Category: Live performance

Sofya Gulyak – pianist extraordinaire

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Piano Recital by Sofya Gulyak

New Zealand School Of Music,

in association with the NZ (Auckland) International Piano Festival

RACHMANINOV – Three Pieces for Piano Op.3 / Etude Tableau in E-flat Minor Op.39

Variations on a Theme of Corelli Op.42

SCRIABIN – Two Poemes Op.32 / SHOSTAKOVICH – Prelude and Fugue in D-flat Op.87 No.15

PROKOFIEV – Piano Sonata No.6 in A Op.82

Adam Concert Room, NZSM, Victoria University of Wellington

Saturday 28th April

Former Professor of Piano at Auckland University Tamas Vesmas instigated in 2005 the Auckland International Piano Festival, an event which for the following couple of years attracted numerous world class pianists to give recitals, concerts and masterclasses. In 2008, Vesmas returned to Europe to live, and the Festival’s organization was taken over by John Eady, of Lewis Eady Ltd, the New Zealand agents for Steinway pianos. Tamas Vesmas was able to maintain an interest in the Festival as Artistic Director, which continued successfully under John Eady’s stewardship, a process which eventually saw the Festival drop the “Auckland” from its title and become the New Zealand International Piano Festival. This year, the prestigious line-up included none other than the 2009 Winner of the Leeds International Piano Competition, Sofya Gulyak. It was Wellington’s great good fortune that she was able to include a visit to the capital in her schedule, and perform her Festival program here as well.

Gulyak’s success at Leeds was historic in the sense that she was the first woman to win the top prize in the competition (Mitsuko Uchida went close in 1975, but was edged out by Dmitri Alexeev, and the talented Noriko Ogawa was placed third in 1987, though she beat the highly-regarded Russian Boris Berezovsky into fourth place). At Leeds Gulyak played the Brahms D Minor Concerto with Mark Elder and the Halle to take the honours, and her performance was praised for its “measured intensity” and its “combination of tonal weight and dark lyricism”. Her success wasn’t entirely unquestioned, as often happens in these competitions, with each of the runners-up preferred by some commentators as the more deserving of the highest award – but Gulyak was able to impress enough of the right people sufficiently to carry the day.

She was certainly able to impress her Wellington audience as well, though not with Brahms – her programme, which she had also played in Auckland, at the Festival, consisted entirely of Russian works.  It was a well-chosen assemblage of pieces designed to demonstrate unequivocally those characteristics we’ve generally come to associate with music from that particular part of the world. Added to this was a style of playing which, thanks largely to recordings of other pianists, could readily be identified as belonging to the “Russian School”, and which Gulyak seemed to me to proclaim practically from her first note of the recital, at the beginning of Rachmaninov’s Elegie from the set of Pieces, Op.3. Her depth of tone, and evocation of both a deep stillness and a wonderfully oceanic surge caught us up in her sound-world within seconds, one which rose and fell at will throughout the music’s journeyings.

The Op.3 Pieces of course contain THE Prelude,  which Rachmaninov the concert pianist grew to hate, as he was simply beleaguered with requests for its performance – “I know my duty – I will play it!” he would wearily say to his stage manager, in response to his audience’s clamouring at the end of each concert. There was nothing weary about Gulyak’s performance, which was very “chiaroscuro” throughout the sharply-delineated opening, but then brought out the variants of colour and tone, with the left hand held in check, allowing the sounds of those tolling bells plenty of space and atmosphere. A quicksilver middle section proclaimed her amazing technical facility, with cascades of sounds pealing in all directions, and then the most magical tonal diminutions of the final chords opened up the music’s vistas and merged sounds with memory.

Despite the programme’s boldly-proclaimed “Five Pieces for Piano Op.3”, Gulyak played only three of them, concluding the group with the Polichinelle, Rachmaninov’s scintillating portrayal of the well-known Pulcinello, from the Italian commedia del’ arte theatre – impish brilliance at the outset, followed by one of those rolling Russian melodies that the composer simply couldn’t help writing, and concluding with a reprise of the opening, working up to an even more brilliant conclusion. The grandly obsessive Etude-Tableau in E-flat minor from the wonderful Op.39 set of these pieces followed, its Lisztian sweep and rhetoric making the perfect foil for what was to follow – the composer’s last piece written for solo piano, the Corelli Variations.

Though the theme Rachmaninov used is not really by Corelli at all (it’s an ancient Portugese dance-tune called “La Folia”) it was used by the latter in one of his Op.5 Violin Sonatas, as well as by other Baroque composers. By this stage in his career Rachmaninov was favouring a leaner, sharper-edged style in his composing, following on from his Fourth Piano Concerto and his “Paganini” Rhapsody.  Sofya Gulyak fills out the spaces contained by these clear edges with dark, rich colours, vividly characterizing each variation (a cricket’s song in Variation Two, for example), and for me making each vignette at once modern-sounding and fantastically Schumannesque. At first I thought her playing in the finale a shade unyielding, but orchestral colours kept burgeoning up out of the textures and the rhythms acquired a real schwung from one keyboard extreme to another – exciting and extremely musical pianism! And the epilogue was brought about with such a sense of “being there”, Gulyak scattering a few roses about the devastation, her playing of the theme at the end a quiet, deep-toned tribute to the journey and its remaining memories.

Scriabin’s “Two Poemes” were played for contrasts, the first Andante Cantabile very beautiful,  limpid and watery, the second more “impetuoso” than its actual marking “con eleganza”. Though seeming like whole worlds apart, Gulyak moved from these worlds of over-wrought sensibility to the sharp, acerbic intensities of Shostakovich with complete ease, flinging the composer’s angularities at us with gusto at the beginning of the Prelude, and switching to playfulness for the child-like middle section, innocent and artless but for the occasional “wrong-note” contouring! And what a wicked, chromatically torturous fugue! Gulyak relished its motoric impulses and its spiky, “in-your-face” concluding cadences, whose ironic, matter-of-fact aspect brought a huge appreciative response from her audience.

Though the Shostakovich work had a modicum of grit, it was left to Prokofiev to provide the evening’s truly coruscating moments. His Sixth Sonata was numbered as the first of what the composer called three “War Sonatas”, begun in 1939 and written throughout the duration. Amazingly, the composer began work on all ten movements of the three sonatas at the same time, in order to be able to switch to a different movement’s mode if he felt any kind of creative “block” with what he was currently grappling with. It’s small wonder that these sonatas have things in common, but an even greater miracle that each does have its own specific thematic and schematic world.

Sofya Gulyak threw herself and all of us into the ferment with a vengeance, giving the Sonata’s opening major-minor fanfare its full clangour and spadefuls of energy, drawing us into the darkly-lit lyricism of the central section, before re-energizing things, the fanfare returning in harsher, more mocking guise. Her playing hurled the sounds across the spaces, transfixing our sensibilities and rending the fabric of things. The Allegretto movement provided a little respite, though Gulyak pointed its its angularities in-and-out of our comfort-zones, unsettling us with sudden accents and dark shadows. I also loved Gulyak’s way with the slow-waltz lentissimo, again, taking us from warm reassurance to cool unease across single measures, rather like moonlight suddenly obscured by cloud and leaving things enveloped momentarily in darkness. Her voicings throughout were beautifully modulated, her control of animation and stasis that of a master, the concluding cadences playing delicacy against darkness most effectively.

The finale here drove between bristling energies and diabolical impulses – we felt a sense of dark pursuit that gave way to a slowly-descending vortex dominated by the work’s opening fanfare-motif. Gulyak’s impulsive reawakening of the textures were the sounds of fireflies in the gloom, the energies spreading to open conflagration, and overwhelming us with explosive force – her delivery of the final “pay-off” phrase had an electric thrill whose shock momentarily knocked our receptive powers sideways, though we recovered to give her the ovation and recalls she so richly deserved. Her encore, appropriately, restored calm and order to our sensibilities – a Bach transcription of part of a Marcello Oboe Concerto, after what we had just experienced, the musical epitome of equilibrium and well-being!  Bravo, Sofya Gulyak!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Full Monte – Baroque Voices let ‘er rip for us

Posted on by Peter Mechen

THE FULL MONTE (Concert Two)

Claudio MONTEVERDI – Madrigals (Books 2 and 9 – exerpts)

Baroque Voices, directed by Pepe Becker

Continuo: Douglas Mews (harpsichord) / Robert Oliver (bass viol)

Stephen Pickett (theorbo / baroque guitar)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Wellington

Sunday 22nd April, 2012

Trying to analyze either truth or beauty brings one to despair at the inadequacy of one’s own command of language. And faced with the truth and beauty of a body of music such as Claudio Monteverdi’s madrigals, I’m conscious that any words I might try to muster up to connect with, describe or explain any aspect of such glorious sounds are not going to match that selfsame glory. The exercise makes one realize anew just why it is that music is regarded as conveying so much more than words ever could.

I’m forced to accept the realization that the best way of telling other people about Monteverdi’s music is to encourage them to experience some of it for themselves. And happily, this is what that wondrous group of musicians and associates, Wellington’s  Baroque Voices, led by Pepe Becker, have decided to make possible for us regarding those justly famous collections of madrigals by the Italian composer, no less than nine books of them, written over a period of more than fifty years, a virtual compositional lifetime.

The group’s aim is to present the entire collection of these works in concert, over a period of four years. The first in this series of concerts was performed almost a year ago last May, one that I attended and afterwards reviewed on RNZ Concert (as a footnote to this present review, I offer my notes from that radio interview, not a word-for-word transcript, but something which contains the essence of what was discussed on air).

Now the group has undertaken a second concert, true to its word, for our delight and pleasure. As they did with the first “The Full Monte” presentation, Baroque Voices aren’t  intending to slavishly follow the composer’s chronological order, but aim for some variety by setting groups of works from different eras in juxtaposition with one another. So it was that this concert alternated madrigals either singly or in pairings from Book Two and individually from Book Nine throughout the afternoon – which meant that we were being constantly confronted by what sounded like music from two different composers.

We had the youthful (1590) more traditionally-influenced composer following the rules of what he called “Prima Pratica” (the older, more conservative way of composition), his works unaccompanied, according to Renaissance tradition, alternated with works from the Ninth Book (published posthumously in 1651), music from a different century, of course, it must be remembered – these madrigals are instrument-accompanied, and the vocal writing is far freer, less predictable,  band more varied, including canzonette (trios) and two-part works whose immediacy of expression are in some cases practically operatic in feeling and in inclination.

As much as I’d like to take credit for what I thought was a perceptive comment regarding Monteverdi’s writing style, I have to confess that the following came from a commentator surveying a number of recordings of these works, and writing about what he thought as the best way for the listener to approach this music. He said, “Trying to understand Monteverdi by working backwards from Handel and Bach doesn’t work, because Monteverdi’s music is the culmination of the Renaissance style, one which looked to express the meaning behind every word of text. He took the “poetry of sound” to its highest level of expression, and in the process, created something which strikes our ears today in places as fiercely modern.”

Between the two concerts the personnel of the group changed a little. Tenor Peter de Blois was replaced by Phillip Collins, joining the other tenor, Oliver Sewell, and bass Benjamin Caukwell took the place of David Morriss. Otherwise, the voices that had delighted us throughout the first concert were there again for the second, and continuing to do so. Pepe Becker’s and Jayne Tankersley’s angelic soprano tones ensured that our sensibilities were kept more-or-less constantly airborne – though very different in individual timbres (very likely an advantage) their blending of their individual lines in places created both mellifluous and startling results! Christopher Warwick’s reliable counter-tenor again wove strong interconnecting lines and enriched those middle vistas with enlivened tones.

Throughout, the blending and contrasting of vocal tones was a constant delight to the listener’s ear – right from the opening “Non si levava ancor”, from Book Two, in which the textures opened like those of a flower, contrasted the mood with a certain mercurial energy, then took up the longer lines once more.I enjoyed those instances of marvellously “attenuated” lines in which a second singer would add to an already existing held note, making for an incredibly intense effect. The song’s totality seemed like some kind of perfection of realization, beginning with impulse, then generating tension, and finally – fruition.

The second item, “E dice l’una sospirand’ allora”, also from Book Two, reminded me of Thomas Tallis in places, with “modal” sounding progressions. As the work progressed the performers excitingly widened and intensified its range of expression, up to the vehement and very dramatic ending, with the “addio” repeated, the words living and breathing. From Book Nine then came a dialogue “Bel pastor, dal cui bel sguardo” between a shepherdess and her lover, Pepe Becker and tenor Phillip Collins played nicely into each other’s and the music’s hands, with delightfully capricious phrasings and figurations, exciting coloratura and winsome echoing of some of the florid passages – most entertaining!

Among the many other highlights was the energetic “Se vittorie si belle” from Book Nine, in which the instrumental ensemble sprang to energetic life, the small baroque guitar displaying real “attitude”, as the instrumentalists matching the singers’ rapid-fire exchanges, the words combatative and flailing about in all directions. Another was the Book Two “Tutte le bocche belle”, with its sublimely stratospheric soprano parts, creating a feeling all around of ecstasy on the wing with the bell-like tones. And the two sopranos gave us another palpable thrill a few minutes later, with the superbly-wrought “Quando dentro al tuo seno” (Book Nine), concluding with a palpably searing clash of seconds from Pepe Becker and Jayne Tankersley which was then brilliantly and fantastically resolved on the phrase’s final note. Sensational stuff!

This ought to have been a literal show-stopper, but we in the audience were perhaps too stunned by the power of the music and virtuosity of the singing to respond immediately! –  and so we waited until the more playful and light-hearted “S’andasse Amor a caccia” (Book Two) brought with its ending the interval. In fact, my only criticism of the concert was that we spectators felt the pressing need to applaud more often, but were stymied by a mixture of inhibition and reluctance to disturb the “spell” of the music-making. We needed, I think, at least one opportunity, midway through each half, to let off a bit of steam and give vent to our appreciation.

I could go on through the second half of the concert highlighting various other “highlights”, the “terraced” beauties of the very first song in the second half, “Mentre io miravo fiso” from Book Two, with its solid underlying harmonic progressions; or the overt, Barbara Strozzi-like emotionalism and volatility of Book Nine’s extraordinary “O sia tranquillo il mare”, the singers having more than ample temperament, sensibility and sustaining power to do these works full justice. Nor was emotive power the exclusive property of the Book Nine madrigals, as we discovered with the performance of the beautiful but intensely dramatic “Dolcemente dormiva la mia Clori” from Book Two, with its lovely, elaborately-turned final cadential measures.

I did think the group right at the end could have chosen a fuller-ensembled madrigal with which to finish, rather than slavishly pursuing the numerical order of the Book Two set  which concluded with the single-sopranoed  “Cantai un tempo…” – as with the concert’s first half, it was the penultimate madrigal which I thought would have made a better and more concerted “finish” here, the Book Two “Ti sponto l’ali, Amor, la donna mia” with its roulades of intense, rolling sound and fearlessly-attacked high notes (soprano Jayne Tankersley in particular in spectacular form). But this, like the very few other criticisms I’ve dredged up, was a minor matter, as smoke compared with Pepe Becker’s and Baroque Voices’ stunning achievement in this music. Even more so than I felt at the conclusion of the first concert of “The Full Monte” in 2011, I now await with impatience the group’s third instalment of these remarkable works.

 

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Appendix

2011 Review: The Full Monte (Concert One)

Baroque Voices’ performances of music from the entire collection of nine Books of Madrigals

by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)

Baroque Voices: Pepe Becker (soprano) / Jayne Tankersley (soprano) / Christopher Warwick (countertenor)

Peter de Blois (tenor) / Oliver Sewell (tenor) / David Morriss (bass)

Continuo players: Douglas Mews (harpsichord) / Robert Oliver (bass viol)

Il Primo Libro de Madrigali (for five voices) 1587 (complete)

Madrigali e canzonette  (for two and three voices) from Libro Nono 1651

Concert 1 Sunday 1st May 2011, Sacred Heart Cathedral, Wellington

(from a review by Peter Mechen for “Upbeat” with Eva Radich)

 

PLAY MUSIC : Filli car e amata (Phyllis, my dear beloved) – Poi che del mio dolor (Since you enjoy feeding on my sufferings) (from Il Primo Libro)

“The Full Monte” – the title suggests revealing something or stripping something off, as in the film of the same name. So, what was done to or with Monteverdi?

Baroque Voices in this concert began what’s intended to be a complete survey of the Madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi. Monteverdi wrote nine books of Madrigals, and gradually evolved his own style of expression. So the early books are in the grand polyphonic tradition of the Renaissance, although one can hear distinctive voices striving for deeper and more overt expression every now and then. And by the time the composer came to write his later books he had ushered in a new style of vocal writing, much freer and more overtly expressive than the old. Baroque Voices performed the entire Book one of the madrigals and interspersed groups of them with selections from Book Nine, music that came almost a whole lifetime later, in fact.……..

How did the idea work, of alternating works by a composer from both the beginning and the end of his creative life?

It worked well – it was a situation where different ways of presenting the music would have made for an equally fascinating, but different, result. Part of the reason everything worked is that the music is so good, so instantly combustible to the ear, so that it became a case of registering differences rather than improvements. The early Monteverdi wasn’t at all shamed or cast low by what we heard of the later works. What was fascinating was how one often heard pre-echoes of the composer’s later style, so that the experience was more organic than one might have thought it would be..……..

So what are the differences between early Monteverdi and late Monteverdi in his madrigal writing?

When Monteverdi was young he wrote madrigals in the old-fashioned sense of the word -that is, following the rules of Renaissance Polyphony……….. These early works were unaccompanied five-part madrigals, and the rules consisted of things like having equal voice parts, preparing the listener for dissonances, certain prescribed chordal progressions were used, and the work’s musical structure was paramount.  By contrast, the later Monteverdi deals in bold dissonances, sudden tempo changes, radical harmonic shifts, chromaticism, florid vocal ornamentation – a generally more volatile and spontaneous attitude towards realizing the meaning of the poetic settings.……….We’ll hear two of these early madrigals: “Amor per tua merce” (Cupid, take pity on me), followed by “Baci soave e cari” (Sweet, dear kisses).

So, what do we expect the group to be doing in this group of two madrigals?

It’s music that’s very light on its feet, with the lyrical sections having  a lovely soaring quality. Listen for the lovely voice-blend in both works, and in the second madrigal the soprano’s unflinching attack on the high notes, even if the intonation isn’t absolutely true all the time. There’s a lovely blend achieved by the group here, and the ebb and flow of the work is beautifully controlled.…….

PLAY: Monteverdi “Amor per tua merce” (Cupid, take pity on me”) and “Baci soave e carry” (Sweet, dear kisses) from Book One of Monteverdi’s Madrigals for five voices (1587).

The music sounds amazing – what is it that you think gives it that compelling quality, that instant connection?

In this case, definitely a combination of the music and its performance. The music itself is extraordinary – last year with the performance of the Vespers by the same singers we got a tremendous demonstration of how vivid and communicative Monteverdi’s music can be – and even without that array of wonderful instruments these madrigals still have the power to engage. You can hear, especially in the later works but even occasionally in the earlier works, how, with such expressivity it was easy for this music to become operatic. Monteverdi’s concern with his vocal works was to give the words and their meaning pre-eminence over musical structures and harmonic progressions – he insisted that it was a case of “Prima le parole, poi la musica….” (first the words, then the music). HIs First Book of Madrigals, though it generally follows the traditional styles of the late Renaissance, occasionally gives an indication of the composer’s desire to pursue more modern styles of writing – he considered “the words are the mistress of harmony, not the servant”. Monteverdi had been criticized by at least one of his contemporaries for what were called “crudities” and “license” in his music, and his response was to coin the name “Seconda Pratica” (Second Practice), aligning himself with other composers who preferred the innovative style, and serving himself and his work apart from what he called the “Prima Practica” (First Practice) of the more traditional composers.

The performances sound terrific! – what was it like being there and feeling the force of it all?

Like all performing groups worth their salt, this group invites total immersion on the part of the listener. It was an incredibly involving experience, of course very much an art that conceals art, because this degree of involvement by the performers in this music  which washed over and all around us was of course possible through skills and techniques that enabled the singers to put the message across so tellingly. If one was looking for faults, there were moments of raw tone, and of one or two not-quite on the note unexposed entries, and a couple of instances of not-quite-matching figurations with singers in duet  but these were so few and far between, and often what might have seemed a rawness, a slightly off-pitched note, a momentary inequality of vocal figuration in duet, also created expressive effects of their own. Now music-making can only do that if it’s generally on an exalted level – like Alfred Cortot’s wrong notes on his recordings – “spots on the sun” I think one commentator called them.And the music-making by this group was of such brilliance, power and depth, that occasional minor lapses took on that “spots on the sun” quality. All in all, I thought the concert was an outstanding achievement.

So, we’re going to hear one of the later madrigals, from Book Nine, in fact – what does one listen for?

Well, it’s a wonderful example of how Monteverdi took his style along further – a very dramatic and theatrical setting of the words, with frequent irruptions of feeling inspired by the text’s meaning – you can hear and feel the surge of emotion and the graphic realization of the words “to cry for help to end my terrible torment”, for example – and then, at the end, the throwaway line “for she causes the words to break on my lips”. Remarkable.

Here’s Pepe Becker and Jane Tankersley, accompanied by Douglas Mews harpsichord and Robert Oliver bass viol.

PLAY: Monteverdi “Ardo e scoprir” (I burn) from Book Nine of Monteverdi’s Madrigals for two and three voices (1651)

Pepe Becker and Jayne Tankersley, sopranos, with Douglas Mews and Robert Oliver bass viol.

It does move the whole scenario that much closer to opera, doesn’t it? 

Well, of course Monteverdi had by now written his famous operas, which were among the first ever written. His earliest surviving opera, L’Orfeo, was first performed in 1607. One of the things that make these works really zing is the quality of the poetry – Monteverdi was using verses by some of the most famous poets of the time, Tasso, Guarini and Rinuccini, people whose use of emotive, sensuous imagery was unparalleled.

Even in the earlier madrigals which are more conventional and perhaps “reined in” emotionally compared with the later ones, the writing is of an order that Monteverdi was fully able to explore and push out the boundaries of what could be expressed – the poetry simply went with him – or, maybe, he simply went with the poetry.

To finish, here’s a couple of shorter madrigals from the First Book, in which you can hear the young composer already responding to the ebb and flow of the very emotional poetry. We’re going to hear the ensemble of Baroque Voices singing firstly “Questa ordi il laccio” (She it was who wove the snare”, followed by a look at a kind of Little Bo Peep of Monteverdi’s time, “La Vaga Shepherdess”.

PLAY TO FINISH: Monteverdi “Questa ordì il laccio”(She it was who wove the snare) and “La vaga pastorella” (The lovely shepherdess) (from Il Primo Libro 1587)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZSO and Pietari Inkinen all at sea

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SIBELIUS – The Oceanides / BRITTEN – Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes”

CHAUSSON – Poème de l’amour et de la mer / DEBUSSY – La Mer

Sasha Cooke (mezzo-soprano)

Pietari Inkinen (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 20th April 2012

Having rather too cleverly used the expression “all at sea”  in this review’s heading, I needs must hasten to add that the words weren’t meant in a pejorative sense – but rather as a compliment to conductor and orchestra regarding their powers of evocation!

Compiling a complete list of musical works inspired by the sea would, I think, result in several closely-worked pages being filled. Of the pieces for orchestra, Pietari Inkinen and the NZSO surely gave us four of the greatest, with the help of mezzo Sasha Cook, who followed her heartfelt performance of Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer of a week ago with a mellifluous rendering of Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer. 

I thought three of the pieces received splendidly characterful performances, the one disappointment for me being the opening item on the program, Sibelius’s The Oceanides. As a friend said to me during the interval, it wasn’t very Mediterranean – we missed the glint of sunlight on the water and the play of light on the waves, a scenario which would have rendered the “big wave” when it came, an even more impressive demonstration of nature’s power. Here, it instead seemed all very Baltic, and somewhat more subaqueous than Sibelius might have intended – a point of view, but one that played down the Homeric inspiration commented on by the composer: – “It (the Oceanides) derives from the mythology of Homer and not from the Kalevala.”

I wondered whether the good ole’ MFC acoustic played its part in swallowing up some of the music’s airiness – in particular the winds seemed scarcely to speak throughout to my ears in the place where I was sitting, though I suspect it was more the conductor’s “through a glass darkly” way with the music. The passage for glockenspiel, harp and clarinet containing the hitherto “embedded” string theme hardly at all registered, and there were similar places whose evocations of air and light (ironically the program note spoke of the music’s “bright warmth”) were made subservient to the string-dominated soundscapes depicting the ebb and flow of watery expanses. Perhaps in venues like the Auckland Town Hall, the winds will get more of a chance to establish a better sense of the play of sun and wind upon the waves.

Having in previous articles commented upon Pietari Inkinen’s seeming reluctance to explore and bring out the “darker” sides of Sibelius’s music, I now may justly be accused of inconsistency at complaining when he does so! Still, Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes” responded marvellously to the same kind of trenchant treatment, though here I thought all sections of the orchestra were encouraged to “speak” and convey their distinctive colours and accents. The playing of the opening Dawn allowed us to sense the vast and lonely beauty of the sea itself, as well as conveying its darker, more threatening power. This was in complete contrast to the gaiety and human bustle of Sunday Morning with its insistent backdrop of church bells – how wonderfully “precarious” those syncopated cross-rhythms of strings and winds always sound, played here as well as any other performance I’ve heard!

More sharply-etched contrasts came with Moonlight, here dark and dour, unresonant and unromantic and filled with foreboding, followed immediately by the physical assault of Storm with Inkinen really encouraging his players to rattle, roar and rend the air with tumultuous sounds. It was all very exciting, with particularly wonderful brass-playing (the tuba roaring like a kraken from the baleful deep), the performance capturing the “frightened shadows” aspect at the end, with properly spectral strings and winds, before the final free-falling orchestral tumult resounded into the silences.

After the interval, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke added her lovely voice to some gorgeously-wrought orchestral textures throughout the opening pages of Chausson’s seductive Poème de l’amour et de la mer. One of a number of stunningly beautiful works for female voice and orchestra written at about this time (such as Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, Elgar’s Sea Pictures and Ravel’s Scheherazade), Chausson’s “endless melody” style of writing enabled the singer to demonstrate her finely-tuned dramatic instincts, in the first part, The Flower of the Waters (La Fleur des eaux) now hushed and expectant at “O ciel qui de sees jeux dois porter la couleur”, now radiant-toned (at “Faites-moi voir ma bien aimee”, and then later at “Et du ciel extrovert pleuvaient sur nous des roses”), the music evoking roses raining from the sky.

Here, and throughout both interlude and the second vocal episode, The Death of Love (La Mort de l’Amour) conductor and players supported and matched their soloist’s outpourings with a range of tones, by turns refulgent, flowing, spectral and halting. How the music darkens at the words “Le vent roulait des feuille mortes”! – with Chausson’s debt to Wagner, and in particular “Parsifal” evident in those sombre harmonic progressions for orchestra alone, and underpinning the despair of the words “Comme des fronts de morts”.

As for the most quintessential sea-piece of them all, Debussy’s La Mer, Inkinen and the orchestra brought out plenty of crisp detail and strongly-contoured lines – this was no impressionist wallow, but a beautifully-judged delineation of detail whose impulses activated a bigger picture with a widely-flung spectrum of variation. While here I didn’t feel quite as consistently the elemental undercurrents that made Inkinen’s reading of The Firebird of the previous week such a powerful listening experience, Debussy’s seascapes were allowed sufficient power in places to “tell”, again with instruments like the timpani encouraged to sound out (a couple of pistol-shot thwacks in the finale from Laurence Reese certainly added to the excitement!), and the lower strings and brass bringing appropriate weight and darkness to some of that same movement’s climaxes. While we’re on this movement, full marks to the trumpet-player (whom I couldn’t see properly – was it Michael Kirgan?) whose brief but cruelly-exposed solo shone out truly amid the darkness.

In all, an exciting, and richly-varied concert, each of these last two orchestral outings making a refreshing change from the usual “overture-concerto-symphony” format, with, for me, equally satisfying results. Maybe there’s hope for things such as Janacek’s Taras Bulba and Elgar’s In The South yet!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resplendent Mozart Requiem from the Bach Choir

Posted on by Peter Mechen

MOZART (edited Süssmayer) – Requiem KV 626

Amelia Ryman (soprano) / Bianca Andrew (mezzo-soprano)

Thomas Atkins (tenor) / David Morriss (bass)

The Bach Choir of Wellington

Douglas Mews (organ)

Conductor: Stephen Rowley

St.Peter’s Church, Willis St., Wellington

Saturday 31st March 2012

Wiser, more experienced concert-going heads than mine would have been better-prepared for the likelihood that the Bach Choir’s Mozart Requiem performance would use an organ rather than the orchestra the composer specified. Having grasped this state of things upon entering the beautiful Church of St.Peter’s on Willis St. in Wellington, I simply had to deal with my own withdrawal symptoms at cardinal points (alas, no trumpets and drums at Dies Irae, no trombone at Tuba mirum and no remorseless, driving strings in the Confutatis maledictis, to mention just some of the obviously affected places). As well, I needed to put Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette out of my mind as best I could at the performance’s almost jaunty organ-only beginning. But when the choir entered with the words “Requiem aeternam”, everything changed dramatically.

Right from these opening phrases, the choir under Stephen Rowley’s direction sang with splendidly-focused tones and full-blooded commitment, rising to the challenge of “carrying” much of the work’s weight and momentum, in the absence of an orchestra. Once I’d adjusted my own expectations I actually found more to relish in Douglas Mews’ organ accompaniments than I expected to, even if parts of the Dies Irae without trumpets and drums sounded a bit undernourished. There were places I wanted more pointed instrumental emphasis, though in one instance (the beginning of the Lacrimosa) the organ blurted out a phrase rather alarmingly before being quickly brought back into line. But mostly the organ-playing served the performance well, a touch of awry ensemble at the first “Quam olim Abrahae” being more in the realm of an occupational hazard than anything else, I would think.

I was impressed with the choir throughout, their lines confidently placed and clearly-voiced across the spectrum, given that the men’s voices were always going to have to work hard by dint of comparative lack of numbers. But whatever imbalances there were I could hear the tenors and basses at almost all times keeping their lines alive and buoyant within the ensemble. Stephen Rowley drove the opening Requiem swiftly, encouraging dramatic attack and plenty of contrast with the more hushed tones at the repeated “Luceat eis”, and allowing the beautifully-floated tones of soprano Amelia Ryman plenty of room. The fugal Kyrie also went with a will, the ensemble crisp and energetic, and the women’s voices actually relishing things like their awkward “eleision” ascents leading up to the assertive final supplication.

One had to “sound” the trumpets and drums of the Dies Irae from within one’s imagination, here, though the musicians’ energies carried the day, the men at their exposed “Quantus tremor” not especially strong, but reliably alert. Then, at the Tuba Mirum the soloists took over the performance – a glorious, magisterial solo from bass David Morriss, negotiating his wide leaps with sure-voiced aplomb, paved the way for the others. Thomas Atkins’ opening notes sounded a tad stressful at first, but he quickly settled into a warm-toned “Liber scriptus”, while mezzo Bianca Andrew’s “Judex ergo” had a rich, velvety quality conveying a properly awed response to the apocalyptic solemnity of her words. Amelia Ryman’s purely-focused lines brought to us a beautifully-ascending “Cum vix justus sit securus?” the words repeated to expressive effect by a tremulously-voiced ensemble of soloists.

A confidently-propelled Rex Tremendae from choir and organ incorporated some lovely sounds from the women at “Salva me”, followed by the reflective Recordare, delicately begun by the organ, and richly-coloured by the mezzo and bass combination, Bianca Andrew and David Morriss, contouring their tones to great effect. The same went for Amelia Ryman and Thomas Atkins a few measures later, the soprano leaving behind a momentary awkwardness at the opening to enchant us with her ascent at “Sed tu bonus fac benigne”. Stephen Rowley then got the maximum possible dramatic contrast with the choir’s Confutatis maledictis, the desperately driving momentums of which brought the subsequent creepy chromaticisms of “Oro supplex et acclinis” into bold relief. Apart from the momentary organ outburst, the Lacrimosa was brought into being with lovely gravitas, Rowley controlling its ebb and flow of emotion with considerable sensitivity, the intensification of “Dona eis Requiem” melting naturally and organically into the final “Amen”.

As the work progressed the choir’s energies seemed constantly to renew themselves, the vigour and focus of the “Osanna” fugues carrying over to the final “Cum sanctis tuis”, and bringing things to a resplendent conclusion. But there was also dignity, tenderness and warmth to be had from the Agnus Dei, with Douglas Mews’ registrations deftly coloring the music’s different dynamics. And Amelia Ryman’s brief but beautiful lead-in to the concluding Lux aeterna had the choir responding in kind, then unerringly building things towards the closure of the work’s circle.

The soloists again came into their own in the Benedictus, the singing as finely-wrought as with the earlier Recordare, with solo lines and ensemble passages alike delighting the ear. The sounds we were given made for moments of great sublimity, even if the music in this instance was more inspired than penned by Mozart, who died before the Requiem was finished. This and the preceding Sanctus were completed by the composer’s pupil Franz Süssmayer, who arranged and reworked a good deal of the music. Fortunately, the music-making throughout this performance was of a quality which appeared to ennoble the ideas and efforts of those who worked to try and realize Mozart’s intentions. It made as though we had with us a real sense of the spirit of the composer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZSO Soloists and a kaleidoscopic “Carmen”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

KENNETH YOUNG – Portrait / TORU TAKEMITSU – Rain Tree / ARVO PÄRT – Fratres

GEORGES BIZET / RODION SHCHEDRIN – Carmen Suite for Strings and Percussion

NZSO Soloists

Vesa-Matti Leppänen (director)

Wellington Town Hall

Saturday 24th March

Strings and percussion put side-by-side make an intriguing ensemble combination – perhaps they’re not natural musical bedfellows to the extent that are winds and percussion or brass and percussion. But their coming-together makes, I think, for unique results, such as their capacity for generating enormous contrasts of timbre and colour. This was evident throughout the NZSO Soloists’ “Carmen Suite” concert, given that the music presented during the first half was perhaps more subtle and subdued than one might have expected from such forces.

It struck me throughout the evening that, because of the difference in sound-worlds, there was a certain tension generated by the combination, a tension of awkwardness, of having to marry these very different worlds together. Perhaps it was as much audience- as composer-generated, but I thought the chalk-and-cheese juxtapositions of “non-percussive” and “extremely percussive” created a mixture of expectation and conjecture as to how it was all going to turn out. Of course there is percussion and percussion, and in at least one of the works programmed in the concert, Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree, one could almost predict that the sounds would hardly sound “percussive” at all!

As I’ve already indicated, the three works in the first half took a gentler, more reflective stance towards the percussion section, as if, along with the strings, traditional adversaries were being brought together for some kind of truce and told to be on their best behaviour! Then in the second half, more overtly “percussive” qualities were given their head in places – though I must say that this music, Rodion Shchedrin’s reworking of themes from Bizet’s opera Carmen into a ballet suite, wasn’t as “noisy” as I had been previously led to believe. More through circumstance than by deliberate avoidance, I had never heard the work before. (Right! – I shall try to no longer use the words “percussion” and “percussive” in this review – if I can!)

The concert opened with a new work, one written especially for the NZSO Soloists and commissioned by the NZSO Friends of the Orchestra. This was Portrait, a work by Ken Young – and from the title, one might have expected the piece to be a self-portrait, or a portrait of some specific person or object. Instead, the composer told us in a program note that the work was one which merely “reflects various moods and sensations”. We were as well invited to make any associations we ourselves wished to make with the music.

It was all my fault – I was expecting the composer of his first two symphonies and that wonderfully exhilarating work Dance to give us something more along those lines. So, I spent much of the listening-time waiting for the piece to do something other than what it was doing! Still, the music I found extremely attractive, written in a late-Romantic idiom, and making striking use of the solo violin – Young employed a kind of descending motif at the opening, one whose harmonies he occasionally “bent” chromatically, in a haunting, atmospheric manner.

I was struck by the beauty of the music for the strings and harp throughout this opening section, with the solo violin like a single wanderer in a beautiful, unfamiliar sonic landscape. The music did gather up its energies during a middle episode, where the writing reminded me a bit of Bartok’s in his Concerto for Orchestra, the motifs sounding folkish and very singable. But whatever more strongly rhythmic episodes there were seemed all too ready to put aside their energies and return to more reflective modes of expression. And because I was waiting for the composer to bring more muscle and thrust into the proceedings, it took a while for me to rid myself of the disappointment that the piece never seemed really to “take off”, beautiful though many of the episodes were.

Upon reflection, and rehearing a section on the work on the radio, I’m inclined towards thinking that the music worked well despite my expectations of the time not being fulfilled. But as regards the next item on the program, Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree, I did expect a completely different kind of sound-experience – in a sense this was the case, though again I had some difficulty focusing on the music, albeit for somewhat different reasons. As I imagined it would be, Takemitsu’s piece was largely meditative, gentle and inward, with occasional irruptions of light (more of this in a moment) and scintillations of impulse. Energy in Takemitsu’s music is, of course, largely of the mind and the imagination, rather than of the blood and sinew. Three percussionists were involved, playing marimba, vibraphone and crotales (antique cymbals) respectively.

What became the performance’s dominant feature (causing much discussion afterwards) was the lighting used throughout the piece. The instrumentalists were individually lit, and the illumination was alternated between the players, according to which instrument was being used – an interesting idea in theory, but in practice one I found fatally distracting. It all seemed too insistent and crude, at odds with the overall gentleness and subtlety of the piece, and an enormous distraction for this listener, at any rate – in fact I found myself absorbed in predicting when each lighting-change was going to happen and to which instrument it would be applied, instead of listening to the music!

Again, the problem is probably mine to an extent, but I would think this also a generational issue. I can imagine audience members younger than myself not batting an eyelid at what I would consider distractions, as they would have probably experienced many musical events with constant variation of lighting and other effects “augmenting” the music. Of course, Takemitsu himself was a noted “cinephile” with a number of beautifully-wrought film-scores to his credit, so his music does have a strong and established association with visual imagery. But I found the lighting changes “noisy “and “clattery” in this instance – visually more like lightning, or dramatic denouement, or explosive flashes one might associate with warfare. I might well have been prepared to accept more delicately-modulated ambient changes, of the kind suggested by the music. But, unfortunately, I still labour under the delusion that a concert is where someone goes to “listen”, and found this all too much to take, something of an impediment.

So, a somewhat muted, circumspect first half was completed by a classic Arvo Pärt work, Fratres, which was written in 1977. This began life as a work for strings and winds, but the composer subsequently arranged the music for a number of combinations of instruments. Probably the most popular version is for solo violin, strings and percussion,as was performed here, though it also makes occasional appearances as a work for violin and piano.

I thought the string-playing during this work was simply a joy to listen to. It all began with the solo violin sounding modulating arpeggiations which grew in intensification as the deep percussion sounds opened up the ground beneath one’s feet, suggesting something monumental and unearthly. The accompanying string chords had an eerie, haunting Aeolian, or wind-blown quality, with the double basses holding on to this deep-seated sound. I like the way the hymn-like music for strings seemed to address the heavenly spaces, with the solo violin also playing music of the air, while the percussion and lower strings kept the foundation sounds well grounded.

One would have thought, after all of this, that the second half of the program, featuring Russian composer Rodian Shchedrin’s Carmen Ballet  (music largely drawn from George’s Bizet’s eponymous opera), would straightway electrify our sensibilities with masses of sound – my somewhat randomly-formed impression of what we were going to hear was that it was going to be “extremely noisy”! In fact, what we got at the start was the gentlest and most evocative kind of “wake-up call” – Rodian Shchedrin begins his Suite with what sound like distant, early-morning sounds, bells sounding the famous “Habanera” theme as a gently nostalgic echo, perhaps for some people a sleepy remembrance of what they were doing the night before! But soon, the music got going in earnest, with the first Dance, an evocation of the bull-ring, flailing castanets prominent.

I thought two differences between Shchedrin and the original Bizet work gradually emerged. Firstly, it became clear that Shchedrin had his own order of events for the action of his ballet – it wasn’t a carbon copy of Bizet’s Carmen story, by any means. And so the tunes we all knew came in a somewhat unexpected order in places. What I didn’t know was that Shchedrin had interpolated a couple of numbers from Bizet’s incidental music for L’Arlesienne into his score and from another opera, The Fair Maid of Perth, along with a bit of Jules Massenet’s ballet music for Le Cid. So these things came as a surprise as well.

Secondly, Shchedrin’s strings and percussion scheme rather unexpectedly drew my attention to the enormous importance Bizet gave to the wind instruments in his opera – without them, as here, the differences were profound. So, in that sense, the strings had a great deal to make up for; and what they lacked in timbral and textural variation, they compensated for by fervently singing – they could, of course, convey all the romance and anguish of Bizet’s themes, even if those accustomed colours and “dialects” associated with some tunes, were no longer there. The NZSO strings were, I’m happy to report, well up to the task.

It was interesting, and perhaps predictable, that the official Soviet reaction (in 1969 the cultural scene in Russia still dominated by “The Party”) was extremely hostile. Shchedrin’s “tweaking” of the story for the Ballet caused outrage in some quarters – Soviet Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furseva exclaimed that the work was “insulting” and that “Carmen, the hero of the Spanish people, has been made into a whore”. It was only after the intervention of Shostakovich that a ban that had been placed on the music’s performance was lifted. Shchedrin’s story-line has Carmen in a kind of “menage a trois” with both Don Jose and Escamillo the Toreador. At the end, Carmen dances with each of her lovers in turn until Don Jose stabs her in a fit of jealousy. Presumably it was Carmen’s apparent “free-range” sexual activities which raised the ire of the Soviet Thought-Police.

Given these scenarios, I was surprised and delighted at the extent to which the music had moments of real fun, of a somewhat irreverent feeling, a “tongue-in-cheek” aspect that peeked out occasionally from between the score’s pages. For example, Shchedrin gets the players to hum the Toreador’s Song at one point, and subsequently asks the percussionists to play kazoos, to everybody’s delight at the concert. Touches like this leavened the intensity of the mix, to the enterprise’s advantage.

So, it was all very entertaining, superbly delivered, exciting and with lots of diverting touches. Perhaps Shchedrin’s work is too quirky in itself to be an enduring masterpiece – but it’s certainly a work that, ultimately, reminds one of what a great piece the original Carmen continues to be!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Albeniz’s Iberia – a musical traveller’s delight

Posted on by Peter Mechen

ALBÉNIZ – Iberia

Guillermo González (piano)

Adam Concert Room,

New Zealand School of Music, Wellington

Friday 23rd March, 2012

Surely the next best thing to actually GOING to Spain would be to listen and give oneself up entirely to either (or preferably both) of those two masterpiece collections for solo piano, Isaac Albéniz’s Iberia and Enrique Granados’s Goyescas. Fortunately, there are a number of fine recordings available of each of the cycles, although live performances of them are rare happenings indeed.

It was, therefore, an occasion worth celebrating and savouring, when Spanish pianist Guillermo González recently played the entire set of Albéniz’s Iberia in Wellington, at a concert given in the NZSM’s Adam Concert Room. As his was a name new to me, I was surprised to find González has actually recorded a good deal of Albéniz’s piano music,including Iberia, for the Naxos label, and made numerous other recordings of Spanish and non-Iberian music as well.

If his recordings manage to convey anything like the grandeur, energy and intensity with which González invested his playing of Iberia for us at the Adam Concert Room, then they ought to be snapped up by Hispanophiles and pianophiles alike. By dint of what seemed his total involvement with the music, González drew us into his Antipodean sound-world, one in which every note had its own organically-wrought impulse of colour, flavour or rhythm. So persuasive were his evocations that, once under their spell, one felt at times almost more like a native than a tourist.

Interestingly, the pianist presented his own order of Albéniz’s twelve pieces, one which (as he explained to us through an interpreter) he believed gave us “the best experience” of the work. However bold an initiative this first appeared, González (who has completed and published a new edition of the work) proceeded to justify his “order of vision” with playing whose sounds suggested total familiarity and identification with the music’s native substance.

The composer’s arrangement for the work’s publication involved four books of three, whereas González’s presentation involved three groups of four, and what seemed like an almost complete change of order of the pieces. So we had two intervals during the concert, an arrangement I found gave the music we’d heard in each bracket time and space to breathe and resonate in the memory. Like Debussy with his Preludes, Albéniz didn’t except the pieces to be played in an entirety – and though (as with Debussy’s work) when played as a set their greatness glows even more richly, each nevertheless has a stand-alone strength and depth which creates its own distinctive and satisfying world.

González spoke about the work as a whole before the concert, and then about the oncoming bracket of pieces after each interval. His words, in gently and melodiously expressed Spanish, were translated by fellow-musician Paul Mitchell, more familiar of course to audiences as a ‘cellist. I found the experience of listening to a musician’s thoughts regarding the music he was about to play fascinating – in this case it seemed to bring the specific worlds of Albéniz’s pieces more closely to us while still leaving some responsibility to our own imaginations for each evocation.

We began the journey with Almeria (Book II), González presiding over a beautifully-phrased unfolding of indolent rhythm, the melodic lines in places densely clustered, but with the intervals, however close or remote, sensitively voiced. Such was the focused earthiness of the pianist’s playing I felt something of a sense of spontaneous growth being tapped about it all; and as with the piece’s rhythms, the light falling about the notes not chiaroscuro-like but subtle and gradated. The music’s great climax was one whose trenchant tones rose and quickly died away, the effect being of an irradiated landscape, the occasional glint of some of the figurations suggesting the groundswell that filled its moment to bursting and then passed. Wide-eyed, transfixing stuff, indeed!

I couldn’t help write similar kinds of jottings about almost every piece, noting the impulsive intensities of the following Málaga, the droll syncopations of El polo masking the music’s ever-growing weight of intent (spontaneous applause for this one!), and the more familiar Triana, lighter in feeling but with a dark undertow of rhythm that native Spaniards probably register instinctively as a blood-pulse. Everything about each of the pieces seemed richly-conceived, the pianist’s silences in places as tone-saturated as the notes, making for tangy evocations of exotic atmospheres.

The second group was similarly introduced, with González telling us about Scarlatti’s influence upon Albéniz’s keyboard writing of Cádiz (sometimes called El Puerto), something one could hear in the playful insistence of the decorations surrounding the piece’s recurring motifs. He then talked about the composer’s swan-song, Jerez, a complex and candidly-written meditation whose material seemed to summon up a life’s work. I thought this drew remarkable playing from González, tightly-wrought at the beginning, then more spacious through some chromatically-coloured sequences, and later exploring the ambiences around and about an expansive theme whose appearance gave rise to a number of contrasting episodes. Here was both quiet ecstasy (lump-in-the-throat downward whole-tone modulations) and pain, which the pianist touched on in his spoken introduction, nothing too searing or scorching, but in the form of anxiety-ridden upward reachings of sounds towards light and liberation.

The obsessively rhythmic opening of El Abaicín provided a telling contrast, an evocation of the Gypsy quarter of Granada, one which González entered into with a will, imparting a wonderfully physical snap to his rhythms, and delivering the recitatives with passionate ardor. Following this, the Messiaen-like clustered tones of the opening of Lavapiés made a festive, almost chaotic effect in the pianist’s hands, as befitted the music’s inspiration from the streets and dance-halls of Madrid, complete with a catchy tune reminiscent of Debussy’s Hills of Anacapri, one whose workings developed beautifully towards a climax in this performance, then even more beguilingly wound down again.

González’s final bracket from Iberia contained both the opening and concluding published pieces of the entire set, beginning with Evocación, which opens Book One, and which he called “a simple expression of soul”. Its beautiful Chopin-like melody at the beginning dominated the piece, by turns passionate and  gently poetic, with some stunning gradations of withdrawn tones towards the end. The dance-like Rondeña opened engagingly (González played us a couple of bars of Leonard Bernstein’s “America” from “West Side Story” to demonstrate the rhythm), its melodic trajectories requiring fistfuls of notes in places – an engaging but demanding piece. I loved the rhythmic directness of the lively Eritaña, and the rich baritonal voicing of the melody mid-way, surrounded by such lovely ambiences. Was that the merest hesitation at one point leading up to a cadence? if so, it was the pianist’s only hiccup of the evening, a momentary hiatus before the plunge into yet another of the composer’s individual modulations, which came thick and fast before the reprise of the main theme.

Having always thought Eritaña, for all its energy and colour, a somewhat inconclusive end to Book Four of the suite, I was pleased that González gave us Sevilla at the end, here – this was music of great spectacle, the opening processional reaching a true “shimmering-point” in this performance, the pianist generating a marvellous sonority, something Liszt would have heartily approved of! The beautiful sequential melody enveloped us in a Parsifal-like halo of solemnity, its progressions, however predictable, totally mesmeric. And the ensuing build-up towards a conflagration of bells and song had a Musorgsky-like grandeur, one whose resonances drifted across our vistas and into the most satisfying of silences at the end. We were left thinking, “What music, and what a pianist!”

(A footnote in the program acknowledged the “generous assistance of the Embajada de Espana en Nueva Zelanda, the Embassy of Spain, for making Guillermo Gonzalez’s visit to New Zealand possible”.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tafelmusik – festive Baroque splendour from Canada

Posted on by Peter Mechen

THE GALILEO PROJECT – Music of the Spheres

(New Zealand International Festival of the Arts 2012)

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra / Jeanne Lamon (Music Director)

Shaun Smyth (narrator) / Alison McKay (Concept, Script and Programme)

Wellington Town Hall

Friday, 16th March 2012

It was all a bit too much at first – I confess I found the mega-hype of the Festival booklet’s blurb for “The Galileo Project” concert distinctly off-putting, creating an impression in my mind of an experience involving as many extra-musical “distractions” as one could possibly throw at an audience. We were promised “Dazzling images…a fusion of science and culture…beautiful classical music and poetic narration…” (and much more along those lines). The program – including an Allegro  from a concerto by Handel, a Rondeau from a larger work by Purcell, plus various instrumental exerpts from operas by Lully, Rameau and Monteverdi – seemed diverting enough, to be sure, but was it the kind of fare one could seriously get one’s teeth into?  It looked like an assemblage of baroque-ish bits and pieces designed to augment some new-age “flash-over-substance” entertainment.

Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong – I should have put my trust in The New York Times, whose review of Canadian baroque orchestra Tafelmusik’s concert was also quoted in the Festival booklet – “An event steeped in intellect and imagination”. For the evening had all the ingredients of a truly memorable experience for the concertgoer, presenting an amalgam of music, words and images that contrived to entertain, stimulate, educate, challenge and satisfy all at once. Even crusty old holier-than-thou musical purists like myself were completely won over. In fact I can’t recall attending a concert at the end of which there seemed more smiling, delighted faces and animated voices thronging the corridors and exitways of the hall.

It took only a few moments of the concert’s opening for us to discover why Tafelmusik was described by Gramophone Magazine as “one of the world’s top baroque orchestras”. Beginning with an Allegro movement for two violins from one of Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico concerti, the group delivered the music with incredibly engaging buoyancy, the two soloists’ melodic lines conversing, countering, echoing, mirroring and contrasting with one another in a delightfully ambivalent exchange, part-confrontational, part-complementary. In the time it took to draw breath, the concerto’s slow movement stimulated a change of lighting, and a regrouping of musicians, so that a different soloist was playing, the music’s rapt stillness a complete contrast to the previous bristling energies.

As if giving tongue to the rapture of the sounds a speaker at one point interposed with those famous lines of Shakespeare’s from “The Merchant of Venice” – Lorenzo’s “How sweet the moonlight sleeps along this bank…”. Then, at the words “Come, ho! and wake Diana with a hymn!…” several wind players joined the strings and began Lully’s Overture “Phaeton”. Generally, the orchestra arranged its string-and wind-players in a circle around its continuo players, two ‘cellos, double-bass, guitar and harpsichord, and as the different works required changes of soloist, the musicians revolved accordingly – at times they revolved during the music, and in places in appropriate pieces did dance-steps as they played. All of this was done with such ease and elegance as to make one hold one’s breath, in mute appreciation of it all.

Besides Shakespeare, we were given, in tandem with appropriate pieces of music, a story from mythology (How Apollo’s son Phaeton met his death), readings from letters of Galileo concerning his telescope, parts of the Inquisition’s pronouncements concerning Galileo’s heresy, reminiscences of the great Sir Isaac Newton, from his manservant Humphrey Newton (we were told “no relation”), readings of Kepler’s theories concerning the harmonies of the spheres, and accounts of historical happenings such as the 1719 Dresden Festival of the Planets with its attendant opera, balls, events and concerts in honour of each of the known planets.

All of these things the speaker/narrator Shaun Smyth delivered with finely-tuned focus and judgement, allowing us by turns to feel the gravitas of things such as Galileo’s condemnation and imprisonment by the Church authorities, the wry humour in descriptions of both Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton by their contemporaries, and the ceremonial splendor of festival events honouring the various planets. It was unfortunate that, at the quietest and most intimately-scaled part of the presentation (the episode of Galileo under house-arrest, playing his lute) an audience-member had to be removed from the auditorium for medical reasons; but to everybody’s credit the emergency was registered, and things on the stage were held in suspension while the operation was completed, then continued as before.

Making flesh of the word throughout all of this was the music – the musicians, every demi-semiquaver played from memory, seemed, by dint of their own intense involvement, able to connect us with sounds of worlds we knew from history books but could now feel as direct sensations. The exhilaration of the opening Vivaldi concerto for two violins, the magical antiphonal effects of Lully’s Chaconne, accompanying the story of Phaeton, between the soloists and the ripieno (the larger group, playing so quietly), the remarkable rhythmic interchanges between two solo ‘cellos and the accompanying orchestra in Monteverdi’s music, following Galileo’s description of his observation of Jupiter’s nearby “stars” – all of these pieces enlivened the spoken commentaries and activated the different worlds of each of the personalities we were presented with.

It may have been during the latter stages of one of Monteverdi’s pieces, or while the band was playing Tarquinio Merula’s Ciaconna (difficult to know where one exactly was, musically, at times during this wonderful farrago!) that the musicians actually danced a kind of courtly dance while playing (with an occasional touch of “silly walk” to debunk any pomposity that might have arisen). And during the “Homage to the Planets” sequences, the orchestra spilled over and down into the auditorium aisles, summonsed from the stage, as it were, by a group which had detached itself during the opening “Entrance of Jupiter” from Rameau’s “Tragedie en Musique” Hippolyte et Aricie, their “offstage” tones sounding like music from Fairyland. How wonderful to then have the whole auditorium of the Town Hall sounding and resounding with music in honour of heavenly bodies such as Venus, Mercury and Saturn!

This was all done with such style and unselfconsciousness as to create a kind of organic flow, the music, movement and narrative dovetailed to perfection. These things were capped off by a series of images projected onto a circular (how other?) screen at the back of the stage, the sequences complementing, but never unduly impinging upon the music. It strikes me as appropriate that Tafelmusik has been given the honour, by the International Astronomical Union, of having an asteroid named after the orchestra – a true “Music of the Spheres” gesture, and one which I’m sure everybody who attended the Wellington concert would, as they did the performers themselves at the evening’s conclusion, heartily applaud.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great enthusiasm at Jenny McLeod’s “Hōhepa” premiere

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JENNY McLEOD – HŌHEPA (opera) – World premiere performance

New Zealand International Festival of the Arts / NBR New Zealand Opera

Cast: Phillip Rhodes (Hōhepa) / Jonathan Lemalu (Te Kumete) / Deborah Wai Kapohe (Te Rai)

Jane Mason (Jenny Wollerman) / Nicky Spence (Thomas Mason) / Martin Snell (Governor George Grey)

Narrator (Te Tokotoko /Te Waha): Rawiri Paratene

Director: Sara Brodie

Members of the Vector Wellington Orchestra

Conductor: Marc Taddei

Wellington Opera House

Thursday, 15th March, 2012

I’m not sure whether I ought to admit to readers of this review that, earlier in the same day that I attended the opening of Jenny McLeod’s “Hōhepa” I took up a friend’s invitation to accompany him to a screening of the latest New York Metropolitean Opera production of “Götterdämmerung”.

Perhaps my abrupt juxapositioning of the two experiences was foolhardy, considering the chalk-and-cheese aspect of the works involved. But I found the inevitable comparisons thrown up by these “close encounters” thought-provoking, residues of which have undoubtedly coloured my reactions to Jenny McLeod’s work, outlined below.

The first thing that must be said of “Hōhepa” is that it’s a pretty stunning creative achievement on McLeod’s part, in line with Wagner’s achievement of writing his own texts for his stage works. And as with Wagner in his “Götterdämmerung” I felt an incredible emmeshment of words and music throughout the work, if at the opposite end of the grandly operatic textural and tonal spectrum.

Employing a moderately-sized cast and chorus with a small orchestra, McLeod created an evocative and enduring variety of ambiences throughout the story’s presentation, the sounds shaping and enlivening the narrative with firmly-focused contouring and colorings. In a sense I thought the orchestral score the most consistently dramatic protagonist, one from which nearly everything on the stage seemed to take its cue. One’s ear was constantly being drawn forwards and into that “world of light”, the sounds suggesting an order presided over by ancient gods and disrupted by unexpected change.

To briefly outline some background – Hōhepa Te Umuroa was a Whanganui Maori living in the Hutt Valley during the 1840s, one who, though well-disposed towards the European settlers he met and befriended, opposed the land-confiscation policies of Governor George Grey and took arms against the British militia. Captured, he and others, including his friend Te Kumete, were exiled to a penal colony in Tasmania, where Hōhepa died. His forgotten grave was rediscovered by a New Zealand child visiting Tasmania, whose parents alerted the authorities, and began a process that would see the remains of the exiled chief returned to New Zealand in 1988.

Through her involvement with writing church music for use by Maori people in the Ohakune district, Jenny McLeod had developed an association with Ngati Rangi. She was asked by Matthew Mareikura, elder, and leader of the mission which brought home Hohepa’s remains, if she would undertake to write the history of the entire saga – not as an opera, but hopefully in book form, a task she accepted. She was then approached by the current director of NBR New Zealand Opera, Alex Reedijk to write “a New Zealand work” for the stage, and she thus decided that it would be appropriate to adapt Hohepa’s story for the purpose.

In the course of her compositional career, McLeod has, in a sense, covered more territory than most, her works ranging from avant-garde innovation and her own brand of neo-primitivism, through popular styles, including hymn-writing for present-day worship, to a re-thinking of an avant-garde “tone-clock theory” involving innovative use of the chromatic scale, something she found influenced her writing of “Hōhepa”. She’s refreshingly pragmatic about her use of such techniques in as much as they have an impact on what the ordinary concert- or opera-goer hears in her music – in a recent “Listener” interview she talked about listeners not needing to know too much about the technicalities, expressing confidence that people would instinctively sense a “structural coherence” in her work.

I wondered, as I listened to the evening’s finely-wrought tapestry of sounds, whether this “structural coherence” of McLeod’s would generate sufficient energy of itself to implant a stage work with requisite dramatic possibilities. What I felt must have posed an enormous challenge for director Sara Brodie was how to respond to McLeod’s writing – how to render it onstage as “dramatic” or “theatrical” in an operatic sense. The presentation involved a great deal of “storytelling” via a narrator, one self-styled as a “talking stick” – Te Tokotoko, who is also the hero’s spirit guardian. Actor Rawiri Paratene looked and sounded the role to perfection, though I wondered whether his prominence throughout actually diminished the impact made on the proceedings by Hōhepa himself, whose dramatic character could have “taken on” more of his own story and enhanced the depth of his onstage presence in doing so.

In an article in the programme, Diana Balham writes of Hōhepa that he “is really an ideal opera leading man” – an ordinary man caught up in events which lead to his wrongful exile, imprisonment and eventual death, his fate leavened by a kind of post-mortem coda of wrongs addressed and put to rights. On the face of things that’s perfectly true – but the writer’s words created an expectation that, as a character Hōhepa would behave more “operatically”, which didn’t seem to be the composer’s (and following on, perhaps not the director’s) intention.

McLeod’s work itself seemed to me stylistically more like a kind of “dramatic legend” – something of the ilk of Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust”, a work which is equally successful in concert as when staged. There were occasional moments during Hōhepa of physical energy and dramatic movement (a brutal killing was depicted at one point), but in general the stage movement and configuration had a gradually unfolding aspect suggesting pageantry or ritual more than theatrical cut-and-thrust.

This impression was heightened by the composer’s use of some of the drama’s supporting characters, as well as the chorus, to advance the narrative – while the effect wasn’t unlike stylized classical drama, I felt the balance between storytelling and theatrical depiction was pushed away from the latter to the point of dramatic dilution. Ironically, I also thought that Hōhepa himself wasn’t given sufficient prominence throughout the first two acts to capture our attention, to train our focus upon him with sufficient force so that his fate as the tragic embodiment of a victim of gross injustice would later have its full dramatic impact.

Phillip Rhodes, who played Hōhepa, did everything he could with the part – he looked and sounded splendid throughout, and had both powerful and touching moments, the most enduring of which for me over the first two acts were the imposing warrior’s delight in his Christianity-inspired “Holy Family”, and his teaching of the names of birds to his children. But the Pakeha settler couple, Jane and Thomas Mason, made even more of a lasting impression on me, dramatically (splendid singing from both Jenny Wollerman and Nicky Spence), while Deborah Wai Kapohe’s Te Rai (Hōhepa’s wife) and Jonathan Lemalu’s Te Kumete (Hōhepa’s friend), both richly-characterised roles, seemed just as prominent in the scheme of things as the eponymous hero.

And yet – perhaps one shouldn’t be making such an issue of this. After all, in Maoridom it is the whanau, hapu, iwi, and the associated whakapapa which matters more than the individual; and Hōhepa’s tragedy was essentially a communal one, given that he endured great personal privation of both a physical and spiritual kind up until his death in exile in Tasmania. In that sense it’s appropriate that the character be portrayed as an integral member of a group as much as an individual, particularly as the Western operatic concept of a “hero” doesn’t sit well with the scenario that McLeod evokes. Should the work, then, be actually called “Hōhepa”? Is it more about a darker aspect of this country’s history than about what actually happened to him? Is it even more universal than that?

At the time, in the opera house, I felt myself musically entranced by it all, despite some bemusement – upon reflection, and having read back through what I’ve already said in this review, I feel myself beginning to incline towards taking the things I saw and heard on their own terms, and greatly enjoying them. Above all was, as I’ve said, the beauty and variation of McLeod’s illuminated tapestry of instrumental sounds, rendered with the utmost skill by a chamber-sized group of players drawn from the Vector Wellington Orchestra, here under the guidance of conductor Marc Taddei.

Then there were the voices, at the beginning of the work as people of the land enacting the rituals of acknowledging the tipuna, and paying homage to their living descendants. These choruses then merged with the drama, as Hōhepa’s descendants witnessing the recovery and repatriation of his bones, and afterwards as his contemporaries, expressing in heartfelt tones the shared ignominious humiliation of displacement, and the sorrow of his loss to exile and death.

Each of the solo voices suggested oceans more capacity for characterization than was allowed by the composer – apart from those I’ve mentioned, Martin Snell as Governor George Grey quickly established the character’s arrogance and implaccable nature, again largely with audience-directed pronouncements, though in places with engagingly jaunty (and ironic) Stravinsky-like accompaniments.

Given that McLeod’s treatment of the subject-matter demanded a good deal of recitative-like storytelling on the part of the characters, director Sara Brodie wisely responded with stagings designed by Tony de Goldi that emphasized and underpinned the ritual-like aspect of the drama. Her “less-is-more” instincts gave our imaginations space to augment the physical movements of the characters with impulses of our own, suggested either by music, words or backdrop images, sensitively applied here by Louise Potiki Bryant.

Opera is meant to be a visual as well as an aural experience – while this unconventional work of McLeod’s seemed to me to work just as effectively as abstract music and storytelling as it did as a theatrical event, the production’s feeling for ritual and atmosphere grew beautifully from the sounds made by voices and instruments. An enthusiastic and heartwarming reception was accorded the composer, along with her singers and musicians and her creative team, by an enthralled audience at the final curtain. I thought it richly deserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Words, music – and film : Jenny McLeod and Serge Prokofiev

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand International Festival of the Arts presents:

JENNY McLEOD – The Emperor and the Nightingale

SERGE PROKOFIEV  – Peter and the Wolf

Helen Medlyn (narrator – “The Emperor and the Nightingale”)

Suzie Templeton (director, Breakthru Films, UK – “Peter and the Wolf”)

Hamish McKeich (conductor)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday 9th March 2012

I’ve never forgotten my delight in reading, a number of years ago, a Charles M. Schulz “Peanuts” comic featuring Marcie and Peppermint Patti at a Symphony Concert, waiting for a performance of “Peter and the Wolf to begin. In the comic strip Marcie, her face suddenly brightening, whispers conspiratorially to her companion, just before the music starts,  “Maybe this time the wolf will get him!”.  I didn’t feel her comment was an indictment of either story or music – merely a reaction to the prospect of yet another humdrum performance.

Had Helen Medlyn narrated “Peter and the Wolf” on that or this present occasion (as I’m sure she’s done at some stage or other), I feel certain that no-one would have thought the occasion in any way humdrum or routine. As it was, her input regarding this concert was confined to the narration of Jenny McLeod’s setting of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor and the Nightingale”. Her performance was, I thought, riveting – she made every word of the story “zing” in places and “ping” in others, and gave the impression that she’d established some kind of “universal” eye contact with her audience all at once, so that we were undoubtedly transfixed by her storyteller persona’s sheer presence.

Though some time ago, I well remember playing in the percussion section of the Manawatu Sinfonia for a performance of McLeod’s delightful realization of Andersen’s story – I can’t recall the exact year, though it was around 1991 or 1992, at the time the Mayor of Palmerston North was Paul Rieger – because he was the narrator! (He was no Helen Medlyn, of course – but as much as a standard “celebrity appearance” could deliver he didn’t let the side down). I don’t remember the composer being present for this performance, but my memory is that it was done beautifully, our modest orchestra surpassing itself for the occasion.

With that experience in mind, what truly astonished me during this recent NZSO performance was the actual sound and impact of the orchestra – the timbres and colours uncharacteristically (for this venue) bright and sharp and to the fore, with the brass-playing in particular making a delightfully visceral impression throughout. Had the orchestra been “brought forward” on the platform, as it were? I didn’t think so – what I put it down to was Hamish McKeich’s encouragement of the players to “play out”, and make certain details really tell. Quite apart from being arresting in itself, the playing was thus able to match the narrator’s “larger-than-life” deliver of the text with similarly characterful instrumental tones.

A scintillation of exotic wonderment from the orchestra launched the music; and after Helen Medlyn’s beautifully-delivered opening statement, there was more of what seemed like the full panoply of orientalism in music refracted through Western sensibilities – pastiche it might have been, but the composer’s grasp of orchestral use was mightily impressive and resulted in some beautifully-focused and characterful sounds. Though in places reminiscent of Ravel’s “Ma Mere l’Oye”, the music readily found its own idiosyncratic character in some episodes, such as the angularities of the courtiers’ journey into the forest following behind the little kitchen-girl, and the inventive, slightly off-beat sonorities given to creatures such as cows and frogs.

Kirstin Eade’s flute-playing (depicting the voice and character of the little nightingale) was gorgeously turned at all points, and deftly characterised with many different colorings. Alongside her, the orchestra’s detailing was woven of similar magic, beautifully unhurried in its unfolding throughout, and (as I’ve said) flaring up excitingly in the bigger, grander moments. Much less obviously a quasi-instructional exercise for those unfamiliar with orchestral and instrumental sounds than the Prokofiev work, McLeod’s music nevertheless seemed beautifully tailored to the Anderson story, perhaps not as “leitmotiv-driven” than was “Peter”, nor as pungently and vividly characterized – but sufficiently colourful and incident-detailed to work successfully, especially in these performers’ hands.

Chalk followed on from cheese, so to speak, with British film-maker Suzie Templeton’s adaptation of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” story, in a trice taking us all to the movies, via a big screen, and with the luxury of a live-performance soundtrack (the film did have its own non–musical sound effects). For anybody expecting a standard, narrator-driven presentation of the work, it would have come as a huge shock, less on account of the spoken words’ absence, and more due to the harshness of the film-maker’s setting. In a half-urban, half-rural setting, Peter and his Grandfather live in a house on the outskirts of a town, making Peter prey to both the Wolf from within the forest and the town bullies from the urban jungle. What Prokofiev depicted as an idyllic rural existence for a boy and his animals, here is shown to be a somewhat fraught, law-of-the-jungle, siege-mentality scenario, almost of the “film noir” variety in places. There were children (and adults) in the audience who found it all a bit too much, though a lot of the (very audible) angst would, I’m sure, have been due to thwarted expectation – on its own terms, the presentation, though not without contentious elements, was, in my view, stunning.

Conductor Hamish McKeich, God bless ‘im, did at the outset nudge us in the direction of the composer’s original intentions by getting the orchestral soloists (as well as the strings) to play the “themes” of the story’s characters (though, for the benefit of us sight-restricted “ground floor concertgoers” it would have been great if every player had been able to stand up while giving us each of the character portraits). Of course, the presence of a film reduced the importance of this process; and indeed the compelling on-screen character-animations and evocative settings throughout put the orchestra’s contribution somewhat in the shade, beautifully though the score was realized by conductor and players.

The experience, cheek-by-jowl with the Jenny McLeod work, made me realize the extent to which our senses and perceptions interact with one another depending upon the nature of whatever stimuli we’re encountering. Suddenly, the orchestra who had played the “Emperor and the Nightingale” music during the first half so vibrantly and engagingly now sounded relatively distant and once-removed, the sounds coming to us as if in a kind of dream, refracted through those images we were all so readily involved with. At times it seemed as though this was no children’s story, but a life-and-death struggle against archetypal forces of darkness, the film-maker, for example “squaring Peter up” to his town-bully tormentors, whose brutality was unvarnishedly depicted. And there was no room for sentimentality – the drop-dead cuteness of Peter’s duck was unremittingly savaged by the wolf (causing the bulk of noticeable audience carnage), those cathartic sounds of a poor creature swallowed whole and therefore still alive, here given no fulfillment of expression, no cause for rejoicing.

Audience participation and involvement throughout, it must be said, was gratifyingly palpable – and if, at the end Charles M. Schulz’s Marcie didn’t get her wish, there was certainly a new twist to the old tale, if one which seemed to unfortunately tie up a loose end that hitherto belonged to the hapless duck, and put paid to her one chance of survival. It seemed to me that Peter’s loyalty towards his small, awkward but obviously lovable friend was sacrificed by the film-maker in favour of a new denouement evoking some kind of libertarian impulse on the part of the hero, in favor of the wolf. Still, it’s hardly surprising in a day and age that seems to actively concern itself with the welfare of perpetrators of crimes, and pay lip service to the suffering of the victims. (In this case, no less a philosopher than Basil Fawlty might have observed, “Well, if you’re a duck – you’re rather stuck!”)….

Technically, the animation resembled those early stop-frame cartoons with the jerky movements that older children like myself remember from our earliest times; and the results are certainly engaging, the figures and their movements having an uncanny realism, a properly tactile effect. I think it was the direct, somewhat primitive aspect of it all (wrought by extremely sophisticated technology and painstaking skill) which heightened the characters’ capacities for expressive gesture, which, of course, had to serve for actual words throughout. In effect, the film represented the substitution, for a well-known story’s retelling, of one powerful communication tool for another, the latter very much for our time. It’s well worth tracking down and watching, and especially with friends who enjoy heated discussion!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strength, delicacy and deep feeling – the New Zealand String Quartet with Jonathan Lemalu

Posted on by Peter Mechen

POWER AND PASSION – New Zealand International Festival of the Arts

The New Zealand String Quartet – Helene Pohl, Douglas Beilman (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello) – with Jonathan Lemalu (bass-baritone)

ROSS HARRIS – Variation 25 for String Quartet

GAO PING – Three Poems by Mu Xin

SAMUEL BARBER – String Quartet Op.11 / Dover Beach Op.3

SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No.9 in E-flat Op.117

Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 4th March 2012

Despite the fact that there really ought to be a moratorium declared on the use of the words “power” and “passion” anywhere and at any time, this Festival Concert featured the New Zealand String Quartet and bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu in performances that defined the best sense of those very words.

In fact this concert was the latest to somewhat bend the righteous pitch of my on-going complaint regarding the Festival’s paucity of music events – during this and recent previous years. Though they’re relatively thin on the ground this time round, compared with the glory Festival days of, say, the 1990s, I have to say, in all fairness, that the 2012 concerts I’ve attended so far have certainly compensated in sheer quality for their lack of numbers. This one was no exception.

Again, the New Zealand String Quartet was there, at the forefront of a cutting-edge musical experience (following on in like manner from their Beethoven concerts) – I thought this program classic and meaty “Festival” fare, its content and delivery transcending the brain-dead hype of its title, and giving us a treasurable variety of memorable intensities (that description isn’t particularly flash, either, but I think it’s better than you-know-what!).

On the face of things the combination of string quartet and bass-baritone would, I think, pose for the average concertgoer more the immediate prospect of a challenge than out-and-out delight. The moderate attendance seemed to reflect something of this attitude, the organizers optimistically using the Wellington Town Hall for a concert of music  whose ethos seemed to suggest more intimate surroundings. Still, the performers in this case were renowned communicators, able to reach out and fill the vistas of most venues with their personalities and musical skills.

As it turned out, the performances seemed to easily draw in all those who were there – and there’s a certain vicarious excitement to be had from experiencing a “large” silence as opposed to a smaller one, which we were all able to enjoy and repeatedly savour, throughout the evening. Our enthusiastic appreciation at the concert’s end for the performers’ efforts belied our actual numbers, I’m sure.

Beginning the concert was local composer Ross Harris’ music, his meditation on one of JS Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, called simply “Variation 25 for String Quartet”. The Quartet’s Second Violin Douglas Beilman announced before the music began that the group would first play a transcription for string quartet of the original “Goldberg” variation. Presumably the quartet had the approval of the composer to do this – one wonders whether any composer who’d written something inspired by one of the world’s great music masterworks would necessarily want an audience reminded of the original, as it were, cheek-by-jowl! However, in this case, the “putting-together” of the two gave the opening of Ross Harris’s work such a telling ambient context, one fancied one could almost “sense” the direct lines of inspiration and observe something of the creative process of gradually making one’s ideas one’s own.

So, to my way of thinking, hearing the Bach original at the beginning (albeit in a string transcription) was an enrichment regarding what followed – very much in line with what the composer wrote in his accompanying notes about wanting “to pay my respects to the beauty and richness of the music…” It seemed to me at the outset something like a “hall of mirrors” effect, the canonic agglomerations producing a magical overlapping, coloring, intensifying and resounding texture – rather like how one might imagine a note, phrase or theme would be creatively acted upon.

One could sense the composer’s imagination getting into full stride, firstly with a paragraph of intense, stratospherically arched extremities, and then through various scherzo-like passages, the arguments frenetic and the energies ecstatic. After these exertions came a graceful, limpid dance which restored listeners’ equilibriums, the sounds transforming the former intensities of light into rather more dappled and fitful modes. And in much the same way the piece’s linear tensions seemed to melt into floating echoes of their former selves, the first violin then making a somewhat torturous ascent through the textures to conclude the piece, leaving in its wake a stricken viola mid-phrase.

I did think the Quartet’s performance a shade over-wrought at the outset, with some on-the-edge intonations, to my ears, throughout both the theme and the opening measures of the Harris piece – the price one perhaps pays in places for intensity? As the work progressed, the tones centered more readily – and throughout the other works on the program the playing sounded poised and true. The soft playing, in particular, throughout the works featuring a singer, had our sensibilities in thrall with the magic of it all; and bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu was able to match the instrumentalists’ rapt murmurings throughout such moments with equally haunting tones.

The first of Gao Ping’s settings of three poems of Mu Xin (a writer and artist who died last year in China, aged 84) perfectly illustrated the performers’ skills in evoking the beauty of great stillness – strings and voice together, floating sounds that seemed not of this world. This was a world premiere, an occasion which the programme notes didn’t emphasize, apart from Festival Director Lissa Twomey’s introductory welcome message. The poems were, I believe, sung in Mandarin, the translations suggesting a poet’s finely-wrought sensibility, with occasional erotic overtones (as in the first of the three settings, “My Bountiful Desire”, in which figured lines such as “lips eddy, breast piers, thigh ravine….”).The second settting, equating a bird’s life with happiness, is all pointillistic texturing and evocative calling, while the third, “A HIstory of Love”, begins with a saga-like sense of momentum and movement, rather like a river telling its story in passing. The two previous settings had magical interactions between voice and solo instruments at their conclusions (with violin and ‘cello, respectively) – but this one concluded with some equally haunting falsetto-like singing from Jonathan Lemalu, the words chronicling the passing of time, of youth, of love.

American Samuel Barber’s best-known work is his Adagio for Strings, often played as a commemorative piece, and used in various films (“I couldn’t help it – I kept on imagining helicopters” said my concert-hall neighbour at the end, alluding to the Award-winning film “Platoon”). Usually heard as a work for orchestral strings, here we heard it in its original guise, as part of a String Quartet, the second of three movements (officially there are only two, but to my way of thinking, the return to the material of the opening after the Adagio constitutes a movement of its own, however brief). The performance vividly characterized the volatile nature of the first movement, with its jagged opening and its hymn-like chorale intertwined throughout; while the Adagio’s songful lines here had a spell-binding vibrancy, the climax “built” with inexorable purpose and intensity – amazing stuff from the Quartet, no matter how many times previously one might have heard the piece.

Not heard as often, but a piece whose beauties undoubtedly deserve more attention is “Dover Beach”, Barber’s setting for baritone and string quartet of Matthew Arnold’s poem (I thought there might be a version for voice and string orchestra, which could increase the work’s performance frequency – but there doesn’t seem to be). Again, Jonathan Lemalu’s beautifully-focused soft singing made for pure poetry of sound in tandem with the strings – it struck me how Barber used the voice as a “fifth string” in many places, the vocal line often sharing the phrasings and figurations of the quartet’s. Particularly beautiful was the line “and bring the eternal note of sadness in”, at the conclusion of the music’s first section.

The bass-baritone’s tones sounded less mellifluous under pressure, though the artistry of the singer’s phrasing was evident at “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” – a fantastic outpouring of emotion, especially telling against the setting’s more hushed moments, the controlled anguish of the final “Where ignorant armies clash by night” an ecstasy of intensity approaching pain. Altogether, I thought it a wonderful performance.

Completing what might be regarded as a line-up of varying intensities, the Quartet addressed the Ninth String Quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich with all of the group’s customary energy and focus. Having heard some of its Shostakovich-playing before, I expected and got a veritable roller-coaster ride of full-on incident and raw emotion, all of the music’s spiked energy, droll humor and bleak melancholy given plenty of amplitude. By the sound of such things, these quartets are surely a body of work that these musicians were born to play – and what we heard confirmed my feelings on the subject.

With a “moments-per-minute” performance such as this one, singling out individual moments can seem to do a violence to the whole – but from the very beginning of the work the Quartet caught the music’s character, intense and claustrophobic, with impulses attempting to energize and lighten the mood leading inevitably to a “screwing-up” of tension and anxiety. Right across the work’s five movements (played without a break) the players readily conveyed that echt-feeling of fatalism regarding humanity’s lot, that “to live is to suffer, and to feel is to invite pain” attitude which continuously informs the pages of this music.

I’m sure the unexpectedness of encountering such richly- and readily-wrought listening experiences played its part in making the occasion for me so truly memorable – a truly “surprised by joy” outcome, a festival concert worthy of the name.