Category: Reviews – Concerts

Brilliant recital of French organ music from Michael Stewart

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

L’Orgue Symphonique : French organ music in the symphonic tradition

Guilmant: Grand Chorus in G minor, Op 84; Widor: Symphonie Gothique, Op 70; Jehan Alain: Le jardin suspendu and Litanies from Three Pieces.

Michael Stewart at the organ

Church of St Mary of the Angels

Sunday 25 September, 2.30pm

I hadn’t adjusted my watch and as a result, missed the first item in the recital: Guilmant’s Grand choeur en forme de marche pour grand orgue, in G minor. Two of the three composers in the programme had been honoured as Radio New Zealand Concert’s Composers of the Week which had been introduced by Stewart himself (Guilmant died in 1911 and Alain was born in that year. Alain’s father had been a pupil of Guilmant’s). So this was a sad mishap, as my knowledge of Guilmant has been confined to several of the works played during the week plus a few pieces in the organ compilations in my CD collection.

However, I was in time fully to enjoy Widor’s Gothic Symphony (his No 9), one of his most successful works. It sometimes seems hard to fit the school of French organ composers into the pattern of other French composers, of opera, orchestral, chamber and choral music: Franck was really the only one to straddle both fields, though several well-known composers like Saint-Saëns and Fauré were fine organists.

Widor, born in 1844, was nine years younger that Saint-Saëns, two years younger than Massenet and a year older than Fauré. Though he lived till 1937, his composing life virtually ended around 1900. This symphony was composed about 1894, as Strauss was writing tone poems, Verdi’s Falstaff had just been produced, Mahler was working on his third symphony, Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune, Brahms’s last piano pieces and the two clarinet sonatas; Tchaikovsky had just written the Pathétique and had died.

Widor produced a large-scale work in this symphony (almost 30 minutes; actually, others would have called it a sonata, being for one instrument: Widor was obviously wanting to suggest the scale and variety of sounds available on a great organ). In the first movement, Moderato, over plunging, rotating pedal notes, the manuals mark out an insistent, almost hypnotic pattern, that could hardly be called a melody; yet it is arresting, slowly rising in pitch and seems to gather more and more stops into its dense and turbulent textures. I’m sure this was my first live hearing; it impressed me greatly, confirming my belief that the essence and force of most music is really grasped only in live performance. Though Stewart’s registrations, as offered by this fine French-style organ that Maxwell Fernie left to us, had great clarity and never overwhelmed through sheer volume, the music’s impact was stunning in a near literal sense.

The slow movement, Andante sostenuto, is one of Widor’s loveliest pieces and its calm, coloured by carefully selected flute stops, was an affecting contrast.

The third movement, a dancing fugue on the plainchant ‘Puer natus est nobis’, is far from the usual sombre character of organ music in a liturgical setting, with its dotted rhythms, though a splendid pedal appearance of the tune, in full diapason vestments, brings it to an fine declamatory end. The last movement, variations on the same tune, seems like a sequence of distinct moments musicaux, so individual are their various appearances, some in rather entertaining fugal form. Stewart held them together through his adroit handling of vivid, contrasted stops.

Jehan Alain, born in 1911, was 15 years older than his famous organist sister, Marie-Claire Alain; he was killed in the first year of World War II, in a heroic confrontation which the Germans themselves later honoured.

These two pieces proved a fine introduction to his work. The hanging garden was obviously an impressionistic piece, which would have been hard to ascribe to any particular orchestral composer who wrote music that carries that label. It was delicate and translucent, inviting the organist to explore an entrancing range of flute stops in high registers.

Litanies then came as a surprising, emphatic irruption, with its insistent theme of striking clarity and its comparably striking handling, evolving, investing with rhythmic energy. Its religious context comes as a surprise: Alain said that ‘in the obsessive rhythm of the work [was] released the irresistible gusting wind of prayer’ (perhaps a not very idiomatic translation of the French which I do not have to hand). All one could say was that Alain’s religion was of a powerful, muscular kind; and the music offered here through Stewart’s impressive medium would surely have caused the sadly small audience to go in search of more.

 

 

Celebrating the rugby, with Beethoven, without the violence

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Kaitiaki by Gareth Farr; Choral Symphony by Beethoven

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pietari Inkinen, with the Orpheus Choir and Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir.
Soloists: Madeleine Pierard (soprano), Sarah Castle (mezzo-soprano), Simon O’Neill (tenor), Jonathan Lemalu (bass baritone)

Michael Fowler Centre

Thursday 22 September, 6.30pm

A relatively short piece was needed for the first half of a concert that was to be dominated by the Choral Symphony. A new New Zealand piece using the same soloists as in the symphony was sensible, and the choice of Gareth Farr was unlikely to prove a deterrent for those allergic to music after 1900. With this in mind, Farr could actually have risked offering something a little more challenging, even more adventurous than what he was invited to do, in association with a text by Witi Ihimaera, which Farr described as ‘vibrant, patriotic and passionate’. Continue reading “Celebrating the rugby, with Beethoven, without the violence” →

A horn trio wins converts at Wellington Chamber Music recital

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nautilus Trio: Wilma Smith (violin), Andrew Bain (horn), Amin Farid (piano)

Mozart: Violin Sonata in A, K 305; Beethoven: Horn sonata, Op 17; Koechlin: Four Little Pieces; Brahms: Horn Trio, Op 40

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall

Sunday 18 September 3pm

Wilma Smith, a former NZSO concertmaster, has been returning to New Zealand every year or so since she became co-concertmaster with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra: usually with a strings and/or piano ensemble. This time, inspired by the urge to play Brahms’s Horn Trio, an appropriate trio was put together, comprising the Melbourne Orchestra’s principal horn and pianist Amir Farid.

Why Nautilus? Nautilus is a mollusc with a spiral shell divided into compartments. Is that the connection with the character of the French horn? In a subsequent exchange with Wilma, she confirmed that this was indeed the significance.

Putting together a programme for the somewhat rare combination of piano, violin and horn would not have been easy, though their encore showed other pieces do exist. They found one written for just those instruments in Koechlin’s short pieces which were attractive even if a bit insubstantial, and they didn’t do much to induce one to explore this interesting composer, some of whose other music I had met. Nevertheless, the writing for the three instruments was subtle and charming, offering the horn a very nice environment in which to work with the two stringed instruments.

The solution to fleshing out the first half was to play sonatas that used violin and horn separately. No trouble with the former, and the one they chose – Mozart’s in A, K 305 – was a good choice: neither well known, nor insignificant. Unusual in shape – two movements (as was not unusual at the time), the second, a theme and variations, rather slower than the first. The galloping rhythm of the first movement was a splendid opener while the Andante grazioso was an interesting set of variations with an unexpected modulation towards the end. It was a most successful opener, the two players demonstrating a rapport that was not just a matter of keeping perfectly together, but combining the voices of violin and piano rather beautifully.

Beethoven’s rather routine sonata (published with the reassurance that a cellist could handle it) is the sort of piece that is only played in circumstances like this. It calls for the horn to launch forth in military-sounding arpeggios in stentorian style, which does not usually bring out the horn’s most engaging sound. But as soon as lyrical passages arrived the player’s skills became more evident, unexpectedly perhaps, in accord with the piano. Individually the two players explored its character carefully, making as good a case as possible for it. By playing the second movement rather more poco than the tempo marking, poco adagio, might have indicated, they sustained its lines – and the slow breaths for the hornist – as well as exposing the somewhat vacuous musical content.

After the interval came the reason for the concert. The remarkable thing about this unique piece is the way in which you never feel that Brahms is going out of his way to write for the particular qualities of the horn. Yet nothing seems to be lie more naturally for the three instruments, either together or individually, at least from the listener’s point of view, than Brahms’s imaginative handling of the ideas; his unmistakable voice is present throughout. Most strikingly in the most passionate passages, the three instruments produced a blend that was sheer delight. Here, more than elsewhere in the recital, the horn’s lyrical qualities were conspicuous, handling the long melodies beautifully.

There is a view that the work might have been composed in response to the recent death of Brahms’s mother, and the third movement, Adagio mesto, might have endorsed this, the tones of violin and horn delivering poised, restrained music reflecting grief.

However, the second movement, Scherzo, and the Finale dispelled any real belief in the work’s general elegiac character. The Scherzo boisterous and extrovert and the Finale marked by the whoops of successive fourths that suggested well enough the activity that the horn was originally used to accompany.

A word about the pianist, Amir Farid. Throughout, his playing was marked by real individual distinction which would clearly make him a superb solo player, but his precise, carefully shaded, acutely pedaled performances in the various pieces, and his collaborative role in a richly sympathetic trio was quite admirable.

They played an encore after applause laced with bravos; it used the three instruments most happily, in an arrangement by one Ernst Naumann (I think Wilma said; he was a 19th century German musicologist/composer/arranger) of the last movement from the quintet in E flat for horn, violin, 2 violas and cello by Mozart, KV 407 (obviously written about the same time as the four horn concertos, which were for Mozart’s friend Ignaz Leutgeb) . This most convincing and delightful performance proved it a work of considerable charm which would, in this arrangement, have been an excellent companion in this concert. I suspect there could be a rush to find the piece on Amazon.com now (try Parsons first).

Delightful American songs from Megan Corby and Craig Beardsworth at the Hutt

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

American songs by Copland, Barber, Ives, and William Schuman, Richard Hundley, Paul Bowles, Richard Hageman and Jason Robert Brown

Craig Beardsworth (baritone) and Megan Corby (soprano); Hugh McMillan (piano)

St Mark’s church, Lower Hutt

Wednesday 14 September, 12.15pm

It’s a few years since I heard either of these singers in a solo recital of any kind. This lunchtime concert was such an enterprising and attractive event that I felt real regret that the audience was so small, though not very different from the audiences that usually come. The real sadness is the failure of the Lower Hutt City Council to save the Laing’s Road Methodist Church where these concerts used to be held, usually attracting more people.

Introducing the concert, Craig Beardsworth sort-of apologized to those who might have expected a recital of American music to present names like Porter, Rodgers, Kern and Gershwin. But unapologetically, he made it clear that some sort of distinction was to be seen between American ‘songs’ and commercial Broadway music, just as there is between Schubert and Schumann, and the world of the West End musical and the Beatles.

By no means undervaluing the lighter varieties of music, I thought the two proved their case very well.

They took turns, generally singing songs that matched the sexes. They were well prepared, their presentations polished and accompanied by gestures that did much to bring the mini-dramas to life, as well as to entertain. Speaking of accompaniment, Hugh McMillan handled the wide variety of styles, from the country rhythms of Paul Bowles’s Lonesome Man to the complexities of Charles Ives, with skill and a distinguished facility with the style and character of each.

American accents were employed judiciously, hardly audible in many songs, but full-blown elsewhere, as in Beardsworth’s arresting performances of ‘The Dodger’, ‘Lonesome Man’ and ‘The Greatest Man’.

Megan Corby opened with an aria, ‘Laurie’s song’, from Copland’s opera The Tender Land, easing us into American song through a work with clear European sources, yet flavoured with Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. Richard Hundley was a name new to me; his two songs, ‘Sweet Suffolk Owl’ and ‘Come ready and see me’ revealed a composer, thanks to Corby, with an ear for notes that were just right for the words. Her Barber songs – ‘The Monk and his cat’ and ‘The Crucifixion’ – presented a composer less committed to a popular style, more in tune with the art song of France or England, yet with American contours. She sang them with real polish.

I realised from what was said about Paul Bowles that my education had been neglected (most of his life he acted as a sort of one-man American cultural out-post in Tangier by the sound of it), and the four songs, evenly shared by the two singers, richly tuneful, not the least hackneyed or sentimental, were among the most enjoyable of the concert. In ‘Sugar in the cane’ Megan, southern twang and all, showed her impatience with the constraints of her condition; while in ‘Do not go, my love’ by Richard Hageman, her anguish at her looming loss was real. Her final song, the 1996 setting by Jason Robert Brown of ‘The Flagmaker’, touching a War of Independence tragedy, was both poignant and dramatic.

Craig’s share of the partnership began strikingly with two of Copland’s familiar folk song arrangements: ‘The Dodger’ and ‘At the River’ – the first satirical and mocking, a bit outrageous, the second rotundly pious, also mocking. Perhaps his biggest challenge was with the three Ives songs, with which he used his interesting voice to great effect. The studied way he put down the score, to start in a quasi-lecturing way, to narrate his tale of ‘The Greatest Man’  was the mark of a highly accomplished performer; there and in ‘The Circus Band’, the voice and the droll, evocative gestures seem to call for him to have much more exposure.

It was a admirable recital that deserves to be enjoyed in other parts of the metropolis.

Gao Ping’s winning presentation of Debussy, New Zealand and east Asian piano music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Gao Ping – piano (Wellington Chamber Music)

Debussy: Book II of Images for piano and L’Île joyeuse; Jack Body: Five melodies for piano; Eve de Castro Robinson: And the garden was full of voices; Gao Ping: Outside the window; Takemitsu: Rain Tree Sketch and Rain Tree Sketch II

Ilott Theatre, Town Hall

Sunday 11 September, 3pm

The first thing to remark is the unfortunate clash between this concert and that in the Michael Fowler Centre by the Vector Wellington Orchestra with pianist Diedre Irons. But in addition to that, there was a concert by the Wellington Community Choir next door, in the Town Hall main auditorium.

Though there were only two pieces, both by Debussy, that could be regarded as standard repertoire, the audience was nearly as large as at most other recent recitals, though that is rather fewer than was usual a few years ago.

There were two works by New Zealand composers.

Gao Ping introduced Jack Body’s Five Melodies for Piano by describing his first contact with the composer in Chengdu, not in person, but through a music tape that he’d left during a visit. He was moved and impressed and spoke warmly about Body, who was in the audience; it was an engaging way of putting the audience in a positive, receptive state of mind. Working the inside of the piano was novel forty years ago; now, there should be reason other than the novelty of a sound that’s distorted from its normal character. Happily, Gao Ping’s manner and his clear enjoyment of the music, its memorable riffs and motifs and drones, the muted strings produced by his left hand helped to make the pieces sound almost standard repertoire, familiar, even congenial. And, in the third piece, the stopping of partials on the piano strings to produce harmonics, and the plain comfortableness of his demeanor at the piano, as awkward as it often looks to be leaning sideways across the keyboard to do things that the instrument’s inventors never dreamed of (they might have said – why not use a harp? or lute? or theorbo? or guitar?)

Eve de Castro Robinson’s And the Garden was full of Voices is a three-part work evoking, with success, the sounds of birds in a garden inspired by a line in a Bill Manhire poem (with contribution from pianist Barry Margan). The composer still finds the need to manipulate the strings of the piano with the hands, but she also uses techniques that have become fashionable a generation after the body-contorting, piano-interior fashion: the integration of the pianist’s voice in the texture. In the second section, ‘Moon darkened by song’, the pianist resumed his seat and treated the instrument conventionally, with a prayerful gesture and two sharp claps from raised hands, bringing it to an end. Especially dramatic in the third section, ‘The ancient chants are echoes of death’, was the dark throbbing, the heavy beat, and the echoes of death evoked from the extreme ends of the keyboard. It made music that expressed both visual and unusual emotional perceptions.

Gao Ping, who seems at least a fairly permanent New Zealand resident, introduced his own piece Outside the window engagingly, recalling the childhood sense of a different – more real or more distant – world outside, and the music was now speaking in a language that offered more familiar resonances.

The first movement (of four, ‘On the way’) suggested a certain Janáček flavour (am I subject to suggestion, partly by the similar subject/title On an overgrown path?), at times touches of jazz, in its rhythms and melodic finger-prints. ‘Chorus of Fire Worms’ was a surprising avian evocation; Debussy was inevitably nearby in ‘Clouds’ (Nuages?), though I was not really reminded of clouds, unless they were of the fast-forward kind. The girls dancing on rubber bands (iv) was a flight of the imagination which Jack Body’s sound-world might have had some influence on.

Gao Ping again diverted us with a story related by Takemitsu: after the devastation and deprivation of the post-war, he had no piano and wandered the streets knocking on doors where he heard a piano, to ask whether he could play for 15 minutes; 40 years later he was greeted, at a concert, by one of his piano benefactors. The two Rain Tree Sketches are among his more popular pieces, not reflecting a particularly Japanese character but impressing with their coherent and confident musical substance and Gao’s playing seemed somehow to incarnate the composer himself, who has always seemed to me a man of warmth and deep humanity – like Gao Ping.

The three pieces of Debussy’s Images Book II, not the best known of his piano pieces, was a clever way to induct the audience into the climate and landscape of the New Zealand and East Asian music in the rest of the concert. The bells of No 1 were sounded in disembodied abstraction; another essential quality of Debussy’s piano music lay in the black-and-whiteness character that’s suggested by the second part – ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’ – the coldness of the moon, static harmonies, stillness. ‘Poissons d’or’ is the most familiar of the three, quite formidable in its spirit in spite of the shimmering dance rhythm that portrays the golden fishes whose flashing movements became quite corporeal and substantial; yet all the time, firmly rooted in the black and white piano keys. Gao Ping’s unobtrusive virtuosity illuminated them all.

And so it was fitting to return to Debussy at the end with his brilliant hail of notes that bespangle the glittering and very difficult L’Ile joyeuse; Gao Ping gave it strong pulse and danced excitedly through it with an almost visceral joyousness.

The encore was what Gao Ping called a vocalizing-pianist piece, written by him to a poem, “perhaps-song of burial”, by Wen Yi-duo. Again, the role of the pianist’s voice complemented his piano-playing; it lamented the death of the poet’s daughter, sustained by a steady rhythm throughout in rolling motifs in the left hand. Whether the words expressed profound grief or a more metaphysical emotion one knew not, but the music seemed to express a calm stoicism rather than unrestrained distress; it was no doubt all the more impressive and moving as a result.

With each of these various composers, Gao Ping, demonstrated an intuitive awareness of the music’s essence, and a refinement, enlivened by virtuosity that was always at the service of the music.

Composer/pianist Frederic Rzewski (who was a guest at Victoria University a few years ago) said: “Gao Ping is one of a new generation that is breathing new life into the classical tradition. An evening with Gao Ping’s music is a true adventure!”

I couldn’t put it better. It was his music, in particular, this afternoon that seemed to me to point in a most fruitful, human, and optimistic direction for the future of ‘classical’ music that will again succeed in reaching out to the large audiences it enjoyed a century ago.

Another snippet.

He was asked in an interview posted on his website how he would define ‘interpreting’. His answer: “In terms of performing? Well, it is a vague word. I prefer ‘recreating’. Playing a Beethoven sonata is to recreate something, not really an interpretation because interpretation seems to suggest ‘explaining’, which is not what one can do with Beethoven sonatas performing it.”

Just one of many tendentious, pretentious words beloved of critics that have always made me uneasy, even though I’ve been guilty occasionally.

On The Transmigration Of Souls – 9/11 Commemoration by John Adams presented by the Vector Wellington Orchestra

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Vector Wellington Orchestra’s John Adams 9/11 Commemoration

BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.5 in C Minor

MOZART – Piano Concerto No.25 in C Major

ADAMS – On the Transmigration of Souls

Orpheus Choir, Wellington / Choristers of the Cathedral of St.Paul, Wellington / Wellington Girls’ College Teal Voices

Diedre Irons (piano)

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Sunday September 11th, 2011

Review adapted – not a transcript – from a radio review for Radio New Zealand Concert’s”Upbeat”, with Eva Radich)

It was unusual for the Wellington Orchestra to be performing  on a Sunday afternoon.

The 9/11 date gives a clue – and in fact it’s ten years to this very day since New York’s World Trade Centre was attacked and destroyed by two hi-jacked terrorist-controlled aircraft. American composer John Adams was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write a piece to be performed on the first anniversary of the attack, in 2002. This performance was the New Zealand premiere of this work, which won for its composer the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003, and for the premiere recording in 2005 various Grammy Awards.

The orchestra usually performs in the Town Hall – but here they were in the Michael Fowler Centre on this occasion.

Acoustically, the Town Hall would have been great for the John Adams work – the music was gradually built up with many different textural strands that would have responded even more powerfully to a full, immediate and  reverberant ambience, the kind of things that performers have to work harder to get in the MFC. But there were advantages gained from performing in the bigger venue, most obviously a bigger audience, and more space in which to place the various choirs that the work requires. Having said this in comparing the two venues, I have to say that I thought the sounds were beautifully managed all the way through – the taped sounds of city activity and the various voices reading the names of people who died in the attack and written tributes to them that were displayed in various places afterwards all came across with plenty of clarity and atmosphere, as did the heartfelt efforts of the different choirs and the power and beauty of the orchestral playing.

It must have been a pretty daunting commission for any composer, to commemorate such an earth-shattering event.

John Adams himself admitted to feeling, at first, a bit overawed by the range and scope of it all – he was quoted as saying “I had great difficulty imagining anything commemorating 9/11 that would not be an embarrassment” –  but then he reckoned that any composer that was worth his salt wouldn’t shrink away from confronting something “profoundly intense” and conveying its essence by whatever means. Adams felt that this event had been so well documented and its images spread so widely, that his job as a composer wasn’t what he called “an exposition of the material” – he had no desire whatever to create any kind of narrative or description. Instead his intention was to create in sound a kind of “memory space” for human reflection, absolutely free from any statement about religion, patriotism or politics. Adams likened to the concept the feeling one gets when one visits an enormous cathedral – he cited the experience of going to Chartres Cathedral in France, saying that “you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot.”

So, how did he do it? – how did the piece begin and develop and make its impact?

Adams decided he would dispense with the usual texts composers used for commemorative works, poetry, liturgy or Scripture. Instead he decided to use words that had been scribbled on posters plastered around Ground Zero by people searching for their missing loved ones. In this way the focus would be on the people who were left behind, on their expressions of hope mixed with gradual acceptance of the reality of loss. He began the piece with prerecorded tape sounds of a city, of people going about their everyday business, pedestrians and traffic noises. Then a voice begins repeating the word “missing” over and over, followed by the introduction of names of the dead. The choirs begin to sing, like angels singing halos of tones, the orchestra strings play soft tremolandos, the percussion begins to softly scintillate, the choirs repeat words with growing intensity, like a great tower or archway gradually lighting up all over. A solo trumpet (very American) reminiscent of Charles Ives and of Gershwin, paying homage to a kind of cultural history, suggests an on-going presence of the spirit, as the choirs continue their chanting (Orpheus Choir) and sustained tones (Choristers’ Choir) accompanied by woodwinds playing Straussian Rosenkavalier-like chords. The music grows and changes textures by osmosis, as different instruments add their timbres and colours, brasses introducing a deep,sombre aspect, the overall sounds gathering girth and variety. The heavy brasses, trombone and tubas, play the most sepulchral notes imaginable and the tape voice repeats the word “missing”, everything growing in intensity and focus until the orchestra, like some leviathan awakening, opens up its heavy batteries with brazen bell sounds, expressing anger, war, disaster and danger, before subsiding into an uneasy calm, with only the children’s voices repeating the messages of grief at first, then gradually joined by the adult choir, the voices like waves of sound, reinforced by the orchestra, canonic flurries from the strings, irruptions from brass and percussion expending tremendous energy. The choir repeats the word “Light” as the taped voices return repeating more names of the dead and the phrase “I see water and buildings” (which were the last words spoken by a flight attendant on her cell-phone) repeated, as the intensities narrow down to a few simple phrases, repeated by the taped voices, such as “my brother’, “my son” and “I love you”. And with these sounds the music gradually fades and dies.

What was the reaction of the audience at the end?

Certainly very respectful, enthusiastic, but at the same time, thoughtful, applause – obviously the “Mr Bravos” of the concert-going world weren’t going to have the chance to exercise their lungs at the end of this piece. I think the audience’s reaction was tempered by the solemnity of it all, and rightly so.

What was the effect of the piece on you? How much power did the piece have to move your emotions?

For me, the most moving section of the work was the last, reflective episode following the final altogether irruptions of sound and energy, impressive though the impact of these was. I found that, in a sense, the composer was requiring of me to “accumulate” emotion over the course of the piece, so that I felt the lump in my throat coming up when I heard the words at the end “My brother”, “my son”, and “I love you”. It’s interesting that, when I was listening to the first five minutes of the work on you-tube on the computer earlier in the day, I felt the emotion well up then, very palpably – but I think that was because the video clip I was watching contained images of the events of the tragedy, the buildings on fire, the rescue workers standing amid the rubble, the onlookers distraught, the people jumping to their deaths, the simply-written poster-messages – somehow the visual imagery worked with the music to activate my emotions far more overtly, which I didn’t experience during the actual performance in any way until those last few minutes.  And I think, as I said, that this accumulated effect was what the composer had planned, that in the end it was the simplicity of utterance of these ordinary people who had been bereaved that was so extraordinarily moving.

This work was placed last on the program – did you think that was a good idea?

Yes, I think one was able to carry out of the concert hall an abiding impression of the commemoration of the day, because of hearing the Adams work last. Of course, to then have played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony wouldn’t have actually “spoiled” the Adams piece – but it would’ve lessened its raw impact on the audience, going into the aftermath of the concert. It was a contemplative, rather than an earth-shattering piece, the realization of which the composer made quite clear was his intention all along.

Perhaps it would have upstaged anything that followed it?

Actually, no – I don’t think so – and again, I think the composer intended it to be that way. Hearing the piece was for me like connecting with some kind of collective human energy for a short while, and feeling a commonality of spirit and of impulse that was comforting in its way. I think it was a boldly-conceived and sensitively-constructed work. I wondered whether some simple visual production techniques, such as appropriately ambient lighting, might have enhanced the work’s overall impact.In one or two places I did imagine that something visual could have been brought into play with no violence done to the composer’s intentions. But there again, it was obvious Adams intended nothing more than a sound-picture, and for those sounds alone to have a cumulative effect upon his audiences.

So, what about the other two items? – were they put in the shade by the Adams work?

For me, not at all – and partly because it was very much a concert of two halves, with each creating its own unique world of feeling. The first half was absolutely splendid in a completely different way, featuring Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (arguably the most famous of all symphonies in the classical literature) and a lesser-known, but still imposing work, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.25, with Diedre Irons as the soloist. I was speaking with one of the ushers whom I know, during the interval, and who told me that the first concertgoer who came out of the auditorium a few minutes before had said to her, “World class – absolutely world class!” So, people were obviously impressed by what they were hearing.

Do you think it would be difficult for any conductor and orchestra to tackle something as well-known as Beethoven’s Fifth, something that almost everybody would have heard, and with so many great performances available on recordings? I would think it would be quite daunting a prospect.

I think you’re right about that – and in the face of such circumstances, the only way to tackle such a work is to do exactly what Marc Taddei and the orchestra did – which was to play the music almost as though they’d never heard anybody else’s performance, and instead make it their own. Interestingly, I reckoned it was only the second performance of the work I’d ever heard “live” – of course I’ve heard countless versions on record – but in the concert-hall the music’s still a relatively new experience for me, so I was really looking forward to hearing the work. I’m happy to say I wasn’t disappointed. Under Marc Taddei’s direction the orchestral sounds blazed forth, all departments covering themselves with glory. One of the things that thrilled me was, despite this being the Michael Fowler Centre, and not the Wellington Orchestra’s usual home, the Town Hall, the playing had enough energy and tonal weight to fill the auditorium’s spaces and get across the music’s heroic qualities with plenty of gusto. Particularly successful in this respect was the first movement – great attack, right from the outset, with urgent, rather than monumental tempi, but with the rhythms given plenty of chunky, energetic emphasis. The strings were excellent, but the support from the brass and winds and timpani was also spot-on. Other highlights – one of them in this performance for me was the way Marc Taddei challenged his string players in the scherzo to keep the tempo steady for the rushing string figurations – you remember the lower strings come in first, followed gradually by other, higher voices. The skin and hair was flying as these players bent their backs to the task and kept the momentum of the music going – absolutely thrilling! Another great moment was in the finale when Taddei brought the players in for the repeat, at which point the playing seemed to leap forward all the more eagerly and propulsively.

I did think, in one or two places that the famous “motto” theme needed a touch more rhetoric, a bit more underlining, such as for its very last, grand, first movement statement – after all, it is an intensely dramatic as well as a structural motif. More serious, for me, was the nonappearance of the goblins in the third movement, where Taddei got his strings to play so quietly their pizzicati could hardly be heard against the winds – in fact at one point I thought they’d lost their way and stopped playing, so hushed were their sounds.

And who are these goblins, you might well ask? – Well, in Chapter Five of E.M.Forster’s novel Howard’s End there’s a wonderful description of the Symphony’s third movement, made by Helen, one of the novel’s characters – “….the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe from end to end. Others followed him. They were not aggressive creatures – it was that that made them so terrible to Helen. They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendor or heroism in the world…..Beethoven took hold of the goblins and made them do what he wanted. He appeared in person. He gave them a little push and they began to walk in a major key instead of a minor – and then he blew with his mouth and they were scattered……..The goblins really had been there. They might return–and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things….” Alas, the pizzicati were so quiet, and the tempi so swift, we couldn’t really register the goblins’ footfalls and their uncanny progress, or feel their ominous presence. And when Beethoven briefly returned to the scherzo just before the reprise of the finale’s triumphal theme, Taddei’s tempi were so quick there was no time for goblins and their ominous footfalls whatsoever!

If you hadn’t read “Howard’s End”, what would you have thought of the performance overall?

Oh, absolutely splendid (though with a touch more drama and rhetoric required for the “Fate” theme) – but you’ll appreciate that there are some episodes in one’s favorite music that have got to be done “just so”, otherwise they don’t work as well as they ought to. This is all terribly subjective, I’m sure you must be thinking!

Tell me about the Mozart concerto with Diedre Irons.

This,alas,was the last in the series of Mozart concertos played by Diedre Irons with the orchestra – such a pity that we’re not going to go as far as the last one of all, which I would love to hear her play. Still, this one, No.25 in C major, was suitably grand and ceremonial, as befits its key, and also a counterweight to the C Minor of the Beethoven Symphony that we heard. This is a big-boned concerto, with occasional touches of the exotic – trumpets and drums speaking with what I thought was a Turkish accent during the second subject group.

After these very grand, ritualistic beginnings the soloist’s first entry is, by contrast, somewhat rhapsodic, making us “stop and listen” – Diedre Irons’s playing has such character, such purpose, so that with each phrase we experience delight in the moment and satisfaction with the whole. I liked her piano sound – it seemed to my ears a more characterful, brighter and more sharply-focused sound she was getting, compared with the instrument in the Town Hall, enabling her to do more with the music.

Has it been a good combination, Diedre Irons with Marc Taddei and the Wellington Orchestra?

I thought this concerto in particular interestingly set the music-making styles of two different musicians together in a very interesting and creative partnership – Diedre Irons’s playing detailed and momentous, able to expand the phrases for expressive effect while maintaining the music’s larger momentum, compared with Marc Taddei’s energetic, somewhat “driven” style, given to tauter inclinations, marshalling his rhythms and driving the lyrical lines. Here, those differences worked well upon one another, and helped to bring out the concerto’s variety of mood and colour, to the extent that, if one didn’t know the music well, one wasn’t sure what was going to happen next (Mozart at his most inventive).

I believe that the first movement cadenza was the work of none other than Kenneth Young, which I didn’t know until after the performance, thinking at the time that it was a wonderful window into a composer’s soul, exploring the music’s fundamental materials in different lights and from varied angles (no cadenzas by Mozart for this work have survived). The slow movement was one of Mozart’s “operatic” realizations – it seemed that the winds’ tender descending phrase had taken us to the world of “Le Nozze di Figaro”, to the Count’s garden in the fourth act, with beautiful al fresco horns alerting us to the wonders of the evening air. Despite a few momentary spills – one or two horn blurps, and, elsewhere, some pianistic sunspots (in somewhat ruminative passages) – Irons and the orchestral winds enjoyed some delicious dialogues throughout, particularly lovely in effect towards the movement’s end. The finale’s chirpy, but somewhat plain-sounding theme, gets a good going-over when triplets turn the tune into exciting rhythmic swirling and tumblings, and later there a lovely dovetailing of pianistic triplets against long string lines as part of the rich variation Mozart brings to the music – undoubtedly some of his most inventive and colourful for piano and orchestra. Soloist, conductor and players despatched it all with the utmost élan and enjoyment, for our enormous pleasure.

Enterprising contribution to Organ Week at St Peter’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Organ Week (Wellington Organists’ Association)

Dianne Halliday, Director of Music at St Peter’s

Chorale for a New Organ, and Adagio for Strings (Barber); Partita on ‘Christus der ist mein Leben’ (Pachelbel); Prelude and fugue in A, BWV 536 (Bach0; ‘Salve regina’ – 2004 (Naji Hakim). Organ music inspired by the progressive Jewish sect: by William Buck, Hugo Chaim Adler, Ludwig Altman and Michael Horvit

St Peter’s church, Willis Street

Thursday 8 September, 12.45pm

While, nationally, we have an Organ Month, in Wellington only an Organ Week has been organized. The effort required to present a month of recitals, almost every day, is very considerable, and can really be
justified only if the response by audiences is encouraging. Judging by the smallish audience at this most interesting lunchtime concert, the decision to confine it to one week is understandable. Yet when free Sunday afternoon concerts were given a couple of years ago on the Town Hall organ, the crowds were impressive. Where were all those organ lovers?

And incidentally, where have been the organ recitals on the Town Hall organ this year, once again. Is this the ‘Positively Wellington’ Convention Centre’s contribution in support of the city’s claim to be the cultural capital? Well done!

St Peter’s has got a lot of attractive features. It’s one of Wellington’s prettiest churches, in graceful and restrained gothic, with its nearly full suite of stained glass windows and the delicately sculpted wooden screen marking the division between nave and sanctuary; and the newly restored organ, its visible pipes as beautifully decorated as any in the country.

Anyone expecting an exhibition of the sort we heard from Cameron Carpenter playing an ultra flamboyant (‘vulgar’ to use Carpenter’s own word) organ toccata by Samuel Barber with the National Youth Orchestra last Friday would have been relieved at the classical restraint and modesty of this Barber piece. This Lutheran-style chorale was treated with the sort of respect that a Stanford or Parry might have offered, only occasionally coloured with modal harmonies. Dianne Halliday’s use of the organ’s resources was guided by good taste, an ear for an uncluttered range of stops.

Barber’s Adagio was similarly refined, but here, even though the organ theoretically offers a wider palette of colours than, say, a piano or string quartet, I felt that the piece did not really sustain itself and, surprisingly, seemed to need to end a couple of minutes before it did.

The Pachelbel Partita employed, again, a traditional German chorale, putting it through a conventional, and predicatable, series of variations that maintained the attention for just long enough, through the choice of a charming variety of stops. Bach’s BWV 536 came from a similar basket, though built on rather more elaborate lines, the A major character reflected in a lot of high-lying writing that conveyed an untroubled piety.

The last piece deriving from the Christian organ tradition was by eminent Franco-Lebanese composer Naji Hakim, who succeeded Messiaen at the church of the Sainte-Trinité in Paris and is current titular at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris: a ‘Salve Regina’ composed in 2004. The melodic lines of this were, like the Bach, set in generally high registers, using unusual high piccolo stops. It was attractive though becoming repetitive melodically and in its tone.

The last four pieces drew on an unusual repertoire – that of the progressive or reform Jewish tradition which the organist explained as having originated in Germany where organs became familiar in liturgical roles and subsequently in the United States.

The first of them was ‘Candle-lighting’ by English-born, New Zealand composer William Buck, who spent 14 years at the Jewish Centre in Venice, Florida. It did not suggest a strongly sacred character, expressing a
benign, meandering spirit which the organist exploited attractively.

Then came two settings of a Jewish melody: ‘Avienu Malkenu’, both by European Jews who went to the United States. Neither sounded markedly Jewish, though that probably reflects my own imperfect knowledge of much Jewish music. The second, by Ludwig Altman, was accompanied by the distinct whirring of a motor which seemed to reveal itself as driving the tremolo stop that gave the piece a somewhat blowsy quality.

The last piece offered an altogether different insight into an aspect of Jewish culture – the ability to mock or satirise their own tradition. After a sententious opening which soon subsided to a gentle tuneful phase, came an amusing shift to a Broadway-style, syncopated, synthetic, Fiddler on the Roof style Jewish, perhaps we should say Yiddish, music arrived to lighten the spirit, in a fine irreverent way.

It was a particularly well-constructed programme, admirably played.

Exotically-flavoured delights from the NZSQ and Péter Nagy

Posted on by Peter Mechen

HUNGARIAN RHAPSODIES (Programme One)

The New Zealand String Quartet

with Péter Nagy (piano)

BARTÓK – String Quartet No.2 Sz.67

LIGETI – String Quartet No.1 (Métamorphoses nocturnes)

LISZT – Mephisto Waltz No. 4 (Bagatelle sans tonalité) / Csárdás in F-sharp minor / Csárdás obstinée

DOHNÁNYI – Piano Quintet No. 2 in E-flat Minor Op.26

Hunter Council Chamber,

Victoria University, Wellington

Sunday 4th September 2011

The publicity accompanying the New Zealand String Quartet’s “Hungarian Rhapsodies” set of concerts made a great thing of the “rhapsodies” designation, bringing into play synonyms such as ecstasy, rapture, bliss, enthusiasm and great joy – but upon hearing the first of the two programs I would have just as enthusiastically endorsed the “Hungarian” part of the description, especially in the context of the Quartet’s characterful and atmospheric playing. Particularly during the first half, we were, at any point, taken to worlds whose sounds, for me, were borne on a different kind of air to that which I normally breathed and listened to, something more tremulous and laden, creating expectancy and a degree of tension at the thought of whatever feelings, emotional and visceral, might be conjured up. What the group was doing, of course, was realizing some of the most interesting and absorbing chamber-music sounds ever to have been written, and bringing us as listeners into the world of those sounds.

And with the sounds came flavours and colours, those of the Bartok Second Quartet’s three movements strongly earthy and dark-hued, but here, keeping the music’s inherent lyricism close at hand. From the Quartet players came a warm, natural growth of sounds, beautifully-focused singing and shaping of the music’s contours, tones and silences alike, expressing the “soul” of the music and the earth from which it rose. Thus the folk-like singing lines over the ‘cello’s “strummed” accompaniment towards the end of the first movement made for a magical opening up of what we had already heard in “songs and snatches”, revealing the music as a kind of extended lullaby, rich and varied, both rustic and ghostly.

If song dominated the first movement, a fierce percussive energy inspired the quartet’s playing throughout  the second, marked allegro molto capriccioso. The composer’s recent travels in North Africa may have accounted for the exotic-sounding motifs, their slurrings and drummings fuelled by over-brimming peasant energies. The players nicely pointed the contrast of an angular gavotte-like trio section, before returning to the motoric energies of the opening.  We heard an almost “East-meets-West” blending of exotic patternings and relentless drive, before being taken on that spookily spectral abyss’s edge gallop towards what I thought came across as strangely reassuring folkish unisons at the movement’s end. The Lento finale resembled for me a huge slow-motion wave at the finale’s beginning, the performance creating impulsive swells that broke and arched up from the music’s undulating surfaces, before exhausting themselves and falling back into the prevailing contours via a couple of telling pizzicato notes.

Violinist Helene Pohl talked briefly about the Hungarian aspect of the program, and, helpfully, about Bartok in particular at the concert’s opening – and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten in turn spoke about Ligeti’s First String Quartet. He provided a brief but insightful overview of the music with the help of his colleagues, who demonstrated with great relish things like the composer’s “mocking” of his own themes in places, from instrument to instrument. The work was composed in 1953/54, from a time the composer was to later call “Prehistoric Ligeti”, those years before he fled Hungary as a result of the 1956 Uprising. The Bartok of the third and fourth Quartets was Ligeti’s model, here, the music at the outset colored by a lyricism, ingratiating tones set against spikiness, and delicacy against muscularity.

The composer’s four-note motto, which Rolf Gjelsten asked the players to demonstrate at the beginning, could be heard subjected to a bewildering variety of transformations, hence the “metamorphoses” of the work’s title. Memorable episodes abounded – a gig-like dotted-rhythm episode contrasted with sequences of haunted whisperings and harmonics, the dark, insidious-sounding Waltz, with its stricken pizzicati “curdling out” as arco phrasings (the poco capriccioso marking living up to its name), and the spectacularly hushed ostinati towards the work’s end set alongside the “mocking” repetitions of the motto theme. A totally engaging listening experience! – of the sort, it must be emphasized, that we’ve come to eagerly anticipate every time, from this ensemble.

Hungarian pianist Péter Nagy presented us with an all-too-brief glimpse into the world of Liszt’s late works for solo piano – I had to restrain myself from leaping to my feet when he’d finished, and proclaiming that it wasn’t enough – demanding that he play things like the Csárdás Macabre and Nuages Gris also, so that we could get a real sense of the composer as a visionary, “throwing a lance into the future”. What we heard barely scratched the surface of this somewhat bleak, atonal world of the composer’s, a true rejection of previous lives, activities, impulses and creations, in favour of what most of Liszt’s contemporaries would have certainly regarded as terra incognito. Still,in keeping with the concert’s “Hungarian Rhapsodies” title, we had to be content with those pieces linked to folk-dance, though the aforementioned Csárdás Macabre would have fitted the bill nicely, as well. The extremely chromatic Mephisto Waltz No.4 (subtitled “Bagatelle sans tonalité”) and the two Csárdás certainly gave notice of a creative sensibility looking to new worlds to explore.

Péter Nagy featured also in the concert’s final work, Ernő Dohnanyi’s Piano Quintet No.2 in E-flat minor. Though it came across as much more of a drawing-room piece cheek-by-jowl with the Bartok and Ligeti Quartets, with an almost Borodin-like exoticism in places, the music still generated great sweepings of activity whose textures definitely sounded “gypsy” rather than Germanic. There was something very “fin de siécle” about those dying-fall sevenths and swooning harmonies – a touch, even, of Cesar Franck, perhaps, in some of the more fragrant harmonic modulations? Not quite what I expected – at this stage of the piece, anyway – though the playing gave the piece every chance to impress on its own terms.

The Intermezzo featured constant changes of mood between salon music, flashes of gypsy energy and formalized structuring, the players characterizing the music’s different courses with relish. Just as it was the viola’s turn to shine at this movement’s beginning, so the ‘cello took the lead in the finale, leading the other voices into a fugal working-out, which the piano further ritualized with solemn chords. However, rhapsodic feeling became paramount once again, the playing “digging in”, building the movement’s energies towards an inevitable intensification of feeling, the string lines wrapping themselves more and more tightly together, and stimulating from the piano massive sonorities. Then, at a slower tempo, the musicians regrouped their resources and brought off a fine climactic archway of romantic feeling, whose hushed coda’s strains brought a comparable sigh of audience pleasure at the very end.

NZSO NYO 2011 – “Tomorrow’s Sounds” already heart-warming strains

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZSO National Youth Orchestra 2011

James Judd (conductor)

with Cameron Carpenter (organ)

ALEXANDRA HAY – An Atlas of Unfixed Stars

SAMUEL BARBER – Toccata Festiva Op.3

SERGEI RACHMANINOV – Symphony No.2 in E Minor Op.27

Wellington Town Hall Friday  August 2nd

Auckland Town Hall Saturday August 3rd

Watching those beautiful, youthful faces totally engrossed in and engaged by the music-making throughout the 2011 NZSO National Youth Orchestra’s Wellington concert on Friday evening, I found myself briefly imagining I had become a camera, and was able to capture for posterity those precious images of  “golden lads and girls” revelling in an evening’s unique moment in time. I suspect that it was all enhanced by the venue – Wellington’s Town Hall has for orchestral concerts a natural immediacy of interaction between the players and their audience, but on this occasion the lines of communication between the groups hummed and buzzed to saturation-point excitement! However inspirational I’ve found previous National Youth Orchestra concerts held in Wellington’s Michael Fowler Centre to have been, I don’t recall a more thrilling, involving and interactive bevy of performances than those we were given by these almost scarily talented youngsters under the direction of their inspirational maestro James Judd.

The concert as a whole was, I thought, a somewhat quirky affair in places, with the showcasing of the youthful orchestra’s corporate and individual talents unaccountably diluted by the antics of the guest soloist, virtuoso American organist Cameron Carpenter. True, his playing of the solo organ part in Samuel Barber’s Toccata Festiva was jaw-dropping in its virtuosity, especially the pedal-only cadenza towards the end of the work. But (perhaps curmudgeonly) I felt other aspects of his contribution to the concert were too self-vehicular in this context – they took the focus away from what I was given to understand the concert was supposed to be celebrating, the coming-together of the country’s finest young musicians to demonstrate THEIR performance skills. To be fair to Carpenter, an impressive performer as such, this may well have been what the people who decide these things at the NZSO wanted – post-Jeremy Wells and his unfortunate TV doco, it seems the attraction of flash over substance is still hanging around and about the orchestral management’s door.

It was the encore item that for me was the rub – to have Carpenter and his colourfully entertaining irruption of performer-pizzaz in the context of a larger group’s activities was one thing, but to then allow him a substantial encore slot which seemed merely to draw attention to the player and his instrument seemed somewhat off-centre. What I would have enjoyed was for Carpenter to have prepared something that had involved the orchestra or a group of players – but, unaccountably, his solo performance meant that the focus was on him and his instrument to the exclusion of the young musicians. Yes, he did acknowledge (in a brief but eloquent post-performance speech) that his work with the group for the concert had been a real “buzz” for him – and maybe, unlike myself and one or two people I spoke with at the interval, the young musicians felt no such qualms over his activities in the concert.

I found it ironic, therefore, that the encore itself was such a hit-and-miss realization of the music. This seemed a pity, in light of Carpenter’s avowed respect for Franz Liszt as a composer,  which his spoken introduction to the work made clear. His transcription for the organ of the work in question, Funerailles, from the set of “Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses” for solo piano, did the music few favours, the instrument simply unable to command the coloristic resonances that give the original composition its striking power in both the opening slow and rapid concluding march sections. Carpenter’s realization did bring out the lyricism of the piece’s central section, especially the consoling major-key episode – even if, in places, the chirpy staccato tones reminded me of Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” – but with the onset of the bigger, more resonant chordings an unfortunate stuttering staccato was the result, with the lack of pianistic nuance and colour giving the themes a blatancy avoided by the original. More weight in the bass did help the player bring off the last couple of pages with a real hiss and a roar, again courting vulgarity (a common criticism of the composer’s music per se, but in this case, I feel, quite undeserved).

But back to the concert proper (protesteth this reviewer too much?) – which began with a work by the orchestra’s 2011 composer-in-residence, Alexandra Hay. With a biographical note about the composer in the program came the following sentence: “Her work often explores processes of gradual transformation: the unfolding of figures, timbres and resonances that converge and disperse.” And thus it was with Hay’s work, here – An Atlas of Unfixed Stars. Pointillistic notes, near-notes and sounds began for us what seemed like a journey through realms of ever-growing awareness, the notes becoming oscillations, the near-notes forming clusters and the sounds ringing the changes through breathings, scrapings and fidgettings. And so the aural detail continued its agglomerations, catching all of us up in spaces beneath “that inverted bowl we call the sky” watching with our ears the stars and their adjoining empty vistas, and gradually “discerning” the celestial details and their different characteristics more clearly – their oscillations, their intensities, and in a few cases their actual movements. The music intensified the hues, textures and incidences, so that we listeners/watchers were increasingly caught up in the display, our involvement adding an extra dimension to the spatial elements of the sounds, the immediacy for us of some figures and resonances set against the relative distancing of others. I found myself a captive listener/spectator at an early stage of the piece, admiring the composer’s adroit handling of detail within an extended structure, and the youthful players’ confident-sounding realization of it all.

Samuel Barber’s Toccata Festiva was new to me, but readily made an impact with rousing orchestral textures and energetic rhythms, the players revelling in the instrumental writing – in fact I thought the marvellously virile opening had more than a touch of the cinema about it, as if it were the on-screen prelude to a filmed Greek or Roman tragedy. In almost no time at all the organ trumpeted spectacularly in soon afterwards, anxious not to be overshadowed, the playing almost maniacally virtuosic. A long, lyrical theme, divided up by the soloist as well as sections of the orchestra added to the music’s variety, which incorporated a kind of struggle for dominance between the different characters, resolved by the organ’s amazing pedals-only cadenza (the soloist hanging onto the organ stool with both hands for dear life while pumping his legs like a stage-winner in the Tour de France, creating an overwhelming sonic effect). The cynic might well quote Shakespeare’s “full of sound and fury – signifying nothing” in response to the work, but I enjoyed its spectacular peregrinations enormously.

An interval’s grace allowed us to catch our collective breath in preparation for hearing one of Rachmaninov’s biggest and grandest works, the Second Symphony in E Minor. Over the years belittled by “fashion-conscious” detractors of the music, and until comparatively recently performed with grievous cuts sanctioned by the chronically self-critical composer, the work’s stature was here suitably and convincingly vindicated, given complete and with the utmost conviction and intensity by conductor and players.

Had Rachmaninov’s First Symphony not been so systematically savaged by its critics at the work’s premiere, the composer’s subsequent works may well have explored even more adventurous and individual pathways – hypotheses such as this are, of course, the absorbing and unanswered might-have-beens of musical history. Though he destroyed the earlier score (it was eventually retrieved via a set of the orchestral parts, after the composer’s death), Rachmaninov (perhaps subconsciously) acknowledged and ratified the youthful work by calling the new symphony his “No.2”. It has all the recognized Rachmaninovian hallmarks – lyricism, melancholy, ceremony, brilliance and drama – and the restoration of all the cuts gives the work an epic feeling, in places ritualistic, in others intensely ruminative. Schumann’s description of Schubert’s “heavenly length” in the latter’s “Great” C Major Symphony for me applies as well here to Rachmaninov’s work of seemingly endless melody.

The young players gave the work exactly what it needed to succeed, truckloads of energy and passionate commitment, put across with astonishing executant skills. No quarter was given, no allowance made for the group’s relative inexperience or brevity of rehearsal time – James Judd directed his young charges with intensity and drive that surprised and delighted me, as I’d occasionally found his conducting too “fussy” and lightweight during his tenure with the NZSO. Naturally, there were places where ensemble didn’t quite come together; and I thought the players distinctly ran out of a bit of “puff” in the finale until their second wind kicked in towards the end. But there was no doubting the musicians’ commitment to the task, both individually and corporately – and as a result, the music’s full stature was triumphantly realized.

In particular, the string playing – crucial to this work’s success – was the stuff of dreams, by turns richly-wrought and finely nuanced, with the occasional stylish portamento giving the heartstrings an extra tug. In circumstances such as these, the different strands weren’t over-moulded, to the music’s advantage, I thought, the characteristic instrumental timbres allowed their particular accents and colours, which brought out the earthy Russian-ness of the sound more markedly. The winds had much the same attractive individual piquancies, with the clarinettist a confident and sensitive soloist in the third movement (an elongated beat at one point scarcely interrupting the flow). The brasses had tricky syncopations to content with in places, but they registered many more thrills than spills, and were there in glorious array for the big moments, as were the percussion, enjoying their more delicate scintillations and ripping into the big moments with gusto (I noticed a nearby audience member, startled by the timpanist’s precipitate entry at one point, was ready for the next onslaught when it came – no circumspection or half-measures here, but instead, a very exciting and appropriately full-blooded sound.

It adds up to yet another successful and heart-warming occasion generated by efforts of the NZSO in helping to proclaim the skills of our young musicians – and (briefly returning to my opening theme) how wonderful it would be to have some of that youthful beauty of concentration, engagement and sheer joy in music-making caught on film – the “golden lads and girls” of our own musical world, indeed!

Aroha Plus gives wonderful programmme of string sextets

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Dvořák: String Sextet in A, Op.48
Erwin Schulhoff: String Sextet
Brahms: String Sextet no.2 in G, Op.36 (Agathe)

Aroha String Quartet: Haihong Liu (violin), Beiyi Xue (violin), Zhongxian Jin (viola), Robert Ibell (cello), with Lyndon Johnston Taylor (viola) and Rowan Prior (cello)

Ilott Theatre

Sunday 28 August 2011, 3pm

It was wonderful to have a programme of string sextets, something I haven’t heard for years. To have six superb string players to perform them was a delight, and the good-sized audience was proof others thought so too.

However, at the beginning of the Dvořák sextet I thought the violin tone rather harsh and shrill. It soon settled down, and the genial quality of Dvořák’s music shone through. Dvořák’s combination of good humour and nostalgia is a joy to hear. His interweaving of the instrumental parts is sublime.

Rhythmic emphases in the Dumka second movement, coupled with the contrast in moods that it contained made it interesting, as it was too, to have a movement with so much bass in it. The third movement, Furiant also had alternating moods and tempi, but there was rough tone at times, and some vagaries of intonation in various places.

The finale featured a lovely warm sound and expressive playing from Zhongxian Jin in the viola theme that opens the movement, with the lower instruments accompanying. Later, there was a fine cello variation from Robert Ibell, with quiet chords as accompaniment. This was followed by repeated notes from the other cellist, with a shroud of long threads produced by the other instruments. Then there were dream-like sustained lines on the upper instruments and one cello while the others played pizzicato. A fast, lively ending completed a satisfying performance.

Erwin (Ervin, in Grove) Schulhoff (1894-1942) died prematurely of tuberculosis, in a Nazi concentration camp. The sextet was written while he was in his twenties. The programme note said that this work was in contrast to his earlier music, “…reflecting his experiences of fighting in the Great War.”

The apt description of his music in the note: “…the music is muscular and resolute but never predictable” was certainly borne out. The opening allegro is angular and harsh, followed by an interlude of tremolo against pizzicato and slow chords. Sul ponticello (on the bridge) playing featured here and elsewhere in the work, giving its other-worldly effect. For this item, the two cellists, and two violists, swapped places from the positions they had sat in for the Dvořák.

The Tranquillo second movement was indeed that – dream-like, with ethereal notes played on the upper strings against repeated notes from the lower instruments. Featured were tremolo notes on two instruments. As the programme note said, “…the ghostly episodes with chilling tremolo accompaniment towards the conclusion are also memorable.”

The short third movement Burlesca was a complete contrast: a very active and exciting movement which had one thinking “What is coming next?” It had Rowan Prior hitting the strings with her bow – much more severely than in mere spiccato playing.

The molto adagio Finale returned to the discordant mode of the opening movement, with a gloomy then muted opening section. An appealing but tense violin solo was followed by a passage of playing without vibrato, and then another section which today would be called minimalist. The music faded away in a mournful ending. The variety of techniques employed in this work made me wonder if it was perhaps more interesting to play than to listen to. That is not to say that it wasn’t well worth being given an airing.

For the final item, the Brahms Sextet, the players resumed their configuration used for the Dvořák work. The gorgeous opening on violin set the tone for the work, followed by another beautiful passage, this time on the cello, and then on the other instruments, but minor intonation lapses near the beginning spoilt the smooth flow. All the thematic material was developed thoroughly in typical Brahmsian style. The movement built up to a very thick texture, before a lilting ending.

The Scherzo started in a jolly frame of mind, with the lower instruments playing pizzicato. Then it conveyed what the programme note called “…a wistful, slightly mysterious character”, following which was a bouncy, jolly section and a sprightly ending.

The third movement, poco adagio, starts with a trio of two violins and viola, then another viola is added, and later the cellos. This lighter texture gave a pleasing contrast to other parts of the work, as did the extensive use of pizzicato. Despite the adagio marking, there was plenty of liveliness throughout the movement, before its gentle close.

The opening of the finale was reminiscent of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream overture. (Why don’t we hear more Mendelssohn from the NZSO and other performers? The New Zealand String Quartet have shown us what wonderful music there is by this composer.) This was followed by passages of deep, dark tones. The players brought these contrasts out well, especially in the fugal passages. The “…hearty, exuberant coda” as Berys Cuncannon’s excellent programme note described it, brought the concert to an upbeat conclusion.

A small point that detracted a little from my enjoyment of this concert was the fact that the violinists wore sparkly items of clothing. I found this off-putting, since the sparkles constantly flash with the players’ movements.

Nevertheless, it was a treat to hear delightful, and thought-provoking, music for string sextet.