Category: Live performance

Diverting woodwinds a delight from first to last at St Andrew’s

Posted on by admin

New Zealand Music for Woodwind

Natalie Hunt (b. 1985)  Winter (Winter is dedicated to Debbie Rawson and the saxophone students of the New Zealand School of Music)
               Reuben Chin (alto saxophone) and Ben Hoadley (piano)
Philip Brownlee (b. 1971)  Stolen Time
Kamala Bain (recorder) and Ben Hoadley (dulcian)
Kenneth Young (b. 1955)  Elegy for Saxophone Quartet
               Saxcess: Debbie Rawson (soprano saxophone), Reuben Chin (alto saxophone), Simon Brew (tenor saxophone), Graham Hanify (baritone saxophone)
Gillian Whitehead (b. 1941)  Venetian Mornings
The Donizetti Trio: Luca Manghi (flute), Ben Hoadley (bassoon), David Kelly (piano)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 14 May 2014, 12:15 pm

This was a concert I headed to with simply no idea of what to expect. It proved to be a delight from first to last. All the works explored the less frequently heard registers and timbres of the various instruments involved, and all evoked moods of reflection and introspection that are not often associated with music for instruments like the saxophone family. It has always baffled me why “classical” composers should have so seldom used the delicious possibilities that these lovely instruments offer, and likewise the matchless grace and individuality of the cor anglais. But that’s another story; there were no cor anglais works here.

Natalie Hunt’s brief Winter piece saw the alto sax floating above the piano with lyrical, almost modal melodic lines that rose and fell in pitch and intensity like the in- and out-breaths of sudden fright followed by relief. Reuben Chin’s playing was beautifully tailored to the moods of the music, and Ben Hoadley’s accompaniment perfectly balanced to the solo line.

Stolen Time was given its first performance at this concert. “Philip Brownlee is a composer and sound artist based in Wellington. His musical interests include forming connections between recorded sound and instrumental performance, and between composed and improvised musics.” (Programme Notes). It was interesting to hear a modern work for two medieval instruments, particularly the lesser known dulcian. This is a Renaissance woodwind instrument with double reed and folded conical bore, more often called ‘curtal’ in English.

The predecessor of the modern bassoon, it flourished between 1550 and 1700, though it was probably invented earlier.  The piece unfolded as a delicate counterpoint between the two solo voices, opening with a spare unison melody that evoked, for me, images of Fiordland bush in the dead of night. There we can indeed steal time from our over-busy urban lives, and listen to the enquiring bird calls that cut into the matchless silence of the rainforest.  The recorder floated on top with light, trilling, fluid lines, over intermittent calls from a Kiwi exploring a few notes outside its normal range, and the occasional honk of a bittern. All closed into the night time silence with another spare, fading unison line…… I was left hoping that we will hear more of Philip Brownlee’s wind writing in future.

Kenneth Young provided some notes for the next work in the programme: “My Elegy for Saxophone Quartet was written especially for my good friends and colleagues of long-standing, Debbie Rawson and Graham Hanify. The melancholy and elegiac nature of saxophones, in general, had always been something I wanted to investigate and base a work on, so when Debbie asked me to pen a work for Saxcess this was very much on my mind as a concept. The real impetus came in 2010 when our family suffered the passing of a much-loved and valued member. It was a truly sad time and that sadness would seem to have found its way into this piece.”

The work opened with a melody from the soprano sax, where Debbie Rawson’s exquisite dulcet tone set the contemplative mood for the whole piece. This developed as a series of conversations between solo melodic lines for the various instruments, and solos accompanied by the rich warmth of the ensemble harmonies. Sadly we heard only a brief snatch from the solo baritone, whose rich warm timbre merits a whole solo work in its own right. The performance was marked by most sensitive playing, beautiful phrasing and the artistry of superb dynamic control. It closed with a final soprano line that faded into breathless silence……..

“Venetian Mornings”, writes Gillian Whitehead, “is dedicated to my dear friend Jack Body as a celebration of this 70th birthday. We first met while visiting Venice independently in the 1960’s. One night we went to hear Peter Maxwell Davies’s new work Vesalii Icones performed by Davies’s group the Pierrot Players. It was a very humid evening; we could hear continuous distant rumblings of thunder as we went into the concert hall and eventually a huge storm broke. We went onto emergency lighting during the piece. Jack introduced himself after the piece. When we left the hall, we discovered Venice had been cut off from the world, a tornado had come out of the sea, overturned a ferry and destroyed a camping ground. A number of people were killed – 12, maybe – but if it had been earlier or later, many more would have died. After that concert Jack and I would meet for breakfast each morning, and have been friends ever since.”  (Programme notes).

The work opened with a very beautiful baritone solo which passed to a pianissimo flute line as one imagined the city barely emerging from the morning mists of the lagoon. It became briefly more lively, but again retreated into soporific silence. The second episode was marked by more animated repetitive rhythms and see-sawing harmonies from the Trio, with melodic writing that was full of beautiful exchanges between the instruments. But the mists finally triumphed as the ending retreated into a fading pianissimo. I’m not sure this work would have been particularly meaningful without the programme notes; but with that background provided, the music vividly recalled all those long-forgotten memories of one’s OE in Venice years ago, when it really was mist over the awakening lagoon and not the stench of thick smog.

This event offered a wonderful opportunity to hear some very special Kiwi work, and I can do no better than to quote my colleague Lindis Taylor, who remarked: “I thought it was a lovely, adventurous little concert, particularly the Whitehead.” (though he would like to add that he found each of the pieces thoroughly diverting in totally disparate ways).

 

 

The Orpheus Choir – music of here, and now……

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orpheus Choir of Wellington presents
DREAMS LIE DEEPER
A concert dedicated to the Pike River Miners

Ross HARRIS – If Blood Be the Price
Dave DOBBYN – This Love
James McCARTHY – 17 Days

Dave Dobbyn (vocals and guitar)
Katherine McIndoe (soprano)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Wellington Young Voices
Lyrica Choir, Kelburn School
Wellington Brass Band

Christopher Clark (conductor for Harris)
Mark W.Dorrell (conductor for Dobbyn and McCarthy)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 10th May, 2014

I’m normally accustomed to encountering seemly, well-regulated conversational tones and discreet movements of habitually circumspect classical concertgoers at Michael Fowler Centre concerts. However, I was aware straightaway of something different and palpable in the air when entering the doors of the same venue on Saturday evening to attend the Orpheus Choir’s concert “Dreams lie Deeper”.

Here were vibrant swirlings of people thronging the foyer, staircases and mezzanine floor of the erstwhile concert venue, people whose dress and demeanour proclaimed their expectation of being witness to something which suggested promises of glamour and glitter – so, was I in the right place, or had I perhaps gotten my dates or the venue confused?

Amidst a sea of unfamiliar faces I caught sight of somebody I recognized, behind an official-looking table – “Ah, Peter!” he cheerfully hailed – “I was told to expect you…” – this was encouraging! –  “and I have here a ticket for you!” I took it gratefully, not REALLY expecting a kind of instant stylistic makeover, transforming my outer persona, but at least feeling that this talismanic touchstone had transferred a kind of “imprimatur” onto my presence – I was now one of the chosen, as it were……

As if I hadn’t been taken aback sufficiently at this stage, I caught my breath upon entering the auditorium – I haven’t been to a “pop” concert since my teenaged years (a gradually receding memory….) – but I fancied I recollected enough of those ambiences to glean that I was in for a different kind of concert experience to that which I’ve become accustomed. It was then that the thought “Will I be up to this task?” suddenly struck me!

It was all very theatrical – the choir was already seated on-stage, their figures outlined in the half-light and no more – the atmosphere was attenuated by what seemed like a kind of “nightclub haze”, though it obviously wasn’t cigarette smoke! Occasionally a billowing of freshly-conjured mist (probably dry-ice) would well up, thermal wonderland style (though not as aromatic!), catching the play of the spotlights and intensifying the mystery and ritualistic aspect of it all.

In the aisles were technical-looking people with what looked like television cameras and microphones on the ends of long poles. Some filming was going on already – it seemed as though people were being interviewed. A glance at my programme told me what was happening  –  that this concert, or at least part of it, was being filmed for television as well as being recorded by radio.  So it was, in effect, a kind of media event.

I guessed the subject matter of the music we were to hear was  largely what had compelled attention – the two New Zealand works scheduled were each inspired by a specific event involving mining activity. Ross Harris’s work consisted of settings to music of words written by poet Vincent O’Sullivan, dealing with the Waihi Miners’ Strike of 1912, during which a miner, Fred Evans, was clubbed to death by government vigilantes for allegedly shooting at a policeman during a demonstration – New Zealand’s first serious casualty of an industrial dispute.

Following this came Dave Dobbyn’s song “This Love”, written to commemorate the deaths of 29 miners in the 2010 Pike River mining disaster, on the West Coast. The singer wrote both words and music, and a supporting choral part was devised by the choir’s music director, Mark W.Dorrell.

The third item of the evening’s program was the work of an English composer, James McCarthy. Entitled “17 Days”, the work explored the events and associated emotions of people involved surrounding the collapse of a mine in northern Chile, also in 2010. Unlike what happened at Pike River the Chilean miners were rescued, word coming to the surface on the 17th day after the collapse that the men were still alive.

Wellington City Councillor Ray Ahipene-Mercer began proceedings by speaking to the audience, briefly telling us of his Welsh mining ancestry, and of his family’s involvement in mining in this country on the West Coast. The latter part of his karakia was expressed in Maori, both welcoming people from different part of the country to the concert, and farewelling the spirits of the dead, invoking the “mauri-ora” the “breath of life”, to come forth and give life to the gathering and the performances.

Ross Harris’s work came first, consisting of settings of words written by his long-time collaborator Vincent O’Sullivan. In seven separate sections, the work is inscribed “In memoriam: Fred Evans”, though none of the sections actually describes the events of the killing. In one of the songs, a brash, over-bright waltz with the title ‘Here’s a Toast!”, the brutal methods of the gangs formed by the anti-strike forces are compared with the methods of both Tsarist Russia and the British ruling class in dealing with protest or insurrection – so we have “Massey’s Cossacks” (the name of the New Zealand Prime Minister of the day), as well as a reference to the “Tory batons”, weapons associated with the murder of the unfortunate Fred Evans.

It seems to me that Ross Harris has deliberately gone for a more direct and unequivocal approach with this music – the tunes have an immediate and relatively unvarnished impact, matching Vincent O’Sullivan’s words in their relative economy and no-nonsense manner of expression – they could be called Workers’ Songs, in that they forcefully conveyed the Socialist ideologies of the miners and their unions, in sometimes brutal conflict with the established consortium of business interests supported by the Government of the time.

Vincent O’Sullivan used the strike’s best-known slogan in the work’s final setting, called “The Words on the Banner” – I actually remember these words from a photograph of the strikers which was displayed of the front cover of a book “THe Red and the Black” written in 1the 1970s about the strike – on a banner one could clearly read the words: “If blood be the price of your cursed wealth, Good God, we have bought it fair!” The directness of the writing of words and music was brought out with considerable impact by singers and instrumentalists under Christopher Clark’s focused direction.

Though the technical apparatus and technicians were a “presence” of sorts throughout these opening parts of the concert, they didn’t swing fully into action until Dave Dobbyn walked onto the stage to introduce his song “This Love”. There were ambient scintillations of lighting, colonnades of hues and colours bedecking the ceiling and walls of the auditorium, and (most disconcerting of all) a wondrously elongated “dinosaur-head” of a camera which, with neck protruding from its upstairs gallery “lair” swooped backwards and forwards over our heads like a curious brachiosaurus surveying a swampful of delicious succulents. I didn’t actually register any kind of rhythmic pattern to the beast’s – sorry, the CAMERA’S movements, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been.

Technical jiggery-pokery apart, Dave Dobbyn’s song was a direct and heartfelt appeal to the emotions to “honour our 29”. Before the song the singer read out the names of all those who had died in the mine and whose bodies are to this day unrecovered. The subsequent audience response to the singer’s, the choir’s and the accompanying musicians’ efforts was properly and palpably life-affirming.

With the departure of the “technical people” and the migration to another undisclosed swamp of our friendly brachiosaurus (having presumably captured the “frisson” of Dave Dobbyn’s live performance of his song) one could focus more readily on the music scheduled for the concert’s second half. This was James McCarthy’s “17 Days”, commissioned originally by London’s Crouch End Festival Chorus and premiered by them at the Barbican in 2012. Tonight’s was its first-ever performance outside of the UK.

McCarthy’s work used largely traditional, essentially tonal harmonies and melodic structures throughout. It was music that didn’t to my ears make any cathartic demands of an interpretive nature on either performers or listeners – there were no grinding, shattering, shell-shocked moments of terror, panic or bleak despair depicted in the writing for either voices or instruments. The evocations were more reflective than immediate, though some sequences of the music “told” instantly and effectively, such as  the rhythmic chattering of the children’s choir depicting the broken, piecemeal nature of the first news reports concerning the tragedy.

The texts chosen largely reinforced this reflectiveness (one of the poems, “Do Dreams lie Deeper?” by Charlotte Mews gave the work its title), though a different poet’s words later in the work brought forth what I thought the most interesting music from the composer – the poem “We live in mud” by Carol S.Lashof. In this work the all-pervading choking opacity of the mud, dirt and dust endured by the miners was contrasted with their thoughts of the radiance of their feelings for their loved ones above the ground, waiting. I thought this desperate love-song the most touching and telling moment of the piece, though Katherine McIndoe’s lovely solo soprano voice sounding from within the choir gave an added poignancy to parts of Charlotte Mews’ poem “A quoi bon dire”.

There was no doubting the work’s whole-heartedness at any given point – and the response by the forces, singers and instrumentalists, under Mark W. Dorrell’s enthusiastic direction was as radiant and forthright as could be imagined, with the Lyrica children’s voices in particular making finely-focused contributions to the setting of Emily Dickinson’s “Hope” such as with the words “And sweetest in the Gale is heard….” The performance deservedly brought forth at the concert’s conclusion enthusiastic acclaim from all sides.

 

 

 

James MacMillan conducts NZSO in his own and Cresswell’s music of the past twenty years

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by James MacMillan with Jonathan Lemalu (baritone)

Lyell Cresswell: The Clock Stops, settings of eleven poems by Fiona Farrell
James MacMillan: Woman of the Apocalypse
The Confession of Isobel Gowdie

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 9 May, 6:30 pm

The second of the pair of concerts from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra devoted to music of the past thirty years was a musical success, even though, again, it drew a smaller audience than the orchestra normally attracts. However, given the absence of any standard, familiar music in the programme, it was very encouraging, probably more than might be expected in most cities of comparable size in other parts of the world; and it won, particularly the final work, a noisy ovation with many bravos and a number coming to their feet.

Oddly, the programme note about Cresswell’s The Clock Stops didn’t refer directly to the subject of the poems – the physical and human impacts of the Christchurch earthquakes. It was chief executive Chris Blake’s foreword that mentioned Christchurch, though the language of the poems could easily be read as reflecting the disaster. The tone of the poems, each dealing in the most economical way with different aspects, found their ideal interpreter in the voice of Jonathan Lemalu, for it was the poetry that imposed itself on the composer’s imagination.

In fact, the music seemed to be constrained by the words, throughout the cycle. Not constrained perhaps, but giving rise to what sometimes seemed to me almost too detailed musical responses, and those responses were an orchestral canvas that was subtle, infinitely resourceful, surprising, loud, magically still.  Alongside the engrossing orchestral effects, the actual vocal line, often seeming rather in the nature of Sprechgesang, secondary to the less literal nature of non-vocal music which did the real work of expressing the wide-ranging experiences and emotions.  Each poem created its own unique sound world: ‘Fog’, with shimmering strings, under the image of ‘a woman waking’, while woodwinds echoed the words ‘The bird sings’, an image that returned later, as ‘the bird sings on a broken wall’.

In the poem ‘Map’, every word chiming on the short vowel ‘a’, supplied first an aggressive tone, and then the fragile sounds of two solo violins. The orchestra became transparent, movement absent, in ‘Lullabye’ with pizzicato strings and muted trumpet and Lemalu’s voice, in spite of his throat infection, shifted momentarily to a falsetto. In contrast, the image of ‘Downtown’ called Lemalu up staccato brass and then timpani as Lemalu’s voice coarsened in its low register. Two poems recalled the history of ancient cities that met either a violent end (Jericho) or disappeared under millennia of decay and conquest (Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia).

Each offered substance to the notion of time stopping, bringing the cycle to its strange end. The last words, ‘Tick, tock’, left one with a sense of futility in the face of human and terrestrial catastrophe.

The score called for an orchestra of great refinement and virtuosity, and MacMillan certainly found such an orchestra at hand.

Contrary to the announced programme, the interval was taken at that point and the two MacMillan works were played in the second half. That might have seemed tidy but it did not really serve the composer well. Though written twenty years apart (Gowdie in 1990 and Apocalypse in 2012), the fingerprints were similar. Cresswell’s scrupulous and discreetly used orchestral palette contrasted strikingly with the insistent and sometimes over-blown orchestration in MacMillan’s works.

MacMillan wrote that Woman of the Apocalypse was partly inspired by paintings ranging from Dürer and Rubens to Blake and Gustave Doré, each of whom treated the subject. Its five parts followed each other without break, each offering the reason for tempo and emotional contrast, like symphonic movements. Interest was held, up to a point, through the opportunities these pictorial-based ideas offered: battle, with ferocious timpani and side drums, brass and percussion fanfares, frantic scampering strings to depict the eagle’s wings, and finally her ascension to Paradise that ends with a sweeping Adagio-like passage. Yet the composer’s main concern seemed to be with the exploiting of orchestral colour and power, and while there were distinctive and striking passages and orchestral effects, in the end the work didn’t engage me emotionally, to leave a memorable musical impression.

The earlier work inspired by the torture and murder of Isobel Gowdie as a witch, with hideous barbarity in the 17th century engaged me rather more. It opens with haunting chords from clarinets, bassoons and horns before strings entered, evolving slowly in a way that was more recognizably symphonic. The brutality of her end, of course, provided the stuff of a more complex, agitated and drum-dominated narrative, though my notes remarked that the overwhelming intensity of the percussion, including three sets of drums/timpani at one point, was too much.  However, the intervening passages for violas and cellos, and then for celeste and tubular bells led to a calm, almost lyrical phase during which, rather movingly, the music simply fell away.

So I could understand how this work has gained renown, with many live performances and recordings.

However, at the concert’s end I found myself wondering whether larger numbers might come to a concert of new music if the programme had included one rather more familiar work of the past half century.

 

Remembering David – a Farquhar tribute from the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

REMEMBERING DAVID
A concert of music by David Farquhar (1928-2007)

Presentation curated by Jack Body
Music performed by staff of
Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music
Jenny Wollerman (soprano) / Martin Riseley (violin)
Jane Curry (guitar) / Jian Liu (piano)

Works:
Sonatina for piano (1950) / Three PIeces for Violin and Piano (1967)
Eleven Pieces from Black, White and Coloured for piano (1999-2002)
Swan Songs for voice and guitar (1983)
Six Movements from Ring Round the Moon for violin and piano (1953 arr. 1992)

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University, Kelburn

Thursday 8th May

This extremely timely concert was organized by Jack Body as a tribute to one of his former teaching and composing colleagues, David Farquhar, on the seventh anniversary of the latter’s death.

Born in Cambridge in 1928, David Farquhar was one of a group of fledgling composers which included Larry Pruden, Edwin Carr, Dorothea Franchi and Robert Burch who studied composition with Douglas Lilburn at the renowned Cambridge Summer Music School during the late 1940s. Afterwards, on completing his degree in Wellington at Victoria University, Farquhar then took himself to England, joining Burch, Carr and Pruden for two years of further composition studies at the Guildhall School of Music in London under the tutelage of Benjamin Frankel.

Returning to New Zealand in 1953, Farquhar joined Professor Frederick Page’s Music Department at Victoria University, managing to balance teaching duties with composition, and producing at least one landmark piece of home-grown music along the way – the Dance Suite for small orchestra, “RIng Round the Moon” written to accompany a stage production by the New Zealand Players. Another work which achieved something of a public profile, albeit briefly, was the 1962 opera “A Unicorn For Christmas”, performed for Queen Elizabeth during a 1963 Royal Visit.

Of course, “Ring Round the Moon” in its various guises has captured people’s affections like none other of Farquhar’s works – I think partly because it doesn’t have any of the slight austerity that seems to me, rightly or wrongly, to be hung about the neck of much of the composer’s output. Even so, there’s so much more of Farquhar’s music which ought to be better-known, some of which we were able to hear performed in this concert.

Other pieces – the most shamefully-neglected of which I think is the First Symphony – await their turn in the scheme of things. Farquhar wasn’t a self-promoter of his music, unlike his contemporary, Ted Carr, though the music of both has entered that realm of curious neglect which composers Ross Harris and Jack Body touched upon in a radio interview prior to the Farquhar concert.

There’s grown up a kind of “lost generation” of New Zealand music, being the work of composers who came immediately after Douglas Lilburn, a list including, of course, David Farquhar, and (as Jack Body pointed out) that of HIS teacher, Ronald Tremain.  Yes, one or two works by these people did “cut through” the Sleeping-Beauty-like thicket and get themselves established – besides “Ring Round the Moon” one thinks of Larry Pruden’s “Harbour Nocturne” as a kind of “Kiwi classic”. And one remembers both Farquhar’s Third Symphony and Pruden’s String Trio being performed in Wellington, well, relatively recently.

But apart from these good deeds shining out like candlelight in a naughty world, the gloom that’s here overtaken the compositional output of people such as the aforementioned Ted Carr and Ronald Tremain, as well as that of Robert Burch and Dorothea Franchi, not to mention slightly later figures like John Rimmer and Kit Powell, has been pretty London-foggish. Another figure whom I’d include is Christchurch’s John Ritchie, whose music seems to get little more than parochial attention, when there are pieces by him which should be well established in our regular concert programs.

Perhaps, as Ross Harris seemed to me to suggest, this process of neglect has a kind of inevitability – like T.S. Eliot’s cat, “The Rum Tum Tugger”, who ” will do what he do do, and there’s no doing anything about it!” In which case, the same process obviously creates in time a kind of need to fill the void, which in turn propagates concerts like the present one – thanks, of course, here, to that “nurseryman extraordinaire”, Jack Body.

As well, there’s a current crop of performers who are ready, willing and certainly able to assist with whatever rehabilitation process is mooted, as was demonstrated to us in the Adam Concert Room on this occasion. After Jack Body’s welcoming speech, the concert proper began with a Sonatina for piano, dating from 1950, written by Farquhar after he’d left New Zealand to take up studies in the UK at Cambridge University. A note in the program told us the the work was published only in 2009 by Waiteata Music Press!

In this three-movement work, pianist Jian Liu revelled in the first part’s explorations of keyboard timbres – at first, brief phrases created a somewhat restless feeling, though the colourings held the angularities together. Then the music gravitated towards the lower piano registers, less agitated in effect, but deeper and slower, almost leviathan-like – not menacing, but sombre and sonorous, with upward irruptions of impulse keeping a kind of spatial awareness of things alive. These bright, glint-like sequences led to a quiet, enigmatic coda.

The second movement, marked Andante, I found almost ritual-like in its step-wise aspect, with an accompanying flourish, the latter following the melody as a train follows a bride’s dress – counterpointing voices played hide-and-seek, the pursuers then throwing their victims in the air to sparkle and scintillate before coming to earth and taking up the stepwise gait again, the flourish somehow detaching itself and leaving us with a piquant impression. The finale’s running, angular figurations were brilliantly activated by Liu, whose energies exuberantly realized the toccata-like middle section, and, after a breath-holding pause, signalled the end with a grand flourish.

I scribbled lots of notes during the next item, the 1967 Three Pieces for Violin and Piano – however, the marking for the first movement, “Improvisando”, says it all, really. I was reminded here of my own youthful, awkwardly shy attempts to engage girls I fancied in conversation, by the piano’s fitful, broken fanfare-like figurations, to which the violin responded with edgy, distant held notes, frequently with harmonics and occasionally punctuating its iciness with impatient, dismissive gestures.

I’m not sure whether the second movement’s “Pizzicato” represented a kind of thawing-out of relations, but the pianist’s plucking of the strings in the piano’s body and activating the lowest ones with a timpanist’s stick seemed to accord more readily with the violinist’s pizzicato notes at first, the increased engagement continuing with the violinist’s fly-buzzing sonorities enjoying the pianist’s strumming of the instrument’s strings. The final piece, “Risoluto” had fanfares (violin) and strumming harps (piano) each player demonstrating a kind of determination suggested by the music’s title, the pianist at one point knocking on the instrument’s body with his knuckles, and the violinist amplifying the fanfare figures before skittishly delivering an abrupt payoff.

Then came the first of two exerpted brackets from a piano solo collection called “Black, White and Coloured” – a typical Farquhar-ish exploration of the different characteristics of music written using either white or black piano keys and their treble/bass/inverted combinations. The first “bracket” was dominated by song, realizations of Negro Spirituals and of songs by Gershwin amongst the items. While finding the idea interesting, I thought some of the pieces too skeletal and bloodless compared with the originals, especially the Negro Spirituals – had I not known the pieces’ origins, I wouldn’t have missed those bluesy intensities put across by various great singers I could recall in my memory, and perhaps given the composer more credit for his relative austerities.

Similarly in the second set I thought the idea worked better the more obscure the music – so while I thought the opening “Silver-grey moonlight” too simplistic in its treatment of Clair de lune, the famous folk-melody, some of the others worked well, though there seemed a reluctance on the composer’s part to do very much with the basic thematic material. I thought the most successful realizations in the second set were “Chorale Prelude” and “Clouds”, in particular, the latter, which brought from Farquhar’s sensitivity to detail some timeless, floating ambiences of beauty and nostalgia.

More successful – in fact, spell-binding in effect – was the song-cycle “Swan Songs”, a 1983 work for voice and guitar, performed here by soprano Jenny Wollerman and guitarist Jane Curry. Framing the cycle at its beginning, middle and end were quotations from Orlando Gibbons’ well-known madrigal “The Silver Swan”, hand-in-glove with traditional song, and texts from Carmina Burana as well as by the composer. On the face of things, a kind of hotchpotch, but in performance, a magical evocation of worlds within worlds, bringing together instances of creative impulses leapfrogging over centuries to make heartfelt connections, one I found delightful, piquant and extremely moving.

With sonorous and evocative guitar-playing from Jane Curry setting the scene, Orlando Gibbons’ evocation of beauty brought forth spoken exclamation at first from the singer, and then, briefly, melody. Together with limpid guitar notes  the singer continued through through a section of the traditional “Swan swam”, evoking stillness and grave beauty. The third section, “Anxieties and Hopes” used the composer’s own text, a setting urgent and anxious, with darting impulses and broken figurations, guitar and voice overlapping, breaking off for a sequence of soaring, impassioned beauty before returning to the previous agitated state of things.

Gibbons’ music returned as a kind of “quiet centre” of things, before the work took a somewhat bizarre turn, quoting the “roasted swan” text from Carmina Burana (also famously used by Carl Orff in you-know-which-work!) – a droll lament for the sweetness of times past, affectingly sung and played by Jenny Wollerman and Jane Curry. After a brief reprise of the singer’s call to the swan, over a guitar ostinato, Gibbons’ music made its concluding appearance, the singer arching the voice over a lovely guitar solo with the words “Farewell, joy……” – brief, and ambient, and beautiful.

Before the programme’s final music item, composer Ross Harris contributed a brief but moving reminiscence of David Farquhar, constructing an engaging picture of a colleague with a number of distinctive traits – a concise and ordered thinker and creative spirit, responsive to challenges, (fiercely competitive especially when playing tennis, which was a great love – in fact the end of tennis for Farquhar seemed to symbolize the end of life…..). Ross Harris talked about a composing legacy of finely crafted music, describing its composer as “ultimately modest”.

The evening’s final, appropriately-chosen item (how COULD it have been left out?) was the violin-and-piano transcription of “Ring Round the Moon”, an arrangement made by the composer for the concertmaster of the NZSO, Isador Saslav, in 1992. I remember, a goodly number of  years ago, introducing myself to David Farquhar as an “admirer” of the work, and the composer graciously acknowledging the gesture by way of seizing his then wife Raydia D’Elsa around the waist and dancing a few steps with her in front of me, explaining that they would dance their way through the music he composed at the time to “try it out”. I’m sure the composer would, had he been present, have relished the playing of violinist Martin Riesley and pianist Jian Liu, despite his well-documented frustration at what he considered the piece’s disproportionate popularity.

Somehow, the immediacy of the violin-and-piano textures brought this memory of our meeting back to me more readily than did any of the orchestral versions of the dances – everything came across as more flavoursome than I ever before remembered, the violin’s piquant re-echoings of the linking motif at the conclusions of some of the pieces, the crunchy harmonies of the Galop, the bar-room atmosphere of the Tango, complete with exhausted-on-their-feet couples, the contrariwise harmonies in the Trio of the Polka, and the alterations between instruments in the Two-Step, complete with the link-motif’s lovely “falling-down-the-slope” effect. To finish, the Finale was encored, the music in this performance as angular, chunky, exuberant and wonderful as ever.

For those people who’ve read to this point, my humble apologies for the lengthy review! – but I hope you’ll conclude from all of this that Jack Body’s and the musicians’ efforts on behalf of David Farquhar’s music were eminently worthwhile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Highly attractive lunchtime guitar recital at St Andrew’s

Posted on by admin

Owen Moriarty, solo guitar

Villanesca (Spanish Dance No.4) arr: Owen Moriarty, by Enrique Granados
Sevilla (from Suite Espanola Op.47) arr: Owen Moriarty, Isaac Albeniz
Staendchen  arr: J.K.Mertz, by Schubert 
Sonata in A minor, Op. 1, No. 4 (HWV 362) arr: D. Russell by Handel
Recuerdos de la Alhambra, by Francisco Tarrega
Laments, Dances and Lullabies, by Miroslav Tadic  

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace, Wellington

Wednesday 7 May 2014, 12:15 pm

This was a most attractive programme, offering a selection from some of the best original music and arrangements for classical guitar. The Villanesca by Granados opened with an almost inaudible pianissimo that built up gradually in volume with astonishing control as Owen Moriarty revealed the intricate, opposing melodic  lines of the writing, then allowed them to recede gradually into breathless silence at the conclusion.

The Albeniz Sevilla, one of the best known works in the repertoire, was by contrast given a very straightforward, almost pedestrian reading in which  it would have been good to hear more of the inner melodies in the outer sections of the piece.

In the arrangement of Schubert’s well known Ständchen (Serenade), Mertz draws on both the original song and Liszt’s solo piano version. Owen Moriarty played the work on a smaller C19th guitar  that evoked a very intimate performance in some private setting for the loved one alone. He crafted the delicacy of the vocal melody with exquisite tenderness, and the interplay of upper and lower voices was quite beautiful in the second section.

The Handel Sonata in A Minor was originally written for recorder and continuo, and was presented here in a very satisfying transcription  by renowned guitarist David Russell. As the programme noted, “this excellent arrangement helps to highlight some of the beautiful melodic lines and ..…harmonic and
rhythmic complexities contained within the piece”. Opposing voices within the texture were always beautifully and clearly enunciated, particularly in the opening Larghetto and the two Allegro movements, with the lively and attractive finale rounding off a most rewarding performance.

Tarrega’s Recuerdos (Memories) de la Alhambra may well be the most famous and well loved piece in the solo guitar repertoire, and Owen Moriarty’s playing showed why. His delicate phrasing, and beautifully balanced interplay of melody and “accompaniment” were exquisite, and one sensed the profound appreciation of every listener in the audience.

The Tadic works were a complete contrast, and full of creative colour and artistry. The opening Makenonsko Devojce (Macedonian Woman) was in rather modal tonalities, and its haunting lines, so expressively played, evoked all the longing and heartache of lost love. The Rustemul  burst into life  with the swirling melodies that are typical of this lively Romanian village dance form, and Owen Moriarty made most effective play on the instrument’s different timbres as the piece moved through its varied repetitions. The final Walk Dance was anything but a walk: it catapulted into frenetic 11/8 rhythms “based on a traditional Macedonian dance called Kalajdzisko oro (coppersmith’s dance)” (Programme Notes). It was the perfect choice to showcase Owen Moriarty’s astonishing technical agility on the instrument, and rounded off the programme with great panache.

This was a most rewarding recital from an artist who consistently opens up the joys of the guitar repertoire to appreciative audiences around the country and abroad. My only reservation was the fact that he made no concessions to the volume of the space, performing always at levels consistent with the intimate settings for which much of the music was originally written. While this is doubtless true to some of the music’s intentions, it can make a performance less than satisfying for a modern audience in larger spaces. Some of the exquisite pianissimi were virtually inaudible even in the third row back – is there an argument here for discreet and thoughtful amplification in the larger settings of twenty first century venues??

 

MFC proves fine venue for superb string quartet plus clarinet concert

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Chamber Music New Zealand

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman, violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello), James Campbell, clarinet

Weber: Clarinet Quintet in B flat, Op. 34
Brahms: String Quartet no.3 in B flat, Op. 67
Tabea Squire: ‘Jet lag’ for string quartet
Mozart: Quintet in A for clarinet and strings, K. 581

Michael Fowler Centre

Tuesday, 6 May 2014, 7:30 pm

The gorgeous opening of the Weber quintet told the audience that we were in for a treat of mellifluous tonalities and contrasting sonorities.  Here was a wonderful programme of music by clarinet-loving composers.

Any concerns I had about chamber music in the Michael Fowler Centre were quickly dissipated.  Admittedly, I was seated only seven rows from the front; a colleague seated elsewhere did not find the acoustic as satisfactory.  The use of a lower platform in front of the stage assisted considerably in projecting the sound.  Upstairs and the extreme sides of the downstairs were closed off, concentrating the good-sized audience in the remaining areas, providing a more intimate ‘chamber’ than would otherwise be the case.  However, others told me that they, like me, find the seats too low, the arm-rests too high and hard, and the low backs to the seats frustrating to the wish to stretch one’s legs out in front.

The sparkling allegro that followed the slow opening of the Weber work had each instrument showing what it could do, but especially the athletic clarinet of James Campbell.  Weber certainly demonstrates the range of the instrument.  The normally utterly reliable New Zealand String Quartet lapsed a little in intonation early on but this was most unusual.

The second movement, Fantasia: adagio, revealed the subtlety of tone that Campbell could obtain from his instrument; his pianissimo playing was quite remarkable.  I don’t believe I have ever heard such quiet, yet warm tones from the clarinet.

The Menuetto that followed was by turns gracious and lively, and gave plenty of opportunity for the clarinet to shine in a variety of delightful melodies, supported by rich harmonies from the strings.  Rapid passage work from the clarinet was replete with excitement.

The final movement, Rondo: allegro gave Campbell the chance for virtuosic display as he traversed the wide range of his instrument. In an interview on radio earlier in the week he had described the Weber work as being operatic.  It is music he has played with the New Zealand String Quartet off and on over quite a long period.  It was a thoroughly masterful and enjoyable performance.

Brahms followed: not the clarinet quintet described in the notes I had been sent by email (they were the notes for concerts in some other centres; Weber was not included either), but his third string quartet.  It was introduced by Gillian Ansell, who remarked on how unusual it was for them to play two succeeding works in the same key, and told us that this had been Brahms’s own favourite of his chamber works.

The superb balance between the instruments was very apparent in the first movement, especially.  This had not been so much the case in the Weber, which was more like a mini-concerto for clarinet and strings much of the time.  Yet the Brahms was full of melody.  After the vivace came the sombre yet calm andante, at first featuring opulent harmonies underpinning a felicitous violin solo, and later a sublime ending.

There followed a third movement agitato (allegretto non troppo) and trio, that began with strong, warm-toned viola playing.  There were many musical ideas; the trio was lyrical and slightly bittersweet.  The poco allegretto con variazioni finale was based on a folksy theme.  The variations’ intricacies made a wonderful tapestry of delicate threads interweaving.  Their inventive qualities ran through a gamut of moods.

A surprise short item before the Mozart quintet brought us a piece commissioned by the New Zealand String Quartet that might have been topical for the visiting clarinettist: Jet lag by talented young violinist and composer Tabea Squire.  It began quite percussively, and moved through passages using much pizzicato and harmonics.  Much of the writing seemed dislocated – as you would feel when jetlagged.   The effect was quite amusing, and showed considerable skill and confidence.

Now to the pièce de resistance.  In introducing the Mozart, James Campbell said it was one of the greatest works for clarinet.  He told us that Stadler, for whom it was written, liked playing in the lower register, and was not an egotist like Baermann, for whom Weber wrote his work.  The programme note informed us that Weber was the cousin of Constanza, Mozart’s wife, and that he was inspired by this work.

The phrasing of the opening theme on the strings was varied in the repetition of the passage; an enchanting feature.  The wonderful melody that follows, first on violin and then on clarinet, creates a tug at the heart-strings.  The harmonies from the other instruments are equally delicious.  There is something intensely satisfying about this music.  Campbell’s control of timbre and dynamics is most impressive, and produces a thoroughly musical result.  Here is a musician who gets to the core of the music.  His playing reveals wonderful nuances, not only of his technique, but more importantly of the character of the composers’ writing.

The calm beauty of the apparently simple Larghetto second movement is nevertheless quite overwhelming.  Words, after all, cannot describe music adequately.  The long phrases are akin to perfection.  The muted violins acted as a foil for the beautifully controlled clarinet.  The strings were played with a minimum of vibrato; they sounded just right for the mood as well as for the period.  Despite the sotto voce nature of the movement, it was full of character.

The Menuetto introduced a livelier element, though it was still a gracious eighteenth century dance.  The allegretto con variazioni finale was sprightly, and classically proportioned, but certainly not formulaic.  Lovely legato passages continued until the clarinet jumped in with some gymnastic jollifications.  Again, all was controlled and exquisitely phrased.  The clarinet was never shrill, and blended supremely well with the other instruments.  The joyous ending completed a concert that was a fulfilling musical highlight.

 

Lower Hutt Little Theatre gets new Steinway, but several much cheaper improvements still needed

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

A new Steinway for Lower Hutt

Welcome reception and concert for the new piano at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Sunday 4 May, 2014

On Sunday friends of the piano were invited to see and hear the new Steinway that had been bought for the Lower Hutt Little Theatre. Replacing the earlier Steinway which had been used in the Little Theatre since the 1950s, it had arrived and been run-in.

Ten years ago at the urging of players, teachers and audiences the Hutt City Council set about building up a fund for the purchase of a new piano, and a charitable trust was set up in parallel to encourage individual contributions. Committee members of Chamber Music Hutt Valley have been vigorous and prominent in promoting the whole exercise.

Among other contributions were a large number of small donations from individuals and small businesses; and particular value was placed on a ‘Kids for Keys’ piano playing initiative, organised by local music teachers. And individual keys were up for purchase: there are still some for sale.

Concerts by the Hutt Valley Orchestra, Chamber Music Hutt Valley and the newly established Chopin Club also yielded funds for the piano.

While the old model D piano continued to serve pretty well, and most professional pianists tended to be discreetly charitable about its sound and the problems of producing top-class performances, there was little dispute about the need for a new instrument.

The target has nearly been reached through the $60,000 raised by donations to the Trust and most of the balance from the City Council with the proceeds of the sale of the old piano, to meet the $170,000 cost of the new piano.

However, the Trust still needs $7000 to meet its commitment.

After a formal welcome with speeches from Mayor Ray Wallace and the Chair of the Trust, Joy Baird, a varied programme was presented. Poulenc’s Sonata for Piano, four hands, began the concert, with Diedre Irons and Richard Mapp at the keyboard. It was an excellent demonstration of the piano’s dynamic and tonal range, and sensitivity. A virtually unknown piece by Alfred Hill followed: his early Miniature Trio for violin, cello and piano, the violin and piano parts taken by pupils at Hutt Valley High School, Hayden Nickel and Nicholas Kovacev.

Two students of piano teacher and composer Susan Beresford, Thomas Minot and Hannah Louis, played three of her compositions plus a remarkably ebullient piece, Carnival, by Thomas. Pianist Ludwig Treviranus who was a high school student in the Hutt Valley, studied music with Rae de Lisle at Auckland University and took his doctorate at Florida State University, has been a loyal friend of music in both Upper and Lower Hutt. He and his jazz group played a set of jazz pieces as well as the Alla Turca movement from Mozart’s Sonata in A major.

Finally, Diedre Irons showed the piano’s responsiveness to Chopin’s ‘Heroic’ Polonaise (Op 53).

So far, so good.

But in spite of the upgrade of the auditorium and back-stage a year or so ago, and now the new piano, the ambience of the foyer remains bleak and unwelcoming, even though a café has been created and doors now give access to the Library. There are no comfortable seats for the audience before, during the interval and after a concert.

There is no décor of any kind, not even places on which posters about forthcoming concerts could be fixed. The walls could well be used to illustrate aspects of musical activities in the valley since the Little Theatre was built, making use of archival photographs which I’m sure could be unearthed.  And racks could be provided for brochures and flyers advertising future concerts and cultural activities in the Hutt Valley, and in the wider Wellington region.

Given an attractive venue, music lovers will come from far and wide for good concerts: I am just one case, living in Tawa and having been a regular at concerts in both Lower and Upper Hutt for many years. Though one hesitates to make a point that might strike a parochial note, city officials could well take a look at the most attractive environment that has been created and maintained in the Arts and Entertainment Centre in Upper Hutt.

Incidentally, I gather the city council is contemplating acoustic enhancement. In the light of the several much easier and cheaper enhancements that still cry out for attention, the professional services of acoustic engineers would be just a little ridiculous. No auditorium is perfect, and one of the first tasks that a performer new to a hall undertakes is to listen to the acoustic and to ensure that he or she obtains the most rewarding sounds. As it stands, I can see (or hear) no justification for such needless extravagance.

 

NZSO scores a success in recent music delving some of the world’s tragedies

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Hamish McKeich with Sara MacLiver (soprano)

Body: Little Elegies
Sculthorpe: Memento Mori
Gorecki: Symphony No 3 (‘Sorrowful Songs’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 3 May, 7:30 pm

The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
The spectre of a half-filled auditorium for a major NZSO concert featuring Gorecki’s famous symphony which had filled this same hall, and halls all over the world, through the 1990s, came as a shock.

Though its first performances outside Poland in the 1980s were roundly abused by most critics, in a typical review, “simply adding to the decadent trash that encircled the true pinnacles of avant-gardism”, it was much better received by audiences. It was the performance recorded by David Zinman and the London Sinfonietta with Dawn Upshaw as soloist that propelled it into the charts, even the pop charts.  The phenomenon was widely seen as a sign that decades of domination of classical music by ‘experimental’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘complex’ music that alienated audiences, were at an end; music that was ‘original-above-all’, music that avoided melody and any sign of musical antecedents, unless of the most radical kind.

Indeed, this symphony played a big part in the reaction against music that drove audiences away whenever a contemporary piece was programmed, and the years since have slowly seen the emergence of composers who knew that all art needs to be grounded in what has gone before, both for its own sake and for it to make sense to its listeners.

There are, nevertheless, still sceptics, of whom I am not one.

The orchestra’s performance under Hamish McKeich was stunningly beautiful, with spellbinding suspense maintained though the long, slow passages that begin and end the first movement in a huge arch, as section after section of the strings enter and later depart with its repeated elegiac phrases in elaborate canon.

One of its significant features is the use of a conservative orchestra, with no percussion and limited numbers of wind instruments; though four flutes/piccolos, pairs of bassoons and contra-bassoons, but no oboes or trumpets. There is a prominent piano part, hinting at bells, and of course the remarkable role for soprano, the splendid Sara MacLiver, singing Polish religious songs, folk songs and a setting of a graffiti prayer left by a victim on the wall of a NAZI prison.

MacLiver’s voice was for the most part well balanced in the orchestral texture, though parts of her range seemed to project less well; nevertheless, she captured the emotion, its moments of contrasting despair and hope, most movingly.

It is uniformly in a lamenting mood, though it is also remarkable for the moments of well-being, that arise through beautifully judged modulations at various points. The second movement, though it was where Gorecki set the graffiti prayer by the 18-year-old girl, provided the richest source of hope, expressed so poignantly by voice and orchestra, with quite limited musical means.

Memento Mori by Peter Sculthorpe
The first half of the concert comprised elegiac pieces by leading Australian and New Zealand composers. Both drew on ‘programmes’ that have strong political and environmental implications, not merely trite, nationalistic reflections on the heroism of war.

Of course, we are singularly starved of opportunities to hear Australian music, and I expect the same is true in the other direction. However, I have tried to compensate on trips to Australia with visits to the Australian Music Centre in The Rocks, Sydney, to get recordings. So I was familiar with the performance of Sculthorpe’s Memento Mori by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under David Porcelijn, a disc mainly filled, not the least incongruously, with his Sun Music.

There were hints of Gorecki in the opening passages of Memento Mori, not an impossibility as it was written in 1993, a year after the famous Dawn Upshaw recording.  But Sculthorpe’s main inspiration was the plainchant, the Dies Irae, which appears, matter-of-factly, after the sombre, Gorecki-like introduction: treading even-paced in both the opening and closing phases of the quarter-hour work. Between those passages was a less bleak evolution of the same music, horns prominent, petering out.

Sculthorpe has made explicit the ‘programme’ underlying this music. He uses the history of the collapse of Easter Island’s society and economy as a metaphor for the approaching degradation of the entire planet, faced with the reckless, comparable exploitation of finite resources.

Yet the piece lightens and the pervading elegiac tone slowly evolves with a sense of calm, offering a possible emergence from catastrophe, given intervention by rational and understanding forces. Though hardly a legitimate gloss for this performance, the notes to the Australian CD refer to echoes of another Sculthorpe piece, Sun Song, which is included on the same CD as Memento Mori.

With the Adelaide performance as a comparison, what I heard on Saturday was better, more simply beautiful and integrated in terms of balance, and in the generation of an elegiac mood as well as a lyrical quality and, in particular, more polished sounds from strings and brass.

Little Elegies
Jack Body’s Little Elegies is nearly 30 years old. Yet its vocabulary is rather more emotionally powerful and elaborate than Sculthorpe’s.

Little Elegies was commissioned by the then General Manager of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Peter Nisbet, for use by TVNZ to celebrate 25 years of television in New Zealand. In his programme note, Body described how he had succeeded in having the music used in an experimental video, directed by Peter Coates, that “inter-cut slow motion gestures of the conductor with what were sometimes quite harrowing topical television news clips”.

The quote in the programme was taken from words included in the Centre for New Zealand Music (SOUNZ)’s listing of the work, which included a few details omitted from the programme, such as the title of book that had inspired Body’s composition: Dith Pran’s The Killing Fields. And interestingly, SOUNZ records that, in addition to its original performance, it has been played again by the NZSO in 1994 and by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in 2012.

The commission and the TV programme itself of 1985 underlines the degeneration and intellectual decay of television in New Zealand in the subsequent 30 years.

Body succeeded in writing a gritty and politically hard-hitting piece that drew attention to television’s trivialisation of human tragedy, specifically the terrible events in Cambodia at the time. His note in the programme recorded his bemusement that his project was accepted, though he could not recall what, if any, response it had stimulated. Yet today, even such a suggestion for a commission would probably be met with scorn and incredulity.

Body noted that the title, ‘Little’ Elegies, referred to the insignificance of his musical statement alongside the enormity of the events he referred to.

It opened with hints of sirens, and an atmosphere of chaos was evoked by the rattle of tom-toms and thud of bass drum, as glissandi strings uttered screams of pain or anger. Gongs along with soft trombones, xylophone and marimba created an Asian scene; piano and celeste contributed surprisingly to that landscape.  The orchestration was often dense but it sounded carefully judged and I sensed that, if tackled, the composer would have given persuasive reasons for scoring each of the instruments in the sonic texture.

It was interesting to be reminded again, what an imaginative and resourceful orchestrator Body is, as I listened while writing this to some of the pieces on the newly released Naxos recording of Body’s music, reviewed by Robert Johnson in RNZ Concert’s CD review programme, midday Sunday: particularly the arias from his formidable opera for the 1998 Festival, Alley, evincing similar orchestral mastery.

So the music of the concert was interestingly linked; themes of human stupidity, either with regard to the environment or driven by political fanaticism (Sculthorpe and Body) or both of those in an undefined meditation that contemplates, ostensibly without topical significance, landscapes of loss and bleakness that afflicts the world at some times and in some places.

Composer of the Week
And Jack Body, turning 70 this year, is Composer-of-the-Week on RNZ Concert this week, the start of New Zealand Music Month.

(And you will have heard the news item on Radio New Zealand on Sunday in which popular-music critic Simon Sweetman questioned the value of this focus on New Zealand music. He is probably right regarding popular music of most kinds; but classical music does not have such an easy ride, and the Month might still be of value.

(One major step would be to improve the quality of music broadcast by National Radio, including discreet items of New Zealand ‘classical’ music; the choice of music is a serious impediment for me when I tune in to its generally excellent spoken programmes: classical music seems to be wholly banned; but neither does it seem particularly good pop music. Are all its listeners musically illiterate?).

 

Piano trios in sparkling performances by Waikato-based ensemble

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Chamber Soloists (Katherine Austin – piano, Amalia Hall – violin, James Tennant – cello)
(Wellington Chamber Music)

Piano Trio in D minor, H 327 (Martinů)
Corybas and Aegean (Psathas)
Piano Trio in F minor, Op 65 (Dvořák) 

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 27 April, 3 pm

I was surprised to discover how long it seems to be since I heard either Katherine Austin or James Tennant in concert. In fact, a search of Middle C back to October 2008 throws up neither name. However, we’ve reviewed three or four recitals involving Amalia Hall.

Most of my experience of Austin and Tennant in earlier years has been in the chamber music series in Wellington or Lower Hutt and at the Chamber Music Festival in Nelson, though I don’t think they have performed there in the last two or three festivals, at least.

So this recital was a pleasure; additionally spiced by Katherine Austin’s ebullient remarks about the music.

I have come to enjoy Martinů’s music over the years and so I found myself feeling much more receptive to this piano trio than I think some of the audience was.

His music is idiosyncratic and I can envisage performances that fail to grasp his spirit. Here however, the trio did not try to make too much of the opening passages: there was a discreet reticence in their approach, though the insistent rhythm, in the shape of motifs of two quavers and a crotchet and the opposite, and the energy that is always present was there, but waiting in the wings, as it were.

Though the melodic ideas are not as strong as in some of Martinů’s music, by the end of the first movement – less than five minutes, it had planted itself very satisfactorily in my head. The second movement starts secretively, on violin and piano though the cello later to enjoy some lovely duetting with the violin. The players didn’t allow the drifting mood of the Adagio to lose its way, though it did seem to take its time to find the exit. The finale found the more characteristic Martinů voice, with its typical ostinato-like motifs and motoric rhythms.

But I await a performance of Martinů’s Nonet from an enterprising ensemble; not to mention one of our orchestras programming one of his six symphonies.

A colleague has observed that the acoustic in St Andrew’s has become a little harder for chamber music since the refurbishment; I’m not sure, as each of the instruments spoke clearly and were always well balanced, even though the piano’s lid was on the long stick and the writing could have tempted the pianist to a more dominant role. (My colleague, Rosemary Collier, told me later that it was probably a rug under the piano that had tempered its sound).

The trio had commissioned Corybas from John Psathas, and he had been inspired to add a short additional piece called Aegean, as an envoi (in the sense of a concluding strophe to, usually, an Elizabethan poem; Psathas called it a postlude).

The pair of pieces had been premiered in Crete in 2011; Corybas had several interlinked references, but was based on a Macedonian dance in complex rhythm; Aegean was in part inspired by the view of the Aegean from his parents’ house high above the sea on the coast of below Mount Olympus.  But Katherine told us that they had decided to play in first, and that seemed very fitting. A complex pattern seemed to lie beneath it but that did not create a barrier for the listener. Its impact was of calm though not, for me, of a seascape. There were long-drawn lines for violin and cello over a busier piano part, and it proved a happy prelude for Corybas.

Strangely, there seemed to be a real affinity between it and the Martinů trio.

The piano opened Corybas with a deliberate exposition of the rhythm, as a serialist might do with a tone-row. But this was no serial or any other kind of avant-garde composition. Though the rhythm was complex, there were quite long passages with a strong and insistent beat; the piece sounded very danceable, at least for someone born in Greece.  I enjoyed the way the energy slowly dissipated as the end approached, though without any loss of spirit. Teasingly, it just got slower and more engaging. The trio has played it a number of times, and their familiarity and affinity added hugely to its acceptance and enjoyment.

Finally, Dvořák’s piano trio: No 3, but the first to make a real mark. Though the programme note linked its character with the recent death of the composer’s mother, there was little, for my ears, that suggested sadness, let alone grief. In a minor key, to be sure, but written with such maturity and confidence (after all he’d written his sixth symphony by this time, 1883; he was 42) that it is the melodic richness, life-affirming vigour and its compositional skill that animates it and gives it stature.

The first movement is the most important, almost a quarter hour and a tour de force given to sudden dynamic changes, a variety of tone and metre and dealing fluently with its fertile thematic material. These players took every chance to exploit all these opportunities, producing a mood of profound contentment. I noted earlier the happy balance maintained between the three instruments; here, perhaps more than before, I was conscious of more than just a feeling of restraint with the cello part, but a view of it as secondary; it may have been where I was sitting, on the left side. Nevertheless, when I turned my attention to the cello, Tennant’s playing was always deeply expressive. And that quality became particularly evident in the slow movement which opens, elegiacally indeed, with a lovely cello melody.

But before that, the scherzo-like second movement, Allegretto grazioso, arrested the ear through the teasing rhythm that seemed to suggest various time signatures, broken by a trio section of quite different and more pensive character.

Both the third and fourth movements, each of round ten minutes, seem to maintain the level of melodic inspiration, as the cello’s melody at the beginning of the Poco adagio is followed by a mirroring melody on the violin that was comparably engaging. And the last movement returned to the serious energy of the first movement where the Katherine Austin’s extrovert piano often led the way in dramatizing the abrupt tempo changes, the accelerandos, the little emphatic outbursts that held the attention even when one, secretly, felt that the composer was prolonging the end somewhat unduly.

So this was a splendid concert, giving a fine exposure to one of Dvořák’s chamber music masterpieces as well as rewarding and successful works of the past half century.

 

Audience stands to honour fine performance by Secondary Students’ Choir

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand Secondary Students’ Choir in Concert directed by Andrew Withington, accompanied by Brent Stewart

Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul

Saturday, 26 April 2014, 7:30 pm

I reviewed the choir almost exactly two years ago; now they are here for another school holiday course.  My enthusiasm for their performance has not diminished, nor has the choir’s skill and versatility, despite the changes of personnel in the meantime.  There was a good-sized audience, but the back third of the Cathedral should not have been empty; this choir is deserving of a larger number of listeners.  Choristers came from all over New Zealand: Whangarei to Invercargill, with representatives from some small towns: Arrowtown, Shannon, Hawera for example.

Most of the programme was sung without printed scores; it was mainly the newer music for which scores were used.   The choir put on a highly professional concert, which I am sure will impress those who hear the singers later in the year in Singapore and Malaysia.  (Their singing won’t be poor, and I’m sure there will be no malaise – excuse me!)

As at the concert two years ago, the opening was with the church in darkness, the women processing in with candles, singing Jerusalem, an ancient Irish chant arranged by Michael McGlynn.  It featured a solo (rather too quiet) while the other singers backed with ‘oo-oo’, before the piece became multi-part.  This made a remarkable sound in the resonant cathedral, but few words could be perceived.

The full choir followed with the ‘Dies Irae’ from Mozart’s Requiem.  The piano accompaniment sounded strange – this is not a building that is kind to that instrument.

However, there was a strong, well-balanced sound.  The tempo was quite fast compared with what I have usually heard – or sung.

Mendelssohn’s Weihnachten followed.  The German was pronounced well, and uniformly, as it was in the Heinrich Schütz Psalm 115 that came next.  For this item, variety was provided by the appropriately baroque accompaniment on a spinet, and the division of the singers into three separate choirs.  The antiphonal singing and responses were superbly done; here, the scores were used.  There was plenty of depth in the basses. Confident attacks and dynamics were notable.  Most of the members watched their conductor almost  constantly.  Some tenors were a little too prominent in this work.  Part of the work was in a faster tempo, with more quavers and slurs.  This daunted the choir not in the least; it was a most creditable performance.

Throughout the accompanied items Brent Stewart, the choir’s principal accompanist, was lively, sympathetic and a thoroughly accomplished performer; the deficiencies were not to do with his technique or carrying out of his role. Items were introduced in groups by members of the staff of the choir and a few of the singers.  The microphone’s use was for the most part appropriate, and their words were heard clearly.

Ave Maria by Franz Biebl was sung by tenors and basses, including a solo trio and piano accompaniment, most effectively.  I knew nothing of Biebl, but on consulting Google, I found that he was a German who died in 2001.  According to the Wikipedia entry, the commonly-used programme note for the Ave Maria is by Dr. Wilbur Skeels – a former New Zealander, later resident in the US, and interestingly, composer of a setting of ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’, another setting of which by David Childs (also a US-based New Zealander) was sung later in the concert.  The men made a gorgeous sound, especially in the opening unaccompanied section.

The soloists all had excellent, well-produced voices, especially fine in the piano and mezzo piano passages. The singers were utterly secure in the moving parts, and the Latin words were very clear.  I see how valuable it was when church singing was always in Latin; the clarity is so much greater than in many other languages in large, high venues.  There was a little stridency crept into the choir tenors at the forte ending.

A pleasing factor was the design of the men’s outfits.  Though I see no reason for all to be dressed in black, nevertheless, the men’s loose, collar-less shirts were a handsome choice.

Brahms was up next, the whole choir singing, with scores and piano, ‘Vineta’ from Drei Gesange, in total unanimity.  For something completely different, the men then performed ‘Mouth Music’, with resonant n and ng sounds, and drum accompaniment played by Brent Stewart.  Another light music piece was Scarborough Fair, sung by the women, in an interesting arrangement with a very well-played violin solo part from Theo Moolenaar that failed to sound out well enough in the Cathedral.

A David Childs item not listed in the programme was Remembrance, on the text referred to above.  The slow opening harmonies were very effective, while the contrasting fast section was lively and with beautiful tone – but there was more difficulty in picking up the words.  The slow passages returned, and both the soloist, Kelly Kim, and the high soprano ending were dramatic.

Twa Tanbou (Three Drums), a Haitian song was tricky, with cross-rhythms, but made an energetic impact just prior tot he interval.  Many syllables, in French Creole, were sounded in this fun piece with its dramatic ending.

We were recalled from the interval by a loud karanga, introducing Kua Rongo by the Wehi whanau.  The choir members now wore shoulder sashes over their garments. The women used single pois through part of the item, while the men did actions with notional taiahas. Memorising music and words, plus all the many movements was a considerable feat.  They were accompanied by Andrew Withington on guitar.

Two more pieces by David Childs followed, the first commissioned in memory of Lois Coplon, NZSSC’s Executive Officer from 1996 to 2009.   This was performed with piano, and began with soprano and alto voices only.  I found the choral harmonies interesting, but the melodies rather sentimental.  Despite the title In Requiescat, it was sung in English.

Between the Childs pieces, an unprogrammed piece, Lux Aeterna by Christchurch composer Richard Oswin, revealed again how well the Latin language sounds in this space.  The effective choral writing included unusual harmonies, chords and vocalisations, which were beautifully controlled.  Excellent low bass notes helped to support this unaccompanied item.

Childs’s Sonnet of the Moon was attractive (but who wrote the words?).  However, I found it became a rather soporific ballad, although sung with great beauty.

Two pieces from Suite Nordestina by Ronaldo Miranda, a contemporary Brazilian composer, were next – Portuguese another language to add to the already lengthy list the choir sings in. The cadences in the very rhythmic ‘Bumba Chora’ reminded me of that other Brazilian choral work, Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla. ‘Dende Trapia’ was lively, and featured precise and uniform pronunciation of syllables.

A leading contemporary American choral composer is Eric Whitacre; his Cloudburst was sung in Wellington by the Orpheus Choir a number of years ago.  It used three soloists, piano, drums and win sheet (these in the upstairs side-gallery), hand-bells, and rhythmic clapping and finger-clicking.  It is a complex, multi-part work featuring close intervals. Despite its English title, it is sung in Spanish. The characterization of rain falling, the build-up to storm, and the lighter rain following are most accurately portrayed, though sometimes the voices didn’t penetrate all that rain.  The closing section of humming completed the drama of this quite lengthy, multi-faceted work, which gave plenty of opportunity to demonstrate the versatility of these singers, and how much they are able to achieve in a short course together.

Why does such a concert always have to conclude with lighter items?  These did not reveal the best singing by the choir, and were for the most part not appropriate to the building – I mean acoustically, not theologically.  Most were too fast and too loud to be heard to good effect.  Why ‘America’ from West Side Story needed to be included in a full programme, I do not know.  It was faster than I’d ever heard it; the only word that was distinct was ‘America’.  It is better sung by an ensemble, not by a large choir.

Another lighter item with piano was Celebrate by Keith Hampton (he and a number of the other composers featured also in the 2012 programme).  Again fast, loud and without perceptible words.  There was a soloist, but she was rather lost standing behind a much taller person.  I’m afraid the style sounded almost ugly in this building, as did the next piece, I’ve got the World on a String in which choir members performed the actions of playing wind instruments.

The concert ended with cultural items – the first, Tate le fia Manatua was acted out by two choruses; it was to do with the possible marriage of Samoan and Tongan prince and princess.  Gestures, movement and facial expressions, particularly of the two leaders, made for a very splendid performance.  Again, fortissimo singing lost the subtlety that at times the gestures were conveying.  However, the latter were quite complicated, and graceful.  It all made up to an exciting performance, and again was a great act of memory.

Finally Siyabangena and Ke Nna Yo Morena, two South African traditional pieces, were very rhythmic.  They were conducted (the previous item was not) and involved a lot of clapping.  Then the choir paraded down the side aisles of the Cathedral, and the audience ended the concert standing to honour the skill of the choir and the thorough enjoyment of the performances.