “minor-key” feeling with impressive poise, and gave us finely-controlled upward surges of feeling at the song’s climactic points. Durante’s “Danza, danza, fanciulla gentile” (Dance gentle girl) scampered this way and that in an attractively elfin manner, the musicians working hard to compensate for the church’s rather unresonant acoustic, a true, but dry-ish sound.

The three Vaughan Williams songs which followed included “Linden Lea”, whose melody, although the composer’s own, is probably his most well-known tribute to English folk-song after his orchestral setting of “Greensleeves”. Described as a “Dorset song” by the composer, the setting is of verses by William Barnes, from a collection “Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset dialect”. Janey MacKenzie’s singing gave a “fresh-as-paint” feeling to the work from the outset, though I felt the words of the second verse needed a touch more “point”. The singer’s focus was resharpened with the third verse’s declamatory, almost operatic utterances, melting touchingly into a final remembrance of the low-leaning apple tree at the end – a nice performance. The second song “Silent Noon” brought out long, strong lines, singer and pianist filling out their tones nicely, and the ensuing flowing movement transporting us briefly to realms of rapt enchantment, before pitilessly moving things on once again. And I thought the beautiful backward-looking high note from the singer near the end at the word “song” very affecting. Gorgeously gurgly piano-playing from Robyn Jaquiery set “The Water Mill” on its way, the singer having to negotiate some treacherous rhythmic eddyings and sudden becalmings in the vocal line throughout, perhaps needing, I thought, to give a little bit more juice to the lyrical episodes in places for more of a”storytelling” effect. Otherwise singer and pianist deftly captured much of the subservience of the lives of the miller and his family to the “time-turning” motions of the water-mill, the song’s chief protagonist.

As a prelude to the Poulenc song-cycle “La courte paille” (The short straw), Janey MacKenzie entertained us briefly with an account of the student experiences in Paris of her sometimes vocal-coach Donald Munro, who would turn pages for the composer Francis Poulenc at the piano accompanying Munro’s teacher, baritone Pierre Bernac. The Poulenc cycle is a setting of children’s nonsense poems by Maurice Carême, the music entirely characteristic of this belovedly characterful composer, and vividly brought to life by both musicians. From the opening “Le sommeil” (The Sleep), with its languid sweetness, through the mischievous “Quelle aventure!” (What an adventure!), whose antics brought laughter to our lips, the salon-like “La reine de coeur” (The Queen of Hearts), and the nervy energies of “Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu”, both singer and pianist brought a wealth of characterisations to life, leading our pleasurable expectations ever onward to the next vignette. The musical distillations of the angel musicians seemed straightforward compared to the occasional chromatic venturings of both “Le cafaron” (The baby carafe), and “Lune d’Avril” (April Moon), the latter’s declamatory homage to the moon fearlessly brought off by the singer, and nicely rounded by a beautiful piano postlude.

For a lunchtime concert, the fare was richly satisfying, concluding with some of Aaron Copland’s “Old American Songs”. Beginning with the Shaker song “Simple Gifts”,  Janey MacKenzie nicely differentiated between the slightly held-back first stanza, and the richly-wrought progression towards the certainty of attaining “true simplicity”. After a less-than-certain start, “The Little Horses” got into its stride, both musicians enjoying the “riding into the dark” episodes, and back to the reprise of the lullaby with nary a further mishap. The good humour of “Ching-a-ring Chaw” and the hymn-like American dream-time “At the River” made a good contrast, the restraint of the latter a perfect foil for the final item, a children’s nonsense song “I Bought Me a Cat”, the singer’s deliciously-characterised animal voices capped off by her newly-purchased man’s honeyed tones at the beginning of the final verse – though, of course, the cat still gets the last word!

SOUNZtender – NZ Music going for a song…..

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SOUNZtender – the Concert

The Music:

John Psathas – Songs for Simon / Gillian Whitehead – Tumanako: Journey through an unknown landscape / Eve de Castro-Robinson – and the garden was full of voices / Ross Harris – Four Laments for solo clarinet  Chris Gendall – Suite for String Quartet

The Winning Bidders:

Jack C. Richards – John Psathas / Helen Kominik – Gillian Whitehead / Barry Margan – Eve de Castro-Robinson / Wellington Chamber Music Society – Ross Harris / Christopher Marshall – Chris Gendall

The Performers:

Donald Nicolson (piano) – Songs for Simon (Psathas) / Diedre Irons (piano) – Tumanako (Whitehead) / Gao Ping (piano) – and the garden was full of voices (de Castro-Robinson) / Phil Green (clarinet) – Four Laments (Harris) / The New Zealand String Quartet – Suite for String Quartet (Gendall)


Ilott Theatre, Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 30th May 2010

New Zealand composers putting their creative talents up for auctioning online? Local music patrons, sponsors and benefactors competing amongst themselves for compositional favours from our top composers? Amid the recent shivers caused by icy blasts directed by politicians and bureaucrats against music practitioners and disseminators such as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Radio New Zealand Concert, this composer-inspired project from the Centre For New Zealand Music represented a skyful of sunbeams brightening up a naughty world. Five composers, all previous winners of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, proposed to each write a work for solo instrument (or, as it turned out, small ensemble) for the five top bidders in an online auction. It took little more than a fortnight for the bidding to bring in more than $20,000 to further assist with the work of SOUNZ in promoting and collecting and making more readily available the work of New Zealand composers.

The resulting concert was the culmination of more than a year’s preparation of the project, whose inauguration took place on May 14th 2009, the ensuing bidding taking place throughout the remainder of that month. The five successful commissioners won the right to work with a selected composer in relation to a particular composition. In each case  there was a degree of collaboration between commissioner and composer, details of which were in some instances (though not all) outlined in the concert’s programme notes. I found the details of all of this fascinating, recalling as it did my readings of past composers’ dealings with people who commissioned works from them – thought-provoking tracings of interaction between creativity and expectation, a process with an extremely colourful history.

So, a little more than a year after the inauguration of the scheme, composers and performers were ready with the fruits of their labours – the overall result was a concert featuring three diverse piano pieces, and a work each for solo clarinet and string quartet. No wonder that each of the performances of these new pieces promised a particular intensity, a sharp-edged focus that would require concentrated and committed listening, the process made all the more direct and immediate by the “shared-space” ambiences of the Ilott Theatre. Those who had been charged with the task of delivery were about to prove the worth of their discharge.

The first of the pieces, John Psathas’ “Songs for Simon” I found something of a disarming experience at first, the pianist (Donald Nicolson) launching into a simple, repetitiously patterned sequence in tandem with pre-recorded percussion. It established a kind of passacaglia form throughout which attractive melodic lines appeared, built up a certain textural ambience, and then gradually diminished, leaving the percussion to “round off” the sequence. The second part, entitled “Minos” by the composer, was much freer rhythmically and harmonically; and presented the fascinating spectacle of a “live” performer interacting in unpredictable, non-rhythmic ways with the pre-recorded sounds. Whereas the first part of the piece (interestingly titled “His Second Time”) had seemed a shade “formulaic” in its regularity, this whole second episode I found extremely compelling due to its improvisatory air. Such was the concentration with which Donald Nicolson seemed to be “listening” to his “partner” the latter’s utterances seemed also to take on a live, spontaneously-wrought quality. I liked the assertiveness of the percussion cadenza towards the end, and the piano’s dreamy, equivocal response which concluded the work. It would have been interesting to have had some inkling of the interaction between commissioner and composer regarding the work, its titles and sections, and its musical content.

Gilian Whitehead’s piece which followed relied entirely on “conventional” piano acoustics, the only departure from tradition being two sections in the work where the performer is invited to extend and further elaborate upon what is already written. Such was the extent to which pianist Diedre Irons seemed to have “swallowed” the work’s whole ethos I found it impossible to tell which sections these were in performance. Commissioner Helen Kominik dedicated this work to her great grandchildren, Kate and Tom Fraser, the composer thoughtfully making reference in her written notes to the music’s journeyings reflecting the progress of time and the coming of new generations. This renewal of life is suggested also by the piece’s title, “Tumanako”, which means “hope”, though a subtitle “Journey through an unknown landscape” gives further dimensions to the music. Arising from a recent trip through the Yunnan province of China, the composer’s inspiration was stimulated by the plethora of images and sensations, partly traditional, partly unknown, that were encountered  and experienced in a short time. The music was intended to reflect this profusion of encounters, and their relatively unrelated juxtapositioning, though I thought  detected a certain recurrence of some motifs. In general, the piece seemed to encompass whole worlds, with ideas often running in accord – sometimes as in a sense of great stillness existing at the centre of rhythmic activity, while at other times with contrasting characters kaleidoscopically changing, bell-like descents alternating with delicate birdsong-effects. Diedre Irons seemed to catch all of the piece’s moods, hold them for our pleasure, and just as tellingly let them go, playing throughout with such freedom and understanding – those deep, upwardly-echoing chords and the slivers of birdsong which ended the work made for one of many such breath-catching moments throughout.

On the face of things putting three piano pieces together at the beginning of the programme seemed a more pragmatic than artistic piece of programming designed to avoid constant piano relocation! In fact, such were the contrasts wrought by each composer’s music that the instrument seemed almost to be reinvented with each piece, perhaps most radically with Eve de Castro-Robinson’s work “and the garden was full of voices”. Bearing the description “for vocalising pianist”, the music requires both performer and instrument to go beyond conventional sound-parameters, the player asked to recite, to whistle and to vocalise, as well as play; and the piano “prepared”, as well as having its strings directly manipulated by the player. Commissioner Barry Margan, himself a fine pianist, took an active part in the music’s initial formulation, suggesting titles for two of the work’s three movements, and working with the composer on various sonic, literary and metaphysical inspirations. The outcome was a piece rich in poetic allusion, the associations intensified by the use of Bill Manhire’s poetry in the titles for both the overall work and its second movement, “moon darkened by song”. On this occasion the pianist was fellow-composer Gao Ping, who, closely miked, entered fully into the performance’s more theatrical aspects, whispering the opening words “I stayed a minute” and using both the piano’s conventional tones and the “prepared” registers of the instrument (which the pianist did in full view of the audience before the music started). The first part resounded with tui calls, antiphonally rendered through the different timbres created by the strings’ augmentations, and contrasted with richer ambiences created by cimbalon-like tremolandi – by contrast, the delicacies of the gently-strummed treble strings gave an other-world effect at the movement’s conclusion.

At the beginning of the second movement I began to wonder whether the pianist’s microphone had actually been set at slightly too high a level for the whistlings and vocalisings – although there was plenty of expressive impact the sounds seemed over-wrought, a shade too “enhanced” next to the piano-tones. Even so, the composer’s “ritualistic” description of parts of the music was adroitly brought into play, as the pianist initiated an almost primitive singing-along with the music’s melody line, as well as speaking in low, chant-like tones and clapping slowly with raised hands, as if invoking an elusive spirit of delight. In between, the piano sounds suggested different kinds of ruminations, surface musings rubbing shoulders with deep thoughts and charged silences, the spoken incantation “moon darkened by song” providing an apt description of the mystery. The “ancient chants” of the finale featured a whispered title from the soloist at the outset, and oscillating repetitions from the piano, the right hand occasionally seeking air and light in the treble, then resubmerging, the repetitions resembling a kind of dance-chant, which builds into an impassioned interplay of half-tone patternings, with resounding bass notes suggesting the abyss below our feet that stalks our existence. As it began, the piece ended as might a ritual, with doomsday-like gong-stroke notes that resounded, lingered and faded away.

Though the solo clarinet featured in Ross Harris’s work which followed provided plenty of contrast with piano timbres, there was no let-up in intensity, as suggested by the “Four Laments” title. Described by the composer as consisting of “four short and rather quiet movements” the music reflected upon and interacted with the sound of each of the movement’s titles, the word for “lament” in four different languages. The first, “Klaga”, was Swedish, slow-moving, very out-of-doors music, its wide-ranging notations suggesting the isolation of vast spaces, and associated loneliness, and a sense of a spirit communing with nature. This was followed by the Yiddish “Vaygeshray”, a rhythmically droll and quirky piece, engagingly angular in places, choleric in others, and with lovely sotto-voce stream-of-consciousness episodes that set off the more energetic outbursts. The “Tangi” movement featured long-breathed lines, flecked occasionally by birdsong, and echoed with haunting “harmonics”, two notes sounded simultaneously, along with the player’s audible breath as a third timbral “presence” (superb playing by Phil Green), creating an almost prehistoric ambience. The last movement was the Gaelic “Corranach”, somewhat redolent of a wake, with its lyrical opening giving way to snatches of mercurial, dance-like sequences, with ghostly jigs and reels fleetingly remembered. Phil Green’s playing conveyed a real sense of living the music throughout, with each sequence drawn into a larger, more equivocal and suggestive world of different life-and death enactments, deeply moving.

Although these SOUNZtender works were originally designated as commissions for solo instruments, Christopher Marshall, the winning bidder for composer Chris Gendall, decided to specify a work for a string quartet. Marshall’s idea was to propose four ubiquitous forms of music and commission a response to each, with a different instrumentalist in the quartet taking the lead in each piece. Gendall’s response was to abstract certain stylistic elements of each form, rather than attempt to imitate with a set of pastiche-style pieces. The result was a set of boldly-etched pieces whose characteristics seemed to leave their original inspirations behind, but whose sharp, if oblique focus still compelled attention in each case.

Canto, the first movement, spotlit the solo ‘cello, whose music represented a struggle to coalesce into any kind of song, despite the efforts of the higher instruments to entice their partner into lyrical mode. The swaying, sighing character of the next movement, “Scorrevole”, conveyed its eponymous character with great delicacy and beauty, while the third movement, “Tango”, seemed to be a kind of “noises off” realisation of the dance, the skeletal left-handed pizzicati evoking something gestural more than sounded. Here, the solo viola juicily intoned the beginnings of a melody amidst the “danse macabre” of the other instruments, which then all rounded on a single note, each voice colouring the contributing timbres and “bending” the pitch to somewhat exotic effect. There was plenty of ‘snap” to the playing from all concerned, suggesting a certain volatility, and rich chordings that broke off their sostenuto character to fragment in different and adventuresome directions. The final “Bagatelle” largely inhabited the stratospheres, the first violin’s harmonic-like shimmerings drawing similar sounds from the other instruments, whose subtly-shifting colourings brought different intensities to bear, before clustering around the tightly-focused tones of the leader in a nebula of other-worldliness.

What worlds, what evocations, what alchemic realisations! All composers except for Chris Gendall were present to share audience plaudits, along with the respective performers, a unique distillation of contemporary New Zealand music-making. People I spoke with afterwards admitted to favourites among those heard, though interestingly no one work seemed to resound more frequently than others throughout the discussions. As with all new music, though, premieres are one thing, and further performances are another – so it will be interesting to listen out for these works played in different settings and circumstances (although Ross Harris’s work “Four Laments” has already stolen a march on the others, being repeated by Phil Green at an Amici Ensemble concert in Wellington again, tomorrow). The commissioners proudly received their presentation scores of the works performed at a function in the Town Hall Mayoral Chambers after the concert – and the project was thus completed. Very full credit to the Centre for New Zealand Music, the directors Scilla Askew (recent) and Julie Sperring (current), its Trustees and volunteers and contributing commissioners and composers, for a notably historic and successful undertaking.

Ensembled delights from Amici in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

AMICI ENSEMBLE – Wellington Chamber Music Sunday Concerts 2010

DEBUSSY – Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp / FRANCAIX – Quintette for Clarinet and Srings / ROSS HARRIS – Four Laments for Solo Clarinet / STRAVINSKY – Three Pieces for String Quartet / RAVEL – Introduction and Allegro for Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet

Amici Ensemble: Donald Armstrong, Cristina Vaszilcin (violins) / Gilian Ansell (viola) / Rowan Prior (‘cello) / Phil Green (clarinet) / Bridget Douglas (flute) / Carolyn Mills (harp)

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Sunday 30th May, 2010

Whether it was my watching Harpo Marx in that memorable harp-playing scene from the film “A Night in Casablanca” which I remember seeing as a child, or my being smitten as a young man by the beautiful Rebecca Harris, the NZSO’s harpist during the 1970s, I’m not entirely sure; but I’ve always been drawn towards music written either for a solo harp or to music with prominent parts for the instrument. My first, wide-eared and open-mouthed encounter with Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro” for harp, flute, clarinet and string quartet on recordings was thus a formative, “surprised-by-joy” experience, music which, to my ongoing regret, I had never had the chance to hear performed “live” before this concert. So, it was with a cocktail mix of pent-up excitement, anticipation, enjoyment and some foreboding that I prepared myself to sit through this afternoon’s beautifully-presented programme, awaiting those limpid wind chordings that announce the beginning of the Ravel work. Of course, I needn’t have worried that the performance was going to be anything less than wonderful, as I was pretty familiar with the work of all the soloists whose combined talents made up the Amici Ensemble – and, most importantly, I’d heard Carolyn Mills as both a soloist and accompanist already, playing the harp like an angel in one of the most beautiful performances of Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols” that I ever hoped to have heard “live” or otherwise, with the Nota Bene choir in 2008.

It didn’t take me long to become embroiled in each of the items once the music started, firstly the Debussy, a work I didn’t know, a Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, one of six chamber works planned by the composer, who unfortunately lived to complete only three of them. What struck me was the music’s absolute freedom of impulse within an extremely simple overall framework – a pastoral-like first movement, a gently-animated, occasionally excitable second movement with a touch of sobriety at its conclusion, and an energetic, free-spirited last movement, the work as a whole elusive and discursive in direction and intent, but undeniably attractive in places.  The players enabled us to dream the opening, flute and harp preparing and slowly awakening the ambience for the sinuous viola line, the harp quite “antiphonal” when contrasting its upper and lower registers. At times the detail wrought by the trio was almost Oriental in its delicacy and clarity of focus, the teamwork responsive and beautifully co-ordinated. A somewhat more earthy and animated second movement was largely energised by Carolyn Mills’ harp, the music losing some of its buoyancy and clouding over towards the end, allowing a moment of introspection to take charge, if only fleetingly. The harp also set in motion the finale with toccata-like insistence, flute and viola playing “poet and peasant” in places, contrasting both the colour and texture of their utterances throughout the ebb and flow of exchange. Despite the players’ advocacy, it was a work I confess to finding more admirable than lovable – subsequent hearings may well change my attitude.

But I must confess to a weakness for Jean Francaix’s music – its droll humour, ready sentimentality and unrepentant volatility, qualities I think of as being very French. In some quarters Francaix’s music is thought of as shallow and vapid, with too ready a reliance upon surface effect; but I like his juxtapositioning of states of emotion, as if keeping foremost in mind the principle of life being “a tragedy to the heart and a comedy to the intellect”. The composer’s Quintette for Clarinet and Strings demonstrates this lightness of touch and playfulness of wit – a sweetly nostalgic opening, but with strongly-etched violin lines nicely projected here by Donald Armstrong, and with Phil Green’s liquid clarinet tones making the music glowing like a ferris wheel turning in the sunset. Very much the music’s protagonist, the clarinet initiates a new, impish mood, gurgling with anticipatory glee before dancing off with a “come on!” gesture. The ensemble energises the music beautifully throughout, pausing for a few melancholic reflections, before taking up the adventure with renewed vigour, the instruments tumbling down the hill with child-like delight at the end. Such winning, infectious playing in the cake-walk-like scherzo, the players then leaning elegantly into the trio, again beautifully characterised, with sentimental clarinet set against more ascerbic, knowing strings, the music seemingly reluctant to return to its scherzo-ish manner at the end. Gillian Ansell’s viola established a mood of sombre beauty at the slow movement’s beginning, the music constructing great archways of gathering and falling tones, the playing full of tenderness. The insistent, nagging finale again had the clarinet playing clown to the strings’ more dogged purpose. I loved the clarinet’s waltz tune, played by Phil Green with wonderful insouciance atop the strings continued rhythmic insistence, as was the solo instrument’s outlandish cadenza, Francaix stressing his “comedy to the intellect” stance by gathering up the work’s strands for a classic throwaway ending. All very stylishly done.

Some of us had heard Ross Harris’s Four Laments for solo clarinet earlier that day at the SOUNZ Tender concert, and were thrilled to hear a new work being given not one but two chances to impress in public. The performer and venue were the same as before, but, as with the behaviour of colours when juxtaposed differently, the music sounded different in this context, perhaps with clarinettist Phil Green taking the opportunity to characterise more fully his view of the work. Each piece was inspired by the concept of “lament” as expressed in four different languages; the first, “Klaga”, from Sweden, the sounds ghostly and hollow-sounding, with brief impulses of movement overtaken by a prevailing sense of isolation. The Yiddish “Vaygeshray” had extroverted energies, behind which seemed to lurk an undertow of anxiety and unease, while the “Tangi” movement featured full-throated wailing, occasional birdsong, and evocative overtones mingled with gestural breathing, the ‘mauri-ora’ (breath of life). Finally the Gaelic “Corranach” evoked a wild landscape and snatches of a dance-ritual, scraps of jigs and reels, the age-old disintegration of a richly-wrought life. Again, Phil Green’s playing “owned” the music, realising sounds that somehow seemed “unlocked” rather than newly-made.

Donald Armstrong entertained the audience most engagingly by way of introducing the programme’s next item, Stravinsky’s Three Pieces for String Quartet. These were written in 1914, a year after the first performance of the composer’s epoch-shaking ballet “Le Sacre du Printemps”, and are unconnected character studies. They were originally published without titles, but Stravinsky later orchestrated them and added a fourth, to create his “Four Etudes for Orchestra”, transferring the names to the quartet pieces. Donald Armstrong asked the strings of the quartet to demonstrate aspects of the work beforehand, and talked about things like the nagging “housewife theme” in the first piece, and the famous London circus clown Little Tich, whose “eccentric movements and postures” Stravinsky modelled the second movement upon. The players confidently characterised each of the pieces, the obsessive four-note folkish repetitions of the opening Danse, the “jerky, spastic movements” of the second piece Excentrique, and the almost liturgical homophony of Cantique, the final one of the set.

After these were done, we settled back to enjoy the afternoon’s final work, Ravel’s “Introduction and Allegro” This performance seemed to me to realise everything one could have wished for from the music, apart from a profoundly uncharacteristic wrong note from the clarinet at one point, a slip which seemed to take Phil Green aback as well! But Carolyn Mills’ harp playing was a joy, the strings and wind achieved miracles of delicacy and balance throughout, and the whole ensemble seemed at one in realising the piece’s contours of intensity, colour and emotion. Nothing was shirked, with tones both diaphanous and forthright, as required, from the ensemble, through the “running” momentum instigated by the harp, and the intensification of the argument by the strings, generating waves of joyous energy leading towards the final upward flourish. My reaction to it all was coloured and flavoured by pleasurable expectation, I admit, but it seemed, nevertheless, to me to be a brilliantly successful performance. For this reason I didn’t need “Greensleeves” as an encore afterwards, but it would have pleased the punters no end, and was, I must report, nicely realised.