Author: Peter Mechen

175 East – Latitudes of recreation

Posted on by Peter Mechen

175 EAST AT ST.ANDREW’S
Works by Michael Norris, Richard Barrett. Rachael Morgan,
Christian Wolff and James Gardner

175 East : Richard Haynes (clarinet), Andrew Uren (bass clarinet)
Ingrid Culliford (flute), Tim Sutton (bass trombone), Carl Wells (horn)
Katherine Hebley (‘cello), Lachlan Radford (bass), James Gardner (laptop)
Conducted by Hamish McKeich

St Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington, Saturday 15th August

175 East, a contemporary music ensemble based in Auckland, prides itself on presenting new, cutting-edge music from both New Zealand and overseas via high-quality professional performances. The group’s recent Wellington concert at St.Andrew’s on the Terrace, which was a repeat of a presentation in Auckland a few days previously, bore ample witness to this stated philosophy – three of the six works played were by New Zealand composers, with the remainder coming from Welsh composer Richard Barrett and the French-born German-American Christian Wolff. The whole was delivered with the skill, panache and commitment to the cause that we’ve come to expect from these uniquely assorted musicians with their idiosyncratic instrumental combinations that composers seem to hugely enjoy writing for.

Two of the works played in the concert were “old friends” in that I’d seen and heard both performed before by the group – given that many pieces of contemporary music receive their premiere performances and nothing more, it was gratifying to have a second chance to hear both pieces, Michael Norris’s Vitus and James Gardner’s A study for voicing doubts. I’d previously encountered both of these works in a 2001 concert – again in Wellington –  which happened to be the first time I’d heard the ensemble play.

Michael Norris’s Vitus made as thoughtful and involved an impact upon me this time round as it did all those years ago. Its subject, the Christian saint Vitus who underwent torture and death for his religious beliefs at the hands of the Romans, is tied up with both the saint’s patronage of dance and dancers and his association with a medical condition known as Choreia, more commonly called St.Vitus’s Dance, one involving involuntary jerking bodily movements resulting from a temporary disorder of the brain. I remembered the music’s broad brush-strokes –  the pungent opening notes of the piece created a kind of “melting-time” impression, into which violent dissonances rushed now and then, gradually screwing up tensions and goading the music into a mock-heroic grand unison, whose riotous dissolution depicted a St.Vitus’ Dance episode. I also recalled the clarinets at the end quietly delineating what sounded like a mind’s inner workings, the instruments tremulously and haltingly answering one another across lonely, and somewhat fraught psychological soundscapes.

The other piece I’d heard previously was Jim Gardner’s A study for voicing doubts, a chamber concerto for clarinet whose title seems to encourage explorations of discords and disagreements between soloist and ensemble, exemplified by scalp-prickling counter-sonorities such as clarinet playing in its high register against bass trombone, and intriguing antiphonal rearrangements of soloist and ensemble mid-stream – political statements in music performance! I liked, then as now, the effects of the change on the music, the “distanced” soloist (or, alternatively “distanced” ensemble) embodying a number of relationship context possibilities, from impasse through compromise to acquiescence. Intriguing.

In Gardner’s work, as in Richard Barrett’s confrontational piece for solo clarinet knospend-gespaltene which featured earlier in the programme, the player was Richard Haynes, demonstrating what seemed like superhuman abilities (including the art of  seeming not to need to take breath for minutes on end) in realizing the composer’s idea of the instrument’s possibilities being able to realize a fixed “theatre” instead of a linear structure. This process of layered enactment took the listeners into a soundworld which seemed to transcend conventional considerations of pitch, timbre and rhythm, and , in the composer’s words, “lay bare” the piece’s and the instrument’s inner structure. Haynes’ virtuoso playing seemed to encapsulate these different states of being simultaneously, giving the effect of something with surprisingly layered and paralleled existences.

Barrett’s other work on the programme, Codex I, was for an ensemble of “improvising musicians”, a kind of re-enactment of the creative process by which the players take their cues from fragments of notation or musical memory which serves as a foundation for an entirely new work being created in performance. Sustained pitches run haphazardly through the piece, but their lines are punctuated by ”improvised divergences”, and numbers of instruments, but not precisely which ones, are specified by the piece, enabling the musicians to “re-enact” a tradition of musical inspiration, including, at the piece’s end, timbral gesturings of a kind which centred on no actual pitching of notes, merely breath- and movement-sounds, bringing to mind Keats’ words “Heard melodies are sweet, but unheard sweeter”…..

Rachael Morgan currently holds the Edwin Carr Foundation Scholarship, and received funding from Creative New Zealand for her most recent work from a fixed point (2009), which received what I assumed was its second performance after the Auckland concert.
The “fixed points” referred to by the composer are manifestations of the nature of sound, so that from within a single-pitch note can emerge all kinds of timbral and rhythmic variations, different instruments exploring the ramifications of the “fixed point”. The music was a journey undertaken into and through such possibilities, the ensemble gathering timbral weight, fortifying and energizing soundscapes, then underbellying the sounds, stretching away from and returning to the pitch-points like elastic, and adopting ethereal, disembodied tones, ‘cello and double bass having the last, skeletal-like say.

What was described as “added Wolff” to the concert in some of the publicity was Christian Wolff’s Two Players, a work that has surprisingly received only three performances in thirteen years – surprising because of the music’s accessibility, brought about by an attractive, almost ritualistic interplay between the two soloists playing horn and ‘cello, in this case Carl Wells and Katherine Hebley, respectively. The composer himself wrote about the importance for the work of the interplay and interdependence between the performers as an essential ingredient, and the two performers vividly realized the “character” of each of the three movements. The first was a night-piece, with long-held notes evoking a dark processional, the second a “dance macabre”, with ‘cello pizzicati leading the horn as a more circumspect partner, while the third used cryptic, almost elliptical gesturings in an almost speechless manner, a “Why don’t you listen to what I mean instead of what I say?” piece, one whose sense of underlying fun lightened the otherwise serious aspect of a marvellous concert.

Pinchas and Players – Wellington’s Zukerman Experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Pinchas Zukerman (violin) / Jessica Linnebach (violin)
Jethro Marks (viola) / Ashan Pillai (viola)
Amanda Forsythe (‘cello)

KODALY – Duo for violin and ‘cello Op.7
BEETHOVEN – String Quintet in C Op.29
DVORAK – String Quintet in E-flat Op.97

Wellington Town Hall, Wednesday 12th August 2009

Known primarily as one of the world’s top virtuoso violinists, Pinchas Zukerman has also developed a reputation as a chamber musician, firstly in association with Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pre on recordings of music by Beethoven; and more lately with a group formed by the violinist in 2002, the Zukerman Chamber Players. Here in New Zealand for the first time to take part in “The Zukerman Experience”, the NZSO’s latest concert series, Pinchas Zukerman is also on tour with his group for Chamber Music New Zealand, taking with them two programmes nationwide. Wellington concertgoers heard the first of these programmes at the Town Hall on Wednesday evening.

In the programme, a quote from English critic David Denton summed up fairly what we heard from the group, with their programme of Kodaly, Beethoven and Dvorak – Denton talked about the Players’ “self-effacing musicianship never standing between the listener and the composer”, a sentiment which seemed to be echoed in the comments of people I spoke with who had also attended the concert. I would agree entirely, while at the same time wondering why on some occasions this self-effacement on the part of performers, often set up as an ideal by connoisseurs and critics, can in fact short-change the musical experience. In relative terms, the performances throughout by the Group were extremely classy; and in at least one instance, that of the Kodaly Duo, I felt thoroughly caught up with the music-making, finding the performers’ engagement with the sounds an enthralling experience. Elsewhere, I felt one step removed, as it were, as if a gloss or a sheen had been applied to the beautifully-finished product, keeping me in the bystander realms, the “spectator-line” in front of the art-work placed a little too far back, as it were.

So, what was different about the performance of the Kodaly Duo that engaged me to an extent that made the experience a stand-out one? First of all, there was a sense, right from the first note, that both Zukerman and his ‘cellist partner, Amanda Forsythe, were living the music – the interplay between them was palpable, the authoritative, “digging-in” opening giving way to a wonderful sense of the players exploring the sound-spaces and stimulating each other’s sensibilities, both using pizzicato motifs to goad the other into responses both of the utmost delicacy and beguiling richness. Then there was the sheer variation of tone-colour, gossamer figurations set by turns alongside full-blooded outpourings, the sounds at times resembling that of a string orchestra, the cellist with simple arpeggiations ravishing our senses with the glorious tones of her instrument.

The slow movement featured song-like sweetness at the outset, but with a central section whose character was almost surreal, as if a gentle dream had suddenly been hijacked by phobia-ridden angst, the tensions gradually melting-down with lovely Aeolian-harp-like strummings from the ‘cellist, and rapt responses from her duo partner. The finale began gloriously, with Zukerman and Forsythe generating an exultant, rhapsodising mood, then plunging into the dance, alternating dark, earthy Hungarian rhythms with more stratospheric flights of fancy, the episodes growing out of one another. I got the feeling that both musicians were throwing themselves into the intricacies of interaction and contrast that the music affords, with a wonderfully adrenalin-led burst of energy at the coda, leaving behind the concert-hall ethos and revelling in a richly-detailed out-of-doors spirit that left us exhilarated.
After these intense out-of-door explorations, the Beethoven Quintet seemed to inhabit another world of sensibility altogether. At first I liked the contrast set up by the more “orchestral” feel of the ensemble, but as the work progressed I began to miss in the playing that sense of involvement with the music that Zukerman and Forsythe had exhibited so tellingly during the Kodaly. Throughout the first movement I kept wanting the ensemble to “dig in” a little more to the string textures, perhaps at a slower, more “pointed” tempo. Interesting that I found the work as a whole somewhat reined in considering that the same composer at this time (1801) was working on other,  more revolutionary pieces that were challenging classical norms and structures in different genres such as the piano sonata (the Op.27 Sonatas, and the “Pastoral”).

I liked the contrasts afforded by the slow movement, the development section “breaking out” from the constraints of the opening, and the players nicely catching the humour of the “false ending”, at what seems like a concluding cadence suddenly plunging back into the turmoil, before slowly restoring a sense of calm. But contrary to the programme note’s description of the Beethoven finale as “pure drama”, I thought the ensemble brought out the music’s urbanity and elegance more than any kind of elemental connections. Detail was beautifully filled in, from the elfin ambience of the tremolando accompaniment at the opening, to the deftest of violinistic touches from Zukerman himself in the more withdrawn Andante episodes; while the Players obviously revelled in the music’s pacy minor-key sections, delivering the notes with plenty of snap and polish, and nicely contrasting the polarities of activity and circumspection throughout. Still, for me, the impression remained of a performance that never really “let go”, so that the Beethoven we were presented with remained a drawing-room composer, albeit an interesting and occasionally surprising one.
The Dvorak Quintet is justly regarded as one of the great glories of the chamber-music repertoire for string instruments – and in a sense, Zukerman and his Players performed it like that, with beautifully-modulated tones and tight rhythmic control throughout, allowing the work’s greatness as an absolute piece of music to shine through, even if there were no folk-singers intoning the tunes and clogs stamping to the rhythms. If my bias extends towards a performance ethos of this kind of music that makes earthier connections than we heard from these musicians, I’m not denying the virtuosity and beauty of tone that emanated from the Wellington Town Hall stage throughout. The musicians gave full-throated voice to the work’s lyrical opening, and expertly spun the syncopated rhythms of the ensuing allegro. Brilliant though their playing of the scherzo was, I missed the chunky “folk-fiddle” ambiences of my mind’s ear, and thought some of the music’s character had been ever-so-slightly dulled with too generalised a response. The Players came into their own with the hymn-like measures of the slow movement, lines gorgeously intertwined, and contrasting sections beautifully characterised, the ‘cello-playing from Amanda Forsythe always ear-catching, especially in the major-minor contrasts of some of the movement’s variations.

The work’s finale bottoms out a bit compared with the other three movements, its contrasting rondo-like episodes needing strong characterisation to provide sufficient contrast with the all-pervasive jig-rhythms of the principal theme. I thought the ensemble gave the music plenty of energy, but didn’t sufficiently “colour” the contrasts enough for there to be a real sense of “homecoming” at the return of the jig-like rhythm each time. But the movement’s conclusion was exhilarating, with dotted rhythms giving way to triplets and building the excitement towards the last, grand lyrical statement – and even if this was delivered more with drive and rhythmic purpose than full-throated joy, the excitement kept us buoyed up right to the end.
Pinchas Zukerman and his Players responded to the warmth of the audience’s appreciation with a movement from a work in the group’s “other” programme, the Andante movement from the Mendelssohn B-flat String Quintet, a supremely elegant coda to an absorbing evening’s music-making.

Cantoris – Simple Song

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Cantoris  (Music Director – Rachel Hyde)
Music by Schumann, Ravel, Body,
Brahms, Britten

St Peter’s Church, Willis St.,

Saturday 8th August 2009

As was the case with Cantoris’s previous concert “Amaryllis and Absalom”,  both the venue, the gorgeously-appointed St.Peter’s Church on Willis St, and a beautifully laid-out booklet programme containing commentaries and texts of the song-settings, admirably set the scene for the choir’s most recent exploration of  the choral repertoire, an attractive programme entitled “Simple Song”. Cantoris director Rachel Hyde welcomed us to the concert and talked briefly about each bracket of songs and of some of the things she and the choir were attempting to realise in their performance. The four Schumann works for double choir which opened the programme were a pleasing choice, the singers quickly able to demonstrate their technical skills and expressive range with nice melodic work in thirds, good dynamic control and a living, breathing flexibility of pulse throughout. I particularly enjoyed the second piece Ungewisses Licht, a piece describing a lonely traveller’s journey through the storms of intense privation towards a distant beckoning light, the singers nicely and truly differentiating the major/minor oscillation of “ist es die Liebe, is es der Tod?” at the end.

Ravel’s gorgeous Trois Chansons are settings of texts by the composer, his only work for unaccompanied choir. The women’s voices tended to overshadow the men’s throughout, carrying the argument, except for the tenor line in the second song Trois beaux oiseaux, which was nicely focused and sensitively delivered. Again in the third song, the riotous Ronde, the women’s voices nicely captured the fantastic character of the setting, the voices relishing the rhythmic and colouristic possibilities given by the grotesque made-up names of the creatures of the Ormonde Woods. Still more “invented” language was brought into play by Jack Body, with his Five Lullabies 1988-89, music whose inspiration stemmed from the composer’s encounters with various exotic cultures, the sounds of both language and music being brought into play. Body makes the point that lullabies might not be always sung for the purpose of sleep; and while several of the settings did produce a mesmeric effect, the fourth sounded more like a “work-song”, energetic and invigorating. The fifth setting returned our sensibilities to the world of dreams, using the Filipino word “calumbaya”, the music filled with haunting, Sibelius-like held notes, as if sounding from a magical island, the divided choirs setting a beautifully-floated sonic backdrop around a more energetic striving figuration in the foreground, creating something altogether rich and strange – very nice.

Brahms used selections from a particularly rich vein of German Marian poetry, called thus after Mary, the mother of Jesus, and also Mary Magdalene, who was one of Jesus’s followers – the poetry uniquely combines a folk tradition with religious symbolism, a point made by Rachel Hyde when stressing the importance of language and its clarity and colour in performance. The songs made a telling contrast after the attractive astringencies of Jack Body’s music, the choir making the most of its storytelling opportunities with progressions such as the angel’s annunciation to Mary of her impending motherhood in the opening song Der englische Gruß. Perhaps not surprisingly, parts of the music have a Mahlerian melancholy, the opening of  the second Marias Kirchgang having something of the fatalistic tread of Mahler’s Lieder und Gesänge, as does the sixth Magdalena, relating the Magdalene’s discovery of Christ’s empty tomb, music with “haunted” harmonies and dynamics. Strong, atmospheric singing throughout.

Benjamin Britten’s Five Flower Songs gave us the lightness and buoyancy we needed at the concert’s end, the voices relishing the piquant skills of the composer’s varied responses, from the opening strongly-focused lines of Daffodils, through the tricky fugalities and finely-wrought dying fall of Four Sweet Months and the jagged, droll-sounding Marsh Flowers, to the delicately-etched harmonies of Evening Primrose, with its sun-drenched death-knell at the end. And with the most engaging syncopations and antiphonal cross-stitchings of the saucy Ballad of Green Broom to finish, the choir was able to conclude its concert with a spring and a smile and an exhalation of pure pleasure, the acclaim of its audience at the end richly deserved.

Zephyr and Diedre Irons at Paekakariki

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Paekakariki Mulled Wine Concert Series 2009

Zephyr Winds (NZSO Principals): Bridget Douglas (flute) / Robert Orr (oboe) / Phil Green (clarinet) / Robert Weeks (bassoon) / Ed Allen (horn) – with Diedre Irons (piano)

MOZART – Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat K.452

BARBER – Summer Music Op.31

BERIO – Opus Number Zoo

POULENC – Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet

Paekakariki Memorial Hall, Sunday 2nd August 2009

We were packed in with a vengeance at the Paekakariki Memorial Hall on Sunday afternoon, our seats almost at the very back and with little or no sight-lines extending to the musicians (the floor has no raised platform for the performers), causing me some anxieties regarding being able to fully “connect” with the music-making. I needn’t have worried – over the heads of the shoulder-to-shoulder throng came the opening measures of the Mozart, gloriously sounded (a combination of lively acoustic and brightly-focused projection from the players) and instantly engaging, quickly putting to rest the rustling ambiences of an audience settling down. The Largo introduction blossomed into an allegro moderato, the playing achieving such felicities of articulation, buoyancy and balance between the instruments as to bring constant pricklings of pleasure to the listener. Diedre Irons’s playing made the piano sound almost like a wind instrument, its strength, agility, flexibility and singing tone blending with what the other players were doing in subtle give-and-take interplay. The full-throated wind choir at the slow movement’s beginning again engaged the piano in a beautifully-written conversation of equals, with lovely explorations of different harmonies in a middle section where the music goes in and out of the sunlight, the tensions resolved in a way that perhaps reflected its creator’s desire for both diversity and order in the world.

In the Rondo Allegretto finale, the music continued its philosophical bent, its poised, at times liquid rhythms incorporating a lyrical and in places melancholic aspect within the same pulse, especially in a somewhat restless middle section. The playing continued to delight, no more than at a lovely concerto-like cadence point of questioning, after which the winds were able to diffuse the tension nicely and return the argument to the poise and urbanity of the opening.

By way of attempting to brighten up our recent wintry Wellington woes, Zephyr undertook Samuel Barber’s “Summer Music”, a lovely, indolent-sounding work enlivened by chirruping energies, conveying a “nature-at-play” ambience against which passages of gentle melancholy perhaps reflect the feelings of the beholder experiencing such seasonal rites. The players took us through a number of beautifully-characterised episodes, at one point the oboe instigating a quasi-oriental dance joined by flute and bassoon, the latter trying the same steps later on his own, to the delight of flute and oboe, whose amused riposte rippled through the ensemble. Just before the end, the music began a kind of journeying aspect, whose rhythmic tread briefly suggested a railway adventure, but with the return of the languid opening music, the impetus was lost, and the bassoon’s final attempt to dance again provoked another tantalising outbreak of mirth whose elfin disappearance came as quickly as its ready laughter.

People not normally drawn to contemporary classical music might have initially swallowed uncomfortably at seeing the name of Luciano Berio on the programme, a well-known experimental composer and pioneer of electronic music. They need not have worried – “Opus Number Zoo” demonstrates a lighter, more playful side of the composer’s activities, the four pieces settings with multiple narrators of allegorical texts whose parallels can be found in the Aesop Fables. Its musical equivalents inhabit a world not unlike that of Stravinsky, in “The Soldier’s Tale”, though there’s also a Waltonesque whimsy in some of the narrations that remind one of “Façade”. The first “Barn Dance” tells the tale of the poor silly chick who danced with a fox (flutist Bridget Douglas demonstrating hitherto unrevealed Thespian skills of an advanced order, here, with her vivid vocal characterisations!), the droll “That’s all, folks!” at the end occasioning a sympathetic chuckle from the audience. “The Fawn” is a bleak meditation on armaments and war-mongering, with ascending, expressive wind-textures highlighting the apocalyptic nature of the scenario; while ”The Grey Mouse” is a droll commentary on youth and age, the musician-speakers demonstrating a wonderfully precise vocal ensemble. Finally, in “Tom Cats”, a confrontational tale of greed and envy, Bridget Douglas’s voice was again to the fore, with the players engaging in “stand and deliver” antics with their instruments at cardinal points – all very entertaining!

After these tongue-in-cheek coruscations it was left to Francis Poulenc to restore some equanimity to our sensibilities with his Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet. The attention-grabbing opening plunged us into a carnival atmosphere, with scenes involving trick-cyclists, jugglers and clowns, everything vividly depicted with sharply-etched playing from Diedre Irons and Zephyr. The bassoon called a halt with an eloquent recitative, answered by the piano, and then evolving into one of those wonderfully “bitter-sweet” melodies beloved of twentieth-century French composers, the mood becoming impassioned, then becalmed, before plunging back into the festive energetics of the opening. Throughout all of this, the ensemble took each different episode in its stride, delivering the music’s variegated moods with tremendous élan. The slow movement, with its oboe-led song-like opening had a dreamlike “drifting-harmonic” aspect, which a burst of jog-trot energy momentarily and cheekily overlaid; while the players threw themselves into the finale’s almost Dadaist energies at the outset with plenty of manic vigour, sanities restored by several of Poulenc’s wonderful astringent melodic episodes, and a surprisingly rhetorical , almost chorale-like ending, delivered by the Zephyr players and Diedre Irons with just the right amount of mock-seriousness.

Occasionally reviewers have experiences which cause them to doubt their own listening abilities and capacities, one such for me being the small encore piece given us by the ensemble at the concert’s end – it turned out to be the animated section of the Poulenc Sextet’s slow movement, which I did think I’d “heard before somewhere” but didn’t recognise! Bridget Douglas comforted me by telling me that people had been caught out before by Zephyr’s repetition of that section of the music: “Out of context it sounds quite different” she told me. That, and the fact that I’d not heard the work before, did give me some comfort, but nevertheless I was abashed at not recognising it for what it was at the time – zut alors!

 

 

Great Romantics – NZSO on tour

Posted on by Peter Mechen

DEBUSSY – Prélude á l’aprés-midi d’un faune

RACHMANINOV – Piano Concerto No.2 in C Minor

SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No.10

Alexander Melnikov (piano)

Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre,Wellington, Saturday, 1st August, 2009

The orchestra undertook an “all-main centres” tour with this programme, finishing in Wellington on a Saturday afternoon in August. Both visiting artists, pianist Alexander Melnikov and conductor Mark Wigglesworth had elicited glowing opinions for previous overseas performances of some of the featured works, and had already been praised by local critics for their work with the orchestra in its other “Great Romantics” programme. So it was with the highest expectations that we took our seats in the Michael Fowler Centre to enjoy the prospect of an afternoon’s richly-wrought music-making.

The programme couldn’t have begun more beguilingly than with Bridget Douglas’s first flute strains at the opening of Debussy’s “Prélude á l’aprés-midi d’un faune”. It was music breathed into being more than “played”, supported by finely-honed chording from the winds and sensuous colouring from harps and horns. Wigglesworth and the orchestra achieved wonders of spontaneous flow, every line seemingly “free” and uniquely woven, with different timbres and colourings happening by instinct as it were. And when the flute took up the melodic line again, the music blossomed afresh, the two flutes in unison at the climax of the melody in perfect accord, clarinet and oboe unable to contain themselves, and augmenting the flow to where the strings were gratefully waiting, embracing the melodic contourings with sensuous warmth. Debussy rang the ambient changes as the work proceeded, a lovely rhythmic trajectory, at once firm-footed and languorous, underpinned gently floated wind octaves, subtle touches of silvery percussion (was that Lenny Sakofsky sitting among the brass players conjuring those magical scintillations from what seemed like the ether?) adding to the magic. At the end, we in the audience were the ones who were enchanted.

Romantic feeling of a darker and more urgent kind was introduced by the Rachmaninov concerto, even if pianist Alexander Melnikov’s opening chords began the work a shade perfunctorily, as if he were unconcerned to match sonorities with the orchestra’s richly velvet tones at its first entry. Throughout the opening and when introducing the second subject Melnikov continued to keep things cool, refusing to fully “command” the music, but instead treat his part almost as a kind of obbligato, part of the overall musical texture. While this ought to have worked in theory, for me it all imparted a detachment somewhat at odds with the music’s emotional core, as if the pianist was playing Saint-Saens rather than Rachmaninov, delicacy and elegance to the fore rather than a sense of every note meaning something worthwhile.

Wigglesworth and the orchestra generated a good deal of maestoso weight during the movement’s march-like central section, something that Melnikov slightly undermined by pressing slightly ahead of the beat, taking away some of the music’s sheer grandeur and leaving an impression of impatience. Some beautiful sounds from the orchestra, though – as in the other works throughout the concert, Ed Allen’s horn-playing was something to die for, and the ‘cellos played their lyrical ascending figure a little later with aching loveliness. Melnikov didn’t really respond to these oases of lyrical refurbishment amid the movement’s darkness, instead continuing to play things coolly and keeping the pulse to the fore, the coda moving towards its terse climax almost before one was ready for it. Again, in the slow movement, Wigglesworth and the players prepared a beautifully-phrased opening which Melnikov treated extremely casually in reply, creating little magic with his arpeggios, content to let the wind players sing out and squeeze the emotional juices. The big climax of the movement came and went with little frisson from the soloist, seeming to continue his “once-removed” attitude towards the music. Quite suddenly, with the brief cadenza, a change was magically wrought – harp-strummed, almost bardic chords from Melnikov invigorated the piano textures, and led to a hushed reprise of the “big tune”, winds and strings absolutely gorgeous and the piano in quiet raptures right up to the end. Why did the man wait so long before finally deciding to dig into the music?

The finale was again a curious affair, filled with imaginative touches and occasional disjointed moments from the soloist. Melnikov’s sweeping brilliance at the beginning, a bit splashy but extremely exciting, worked well with the on-the-spot orchestral contributions, the pizzicati during the brief scherzando episode really “telling” for a change, as the pianist danced up and down the keyboard. Melnikov and Wigglesworth went for a more massive effect than usual in the big build-up towards the fugato, whose speeding-up seemed to me a bit contrived, the music obviously wanting earlier to burst out of its constraints and race towards its contrapuntal trystings; but the second appearance of the big “Brief Encounter” tune was wonderful, with orchestra and pianist again “finding” each other, romantic feeling answered with poetry and tenderness. The final section had its “stop-start” moments, with Melnikov wanting to go faster than the orchestra with each of his soloistic episodes; but the grand final piano-and-orchestra peroration was undeniably spectacular, with all the requisite keyboard fireworks from the soloist and richly-singing orchestral tones.

In response to audience acclaim, Melnikov sat down to play an encore – and with the first few notes of Rachmaninov’s B Minor Prelude (the one that pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch christened “The Return”) the pianist seemed utterly transformed – the “every-note-counts” commitment that I’d felt was lacking in the concerto was suddenly manifest in earnest, Melnikov catching that aching “tug” between urgency and stasis in those opening utterances so characteristic of the composer’s music. As the work moved into its more agitated central episode, we were made to feel all of the pent-up emotion and world-weariness of the long-absent traveller in sight of his homeland – the sounds caught every impulse and instinct, both compulsive and ambivalent, whose interaction gives the music its underlying power. Interestingly, Melnikov chose to “brush in” the flashing pianistic figurations of the climax instead of giving them the usual rhetorical glint and edge, which worked beautifully in the context of the searing concentration he applied to the overall musical argument. The final utterances of the piece are cries which mingle joy, longing and foreboding; and Melnikov brought out their complexities with a sure instinct, weighting his touch with enough dying fall to leave us in a limbo of uncertainty and darkness. Coming after the disappointment of the concerto, this encore performance left me – well, dumbfounded!

Mark Wigglesworth himself contributed the programme note for Shostakovich’s mighty Tenth Symphony, stressing the links in the music between Stalinist repression and brutality in Russia and the composer’s belief and determination that the human spirit would survive come what may. Shostakovich himself talked about the connections between the music and Stalin; and the torturous nature of the emotional terrain through which both this and the equally epic Eighth Symphony travels demonstrates a powerful, consistently disturbing and at times frightening relationship between style and content which the composer himself may have matched but never surpassed in later works.

The performance amply demonstrated Wigglesworth’s credentials as an interpreter of the composer’s music, from the dark menace of the symphony’s very opening (reminiscent of Fafner’s cave in “Siegfried”), through the gratuitous brutality and the fire-alarm terror of the Scherzo’s frenetic storm, and the grotesqueries of the Allegretto Third Movement’s spectral dance, to the gritty optimism of the finale. Throughout the NZSO played with the utter conviction and surety of musicians who had swallowed a work whole and tapped all of the music’s inherent power and depth of expression. Perhaps there wasn’t quite the knife-edged intensity one experiences when listening to recordings by some of the great Russian interpreters such as Mravinsky, Kondrashin and Svetlanov; but in general Western musicians don’t have access to the same culture of direct experience of war and oppression which obviously gave many of those pre-Perestroika Soviet performances such a brutally stricken ethos.

To analyse Wigglesworth’s and the orchestra’s performance closely would stretch this already elongated review to unacceptable bounds – however each of the movements featured remarkable realisations of aspects of the composer’s vision. In the first movement the transition via solo clarinet and strings from the Winterreise-like loneliness of the opening to the pulse-quickening episode with flute and strings was magically achieved, as telling as the heartbreak of the strings climbing towards the piccolo’s distant visionary angel-spectre at the movement’s end. The orchestral onslaught in the second movement had an elemental wildness (Laurence Reese’s timpani strokes positively apocalyptic at one point!), the strings surviving a brief moment of imprecision towards the end to help with driving the argument to its conclusion, the playing eliciting a stunned silence in the auditorium at the brutality and ferocity of it all. Ed Allen’s magnificent horn-playing dominated the third movement, with its repetitions of the five-note theme, the last being a magically “stopped’ call from another world. And it was the wind players who so splendidly articulated the finale’s opening, the oboe’s call of desolation mingling with the bassoon’s sober soliliquies, and flute and clarinet despairingly trying to goad each other into launching a dance of defiance, one which succeeds in activating the mighty show of white-knuckled optimism that concludes the work. Conductor and players – a magnificent achievement, indeed!

John Chen at Upper Hutt’s Expressions

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN CHEN – PIano Recital

Works by POULENC, DEBUSSY, RAVEL, 

TONY LIN, BEETHOVEN, and TCHAIKOVSKY

Genesis Energy Theatre, Upper Hutt,  Monday 27th July 2009

Malaysian-born naturalised New Zealander John Chen, now just twenty-three years old, first achieved international prominence by winning the Sydney International Piano Competition in 2004 at the age of eighteen, the youngest-ever winner of this competition. Since then his career has taken him to appearances with all the major Australasian orchestras, and to numerous chamber music and solo recital engagements, all to critical acclaim. He has recorded discs of French music for Naxos, in particular the complete solo piano works of Henri Dutilleux, and is an advocate of contemporary New Zealand music, with premieres of music by Jenny McLeod, Ross Harris, Claire Cowan and Tony Lin to his credit. This year in New Zealand he’s been on tour with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, and is about to embark on a series of concerts with the T’ang Quartet of Singapore featuring a work by Gao Ping. At present he’s coming to the end of a 10-centre tour of the country with two solo recital programmes, each of which contains a new work by Christchurch-based composer Tony Lin. On Monday evening at the Expressions Genesis Energy Theatre in Upper Hutt he gave one of these programmes, a first half consisting of French music, and after the interval works by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to go with Tony Lin’s new piece.

 

John Chen began the recital with a piece by Francis Poulenc entitled Melancolie, concerning which the composer was overheard remarking that the French “realise that sombreness and good humour are not mutually exclusive”. It was apparent from the outset that the young pianist felt completely at home in this repertoire, his playing at once elegant, liquid, rich and warm, with the deftest of detailing enabling the ebb and flow of the music to cast an effusive glow all around the auditorium. The sounds evoked an aura and personality of a composer whose charm and wry manner must have endeared him to the friends and colleagues in whose honour he wrote a good deal of his piano music.

 

From Poulenc we moved on to Debussy, and the latter’s Second Book of Images, composed in 1907. Chen’s ability to colour sounds and create liquid flow was given full scope in these sensitive realisations, the first (“Bells Through the Leaves”) suggesting an interplay between substance and dissolution, the notes delivered with the utmost delicacy, conjuring up worlds where familiar sounds are enveloped in mystery. Debussy wrote the music on three staves, implying a certain “terracing” of sounds, which Chen evoked superbly throughout, drawing from a gorgeous but evanescent sound-palatte. The second piece, “And the Moon Descends on the Temple that Was” emerged in Chen’s hands as an evocation of columns of sound shrouded in deep mists, rich, resonant chording set against finely-etched detailings, as if a visitor to an old house had stumbled upon a forgotten room filled with ancient clocks, the chimings and tickings imagined rather than real, and the memory of the experience seeming like one recalled in old age. The third piece “Goldfish” brought a more mercurial quality to the sounds, with runs of pure gossamer over the keys set against other scintillations of movement whose ripples sparkled and splashed. John Chen’s differentiations of these specific impulses were quite miraculously evoked, set in contrasting motion to the episodes of more forthright gesture, moments of rhetoric that passed quickly, returning the sounds to the world of suggestiveness and fleeting impressions.

 

More sharply-etched and crystalline, though equally as suggestive, Ravel’s vivid evocation of Ondine, the water-sprite and temptress of man, forms the first part of the composer’s musical triptych “Gaspard de la Nuit”. Again, Chen’s ultra-sensitivity and beautifully-honed delicacy brought out all of the music’s liquid tintinnabulations, the textures at once cleanly-drawn and ambiently glowing. And the pianist’s fingerwork performed miracles of articulation as the river waters rose in response to the nymph’s gesturings, suffusing everything with watery hues – but just as scintillating was the piece’s final flourish, the poem’s words – “…abashed and vexed she dissolved into tears and laughter; vanished in a scatter of rain….” vividly conveyed by Chen’s brilliant pianistic flurries and the charged silences that followed. Of a different order of expression was the middle piece, “Le Gibet”, a somewhat grisly depiction of a hanged man left on the gallows in the sunset, the music tolling a ghostly bell-sound throughout, around which eerie crepuscular ambiences gradually close in, mourning fragmented chorales and skeletal descending cluster-harmonies representing the pity, horror and nonchalance of the scene. John Chen controlled it all beautifully, though I have heard those ghoulish descending chords played with more “point” as to make one’s flesh creep – here they were deftly brushed in, but a tad anonymous-sounding.

 

As for the final “Scarbo”, Chen’s dwarf emerged from the shadows as a brilliantly mischievous imp, rather than as an out-and-out malevolent creature of the night – which is to say that the characterisations were touched in more lightly and suggestively than is usually the case, the necessary “glint” in the playing having an elfin incandescence rather than a diabolical “bite”. Again, Chen’s control of detail was astonishing, bringing out a Puckishness in the characterisation, more so than the spectral quality favoured by some interpreters, and actually more, I think, in line with the descriptions in the verses by Aloysius Bertrand. As with all of John Chen’s work, it’s about the music rather than the interpreter, which I greatly appreciated.

 

Beginning the second half was a composition by one of Chen’s pianistic contemporaries, Tony Lin, whom I’d seen and heard play last year in Kerikeri, when he came within a whisker of winning the final of the International Piano Competition, but was edged into second place by young Jun Bouterey-Ishido. On that occasion Lin played one of his own compositions, a work called “Impression”, to great effect. For his present tour John Chen commissioned a new work by Tony Lin, called “In veils concealed….”, the music, like the earlier piece, making a distinct and deeply-considered impact. Lin’s idea was to characterise fragments of thought or memory as being concealed in bright veils but partly revealed by the play of light, suggesting their nature or origin. The work began with a Ravelian delicacy, exploring treble-keyboard sonorities, and using a repeated ascending figure, now insistent, now distant, augmenting these gestures with birdsong-like figurations. John Chen brought out the music’s wondrously layered effect, skilfully terracing his dynamics and voicing the fragments in sequences that seemed to cohere and advance the argument. As the piece progressed the details seemed to become more elongated, increasingly sinuous and extended, all the while punctuated by exquisite harmonic clusters at the top end of the keyboard. Chen occasionally used the pedal to wondrously enrich the textures and extend the piece’s layered character further, before reducing the dynamics to a whisper and allowing the figures and motifs to become remembrances and echoes. A deeper note, the piece’s only excursion into territories below Middle C, then brought a lovely work to a thoughtful conclusion.

 

Beethoven’s contemporaries probably had similar reactions to the above when encountering some of the composer’s late, more transcendentally-conceived works, one such being the A Major Piano Sonata Op.101. The very opening of the work sets lyricism against forward movement in an enticingly equivocal manner, with Chen catching that delicate balance to perfection, bringing to mind thoughts such as “letting things unfold” and “moving and being moved” with his playing. The succeeding march brought a touch of steel to the tone, with the rhythm perhaps calling for a bit more “spike” and rather less speed – but this, of course was an energetic young man’s performance. I thought the trio section also needed to take a little more with it, moving forward, but carrying just a bit more circumspection, so as to not hurry, but letting the distant music of the march gradually re-materialise. And I’m sure it was heat-of-the-moment exuberance that caused Chen to nearly overplay the last triumphant chords, a forgiveable piece of impulsiveness!

 

The slow movement unfolded quite gorgeously, Chen nicely capturing the wonderment of where the music was taking him, creating a strong sense of expectation which the reprise of the work’s opening nicely teases, before those sudden “call-to-attention” chords release the pent-up energies of the finale, the pianist spinning the jog-trot rhythms engagingly, and launching the fugue with mordant wit and beautifully-weighted voicings – the whole a truly living organism, here, underpinned by the pianist’s finely-tuned awareness of the creative play of different elements within the music’s structure.

 

To finish the programme we were given Tchaikovsky’s infrequently-performed Theme and Variations in F, a work that made me wonder why we don’t hear more of the composer’s solo piano music – despite its occasional unevennesses, the collection of twelve pieces known as “The Months” for one would surely make an attractive and unusual recital item. So it proved with this work, Tchaikovsky’s individual approach to theme-and-variation form creating a number of distinctive and worthwhile pieces. Highlights were the Schumannesque No.4, whose song-like character brought out a melancholy characteristic of the composer, the waltz-like No.8, alternatively piquant and demonstrative, and the innovative No.11, whose rhythm derived from the previous dance-like piece, but with an altered time-signature and a completely new and different-natured melody – very clever composing! John Chen made the most of these pieces, bringing the work to a brilliant and satisfying conclusion with the scamperingly virtuosic final variation. As if to return our emotional states to normal, John Chen played the first of Brahms’ Op.119 Piano Pieces as an encore, bringing out the music’s Janus-faced combination of world-weary experience and fresh wonderment. Naturally, we were a most appreciative audience, and lost no time in enthusiastically demonstrating our approval.

Wellington Orchestra On The Town

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BERNSTEIN – On The Town: Three Dance Episodes

BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No.3 in C Minor

(with Michael Houstoun – piano)

BRITTEN – Les Illuminations

(with Benjamin Fifita Makisi – tenor)

BRAHMS – Variations on a Theme of Haydn

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Wellington Town Hall,  Saturday 25th July 2009

You could tell that it was going to be a night for the orchestra, whatever else happened, from the moment Marc Taddei gave the signal to begin Leonard Bernstein’s “On The Town” with the opening of the first of the work’s Three Dance Episodes, an Allegro pesante whose crackling pace set the pulses racing. The Wellington Orchestra players revelled in the music’s boisterous spirits, managing to inflect the dynamics and point the syncopations at a rate of knots that would have, one suspects, kept even the New York Philharmonic on its toes. A  bluesy muted trumpet solo introduced the second Episode, a kind of “Lass that Loved a Sailor” sequence whose music blossomed into being from melancholy beginnings, strings singing their hearts out at the climax and winds spicing the romantic outpourings with piquant harmonies, the cor anglais at the movement’s end nicely picking up the remnants of feeling from the opening after the more heart-on-sleeve emotions had run their course. The final “Times Square 1944” movement took us into the feisty world of big bands, snappy, raunchy brass, underscored by a jazzy piano obbligato, and with sudden, pulse-quickening lurches into new sleaze-mode scenarios, Debbie Rawson’s eloquent saxophone work characterising the terrific support the winds in general gave to the brass throughout. It all sounded like the work of an orchestra on top of its game, my only quibble being the somewhat bizarre placement of the Beethoven C Minor Piano Concerto immediately afterwards, a chalk-and-cheese alignment whose incongruity was admittedly played down by Marc Taddei’s customary welcome to the audience being given after the Bernstein and as the piano was being rolled into place.

So, there was a sufficient “let’s start again” ambience by the time Michael Houstoun took the stage for the Beethoven concerto, a work that of course marks a threshold in the series of piano-and-orchestra works by the composer – a world of deep and thoughtful expression taking the classical style into more romantic and subjective realms. The orchestra’s urgent, tightly-woven exposition set the scene for Houstoun’s commanding entry, the pianist’s finely-judged masculine-and-feminine exchanges at the outset drawing the parameters of the musical argument to follow, and which the subtle interplay between soloist and orchestra proceeded to explore. I particularly liked Houstoun’s way with the second subject, lyrical and flexible, but also tensile enough to be readily drawn back into the purposeful, even confrontational C Minor world of serious life-questioning business that the music addresses. Neither pianist nor orchestra packed their punches in both assertive and reflective episodes, a tremendous tutti leading to the hushed, almost ghostly development, one with a very “Fifth Symphony Scherzo” feel to it, Houstoun’s withdrawn, almost disembodied tones sounding in awe of the stalking timpani notes and the muttering string figures. The cadenza boldly addressed the issues, Houstoun laying down the music’s law with real commitment, evincing an almost transcendent orchestral response, hard-headed timpani sticks giving the sounds an almost spectral feeling, one which the piano’s downward arabesques matched perfectly, leading to a no-nonsense, hard-hitting statement of mutual assertion and strength of feeling at the end.

Houstoun’s concentration was almost palpable in the stillness and strength of the slow movement’s opening notes, while the orchestra’s ready response was warm and conciliatory but extremely focused, carrying no excess. Throughout the interaction between piano and other instruments was ear-catching, bassoon and flute eloquently dialoguing with the soloist, and the strings perfectly complementing the piano at the opening’s reprise, augmenting with such surety what the solo instrument does. Again, the strings had such a lovely “veiled” tone after the short cadenza’s rapt conclusion, a mood that the ever-so-slight “fluff” on the horn didn’t manage to disturb – such poise and quiet rapture from everybody. After this, I thought the finale found Houston and Taddei in wonderful accord, the pianist dancing along the tightrope with fleet fingerwork and nicely-weighted sonority. At first I thought the winds a bit reticent, but a nicely-breathed, quite “reedy” clarinet solo from Janina Paolo re-established that essential  feeling of dialogue on equal terms, giving the string fugato a proper foil, and sparking off a commanding response from Houstoun, and an equally strong set of sequences leading to the joyous coda, whose rumbustious energy set the seal on what I thought was a great performance of the work.

A work that in its own way matched the visionary aspects of the concerto followed after the break, Benjamin Britten’s “Les Illuminations”, a song-cycle featuring settings of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, extravagant, almost surreal visions of wonderment and excitement. Britten was drawn to French poetry and language, and the evocations of these verses found a ready response from the young composer, with extraordinarily sensitive and imaginative results. Most people would associate this music with a voice of the likes of Peter Pears or Robert Tear; but the work was actually written for a soprano, Sophie Wyss, who gave the first performance in London in 1940. Tenor Benjamin Fifita Makisi threw himself unflinchingly into the work from the outset, responding excitingly to the fierce fanfare-like antiphonal figures played by violas and violins. Makisi had sufficient vocal heft to declaim Rimbaud’s fulsome descriptions of cosmopolitean splendour in the following “Villes”, bringing off the chromatic downward slides in the vocal line with some relish, though he found it difficult to “float” his voice with enough rapturous wonderment in “Phrase”, describing the ropes stretching from steeple to steeple. In general Makisi was happiest with the strongly-focused moments, the marvellous “schwung” of the waltz-like “Antique” with its lump-in-the-throat melodic progressions, and the exuberant declamations of “Marine” with its skyrocketing whoops of pleasure.

At times I thought his voice needed to “free up” somewhat, being unable to escape a kind of “earthbound” quality which prevented episodes like the “Interlude” from truly taking wing. Fortunately the orchestral strings played like angels throughout, focused and incisive in the ringingly declamatory moments, muscular and energetic in rumbustious episodes such as those from “Villes”, and full-throated, warm and rich in the many “singing” passages, like the one already referred to from “Antique”, and responsive to the kaleidoscopic shifts of colour, timbre and intensity continually demanded by the music. The final “Depart” was beautifully done by singer, conductor and players, capturing a valedictory sense of “Enough seen” and an enduring enrichment of experience.

After this the Brahms “St Anthony” Variations for me didn’t really clinch the evening, partly because anything would have been a hard act to follow after the Britten, and partly because Marc Taddei’s treatment of the work was simply too stop-start for the sections to knit together satisfactorily. Taddei did get wonderful orchestral playing, the “village-band” effect at the start with perky, rustic winds and abrupt phrase-endings bringing out the dance-like aspects, with some lovely work from the horns, the “skipping” variation with its attractive syncopations and the following “hunting-horn” episode bringing out excellent work from all sections of the orchestra. But the pauses between the variations seemed to get longer as the work progressed, and the finale, marked “Andante” was moved along so quickly we seemed to be in the midst of the final resounding statement of the main theme before we knew where we were, with the result that it all seemed to pass by too hurriedly – more a vigorous lunch-hour round-the-bays constitutional than a celebratory processional, sadly lacking warmth and heart. Not perhaps the most satisfying finale to the concert that one hoped for, but fortunately there were other moments aplenty which would serve as highlights one could play and enjoy in one’s head, all over again.

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 50th Anniversary

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZSO NATIONAL YOUTH ORCHESTRA

50th Anniversary Tour, July 2009

Paul Daniel (conductor)

John Chen (piano)

NZSO National Youth Orchestra

NATALIE HUNT – Only to the Highest Mountain

RAVEL – Piano Concerto for the Left Hand

MAHLER – Symphony No.7

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington,  Saturday 4th July (also Christchurch, Wednesday 8th July, and Auckland Friday 19th July)

This concert marked an historic occasion for the NZSO Youth Orchestra, 2009 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Youth Orchestra’s conception, thanks to the vision, energy, skill and commitment of the newly-appointed Principal Conductor of the National Orchestra, John Hopkins, who put his dream of forming a nation-wide orchestra for promising young players into action in 1959 with concerts in Lower Hutt and Wellington, in September of that year. Their programme included a Handel Overture, Delius’s “Walk to the Paradise Garden”, the Beethoven First Symphony, Mendelssohn’s ubiquitous Violin Concerto, and Glinka’s Polonaise from “A Life for the Czar”. Fifty years later, the same orchestra was programming the Mahler Seventh Symphony, an indication of the enormous technical and interpretative advances made in the interim by the country’s young musicians, such an undertaking being of an order that would have daunted the National Orchestra of half-a-century ago, let alone their newly-formed youthful counterparts.

Before the concert began, a former member of the orchestra, violinist Wilma Smith, talked with the audience, and to everybody’s delight introduced the same John Hopkins, over from Australia for the anniversary, now in his eighties, but with the same boyish grin and bright piercing eyes, ascending the podium and waving to the audience, acknowledging the plaudits pouring in from all sides – a pity that the flowers arrived so quickly that he didn’t get the chance to have the microphone put into his hands for a few words (he managed a “Thank you very much!” as he left the stage, again to great applause, shaking hands with a few of the youthful musicians who were now coming onto the platform to begin the concert). I would imagine that he had plenty of other opportunities to speak at the various functions planned for the celebrations, but I still would have liked to hear a couple of his verbatim thoughts at the occasion of the concert.

Paul Daniel, the latest of a series of NYO guest conductors with an impressive performing pedigree, took the podium, and with little further ado set in motion the first item, composer-in-residence Natalie Hunt’s “Only to the Highest Mountain”. At a mere five minutes’ duration, the composer set herself very little time to make an impression and get the salient points of her work across to the listeners; but from the beginning the arresting, bird-like calls of the antiphonally-placed oboe and cor anglais were able to coax our sensibilities towards and into a kind of nature-ambience suggesting maritime influences, subaqueous rumblings and light-shafts of wind and brass tone interacting with string ostinati whose oceanic figurations played a part in defining the music’s origins. I was able to talk briefly with the composer after the concert and she confirmed the references to the sea, with the weaving of undulating rhythms and textures into the music, in a way that occasionally reminded me of Sibelius’s music for “The Tempest”. What the music lacked in breadth it made up for in sheer atmosphere and focus, with occasionally daring effects such as the shaking by string players of sheets of their music to create a rustling effect. And there’s something proverbial about that kind of circumstance, about saying what one has to say, succinctly and to the point and then stopping, to telling effect…..

Somebody who had a similar penchant for economy was Ravel, whose Piano Concerto for the Left Hand was also featured in the concert, the solo part played with a stunning amalgam of élan and sensitivity by John Chen, supported to the hilt by the orchestra under Paul Daniel. The performance brought out all the music’s unities and contrasts, from the very opening’s “slumbering giant” orchestral ambiences to the pianist’s absolutely electrifying entry, capped off by a gravity-defying upward flourish, again setting the tumultuous orchestral tutti that followed in bold relief. Some marvellous moments – the limpid beauty of the pianist’s playing, and soulful bassoon and cor anglais solos, characteristic of the orchestra’s individual instrumental contributions work – testified to the all-round excellence of the performers, even if the build-up to the swaggering march mid-work lacked the sheer weight that professional players would have been able to summon at that point. No reservations about the wealth of detailing from individual players and sections during the march itself, or the energy and incisiveness of John Chen’s marvellous playing (scintillating repeated-note cascades from soloist and orchestra at one point, and complete control over the music’s character-changes to filigree scamperings, wind solos following suit). In between these episodes, the march gathered terrific momentum of an almost barbaric splendour, again with colourful detailing from the winds, beginning with the bassoon, and building up to the full orchestra most resplendently. The grandly ritualized final few pages of the work again go back to what seem like primordial beginnings with the piano musing in its lowest registers,  reawakening those same instruments that began the work, and eventually goading them into shouts of triumph towards an emphatic, non-nonsense ending of a colourful concerto.

Thus far in the concert the focus had been on either the composer (Natalie Hunt with her work “Only to the Highest Mountain”), or the soloist (John Chen in the Ravel Left-Hand Concerto). Now, with the major work of the evening, the Mahler Seventh Symphony, it was the turn of conductor Paul Daniel and the orchestra to take centre-stage, which they did with a vengeance. The Symphony is Mahler’s second-longest, one of those works which, after you’ve experiences a performance you can’t remember what the world was really like when you began it. It’s an extraordinary work, with two long and demanding outer movements, flanking three “character” pieces, two of which are called “Nachtmusik” by the composer, in between which is a spooky Scherzo.

Right from the beginning, orchestra and conductor showed their mettle, everybody digging into the grim opening utterances with gusto, the tenor horn solo played with extraordinary virtuosity and characterful point by Luke Christiansen.  Paul Daniel encouraged string playing of the utmost conviction and commitment at a pace that allowed a sense of something gathering momentum and purpose, the allegro creating the necessary “flailing” effect without rushing. In fact all through the first movement the tempi seemed beautifully judged, allowing the players technical and expressive room in which to pour their very beings in what sounded and felt like a most satisfying way. Though the orchestra lacked tonal weight in places, the “lean and hungry” impression this created actually worked to the music’s advantage, as the textures never sounded overblown and bloated, always realizing the composer’s tremendous variety of timbral incident, and registering the character of each mood-change, such as the typically “far from the madding crowd” episode in the first movement, nostalgic brass fanfares helping to bring about what seemed like a transformed world for a few moments, the abyss temporarily forgotten (though not very far away), the chamber-like scoring for winds and brass (including the four-note-quote from the Dvorak ‘Cello Concerto, which I always enjoy) leading via a sweeping harp glissando to the big string tune which, for a short while, allows the music to wear its heart on its sleeve. The return of the “grim reaper” opening featured a scalp-prickling confrontation between trombone and tenor horn, creating a great, black sound, the brass like stone-giants confronting one another across glacial valleys. The players gave the dotted-rhythm motive extra juice, aided by the timpani, as the music gathered momentum, through a brief backward-looking hiatus and into the movement’s final pages, the excitement generated being too much for the conductor’s baton which escaped its owner’s grip and flew spectacularly through the air a few bars before the end, landing among the brasses, who never missed a beat, driving home the music’s abrupt conclusion, and only then relaying the errant stick back to its owner (to the delight and amusement of the audience).

Mahler’s scheme for this symphony comprised an epic first movement, followed by three “mood-pieces” two of which the composer named “Nachtmusik” (though he could well have given the middle Scherzo the same title), and a concluding finale which is as festive, energetic and joyous as the first movement is grim, dark and wild. Nachtmusik I is a purple-hued processional through evocative gloamings, containing both naturalistic and stylized elements, the rhythms mostly slow-march, but with occasionally dance-like episodes, pastoral allusions (cowbells and hunting-horns) and irruptions like the timpani’s sudden forceful reiteration of the basic rhythm near the beginning. The young players made the most of their opportunities throughout, though the swift tempo adopted by Daniels meant that some detail (for example the eerie bouncing of bows on strings) for me flowed too quickly to properly register, and a couple of the rhythmic dovetailings towards the movement’s end became scrambled as the players strove to keep up instead of deliciously fitting their voices in with the others – still, if a bit breathless in places, the phantasmagorical processional aspect was vividly conveyed by all concerned. And one really must put in a special word for the horns in this movement, their call-and echo sequences at the beginning, and in other places, beautifully played.

The scherzo that followed is probably Mahler’s most “haunted” symphonic movement, with the fantastic element very much to the fore in an ironically-expressed manner. The strings have a great deal to do throughout, and the NYO players gave it everything they had, with plenty of “schwung” to the phrasing, their lurching aspect perfectly matched by the tuba’s elephantine comments and the solo viola’s personal “danse macabre”. Despite somebody in the orchestra dropping something noisily in the middle of a “tuba dreams” sequence, the ambience was maintained unbroken, with the brass anticipating the composer’s Ninth Symphony Scherzo at one point, joining in with the waltz-tempo towards the end in a suitably riotous fashion. Great though the playing was throughout the movement, I thought the second “Nachtmusik” which followed even more special, with Ben Morrison’s juicy opening violin solo and the tender voicings of guitar and mandolin setting the scene for some lovely things to follow – a gorgeous horn solo making the most of the first appearance of the movement’s “big tune”, then matched by the violins, Paul Daniel encouraging them to give the melody all the juices they could muster, with goosebump-making results.

If the finale wasn’t quite at this level of execution, it was partly due to the music’s sheer difficulty , and partly because Paul Daniel’s interpretation was so volatile, an approach which took no prisoners and “fronted up large” to the score’s every variation of tempo, dynamics, colour and nuance – you could say, to the point where the music’s through-line felt obscured by detail. I would imagine the conductor wouldn’t have wanted such a large musical structure to “sag” at any point, with tempi that may have given the players more time to breathe, but could have easily resulted in plodding. It was certainly a vividly-conceived viewpoint, and undoubtedly a challenge for the orchestra but even so, it seemed to me to put the emphasis for these young players overtly on the music’s technical demands at the expense of the work’s overall coherence as a symphony. The brass, who’d played so well throughout, were under real pressure in places, and had a few uncharacteristically uncomfortable moments with their gleaming fanfare-like statements that pop up along the music’s course, though they did really well in other places, for instance over the top of the strings’ fugato-like scamperings (so reminiscent of the Fifth Symphony’s finale), while front-desk strings and wind beautifully pointed their chamber-like sequences a little later, underlining Mahler’s skill at creating diaphanous textures from such large forces. This is to perhaps cavil unnecessarily – generally, the challenges that Daniel’s approach set for the young players were triumphantly met, with the thrills matching and eventually supplanting the spills, the symphony’s last few pages raising the roof and the temperatures of all concerned.

Wellington Chamber Orchestra – Psathas, Lilburn, Beethoven, Vaughan Williams

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Conductor : Michael Joel; Soloist: Catherine McKay (piano)

PSATHAS – Luminous;   LILBURN –  Overture “Aotearoa”;  BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No.4 in G Major;     VAUGHAN WILLIAMS – A London Symphony

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington; Sunday, 28th June, 2009

This was a richly-conceived and engagingly-presented concert from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra, the music covering a kaleidoscopic range of repertoire, with the character of each separate work explored and brought to the fore for the listener’s delight. Things are seldom what they seem, as the saying goes – and it may have appeared to the average audience member that the concert would be something of a “separate halves” affair, with the “lighter” and therefore “easier” works placed in the first half, followed after the interval by a lengthy and hugely demanding single symphonic work. In fact, the programme had varying kinds of technical and interpretative challenges for the musicians all the way through the afternoon, most of which were triumphantly surmounted, even if there were occasionally moments of not-quite-together ensemble. Right at the end, the orchestra rose magnificently to the challenge of the finale of the Vaughan Williams symphony, throwing everything into the music’s impassioned utterances, and then achieving with their conductor Michael Joel (and leader Ann Goodbehere’s lovely final solo) an evocative and compelling stillness and beauty throughout the epilogue. In a sense it was appropriate for the concert to end this way, because establishing and sustaining a specific mood, especially in the slower music, was one of the things that the orchestra did extremely well at various times throughout the afternoon’s music-making.

The opening item, John Psathas’s Luminous, was recreated by conductor and players with breath-catching beauty, underlining that dichotomy of stasis and osmotic movement with firm, well-focused but still diaphanous tones, and a magical “other-world” ambience caught at the moment of withdrawal of a full orchestral triple-forte. The musicians nicely brought out the composer’s concentrated suffusion of the textures with light and atmosphere, very Ligeti-like in places, and building to the full weight of an orchestral climax with sound judgement, the close ambience of the hall allowing us to enjoy the full-textured differences between the smoky brasses and the more translucent strings. From outer (or perhaps “inner”) spaces we were taken out of our heads and out-of-doors in Lilburn’s Overture “Aotearoa”, the striking opening as plangently delivered as I’ve ever heard it by the bright, long-breathed flutes, contrasted beautifully with the other wind timbres, secure strings and nicely “terraced” brass, exchanging rhythmic figures with strings. The tricky dotted-rhythm motto theme of the work was occasionally a stumbling-block, the strings in particular not quite certain as to how much “snap” to generate in places, which put ensemble “out” in places. There was also an occasional rawness of tone, now and then a bit intrusive, but mostly helping to capture the bracing ruggedness of the writing, very much at the service of the music’s intentions – and better the occasional roughness than something lacking in spirit, which this performance never was. Though lacking finesse in places the playing plainly and forcefully brought out the music’s essential character.

Readings of Beethoven’s G Major Piano Concerto seem either to declaim the notes as if intoning a sacred ritual, or trip a kind of light fantastic, carrying little ballast – this performance was of the latter, light-footed variety, the orchestra kept very much on its toes by Michael Joel’s edge-of-the-seat tempi for the opening tutti. Catherine McKay’s silvery playing was delightfully poised throughout, her rhythmic trajectories giving the notes plenty of phrasing-space while keeping up the music’s basic momentum, something which the orchestra found difficult to successfully emulate in places. The orchestra by contrast, seemed tenser, the playing even slightly “accelerando” in places, so that some of the “tumbling passagework” sequences took a while to find complete accord between soloist and band. Despite the lightness of touch, certain places where Beethoven hints at more esoteric, even metaphysical realms, received full due – the piano’s rapt modulation into distant harmonic realms mid-movement nicely highlighted the rolling concertante arpeggiations that followed, though I confess I wanted from Catherine McKay more of a contrast with the big G Major-related chords from the magically elfin passage that follows immediately after. The cadenza was the longer, more conventional of Beethoven’s, beautifully shaped by the soloist, and, despite a miscalculation by the oboe, nicely augmented by the winds at the end. The slow movement’s first string declamations were terse, abrupt and to the point, provoking a rather more assertive reply from the pianist than one usually experiences, more emotion-laden than ethereal and distant. As for the finale, what the strings lacked in rhythmic poise at the start they made up for in sensitivity of tone – and the whole orchestra made a splendid showing in the tutti passages in between the soloists’s fleet-fingered counter-statements. I thought the violas made lovely sounds during their “moment”, just before the build-up to the reprise of the opening; and the winds and strings worked well in accord throughout the myriad modulations leading up to the cadenza, the “stamping beginning” one, to which Catherine McKay gave plenty of dash and élan. Finally, what a joy to hear the horns right at the end sound the hunting-call with such confidence and relish, bringing the work to an exuberant close.

I’ve already mentioned the orchestra’s energy and commitment regarding the final movement of the Vaughan Williams symphony (such a lovely work!). Michael Joel and the players coaxed the first movement’s beginnings into life and brought about a vibrant sunrise, with a wealth of instrumental incident too numerous to recount in detail – though one remembers things like the tuba’s wonderfully rhythmic raspings leading into the allegro, and some great shouts of exuberance from the other brass in places, along with the entirely memorable “Thomas Tallis” string ambience at the beginning of the becalmed central section of the movement – lovely playing from the front desk strings. As with the Lilburn Overture, some of the jaunty syncopations in the exposed string phrases were ragged-sounding, though the section rose to the occasion magnificently in tutti at the movement’s conclusion. The slow movement I thought outstanding, the conductor encouraging playing from all sections redolent with the most wonderfully “charged” ambience, from the lovely cor anglais solo at the beginning to the dying viola phrase at the end. The wind trill that began the scherzo was scalp-prickling in its sheer joie de vivre, though the rhythmic complexities of this movement took their toll in places like the short fugato, where entries went off like out-of-control skyrockets! – such unsolicited excitement was only momentary, and generally the calm and poise of the harp and flute leading stepwise into the gloomy shadowlands of the coda spoke volumes for the playing of the orchestra as a whole throughout. All told, an exciting and warm-hearted concert to remember.

Festival Singers – Wellington Shines!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

WELLINGTON SHINES!

Works by Wellington Composers

Jonathan BERKAHN –  Resurrection Cantata “The Third Day” (premiere performance)

– with works by Andrew BALDWIN, Pepe BECKER, Jack BODY, Jonathan CREHAN, Stuart DOUGLAS, Felicia EDGECOMBE, Gareth FARR, Maurice FAULKNOR, Jenny McLEOD, Carol SHORTIS

The Festival Singers

Various Instrumentalists

Rosemary Russell (conductor)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Saturday June 27th 2009

 

Some people might react to the expression “community music-making” with condescension bordering upon snobbery; but I can’t think of a better, more appropriate way to convey in words the remarkable scope and atmosphere of this joyous concert put on by Wellington’s Festival Singers, appropriately titled “Wellington Shines!”. A simple, cursory look at the names of some of the composers who contributed works to the concert would have been sufficient to alert concertgoers regarding the possibilities of a richly rewarding musical evening; and in fact, if not absolutely full- to-bursting St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace had a satisfyingly “well-peopled” feeling about it, which must have gratified the concert’s organisers. This feeling was reinforced in the most appropriate way imaginable by the standing ovation that greeted the conclusion of the evening’s most substantial item, Jonathan Berkahn’s Resurrection Cantata “The Third Day”.

 

But what better way to begin such a concert than with music by one of the most people-orientated of composers, Jack Body? His “Nowell, in the Lithuanian Style” required the singers to approach from a distance, gradually forming two groups on the platform and creating a charming overlapping vocal effect, the groups eventually merging as one, physically and musically (a metaphor, perhaps, for the evening’s bringing together of diverse peoples to enjoy a concert of music?). Just as engaging, but often in a sheerly visceral sense, is Gareth Farr’s work, his 1998 “Tangi te Kawekawea” based on a Maori chant announcing the beginning of the kumera-digging season engaging both choir and percussionists, with beautiful solo singing by Lydia McDonald in particular. Stuart Douglas’s 2003 work “Chanticleer” was another rhythmically infectious piece, featuring an attractive soprano line and snappy rhythmic support from the choir’s middle and lower voices. A simpler, more direct treatment of words was provided by Felicia Edgecombe’s attractive setting of G.M.Hopkins’ well-known “Glory Be To God For Dappled Things”, in which women’s, and then men’s voices by turns intone the melody before harmonising together.

 

A complete change of mood was provided by Pepe Becker’s piece for organ solo “Organis Plagalis”, using note patterns and intervals relating to birthdates, written for Douglas Mews, and played here by Jonathan Berkahn, an obsessive, even claustrophobic work which spent most of its time trying to fight free of the key of G to reach a D pedal note. Jonathon Crehan’s recently-composed “Three Songs” (2009) were great fun to listen to, the singer Frances Moore’s smallish, but responsive voice making the most of her opportunities to inflect the text and convey what the composer called the “fun, excitement and drama” of the pieces. Both singer and pianist-composer particularly enjoyed the second song, “Schadenfreude”, an amusing feline-phobic mini-drama. I thought the piano part a bit too heavily textured for the third song, everything needing a lighter touch for Eileen Duggan’s “Low Over Tinakori” to come clearly and engagingly through. But I liked Frances Moore’s singing, and found myself wondering how she would do Gershwin.  Still ringing the programme’s contrasts, Maurice Faulknor’s “The Lonely Seagull” for flute and piano pleasantly and poignantly explored melancholic realms, with episodes of flurried passagework from both Bernard Wells’ flute and Jonathan Berkahn’s piano providing added interest.

 

Andrew Baldwin’s setting of “Ave Maria” won the New Zealand Secondary Schools Choral Composition Award in 2005. I was particularly struck by the music’s rich harmonies at “Blessed is the fruit” with full flowering on the word “Jesus”, and by the “rounding-off” effect of the first line’s repetition and “homecoming cadence” at the end. Carol Shortis’s setting of a text based on Psalm 128 “Show Us Your Ways” followed along  similar richly-upholstered harmonic lines, its direct appeal linking strongly in effect to one of Jenny McLeod’s “Sun Carols” which came immediately afterwards. Entitled Indigo II: “Light of Lights”, this was another lovely work, whose rocking motion and direct simplicity of utterance linked past and present with great strength and candour, as if we were listening to the collective voice of a faith-based community.

 

In a programme note Jonathan Berkahn made the point that, while there were plenty of musical works whose subject was Christ’s Passion and Death, there were few dealing with the latter’s Resurrection. Using texts taken from the Gospels and recast into different kinds of song-forms, Berkahn’s “Resurrection” cantata recounted the story from Christ’s death and burial to his rising from the tomb and reappearance to his followers, charging them with “The Great Commission” of going forth and teaching all nations. With Kieran Raynor’s sonorous bass voice, the full Festival Singers choir and a group of instrumentalists that included violin, accordion, electric guitars, bass and drums, everything seemed set for a colourful, rip-roarin’ traversal of one of the world’s great stories. As with Baroque performing practice, the instrumentalists were given melodic lines and the occasional chordal cadence around which they were expected by the composer to fill in appropriate textures and interlocking rhythmic patterns, which they all seemed to do so in the manner born. The whole progressed with a sweep and momentum that I for one found quite exhilarating.

 

Particularly striking throughout was the ease with which the composer fused the music’s sometimes jagged rock elements with a gentler, more lyrical character, in particular the extended exchanges between the two in the “Do you remember?” section near the beginning, the accordion at times imparting an almost Klezmer-like ambience to the proceedings. Berkahn used these contrasts to great effect in different ways, the choir voices soaring over the top of the instrumentalists’ fierce rhythmic energies in “He descended to the dead”, and in the dramatic change of ambience from number to number, as with “Early in the morning” which followed immediately afterwards, guitars gently rolling over a folk-ballad rhythm appropriate to the text’s aftermath of mourning and quiet tragedy. And the sudden effervescence of realisation that death has in fact been overcome in “Did you hear the angels?” – the voices almost falling over themselves with urgency and delight – suggests that the story contains far more drama, tension and excitement than one would guess from its relative neglect as a subject by composers over the years.

 

Another memorable effect was the use of a folk-fiddle at the beginning of the work’s finale, where the instrument’s dance-like rhythm blended with the chorale-like theme sung by the choir – very Bachian, and skilfully put together. At the very end the organ spectacularly added its antiphonal voice to the proceedings, giving splendour and tremendous weight to the words “Christ is risen: he is risen indeed: Alleluiah!” After such a tumultuous finale, no wonder the composer and musicians received a standing ovation! – most richly deserved.