Category: Reviews – Concerts

Wolcum Yole! from the Tudor Consort

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BRITTEN – A Ceremony of Carols / A Boy Was Born

The Tudor Consort

Carolyn Mills (harp)

Choristers of St.Mark’s Church School

Michael Stewart, director

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Wellington

Saturday, 10th December 2011

This was the first of two concerts given by separate choirs in the capital on different days of the same weekend and in the same venue, both featuring the music of Benjamin Britten. If, after reading this, you’re confused, I confess that I myself had to re-type the sentence a number of times to “fine-tune” and get it right. Fortunately, I was scheduled to attend both events, thus avoiding the likelihood of my turning up at the “wrong one”. Advent is a season which constantly balances delight and confusion, during which anything like that can happen to anybody.

Though Britten’s works are well-known and highly regarded, for some concertgoers he’s still a bit of a tough nut to crack, very much a “twentieth-century” composer, whose music has that edge and astringency which takes listeners out of their comfort-zone. Yet once these characteristics are accepted, rather as one might get used to (and begin to make sense of) a regional accent or an idiosyncratic speech pattern, one begins then to listen past these things to the content of what’s being expressed. Even in the works he wrote for amateur performance he kept a contemporary edge to melodies, harmonies and textures, enough to challenge performers without making too difficult what they were attempting to realize.

Interestingly, though an English composer, much of Britten’s music sounds more “international” than that by nearly all of his contemporaries, the exception being the work of William Walton.  That’s not to say that his music doesn’t connect with his cultural roots – as well as being a devotee of the compositions of his great countryman, Henry Purcell,  Britten made many voice-settings of medieval and Renaissance English carols and folksongs (as with the two works in this concert), as well as of the verses of a wide range of English poets. But his compositional voice is very much his own, his origins and influences well integrated in an intensely “human” way of expressing emotion in sound.

This “human” attitude towards his art is summed up in his own words: “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain; of strength and freedom – the beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony”. That Britten as a composer “grew” these thoughts from seeds within his very being is borne out by the quality of some of the music he wrote when very young. The Tudor Consort’s recent Britten concert gave listeners the chance to hear a live performance of the most significant work from the composer’s teenaged years – this was a set of choral variations with the title, A Boy was Born.

The work shared the Tudor Consort’s program with the more popular, often-performed A Ceremony of Carols. Written for boys’ treble voices, the work can be successfully (if not quite so characterfully) performed, as here, by a women’s choir – in fact Britten at an early stage of writing the work was seriously considering using women’s voices, and even, at a later stage, a mixed choir. This was a wartime work, much of which was composed during a crossing of the North Atlantic by the composer and his partner Peter Pears, the pair on their way back to a war-torn Europe in 1942 – a salutary demonstration of the “inner life” of art and its creation, though there are parts of the work which do express tensions and struggle between the forces of good and evil, paralleled at that time by the military forces of the free world striving in accord against the perceived Fascist threat.

I had previously heard the “Carols” performed in the same venue by the women’s voices of the Nota Bene Choir – and, as here, with Carolyn Mills as a peerless harpist, once again providing an accompaniment and solo interlude whose character and beauty one could easily die for. Reading between the lines of a review of that concert I wrote in December 2008, I would hazard a guess that there were critical swings and roundabouts regarding the singing in both older and newer performances – Nota Bene’s voices might have sounded a shade less refined in places than did the Tudor Consort’s, but the former may well have brought a bit more vocal “schwung” to appropriate places here and there (an instance being the last “Wolcum!” of the “Wolcum Yole!” opening carol, the earlier performance just that bit more lusty an exclamation of joy).

In places, especially when singing softly, the purity and refinement of the Tudor Consort did have a treble-like quality, which was most appealing. Michael Stewart’s direction brought out a wealth of detail, very “terraced” dynamics in “There is no Rose”, a lovely passage in octaves, and most characterful playing from Carolyn Mills. The solo singing, too, was wrought of magic in places, alto Andrea Cochrane’s beautiful, rock-steady purity  for “That Yongë Child” counterweighted by Anna Sedcole’s silvery soprano line in the following “Balulalow”. Britten’s biographer Humphrey Carter once described “This Little Babe” as having all the exuberance and muscularity of a good pillow-fight, an image I confess I couldn’t quite equate with the group’s poised dignity, even when their vocal energies joined in the fray with pin-pricking accuracy against Satan’s fold on the side of Christ and the Angels.

One of the most difficult of the carols to bring off, in a sense, is “In freezing Winter Night”, the piteous words a corrective to the homely kitsch of many of our popular examples of the genre. The music brings to mind T.S.Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” – “…the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter….” but such is the anguish of the music’s stark, uncompromising lines, one imagines Britten might also have in part been paying a tribute to the poet, Robert Southwell, a Jesuit priest brutally martyred in England during the reign of Elizabeth I.  This “dark centre” of the cycle properly chilled our sensibilities in this performance, soprano Anna Edgington surviving a moment of slight unsteadiness early on to deliver a beautifully soaring strand of tone, seconded by Megan Hurnard’s truly-placed alto. The latter also partnered soprano Erin King in a gracefully-wrought “Spring Carol” which followed, voices and harp providing a sunlit, heartwarming counterweight to the previous carol’s austerities.

The performers then took to the concluding “Deo Gracias” carol joyously and energetically, Michael Stewart encouraging both voices and harp to hurl their sounds up into and throughout the cathedral ambiences with infectious gusto. Had the choir, at this point, then done what Nota Bene did a few years ago, which was to gradually exit the nave completely, while singing the Recessional hymn “Hodie Christis natus est”, my delight would have resounded in the memory, like the voices’ departing echoes, to this moment. Alas, as with the opening “Processional” the Consort chose not to employ the extra distancing the church’s foyer would have given, and so we were, I felt, deprived in both instances of that true frisson of arrival and departure from and to “other realms”. My rapture was thus modified at the time, but fortunately the beauty and presence of the group’s singing made a more lasting impression.

Happily, no such qualification hindered in any way my delight at the Consort’s performance of the evening’s second work – A Boy was Born, first performed in 1934, and the nineteen year-old Britten’s most accomplished composition up to that time. Though, like the “Carols”, the work contains a number of settings of medieval poems and carols, alongside verses by two later poets, the writing here is far more virtuosic and demanding for singers. Britten in fact added an optional organ part a number of years afterwards, undoubtedly prompted by the difficulties groups had experienced in performance up to that time. Still, right from the beginning, and throughout the opening, Michael Stewart got from his voices such exquisite liquidity of tone and subtle gradations of colour, all seemed well for what was to follow.

Joining the Consort were a number of boy choristers from St.Mark’s Church School, whose ethereal voices set  one’s scalp a-tingling with their contributions to episodes such as “Lullay, Jesu”, “In the Bleak Midwinter” and the “Noel! Wassail!” finale. And the solo treble part in the serenely meditative “Jesu, as Thou art our Saviour” was beautifully sung by Shashwath Joji, except that the final, scarily stratospheric ascent was entrusted, most convincingly, to soprano Anna Sedcole. Throughout the final “Noel! Wassail!” section, the boys’ voices were also given extra, albeit unobtrusive, support by Melanie Newfield’s pure soprano, with pleasing, clearly-defined results.

In its command of detail coupled with a consistently-applied strength of purpose, the Consort’s performance was, I thought, a pretty stunning achievement.  Michael Stewart again and again drew from the group expressive moments, episodes and whole worlds which transcended time and place, from the hypnotic murmurings of “snow on snow on snow” in the setting of Christina Rosetti’s famous poem, to the energetic background roisterings of sixteenth-century poet Thomas Tusser’s “Get ivy and Hull, woman, deck up thine house” amid accompanying detailing suggesting joyous seasonal outpourings. It would, in fact, take a response beyond the scope of this review to do full justice to everything the Consort achieved with this music.

So, in conclusion a mere couple of impressions of things from A Boy was Born that have continued to play in my head since the concert – one of them being the group’s breathtaking terracings of trajectory and tone in “The Three Kings”. I loved those ethereal voices of wonderment floating over the lustier-voiced hill-and-dale travellers, relishing their coming-together in great washes of sound at “Gold, Incense and Myrrah-a”, before the sounds departed with the Kings, just as magically and mysteriously. Then, following on, came the contrasted austerities of “In the Bleak Mid-Winter”, with those boys and soprano voices singing their lament of loss against the patient murmurings of the falling snow, an exquisitely-etched moment. Finally there was  the volatile excitement of the Consort’s concluding “Noel! Wassail!”, which left we listeners at once both breathless and energized. And I was pleased the voices proceeded to make nonsense of my earlier assertions regarding a so-called lack of exuberance in the singing – here, the near-orgiastic abandonment of the “Welcome Yule” left our ears appropriately resounding with musical goodwill, which, at the end we took back to our lives to share with others, enriched by both music and its performance beyond measure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fine violin and piano recital, of variable music, as final 2011 offering from School of Music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Beethoven: Violin Sonata in G, Op 30 No 3; Martin Bresnick: Bird as Prophet for violin and piano; Messiaen: Theme and Variations for violin and piano; Schumann: Violin Sonata No 2 in D minor, Op 121

Sarita Kwok (violin) and Jian Liu (piano)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University

Friday 9 December, 7.30pm

This was the last concert presented by the New Zealand School of Music in 2011. Stephen Gibbs, who has taken over as ‘marketing and events coordinator’, and done it with spectacular success, told us that it was the 281st (or near enough to it) event open to the public this year. That includes formal concerts,  as well as master classes, student recitals, composer workshops and so on, at venues both in the two universities that jointly created the school, and in the city and the wider metropolitan area. Even though the school seems not to be performing as it might in certain areas, the arrival of distinguished new faculty members this year, together with Gibbs, augurs well, and the singular visibility that has been achieved this year in concerts and recitals, many free or at modest prices, greatly enriches our musical life.

Sarita Kwok has been a guest artist in the school in the last term; she is from Australia but did post-graduate work at Yale University where she now teaches. Her performance career has taken her round the world as concerto soloist and chamber musician. Clearly she was here through a connection with the Head of Piano Studies, Jian Liu, who also worked  at Yale.

The collaboration between the two was evidence of their having played together a good deal as well as having acquired approaches to music that were complementary. That is, in the pains taken with detail, a delicacy in handling dynamics as well as a robust, extrovert manner in the Beethoven sonata. That was evident in the emphatic, tumbling motif dominated by the piano at the start of the first movement. But there was no question of one instrument in charge; both played equally important roles as Beethoven wanted, neither merely accompanying. I felt that the dynamic variety and suppleness was never merely to offer entertaining variety, but was driven by the inner emotion of the music.

They revealed in the second movement the impression of very long and careful study, creating from a mere dance-inspired piece, a movement of great interest; the pianist, in particular invested his part with turns of phrase that added real illumination.

The rippling piano part of the final Allegro vivace seemed written for Jian Liu, so fluently did he handle it; and the violin matched him in the fast, flighty melody that leads the way. They grabbed attention by slightly prolonging the pause before the surprising modulation that precedes the coda, which brought it quickly to its end.

Martin Bresnick is professor of composition at Yale, and thus a colleague of the two musicians. Bird as Prophet is the last of twelve pieces entitled Opere della Musica Povera (‘Works of a Poor Music’). The title refers to Schumann’s well-known piano piece from the Waldszenen. Though there was some use of microtones in the early stages, otherwise there was little departure from a broadly tonal palette; it suggests the bird by means of abstract musical patterns, in rhythms that were hard to keep track of but which made sense (there is also some reference to jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, who was known as Bird, and referred to by, among others, clarinetist Tony Scott as his prophet).

I felt that some of the significance of the piece eluded me, as its non-musical landscape tended to interfere with my hearing it simply as a musical creation; nevertheless, its inventiveness held my attention and its performance did it justice,

Though I did not know the piece by Messiaen, it had at least the advantage of a familiar name; it was a wedding present for his first wife. The opening melody was unmistakably Messiaen, with his characteristic harmonies, and though I could understand why it had not attained the fame of some of the composer’s other music, its framework, in variation form, lent it a shape and a variety of moods and tempi that maintained interest. The third (I think) variation, with staccato piano under a lyrical violin part, seemed to be the emotional centre, though the next variation, with strong hints of the last movement of The Quartet for the End of Time (‘Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus’) was a comforting association; the variations subside in a peaceful resolution. The rendering of this too was a gift from these two gifted, subtle and extrovert players.

Finally, Schumann’s Second Violin Sonata. He wrote three of them after 1851, five years before his death, when his musical gifts had generally declined. I know the first sonata quite well but not this or the third, and have to confess to finding this, in spite of its admirably committed performance, a thing of striving after inspiration that almost constantly eludes the composer. Schumann wrote about this work: “I did not like the first Sonata for Violin and Piano; so I wrote a second one, which I hope has turned out better”. I’m not too sure….

It can be admired from a formal point of view – its calm but arresting introduction moving to a lively Allegro (Schumann uses German tempo markings – Lebhaft) is promising enough but one waits in vain for a memorable tune to sustain the movement. All there is is rhetoric and ritual passage-work. A tune worthy of the name (of slightly Scottish flavour) finally arrives with the third, slow movement (Leise, einfach, or I suppose, ‘tranquillo, semplice’), and Kwok and Liu played it with fine elegiac warmth. The finale seems to search for a memorable theme, or two; but all Schumann finds are somewhat arid motifs; consequently it outlasts its material, and the end, in spite of the most warm-hearted efforts by the players, seems a very long time coming. And I am a true member of Schumann’s  Davidsbündler.

However, it is perhaps not fair to compare every composition that just misses an ‘excellent’ grade, to the few real masterpieces. Who actually wrote a better one through the four decades of the mid 19th century? Beethoven’s last was in 1809; Mendelssohn also missed the mark with his violin sonatas; Spohr, a violin virtuoso, left none; there’s one listed, of 1845, by Vieuxtemps, that I don’t know; Carl Rheincke wrote one about 1848; Brahms’s first was not till 1879; but Grieg’s attractive ones were written in the 1860s; Fauré’s, 1875; Saint-Saëns, 1885 and Franck’s not till 1886. In that context, Schumann’s sonatas don’t look so bad.

Considering the stature of these two musicians, and the insights they offered in all four works played, the audience at this free concert was disappointingly small.

 

Classical guitar lecturer gives fine, varied recital at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Music by Barrios, Vivaldi, Ian Krouse and Walton

Jane Curry – classical guitar

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 7 December, 12.15pm

Jane Curry joined the faculty of the New Zealand School of Music at the beginning of 2011; although she’s given public recitals before this was my introduction to her playing.

I was a minute late and she was part-way through Caazapa by famous Paraguayan composer/guitarist Augustine Barrios; the sounds she was producing were limpid, relaxed , with an air of improvisation that spoke of her confidence and thorough command of the music. Her second piece was called Maxixe, faster, fluent, again with a relaxed manner that produced the most natural dynamic and rhythmic subtleties.

Jane’s biographical note in the programme didn’t tell me of her New Zealand background, but the school’s website did. She’s been very peripatetic: a B.A. from Waikato University, a B.Mus. from Massey followed by an honours degree at Auckland University. Then, following work at both the Royal College of Music in London and the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, she went to study with Scott Tennant at the University of Southern California. She then took a master’s degree and a doctorate from the University of Arizona. (What an amazing contrast with the normal qualifications of university teachers in my day when a master’s with first class honours, and an occasional doctorate, from rarely more than two different universities, usually afforded plentiful depth as well as breadth of learning and skills, in the days when the emphasis was teaching rather than today’s obsession with ‘research’).

Her CV also mentions theatre studies and an interest in ‘collaborative and cross-disciplinary work in musicology and ethnomusicology’, with focus on the music of the Balkans. It will be interesting to watch her impact in those areas, already well developed, at the New Zealand School of Music.

Jane Curry’s second piece was an arrangement by David Russell of Vivaldi’s 6th cello sonata, in B flat (RV 46). (I think she remarked that it was transposed). Russell, with whom she worked in Arizona, has published a CD of his recordings of his arrangements for guitar of a number of keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, ones by Handel and Loeillet, plus this one.  The opening Largo was gracious and unhurried, as she relished the pensive, cantabile melody that transferred very comfortably to the guitar. If the technical challenges were not overwhelming in that, they emerged more dramatically in the Allegro, showing that the writing lies no more easily with the guitar than it would with the cello, especially as the arrangement involved carrying the essentials of the continuo part, often played by a second cello, by means of a left hand whose agile fingering involved the most astonishing contortions. Here Curry demonstrated a range of nuances that were no less beguiling than a cello would have done. The third movement was another Largo in which the rhythm suggested careful picking one’s way across stepping stones in a stream; what variety of harmony and dynamics are available to a skilled guitarist!

Curry expressed her admiration for composer Ian Krouse with whom she worked in Los Angeles. His interest in Balkan music yielded his Variations on a Moldavian Hora (a word cognate with the Greek ‘Choros’ from which ‘choreography’ is derived). The piece involved, to start, sounds emanating from the extremes of the guitar’s range, sometimes provocative, sometimes seeming to resolve. But the technical difficulties soon faded from view – for the listener at least – as Curry’s handling of the dancing theme emerged so musically. I’m sure it was one of those pieces in which the overcoming of difficulties was continuously accompanied by real musical rewards.

Finally Curry played four of Walton’s five Bagatelles. The first is a hypnotic riot of virtuosity which seems to demand the most awkward-looking, fast and tortuous fingering, which produced racing and irregular phrases. The second piece, Lento, limited in its expressive range and musical material, seemed to convey a suppressed unease, or at least an absence of overt emotion.

Alla Cubana is perhaps the most lyrical of the Bagatelles; it begins and remains for the most part on the lower strings, soon developing a Caribbean character, with only a rare leap up the E string. The last, Con Slancio, expresses a nervous, distinctly Latin flavoured quality, short-winded and quite pithy, but she infused it with spirit and energy that brought the recital to a close in a confident temper.

The School of Music is fortunate to have secured such an accomplished performer and so versatile a musician to teach guitar after the departure of Matthew Marshall.

 

Accomplished playing from Wellington Chamber Orchestra

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lilburn: Drysdale Overture; Mozart: Violin Concerto No 5 in A, K 219; Warlock: Capriol Suite; Gounod: Petite symphonie for winds; Bizet: Carmen Suite No 1

Wellington Chamber Orchestra conducted by Michael Joel with Anna van der Zee (violin); leader Paula Carryer

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 4 December, 2.30pm

Michael Joel is a major conductor in the New Zealand orchestral, choral and opera scene, particularly in Christchurch which is where I guess I first encountered him, conducting for Canterbury Opera’s Lakmé, La Traviata and Rossini’s Le comte Ory. He has conducted the Wellington Chamber Orchestra at least once before.

Though I should be reluctant to ascribe all the credit for the impressive performances in this concert to him – for the orchestra is a very different body today from what it was a decade ago – his painstaking work was surely very important in the striking results achieved this afternoon.

Oddly enough, it was the first piece on the programme, Lilburn’s Drysdale Overture, in which the sound needed more control; it’s scored for large symphony orchestra and some of the difficulty lay in achieving balance between brass and the other sections. It was more a problem inherent in the acoustics of the church which always present problems for large instrumental ensembles and specifically for timpani and brass.

The opening chord of the overture was intentionally arresting, but it was also unduly shrill and uncomfortable. Dynamic levels continued to be a bit high, until the calmer middle section which came as a relief, with strings and woodwinds playing sensitively. I always imagine the piece as depicting a pastoral landscape, but I found myself wondering whether Joel sought to offer a tough and somewhat more brutal view of hill-country farming than is usual. Lilburn was a gifted orchestrater but perhaps in this youthful work his facility carried him away.

The Mozart concerto is music better adapted to the size of the church, and orchestrally there was much to admire. After the orchestral introduction which signalled a keen feeling for the moderate scale of the music and the way it can be accommodated in the space, soloist, Anna van der Zee, who plays with the NZSO, opened quietly, allowing the character of her instrument to express itself warmly. Her playing might have benefited from a more relaxed approach to the pace which didn’t always allow it to breathe a little more freely between phrases.  A fairly slow pace in the Adagio seemed to expose the orchestra uncomfortably, but the Finale produced a warm and relaxed quality; the Turkish aspects suggested a somewhat sinister character. The care taken with the structure of the concerto  was well exemplified through the undulations in dynamics and the telling pause before the recapitulation toward the end.

Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite seems to be the quintessentially amateur piece; yet it’s by no means easily realized by other than reasonably polished and careful performers. Ensemble was markedly good in the Pavane and I admired the pizzicato in the third movement. What it did, more than in the Mozart, was to demonstrate how much more the acoustic suits a purely string ensemble.

I had to revise that thought however with the charming performance of Gounod’s wind nonette, which he called a petite symphonie, modeled, not on Spohr’s famous nonette which is for a combination of strings and winds, but rather on the wind ensembles for seven or eight instruments by Mozart, Beethoven or Krommer. The first movement reminded me of the delightful Provençal-influenced music Gounod had written for Mireille, and the next movement’s aria-like tune reinforced the spirit of Gounod the opera composer; flute and oboe played beautifully. The excellent ensemble did justice to the lovely harmonies of the Finale.

The suite from Carmen had me further revising my thoughts about the impact of brass and of the generally boisterous playing of this music in the church. Scored for a full orchestra, there were very few moments when the volume was excessive, though the timpani was emphatic enough in the Prelude. There were numerous displays of fine playing by individual woodwind instruments; dynamic undulations and generally careful balance and ensemble kept this popular suite from sounding hackneyed, as the rather splendid brass contributions brought it to an end with the  toreador’s song.

A particularly charming lunchtime concert at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Nikau Trio – Karen Batten (flute), Madeline Sakofsky (oboe), Jane Young (cello)

Serenade IV in B flat, K 439b (Mozart); Trio Sonata in C minor (Telemann); Chrzaszcz (‘Grasshopper’) (G Waterhouse); Trio in C, Op 87 (Beethoven)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 30 November, 12.15pm

Not a lot of composers have written music specifically for the combination of flute, oboe and cello; however, any composers present at this concert might have been prompted to do so both on account of the intrinsic attractiveness of the sound blend, and the charming case these three players made for the four pieces they played.

They began with a to-me-unknown serenade by Mozart: K 439b, listed as Serenade IV: that means No 4 in the group of five serenades or divertimenti (25 ‘divertimenti’ in all) that carry the catalogue number K 439b (K.Anh.229 in the fairly definitive 6th edition of the Köchel Catalogue). It gets more complicated…

Naturally, you will find a great deal of interesting, if not altogether straight-forward scholarly information on the famous  catalogue through Google and Wikipedia.

The five serenades are scored for various instruments; this one appears to be scored for three basset-horns or two clarinets and basset-horn.  So what we heard evaded the sounds that Mozart had very emphatically in his mind – that of the clarinet and its bass cousin the basset horn. The introductory rising, unison triad would have sounded more convincing played by three identical instruments; the effect from instruments of very different timbres was, to say the least, strange, something that I doubt Mozart would have written.

However, sources reveal arrangements for a wide variety of instruments – almost all winds – including clarinet, oboe, cor anglais, French horn, bassoon, and including a piano.

In general, however, the five brief movements, most based on one theme, were charming though slight. In this scoring, it seemed easier to hear them as mere background music for a vivacious social event. The players established straight away their facility and their comfort in the salon style of music Mozart wrote here.

However, I felt that this piece proved the most problematic in terms of persuasive, idiomatic sound. In contrast, the Telemann trio launched itself with an air of some consequence, written of course when the baroque style was still dominant; it bore the marks of contrapuntal mastery and steady attention to the role of each instrument, bearing mind players and perhaps audience of some musical sophistication as compared with the perhaps less attentive and well-schooled listeners to Mozart’s piece.

It really is a revelation to encounter from Telemann music that shows both such compositional skill and inventiveness, as well a such charm. Each instrument seemed to have music that revealed its best characteristics, the cello in the first movement, the oboes at the opening of the third, a thoughtful Andante, and a lively flute opening of the final Allegro, which employed an adroit though unostentatious fugue.

The third piece was by a Munich-based English composer, Graham Waterhouse (born 1962). His piece had a fine Polish name of nine letters with only one vowel: Chrzaszcz. (Isn’t it interesting to contemplate how much more economically this word would appear in Russian – Хжaщ.  Cyrillic script provides single letters for most sounds that demand two or more letters in Polish and in English and other languages that used the Roman alphabet).

Written in 1984, it was quite short, pithy and its motifs and rhythms offered sufficient justification of its title that means ‘grasshopper’; but its main stylistic origin sounded neither English, nor German, nor Polish – but French, of the Poulenc or Françaix flavour. The players were clearly entertained by it and gave a lively, colourful performance.

Though it carries a fairly late opus number which would suggest around 1810, the Trio, Op 87 was probably written in 1794, shortly after Beethoven’s arrival in Vienna. Hardly a profound work of course, but among its strengths was the fact that, though originally for two oboes and cor anglais, its arrangements seem not to detract from its musical value; rather, as in this case, it seems always appropriate, as the music’s quality is proof against any maltreatment; an arrangement can even enhance its attractiveness and character.  That seemed particularly the case with the cello, whose voice was hardly represented in the original score.  These players seemed to relish the opportunities offered by their individual parts, as well as responding collegially to blending of their parts.

Though the first movement was quite long, its material supported it without a hint of empty note-spinning. Unlike much music of the classical or galant era, no movement seemed without substance: an Adagio that may not have been profound but reflected the thoughts of a serious-minded composer; a minuet that didn’t avoid the routine form, but already revealed an originality and intelligence. In the Finale the cello’s role provided colour and a lyrical quality that might not have been common in such pieces at that time (apart from Haydn and Mozart). It is a highly diverting piece whose individuality the players relished and which brought a delightful recital to a lively end.

‘Make sure your cellophonia are ON’: memorable injunction from the School of Music

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

‘Cellophononia’

Music written or arranged for cello ensemble, by Corelli, Villa-Lobos, de Falla, Klengel, Popper and Bach (arrangements by Claude Kenneson)

Cello Ensemble Concert in association with New Zealand School of Music

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University of Wellington

Sunday, 27 November 2011

What a treat!  Eight cellists from the New Zealand School of Music, NZ Trio, New Zealand String Quartet, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Vector Wellington Orchestra and Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (their new principal, Eliah Sakakushev) formed the backbone of ‘Cellophonia’. They performed with 14 others joining later in the concert, from various other ensembles and none.

It was a mystery as to why this concert was free.  Surely most people in the audience could afford at least a koha, which could have gone towards teaching music to young people, including those in underprivileged situations.  An increasing amount of music teaching is going on in such circumstances; some money from this source would have been a great fillip to them.

The usual request to ensure that cellphones were off seemed to be particularly relevant this time.  But this playing had no extraneous sounds, and was utterly transparent in character.

First up was Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in G minor, Op.6, no.8 the ‘Christmas Concerto’, with 8 cellists (Ashley Brown, Rolf Gjelsten, Andrew Joyce, Inbal Megiddo, Annemarie Meijers, Sally Pollard, Rowan Prior and Eliah Sakasushev).  The music did sound a little strange, with the mainly lower-pitched sonorities – and it can’t be said that intonation was perfect.  The lack of variety of timbre made this familiar music less than appealing to me; it was gravelly (and grovelly), despite some fine playing, and appropriate tempi and dynamics.

The later sections had more movement and were lighter in quality, with Andrew Joyce (who led) playing at a higher register.  The playing of Joyce and Megiddo was particularly effective.  The final Pastorale was characterised by sonorous contemplation that was most satisfying.

It was followed by Mahler’s dreamy Adagietto from his Symphony no.5.  This time the leader was Ashley Brown, and an additional cellist (Jane Young) took part.  The piece worked very well; the harp of the original was rendered on plucked strings, and the whole maintained its nostalgic, elegiac quality.   Being Romantic music rather than baroque, it worked much better for this combination.  Ashley Brown’s solo part was very beautifully played, if a little metallic in the upper register.  Mahler’s seductive melody and harmony could not fail to play upon the heart-strings.

The arrangements of this and the Corelli were by Claude Kenneson, about whom I could learn nothing from Grove, and the printed programme was silent about him.  However, Google led me to some information about this Canadian (American-born) cellist, born in 1935, and his long period of teaching at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where the New Zealand String Quartet has been resident.

Now for a work actually written for 8 cellos: Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras no.1.  The popular series of 9 pieces is most well-known for no.5, the one with voice.  As Grove says “…he wrote polyphonies for groups of cellos and obtained, from an extended range, resources of an almost orchestral richness.”  This time the group was led by Rolf Gjelsten.  (The complex rearrangement of the players between items, particularly in the second half, reminded me of a skilled marching team in action.)  He played the gorgeous melody in the Preludio with warmth and mellifluous tone.

The rich sound from all the performers blocked out the howling of the wind outside.  Villa-Lobos’s music transported me to another world, through the incessant rhythm of the  Introduction, and the thrilling timbres achieved by the players.   For the Fugue, Gjelsten swopped with Andrew Joyce; mostly there were duos of cellos to each part.  It was a lightly rhythmic fugue à la Bach, with a modern twist and complex writing.  The fact that the piece was written for this instrumentation certainly showed.

On now to Spain: the Suite Populaire Espagnole by Manuel de Falla, again arranged by Claude Kenneson.  Originally a work for voice and piano (Keith Lewis has recorded it with Michael Houstoun), it translated well to the medium of 8 cellos.  In the first movement, ‘El Paño moruno’, Andrew Joyce played very high on the finger-board; the melody sounded most sonorously, despite the carpeted floor.  His superb playing demonstrated the great versatility of the cello.

A quiet ‘Asturiana’ followed, with Rolf Gjelsten taking the solo.  A quiet, sultry atmosphere was created.  The next, ‘Jota’, incorporated delightful dance rhythms, using spiccato technique, and a solo from Ashley Brown.  However, I missed castanets.  The ‘Nana’ movement had all the players using pizzicato except the solo from Eliah Sakakushev, with Inbal Meggidu bowing a bass drone.  She performed the soulful and beautiful solo in ‘Canción’, with an accompaniment that could have done with some different timbres.

The final ‘Polo’ was stirring stuff, again with Inbal Megiddo as soloist.

Now to a work for twelve cellos – but played here by 23.  Hymnus was composed by Julius Klengel, a German cellist and composer for that instrument, who died in 1933.

The opening of his piece was conducted by Andrew Joyce, but after that, everyone was on their own.  Not all the cellists were playing for much of the piece.  The melody was taken first by Ashley Brown, then Andrew Joyce joined in at a higher register, and others followed in this soporific but beautifully romantic piece.

David Popper was an Austrian cellist and composer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with many compositions to his name, including much for his own instrument.  Again, there was a big, lush sound in his Requiem Adagio for 3 cellos and piano (add 20 to that).   There was a wonderfully wide dynamic range, and great cohesion and rhythm in this slow and soulful piece.  With this performance, it was hard to see how it could all be played on just 3 cellos.   While Jian Liu could not readily be seen by most of the audience, his sensitive and musical support and clarity in the effervescent piano part were readily heard.

The fact that the Corelli did not really come off led one to expect the same of the Bach; this could not be further from the truth.  After yet another complicated change of positions, all 23 played again, without conductor in a very effective performance of Brandenburg Concerto no.3 in G major, BWV 1048.

After the delightful Allegro came the Adagio with Inbal Megiddo as soloist.  She played with great style and tonal variety, and with Gjelsten and Brown in the last movement, ending with her playing solo again.

The concert attracted a full house – but a good deal of the downstairs area usually used for audience seating was taken up by cellists, leaving only two rows of chairs, instead of the usual four or five.

The programme could be called experimental, but on the whole the items worked superbly well.  Full marks to the musicians, and also to Claude Kenneson, who arranged most of the pieces.  All the cellists made a fine sound, and the effect of their combined forces was exotic, lush, and thoroughly enjoyable.

 

The Bach Choir – Where would we be without Messiah?

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HANDEL – Messiah

Amelia Ryman (soprano) / Megan Hurnard (contralto) / Thomas Atkins (tenor)

David Morriss (bass)

The Chiesa Ensemble (Leader: Rebecca Struthers)

Douglas Mews – Continuo

The Bach Choir of Wellington

Stephen Rowley (conductor)

Sacred Heart Cathedral, Wellington

Sunday 27th November 2011

Though associated by dint of its “Birth of Christ” references with Christmastime, Messiah has as many affinities with the other “big” Christian event of the Liturgical year, which is, of course, Easter. Conductor Stephen Rowley seemed to emphasize the latter connection at the very beginning of the work in the Bach Choir of Wellington’s recent performance. In fact, it could have been that “High Priest of the German classics” Otto Klemperer conducting, so solemn, grand and slow were those chords at the opening of the overture, though the succeeding Allegro was sprightly enough, with perhaps just a touch of heaviness here and there. It wasn’t a performance for “authenticists” – too full-toned, with an almost romantic sensibility about the music’s expressive unfolding (but in a more cosmic sense, its unique delivery very much in a spontaneously “baroque” tradition).

Having admired and enjoyed the Chiesa Ensemble’s playing on many past occasions, I was a little surprised at the number of noticeable instrumental spills I noticed along the way (insufficient rehearsal, perhaps?) – ensemble awry at the beginning of  the recitative “For Behold…” and again with the soprano in her recitative “And suddenly…..”  – as well as some ragged playing in “Since Man came by Death”. Against these moments were some magnificently buoyant and pin-precise episodes, great support for the choir in “For Unto Us a Child is Born”, as indeed there was throughout all the choruses, another highlight being “And With His stripes” where both singing and playing was excitingly vigorous and secure.

Certainly those big moments, where one wants the utmost glory and majesty, were brought off thrillingly – I actually couldn’t see whether it was Mark Carter or Tom Moyer playing the solo in “The Trumpet Shall Sound” so beautifully, but both gave their all during the final choruses, amply supported by Larry Reese’s scalp-tingling timpani-playing, and full-toned outpourings from strings, winds and continuo.

The Choir itself, somewhat compromised by the imbalance of women’s against men’s voices (an all-too common phenomenon among choral groups these days), performed honestly and reliably throughout, here and there actually touching realms of true sublimity. There were instances where those middle and lower voices were overpowered by the higher ones – though in live performances it’s amazing what the “eye” can imagine the “ear” is actually hearing, especially if one knows the music well. Thus a chorus like “And He shall purify” featured a more-than-usually gleaming soprano line, though one could sense the effort of projection on the part of the other strands, coming together splendidly at the words “That they may offer unto the Lord”.

I liked conductor Stephen Rowley’s emphasizing of some of the choruses’ expressive gestures – the chorus ‘HIs yoke is easy” was nicely modulated throughout, with the dynamics well-controlled, and the tones of the voices on the last word “light” nicely softened into a diminuendo. And the voices’ emphasizing of the word “Death” in “Since Man came by Death” made for a dramatic, breath-catching moment. The Choir also sustained splendidly the long lines of “Behold the Lamb of God” at the words “taken away”. In short, splendid moments, these and others, transcending the difficulties, also occasionally apparent, of the group’s varying strength in different sections.

Of the soloists tenor Thomas Atkins was the first to impress with a thrilling “Comfort Ye”, the recitative properly declamatory and prophet-like, and the aria “Ev’ry valley” joyously energetic (and supported by some lovely string-playing). Also, he made something distinctive, I thought, of his sequence beginning “All they that see Him laugh Him to scorn”, the singing powerful and sonorous, as it was through “Thy rebuke hath broken His heart” . I must confess to wondering, throughout the first half, whether the microphone in the church’s pulpit (from where each of the soloists sang) had been left switched “on” as the voice-tones seemed to have for a while a somewhat augmented and “directional” resonance – but I never got to the bottom of the mystery, except that throughout the second half the voices seemed to my ears more naturally projected.

Contralto Megan Hurnard gave reliable, centered renditions of her solos, the voice gravely beautiful throughout her centerpiece “He was despised”, even if some of the words sounded a shade inert, needing more emphasis in order to make them live and breathe. I thought, for example, that during “He gave his back” the singer could have risked a little roughness of tone to get something of the sting of words like “smiters”, and even “spitting” across to us.

Bass David Morriss gave us something of that vocal energy, interestingly poetic-sounding and beautiful where I expected him to be darker and more sepulchral in “For behold, darkness shall cover the earth”. But he nicely “grew” the phrase “……have seen a great light” with an unerring sense of what the music ought to be doing, as with the more hushed tones of “And they that dwell”. The dramatic “Why do the nations” went splendidly also, with the figurations generating plenty of agitated bluster; and perhaps the brief moment that went awry in “The kings of the earth rise up” was due to the same unaccustomed “lurch” we all felt, of tumbling straight afterwards into the “Halleluiah” Chorus (one gets so used to another chorus “Let us break their bonds” coming beforehand – we were, in fact, so caught up by surprise that nobody on this occasion stood up!).  As for “The trumpet shall sound”, the introduction was full of expectancy and growing excitement, and, one or two “ensemble” moments notwithstanding, the interchanges between singer and trumpet-player were nimble and enlivening.

I enjoyed soprano Amelia Ryman’s bright, silvery tones throughout, celestial and sparkling at “And lo, the angel of the Lord”, and surviving some out-of-sync moments with the orchestra at “And suddenly there was” (the string players making amends with some beautifully hushed work at the end). The spirited, but difficult “Rejoice greatly” was negotiated confidently and securely (breathing an issue in places, here, with such long and florid vocal runs). And her entry during”He shall feed His flock” was a highlight, like an unveiling, an irradiating of the musical textures. Of course, the soprano’s big moment is “I know that my Redeemer liveth” – and we got a heartfelt rendition balancing poise with impulsiveness in places, which I liked – one sensed the words here really meant something, such as at “And though worms destroy this body”. A lovely ascent at “For now is Christ risen” capped off a pleasingly-wrought performance.

I’m sure many people feel as I do, that the year’s concert-going wouldn’t be complete without hearing a live performance of Messiah. By dint of the various performing editions and the possible combinations arising from these, let alone the difference between singers, instrumentalists and conductors, the work for me invariably emerges newly-minted from each encounter. My preference (not necessarily with all works, but this is one of them) would be to hear a performance in the evening – for me there’s always been something about the interaction of music performance and darkness that creates extra frisson (but I am having therapy!). Seriously, I thought this was a presentation with its own distinctions and set of ambiences, one which contained some excellent performances, and which readily conveyed to us the work’s on-going greatness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NZSM Piano Trio give superb concert of major works

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Piano Trios by Beethoven (Op 70 No 1); Mendelssohn (Op 49); Dvořák (Op 65)

New Zealand School of Music Piano Trio (Martin Riseley, Inbal Megiddo, Jian Liu)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University

Thursday 24 November, 7.30pm

I was struck by the use of the word ‘irritability’ in Martin Riseley’s notes about Beethoven’s ‘Ghost’ Trio. I have no idea whether the word has been applied before by others, but it opened a different response for me; one that I found made me listen to it rather afresh.

That might be an initial feeling in the opening phase of the first movement, but it’s quickly replaced by a more positive emotion.  I do not usually find myself remarking much on the performances of individuals in chamber music ensembles; since the end of the eighteenth century the raison d’être of chamber music has been a collaboration between players, and I would rather promote that than encourage audiences to seek stars, and personalities (it’s bad enough that politics has become a popularity contest at the expense of a contest between political philosophies).

However, it was pianist Jian Liu whose playing seemed not just to dominate in terms of audibility, but which guided the character of the performances with such distinction. That is not unusual in a piano trio of course, compared with a string quartet; for the piano commands greater density of sound, most of the harmonic spectrum of the music and, to revert to the eighteenth century model, makes it hard sometimes to avoid the impression of a piano sonata with violin and cello accompaniment.

The Ghost trio is perhaps the most democratic of the three works played, with striking contributions early in the first movement from the cello, beautifully played by Inbal Megiddo; nor is the violin part secondary, though Martin Riseley, here and elsewhere, sounded less robust and rich in tone. The first movement felt somewhat hurried; hurried rather than energy-driven, and the rather perfunctory ending of the movement seemed to come too quickly.

After a lovely calm entry by violin and piano in the second movement, it was the cello that soon caught the ear as Megiddo invested it with a deep emotional intensity, and Beethoven seems to call on the cello to carry much of its dark quality . There is evidence that this movement had its source in music Beethoven sketched for an opera on Macbeth which never got beyond that; the conjuring of a ghost here always escapes me however, even though the piano enjoys some other-worldly growling in the bass regions.

In the last movement the responsibilities are more evenly distributed; it’s given to short phrases that break off and then take off in a different direction.

Mendelssohn’s first trio is very much the work of a young piano virtuoso, and here, more than elsewhere, was the main ground of my remark about the piano’s omnipresence, not just constantly, but in dazzling virtuoso mode which hardly let up. Yet the piano is rarely alone and it never dominated the ensemble, allowing equal the participation by violin and cello; indeed, both have their moments in the bravura spotlight; here too, no player was inclined to overlook the need to create a harmonious synthesis.

The second movement, often likened to one of the composer’s ‘songs without words’, never slipped from its quiet nobility: a particularly successful movement. The scherzo went so fast – as it should – that the players may well have barely saved themselves from minor stumbles.

The last movement filled one with admiration at the pianist’s ability to deliver dazzling, and visually beguiling virtuosity in the most charming, self-effacing manner.

Dvořák’s third piano trio is a serious affair, coming between the D major and D minor symphonies (Nos 6 and 7), of his full maturity. It followed the death of his mother in 1882; that accounts partly for its somber character; the other rather strong influence is that of Brahms. Riseley’s remark about the relative neglect of Dvořák’s large body of great chamber music is well said. Apart from the Piano Quintet, the American Quartet, the Dumky Trio, what is really much heard?

Dvořák was not notable as a pianist (though an excellent one in fact), yet it is again the piano part that commands attention here, though there is interesting writing for the two strings, both again giving glowing performances. The piano is hardly less busy than in the Mendelssohn in dealing with thousands of notes in breathtaking cascades, especially in the second movement, Scherzo.

However, I confess to finding the slow movement somewhat listless, and though it was played with insight and intelligence, I could not escape the feeling of note-spinning. Nor did the players really convince me in the last movement where the piano again rather subordinates the strings and it strikes me as having run out of steam before the end. Yet the players seemed determined to make the most convincing case for it, and they almost succeeded.

Georgina Zellan-Smith – new light on the “Moonlight”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Piano recital by Georgina Zellan-Smith

Music by Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Chopin – plus some “popular favorites” requests.

House concert, Johnsonville, Wellington

Tuesday 22nd November 2011

Auckland-based pianist Georgina Zellan-Smith is, sadly, an infrequent visitor to Wellington these days. She performed here last at a commemorative concert in 2008 which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Richard Farrell, on which occasion she played an excerpt from Liszt’s Italian Book of his “Years of Pilgrimage”. On that evening she shared the piano with Maurice Till, Margaret Nielsen, Diedre Irons and Jun Bouterey-Ishido. So it was with the keenest of anticipation that I awaited her proposed house-concert scheduled for November in Johnsonville, and for which she would presumably have the piano all to herself (no reflection whatever, of course, on those other excellent pianists who contributed so movingly to the Richard Farrell evening).

In the event, she gave her attentive and highly appreciative audience a richly-conceived programme, using an instrument (a Kawai) whose tones seemed particularly sonorous at the lower end of the sound-spectrum. Whether this quality was in fact a natural penchant of the pianist’s towards middle and lower tones, or whether the player connected with and used the instrument’s intrinsic voicings to noticeable advantage, I’m not entirely sure. But in places such as throughout the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, under Zellan-Smith’s fingers the middle and bass voices of the music had a fuller, richer and darker aspect than one normally experiences in this music. The effect was to bring a somewhat uneasy, almost sinister quality to the familiar “Moonlight on the lake waters” evocation, and explore a whole new dimension of feeling and response to the composer’s vision. Never have I heard this music sounding more than it could have been out of Schumann’s “Kreisleriana”, the lower voicing emphasizing the shadows stalking the right-hand melody throughout.

In this context the second movement of the “Moonight  made for a strong contrast, the syncopated rhythms in the middle section played fully out, suggesting something more elemental than what we normally hear. The finale continued the music’s mood, bringing great weight as well as momentum, Zellan-Smith pointing the rhythmic trajectories of the music to compelling, energetic effect rather than relying merely on speed for excitement. She also made a great deal of the claustrophobic contrasting episodes, hands close together concentrating the music into obsessive repetitions before opening up the vistas with the concluding rolling arpeggiations. Alone, the pianist’s playing of this somewhat hackneyed, but still potentially magical work made the concert worthwhile for me.

Incidentally, as a kind of prelude to the “Moonlight”, Zellan-Smith gave us the beautiful Adagio Cantabile” from the same composer’s “Pathetique” Sonata – and again she found in the music such a rich well of light and dark feeling. It was her left-hand work which riveted me, the ebb and flow of tonal coloring beautifully controlling and shaping the right-hand melody (one of the world’s great tunes, I think), the tempo not particularly slow, but always giving things time to breathe, each note specifically placed instead of being delivered in a generalized way. She made a great thing of the middle section’s arched magnificence, her left hand again making certain that all the music’s voices had a part in the overall scheme of things. I could have, on this showing, happily listened to her playing an entire program of Beethoven – what wouldn’t she have done with things like the wonderful “Les Adieux” Sonata, or one of those unearthly late masterpieces such as Op.111?

But then we would have had to do without some other deliciously different things, such as the recital’s opening piece, a Scarlatti Sonata in F Major, played here with such a delicious amalgam of grace, energy and good humor – something that fellow-New Zealand pianist Margaret Nielsen would, I’m sure, have called “great character” – and a Mendelssohn work that I couldn’t recall having ever heard before (to my shame, as a piano-fancier!), his Fantasia in F-sharp Minor, Op.28 (known also as the “Scottish Sonata”), a tremendous piece, beginning with swirling, almost Gothic-like arpeggiated mists, from which developed a beautiful, melancholic theme not unlike that from the opening of Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata. In places Zellan-Smith’s playing strongly brought out the connection with Bach’s toccata-like organ works, Mendelssohn paying homage, one suspects, to those fantastic harmonic modulations that readily conjure up dimly-lit and spookily obsessive dream-like sequences of deranged organists lost in their private worlds of sound. I liked the pianist’s winsome treatment of the theme’s intermingling of major and minor at the end of the movement, and the soft drumbeats acknowledging the ending’s ghostly echoes.

As with the Beethoven Sonata, there’s a graceful ,dance-like movement between the two outer giants (shades of Schumann’s “flower between two chasms” – or was it Liszt who said that of the “Moonlight” Sonata’s middle movement?) – here, the pianist played the dance more for strength than for charm, which I liked, the music to my ears responding positively to such a purposeful approach. As for the last movement’s “diabolique” impulses, Mendelssohn’s sprites tend to be more mischievous than malevolent, though here the delicacies seemed to have flint-edges, the composer managing to conjure up a Beethoven-like mood of agitation in places (though the “Scottish” ambiences of the first movement didn’t seem to be carried over strongly into the rest of the work). Zellan-Smith kept the music’s serious mood to the fore, avoiding the “drawing-room gentility” that tends to hang about a lot of the composer’s chamber and instrumental music, and maintaining an “edge” to the textures and rhythms right up to the work’s final energetic flourishes.

A further delight of the recital was Georgina Zellan-Smith’s playing of a couple of items from her recent CD of popular piano classics, “Remembrance”, including the beautifully atmospheric “Rustle of Spring” by Christian Sinding, the piano on this occasion giving the pianist’s swirling left-hand accompaniments in places a bit more weight and body than on the CD recording, and providing the agitato feeling that the more delicate episodes o the music need to bring out their full effect. By the time the pianist reached the Chopin items which concluded the program, including the fleet-fingered Fantasie-Impromptu (another world-famous melody) I suspect that the effort of realizing both the Beethoven and Mendelssohn items so whole-heartedly was beginning to take its toll, though the G-flat waltz in particular was a great pleasure to experience. In all, there was a great deal of wonderful music and fully-committed music-making packed into what seemed like too short a time, throughout this recital. I do hope we in Wellington get further opportunities to hear Georgina Zellan-Smith play more of the music she obviously loves and illuminates with such skill and understanding.

 

 

 

Festival Singers’ Papa Haydn – a Man for All Seasons

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HAYDN – Oratorio “The Seasons”

Lesley Graham (soprano) / James Adams (tenor) / Roger Wilson (bass)

Festival Singers / Orchestra (Simon McLellan, leader)

Rosemary Russell (conductor)

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

Sunday, 20th November, 2011

Of all the works produced by that exemplar of creative industry and longevity Josef Haydn (1732-1809), his oratorio “The Seasons” is surely one of the happiest on all counts. In the work the composer gives full expression to his delight in nature, his obvious relish for country pastimes (blood-sports and all), and his serene religious faith.

What strikes the listener at a first hearing is the work’s ceaseless flow of wonderful things, the composer’s imagination and powers of expression obviously undimmed by his advancing years, despite his complaints to his publisher, thus:

 “The world daily pays me many compliments, even on the fire of my last works; but no one would believe the strain and effort it cost me to produce these, in as much as many a day my feeble memory and the unstrung state of my nerves so completely crush me to the earth that I fall into the most melancholy condition, so much so that for days afterwards I am incapable of finding one single idea, until at length my heart is revived by Providence, when I seat myself at the piano and begin to hammer away at it. Then all goes well, again, God be praised!”

The work’s librettist, Baron Gottfried Von Swieten, has come in for some stick over the years, some of it from the composer himself, who was supposed to have exclaimed at one point that the libretto was “Frenchified trash”. Swieten adapted his verses from those of the Scottish poet James Thomson, whose epic, eponymous work in praise of nature had become one of the most popular texts of his age. Haydn and Swieten quarrelled over various aspects of the work (as happens with nearly all fruitful collaborations of this kind) – but the success of the finished product consigned such differences to the wake of musical history.

The work was here sung in English, the words a curious amalgam of Swieten’s re-translation of his own script back to the original language (losing most of Thompson’s poetry in the process) and various “improvements” made by different editors at diverse times. Some of the original numbers were cut, and others shortened, but nothing was lost which caused great violence to be done to the work as a whole.

Haydn begins with a dark, orchestra-only evocation of winter gloom – a few gravely-descending bars of darkness set the scene before conductor Rosemary Russell brought in the allegro strongly and sternly, placing winter in retreat-mode, and being more roundly dismissed by both bass and tenor (Roger Wilson stentorian and vivid, James Adams sturdy and poetical). Soprano Lesley Graham then welcomed the spring breezes from “southern skies” with true, lightly-floated tones, the cue for the chorus to properly ring the seasonal change with a lilting “Come gentle spring”….

The number I knew once as “With joy, th’ impatient husbandsman….” here became “At dawn the eager plowman”, given plenty of agrarian spirit by Roger Wilson, and relished by the counterpointing bassoon, nicely played by Oscar Laven. We enjoyed these things greatly, along with the “Surprise Symphony” orchestral quotations, and the singer’s slightly more decorative reprise vocals. James Adams impressed, also, with his golden-toned “The farmer now has done his work”, the following Trio giving the orchestral horns the chance to shine throughout a nicely-burnished moment of introduction, and bringing in the chorus, beautifully rapt at “Let warming air turn suddenly soft”, though with a bit of momentary strain when delivering the stratospheric “And let thy sun resplendent shine”.

Lesley Graham’s lovely “Our prayer is heard on high” set the tone for a nicely-poised duet “Spring, her lovely charms…” between the soprano and tenor, James Adams. And the “God of Light, God of Life!” chorus was stirringly done, the rapturous Beethoven-like mood amply and satisfyingly forwarded by the soloists. Apart from an uncertain initial entry by the men in the fugal chorus “Endless praise to Thee….” the vocal lines were woven together with strength and clarity, Rosemary Russell keeping her orchestra equally up to the mark right to the final cadence.

The remainder of the performance reinforced the above impressions, though particular moments remained in the listener’s memory, such as the sunrise sequence at the beginning of summer, a vivid and urgent introduction by Lesley Graham, followed by soloists and chorus making a marvellous refulgence.

The “Country Calendar” commentaries that followed were also characterfully delivered, Roger Wilson bringing alive the Breughel-like harvesting, and James Adams contrasting the hustle and bustle with a sun-drenched paean of idyllic indolence – all of which led naturally to Lesley Graham’s sweet-toned portrayal of a “haven for the weary”, with Jose Wilson giving us  some nicely-turned oboe-playing.

From this “Rural Roundup” kind of mode, we switched to full-on weather-forecasting, portentous announcements from Roger Wilson, with timpanist Doreen Douglas providing telling ambient support. James Adams’ warnings were no less dire, the pizzicato raindrops by now falling about Lesley Graham’s breathless, suspenseful utterances. A sudden lightning-flash, and chorus and orchestra hurled themselves into the maelstrom with great abandonment, a pleasing disorder of unsettling sounds resulting within the confines of the hall.

Autumn, too had its delights, even if the introductory string-playing had some ensemble problems – the Terzetto and Chorus which followed, praising industry and advocating its rewards, had something naughtily Haydn-esque about it, the droll wind figures decorating the soloists’ lines seeming to me to poke gentle fun at the seriousness of it all. The concluding chorus-and-orchestra fugue survived some “woolly” moments along the way towards some wonderfully chromatic upward modulations and a triumphal concluding marriage of honest labour with moral righteousness, soloists, chorus and orchestra shirking not their duties.

Sports of all kinds were celebrated, innocent, knowing and deadly purposeful – we enjoyed both James Adams’ singing and enjoyment in turn of his line “the orchard shades maidens large and small”, and Roger Wilson’s account of the spaniel’s hunting of the hapless bird, shot with a loud timpani retort! As for the deerhunt, the rousing horn-playing (Peter Sharman and Kevin Currie) led the way in grand style, matched in energy and vigour by the chorus, who were then called upon once more a after a short respite, this time for a rollicking drinking-song, “Joyfully, the wine flows free…” The voices did well to sustain their pitch as well as they did across the span of broken phrases, as required by the composer, besides keeping enough energy in reserve for the final “All hail to the wine!”.

Though there were occasional problems with both ensemble and intonation in places, the orchestral playing never lacked for atmosphere and colour throughout – and so it was with the opening of “Winter”, where a lovely, dark-toned instrumental colour at the opening used sombre strings and plaintive winds to suggest the grey mists and gloom, an evocation which the composer equated with his own mortality and failing powers. The Cavatina that followed taxed the strings’ ensemble at the beginning, but Lesley Graham focused our attentions with her tremulously-toned lament at autumn’s passing into darker climes. James Adams’ tale of a lost traveller was also dramatically told, even if the singer didn’t have quite enough breath to easily cap the ascending phrase at “to find comfort sweet”.

The chorus’s “Spinning Song” (surprisingly romantic, dark and dramatic, sounding almost like something out of Wagner!) went with a swing, making a piquant contrast with the saucy tale of the maid who extricated herself from the clutches of a lascivious nobleman. Lesley Graham pointed the detail with some relish throughout, if not with quite enough “heft” in places to be properly heard, though the chorus’s “ha! ha!’s” certainly demonstrated its appreciation of the entertainment.

Roger Wilson’s deep, rich tones saluted the icy grip of winter, imploring all to cling to virtue as a means of salvation – though the brass blooped their first notes in response they recovered to cap the concluding orchestral efforts, and support some fine, strong lines of singing in the fugal passage “Direct us in thy ways”. Everything became somewhat revivalist at the very end, the energy and fervour of the singing and playing filling the hall, and making for a most satisfying conclusion. All credit to the efforts of singers and instrumentalists, and to Rosemary Russell for her inspired and sterling direction, and for bringing such a delightful work to the fore once again, for our pleasure.