Category: Live performance

Orchestra Wellington’s fifth concert excels with last works of Berlioz, Bartok and Tchaikovsky (almost)

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei and Vincent Hardaker, with Michael Houstoun at the piano
Arohanui Strings – Sistema Hutt Valley, conducted by Vincent Hardaker

Arohanui Strings: arrangements of music by Purcell, Tchaikovsky (Serenade for Strings and the waltz from Sleeping Beauty)

Orchestra Wellington:
Overture to Béatrice et Bénédict (Berlioz)
Bartok: Piano Concerto No 3
Tchaikvosky: Nutcracker – Act II

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 15 October, 7:30 pm

This was the once-a-year event for the young musicians involved with the Hutt Valley Arohanui Strings, the project inspired by the famous Venezuelan institution, El Sistema. They filed in after some of Orchestra Wellington’s players had taken their seats: the more advanced ones taking seats alongside a professional player as mentor; the beginners spread across the front of the stage – some of them looked aged about four. They were conducted by the orchestra’s assistant conductor Vincent Hardaker, with assistance from the side by Alison Eldrigde, encouraging the littlies at the front.

Playing some simplified, though genuine classical pieces: Purcell, Tchaikovsky, Scottish dances, they charmed the audience.

Hardaker stayed to conduct the orchestra itself in the Béatrice et Bénédict overture, Berlioz’s last opera and though about six years before his death, really his last work. It’s based on Shakespeare’s Much ado about Nothing, written on commission from the Baden Baden Opera. Though it hasn’t taken root in the regular repertoire, I saw it staged by the Australian Opera in 1998; there’s some fine music, several quotes of which appear in the overture, which has always held its place in the orchestral repertoire. Its brightness and wit were splendidly captured by Hardaker and the players, with secretive little passages from clarinets, edgy brass and dancing violins.

Bartok’s last piano concerto, left a few bars short of completion when he died in New York in 1945, as WW2, too, was ending. I recalled with bemusement how barbaric it sounded when I first heard it in my late teens, which was, after all, only about 10 years after its composition.

Musicologists enjoy themselves identifyjng its odd modal tonalities; all quite beside the point. Any audience can assess its blending of Balkan folk music with ancient modes and contemporary musical obsessions, all overlaid by sheer musical inspiration. Houstoun approached the first movement with a sense of determination and energy, though its generally lyrical character emerged clearly, allowing melodic figures to take root; lovely flute notes at its end. It confirmed the admirable collaboration between Houstoun and conductor Taddei.

The second movement on the other hand can be heard simply as a rather beautiful piece of music, even though analysis shows characteristics uncommon in western classical music. But ‘beautiful’ hardly touches the enigmatic, spiritual, orphic quality of this singular movement. The orchestra alone and many individual players proved their capacity for exquisite, contemplative playing at the start and throughout there are some breathlessly calm, slow passages for the piano alone, Bach-like figurations, in which Houstoun captured a metaphysical spirit, perhaps the composer meditating on his imminent death – it’s entitled Adagio religioso. But then there’s an upbeat interlude, curiously alive with bird-calls in the middle, ending with skittering keyboard.

The third movement returns to an energetic, folk-dance-inspired Allegro vivace, where there’s still more opportunities for individual instruments to shine, like horns and the piano to indulge in fast fugal passages that come to envelope the whole orchestra.

In all, a splendid show-case for the orchestra and pianist, in one of the 20th century’s real masterpieces.

The opportunity to hear a whole of Act II of Nutcracker played without the distraction of dancers proved hugely rewarding, as the score is endlessly inventive and memorable as pure music, quite apart from its qualities of marvellous danceabilty with which choreographers and dancers have been able to create indelible productions.  While I have grown very tired of performances of the Suite that compacts the character dances, in their setting, as little orchestral pieces played by a live orchestra in the concert hall, they sit perfectly in context; their genius, their instrumental brilliance, and the way they flow the one into the next is simply a delight. The programme note records that Nureyev said that it was Tchaikovsky who encouraged serious composers to engage with choreographers, making possible masterpieces like the Stravinsky ballets, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloë, Prokofiev, as well as dozens of wonderful scores by other great 20th century composers.

Nutcracker engages with an orchestra, inspiring spirited and moving playing from almost every section and including a few instruments like the celesta which Tchaikovsky was the first to use symphonically (though Chausson had actually beaten him by a few years with incidental music for a French version of The Tempest). It’s the great Pas de deux that follows the Waltz of the Flowers that especially enchants me, and it was wonderful to hear this played so well by a ‘live’ orchestra.

Nutcracker mightn’t have fitted perfectly with the ‘Last Words’ theme of this year’s concerts, for the Sixth Symphony, and some piano pieces and songs followed it. But it served a higher purpose: to elevate the genre of great ballet music to the concert hall, and with this performance Marc Taddei proved the case most convincingly.

Taddei gave the first clues to the 2017 programme, which will follow the same most successful pattern as this year, disclosing the general theme of the music, associated with the great impresario Diaghilev, and at least two of his greatest collaborators: Stravinsky and Ravel. If you buy before the next and last of this year’s concerts, the sub is only $120.

 

Revelatory chamber music experiences from London Conchord Ensemble

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

London Conchord Ensemble
(Chamber Music New Zealand)

Daniel Rowland – violin, Bartholemew LaFollette – cello, Daniel Pailthorpe – flute, Emily Pailthorpe – oboe, Maximiliano Martin – clarinet, Andrea de Flammineis – bassoon, Nicholas North – horn, Julian Milford – piano

Mozart: Quintet in E flat for piano and winds, K 452
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No I in E, Op 9 (arr. Webern for violin, flute, clarinet, cello and piano)
Poulenc: Sextet for piano and wind quintet, Op 100
Debussy: La mer (arr. Beamish for piano trio)

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 13 October, 7:30 pm

An overseas ensemble of eight distinguished players is a rare event for Chamber Music New Zealand, even more so when most are principal players in leading British orchestras, chamber groups or music academies; an ensemble as various in backgrounds and careers as the music they played.

They never all played together, apart from the encore, party pieces: bits of Brahms’s Hungarian dances. Other than at the concerts in the four main centres, the players split up to perform in six provincial cities, mainly in duos or trios, I think, in entirely different programmes.

Mozart; Quintet for piano and winds 
The extraordinarily well-documented life of Mozart includes his own self assessments; the quintet for piano and winds is probably never performed without reference to his letter to his father remarking that it was the best thing he’d written so far. Such things tend to skew one’s judgement. Only it so happened that the first time I heard it, in my mid-twenties, in perfect innocence, I was enchanted; and kept hoping to find other Mozart pieces for the same combination. It was some time later that I discovered the three great wind serenades.

They began in an almost tentative spirit, as if handling a rare manuscript, with kid gloves, the opening chords stated with utmost delicacy, then step by step each takes its discreet role – oboe and clarinet and bassoon, then the horn is given its special place while the piano supports and elaborates. But it’s not about showcasing the individual instruments, for the sort of attention each gave to the preceding player seemed both to emulate and to elaborate each instrument in turn, delicately, with scrupulous care. Each seemed to listen acutely to the shape and rhythm of each other’s playing, then echoing it subtly so as to enhance its magic. Specially enchanting were the phrases where pairs of instruments conversed – oboe and clarinet; horn and bassoon for example.

Schoenberg; Chamber Symphony No 1  
Mozart represented the first Viennese school; Schoenberg, the second. His famous First Chamber Symphony seems to be spoken of as if it’s a major step towards atonalism, but it came only a few years after Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande, before his ‘atonal period’ is said to begin. It’s unashamedly in E major though there are plenty of other tonalities, near and far.

The work is written for single instruments, five strings, two horns, and eight woodwind instruments. Webern’s arrangement of the Chamber Symphony for piano, violin and cello, flute and clarinet, made in 1923, was one of several by the composer himself and his younger acolytes. (The composer had arranged it for piano four hands and for a larger orchestra; Berg arranged it for two pianos, and Webern also made an arrangement for piano and strings).

Violinist Rowland recalled the famous 1913 concert in Vienna (Paris and Stravinsky were not the only heroes of musical riots) where, as well as this chamber symphony, music by Webern, Zemlinsky and Berg was played: a riot broke out during Berg’s songs. At the subsequent trial, Rowland said, the operetta composer Oscar Straus testified that the punch by concert organizer Erhard Buschbeck had been the most harmonious sound of the evening.  The Michael Fowler Centre, however, remained calm.

Yet it’s interesting that the piece has not really taken its place alongside other famous music of the period, like Salome and Elektra, like Mahler’s symphonies, like Debussy’s La mer and Images… (for example, I’ve only got one version on record). For it here and there it presents a rugged, somewhat challenging face. There are tunes, sometimes they quickly distort or are overtaken by conflicting ideas, but often, especially if one is reasonably familiar with it, each hearing brings more of a feeling of familiarity and tunefulness; and this performance enhanced those impressions.

Poulenc: Sextet  
French composers of first half of the twentieth century typically shied away from the trends across the Rhine, none more than Poulenc, especially after the First World War.  His Sextet was composed during the 1930s. It starts with a couple of cheeky, defiant gestures but then set out busily until the music stops as if at the end of the movement. It resumes however with a calm bassoon solo; the piano has a turn, then oboe and then all really come to dominate most of the first movement till the first tempo returns for the last couple of minutes. The second movement, Divertissement, is hardly in the same class at the famous music by Ibert, but it’s recognisably Poulenc, flipping from one tempo to another and played with a delightful Gallic sense of impropriety, and ending as flute and horn lead to a near unresolved suspension.

The last movement returns to Poulenc proper, setting off with screechy woodwinds and staccato horn, piano and winds trading insults.  The final surprise is the sudden killing of the Prestissimo tempo as the bassoon leading the rest through an admonitory calm (Subito très lente, says the score, mixing French and Italian), in an emphatic absence of anything brash or tasteless.

Debussy: La mer
I think there was a particular feeling of scepticism that a richly orchestrated thing like La mer could be reduced to a piano trio and not sound ridiculous, and really disrespectful of Debussy’s laborious work of orchestration, which was not his favourite occupation. My own doubts lasted a full 47 seconds, by which time I was won over in the utmost astonishment.

Only three players, Daniel Rowland – violin, Bartholemew LaFollette – cello and Julian Milford – piano, wrought this miracle. It was the work of English composer Sally Beamish, and though there were moments when I couldn’t help hearing the original version in my head, those lapses were quickly replaced by wonderment at her achievement. While there was no hope of dealing in some way with every note in the full score, the spirit of La mer was almost always there in an inexplicable way, with the very instrumental sounds seeming to emerge as if by magic.

I wondered how she’d tackled it and imagined that the best way would have been to have done it from memory, just checking now and then with the score for the odd harmonic detail. A good deal of the cogency of the performance – probably most of it – had to be due to the sensitivity and skill of the three players who, eux aussi, must simply have had the original sounds embedded in their heads.

The other lesson from this performance was to endorse a feeling I’ve long had that the real test of orchestral music’s substance and worth lies in the experience of it with all the colour removed, leaving it like a black and white photo or a copper engraving. Debussy’s masterpiece, subjected to that test, passes with a triple A rating; and again, it could not have been such an illuminating experience without superb musicians such as these proved to be.

 

Streeton Trio, at Waikanae, offers persuasive, unfamiliar music but lacked a masterpiece

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Streeton Piano Trio: Emma Jardine – violin, Meta Weiss – cello, Benjamin Kopp – piano
(Waikanae Music Society)

Debussy: Piano Trio in G minor
Beethoven: Piano Trio in B flat, Op 11
Mendelssohn: Three Songs without Words (arr. Kopp)
Saint-Saëns: Piano Trio in E minor, Op 92

Waikanae Memorial Hall

Sunday 9 October, 2:30 pm

The Streeton Piano Trio was named for the important Australian painter Arthur Streeton, though I don’t know whether there was any reason for making the connection with the visual arts. The trio has twice toured New Zealand before, in 2012 and 2013, when they made a very good impression; Middle C reviewed their concerts at Waikanae.

Mozart dropped for Debussy
Their advertised programme had begun with Mozart’s early trio in G, K 49, but they changed that in favour of Debussy’s youthful trio of 1880, when he was 18. It wasn’t quite new to me as I’d heard a student group play it at the 2015 NZSM Queen’s Birthday Chamber Music Weekend in the Adam Concert Room at the school of music.

It was written during Debussy’s time teaching piano to the daughters of the wealthy Russian widow Nadezhda von Meck, who was most famous as Tchaikovsky’s patroness and close musical confidante for fourteen years. She apparently thought well of Debussy’s piece which she referred to as the ‘wonderful’ trio and it is thought to have inspired Tchaikovsky’s ‘wonderful’ piano trio, written just a year or so later.

While I was slightly curious about this immature creation then, the feeling of curiosity was replaced now by a certain disappointment at not discerning in the young Debussy much sign of the great talent and originality that was soon to emerge. It was quite pleasant, hinting at Fauré, with insipid melodies perhaps reflecting popular songs of the time. However, it worked nicely for the instruments, particularly between the two stringed instruments, and then between piano and cello. The second movement, Scherzo, had a certain character, employing pizzicato and staccato attractively; the Andante was somewhat dreamy and sentimental, though later showing some individuality.

The piece seemed to end with an appropriate close, but the music resumed just in time for the clapping not to start. The performance was polished however, the players clearly taking pains to draw all there was from the music and make the most of its limitations.

Beethoven’s Gassenhauer
Beethoven’s trio Op 11, nicknamed ‘Gassenhauer’, for the tune in the third movement that Beethoven took from an aria in a popular comic opera that was whistled in the street (‘Gasse’). It can hardly be called a youthful work as Beethoven was 27, but then he was not the sort of prodigy that Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn or Saint-Saëns were. It was scored originally for clarinet but also for violin. It’s a thoroughly high-spirited piece and the music is interestingly scored, resourceful and individual.

It was intriguing to compare the quality of the sentimentality evident in the second movement with what it meant for Debussy. Music may have become more complex harmonically, larger in scale and involving bigger orchestras and operatic forces by the late nineteenth century but the indefinable elements of cultivation, refinement and taste around 1800 were more elevated under the influence of the baroque and classical periods. By the end of the century as wider audiences, more bourgeois, emerged, the lighter genres of classical music became more shallow, frivolous and ephemeral.

So in the set of variations that comprise the last movement of the Beethoven, the players captured varied moods, between the reflective, the spirited, the fairly serious, culminating in a delightful fugal coda.

Mendelssohn’s piano into Kopp’s trio
The pianist Benjamin Kopp had been inspired by playing through Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words with the feeling that they somehow cried out to be arranged for piano trio. He confessed to taking various liberties with the pieces in the process in terms of fleshing out harmonic textures, changing rhythms and adding notes. Three were eventually chosen from a larger number of arrangements; they were Gondollied, WoO 10, Spring Song, Op 62 No 6 and the Op 31 No 1, E flat. In the end I wondered whether Gondollied wasn’t too decorated for its own comfort; the Spring Song sounded rather more tasteful and successful; and the last, blessed with one of Mendelssohn’s loveliest melodies, struck me as the most successful, handling the original with integrity. Certainly, all were played with great affection and though there was no claim to their forming a coherent piece of music they made an agreeable little suite.

Saint-Saëns
The Saint-Saëns piano trio is one of those pieces that has tended to be neglected as a result of a quite wide-spread determination to disparage his ranking as a great composer, dismissing his music as insubstantial, ephemeral. It too, like the Debussy, I heard played by students last year and then by the NZTrio in Upper Hutt in October.

Yes, one can find uninspired music in his large output, but there’s a lot more that deserves a better press. And this is one that contains a mixture of the good and the less interesting. The first movement contains some impressive, urgent writing involving an attractive melody, interestingly developed and distributed among the three instruments.

Then there are three movements that are indeed somewhat inconsistent. The second, Allegretto, outlives the strength of its ideas, the Andante rates as very agreeable, and the third movement, Grazioso poco allegro is, as its title suggests, graceful but not especially serious. But the fifth movement, Allegro, returns to music of much greater variety, buoyancy and accomplishment, and its performance substantiated its virtues: a skilful and successful fugal passage, a spacious Beethovenish episode in a Gallic spirit, employing an unpretentious though attractive melody, ending in a Coda that springs mild, unpredictable surprises.

It was an interesting concert but suffered a little from the lack of at least one important and more arresting work.

 

America: NZSO performances of brilliant new violin concerto plus Dvořák in New York and Reich in minimalist heaven

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fawzi Haimor with Anne Akiko Meyers (violin)

Steve Reich: Three Movements
Mason Bates: Violin Concerto
Dvořák: Symphony No 9 in E minor, Op 95 (‘From the New World’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 8 October, 7:30 pm

Once upon a time to have scheduled the New World Symphony would have guaranteed a pretty full house in spite of its being accompanied by unfamiliar music. But sometimes I think that as the years pass, the general public is becoming, not more open and adventurous, and simply ‘well-informed’ in the arts, and music too, but less in all those spheres.

And there are various reasons: slavery to the flat black screen, perhaps the cost of tickets, disagreeable weather outside, but most importantly, the lack of exposure on all popular radio and television channels, to anything but the most vacuous noises and sights of the tawdry, commercialised world of entertainment; and a school curriculum that avoids much real exposure to worthwhile music, or the other arts, including literature.

So there were too many empty seats for what turned out to be a splendid, enjoyable concert and the ‘happy few’ – I mean, really ‘quite a large number’ went pretty wild after each piece.

Steve Reich’s earlier New Zealand appearance
The first piece was a chance to recall the great days of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts (as it was then), in 1990, the first of the two under the direction of Chris Doig. One of the many exciting international visitors was Steve Reich and the Musicians, who played inter alia, Reich’s famous, holocaust-related Different Trains.

Perhaps trains have a special place in Reich’s life, for the piece played on Saturday, Three Movements, has inspired a performance on You Tube, played by the LSO under Michael Tilson Thomas, accompanied entirely by a film by Alessandro Manfredi featuring trains in Switzerland, some speeded up to accompany the outer fast  movements, some slowed for the middle movement. It’s a riveting, infectious experience, for a lover of both trains and music.

Three Movements for Orchestra
So was the NZSO’s performance. Coincidentally or calculatedly, the performance celebrated Reich’s 80th birthday, on 3 October.

The centre stage was occupied by two marimbas, two vibraphones and two pianos, which squeezed the strings to the sides; they were divided into two distinct string orchestras. It starts with marimbas and piano in fast alternating beats, with excitement created by shifting tonalities (accompanied in the You Tube clip as white and red, high-speed Swiss and occasional Deutsche Bahn passenger trains flash through, intensifying the excitement of the music). While the pulse remains steady, the rhythm changes to become more and more difficult to identify as sections of the orchestra handle overlapping harmonies and rhythms.

The middle movement runs at half the speed of the outer movements with vibraphones taking over the main rhythmic work and woodwinds, notably clarinets and oboes (winds are limited to pairs of each, but four horns and triple trumpets and trombones) dominate the colouring. The third movement resumes the speed of the first, but intensifies the experience as both marimbas and vibes and the pianos increase the density, loudness and rhythmic complexity. Reich draws attention to his penchant for rhythmic ambiguity and coins the term ‘canonic mensuration’ to describe the way his motifs appear simultaneously in two or more speeds. Even though it’s not easy to keep track of the pulses, they are undeniably fascinating and compelling.

American conductor Fawzi Haimor electrified the orchestra with gestures that were vivid and lucid; it was an occasion when the orchestra’s international quality and acumen were both in high demand and met the competition with formidable success.

Bates: Violin Concerto
Similar strengths were demanded by the next work by 39 year old Mason Bates who has made an impact in the United States. It was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin in 2012. Bates is composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC, having just completed five years in a similar role with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He followed the violin concerto with one for the cello; his first opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, will premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 2017.

It looks as if its performances in New Zealand are among the few so far outside the United States, if my Internet browsing reflects the situation. The violin concerto has been recorded by the London Symphony under Slatkin with Anne Akiko Meyers, the soloist in Wellington; and the European premiere was by the Orchestre national de Lyon last year. In the United States it’s been played by orchestras in Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and others no doubt that don’t appear on my computer screen.

And incidentally, Bates’s website and others highlight the three-city tour by the NZSO.

Bates is travelling the road that was paved by the minimalists, Glass, Reich and Riley, but his palette is rather more eclectic, not adhering to the habits of repetitiveness felt in the early minimalists. Like most younger composers who are more interested in giving audiences a good time than impressing musicologists, he avoids serialist dogma and complex, tuneless music such as his compatriots Morton Feldman or Elliott Carter produced.

I found an interesting observation in an American review of Bates’s music, touching the direction of classical music today:
“… classical music and its audiences love young dynamos who satisfy the urge for innovation while continuing the traditions of the classical canon. Bates presents cutting-edge concerts and writes big pieces for orchestra that are essentially 21st-century tone poems, or musical narratives.”
It’s not irrelevant that he moonlights as a DJ, is deep into electronica, and the sophisticated areas of pop music.

So what does the violin concerto sound like? What are its influences?
Though I didn’t find many distinct echoes of earlier composers, there were glimpses of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, inter alia, certain of the pulsating passages of his violin concerto; and you can hear sounds that, in a couple of decades from now, will define the time and place of this music. Thinking about violin concerto models, the fast movements of John Corigliano’s ‘Red Violin’ Concerto is not far away.

The piece doesn’t demand a Straussian or Mahlerian sized orchestra: strings numbered 14 first violins down to six basses; there’s a piano and some interesting percussion that I could hear but not see.

Bates and the primitive birds
Then there’s the illustrative aspect. Bates’s own notes describe how he fastened on depicting a chase between two mesozoic animals, of the Jurassic age (around 150 million years ago): the bird-like Archaeopteryx lithographica chasing a compsognathid (Compsognathus longipes) at night. Though I’m really not interested in dinosaurs, it was not hard to be fascinated by the music itself, listening to the contest between the two creatures, through frantic, pulsating, skittering sounds alternating with the violin’s rather gorgeously lyrical, soaring music.

There was, naturally, a very special feel in the violin’s part, since we were privileged to have the commissioner/dedicatee/performer of the premiere playing with the NZSO; they were indeed driven by the combination of Meyers’s intensity and soulfulness, and the elegant, energetic conducting of Haimor. While the orchestral part of the work is full of entertainment and uncluttered virtuosity, the violin was so constantly the centre of attention that it was too easy to miss the delights conspicuous in the orchestra.

The second movement, called ‘Lakebed Memories’, took us from the actual Jurassic age to viewing a mesozoic lakebed, perhaps from the present day, in a series of slow, falling phrases from the violin and semi-glissandi pizzicato from cellos and some curious sounds from percussion, e.g. crotales(?) and glockenspiel(?).

In the middle of the third movement the orchestra gave way entirely to the violinist who raced away with endless oscillating figures representing ‘The Rise of the Birds’, another opportunity for flight, breathless ascents, or peaceful gliding on up-draughts, as the by-now-familiar, beautiful soaring motif comes to dominate until the relatively matter-of-fact ending.

I doubt that the orchestral performance was any less brilliant and convincing that those by the premiering orchestra, Pittsburgh, and others that have played it. It was one of the most attractive and engaging pieces of contemporary music I’ve come across for a while.

The New World Symphony
After the interval, the ‘New World’ Symphony did not feel like a retreat to old-fashioned music, something one knew too well, that had become hackneyed. Though other composers like Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, of the period when Dvořák wrote it (the 1890s) have now come to dominate, to hear such a vibrant and vivid performance was to be reminded that it was no disgrace to have become more immediately popular than the other composers I mentioned.

The opening, extremely calm with strings and a telling clarinet note, and then a surprising, extra-fortissimo call to attention from Lenny Sakofsky’s hard-sticked timpani and Greg Hill’s horn. To watch conductor Haimor again, in main-stream repertoire (and here, no score), bending to the same emphases and gestures, the balletic movements that galvanised the auditorium in the first half in music of our day, made clear the essentially contemporary nature of the symphony. Every section of the orchestra, now at full strength – 16 first violins down to 8 basses – seemed to be electrified by the call to deliver a message of this kind: breathy, slow and quiet flute, velvety horns, and in the famous Largo tune, cor anglais and then bassoons, in playing that quite eliminated any sense of its being over-familiar.

And the Scherzo movement was alive with variety and subtlety, with scrupulous articulation everywhere. The Finale – con fuoco – further upped the emotional temperature where sudden switches of tempo, dynamics, discretion and brashness, brilliant orchestration and, as the programme note remarks, Dvořák’s unending melodic invention, create one of the most colourful and arousing of orchestral finales. An early experience of the symphony came to mind, hearing, in the late 1950s the opening of the Finale used as a sensational promotional tool in a sampler LP of the ‘new stereophonic recording technique’ , when the breathtaking opening assaulted the ears seemingly from every direction.

Not much has changed.
This concert will go down as one of the real highlights of musical 2016.

Adventures in great music both well-known and unknown, marks strong revival by Cantoris

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Cantoris conducted by Thomas Nikora

Sacred Music by D’Astorga and Mozart
D’Astorga: Stabat Mater
Mozart: Ave Verum Corpus, K 618; and Vesperae Solennes de confessore, K 339

Soloists: Olivia Marshall, Linden Loader, Jamie Young, Will King
Cantica Sacra Instrumental Ensemble of selected musicians

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 2 October, 3 pm

In many ways, an appealing way to design a programme: two of Mozart’s best-loved choral works and one obscure, but as it emerged, beautiful piece by an almost totally unknown composer. Emanuele d’Astorga was born in Sicily in 1680, in perhaps the most fruitful and brilliant decade in the whole history of western classical music – the decade of Vivaldi, Telemann, Rameau, Bach, Handel, Biber, Geminiani, Pachelbel, Domenico Scarlatti (who also divided his time between Italy, Spain, and Portugal; though Astorga lived in Spain at certain times, he lived mainly in Italy, travelled widely too).

Emanuele d’Astorga
Astorga inherited a Spanish barony with estates in Sicily (which was then under Spanish rule); Astorga is a town on the Camino de Santiago about 40km west of Leon in the province of that name. But there’s no evidence of his family’s residence there.

Thomas Nikora introduced the music but either he didn’t use the microphone or it wasn’t working properly for I caught little of it. Though the short account of Astorga’s life suggests that very little is known about him, browsing the internet, and even looking back to old sources such as the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica there is an entry that covers most of what is known today. The best account I’ve seen is a CD booklet note by English choral conductor Robert King accompanying his recording of the Stabat Mater.

D’Astorga’s Stabat Mater
The Stabat Mater was probably written earlier than Pergolesi’s (1736), based purely on stylistic grounds (I can find no confirmation of its first performance in 1713, as offered in the programme notes).

One’s first reaction is a comparison with the very popular Pergolesi work, and the feeling that while Astorga’s is contrapuntally more sophisticated, it hasn’t Pergolesi’s artless poignancy. Nevertheless, the instrumental introduction immediately showed a skilled and imaginative composer, capturing a calm melancholy, in playing that was reassuringly secure, if not blessed with the aching sounds that the best baroque ensembles produce.

Here was an orchestra of nine strings (led by Corrina Connor) plus the chamber organ played by Heather Easting; to find fault would be unhelpful and difficult. The most important thing to stress is the huge difference a competent, instrumental ensemble makes to the persuasiveness and integrity of choral music. Much as I enjoy organ music, it usually fails as a substitute for the instruments prescribed by the composer as choral accompaniment.

The first choral entry was characterised by rising chromatic lines giving signs of a well-rehearsed choir, with soprano Olivia Marshall, right from the first, handling her lines very well, especially in her bright, higher register. The weaving of the separate lines of the choral writing, and their nicely balanced performance, that frequently made it hard to decide where the actual melody was – all parts were of equal interest. The same went for the soloists; soprano, bass, then tenor entered in turn in the ‘O quam tristis’. There were some initial tonal weaknesses, but nothing worth mentioning. An early delight was the soprano-mezzo duet at the start of the charming, triple time ‘Quis est homo’; and later in that section the men had similar opportunity which they exploited splendidly; as did tenor Jamie Young and mezzo Linden Loader in short fugal duets in the ‘Fac me tecum’.

The varied treatment of solo parts were soon comfortable, and continued to be a most attractive feature of the work. Bass Will King was uniformly impressive, his voice flexible over a wide range and relished his final exhibition in the ¾ time ‘Fac me plagis’ to which one can almost dance.

There are moments where one hears touches of Handel, in the final ‘Christe’ – the Amen chorus, or of Vivaldi in some of the rapid quaver figures from the strings; none of that’s very remarkable, since, until the current age of obsession with ‘originality’ there was nothing to be ashamed about in composing in a way that reflected one’s own age and one’s most gifted predecessors. In fact the final chorus whose contributions were charmingly varied, perhaps not in a way that especially illuminated the text, made the music constantly interesting and delightful.

There are records of a few operas by Astorga, but only one act of Dafne survives. However, he also wrote perhaps 170 ‘chamber cantatas’, said to be very attractive. Judging by the great gifts evident revealed in the Stabat Mater, I look forward to their being explored and performed.

Mozart: Ave verum and Vesperae solennes
The second half of the concert was for Mozart: the little masterpiece of his last months, Ave verum corpus, and then the splendidly-named Vesperae solennes de confessore (It always intrigues me to resurrect my knowledge of Latin grammar to explain the varying endings of each word).

The touches of uncertainty in the orchestral introduction of the Ave verum only emphasised the feeling of reverence and awe the musicians might properly have felt as they approached this serene, forgiving, simply beautiful music (I speak not of the religious significance), but there was nothing lacking in the subdued and carefully articulated performance.

The ‘Solemn Vespers’ was Mozart’s last composition for the Salzburg Cathedral before he left for Vienna. However unpleasant was his relationship with the Prince Archbishop, Mozart did not carry his feelings into this wonderful work. The chance of hearing it on a Sunday evening at your local church would have made adherence to the Catholic Church richly rewarding, in fact irresistible, in the years before the liturgical changes of the 20th century.

Again, both orchestra, now joined by a couple of trumpets and percussion, and choir evinced a touch of nervousness which quickly dissipated. It’s not only the beautiful ‘Laudate dominum’ that is memorable, each section (all are based on Psalms) is inspired both by melody and its musical elaboration. The ‘Dixit Dominus’ is a choral piece in triple time, and the singing was lively, and words were often distinct; the four soloists took change in the ‘Confitebor’, with soprano Olivia Marshall prominent, and she was a particular ornament later, in the ‘Laudate Dominum’; but each, particularly tenor Jamie Young, made distinctive contributions. They all conversed attractively in the ‘Beatus Vir’, as the voices formed and reformed the musical patterns, Linden Loader leading at times; and the strings handled their striking phases well. The ‘Laudate pueri’ is characterised by the men’s and women’s voices moving separately, fugally, around a steady almost hypnotic rhythm in common time.

It’s interesting that, in its setting, the ‘Laudate Dominum’ seems not particularly to stand out, but simply takes its place as a moment of calm between more forthright movements; apart from the splendid soprano solo, one of its glories was way in which the last bars fell away to beyond pianissimo at the end. The ‘Magnificat’, the last movement, finally made trumpets and percussion conspicuous, and gave more attention to soloists, sometimes in duet, sometimes separately.

Cantoris has had its vicissitudes over the years, but this concert was a small triumph both on account of the important and great music chosen (too many choirs seek obscure but insignificant music, guided by some ‘theme’) and the evident confidence and energy that Thomas Nikora has injected into it.

 

 

Challenging and enterprising concert “Freedom and Captivity” and the like, from Nota Bene

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nota Bene conducted by Peter Walls
Organ: James Tibbles
NZSM Baroque Ensemble (Samantha Owens – oboe, Fleur Jackson – violin, Grant Baker and Sophie Acheson – violas, Rebecca Warnes and Corrina Connor – cellos)
Percussion: Sam Rich
Kapa haka: Fruen Samoa and Te Whanau Tahi; Kuia: Erina Daniels

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Saturday 1 October, 7:30 pm

This concert was entitled Freedom and Captivity, reflecting, in music and words, on the experience and problems faced in wars, in colonisation, in racism and other forms of oppression. A good example of what might still be to some, an improper mixing of art and politics (recall sport and politics a generation ago).

It is a worthy and fruitful topic which has inspired a lot of music and other arts, which can be discerned in all eras, particularly our own.

While all branches of the arts, especially literature, have always been intimately concerned with politics, and the visual arts only a little less so, music can easily exist, oblivious to politics.

Here, to make the point, music and readings were interspersed, handling many of the trials and tragedies of mankind: war, imprisonment, exile, cruelty, refugees…

Forced migration, from Biblical times
Forced migration has a long history, none more legendary than the expulsion of the Jews from Israel, and Psalm 113 was a fitting way to open the programme, assuming a universal approach to Biblical stories; this was presented in calm plainchant form sung by the women of the choir.

The readings were mixed, some, like the address of Volumnia from Coriolanus perhaps Shakespeare’s most profoundly political play with deep resonance for today, was an unfamiliar (to most) piece. Rebecca Blundell, a good soprano, came very close to capturing the full dramatic force of the mother’s plea to her son to desist from Assad-like killing of his own people.

Though amplification was evidently available, it was either not used or was inadequate and some of this and other readings were missed. An important part of any rehearsal is surely to test levels of audibility.

After the reading from Coriolanus, Arvo Pärt’s De Profundis (Psalm 130) was sung, a less specific but profound account of human persecution, which has been a rich source of inspiration by many composers and writers throughout European history. (A look at the Wikipedia entry on De Profundis is insightful, highly interesting; inter alia, there’s Shostakovich’s use in his song-cycle-like 14th Symphony of Garcia Lorca’s Spanish version of the Psalm, among many other poems dealing with mortality).

Pärt’s complex, tortured De Profundis is set in Latin for men’s choir, percussion and organ and was first performed in Kassel in 1981. His setting is far from the well-known, lucid pieces like Fratres or Spiegel im Spiegel or the Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.  It was a challenge to the choir and indeed it was not altogether defeated; the percussion in the shape of a big bass drum, and the increasingly prominent organ, with some fine bass voices left quite an impression.

The second reading was an extract from a Department of Labour report on the 4500 post-WW2 refugees arriving at Pahiatua, taken from Anne Beaglehole’s study, Refugee New Zealand: A Nation’s Response to Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Jenny Gould’s voice, with its normal New Zealand character, was well adapted to the subject. I guess the message was: for a population about a third of today’s, we took about six times the number of refugees in a year.

David Morriss is a more experienced speaker and his reading from magistrate John Gorst’s important, almost classic account of the wars in the Waikato: The Maori King; or, the story of our quarrel with the natives of New Zealand of 1864 was an interesting revelation of tolerant balance. It reported, in a tone that was distinctly critical of Government handling of the causes and course of the wars, on refugees from Maori villages near Auckland. It too was extracted from Anne Beaglehole’s Refugee New Zealand.

Virginia Earle read with unpretentious simplicity a touching, imaginative piece from Short Stories by Young Refugees in New Zealand (2008). (It was taken from a collection of such material edited by Fiona Kidman and Jeff Thomas).

It struck me at about this point that dimmer lighting would have been in the interest of the small-scale dramas told in both words and music.

There were two further readings, in the second half. First, Martin Luther King’s famous speech of 23 August 1963 urging pacifism, tolerance, turning-the-other-cheek, in the face of White abuse. Ray Coats, from the pulpit, made a splendid oratorical impact.

James Bertram: poet, journalist, scholar
Poet and university English lecturer, James Bertram was a 1930s correspondent in China and wartime prisoner in Japan; With admirable clarity and almost excess ‘expression’, John Chote read Bertram’s poem Home Thoughts from Abroad – Tokyo working party 1945 offered another view of displacement, alienation, violence and inhumanity.

(I reflect gratefully on Bertram’s lectures throughout my university years: he was one of the few who could make enlivening references to music, and all the arts, while discussing, for example, Milton; charismatic perhaps not, but a wondrously elegant and articulate lecturer with a phenomenal flair for springing a telling and picturesque quotation on his happy students).
Apologies for that self-indulgence.

After Oxford, (as a Rhodes Scholar, and where he was one of the James McNeish’s Peacocks – Dance of the Peacocks, with Dan Davin, Geoffrey Cox, Ian Milner and John Mulgan) Bertram was a journalist on an Oxford scholarship to China and Japan from 1936, and he became deeply involved in China in the war years: he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1941 and was lucky to survive. After the war he returned to Japan as adviser to the New Zealand delegation to the Far Eastern Commission; and this was the source of his poem. He came to the English Department of Victoria University College in 1947.

To return to the music, which was just as varied.
Samuel Sebastian Wesley was a grandson of hymn-writer Charles Wesley whose brother was Methodist Church founder John Wesley. A respected composer in his day, his work, The Wilderness, pitched a quartet of voices against the full choir, demonstrating how the weaknesses of individual voices are obscured when singing en masse. But though I tried to be open-minded I did not find the performance revelatory or the music other than rather insipid.

An excerpt from an opera-in-progress, Kia tu tonu; Tohu tells us by Gillian Karawe Whitehead on Parihaka was semi-staged. But its dramatic impact could only be guessed at from an excerpt where there was no chance for an audience to understand the thrust of the story or to form an impression of characters. Just who was who in the crowd in front of us eluded me, as did the significance of spreading the choir members around the side aisles and the rear of the church, or Thomas Nikora in the gallery.

And one can only form a view of the musical force of a large-scale work like this from a fuller performance where it’s possible to hear things twice, and in the proper context.

Mendelssohn’s late-in-life motet on the Nunc Dimittis (Herr, nun lässet du), proved an interesting and attractive find, employing again a quartet of soloists contrasted with the full choir; it might have been conventional, both musically and liturgically, but this performance did it justice.

If that was almost Mendelssohn’s last work, the next was said to be Bach’s first known cantata, Aus der Tiefe, rufe dich (BWV 131), the German version of De Profundis, written at Mühlhausen; though I have been under the impression that Christ lag in Todes Banden (BWV 4) also written in Mühlhausen, where he worked immediately before his first major position at Weimar, was his first cantata. Anyway, now in the company of a baroque oboe, prominent right at the start, this was an interesting performance revealing an already mature composer, with recognisable Bachian melodic characteristics and harmonic finger-prints. The second movement gave bass David Morriss a rewarding opportunity in a typical Bach arioso. A peaceful aria and chorale, Meine Seele wartet auf, in triple time, gave tenor Patrick Geddes, in good voice, solo exposure nicely accompanied by cello. This movement was particularly charming as the choir, very quietly and unobtrusively beneath the solo voice, sang a reflective text lamenting the poet’s sins. The cantata ended with a beautifully balanced chorus with alternate fast and slow passages, with more attractive oboe exposure.

After that, the Spirituals from Tippett’s A Child of our Time, seemed perhaps uncalled for. I confess to remaining rather indifferent to even these examples of Tippett arrangements and will refrain from comment; in any case it started to seem a long concert.

And I suppose it was inevitable that the most famous composition involving an exiled people, ‘Va pensiero’ from Nabucco, would be included. Given the size of the choir, they did justice to this great heavyweight chorus describing the horrible experiences of a nation, experiences suffered today by a different population, oppressed now by the victims of 2500 years before.

So there had been enough unusual and rewarding music, touching on many of the crises that proliferate today. In fact, director Peter Walls and the choir are to be congratulated for their courage in presenting material that might be troubling for some, bringing the light of humanity to some of today’s most intractable problems.

 

Mature performances by undergraduate NZSM guitar students at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts

Classical guitar students of the New Zealand School of Music
Dylan Solomon, Olivia Fetherston, Joel Baldwin, Rameka Tamaki, Amber Madriaga

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 28 September, 12:15 pm

This student recital was a showcase for an honours student (Solomon) set beside four first and second year students. The test for the audience might have been to have asked them to identify the levels of accomplishment of each, without knowing their place in the academic hierarchy. Without denigrating the splendid playing of Solomon, I was often surprised at both the skill and the interpretive insights displayed by the undergraduate students.

Because soprano saxophonist Kim Hunter had a conflicting engagement, Solomon substituted for the planned piece for saxophone and guitar by Giulianni, a solo guitar piece by James Mountain, Four Fountains, and the Gigue from Bach’s Lute Suite in C minor (BWV 997).

James Mountain is an Australian composer/guitarist, and this piece was inspired by Len Lye’s Four Fountains, a central installation at the Len Lye Centre in the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.

He began with such unobtrusive hand movements at the top of the strings, that I thought he was perhaps tuning in an unusual way. But it soon became clear that we were in flight and the ethereal sounds seemed to confirm the sense of a Len Lye creation. I have not yet got to see the new Len Lye gallery so I’ll satisfy myself with an extract from the gallery’s website:

“The new Len Lye Centre opened in July 2015 with an audience favourite: the gentle swaying Fountain, a bundle of rotating stainless-steel rods that twist, flex and shimmer. Among the earliest of Lye’s ‘tangible motion sculptures’, Fountain became a work he returned to throughout the 1960s and 1970s with numerous variations in collections around the world.

“Performing alongside three earlier versions of Fountain, a new member of this family of works arrived in 2015 with the 8-metre tall version – Fountain IV – engineered by the Len Lye Foundation based on Lye’s detailed design drawings and notes.”

Having made this connection, I would rather like to hear the piece again. There were two parts: the first an ethereal, spectral melody in a gently swaying motion; the second, more corporeal, with faster, rolling chords, yet still enigmatic and hypnotic with an endlessly repeated note in the centre of the surrounding sounds.

Solomon’s second piece was the Gigue from Bach’s Lute Suite in C minor. The authenticity of the lute suites and other pieces for the lute is a subject that the layman might well avoid. At one end of the controversy is the lack of evidence that Bach wrote any suites specifically for the lute, and that the so-called lute suites (BWV 995 – 1000), are arrangements of music written for other instruments. The water is muddied by transcriptions of, for example, Bach’s solo violin sonatas and partitas being entitled (by Hopkinson Smith for example) as ‘lute sonatas and partitas’.

It was a rather moderato version of a gigue which is often presented as a quicker dance, but then all the dances that came to be employed by composers over the centuries were treated in individual ways, without the focus primarily on dancing. The way this went was very attractive.

A couple of weeks earlier I’d attended the concert in the Adam Concert Room at Victoria University where Marek Pasieczny himself played; here, first-year student Olivia Fetherston played his Little Sonata of 2011; she reported that it was based to some extent on pieces by Hindemith and Schubert, though I didn’t recognise anything very reminiscent of the styles of either composer. It’s a carefully written work which does not, as the name suggests, outlive the interest of its material; it called for the player to give much attention to dynamics, vibrato, subtle tempo changes, interesting sequences of chords that are always an engaging aspect of the instrument’s resources, and flashes of flamenco-like strumming in the last movement. All played with impressive accuracy and sensitivity.

Joel Baldwin played three of Lilburn’s Canzonas. Though I’ve heard them played on guitar before, I had not heard the one presented as No 1 which is based on Sings Harry; perhaps it’s a changed sequence adopted for the guitar arrangements. The usual No 1 is that composed as incidental music, as were two of the others, for Ngaio Marsh’s famous Shakespeare productions for the Canterbury University College Drama Society: this one for Hamlet, and Joel played that second. I didn’t catch the origin of the third one – either for Marsh’s Othello, or for Maria Dronke’s reading of Rilke’s famous The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Rilke. They lie very well for the guitar, but are deceptively hard to capture, given Lilburnian elusiveness and reticence; and it’s no disgrace not to have mastered every subtlety. He followed with the Fugue from Bach’s solo violin sonata in G minor, BWV 1001, one of those transcribed via a lute arrangement. His playing was fluent and managed to find the outlines of the fugal workings clearly.

Rameka Tamaki played two contemporary pieces, the first by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer and the second by eminent French composer Roland Dyens. With Brouwer’s Danza del Altiplano Tamaki showed a surprisingly comfortable familiarity, as if he’d lived on the Altiplano (the high plateau straddling Bolivia, Peru and Chile) rather than Cuba. There was an instinctive feel for the rhythm and his fingering was agile; he seemed to rejoice in the nasal sound created by strumming close to the bridge.

Dyens’s famous Tango en Skaï, has cropped up in school of music recitals a few times over the years. For a young first year student, Rameka Tamaki exhibited an air of confidence and considerable virtuosity in the varied demands on each hand. Perhaps it’s a kind of send-up of the Argentinian tango and the playing commanded the complex rhythms and flourishes with seeming ease.

Finally Amber Madriaga. First she played the pair of minuets from Bach’s solo violin partita in E minor, BWV 1006, the first of which is a gentle piece, very exposed for a violinist though not that hard simply to play the notes and the same goes for the guitarist. The second minuet, a little more subdued in spirit, is usually played at the same tempo, but she emphasised its meditative character by slowing further; a satisfying performance.

I recalled Madriaga’s name from her participation in the university’s Young Musicians Programme in 2012 where she played the Tango en Skaï. Here she played, instead, Dyens’s Fuoco (from his Libra sonatina), a furiously virtuosic piece that was, perhaps, not technically perfect, but nevertheless exemplifying the admirable level of accomplishment that the school of music is achieving, specifically in guitar.

 

 

 

Annual Wellington Aria Contest final showcases some fine talent

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Regional Vocal Competitions: Final
(Hutt Valley Performing Arts Competition Society)

Adjudicator: Martin Snell
Finalists: Laura Loach, Elyse Hemara, Emily Mwila, Sophie Sparrow, Frederick Jones, Pasquale Orchard, Olivia Sheat, Joe Haddow
Accompanists: Catherine Norton and Mark Dorrell
Commentator: Georgia Jamieson Emms

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 18 September, 7:30 pm

This year eighteen singers entered for the annual aria contest (it used to be the Hutt Valley Aria, when there was also a Wellington-based contest, run by the Wellington Competitions Society which died in the 1970s).

Some names were more familiar to me than others. I had only recalled Laura Loach in a smaller role in last year’s Gondoliers from Wellington G&S Light Opera, but couldn’t recall her voice. Her first aria was ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca in which her large voice emerged both accurately but perhaps with rather more ferocity than pathos. Her second piece was Agathe’s beautiful ‘Leise, leise fromme Weise’ from Der Freischütz; it calls for quite marked contrasts, as it moves from the recitative-like ‘Wie nahte mir der Schlummer’, to the aria proper. Her voice was under nice control, even and subdued, then preparing a good contrast as the intensity builds to the big tune from the overture: ‘All meine Pulse schlagen, Und das Herz wallt ungestüm…’ which I thought was really fine.

Elyse Hemara’s first aria was one of Massenet’s loveliest from his little known Hérodiade, ‘Il est doux, il est bon’, that one only hears in anthologies by the likes of Kiri and Angela Gheorghiu. Intonation was a bit shaky to begin, but as she gained confidence there was sensitivity, and a sense that she meant what she was saying. Here she was in a quite different sort of role, having heard her as Lady Billows in the excerpt from Albert Herring a couple of weeks ago; but just as comvincing.

Like Massenet’s Hérodiade, I Vespri siciliani is not one of Verdi’s best known operas, but Elena’s fifth act aria, ‘Mercé, dilette amiche’, known as the ‘Bolero’, stands out in a somewhat laborious, if essentially Verdian score. Elyse, now in a rich deep purple dress, hinting at Roman aristocracy, shone in this bravura aria (no matter the missing top note), supported by Mark Dorrell’s scintillating piano.

I’d been impressed by Emily Mwila who sang Zerlina in both casts of Eternity Opera’s Don Giovanni: made for her. I was impressed that she’d tackle the only pre-Mozart aria in the Finals and she succeeded in expressing dignified grief in Handel’s Giulio Cesare (‘Piangero’); slightly desperate in the faster middle section, with accurate bravura flourishes.

For her second item, Emily also departed from the Italian repertory to which almost all the other finalists confined themselves: ‘Je veux vivre’, or the Waltz Song as it used to be called, from Roméo et Juliette. I admired Emily’s taste in dress, a subdued brocaded yellow. With teen-aged delirium she almost danced through her excitement at attending the ball where she’ll meet Romeo for the first time. Fully in command of her technique, it confirmed her radiant soubrette flair.

For the last year or so Georgia Jamieson Emms has introduced each item with amusing and pertinent remarks and sometimes a flippant precis of an opera plot which have added richly to the audience’s enjoyment. Her remarks about obscure works were particularly engaging.

I hadn’t come across the fourth finalist, Sophie Sparrow, before. Accompanied with colour and subtlety by Catherine Norton, she unearthed an aria from Mozart’s youthful La finta giardiniera, which I seem to recall, inconsequentially, as an opera in which Malvina Major had a principal role in the late 1980s. It was at La Monnaie, the national opera in Brussels, when her career was seriously taking off. ‘Gema la tortorella’ is sung by one Sandrina, the name assumed by the ‘fake gardener’. In truth, as Georgina hinted, it’s one of the more absurd opera plots, but contains lovely music; I wondered whether Miss Sparrow had picked an aria about a bird (a dove) deliberately (better known of course is Antonia’s aria in The Tales of Hoffmann ‘Elle a fui, la tourterelle’, and perhaps Stephano’s ‘Que fais-tu, blanche tourterelle?’ from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette). A fine bird simulation, with high staccato notes.

Her second choice was from an American opera that has become reasonably well known in the United States: Douglas Moore’s 1956 work, Baby Doe (not a nice story). It revealed a voice under very good control, again much of it lying high yet comfortably within her range, without becoming attenuated.

Sophie Sparrow was placed as runner-up by adjudicator Martin Snell.

Frederick Jones has a tenor voice of considerable purity and emotional range. I’ve come across him at the Opera School in Whanganui and in a couple of productions (Il Corsaro from the NZSM in 2013 and Der Rosenkavalier from Opera at Days Bay). He stuck to arias that exploited both his command of major tenor roles as well as strongly contrasted emotions : great happiness in the case of Alfredo in La traviata, and despair at becoming victim of a stupid masculine honour code in the case of Lensky in Eugene Onegin.

That he wore a dinner suit for both, in contrast to all the other singers who sought to match dress with the roles, clearly did him no harm. His voice was refined and polished and created, with limited hand or facial gestures, the emotion of each aria. Even so, it seemed to me that Alfredo’s words ‘bollenti spiriti’ lacked much real ecstasy. Lensky’s aria however, was full of helpless grief.

Jones was awarded the main prize, the $4000 Dame Malvina Major Foundation Wellington Aria Prize.

Pasquale Orchard has sung in at least a couple of G&S Light Opera’s productions; and she also reached for Der Freischütz, this time the aria from Agathe’s cousin Ännchen, ‘Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen’, her effort to relieve Agathe’s anxiety about Max’s chances in the shooting contest. She was in cheerful peasant gear, a green top and pink apron and she sang with even tone, investing it with a similar spirit.

Pasquale also sang Norina’s spunky aria from Don Pasquale (no pun intended). ‘Quel guardo il cavalieri’. Though she sang excellently, her voice showed more brilliance and accuracy than beauty in her high register.

Pasquale Orchard won the Rokfire prize for the most outstanding singer overall (strangely, a prize that seemed not to be mentioned in the programme).

She and the next singer, Olivia Sheat, had sung together as Frasquita and Mercedes in the Card Scene from Carmen at the NZSM opera excerpts concert 10 days ago.

Olivia Sheat’s first item was from Peter Grimes: the Embroidery Aria where Ellen sees the jersey that she had embroidered for Grimes’s apprentice who is presumed drowned. With every sign of natural dramatic talent, she captured the vein of confusion and enigmatic concern that invest not just this episode but the whole opera; her choice was no doubt a mark of her training at the New Zealand School of Music.

For her second aria Olivia also drew on Faust, with Marguérite’s Jewel Song, in which, with slightly excessive gestures, she displayed a well-supported voice in growing wonderment and susceptibility to the combined forces of avarice and passion.

Finally, Joseph Haddow, who was winner of the Robin Dumbell Memorial Cup for the young aria entrant with most potential, sang first ‘Ah, per sempre io ti perdei’ from I Puritani, and then the Catalogue aria from Don Giovanni.

I’d heard him a couple of weeks before singing Mozart’s Figaro in the School of Music’s concert of opera scenes. His is a well-founded baritone, a warm voice with a resonant quality, that handled the bravura aspect of the Bellini’s belcanto role well.

And the final offering of the evening, Leporello’s list of the Count’s conquests, is one of the most quintessential and well known arias. Though he didn’t hold the famous ‘catalogue’ in his hands, the hands and facial gestures, with even a touch of cynical sleeziness at the end were the marks of an instinctive singer.

So, as with every occasion when gifted young singers (and classical musicians in general) perform, one feels deep uneasiness at the ever-increasing numbers of fine young artists facing a steadily declining market, in a society that is led by a purportedly educated class that is largely unlettered and uncultivated in fields that separate the civilised from the barbarians.

In addition to the occasional reference in the above notes, I have to remark on the very supportive and artistically appropriate accompaniments from both Catherine Norton and Mark Dorrell.

It may be unorthodox to mention singers that I felt were a bit unlucky not to be named, either those among the Finalists or other entrants whom I’ve heard singing recently. Jamie Henare, heard as Leporello in Don Giovanni last month; Emily Mwila (Zerlina in the same production of Don Giovanni, as well as in the school of music’s recent ‘Scenes from opera’).

Three wonderful concerts on the day for Mozart and Brahms string quintets

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello) and James Dunham (viola)
(Chamber Music New Zealand)

Quintessence Mini Festival – 17 September
Concert 2:
Mozart: String Quintet No 5 in D, K 593
Brahms: String Quintet No 1 in F, Op 88

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 17 September, 3 pm 

A series of concerts, like this on Saturday, probably hasn’t been heard in Wellington since 1988 when the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts (as it was originally called) presented members of the Australia Ensemble (six of them), playing all six (not just the four we hear this weekend) of Mozart’s string quintets, plus Brahms’s two string sextets and his string quintet Op 111. It was sponsored by the Turnovsky Endowment Trust, at three concerts on separate evenings in the (then) State Opera House.

That marvellous occasion, in the second of the “REAL” international festivals that began in Wellington in 1986, remains vividly in memory. Just to refresh any skeptics: that was the year Nureyev featured at the Gala opening, when Rostropovich played with the NZSO, at one of three concerts conducted by both Rostropovich and Maxim Shostakovich; with concerts by Franz Bruggen’s Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century; Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain; the young Kronos Quartet. And there were daily concerts both at lunchtime and in the early evening by the best New Zealand musicians.

That festival, and the two, even better, run by Chris Doig in 1990 and 1992, which included Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Salome, and plenty of other great classical music, established a brilliant standard that matched the best overseas festivals. That high standard was maintained till about the end of the 1990s; since then the so-called festivals have been dominated by eviscerated, ephemeral spectacle and bizarre, popular-but-forgettable performances.

I was able to get to only the 3pm concert, the second one, with the penultimate Mozart quintet, in D, K 593, plus Brahms’s Op 88. (Missing from this series were Nos 1 and 2, K 174 of 1773 and K 405 of 1787).

It was perhaps too much to expect a very big audience, but the numbers were no disgrace.

Mozart’s D major quintet
Writers about the piece, including Frances Moore in the programme, fasten on the idea of a conversation between the cello and other instruments, a good way to describe much of what goes on in concerted music, and especially reflects the character of the Mozart in D major.

The opening Larghetto, led by Rolf Gjelsten’s cello, did lend a calmly meditative spirit that became rather more sprightly, even witty, later in the first movement, and while its mood is less weighty than the last quintet, K 614, it becomes musically complex and absorbing. The prevailing spirit of this quintet is gentle and beguiling and though the cello does indeed announce a philosophical, profoundly contemplative tone that might be expected to be maintained, it pursues a different path; its contrapuntal character is so subtle that it can virtually escape notice. The first movement is interesting in the way the Larghetto returns at the end.

In a quintet there is an inevitable tendency to listen for ways in which the extra viola (in some cases a cello) enriches the texture. One seeks for hints of favouritism for the first viola, here played by guest violist, James Dunham, but I wondered whether other ears might claim to, or really did, discern any superiority by one over the other, but although the two often had quite different melodic or harmonic roles, they were just as often affording each other support and comfort; their contributions were complementary even though Gillian Ansell’s instrument often seemed to be the dominant party.

The feeling of intimacy was most evident in the Adagio which, through its sheer beauty, came close to reflecting on life’s pains and disappointments. The players seemed sometimes to prolong the ‘rests’ between phrases reminding us that we cannot escape from the nature of humanity.

I often find myself reflecting on what was happening in the world as music was being written. Here, we could contemplate Mozart having learned of the French Revolution a few months before and the death in February 1790 of Emperor Joseph II who had been supportive of the arts: things that were bringing about profound economic and social changes, not just in France, but also in Austria and throughout Europe; as well as to Mozart’s well-being.

The Menuetto, with its joyous spirit, banishes any temptation to contemplate the wider world; the Trio offers each instrument opportunities for solos, typically, repeated, rising arpeggios. The same almost carefree spirit reigns in early pages of the Finale with the descending, chromatic flavoured scales that are like a mirror image of the rising arpeggios in the Minuet. But its real interest lies in the sophisticated counterpoint that arises after a couple of minutes, in what might be called the development part of the movement leading to a fugal passage where the chromatic scales rise and fall for a while, creating a delightful, relatively complex succession of references to earlier material.

The quintet created a wonderful sense of delight throughout, and the concluding phase continued to be elusive as fresh witty interventions by each of the instruments, individually and leap-frogging each other.

It seemed as if Mozart, and the five players understood it utterly, had held back proof of his genius till the very last page of this deceptively cheerful and straightforward quintet.

Brahms’s string quintet in F major
Brahms’s string quintets follow the same model as Mozart’s – doubling the viola rather than the cello as did Boccherini’s and Schubert’s only one (scholars note that Brahms didn’t come to the string quintet till some years after successful string quartets and sextets).

Op 88 was written at Brahms’s beloved summer retreat at Bad Ischl (near Salzburg) in 1882, almost a century after Mozart’s last year. Rolf Gjelsten spoke before the performance, mainly about the unusual second movement which combines the character of a slow movement and a scherzo, but he also managed to make amusing (I think, as I couldn’t hear it all) remarks about erotic qualities to be found in the sarabande which he’d written nearly 30 years earlier – Brahms’s enigmatic private life stimulates a lot of such speculation and anecdote.

The two violists changed places here, with Gillian Ansell at the right end of the group and James Dunham behind her, to the left.

The first viola really emerges only in the swaying, second theme almost waltz-like – perhaps ‘ländler’ would be more accurate, and I soon realise that Brahms is not intending listeners to be striving to pick up individual players and to spot possible details of iffy balance or soloistic flights, generally the obsession of people in the trade I pursue, a tendency that I usually try to avoid. The ensemble achieved admirable clarity and a lively feeling for rhythms and dynamic undulations.

The interesting second movement did repay attention through its several phases, with violins and occasionally the cello becoming more prominent, as the sarabande gives way to a gavotte rhythm and then reverts after a distinct pause. The two violas are supplied with phrases where they play in sort of duet, but these are unimportant details in music where Brahms had other ambitions and expectations from his listeners. Experts note the way the music moves from the starting key of C sharp minor to close in A major. It does create a meandering shape which doesn’t make it easy to follow, apart from simply allowing it to penetrate subliminally. More clarity arrives with the third movement which proceeds in a normal fashion and brings the quintet to a conventional close.

Brahms esteemed this quintet very highly, perhaps on account of the unusual structure of the second movement, but just as likely on account of the relationships between the parts of the first movement and the interplay of the instruments, that hardly follows conventional patterns in any of the three movements.

I regretted being unable to get to either of the other concerts to hear the other two Mozart quintets and the second Brahms quintet.

Perhaps we must await the arrival of a knowledgeable festival director with mature artistic tastes to revive Wellington’s wonderful festivals of the Chris Doig years to include music like this again.

Intriguing and largely successful Villani Piano Quartet recital at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Villani Piano Quartet: Flavio Villani (piano), Marko Pop Ristov (violin), Helen Bevin (viola), Sarah Spence (cello)
(Chamber Music Hutt Valley)

Mahler: Piano quartet in A minor
Schnittke: Piano Quartet, after Mahler
Brahms: Piano Quartet in G minor, Op 25

Little Theatre, Lower Hutt

Monday 12 September, 7:30 pm

Last Saturday’s subscription concert by Orchestra Wellington explored connections between Mahler, his wife, Alma, the unfinished tenth symphony, Alma’s lover of the time, the famous architect Walter Gropius, their daughter, Manon, born after Mahler’s death, and Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto written in memory of her death aged 18 (a bit sad that Berg’s compulsion to memorialise Manon’s death probably stopped him from completing Lulu). A further connection was that between Wilma Smith, Saturday’s violin soloist, and one of her teachers at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Louis Krasner, who gave the premiere of the Violin Concerto in 1935. Not many concerts can boast that range of spectacular associations.

Mahler in chamber music
This chamber music concert dwelt on more purely musical connections between Mahler and a later composer, without, to my knowledge, any especially erotic elements to the story. The later composer was Schnittke who was born 23 years after Mahler died, and who died in 1998. (Though he did overlap Alma Mahler’s life; she died in 1964).

As a student Mahler had begun to write a piano quartet of which only the first movement was found in 1960 in a box (I’m not sure whether there is any suggestion that he had actually completed it); however, a short sketch of a Scherzo was found in the same box.

Schnittke was attracted to it and rather than dealing with it as various musicologists had with the sketches of Mahler’s tenth symphony, he used it as an inspiration, or perhaps basis, for a piece that had far more similarities to his own music than to Mahler’s own.

Mahler’s first movement was very much the child of its time – the last quarter of the 19th century. After a somewhat tentative sounding opening, a distinctive, descending and somewhat chromatic melody arrives and lends the music a memorable character. The violin part is prominent, though all four instruments have interesting and engaging contributions. Balance was occasionally questionable, with the piano prominent in the somewhat excitable, climactic central part of the movement. The three stringed instruments enjoyed a sort of cadenza towards the end.

To Schnittke
Schnittke has become a name to conjure with in the post-Soviet era, alleged to be a sort of successor to Shostakovich though that must be meant merely as an artist whose musical impulses did not endear him to the Soviet authorities, and in fact put him at risk. With increasing ill-health, he left the USSR in 1990 to live in Hamburg, dying there in 1998. I think almost all the music that I’ve heard of Schnittke has been chamber music which I have not warmed to. However, I have also explored some of his large output of symphonic and other music and have been surprised to have been engrossed by it in a way that the chamber music has not. I wonder why our orchestras have not explored the symphonies, concerto grossos, concertos, choral works and music else. While he briefly experimented with serialism and was unfortunate to have the label ‘polystylism’ applied to his music generally, most of what I’ve heard in live performance has been remote from and much less interesting than the recorded music I’ve heard. That certainly applied to this piece, which struck me as an eccentric and unfortunate example of Schnittke the real composer.

The cello has something resembling Mahler’s melody with the other instruments circling round it, with the piano soon seeming to assert its right to be heard. The players attempted to elucidate the music before playing, choosing to excite interest by having pianist Villani show us what ‘clusters’ were like. I couldn’t decide whether Schnittke was being flippant and mocking Mahler, demonstrating his own gift for unravelling the mystery of an unfinished work through a series of unfulfilled references to scraps of the Mahler, handled by means of quasi-psychological processes and strict, sophisticated musical devices. For what it was worth, the players delivered a serious and competent performance of a piece that lies only on the fringe of the composer’s real musical achievements. I would urge those who have not explored Schnittke, to listen to the ever-expanding resources on You Tube on the Internet to be moved and enraptured by the real Schnittke.

Brahms Opus 25
The music I was really there to hear was Brahms’ Op 25 piano quartet. I confess to being a fully paid-up Brahms lover, and can’t even admit to understanding Schoenberg’s decision to orchestrate it because, he said, its density led to poor performances. Nevertheless, the Schoenberg version is an interesting achievement if a bit of a curiosity (though I seriously miss the piano part it in it), essentially about as satisfying as his arrangements in the other direction, of Strauss waltzes for chamber ensemble.

The opening phase is certainly an emphatic episode where the violin tune was here accompanied by a somewhat heavy piano, but which is soon followed by the lovely, full-blooded, undulating melody which really remains the heart of the movement. The second movement, labelled Intermezzo, is a sort of Scherzo and Trio, the first section in triple time, though without a pronounced danceable rhythm; the chief impulse in the early pages is its quaver triplets, while the Trio is quicker, in a triple time that often seems ambiguous. The performers are well on the way to gaining full confidence in Brahms’s devious turn of mind, as displayed in this movement.

The beautifully lyrical slow movement went well and the players created a small thrill with the arrival of the alla marcia rhythm borrowed from the second movement. The following subsidence to the calm opening part of the movement, is prolonged and there was some loss of intensity which I suspect is hard to avoid.

The finale, a Rondo in gypsy style, embeds the popularity of this quartet, and the combination of gypsy schmaltz and vigorous thrusting dance rhythms was effectively achieved. But chamber music is a genre that calls for prolonged years of playing together, to gain mastery of the qualities that allow an ensemble to recreate the greatest masterpieces in the classical repertoire; so it is always rewarding to hear a group that has achieved a high degree of skill and insight, though not yet at the level of the best international ensembles.

Though I had misgivings about the Schnittke, both the Mahler and the Brahms were works that deserved and got splendid, energetic and satisfying performances.

I should record that, on 28 August, the Villani Quartet gave a recital at St Andrew’s on The Terrace in Wellington, which was to have been reviewed here (not by me). It was a particularly interesting programme:
Frank Bridge: Phantasy Piano Quartet
Peteris Vasks: Piano Quartet
Schumann: Piano Quartet in E flat, Op 47
Alfred Hill: “The Sacred Mountain” (1932)
(the last two were changes from the originally advertised programme)