Category: Reviews – Concerts

175 East – Latitudes of recreation

Posted on by Peter Mechen

175 EAST AT ST.ANDREW’S
Works by Michael Norris, Richard Barrett. Rachael Morgan,
Christian Wolff and James Gardner

175 East : Richard Haynes (clarinet), Andrew Uren (bass clarinet)
Ingrid Culliford (flute), Tim Sutton (bass trombone), Carl Wells (horn)
Katherine Hebley (‘cello), Lachlan Radford (bass), James Gardner (laptop)
Conducted by Hamish McKeich

St Andrew’s on-the-Terrace, Wellington, Saturday 15th August

175 East, a contemporary music ensemble based in Auckland, prides itself on presenting new, cutting-edge music from both New Zealand and overseas via high-quality professional performances. The group’s recent Wellington concert at St.Andrew’s on the Terrace, which was a repeat of a presentation in Auckland a few days previously, bore ample witness to this stated philosophy – three of the six works played were by New Zealand composers, with the remainder coming from Welsh composer Richard Barrett and the French-born German-American Christian Wolff. The whole was delivered with the skill, panache and commitment to the cause that we’ve come to expect from these uniquely assorted musicians with their idiosyncratic instrumental combinations that composers seem to hugely enjoy writing for.

Two of the works played in the concert were “old friends” in that I’d seen and heard both performed before by the group – given that many pieces of contemporary music receive their premiere performances and nothing more, it was gratifying to have a second chance to hear both pieces, Michael Norris’s Vitus and James Gardner’s A study for voicing doubts. I’d previously encountered both of these works in a 2001 concert – again in Wellington –  which happened to be the first time I’d heard the ensemble play.

Michael Norris’s Vitus made as thoughtful and involved an impact upon me this time round as it did all those years ago. Its subject, the Christian saint Vitus who underwent torture and death for his religious beliefs at the hands of the Romans, is tied up with both the saint’s patronage of dance and dancers and his association with a medical condition known as Choreia, more commonly called St.Vitus’s Dance, one involving involuntary jerking bodily movements resulting from a temporary disorder of the brain. I remembered the music’s broad brush-strokes –  the pungent opening notes of the piece created a kind of “melting-time” impression, into which violent dissonances rushed now and then, gradually screwing up tensions and goading the music into a mock-heroic grand unison, whose riotous dissolution depicted a St.Vitus’ Dance episode. I also recalled the clarinets at the end quietly delineating what sounded like a mind’s inner workings, the instruments tremulously and haltingly answering one another across lonely, and somewhat fraught psychological soundscapes.

The other piece I’d heard previously was Jim Gardner’s A study for voicing doubts, a chamber concerto for clarinet whose title seems to encourage explorations of discords and disagreements between soloist and ensemble, exemplified by scalp-prickling counter-sonorities such as clarinet playing in its high register against bass trombone, and intriguing antiphonal rearrangements of soloist and ensemble mid-stream – political statements in music performance! I liked, then as now, the effects of the change on the music, the “distanced” soloist (or, alternatively “distanced” ensemble) embodying a number of relationship context possibilities, from impasse through compromise to acquiescence. Intriguing.

In Gardner’s work, as in Richard Barrett’s confrontational piece for solo clarinet knospend-gespaltene which featured earlier in the programme, the player was Richard Haynes, demonstrating what seemed like superhuman abilities (including the art of  seeming not to need to take breath for minutes on end) in realizing the composer’s idea of the instrument’s possibilities being able to realize a fixed “theatre” instead of a linear structure. This process of layered enactment took the listeners into a soundworld which seemed to transcend conventional considerations of pitch, timbre and rhythm, and , in the composer’s words, “lay bare” the piece’s and the instrument’s inner structure. Haynes’ virtuoso playing seemed to encapsulate these different states of being simultaneously, giving the effect of something with surprisingly layered and paralleled existences.

Barrett’s other work on the programme, Codex I, was for an ensemble of “improvising musicians”, a kind of re-enactment of the creative process by which the players take their cues from fragments of notation or musical memory which serves as a foundation for an entirely new work being created in performance. Sustained pitches run haphazardly through the piece, but their lines are punctuated by ”improvised divergences”, and numbers of instruments, but not precisely which ones, are specified by the piece, enabling the musicians to “re-enact” a tradition of musical inspiration, including, at the piece’s end, timbral gesturings of a kind which centred on no actual pitching of notes, merely breath- and movement-sounds, bringing to mind Keats’ words “Heard melodies are sweet, but unheard sweeter”…..

Rachael Morgan currently holds the Edwin Carr Foundation Scholarship, and received funding from Creative New Zealand for her most recent work from a fixed point (2009), which received what I assumed was its second performance after the Auckland concert.
The “fixed points” referred to by the composer are manifestations of the nature of sound, so that from within a single-pitch note can emerge all kinds of timbral and rhythmic variations, different instruments exploring the ramifications of the “fixed point”. The music was a journey undertaken into and through such possibilities, the ensemble gathering timbral weight, fortifying and energizing soundscapes, then underbellying the sounds, stretching away from and returning to the pitch-points like elastic, and adopting ethereal, disembodied tones, ‘cello and double bass having the last, skeletal-like say.

What was described as “added Wolff” to the concert in some of the publicity was Christian Wolff’s Two Players, a work that has surprisingly received only three performances in thirteen years – surprising because of the music’s accessibility, brought about by an attractive, almost ritualistic interplay between the two soloists playing horn and ‘cello, in this case Carl Wells and Katherine Hebley, respectively. The composer himself wrote about the importance for the work of the interplay and interdependence between the performers as an essential ingredient, and the two performers vividly realized the “character” of each of the three movements. The first was a night-piece, with long-held notes evoking a dark processional, the second a “dance macabre”, with ‘cello pizzicati leading the horn as a more circumspect partner, while the third used cryptic, almost elliptical gesturings in an almost speechless manner, a “Why don’t you listen to what I mean instead of what I say?” piece, one whose sense of underlying fun lightened the otherwise serious aspect of a marvellous concert.

Pia Palme – Austrian Connections from Caprice Arts

Posted on by Alan Wells

Pia Palme (contrabass recorder), Dylan Lardelli (guitar), Bridget Douglas (piccolo), Ben Hoadley (bassoon), Nicholas Hancox (viola), Donald Nicolson (piano), Philip Brownlee (synthesizer), Niky Clegg (vocalist).
SOREN EICHBERG: “4 Pieces for Bassoon and Piano”;
PIA PALME: “AXE.WHO.TREE”, “Noneuclidian Playgrounds”;
DANIEL DE LA CUESTA: “Fachwerk”;
PHILIP BROWNLEE: “The Length of a Breath”, “As if to Catch the Fleeting Tail of Time”;
MICHAEL NORRIS: “Amato”;
JACK BODY: “Aeolian Harp”;
THIERRY BLONDEAU: “Non-Lieu”.

Salvation Army Citadel, Friday 14 August 2009

This concert organized by the enterprising Caprice Arts Trust featured an adventurous array of contemporary music.

At the more conservative, conscientiously-constructed end of the spectrum, Denmark’s Soren Nils Eichberg’s “4 Pieces for Bassoon and Piano” effectively showcased the artistry of their commissioner, New Zealander Ben Hoadley. Much of the first piece involved the bassoon in a dialogue with itself across its different registers, from deep and mellow to high and plaintive. The second was a lively unison dance for both instruments. In the third, the piano set up a stalking funeral march beneath the bassoon’s lugubrious lament, while the fourth was rather like a busy “Bumblebee” for bassoon.

Towards the opposite extreme, Austrian Pia Palme’s “AXE.WHO.TREE” employed almost all the available resources to create a complex, changing sonic environment which included water-like electronic sounds, minimalistic piano chords, and the vocal agility of Niky Clegg. The result had something of the feel of free improvisation (a little too much so for my taste).

Palme is not only a composer: the Viennese virtuoso also plays the contrabass recorder. Her Swiss-made Kueng instrument, standing at over two metres tall, resembles nothing so much as an orphan organ pipe (and the organ is, after all, basically just a consort of recorders with delusions of grandeur). This modern adaptation of a medieval prototype is perhaps the most recent addition to the woodwind sub-bass range, joining some (less common) members of the saxophone family, the more established contrabassoon and contrabass clarinet, and (from the 1980s) the contrabass flute. The soft sound of the instrument benefits from discreet amplification, which makes it ideal for use with electronics. Palme’s other composition (a premiere), “Noneuclidian Playgrounds”, included guitar and electronic transformation of the giant recorder, and progressed to hatch a surprising drum-beat rhythm at the end.

The contrabass recorder was heard to good effect in the solo “Fachwerk”, from the Mexican-Austrian Daniel De la Cuesta. A strict palindrome, it began (and, of course, ended) with the “pizzicato” effects of tonguing, developing into a high-register melody with a low pitched accompaniment, and on to a pivotal core of multiphonics and organ-like depth.

Wellingtonian Philip Brownlee’s 2009 “The Length of a Breath” showed another side of the contrabass recorder, challenging Palme to produce exquisitely soft, mellow notes over the wide range of the instrument. Along with his other premiere in this concert, “The Length of a Breath” marked a welcome return to composition for Brownlee. Also written this year was the even more impressive “As if to Catch the Fleeting Tail of Time” for an ensemble of piccolo, bassoon, viola, guitar and piano. Here Brownlee’s timeless world of carefully placed gestures, unsuspected colour blends, and delicate Webernian klangfarbenmelodie distributed among the players, was enough (just) to sustain one’s interest, despite any perceivable thrust of forward momentum. (One intriguing technique was a microtonal scale achieved by successively plucking a guitar string while simultaneously pitch-bending it.)

Another premiere from another Wellingtonian was Michael Norris’s 2008 “Amato”. As sensitively rendered by pianist Donald Nicolson, this proved one of Norris’s most immediately attractive works to date, as it evolved from its rarefied opening to gradually fill the keyboard space out to its extremities, on towards a fortissimo explosion, and then to a mysterious close.

Jack Body’s “Aeolian Harp” from 1979 is almost a classic, in its versions for violin or cello. Somewhat rarer was the recension for solo viola performed by Nicholas Hancox. A study in harmonics, this piece evoked a wind-harp playing the most primordial of all scales.

“Non-Lieu” by French composer Thierry Blondeau also began as an essay in harmonics, expertly elicited (in rapid-fire staccato) from the guitar, by Dylan Lardelli. Further techniques introduced within this ingenious (if overlong) composition included live detuning with the tuning pegs, closely-beating intervals, and, during Lardelli’s theatrical exit (reflecting the interest in the use of space found also in Blondeau’s piece for a “moving chamber orchestra”), swinging the guitar to produce Doppler-effected pitch changes.

The Yeomen of the Guard at the Opera House

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Yeomen of the Guard by Gilbert and Sullivan

Wellington G & S Light Opera. Musical director: Hugh McMillan; stage director: Gillian Jerome

The Opera House, Friday 14 August 2009

The Yeomen of the Guard is often considered the one G & S comic opera that comes closest to being an ‘opera’; it is a case of a work in an essentially comic genre that ends sadly, with the jester losing his girl.

It becomes poignant because the jester, Jack Point, is sung with such feeling and conviction by Derek Miller; he has been the company’s stalwart character singer, pivotal in their productions, for many years. Again, all eyes were on him whenever he was on stage, with agile, expressive movement, characterful singing and great facility in delivering floods of witty words at high speed.

But there were several other fine performances, starting with Chris Whelan as the Head Jailer, Wilfred, with whom Miller duets brilliantly in Act II. Tall, oafish and a bit thick, Whelan’s voice and comic movements were inimitable, though perhaps his portrayal overlooked the fact that a Head Jailer may well be a pompous ass, but need not be quite as stupid as Whelan had him. Lindsay Groves as Sergeant Meryll and Chris Berentson as the quasi-hero Fairfax (the object of female efforts to rescue from imminent beheading) took their fairly big roles well.

Among the female singers, the sad clown’s partner and love, Elsie, who eventually falls for Fairfax, was sung with real style by the vocally accomplished Celia Falchi. She and Miller sang the quite moving duet that is undoubtedly one of Sullivan’s finest, a real trouvaille, ‘I have a song to sing’.

Not far behind were the Phoebe of Malinda Di Leva and the Dame Carruthers of Sharon Yearsley.

It’s an operetta where the story does count for something: for one thing, perhaps arguing for the sanctity of marriage regardless of insincere or fraudulent original motives. So it was a pity that the words from one or two singers were hard to understand, but not so as to make it hard to follow.

The set is simple – in a courtyard of the Tower of London, costumes conventional, of Tudor times. Movement on stage was fluid though the yeomen themselves overdid the military stiffness. Normal first night shortcomings were evident: a tentative orchestra in the overture and for some distance into the first act; so were some of the early choruses. But the show, full of great music, gained confidence during the first act and there were, particularly in the women’s chorus, some very poised and attractive singing in the second act.

The test of good theatre is whether you start to care about what happens to the characters on stage; I did, and the pathetic denouement quite had its way with me at the end.

(the full and edited version of the review that was abbreviated in The Dominion Post)

Pinchas and Players – Wellington’s Zukerman Experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Pinchas Zukerman (violin) / Jessica Linnebach (violin)
Jethro Marks (viola) / Ashan Pillai (viola)
Amanda Forsythe (‘cello)

KODALY – Duo for violin and ‘cello Op.7
BEETHOVEN – String Quintet in C Op.29
DVORAK – String Quintet in E-flat Op.97

Wellington Town Hall, Wednesday 12th August 2009

Known primarily as one of the world’s top virtuoso violinists, Pinchas Zukerman has also developed a reputation as a chamber musician, firstly in association with Daniel Barenboim and Jacqueline du Pre on recordings of music by Beethoven; and more lately with a group formed by the violinist in 2002, the Zukerman Chamber Players. Here in New Zealand for the first time to take part in “The Zukerman Experience”, the NZSO’s latest concert series, Pinchas Zukerman is also on tour with his group for Chamber Music New Zealand, taking with them two programmes nationwide. Wellington concertgoers heard the first of these programmes at the Town Hall on Wednesday evening.

In the programme, a quote from English critic David Denton summed up fairly what we heard from the group, with their programme of Kodaly, Beethoven and Dvorak – Denton talked about the Players’ “self-effacing musicianship never standing between the listener and the composer”, a sentiment which seemed to be echoed in the comments of people I spoke with who had also attended the concert. I would agree entirely, while at the same time wondering why on some occasions this self-effacement on the part of performers, often set up as an ideal by connoisseurs and critics, can in fact short-change the musical experience. In relative terms, the performances throughout by the Group were extremely classy; and in at least one instance, that of the Kodaly Duo, I felt thoroughly caught up with the music-making, finding the performers’ engagement with the sounds an enthralling experience. Elsewhere, I felt one step removed, as it were, as if a gloss or a sheen had been applied to the beautifully-finished product, keeping me in the bystander realms, the “spectator-line” in front of the art-work placed a little too far back, as it were.

So, what was different about the performance of the Kodaly Duo that engaged me to an extent that made the experience a stand-out one? First of all, there was a sense, right from the first note, that both Zukerman and his ‘cellist partner, Amanda Forsythe, were living the music – the interplay between them was palpable, the authoritative, “digging-in” opening giving way to a wonderful sense of the players exploring the sound-spaces and stimulating each other’s sensibilities, both using pizzicato motifs to goad the other into responses both of the utmost delicacy and beguiling richness. Then there was the sheer variation of tone-colour, gossamer figurations set by turns alongside full-blooded outpourings, the sounds at times resembling that of a string orchestra, the cellist with simple arpeggiations ravishing our senses with the glorious tones of her instrument.

The slow movement featured song-like sweetness at the outset, but with a central section whose character was almost surreal, as if a gentle dream had suddenly been hijacked by phobia-ridden angst, the tensions gradually melting-down with lovely Aeolian-harp-like strummings from the ‘cellist, and rapt responses from her duo partner. The finale began gloriously, with Zukerman and Forsythe generating an exultant, rhapsodising mood, then plunging into the dance, alternating dark, earthy Hungarian rhythms with more stratospheric flights of fancy, the episodes growing out of one another. I got the feeling that both musicians were throwing themselves into the intricacies of interaction and contrast that the music affords, with a wonderfully adrenalin-led burst of energy at the coda, leaving behind the concert-hall ethos and revelling in a richly-detailed out-of-doors spirit that left us exhilarated.
After these intense out-of-door explorations, the Beethoven Quintet seemed to inhabit another world of sensibility altogether. At first I liked the contrast set up by the more “orchestral” feel of the ensemble, but as the work progressed I began to miss in the playing that sense of involvement with the music that Zukerman and Forsythe had exhibited so tellingly during the Kodaly. Throughout the first movement I kept wanting the ensemble to “dig in” a little more to the string textures, perhaps at a slower, more “pointed” tempo. Interesting that I found the work as a whole somewhat reined in considering that the same composer at this time (1801) was working on other,  more revolutionary pieces that were challenging classical norms and structures in different genres such as the piano sonata (the Op.27 Sonatas, and the “Pastoral”).

I liked the contrasts afforded by the slow movement, the development section “breaking out” from the constraints of the opening, and the players nicely catching the humour of the “false ending”, at what seems like a concluding cadence suddenly plunging back into the turmoil, before slowly restoring a sense of calm. But contrary to the programme note’s description of the Beethoven finale as “pure drama”, I thought the ensemble brought out the music’s urbanity and elegance more than any kind of elemental connections. Detail was beautifully filled in, from the elfin ambience of the tremolando accompaniment at the opening, to the deftest of violinistic touches from Zukerman himself in the more withdrawn Andante episodes; while the Players obviously revelled in the music’s pacy minor-key sections, delivering the notes with plenty of snap and polish, and nicely contrasting the polarities of activity and circumspection throughout. Still, for me, the impression remained of a performance that never really “let go”, so that the Beethoven we were presented with remained a drawing-room composer, albeit an interesting and occasionally surprising one.
The Dvorak Quintet is justly regarded as one of the great glories of the chamber-music repertoire for string instruments – and in a sense, Zukerman and his Players performed it like that, with beautifully-modulated tones and tight rhythmic control throughout, allowing the work’s greatness as an absolute piece of music to shine through, even if there were no folk-singers intoning the tunes and clogs stamping to the rhythms. If my bias extends towards a performance ethos of this kind of music that makes earthier connections than we heard from these musicians, I’m not denying the virtuosity and beauty of tone that emanated from the Wellington Town Hall stage throughout. The musicians gave full-throated voice to the work’s lyrical opening, and expertly spun the syncopated rhythms of the ensuing allegro. Brilliant though their playing of the scherzo was, I missed the chunky “folk-fiddle” ambiences of my mind’s ear, and thought some of the music’s character had been ever-so-slightly dulled with too generalised a response. The Players came into their own with the hymn-like measures of the slow movement, lines gorgeously intertwined, and contrasting sections beautifully characterised, the ‘cello-playing from Amanda Forsythe always ear-catching, especially in the major-minor contrasts of some of the movement’s variations.

The work’s finale bottoms out a bit compared with the other three movements, its contrasting rondo-like episodes needing strong characterisation to provide sufficient contrast with the all-pervasive jig-rhythms of the principal theme. I thought the ensemble gave the music plenty of energy, but didn’t sufficiently “colour” the contrasts enough for there to be a real sense of “homecoming” at the return of the jig-like rhythm each time. But the movement’s conclusion was exhilarating, with dotted rhythms giving way to triplets and building the excitement towards the last, grand lyrical statement – and even if this was delivered more with drive and rhythmic purpose than full-throated joy, the excitement kept us buoyed up right to the end.
Pinchas Zukerman and his Players responded to the warmth of the audience’s appreciation with a movement from a work in the group’s “other” programme, the Andante movement from the Mendelssohn B-flat String Quintet, a supremely elegant coda to an absorbing evening’s music-making.

Two Lunchtime concerts: Old St Paul’s and St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

1. Richard Apperley (organ)

The German Chorale: Pieces by Mendelssohn, Buxtuhude, Reger, Kuhnau, Hauff, Böhm and Karg-Elert

Old St Paul’s, Tuesday 11 August

The scheduled performer at this free lunchtime concert, Michael Fulcher, organist at the Cathedral of St Paul, had to make an urgent trip to Australia and assistant cathedral organist Richard Apperley stepped in.

He drew mainly on the repertoire that his CV describes as his particular interest: Buxtehude and contemporary organ music, and there were side trips from those centres. For example, as well as music by Buxtehude himself, he played attractive examples of three other of his near contemporaries; but nothing closer to our own age than Reger and Karg-Elert, both of whom died in the first half of the 20th century.

The two Little Chorale Preludes (‘Lobe den Herrn’ and ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’) of Reger, were indeed short yet they served to whet my curiosity to hear more of this somewhat neglected composer’s organ music. Today, Karg-Elert’s organ works are even less known, though I heard his music, and his name stuck I my memory, when I was a student; and this Chorale Improvisation, ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ renewed my interest, though perhaps it’s not typical of the composer whose music is usually more impressionistic (listen to his Kaleidoscope, Op 144).

The recital started with Mendelssohn’s third organ sonata, music that I hear as too serious, too venerating of Bach and of the spirit of 19th century Protestant religion. I’ve tried, having started with a secondary school friend whose own interest in the organ at least educated me a bit to the mysteries of the remarkable instrument. He was learning the Mendelssohn sonatas and I tried my hand too but was not hooked.

However, this performance, employing bright registrations, interestingly flavoured with flute stops made a very good case for it, but the feel of seriously pious music looking backward was undeniable.

Four of the other pieces were from the generation before JS Bach. Two were famous as his mentors: The two chorale preludes by Buxtehude and Böhm had some of the intellect and formal shape of Bach but not the imprint of genius that most of Bach’s music bears. Richard Apperley’s playing provided them with clarity and sufficient tonal variety and complexity to excite interest.

It’s a while since I’d heard the organ at Old St Paul’s played in a formal recital. Having heard it played without much apparent appreciation of its strengths and weaknesses, and sensitivity to the acoustic of the church, it was a pleasure to hear it played with such discrimination and attention to both its character and to the space it has to emerge in.

2. Baroque Workshop, New Zealand School of Music

Music by Telemann, Willem de Fesch and Sweelinck.

Olga Gryniewicz (soprano); instrumentalists: Brendan O’Donnell (flute), Judy Guan (violin), Emma Goodbehere (cello), Tom Gaynor (harpsichord and rogan), Douglas Mews (harpsichord)

St Andrew’s on The Terrace. Wednesday 12 August 2009

The lunchtime concert on the following day was another chance to hear several of the most talented musicians in advanced stages of their studies at the New Zealand School of Music. Intentionally or not, all the music was of the 18th century or earlier; it started and finished with pieces by Telemann.

The first was a Fantasia (No 7 in D minor) for flute and violin (Brendan O’Donnell and Judy Guan). While O’Donnell played it on the recorder, which I felt robbed it of the slightly more interesting texture produced by the flute, the two soprano instruments were played so scrupulously, with such calm, that the experience was rather enchanting both in the gentle Alla francese and the faster Presto, of the character of a courante.

A close Dutch contemporary of Telemann, Willem de Fesch (even closer to Bach and Handel) wrote the next piece, a cello sonata that was played by Emma Goodbehere and Douglas Mews at the harpsichord. There was a slow prelude followed by a quick movement in common time and two minuets, a most accomplished performance adorned with tasteful ornaments that were kept grounded by a carefully balanced harpsichord.

An anonymous piece, rather slight, called the Duke of Norfolk or Paul’s Steeple was played by Judy Guan on the violin with cello and harpsichord continuo: a set of variations on a popular dance tune. Though the violin was a little too bright for its context, it was the violin’s piece and gave Guan another opportunity to display her instinct for and taste in early music.

Jan Pieter Sweelinck lived a full century before Telemann and Bach, one of the most important composers of his age, particularly in the development of the organ. Thomas Gaynor played his Variations on ‘Mein junges Leben hat ein End’ which had a lightness that rather belied its morbid subject. Considering the modest colour palette available on the church’s chamber organ, Gaynor invested it with great interest and variety.

A cantata by Telemann brought the concert to an end: ‘Lauter Wonne, lauter Freude’, accompanied by recorder which had well articulated, ear-catching figures at several points, cello and with Gaynor on the harpsichord. Olga Gryniewicz (whom we heard singing the role of Iris in Semele a few weeks before) was the soprano soloist. It was good to hear her in another setting, her voice comfortable if a little tight, evincing some production problems, in the high register, agile, with a quick vibrato under good control.

Her performance was vivacious, the arias expressive, as if she really meant what she was singing, her recitatives dramatic, committed. In the second aria she created striking contrasts between moments of laughter and lamenting. She conveys youthful delight in performance, which transmits immediately to her audience. However, for all Gryniewicz’s accomplished performance, the success of the cantata rested just as much with the instrumentalists accompanying her.

Ensemble Selisih – making the difference

Posted on by Alan Wells

ENSEMBLE SELISIH

Elizabeth Farrell (flute), Mathias Trapp (piano), Daniela Wahler and Markus Rombach (saxophones)
DIETER MACK: “Selisih”, “Trio III”;
CHANG-SOON RYU: “Quartett”;
DYLAN LARDELLI: “Two Bells”;
ROBIN TOAN: “Twitter”;
MICHAEL NORRIS: “BADB”;
GILLIAN WHITEHEAD: “Taurangi”.

NZ School of Music Adam Concert Room, 12 August 2009

“Selisih”, an Indonesian word meaning “argumentative discussion”, was the name given by German composer Dieter Mack to his duo for alto and baritone saxophones. Mack, now on his third visit to New Zealand in a professional capacity, has lived in Indonesia studying gamelan performance practice, and (partly inspired by this) has made the interactions between players, one of the fundamental principles of his music. The name was subsequently adopted by this ensemble of four individualists – two saxophonists, a flautist and a pianist.

Mack’s 2003 composition “Selisih” itself formed part of the programme. The duo began with Wahler’s querulous alto sax answered by Rombach’s staid baritone, which in turn was to respond with increased nervous energy. The conversation turned to treat a serious topic with mysterious multiphonics, before they joined together in rapid unisono figures and a perfectly united vibrato.

The 2005 “Trio III” reflected Mack’s more recent concern with creating new timbres using multiphonics, incidental microtones and, especially, by blending together instrumental sounds (analogous to an organ’s mixture stop, and sharing some similar concerns with the French Spectralists). Flute (and sometimes piccolo) melded with alto sax to produce unison lines in novel, Messiaen-like colours, while the discreetly prepared piano added a quietly dark commentary.

Korean-born Chang-soon Ryu has studied with Dieter Mack in Lubeck. His 2007 “Quartett” for the Ensemble Selisih showed some of Mack’s interest in timbre-building, and also a feeling of stasis that those of us who have grown up with the thematic development, metrical pulse and harmonic motion of the western tradition, tend to associate with East Asian music.

Wellingtonian Dylan Lardelli’s 2009 “Two Bells” displayed a similar sense of static time, and for good reason: it was inspired in part by the stately unfolding of classical Japanese Noh drama. As with his 2008 “four scenes” for Stroma, and more successfully than in his earlier “Sent into Silence” at the 2007 Asia Pacific Festival, Lardelli here suspended any need for forward direction or climax. The poised, spare texture incorporated judicious special effects: muffled prepared-piano notes illumined by a halo of resonance; throbbing close-interval sustains; slap-tonguing and key clicks on the baritone sax.

“Two Bells” was commissioned by Selisih (with Creative NZ) to increase the repertoire for this unconventional ensemble. So too was Aucklander Robin Toan’s 2009 “Twitter”, a set of three short character-pieces “about” birds (not micro-blogging). The first – perky, cheeky, syncopated – was reminiscent of the “Aquarium” and “Puppets” movements from her 2005 “Barcelona Postcards”. The second was pensive, with a plangent melody on the soprano sax, some contrapuntal complexity and cadenza passages. The third was motoric (rather than syncopated like the first), featuring rapid ostinati on the baritone sax and chirping runs and trills on the piccolo, building up to an sudden end.

Michael Norris’ “BADB” was named after a shape-shifting Celtic goddess. It opened with Farrell singing into her flute, with crystalline high piano runs from Trapp. However, the goddess’s fearsome side was soon made evident with fortissimo crow-calls.

Gillian Whitehead’s “Taurangi” was premiered by Bridget Douglas and Rachel Thomson during the 2000 International Festival of the Arts. It made my list of highlights in the retrospective of that year that I wrote for the “NZ Listener”. This was a most elegant rendition from New Zealand-born flautist Elizabeth Farrell and pianist Mathias Trapp: the flute’s subtle pitch-bends and the closing, barely audible inside-piano glissandi still had the magic to send tingles up the spine.

Town Hall Organ Series 2009 – Douglas Mews

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Variations on La Marseillaise (Balbastre), Scherzo from Symphony No 6 (Vierne), In Paradisum (Dubois), Scherzo (Gigout), Grande Pièce Symphonique Franck)

Douglas Mews at the organ

Presented by the Wellington Convention Centre

Town Hall, Sunday 9 August 2009

Now that Wellington has a City Organist to help ensure the better use of one of the greatest, substantially unmodified, organs of its kind in the world, it is good that a recital series is under way.

This one was entitled Vive la France and it celebrated, after a fashion, French organ music. I can understand the motivation for a concert of mainly light, even meretricious, pieces of organ music: the hope of attracting the crowds with some organ fireworks.

Well, I was indeed surprised to find all the seats in the stalls of the Town Hall occupied when I arrived a minute late: clearly the organisers had miscalculated the level of interest and had not put out enough seats and had even closed the gallery (not a bad idea since people tend to sit around the curve of the gallery, so far away that the hall can appear thinly peopled).

Balbastre’s games with the French National Anthem were under way when I arrived. Written, said the programme note, in 1792 (La Marseillaise itself was written by Claude Joseph Rouget de l’Isle in April 1792, in Alsace, as Chant de Guerre pour l’armée du Rhin, but got its name when it was played by a Marseillaise battalion in Paris later), it did little for that most dynamic of all national hymns apart from running through some standard routines used in the ‘variation’ form at the time. I did not mind being a bit late.

The next piece was played by Tom Gaynor with help from Richard Prothero (organ scholars of the New Zealand School of Music and of St Paul’s Cathedral, respectively): the scherzo movement from Vierne’s Sixth Symphony. In introducing the piece, Douglas Mews told the familiar story of his death at the console of the main organ in Notre Dame, falling onto the pedal E flat which continued to sound until it occurred to someone that an unusually sustained pedal note was not resolving into, say, A flat. He reassured us that Gaynor would probably make it through. Death at the organ console was a Paris speciality: One story has Tournemire dying at St Clotilde (formerly Franck’s church), but there are other, more authentic if as strange, accounts of his death.

The other important qualification for organists was blindness; Vierne, Langlais, Litaize, to name three.

We rarely hear more than a few of Vierne’s occasional pieces, such as the Carillon de Westminster, and isolated movements from his six symphonies for organ (he also wrote one orthodox orchestral one). Yet he is a major figure, Franck’s worthy successor (he did have several).

Though Vierne was born in Poitiers, in west central France, it has been pointed out that the great French school of organ composition and performance was born in Belgium: Franck was born in Liège and two other major influences on Vierne, Nicolas Lemmens and François Joseph Fétis taught at the Brussels Conservatoire.

The Scherzo is hardly typical of Vierne’s music, it is light, jazzy, almost flippant, and while no doubt offering performance hurdles, certainly sets up no intellectual challenges.

There followed a couple of other light-weight pieces, by Dubois (In Paradisum) and a Scherzo by Gigout, which were colourful, were decorated by what could be described as tunes; they served to built up an impatience for the major work in the programme – Franck’s Grande pièce symphonique, the largest of his works for organ.

I deplore personal anecdotes that are mere name dropping, but here goes.

My most memorable hearing of it was at Notre Dame, Paris, about 25 years ago. The organ was playing something I didn’t know, though obviously Franck. I sat transported by my good fortune and by the whole situation: being in Notre Dame again, the dim light sifting through stained glass, the murmur of voices, the voluptuous music echoing in the vast cathedral; at the end I asked a woman, also listening rapt, what it was and it was this piece. My life seemed to be utterly fulfilled.

Much as I love Franck’s music, the reality of this piece, recollecting that hearing, sometimes doesn’t quite fulfils my expectations. It might well have been a symphony or sonata in one movement, though it is in three sections, and though its shape and the character of the phases through which it passes can seem a little meandering, rhapsodic, a bit disconnected, but the succession of romantically coloured episodes played predominantly on dark purple, diapason stops, with sudden little fanfares on Bombarde-like stops, a lovely, typically Franckian melody in the Andante central section which ‘hovers round the third note of the scale’ in the words of one commentator.

Perhaps this performance employed registrations that were too colourful, too many reed stops, but ultimately it was a great experience in spite of the absence of dim light shafting through mystic gothic arches; it was on an organ well equipped to do it justice, by an organist who had the technical resources and the taste, and the French and Franckian sensibility to make it a performance in which to immerse oneself in contentment.

Cantoris – Simple Song

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Cantoris  (Music Director – Rachel Hyde)
Music by Schumann, Ravel, Body,
Brahms, Britten

St Peter’s Church, Willis St.,

Saturday 8th August 2009

As was the case with Cantoris’s previous concert “Amaryllis and Absalom”,  both the venue, the gorgeously-appointed St.Peter’s Church on Willis St, and a beautifully laid-out booklet programme containing commentaries and texts of the song-settings, admirably set the scene for the choir’s most recent exploration of  the choral repertoire, an attractive programme entitled “Simple Song”. Cantoris director Rachel Hyde welcomed us to the concert and talked briefly about each bracket of songs and of some of the things she and the choir were attempting to realise in their performance. The four Schumann works for double choir which opened the programme were a pleasing choice, the singers quickly able to demonstrate their technical skills and expressive range with nice melodic work in thirds, good dynamic control and a living, breathing flexibility of pulse throughout. I particularly enjoyed the second piece Ungewisses Licht, a piece describing a lonely traveller’s journey through the storms of intense privation towards a distant beckoning light, the singers nicely and truly differentiating the major/minor oscillation of “ist es die Liebe, is es der Tod?” at the end.

Ravel’s gorgeous Trois Chansons are settings of texts by the composer, his only work for unaccompanied choir. The women’s voices tended to overshadow the men’s throughout, carrying the argument, except for the tenor line in the second song Trois beaux oiseaux, which was nicely focused and sensitively delivered. Again in the third song, the riotous Ronde, the women’s voices nicely captured the fantastic character of the setting, the voices relishing the rhythmic and colouristic possibilities given by the grotesque made-up names of the creatures of the Ormonde Woods. Still more “invented” language was brought into play by Jack Body, with his Five Lullabies 1988-89, music whose inspiration stemmed from the composer’s encounters with various exotic cultures, the sounds of both language and music being brought into play. Body makes the point that lullabies might not be always sung for the purpose of sleep; and while several of the settings did produce a mesmeric effect, the fourth sounded more like a “work-song”, energetic and invigorating. The fifth setting returned our sensibilities to the world of dreams, using the Filipino word “calumbaya”, the music filled with haunting, Sibelius-like held notes, as if sounding from a magical island, the divided choirs setting a beautifully-floated sonic backdrop around a more energetic striving figuration in the foreground, creating something altogether rich and strange – very nice.

Brahms used selections from a particularly rich vein of German Marian poetry, called thus after Mary, the mother of Jesus, and also Mary Magdalene, who was one of Jesus’s followers – the poetry uniquely combines a folk tradition with religious symbolism, a point made by Rachel Hyde when stressing the importance of language and its clarity and colour in performance. The songs made a telling contrast after the attractive astringencies of Jack Body’s music, the choir making the most of its storytelling opportunities with progressions such as the angel’s annunciation to Mary of her impending motherhood in the opening song Der englische Gruß. Perhaps not surprisingly, parts of the music have a Mahlerian melancholy, the opening of  the second Marias Kirchgang having something of the fatalistic tread of Mahler’s Lieder und Gesänge, as does the sixth Magdalena, relating the Magdalene’s discovery of Christ’s empty tomb, music with “haunted” harmonies and dynamics. Strong, atmospheric singing throughout.

Benjamin Britten’s Five Flower Songs gave us the lightness and buoyancy we needed at the concert’s end, the voices relishing the piquant skills of the composer’s varied responses, from the opening strongly-focused lines of Daffodils, through the tricky fugalities and finely-wrought dying fall of Four Sweet Months and the jagged, droll-sounding Marsh Flowers, to the delicately-etched harmonies of Evening Primrose, with its sun-drenched death-knell at the end. And with the most engaging syncopations and antiphonal cross-stitchings of the saucy Ballad of Green Broom to finish, the choir was able to conclude its concert with a spring and a smile and an exhalation of pure pleasure, the acclaim of its audience at the end richly deserved.

Musica Sacra: first of three baroque concerts

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Harmonische Freude – German Baroque music – directed by Robert Oliver

Telemann: ‘Sei getreu bis in der Tod’, TWV1:12184, Quartet No 6 in E minor; Phillipp Heinrich Erlebach: Songs from Harmonische Freude, Nos 12, 21, 14, 2; J S Bach: ‘Der Herr denket an uns’ BWV 196.

Baroque Voices (director: Pepe Becker; Katherine Hodge, John Fraser, David Morriss), Academia Sanctae Mariae (leader: Gregory Squire, with Anne Loeser, Shelley Wilkinson, Katrin Eickhorst-Squire, Robert Oliver, Douglas Mews)

Church of St Mary of the Angels, Sunday 2 August 2009

The collaboration of two groups, vocal and instrumental, under the title Musica Sacra, has been presenting a series of concerts in the latter part of the year at St Mary of the Angels for a number of years. As far as I’m aware, the Academia performs in no other context, but Baroque Voices has a long-standing presence in Wellington as a chamber choir.

This was the first of the three concerts of their 2009 series, this one devoted to German sacred music: two familiar composers, but one unknown, I imagine, to most of us.

Telemann came first, with a cantata that could well pass for Bach to all but the specialist. Instruments played a slow introduction and then the four solo voices entered one at a time, well contrasted and stylistically sensitive. The following sections allowed each voice its turn; David Morriss’s bass seems to have developed in both projection and resonance since I last heard him; in the alto part, Katherine Hodge displayed a most attractive timbre that expressed the gentle piety of the words. The combination of Pepe Becker’s ecstatic soprano with Robert Oliver’s bass viol seemed rather at odds with the scourging words, reviling ‘vain pleasure’; and finally John Fraser sang the more sprightly tenor aria with a voice more at ease with the physical world, accompanied by violins.

Telemann wrote six instrumental quartets – not really the forerunners of Haydn’s – for Paris. Some features: the flute part taken by Katrin Eickhorst-Squire on a ‘voice flute’ = recorder, Squire’s violin given to flamboyant cadenzas, Robert Oliver’s viola da gamba, enjoying some particularly attractive passages, and Douglas Mews at the chamber organ (lent by the NZ School of Music) duetted charmingly with the recorder in the second movement. The organ, often embedded in the continuo textures, supplied a bass timbre in genial contrast to the bass viol.

In contrast to the cantata, these chamber pieces for a Parisian audience, much in triple rhythm, showed signs of the emerging ‘galant’ style, marking the end of the Baroque age.

The programme note enlightened (most of) us about the composer Erlbach, of the generation before Bach. Most of his works were lost in a fire but these songs, for all the strangely naïve piety of the words, proved beautifully adapted to soprano, alto and tenor and also offered rewarding passages, for example in song XIV, for violinists Squire and Loeser and gambist Oliver. The music, one had to say, was a rather more cultivated than the words.

I couldn’t help reflecting on the nature of contemporary English or French poetry, both with several centuries of prolific, more polished and cultivated literary activity than had taken place in German lands. And their civilizations had not been rent by a Thirty Years War.

Yet the words and music again gave Pepe Becker, alone in Song II, scope for floating the long flowing lines that were beautifully enhanced by the church acoustic.

The programme note claimed this to have been the New Zealand premiere of Bach’s Cantata No 196 (it must be very hard to be certain), thought to be for a family wedding. This performance should result in its gaining a foot-hold, for it is a setting of great musical delight, starting with a chorus of celebratory vitality. And then an aria for soprano and a duet for tenor and bass, a chance to hear David Morriss, this time, in happy wedding spirit.

The programme had been devised so that lesser but by no means worthless music laid the ground for this fine, entertaining Bach cantata and it left the audience well contented.

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!