Category: Live performance

Cantoris takes on The Armed Man

Posted on by Julia Wells

Cantoris Choir: The Armed Man

Karl Jenkins: The Armed Man – A Mass for Peace

Cantoris Choir, Ensemble and Karakia

Director: Brian O’Regan

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Friday, 26th April, 2013

Cantoris are to be congratulated on a very good performance of Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man, as is their new director, Brian O’Regan, and accompanying musicians. As soon as the first drum tattoo echoed through St Andrews, I was glad to be there. The choir made a wonderful start as well, producing a rich and full sound that filled the church. Indeed, it was the warmth and depth of the choir that most stood out for me, carrying the performance through what were occasionally rather banal words (ring out the old, ring in the new/ ring happy bells across the snow). Reading through the programme beforehand, I had wondered how they were going to pull off some of the lyrics, particularly those of the last section, ‘Better is Peace’. The performance stood as a testament to how music can elevate less than astounding words.

The second section, traditionally an islamic call to prayer, was replaced by a karakia, beautifully performed by Wairemana Campbell. The substitution worked well, making this a distinctively New Zealand performance, something that was particularly fitting the day following Anzac Day. The next section, the Kyrie, again showcased the choir’s rich sounds. This part also contained a haunting cello solo by Margaret Guldborg.

The section that was the most striking, however, was section five, the Sanctus. It began quietly, with the underlying menace of the percussion (wonderfully played by Thomas Guldborg and Hazel Leader) belying the sweetness and serenity of the choir. When they reached the Hosanna the audience was rocked by an overwhelming and climactic wall of sound. In a way this made it difficult for the choir in the Charge section, which should logically be the climax of the mass. So much sound and energy had already peaked during the Sanctus that the music struggled to gain enough for the Charge. Although they rallied in the end, for me it lacked the drama of the Sanctus.

After the Charge came the unremitting grimness of the Angry Flames and Torches. It was a relief when the Agnus Dei arrived and the piece began to move away from the horrors described in the middle sections. The choir was particularly soft and sweet during the Benedictus, which also featured some lovely work from the ensemble, although the background organ was perhaps a little overbearing. In the final section, Better is Peace, the choir captured the hope and excitement of the ending, bringing the piece to a spectacular finish.

Stroma’s second Mirror of Time – a “Rogues’ Gallery” of Music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – THE MIRROR OF TIME – 2

Music by: Michael Norris, Jean-Féry Rebel, Thomas Adès,  Anthonello de Caserta, Heinrich Biber,

Louis Andriessen, Carlo Gesualdo, Philip Brownlee, Josquin des Prez, Arvo Pärt,

Thomas Preston, Erik Satie, Matteo da Perugia, Mieko Shiomi, Anon (14th C.)

(all arrangements by Michael Norris)

Stroma: Vesa-Matti Leppänen, Rebecca Struthers (violins) / Andrew Thomson (viola) / Rowan Prior (‘cello)

Kamala Bain (recorder(s) / Rowena Simpson (soprano)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

Artistic Director: Michael Norris

St.Mary of the Angels, Wellington

Friday 26th April, 2013

With some surprise I read in the Stroma program booklet that this was in fact the SECOND “Mirror of Time” Concert presented by the Ensemble, following on from an occasion in 2012 – had I recently awakened from a kind of “Rip Van Winkel” sleep, or something? I had been to and reviewed a couple of Stroma concerts that year, but I couldn’t remember a “Mirror of Time” title, or a similar theme, even thought the expression dégustations rang a bell. Furthermore, if the first of these explorations of short but visionary, ground-breaking compositions from the Middle Ages to the present day had been as entertainingly assembled and characterfully performed as this present one, then I had indeed missed something special, while in my “sleepwalking” mode.

Having the beautiful and old-worldly church of St.Mary of the Angels available for music performance is invariably a kind of “added value” for performers and audiences alike – and so it proved on this occasion. From out of the ambience of this most atmospheric venue came the first notes of this concert’s music, the quartet of performers antiphonally placed for maximum effect, playing a twelfth-century plainchant theme “O igneous Spiritus”, written by Hildegarde of Bingen, and arranged here by Michael Norris.

Each player gave us his or her own particular variation of the plainchant tune, the effect being an awakening a kind of “music of the spheres” fancy, or, in Hildegarde’s own, if differently-contexted words, sounds “on the breath of God”. The playing, too, had a kind of other-worldly quality, heightened by drawn-out harmonics and occasionally tempered by exotic, vocal-like slides between the notes. I liked Michael Norris’ likening of the effect to “stained-glass” encapsulations of past echoes, preserved for all time. As the musicians finished playing, each one came up to the platform in front of the audience – a nice, ritualistic touch.

From then it was delight following upon delight, really, though one was never sure exactly what shape or form the delight would be presented in (which are the most exciting kinds of delights – as everybody knows!). Having properly gotten an ecclesiastical version of Michael Flanders’ famous “pitch of the hall” (from his and Donald Swann’s show “At the Drop of a Hat”), the musicians (strings joined by a recorder – well, two recorders, more of which in a moment) then proceeded to “let ‘er rip” with a shocking discord made up of a tone cluster, written two hundred years ahead of the likes of Henry Cowell and Penderecki. This came from the pen of French Baroque composer Jean-Féry Rebel, whose dates (1666-1747) make him a near-contemporary of JS Bach, though the former’s innovative experiments with rhythm and harmony put some of his music light-years apart.

As Michael Norris pointed out in the program, this and many of the pieces in the evening’s concert were arrangements of originals, rather than being “authentic” realizations, the intention being to emphasize for listeners the music’s more innovative content. Rebel’s work “Le Cahos” comes from his ballet “Les Élemens”, the full score of which has been lost in any case, leaving a “performing edition” put together by the composer for amateur use at home – so tonight’s performance was perfectly in scale with the composer’s intentions. Strings were partnered by a recorder, firstly a sopranino, whose piercing tones could be heard through the discordant opening, and then a treble instrument taken up as the music increasingly featured solo lines – it was all a bit like a rather more elemental manifestation of Vivaldi.

Leaping forward in time to the music of Thomas Adès from such radical expression suddenly didn’t feel so big a deal in this context, though in other ways Adès’ work “Lethe” made a marked contrast to Jean-Féry Rebel’s chaotic seismic irruptions. Here, Rowan Prior’s beautiful solo cello suggested the Lethe River, interwoven with eerie harmonics from the other strings, the effect not unlike a slowly revolving kinetic sculpture, or else movements from an age-old windmill out of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”. Such antiquities used by a contemporary composer helped bridge the gap to the music of one of the concert’s earliest featured composers, Anthonello de Caserta, a 14th century song “Dame d’onour en qui” featuring the soprano voice of Rowena Simpson. De Caserta’s rhythmic configurations were a delight and a tease for the ear in this sparkling performance.

Heinrich Biber’s music is better-known, of course, and we enjoyed his “Mars”, an exerpt from Battalia à 10, with the ‘cello using a sheet of paper inserted between the strings for a “snare” effect. A different kind of unorthodox instrument use was employed by the Dutch contemporary composer Louis Andriessen in his “Ende”, requiring the player to use two recorders simultaneously, Kamala Bain rising spectacularly to the occasion, tossing the pitches between instruments and giving us an exciting acccelerando at the end.

The work of another contemporary composer, Wellington-based Philip Brownlee, followed that of Carlo Gesualdo, the latter’s music employing chromatic shifts to wonderfully haunting effect, in the madrigal “Io puri respiro in cosi gran dolor”, some sequences having an almost Gothic feel to them. Rowena Simpson’s bell-like voice both enriched and wrestled with the parallel string lines throughout, voice and instruments then “finding” one another at the end of the piece’s dying fall. Not Gesualdo, however, but Giovanni Gabrieli provided the Kiwi composer with his starting-point for “Canzona per sonare: Degraded Echoes” (a world premiere), the opening tones “summoned” as it seemed from faraway places, a sombre medieval sound made of long-held lines from strings and recorder, the lines and harmonies vying with the actual timbres, giving we listeners the opportunity to think spatially, or else indulge our preoccupations. An agitated middle section, aleatoric in effect, underlined rhythmic and pitching gestures, encompassed by piercing tones from the recorder, and took us at the end to edges of known territories, where wonderment begins.

Josquin Des Prez’s brief but beautiful “Agnus Dei” from his “Missa l’homme arm super voces musicales” threw some light upon Arvo Pärt’s following Da Pacem Domine, the latter inspired by medieval plainchant, and saturating our sensibilities with its wonderful drawn-out timelessness of utterance. And to draw us briefly from these and following enchantments came a brief soupcon from the little-known 16th-century English composer Thomas Preston, an organ piece with a strangely bitonal bass-line, strings and recorder simultaneously following separate harmonic pathways, and creating lines whose relationship sounded oddly and ear-catchingly ambivalent.

Ambivalence of various sorts certainly hovers about many of the works created by the uniquely fascinating Erik Satie. We heard an arrangement of the Prelude to his incidental music to a play “Le Fils des Étoiles”, one whose use of an offstage soprano voice and muted strings underlined the general exotic mysticism of the music and its context. Throughout I kept on thinking of Shakespeare’s “Tempest” – soundscapes of air and water created from those disembodied tones were added to Satie’s preoccupation with harmonies based on the interval of a fourth. All of it made for ambiences “rich and strange”, and had a utterly captivating aspect.

The rest brought us back to solid earth with plenty of sheerly visceral fun, Italian composer Matteo da Peruglia’s fifteenth-century 3-part canon given the “treatment”with two more parts added and the original tempo given a turbocharged “take two”, and an arrangement of the anonymous 14th-century song “Cuncti Simus Concanentes”, an energetic homage to the Virgin Mary with bells and hand-clapping thrown into the festive mix. This was after the string-players had picked up and rearranged their music on the stands from which they had been ignominiously blown by a hand-held hair-dryer, Kamala Bain employing a different kind of wind instrument to disruptive effect in Japanese composer Mieko Shiomi’s “Wind Music”. Of course, had it been Stockhausen’s music, helicopters might have arrived, and there would have been an awful din – so we were grateful that the turbulence created here, though annoying for the musicians trying to make sense of their written parts, was more-or-less containable.

All in all, a terrific assemblage of inventiveness on the part of artistic director Michael Norris, and of performance skills from the members of Stroma.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homage to Britten from the Aroha Quartet

Posted on by Peter Mechen

AROHA STRING QUARTET

with CATHERINE McKAY (piano)

BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in B-flat Op.18 No.6

BRITTEN – String Quartet No.3 Op.94

SCHUMANN – Piano Quintet in E-flat Op.44

Aroha Quartet: – Haihong Liu, Blythe Press (violins), Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (‘cello)

St.Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 21st April, 2013

For some reason I hadn’t really registered before this concert just how big a space at St.Andrew’s Church a small ensemble has to fill with sound, both behind the musicians and above them. It seemed to my ears when the Aroha Quartet began their Beethoven which opened the concert that everything was set back, as opposed to “being in one’s face”, and that the instrumental timbres were more than usually “terraced’. Once my ears got used to this, I enjoyed the extra spaciousness of it all, even if some of the solo lines sounded a bit removed, and some of the ambiences in the more rapid concerted passages were as rushing winds, having a slightly disembodied effect.

Probably the reason my ears were receiving these sounds in this way was that I had been listening to some chamber-music recordings that morning which had been given the “full-blooded” treatment, the instruments closely recorded, and with what sounded like plenty of reverberation – all a little too much, in my opinion, as if the ensemble (the Amadeus Quartet, recorded by Decca) had swelled into chamber-orchestra proportions in certain places.

Once my listening-palette had been re-aligned, I was able to appreciate the lean, lithe and joyously physical energies of the performance of the Beethoven work. These players always generate plenty of  élan in such music, and this quartet’s first movement positively bristled in places. Though intonation wasn’t absolutely perfect, the spirit of the composer leapt at us from the notes. In the second movement I loved the different voicing from first and second violins, the first silvery, the other golden-toned, both displaying heart-warming teamwork. What beautifully-tailored dynamics throughout the hushed central part of the movement – those awed, withdrawn tones! – and what light-as-feather playing throughout the lead back to the opening’s reprise!

I enjoyed the players’ joie de vivre in the scherzo, the syncopations encouraging wonderful stresses and parallel energies. The trio carried the momentums onwards, with the violin skipping among the notes out at a great rate and galvanizing the ensemble’s return to the mainstream. The finale’s introduction, “La malinconia” brought down upon the sound-world a properly sobering and despondent air before swinging into an elegant round-dance, the quartet rounding off the music’s curves with relish. We got the merest foretaste of the “Muss es Sein” of Op.135 with an exploratory interlude, before the players adroitly steered the lines back to the rounds, slowing things romantically and wistfully, before exploding with exuberance and drive over the last few bars – great stuff!

How often does one get to enjoy a Britten String Quartet live? – and if not this year, will there ever be more chances? We’re in debt to the Quartet for not only playing the work at all (à la Dr.Johnson and his “dog on its hind legs” analogy) but for giving it such a cracking performance. Here, it was nicely prepared before a note was played, with ‘cellist Robert Ibell telling us about, among other things, the links between the work and the composer’s opera “Death in Venice”. The work, cast in five movements, opened with a sequence called “Duets” reflecting the writing in pairs of instruments throughout, often haunting, ambient-toned writing creating plenty of “atmosphere” through resonating, overlapping tones, and undulating lines.

The second “Ostinato” movement had a more abrupt, machine-like character, derived from definite, energetic movements – at one point an evocative “road music” sequence forwarded the argument through unfamiliar territories, until skittering cross-rhythms from the violins contrived to bring things to a stuttering stop. Then, the succeeding movement “Solo” featured a gently-singing violin counterpointed delicately by the other instruments. Beautiful soaring lines suggested in places the violin itself in ecstasy, underpinned by atmospheric pizzicato and glissandi from the other instruments, giving a haunting kind of Aeolian Harp effect. After this, what a contrast with the earthy, vigorous “Burlesque”! – its angular effect was readily captured and confidently delivered by the players, the music in places reminiscent of the more quirky parts of the ballet “The Prince of the Pagodas”.

Britten concluded the work with a Recitative and Passacaglia, the instruments in the introductory measures quoting themes from “Death in Venice”. We heard spare, stepwise pizzicati and oscillating violin lines leading to an eloquent ‘cello solo, and thence to strangely compelling twilight-world explorations culminating in the instrumental unison “I love you” cry of the opera’s central character Aschenbach. The players then took us strongly and surely on the passacaglia’s journey, during which the ensemble seemed to me to glow increasingly with lyrical fire, as the music developed thematic material from the Recitative over a ground bass. I felt we were being presented with a world of creative sensibility which here seemed to gradually drain away with the sounds, as if it was all part of the natural order of things.

Still more treasure came with the performance of Schumann’s well-known Piano Quintet after the interval, for which the Quartet was joined by pianist Catherine McKay. I had previously heard her perform both a concerto and some chamber music with other ensembles, finding her always a positive and responsive player. Here, I wondered whether the piano was too recessed in relation to the quartet, whose members seemed “bunched together” right in front – irrespective of the sound quality, the visual effect was of a supporting instrument rather than an equal player, the latter needing to be the case in this work.

Pianos can certainly be awkward things to set among ensembles, and the situation varies from venue to venue – I would have thought a slightly more antiphonal arrangement feasible, either with the piano to the left and turned slightly backward, which would have instigated a kind of half-circle that the quartet-members could have completed, or with the quartet slightly “parted’ in the middle and the piano brought slightly forward, and “into the loop”. Further forward on the St.Andrew’s platform, such an arrangement would have been possible.

Either layout would, I think, have better integrated the sound, and possibly the performance. My ears occasionally imagined a kind of “delayed” interaction between piano and strings in some of the exchanges – this was especially noticeable in both middle movements in places. During the second movement’s central agitations, when the gothic mystery and drama of the ambience is suddenly hurled to one side, and the piano takes the lead with a number of accented entries to which the strings respond, I wanted more incisiveness from the piano, and more “schwung” in the cross-talk between the players. The same went for the roller-coaster flourishes in the third movement (Mendelssohn could have written the piano part in places!) – they were excitingly played as such, but I wanted more piano, more presence and bite given to the syncopations!

With more even balances, the performance would have, I though, really taken wing, as there were so many felicities in any case – though the first movement was more tightly-conceived in general than my excessive romantic sensibilities usually crave, I thought the players still gave plenty of heartfelt voice to the composer’s uniquely poetic outpourings. There was sensitive duetting between violin and ‘cello and some lovely, yielding, liquid tones from the piano, contrasting nicely with those swirling undercurrents of the more agitated sections. And the slow movement’s somewhat sinister footfalls made both the lyrical yearnings and the irruptions of the middle section all the more telling.

Both muscularity and delicacy were made ours to relish throughout the finale, the strings digging into the part-writing with gusto, and the piano incapable of giving us a mechanical or unfeeling phrase – in fact, such were the mid-movement excitements generated that a fire-engine turned up in the street outside to see what was going on! I especially liked how the ensemble’s full-blooded playing made the composer’s rather engagingly gauche way of reintroducing the opening theme of the Quintet work so well at the end. Despite my few reservations regarding the balances, full credit to the musicians for giving us an experience which for me underlined what live music-making is all about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Konstanze Eickhorst – recital from Vienna

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

New Zealand School of Music

Mozart: Sonata in A minor, K.310 (allegro maestoso; andante cantabile con espressione; presto

Schubert: Fantasy in C, Op.15 (D.760) “Wanderer” (allegro con fuoco; adagio; presto; allegro, played without a break)

Mozart: Fantasia in C minor, K.475

Schubert: Sonata in C minor, D.958 (allegro; adagio; menuetto: allegro; allegro)

Konstanze Eickhorst

Adam Concert Room

Thursday, 18 April 2013 at 7.30pm

Recitals by visiting instrumentalists are not nearly as frequent as they were when the old Concert Section of the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation promoted recitals by artists who were here to play concertos with the Symphony Orchestra.  So it is gratifying that the New Zealand School of  Music has taken up some of the slack in Wellington by bringing overseas musicians to conduct master classes for the students and perform for the public.

Konstanze Eickhorst was here in Wellington both to give a master class and to perform a recital (and she has a cellist sister here), but her principal occupation will be to play in the New Zealand International Piano Festival, in Auckland.

Her all-Viennese programme was different from the typical piano recital programme that begins with Bach and ends with a contemporary composition.

The Adam Concert Room was virtually full.  A pleasing feature was that the lights were left on, so that it was easy for audience members to read the notes and check the tempo designations for the movements.  Other promoters, please note!  It is a strange New Zealand aberration to lower the lights at concerts, so that the programme the punter has just bought cannot be read in the auditorium.  A recital, particularly, is not a stage spectacle, so there is no need for the lights to be lowered.

The opening Mozart sonata began with a bold attack.  I noted what very flexible fingers, hands, wrists and elbows Eickhorst possesses.  Of course, the differing kind of concert dress worn by male versus female artists makes this easier to observe in the case of the latter.

I would have liked a slightly gentler approach to Mozart, remembering the pianos of his period.  The treble of the piano had my ears ringing at times.   However, the pianist did vary the tone and touch of her playing.  The problem is the small size of the venue and the bright, reflective, varnished wooden floor; performers need to take this into account.  The brittle, hard-edged sound was commented (without any remark from me) by my neighbour at the concert.

The programme notes spoke of the suspensions ‘that wail unhappily throughout’ in the first movement; indeed they were most apparent.  This sonata has much depth, and although a relatively early one, shows emotional and musical profundity not always true of the later ones.

The slow movement featured a singing melody, and the playing truly lived up to the composer’s designation for it.  Phrasing was superb and there were appropriate rubatos.  The third movement was almost playful the speed demonstrated Eickhorst’s sturdy technique.

Of all Schubert’s compositions for piano, the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy is one of the longest and most demanding technically.  As the programme note said “[it] is Schubert’s most challenging and flamboyant composition for the piano.”  Following the busy opening movement, we were straight into the slow movement, which is based on Schubert’s song of the same name.  The movement proceeds as variations on the song’s theme.  The opening was very telling, pensive, inward, and expressive.  The slightly ominous undertone and a furious middle section rounded out a highly varied and interesting movement.

What a complete change of mood there was for the scherzo!  The emphasis here was on rhythm.  The pianist exhibited fantastic finger-work in the fast figures.  There were some wonderful sonorities in the final movement and the pianissimo passage was played with great feeling, while the last section was sheer bravura.

I found the first movement somewhat over-pedalled at times, and some chords hit a little too hard for this small, very resonant auditorium.  Nevertheless, this was a tour de force indeed.  It was a virtuosic performance of this showpiece, by a formidable pianist.  A little memory lapse here and one in the Mozart hardly mattered in the midst of such prodigious feats as these.

Back to Mozart after the interval, and one of his three Fantasias.  It is notable that there were only two composers represented in the recital, yet we were treated to a great variety of music.

A slightly curious comment in the notes implied that this work and the composer’s C minor sonata, published together with the same opus number, had also the same Köchel number, but this piece is K.475 while the sonata is K.457.

This is a quite gorgeous piece of music, and I found the playing more to my taste than that of the Schubert Fantasy.  There was lovely variation of touch and subtle changes of dynamics; in my view, more true resonance is obtained from the piano, as opposed to getting it from the room, when the playing is not too loud.  Not that this was a gentle, relaxing piece; it, like the other works on the programme had changes of character, and stormy passages.  Again, the character was not such that one normally associates with Mozart’s piano music.

Schubert’s sonata in C minor, another lengthy work, was striking in its shifting keys and switches between lyrical passages and more dynamic, declamatory ones.  The prestidigitation required to obtain these dramatic contrasts of tone and texture was remarkable.

In the adagio, the lines were sometimes muddled a little by the pedal again.  Elsewhere there was considerable clarity and weight.  The third movement was unusual for a minuet, with its interruptions.  The finale was again a technically demanding movement; it returned to the lyrical before the end, in episodes.

Although the programme was by well-known composers, the music played was not ‘run-of-the-mill’, and did not conform to what one might think of as typical of these composers.  This made it interesting, and despite my quibbles, it was superb recital of relatively little-heard music of great brilliance, drama and passion, played by a pianist with formidable skills.  Apart from anything else, the recital demanded great stamina on the part of the pianist.

It was refreshing to find that Eickhorst did not feel it necessary to sweeten the programme with some lighter works or encores.

Michael Houstoun – Beethoven Revisited

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:

Michael Houstoun (piano) – Beethoven ReCycle 2013  (Programme Three)

Sonata No.5 in C Minor Op.10 No.1 / Sonata No.10 Op.14 No.2

Sonata No.22 in F Major Op.54 / Sonata No.106 “Hammerklavier” in B flat Op.106

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall, Wellington

Monday 15th April 2013

One of the highest accolades a musician can receive is to have his or her name indelibly associated in people’s minds with that of a particular composer’s music – and more than any other pianist in this part of the world, Michael Houstoun’s name has become practically synonymous with Beethoven.

It’s not been an association lightly or casually wrought – it’s grown and developed over a span of time and through the pianist’s Herculean efforts involving preparation and performance of all of the composer’s significant keyboard works. Both the passing of time and life-changing events have made their own contribution to the association, so that Houstoun is presently a different musician to what he was twenty years ago, around the time of his first Beethoven voyage through the sonatas. He himself delineates aspects of the change in his musical outlook in the excellent program booklet, an account that makes absorbing reading.

Many concertgoers attending the present series would have been there last time round, and able to remember well the impact of that first cycle, momentous in so many ways. If the present series seems not quite such a “charged” occurrence, it still generates its own storehouse of interest from the point of view of Houstoun’s own growth and development as a major artist, and the broadening and deepening of his views about the music.

I found having to choose one of three recitals from Houstoun’s first “round” of his Beethoven Re-cycle a costly experience, as there was so much to lose as well as to gain – but I finally plumped for the third programme, which had the mighty “Hammerklavier” as a kind of finale to three earlier (and briefer!) works.

Over the years I’ve worked hard at NOT becoming a total “Hammerklavier-junkie”, though it’s sometimes been a near thing – every great performance I hear of the work has the effect of pushing me close to that edge over which the way back to sanity would be a torturous process. This was such a performance, but one with a difference to some of the more “addictive” experiences I’ve gone through – it was more of a “cleansing” experience here, rather than an immersion in or partaking of something rich and strange.

Until relatively recently I’ve found Michael Houstoun’s playing of Beethoven somewhat enigmatic  –  I would sit and listen to live performances and recordings of various things and admire the playing’s obvious mastery, its strength, purpose, clear vision and command of both structure and detail. One of Houstoun’s most pronounced qualities – a kind of “greatness”, I believe – is the ability to convince the listener of the validity of his approach to any piece of music he plays at the time, however much one might find oneself holding different views in retrospect.

Of course, any musician ought to be able to similarly persuade listeners to accept the “truths” of what he or she plays, but in Houstoun’s case the force of his “in-situ” persuasion is quite remarkable. Nevertheless, I remember thinking repeatedly in those days how strange it was that the pianist’s playing, despite its obvious qualities, hadn’t really ever moved or touched me –  it was music-making I admired, but didn’t love.

After Houstoun’s debilitating encounter in the year 2000 with, and eventual recovery (2005) from focal dystonia (a process documented clearly and movingly in an article on the pianist’s web-site, found at www.michaelhoustoun.co.nz), I began to feel a kind of “thawing-out” in his playing – especially memorable for me were recitals featuring Schumann’s Kreisleriana (August 2010) and Schubert’s B-flat Sonata D.960 (July 2011), both works getting magnificent, expressive readings. My reviews, to my surprise, were punctuated with many comments referring to the pianist’s poetic sensibilities and evocation of free and open spaces – “beautifully and sensitively weighted, equivocally poised between worlds of foreboding and resignation” was some of my purpler prose.

Houstoun mentioned in his account of the FD saga his “rediscovery of a happiness in simply playing the piano” as part of his healing process – and for me that rediscovery is manifest in what sounds to me like a greater warmth and freedom in his playing. I noticed, for example, during the recent Beethoven recital how beautifully differentiated the three first-half sonatas were, each offering very different aspects of the composer’s musical personality – the “Hammerklavier” of course, was something else again!

Simply the selection of keys across the three first half works gave the listener interest and pleasure – plunging into a stormy C Minor to begin with, the recital moved to a good-humored G Major for the second work, and a brief though richly-plaintive immersion into F major for the diminutive Op.54 Sonata. At first, from the beginning of Op.10 No.1, with its terse ascending figurations hurling out a challenge to the world, I thought the Ilott Theatre acoustic would prove too dry and dull for the music to properly “speak” – but as the work progressed I realized that the sounds were bringing out both player and instrument beautifully, without need of much help from the hall at all.

Houstoun relished the operatic character of the second movement, energizing the dramatic, baroque-like flourishes that contrasted with the lyrical lines, and bringing out the playful countervoice dancing over the top of things, before the richly beautiful concluding descent. Having sufficiently expressed his ardour, the young virtuoso composer applied his pianistic spurs once again and galloped off and into an incident-packed third movement, rich with variety. The pianist took us adroitly through all of this towards the somewhat Haydnesque harmonic cul-de-sac which brought the journey to a whimsical halt, then laughingly turned us around and pushed us in the right direction to the final cadence.

The opening of Op.14 No.2 had, by contrast, a feline grace, in Houstoun’s hands, with the music’s contours finely sculptured, but with some easing at the phrase-ends, just as a singer would breathe. The middle section clouded over and giddily whirled us through various agitations to a wonderful release-point nicely held by the pianist before returning to the gentle warmth of the opening – I thought Houstoun’s tones positively glowed in places towards the end, with a kind of burnished quality. The andante stepped out with attitude, Houstoun terracing the dynamics finely and without exaggeration – I had never noticed a kind of kinship of utterance between places in this movement and the variation movement of No.30 (Op.109) before hearing this performance.

Regarding the finale, it was “and now for something completely different….” on the composer’s part. Houstoun brought out the music’s skittishness, in places as much lightly brushing-over as playing the notes – as another pianist once said to me, having just played the work, “It’s all slightly mad, isn’t it?” – and splendidly delivered Beethoven’s gorgeous growl of impulsive drollery right at the end. And from this we were taken to a world of grander, more ceremonial and ritualized fun-and-games, the enigmatic two-movement Sonata No.22 (Op.54).

Comparing this performance with Houstoun’s Trust recording of the work, made in 1994, I noted the more open and varied touch throughout the first movement’s exuberant octave hammerings. I also felt a stronger sense of narrative throughout – here, the introductory minuet-like dance was beautifully augmented on each of its appearances with grace-notes and other accoutrements, and thus transformed into a wondrously-adorned processional. The pianist allowed it a moment of glory before gracefully delivering a succession of plaintive, fading chords, and letting it all go.

As for the moto perpetuo-like second movement, Houstoun has always played this music superbly, as here. From the beginning there was a finely-controlled but burgeoning excitement, Houstoun bringing out Kreisleriana-like voices from the occasional held notes, and varying the tones and intensities throughout different episodes. I enjoyed the wonderful “lurches” into different ambiences, before the pianist refocused the music’s bearings, girded its loins for a final reprise, and made an all-out dash for the finish line, to exhilarating effect.

So – we were now “primed” as it were for that Everest of the pianistic literature – the “Hammerklavier”. The music was hurled across the firmament for us at the very start, Houstoun’s hands leaping excitingly through voids of time and space. His fingers didn’t quite encompass every note cleanly in the subsequent figurations, but the hint of strain suggested a no-holds-barred commitment, and the titanic nature of the effort required to bring those sounds into being for us. The energies generated and subsequently released throughout the whole movement in places suggested to me dancing star-clusters, forming and breaking apart, the pianist’s strength and vision of the whole keeping the ebb and flow of things together. The  fugal sequence had both vigour and weight, suggesting a human mind attempting to come to grips with something elemental and for the ages. A tremendous achievement.

The scherzo was kept “tight”, and the dynamics contained, though circumspection was thrown aside as the madly scampering trio section brilliantly touched off the volcanic climax, the sounds skyrocketting upwards and all over in a brilliant display of surging pianistic exuberance. A few obsessively-repeated chords and a throwaway ending, and we were suddenly in another world of vast spaces and far-flung thoughts, as the slow movement was begun.

When reviewing Houstoun’s recording of this work, I felt that the pianist demonstrated that he was a skilled, committed and thoughtful architect and builder, from the opening notes of this movement shaping the music into a magnificent structure, exquisitely proportioned and finely detailed in all of its parts. His grasp of the different dimensions suggested by the music made for profound contrasts of space, light, meaning and feeling which I felt readily opened themselves to the listener. It was a telling journey through these different vistas, with seemingly endless explorations in and around the music’s structures, upwards and outwards, though I didn’t ever feel I was invited or encouraged by the playing to stop and experience the depths of the stillness at the heart of it all.

Seventeen years on I felt Houstoun’s approach to this music had moved closer to this stillness, though he seemed as disinclined to take that last step into the vortex of allowing the music to direct him, of surrendering to the ineffable and feeling the full depth of the silences between some of those notes. Rather, the music was, I thought, kept on the continuum of a living pulse, with everything admirably weighted and sensitively detailed. Beethoven’s use of a slow waltz-rhythm throughout suggested in its way a kind of life-dance, whose ebb and flow underwent profound transformation, and Houstoun’s invitation to us to share in that dance pared our existence to the music’s essentials for its duration. And though this music was supposed to represent the well of the world’s sorrow, here on the opposite side of its tragic aspect was an antithesis, a kind of cleansing of the spirit and a refreshing of the indomitable will. It was on this plane that I thought the pianist’s achievement in this music was truly memorable.

On a prosaically functional level, a truly transcendental performance of the slow movement can leave one in a kind of emotion-suffused daze, creating the unforgivable solecism of wanting to turn the work into a kind of “Unfinished Sonata” by breaking off one’s listening at that point. Perhaps Beethoven sensed such a possibility, responding with a finale whose opening easeful, recitative-like gestures suddenly plunge the listener into a seething cauldron of fugal interaction, one which largely dominates the movement. Houstoun’s strength and energy really came into its own, here, and his playing vividly delineated the music’s fugal form as a wonderfully jagged cliff-face, whose relief outlines displayed things such as augmentation, retrograde and inversion (as all good fugues ought). With him we climbed that cliff-face, experiencing the stature, grandeur and beauty of the journey, and braving things like suspensions, overhangs and false steps, and pausing for breath at a certain point to take in the full extent of the terrain thus far covered, savour its beauties and terrors, and then plunge upwards and onwards.

Having gone within hailing distance of the goal, the music then intensified the order of its going, requiring the pianist to interweave some of the elements thus far encountered, before finishing with a part-defiant, part-exultant ascent of the B-flat major scale of tenths and trills to the final tonic-dominant cadences of the work’s summit. Resisting the temptation to employ Sir Edmund Hillary’s famously reported description of his and Tensing’s ascent of Everest at this point, I might instead say that Houstoun thus came, saw and on this occasion conquered. His traversal of all four sonatas (but especially the last!) justly drew forth a rapturous response from a near-filled Ilott Theatre, people almost without exception on their feet wholeheartedly acclaiming a stellar achievement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Round the Horn” – Wellington Chamber Orchestra and Samuel Jacobs

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

Beethoven: Fidelio Overture

Richard Strauss: Horn Concerto no.1

Brahms: Symphony no.4 in E minor

Wellington Chamber Orchestra conducted by Rachel Hyde; Samuel Jacobs (horn)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday, 14 April 2013, 2.30pm

It was unfortunate that probably many in the audience beside myself had attended the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s concert in the Michael Fowler Centre the previous night: a close juxtaposition of the playing of a professional orchestra with that of an amateur orchestra is not good for the latter.

Nevertheless, there were high points in this ambitious programme.  It was good to see (and hear) the brass out of the sanctuary this time, so that the instruments could be heard clearly, without undue reverberation.

A splendid opening to Beethoven’s overture was rather soon marred by the horns muffing notes.  There were four horn players, and Beethoven gave them a lot to do, some of which they performed very well – but too often their contribution was less than perfect.  By contrast, the trumpets were excellent – of course, the trumpet is not nearly such a difficult instrument to play.  As a whole, the performance of the overture was a good effort.

It was a sad shock to learn earlier in the week that the English leader of the NZSO horns will be returning to Britain at the end of the year, after less than two years here.  Samuel Jacobs played the Strauss concerto in great style – and some of his professional colleagues were there to hear him play only the second concerto he has performed in this country.

Strauss gave parts to only two horns in the orchestra, so the other horn players could enjoy hearing the solo –  one did it with a smile on his face most of the time.

Jacobs’s playing was true and vital with fine tone and lovely phrasing.  His high notes were refined and controlled.  His playing echoed the programme note description of Strauss’s horn-playing father’s efforts: ‘…almost universally admired in German music circles or his flawless technique and impeccable artistry.’  The solo playing here was always lovely, with a variety of tonal colours.

The first movement of the concerto was extremely lyrical, even Romantic in style.  String intonation wavered at times, but was mainly good.  The orchestra rose to most occasions.  There was a charming episode featuring horn solo with woodwind; the flutes particularly did a great job.

In fact, the whole work, described in the programme note as ‘…a very conservative work… [with] melodic ardour and profligacy’ was superbly played, and was greeted with tumultuous applause such as one doesn’t usually hear at an amateur concert.

The Brahms fourth symphony was a big work to tackle for a chamber orchestra.  While it was given a creditable performance, maybe it was a little beyond these musicians.  As the programme note said, here ‘…Brahms explores a range of emotions as well as sheer orchestral colour beyond anything he had attempted in his earlier symphonies…’ and so the demands on the players were huge.  It is a complex composition – but I do find that towards the end of the finale it becomes somewhat dull and predictable – Brahms was famous for making the most of every scrap of material.

The first movement (allegro non troppo) opens with a slightly sad, lyrical passage – this was played well.  Surging lower strings and strong brass were later features, the thick textures demonstrating the great strength of Brahms’s writing, but also providing difficulties for the orchestra in obtaining clarity.

The andante moderato second movement is characterised by beautiful lyrical phrases and themes, but some of them suffered from a lack of precision in the strings, though the winds continued to be effective.  Richard Strauss apparently told Brahms that the music suggest ‘a funeral procession moving in silence across moonlit heights’; this seemed apt, but the orchestration was quite grand following a most nostalgic section for horn.

The third movement, allegro giocoso, was more jovial, not least for the introduction of the triangle and the piccolo.  Trumpets and horns both played well here.  A long flute solo with two horns intoning repeated notes was very well executed.

In the large-scale finale (allegro energico e passionato) the trombones finally got a chance to play, and they did it with skill and character.  By the end the music, and playing, became a little tedious.  After such a demanding programme I should not be surprised if the players had become tired.

Overall, the orchestra made a good sound, but inevitably in an amateur orchestra there is a range of skills and levels of competency.  The Strauss horn concerto was the outstanding part of the programme, and the excellence of the solo playing made it all the more regrettable that Samuel Jacobs is not staying around.

Rachel Hyde had the flutes stand first after the general applause at the end of the concert, marking their considerable and skilled contribution to the performance.

NZSO’s “Home is where the Heart is….”

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:

ECHOES OF HOME

Larry Pruden: Soliloquy for Strings

Dvořák: Cello Concerto in B minor, Op.104 (allegro; adagio non troppo; allegro moderato

Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances, Op.45

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Pietari Inkinen, with Daniel Müller-Schott (cello)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday, 13 April 2013, 7.30pm

The title alludes to the fact that these works were either devised, or revised, when their composers were a long way from home: Pruden in London, Dvořák in the USA and Rachmaninov in the States also.

Larry Pruden’s work for string orchestra was a fine concert opener.  Its dreamy, unison opening for violins only, led us gently into the concert.  Other strings followed, the minor key giving the work a melancholic air, although there was plenty of passion present.  For a while the music wandered around a rather stark landscape, then became tense and astringent, before a calmer mood overcame the tension, and excitement built up.

A solo violin section led to a gradual resolution of the argument; a slightly uneasy peace settled by the end.  Throughout, the strings played with panache and sensitivity, giving a fine reading of the piece.

Dvořák’s Cello Concerto must be one of the all-time favourite concertos, and it is always gratifying to hear this well-loved work played live in concert – on this occasion by good-looking young German Daniel Müller-Schott.

The minor key opening belies Dvořák’s usual good humour and cheerfulness, with its storm of notes, noble theme and blaring brass.  Dvořák could never keep a good tune down for long, and some significant woodwind passages, and a beautiful melody that emerges on flute, were succeeded by another for the horn, calling across the beloved Bohemian landscape.

Sweeping strings and brass introduce a new subject, leading to the soloist’s incisive entry, taking up the orchestra’s themes.  The following passage-work was indeed demanding of the cellist, but Müller-Schott was its equal, before mellifluously rendering his first major theme.  Lots of orchestral detail emerged, especially from the woodwind and brass sections.  Lovely phrasing graced Müller-Schott’s lyrical playing; bow changes were imperceptible.

The early part of the development did not rise to the level of excitement that I was anticipating.  However, the final pages made up for it, with gorgeous string sound from both orchestra and soloist.

Nevertheless, there were times when I was expecting a fuller and warmer sound from Müller-Schott.  Whether this lack was a function of the Michael Fowler Centre, I couldn’t say.

The delicious opening clarinet of the slow movement followed by the cello soloist’s entry and the orchestral cellos’ pizzicato comprise one of music’s magical moments. The ravishing build-up of passion following this is as dramatic as an aria in opera.  The woodwinds reprise is gentle, only to be shocked by the tutti that follows.  The soloists’ melodies do not quell the ardour, but nevertheless lead the orchestra to calmer waters.

There were moments here when the solo was drowned by the orchestra – surely not the composer’s intention.  The cadenza was enhanced by a flute obbligato from Bridget Douglas.  Some of Dvořák’s most superbly magical writing is here.

Both Tovey and the friend with whom I attended the concert remarked on how the composer seems repeatedly to be bringing the movement to an end, and then carries on.  The positive side of this is that we hear constantly renewed beauty from the music.

The allegro slow movement is an utter contrast. It presents a rollicking band, while the cello solo veritably dances.  The sheer breadth of sound from the entire orchestra was breathtaking.  The cello section of the orchestra had plenty to do.  The ending was superb, thanks to the composer’s lovely writing for winds, while the soloist had much lyrical playing to delight the audience.  His technique is splendid, as was his command of the music, but I had anticipated a bigger, richer sound than we always got.  I am referring to timbre and tone rather than volume.  Nevertheless, this was fine, sensitive playing.

Müller-Schott greeted the continuous enthusiastic applause and cheers by playing an encore: Ravel’s Habanera.  In this I heard the sort of tone I had been seeking in the concerto – without orchestra, it came through strongly and eloquently.

Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances was a work only vaguely familiar to me, but it proved to be full of delights.  The delicate, quirky opening was followed by slow intoning accompanied by woodwind solos, and a discreet piano.  A splendid section for woodwinds followed, including an alto saxophone solo, plus some fine cor anglais playing.  Then grand phrases for strings swept us away.  All very dramatic and very Russian, and punctuated by an insistent three-note figure.  This movement was designated ‘non allegro’ (fast but not too fast?)

A strident brass opening of the second movement (andante con moto – tempos di valse)led to a solo violin passage of eloquent phrases, played by Vesa-Matti Leppänen.  This was followed by solo oboe.  Then we were into the lilting waltz, with its quirky interruptions.  The principal double bass player entered into the waltz, with his swaying instrument, the brass plate behind the tuning pegs reflecting the light as it moved.  The movement was full of good cheer.

The opening of the third movement (lento assai – allegro vivace – lento assai – come prima – allegro vivace) reminded me of Sibelius, but it soon changed to something more insistent.  Splendid percussion was a feature of this movement.  Another Sibelius-like theme emerged on the strings.  Brass flourishes appeared before a return to the slow and sombre temper again, with a lovely cor anglais solo.  The harp was notable.

Tremolando strings along with clarinet created a very spooky atmosphere.  This was such effective writing, full of contrasting dynamics.  Back to waltz rhythm again, and then the music worked up to an allegro, packed with excitement and rollicking brass at full pelt.  Drums and cellos sounded Sibelius-esque again, while off-beat rhythms reminded me of Carl Orff.  A tumultuous ending with gong strokes finished a wonderful and satisfying performance of a work of great variety with marvellous rhythms and luscious orchestration.

The printed programme was graced by Frances Moore’s superb notes, in which unfamiliar material was presented in a refreshing way.

Wellington audiences are having four days of an embarrassment of riches: three Houstoun Beethoven sonata concerts, this NZSO concert, and a Sunday afternoon concert from the Wellington Chamber Orchestra.

Youthful voices savoured – NZSM Voice Students

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

NZSM presents: Arias and lieder

New Zealand School of Music: vocal students of Richard Greager, Jenny Wollerman and Margaret Medlyn, with Mark Dorell, piano

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 10 April 2013, 12.15pm

I heard four of these same singers perform last October, in Upper Hutt (9 October 2012), and my remarks then in some cases still apply; in others, the singers have noticeably improved their skills and performances.  Elisabeth Harris I heard in the master-class run by Denis O’Neill after the Lexus Song Quest last year.  Her singing has certainly moved onwards and upwards since then.

First, though, we heard from Oliver Sewell (tenor) who sang  the recitative “Comfort ye” and the following aria “Every Valley” from The Messiah by Handel.  Following the short overture, these open the great work, so must be arresting and interesting.   Sewell made them both of these things.  Although he was the only performer to use a music score, this is, after all, the norm in oratorio.

Sewell proved to have easy voice production, a good control of dynamics, a strong tenor voice, and appeared very confident.  His was as fine a performance technically, as I have heard in the many performances of The Messiah for which I have been a choir member.  Just a little more subtlety in interpreting the words and meaning are required.

James Henare has a very fine bass-baritone voice, with which he sang one of my favourite Schubert songs, “Du bist die Ruhe”.   The words were beautifully rendered, as was the phrasing.  Perhaps the loud section was a little too loud for this song.

Elisabeth Harris (mezzo-soprano) sang “Se Romeo t’uccise un figlio” from Bellini’s opera I Capuleti e I Montecchi in a fine, strong, dramatic rendition, using her voice to good effect, although there was a slightly breathy quality at times, and the intonation was a bit variable in places early on.

From Bizet’s Carmen Christina Orgias (soprano) gave us Micaela’s aria, in a most convincing performance.  Her splendid voice and her confidence carried her through a long and difficult aria, with the feeling of pathos conveyed well.

Henare sang again, a stirring “Il lacerato spirito” from Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.  This was sung in a splendid Verdian voice; the low notes were simply fabulous, and the entire characterisation splendid.  His variation of timbre was impressive; this was indeed very fine Verdi.

Isabella Moore has earned plaudits for her fine soprano singing.  As well as knowing how to use her big voice, she knows how to look dramatic – appropriate for the character of Salome in Massenet’s Herodiade.  Her warm tone and clear words gave excellent expression to this lesser-known aria.

Christian Thurston is a baritone, and also possesses a fine voice.  His aria from Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, “O vin, dissipe la tristesse” was difficult, but he portrayed the hero convincingly, thanks to good breath control, and excellent French.  Indeed, all the singers pronounced and enunciated their words well.

Baritone Fredi Jones has spent time as a tenor, and this showed in that the bottom of his baritone voice lost tone, while the resonance and tone of the top was very fine.  His singing of Yetletsky’s aria from The Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky was accomplished, and his Russian was good (as far as I could tell).

Isabella Moore returned to sing Heimliche Aufforderung, one of Richard Strauss’s many beautiful songs for soprano voice – specifically, for his wife-to-be at the time he wrote it in 1894.  It is a song of bright character, with his typical superb rising cadences.  A gratifying song, magnificently sung.

The next offering from Fredi Jones, the lovely “Sure on this Shining Night” by Barber, was sung perhaps a little too dramatically for this contemplative song.  It was a very pleasing performance, nevertheless.

Contemporary American composer Ben Moore’s Sexy Lady proved to be an excellent vehicle for Elisabeth Harris.  Another trouser role (well, partly!), it was the only item in the programme sung in English, conveyed very clearly.  It suited Harris better than did her first offering; her dramatic abilities, including facial expression, had full play, and her voice sounded better.  Parodies of many classical arias were incorporated in humorous fashion, and Harris’s enjoyment of the piece was obvious, and added to that of the audience.

Mark Dorell, as always, was a splendid accompanist, playing many a complex accompaniment in a cool church.

Programme notes were good, although the English was a little strange in a couple of them.  It was great to have the dates of the composers and the names of poets and librettists.  However, it was a pity that Richard Strauss was deprived of 16 years of life – no Four Last Songs, but no enduring World War II either, if he had in fact died in 1933, rather than the actual date of 1949.

The New Zealand School of Music is training some fine singers, and teaching a range of repertoire and also excellent language skills.  Some of these people should make fine careers in opera – starting out with the School’s production of Verdi’s Il Corsaro in July this year.

Britten, Milhaud and Tchaikovsky from the NZSM Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:

NZSM Orchestra – “Pathetique”

BRITTEN – Suite on English Folksongs

MILHAUD – Viola Concerto No.2 Op.340

TCHAIKOVSKY – Symphony No.6 “Pathetique”

Irina Andreeva (viola)

Kenneth Young (conductor)

New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Tuesday 9th April, 2013

This was a whale of a concert from the NZSM Orchestra and conductor Kenneth Young, performing with Auckland-based viola soloist Irina Andreeva. Much of the enjoyment was in our anticipation of the programme, which featured a not too-well-known Folksong Suite by Benjamin Britten, and an even more rarely performed concerto for viola by Darius Milhaud, coupled with one of the best-loved of the Tchaikovsky Symphonies, the “Pathetique”. If not quite “something for everybody” the concert certainly ranged over an impressive and satisfying stretch of stylistic and emotional terrain.

The concert’s centerpiece was the Milhaud Viola Concerto, the composer’s second for the instrument and reputedly one of the most difficult works for viola in the repertoire. Milhaud wrote it during 1954 and 1955 as a dedication to the eminent virtuoso William Primrose, who apparently found it difficult and ungrateful to perform. Upon complaining to the composer, Primrose recalled that Milhaud replied, disarmingly, “Mon Cher, all concertos should be difficult”.

To date there has been no commercial recording made of the concerto, though there are rumours that a tape of Primrose playing the work does exist. The violist was quoted as saying it (the concerto) was “the most outrageously difficult work I ever tackled, and for all the immense labour I devoted to it never appealed to the public”.

For myself, on a first hearing, I thought it lacked the charm and variety and energy of Walton’s only concerto for viola, the first rival twentieth-century work which comes to mind. Though they’re not exactly thick on the ground, other concerti for the instrument by Bartok, Hindemith, Schnittke, Penderecki and Piston do turn up in adventurous orchestral programmes – and one mustn’t forget things like Anthony Ritchie’s 1994 concerto, of which there’s an Atoll recording featuring violist Timothy Deighton. (There are also viola concerti by Alfred Hill and Nigel Keay, further off the beaten home-grown track…..).

But Milhaud it was on this occasion, and the soloist Irina Andreeva bent her back to the task with a will, meeting head-on William Primrose’s assertion regarding the music’s difficulty, and emerging triumphant at the end, though not without playing her way through some nail-biting moments. The first movement is marked “Avec Entrain” which my on-line translator rendered as “with spirit” – and as the solo instrument virtually never stopped playing throughout, spirit was certainly required on the part of the soloist!  The music consisted of a running figure for the viola which sometimes relaxed into a more lyrical mode, accompanied in a disconcertingly pointillistic way by the orchestra, with abrupt squawks in places and lovely squealings in others. And I did enjoy the frequent insouciance of the wind-playing, in marked contrast to the nervous and keeping-on intensities of the violist’s undulating figurations.

Movement 2 was “Avec Charm” which I guess didn’t need translation, though the music’s ambience was, I thought, “small-hours dance-floor” with only a few couples left. The soloist’s lovely tone amply filled out the lyrical figurations, one or two intonation sags aside, especially when under pressure from what seemed like awkward stretches – the “difficult and ungrateful to perform” ghost here hovering about the music. But there were some gorgeous low-lying passages which brought forth plenty of juice from Andreeva’s instrument, accompanied by nostalgic winds and some “last dance” harp phrases, leading up to the crack-of-doom gong-stroke which then sent the phantoms of the small-hours packing into the gloom.

My schoolboy French wasn’t up to “Avec esprit”, and I was put right in conversation afterwards by a friend who explained it was literally “with mind” [it also means ‘wit’: L.T.] – which made more sense of music that seemed extremely controlled in its expression, a tight rhythmic regime which came across like a waltz in a straitjacket – the soloist’s recurring “theme” alternated with orchestra comment whose textures supported the argument with occasional punctuations and deft cross-rhythms. And there was no let-up for anybody in the concluding “Avec gaîtè”, a slowly-lolloping jig, whose stride gathered up the soloist’s strenuous double-stopping and the marvellously detailed orchestra textures, and proceeded to generate a well-nigh unstoppable momentum towards a “fin triomphant”! Accolades all round was the richly-deserved response to a fine performance.

To begin the concert, we had another work rarely encountered in the concert-hall, Benjamin Britten’s Suite on English Folksongs, music which took a somewhat different approach to that accorded traditional airs by composers such as Holst and Vaughan Williams. Britten had written a work for inclusion in the celebrations surrounding the opening of the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1966, an arrangement for winds of the folk song Hankin Booby, and so, eight years later, included the work in his new suite. The whole work was given the subtitle “A time there was…..”, which was a quotation from a poem by Thomas Hardy, reflecting upon an age of innocence, and its subsequent corruption, something of a recurring theme in Britten’s own work.

Unlike other folksong treatments, Britten took the traditional folk-themes and developed them in pairs, subjecting the combinations to concise, but nevertheless intense explorations, finding worlds within worlds from these melodies. I noted in the very first one, Cakes and Ale, the rhythmic thrust of the writing from the very first chord – superbly delivered, here! – and the great work by the brass in carrying this forward. Interwoven with the themes were tortured, obsessive figurations, heightening tensions between both tunes and underlying accompaniments.

The second piece, The Bitter Withy, inspired beautiful string playing and support from the harp, the instrumental tones nicely gradated and the intensities well terraced, bringing sharply into relief the rustic angularities of the following Hankin Booby, the work’s “godfather” piece. What wonderful sonorities, and how pungently and wholeheartedly the orchestral winds put across their characteristic tinbres – riveting!

Hunt the Squirrel suggests as a title a quintessential English activity set to music, and the open-sounding strings brought out the essential earthiness of the fun, with some great playing from the orchestral leader, Salina Fisher. The ensemble wasn’t absolutely note-perfect, but put across a corporate verve and energy which underpinned the music’s excitement.

Again, Britten set one piece’s mood against its previous opposite, with the suite’s finale, Lord Melbourne. A tragic note hung around the music’s beginning, with its deep-throated percussion and “wandering” string and wind lines – this continued until the cor anglais solo, when conductor Ken Young suddenly stopped the orchestra and indicated to the players to start again – it had transpired (I was afterwards told) that one of the wind soloists had been ill before the concert, and had at that point gotten somewhat out of time and wasn’t “knitting” with the rest of the ensemble.

The repeat that followed seemed to present a tauter aspect to the music, if less spontaneous-sounding and “dangerous”. The piece built to a climax with the help of some intensely-focused string entries, then ebbed the tension away with birdsong-like winds and all-pervading feelings of nostalgic longing, the music expressing a touching loss and sorrow at the end. Altogether, the music was a discovery for me, and the performance presented it memorably, in an entirely sympathetic light.

I haven’t left much time or space to talk about the performance of the “Pathetique” which took up the second half of the concert, mainly because I thought the orchestra had presented the concert’s first-half items with such distinction, along with the soloist in the Milhaud Concerto. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony was also played magnificently, with a palpable sense of commitment and concentration from the very first gloom-laden notes, the bassoon and violas empowering the basses to “focus” their initial phrases a bit more securely the second time round after what I thought were a somewhat nervous first couple of notes.

Tchaikovsky’s adoration of Mozart was apparent with the violins’ opening phrases, here, the poise and clarity of the playing growing in intensity towards the brass fanfares, then erupting in agitation but called back to a state of relative calm by the lower strings – and how beautifully the violins stole in with the “big tune”, the playing expressive and plaintive-toned, with proper heart-on-sleeve emotion here, from winds as well as strings.

Conductor Young didn’t spare the players with the sudden onset of the allegro, and encouraged a terrific noise at the heart of the conflicting hubbub, timpani especially “charged” and well-focused throughout. With the big tune’s reprise at the end of the tumult, the sound wasn’t especially pure from the violins, but had great character, which I much preferred to a kind of bland homogeneity, the emotion expressed in great waves. Lovely winds and noble brass at the end, with every pizzicato note sounding as though it really meant something.

If I describe the remainder of the symphony’s performance like this I shall be here all night – so suffice to say that the 5/4 Second Movement was expressed by Young and his players with great urgency, or “a fair old lick” as they say in the classics, with the pizzicato passages a forest of plucking noises at that speed! No respite from the Trio, either, the music’s anxiety level kept near the red throughout, and the playing matching the music’s mood in point and focus. Then, the third-movement March was all urgency and angst – music of flight as much as nervous energy – with the antiphonal exchanges between the instruments thrilling. Every now and then an instrumental detail would arrest one’s sensibilities, such as a piccolo-led wind flourish, and a keenly-focused timpani crescendo.

Young gave his strings enough room to really “point” the main theme, and also deal with the syncopated exchanges between instrumental groups. The build-up to the first percussion onslaught was fabulous, even if the bass drum slightly anticipated one of its entries. And the coda was all the more effective through being kept rock-steady, allowing the winds a terrific texture-piercing flourish before the final crunching chords. How the audience restrained itself from breaking into spontaneous applause (a common occurrence with this work in concert) I’ll never know!

Sweet, regretful strings there were at the finale’s beginning, the emotion dignified at this initial stage, the phrasings given plenty of breath, wind and brass steady, apart from the occasional tiny horn burble. As the music slipped into the major, the mood took on a more hopeful aspect, the plea becoming increasingly eloquent – only to flounder against a brass rebuttal and crash to a halt in disarray. I enjoyed the subsequent ghoulish brass raspings and Wagnerian string intensities “sung out” by the players just before the second and final irruption, giving the moment of death-convulsion a truly fatalistic feeling and colour. The trombones intoned their lament superbly, as did the strings, with great, weeping swells of emotion, leading to dark, drained silences at the end.

I confess to being spellbound, throughout, by the playing’s energy and commitment – in short, I thoroughly enjoyed the concert’s two earlier (and less familiar) items, but thought the whole of the symphony was well-and-truly “nailed” by these youngsters and their inspirational conductor. Bravo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Riseley (violin) and Jian Liu (piano) – elegance plus outrageous virtuosity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:

Martin Riseley (violin) and Jian Liu (piano)

FRANCK – Violin Sonata in A Major / DEBUSSY – The Girl with the Flaxen Hair

SARASATE – Introduction and Tarantella Op.43 / PAGANINI – Moto Perpetuo

WIENIAWSKI – Scherzo-Tarantelle Op.16

Adam Concert Room, NZSM Kelburn Campus

Victoria University

Friday 5th April

The present recital, featuring violinist Martin Riseley and pianist Jian Liu, was one of a series of concerts organized this year by the New Zealand School of Music.

Martin Riseley has on at least one previous occasion given me short-term lockjaw in the open position, when he played the 24 Caprices of Niccolo Paganini at a concert I attended in Wellington a little over three years ago. Playing those works in a single performance span and making a success of the undertaking demonstrated at the time that the violinist was a virtuoso-musician of considerable stature.

This time round, Riseley again wowed us with his brilliance and quicksilver reflexes, though the “relentless virtuosity” of Paganini and a later generation of virtuoso performer-composers represented by Sarasate and Wieniawski was confined to the recital’s second half. Not that the opening part of the concert gave the musicians any great relaxation, though the demands were of a slightly “removed” order of musicianship – this was the well-known Sonata in A major by Cesar Franck, inhabiting what Robert Schumann might have called “different realms” of expression.

I found Martin Riseley’s programme notes fascinating, as much for conveying his attitudes towards and history of playing the Franck work, as for giving me certain insights into some of the different technical aspects of playing both sections of the recital. I was interested that he mentioned as his “ideal” the recording of the Franck Sonata made by the Russian pair David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter, as that performance has always been a great favorite of mine as well.

So it was with much anticipation that I settled down to await the beginning of the Franck, aware as I was of the playing and interpretative skills of not only Riseley, but pianist Jian Liu, whom I had heard and enjoyed a number of times in recital.

I thought the work’s opening beautifully voiced, having a growing focus from the first notes which flowered nicely at the first real climax. The passagework of both musicians had a lovely velvet touch in places, but had sinew and muscle in others when strength was required – the players’ detailing suggested depths as well as half-lights. Each musician nicely “wreathed” the other’s playing – still, I felt the music and its intensities slightly held back throughout, each player doubtless aware of the terrain still to be traversed.

Jian Liu’s clarity of fingerwork at the scherzo’s beginning actually reminded me more of Saint-Saens than Franck – he brought out the music’s athleticism, rather than what I think of as its erotically suggestive Wagnerian undercurrents. But both pianist and violinist beautifully integrated the “quiet centre” of the piece into the music’s pulsing, maintaining a “charged” quality throughout, and giving the growing dramatic rhetoric of the recitatives full force. The violinist splendidly brought out the soaring theme at the height of the agitations, contrasting it beautifully with its more reflective self in the quieter moments. The coda was properly hushed and expectant at the start, gathering energy and thrust and featuring the instruments really “digging into” the music, though again, the articulation was so very precise, the feeling was for me more abstracted than truly suggestive and passionate.

At the slow movement’s beginning the gestures had a truly Shakespearean eloquence, grand and declamatory, but with real “quality” in the silences. Both musicians were able to fine down their tones from those very public utterances to more private musings. Franck introduces his themes so touchingly in this movement, and Liu’s liquid keyboard tones and Riseley’s beautifully-floated lines meant that the first “suggestive” theme and later the more declamatory “unveiling” theme both had a kind of “borne along” quality, very intense, but beautifully integrated into the flow.

After this I was a little disconcerted by the finale as played here, the instruments (especially the piano), bent upon contrast instead of pursuing a continuance of “coming-out” from the previous movement’s thrall – in fact the first paragraph was simply too brightly and bouncily played for me after what had gone before. However, the contrasting episodes were voiced beautifully and sensitively by both musicians, even if I wanted the piano tones to have more “tumbling body-warmth” in places. When the slow movement’s theme was reintroduced, I thought the piano figurations which built up towards the violin’s impassioned entries too skitterish, and needing more weight of tone to match those incredible “drenched” violin tones.

Still, a committed performance can win over the most curmudgeonly listener, and thus it proved here – I found myself applauding as wholeheartedly as anybody in the Adam Concert Room when the music was all over. Perhaps in response to our enthusiastic reception the players decided to spontaneously add another item to the program, that of an arrangement for violin and piano of Debussy’s Prelude for solo piano, La fille aux cheveux de lin. This was simply gorgeous, the musicians giving the music absolute security of intonation throughout, and allowing the notes themselves to express their “quality” within the overall shape of things – the piece’s interpretation thus came from the actual “sounds” of the notes, added to which were episodes of haunting harmonics in the middle section, and dead-in-tune double-stopping towards the end.

From here on in the program there were fireworks aplenty, with the very occasional moment of repose or circumspection grudgingly allowed the musicians (well, the violinist, really!), such as the very opening to Pablo de Sarasate’s Introduction and Tarantella. Even so, there were difficulties aplenty here, such as frequent high-wire harmonics capping a whole series of finely-wrought archways of melody. But the Tarantella, when it began, astonished us all, bristling with virtuoso displays, the wonderful alternating (and then together!) left-hand/right-hand pizzicati a visual as well as an aural delight, as were the three-octave leaps along the instrument’s top string. The dance’s reprise was a breathtaking gallop, notes flying in all directions as would pebbles scatter from beneath a horse’s hooves.

More wizardry came with the Paganini Moto Perpetuo. The music resembled a rushing fusillade of notes in places, though Riseley’s playing retained sufficient poise to be able to bring out the music’s dynamic variation, and get an attractive “ebb and flow” aspect. Less gratefully written was the work by Henryk Wieniawski, in which the violinist has to constantly “reach” for the top note in the melodic line, making for more effortful results than in the other two virtuoso pieces. Yet the violinist was still able to bring out the gorgeousness of the writing with the main tune’s reprise. Throughout these pieces Jian Liu was a reliable and rock-steady support-partner, his presence the launching-pad from which Martin Riseley’s violin was able to sing, soar and scintillate to great and thrilling effect throughout the concert.