Category: Reviews – Concerts

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS – Wellington City Orchestra’s congress of assorted realities

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington City Orchestra at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, with Diedre Irons (piano), Brendan Agnew (conductor), and Virginie Pacheco (Assistant Conductor)

SAI NATARAJAN – In This Corner Of The World
LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor
DOUGLAS LILBURN – Symphony No. 2

Diedre Irons (piano)
Virginie Pacheco (Assistant Conductor – Natarajan)
Brendan Agnew  (Conductor)
Wellington City Orchestra

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Sunday, 7th December, 2025

Now this was a treat for any concertgoer relishing the thought of something old and something new, combining an easeful kind of familiarity with more challenging musical terrain, as well as setting home-grown worlds in a wider context. Wellington City Orchestra’s programme enterprisingly opened up for us here-and-now impressions of creative forces at work in Aotearoa, before time-travelling us to Beethoven’s world and back again, and finally giving us a time-in-motion slice of “being” at a significant emerging point in our own colourful history. The sounds we heard spoke volumes for each of these times and places – it was something of a proverbial journey!

Different people participated in this process, and in different ways – we were welcomed to the concert at its beginning by Rowena Cullen, the orchestra’s President who’s also a member of the violin section, after which today’s conductor Brendan Agnew firstly paid tribute to a recently deceased orchestra member, Mark Hill, and then introduced today’s concert’s assistant conductor, Virginie Pacheco, who directed the concert’s opening performance, a heartwarming piece by youthful composer Sai Natarajan. At its conclusion Brendan Agnew then  bade us welcome pianist Diedre Irons to the stage to deliver her Beethoven concerto performance. Like the “players” in Shakespeare’s “Ages of Man” all of these individuals had, by their own lights, a special part to play in the panoply.

Beginning the concert charmingly  and sonorously was a work written by emerging freelance composer Sai Natarajan, from Palmerston North, one called “In This Corner of the World”. With Assistant Conductor Virginie Pacheco (the first to actually hold this title with the WCO) at the helm, we were transported at the beginning to the Manawatu plains, with Sibelius-like wind impulses sounding across the deeper murmurings of those open spaces, all the while engendering awakenings of activity, the thrustings and resoundings suggesting  iceberg-tips of the “absolute powerhouse of artistic and musical talent” that abides in the region.

The music gathers itself and epically “pushes out” this landscape, contrasting numerous “forest murmurings’ with attention-grabbing percussive scintillations, a recurring motif resounding in one’s attention as the brass give us some Lilburn-like reminiscences suggesting the inherent “musicality” of natural rhythms. My own experiences as a born-and-bred Palmerstonian responded to the composer’s recognition of “artistic toiling” in modestly-appointed, yet still-resonating hatcheries of human productivity in all fields of expression. I remember watching as my parents and their contemporaries set examples for us of partaking of things resulting for some of us in what Sai Natarajan calls  an artist’s “joys, struggles, disappointments and triumphs”, and from which modest origins still brought forth “beauty and joy”  in the doing, and occasionally even something enduring and worth celebrating – as this this great-hearted piece certainly was!

Happily, “In This Corner of the World”, after being premiered by the Manawatu Sinfonia in 2024, was recorded earlier this year by the NZSO as part of their annual NZ Composer Sessions initiative. I would imagine we haven’t heard the last of this intuitive, versatile, and delightfully communicative composer.

The programme’s suggestion of a wider context of human creativity was hinted at by the music of a composer whose output for many people epitomised a kind of universality  of utterance, Ludwig van Beethoven. His Third Piano Concerto is a kind of bridge-work between the classical and romantic eras, a realm which Mozart had also occasionally explored in music written in a similar key, but one more fully and dramatically furthered by this and other works by Beethoven.

Having splendidly recorded all of the composer’s piano concertos, and frequently played them in concert Diedre Irons was the ideal soloist to realise the “sturm und drang” of this work, aided by a suitably dark-browed accompaniment from the orchestra, with conductor Brendan Agnew on the podium. The opening was the orchestra’s alone, strongly-focused and well-detailed, to which the soloist responded with suitably dramatic contrasting gestures – it wasn’t all high drama and theatricality, with the second subject group almost playful in intent in places under Irons’ fingers, but leading back to a stern recapitulation by the players under Agnew’s direction and a properly virtuoso performance of the solo cadenza. Here, Irons was in complete command of the drama and volatility of the writing, bringing out the almost ghostly ambiences of the instrument’s return to the world of interaction in the movement’s darkly-enigmatic coda.

One of the most beautiful of Beethoven’s slow movements followed, with piano and orchestral passages delighting the ear, and the interchanges expressing a heartfelt “communal” sense of expression. Irons’ voicing of the decorative poetic utterances made every impulse a joy, and the winds and strings in particular matched her ardour – though the strings’ pizzicati could have been a tad firmer in places as they were near to inaudibility, so sensitive was their response! Particularly lovely were the last few interactions, the strings tender phrasings and the piano’s “haunted” chordings all underpinned by dark wind-and-brass murmurings before the latter echoed the piano’s final descending notes and brought in a final single chord – magical!

I loved the insouciance with which Irons then started the finale’s ball rolling – but the orchestra was ready for her, picking up the traces of the trajectories and ready to do its bit with the first big tutti – what great exchanges between orchestra and piano with those mighty chords and flourishes! A lovely clarinet solo introduced and elaborated on a new episode, and a string fugato followed, after a while beginning to loosen at the seams, but managing to complete the task as the pianist jumped in and steadied the rhythms! The recapitulation was strong and purposeful, as was Irons’ final grandstand solo flourish before the coda’s cheeky beginning, with truly spectacular piano-playing and a suitably vigorous audience response.

She was accorded a richly deserved tribute from all, but had not done with us yet! To our delight she sat back down at the piano and began the deliciously droll F Minor Allegro moderato dance from Schubert’s adorable Moments Musicaux. It was playing in which every note resonated and every impulse “choreographed” its own sound, inviting parts of us by turns to listen and sing and dance in our minds – and the moment towards the end when the final line impishly turned to F Major seemed as if the music was suddenly smiling at us and telling us to forget our troubles – magical piano playing!

An interval saw the piano further “magicked” to one side, leaving more space for the players to resound the strains of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant musical compositions, Douglas Lilburn’s Second Symphony. Completed in 1951, this iconic work had to wait until 1959 for its first public performance. Part of the problem was the country’s National Orchestra still being in its relative infancy (it gave its first concert in 1947) and its early conductors were certainly reluctant at that time to “take the plunge” with anything as off the beaten track as a locally-produced symphony – rather, they were set upon establishing the standard repertoire. The composer’s First Symphony had been an earlier casualty, completed in 1949, and premiered in 1951, to be then ignored for a further ten years. It wasn’t until the advent of John Hopkins as the National Orchestra’s Principal Conductor in the late 1950s that Lilburn’s music began to be performed more regularly – the composer’s gratitude was such that he went on to write a Third Symphony in 1961 and dedicate it to Hopkins!

The Second Symphony has always been associated with quintessential aspects of New Zealand life and landscape. What the composer referred to as “the imponderables” of the natural world feature strongly in the work – contrasts of light and shade and the vagaries of weather are prominent characteristics of the music’s different ambiences. Human influences are also a factor – in the second movement Lilburn immortalised what he described as the ”nasal and tangy” cry of Wellington’s Evening Post Paper-boy’s call, heard as he passed through the capital en route to or from the South Island. Others have commented upon the “search for identity” aspect of the music in the other movements, particularly in the third “Introduction”, where the “frontier” aspect of the environment seems somewhat remote and forbidding and essentially solitary. The music’s angst-like textures and ambiences seem to reflect struggles associated with a 1950s “coming of age” in artistic and other matters, one which the final movement translates into more positive and robust gesturings. I must here admit to a degree of dissatisfaction with the “Introduction” movement regarding its brevity – though expertly crafted, it doesn’t for me go far enough or even resound sufficiently within its existing parameters, eluding the feeling of a truly epic statement of being (it’s significantly shorter in scale than both the first or last movements!) – or have I been listening to too much Mahler or Bruckner or Shostakovich of late?

But to the beginning – beautifully and wistfully opened by the strings the first movement also featured buoyant solos from oboe, clarinet and flute, with the horns in atmospheric alignment. The strings, winds and brass raised us to the heights mid-movement with the horns having a wonderful “Carl Nielsen” moment (I once got taken to task by Lilburn himself for suggesting  the merest connection of him with that composer!), and the timpani adding to the music’s “epic” quality before the strings, with the oboe supported by the horns, bring the movement to a relatively placid close. A pity the St.Andrew’s acoustic had difficulty sorting  the dynamics, with the brass, to my ears sounding a bit lost in the mid-movement tuttis’ welter of sound!

Better-realised was the Scherzo, a more nimble, less weighty sound, the oboe doing a great job with the perky theme, and the brass and timpani lively at the climaxes. The other winds did splendid things with their variants of the theme, but the most nostalgic moments were the cellos’ introduction of the “paperboy” theme, and the strings in general joining in with its more extended moments. Elsewhere, the “snap” and “bite” of the rhythms was a joy.

The opening of the third movement  “Introduction” with its bleak and unremitting atmosphere was promising – strings and winds in tandem advanced the sobriety of it all, bringing out an almost Sibelius-like feeling of isolation to the textures. The strings pursued a “wandering” course underscored by the brass and counterpointed by the horns, and with the oboe and flute doggedly “lifting” the mood in places. The brass seemed warmer and more heroic when first entering, but their aspect quickly darkened in accord with the strings, the anguished chordings from both heightening the unease which the flute sought to console. At this point I wanted more, but for whatever reason the composer had decreed “enough”, and before we knew where we were, the finale was upon us and the clouds had dispersed …..

Though the composer might have given this marvellous finale more to react to in situ,  the energising warmth and freshness of the movement’s opening textures set the tone for what followed, impulses which seemed like a symbolic renewal of confidence following a dark night of the soul. Lilburn had already in words enjoined his fellow-composers to engage in what he called “a search for tradition” relating to the necessity of “writing our own music”, in his now-historic 1946 Cambridge Music School lecture written under the same title. Here, now, he practised his own dictum in the composition of this symphony, and to the extent he felt it necessary, whatever critics might say about the result! The work emphasised both challenge and possibility, and the results today spoke for themselves.

The coming-together of these things in this finale was a heady experience – moments in which the big ringing brass theme soared out gloriously, and the orchestra in other places seemed to pick up its skirts and dance were made the more memorable by a final peroration begun by stratospheric strings, and chiselled out of the texture by resounding brass and rolling timpani in glorious C Major! It had the effect of consuming everything at the concert’s conclusion in swathes of splendour and happiness!

 

 

 

BACK TO BACH from Baroque Voices takes the listener on a journey

Posted on by Peter Mechen
Baroque Voices at St.Mary of the Angels – from left: Pepe Becker, Andrea Cochrane, Samuel Berkahn, David Morriss, Imogen Granwal (‘cello), Simon Christie. Jamie Young, Toby Gee, Rowena Simpson

 

JS BACH – The Six Motets (BWV 225-230)
Baroque Voices (directed by Pepe Becker)

Pepe Becker, Rowena Simpson (sopranos)
Andrea Cochrane, Toby Gee (altos)
Samuel Berkahn, Jamie Young (tenors)
David Morriss, Simon Christie (basses)
Imogen Granwal (baroque ‘cello)

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Boulcott St., Wellington
Sunday 30th November, 2025

To my shame, I had never before heard a single one of JS Bach’s Motets before finding out about this concert – I’d “heard of” a couple of the titles of famous ones, such as “Komm, Jesu, komm” and “Jesu, mein Freude”, but had never taken the step of getting to know them, thinking that the “Passions” and the “B Minor Mass” and the “Christmas Oratorio” and the “Magnificat”, plus a clutch of Cantatas sufficiently qualified me as an accredited “Choral Bach listener”. So I was both delighted and intrigued upon being told by Baroque Voices’ director Pepe Becker some time ago that this concert was coming up, and DID managed to track down a couple of recordings and fit in some “listening” beforehand so as to get something of an idea of what I was in for…..

The concert date duly arrived and the presentation took place with the succinct title “Back to Bach” for  the Voices’ heady “whirlwind tour” through all six of the composer’s sacred motets, performed by the Wellington ensemble in the sumptuous (perhaps a tad too much so acoustically!) setting of St.Mary of the Angels church in the heart of the city. The director, Pepe Becker, described these works in her programme notes for the concert as “sublime, complex and deeply moving”, though one could add plenty of further epithets to the description of the afternoon’s performance by the ensemble. We warmed as readily to the exuberance of the writing, its enjoyment generated as much by the music’s own urgencies of feeling as by the voices’ different physicalities, all with their own channelled energies. These things all came together, the pieces amply reflecting their creator’s unquenchable human spirit and belief in a higher divine authority.

Unlike the cantatas, which Bach wrote regularly for every Sunday of the church year, the motets were infrequently produced for special occasions in Leipzig, and some may have even been lost. The six surviving ones were in fact the only choral works of Bach which didn’t disappear entirely from view until the renowned “Bach revival” of the 19th Century. The famous story of Mozart’s joyful response, upon hearing in Leipzig in 1789 a performance of Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (Sing to the Lord a new song) bears witness to these works carrying a torch for future generations.

It’s unclear what Bach’s intentions were regarding the instrumental accompaniment of these works – only one of the motets, Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf (BWV 226) has extant orchestra parts, and two other Motets have separate continuo basslines written, Furchte dich (BWV 228), and Lobet den Herrn (BWV 230). So there is no “final word” regarding instrumental accompaniment, according to the composer. The works would probably have been accompanied at least by basso continuo (an organ or a melodic bass instrument) – Baroque Voices use a bass stringed instrument in all but two of the Motets – Komm, Jesu, komm (BWV 229), and Jesu, meine Freude (BWV 227), here a baroque cello, played by Imogen Granwal.

Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied got the concert away to a stirringly festive beginning, with the wonderful “pinging” calls of the opening Singet, the tones brightly shining, and the lines mellifluously blending, swirling nicely together at Die Gemeine der Heiligen sollen in loben, (Sing His praise in the congregation of saints). As well, the infectious “dancing” tones of Die Kinder Zion sei’n frölich über ihren Könige  (Let the children of Zion be joyful in their King) were delightful, leading to the  splendid all-in tones of the climactic Mit Pauken und Harfen sollen sie im spielen! (Let them sing praises unto Him with the timbrel and harp)! The second-movement Chorale Wie sich ein Vat’r erbarmet (As a father is merciful) had one group singing the chorale, and the other interspersing lines from the aria Gott, nimm dich ferner unser an (O, Lord, continue to care for us) – beautiful, heartfelt exchanges! A suitably zestful Lobet den Herrn in seinen Taten (Praise the Lord for His mighty acts), then moved without a break in momentum to a triple-time Alleluia for a satisfying finish.

Next was the tremulously-expressed Komm Jesu, Komm (Come, Jesu, Come), so very theatrical at the outset, and with the individual voices then conveying the hardship of life’s vicissitudes with Die Kraft verschwindt je mehr und mehr (My strength is fading more and more), and the solace of expectation, freed from “Der saure Weg” (the stony path). The voices put an infectious eagerness into the renewed cries of “Komm, komm”, and a renewed strength of certainty  (with touches of elation!) into the trajectories of Du bist der rechte Weg, die Wahrheit, und das Leben (The Way, the Truth and the Light). The concluding Chorale, Drum schliess ich mich in deine Hande (So I entrust myself into Thy hands) quietly exalted in its certainty here, right to the final long-breathed notes.

Though written for the funeral service in October 1729 of Johann Heinrich Ernesti, longtime rector of the St. Thomas School  in Leipzig, Bach was perhaps inspired by the great man’s positive qualities by writing some attractive and inspirational music for this motet, Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf (The Spirit also helpeth our infirmities). Its cheerful, forward-pressing gait and general overall tone includes some droll references to the “Spirit’s” intercession for our prayers “mit unaussprechlichem Seufzen” (with unutterable groanings)! The music’s lovely 3/8 trajectory at the beginning changes to common-time for both the “groanings” and the references to “Der aber die Herzen forschet” (He that searcheth the Heart). My only other thought was that the Chorale could perhaps have been a little more hushed, and varied in delivery at the outset, as befitted the words “Du Heilige Brunst, süsser Trost” (Heavenly Fire, sweet consolation) – which sounded as if they might have come from Schiller, for goodness sakes!

The interval gave us time to reflect on the magnificence of the music and the manifest qualities of the performances, which were considerable – brightly-shining tones, nimble trajectories, neither rushed nor dragging, distinctive individual voices, and, despite some idiosyncratic vocal “blends” in certain places, still successfully ensuring the voices’ clarity and the words’ flavourings and colourings were imparted. I wondered in places whether the acoustic was actually a bit “too much”, resulting in some of the singers’ tones being amplified more than others, and wondered whether a smaller, sparser acoustic might have integrated the sounds better. However, it was a “sometimes” effect, as more often the ensembled sounds came together most mellifluously.

The lovely opening of Fürchte dich nicht (Fear not) with its euphonious exchanges continued our pleasure, as did, in an entirely different way, the dramatic interpolations of recitative-like utterances of “Ich stärke dich!” from individual singers, and the contrast between the austere chromatic fugal passages and the radiant chorale excepts from the sopranos in the ensuing fugue, a vocal contrast that continued to delight us until the final concerted statement “Furche dich nicht – Du bist mein!” Heartwarming!

The longest and most complex of the motets is Jesu, meine Freude  (“Jesus, my Joy”). Essentially scored for five voices, including a second soprano line (as with Bach’s Magnificat) it alternates a chorale tune by Johann Crüger with settings of texts by Johann Franck and from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. It’s uncertain just when this motet was composed, or for what particular purpose, with one scholar even advocating the idea of Bach using the work just for educational purposes with his St.Thomas’s Leipzig  choir.

The beautiful opening sang out gloriously, the singers relishing the third of each group of lines of text, arching each towards a moment of intense feeling – a marked contrast with the beginning of the next movement’s Es ist nun nichts Verdamliches (There is therefore now no condemnation) with the word “nichts” separately and pointedly repeated, and the following line “Die nicht nach dem Fleische wandein” (Who walk not after the flesh) which wanders graphically in a kind of wilderness! The wonderful third movement Unter Deinem Schirmen (Protected by Thee) returned to the chorale tune, whose serenity was “roughed up” with references to Kracht und Blitz (“Thunder and Lightning”) and then Sünd und Hölle (“Sin and Hell”) adding to the dramatic effect. The three women’s voices then consoled our fears with the fourth movement’s Denn das Gesetz des Geistes (“For the Law of the Spirit”).

More drama and contrast was depicted by the fifth movement’s  Trotz dem alten Drachen (“Defy the Old Dragon”), the singers hurling the word “Trotz” (Defy!) upwards and outwards, and agitatedly word-crafting a world raging and quaking (Tobe, Welt und Springe – ”Rage, world, and quake!”), before painting a picture of the soul standing and singing  in perfect peace with God (Ich steh’ hier und singe in gar Sicher Ruh). The following movement Ihr aber seid nich Fleischlich (“For ye are not of the flesh”) most winningly here contrasted a quick-moving fugal opening with a sonorous chorale-like conclusion Wer aber Christi Geist nicht hat, der ist nicht sein! – (“Yet one who has not the Spirit of Christ is not His!”).

The vigorous and wonderful Weg mit allen Schätzen(“Away with all earthly treasures!)  that followed featured the soprano with the chorale line set against such deliciously contrasting and detailed figurations from the others – the urgently-delivered opening from the lower voices and with its first word Weg! repeated, was such a delight! And the singers conveyed the “strongly-felt essence” of other utterances such as Elend, Not, Kreuz, Schmach und Tod (“Poverty, distress, Cross, disgrace and death”) so very vividly at the conclusion.

The winsome So aber Christus in euch ist (“And if Christ be in you”) was gentle and dance-like, here, until the words Der Geist aber ist das Leben “But the Spirit is life”, when the figurations quickened, though leaving us with a somewhat unresolved conclusion – this was supplied by the following Gute Nacht, O Wesen (“Goodnight, O earthly Life”) – here, a stunningly beautiful piece whose lines I thought the sopranos  took a little time to settle into at the beginning, but which achieved a magic by the end.

After these heartfelt articulations, So nun der Geist des (“Now that the Spirit of him”) seemed businesslike and anecdotal by comparison, almost a case of the narrator moving the story on to its inevitable conclusion! Bach replicates the manner of the work’s second movement in the use of a repeated word (here, “Geist” is repeated, as was the word “Nichts” in the second movement) and the text has the same instruction-like tone as Es ist nun nichts Verdamliches. The true frisson of feeling came with the final Weicht, ihr Trauergeister (“Disperse, sombre spirits”), with the original opening Chorale melody taking us back to the work’s beginning in the most disarming and direct way – all truly wonderful!

There remained the “orphan” of the bunch to give some attention to – the motet Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden (“Praise the Lord all ye nations”), the one that there’s “doubt” as to whether or not it’s by Bach at all.  Pepe Becker put it succinctly in her programme note about the piece, saying that “it’s hard to imagine who else could have written such a vital, well-crafted piece”. And who could blame her, with such material to perform? At the beginning a sprightly combination of lines led to a splendidly-voiced fugue at “Und preiset ihn, aller Völker”, after which an appropriately slower section made reference to Seine Gnade und Wahrheit (which will) waltet uber uns in Ewigkeit “His mercy and truth (which will) reign over us for all eternity” – and with everything then enlivened by a sequence of triple-time Alleluias – an appropriately joyful way to end such a concert!

What to say? – except that the experience for me of hearing these works in concert for the first time was life-changing. To Pepe Becker and her Baroque Voices grateful thanks for a truly resounding experience!

 

NZSO’s night of beauty and splendour with Berlioz and Bruckner

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Joyce diDonato sings Berlioz with the NZSO and Gemma New – photo credit Phoebe Tuxford

HECTOR BERLIOZ – Les Nuits d’ete
ANTON BRUCKNER – Symphony No. 7 in E Major

Joyce diDonato (mezzo-soprano)
Gemma New (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Friday, November 28th. 2025

We would have been forgiven, at the conclusion of this Wellington concert’s first-half-outpouring of glorious vocalism from American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, for imagining that the rest of the evening’s music-making would prove at best worthy, but hardly scaling the heights to which we’d been taken. And with good reason, as we had just heard one of the most beautiful of all orchestral song-cycles, Hector Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’ete”, here performed in a way that simply embodied the idea of a singer “inhabiting” a piece of music, with every note, phrase, expression and gesture savoured as if parts of a living entity. For Joyce DiDonato, it’s music that, in her own words, is “emotional, beautiful and identifiable – it has both the light and the dark, a little bit of humour, and then the pathos.”

From the moment she stepped onto the Michael Fowler Centre stage DiDonato had her audience’s attention (as befitted a renowned international singer making her New Zealand debut) and, on this occasion transfixed her listeners with the first few notes of “Villanelle”, the cycle’s opening song, a charming “pastorelle” describing the onset of the spring, and the simple peregrinations of lovers, and with the singer’s voice by turns eager, wry, teasing and tender. As with the other songs, not a phrase or gesture went for nothing – we saw the “pearled dewdrops” and heard the “blackbirds call”, in “the month that lovers bless”, all delivered with a natural-sounding fluency, an artistry concealing art and revealing living feeling.

So it was with the different world of “Le Spectre de la Rose”, the renowned song which depicts a dream-like sequence of a rose plucked and worn at a ball, and promising to return every night to haunt its wearer’s dreams – the singer firstly galvanised us with the splendour of words such as “..j’arrive du Paradis” (I come from Paradise) – but then, how different a world the same voice plunged us into with the following “Sur les lagunes” (On the Lagoons), with the opening words “Ma belle amie est morte” (My beautiful love is dead), with each of the verses’ chilling and prescient Mahlerian final line “Ah!  Sans amour s’en aller sur la mer!” (Alas! – to go over the sea without love).

My favourite from the cycle has always been the radiant “Absence” – and DiDonato didn’t disappoint, tugging at the heartstrings even more than Regine Crespin and Janet Baker in favourite recordings, with her luminous “ownership” of the opening “Reviens” (Return) and her pitiable “Comme une fleur loin du soleil” (like a flower away from the sun). So bewitched were we, the audience, with her “moth-to-the-flame” detailing and resonating lines of ambience in “Au Cimetière” (In the cemetery) that, when what sounded like a stray cell-phone tone broke the ending’s silence, the audience hurriedly applauded to cover the intrusion!  The musicians then, in turn, broke into the applause to deliver the final, exuberant “L’ile inconnue” (The Unknown Isle) – here done with irresistible verve and detachment sense of release from what had been up to that moment the composer’s longed-for and sadly unrealised “Toujours” (always) from the opening “Villanelle” – acknowledged here by DiDonato with wry equanimity, rather than bitter resignation to “la jeune belle”, with the open-hearted words at the end – “Ou voulez-vous aller? – La brise va souffler….” (Where would you like to go? – the breeze is about to blow….).

Having received rapturous audience accolades for her efforts, diDonato repaid us handsomely, with, firstly, the “Habanera” from Carmen (orchestra AND even some audience voices supplying the chorus’s “Prends garde a toi!” response here, in each verse!), and then what the singer called “a present to us in return from her part of the world”, a verse and chorus of Harold Arlen’s  song “Somewhere, over the Rainbow” from the film “The Wizard of Oz”. At that, even this diehard critic found himself on his feet, applauding!

But then! – the evening’s biggest surprise for me, however, came with the Bruckner! I had heard the NZSO give radiant performances of some of the symphonies over the years with maestri such as Franz-Paul Decker and more recently Simone Young, both of whom held established “Bruckner credentials” – so the orchestra had proven itself as a “Bruckner ensemble” in distinguished company. And while I’d been impressed over the last couple of years with Gemma New’s conducting of Mahler I’d never been one to “presume” (as many seem to do) that proficiency with the latter automatically guarantees the same with Bruckner’s similarly large-scale but vastly different worlds of expression. And I hadn’t been able to find any record of New having conducted Bruckner before, so this seemed to me like something she was undertaking for the first time.

Straightaway I was frustrated by the symphony’s opening, since New, after ascending the podium, very quickly gave the orchestra the signal to begin –  which meant that the near inaudible string tremolando with which the work opens was for me on this occasion totally inaudible due to audience “rustle” as part of the settling-down process. I SAW the violins begin, but simply heard the “E” of the lower strings “begin” the music! I wish she’d instead secured absolute stillness in the auditorium before beginning, and allowed the sound to magically conjure itself as it were out of the ether –

And then the surprise unfolded – not instantly, but as a slowly growing and evolving feeling as the symphony progressed that I was actually witnessing a superbly-played and wondrously-articulated performance. The symphony’s very first theme, for me had a pliable elasticity contributing to a parallel expansion and intensification of the sound as the trajectories proceeded, and with everything beautifully voiced. New kept the tempi of the different sections related to what seemed like a single inner pulse so that nothing had to speed up or slow down appreciably to properly “speak” its character – for instance, the massive brass entry featuring a minor-key inversion of the opening theme seemed more organic than disruptive in this overall context –- and how beautifully the composer used his wind players’ material to elaborate on existing themes when these variants were brought back later in the movement.

The majestic slow movement, Bruckner’s tribute to Richard Wagner, was just as successfully unfolded by New’s unhurried, but vitally-phrased tempi at every turn –  the first upwardly thrusting string phrase taking the lead in exuding emotion of a vigorous and resounding kind – while the deep brass, at first contained, still made so eloquently the perfect foil for the following full-throated strings-and-winds’ songbird manifestations. As the movement developed so did the urgency and vigour of New’s marshalling of the music’s tectonic forces towards and into a spaciously resplendent climax, one superbly delivered by conductor and players. However, it became as much a funeral oration with the news of Wagner’s death “capturing” this music for history from that moment on, the flute sonorously summonsing the resplendent “Wagner tubas” and their tones of sorrowful tidings, and bestowing upon the music a kind of immortality.

After this, there’s a lithe, muscular Scherzo, here splendidly directed and delivered in every way imaginable, the normally bucolic impulses of Brucknerian scherzi in this case to my mind worthy of elevation both by association and sheer exuberant excellence to the realms of “sport for the Gods”. But then, for me, it was New’s and the orchestra’s playing of the finale as much as anything else in the symphony that lifted the experience beyond my expectations, transforming what I’d always previously regarded as a somewhat “poor relation” of a movement to a piece that suddenly seemed bristling with nuance, impulse, spontaneity and variety while appearing to know unto itself exactly where it was going!  – (never mind a couple of false notes and a squawk or two along the way!)  And, what was more, as with the symphony’s beginning, I uncannily had another brief  “moment” of disappointment, thinking that New had begun the work’s coda too abruptly, and that what was needed was more time and space to “savour” the whole of what we had heard, and to bring the work to a “grander” conclusion. Halfway through the coda I found myself thinking, “This actually works! – in fact, it’s exhilarating!” – and by the end, my thought was “Wow! What a performance!”

Joyce DiDonato and her extraordinary singing will remain an ineffable memory for me! – but Gemma New’s Bruckner was also a revelation, one that I hope we’ll get even more chances to experience in times to come!

 

SHOSTAKOVICH – “unpacked” and emptied out – a life’s remarkable music

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Estella Wallace introduces her new work “Of Sorrows” at the Prefab Hall, Wellington’s “Shostakovich Unpacked” – photo: Maeve O’Connell

SHOSTAKOVICH UNPACKED – Concert Series from the New Zealand String Quartet

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Quintet in G Minor Op. 57 (1940)
Sonata for Viola and Piano Op.147 (1975)

ESTELLA WALLACE – Of Sorrows, for String Quartet (2025)  – world premiere

Gillian Ansell (viola, New Zealand String Quartet)
Peter Clark (violin, New Zealand String  Quartet)
Anna Van Der Zee (guest violinist, New Zealand String Quartet)
Andrew Joyce (guest ‘cellist, New Zealand String Quartet)
Jian Liu, piano

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Wellington
Tuesday, 25th November, 2025

Shostakovich and his music have never before had it quite so good in Wellington New Zealand – throughout this year of years for the composer (the fiftieth anniversary of his death) his music has undergone an exploration of a concentrated focus not previously experienced to the same extent in the capital. I recall a few great Shostakovich moments from past NZSO concerts here – among them, Kurt Sanderling (in the Town Hall in 1981) conducting the composer’s Fifth Symphony, and Vasily Petrenko (at Michael Fowler) with the epic “Leningrad” Symphony – but these were drops in the ocean compared with the relative riches served up to us during 2025. Orchestra Wellington’s stunning Shostakovich season took in the first five symphonies and a shortened concert version of the composer’s notorious opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”  (sadly, the NZSO seemed to completely ignore the commemoration, even though given carte blanche regarding any of the ten remaining Shostakovich symphonies by Orchestra Wellington’s programming). As well, various chamber ensembles with players made up of both current and ex-New Zealand String Quartet members performed a number of the string quartets and several of the other chamber works. Yes, we could have done with some solo piano music as well (as far as I know Wellington awaits a first complete performance of the composer’s remarkable Op.87 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano) but one must instead be truly grateful for what we were enabled to receive! – in short, quite a year!

This evening’s concert in the New Zealand String Quartet’s enterprising “Shostakovich Unpacked” series gave us a delightful “bonus” item in the form of a new piece written by Estella Wallace, a student at Te Koki New Zealand School of Music, and the winner of a new “Finlayson Prize for Composition”. This competition was developed in partnership between the NZSM and SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, and sponsored by the Hon. Christopher Finlayson in the form of prize money and a number of professional development opportunities for the winner – composition students had been invited to create new works “inspired by or responding to” the music of Dmitri Shostakovich.

Estella Wallace herself introduced her work “Of Sorrows” to us at the concert’s beginning, speaking about her love of Shostakovich’s music in general, and her fascination with his Viola Sonata which we were to hear tonight. She talked about using fragments and themes from the music into her work, as well as her own responses to “the tension and sorrows” of the life he had lived. Her piece tread an adroitly-shaped path balanced between tension and melancholy right from its beginning with arresting opening chords reiterated to interrupt a violin recitative, and melodic lines that followed savaged by frenetic scherzo-like figurations, the thematic material coming thick and fast, via driving trajectories and wailing melody-lines. These gave way to eerily ambient chordings from sul ponticello violins, to which the viola joined, its melody darkly “coloured” by the other instruments – introspective and truly desolate –  bringing the work to a poignant conclusion. These thoughts – jotted down “on the run” – came, in the capable hands of the New Zealand String Quartet, from a powerful and deeply-engraved impression on this listener and on an appreciative audience at the end.

Perhaps it would have been even more appropriate to have played Wallace’s piece as a prelude to the Viola Sonata at the second half’s beginning  – still, in view of the frequent contrasts of mood in Shostakovich’s work as a whole, it did no violence to contrast this opening piece’s sobrieties with the Piano Quintet’s arresting and  flamboyantly ceremonial, neo-Baroque piano solo opening, here spectacularly and sonorously played by Jian Liu. The quartet of strings echoed the music’s declamatory splendour before setting off with the viola in attendance on a sombre waltz which, however, developed with the other instruments into a full-scale, almost epically-surging elaboration of the material of the kind the composer admired in intricate Baroque music but also felt as if it owed something to late-romantic fulsomeness!

The Fugue which followed, begun quietly by the strings and then joined by the piano, gradually became more impassioned, with the exchanges intensifying until the piano commandingly took centre-stage with a grand recitative statement followed by the other instruments in more conciliatory tones which brought our sensibilities closer to a sense of “peace”, possibly a reaction of the composer’s to the turmoil he experienced during  the years leading up to the Fifth Symphony. Towards the end the strings brought out a richly-phrased theme which, together with the piano, sighed, reiterated, grumbled, and then resounded with finality.

Next, the Allegretto Scherzo danced its way cheekily into the soundscape, its somewhat artless theme nevertheless keeping the music’s energies on task with (readily inverted) clarion calls, and ”shepherding” the music back from trio-sounding excursions into vortex-like episodes which rather alarmingly build up unwanted tensions until suddenly things were defused, and brought back in line – as the famed conductor Sir Thomas Beecham once observed in a different context, this music couldn’t help but give the idea, in places, as if a lot of yaks were there all jumping about!

The Intermezzo, marked Lento  brought pizzicato cello and arco violin  together, joined by the viola, tones invested with exquisitely-nuanced variety by Anna Van Der Zee’s solo violin and Gillian Ansell’s viola – then with Jian Liu’s piano as a patiently sonorous guide all the strings “grew” their figured  intensities in pairs, Peter Clark’s violin matching Anna Van Der Zee’s and Andrew Joyce’s ‘cello in complete accord with Gillian Ansell’s dusky utterances. And the “where to from here? question begun by a somewhat awry canonic sequence from the violins was of course resolved by the composer with the piano!

I simply adored the playing in this final movement –  the piano’s initial confidence and sparkle, the strings’ moments of chromatic unease, the fanfare-like surges of hope, the continued vacillations as the strings continued to wrestle with their doubts, the viola and ‘cello seemingly more confident at times  in a “come on” sort of way, and the piano always ready to rally the troops – the ending, when it came was like a musical smile of quiet relief, and certainly balm for tortured sensibilities…..a cherishable moment!

Gillian Ansell (viola) and Jian Liu (piano) play Shostakovich’s Viola Sonata – photo: Maeve O’Connell

And then, after the interval, we found ourselves suddenly transported to the composer’s “evening”, thirty-five years later, with his valedictory Viola Sonata. At various times Shostakovich had expressed a wish to write a viola sonata to go with  those for violin and cello that he had completed. He only just made it in relation to his failing health as he died in August 1975 shortly after the work was finished – he was able to tell its dedicatee, the violist Fyodor Druzhinin on July 5th 1975 that he had completed the work and sent it off to be published. The work was first performed privately at Shostakovich’s apartment on September 25th by Druizhinin, with pianist Mikhail Muntyan, and received its first public performance in October that same year from the same artists.

In her illuminating programme note Gillian Ansell told us what we needed to know regarding the music’s circumstances along with something of its character. Before beginning the performance she and Jian Liu demonstrated to us something of the significance of the composer’s frequent use in the work’s finale of recognisable phrases from Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.

Although much of the composer’s later music was dark and pessimistic, this work is different, especially in the outer movements. The first movement of this work is marked Moderato, and was described by the composer as a “novella”, a description which suggests something smaller or reduced in scale, more concentrated. The opening pizzicato notes (recalling Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto), led to a soulful kind of dialogue between the instruments, gradually leading to a great mid-movement outburst – great “schwung from both players – one followed by the piano quoting the opening pizzicato notes nd the violin playing eerie sul ponticello tones. A strange, unsettling waltz-tune followed, leading to a cadenza which interspersed the opening pizzicato notes played arco, then returning to the pizzicato at the movement’s end.

The scherzo which followed used material from the composer’s unfinished opera “The Gamblers” – we enjoyed plenty of folkish “slides” and note-bending  in this sardonic and sometimes savage kind of “danse macabre” – a darkly sinister viola theme led to a kind of “trio” begun by great pizzicato and furthered by declamatory exchanges and an impassioned string solo before the dance returned, as volatile and ornery in places as before, and then gradually fading into indeterminant spaces.

The finale began with a beautifully-sustained string solo, capped off by soft pizzicato notes, out of which came the piano’s first, deeply-voiced three-note figurations  bringing to mind the spirit of Beethoven, and answered by the violin’s voicing of the “Moonlight” Sonata’s theme, simply the dotted phrase’s opening with (sometimes) the first rising note of its continuation, here repeated and varied continually. It was even brought into an impassioned cadenza, whose mood then took over the viola-and-piano exchanges, as if the composer was wrestling with demons rather than fond remembrances (with quotes from his symphonies and the Second Violin Concerto tumbling through the music), before giving up the struggle and accepting that all of this was, in fact, a farewell to life. How interesting that it was the unassuming viola to which Shostakovich had given pride of place to perform this momentous task!

This concert made a brilliant and fitting finale to the New Zealand String Quartet’s richly-crafted commemorative 2025 tribute in memory of the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most truly significant creative artists. Heartfelt bravos to all who contributed to bringing the music of Dmitri Shostakovich into such finely-crafted focus for all of us here to enjoy!

 

 

Music from Home and Abroad – for its time and for all time

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents:

THE ARTIST REPENTS

VICTORIA KELLY – Requiem
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No. 5 In D Minor Op.47

Barbara Paterson – soprano
Alexander Lewis – tenor
The Tudor Consort
Orchestra Wellington
Marc Taddei – conductor

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 22nd November, 2025

The sixth and final concert in Orchestra Wellington’s 2025 series The Dictator’s Shadow portrays a creative artist’s dilemma living and working in a regime seeking to curb individual artistic expression and freedom of speech, and while under severe duress producing a work which adroitly treads a path of compromise. Dmitri Shostakovich had fallen foul of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin with an opera, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” in 1936 which brought the full weight of displeasure upon the composer’s head via the Government’s official print-organ, the newspaper “Pravda”, which condemned the work and its performance on the basis of Stalin’s negative reaction to the production (ironically, since its premiere two years previously, “Lady Macbeth” had been a resounding success with the public and with officialdom!).

Reeling under the weight of the regime’s official expression of displeasure, Shostakovich had his opera withdrawn within two months of the “Pravda” article, and then did the same with his ballet “The Limpid Stream”, which was being performed at the time, and came under similar attack from the same source – while this was happening, he was writing his Fourth Symphony intending to have it performed, but was persuaded from doing so by friends and associates who heard the work in rehearsal and feared for the composer’s safety if the performance went ahead. Shostakovich complied with the advice and turned, not to an ostentatiously patriotic cantata or regime-praising ode, but to yet another symphony, one, however, that came to have bestowed upon it the famous byline (whether from the composer himself or another commentator is uncertain) “A Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism”.

The work’s reception, in November 1937 could possibly have saved Shostakovich’s skin, judging by the fate of some of his friends and colleagues whose activities had similarly displeased Stalin at around this time. It addressed all of “Pravda’s” criticisms regarding the composer’s previous efforts – the music was tonal, with simple, direct language, its form was classical, with easily-discernable themes, and it ended on a positive note, in fact with a triumphant fanfare-like apotheosis. Shostakovich said later in private that the music for the finale was a kind of satire, with a hollow exuberance glorifying the dictator. One of the composer’s biographers, Elizabeth Wilson, aptly characterised the situation for Shostakovich, commenting that in this music “he had found a way to be truthful for those who had ears to listen.”

All of this was here laid aside for the concert’s second half, as the evening’s opening item confronted us with a vastly different work in many ways – New Zealand composer VIctoria Kelly’s 2023 Requiem, for soprano, tenor, mixed choir and orchestra. In her programme notes she calls the work “a secular contemplation of life and mortality”, using texts from five New Zealand poems, alongside word-fragments of the text for the Latin Requiem Mass. We were fortunate to have the composer’s presence at the concert, emanating as vibrant a force in person when acknowledging the applause and the efforts of the musicians as had her music done that we’d heard.

Kelly wrote the work in response to the deaths of her parents, ten years apart, telling us that her music and the poets’ words were her responses to not being able herself to find “words for the events” bringing with them such loss and grief and all of their manifold associations. For her it took shape as a non-religious work. hence the “secular” poetry, but with connections to tradition briefly acknowledged (the word “Requiem” itself being an example). She talks of the poems as “filled with the wonder of nature, of grief and longing, of surrender and letting go”….

This work has already achieved fame, winning the SOUNZ Contemporary Award / Te Tohu Auaha at the 2023 APRA Silver Scrolls. I had the enthralling experience of watching the SOUNZ/RNZ film of the premiere performance at the Auckland Town Hall, given by the Auckland Philharmonia and conducted by Vincent Hardaker, with soloists Simon O’Neill and Jayne Tankersley, together with the Luminate Voices Women’s Chamber Choir and Lux Singers   – so I was in a sense prepared for tonight’s performance, while finding myself consumed with expectation as to how different it could sound with different performers!

What particularly transfixed my reactions to both performances were the solo singers in both cases – Kelly required the tenor in particular to sing in falsetto for much of the time, far above his natural register, wanting his voice to convey “vulnerability, hope and fear”, which Alexander Lewis certainly managed, though not as effectively as Simon O’Neill due to the latter being so closely-miked (as were both the Auckland soloists). In this latter performance both singers, though miked, were not as clearly projected – I could hear more of Barbara Paterson’s voice, though she, like her partner, struggled in places to be heard over instrumental and sometimes choral tones. We had the texts in our programmes, and I could read them, but still found them difficult to follow – and friends sitting elsewhere told me during the interval that it was too dark where they were sitting to make out the words on the page!

Having said all of this it struck me that the impact of the work as sound alone was conveying such a visceral impression, with orchestra and choir making music which, in Kelly’s own words  “ebbs and flows around the poetry”, that one could surrender readily to the degree one often experiences so exhilaratingly in opera where the singers’ voices are the catalysts for overwhelming emotion rather than the words’ “meaning” in a literal sense!  This in an almost animalistic way gave to us throughout the work so much of that “reaching for one another” sensation which Kelly described as creating “harmony” – here a kind of transcendent thing that didn’t need explaining, as so many great abstracted instrumental pieces of music do with their tones alone.

We were able, therefore, to “experience” those frissons of feeling described by the singer with the words “I stayed a minute – and the garden was full of voices” – the “language of earth” activated for our pleasure in the midst of sorrow! Likewise, we were taken, here tumultuously, with the ascending voices and percussive scintillations illustrating Sam Hunt’s lighthouse keeper manning the lights “to reappear among his polished stars”. Coincidentally, I had not long before heard John Rimmer’s beautiful instrumental realisation “Where Sea Meets Sky” using those same words by poet Ian Wedde as used here by Kelly, here poignantly continuing with the second part of the poem , in which friends long to embrace once more “between sea and sky”, to the accompaniment of the chorus’s beautiful “Libere eis de morte aeterna” (Free them from eternal death).

The voices began and continued Chloe Honum’s claustrophobic “Bright Death” with canonic “Lacrimosa, dies illa” phrases  accompanied by piteous oboe tones, the music inexorably and obsessively building towards grief-stricken utterance, before concluding with a quietly-voiced “Requiem”. And lastly, we felt a liberation of sorts with James K. Baxter’s “High Country Weather”, with spacious string and percussive texturings, and voices sounding like unfettered winds sweeping through the sky – the choir built great utterances from the word “Gloria” after which the silences surged softly backwards and forwards, allowing the soprano to intone the thoughts of a life in what seemed the throes of its finality, with the words “Surrender to the sky your heart of anger” marking a final acceptance of what is and will be. Barbara Paterson’s celestial soprano took us there unerringly and gratefully (with a quieter, less demonstrative, but just as needfully “present” voice as Jayne Tankersley’s), one which, along with the choral voices and instruments drifted through hypnotic repetitions of the word “surrender” and into the silence finally left by a single sustained instrumental note…

As much thoughtfulness as discussion (mostly regarding the solo voices and the different impression they made) seemed to absorb every moment of interval before resettling and proclaiming us ready for the Shostakovich symphony to follow. It proved a more than fitting finale to the composer’s “season”, with Marc Taddei and his well-versed forces bringing all the music’s sharply-focused accents, upholstered tonal weight and gait, and purposeful attitude to the fore throughout the first movement’s tense, playing-for-keeps utterances!  Those baleful brass calls splendidly activated the rest of the orchestral forces towards an allegro which in turn pushed the playing  excitingly into  the string reiteration of the opening – so gloriously wild and combatative! The big recitative-like unisons would have gladdened all hearts at that first performance (most likely for different reasons!) – but they were just the job, as were the great crashes leading to the flute-and-horn “appeasement” passages (with one or two slightly “blurped” brass notes here simply adding to the excitement!).

Then, what terrific attack we got from the lower strings at the Allegretto’s beginning! – such incredibly “engaged” playing from all the sections! And what a contrast with the Largo, with its real sense of “lament” (I read somewhere there were accounts of people at the first performance weeping during this movement!) – the performance made much of the contrast between the moments of tension and the hush of the more desolate sequences, Again one was made to think in various places of the “layered” agenda of the composer in giving the establishment what it thought it wanted!

As for the finale, its “enormous optimistic lift” referred to by most Soviet critics was here made more than palpable by the orchestra’s performance, the playing holding nothing back, its full-bloodedness a resounding indication of how officialdom’s faith in the composer’s  restoration of “all that is bright, clear, joyous, optimistic and life-affirming” would have been restored. And, of course, we also heard in this performance what other critics were able to discern at the time as “unsettled, sensitive, (and) evocative music” inspiring “gigantic conflict” – the same sounds which the composer reportedly referred to as “forced rejoicing”. Those massive concluding bass-drum strokes here at the work’s end continue, as they did at the time, to speak volumes in today’s world of enforced glorification and scarce toleration of views which dare to be different!

To Marc Taddei and his redoubtable Orchestra Wellington players I dips me lid in sincere tribute to their incredible collective artistic achievement throughout what has been a truly memorable season of music-making that’s exhibited both brilliance and depth – brilliance in the standard of execution, and depth in the explorations of music as a living entity of our human condition, be it a Requiem with a recognisably home-grown articulation of ritual from the orchestra’s resident (and native-born) composer Victoria Kelly,  or the music of a distant Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich which expressed attitudes and values out of step with those of the ruling powers, and initiated what potentially became a life-and-death struggle, one with wider implications for humanity at large. I look forward to the continued enrichment of music and music-making from these amazing artists with the advent of 2026.

 

Amazingly vibrant, energetic and tumultuous “Christmas Oratorio” – the Bach Choir of Wellington, Nota Bene and the Chiesa Ensemble

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The Bach Choir, Nota Bene Choir, The Chiesa Ensemble and soloists, conducted by Shawn Michael Condon  – photo, Colin McDiarmid

JS BACH – Christmas Oratorio
BWV 248 – Parts I, II, III and VI

Georgia Jamieson-Emms (soprano)
Maaike Christie-Beekman (alto)
Iain Tetley (tenor / Evangelist)
Robert Tucker (bass)

Douglas Mews – organ

The Bach Choir of Wellington
Shawn Michael Condon (director)
Nota Bene
Maaike Christie-Beekman (director)
The Chiesa Ensemble
Rebecca Struthers (director) / Anne Loeser  (Concertmaster)

Shawn Michael Condon (conductor)

St.Mary of the Angels Church
Boulcott Street, Wellington

Saturday 15th November, 2025

There’s been a definite kind of newly-furbished “buzz” associated with choral events I’ve attended in Wellington over recent times, particularly associated with a venue, St.Mary of the Angels Church, which by dint of its richly-appointed  ambiences and built-to-standard acoustical properties seems made-to-order for public performances of works of an ecclesiastical nature – two such for me have been, firstly, of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers for the Blessed Virgin ( ) and, more recently, of JS Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. I’m actually anticipating some kind of triumvirate of performance in writing this, as another different vocal ensemble based in the capital, Baroque Voices, is set to perform another work of JS Bach’s, the Six Motets BWV 225-230, later this month, again in St.Mary of the Angels Church  – hopefully the occasion will be as tumultuously supported as were both the Monteverdi and the more recently performed Bach work which I’m here reporting on….

Of course the excitement of a “sold out” concert for both musicians and audiences can’t help but add layers of lustre to any such occasion, and would have certainly “fired up” the musicians involved in this recent presentation. I’m certain there would have been a degree of corresponding “lift-off” to the performance we heard, relating to such overwhelming audience support, and  particularly as the opening chorus of the work “Jauchzet, frohlocket” (Celebrate, rejoice) was sung and played at the liveliest pace I’ve ever heard it performed – in fact, conductor Shawn Michael Condon took it all a tad too vigorously for my liking, though all the musicians, vocalists and instrumentalists, seemed to get their notes in! And I was sitting close enough to register the absolute delight and definite purpose on the faces of those in the choir singing this music, as if the extra notch or three of trajectorial purpose was stirring the blood of all concerned even more!

Conductor Shawn Michael Condon, with soloists Iain Tetley (tenor), Maaike Christie-Beekman (alto), Robert Tucker (bass) and Georgia Jamieson-Emms (soprano) –  photo, Colin McDiarmid

The rest had manifold pleasures and beauties – all of the vocal soloists made ear-catchingly impressive “beginnings” – the first to be heard, tenor Iain Tetley, handled his opening “Es begab sich aber zu der Zeit” (It came to pass at that time) with great aplomb and nicely-varied impulse, continuing to do so right through the evening, though the composer’s near-impossible demands upon the tenor in the final cantata seemed to take something of a toll! Elsewhere, though, his tones and enunciation of the text were a joy to listen to, in Part Two catching the excitement of the heavenly hosts,  and in Part Three conveying plenty of the narrative’s thoughtfulness, particularly  regarding Mary’s pondering of the words spoken about the infant’s wondrous birth…

I enjoyed the dulcet tones of alto Maaike Christie-Beekman, her line steadily and fluently maintained in “Bereite dich, Zion” – and she was especially  moving in Part Two’s lovely “Schlafe, mein Liebster” where her lovely long notes and sensitivity in general made up for a somewhat prosaic “Schaut hin, dort liegt im finstern Stall”  from the choir – a pity, as the soprano choral tones had been so lovely in the previous part’s “Wie soll ich dich empfangen?”

Bass-baritone Robert Tucker’s versatility was in no doubt with his “Grösser Herr”  giving great pleasure and managing to even make something of those lower notes which were more difficult to “centre” than others! I thoroughly enjoyed his brief but vivid cameo of the despicable King Herod in Part VI , while earlier, his “So recht, ihr Engel, jauchzt und singet” joined with the heavenly host’s excitement at “Den Menschen ein Wohlgefallen”!  He also interacted splendidly with soprano Georgia Jamieson-Emms’s Angel in Part Three’s  Duet Aria “Herr, dein Mittleid” , both singers given ample space to float and negotiate their tones  while the oboes (I couldn’t tell from where I was sitting who was playing) were splendidly vital, by turns lyrical and energetic in their support.

Part VI had splendid orchestra playing, with the trumpets and timpani displaying pin-point accuracy and with plenty of “schwung” besides, from both chorus and orchestra. That done, the tenor and bass  vividly paved the way for the Angel’s condemnation of Herod’s treacherous intentions – Georgia Jamieson-Emms certainly gave her recitative plenty of bite, and, aided by great support from strings and oboes tackled the angular lines of her aria with plenty of verve and appropriate resolve.

All four soloists relished their interactive dramatic recitative, preparing us for the work’s final chorus, a tour de force for both instrumental and choral forces, alternating as it did the chorale lines with more vigorous instrumental passages. The instrumental playing from the various Chiesa Ensemble members (strings, flutes, oboes, brass and timpani) throughout couldn’t be faulted (including leader Anne Loeser’s hand-in-glove accompaniment of  Maaike Christie-Beekman’s “Schliesse, mein Herze”), the players  (including the continuo of Douglas Mews’ organ) achieving a standard I’ve not heard bettered in any performance of a baroque work I’ve previously attended.

Members of the Chiesa Ensemble – Kirstin Eade (flute) and Robert Orr (oboe) – photo, Colin McDiarmid

My abiding memory, though is of the chorus throughout, of those faces showing every sign of putting their hearts and minds into every syllable of what they uttered, and filling the building unstintingly with their tones accordingly. Their response to conductor Shawn Michael Condon’s every impulse was direct and giving, demonstrating in the most heartfelt way what their voices were conveying. It all made for a memorable and vibrant experience of a piece with the music we heard and enjoyed.

ENEMY OF THE STATE – a multivaried concert experience with Psathas, Glazunov and Shostakovich

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents
ENEMY OF THE STATE

JOHN PSATHAS – Next Planet
ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV – Violin Concerto
DMITRI  SHOSTAKOVICH – Lady Macbeth of the Mstensk District –
(Suite from the Opera – arr. Marc Taddei)

Benjamin Baker (violin)
Madeleine Pierard (soprano)
Hutt City Brass
Marc Taddei (conductor)
Orchestra Wellington

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday 18th October 2025

Concert programmes can be tricky things to put together, whatever the aims and objectives of those who consider what might best fulfil projected outcomes. Some will prioritise the idea of pleasing what would be considered a requisite amount of people for attendances’ sakes, looking to assemble repertoire that’s either tried and true, or novel in a sense of interest generated by reputation or even recent sensation. Others wanting to explore less well-worked vistas which however indicate sufficient potential for attracting interest will gradually build momentums of discovery and exploration for audiences to ease themselves into and hopefully relish such discoveries and thus be enthused all the more, developing a positive and lasting momentum of support.

Obviously my scenario descriptions show a bias in favour of the latter, mainly because it’s a scenario which I think Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington have followed throughout this present season with considerable success, and in their own distinctive way – Taddei could have alternatively “cherry-picked” Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s entire symphonic output over the six concerts, or presented an amalgam of symphonic and concertante works, but instead chose to concentrate on a specific era of the composer’s creative achievement, in this case (and quoting the title of one of the concert programmes)  very much “Under the Dictator’s Shadow”.

What it’s meant is that we’re being given an in-depth resume of a significant period of activity by one of twentieth century music’s most significant creative artists while in the throes of institutionalised disapproval almost to the point of persecution at the hands of the authorities, personified (and instigated) by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The final concert of the sequence will present to us a composer’s ostensible “giving way” to a dictator’s demands with what seems a public gesture of submission, while privately and through encoded musical gesturings, expressing and maintaining defiance. Some commentators continue to maintain that, despite such ambiguities the composer’s behaviour suggests an acquiescence to  the Soviet regime even after Stalin’s death, while others tend to disagree, a debate that continues to divide opinion.

This latest concert instalment of the sequence highlights a particular flashpoint in the dictator/ composer relationship, the latter’s 1934 opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, a work that had achieved popular success until Stalin took it upon himself to attend a performance, late in January 1936, and famously leaving the theatre before the work’s conclusion. Little time was wasted in expressing his displeasure at what he heard, via the Soviet newspaper Pravda’s notorious review of the work a couple of days afterwards, bringing down the dictator’s ire, along with that of his collection of toadies  that made up institutionalised Soviet officialdom, on the composer’s head.

Pravda’s resounding phrase “Muddle instead of Music” has since, along with similar  examples of critical invective levelled against Shostakovich,  triumphantly vindicated Oscar Wilde’s famous quip “There is only one thing worse in the world than being talked about and that is NOT being talked about”, Even though in situ there were , of course,  attendant dangers for artists in Stalin’s Russia in voicing any criticism of the regime, history has come out with firmly positive views regarding the opera’s artistic validations of life and culture for Russian people in the era of the time, set within its wider depictions of human universality.

Though even in its somewhat truncated form here “Lady Macbeth” simply dominated in almost every way its concert companions on this occasion, both offerings allowed us a modicum of “food for thought” of divergent kinds. The concert opened with a work by John Psathas, a superbly-ambient “spaced-out” orchestral experience whose title “Next Planet” nevertheless posed for me more questions than it answered by the time the music had run its unexpectedly brief inter-planetary course. Psathas’s work was jointly commissioned by the Tonnhalle Dusseldorf GmbH and the Dusseldorf Symphony as part of an extended environmental protection project whose theme was “sustainability within the concert experience” – “Next Planet” was one of twelve works, each assigned to different sustainability topics, though Psathas, who co-ordinated the project, was allowed to choose his own topic. His response was to write a piece about “the self-aggrandizing heroes…intent on spending billions in taking a few people to Mars, rather than invest that money in improving life here on Earth……”

On the face of things, the music depicted little more than what seemed like the outer-space equivalent of  “a short ride in a fast machine” – but I was taking the music at its face value instead of looking for clues suggesting hidden meanings and agendas. It may be that Psathas’s piece might perhaps have been more appropriately performed  in the orchestra’s finai concert along with the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony, (as “coded” a piece of outwardly-optimistic composition as ever was conceived!) – Psathas’s contempt (heartily endorsed universally) for such inappropriately self-glorifying undertakings would have then made a splendidly fatuous-sounding adjunct to Shostakovich’s hollowed-out paeans of praise for an already brutal and repressive regime and its great leader!

Though I would have just as happily heard some examples of shamefully-neglected music by Rimsky-Korsakov (those splendid suites from “Tsar Saltan” or “Le Coq d’Or”) as examples of anti-establishment artistic expression, I took heart at reading about the supportive stances and various kindnesses shown to his fellow composers (including Shostakovich) at various times by Alexander Glazunov, whose Violin Concerto was here programmed. The only previous work I had heard of Glazunov’s was the delightful Ballet “The Seasons”, while his other, somewhat dubious claim to fame I’d encountered  was his much-reiterated ineptitude as a conductor when placed in charge of the ill-fated premiere of the young Sergei Rachmaninov’s First Symphony!

I had never heard the Violin Concerto before – a work notable for its late-Romantic nostalgic feeling and somewhat idiosyncratic structure, its three movements being  reorganised into two, with the usual slow movement “sandwiched” into the first as a kind of “interlude”, and the last movement entered without a break at the conclusion of a cadenza from the soloist. All of this fell most gratefully on the ear, and provided ample opportunity for the soloist, Ben Baker (whom we’d seen and heard at an earlier concert in Mozart’s gorgeous Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola) to display his  virtuosity and feeling for the music’s character.

Soloist and orchestra established a focused, sombre mood at the beginning, the work’s sequential passages then bringing us to the tender second subject, Baker’s tone pure and clean and delightful, with a gorgeous “silvery” aspect in places, though one that was sometimes “covered” by his accompaniments – in the scherzo-like section Baker was more assertive, leading from this into the cadenza with pin-drop concentration, and varied energies. Though one quickly tired of the rather trite fanfare theme of the finale, Baker put across great enjoyment of the more rustic of the variations, and the quickening of the tempi towards the ending brought excitement and daring to the concluding exchanges.

And so the stage was set for the performance of a Shostakovich work which in terms of range and scope and potential trouble from the ruling establishment for the composer, is almost a kind of “companion work” for the epic Fourth Symphony that featured in the orchestra’s previous Shostakovich concert,. The composer’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”, was presented tonight in a truncated but still impactful version made up of various orchestral excepts (mostly “interludes” which the composer had crafted especially for the work) and various arias sonorously delivered throughout the story by the opera’s heroine.  Katerina is the bored wife of a merchant husband who spends most of his time away from her on business. She inevitably falls in love with somebody else, and her obsession with her new lover, Sergey, leads to the murders of both her father-in-law and her husband before she and her lover are eventually caught and sent to a labour camp, where Sergey, having grown tired of her, blames her for everything and rejects her, before forming an association with another woman prisoner – in the throes of despair, Katerina drowns both her rival and herself in a nearby lake.

Despite the dark savagery of much of the story, parts of it (Katerina’s arias especially) are genuinely moving, while other parts draw from Shostakovich’s gift for black comedy and irony (the picture drawn of the police force is of pure comic irony, Gilbertian, but with savage overtones). In a society where corruption is rife and brutality and misogyny are close to the surface, the story still readily resonates – to claim that it would lack basic box-office appeal (as does another reviewer, while nevertheless rhapsodising over Madeleine Pierard’s stunning vocal realisations of the aforementioned arias) is in my view a debatable point!

Music director Marc Taddei selected not only the existing orchestral interludes crafted for the opera by the composer, but excerpts from every scene of the opera, contriving, in his own words, “a concentrated symphonic portrait of her passion, independence, transgressions and tragic fate”. Certainly the juxtapositioning of charged, atmospheric orchestral narrative with Pierard’s straightaway arresting voice brought us into almost cheek-by jowl proximity with both the character and the circumstances that would shape Katerina and her destiny. As a “road map” of the opera I found it an incredibly full-on experience, though I felt it was somewhat less “of a piece” with Katerina herself when her character seemed to suddenly recede during the orchestral descriptions of the discovery of Katarina’s husband’s body, the wedding celebrations and the arrival of the police to arrest the lovers. We “connected” with her again when she returned to the front of the platform to deliver her two despairing final arias, here very properly running them into one single utterance so that the character’s opening lament is then subsumed into a nihilistic vision, giving her the only option available that makes sense – simply devastating!

Marc Taddei’s dauntless Orchestra Wellington and their sonorous cohorts, the Hutt City Brass, played their hearts out in bringing into being the composer’s extraordinarily vivid depictions of life under duress for the story’s characters. As with this orchestra’s quite extraordinary realisation of the demanding Fourth Symphony of Shostakovich a couple of months previously, the players seemed to revel in whatever demands the music made on ensemble, or tone production, with only a hiatus or two of trajectory which I noticed on the couple of occasions that conductor Marc Taddei introduced some kind of rallentando in heavily-scored passages where the ensemble seemed to have brief moments of less-than-unanimous response. For all the rest it seemed that conductor and players had again achieved something remarkable with this less-than-well-known but fascinatingly addictive and readily compelling music.

 

Late-afternoon Bach and Shostakovich – worlds and times apart sounding together….

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JS BACH – Suite No. 3 in C Major for Solo Violincello BWV 1009
Rolf Gjelsten  (‘cello)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartets: No 5  in B-flat (1952) / No. 2  in A Major Op. 68 (1944)
The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble:
Helene Pohl, Simeon Broom (violins), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (’cello)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday, 18th November, 2025

“Wuthering Heights” might have been an apter name for Roseneath’s “The Long Hall” on Saturday afternoon, when Wellington’s Point Jerningham resoundingly lived up to its reputation as the windiest spot in the capital during a concert given by the Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble, one in which the wind played at pedal points, drones, and vigorous ostinati as constant accompaniments to the music-making.  The latter, of course, persisted and eventually triumphed, with the players’ all-pervading focus on the music happily relegating such disruptions, however tumultuous, to an incidental, scarcely noticeable in situ degree.

The Ensemble’s quartet personnel has undergone fascinating and fruitful variation over the year, in particular regarding a second violinist, and featuring luminaries such as Monique Lapins, Anna van der Zee and Peter Gjelsten in the position. For this concert the player was Simeon Broom, currently an NZSO member with a number of years’ valuable experience spent in various orchestras overseas. Each of the quartet performances in this concert demonstrated both the group’s flexibility and individual members’ skills at adaptation to fresh combinations, auguring well for continuance of presentation by the ensemble of one of chamber music’s core repertoire resources.

As well they might for the purposes of such an exploration of what is becoming increasingly apparent to me as one of the great cornerstones of musical expression of its time and its relevance for other times – Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifteen string quartets. Though Beethoven’s acclaimed cycle of quartets would seem like an obvious inspiration to any aspiring composer tackling the same genre of works, Shostakovich’s relationship with the form took a different path over time, with the young composer, mindful of his experience with the 1936 “Lady Macbeth affair”,  all too aware of those repressive conditions foisted upon creative artists within his homeland, and thus taking care with his first string quartet venture (1938) to avoid any undue excess. It was six years before he returned to the medium in 1944, confident then of giving an impression of a loyal Russian’s patriotic response to the war effort via his references in the work to Russian folk music, though the ethnic elements in this second quartet included definite references to Jewish “Klezmer” music, perhaps more for aesthetic reasons than political ones. The Third, Fourth and Fifth Quartets were less fortunate, with the composer’s increasingly dysfunctional relationship with Stalin and his cohorts resulting in his regarding the works as “for the drawer” – the Third Quartet (1946) received one performance before being withdrawn), while the other two (the 1949 Fourth and the 1952 Fifth)  languished unperformed until after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Of longer-term interest is Shostakovich’s love of the music of JS Bach – he headed a Soviet delegation in 1950  to attend in Leipzig events marking the bicentennial commemoration of Bach’s death , where he was quoted as saying “For us Bach’s legacy is an embodiment of flaming emotion, soulful humanity and true humanism, which stands in contrast to the dark world of raw evil and contempt for humanity.” Shostakovich knew the Well-Tempered Clavier intimately (he had been playing it from the age of twelve), when he encountered the 26 year-old Tatiana Nikolaeva playing selections from the work at the International Bach Competition which was one of the Leipzig bicentennial events. Her playing (which won her the competition’s first prize) inspired Shostakovich to compose his own set of 24 Preludes and Fugues, and dedicate the set to Nikolaeva, who premiered them in December of 1952 (she subsequently recorded them no less than three times!).

These Op.87 Preludes and Fugues provide a thoroughly refreshing look at musical examples of the art we readily associate with Bach – counterpoint, fugue and texture, a dynamic collection of captivating opportunities for what one commentator has described as “musical ecstasy and reflection”. And, as ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten pointed out in his pre-concert talk today prior to playing for us Bach’s heart-warming ‘Cello Suite No.3 in C Major,  the work’s confidence, ebullience and mastery of form is a representation of the effect on Shostakovich’s own use of counterpoint and fugue in certain of his quartets, especially evident in the 1944 Fifth Quartet which we were to hear immediately after this work.

I’d recently been enjoying former Wellingtonian cellist Miranda Wilson’s “The Well-Tempered ‘Cello” (published 2022, Fairhaven Press) , describing her own saga of getting to know, working on, and eventually performing these ‘Cello Suites – so the section of the book devoted to this Third Suite occasioned some required (re)reading and (re)relishing!  She emphasises the work’s in-built resonances, being in the C-major key, and Rolf Gjelsten seemed to confirm this with his verdict regarding the work’s general affability and out-going nature – music with plenty to say and with the resonances created that supported this kind of character.

Right from that opening “downward plunge” into Bach’s flow of notes I felt a wonderful sense of well-being – the journey at first was mostly scalic, but with some wider steps and a couple of quirky jumps, and a voice which grows in variety of expression, passing through single notes, phrases, lines and episodes, and with an engagingly droll drone-sequence around the note of G, before a few moments of recitative bring us to the end.  The Allemande contrasts with the bright-and-bushy-tailed Prelude in being so gorgeously relaxed in its graceful trajectory, the sudden chain of double-stopped notes in the piece’s first half, a brief frisson of tension that resolves with a nudge of extra warmth. Rolf had told us about the Courante with its “crazy dance” aspect (Miranda Wilson refers to the piece’s “frantic-up-and-down arpeggios”!) – and to my untutored ear it seemed to possess and swap between two kinds of rhythmic trajectories at will, with beat-stresses changing as if playing a kind of game with my sensibilities!

The Sarabande, my attendant author’s “powerfully moving” rhythm, is similarly characterised by my in situ player as having “a unique kind of intensity” – I didn’t know before this concert that it’s a dance form that was banned in the 17th Century as eliciting “too erotic” a response from its participants! I’ve now been dangerously over-sensitised to its allure, and will have to watch myself over that second note in each bar, in future!  I catch myself savouring it during the performance, here, and thinking that it must be a case of “once heard, etc….!”

The Bourees plucked me our of any such fantasy world I might have ventured into. They’re wonderful, “two-sides to the coin” dances, suggesting different physical, psychological or emotional views of the same location, feeling, or situation. Here the difference seemed like a masculine/feminine distinction, a somewhat conventional response, I know, but one which a lifetime of observation has ingrained for good or ill! And I loved the Gigue, here, with its almost lazily loping stride, and especially the bariolage sections (one note repeatedly sounded in the midst of a whirl of others) which have always had a pleasantly astringent “ring”, and which were followed with a reassuring “that’s enough of that” rejoiner!

So, onto the first of the Shostakovich offerings of the afternoon we went, with the wind just as fulsomely attendant as ever! The Fifth String Quartet appropriately back-ended the Bach Suite performance, allowing the former’s compositional proximity to the composer’s own 24 Preludes and Fugues to resonate more readily, the earlier Second String Quartet having a rather different, and more removed kind of genesis. I was intrigued by other references I’d found to this later quartet’s influences, among them the music of one Galina Ustvolskaya, a former pupil of the composer’s and one he apparently harboured deeper feelings for, following the death of his first wife – Shostakovich quotes a four-note motif from Ustvolskaya’s B-flat Clarinet Trio, played by the first violin in the quartet’s first movement coda (the composer’s feelings, incidentally, were never returned, adding to the poignancy of the quote).

In his introduction to the work for us Rolf Gjelsten emphasised the composer’s predicament at having to indefinitely defer some of his music’s performances, such as this Quartet (along with his two previous quartets, one of which did get a “premiere” but was then withdrawn!). Stalin’s death in 1953 meant that this Quartet could at last come in from the cold, along with a number of other important works “awaiting their time”. It was the first of the composer’s Quartets which joined the movements together in a single sweep, and it contained a number of unusually “personal” references – elements which would come to increasingly characterise the quartets still to come.

The work’s striking opening contained a “walking” theme whose determined trajectories were set upon by trenchant figures whose intensities assailed the music until the second violin’s introduction of a more lyrical subject tossed about between the players. Gradually the mood intensified further, with both the walking and lyrical themes returning but under siege, the lines buzzing like fierce insects, out for blood, but then gradually receding as, firstly, the lyrical theme made an impassioned return, and then, from nowhere, came the aforementioned Ustvolskaya quote on the first violin, disappearing after a second, higher, more ethereal statement as the instrument took the music via a single note and accompanied by pizzicati, to the next movement.

Here, the lines portrayed a kind of stillness, a post-rampage desolation, in places a kind of austere beauty, with eerie unisons and soulful phrases clasping the ambiences and holding them fast, until the viola, obeying a lonely impulse stepped forwards with an engaging phrase in hand to begin the dance, a tart little waltz whose good-humoured gesturings gradually turned once more into the furies that beset the opening movement. And just as unexpectedly as in the opening movement, the tumult ceased, and first the violin, and then the viola impassionedly sounded the Ustvolskaya theme once again, punctuated by emphatic pizzicati from the others. As with its first appearance the theme gave little solace, more a sense of something out-of-reach, emphasised by the subsequent “walking away” of the music, the jog-trot of the finale’s opening leading to a bleaker, much reiterated theme which then dissolved into silence.

After giving us such a “living and breathing from within” response to this work’s emotionally searching sound-saga, the players allowed us an interval’s space before launching into the  stunningly contrasted physicality of the opening “Overture” to the composer’s Second String Quartet , written in 1944 – music sounding for the moment relatively free from the constraints of politics or dogmas, its folkishness serving both as Shostakovich’s loyal citizen-response to the “Great Patriotic War”, and in particular his fondness for Jewish klezmer-like idioms in the exuberant opening theme, here suggestive of a folk-celebration.

Though this remained an ensemble performance overall, throughout the work’s second movement I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the charismatic violin-playing of Helene Pohl in her delivery of the piece’s klezmer-like solo, mournfully expressive soliloquies over drone-like accompaniments, and with the occasional notes ambiently “bent” in what one presumes is an authentic style. At one point the ‘cello sounded a brief solo before the violin began a slow waltz, one into which melody the other instruments gradually climbed, their notes rising to agitatedly “connect” with the violin’s before falling away once more – for most of this movement the violin is played as if it has joined with its player at prayer…..

A nocturnal scherzo/waltz followed, swift, ghostly and chromatic, a real danse macabre, alternating between substance and shadow before taking its “do I wake or sleep?” leave.  In its enigmatic wake was left the finale, an astonishing theme-and-variations movement, recitative-like at the beginning between the instruments , settling down to expound and extract every ounce, strand and tone of the folk-tune introduced by the viola, and then refracted through what seemed like all possible combinations, and every single conceivable characteristic one might ascribe to the composer’s experience. All the players here – violinist Simeon Broom, violist Nicholas Hancox and cellist Rolf Gjelsten – brought into play intensities and virtuosities echoing those of Helene Pohl’s brought over from the previous movement, carrying the music through its tumultuous journey to a monumental conclusion.

I managed a few grateful words of breathless appreciation to Rolf Gjelsten at the end – and then, afterwards, the still-insistent winds were good company as I walked home, drawing out the music’s tumultuous resonances from my memory and setting them dancing in the open air, art and nature joining hands in an unexpected post-concert bonus!

Impactful Shostakovich unpacked -The New Zealand String Quartet and the Ghost Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SHOSTAKOVICH UNPACKED
New Zealand String Quartet  / Ghost Trio

String Quartet No. 4 in D Major Op.83 (1949)
New Zealand String Quartet ; Peter Clark (violin) / Arna Morton (guest violinist)
Gillian Ansell (Viola) / Callum Hall (guest ‘cellist)

Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano (arr. Lev Atovmian, 1955)
Peter Clark and Monique Lapins (violins) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor Op 67 (1943-44)
Ghost Trio: Monique Lapins (violin) / Ken Ichinose (‘cello) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

With: ROBERT BURCH (1929-2007) – Essay to the Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich for
‘cello and piano (1975)  Callum Hall (‘cello) / Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Prefab Hall, Jessie St., Wellington
Wednesday, Ist October 2025

Part of a welcome (and essential) commemoration here in Wellington of the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) has been “Shostakovich Unpacked”, a four-part series of concerts exploring some of the composer’s chamber music masterpieces. This was the third concert in the New Zealand String Quartet’s series which presents five of the composer’s fifteen string quartets along with various other chamber works from similar periods in Shostakovich’s creative life, much of which met by official disapproval, and for a time in the form of censure from no less threatening a figure than the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

I couldn’t make it to the two earlier concerts in the series; and after listening to the ensemble’s superbly-wrought reading of Shostakovich’s Fourth Quartet found myself wishing I had moved more sizeable portions of heaven and earth to try and do so! Still, gratitude for what one has and can do is a marvellous thing on its own terms – and the music-making in this evening’s concert was of an order that one was left to marvel at in astonishment! And, it was little short of luxury casting to have TWO ensembles of such quality performing in the same programme, with the added bonus of items featuring members of each group displaying as much enjoyment in the collaborations as the skills required to successfully bring them off.

I particularly enjoyed the contributions made by the two “guest” players in the NZSQ, each notable for their “blending into” the overall textures as for their individual voices, always alive to the potentialities of each phrase they articulated. Arna Morton’s violin sturdily and ambiently partnered leader Peter Clark’s instrument throughout the folksy first movement, while taking her instrument’s mosaic-like opportunities throughout the rest of the work with great surety. Callum Hall’s ‘cello had more opportunities for its solo voice to shine, repeatedly catching the ear with both rhythmic and lyrical enactments of resounding character. Both players seemed for the occasion a glove-like fit into the ensemble’s realisation of a work from a composer whose personal expressions of ideological belief frequently collided with censorious officialdom at the highest (and potentially deadliest) level.

Shostakovich wrote this quartet on a “high” after having attended as an official Soviet spokesman (amazingly, at the directive of Stalin himself) the “Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace” held in New York in March of 1949. Stalin also revoked a previous (1948) ban on the music of “formalist composers” in order to cast the visit of his “representative” to the US in a more positive light. Obviously emboldened by this, Shostakovich had straightaway begun work on the quartet on returning home in April, and finished it before the year was out. Five months later, after intense rehearsals and soul-searchings, the work was privately performed by the composer’s favourite Quartet, the Beethoven Quartet, to an invited audience, whose members immediately expressed alarm at the new work’s ostensible use of Jewish musical idioms. The upshot was that Shostakovich was persuaded to withhold the first public performance and wait “for better times” – which came with the death of Stalin in 1953, and the work’s premiere in December of that year. By this time, the composer’s cynicism at the “new era” was apparent, writing to a friend, “The times are new, but the informers are old”.

All of this history seemed of little concern as the work’s heartwarming introductory sounds were initially launched by the players – a lovely lyrical ambience whose trajectories first suggested something exotically folkish, almost bagpipe-like, with the droning lines of viola and ‘cello underpinning the rhapsodical outpourings of the two violins – tensions arose between the increasingly insistent, sometimes dissonant voices, before shifting harmonies brought viola and ‘cello into the discourse – a more sombre minor-key shift brings meanderings, a hint of a dance and a brief  return to drone-accompanied lyricism at the movement’s end. The Andantino’s first 4-note phrase on the violin straightaway had me thinking “Tchaikovsky”, but not the rest, an intensely-wrought waltz with the ‘cello silent until the player reintroduced the same “Tchaikovsky” theme  – the intensities rose and fell, with Peter Clark’s violin sounding a beautifully “covered” tone replicated by his companions, and  falling gradually away to echoed remembrances of what had gone before.

A gorgeously “chugging” figure introduced the Allegretto, Callum Hall’s ‘cello leading off with a workmanlike theme repeated by the violin, followed by a whimsical unison “trio” of violin viola and ‘cello, the ambience being of a ghostly kind of “night ride” that was then cranked up by the violin’s Jog-trot rhythms (Shostakovich paid a visit by Rossini?) and with wind-blown chromatic figurations introducing an eerie aspect to the journey. Where it eventually took us was to somewhere akin to Robert Schumann’s renowned “other realms” description of worlds of hitherto unexplored experience, a state of being often requiring courage and steadfastness for both performer and listener. Here Gillian Ansell’s viola was the ideal fulcrum for such action, a voice in the midst of the void inviting others to plunge with her into the throes of one of the composer’s most challenging, and in the circumstances, reckless undertakings.

With several audaciously delivered pizzicato chords the introduction to the finale revealed its creator’s raison d’etre for the work, which gradually built up from its robust, truculent beginnings into a kind of danse macabre drawn from Jewish-sounding dance motifs, an unbridled and unashamedly grotesque outpouring of lament in a similar vein to that sounded by the composer’s Second Piano Trio finale. It was no wonder that the work’s first private audience was disturbed at Shostakovich’s apparent insensibility to potential strife and condemnation with this music – its scale was almost orchestral in places, with powerful unisons, sharp accents, and massive chordings, all of which eventually unravelled to leave mere vestiges of desolation for us to marvel over at the music’s end.

Not in the above written order, the programme’s next item was, appropriately enough, a work written in 1975 by a little-known but still significant New Zealand composer, Robert Burch, as “An Essay to the Memory of Dmitri Shostakovich, for ‘cello and piano”, performed by Callum Hall and Gabriela Glapska, one introduced and preluded by Peter Clark, who read an additional posthumous word-tribute by Burch to his illustrious fellow-composer.

Much of the work was not inappropriately sombre, beginning with heavy introductory unison notes from both instruments, stern exchanges, either in unison between piano and ‘cello or in counterpoint with one another. The mood remained serious and studious at first, occasionally highlighting a particular rhythmic five-single-note figure on both instruments – a passage with the cello played pizzicato followed, as did afterwards an almost ad lib section, the cellist bouncing the bow on the instrument’s strings by way of advancing the theme in a different form. The piano suddenly embarked on a convoluted, rhythmically rugged expansion of the thematic material before taking up a fugue-like passage which the cello interrupted, again with the abrupt five-note passage. After a series of forceful chords from the piano, the instruments seem to enter into some kind of collusion, the ‘cello sounding long-breathed lines and Elgar-like pizzicato chordings, to which the piano replied with gently luminous harmonies in the higher registers, the cello continuing to draw out the five-note patternings in more contentedly-expressed terms of acceptance of the piano’s celestial-sounding representations.

In view of Shostakovich’s well-documented sense of somewhat ironic humour, it was appropriate to have some musical representation of his facility in this respect, with ample proof furnished by a performance of several pieces arranged for two violins and piano drawn from the composer’s various suites of “lighter” music for film and other “incidental music” activities. One of his composer-friends, Lev Atovmian, was frequently assigned by Shostakovich to produce arrangements from several of his stage and film scores, one of which was the collection Five Pieces for Two Violins and Piano. I must admit to enjoying looking further into the individual pieces’ genesis (at the risk of further elongating this review!) – the opening Prelude was from the 1955 film score The Gadfly, a mixture of tenderness and ebullience which the players designated with considerable relish. Then came the Gavotte, lovely and “bouncy”, from incidental music to The Human Comedy (1934), and followed by a poignant Elegy from the same work, a sequence originally titled The Panorama of Paris. The succeeding Waltz, supposedly from music for a cartoon film The Tale of the Priest and his servant Balda moved by turns through tense, insinuating and buoyant sequences involving a pompous priest, his beautiful daughter and a resourceful servant – however, the concluding Polka certainly added to its interest with further clarification as to the source –  taken from the Ballet The Limpid Stream, its full title was Dance of the Milkmaid and the Tractor Driver.  (Surely no commentator would pass on an opportunity for such a colourful mention!)

It almost goes without saying that violinists Peter Clark and Monique Lapins, together with pianist Gabriela Glapska, all readily brought out the fun, the quirkiness and the tongue-in-cheek sentimentality of these pieces, making the presentations as much fun to watch as to listen to. Other qualities far removed from such innocent enjoyments, and ironically involving two of the same performers here, then took over the final part of the programme. This marked the appearance of the “other” ensemble, the Ghost Trio, in which Monique Lapins and Gabriela Glapska were joined by ‘cellist Ken Ichinose for a performance of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Trio, one of the composer’s defining statements concerning, in Gabriela Glapska’s own moving notes about the music, “both intimate grief and the collective trauma of a war-torn nation”.

It was my privilege to have heard the same Ghost Trio play this work less than six weeks ago, at a concert at St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, to simply overwhelming effect on that occasion  – https://middle-c.org/2025/08/ghost-trios-st-andrews-concert-haunts-the-memory/ –  I don’t propose to try and describe the music all over again, merely to report on the effect I thought the work and its performance had on a different audience. When experiencing the work alongside other music by Shostakovich I felt it made a different kind of impact for me, its “shock effect”  no longer as marked, but when performed in the wake of something like the Quartet, having a deeper, more lasting sense of unease at the enormity and insidious  power of the forces that were obviously arrayed all about the composer’s world in order to keep in place a status quo of power and control – in this case characterised by fear and terror enacted upon any refusing to co-operate. I thought the St.Andrew’s acoustic more responsive to the music as well, where every sliver of impulse seemed to send shock waves in all directions – the ambiences of the Prefab Hall made, I thought, the work’s impact a tad more diffuse, though a second hearing can easily produce variants, musicians being human beings. Though, in short, less of a “knockout” performance for me this time round, the Trio further intensified my awe and respect for the composer in this music and for the people who put themselves “on the line” to bring these works off with such searing commitment!

As did the rest of the programme – a great success for all concerned!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beauty, grace, wit, adventure and excitement – the Aroha String Quartet and friends

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Aroha String Quartet and friends                                                                         Photo: Zhongxian Jin              Back row: Nick Walshe (clarinet), Justin Sun (bassoon), Alexander Hambleton (horn),  Oleksandr Gunchenko (double bass)
Front Row: Robert Ibell (‘cello), Haihong Liu (violin) Konstanze Artmann (violin), Zhongxian Jin (viola)

MOZART – String Quartet No.22 in B-flat K.589
NIELSEN – Serenata in Vano FS 68, for Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn, ‘Cello and Double-Bass
SCHUBERT – Octet in F Major D.803. for String Quartet, Clarinet, Bassoon, Horn and Double-Bass

The Aroha Quartet: Haihong Liu (leader) and Konstanze Artmann, violins,  Zhongxian Jin, viola, Robert Ibell, ‘cello
– with Nick Walshe, clarinet / Justin Sun, bassoon / Alexander Hambleton, horn / Oleksandr Gunchenko, double-bass

St.Peter’s Church, Willis St., Wellington
Sunday, 28th September, 2025

Is there a venue in Wellington for chamber music that surpasses in ambient warmth and atmosphere the gorgeously-appointed “St. Peter’s-on-Willis” (to use the name aligned with that long-given to the well-known “St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace” church in the same city)?  From the moment the players of the Aroha Quartet put their bows on the strings of their instruments to begin Mozart’s adorable String Quartet in B-flat K.589, I immediately felt I was being drawn into a kind of seventh-heaven of existential bliss, one which continued for me right through the work.

As much as it was the music itself, I was particularly taken with the sound-quality of both the individual strands and the concerted blends emanating from the players. Perhaps it was at least due in equal parts to a chemistry of delight in encountering a work by Mozart that I’d never before heard (yes, really! – for some reason all my attention had been “snaffled” by the composer’s string quintets up to this point in time!) – If this was indeed a baptism of sorts, it couldn’t have taken place in an environment more conducive to enchantment of the kind that overtakes its listeners in situ, and in most instances for some time afterwards.

The other two works of the programme generated delights of a different order – in the case of the Nielsen Serenade I had already made the acquaintance of the composer’s obvious delight in wind instruments through his wondrous Wind Quintet, a work replete with the energies, drolleries and wry acceptances of life that were  on show in the brief but totally engaging “Serenata in vano”. After this, nothing could have surpassed the “all brought together” perfection of the programme with Schubert’s chamber masterpiece, the mighty Octet, casting its spell over all and sundry.

It was the Mozart work which worked the first magic of the afternoon, however –  such effortless lyricism, and with so many beautiful exchanges generating what seemed like cascades of joyously lyrical enjoyment amongst those voices, all performed with the lightest and deftest of touches by the players. The pairings of violin and ‘cello, of viola and ‘cello and then of the two violins throughout the exposition brought near-endless delight, the plunge into the development section underlining the minor-key change of atmosphere and the recapitulation enriching the interactions with tendrils of phrasing shared between the instruments, the ‘cello often playing higher than the others and the viola getting significant “running” lines to emphasise the music’s “shared” character.

The larghetto slow movement began with the ‘cello taking the theme, sensitively voiced by Robert Ibell, and winsomely replied to by the first violinist Haihong Liu, though all the players had the chance to shine with individually elaborated series of alternated downward runs throughout the movement.  Again, the passagework was exquisitely decorated and interactive, a quality noticed by the publisher Artaria, who in 1791 referred to these particular works as “concertante quartets”).

Many commentators have remarked upon the Minuet and Trio as being the most vital and progressive part of the work – its “Moderato” marking gives the music room for a decorative aspect which the players here relished to the full, the Quartet leader Haihong Liu in particular exhibiting passages of exquisitely-finished fingerwork. The Trio seemed even more “possessed” by a faery spirit bent upon evoking mischievous endeavours, the players taken to extended realms by the music’s whims of fancy, with fingers, bowing arms and sensibilities all put through their paces!

A carefree spirit as well informed the finale’s 6/8 allegro assai, rather more in the typically Mozartean manner, though with a few twists and turns along the way, some stop-start  harmonic recalibrations, and a few manic trajectoried variants, just for the fun of doing encouraging players to do them! But I thought the nicest touch was at the end where the music shaped up to a conventional tonic/dominant couple of concluding chords, before completely disarming all expectations with a sudden, gently terra firma-engaging concluding phrase!  The general sigh of pleasure at that point, both inward and outward, was palpable!

What a treat to get a (for me!) hitherto unknown piece by the irrepressible Carl Nielsen! While not all of his music is “comfortable” to listen to (some works, like the Fifth Symphony and the Wind Quintet, are glorious, and others, such as the Clarinet Concerto, are just plain irascible!), this little “Serenata in Vano” quintet brings out what the composer’s great contemporary, Jean Sibelius, described in a posthumous tribute to Nielsen as having “head and heart….in the highest degree”. It’s the humanity of this droll portrait that one essentially responds to – that of a group of musicians attempting to serenade a lady, to “lure the fair one out onto the balcony” (in Nielsen’s own words), but without success! – (“in Vano” – in Vain!) – and their subsequent “Oh, well….” kind of reaction, in which they “shuffle off home” is a particularly treasurable moment! It’s worth noting that, included in the ensemble was Robert Ibell’s ‘cello and Aleksandr Gunchenko’s double-bass, each of whom still managed to vividly convey a sense of “to-ing and-fro-ing” despite their barely transportable instruments!

And so we came to the raison d’etre of the concert, Schubert’s justly-famous Octet, the St.Peter’s acoustic as readily amenable to the sounds as it had been to that of the string quartet’s glorious outpourings  I wondered, as the players took their places, whether the strings’ balance of texture in the whole might be affected for us by their facing sideways in the ensemble rather than outward, but the sound, from where I was sitting, seemed in accord with what one expected to hear – from my seat I couldn’t see either Konstanze Artmann’s violin or Zhongxian Jin’s viola being played, but I could hear and appreciate both of their contributions clearly.

Along with the thriil of that first, arresting chord is the great moment when the allegro begins with an upward-thrusting unison, one which really sets the adventure on its path. Tempi are swift, here, with that same “gossamer” effect in the playing I noticed in the Mozart, the work varying between these diaphanous interactions and powerful unison statements to hold the movement’s “thrust” together. The solos were invariably superbly-turned, with Haihong Liu’s violin and Nick Walshe’s clarinet centre-stage for much of the time (in the latter’s case unsurprisingly as it was a clarinettist, Count Ferdinand von Troyer, who commissioned the work and played in its first performance).

The voices took both their concerted and solo opportunities – there was a lovely becalmed “trio” effect from clarinet, bassoon and horn in tandem just before the movement’s recapitulation, and both Justin Sun’s bassoon and Zhongxian Jin’s viola were heard by turns relishing their advancement of the theme as the trajectories took up again and flowed swiftly onwards. Alexander Hambleton’s horn’s brief “bloop” at one point was worth the expression on the player’s face in the aftermath, especially in light of the terrific playing elsewhere, the same player, for example making much of the “hunting-call” theme in the affecting solo just before the movement’s conclusion.

Clarinet and violin acted as “empathetic companions”  for much of the slow movement, such as in a beautiful unison passage leading back to the main theme’s return, after which numerous other solo “turns” played their part in the movement’s beauty of utterance. And then, what a contrast with the ebullient Scherzo! – the players here relished the dynamic contrasts of the exchanges, and brought out the insouciant character of the “whistling tune”  to suitably carefree effect. delivered even more insouciantly, more characterfully carefree. I liked the Trio’s determinedly po-faced  response, Robert Ibell’s cello bringing out the quasi-academic lines with plenty of “keep up” nudgings and encouragings.

The Andante variation movement at first seemed like a series of charming interludes until Schubert suddenly took the music into unrelated, more stratospheric realms, courtesy of strings playing in their upper registers and the winds  floating their lines as if beholding hitherto undiscovered territories! – fascinating! The music seemed then to almost regretfully retreat from these hints of an Elysium somewhere above, lingering for a few seconds before settling back down to more earthy pleasures, with versions of scamperings, gurglings and gentle rumbustifications, ready for the Menuetto. Here, the players make it “swing” and dance in a properly homecoming kind of way (with a very “gemachlicht” kind of Trio to reinforce the mood!).

All the more extraordinary the finale’s opening, then, replete with disturbing tremolandi and baleful chords – so theatrical in effect, yet suggesting  a personal darkness that’s somehow escaped its composer’s inner realms and made its presence felt. It leaves the following Allegro by-and-large cheerful, but with moments of anxiety (manic triplet passages from both violin and clarinet here and later), and eventually drawing us back into proximity with the movement’s opening Void-like darkness, breaking through once again  thrown into prominence at the movement’s beginning. Schubert’s response is to give voice to words he himself had written in a letter, and finish the work with joyful energies, vibrantly expressed by this performance – “When I would sing of love it turned to pain. And again when I would sing of pain it turned to love.”