Author: Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington’s “Prophecy” – promise and fulfilment by young composers

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:
PROPHECY – Music by Thomas Ades, Benjamin Britten, Briar Prastiti and William Walton

THOMAS ADES – ….but all shall be well 1993
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – Violin Concerto 1939
BRIAR PRASTITI – Akri
WILLIAM WALTON – Belshazzar’s Feast 1931

Amalia Hall (violin)
Benson Wilson (baritone)
Orpheus Choir, Wellington (director Brent Stewart)
Wellington Brass band
Hutt City Brass
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 5th August, 2023

 

What appeared to be a nearly-full-house turned up at the Michael Fowler Centre for the latest of the 2023 season’s inspirational Orchestra Wellington concerts – I was intrigued to learn from Marc Taddei during the course of his welcoming remarks regarding the concert that the presented works were all written by composers when in their twenties or early thirties, and thus making up a bevy of youthful creative efforts, augmenting the concert’s “Prophecy” title with the idea of a foretaste of creativity still to come at that time. I hadn’t fully “taken in” the youthfulness of William Walton, for one, in relation to his work, so it certainly added an energy-charged degree of expectation to the proceedings!

The title of Thomas Ades’  1993 work “….but all shall be well” is a quote from poet TS Eliot quoting in turn the fourteenth-century mystic seer Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love which she wrote at the time of the Plague and other widespread human tribulations continue to this day to inspire hope in people in the midst of human privations of great suffering, and of thus “finding calm and quiet and focus in a chaotic world”. Ades’s music begins as slivers of percussion, with additional keyboard notes gradually morphing into orchestrally-conceived impulses, which in turn give rise to repeated scales rising and falling half-an-octave, frequently counterpointed by deep percussion notes and occasional figures resembling dance-band scraps of melody, and evolving a seemingly limitless panoply of texture, timbre and colour in this constant mesmeric movement of impulse – an effect not unlike a slowly-revolving mirror-ball reflecting an entire surrounding world of contrasts, including an almost malevolent avalanche of sounds in one sequence which are eventually quelled.  The fine programme notes (well-nigh impossible to read when the auditorium lights, as here, are dimmed, for whatever reason) performed a great service, here, if only in retrospect! – with new music (this being a New Zealand premiere) it can be helpful to have a guide to lead one through what can seem in some cases like a thicket of unfamiliar sounds. These from Thomas Ades, though relatively easy on the ear, still benefitted from the written commentary (presumably the meticulous work of Erica Challis) and allowed us, if largely in retrospect, to enjoy the expertise of playing and direction of this music all the more.

Next was Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto, completed in the United States in 1939, a work which reflects the composer’s reaction to both the horrors of  the Spanish Civil War and the growing unrest in Europe leading to World War II. Inspired at first by the “intellectually emotional” character of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto which he had heard in 1936, Britten’s work runs a gamut of conflicting emotional states (he was in the company of his lover, tenor Peter Pears, throughout this time), which his partnership with the work’s first performer, Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa further refracted through the inclusion of technical demands of the utmost virtuosity. Various violinists have since remarked on the works’ difficulty, though with the consensus being that such obstacles are, in the words of one of the work‘s exponents, “always in the service of the music, and not for its own sake – sometimes the strain of the performer is actually the point! If the piece was too easy it wouldn’t communicate the struggle and anguish that Britten was going for”.

Amalia Hall, tonight’s soloist, certainly conveyed a no-holds-barred aspect to her addressing of the work’s many differing moods, even if the relatively unsupportive character of the MFC acoustic meant she had to work hard to make detail really “tell” in places for people like myself sitting some distance away. The first movement, with its portentous exchanges between the violin and the orchestra’s insistent rhythms, moved between a kind of charged serenity (lovely silvery violin tones alternated with chunky pizzicato interpolations from Hall) and more rumbustious declarations from orchestral winds and brasses, with the movement seeming to express its “soul” at the point where  the strings, introduced by the harp, take up the beautiful cantilena theme, and the violin provides the motto-like accompaniment with a combination of arco and pizzicato notes, which exchange grows in intensity until soloist and orchestra seem entranced in a sea of dreamlike harmonics and gently plucked notes.

The Scherzo which then bursts in is driving and dangerous, Hall pushing her instrument over a number of obstacle-like ascents with verve and surety, with the orchestra both supporting and occasionally seeming to “duel” with the soloist! Hall and Taddei relish the sparrings of sequences such as the soloist’s exotically sensual theme gleefully “trounced” with boisterous chordings by the orchestral brass and percussion, leading to an amazing “trio” involving piccolos and the tuba whose angularity recalls Berlioz! And the orchestra reacts accordingly, with a crescendo that threatens to engulf all and sundry, breaking off at the point of internal collapse, and leaving the soloist to reassemble the music’s fragments in a cadenza, Hall displaying her technical armoury with unrelenting resolve, taking the music to its uppermost reaches before being joined by the trombones from out of the depths, intoning the first notes of the final Passacaglia movement.

Trombones, strings, trumpets, winds, percussion all impressively have their say, before the violin embarks on its journey of infinite variation, a journey made in conjunction with orchestral forces requiring utmost virtuosity from the soloist and big-boned responses from all orchestra departments in a magnificently resonant middle section whose aftermaths include a long-breathed kind of lament by the soloist over a D major chord in the orchestra, Hall’s instrument however, hovering undecidedly between F and G-flat, and seeming to tread a fine line between hope and despair, before letting the silence being the judge, and with it our enthusiastic, if somewhat dumbfounded, applause!

The interval gave us all time and space to realign our thoughts before squaring up to a new work by a composer presently making a name for herself, locally. This was Briar Prastiti whose work Akri we were about to hear and who has another work scheduled for the orchestra in a concert later in the year, besides having completed music written for a play, Prima Facie by Suzie Miller, recently staged at Circa Theatre.  The title of Prastiti’s piece, Akri, means “edge” and symbolises a certain predicament experienced by people such as herself, who belong to two different cultures (Prasititi is of mixed New Zealand/Greek heritage), and feel never wholly at one with either.

Carrying the thought in my own head of having to experience such a conflict when preparing to listen to Prastiti’s piece I was surprised to find myself engulfed in the sounds of a gorgeously ambient opening chord which developed its own oceanic-type modulatory patterns, vaguely Sibelian or Baxian in character, resonant and flexible in surface aspect, the tones “bending” and pliably responding to impulse, somewhat belying the “edge” sobriquet borne by the composition’s title. The music opens up with full brass and percussion textures widening the sounds’ vistas, but with an intensity of focus giving birth to both rhythmic and thematic material, with particularly lovely writing for winds “caught” between gestures that have a rounded monumentality to my ears rather than any abrasive or intransient surface. I was naturally looking for tensions that would suggest alienation of a kind suggested by the piece’s name, but found instead a kind of kaleidoscopic change whose “dramatic contrasts” had more holistic “centres” whose presence meant life that had learned to coexist, though (as the piece’s abrupt ending seemed to demonstrate)  not without a certain volatility…….I liked Prastiti’s  idea of a unifying “thread” which holds the characters together and facititates the process of journeying from one kind of awareness to another…….it was. I thought, music with a certain filmic power of expression that I would be interested in hearing again…..

How ear-opening, therefore, to encounter in this same concert such marked variances of expression, when setting Prastiti’s all-encompassing soundscape variants against the young William Walton’s fervently bardic declamations delineating oppression, captivity and liberation of peoples from privation and slavery. Walton’s oratorio “Belshazzar’s Feast” is splendidly virile Old Testament stuff whose text is taken straight from the Bible (the Book of Daniel and Psalm 137) courtesy of Osbert Sitwell with whose family the young Walton had already formed a long-lasting association, most famously with the 1923 work Façade, its poetry by Osbert‘s sister, Edith having inspired Walton’s music.

First performed in 1931 under Malcolm Sargent, Belshazzar had a colourful genesis, with Walton originally commissioned by the BBC for a work with “a small choir, soloist, and an orchestra not exceeding 15 players! Walton found that, as the work proceeded so did his conception of the work “enlarge”. When the Leeds Festival agreed to stage the work’s first performance its director Thomas Beecham famously suggested to the young composer that he should “throw in a couple of brass bands” to the work (the Berlioz Requiem was being performed at the same Festival, and there were plenty of brass players on hand), as this was likely, Beecham opinioned, to be the only performance he would ever hear! However, thanks in part to the outstanding choral skills of Sargent the work was a great success, with Walton himself subsequently conducting (and recording) the work.  In fact, on a visit to New Zealand in 1956 Walton himself conducted the work in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland, all with the Christchurch Harmonic Society Choir and the (then) NZBC Symphony Orchestra!

Doing the honours with Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington this time round were baritone Benson Wilson (presently developing a career in the UK with the English National Opera), the Orpheus Choir of Wellington, and players from both the Wellington Brass Band (current New Zealand champions) and the Hutt City Brass. With the mentioning of Berlioz and all those brass players I was hoping for a similarly splendid kind of effect in places to that I’d experienced when hearing my first live Berlioz Requiem! – alas, the Michael Fowler Centre is certainly no Wellington Town Hall, acoustically speaking, so I had to be content with modified rapture….

What could be wrought from the occasion both the Orpheus Choir and the brass-augmented Orchestra Wellington splendidly achieved under Marc Taddei’s incisive leadership! The opening brass calls pinned back our ears, as did the stenorian “Thus spake Isaiah!” responses  from the choir, the introduction’s essential theatricality given full rein with its pauses and dynamic contrasts, and the baritone’s sorrowful entry at “If I forget thee, Jerusalem”, intoning his words like a character rather than as a mere narrator. The choir, too conveyed the angst of the captive Israelites, both in the aching, arching lament “By the waters of Babylon”, and in the vengeful tones of the prophet at “O Daughter of Babylon”, hurling forth the words of doom, which resonated a kind of fateful ambience over what was to follow.

Benson Wilson made the most of his Babylonic “shopping-list”, allowing rather more fateful tones to take over his concluding item of currency “…and the souls of men”. In contrast to the lament-like aspect of the opening the Orpheus voices then relished their energetic and enthusiastic descriptions of the revels of the Babylonian king and his courtiers, backed up by terrific orchestral detailing,  Benson Wilson leading in kingly fashion the acclamation for the pagan gods of Gold, Silver, Iron and others, echoed by the choir and amplified by the orchestral voices, including the brass players from their antiphonal positions with voices such as the saxophone underlining the composer’s jazzed-up rhythmic inflections, and the extra brasses adding splendour to the general acclaim for the heathen deities.

The fateful scene of the “fingers of a man’s hand” and the fateful words written on the wall was declaimed in suitably chilling tones by the baritone, then translated by the implacable choral voices – and the choir, of course, relished its famous “shouted” exclamation “slain!” in response to the soloist’s utterance of Belshazzar’s grim fate. The silences that followed were beset and then overcome with joyous energies from voices and instruments alike, with the bandspeople on each side rising to their feet to join in the acclamations, which, with the exception of a more reflective sequence, “…..the trumpeters and pilers are silent, and the harpers have ceased to harp, and the light of a candle shall sign no more….” express full, unalloyed joy at the deliverance of the Children of Israel from their yoke of captivity – and Marc Taddei and his players, to use the vernacular, “go for it” over the work’s final pages, with the youthful Walton’s exuberant writing for both voices and instruments given free and joyous rein. Even the relatively unresponsive recesses of the MFC could scarcely  forbear to resonate in acknowledgement!

Celebrating 70 Years – Royal New Zealand Ballet’s “Lightscapes”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Royal New Zealand Ballet presents
LIGHTSCAPES
St.James Theatre, Wellington

Thursday, July 27th 2023

Serenade (choreography: George Balanchine / Music: Pyotr Tchaikovsky)
Te Ao Marama (choreography: Moss Te Ururangi Patterson / Music: James Webster – adapted Ariana Tikao / Shayne Carter)
Requiem for a Rose (choreography: Annabelle Lopez Ochoa / Music: Franz Schubert
Logos (choreography: Alice Topp / Music: Ludovico Einaudi)
Set and Lighting Design – Jon Buswell
Costumes – Karinska (Serenade), Moss Te Ururangi Patterson (Te Ao Marama),
Tatyana van Walsu (Serenade for a Rose), Alice Topp (Logos)

Currently in the foyer of the St.James Theatre is an exhibition mounted by the Royal New Zealand Ballet, one which commemorates the company’s 70th year. Beginning in 1953 under the stewardship of Danish Royal Ballet Principal Dancer Poul Gnatt, who had arrived in the country the previous year, the fledgling company travelled the length of New Zealand, visiting and bringing dance to the remotest of rural towns. From those beginnings the company’s history is depicted in a series of historical displays up to the present day, concluding with the stewardship of the current artistic director, Patricia Barker (due shortly to retire after more than five years at the helm, and hand over the job to Australian David McAlister.

Accompanying the exhibition is the RNZ Ballet’s current production, a quartet of shorter works with the collective title Lightscapes, each one representing different and distinctive aspects of the talent and scope of the dancers, choreographers and production staff responsible for what we see and hear on and from the stage throughout the evening, the whole as well representing and celebrating the past 70 years of the company’s achievement.

First of the four ballets to be performed was the aptly-named Serenade, which was the first original ballet created by the renowned choreographer George Balanchine after his arrival in America, in the wake of his earlier years with, firstly, the Russian Imperial Ballet School, and the Mariinsky Ballet, before leaving Russia and joining the Ballet Russes as a choreographer until his relocation to the United States in 1933.

Serenade uses one of the most famous compositions of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the latter’s Serenade in C Major for String Orchestra Op.48. After reworking the ballet a number of times Balanchine reversed the original order of the last two movements, so that the work ended on an elegiac rather than a vigorous and brilliant note, an order which was maintained this evening. Balanchine developed the idea of incorporating everyday chance rehearsal mishaps into the ballet’s choreography, so that the presentation, though without an actual plot or story, reflected the unexpected vagaries which sometimes beset human activity. Una Kai, the company’s fourth artistic director first presented this work here in 1975. which has been since repeated several times, most recently in 2019 by Patricia Barker, following a staging devised by Rebecca Metzger.

With strikingly sparse backdrops predominating, the dancers garnered our full attention throughout, bringing off exhilaratingly flamboyant configurations as easefully and flowingly as they did the simply-nuanced movements and gestures, the whole while mirroring the music’s many-faceted rhythmic configurations, as did in their turn the solo/partner dancers  Maiyu Tanigaito and Kihiro Kusukami, with beautifully-integrated movements and responses.

Serenade was separated by an interval from the next work, Te Ao Mārama, a work devised by Moss Te Ururangi Patterson, who’s currently the CEO and Artistic Director of the New Zealand Dance Company. His description of a sense of inner consciousness formed by that “buoyant, quiet meditative space” which characterised his childhood in Tokaanu on the shores of Lake Taupo seemed somehow to awaken as  I listened my own childhood memories of spending time in some of those same places, so that the evocations of time and place sounded by the taonga puoro of Ariana Tikao, and the guitar playing of Shayne Carter readily evoked a sense of enabling “near-and-far resonances” across time and distance of the kind that Patterson was intending in accord with his own experiences. For this reason I found the whole experience of the bringing-together of worlds here intensely human in both a turangawaewae and a universal sense – and this before any choreographic stage movement had yet taken place!

I was further captivated with Moss Te Ururangi’s personification in gesture and dance of the Te Ao Maori perspective regarding the coming of light to the world over three periods of time, Te Kore, the nothingness, Te Po, the darkness, and finally, Te Ao Mārama, the world of light created by the separation of Ranginui and Papatuanuku, which I’d long been made familiar with from an early age, thanks to parents who were themselves aware of these intensely spiritual beliefs in their own way, and which thus enabled the kind of “connections” Moss talked about encouraging  to help form between cultures. Here, these were “made flesh” through movement, gesture and speech as the dancers personified the growing energies stimulated first by Te Kore (the nothingness) giving birth to Te Po (a great longing) and then bursting out with full-blooded force as Te Ao Mārama (the well-nigh irresistible life-light!). All overwhelming from this observer’s point of view, and cause for great gladness, thanks to dancers, musicians, choreographers and composers alike!

After these raw and invigorating energies were spent, the focus shifted to different archetypal imagery, that of the essential fragility and non-permanence of a flower used as a symbol of love, with Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s arresting choreography featuring both individual and ensembled personification of the power of such an image. From the beginning, solo dancer Kirby Selchow, dressed in a nude leotard and carrying a single rose in her mouth, enacted a tour de force of expressive movement throughout, establishing for me  an almost frightening, nightmarish vulnerability and desperation right from her heartbeat-driven entrance, which then morphed into Franz Schubert’s fraught, deeply-troubled music – the Adagio Movement from the composer’s String Quintet – when twelve red-skirted dancers  appeared, representing the bouquet of roses.

Upon reading the programme notes afterwards I was surprised at first to read that the solo dancer represented Venus, as her characterisation seemed to me to emphasise the raw angularity of love as something driven by desperation and anxiety rather than affording any kind of lasting fulfilment, the character seeming as much a kind of sacrificial victim as an embodiment of love’s passion and transience. The dancers variously duetted, and formed a quartet of various interactions, a tableau which the Venus goddess/victim rejoined as the heartbeat  rhythm returned.

A second interval later we were back with the final Lightscape, “Logos”, choreographed and costumed by Alice Topp to music by Ludovico Einaudi, and with set and lighting design by Jon Buswell. The work featured four tableaux, each dealing with a different focus on a search for meaning in an individual’s life (the title “Logos” meaning reason or logic). The first dominated by a stunningly voluminous mirror-like backdrop in front of which a couple (Mayu Tanigaito and Levi Teachout) spectacularly, almost combatatively danced, presented a scenario of self-focus and awareness, and the surety which that brings, though the interaction had an insistence that felt like boundaries were constantly being pushed between the two – the ebb and flow of this was, I thought superbly realised! The next tableau suggested containment and boundaries as “necessary securities”, with groups of dancers on stage each dealing with and immersed in their own “pools” of activity, a common and observable everyday human trait…..for some reason the ‘soundtrack’ seemed to stop before the dancers did, so that it wasn’t clear whether the last minute or so of dance interaction was intentionally a silent one, or was a technical glitch!

Nothing could have surpassed the moment of transition between the third and fourth tableaux, when, in what seemed like some kind of moment of transcendental release,  one of the “frames” surrounding the third tableau’s backdrop inwardly collapsed without warning onto the stage floor, accompanied by proliferations of mist and light – perhaps representing a “blowing-out” of constraints and obstacles to freedom, accompanied by an enormous “cosmic sigh” of relief from duress!  But more touching was the final dance between the two figures (Ana Gallardo Lobaina and Matthew Slattery) left on the stage amid the swirling mists, rain (real rain!) and ever-burgeoning light, with choreographer Alice Topp’s idea of an experience involving release from all kinds of pressure manifesting itself in all kinds of ways, in, around and about the dancers, an extremely moving conclusion!

Expressions of joyful energies – JS Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos from the Amici Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents:

The Amici Ensemble
JS BACH – The Six Brandenburg Concertos

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday, 23rd July 2023

Time can easily wrong-foot one’s perceptions of things through distraction and/or inattention  – to read in Sunday afternoon’s Waikanae programme featuring the splendid Amici Ensemble that the group is currently in its 34th season was for me something of a jaw-dropping realisation, not the least because the performers themselves all seemed as imbued as ever with youthful zest and boundless enthusiasm! – how on earth could it be so many years’ worth? Where did all the time go?

And if that wasn’t enough, what a stupendous undertaking it all was on this present occasion! – one with which a music ensemble could justly demonstrate its capabilities and proclaim its calibre! I don’t know whether this was actually the first time all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos had been performed in a single concert in this country, but the music’s sheer variety of invention and its technical and interpretative challenges seemed to me the perfect vehicle with which a group could make a “who-we-are” and “what-we-do” statement that would resonate so readily and widely among audiences.

Pretty well every instrumental ensemble worth its salt world-wide would have had a “go” at the Brandenburgs at one stage or other, and the recordings on all kinds of carriers are, of course, legion! Longer-term listeners like myself have found ourselves living through different “eras” of style and performance practice that have variously established and then turned on their heads ways of doing things over the duration, but leaving us, I think, enriched in the process. I still treasure my 1950s Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra LPs of these works, for example, while being newly invigorated by some of the later and totally different efforts of various modern-day ensembles.

As is the case with all music performance the listener’s “individual preference” factor continues to lend a fascination to hearing performances that can differ to what’s hoped for and/or expected. Of the performances we heard, I can say that I unreservedly enjoyed every one of the “middle” concertos, Nos 2, 3, 4 and 5, while finding myself responding positively to PARTS of the First and Sixth Concertos – I simply didn’t want to feel quite so “rushed” in either of the latter two’s opening and (in the First Concerto) closing movements. (I’ll get such subjective niggles out of the way, first, in order to be able to express my unreserved joy regarding the rest of the concert!)

I did think the playing order that the group devised made good sense, particularly concerning No. 1 being placed last, this being the grandest of all of the concertos, with the most instruments and the greatest number of movements. It was an obvious choice for the concert’s finale, and especially with the horns making their only appearance across the entire set, and, in a sense stealing the show with their spectacular playing. Still, here, I wanted the tempi for the first and last movements to be “chunkier”, more bucolic and rustic-sounding, and not create quite such a “hurried along” impression as I gleaned. I found myself thinking “Why rush through such delightfully detailed music?” as, to me, if felt that that this performance of the “grandest” of the works didn’t evoke quite enough grandeur…..

My other bout of “modified rapture” came with the opening of No. 6, where I wanted the violists to phrase more “affectionately” and relaxedly together, instead of the crisp repartee it seemed we got – (this is a “preference” of course, as I’ve said) – and I straightaway must add that violists Nicholas Hancox and Beatrix Francis beautifully dovetailed their phrasings in the finale, which more than  made up for the impression of undue haste in the first movement – I particularly enjoyed the ensemble’s’ wholehearted  “plunge” into the minor-key section of the finale – real “temperament” at work here, and most enjoyable!

As I’ve said, the rest of the concert was sheer undiluted delight! Beginning with No. 2, and its joyous and energetic opening, we were enchanted by the stellar playing of trumpeter Michael Kirgan, whose dexterity upon his instrument was little short of wondrous, both here and in the finale, a single note during the latter at one point failing to “sound” being neither here nor there!  His fellow-soloists (Donald Armstrong, violin, Bridget Douglas, flute, and Robert Orr, oboe) were not to be outdone in this work, as the slow movement gave them the opportunity to bring out a most touching melancholy, so creating something of this great music’s “eternity” in their evocations of sounds amid a deep sense of stillness.

No. 5 seemed to lap up the musicians’ energies with glee, with flutist Kirsten Eade and violinist Donald Armstrong at first sharing the solo limelight with harpsichordist Michael Stewart, whose “concerto” this work ostensibly is, and whose solo cadenza on this occasion was momentarily “held up” by a page-turning mishap which necessitated some quick rearguard action by the player to regain his place in the music before launching into the movement’s cadenza – which he eventually did with what seemed like unflappable surety! – (I noted one of the ensemble helping him out by becoming his page-turner for the next little while!) The slow movement of this work – harpsichord, flute, violin and cello – was gorgeously done; while the gigue-like Allegro finale resembled a dance to which all the players gradually joined, with both spring and girth making an irresistible combination of buoyancy and energy!

I remember my first “live” encounter with these works in earlier days was through the Third Concerto, a kind of Baroque “Concerto for Orchestra” played at an NZSO concert, though I can’t remember who conducted – in any case, it all made for a vastly different sound-world to the one which the Amici Ensemble recreated here at the second half’s beginning, a briskly energetic, light-footed dance with crispy-wrought lines and plenty of tonal and textural variation in the strings-and-harpsichord sound. It all worked so well, especially the finale, whose wonderfully-wrought crescendi were irresistibly grown out of the molto-perpetuo rhythms before scintillatingly breaking at their apexes like finely-modulated oceanic waves – all very exciting and visceral an experience!  Incidentally, the  famous “chordal modulation” that constituted the slow movement was made into a satisfyingly “mysterious and enigmatic moment” from which the work’s finale whirled us into those “other realms” outlined above.

This was followed by the contrasting No. 4, one probably vying in popularity with No. 3, and perhaps even surpassing the latter in terms of having singable melodies! Two flutes (Bridget Douglas and Kirsten Eade) and a solo violin (Donald Armstrong) were the soloists, supported here by strings and harpsichord. Light and vivacious on its feet, the music featured delectable duetting from the flutes, and some violin pyrotechnics from Donald Armstrong that caused sparks to fly, both in the first and last movements. In between were sequences of exchange between flutes and strings, creating a fanciful aura that evoked exchanges between mythical beings, such as Echo and Narcissus, Apollo and Daphne, or Pan and Syrinx. The finale brought the strings into the limelight via a brilliant Presto, during which all the instruments adroitly interwove their lines, while revelling in the sharing of songful expressions of joyful  energies.

Certainly, such “songful expressions” and “joyful energies” were readily brought out by the musicians, keeping my sensibilities on the boil for practically all of the concert, a response obviously shared by the Waikanae audience, judging by their prolonged applause at the concert’s end. I haven’t mentioned all the musicians by name thus far, and want to pay tribute to both their individual and collegial skills in helping to make this “Brandenburg journey” such a delightful and resounding experience – Anna van der Zee (violin/ piccolo violin), Malavika Gopal (violin/viola), Andrew Thomson (violin/viola), Ian Greenberg (‘cello), Ken Ichinose  (‘cello), Damien Eckersley (bass), Louise Cox (oboe), Michael Austin (oboe) Justin Sun (bassoon), Alex Hambleton (horn), Kate King (horn). All deserve acclaim for their part in making these works for our pleasure at once a wondrous evocation of an era and such living, thrusting expressions of timeless human relevance.

“Sing Joyfully” sings its name – The Tudor Consort’s 400th-year anniversary tribute to William Byrd

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Tudor Consort presents:
SING JOYFULLY –

A 400th Year Celebration of the works of William Byrd (c.1540-1623)

Mass for Four Voices
– Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus & Benedictus, Agnus Dei
Ave Verum Corpus
Ne irascaris Domine satis
– Civitas Sancti tui
The Great Service
– Kyrie, Venite, Credo, Benedictus, Te Deum
Praise our Lord all ye Gentiles
Sing Joyfully

The Tudor Consort
– sopranos:  Erin King, Jane McKinlay, Melanie Newfield, Rebecca Stanton
–  altos:  Emma Drysdale, Alexander Granville, Tahlia Griffis. Kassandra Wang
–  tenors:  John Beaglehole, Peter Liley, Joshua Long, Herbert Zielinski
–  basses:  Brian Hesketh, Joshua Jamieson, Matthew Painter, Isaac Stone

Music Director;  Michael Stewart

Instrumentalists (The Great Service)
–  Cornetti:  Andrew Weir, Paula Weir
–  Sackbuts:  Jonathan Harker, Byron Newton, Peter Maunder, Luke Spence

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul, Molesworth St.

Saturday, 1st July 2023

Being a music-lover but still made occasionally aware of certain “gaps” in my knowledge of and love for various musical eras and their characteristic styles, I was forced to confront head-on such a one of these unchartered spots over recent days when asked to review a concert presented by the Tudor Consort, one devoted to the music of William Byrd on the occasion of the latter’s 400th anniversary. I make this statement knowing fully well that my opinions as expressed below of the quality of music-making I heard at the scheduled concert inevitably consist more of the fruits of nascent revelation than of prior knowledge or experience. Rather than striving to somehow “paper over” such gaping holes in my musical education I thought I would readily acknowledge my defects and seek to present my “delight in discovery”, hopefully, in the process of doing so conveying a measure of the extent to which the performers brought the music to glorious life for everybody present, including the uninitiated, such as myself.

Happily, much of the background information relating to the concert was provided in a pre-concert talk by the Tudor Consort’s Director Michel Stewart, who outlined some of the flavour of the times in which William Byrd lived and worked as a musician and a composer in England. It was of course a period dominated by religious and political upheavals brought about by both the Reformation and the changes in succession to the English throne, resulting in the older Roman Catholicism having to eventually give way to Protestantism as decreed by the Monarch of the time. Byrd, who was a devout Catholic, found himself unable to publicly practise his faith when the 1559 Act of Uniformity forbad the celebration of the Catholic liturgy. He was fortunate, however, that Queen Elizabeth I, who had taken the throne and firmly established the Protestant Church of England, was herself a music-lover and musician, and was at first tolerant of both Byrd’s and his fellow-composer (and former teacher) Thomas Tallis’ religious beliefs. Both composers were members of and wrote for the prestigious Chapel Royal, Byrd continuing to produce a substantial amount of English liturgical music, among which can be found numerous English Anthems, and “The Great Service”. The latter was not published in Byrd’s lifetime, about which there has been considerable conjecture – was this due to potential difficulties for Byrd caused by increasing anti-Catholic sentiment, even though the work was probably his most significant contribution to the Anglican liturgical world? He was, as well, engaged in writing settings of the Latin mass after he’d left London, removing himself from the scrutiny of the Queen’s “informers” regarding his participation in and contributions to secret Catholic rites of worship.  He continued to write settings in English as well, both sacred and secular, though his music’s Latin texts frequently made allusions to the plight of the Jews in Biblical times, relating the same to the English Catholic community’s present privations. After living for a while at Harlington, in Middlesex, he eventually moved his family to Stondon Massey in Essex where he died 400 years ago.

Michael Stewart drew our attention to several examples of what the evening’s programme would present us with, beginning with the “Catholic” first half, and mentioning in particular an item which the Consort had performed in their inaugural 1986 concert – the five-part motet Ne Irascaris Domine – Civitas sancti tui (Be not angry, O Lord…). The text consists of verses from Isaiah (64:9,10) interpolated into the Mass, an example of text derived from Scripture which could easily pertain to the situation of Catholics wanting to practise their faith in England at Byrd’s time. Another, earlier interpolation in the mass was the motet “Ave Verum Corpus”, for centuries a “forbidden pleasure” in England, being a Catholic work, but more recently a staple of what one might describe as almost interdenominational worship – and at Evensong, no less (all of this according to what I’ve recently read about the work!)

Regarding the concert’s “Anglican” second half, Stewart spoke of Byrd’s “The Great Service”, telling us that the evening’s performance would be augmented by instrumentalists in places (along with an accompanying organ, there were to be cornetts and sackbuts) as was sometimes done (and, according to some accounts I read, to the “indignation” of some more Puritan listeners!).  A particular feature of tonight’s performance was that, as well as two cornetts, it featured no less than four sackbuts accompanying the singers, and (as one of the players told me) was the first time so many of these particular instruments had been assembled for a concert in this country!

So it was with a good deal of anticipation that we awaited the arrival of the Tudor Consort voices for the concert’s first half, sixteen soloists in groups of four per single part, to firstly perform for us Byrd’s Mass for four voices. This was probably the first of his three Mass settings to be written, but the exact dates are unknown, due to the composer’s reluctance to publish these works in complete form at a time when such pro-Catholic activity was a potentially punishable offence. This also explains in part the simpler resources required for this music compared with those compositions by the composer for the Chapel Royal.

The opening Kyrie was exquisitely realised, sounded with a delicacy that suggested an awakening – with the following Christe came an increased sense of space, not merely from the cathedral acoustic, but a kind of widening of vocal possibility, as if after an awakening came a flowering.  The Kyrie’s return imparted a strengthening of this resolve, and a plaintiveness whose edge could be felt amidst the sound’s beauty, fully drawn by the end.

A tenor solo introduced the Gloria, an announcement followed by some concerted vocal excitement, even, I felt, a touch of urgency here and there, the lines thankfully binding together at Gratias agimus tibi, and building joyfully towards the soprano line at Deus Pater Omnipotens. The voices brought out Byrd’s different portrayal of Jesus Christi as unigenite (Only Son) and Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) – in other words as a sacrifice! And what ritualistic beauty and wonderment the ensemble imparted to Qui tollis peccata mundi, an amalgam of radiance and faith, all the more intensified by Qui sedes a dextram Patris, with its sense of majesty. By contrast, the juices start to run with  Quoniam tu solus sanctus, building up to exhilaration at Cum Sancto Spiritu right through to the conclusive Amen!

It seems as though Byrd intended his movements of his masses to be interspersed with other material, perhaps randomly, perhaps in conjunction with various feast-days on the liturgical calendar, Whatever the case, the Tudor Consort chose firstly the motet Ave Verum Corpus, written by Byrd for the feast of Corpus Christi, a holy day outlawed in England following the Reformation, but still celebrated secretly – which circumstance would have given rise to its insertion in a Mass, as here. Its beautifully harmonic blend of tones at the opening has a resonance and richness befitting the sacredness of the image – Ave verum corpus natum – Hail, the true body! – while the voices’ incisive, pinpoint attack upon the words at Cuius latus perforatum (from whose pierced flank) readily pierced the flesh of one’s listening sensibility. And what a touching contrast we heard with O dulcis, O pie, O Jesu Filii Mariae, the lovely thirds of Miserere mei giving a real sense of mercy implored. The repeat of O Dulcis, and Miserere Mei was even more “covered” and replete with intent, which the defiant and resolute Amen strengthened splendidly.

The Credo, announced by the tenor once again, began with the women’s voices in a canon-like opening exchange which filled out as the men’s voices joined the mosaic-like textures of Patrem omnipotentem  and the abstracted word-painting of visibilium omnium et invisibilium with celestial assurance. I relished all over again my distant but still well-remembered delight in “bouncing” some of these words back and forth as a child in our penny-plainchant parish church version – Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum verum, de deo vero…. Such quasi-celestial pleasures were brought down to earth at Qui propter nos homines, the singers allowing a haze of luminosity to descend from the heights via a lovely cascading soprano line at de caelis. The almost lullabic Et in carnatus est was beautiful, culminating in a swaying factus est from the sopranos and tenors, before the pitiless announcement of the Crucifixus  darkened the spirits. What relief the announcement Et resurrexit tertia die here brought! And how thrillingly visceral was Et ascendit in coelum, along with the roulades of tone that accompanied Sedet ad dexteram Patris, and the reassuring cujus regni non erit finis.  Then the ceremonial declaration of faith at “Et unam sanctam catholicam Ecclesiam” gave all the more more life and overt purpose to the final Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, which made leaps and bounds through Et vitam venturi saeculi to a resounding “Amen”.

By way of another break from the liturgical narrative we then heard the motet Ne Iracaris Domine – Civitas sancti tui (Be not angry, O Lord…), whose commentary regarding the plight of the Jewish people at the hands of  the oppressors would have resonated in the hearts and minds of Byrd’s fellow Catholics under a similar yoke of oppression. It received a performance from the Consort which, in my humble opinion produced the most beautifully sustained singing of the evening – begun by the male voices, the opening “Be not angry, O Lord” registered as a gentle lament rising from the depths, the words repeated with the entry of the women’s voices, the music growing in intensity as the “iniquities” of privation are mentioned, and bursting forth at Ecce, respice (the building’s resonances wondrously activated at this point!), continuing the beseechment with populus tuus omnes nos (Behold, we are all your people!) – everything long-breathed and intertwined, as if the whole world was raising its voice! The motet’s second part, Civitas sancti tui (Your Holy City),refers to the resultant desolation of Jerusalem (Zion), the music imparting more sorrow than anger throughout, and in places seeming to evoke memories of past glories and the iniquities that have brought desolation to the place of these glories.

I thought the Sanctus strangely austere and lament-like at first, the singers solemnly and intensely drawing us into the ceremonial realm, with the Hosanna at last bringing us some relief! All very beautiful……similarly, the Benedictus invited us to contemplate, at first, the “one who comes”, before giving voice to joyful energies with the concluding Hosanna. The Agnus Dei seemed like an extended return to the opening Kyrie at first, with the women’s voices beautifully filling out the two-part textures; but the music morphs into perhaps the most moving part of the whole Mass with the intensification of tones and textures towards the third Agnus Dei and its beautiful Dona Nobis Pacem at the end.

This was, as previously outlined, very much a concert of two halves, and it was possible to sense a different kind of excitement regarding the Consort’s presentation of the second part, featuring Byrd’s “The Great Service”, in addition to two “interpolations”, the 1611 “Praise Our Lord all ye Gentiles”, and the earlier anthem “Sing Joyfully”, both written for use in the Anglican service. What galvanised one’s interest was the appearance of the instrumentalists, whose task was to accompany those parts of “The Great Service” performed this evening – incidentally, two of these, the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, were omitted, to be included instead at the Cathedral‘s Evensong service the following day.

Byrd wrote the work for the Chapel Royal, which accounts for the elaboration of the writing, both vocal and instrumental, compared with that for his Masses – he therefore had sufficient scope for six, eight and even ten-part counterpoint, often contrasting solo and small-ensemble lines with the larger groupings for dramatic and structural effect. According to what I’ve read Byrd was not averse to sackbuts and cornetti accompanying the voices alongside the organ, though various commentaries and reviews seem to differ on this point. My only comment as to their use in this present context is that their presence certainly contributed to the overall magnificence of the music’s sound, but made it even more difficult for the actual words to be deciphered – in the voluminous spaces of Wellington Cathedral, size (i.e., the number of performers) is one of the considerations which does seem to really matter!

For this reason most of the second half was a markedly different listening experience to that heard before the interval – the exceptions were the aforementioned “interpolations”, the texts of both of which I could follow more readily, as with the Mass and the motets we heard before the interval. In a less cavernous acoustic I would imagine we could experience (and enjoy) much of the added magnificence of the wind-and-brass sounds without sacrificing the clarity of the words to the same extent. After the deliciously light and airy opening “O come, let us sing unto the Lord”, the full range of voices and instruments in most of the other movements created an overwhelming impression which one simply had to relish for its own, (admittedly at times thrilling!) sonorous qualities. The sound by no means lacked variety, but the contrasts in tone and colour I found difficult to pinpoint in the text. I wasn’t alone in this as my companion similarly attested afterwards to a strain throughout in making out where the voices had gotten up to in the ensembled passages.

The difference became obvious with the following unaccompanied Praise our Lord all ye Gentiles, in which the singing and word-pointing had such an infectious sense of unbridled energy throughout, as if “all ye peoples” around the globe were helping to make it spin, the final “Amen” being particularly vertiginous for all concerned, with the acoustic actually heightening the sense of abandonment.

Next was the Creed, introduced by the tenor, then with voices uplifted at first to God alone, then with the sounds opened up to creation at And of all things visible and invisible  (my familiarity with the text here helping to identify the words!).The Almighty was suitably solemnised at God of Gods, Light of Light, Very God of very God, the voices then descending and imparting a more human voice at who, for us men, then celebrating at and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost. The voices beautifully resonated the words He suffered and was buried,  the day of resurrection “grown” within the music as if by divine will, as was the following and ascended into heaven, drawn upwards by the airborne voices.

I found both the Benedictus and  the Te Deum from “The Service” more difficult to follow through unfamiliarity with each of the texts, despite having the words to hand, though there were compensations afforded by the music’s kaleidoscopic textures, the constant shifting of form, pattern and colour in the music making for endless fascination, especially as these qualities were so writ-large in such a listening environment, if at the expense of the words’ clarity. The instruments themselves never obtruded in an unseemly or ill-balanced sense – as an orchestral texture they blended richly and colourfully, providing a fascinatingly flavoured contrast with the other music in the evening’s programme. Perhaps because of my relative inexperience with these genres, I had no “puritan” objection whatever to the presence of the instruments, which, if performed in a less resonant location would have given more ambient space to word-sounding while still making a world of difference.

Happily, I also took away from the concert the impression made by the programme’s second-to-last item, the name of which, incidentally, Sing Joyfully, was  given to the presentation by the group – an impression of joyful immersion in singing and musicality from all concerned, and of communication to listeners via sound, aspect and movement. I had an opportunity to briefly talk with one of the singers afterwards whose only complaint regarding what they’d done was that they were only getting one chance at performing the music – quite apart from any idea that they might be able to “improve” things that didn’t quite come off as hoped, the singer lamented the “end” of the experience as it was, rather than having the opportunity to do something all over again that was so wonderful! Apart from the sadness at it coming to such an abrupt end, I thought the sentiment paid a richly-deserved tribute to the composer and his music and to the excellence of what was achieved by those who took part – Tudor Consort Director, Michael Stewart, and his wonderful singers and (for the second half) instrumentalists. It’s a tribute I’m pleased to be able to endorse as a listener new to this music and duly captivated by the beauty and lasting relevance of it all.

 

Worlds of difference and sympathy – rapturous Beethoven and Saint-Saens from the Wellington City Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra presents
BEETHOVEN and SAINT-SAENS

BEETHOVEN – Violin Concerto in D Op.61
SAINT-SAENS – Symphony No. 3 in C Minor “Organ” Op.78

Helene Pohl (violin)
Max Toth (organ)
Wellington City Orchestra
Rachel Hyde (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington

Saturday 24th June, 2023

Small wonder that this concert drew what seemed like a full house to St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church in Wellington on Saturday afternoon. – not only were the two featured works on the programme sure-fire drawcards, but each presentation had the kind of “ädded value” that made their pairing difficult to resist.

The lately-renamed Wellington City Orchestra’s second 2023 outing was this time with the much-respected Rachel Hyde taking her turn on the podium. First up was Beethoven’s adorable Violin Concerto, with great interest centred around the soloist, none other than Helene Pohl, the leader of the internationally renowned New Zealand String Quartet. Having heard Pohl lead her ensemble with enormous distinction through complete cycles of the composer’s string quartets I was naturally intrigued to hear how she would tackle the very different role of a concerto soloist, albeit in the same composer’s music .

What first grabbed my attention.however, was the sharply-defined focus of the orchestra’s introduction to the work, once the slight uncertaincy of the timpanist’s opening strokes had passed – Rachel Hyde secured finely-wrought dynamic contrasts between tutti and chamber-like passages with solo wind lines imparting great character. It was playing that created great expectancy regarding Pohl’s first, ascending-octaved entry, her tones beautifully “growing” out of the orchestral ambiences that had preceded the solo violin’s arrival.

I loved the “elfin” quality of Pohl’s tone throughout, with its shades of expression whose every utterance seemed to simultaneously evolve from whatever she had previously played and respond to whatever solo or ensembled phrases accompanied hers. Her instrument’s voice had a silvery quality which took on a more burnished- golden aspect in places where Beethoven’s thoughts were at his most profound, then returning to a diaphanous quality when, in places, dancing with similarly delicate orchestral solos. For their part, Hyde and her players both supported the soloist and took the lead when necessary, splendidly initiating and controlling the tensions leading up to the tutti outbursts leading to the movement’s solo cadenza.

Pohl’s sounding of this was like a prayer, chordal-like ascendings, followed by playful duettings of themes, and heroic passages in thirds, before her summonsing of the orchestra once more, true greatness in her playing of the melody’s valediction, and of the single note which sang out so purely at the top of the phrase’s final contouring – exquisite!

Hyde got her string players to sound the slow movement’s first trance-like phrases with wonderful “innigkeit”, horns, and then clarinets confidently taking over from the strings and preparing the way for the soloist’s birdsong-like rhapsodisings. Even more rapt was the movement’s central section, Pohl’s playing resembling a kind of hymn to existence, even more so when orchestral pizzicati provided an enchanting backdrop for the solo violin’s spell-weavings.

An orchestral call to arms, and a short, cadenza-like flourish from the soloist brought in the work’s finale, the orchestra taking a while to settle into the soloist’s rhythm, possibly the result of the players having, like the rest of us, “blissed out” during the heavenly Larghetto! Pohl took it all in her stride, alternating a characterfully rustic treatment of the main theme with more quixotic-like poise when repeating the same an octave higher. Then, in the more pensive minor-key second subject, the line was delivered with great emotion, ably supported by the bassoon – and, when the opening returned Hyde seemed to have reawakened her players so that they were with their soloist all the way, building those horn and wind fanfares into a mighty cadenza-welcoming shout! This was one to which Pohl responded with a cadenza I wasn’t as familiar with as I could have been, but which, using material from the finale itself, built quickly and spectacularly to the point where the orchestral cellos and basses were INVITED to make a “what do we think?” comment on the proceedings! – duly satisfied, soloist and orchestra here exchanged, syncopated, inverted and brought things to a by-then ecstatic close!

During the interval that followed, I gleaned. from all sides of where I was sitting. that things had been extremely pleasing thus far, the performance having created a suitable buzz in the minds of my neighbours, young and old. It seemed to augur well for what was to follow next, the orchestra having meanwhile “growed” some extra personnel for the second-half performance of Camille Saint-Saens’s well-known “Organ” Symphony, an undertaking obviously sparked by the not-too-distant (April 2021) refurbishment of the St.Andrew’s church organ.

I was a bit surprised that the organist for this occasion, Max Toth, was not given a special mention in the printed programme – though to be fair Saint-Saens’ work is not a “concerto” with a star soloist, but a “symphony”, and with works described as such individual instrumentalists’ names are normally mentioned only in orchestral listings of players. And the organist’s name was certainly there, even if the noise he conjured up from his splendid instrument was out of all proportion to his modest rank-and-file listing – a minor matter, and certainly in the light of the “special ovation” he was accorded at the piece’s end, at the prompting of Rachel Hyde herself…

As to the piece we were about to hear, Saint-Saens once remarked of himself that, as a composer he produced music as an apple tree produced apples, though he obviously meant he had great facility, and not that he considered his work facile and repetitive. The “Organ” Symphony was something of a biological “sport” for its time – the only reference I have found to a previous use of the organ in an orchestral symphony (1877) is by the nearly-forgotten Austrian composer Johann Ritter von Herbeck (1831-1877), though the fame of Saint-Saens’1886 work spawned a number of imitators, most of them French!

Right at the beginning, Hyde and her players opened up the work’s spaces, the strings’ first floating chords answered first by the oboe and then the flutes, their upward phrases drifting into what seemed like a void, but sparking a response from pizzicato strings and winds which suddenly and excitedly awoke the rest of the strings whose tumbling, chattering phrases spread through the textures galvanising the entire orchestra.

Hyde’s direction imparted just enough urgent impetus for the movement to maintain its course and for the players to keep the syncopated rhythms together, which they did most impressively throughout. And I enjoyed the occasional bedecking of the textures with detailed impulse, such as the tuba making its presence “tell” for a moment of glory, along with the brass and timpani, in underlining the importance to the work of the composer’s use of the “Dies Irae” variant by capping the climax of the excitement with great elan.

The slow movement was beautifully “prepared” for by pizzicato strings and brass, the organ establishing the requisite mood for the strings to fill the spaces with gorgeous tones, then allowing the wind and brass the chance to sing the same melody, the organ judiciously providing the transitions between the different orchestral forces’ sequences. Apart from some slight imprecision between the string “voices” in the duet-like-like sequences, the players delighted us with the beauty and focus of their playing of the movement’s gorgeous outpourings. At first I thought the organ pedal during the lyrical theme’s last great reprise not robust enough, but its deliciously tummy-wobbling aspect began to tell as the music soared to its conclusion – moments of glorious, ultra-Romanticism, capped off by the authentic-sounding reediness of the organ’s registrations at the end.

In terms of commitment from the players and cool-headed control from the conductor, the symphony’s Scherzo was for me a highlight of the performance (also bringing back vivid memories of my days as a percussionist, and our orchestra in Palmerston North tackling this work!). Strong, vibrant attack at the opening was capped off by on-the-spot timpani, and vibrant playing from the winds – Hyde kept the tempo steady, allowing her players room to shape and “point” the rhythms. As for the Trio, it was very properly a riot of impulse every which way, with the piano’s tumbling figurations adding to the excitement. The players did so well with these vertiginous rhythms and syncopations – while not every detail was perfect, the few spills simply added to the excitement and dare-devilry of the whole.

Both the Scherzo and the opening of the Trio were repeated, the latter dominated by the brass, with the winds capering all about underneath, and the strings steadying the euphoria with some meltingly beautiful playing, joined by the winds and brass, with the “Dies Irae” ominously sounded by the basses below – after all of this one could easily forgive the not-quite-together wind chord which prefaced the finale!

The voices awaiting within those organ pipes to sound their utmost simply burst forth magnificently as organist Max Toth activated the instrument! How emotional it all seemed, with the C major melody (the much-lauded “Babe” tune as garnered for use in the eponymous movie!) firstly stealing in via the strings and piano duettists underpinned by the deep organ pedal notes, then allowed its full magnificence with organ and orchestra each given its head, cymbal crashes, bass drum thwacks, brasses and all replying to the organ’s splendour! The strings made a sterling job of their fugal passage which followed, taken up vociferously by the brasses and then quelled by the lines being allowed to soar and “float” by the strings and winds, as a respite from the energies and excitements already unleashed and still to come. Enough to say that the performance of the rest fully expressed the “cri de coeur” of the composer: – “I gave everything to it I was able to give! – what I have here accomplished I will never achieve again….”

It seemed fitting that, right at the end Rachel Hyde gave the last voice to the organ, allowing the instrument to hold the final chord for a few moments after the orchestra had ceased playing (a gesture I’d not previously heard made in this work, but which certainly had its effect – not unlike the organ chord which continues sounding at the end of the opening (!) of Richard Strauss’s tone-poem “Also Sprach Zarathustra”). But the glory was as much the Wellington City Orchestra players’ and conductor’s as the organ’s, and of course the music’s. Both composers and their respective works were on this occasion certainly done proud.

A thought-provoking “Cosi fan tutte” from NZ Opera

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
MOZART – Cosi fan tutte (1790)– Opera Buffa in Two Acts

Cast:  Emma Pearson (Fiordiligi), Hanna Hipp (Dorabella), Jonathan Abernathy (Ferrando)
Julien van Malaerts (Guglielmo), Georgia Jamieson Emms (Despina), Andrew Foster Williams (Don Alfonso)

Director: Lindy Hume
Assistant Director: Matthew Kereama
Set/Costume Design: Tracy Grant Lord
Lighting Design: Matthew Marshall
Chorus Director: Michael Vinten

NZ Opera Chorus Wellington
Orchestra Wellington
Conductor: Natalie Murray Beale

St.James Theatre, Wellington

Wednesday 14th June,  2023

This production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte opened in Auckland on May 31 for three performances before coming to Wellington mid-June for another three nights, the season concluding in Christchurch in July following another trio of performances. The production coincided with the conclusion of NZ Opera General Director Thomas de Mallet Burgess’s five-year tenure in that role, one which featured plenty of incident and not a little controversy, as well as bearing the brunt of the effects of the pandemic for a good deal of that time. In view of what he called these “extraordinary times” de Mallet Burgess would have been well pleased with having Cosi as a fitting finale to his stewardship of the company, and especially in the light of the critical response garnered in the press by the production’s Auckland season.

Already in Wellington, the reception accorded this, the opening night at the capital’s  splendidly refurbished St.James Theatre has reinforced the general enthusiasm accorded  the new production. Cosi fan tutte has probably been the most trivilised, misunderstood and  belittled of all of Mozart’s operas over time; and even now commentators seem to disagree as to what Mozart’s and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s real intentions were in bringing to life a drama whose story-line seems so overtly cynical and even misogynistic. Two young blades make a bet with an older, cynical friend regarding the constancy of their respective lovers, which involves each wooing the other’s amor in disguise – outwardly each succeeds, but with not altogether expected confusions and doubts resulting from the exercise.

Australian director Lindy Hume’s own response to the work has, as she told us in an illuminating programme note, undergone a definite change over the years, one that’s certainly been reflected in other productions I’ve seen and heard from different parts of the world of late, nearly all involving a definite shift in attitude towards human relationships and societal sex-roles. For Hume the essential message concerning the characters and their interactions in the story is conveyed by the “before” and “after” aspects of the various emotional topographies that everybody has tumbled into, which, in effect, turn them all into “strangers to each other”.

As one critic perceptively pointed out, da Ponte might well be accused of misogyny in his libretto, but Mozart in his music more readily refutes such a charge, even given the men’s statement of the “Cosi fan tutte” motto, which rings hollow in the light of both their own connivance, and its undermining of their original partners’ resolve. And the final lines of the work, which propound a “let reason be one’s guide” resolution to the affair, is sung by all of the personalities with bewilderment rather than certainty, conveying the conclusion’s ambiguities with unnerving dismay, rather than falling back on the somewhat relieved “as we were” scenario beloved of countless earlier productions over the years.  Of course both Mozart’s and da Ponte’s work give the listener/observer/reader ample conjecturings along the way, with words and music which seduce and conceal as much as expound and illuminate. What Hume’s production brings out is the extent of the epiphany undergone by all the characters during the evening, disconcertingly made evident at the end.

Set and costume designer Tracy Grant Lord used a fluidly-employed revolving stage brilliantly mirroring the uncongealed nature of the work’s constantly-evolving interactions with the inestimable help of Matthew Marshall’s lighting designs. While from the very beginning the settings established and maintained a contemporariness throughout, other aspects seemed to underline a transformational fairytale air, such as during Act Two’s Garden scene, with shades of The Magic Flute in the appearance of the chorus in animal masks, and the full-length flowing gowns worn by the two girls, in a sense anticipating their transition into proper womanhood which the story and its circumstances bring into bitter-sweet effect.

All involved – soloists, chorus, conductor and orchestra – gave their all in the enterprise, the singers at once doing full justice to the “ensemble piece” aspect of the work (famous sequences such as the gorgeous Act One Terzettino “Soave sia il vento”; and the brilliantly disputatious full-cast finale to Act One were brought off magnificently), as did the various “couples” with their frequent duetting numbers and solos alike. Both sisters, Emma Pearson as Fiordiligi and Hanna Hipp as Dorabella, were nicely differentiated vocally and physically, Pearson’s constancy of character and elegant beauty of voice contrasting well with Hipp’s more adventurous inclinations and her compelling and engaging gusto.

Their lovers, Julien Van Mellaerts as Guglielmo and Jonathan Abernathy were similarly contrasted, the former’s sonorous and outgoing good humour a perfect foil for the latter’s more serious, heroic intensity, qualities which were to be thoroughly put to the test by the plot’s convolutions. Conspirators Don Alfonso (by turns rigorously and urbanely sung by Andrew Foster-Williams) and Despina (with Georgina Jamieson Emms here revelling in not only her character’s upwardly-mobile status promotion as bar-manager, but in her two famous cameo appearances as a doctor and a notary) brought their different kinds of  gravitas and comedy to bear at cardinal moments.

And conductor Natalie Murray Beale’s vital, pliable direction held cast, chorus and orchestra, together with distinction, making the most of the NZ Opera Chorus’s Wellington contingent’s infrequent but always mellifluous and characterful contributions to the settings; and securing from Orchestra Wellington a richly-varied set of reponses, both solo and corporate, to Mozart’s ineffably beautiful score. In this way conductor and players became the fulcrum around which the opera’s equivocations were most successfully and thoughtfully delivered throughout, for our pleasure!

 

Sounds of Home from man and guitar transcend wet and gloom

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SOUNDS OF HOME – Guitar Music from Aotearoa New Zealand

Works by Michael Stoop, John Ritchie, Amanda Riddell,
Kenneth Young, David Farquhar, and Bruce Paine

Christopher Everest (guitar)
at St. Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday, 4th June 2023

(Event sponsored by Jack C. Richards, and SOUNZ (Centre for New Zealand Music)

The most obvious thing to say about Christopher Everest’s guitar recital at St Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace on a wet and windswept Sunday afternoon on a recent King’s Birthday Weekend would be that so many factors contributed to its sparse audience attendance – arriving as I did with ten minutes to spare, and surveying the half-dozen or so people already in attendance I immediately felt sorry for the artist, who would have obviously put a lot of work into the presentation, for what at first  seemed sparse reward regarding his efforts.

However, two things then occurred to me, one at the point when the guitarist made his entrance, and the other at some unspecified time when a particular ambience involving both the music-making and its reception brought the thought into my head………

Firstly, I became conscious from the volume of applause that greeted the artist that the audience had at least tripled, if not quadrupled, in the time since I entered the church – and however small the number remained there was definitely a mini-buzz of excitement, one which Christopher Everest most positively responded to upon appearing to play, complimenting all of us upon our forbearance in braving such inclement weather conditions.

Then, at some stage after Everest had begun playing – perhaps it was as early as during the first item that the thought visited me – I was struck by the memory of something that, long ago, a visiting pianist, Frederic Rzewski, whom I’d heard give a recital – again, I think, in St. Andrew’s, and to a similarly sparse audience on that occasion – told a radio interviewer, when asked afterwards whether small numbers of audience members at concerts he gave bothered or annoyed him. Rzewski replied that he thought there was, at every concert, always the “right” number of people in the audience.

I presumed he meant that, whether ten or two hundred people were in an audience, he always made sure that he played “for everybody present”, so that no-one was disadvantaged, least of all the artist, who was, after all, there to communicate with the audience, whether they were few or many.  And there in St.Andrew’s was Everest, playing, it seemed, for us all, a few who seemed at that moment  the “right” number of people……..

A word about the artist, whom I hadn’t before encountered – beginning his studies as a pupil of Dr. Jane Curry at the NZSM, Everest received a grant to study with the eminent guitarist and pedagogue, Paul Cesarzyck, at Mahidol College of Music in Bangkok, Thailand. Returning to New Zealand, he graduated with First-Class Honours in 2022 from Victoria University, and plans to take up various Masters programmes in various institutions worldwide, while continuing to concertise when he can back in New Zealand as both a soloist and an ensemble member with the New Baroque Generation and the Kowhaiwhai Duo.

So to the concert – whose title “Sounds of Home” suggested a musician suitably well-grounded in music that reflected his place of origin. Everest began with an excerpt from a work by Michael Stoop, who had been one of his composition lecturers at Victoria – the Allegretto movement from Stoop’s Sonatina No. 1. I enjoyed Everest’s voicing of the questioning rise towards the repeated top-of-the-phrase note, a sequence whimsically contrasted with more flowing interludes – making the whole a beautifully reflective piece, touched here-and-there with contrasting timbres.

Next came John Ritchie’s “Whimsies”, three meditations inspired by Shakespeare. The first, “Full Fathom Five” began with slowly rocking rhythmic patternings, suggesting the sea’s action, repetitive notes and chords resonating the “rich and strange” subaqueous atmosphere. “The second “Where is Fancy Bred” features music turning in upon itself, proffering no answer to the question, but implying more fancy, resonating the repetitive melody in different registers towards the piece’s end, with a touch of “Dies Irae” further deepening the mystery. A more energetic “Blow, blow, thou Winter Wind” wasn’t especially “wintry”, more bracingly-textured than bleak and shivery, and of lighter substance, with widely-spaced ritual-like ”knockings” and vigorous strummings – a positive response to seasonal duress, which ends reflectively and philosophically (Shakespeare nay-sayers, take note!).

Further girdles were put around the earth by Amanda Riddell’s work “Vanya’s Lament”, inspired by Anton Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya”, the pieces reflecting an essential mood from each of the four acts of the play – presented as a continuous span, it seemed to me as if the music would work on each listener individually, the titles a “starting-point” rather than an out-and-out description, the sounds by turns quixotic, rhapsodic, wistful and energetic, but seeming to return to a general overall sobriety.  The theme of melancholy persisted with the next item, Kenneth Young’s “Three Sad Waltzes”,  again allowing the listener free rein in characterising emotions by giving the music plenty of contrast. As with Amanda Riddell’s work, Everest brought out the music’s quixotic nature, contrasting more strictly-organised running passages with improvisatory-sounding sequences, very much the “plan” of the first Waltz. By contrast the other two Waltzes expressed their dance-forms more self-consciously, the second’s gentle melancholy the perfect foil for the third’s rather more “insinuating” progressions of rhythm and melodic shaping, such as a deliciously droll bass line.

Everest described David Farquhar’s Suite as the first big “hit” in the New Zealand classical guitar world . It was written in 1966 for Ronald Burt, whose influence as a teacher pioneered classical guitar composition in this country. Farquhar became especially fond of writing for the instrument, his output including more solo guitar and several ensemble pieces, including a guitar concerto (1992).

A work in five sections, the Suite began with a stately opening Prelude, a kind of ritual processional at the outset, though with the sounds taking on a sensuous element, contrasted with a kind of ”tumble down the hill” middle section, before echoing some of the opening’s more haunting sounds.  The following Capriccio, at first restless and exploratory, then took on an almost balladic quality, a strummed accompaniment to a song (with high, harmonic-like sounds in places), before returning to the restless opening.

The Ostinato third movement set repeated notes against discursive, wayward harmonies, creating relationships both combatative and complementary – a “friendly rival” relationship; while the following Rondino seemed to take us some of the way towards the world of Manuel de Falla’s “Three-Cornered Hat” Ballet, Everest excitingly bringing  out the percussive element in a piece where rhythm was all-important. Just as telling in an entirely different way was the piece’s Epilogue, a valediction with a sounding gong marking time in between the musings, not unlike a dialogue between reality and fantasy, or reason and imagination – thoughtful and moving…….

Christopher Everest concluded his recital with a work “Seringapatam” (misspelled on the programme cover as “Seringapatum”) by another New Zealand guitarist, Bruce Paine. The piece was written with an historic Auckland homestead in mind, one that came into being through both Scottish and Indian influences, in the latter case from a town of the same name in the Mandya district in the Indian state of Karnataka, the place where the house’s founder, the son of a British Army Lieutenant-Colonel originally from Scotland, was born. The music thus contains both Scottish folk-song and Indian sitar music influences.

The music began in what seemed minstrel-like ways, but with the melody played as if it was “sounded” on an Indian sitar, with the notes having characteristic microtonal “shifts”, giving the folk-song (”The Blue Bells of Scotland”) an additional exotic quality. A more energetic central section evoked something of the exhilarating drive of a characteristic Indian “raga”. The folk-tune then briefly reappeared, and the undulations of the accompaniment gradually faded.

We had, by this time, become totally accustomed to our listening-spaces, and our musician and his instrument, so much so that the concert’s end came as a surprise! In short this presentation had transcended the state of the world outside, so involved we seemed to have become with the music and Christopher Everest’s compelling realisations of it all. Frederic Rzewski had obviously been right all along – “it was, you might say, satisfactory………”

 

Myth and Ritual in everyday life – from Orchestra Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RICHARD STRAUSS – “Dance of the Seven Veils” from “Salome”
ARJUNA OAKES – “Safe Way to Fall”
JOHN PSATHAS – Zahara
BELA BARTOK – “The Miraculous Mandarin”  Ballet

Orchestra Wellington
with……..
Arjuna Oakes (singer)
John Psathas (piano)
Valentina Michaud (saxophone)
Orpheus Choir, Wellington
BalletCollective Aotearoa
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei  (conductor)
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday June 3rd, 2023

“Myth and Ritual” was something of a concept-bending title, to my initial way of thinking, as a description of the programme Marc Taddei and his musicians put together on Saturday evening (June 3rd). Myth brings to mind legendary figures and events, while ritual suggests some kind of rite to do with religion or culture.

However, with the boundaries pushed out wider, as here, we saw that the concert’s range and scope took in both individual and societal aspects of the human condition, involving both transgressors and victims.

Bookending the evening’s presentation were portrayals of obsession matching that of any mythical hero – while the two central items presented conflict of diametrically opposed kinds, one in terms of individual resolution, and the other in epic, broad brush-stroke happenings putting groups of people at risk.

Not only was the evening‘s content far-flung, but the means by which the performances worked their magic were varied, which was part of sustaining our interest through spectacular orchestral, solo vocal, instrumental, choral and theatrical means.  Perhaps it wasn’t everybody’s “cup of tea” in toto, but it did have a readily-welcomed “different strokes for different folks” sense.

Things began spectacular with the famous “Dance of the Seven Veils” written by Richard Strauss for an episode in his opera “Salome”, which was a setting of Oscar Wilde’s play (written in French) whose subject was the eponymous Biblical character, the beautiful step-daughter of Herod, the Judean king of around the time of Jesus Christ.  Strauss’s set both French and German texts of Oscar Wilde’s play “Salome” which makes mention for the first time of the “Seven Veils” (in Matthew 14 she merely “danced for the guests”).

Wilde designated for Salome a kind of growing sexual obsession with John the Baptist (Jokaanan, in the opera), one which, along with the erotic nature of the Dance Strauss readily took on for the entirety of the character, presenting her as no less an obsessive figure than any mythical hero or heroine bent upon achieving great deeds.

An extraordinary tour de force of composition, the Dance brought forth from Marc Taddei and his players a brilliant response in both corporate orchestral and individual soloistic terms. From the frenetic opening, through the most languid sequences and right up to the final whiplash chords, the playing caught every mood, superbly voicing the chameleon-like progressions with that unique combination of sensuousness and “edge” to themes, rhythms and textures.

What particularly held my attention was the spaciousness of the phrasings in the early stages of the dance by both solo players and sections,  Taddei and his musicians enabling the music’s essential bitter-sweet character to emerge, setting the strings’ almost decadent voluptuousness against the winds’ piquant flavourings, the latter pungently activating the dancer’s growing excitement and urgencies, leading to the unbridled excitement of the concluding section’s abandoned flourishes, the knife-edge wind arabesques, and the cataclysmic whiplash chords at the end – stunning!

Nothing could have been further from these excesses than the concert’s second item, a song for voice, piano and orchestra called “Safe Way To Fall”. Written as a collaboration between singer/songwriter Arjuna Oakes and composer/performer John Psathas, the work grew from a “springboard” award from the NZ Arts Foundation which enabled Oakes to choose Psathas as a mentor, and led to a creative partnership between the two. The pair shared a desire to explore ideas that would “make musical ideas hit home emotionally”, and the song was one of four tracks that emerged from this initial collaboration.

With Psathas himself as the pianist (his debut as a performing pianist in public, he told us afterwards) and the orchestra providing backing of what seemed a “filmic” kind of orchestral texture, Oakes delivered his song via a microphone, words expressing the idea of feelings of vulnerability giving rise to strength in relationships. Psathas’s most telling comment afterwards. I thought, was that collaboration seemed a way for an individual to grow stronger, or in other words, a “Safe Way to Fall”, considering that any creative journey will involve occasional failings and fallings. What I got from the item and its presentation was an insight into creative process that’s outside popular perception of that process, but nevertheless produces a result, whatever one might think of the same as heard here.

John Psathas’s other (somewhat more substantial) contribution to the concert was in a more traditional “inspired by various stimuli” kind of mode, in this case a two-part synthesis of other people’s literary and musical skills. The composer was entranced by author Dean King’s “Skeletons on the Zahara” outlining the historical shipwreck of a group of American sailors off the western coast of Africa in 1815, and their subsequent travails in a hostile desert landscape and at the hands of nomadic tribesmen – so when saxophonist Federico Mondelci, who in turn had been inspired by an earlier concerto for the instrument by Psathas, approached him to write another concerto, it was Zahara which came into being.

Saxophone soloist for the concerto’s performance Valentine Michaud provided considerable visual as well as musical stimulus, appearing on the platform in a stunningly voluminous (social-distancing-style?) orange-crimson dress whose undulating folds seemed to become as desert sands as she launched into the first of the concerto’s four movements,  her instrument straightaway “possessing” the ambience created by the long lines of the ambient orchestral accompaniments, denoting rituals of both physical and spiritual identification.

The concerto moved through these exotic realms with considerable variety, a second movement establishing ostinato-like rhythms as the soloist’s playing gradually “enlivened” the music, the exchanges massively and dramatically irrupting and falling away almost to nothing in attention-riveting ways; and a third movement prayerful and ethereal, the music’s haunting aspect enhanced by the soloist’s playing of multiphonics (two notes played at once) above what seemed to me like enormous blocks of air, as if one was a bird soaring over a landscape far below, before the ostinato rhythm was re-engaged and the soloist rhapsodised with the orchestral winds, oboe, bassoon, and clarinet.

The final movement straightaway re-invoked the whole scenario, creating in my mind a desert environment through winds and brass, over which the strings soared as the sky and beneath which the percussion rumbled as of the deep earth. Valentine Michaud used a soprano sax to scintillate through the movement’s first part, then returned to her tenor instrument to deepen the “earth-connection”, the orchestra keeping the ostinato thread going throughout, and lifting the ambiences into a “cheek-by-jowl” fusion of excitement and oneness with the soloist, all scintillation and coalescence to finish!

Michaud returned us to our lives at Zahara’s conclusion with an encore, playing a fun work which she told us was called “cuku” (a chicken), and further demonstrating her virtuosity with multiphonics, as if two birds were simultaneously calling to one another – a very “rustic farmyard” piece which entertained us most delightfully!

And so, after the interval, we entered the very different world of Bela Bartok’s ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin”, having, incidentally, been warned at the beginning by a “voice-over” announcement that the work we were about to hear contained scenes of rape and sexual violence (one might imagine the present-day general cultural entertainment scene well-versed in such antics, though of course government health warnings are still bandied about, and “live” performances might still shock the unsuspecting with the unexpected!)

Musically, I found the performance as enthralling and satisfying as was the Strauss work in the concert’s first half. The opening vortex of bedlam-like sounds – “humanity’s mad, inhuman noise” (as Alan Jay Lerner wrote in “My Fair Lady” in a somewhat different context) – was superbly and sonorously delivered, though it was disconcerting how, for me, the advent of the dancers (members of “Ballet Collective Aotearoa”) radically changed the focus of my attention to the visual drama (the result of having previously “immersed” myself in the music via recordings).

Each of the clarinet solos depicting the girl’s “luring” of prospective clients to be robbed by her cohorts was superbly wrought as was the orchestral support, given that the visual aspect constantly took one’s focus away from what one was “hearing” to that which was being “watched”. Bartok’s evocation of relative “innocence” in the case of the young boy was touching, as was the girl’s response to him, a situation brusquely ended by the ruffians (who, at one stage seemed to morph as a group into a quartet rather than the original trio).

The dancers conveyed what they could of the different scenarios, hampered as they were by the lack of space which a proper stage would have otherwise afforded. Dramatically, the most effective moment  was the appearance of the Mandarin, who emerged from a trapdoor centre-stage, dressed in a red robe and bathed in bright light. That, and the impact of  the sickly green light which illuminated the Mandarin’s transfixed form after his stabbing by the ruffians were theatrical highlights of the presentation – I only wish someone had thought of deploying an additional light upon the mandarin after he had “embraced” the girl and “satisfied” his desires, at which point his wounds begin to bleed, and he dies – a blood-red spotlight would have provided an apt contrast to the colours that had been previously used.

In all, I thought the presentation was a great success, and especially from the orchestral point of view, in which the flow of the story, the drama and the tension never let up. The Orpheus Choir, too, sonorously and atmospherically played its part, beautifully accompanied by the orchestral violas as the voices gathered intensity, helping to breathe life back into the Mandarin so as to fulfil his destiny with the girl – musically, a scalp-pricking moment, even if hardly the visual embodiment of erotic consummation of desire we had been “threatened with” at the outset.

A definite “feather in the cap” of Orchestra Wellington, then – and the success of “The Miraculous Mandarin” left me longing for the point at which Marc Taddei and his players might again enlist some dancers and give us Ravel’s complete “Daphnis et Chloe” – just a thought, but meant as a compliment for all concerned.

 

 

Tribute to Souvenirs, Sovereigns and Soulmates from the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents
“EMPEROR”

Paul Lewis (piano)
Eduardo Strausser (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

ROSS HARRIS – Cento (2005)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto in E-flat Op. 73 “Emperor”
ROBERT SCHUMANN – Symphony No. 2 in C Minor Op.61

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday 11th May 2023

“The work is an abomination” declared fellow-composer Jenny McLeod upon hearing Ross Harris’s “Cento”, commissioned and performed by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra for its 25th Anniversary in 2005. According to the excellent – in fact, indispensable! – SOUNZ website (containing ‘most anything one wishes to know regarding Kiwi music and its composers!), Harris was given the brief of using “pieces that the orchestra has made its own over the last 25 years”. His response was the musical equivalent of a poetry “cento” (a work made up from brief quotes taken from other verses), deftly constructing a musical tapestry of excerpts which takes the listener on a whirlwind orchestral ride of far-flung compositional variety and drawing from at least three hundred years of musical provenances in doing so.

It was all a kind of “first cousin” of antics familiar to those who could recall the zany Hoffnung concerts (which seem to have fallen out of fashion in recent times), with the composer tacitly inviting us to “tease out” from the kaleidoscopic array of sounds any references we detected to works from the standard classical repertoire. Depending on their respective tastes and sensibilities, some listeners might well have sided with Jenny McLeod’s reproachful  reaction to such a farrargo, while others, like myself would have taken the opposite viewpoint and admired both the skill and daring of the accomplished collage of tones, marvelling at the frequent fusing of contrasting sound-colours and rhythmic impulses, here with predictably volatile, and there with surprisingly harmonious results.

I wrote down as many references as my memory could muster during the piece’s eleven minutes, delighted at greeting old friends, abashed by some I knew but couldn’t name, and puzzled by a couple of strangers whose tones rang no bells! To give just a few examples, I noticed the recurring preponderance of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” vying with Beethoven’s Seventh, Mahler’s Third and Brahms’ Second Symphonies, along with several “Ivesian” touches of combinations of opposites that “worked” despite diametrically-opposed essences – the most outlandish of these for me being Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony finale being jostled along by F.J.Ricketts’ cheerful “Colonel Bogey” march-rhythms! Conductor Eduardo Strausser’s and his players’ juggling of such determinedly whimsical snippets out for mischief and mayhem was itself, I thought, sheer delight, exhibiting both control and panache in abundance.

After such a work-out the musicians must have been more than ready for whatever challenge was next – and it came with the music of Beethoven, in the form of the “Emperor” Piano Concerto (hence the concert’s title), no less. The orchestra was joined by the English pianist Paul Lewis. making his first-ever appearance in Wellington, following a previous visit during 2022 to Auckland, where he’d already performed a complete cycle of the concertos to  critical acclaim.

Following in the wake of the Harris work, Beethoven’s music was always going to give a more-than-usually purposeful and cogent impression, something that the grand opening exchanges between orchestra and piano further emphasised, proclaiming a kind of “sovereignty” which obviously fuelled the idea in some quarters of the piece having imperial associations, and resulted in its nickname (though whatever its provenance the title “Emperor” had nothing whatever to do with the composer!)

The opening gestures done, the orchestra straightaway took up the “swing” of the music, with conductor Eduardo Strausser encouraging magnificent tutti passages that contrasted memorably with the beautiful “voicings” from the different groups. The strings brought both strength and sensitivity to the journey via eloquent shadings and colourings, as did the winds with phrasings as individually ear-catching as were their various ensembles. The horns sounded wonderful with their duetting lines, while the trumpets and timpani were excitingly impactful! All of this preceded the soloist’s re-entry in which the piano seemed at first very much part of the ensemble’s musical fabric, before building to a more substantial and authoritative soloist’s voice.

I must say Paul Lewis’s playing surprised me at first with what I felt was an amiable quality, having previously listened to various of his piano recital recordings and thinking at the time that he was a very serious musician indeed! Throughout the concerto’s first movement his playing readily exuded both poetry and vivacity by turns, never “barnstorming” the line, even when delivering the great, hammered chords exchanged with the orchestra towards the end of the development section of the music. This was a quality underlined by his sitting still at the instrument, and letting his hands and fingers do the work in relation to the rest of his body. It all suggested what seemed to me something of a “victory beyond the battle” kind of approach to the work, more so than I’d been used to in my previous listening experiences of it – definitely a “musician’s” more than a “virtuoso’s” performance, and one that resulted in my finding myself continually leaning forward in my seat to take in the detail, instead of sitting back and letting the grandeur of it all wash over me….

With the slow movement’s opening the orchestral playing again enchanted the ear, Strausser drawing from his strings a rapt quality of utterance which the pianist’s first notes illuminated like early evening stars, the opening notes of each entry “placing” the sounds to a most disarming effect. Lewis’s subsequent fuller-toned chordal ascent then glowed as if moonbeams were issuing forth from behind a cloud, suggesting warmth more than out-and-out grandeur. After the pianist and the winds had resounded in turn the rapt opening theme, a moment of hushed wonderment led eventually to a joyous explosion of pianistic energy into which the orchestra unreservedly threw itself also. We were aroused, galvanised and charmed in our turn, with Lewis again playful of pianistic aspect rather than scintillating or trenchant, and thoroughly enjoying, along with his conductor and cohorts, the various adventures throughout the finale, right up to that moment of poignant rapport with Larry Reese, the timpanist, at the end of the work! A sudden pianistic irruption of energy goaded the orchestra into doing the same, into which exuberant valediction Lewis actually joined with the players – a final, heart-warming gesture of solidarity!

The interval’s leg-stretching ritual having been undertaken, I was back for the second half, eagerly anticipating the Schumann Second Symphony, the first of the composer’s four I’d gotten to know while still a student. I recall having read over the years various commentaries professing to explain why it was Schumann couldn’t REALLY write for the orchestra and had to be “helped”, a process which certain conductors had gone along with and apparently edited the scoring to order, while others had declared the practice “an abomination” (where HAVE I heard that word before?). As I had not too long ago bought a couple of CD sets of the complete Schumann symphonies conducted by a new generation of maestri who HADN’T thus interfered with the composer’s scoring of his music in any way, I felt heartened that Maestro Strausser, tonight’s conductor, might be of a similar bent in such matters. And so it thankfully proved.

From the outset, the sounds of the brass rang forth clearly and atmospherically over the Bach-like contourings of strings and winds that made up much of the character of this beautiful work. Nowhere was there heard any kind of obfuscation of detail, the lines beautifully balanced and the trajectories nobly advanced. The allegro, when it came perhaps felt at first a bit tense under Strausser’s beat, with the dotted rhythms slightly clipped, as if a shade TOO eager; but the development section of the movement, with its beautiful “sighing” motif enchanted the ear, as did the syncopated wind chatterings and undulating timpani rolls which lead back to the allegro’s beginning. This time, all was suitably heroic and energetic, with repeated-note fanfare figures adding to the excitement and giving the lie to any thought of technical ineptitude on the composer’s part.

The Scherzo, a splendid creation, here bristled with near-obsessive energies, conductor and players making the most of each of the two contrasting Trio interludes, the first featuring quixotic, even garrulous exchanges between the winds and strings, and the second a throwback to the Symphony’s polyphonic opening (Schumann’s homage to the spirit of Bach), again with winds and strings here gorgeously blending lyrical and cerebral lines in masterly fashion. I loved it all, apart from what I thought a somewhat vulgar presto-like tempo adopted by Strausser for the movement’s coda, one certainly not indicated at all in my score – my favourite versions on record (conducted by Kubelik, Sawallisch, Karajan, Schuricht, etc.) all bring out the timpani and the brass to thrilling effect without unduly speeding up the tempo!

Of course the effect here was as momentary as it was subjective, as Strausser and his players then proceeded to give a reading of the slow movement that was as enchanting as any I’d previously encountered! – the opening strings imparted a quiet, deeply-felt beauty to the melody similarly taken up by the solo oboe and counterpointed by the bassoon. The horns, joined by the other winds, with clarinet and flute taking their turn, all made their own magic and paved the way for the strings to return to claim the melody as their own – or so it seemed to our entranced ears, amid all the re-echoings bringing us to the movement’s end.

Strausser took the final at a goodly lick, enough to emphasise the music’s girth and energy in the playing from all the sections, festive brass fanfares alternating with vertiginously swirling string textures and babbling winds at the beginning, before the music got down to an equally vigorous “working out” interaction, the winds calling attention to a kind of redemptive theme which other instruments swirled around and about , as if encouraging it to “flower”. Of course, in tandem with the return of the work’s opening fanfares it eventually blossomed, bringing about a most vibrant conclusion, a sense of recognition and concourse between creative souls, sonorously celebrated on this occasion by superb playing from the entire orchestra.

Rather than the proverbial “darkness to light” journey of the kind beloved by the Romantics, what came across to me seemed like a coming together of different energies – the opening movement’s fanfares posed the question, and then, throughout the course of the work interacted with similar kind of questing impulses, until, step-by-step, the music was able to reach a true synthesis in the work’s final movement. It was, I felt, conductor Eduardo Strausser’s and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s real achievement with this performance that these elements came together so magnificently at this concert

Wellington Youth Orchestra take on Verdi, Grieg and Tchaikovsky

Posted on by Peter Mechen

A GLORIOUSLY UNINHIBITED CONCERT EXPERIENCE

Wellington Youth Orchestra
Music by Verdi, Grieg and Tchaikovsky

VERDI – Overture “Nabucco”
GRIEG – 4 Norwegian Dances
TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.5 in E Minor

Mark Carter (conductor)
Wellington Youth Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church, Wellington

Sunday, 30th April, 2023

St. Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace was positively burgeoning with people on this holiday afternoon, all bent on celebrating what was the final day of April. The auditorium was jam-packed full, and bristling with excitement and expectation as well as sporting what seemed like a forest of violin bows brandished by seated uniformed platoons of fresh-faced youngsters, affiliated with similarly attired groups sporting wooden and metal whistles, and backed up by others carrying  gleaming brass bells with tubes attached or standing next to pairs and trios of sizeable rounded objects that straightaway invited banging and crashing together.

In fact the orchestra (which was what this assemblage was) seemed to take up at least half the auditorium’s floor-space, a prospect which seemed very likely to involve at some particular stage a right royal welter of assorted sound! One presumed that attendance at such a farrago would certainly not be for the faint-hearted!

Such was the bustling scene that any Sunday afternoon passer-by would have encountered. who might have  looked into the church to see what was going on!  Posters displayed on the street outside would  have given people in the “know” more clues as to what was brewing within, and especially as the name “Tchaikovsky” dominated what seemed a tantalisingly lurid seascape image which most excitingly took up the whole of the display. And once tempted through the doors of St.Andrew’s the casual visitor would have then been irresistibly drawn into the  ferment, with no possible chance of having second thoughts regarding the adventure, or of resisting the ready blandishments  and associated excitements being primed for tumultuous action!

Of course, for me it was at first simply another concert to add to the cache of my own musical experiences – and with all the things I’d seen and heard since arriving at that oft-visited church on Wellington’s The Terrace, part of the by-now-familiar fabric of preparation for music-making. And yet, from the time I’d ascended the church steps and eased my way through the entrance portals and into the auditorium, I’d again caught that whiff of excitement in my nostrils that can still, even on the ultra-umpteenth concert occasion, stimulate one’s interest – and the hubbub of the things I’ve already described upon arriving certainly did it for me again this time round.

Although the name of Tchaikovsky dominated the bill of fare, no less interest was generated by the supporting items from the equally illustrious pens of Verdi and Grieg – each as well being striking examples of orchestra virtuosity and of sounds characteristic of its respective composer. I hadn’t actually heard Verdi’s “Nabucco” Overture for some time, never having seen the opera on the stage, though the music brought back many recollections of my youthful tourings as a beginner actor in a children’s theatre troupe, our play using a recording of the very same overture! – excellently vivid, impactful sounds which, thanks to the composer’s irrepressible native theatrical instincts, have stayed vividly in my memory.

So it was, from the first solemn utterances of the brass chorale that opened the work, an evocation of magic from trombones and tuba, the sounds beautifully-rounded and splendidly-finished – and the characteristic, theatrical Verdian outburst from the entire orchestra that followed, stunning in its impact and setting the theatrical tone for the rest of the work. I was impressed with the response of  the players to their conductor Mark Carter’s insistence upon razor-sharp orchestral attack and beautifully graded dynamics, bringing out the composer’s native theatrical instincts, and preparing the way for our first taste of the famous melody “Va pensiero”, which was to bring the composer such lasting fame in its choral version from later in the opera. Time and again throughout the piece a particular orchestral detail in the playing from these youthful musicians made me prick my ears, such as the delightfully insouciant wind episode which lightened the wound-up tensions of the martial-sounding allegro, the nail-biting crescendo which then followed, and the “caution-thrown-to-the-winds” coda of the work, which left us all breathless with exhilaration at its conclusion.

Where Verdi’s music was innately theatrical and dramatic, Grieg’s was, by contrast, redolent with folkish charm and out-of-doors exhilaration, the Four Norwegian Dances positively exuding a bracing northern outlook – by turns each one bewitches and invigorates the senses with its specific evocation of time and place. Yet Grieg in his own music was never content to merely copy his country’s traditional melodies and rhythms, wanting to convey to a wider world these characteristics by echoing them in his own music. Though these Dances are all derived from Norwegian folk-tunes, he invested them with his very own harmonic brands (whose strains were to subsequently inspire Debussy, Ravel and Delius in their music) and similarly flavoured the native dance rhythms the composer so loved with the same piquancies and contrasts of mood and atmosphere. Written in 1881 first of all for piano four-hands by Grieg, the set of Dances has become more widely-known through their orchestral version, made in 1888 by the distinguished Czech violinist, Hans Sitt, and presumably used here.

Surprisingly, the players sounded to my ears at first slightly less comfortable with Grieg’s more bucolic measures than they had done with Verdi’s tight-as-a-drum rhythmic patterns, the opening of the first Dance seeming a shade “drunken” rather than spot-on with the rhythms, as if the dancers had helped themselves too freely to the Aquivit before the band struck up – but all seemed well by the time the music’s gorgeous trio section was reached, some beautiful oboe playing alternating with heart-on-sleeve string responses. And I had no reservations whatever with the Second Dance, utterly entranced as I was by the performance here of one of the world’s most charming melodies, again on the oboe (principal David Liu thoroughly deserving a mention!) and then just as beguilingly on the strings. I wasn’t prepared for the extent to which conductor Mark Carter put his foot down for the Trio section, but the fast and furious response by the players was brilliantly achieved! – making, of course, the reprise of the opening all the more “lump-in-throat” than before!

After which the Third Dance might well have made many people like myself get up and actually begin dancing, with the winds right on form and the strings and brasses even having a friendly rhythmic “tussle” at one point during their replies. In this Dance’s Trio, too,  I could hear instances of Grieg’s chromatic harmonisings of the kind that Delius obviously admired and would “echo” in his own music. The Fourth Dance seemed, at the outset, as it was going to pre-date its more sophisticated cousin-to-be, the Fourth Symphonic Dance in the later Op.64 set of Dances – more portentous than any so far at the outset, and threatening to maintain the ominous mood throughout (with even Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’s introduction briefly echoed) – but then, with a few enlivening gestures, the dance spirit was reactivated and the music “ready!-steadied” into life once more, though the accompaniments here were interestingly enough the “darkest” of any throughout the set. On this occasion, too,  the Trio sounded especially melancholy, becoming a kind of miniature tone-poem of contrasting mood, with strings and brasses darkly accompanying first the oboe and then the flute, before further intensifying the melancholy mood (wonderfully black-browed brass and timpani here, almost Wagnerian in effect!) – then, suddenly, the dance broke in again, as before. This time, there was a gorgeous “We’ll see you again sometime” kind of coda, with flutes and horn making “farewell” exchanges, before the music suddenly erupted with energy and stormed to a brilliantly abrupt finish!

A short interval later and we were ready for the Tchaikovsky, his Fifth Symphony being the most classically-conceived of the composer’s three numbered later symphonies, though still imbued with plenty of characteristic late-romantic feeling – as this performance was to demonstrate with considerable elan. The orchestral masses having suitably regrouped, we were off, straightaway plunged into melancholy with superbly delivered clarinet phrases underpinned by dark-toned strings, intoning the work’s hauntingly sombre “motto theme”.

Conductor Mark Carter gave his players enough room to maintain a portentous march-tread for the Allegro con anima  opening theme while  keeping the music’s energies active in the rippling wind counterpoints to the theme, and to all of its various adaptations, such as the strings’ and then the winds’ beautiful rising variant, followed by the winds’ perky repeated fanfare call. The only difficulty for the strings came with the equally gorgeous but trickily syncopated second subject, whose rhythm pattern the players repeatedly anticipated, pushing it ahead of the accompaniments – however, the repeated fanfare figures on full orchestra fortunately restored order, with the horns and winds reliable in their turn.

Carter had obviously worked the players meticulously through the tricky rhythmic dovetailings of the development, so that the few strands that unravelled were easily pulled into place once more, the players achieving a fine cataclysmic ferment of interaction at the climax before the sounds gradually wound themselves back into the recapitulated allegro con anima, the winds doing the honours at first with distinction before the strings strode into the picture once again. The same problem of the strings’ syncopated melody recurred, but things were again righted by that same repeated fanfare figure of yore, which then led excitingly and defiantly to the movement’s coda – at the ferment’s zenith-point Carter gave his players extra elbow-room to hurl out the phrases expansively, before allowing the music to subside into a kind of brooding silence.

One of Tchaikovsky’s greatest symphonic slow movements followed, on its own terms a lyrical drama with a central episode leading to a magnificent motto-theme-led climax (that same motto theme makes an unscheduled return towards the movement’s end as well, which gives the drama extra “clout”) – but all the greater as a central part of an overall symphonic plan with each of its unifying strands fully activated. The scope of this review doesn’t permit a full description, but allows tribute to be paid to the conductor and players in this case who breathed life into every aspect of the structure – the darkly ample strings at the beginning, the magnificently-realised horn solo (played by principal Isabelle Faulkner) featuring the first of the themes that unify this movement, the oboe/horn duet that sounds the second and most-repeated theme, and the clarinet theme (played by Joseph Craggs, and backed up by Maya Elmes’ bassoon) that dominates the movement’s central episode until the motto theme’s reappearance blows it all out of the water. I felt in general that we got the best playing in the whole work from this movement, both with the soloists involved in the different themes and with the orchestra as a whole superbly committed towards expressing the different character of each of the sections.

Another concerted effort from the players was in the ballet-like Waltz movement which followed, one demanding particularly adroit instrumental counterpointing from both the different string sections and  a number of soloists, particularly the winds, all of whom performed like heroes, including the flute principal, Keeson Perkins-Treacher, and, as well, the trumpet principal, Lewis Grey, whose notes I clearly and cleanly heard at salient points.

Having already remarked that I thought the Symphony’s second movement contained the work’s best playing on the part of the WYO, I must confess that I can’t anywhere in my notes find reference to any mishap, failing or inadequacy in the orchestra’s full-blooded tackling of the work’s finale. Beginning with the words – “Finale – attacca!” I proceeded to nail my critical colours to my private mast (my notebook), and generally wax lyrical! – viz. “Splendid at the outset – brass forthright and confident, and winds the same! – the climax to the Intro is worked up well! The brass subsequently sonorous and oracular in their pronouncements!” That, of course, was the slow introduction….

Then came the allegro vivace (alla breve) – “Strings and chattering winds and brass do excellently well through the allegro’s opening charge! Winds are lovely and sonorous….strings also keep the melody buoyant! Brass resound the Motto splendidly! Winds give us plenty of swirling detail – the stamping theme is magnificent, underpinned by the timpani! Brass calls really nail the essential tumult, Winds and strings lean into the “Russian Dance: episode – the music gradually becalms, conductor holding the players nicely in check until the explosion restarts the conflagration….”

So far, so good! – the reprise of part of the finale elicited a comment, “Again the orchestra handles it all well – as before,  strings are fantastic! The brass and winds support the tumult! – the music rushes airborne towards the motto theme!”

Then came the Apotheosis – “Triumphal homecoming, great and heartwarming! Everybody playing their hearts out! What a coda! Mark is keeping it splendidly on the rails! Majestic right at the end!” And that was it! – a glorious and celebratory occasion! (I obviously knowed no more that afternoon!)

With those final in situ comments I rest my case! Well played, WYO!!