Category: Reviews – Concerts

Zephyr and Diedre Irons at Paekakariki

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Paekakariki Mulled Wine Concert Series 2009

Zephyr Winds (NZSO Principals): Bridget Douglas (flute) / Robert Orr (oboe) / Phil Green (clarinet) / Robert Weeks (bassoon) / Ed Allen (horn) – with Diedre Irons (piano)

MOZART – Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat K.452

BARBER – Summer Music Op.31

BERIO – Opus Number Zoo

POULENC – Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet

Paekakariki Memorial Hall, Sunday 2nd August 2009

We were packed in with a vengeance at the Paekakariki Memorial Hall on Sunday afternoon, our seats almost at the very back and with little or no sight-lines extending to the musicians (the floor has no raised platform for the performers), causing me some anxieties regarding being able to fully “connect” with the music-making. I needn’t have worried – over the heads of the shoulder-to-shoulder throng came the opening measures of the Mozart, gloriously sounded (a combination of lively acoustic and brightly-focused projection from the players) and instantly engaging, quickly putting to rest the rustling ambiences of an audience settling down. The Largo introduction blossomed into an allegro moderato, the playing achieving such felicities of articulation, buoyancy and balance between the instruments as to bring constant pricklings of pleasure to the listener. Diedre Irons’s playing made the piano sound almost like a wind instrument, its strength, agility, flexibility and singing tone blending with what the other players were doing in subtle give-and-take interplay. The full-throated wind choir at the slow movement’s beginning again engaged the piano in a beautifully-written conversation of equals, with lovely explorations of different harmonies in a middle section where the music goes in and out of the sunlight, the tensions resolved in a way that perhaps reflected its creator’s desire for both diversity and order in the world.

In the Rondo Allegretto finale, the music continued its philosophical bent, its poised, at times liquid rhythms incorporating a lyrical and in places melancholic aspect within the same pulse, especially in a somewhat restless middle section. The playing continued to delight, no more than at a lovely concerto-like cadence point of questioning, after which the winds were able to diffuse the tension nicely and return the argument to the poise and urbanity of the opening.

By way of attempting to brighten up our recent wintry Wellington woes, Zephyr undertook Samuel Barber’s “Summer Music”, a lovely, indolent-sounding work enlivened by chirruping energies, conveying a “nature-at-play” ambience against which passages of gentle melancholy perhaps reflect the feelings of the beholder experiencing such seasonal rites. The players took us through a number of beautifully-characterised episodes, at one point the oboe instigating a quasi-oriental dance joined by flute and bassoon, the latter trying the same steps later on his own, to the delight of flute and oboe, whose amused riposte rippled through the ensemble. Just before the end, the music began a kind of journeying aspect, whose rhythmic tread briefly suggested a railway adventure, but with the return of the languid opening music, the impetus was lost, and the bassoon’s final attempt to dance again provoked another tantalising outbreak of mirth whose elfin disappearance came as quickly as its ready laughter.

People not normally drawn to contemporary classical music might have initially swallowed uncomfortably at seeing the name of Luciano Berio on the programme, a well-known experimental composer and pioneer of electronic music. They need not have worried – “Opus Number Zoo” demonstrates a lighter, more playful side of the composer’s activities, the four pieces settings with multiple narrators of allegorical texts whose parallels can be found in the Aesop Fables. Its musical equivalents inhabit a world not unlike that of Stravinsky, in “The Soldier’s Tale”, though there’s also a Waltonesque whimsy in some of the narrations that remind one of “Façade”. The first “Barn Dance” tells the tale of the poor silly chick who danced with a fox (flutist Bridget Douglas demonstrating hitherto unrevealed Thespian skills of an advanced order, here, with her vivid vocal characterisations!), the droll “That’s all, folks!” at the end occasioning a sympathetic chuckle from the audience. “The Fawn” is a bleak meditation on armaments and war-mongering, with ascending, expressive wind-textures highlighting the apocalyptic nature of the scenario; while ”The Grey Mouse” is a droll commentary on youth and age, the musician-speakers demonstrating a wonderfully precise vocal ensemble. Finally, in “Tom Cats”, a confrontational tale of greed and envy, Bridget Douglas’s voice was again to the fore, with the players engaging in “stand and deliver” antics with their instruments at cardinal points – all very entertaining!

After these tongue-in-cheek coruscations it was left to Francis Poulenc to restore some equanimity to our sensibilities with his Sextet for Piano and Wind Quintet. The attention-grabbing opening plunged us into a carnival atmosphere, with scenes involving trick-cyclists, jugglers and clowns, everything vividly depicted with sharply-etched playing from Diedre Irons and Zephyr. The bassoon called a halt with an eloquent recitative, answered by the piano, and then evolving into one of those wonderfully “bitter-sweet” melodies beloved of twentieth-century French composers, the mood becoming impassioned, then becalmed, before plunging back into the festive energetics of the opening. Throughout all of this, the ensemble took each different episode in its stride, delivering the music’s variegated moods with tremendous élan. The slow movement, with its oboe-led song-like opening had a dreamlike “drifting-harmonic” aspect, which a burst of jog-trot energy momentarily and cheekily overlaid; while the players threw themselves into the finale’s almost Dadaist energies at the outset with plenty of manic vigour, sanities restored by several of Poulenc’s wonderful astringent melodic episodes, and a surprisingly rhetorical , almost chorale-like ending, delivered by the Zephyr players and Diedre Irons with just the right amount of mock-seriousness.

Occasionally reviewers have experiences which cause them to doubt their own listening abilities and capacities, one such for me being the small encore piece given us by the ensemble at the concert’s end – it turned out to be the animated section of the Poulenc Sextet’s slow movement, which I did think I’d “heard before somewhere” but didn’t recognise! Bridget Douglas comforted me by telling me that people had been caught out before by Zephyr’s repetition of that section of the music: “Out of context it sounds quite different” she told me. That, and the fact that I’d not heard the work before, did give me some comfort, but nevertheless I was abashed at not recognising it for what it was at the time – zut alors!

 

 

T’ang Quartet and John Chen in fine concert at the Ilott

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Music Society concert

Schnittke: Quintet for piano and strings, Gao Ping: Piano Quintet, Dvořák: Piano Quintet No 2 in A, Op 81

T’ang Quartet (Wilma Smith and Ang Chek Meng – violins, Han Oh – viola, Leslie Tan – cello) and John Chen (piano)

Ilott Theatre, Sunday 2 August 2009

Though it is fair to say that Wellington’s taste for new music is probably more adventurous than that of other major cities, it may well have been the pulling power of musicians of such distinction as these that attracted an around 80 percent audience to a programme containing two contemporary works, one newly commissioned and the other probably unfamiliar to 95 percent of the audience.

There were two changes in the quartet’s personnel for this tour. The regular leader, Ng Yu-Ying, was replaced by Wilma Smith and violist Lionel Tan by Han Oh.

Schnittke can hardly be described in terms of other composers of his generation, except in fairly general and unhelpful ways. One might be to say music of the time this piece was composed – the mid 1970s – was still heavily in thrall to the avant-garde, with its conviction that the widening gap between composers and audiences was the latter’s problem. Some of it, from composers of genuine genius, has gained a place in our auditory hard-drive, some has disappeared without trace, while some cling to a raft becoming crowded with more interesting and congenial makers of music of recent years, but may survive:

I think Schnittke is in this last class. While there is a core of music lovers sympathetic to his music on account of his personal situation vis a vis the Soviet Union and his persistent ill-health, there are as many who are sceptical of his aesthetic and the validity of his musical impulses.

This piano quintet, however, seems to spring from a genuine creative inspiration, with less of the trade-mark poly-stylism that strikes many as a gimmick or as a way of masking a lack of melodic invention. It clearly describes a time of personal loss through its spare, bleak textures, long-sustained single notes, the emptiness of the mocking waltz of the second movement, the Andante with its microtones laced with little glissandi, finally closing in a mood of timid hope. John Chen’s role was conspicuously in command of the piano’s striking, sometimes eccentric contribution; the string players clearly understood its emotions and the musical means by which they were expressed, eventually finding some kind of peace in the last movement.

Gao Ping’s piece was commissioned by the Christchurch Arts Festival where it was played, in fact, the day after the Wellington performance.

A piece rather more typical of the current musical climate, music that does not sound so disturbed; in fact, presenting a sunny scene, Though each of the four movements is some sort of reflection on the four qualities that are significant in ancient Chinese literary life, efforts to bear them in mind through the performance seemed superfluous, even irrelevant.

The flow of the music and the rewarding writing for individual instruments, the cello in particular in the third part (Bamboo), made any concerns with non-musical ideas fade away. In the last section, the viola (Han Oh, seemingly perfectly in accord with his colleagues) took charge of a beguiling tune that, teasingly, refrained from evolving as it wanted to. Leader Wilma Smith was notably comfortable in the quartet, in this work, capturing the tone of the Chinese violin, such as the erhu, idiomatically.

The second piano quintet by Dvořák is one of the most loved in the repertoire. Its hearing does, unfortunately, prompt the question in the mind, ‘why is it not possible for today’s composers, some of whom must be comparably gifted with melodic fecundity, to write such music built on beautiful melody that is worked out with such impulsive delight’.

Wilma Smith again sounded in full command of the piece, responding to the style of her colleagues with great warmth; and cellist Leslie Tan took full advantage of his opportunities both at the start of the first movement and the passages of lovely, sustained lyricism in the second movement. Though John Chen was very much a star of the concert, his fluent and interesting playing never drew attention to itself even though one’s ear was constantly enchanted by his perfectly judged role, and contributed to a wonderful unity of spirit through the joyful Finale.

Great Romantics – NZSO on tour

Posted on by Peter Mechen

DEBUSSY – Prélude á l’aprés-midi d’un faune

RACHMANINOV – Piano Concerto No.2 in C Minor

SHOSTAKOVICH – Symphony No.10

Alexander Melnikov (piano)

Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre,Wellington, Saturday, 1st August, 2009

The orchestra undertook an “all-main centres” tour with this programme, finishing in Wellington on a Saturday afternoon in August. Both visiting artists, pianist Alexander Melnikov and conductor Mark Wigglesworth had elicited glowing opinions for previous overseas performances of some of the featured works, and had already been praised by local critics for their work with the orchestra in its other “Great Romantics” programme. So it was with the highest expectations that we took our seats in the Michael Fowler Centre to enjoy the prospect of an afternoon’s richly-wrought music-making.

The programme couldn’t have begun more beguilingly than with Bridget Douglas’s first flute strains at the opening of Debussy’s “Prélude á l’aprés-midi d’un faune”. It was music breathed into being more than “played”, supported by finely-honed chording from the winds and sensuous colouring from harps and horns. Wigglesworth and the orchestra achieved wonders of spontaneous flow, every line seemingly “free” and uniquely woven, with different timbres and colourings happening by instinct as it were. And when the flute took up the melodic line again, the music blossomed afresh, the two flutes in unison at the climax of the melody in perfect accord, clarinet and oboe unable to contain themselves, and augmenting the flow to where the strings were gratefully waiting, embracing the melodic contourings with sensuous warmth. Debussy rang the ambient changes as the work proceeded, a lovely rhythmic trajectory, at once firm-footed and languorous, underpinned gently floated wind octaves, subtle touches of silvery percussion (was that Lenny Sakofsky sitting among the brass players conjuring those magical scintillations from what seemed like the ether?) adding to the magic. At the end, we in the audience were the ones who were enchanted.

Romantic feeling of a darker and more urgent kind was introduced by the Rachmaninov concerto, even if pianist Alexander Melnikov’s opening chords began the work a shade perfunctorily, as if he were unconcerned to match sonorities with the orchestra’s richly velvet tones at its first entry. Throughout the opening and when introducing the second subject Melnikov continued to keep things cool, refusing to fully “command” the music, but instead treat his part almost as a kind of obbligato, part of the overall musical texture. While this ought to have worked in theory, for me it all imparted a detachment somewhat at odds with the music’s emotional core, as if the pianist was playing Saint-Saens rather than Rachmaninov, delicacy and elegance to the fore rather than a sense of every note meaning something worthwhile.

Wigglesworth and the orchestra generated a good deal of maestoso weight during the movement’s march-like central section, something that Melnikov slightly undermined by pressing slightly ahead of the beat, taking away some of the music’s sheer grandeur and leaving an impression of impatience. Some beautiful sounds from the orchestra, though – as in the other works throughout the concert, Ed Allen’s horn-playing was something to die for, and the ‘cellos played their lyrical ascending figure a little later with aching loveliness. Melnikov didn’t really respond to these oases of lyrical refurbishment amid the movement’s darkness, instead continuing to play things coolly and keeping the pulse to the fore, the coda moving towards its terse climax almost before one was ready for it. Again, in the slow movement, Wigglesworth and the players prepared a beautifully-phrased opening which Melnikov treated extremely casually in reply, creating little magic with his arpeggios, content to let the wind players sing out and squeeze the emotional juices. The big climax of the movement came and went with little frisson from the soloist, seeming to continue his “once-removed” attitude towards the music. Quite suddenly, with the brief cadenza, a change was magically wrought – harp-strummed, almost bardic chords from Melnikov invigorated the piano textures, and led to a hushed reprise of the “big tune”, winds and strings absolutely gorgeous and the piano in quiet raptures right up to the end. Why did the man wait so long before finally deciding to dig into the music?

The finale was again a curious affair, filled with imaginative touches and occasional disjointed moments from the soloist. Melnikov’s sweeping brilliance at the beginning, a bit splashy but extremely exciting, worked well with the on-the-spot orchestral contributions, the pizzicati during the brief scherzando episode really “telling” for a change, as the pianist danced up and down the keyboard. Melnikov and Wigglesworth went for a more massive effect than usual in the big build-up towards the fugato, whose speeding-up seemed to me a bit contrived, the music obviously wanting earlier to burst out of its constraints and race towards its contrapuntal trystings; but the second appearance of the big “Brief Encounter” tune was wonderful, with orchestra and pianist again “finding” each other, romantic feeling answered with poetry and tenderness. The final section had its “stop-start” moments, with Melnikov wanting to go faster than the orchestra with each of his soloistic episodes; but the grand final piano-and-orchestra peroration was undeniably spectacular, with all the requisite keyboard fireworks from the soloist and richly-singing orchestral tones.

In response to audience acclaim, Melnikov sat down to play an encore – and with the first few notes of Rachmaninov’s B Minor Prelude (the one that pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch christened “The Return”) the pianist seemed utterly transformed – the “every-note-counts” commitment that I’d felt was lacking in the concerto was suddenly manifest in earnest, Melnikov catching that aching “tug” between urgency and stasis in those opening utterances so characteristic of the composer’s music. As the work moved into its more agitated central episode, we were made to feel all of the pent-up emotion and world-weariness of the long-absent traveller in sight of his homeland – the sounds caught every impulse and instinct, both compulsive and ambivalent, whose interaction gives the music its underlying power. Interestingly, Melnikov chose to “brush in” the flashing pianistic figurations of the climax instead of giving them the usual rhetorical glint and edge, which worked beautifully in the context of the searing concentration he applied to the overall musical argument. The final utterances of the piece are cries which mingle joy, longing and foreboding; and Melnikov brought out their complexities with a sure instinct, weighting his touch with enough dying fall to leave us in a limbo of uncertainty and darkness. Coming after the disappointment of the concerto, this encore performance left me – well, dumbfounded!

Mark Wigglesworth himself contributed the programme note for Shostakovich’s mighty Tenth Symphony, stressing the links in the music between Stalinist repression and brutality in Russia and the composer’s belief and determination that the human spirit would survive come what may. Shostakovich himself talked about the connections between the music and Stalin; and the torturous nature of the emotional terrain through which both this and the equally epic Eighth Symphony travels demonstrates a powerful, consistently disturbing and at times frightening relationship between style and content which the composer himself may have matched but never surpassed in later works.

The performance amply demonstrated Wigglesworth’s credentials as an interpreter of the composer’s music, from the dark menace of the symphony’s very opening (reminiscent of Fafner’s cave in “Siegfried”), through the gratuitous brutality and the fire-alarm terror of the Scherzo’s frenetic storm, and the grotesqueries of the Allegretto Third Movement’s spectral dance, to the gritty optimism of the finale. Throughout the NZSO played with the utter conviction and surety of musicians who had swallowed a work whole and tapped all of the music’s inherent power and depth of expression. Perhaps there wasn’t quite the knife-edged intensity one experiences when listening to recordings by some of the great Russian interpreters such as Mravinsky, Kondrashin and Svetlanov; but in general Western musicians don’t have access to the same culture of direct experience of war and oppression which obviously gave many of those pre-Perestroika Soviet performances such a brutally stricken ethos.

To analyse Wigglesworth’s and the orchestra’s performance closely would stretch this already elongated review to unacceptable bounds – however each of the movements featured remarkable realisations of aspects of the composer’s vision. In the first movement the transition via solo clarinet and strings from the Winterreise-like loneliness of the opening to the pulse-quickening episode with flute and strings was magically achieved, as telling as the heartbreak of the strings climbing towards the piccolo’s distant visionary angel-spectre at the movement’s end. The orchestral onslaught in the second movement had an elemental wildness (Laurence Reese’s timpani strokes positively apocalyptic at one point!), the strings surviving a brief moment of imprecision towards the end to help with driving the argument to its conclusion, the playing eliciting a stunned silence in the auditorium at the brutality and ferocity of it all. Ed Allen’s magnificent horn-playing dominated the third movement, with its repetitions of the five-note theme, the last being a magically “stopped’ call from another world. And it was the wind players who so splendidly articulated the finale’s opening, the oboe’s call of desolation mingling with the bassoon’s sober soliliquies, and flute and clarinet despairingly trying to goad each other into launching a dance of defiance, one which succeeds in activating the mighty show of white-knuckled optimism that concludes the work. Conductor and players – a magnificent achievement, indeed!

Cook Strait Trio in full sail

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Chamber Music Hutt Valley

The Cook Strait Trio (Blythe Press – violin, Paul van Houtte – cello, Amber Rainey – piano)

Turina: Piano Trio No 2 in B minor, Op76, Psathas: Island Songs, Dvořák: Piano Trio in F minor, Op 65

Lower Hutt Little Theatre, Thursday 30 July 2009

The Cook Strait Trio is just the kind of chamber music group that one hopes and expects Chamber Music New Zealand will promote in its Associated Societies series. That is, the mainly New Zealand groups that it takes under its wing to tour to the score of smaller chamber music societies that flourish – or least survive – in the towns that do not sustain concerts in the so-called Celebrity Series.

Just to remind you of the societies drawing on at least some of the groups in CMNZ’s stable that exist in Greater Wellington – the Waikanae Music Society, Chamber Music Hutt Valley and the Wellington Chamber Music Society (which, for promotional purposes, now drops the word ‘society’). This group had performed this programme at Waikanae on Sunday 26 July.

The three are Wellington-born and/or educated, though it would probably be risky to claim they will long remain working here. Only Amber Rainey has yet to undertake overseas training.

One longs to discover neglected works that prove substantial and beautiful and it was so with the Turina. He is the fourth of the notable Spanish composers born in the 30 years after 1860 and the least known and perhaps least important. Once upon a time his Canto a Sevilla was popular on account of Victoria de los Angeles’ performance.

Though it was most sympathetically played, this trio did not prove more than an agreeable salon piece of a superior kind. That generalization derives from the tone of the music rather than its formal structure which is sophisticated enough, as pointed out in the programme notes. The Spanish character of the music is not of the usual, strongly rhythmic kind, but derived from the more subtle kind of folk music that does fling itself at you. Its besetting sin perhaps is Turina’s excessive use of diminished harmonies that tend to impose a tonal anonymity on the music. The last movement revealed a stronger character, mainly through its piano part, spendidly played by Amber Rainey.

John Psathas’s Island Songs, now 14 years old, has by now attained the rank of a New Zealand classic. The islands are of Greece – not of New Zealand. However, the music, while carrying occasional suggestions of Greek land and seascapes, and sound such as bells chiming in the piano, does not evoke a conventional sound impression of Greece.

In the first movement, the piano underpinned the strings with ostinati reminiscent of Psathas’s early Waiting for the Aeroplane and he surprises those whose knowledge of Greek music is confined to Theodorakis’s music for Zorba and the bouzouki, with the sparest writing to depict the Zeibekiko in the second movement. In the third movement the piano, again moving through a narrow range of pitches, was a little out of step with its colleagues. 

Dvořák’s Piano Trio Op 65 has received some high praise. Some consider it his finest chamber work, but the competition from the Piano Quintet, and the Dumky Trio, the Quintet Op 97, and the American Quartet would seem to be quite strong.

To start with, it is as markedly Czech as one feels the Turina not to be so Spanish. That feeling might stem from its serious, minor key character in the first movement which is announced by the opening unison passage from violin and cello. However, there is a graciousness in the music which Blythe Press’s violin, in particular, caught beautifully, as he did again in the charming slow movement. The strong instruments here were the piano and violin which often tended to cast a shadow over the cello though it enjoyed some lovely solos early in the first movement, leaving no doubt about Paul van Houtte’s musicality.  

There was a certain loss of momentum in the middle section of the second movement: it felt rather more than the Meno mosso marking called for. Perhaps the trio offered the best of themselves through the fusing of their sounds in the Poco adagio, achieving a beautiful stillness at the movement’s end. In the last movement, they handled the many changes of rhythm with great naturalness engaging overdrive excitingly for the final peroration.

 

John Chen at Upper Hutt’s Expressions

Posted on by Peter Mechen

JOHN CHEN – PIano Recital

Works by POULENC, DEBUSSY, RAVEL, 

TONY LIN, BEETHOVEN, and TCHAIKOVSKY

Genesis Energy Theatre, Upper Hutt,  Monday 27th July 2009

Malaysian-born naturalised New Zealander John Chen, now just twenty-three years old, first achieved international prominence by winning the Sydney International Piano Competition in 2004 at the age of eighteen, the youngest-ever winner of this competition. Since then his career has taken him to appearances with all the major Australasian orchestras, and to numerous chamber music and solo recital engagements, all to critical acclaim. He has recorded discs of French music for Naxos, in particular the complete solo piano works of Henri Dutilleux, and is an advocate of contemporary New Zealand music, with premieres of music by Jenny McLeod, Ross Harris, Claire Cowan and Tony Lin to his credit. This year in New Zealand he’s been on tour with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, and is about to embark on a series of concerts with the T’ang Quartet of Singapore featuring a work by Gao Ping. At present he’s coming to the end of a 10-centre tour of the country with two solo recital programmes, each of which contains a new work by Christchurch-based composer Tony Lin. On Monday evening at the Expressions Genesis Energy Theatre in Upper Hutt he gave one of these programmes, a first half consisting of French music, and after the interval works by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to go with Tony Lin’s new piece.

 

John Chen began the recital with a piece by Francis Poulenc entitled Melancolie, concerning which the composer was overheard remarking that the French “realise that sombreness and good humour are not mutually exclusive”. It was apparent from the outset that the young pianist felt completely at home in this repertoire, his playing at once elegant, liquid, rich and warm, with the deftest of detailing enabling the ebb and flow of the music to cast an effusive glow all around the auditorium. The sounds evoked an aura and personality of a composer whose charm and wry manner must have endeared him to the friends and colleagues in whose honour he wrote a good deal of his piano music.

 

From Poulenc we moved on to Debussy, and the latter’s Second Book of Images, composed in 1907. Chen’s ability to colour sounds and create liquid flow was given full scope in these sensitive realisations, the first (“Bells Through the Leaves”) suggesting an interplay between substance and dissolution, the notes delivered with the utmost delicacy, conjuring up worlds where familiar sounds are enveloped in mystery. Debussy wrote the music on three staves, implying a certain “terracing” of sounds, which Chen evoked superbly throughout, drawing from a gorgeous but evanescent sound-palatte. The second piece, “And the Moon Descends on the Temple that Was” emerged in Chen’s hands as an evocation of columns of sound shrouded in deep mists, rich, resonant chording set against finely-etched detailings, as if a visitor to an old house had stumbled upon a forgotten room filled with ancient clocks, the chimings and tickings imagined rather than real, and the memory of the experience seeming like one recalled in old age. The third piece “Goldfish” brought a more mercurial quality to the sounds, with runs of pure gossamer over the keys set against other scintillations of movement whose ripples sparkled and splashed. John Chen’s differentiations of these specific impulses were quite miraculously evoked, set in contrasting motion to the episodes of more forthright gesture, moments of rhetoric that passed quickly, returning the sounds to the world of suggestiveness and fleeting impressions.

 

More sharply-etched and crystalline, though equally as suggestive, Ravel’s vivid evocation of Ondine, the water-sprite and temptress of man, forms the first part of the composer’s musical triptych “Gaspard de la Nuit”. Again, Chen’s ultra-sensitivity and beautifully-honed delicacy brought out all of the music’s liquid tintinnabulations, the textures at once cleanly-drawn and ambiently glowing. And the pianist’s fingerwork performed miracles of articulation as the river waters rose in response to the nymph’s gesturings, suffusing everything with watery hues – but just as scintillating was the piece’s final flourish, the poem’s words – “…abashed and vexed she dissolved into tears and laughter; vanished in a scatter of rain….” vividly conveyed by Chen’s brilliant pianistic flurries and the charged silences that followed. Of a different order of expression was the middle piece, “Le Gibet”, a somewhat grisly depiction of a hanged man left on the gallows in the sunset, the music tolling a ghostly bell-sound throughout, around which eerie crepuscular ambiences gradually close in, mourning fragmented chorales and skeletal descending cluster-harmonies representing the pity, horror and nonchalance of the scene. John Chen controlled it all beautifully, though I have heard those ghoulish descending chords played with more “point” as to make one’s flesh creep – here they were deftly brushed in, but a tad anonymous-sounding.

 

As for the final “Scarbo”, Chen’s dwarf emerged from the shadows as a brilliantly mischievous imp, rather than as an out-and-out malevolent creature of the night – which is to say that the characterisations were touched in more lightly and suggestively than is usually the case, the necessary “glint” in the playing having an elfin incandescence rather than a diabolical “bite”. Again, Chen’s control of detail was astonishing, bringing out a Puckishness in the characterisation, more so than the spectral quality favoured by some interpreters, and actually more, I think, in line with the descriptions in the verses by Aloysius Bertrand. As with all of John Chen’s work, it’s about the music rather than the interpreter, which I greatly appreciated.

 

Beginning the second half was a composition by one of Chen’s pianistic contemporaries, Tony Lin, whom I’d seen and heard play last year in Kerikeri, when he came within a whisker of winning the final of the International Piano Competition, but was edged into second place by young Jun Bouterey-Ishido. On that occasion Lin played one of his own compositions, a work called “Impression”, to great effect. For his present tour John Chen commissioned a new work by Tony Lin, called “In veils concealed….”, the music, like the earlier piece, making a distinct and deeply-considered impact. Lin’s idea was to characterise fragments of thought or memory as being concealed in bright veils but partly revealed by the play of light, suggesting their nature or origin. The work began with a Ravelian delicacy, exploring treble-keyboard sonorities, and using a repeated ascending figure, now insistent, now distant, augmenting these gestures with birdsong-like figurations. John Chen brought out the music’s wondrously layered effect, skilfully terracing his dynamics and voicing the fragments in sequences that seemed to cohere and advance the argument. As the piece progressed the details seemed to become more elongated, increasingly sinuous and extended, all the while punctuated by exquisite harmonic clusters at the top end of the keyboard. Chen occasionally used the pedal to wondrously enrich the textures and extend the piece’s layered character further, before reducing the dynamics to a whisper and allowing the figures and motifs to become remembrances and echoes. A deeper note, the piece’s only excursion into territories below Middle C, then brought a lovely work to a thoughtful conclusion.

 

Beethoven’s contemporaries probably had similar reactions to the above when encountering some of the composer’s late, more transcendentally-conceived works, one such being the A Major Piano Sonata Op.101. The very opening of the work sets lyricism against forward movement in an enticingly equivocal manner, with Chen catching that delicate balance to perfection, bringing to mind thoughts such as “letting things unfold” and “moving and being moved” with his playing. The succeeding march brought a touch of steel to the tone, with the rhythm perhaps calling for a bit more “spike” and rather less speed – but this, of course was an energetic young man’s performance. I thought the trio section also needed to take a little more with it, moving forward, but carrying just a bit more circumspection, so as to not hurry, but letting the distant music of the march gradually re-materialise. And I’m sure it was heat-of-the-moment exuberance that caused Chen to nearly overplay the last triumphant chords, a forgiveable piece of impulsiveness!

 

The slow movement unfolded quite gorgeously, Chen nicely capturing the wonderment of where the music was taking him, creating a strong sense of expectation which the reprise of the work’s opening nicely teases, before those sudden “call-to-attention” chords release the pent-up energies of the finale, the pianist spinning the jog-trot rhythms engagingly, and launching the fugue with mordant wit and beautifully-weighted voicings – the whole a truly living organism, here, underpinned by the pianist’s finely-tuned awareness of the creative play of different elements within the music’s structure.

 

To finish the programme we were given Tchaikovsky’s infrequently-performed Theme and Variations in F, a work that made me wonder why we don’t hear more of the composer’s solo piano music – despite its occasional unevennesses, the collection of twelve pieces known as “The Months” for one would surely make an attractive and unusual recital item. So it proved with this work, Tchaikovsky’s individual approach to theme-and-variation form creating a number of distinctive and worthwhile pieces. Highlights were the Schumannesque No.4, whose song-like character brought out a melancholy characteristic of the composer, the waltz-like No.8, alternatively piquant and demonstrative, and the innovative No.11, whose rhythm derived from the previous dance-like piece, but with an altered time-signature and a completely new and different-natured melody – very clever composing! John Chen made the most of these pieces, bringing the work to a brilliant and satisfying conclusion with the scamperingly virtuosic final variation. As if to return our emotional states to normal, John Chen played the first of Brahms’ Op.119 Piano Pieces as an encore, bringing out the music’s Janus-faced combination of world-weary experience and fresh wonderment. Naturally, we were a most appreciative audience, and lost no time in enthusiastically demonstrating our approval.

Christopher Herrick and Leipzig singers at Lutheran Church

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Lutheran Church of St Paul, King Street, Newtown 

1 Christopher Herrick (organ) in music by Buxtehude, Bach, Iain Farrington, Boccherini, Flor Peeters and Samuel Sebastian Wesley.

Friday 24 July 2009

2 Ensemble Nobiles – six singers from the Tomaskirche Boys’ Choir in Leipzig. German liturgical and secular music 

Sunday 26 July 2009

Christopher Herrick is one of the world’s most distinguished organists. I spotted his name in an organ journal, listing his concerts on a New Zealand tour. There was one in Wellington and it was at the Lutheran Church of St Paul in Newtown. Where? I didn’t know it and I wondered what could induce a world-class organist to play at what I imagined to be a small suburban church.

However, knowing that an organist is much more interested in the character of an organ than in the popular perception of a venue, it seemed possible that here was an interesting organ which Herrick had discovered. 

Then I started hearing other things about the church. It has a fine piano which is being used for piano recital performances by Wellington piano teachers, and accordingly the church had come up as a possible venue for a piano recital series that’s being discussed.

Music has a strong place in the tradition of the Lutheran church: Luther himself, and then others such as the Bach dynasty; the present Pastor, Mark Whitfield, doubles as organist. The church previously had a small pipe organ, in an alcove above the sanctuary, but it was inadequate. Even as the church had almost signed a contract for a new instrument with an American builder, an interesting one came up for sale in a Dutch hospital. It was built in 1962 as a one manual organ with a permanently coupled pedal range and enlarged with a second manual a year later. When the sale was discussed the addition of an independent pedal department was proposed and a 16 foot pedal stop was installed.

Its opening recital took place in March 2008.

The recital began with five pieces by Buxtehude, arranged to form a sort of suite or at least a coherent sequence, alternating between two praeludiums and two chorale-based pieces around a central toccata. The first Praeludium in A minor (Bux153) offered both a splendid exhibition of the organ’s qualities and of the variety of compositional resources Buxtehude commanded and his ability to make singular shifts in tone and rhythm without losing a feeling of unity.

The organ with its two manuals and limited number of registrations created an ideal clarity and tonal distinction for the two chorale pieces, ‘Komm, heiliger Geist’ and ‘Nun lob mein Seel’ (Bux 199 and 213). The Toccata in D minor (Bux155) may well flourish in a performance on a larger, more powerful organ, but here its striking contrasts, now conspicuously involving virtuosic pedal intervention with a flamboyant flourish at the end.

The rest of the concert offered delightful variety: untroubled by authenticity strictures, Boccherini’s Minuet was beguiling, perhaps a little droll. The fact that a quirky set of pieces like Animal Parade by young English organist/composer Iain Farrington has been composed in recent years attests to the vigour of organ music and a world-wide following. Herrick played three of the twelve highly diverting pieces, including Barrel Organ Monkey that relished both the bravura of a Lefébure-Wély and the nostalgia of the street barrel organ.

Bach arrived at the beginning of the second half in the Trio Sonata No 4 in E minor; pedals busier than ever; with its origin in chamber music with the individual voices so sharply delineated, it was the perfect fit for the organ.

King Jesus has a Garden comprises five variations, from a set of Ten Chorale Preludes by Belgian composer Flor Peeters. Its style varied between serious virtuosity and light-hearted multi-key treatment of the theme, hands tumbling confusedly over each other in the third variation, and finally another pedal display.

The choice of Choral Song and Fugue by Samuel Sebastian Wesley seemed a less than dramatic way of ending the recital; it had some character but mainly of the inoffensive kind. His encore however, Festmusikk by Norwegian Mons Leidvin Takle made a suitably exciting finale.

 

2 On the following Sunday the church hosted a six-voice ensemble from the choir of St Thomas’s church in Leipzig – Bach’s church. The six young man, aged 18 – 19, have completed their last year as boarders at the famous school attached to the Tomaskirche and have all been singing in the choir for nine years. They formed their ensemble, Ensemble Nobiles, three years ago As well as gaining an enviable musical education have also acquired an education of the kind that has long disappeared from New Zealand schools, including the first foreign language from Year 5 and at least one other foreign language a couple of years later.

Their concert took the form of a mass with each section interspersed with a variety of other music – part songs, Renaissance polyphony, little motets and cantata movements, old and new, one by a composer/conductor they have worked with, Manfred Schlenker.

The mass was Schubert’s charmingly naïve Deutsche Messe. I’ve never heard it apart from a performance on CD with full male choir plus organ. This was a totally different experience, one voice to a part, more or less, and a cappella. The Zum Eigang, which opened the concert, was a hair-raising experience, so miraculously balanced, with voices sounding as one, the result of the nine years of listening to each other; and each successive section (eight in all) grounded the entire concert in the style that seemed absolutely native to them. They ranged from Palestrina, Schütz and Byrd through Bach to several little known composers of later periods. A Cantate Domino by one Berthold Hummel (a 20th century one) and three by Hugo Distler, also 20th century, offered variety, displayed textures that were unusual, or dwelt in the lower reaches of all the voices. One of the singers introduced the music, fluently, wittily (not easy to be genuinely funny in a foreign language) and appreciative of the church, the congregation and Pastor Mark Whitfield, who punctuated the concert by playing part of Jean Langlais’s Hommage à Frescobaldi and then Bach’s Fugue in D major.  

I, at least, will be watching musical activities at the church from now on.

Wellington Orchestra On The Town

Posted on by Peter Mechen

BERNSTEIN – On The Town: Three Dance Episodes

BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No.3 in C Minor

(with Michael Houstoun – piano)

BRITTEN – Les Illuminations

(with Benjamin Fifita Makisi – tenor)

BRAHMS – Variations on a Theme of Haydn

Vector Wellington Orchestra

Marc Taddei (conductor)

Wellington Town Hall,  Saturday 25th July 2009

You could tell that it was going to be a night for the orchestra, whatever else happened, from the moment Marc Taddei gave the signal to begin Leonard Bernstein’s “On The Town” with the opening of the first of the work’s Three Dance Episodes, an Allegro pesante whose crackling pace set the pulses racing. The Wellington Orchestra players revelled in the music’s boisterous spirits, managing to inflect the dynamics and point the syncopations at a rate of knots that would have, one suspects, kept even the New York Philharmonic on its toes. A  bluesy muted trumpet solo introduced the second Episode, a kind of “Lass that Loved a Sailor” sequence whose music blossomed into being from melancholy beginnings, strings singing their hearts out at the climax and winds spicing the romantic outpourings with piquant harmonies, the cor anglais at the movement’s end nicely picking up the remnants of feeling from the opening after the more heart-on-sleeve emotions had run their course. The final “Times Square 1944” movement took us into the feisty world of big bands, snappy, raunchy brass, underscored by a jazzy piano obbligato, and with sudden, pulse-quickening lurches into new sleaze-mode scenarios, Debbie Rawson’s eloquent saxophone work characterising the terrific support the winds in general gave to the brass throughout. It all sounded like the work of an orchestra on top of its game, my only quibble being the somewhat bizarre placement of the Beethoven C Minor Piano Concerto immediately afterwards, a chalk-and-cheese alignment whose incongruity was admittedly played down by Marc Taddei’s customary welcome to the audience being given after the Bernstein and as the piano was being rolled into place.

So, there was a sufficient “let’s start again” ambience by the time Michael Houstoun took the stage for the Beethoven concerto, a work that of course marks a threshold in the series of piano-and-orchestra works by the composer – a world of deep and thoughtful expression taking the classical style into more romantic and subjective realms. The orchestra’s urgent, tightly-woven exposition set the scene for Houstoun’s commanding entry, the pianist’s finely-judged masculine-and-feminine exchanges at the outset drawing the parameters of the musical argument to follow, and which the subtle interplay between soloist and orchestra proceeded to explore. I particularly liked Houstoun’s way with the second subject, lyrical and flexible, but also tensile enough to be readily drawn back into the purposeful, even confrontational C Minor world of serious life-questioning business that the music addresses. Neither pianist nor orchestra packed their punches in both assertive and reflective episodes, a tremendous tutti leading to the hushed, almost ghostly development, one with a very “Fifth Symphony Scherzo” feel to it, Houstoun’s withdrawn, almost disembodied tones sounding in awe of the stalking timpani notes and the muttering string figures. The cadenza boldly addressed the issues, Houstoun laying down the music’s law with real commitment, evincing an almost transcendent orchestral response, hard-headed timpani sticks giving the sounds an almost spectral feeling, one which the piano’s downward arabesques matched perfectly, leading to a no-nonsense, hard-hitting statement of mutual assertion and strength of feeling at the end.

Houstoun’s concentration was almost palpable in the stillness and strength of the slow movement’s opening notes, while the orchestra’s ready response was warm and conciliatory but extremely focused, carrying no excess. Throughout the interaction between piano and other instruments was ear-catching, bassoon and flute eloquently dialoguing with the soloist, and the strings perfectly complementing the piano at the opening’s reprise, augmenting with such surety what the solo instrument does. Again, the strings had such a lovely “veiled” tone after the short cadenza’s rapt conclusion, a mood that the ever-so-slight “fluff” on the horn didn’t manage to disturb – such poise and quiet rapture from everybody. After this, I thought the finale found Houston and Taddei in wonderful accord, the pianist dancing along the tightrope with fleet fingerwork and nicely-weighted sonority. At first I thought the winds a bit reticent, but a nicely-breathed, quite “reedy” clarinet solo from Janina Paolo re-established that essential  feeling of dialogue on equal terms, giving the string fugato a proper foil, and sparking off a commanding response from Houstoun, and an equally strong set of sequences leading to the joyous coda, whose rumbustious energy set the seal on what I thought was a great performance of the work.

A work that in its own way matched the visionary aspects of the concerto followed after the break, Benjamin Britten’s “Les Illuminations”, a song-cycle featuring settings of poems by Arthur Rimbaud, extravagant, almost surreal visions of wonderment and excitement. Britten was drawn to French poetry and language, and the evocations of these verses found a ready response from the young composer, with extraordinarily sensitive and imaginative results. Most people would associate this music with a voice of the likes of Peter Pears or Robert Tear; but the work was actually written for a soprano, Sophie Wyss, who gave the first performance in London in 1940. Tenor Benjamin Fifita Makisi threw himself unflinchingly into the work from the outset, responding excitingly to the fierce fanfare-like antiphonal figures played by violas and violins. Makisi had sufficient vocal heft to declaim Rimbaud’s fulsome descriptions of cosmopolitean splendour in the following “Villes”, bringing off the chromatic downward slides in the vocal line with some relish, though he found it difficult to “float” his voice with enough rapturous wonderment in “Phrase”, describing the ropes stretching from steeple to steeple. In general Makisi was happiest with the strongly-focused moments, the marvellous “schwung” of the waltz-like “Antique” with its lump-in-the-throat melodic progressions, and the exuberant declamations of “Marine” with its skyrocketing whoops of pleasure.

At times I thought his voice needed to “free up” somewhat, being unable to escape a kind of “earthbound” quality which prevented episodes like the “Interlude” from truly taking wing. Fortunately the orchestral strings played like angels throughout, focused and incisive in the ringingly declamatory moments, muscular and energetic in rumbustious episodes such as those from “Villes”, and full-throated, warm and rich in the many “singing” passages, like the one already referred to from “Antique”, and responsive to the kaleidoscopic shifts of colour, timbre and intensity continually demanded by the music. The final “Depart” was beautifully done by singer, conductor and players, capturing a valedictory sense of “Enough seen” and an enduring enrichment of experience.

After this the Brahms “St Anthony” Variations for me didn’t really clinch the evening, partly because anything would have been a hard act to follow after the Britten, and partly because Marc Taddei’s treatment of the work was simply too stop-start for the sections to knit together satisfactorily. Taddei did get wonderful orchestral playing, the “village-band” effect at the start with perky, rustic winds and abrupt phrase-endings bringing out the dance-like aspects, with some lovely work from the horns, the “skipping” variation with its attractive syncopations and the following “hunting-horn” episode bringing out excellent work from all sections of the orchestra. But the pauses between the variations seemed to get longer as the work progressed, and the finale, marked “Andante” was moved along so quickly we seemed to be in the midst of the final resounding statement of the main theme before we knew where we were, with the result that it all seemed to pass by too hurriedly – more a vigorous lunch-hour round-the-bays constitutional than a celebratory processional, sadly lacking warmth and heart. Not perhaps the most satisfying finale to the concert that one hoped for, but fortunately there were other moments aplenty which would serve as highlights one could play and enjoy in one’s head, all over again.

Handel’s Semele from NZ School of Music

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand School of Music: Handel’s Semele, conducted by Michael Vinten, directed by Sara Brodie

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University, Kelburn Campus. Thursday 23 July 2009

Back in 2001 the Victoria University School of Music staged Semele. It was not this opera however, now produced by the New Zealand School of Music, but the version by John Eccles, the composer for whom Congreve actually wrote the libretto. As the programme notes record, Eccles’s setting was never performed and was not heard till April 1972, at St John’s Smith Square in London; oddly, the notes failed to mention the 2001 Victoria University production, also in the Adam Concert Room.

A few years before, I heard a lecture by the late Professor Don McKenzie, a Victoria graduate of and later lecturer in the Department of English, who became Professor of bibliography and textual criticism at Oxford, and a specialist in 17th and 18th century English literature. He tutored a paper in literary criticism In my MA year; he was about the most engaging and brilliant lecturer I ever had, and I credit the best mark in my honours degree to his inspiration.

McKenzie was also a knowledgeable music lover and the subject of his lecture was English opera, a consideration of the reasons that opera in English did not take root around the beginning of the 18th century, as it had in France with Lully in the late 17th century. His lecture dealt with the case of Eccles’s Semele and its failure to be staged, because Congreve’s libretto was too late for the opening of the new Queen’s Theatre in 1702 and when it was finished and set by Eccles by 1707, a planned production at the Drury Lane Theatre fell through due to certain duplicitous activities by the impresario who opened his theatre with an Italian pasticcio. That was the beginning of the fashion of the nobility and upper middle class for opera in Italian.

McKenzie played recorded versions of both the Eccles and Handel versions, arguing that Eccles had found an idiomatic musical style much more idiomatically adapted to the English language than was Handel’s (it was his only opera in English); he even believed that Eccles version (recorded in 1989) was the more beautiful and successful rendering of Congreve’s text. New Grove Opera declares that the Eccles opera was the finest opera presented in London between the death of Purcell and Handel’s Rinaldo in 1711. If it had been performed in 1707 and a theatre had been ready to encourage English opera as a result, he argued there was a good chance that an indigenous opera in English might have taken root. For example, Handel would probably have written his works in English and his imitators would have ensured that an English tradition continued to flourish.

Handel’s Semele was a good choice in the 250th anniversary of his death; it is presumably considered a good piece for students because of the large number of roles; clearly not on account of ease of performance and interpretation. There are ten main roles and choruses of wedding guests and of Heavenly Deities, many of which are duplicated or even triplicated. There are 19 names in the cast list.

The Adam Concert Room is not an ideal place for staged productions, but it is at least flexible. This time the orchestra was placed in front of the organ, an attractive position (since it focused attention of the charming case and pipe-work of the instrument), while the audience was seated on the other three sides. It meant that those on the sides had an impeded view at times.

The stage was furnished very simply, with a large round bed in the centre, a door between the audience seated on the right and those facing the orchestra, and a stair on the right of the orchestra leading to the gallery (not used by audiences) which encircles the auditorium – it represented the home of the gods. The main prop was a huge white sheet used variously to cover some of the sexual activity that is often suggested and sometimes to suggest a distinction between earth and the realm of the gods.

The wedding guests’ costumes are modern; while deities both great and small were in a variety of seductive gear, hot pants were favoured by several of the female deities.

The orchestra of 24 players, in front of the organ, played with a certain vivacity though there was some rhythmic monotony and I did not find the kind of accuracy that I’m sure I’m right in recalling at many of the productions and concert performances by the school of music of a decade and more ago.

Principals were good, particularly conspicuous the two cellos which had much solo, quasi-continuo work to do. The harpsichord continuo was deftly contributed by Julie Coulson.

The chorus was rarely disposed as a group, a phalanx, as is the default position among less imaginative directors, but were often in an outward facing circle that allowed the audience to hear the three or four voices in front of them much more loudly than the rest. It was just one of the marks that distinguished the direction by the gifted Sara Brodie. The result was an assembly of solo voices rather than a normal chorus; the aural effect was interesting and far from objectionable. They behaved generally as individuals and throughout created visual diversion.

Most of the principals were a good deal less secure at the beginning than later, after the impact of the full house had given them confidence and dissolved some of the nerves.

The leading roles were more than adequately filled, mainly by advanced or graduate students. Michael Gray, as befitted an already fairly experienced performer, was well-cast as a lustful and arrogant Jupiter, though not without a little concern for the welfare of the girl he has identified as a likely target – and vice versa.

His somewhat cynical urge, ‘I must with speed amuse her’, as he realizes how desperate she is, not just for his sexual attentions, but also to be elevated to the ranks of the immortals, with some particularly turbulent orchestral playing, was tempered by a lovely ‘Where’er you walk’ which at least sounded genuine. Juno, like Fricka in The Ring, has the jealous spoiler’s role; that didn’t deny Rachel Day (Laura Dawson sang Juno at other performances) some good moments such as her urgent ‘Hence Iris, hence away!’. Ultimately, manipulated by Juno disguised as Ino, Jupiter accedes to Semele’s insistence; Jupiter has by then sworn to comply with Semele’s demands and is appalled when she asks for him to appear in his true, incendiary form: ‘Ah! take heed what you press’ he pleads uselessly; and she is incinerated.

Amelia Berry as Semele (Rose Blake, her alternate) had a big role, credibly oversexed, and she sang attractively too. Though her report from on high, ‘Endless pleasure, endless love’ was sung instead by Iris, Semele’s ‘Sleep, why dost thou leave me?’ and ‘Myself I shall adore’, exhibiting very different emotions, were heart-felt, and she delivered some rather thrilling, if abandoned, top notes in her aria ‘No, no, I’ll take no less’.

Eventually her insatiable appetite and her Olympian ambition are her undoing.

Her more sedate sister, Ino (Bryony Williams – at other sessions, Bianca Andrew), who was also in love with Athamus, rejoices to be awarded as a second prize to the dead Semele’s bride-groom, and turns out to have an aptitude for sex as eager as her sister’s. Keiran Rayner sang Athamus with some feeling, exhibiting impatience with Semele’s procrastination with his ‘Hymen, haste’; but he’s little more than a plaything of the gods.

Omnipresent was Olga Gryniewicz as Iris, which she sang and acted most vividly, a lively presence throughout the opera. She was given Semele’s aria, ‘Endless pleasure, endless love’ (Congreve had given it to Iris in his libretto but Handel changed it to Semele; this production goes back o the original) which she sang from on high with a gusto as if it was she herself was in the midst of it all. A medium-sized role was that of Somnus, the god of sleep, invoked for somewhat nefarious purposes, sung by Joshua Kidd; he sang his famous aria, ‘Leave me loathsome light’ admirably, with a voice ranging from the hushed to ardent pleading.

As I remarked above, the orchestra sounded a little under-rehearsed though there was much excellent individual playing; the staging was imaginative; the cast was excellently disposed and they moved meaningfully. And the singing, both by the many principals and the choruses, was the thing, a good demonstration of the school’s strength.

On the opening night there was a deserved full house; as the only Handel opera Wellington seems likely to see in his anniversary year, and for quite a while, I hope the rest of the season was well supported.

Contemporary Rites – Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer

Posted on by Alan Wells

PESTOVA/MEYER PIANO DUO
Xenia Pestova, piano; Pascal Meyer, piano
STRAVINSKY: “The Rite of Spring”;
DUGAL MCKINNON: “Diktat, Ditty Half-Life”;
CHRIS WATSON: “Coffee Table Book”.

**STOCKHAUSEN: “Mantra”

NZ School of Music Adam Concert Room, 17 July 2009

**VUW Hunter Council Chamber, 19 July 2009

Is ballet music programme music when performed without the ballet? If it is, then is it “about” the dance action onstage, or is it, instead, more “about” the story and images that inspired the ballet’s  scenario in the first place? If so, then Stravinsky (famous for the dictum that music expresses only itself) may, paradoxically, have written one of the greatest tone poems of the twentieth century.

These were some of the thoughts going through my mind as I listened to duo pianists Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer playing “The Rite of Spring”. Their two-piano version provided more resonance and weight than the composer’s own arrangement for one-piano-four-hands, edging just a little closer to the power of the orchestra. At times Pestova and Meyer evoked familiar instrumental timbres (the opening bassoon, the dialogues of muted trumpets): at others they created something fresh and new – from washes of piano arpeggios, to sinister stalking rhythms.

Unexpectedly, rhythm also emerged as a crucial element in Stockhausen’s “Mantra”. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised: after all, “Piano Piece IX” began with a premonitory dose of pre-minimalist minimalism. However, in the 1956/61 piece, the regularly repeated chords were readily deconstructed into irregular flourishes at the extremes of the keyboard. In the 1969/70 “Mantra”, by contrast, a measured pulse recurred many times during the work – at one point with acerbic wit, as when Pestova’s peremptorily iterated high pitch “corrected” a “wrong” note written for Meyer’s part.

Pestova and Meyer’s intimate engagement with the piece enabled them to highlight episodes of lush romanticism and snatches of melody. Despite these, and the extended periods of metre, the 70-minute “Mantra” proved an epic marathon demanding concentration, commitment and stamina – and that was just for the listeners. The duo pianists themselves needed all these, plus exquisite coordination – especially in such instances as when Pestova’s microsecond woodblock had to coincide with Meyer’s attack. For the performers not only had the pianos, but also an array of small percussion instruments (woodblocks, tuned crotales), as well as dials to initiate ring-modulation (an electronic effect equivalent to Cage’s prepared piano, bringing the tone colour closer to that of the crotales).

Expertly controlled by sound projectionist Philip Brownlee, the ring modulation also offered an escape from the prison of twelve-equal temperament, notably in the form of arresting (all the more so for being sparingly deployed) sliding portamenti on piano sustains. With “Mantra”, Stockhausen had returned to more rigorously formulated composition after a period of experimentation with improvisation and chance: had he followed the precedent set by Markevitch, Ives and Wyschnegradsky and tuned one of the pianos a quarter-tone apart, he would have had even more scope for his procedure of expanding and contracting his intervallic material (a process pioneered in the 1920s by Mexican microtonalist Julian Carrillo).

After having been percussionists and vocalizing actors, Pestova and Meyer further heightened the excitement towards the end with a tour-de-force of rushing fugato passages.

Echoes of Stockhausen’s uncompromising modernism were present in Chris Watson’s “Coffee Table Book” in the earlier recital. Intended as the musical analogue of a pictorial volume (as opposed to the structured narrative of literary fiction), the piece was duly episodic, but retained Watson’s characteristic control of the flow of tension.

Xenia Pestova, a graduate of the Victoria University School of Music and pupil of Judith Clark, has always shown a commitment to contemporary (and New Zealand) music. With Luxembourg pianist Pascal Meyer, this seems set to continue with compositions for two pianos. Dugal McKinnon’s “Diktat, Ditty Half-Life”, with its neatly encapsulating concluding gesture, was the first of a series of miniatures for the duo. I look forward to hearing more.

Sing-along Requiem

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Requiem by Verdi

The Orpheus Choir, enlarged with a massed chorus, conducted by Michael Fulcher

John Wells (organ) and Fiona McCabe (piano).

Soloists: Janey Mackenzie, Annabelle Cheetham, Richard Greager and Justin Pearce

Wellington Town Hall, Saturday 18 July

The Orpheus Choir has been staging a Singalong or Come’n’sing performance of a major choral masterpiece for as long as I’ve been writing reviews – over two decades. It’s always been popular, a wonderful way of meeting unfulfilled singing ambitions.

If the audience was not as big as you’d expect for Verdi’s Requiem (its first performance in Wellington for eight years) , which fills theatres anywhere in the world, it was because so many of the potential audience were on stage singing. The choir totaled nearly 300.

One might have expected a few weaknesses, but the result of solid rehearsal under Michael Fulcher, Friday evening and all day Saturday achieved a performance of energy, clean attack and ensemble and confidence: its very opening pages were highly impressive.

Signs of the times lay, rather, in the fact that an organ (Auckland City organist John Wells) rather than an orchestra accompanied, with sections for solo voices accompanied by Fiona McCabe at the piano. An orchestra would have been better, but it would have added unaffordable cost. (Help came from a subsidized Town Hall rental and from the city’s Creative Communities fund). Both organ and piano were more than adequate and there were many times (the piano with the four soloists in the Offertorio) when their contributions were most satisfying.

The soloists might not have been New Zealand’s top opera voices, but their performances varied from pretty good to surprisingly excellent. Justin Pearce was clearly nervous at this big assignment, but by the Confutatis Maledictis his voice had settled, admirably fitting the sense of that movement.

Professionally experienced mezzo Annabelle Cheetham and tenor Richard Greager (who stood in for John Beaglehole at short notice) were the most polished. Cheetham shone in the Recordare and Lux aeterna. The tenor’s main outing is the aria common in opera aria collections, the Ingemisco; better suited to his timbre were his parts in the Rex Tremendae, the Offertorio.

Janey Mackenzie sang her soprano role very engagingly: she had a successful duet with Cheetham in the Agnus Dei, and then astonished me with her penetrating, high-lying solo, floating above the choir in the latter stages of the Libera Me: there was nothing better than the conclusion with that varied, magnificent, beautifully controlled movement.