Category: Live performance

The Goldbergs with strings attached…

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Hutt Valley Chamber Music presents:

THE NEW ZEALAND STRING QUARTET – Goldberg Variations

J.S.BACH (arr. W.Cowdery) – Goldberg Variations BWV 988

New Zealand String Quartet

Helene Pohl, Douglas Beilmann (violins) / Gillian Ansell (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

St.Mark’s Church, Woburn Road, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 22nd May, 2013

I wouldn’t dream of going so far as to say that I NEVER, EVER want to hear the Goldberg Variations played on a keyboard instrument again – but all the while the New Zealand String Quartet was performing this work in an arrangement made by Bach scholar (and harpsichordist!) William Cowdery, I was transported, wafted into a world of enchantment from which all keys, jacks, hammers and pedals – anything remotely percussive – had been removed.

Or so it seemed, at the time, to me. The next day, I played my Glenn Gould recording of the work, performed, of course, on a piano, and was, to some extent, reconverted. But it’s a measure of the durability and flexibility of Bach’s music that, when presented on instruments of completely different sound-character, it seems to envelop timbre, texture and tone, and make the instrument (or instruments) seem utterly and indisputably appropriate to the occasion.

I had heard the NZSQ play this work before, in Upper Hutt, and remembered at that time being both intrigued and impressed – though on that occasion the impact of it all was, I think, diluted by having another work on the program, Elgar’s Piano Quintet. Here, in the softer, more homely and intimate setting of St.Mark’s Church, Woburn, the “String-Goldbergs” filled both time and space with sounds which, even more than the last time round, seemed to fuse both craft and content into a symbiosis of beauty and feeling.

What the string quartet version seemed to me to allow was a contrapuntal partnership of equals which the solo keyboard versions I’ve heard don’t emulate in the same way – having both the strength and individuality of a single player to a voice makes for a more dynamic kind of interaction of parts than a single player at a keyboard can provide. With two, sometimes three, and occasionally all four players committed wholly to the notes, to matters of technique, timbre, intellectual overview and emotional expression, the music’s amplitude is enriched to what I felt was a compelling degree.

As expected, the players of the New Zealand String Quartet were wholly taken up with and set aglow by the bringing together of these different elements, and reinterpreting the music’s world. Even an injured Helene Pohl was able to contribute a characteristically heartfelt first-violin line as required, astonishingly redistributing the fingerings of her parts to avoid using a recently-damaged little finger. The process made not one whit of difference to her usual vibrancy and focus – a mere handful of notes not quite in tune still resonated with that intensely musical quality particularly her own.

Here are a few thoughts regarding some of the individual variations and their place in the whole – from the outset, the group adopted a “whiter”, more austere tone than I’ve previously heard from them, effective as an opening statement of intent, a “surface” that suggested both order and contained expressive potential. From the dignity of this opening Sarabande, we were energized by the polonaise rhythm of the first variation, its running lines reminiscent of the Third Brandenburg Concerto’s finale – the repeat featured some delicious variations of tone, the lines having an engaging “stand-alone” quality, more so than with the keyboard version, though still as integrated.

As mentioned above, not all the variations used all four players, a textural device which, as happens with both piano and harpsichord, gives the music contrasting densities – so the Canon of the third variation, with its two-violin interaction and ‘cello bass line created spaces which, in the succeeding Passepied, the extra player joyously filled, excitingly amplifying the sound-picture.

Sometimes an individual player stole the show, as did Doug Beilmann with the “schwung” of his figuration’s rhythms in the Gigue of No.7 – at other times it was the interaction between the musicians which gave real pleasure, as when Gillian Ansell’s viola cheekily finished off Rolf Gjesten’s ‘cello phrases at the line-ends of the following Variation (No.9). Then, in the following Canon everybody had a part to play in the music’s strolling grandeur, the players (I fancied) smiling with the pleasure of it all.

The trio of variations that concluded the work’s first part were worlds in themselves, the playing bringing out by turns the music’s propensities towards delight and sorrow. No.13’s Sarabande had a kind of “heavenly length” quality, combining serenity with a mellifluous character, the occasional  “catch” in the instruments’ throats on certain strings adding to the intensities. The Toccata was a clever-witted philosopher between two poets, his élan further honing the melancholy of No.15’s Canon, its wistful, questioning phrases played with wonderful poise by the ensemble, in readiness for what was still to come.

I so relished the players’ presentation of the “Grand Overture” which began the second part of the work – all very celebratory, and “orchestral” in style, though never generalized as such, but always with “point” and plenty of variation. (Incidentally, from this point on my notes began to voluminously grow!). Again there was conveyed throughout the work’s second part a kind of “joy of interaction” among the players, the two-part  No.17 Toccata (arranged among three instruments, here) brimful of lines eagerly looking to interact with their counterparts. The following Canon represented a kind of fruition of this with Rolf Gjelsten’s ‘cello dancing in counterpoint with two singing violins – and if the succeeding No.19 charmed us with pizzicato-voiced dance-impulses, the following Toccata stimulated our impulsive leanings with the players’ exciting alternations of pizzicato and whirling bowed triplets!

So much more to describe! – but one must resist most of the remaining blandishments and concentrate instead on the great Adagio of the 25th Variation – the violin’s anguished leading line like a bird hovering above the ocean of the lower instruments’ sombre counterpoints. Here, the violin’s bird brought to us something of the feeling of the “immensity of human sorrow” while holding fast to the skein stretched across vast distances to the lower instruments’ quiet, oceanic certainty – a kind of depiction, I thought, of both the solitariness and surety of spiritual faith, on the composer’s part.

Several other rich and vibrant variations later came the celebrated Quodlibet (a Latin term for “whatever” or “what pleases”), the last . This featured Bach’s droll synthesis of two German folk-songs (how wonderful to contemplate those woods “Cabbages and turnips have driven me away” in this context!), the players enjoying the music’s mix of friendly rivalry and adroit partnership. And, quite suddenly, it seemed, at the end, there it was – with the return of the opening Aria, it felt to us as though the music was coming home once again, having undergone its own solar orbit and experienced many world-turnings, both interactive and solitary. Now, the players’ tones seemed more in accord than counterpointed, more fulfilled than striving, more fused than disparate. Here, we in the audience were being given the well-wrought strains of sounds approximating to a divine order, a ray of serenity from chaos. We held onto those strains as best we could, but in the end we had to let them go.

Much acclaim and very great honour to the New Zealand String Quartet players! – through their sensibilities and skills we were able to coexist, for a short time, with a kind of transcendental awareness of things, by way of music whose being somehow seemed to accord with our own existence.

Delights and disappointments from the Poinsett Trio

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Wellington Chamber Music Trust

Mozart: Trio in C, K.548 (allegro; andante cantabile; allegro)

Brahms: Trio in C minor, Op.101 (allegro energico; presto non assai; andante grazioso; allegro)

Fauré: Piano Trio in D minor, Op.120 (allegro ma non troppo; andantino; finale: allegro vivo)

Paul Schoenfield: Café Music (allegro; andante moderato; presto)

Poinsett Trio (David Cross, piano; Deirdre Hutton, violin; Christopher Hutton, cello)

Ilott Theatre

Sunday, 19 May 2013

(Reviewer’s note: It is now known that Deirdre Hutton’s violin had, before the concert on Sunday 19 May at the Ilott Theatre, developed quite a long seam opening.  This led to major problems with sound production.  The matter could not be fixed prior to the concert.

Apparently they tried to get hold of an Auckland violin maker prior to the concert, who was visiting Wellington, but didn’t succeed, as she had already left.  She’s now repaired the instrument. – R.C.  25th May)

It is always good to welcome back Wellington musicians studying or working overseas.  This is the case with cellist Christopher Hutton.

However, overall I found this concert disappointing, given the very high standard always demonstrated in the Wellington Chamber Music Trust series.  At the beginning of the Mozart sonata the violin was a little off pitch; this recurred at various times throughout the concert.  The beautiful piano part was for the most part beautifully played with commendable delicacy of touch, but it rather over-awed the strings.  Yes, the piano had the principal part in Mozart’s early chamber works, but this was not an early work.  Maybe it was the dry acoustic, but I found the violin tone harsh; the cello I could not hear much from through most of the work.  I liked the instrument’s sound when I could hear it.

In the Brahms trio, the balance was more equitable between the piano and the strings.  It opened with a typical Brahms melody, after a lively introduction.  Better tone and intonation emerged from the violin.

The second movement was unusual for the use of mutes throughout by the strings – even when pizzicato was being played.  The movement was fast, soft, and had a gentle, rollicking character, due to the rhythm, and the muted pizzicato.

The lovely opening string duet of the slow third movement was echoed in the piano solo that followed; this was the pattern throughout the movement. This back and forth character gave interest and clarity to the writing and the performance.  Again, there was some harshness of tone from the violin.  The most extended of the piano solos had rather the features of a salon piece for piano.

The finale was agitated, bur mellifluous melodies were passed from the strings to the piano and back again.  However, there were too many flaws in this performance to allow the music to carry me away, although the ensemble was more cohesive in this work.

The Fauré trio was heard in last year’s Sunday afternoon series, just over one year ago, with a trio of young New Zealanders studying overseas.  Its character demands subtlety, and the Poinsetts demonstrated it, and some élan showed through, despite occasional waywardness of the violin’s intonation.

The charming song-like opening melody of the andantino was most pleasing.  However, the pianist did not vary his dynamics as much as did the string players.  An impassioned duet for cello and violin was very pleasing.  Ensemble and tone were improved.

The fast finale found once again that tuning was not always on the spot.  The movement featured a lively and ingratiating piano part.  As the programme note said, ‘the music is restrained, finely crafted, and entirely charming.’

Paul Schoenfield’s Café Music was exactly that, and didn’t ‘grab’ me as a component of a chamber music concert, being full of jazz rhythmic clichés, though written as recently as 1986; for example, the second movement’s off-beat ‘swing’ (in the traditional slow middle movement of chamber trios, despite the programme notes saying ‘traditional slow-fast-slow’).  The final presto was a dizzy, discordant dance taken at a cracking pace, and was a bit more adventurous.  It was rhythmically lively, but that rhythm did not contain much variety.

The violinist played the jazz style very well, as did the pianist.  All in all, this was a skilled performance – even if somewhat lightweight, nevertheless skill was required in its playing.

As an encore, the trio played the first movement of Dvořák’s ‘Dumky’ Trio, which was a component of the other programme they were presenting in their 13 concerts around New Zealand.  The delightful work was given a crisp introduction and a good rendering of the jolly, fast main theme that alternates with elements from the introduction.  There was plenty of emphasis on important notes, and a build up to each entry of the theme, making it a truly dance-like performance to end the concert.

 

Larks and serious business, with Yevgeny Sudbin and the NZSO

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:
THE LARK ASCENDING

Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending

Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.2 in B flat Op.19 (allegro con brio; adagio; rondo: allegro)

Elgar: Symphony no.1 in A flat Op.55 (andante nobilmente e semplice – allegro; allegro molto; adagio; lento – allegro)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, with Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin) and Yevgeny Sudbin (piano)

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday, 17 May 2013, 6.30pm

It was gratifying to see the Michael Fowler Centre virtually full, no doubt due at least in part to the presence on the programme, The Lark Ascending, the work that tops the Radio New Zealand Concert ‘Settling the Score’ popularity programme almost every year.  Works by English composers book-ended the concert, and an Englishman was the conductor, who obviously knew the music very well, especially the Elgar.

While the concert-master played the delicious solo part in the Vaughan Williams, his colleague Yury Genzentsvey led the orchestra in both this work and in the Beethoven concerto.  A slightly smaller orchestra, particularly in the wind departments, played these two works; the full team assembled for the Elgar symphony after the interval.

Excellent, informative and quite lengthy programme notes were not credited to anyone.  The only other negative thing to say about this concert was that there was an unfortunate amount of unsuppressed coughing, especially during the Lark, that quietest of quiet orchestral pieces.  It was absent during Bryn Terfel’s recent concert – what has happened?

Leppänen bestowed a wonderful variety of tonal colours on the piece, including warm and rich, sprightly, and, well, bird-like.  The slower section was considerably drawn out compared with other performances I have heard – but none the worse for that.  All of the many solo passages were superbly executed, and at the end, his colleagues applauded as warmly as did the audience, but they themselves gave a fine account of Vaughan Williams’s music.  Notable was some gorgeous woodwind playing; for example, flute and clarinet together.

Written before the concerto known as no.1, this Beethoven concerto is very much in the Classical tradition of Haydn and Mozart, particularly in the first movement.  The violins did not sound at their best always in the opening passages.  However, the tall, handsome young pianist made an immediate impression in his lilting initial foray, varying his dynamics subtly.  Phrasing was lovingly done.  Sudbin showed great delicacy in pianissimos, and every note was in place.  Compared with most other pianists, he sat very close to the keyboard, and played from almost directly above it.

One was seldom aware of the sustaining pedal, and his sound was full, while never being ‘louder than lovely’.  There was nothing mechanical about this playing; it was always nuanced and apt, such as through the various changes of key, and the athletic runs, for example in the magical cadenza – which ended with surprising little chords.

The slow movement began with an inspiring orchestral flow into which the piano breaks, but without disturbing the tenor of it lofty expression.  There were delightful piano syncopations before a more sombre mood emerged.  The return of the main theme was decorated most deliciously by the piano.  The facility of this young pianist is remarkable.  Yet he makes every note count.  However, I was surprised to hear trills on the piano pedalled; this gave out an odd metallic shimmering sound from the instrument.  The orchestral playing in this movement was sublime.

The finale breaks in as a lively, passionate contrast.  The pianist’s dexterity continued to be varied, and carried expression with it.  The ending of the movement was enchanting; delicate yet strong.

The audience’s enthusiastic response to the pianist was rewarded with not one, but two unannounced encores.  The beauty of the first was somewhat marred by a cellphone’s intervention.  It was a delight not to have a showy piece played, but rather a poised, gently glowing piece.  However, the next one demonstrated technique to burn, including superb articulation, the pianist playing even more over the keyboard than in the concerto.  This was a much faster, noisier piece, with a bit too much pedal for my taste.  Although they were not familiar to me, I concluded that both pieces were by Scarlatti, and some learned friends I spoke with in the interval had the same thought.

The Elgar symphony came as quite an aural shock after the relatively restrained first half, with the much larger orchestra, especially in the brass and woodwind departments.  The opening march-like theme would declare the music to be by Elgar even if one didn’t know.  There were lots of typical surging crescendos; how different from Vaughan Williams’s gentle piece!  Of course the latter was also a considerable symphonist.

Excitement builds in the first movement, tuba and all.  Is it all bluster?  The first significant symphony by an Englishman was not, however, all ebullience. The opening theme returns in quieter mode, before it is shouted from the rooftops again.   It featured gorgeous string writing – and playing.

The second movement has another rather imperialistic theme for full orchestra, with much percussion and a contrabassoon lurking underneath.  Glissandi from the two harps glowed, and then it was back to the march of soldiers in combat, trumpets giving the battle calls.  The music became more than a little pompous, saved by some delicate woodwind and string passages, sometimes in unison.  I detected fine bass clarinet playing.

The adagio was a quiet, elegiac patriotic song for fallen heroes.  The cor anglais intoned mournfully before a resolution of grief arrived.  There were little solos for the string principals.  Passionate, even pleading cries led to a quiet, contented resolution, and peace.

Then straight on to the final movement, unusually set as a lento leading to allegro (not lento-adagio as printed at the head of the notes).  A quiet allusion to the main theme of the first movement, noble string playing, followed by shimmering unisons and chunky alternating staccato passages.  As the whole orchestra asserted itself in bombastic variations on the first movement theme, the music became more than a little Brahmsian Finally, it became frenzied and boisterous.

Perhaps we hear that theme a little too often.  It seems as though it was designed to rouse the masses to heights of either ecstasy or fury.  Anyway, it drew an enthusiastic response from the audience.  The pressure to write symphonies was obviously great; to me, the essence of Elgar is in his Sea Pictures, Enigma Variations, and his many attractive choral pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

Fair, fresh winds from home

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

NZ Music for Woodwind

Music by Edwin Carr, Dylan Lardelli, Alex Taylor, Gareth Farr, Ken Wilson, Anthony Young.

Ben Hoadley (bassoon), Madeline Sakofsky (oboe and cor anglais), Emma Sayers (piano), Duo Solaris: Debbie Rawson and Donald Nicholls (clarinets)
New Zealand Clarinet Quartet: David McGregor (E flat clarinet), Hayden Sinclair (B flat clarinet), Nick Walshe (A clarinet), Debbie Rawson (bass clarinet)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 15 May 2013

A concert featuring two world premières is not a common event in New Zealand.  However, this was the case on Wednesday.

The concert began, though, with a work from 1977, of Edwin Carr.  It was titled Two Mansfield Poems, and the two beautiful poems by Katherine Mansfield were included with the printed programme: ‘Sanary’ (1916) and ‘Sleeping Together’ (1908).  The first piece echoed the sunny day of the first poem.  The latter was a recollection of children sleeping in the same bed, whispering to each other.

Carr’s settings for cor anglais and piano were quite lovely.  How seldom one hears the cor anglais apart from in an orchestra! The cor anglais proved to be an apt instrument to reflect the sultry sun described in the second poem; the music was wonderfully pensive, while the playing had a gorgeous timbre.  Some of the music was dance-like, and the whole represented a great gift of delightful writing for cor anglais players.

A world première of One Body, a shortish piece by Dylan Lardelli failed to move me.  It was written for clarinet quartet.  It seemed to me suitable for accompanying a video or film about music of the spheres, or something spooky on the galaxies; or for a modern dance performance, my companion suggested.  It was all sound effects, including puffing notelessly through the instruments.  I could not find any music in it.  Given the title, I wondered if it was meant to portray the workings of the human body.

The second world premiere was of loose knots for bassoon, by Alex Taylor, a young Auckland composer.  It was certainly extending for Ben Hoadley; it was good to hear this instrument, too, in a solo capacity.  Some lovely tones emerged in a piece that incorporated microtones, and flutter tongue technique.  The piece was in three movements, and was rhythmically lively.  Hoadley commissioned it (with funding from Creative New Zealand, who also funded the  Lardelli and the Farr works) to play at a world double-reed convention he is to attend in California next month.

Gareth Farr’s Five Little Monologues was written in 2006 for the players we heard here.  The first opened with quiet ripples that moved from fast to very shrill.  Number two was an angular piece with shrieking all over the place, mainly staccato.  It was an effective little piece, and incorporated fleet-footed melodies, and became jokey at the end.

The third piece was legato with trills, while the fourth featured staccato playing again, like little sprites running all over the place, with another humorous ending.  The final piece had the instruments running quickly everywhere, high-pitched phrases alternating with low ones.  This was very accomplished writing with plenty of interest.  The work employed very musical language and phrasing.  Another quirky ending completed the set.

Ken Wilson’s Duo for two clarinets from 2002 was jolly and laughing.  The playing was preceded by some words from Debbie Rawson about Ken and his music, in which she said he was known as ‘Fingers’ Wilson.  Certainly this piece required dexterity.  It was vigorous, sprightly and jaunty; thoroughly enjoyable.  I hope Debbie Rawson will fulfil her promise to play more of Ken Wilson’s music.

Trio for oboe, bassoon and piano of Anthony Young, was written in 2011, and like the Ken Wilson piece, was a Wellington première.  The piece was inspired by baroque sonata form – four movements: slow, fast, slow, fast.  After a pensive opening, the intertwining of the parts was grateful on the ear.  The second movement had lots going on for all three instruments, Emma Sayers at times conducting with her head for entries.

The third movement featured ponderous piano and bassoon, the oboe’s melody thoughtful, even questing, with the bassoon following in like vein.  The final movement began fast, especially for the piano.  There were contemplative moments for all instruments; in fact the work explored the instruments’ capabilities, and provided plenty of variety.  A hearty ending section with a sudden full-stop completed this well-crafted work.

The whole concert was notable for extremely fine playing throughout; although the concert was overly long for a lunchtime one, it was very rewarding to hear such a range of accomplished wind music from our own country’s composers.

Worlds of difference from the NZ Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:

NZ TRIO – Old World : New World

ERICH KORNGOLD – Piano Trio Op.1 /  CLAIRE COWAN – Subtle Dances

BRIGHT SHENG – 4 Movements for Piano Trio

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – PIano Trio No.2 in E Minor Op.67

NZ Trio – Justine Cormack (violin) / Ashley Brown (‘cello) / Sarah Watkins (piano)

Town Hall, Wellington

Wednesday 15th May, 2013

It took me a while to “settle in” to the Town Hall’s more-than-ample sound-spaces for this concert – the NZ Trio had daringly opted to begin with Korngold’s Op.1 Piano Trio, music that called for plenty of rich, vibrant and well-uphostered sounds from the ensemble. Despite the vigour with which the players began the piece, I thought that the amplitude of the acoustic seemed at first to dwarf the players’ tones. As well, certain musical detailings sounded as though closer proximities were needed in order to make their effect (Justine Cormack’s thrummings just before the opening’s repeat here became little more than a physical gesture), so that I felt something of the music’s flavour and variety wasn’t getting through. In fact, the dialogues involving violin and ‘cello at first resembled the exchanges between a couple of faded beauties reminiscing about old times – a feeling which I thought simply wouldn’t have been in accord with a youthful composer’s freshly-wrought impulses.

However, once my ears had become used to this particular sound-world (“gotten on the wavelength”, would have been my generation’s chic expression for the phenomenon) I was better able to appreciate what the NZ Trio was doing, and enjoy the explorations of contrasts which throughout the first movement swing wholeheartedly between impassioned exchange and wistful stillness. By the end, I thought the players had caught the essence of things, summed up by what came to us as almost an ecstasy of sustained arco and pizzicato sounds over the final measures .

A lively, mischievous and angular Scherzo with its sultry Trio followed, compounding my amazement at its thirteen year-old composer’s prodigious creativities. It made me think of conductor Water Damrosch’s celebrated response regarding a youthful work of Aaron Copland’s, a remark (made straight after a performance of the work to its audience) that stated its composer would eventually be “capable of committing murder”. Naturally, Copland didn’t follow up the suggestion, and (as far as I’m aware) neither did Korngold undertake any such venture.

The slow movement’s opening ‘cello solo, lovingly played by Ashley Brown, brought out the music’s reiterating “dying fall”, with exciting, surging “road-music” contrasts in places. The same idea was present in the finale as well, ballade-like in its opening presentation, though under siege from certain angularities. The Trio’s big-boned forward drive swept the music’s changes along, the players alive to all of the music’s possibilities, engaging our sensibilities and giving us no doubt as to why its composer would have been regarded as such a “wunderkind” at the time.

In the light of Korngold’s youthful efforts, it was interesting to read New Zealand composer Claire Cowan’s thoughts regarding the composition of her work for Piano Trio, Subtle Dances. I liked her connection between her “intuitive” approach to composition and the relationship between composer, performers and audiences, and their respective places in the music’s “space”. I wondered, after reading these words, to what extent the work of a gifted thirteen year-old Viennese composer might have, however subconsciously, been similarly guided by intuition.

Claire Cowan characterized the first part of her work as “a rhythmical and passionate interlocking of playful lines”, but included a warning of the danger or risk element in such undertakings as well. The music awakened like a simple organism’s first, exploratory pulsings, with firstly the ‘cello and then violin exchanging pizzicato notes, and the piano adding a voice. The string-players tapped their soundboxes, gradually evolving an off-beat rhythm, decorated by piano figurations. When the violin joined the piano one got a sense of the composer’s “passionate interlocking” – as angst-filled as something bluesy, without being the blues…something ethnic, with a pronounced and engaging rhythmic trajectory.

It all stopped abruptly and gave way to the second movement’s be slow and lie low. A deep and wide world of inner feeling gradually settled on everything as the slow-motion dance spread its soft, shimmering silences around and about, the stillness tingling with magical harmonies. The change to the following movement was as marked as the previous transition, Sarah Watkins’ piano resounding splendidly like gamelan, and her companions supporting the piano with richly-wrought string lines, tremolandi and ostinati creating both vast open spaces and insistently claustrophobic textures at one and the same time, fitting Claire Cowan’s title for the movement, nerve lines. What a gift for sonorities this composer has!

Wisely, the Trio gave us some breathing-space in the form of an interval before serving us up with some more strongly-flavoured though differently-inspired evocations – these were the four movements of Chinese composer Bright Sheng’s Piano Trio. The composer wanted to re-explore a work for piano solo that he wrote in 1988, called My Song, reworking the musical material, and developing further his idea of bringing aspects of eastern and western art-music together. The first movement gave us birdsong, the strings’ notes gliding across spacious, airy textures. The instruments played “concurrently” rather than together, with winsome glissandi, capturing an early-morning ambience – a truly other-worldly effect, supported by the pianist reaching into the piano and softly plucking strings.

Then came a vigorous dance-like song, Sarah Watkins’ piano excitably fetching up tones from out of the instruments’ depths, and the strings with glissandi and portamenti again having an airborne quality, over surges of rhythmic energy. A beautiful shimmer of resonance sounded like an echo at the piece’s end. In contrast, the biting, driving rhythms of the “savage dance” dug into the earth, recalling similar tones of Bartok’s from his strings, percussion and celesta music. The final Nostalgia created sounds which unlocked memories of things long ago or far away, and encouraged a longing for those things to come again. The piano and strings played delicately-counterpointed lines whose resonances were allowed to drift evocatively into the imagination’s distances – beautiful!

And finally, to Shostakovich, and to a work written by the composer in memory of a close friend, who had died during 1944. Shostakovich’s particular creative intensities seemed to find the fullest expression in chamber music, and this Trio was no exception. It seemed to me that, in the first movement, there was a kind of bringing-together, the ‘cello representing something exotic, more other-worldly, and violin and piano bringing aspects of a contrapuntal framework to the exercise. Ashley Brown’s ‘cello-playing again demonstrated remarkable sensitivity, with stratospheric figurations involving haunting harmonics – it seemed as though the sounds were being “offered up” by the composer, as some kind of pre-arranged sacrificial ritual, enacted through that most severe of all forms, a fugue.

The Scherzo was a characteristically vigorous piece, both exuberant and frenzied, with rushing, upwardly-rollling figures and heavy-footed, angular stampings, the whole suggesting that there’s sometimes a fine line between enjoyment and obsessiveness. Justine Cormack’s violin lead the way with gutsy, unflinching gestures that kept energies and intensities on the boil. Afterwards, the largo’s monumental opening piano chords took us to the composer’s wellside of grief, the strings at one in their concerted lament – the dance-like opening of the finale, and its progression into and through harrowing realms merely underlined the desperation of things for Shostakovich, and the extent of his own grim resignation in the face of it all. The NZ Trio gave its all, or so it seemed – after such ordeals, the final quiet string and piano arpeggios and chords in an exhausted E major came less as relief and more as affirmation of something indestructible to be grasped against all odds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NBR NZ Opera’s “Butterfly” – traditional and triumphant

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NBR New Zealand Opera presents –

Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly

Cast: Antoinette Halloran (Cio-Cio-San) / Lucy Schaufer (Suzuki) / Piero Pretti (Pinkerton)

Peter Savidge (Sharpless) / James Rodgers (Goro) / Richard Green (The Bonze)

Jared Holt (Yamadori) / Bianca Andrew (Kate Pinkerton) / Kieran Rayner  (Commissioner)

Edward Laurenson (Registrar) / Lesley Graham (Cio-Cio-San’s mother)

Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus

Orchestra Wellington

Conductor : Thomas Ringborg

Chorus Master: Michael Vinten

Director: Kate Cherry

St.James Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 11th May, 2013

This “Butterfly” has already flittered, swayed, dipped and floated her way down the island from most of the way up north – so quite a few people will by now have seen and heard her. I’ll go out on a traditionalist limb and declare that most of these people, I feel certain, would have been pleased to find her heart-rending story more-or-less conventionally staged and costumed, though with enough creativity and flair to make something uniquely beautiful and memorable.

How refreshing to be able to concentrate for once upon the musical aspects of a standard repertoire opera, instead of having to fight one’s way through some hot-shot director’s quirkily modernist and sometimes fatally intrusive “production take” on the well-known story (“Anything to stop it being done straight!” as comedian Michael Flanders says at one point in his and Donald Swann’s legendary revue “At the Drop of a Hat”, regarding a musical adaptation of a seventeenth century novel.)

Before the bright things of the revisionist world begin casting their barbed spears in my direction, I must emphasize that I’m not against the idea of taking a new look at any such performance-art-form, provided that its impulse to do thus comes from inner conviction on the part of those responsible, not merely a desire to be superficially “trendy” or “fashionable”. Then, of course, the conviction has to be intelligently thought through and applied, at the very least as coherently as the work would have been wrought by its original creator.

Apart from one or two brief and unnecessarily gratuitous touches, I thought, for example, the recent NBR NZ Opera production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” was a brilliantly successful rethink of the work’s original setting. As I believe many people would also, I would nevertheless be eminently satisfied with seeing the work staged as the composer himself would have had it presented. With all  the recent emphasis in the music world on “authentic performance” it’s interesting that there isn’t a parallel set of impulses to try and recreate original stage settings as faithfully as possible as well – in fact, especially in the case of baroque opera, there’s sometimes a kind of schizophrenic dislocation between what happens in the orchestral pit as opposed to the goings-on up on the stage!

It will be obvious by now to anybody reading this review that I loved this production of “Butterfly” – its predictable aspects concerning the Japanese setting somehow had a freshness which transcended any feeling of routine or tired tradition, as if the “obvious” had been completely rethought, and emerged as something original. As an example of this, I liked the uses of the sliding doors to create different spaces and ambiences, with not a single movement unmotivated by text or music.

With a set at once fixed and yet extremely fluid, lighting had an enormous part to play in the creation of a distinctive ambience, and there was a similar sense of the “expected” still being able to take us by surprise. Butterfly’s Act One entrance was suffused with light (firstly through screens, and then spilling gloriously through the opened spaces) – as it should, the music giving ample demonstration of what’s required at this point – but our senses were suitably enraptured by the whole sequence in a way that joined us with the onstage spectators witnessing this Venus-like arrival.

The Act One love-duet took us to the opposite end of the lighting spectrum, with suspended, descending lamps both literally and metaphorically signifying the onset of the mysteries of night and the consummation of ardent expressions of love at the scene’s end – again, a beautiful, uncontrived effect. In the Humming Chorus, lamps were this time carried by the watchers, and extinguished one by one, the effect of “going into the night” tellingly contrasted  with the wide-wake steadfastness of Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly), waiting for her lover, Pinkerton.

In the context of such “charged” naturalness throughout, the costumes were of a piece with the sun’s radiance and the night’s gentleness. The Japanese/European contrast was necessarily marked, the Americans’ naval uniforms and the woman’s elegant western garb at the end having a plain, almost functional beauty which contrasted with the colourful oriental styles and hues worn by the Japanese characters.

With so many visual and functional felicities in play, the stage was, as it were, beautifully set for the singers and orchestral musicians to contribute their particular magic. Happily, they responded with a wholeheartedness that I felt matched the inspiration of the work’s creators, here brought out by astute, sensitive direction. Kate Cherry and her assistant Jacqueline Coats, together with stage and lighting designers Christina Smith and Matt Scott had, I thought, between them captured a kind of essence of universal human emotion, exotically but subtly flavoured, so as to retain our audience-connections with the situations of the characters.

First to impress (and weakening my resolve to castigate the NBRNZ operatic powers-that-be for casting so many non-New Zealanders in major roles) was the engagingly-acted and superbly-sung Goro (the marriage-broker), of Wellingtonian James Benjamin Rodgers, his demeanor capturing the bumptious servitude of the character to the full and his voice impressively clear and communicative at all times. His dynamic of interaction with Butterfly’s maid, Suzuki, was flecked with delightful self-righteous impulses tempered with proper “knowing-one’s-place” decorum; and American mezzo Lucy Schaufer’s Suzuki gave as good as she got. Elsewhere Schaufer’s attendance upon her mistress, Cio-Cio-San, took her character to another expressive level, beautifully mirroring Butterfly’s hopes and fears throughout.

Overshadowed by the loquacious Goro when he first enters, Italian tenor Piero Pretti as Lieutenant Pinkerton nevertheless quietly and confidently eased his character’s presence into the scenario, from the beginning his manner hinting at a none-too-subtle disdain of things Japanese. Then with the entrance of his friend, the American consul Sharpless (sung by English baritone, Peter Savidge), both tenor and baritone had to open their respective vocal throttles, partly to cope with an accompanying orchestral fabric which I thought was too fulsome and insistent in many places throughout the scene. Thankfully, Swedish conductor Tobias Ringborg thereafter seemed to pick up on the balances between singers and orchestra more surely, getting more clarity and coherence from the stage as a result, and some beautifully sensitive work from the pit.

I thought Piero Pretti a strong, heroic-sounding Pinkerton, sounding as though he had to push his tones over the orchestral fabric during those first exchanges with Sharpless, but thereafter responding to Butterfly upon her entrance, and during the love duet, with great tenderness and ardour. As Sharpless, Peter Savidge’s baritone also struggled to make his words be heard during his first scene, and similarly benefitted from the more diaphanous orchestral textures accompanying Cio-Cio-San’s entrance. Later, in Act Two, he again needed to be more incisive at first, but then settled and deepened his voice in time for a well-acted, extremely touching letter-reading scene with Butterfly.

And so to the heroine – Antoinette Halloran was the second Australian soprano I had seen and heard sing the role of Cio-Cio-San in Wellington (Rosamund Illing was the first, back in 1990), and like her distinguished predecessor she didn’t disappoint. Butterfly’s approach and entrance, as previously mentioned, was here a wonderful moment, the character’s appearance personifying both radiance and simple beauty, aided and abetted by a profusion of bright chorus colours and sunlit tones. Like many an operatic Butterfly, Halloran didn’t look particularly Oriental, but she nevertheless presented a believable portrayal of an exotic young girl on the brink of womanhood, readily and innocently putting her trust in a man she hardly knew, but had nevertheless fallen in love with.

Perhaps her voice wasn’t always ideally steady when under vocal pressure, though she delivered the well-known “Un bel di” with just the right amount of growing intensity towards a powerful, and properly fraught conclusion. Just once I felt her acting more workmanlike than inspired (her response to the Bonze, her uncle’s angry public condemnation of her marriage) – but for the rest of the time I thought it a beautifully-wrought and deeply touching portrayal. Among a number of enduring impressions of Halloran’s Butterfly, my most vivid is of her whole person’s transfigured intensity during her all-night vigil, throughout both the Humming Chorus and the orchestral prelude to the final scene, waiting for Pinkerton’s return.

Solid, reliable work from both the chorus and singers in smaller roles rounded out the picture – though of the latter only Bianca Andrew in her brief appearance as Pinkerton’s American wife, Kate, seemed entirely at one with her character, her poised elegance barely disguising her awareness of Butterfly’s situation. And, mention must be made of Butterfly’s child Sorrow, engagingly and winsomely played by Finn Bowden.

Apart from that first-Act sequence during which I thought the orchestral playing a couple of notches too insistent and unvaried against the tones of Pinkerton and Sharpless, conductor Tobias Ringborg and the Orchestra Wellington gave us both sensitive and spirited playing, illuminating the score’s most telling moments with tones ranging from finely-crafted diaphanous texturings to deep, louring portents of the ever-resonating tragedy. The playing fully realized the composer’s fascination with and use of exotic colour and piquant harmonies, both through individual instrumentalists’ skills and finely-judged ensemble work – a “moments per minute” scenario of continuing delight.

I thought this production brilliantly (and triumphantly!) gave the lie to the idea that today’s audiences require opera to be “updated” (I use the word euphemistically) in order to be able to connect with the stories, themes and characters. This was something “whole”, its power and impact the result not of outward titillation but inner conviction.

 

Wellington Youth Orchestra trumps with Shostakovich

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

WELLINGTON YOUTH ORCHESTRA PRESENTS:

John Psathas: Tarantismo (Wellington Première)

Rachmaninov: Excerpts from Aleko

Shostakovich: Symphony no.5 (moderato, allegretto, largo, allegro non troppo)

Wellington Youth Orchestra, conducted by Hamish McKeich, with Paul Whelan (bass-baritone)

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday 11 May 2013

A recent work by John Psathas, Tarantismo demonstrated again his considerable skill in orchestral writing, and his inventiveness.  The programme notes explained that the title refers to tarantism, the extreme desire to dance, that used to be attributed to the bite of the tarantula, but is named after the sea port in southern Italy.  From this tradition comes the dance, tarantella, a rapid, whirling dance.

The piece opened with tubular bells; soon there were brass melodies, particularly on the trombones.  The writing became briefly somewhat Mendelssohnian.  A large orchestra was required; numbers of ‘friends and guest players’, whose names were not listed, joined to support some sections.  I noticed three additional horns, the principal double bass and the principal violist from the NZSO.  There may have been others, notably in the percussion.  I noted, too, two players from the Quandrivium quartet that I heard perform two nights before. There was gorgeous harp playing from Michelle Velvin – and indeed throughout the concert.

Undulating phrases helped the work to build and build in both volume and tempo to complete was a very successful work, with something worthwhile for each player to do.

The surprise guest was brought to the platform for the second work, and turned out to be bass-baritone Paul Whelan, who had been performing the previous night with the NZSO and the Orpheus Choir in Psathas’s Orpheus in Rarohenga.

The music from Rachmaninov’s opera Aleko was completely unfamiliar to me, but most enjoyable.  The Introduction started with woodwind and then there was a big symphonic sound.  Throughout, there were delightful little solos for woodwind, and the harp again made a most distinguished contribution.

The second excerpt was a Cavatina for the bass-baritone.  Paul Whelan almost shocked us with his big sepulchral Russian voice.  Parts of his excerpt were ominous and menacing, the voice used superbly to obtain these effects.  There were some Tchaikovskian turns of musical phrase near the end – perhaps reminiscent of Onegin, since the character in Aleko was described in the programme notes as ‘a world-weary young man from a wealthy background…’  The instant applause at the end was well-deserved.  This was great singing.

The Men’s Dance was rumbunctious, the double basses getting a good workout at the beginning.  Their playing was very fine, as was the brass playing, with some lovely long-held pianissimos, and much for the percussion to do.  McKeich’s conducting gestures looked clear and always meaningful.  The orchestra made a great sound, and always played as a cohesive unit.  The music was very involving.

The best was yet to come.  The playing of the Shostakovich symphony was simply splendid. This, perhaps his best-known symphony, is full of power.  I would be glad to hear a professional orchestra play this work as well as the Wellington Youth Orchestra did, despite a few intonation flaws in the strings soon after the opening phrases.  The strings nevertheless played superbly, rendering the bleak atmosphere through beautifully controlled dynamics and phrasing.  Refined oboe playing was just part of the magical woodwind to be heard throughout.  An unnamed pianist made a robust contribution.

Some Mahlerian phrases could be heard, but much of the music is more abrasive than Mahler, and much more percussion is employed, including impressive timpani playing from, I believe, another guest player.

The rather disturbing opening theme is repeated in many different guises in this first movement.  A violin solo, full of pathos was beautifully played by leader Arna Morton.

Again in the second movement, the double basses got the initial passages.  The jolly (or mocking?) section that followed was full of joie de vivre – apparently.  Solo violin was again an outstanding feature, then flute had its time in the sun, and many others, including the contra-bassoon.  The pizzicato string passages accompanying some of these were absolutely spot on.  The conductor had the measure of the work, and the orchestra conveyed that.

Notable in the third movement were the horns in top form (acknowledging that not all were regular WYO players).  The music moved from the jolly to the sombre here.  After a marvellous harp and flute duet, there followed ominous passages, in which the strings really dug into their instruments, to produce full, rich tone, exquisitely nuanced.  The dramatic contrasts and extremes were most exciting.

The finale started with bang, bang brass, especially the tuba, and timpani, as they played an exciting dance.  The movement ran a whole gamut of senses and emotions.  The period of quietude seemed almost shocking after what had gone before.  The tension mounted as the military, in the shape of brass and side-drum, called; the strings endlessly repeated one note in unison until the climax, and the end.

All the music was chosen well, to give a range of solo passages for many of the players, and passages allowing other sections of the orchestra to shine.  It is hard to think of a symphony that provides more opportunities for woodwind solos than this one does.

The audience, if not large, was very attentive, and a partial standing ovation greeted the concert’s conclusion.  I left the hall on a ‘high’.  All credit to Hamish McKeich and the players.  The future of symphonic music in this country seems secure in these hands.

Tribulation and triumph for young pianist at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music Hutt Valley presents

JASON BAE – Piano Recital

BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata No.6 in F Major Op.10 No.2

RAVEL – Gaspard de la Nuit

CHOPIN – Mazurkas Op.59

RACHMANINOV – Piano Sonata No.2 in B-flat Minor Op.36

Lower Hutt Little Theatre,

Thursday 9th May 2013

Chamber Music Hutt Valley organizers must have wondered about what else was going to go wrong, regarding the chain of events associated with the Society’s much-awaited piano recital by Serbian Sonja Radojkovich. Firstly, Radojkovich had to withdraw due to ill health, and then replacement pianist Jason Bae, of Auckland, had his bag containing practically all of his personal effects stolen from the Lower Hutt Theatre while he was rehearsing for the concert.

The wonder of all this was that, despite the setbacks, the concert still went ahead and the music triumphed, thanks to the outstanding abilities of and remarkable professionalism displayed by the young Korean-born pianist, playing without his normal contact lenses, and having to rely entirely on memory throughout much of his final day’s preparations for the recital.

Jason Bae had, a week before, graduated with performance honours from the University of Auckland’s School of Music while under the tutelage of Rae de Lisle. After concluding this present tour, and fulfilling a couple of concerto engagements in Auckland with the Philharmonic, he will be heading for London, where he has been accepted into the Royal Academy of Music for a Masters of Arts in piano performance, studying with Christopher Elton and Joanna MacGregor. High-flying stuff!

On the strength of his performances in this present recital, I would say that he has all the requisite talent and all the “young-pianist” characteristics to be able to develop into a truly remarkable musician. In terms of technique alone, he was able to square up to all the contact-points of the most demanding items, while his musical sensibilities enabled him to sensitively and tellingly shape and control the ebb and flow of many different aspects of the music’s expression.

Probably the most successful performance overall during the evening was that of the Rachmaninov Sonata, a work that requires a kind of “grand virtuoso manner” with a fastidious ear for voicing individual parts and a feeling for facilitating a kind of play between impulse and poise. To my ears, Jason Bae showed that he possessed all of those qualities, giving us a proper “epic” quality in the playing, right from the opening of the work. Here were grand orchestral sonorities set against gentler melancholic strains that followed (shades of the composer’s famous Op.32 B Minor Prelude at one point), and an impressive array of keyboard textures, the music cascading from bright, Rimsky-Korsakov-like glisterings on the heights to deep-throated bells down in the valleys. Perhaps the melancholy lyricism was a bit dry-eyed in places, but so much else was achieved in impressive style, one couldn’t really complain.

The second movement’s lyrical opening seemed to form of itself out of the very air in the pianist’s hands, the composer then seeming to play with salon-like melodic sequences, but then subject them to all kinds of adventures, ritualistic, agitated and breath-catchingly melodic – the playing here amply demonstrated why it was that pianists love to tackle Rachmaninov’s music! After a brief introductory moment of reflection the finale irrupted with energy and forward drive, a kind of “boyars’ march”, delivered by the young pianist with brilliance and swagger, and maintaining a sense of excitement right through to the concluding flourishes, doing rich justice to a self-assured display of confidence by no means characteristic of a sometimes cripplingly self-critical composer.

Ravel’s formidable Gaspard de la Nuit was also impressively recreated, especially throughout the two outer movements, each of which brought out Jason Bae’s wonderful variety of touch and surety of emphasis at any given point in the music. Thus the opening Ondine shimmered and swirled most delicately, while conjuring up a growing sense of volatility born of the water-sprite’s hopeless love for a mortal man, culminating in a frisson of movement and bitter laughter which at once mocked and stung as well as filled the heart of the enraptured listener with both pity and relief.

Its shadow-side here was Scarbo , the work’s third movement, reckoned by many commentators as an exemplar of musical malevolence. The pianist’s prominent repeated notes shortly after the music’s creepily disturbing beginning did seem to me to lack true visceral bite, but Bae made amends by later conjuring up some truly awe-inspiring, necromantic figurations and textures, orchestrating the tensions and suggestively psychotic confrontation-points with dark brilliance.

Interestingly, I thought his Le Gibet  (a musical depiction of a corpse left on the gallows in the setting sun) not yet on the level of the two other realizations, macabre stillness and pity perhaps more elusive states to realize and maintain in music over long periods. Bae’s playing seemed to my ears concerned more with beauty than with desolation, his tone-gradations and texturings missing something of a “stricken” quality, a kind of underlying ghastliness that informs every chord progression, every melodic impulse, every single bell-tolling note. No tone-poem to nature’s beauties, this, but a study in gloom and hopelessness. Perhaps one ought to be heartened at the thought of a musician young in years whose mind is yet unclouded by such morbidities and their musical realization.

On a similar level of accomplishment was Jason Bae’s rendition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.6 in F Major, the work which opened the recital. The music’s opening measures were given plenty of poise and spring by the pianist, the juxtapositioning between legato and staccato passages helping to bring out the fun of the work, evident from the very first two chords. Though an early sonata, there’s already a distinctive creative spirit at work in its alternations of virtuoso display, poised, elegantly-worked figuration, and touches of humour. Jason Bae’s playing underlined the first two of these qualities with plenty of stylish gestures and technical aplomb, though the music’s humour was somewhat left to its own devices.

I thought the slow movement nicely done, if rather sectional, with the pauses between sequences of the movement feeling a bit dead instead of “thought-through”. But the pianist achieved a lovely contrast between the contrapuntal opening and the more chordal trio section, with an ear for gradations of tone in evidence. And the tongue-in-cheek nonchalance with which the finale’s presto was launched buoyed us along splendidly, even if the bumptiously ornamented key-change could have raised our eyebrows a bit more mischievously. But Bae missed, in my opinion, the biggest joke of them all (perhaps this WAS the joke!), the unexpected plunge back into the second-half repeat, as if Beethoven was saying, “AND another thing….!” It was, come to think of it, a twist of a different kind, a “That’s enough of that!” gesture, instead.

I’ve left the Chopin Mazurka group to the end, because I found it a bit of a puzzle – the individual pieces were played cleanly and smoothly, with all the pianistic dots and crosses filled in – but I didn’t feel the music’s character was sufficiently projected, via a dance-element that’s earthy and in places even spiky.  I certainly don’t think pianists should play the Mazurkas as though they’re another set of Waltzes – Schumann’s Countesses have no place in these largely rustic, strongly-accented pieces, whose rhythmic quirkiness and obsessive leading beats confounded some of Chopin’s contemporaries (there are accounts of Chopin “falling out” with people over reactions to his playing of these very individual works.

The composer’s enjoining other interpreters to “listen to Bellini” in order to play his music properly would have most likely been a directive to take notice as much of the singers’ rubato as part of the beauty of the vocal line. As with Mozart, who wanted his music to “flow like oil” Chopin’s advice to other pianists has been taken up by many as meaning to create a kind of unending prettiness, bringing to heel any more vigorous or darker aspects to the music. I’m certain Jason Bae will, as he continues to explore those Mazurkas, come to dig his fingers into them more deeply and uncover more of their “cultured earthiness”. Liszt has been practically castigated by more recent scholarship for comparing these pieces to Polish folk-music all those years ago,  but one can HEAR in the music’s characterful impulses what he meant.

All credit to Jason Bae on a number of counts, regarding an exciting and stimulating recital. We wish him all the very best for his oncoming period of study in England, and look forward to encountering his playing again, at some undisclosed but eagerly awaited time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ground – (and knuckle – ?) breaking Debussy and Ligeti

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:

XIANG ZOU and JIAN LIU

György LIGETI – Etudes for solo piano Bks 1-3 (complete)

Claude DEBUSSY – Etudes for solo piano Bks 1-2 (complete)

Xiang Zhou (Ligeti) and Jian Liu (Debussy) – piano

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Sunday May 5th 2013

Time was when many people would look at the kind of fare offered by a concert such as this and suddenly discover all kinds of other things that they simply HAD to get done instead, such as mowing the lawns. Although the Ilott Theatre wasn’t packed to the extent that it was for Michael Houstoun’s recent Beethoven concerts, I thought the attendance was a “good average” for what seemed, on paper a fairly “studied”, and perhaps slightly daunting affair.

Thirty or so years ago most people’s consciousness of the name of Ligeti wouldn’t have gone past encountering the wonderful music of his used in the film 2001- A Space Odyssey;  and one might imagine little more of Debussy’s music than things like the Children’s Corner, Suite Bergamasque,  and random selections from the composer’s books of Preludes and sets of Images being given here in recitals.

Now, thanks in part to local musicians such as the New Zealand String Quartet fearlessly tackling works of the order of difficulty of Ligeti’s First String Quartet, the composer’s music has begun to shape something of a local performance profile – and though Debussy’s Etudes would, for most people, inhabit the more esoteric realms of his output, complete performances of other works such as the two books of Preludes for solo piano have been given within these shores over living memory by people like Tamas Vesmas and David Guerin. So a way of sorts had been prepared – and now, here we were, pushing the frontiers back even further.

Two pianists had been pressed into service for this concert, the quality of their credentials suggesting that we were being treated to luxury casting. First up, playing Ligeti, was Xiang Zou, of Chinese birth, and a product of both the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in China and the Juilliard Music School in New York. He’s won various prizes for his piano-playing in various international venues over the years (he’s now thirty years old), and currently he teaches at Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music. He recently gave the Chinese premiere of all three books of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Etudes, so the music one would reasonably assume, would have already been well-and-truly explored, and “taken-on-board” for the purposes of this concert.

Though Ligeti lamented his own lack of pianistic skill, his creative imagination was able to transcend any physical limitations, to produce in these pieces what could well be regarded as the twentieth century’s most Lisztian keyboard explorations (ironic that both composers were Hungarian). Despite the protean technical difficulties of keyboard works I’ve encountered by people such as Busoni, Godowsky and Sorabji, I would feel that perhaps only the piano music of Messiaen can claim to having comparable levels of both technical exploration and poetic creativity to Ligeti’s Etudes.

So – these are a few comments regarding the range and scope of the first of the books. Xiang Zou’s playing of the opening study, Désordre (Disorder), gripped our sensibilities with pincer-like force from the outset. These were sounds which instantaneously conveyed a sense of incredible force and energy, the music setting the keyboard’s white keys across the hands against the black via inexorably rapid, vortex-like movements. The effect was strangely exhilarating, at one and the same time vertiginous and claustrophobic.

Contrasted with this was the Berg-like austerity, the sparse romanticism of Cordes à vide (Hollow Chords), the second of the Etudes. Where the first piece was tightly-worked, to the point of being oppressive, here were opened-out spaces, with calm, delicate detail, impulses nudged and rippled (beautiful left-hand legato figures) rather than things muscled or thrusted. As for the third, the Touches bloquées (Blocked Touches), this highlighted a visual aspect to the studies, as towards the end of the piece the player was required to press keys already held down, the hands therefore mixing ghostly resonance with a kind of dumb-show aspect. At the start the music created an uncanny stuttering ambience, with voices seeming to cancel out each others’ tones, with the dialogue then breaking off for a trebly-voiced trio section, a kind of “noises off” musical mise-en-scène. 

Fanfares, the fourth in the set, had the player alternating and entangling brass and wind calls with roulades of connecting tones, pianist Xiang Zou breathtakingly dovetailing the separate rhythms between the hands, and nicely shaping both the music’s winding down, and the feathery flourishes at the end. Then, with Arc-en-ciel (Rainbow), a free, airy and floating ambience at the start contrasted with richer, more substantial tones that grew with the piece, as if the composer was detailing first the sky and then the earth below. Xiang Zou’s marvellous control of texture and colour enabled the music to dissolve at the end into what seemed like thin air. After such pantheistic delicacy the concluding Automne à Varsovie (Autumn in Warsaw) cruelly brought human emotion into play with the elements, as the music’s tragic, obsessive descending figure seemed to spread like inexorable darkness over everything and everybody,  Xiang Zou’s playing piling on an ever-increasing weight of gloom and despair towards a crushing conclusion at the bottom of the keyboard.

In retrospect, placing the four completed Etudes from Ligeti’s Third Book immediately afterwards was, I felt, too much of a good thing, especially as Xiang Zou’s playing of the first Book was so “of a piece”, bringing out the contrasts so unerringly placed by the composer. The Four Book 3 pieces had for me, their own ambient world, but their presence, in view what else was to follow in the recital, overtaxed the balances, in my opinion. When Jian Liu, currently Head of Piano Studies at Te Koki New Zealand School of Music, finally walked out on the stage to begin his traversal of the Debussy Etudes, we were more than ready for him.

Xiang Zou ‘s playing had excitingly met Ligeti’s demands for a kind of up-front, confrontational virtuosity head-on. Now, we were treated to a marked contrast of both style and content, with the older pianist’s rather more relaxed, less “coiled spring” approach to music that, to be fair, seemed also more inclined to persuade rather than coerce its listeners to accept a point of view. Straightaway, one registered a tonal richness and depth in Debussy’s music largely eschewed by Ligeti, writing almost three-quarters of a century onward.

Unlike with Xiang Zou, I had previously heard Jian Liu play, and his qualities were all that I remembered from my previous encounters with him – first and foremost an ease of tonal production with almost nothing unduly forced, except those strokes by composers which are all the more telling when sparingly employed; and second, a clarity and balance of tone, colour and articulation, which I thought here ideal for the composer of these particular pieces. Since the time of their composition, Debussy’s Etudes have been regarded with as much awe (one writer called the Doux Etudes  “an ultimate in perfection, an end of conquest”) as have Ligeti’s, though for different reasons –  the former create their own unique impression on the listener, for much of the time fulfilling the composer’s oft-quoted remark,”Let us forget that the piano has hammers…”, an attitude to which the performance we got from Jian Liu certainly paid its dues.

Space precludes an exhaustive discussion of every individual item’s performance by each pianist – so, as with Xiang Zou’s Ligeti, I’ll record a few specific impressions of Jian Liu’s playing of the first Debussy group. To begin, the composer’s affectionate tribute to “the five-finger exercise” courtesy of pedagogue Carl Czerny was given appropriate ambivalent treatment, nostalgia tempered by gentle mockery, as befitted a parody-piece, the swirling main idea “put up” to all kinds of antics, impulsive, absent-minded and reflective. Pour les tierces (For the thirds), which followed, placed the “exercise” at the service of the music’s poetry and visceral movement, Liu’s beautifully modulated undulations capturing a readily-evoked “play of waves” effect.

The following Pour les quartes (For the fourths) had a properly volatile character, the march-rhythm capturing the piece, exciting the figurations and carrying our sensibilities triumphantly along, before running out of steam. I like the way Liu’s beautifully brushed-in upward arpeggios at the end restored the music’s equanimities. The pianist’s elegantly-realised tones underlined Debussy’s affinities with Chopin in Pour les sixtes (For the sixths), setting down a beautiful carpet of sound whose resonances supported both feathery brilliance and tones of great stillness. The big-boned Pour les octaves (For the octaves) also demonstrated the pianist’s command of contrast between bravura and delicacy, while the rippling, scampering flat-handed finger-whirling Pour les huit doigts (For the eight fingers) set our senses spinning, glissandi and all, right up to the delightful throwaway ending.

And to think that, at the interval, there were still plenty of worlds within the worlds of these works that we hadn’t yet explored! To reproduce all my notes regarding what we heard afterwards would be to expose my poverty of description – suffice to say that each composer’s music in the second half seemed to be as excellently served by its respective interpreter as before, the two strands again creating an even wider angle of divergence from one another throughout. Jian Liu’s Debussy playing further delighted in the music’s evocations of poetic sonority, while Xiang Zou’s Ligeti continued to rage, melt, burn and whisper, refurbishing our perceptions of pianistic possibility – if the concert was for me a shade too elongated and balanced slightly off-centre, it nevertheless packed plenty of meaningful punches, both iron-fisted and velvet-gloved – a truly memorable occasion.

 

 

 

 

Uncovering the fullness of Monteverdi – Baroque Voices

Posted on by Peter Mechen

THE FULL MONTE – Concert Four

MONTEVERDI –  Madrigals Book 4 (1603) – complete

Selected Duets from Madrigals Book 7 (1619)

Baroque Voices : Pepe Becker, Jayne Tankersley (sopranos)/ Andrea Cochrane (alto)

Christopher Warwick (countertenor) / Jeffrey Chang (tenor) / Simon Christie (bass)

Continuo: Jonathan Berkahn (virginals) / Robert Oliver (bass viol)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Sunday 28th April 2013

On the face of things, this was another expertly put-together and engagingly-performed concert in Baroque Voices’ Monteverdi series, with pretty much the same underlying features as in previous concerts. But the ensemble has now reached Book Four of the composer’s nine separate madrigal collections, one which represents a crisis-point in the series.

Monteverdi was to thenceforth embark on a new path, what he called his “Seconda Pratica”, moving away from traditional unaccompanied polyphonic modes in favour of freer and bolder uses of harmony and ornamentation,including the use of continuo instruments. He announced his intentions in his written preface to the Fifth Book, published in 1605, declaring that he would make “the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant”.

So, the music of parts of this concert represented a kind of summation of an era, given that we as listeners following the series had already been well-and-truly initiated into the new age! Thanks to the group’s alternation of madrigals from both of the stylistic eras in every concert thus far, we’ve enjoyed and already marvelled at some of the expressive possibilities of the composer’s “Second Practice”. Though this may have “muddied the waters” for those wanting clearly-defined divisions in performance, for me the presentations have, in a different sense, been enriched with the use of these contrasts in the music as renaissance turns into baroque.

In any case part of the fascination for me of having the two “practices” presented cheek-by-jowl was, as with other concerts in the series, having those “window-in-time” opportunities for registering how the younger Monteverdi was always straining at the leash of compositional convention, and occasionally (to quote Franz Liszt’s famous words) “hurling his lance into the future” with unexpected and scalp-prickling emphases and irregularities which earned him the ire of him more conventional colleagues and rivals.

There were far too many moments of sheer musical illumination to catalogue adequately during the course of this concert – of course, we have become thoroughly accustomed to, indeed spoilt by the “moments per minute” nature of the presentations thus far – and so it proved here. I shall content myself with recounting my impressions of some of the more “stand-out” realizations achieved by the group, while noting the presence of a few moments which seemed to me to be less successfully achieved than the group might have wanted.

The concert began with the first madrigal from Book Four Ah delete partita (Ah, painful departure) – a spectacular unison soprano line began the piece, subsequently cleaving into two a tone apart, creating enormous intensity which was, I thought, beautifully sculptured by the singers, though Pepe Becker’s normally secure tones seemed to me a little strained and perhaps “unwarmed”, the effort more than usually noticeable.

Pepe’s and fellow-soprano Jayne Tankersley’s very individual timbres always delight in combination, their differences illuminating the lines and, by nature, the texts. The following Book 7 madrigal, featuring both singers Non è di gentil core (No-one has a gentle heart) brought out these features, the beautiful descents at “e nel foci d’amor lieta godete” (“who revel gladly in the fire of love) and the variation of impulse at “Dunque non e di gentil core” (This proves that no-one has a gentle heart) giving the more impulsive passages a wonderful “quickened by love” aspect.

Two Book 4 settings which then followed, both texts beginning with the words “Cor mio…” served to demonstrate the composer’s inclinations towards more overt expressivity and volatility than was accepted as the norm within the framework of the “old rules”. Especially the second of these, Cor mio, non mori? (My heart, will you not die?) contrasted a charged stillness at the opening with an impulsive leap forward at “non mori?”, employing volatilities and richly-wrought harmonies hand-in-hand, seeming to look forward as readily and uncannily as our sensibilities as listeners were drawn back in time as well.

The contrasts between the two styles did tell splendidly in places, such as in Book 7’s O viva fiamma (O live flame of love) with its excitable exchanges between the sopranos – Jayne Tankersley’s expression vibrant and pulsating, Pepe Becker’s more contained and poised – and its sorrowful and pitiable conclusion at “pieta vi prenda del mio acerbo pianto” (take pity on my sorrowful lamentation). The two altos, Andrea Cochrane and counter-tenor Christopher Warwick made much of their first-half Interrotte speranze (Hopes shattered) from Book 7, conveying the intense pain of unrequited love, underpinned by some deeply-felt tones from Robert Oliver’s bass viol. I enjoyed the deep, rich vocal unisons breaking into thirds, perhaps symbolizing the text’s parting of love’s way. However, in the second half I didn’t feel that the same two singers quite nailed another Book 7 madrigal,Vorrei baciarte (I’d like to kiss you) to the same extent, the piece requiring more vocal “ring” than these two pleasing, but rather soft-grained voices could muster.

There’s a barely-concealed eroticism in a good deal of Monteverdi’s music (including parts of his Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) which here bubbled to the fore in a number of places, such as Book 4’s Si, ch’io vorrei morire (Yes, I want to die of love), put across by the ensemble with great relish. Sequences like the suggestive ascending intensities of “Ahi, car’e dolce lingua” (Ah, dear, sweet tongue) and moments such as the fully-flowering “Ahi, vita mia, a questo bianco seno” (Ah, my love, to this white breast) would possibly have earned censorship strictures at less permissive stages of human history. As for the effect, visceral or imaginative, of the repeated exclamations of “Ahi…”, either way the intention could hardly be more explicit.

Rather less evident as soloists throughout, both tenor Jeffrey Chang and bass Simon Christie made exemplary contributions to the ensemble, especially prominent in Book 4’s Voi pur di me partite (So, you really are leaving me), with its male-only middle section at “Ardo d’amor, ado d’amore!” (I burn with love – I burn!). Tenor Jeffrey Chang made a good fist of stirring the emotions in Book 4’s Anima dolorosa, with his anguished tones at “Amor spire? Che spire?”  (Love, what hopes have you?) in the midst of more dignified mourning and sorrow. And Simon Christie’s rock-steady “anchoring”of the ensembles showed impeccable judgment and sensitivity in every case, his lines coming to the fore when appropriate, as in the eloquent Book 4 Longe da te cor mio (Distant from you my dearest).

Incidentally, this madrigal occasioned the only real “glitch” of the concert, Pepe Becker stopping the singers after a few measures, and starting again, presumably to “retune”. The only other untoward things were those previously mentioned very brief instances of voices sounding insufficiently warmed when straining for high notes (both sopranos and the counter-tenor), and a couple of tiny delays due to outside aeroplane noise. The rest was unalloyed delight – and with the next concert, we will presumably get the composer’s “Seconda Pratica” in full candlepower, music’s history in its making.