Category: Reviews – Concerts

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Orchestra Wellington presents
ENEMY OF THE STATE

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

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

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday 18th October 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SHOSTAKOVICH UNPACKED
New Zealand String Quartet  / Ghost Trio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Posted on by Peter Mechen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O FORTUNA – a sacred and profane Wellington/Auckland choral spectacular!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

LEONARD  BERNSTEIN – Chichester Psalms
CARL ORFF – Carmina Burana
Emma Pearson (soprano), Coco Diaz (counter-tenor), James Harrison (baritone)
Jian Liu, Diedre Irons (pianos)
Auckland Choral (Uwe Grodd, Music Director)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington (Brent Stewart, Music Director)
Wellington Brass Band (David Bremner (Music Director)
Brent Stewart (conductor)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 27th September 2025

Palpable excitement was in the air regarding the Orpheus Choir’s September 2025 concert at Wellington’s  Michael Fowler Centre, featuring as it did the ever-popular choral classic by Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, and coupled with a lesser-known but up-and-coming classic from the 1960s, Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. What gave the concert even more added interest was the double novelty of the Orpheus Choir  being joined by a second choir, Auckland Choral, and being accompanied in Carmina Burana by a brass band instead of the usual symphony orchestra. Together these ingredients gave the prospect of attending such a concert the kind of aura and excitement one recalled from festival events in previous years, an atmosphere palpably alive from the evening’s beginning in both the foyer and auditorium.

Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms  was composed as the result of a commission from the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, the Rev. Walter Hussey, who over the years successfully commissioned no less than eleven significant works from various well-known composers, failing only in his attempts to procure a work from Igor Stravinsky in 1968! Hussey had actually suggested to Bernstein that a Psalm setting  with “more than a hint of “West Side Story” about the music” would be more than welcome; and after some initial misgivings Bernstein became inspired by the Psalm-setting idea, producing in 1965 a work in three movements, to be sung in Hebrew. Its first performance was in New York in July of that year, with the composer conducting, after which came the Chichester Festival’s opening later that month. Bernstein did come to Chichester for the opening but declined to conduct, saying he wanted to hear it “as an audience member”. The success of that occasion was instrumental in inspiring  several more commissions by Walter Hussey for future Chichester festivals, from composers  William Walton, Lennox Berkeley and the American William Albright.

Here in Wellington the combination of the two choirs galvanised the openings of each of the works programmed in a manner each composer surely intended. The Hebrew words of the Chichester Psalms were translated for us in English surtitles, beginning with the declamatory “Awake, Psaltery and Harp” and with percussion and  piano adding to the clamour and excitement of the words. The composer, heedful of his commissioner’s comments referring to “West Side Story” set the following words from Psalm 100 “Make a joyful noise unto the world all ye lands” in a catchy, and in places percussive 7/4 metre, the angularities pointed by the voices and pianists with gusto!

Though I had heard the work only once before, I remembered well the plaintive solo contribution to the second movement with its distinctively “bluesy” flattened note in the melody line – suddenly there it was, in the guise of a memory awakened! From Psalm 23  “The Lord is my Shepherd – I shall not want”, with Coco Diaz’s haunting voice then joined by the choir’s female voices. The choir’s male voices then broke in with sharply-accented cries – “Why do the nations rage?” – similarly sharp, heavy accents rhythms underpinned the women’s voices, until the tenor soloist re-entered singing the words “Surely goodness and mercy”, and with the same  affecting “flattened note line” at the words “And I will dwell in the house of the Lord” – so lovely!

At this point something went awry with one of the lower platforms near the players, as if someone had dropped something percussive, making what seemed like an unscheduled entry!  – but all continued, with composure only briefly shaken and then restored – the pianists played an extraordinarily anxious and fretful sequence – by turns lamenting, brooding, fretting, and sorrowing – until the men’s voices entered with a gently lullabic  Psalm 131  – “Lord, my head is not haughty, nor my eye lofty”, , which the women’s voices joined in semi-canonic fashion, the groups approximating rather than replicating each other’s  utterances, until, joining together, the voices sang the same melody wordlessly (all of this was done in a deliciously improvisatory-sounding 10/4 rocking metre).

In conclusion, the voices turned to Psalm 133  – “Behold, how good and how pleasant it for people to dwell together in unity” unaccompanied, except for the concluding “Amen” – sentiments which, in view of the language used by the work would have resonated in a multitude of ways with many present, mindful of the present day-and-age goings on of the outside world.

Plenty of sober reflection then, to take into the interval and then, upon returning, worlds of difference to encounter!  –  this was Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana”, representative of a long-since departed age’s outrageously expressed declarations of defiance and disdain in the face of the supposed spiritual and social hegemony of the church at that time, here in the form of verses written by the more dissident and dissolute representatives of the era, for our edification, centuries later! Oh, yes, and composer Carl Orff also had a hand (or two) in the latter parts of the process!

Having been familiar with the “traditional” choir and symphony orchestra mix in performances of this work for the last fifty years, I was ineffably curious as to how it would all turn out with the Wellington Brass Band in attendance instead!  The opening “O Fortuna” was predictably magnificent, as was the following “Fortune plango vulnera”, both of which had plenty of full orchestra accompaniment in the originals. With the ‘Springtime’ songs the various individual instruments showed what they could do in imitation of normally-heard winds and strings, the first “Veris leta facies” beautifully sung and accompanied. Especially lovely was the second, “slow dance” from Part One, with beautifully “covered” brass notes and gorgeously deep trajectories, seductive in their way. And the beautiful “Chume, Chum, geselle min” featured a gorgeous flute-like solo as well as exquisite singing. Of course the final “Spring movement” Were din werlt alle min” with the “made-to-order” brass fanfares were dispatched by this ensemble and the voices with great pizzazz!

“In Taberna”   began with a clarion call and crash, the instruments pushing the dotted rhythms excitingly along in support of the singer, creating a striking contrast with the fantastic “Olim Iacus colueram”, the grotesque “roasted-swan” song for counter-tenor solo – the scene’s eeriness palpably wrought by the singing and playing as the singer was “turned on the spit” and “basted” by serving-wenches!

The band revelled in the other “tavern” scenarios, particularly the percussive interjections during the Abbott’s plaintive lament “Ego sum abbas”, and the exciting running trajectories in the “In Taberna quando sumus” – it was “Oompah!” with a vengeance, in places!

Among the enchantments of this performance were the brass instruments sounding almost like the winds they were replacing, particularly so in “Amor volat undique” (Love flies everywhere) supporting the children’s choir and the soprano, particularly in the latter’s enchanting “Siqua sine socio” – and the accompaniment of the soprano’s beautiful “Stetit puella” (There stood a young girl) – Emma Pearson everything one could wish for vocally, here! – gave us aural ambiences that were almost unworldly in terms of their beauty.

As for the pianists. Diedre Irons and Jian Liu,  along with the various other percussionists, they were heroes in terms of rhythmic precision, thematic networking and colouristic variety, picking up on each of the score’s different parts its special character, and adapting according to the season, the time of day, the locale and the different emotions in the music which flash or float by, linger or depart, proclaim or insinuate. Together with the band, and at the varied and persuasive instigations of their conductor Brent Stewart they marvellously realised the patchwork of qualities which make up this ever-fascinating work.

All of the solo singers gave what seemed  their utmost to their different roles – James Harrison’s baritone seemed to “fill out” as the work progressed, at his best in the “Ego sum abbas”, (where he enjoyed his touch of play-acting, collapsing on his chair) and at “Dies nox et omnia” (Day, night, and all the World), making a feature of the “falsetto” parts of his recitative and answering in his lower register with real authority. Countertenor Coco Diaz’s “Roasted swan” scene was almost a showstopper in its blend of picturesque timbral ambience and theatricality – a brilliant idea to have him being turned on a kind of “spit” as he lamented his fate! As for Emma Pearson, she enchanted from the moment of her entrance, at “Siqua sine socio” (If a girl lacks a partner”), and came into her own in terms of sheer vocal beauty at “In Trutina mentis dubia” (In the scales of my wavering indecision). The highest notes of the following “Dulcissimi” were effortful compared with the rest, but nevertheless conveyed a kind of “emotion in extremis” pinnacle to which everything had inevitably been brought.

As for the choirs themselves, the Children’s Choir, comprised of singers from  Samuel Marsden Collegiate School and Scots College enchanted from its first utterance in “The Courts of Love” sequence, and enjoyed the innocent rumbustifications of “Tempus est iocundum” (Pleasant is the season). The rest was a truly concerted delivery of vocally sonic delight from two recognised bodies of singers performing as one, and galvanising an audience in doing so. Brent Stewart’s direction of all of this was unerringly focused on bringing out in his singers the work’s obvious strengths of articulation, tonal variety and human interest, so that we were satisfied in all aspects of audience experience. As any listener might, I “heard” some things differently at times, most obviously the faster-than-accustomed-to speeds of some of the concerted passages  challenging and at times even seeming to blur articulation of words – but such observations merely confirm this performance’s desire to challenge and stimulate those who attended to react and resound what was heard and experienced in the memory. Judging from the reactions of people I spoke with afterwards the occasion was a triumph – and it augurs well for the Orpheus’s return visit to Auckland for a further performance, as guests rather than as hosts. For the moment, in the wake of this initial performance, one raises one’s hands in salute of and acclamation for a mighty and most memorable presentation.

 

 

 

Handel, Ysaÿe, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn – courses and causes at Roseneath’s Long Hall.

Posted on by Peter Mechen
Helene, Rolf and Peter Gjelsten perform Handel at The Long Hall

The Chamber Pot-Pourri Ensemble presents:
GEORG FRIEDRIC HANDEL – Trio Sonata in B Minor
EUGENE YSAŸE – Ballade for Solo Violin Op. 27 No 3*
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor
FELIX MENDELSSOHN – String Quartet No.2 in A Minor Op.13

Helene Pohl and Peter Gjelsten* (violins)
Nicholas Hancox (viola) / Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)

The Long Hall, Roseneath, Wellington
Saturday, 20th September
(A Concert to Benefit Kaibosh Food Rescue)

Violinist Helene Pohl’s and ‘cellist Rolf Gjelsten’s ever-resourceful Pot-Pourri Ensemble was joined today at the Long Hall by Peter Gjelsten on second violin as well as violist Nicholas Hancox. I’d previously encountered the latter’s excellent contributions to this series on a couple of occasions, but this was my first encounter with violinist Peter Gjelsten (Helene’s and Rolf’s son) in these concerts.

This was a programme which offered interest and delight through music from different eras, containing contrasts and connections of different kinds. Though not presented in chronological order, the pieces’ remarkably varied intensities could be said to form a sequence begun by Handel’s B Minor Trio Sonata No, 1 with its “boldly inventive variety and expressive range” (to quote from another review I happened to read of a recent recording of this work), and continuing throughout Eugène Ysaÿe’s brilliant demonstration of virtuosic violin-playing capabilities in one of his solo Violin Sonatas. With Dmitri Shostakovich’s dark and iconically dissident Eighth String Quartet from 1960 the intensities reached levels of extremity which the extraordinarily accomplished Mendelssohn Quartet that concluded the programme both defused and yet echoed in the music’s youthful impetuosities with considerable confidence and elan.

The opening item required just three players for two violins and a ‘cello, the ensuing combination bringing forth a delightful rendition of Handel’s delectable work, one that straightaway brought to my mind the composer’s wonderful Op.6 Concerti Grossi, and from whose manifold thematic treasury there may have even been some cribbings, as was the composer’s wont in certain instances elsewhere. Exquisite phrasings and ear-catching tonal variations brought gorgeous duetting between the two violins in the opening Andante, and a particularly fetching lead-in to the allegro ma non troppo, with the two violin lines playfully nudging one another, and the ‘cello dancing in attendance – we especially enjoyed, towards the movement’s end, the spicy discord, beautifully resolved.

The Largo which followed, gracefully and ceremonially, brought an opening sequence that was “echoed” in a subtle and more intimate way by the players, before the rather “hunky” finale made its unashamed entrance with its rustic kind of rhythmic  charm. Altogether, it was a perfect “ear-opener” with which to experience both the music’s subtleties and more forceful characterisations of mood in preparation for what was to follow.

Peter Gjelsten then introduced a solo violin item, the Sonata for Solo Violin in D minor ‘Ballade’, Op. 27, No. 3  by Eugène Ysaÿe. a one-movement work from 1923, and the third in a set of six sonatas for solo violin. Each of these works, we were told, was intended as a tribute to a famous contemporary violinist, the first being dedicated to Josef Szigeti, whose performance of one of Bach’s solo violin sonatas was Ysaÿe’s direct inspiration for the set as a whole. Today’s work was dedicated to the Roumanian violinist and composer Georges Enescu.

Ysaÿe begins the work with a rhapsodically ascending, double-stopped figure – an arresting gesture and here compellingly played! Having captured our attention, the music brought us in closer with a musing line, in places partnered by a similarly-inclined harmonising voice. Secure and definite chording joined with the long-breathed lines, the double-stopping assuming a heroic character in places, the young player giving his all to these strongly-chiselled statements, whether lyrically or heroically-stated. An almost furtive, will-o-the wisp character suddenly took over the lines, the music materialising and dematerialising as the notes from the strings responded to a more mercurial touch, out of which the heroic manner emerged even more strongly, and with a more purposeful sense of direction.

As the piece pushed excitingly onwards I got the feeling that the music and player were actually driving one another, sharing in the exhilaration of the quest approaching its raison d’etre, the completion of a uniquely-characterised journey, and one resonantly demonstrated with a resolute ascending double-stopped figure falling onto a single concluding note  –  a splendid “That’s it” gesture! Since the concert, I’ve found a sentence in an article about this music that has enhanced the enjoyment of my memory of Peter Gjelsten’s splendid performance, something which Ysaÿe himself wrote about it: “I have let my imagination wander at will – the memory of my friendship and admiration for George Enescu and the performances we gave together…..have done the rest”.

The musical discourse seemed on a roll by now, having generated sufficient interest and momentum for our sensibilities to be exposed to what seemed would be the afternoon’s most demanding and mind-stretching experience – a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s well-known Eighth Quartet, a work that’s haunted me for most of my music-listening life ever since hearing a famous 1960s recording (probably the first!) by the Borodin Quartet (though I wasn’t as “close to the cutting edge” as that remark sounds, as I didn’t encounter the recording until the 1970s!).

The work itself has invited plenty of animated discussion regarding what it actually signifies – there are the composer’s own words inscribed on the score – “In memory of victims of fascism and war” and his remarkable completion of the work in three days while on a visit during 1960 to Dresden, the city almost completely destroyed by Allied firebombing in 1945. Set against all of this is conjecture arising from the composer’s liberal use of the notes D-E-flat-C-B, which, in German notation is an abbreviation of his own name, DSCH (the composer had used it before in his Tenth Symphony), a motif which appears right at the work’s beginning, It proceeds to dominate the whole work, appearing in tandem with fragments of other works by Shostakovich – the First, Fifth and Eleventh Symphonies, the Second Piano Trio and the First ‘Cello Concerto – and there’s a significant quotation from the composer’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, So why all this self-quotation in a work dedicated to “victims of fascism and war?”

For those who ascribe to the composer’s posthumously-published (and widely-disputed) memoirs, Testimony, edited by Solomon Volkov, the Quartet’s subject is instead autobiographical, the music directly referring to Shostakovich’s own personal sufferings and sorrow. This view was reinforced by events of that time, of his despair and feelings of guilt having to join the Communist Party when promoted as Head of the Union of Composers of the Soviet Federation – even contemplating the option of suicide (in a letter to a friend Shostakovich wrote re the finished work, “You could write on the cover – “Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this Quartet”).

From the beginning it all feels too self-obsessed and deeply stricken to be anything but an undilutedly personal utterance – the Largo opened with the solo cello voicing the DSCH theme and the other instruments giving the same theme slow canonic treatment. The violin played eerie chromatic lines, echoed later in the movement by the ‘cello, as the accompanying instruments “held the lines”, their implacability creating all kinds of tensions and expectations, with viola and cello steadfastly continuing as the two violins counterpointed their themes – what a wonderful “mini-crescendo” mid-movement with a reiteration of the DSCH theme! – and while the ‘cello played its chromatic figures I could almost “hear” strands of Russian church chanting, before the DSCH theme gathered the strands together for a bit of pre-onslaught bolstering up…..

Almost without warning the Allegro burst upon us, assailing us with the first movement themes presented as vehemently and viciously as possible, and alongside the DSCH motiv, throwing in things like the “massacre” music figurations from the Eleventh Symphony in the lead-up to the Jewish folk-theme – all so heart-rending in this context, the players immersing themselves, body and soul, in the music’s agony! – and with the composer refusing to spare them or us when he reintroduces the DSCH as its own accompaniment before returning to the Jewish tune! – such macabre moments, with the climax followed by a wrenching split-second of silence!

One wondered during that split second whether anything else could be as shocking as what we’d just heard – the answer, when it came with just as much force and similar intent was the black humour of the third movement Allegretto, Helene Pohl’s violin throwing the DSCH motif into the air with spiteful Mephistophelean glee before beginning a waltz whose crude trajectories and mocking tones were further underlined by Peter Gjelsten’s wonderfully eerie violin trills decorating the dance’s obsessive “waltzification” of the DSCH theme. A second theme was even more pitiless in its crudity and brutality, a mood relieved only by the music suddenly switching trajectories and quoting the composer’s First ‘Cello Concerto (but with the ‘cello theme played by the violin). Then while the violins played a strangely wind-blown chromatic sequence, Rolf Gjelsten’s cello in its high register gave us a stunningly eerie-sounding passage, the music seeming as though it had lost its way – after a few more desultory waltz-measures, and another ‘Cello Concerto quote, the violin then retreated into a self-communing world, leaving the remaining instruments to rap out an ominous three-note tattoo, by way of signalling the Largo fourth movement’s arrival, a motif that recurred at various stages.

This movement’s rather more Janus-faced character was evident in its alternation  between the sobering appearances of both the DSCH quotation and the hammering three-note motif’ and what proved to be the work’s most poignant expressions of human emotion – firstly came a lament-like quote from the Eleventh Symphony, and then a moving sequence from a revolutionary song “Exhausted by the hardships of prison”, with the melody played on the violin. However the most beautiful of these was an excerpt from an aria sung by the principal character, Katarina, from the composer’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, here played most affectingly on the ‘cello’s high register by Rolf Gjelsten. And even though the sequence’s last word (continuing into the final movement) was the lately ubiquitous “hammering” motif, the presence of these glimmerings of a universal kind of human spirit testified to the power of hope in the most outwardly unpromising circumstances.

No easy solution, then, was forthcoming – and the finale’s music simply deepened the work’s enigmatic profile, reinforcing the idea of the Quartet as “autobiographical”  – We heard the DSCH motive introduce the finale, lightened by a kind of counter-melody, but offering little actual redemption, leading to a dark and final reprise of those ineffably enigmatic notes before they disappeared into the silences. We sat at the end, stunned by the immediacy of it all, uncomfortably mindful of the music’s delineations of an individual’s tragedy which continues to speak for countless numbers of people – there, but for fortune awaits the world’s sorrow for any of us.

What a relief, then, after the interval, to journey into a different world, that of a young and gifted composer who’d encountered love for the first time and bravely borne its loss, both in life and in his music! Felix Mendelssohn was a child prodigy comparable to Mozart (Robert Schumann called him “the Mozart of the 19th Century), and at the time of writing the A Minor String Quartet we were about to hear, the 18 year-old had already produced 12 String symphonies, a String Quintet, the first of his five “mature” symphonies, the Overture “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and his renowned “Octet” for strings, not to mention a number of unpublished earlier string quartets. The Quartet showed the influence of Beethoven’s late quartets, especially the latter’s inclinations towards cyclic form which many later nineteenth-century composers were to fully exploit – here, one of Mendelssohn’s own songs, Frage (“Question”) Op.9, No. 1 haunted each of the movements (the composer actually had the song published in tandem with the quartet to emphasise the connection).

Such a romantic and lyrical opening! – one that immediately bore out what cellist Rolf Gjelsten said in his introduction about music one readily imagines as having words being sung  – I loved, for instance, the loaded three-note phrase practically speaking the words “Is es wahr?” (Is it true?), just before the music swept into the Allegro vivace in the key of A Minor, aptly suggesting a telling degree of angst in the notes’ expression – (how often were composers from Beethoven onwards to use that same three note-progression for various expressive purposes, with both Liszt and Brahms immediately coming to mind!).

Being new to this work I couldn’t help but be astonished by its sheer facility, with interaction between all the players worked into a seamless flow, and no part seemingly relegated to that of a mere accompanist – no wonder that a contemporary listener to one of the young Mendelssohn’s similar efforts was overheard to say to a companion – “Which quartet of Beethoven’s is this?”

Similarly, in the Adagio non lento movement which followed, the fugato section, deliciously played, captivated with its feeling of integration of all the voices, the young composer then daring to insert a kind of dancing fugal holiday for the players, with the theme an enthusiastic, if sometimes inverted, and in places, even wayward and rumbustious fellow-traveller. By way of helping to restore order, the players then gave the return of the opening a gentle, jewelled-like rite of passage to the finish.

The Intermezzo was next, dancing its somewhat circumspect way along, when it was more-or-less “ambushed” by allegro di molto fairy-music with at first wonderfully-confusing rhythmic patternings for this hapless listener (I was eventually “sorted”, here, even without being rich!), and with lyrical lines deftly floating over the scamperings! – having run out of “puff”, the music slowed and regained its composure (with a brief but delightful whimsical coda!) – then, suddenly, from our fairyland-like observation-platforms we were assailed with fierce tremolandi from the lower strings and an anguished recitative from the first violin, the strings tumbling down a slope towards a second-tier onslaught (not quite as fierce!) of more tremolandi, this time gathering up the voices and proceeding with the finale’s agitations – dramatic stuff!

We heard fast-moving passages revisiting the first-movement’s agitations, interspersed with recitative-like sequences, and another fugal-like sequence launched, as in the second movement, by Nicholas Hancox’s sonorous, ever-steady viola – the reappearance of the tremolandi that began the movement’s precipitate beginning still carried some of the young composer’s “hurt”, but after further agitations and deliberations, a third and final recitative-like series of more circumspect tremolandi-like gestures indicated a softening of resolve, as did a poignant return of the quartet’s opening. A final sounding of the three-note “Is es wahr” phrase and the dream of love was put to rest – perhaps the youthful Mendelssohn’s most candid outpouring of emotion in music, and done rich and sensitive justice here by these players.

Lights which keep us from darkness – CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610

The Tudor Consort, directed by Michael Stewart

Sopranos: Anna Sedcole, Erin King, Jane McKinlay, Lydia Joyce, Pepe Becker,
Rebecca Stanton   Altos: Andrea Cochrane, Alexandra Granville, Helene Page,
Alexandra Woodhouse-Appleby, Kassandra Wang, Maaike Christie-Beekman
Tenors: Axel Tie, John Beaglehole, Josh Long, Phillip Collins, Philip Roderick,
Richard Taylor   Basses: Brian Hesketh, David Houston, Frazer MacDiarmid,
Joshua Jamieson. Keith Small, Matthew Painter

Violins: Greg Squire, Anne Loeser   Violas:  Sophia Acheson, Lynsey Mountford
‘Cello: Jane Young    Viola da gamba: Imogen Granwal   Violone: Joan Perarnau Garriga
Cornetti: Danny Lucin, Matthew Manchester, Peter Reid   Recorders: Kamala Bain,
Katrin Eickhorst  Sackbuts: Peter Maunder, Byron Newton, Jon Harker
Dulcian: Ben Hoadley   Lute; Jonathan Le Cocq   Organ: Bethany Angus

St.Mary of the Angels Church, Boulcott St., Wellington
Saturday, 13th September 2025

Claudio Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin) could well lay claim to be the composer’s equivalent “signature work”  to that of Georg Frideric Handel’s  Messiah. Of course the latter’s popularity has never been in doubt,  triumphantly surviving even its somewhat grotesquely-inflated periods of presentation throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and continuing (in more “authentic” formats) to be widely-performed today. Monteverdi’s work, on the other hand, written well over a century earlier, has by comparison both a mystery-shrouded genesis and early performance history.  The work’s 1610 publication was in the form of eight partbooks rather than as a single, complete score, of which it seems only one has survived – and no performance of the Vespers in the composer’s lifetime has been documented. It wasn’t until 1932 when the first “complete” edition of Monteverdi’s works appeared that the work as a whole began to receive attention from scholars and performers, attention which has since come to represent almost iconic status!

Today with the help of both recordings and (happily, here in Wellington) “once-in-a-blue-moon” stellar live performances, we can be freshly astonished at the grandeur and splendour wrought by such an opulently resonant sound-window as that thrown open by the present performance. My own introduction to the work was in 2010 at the same venue through St Mary of the Angels’ then music director Robert Oliver’s magnificent celebration of the work’s 400-year existence with local singers (Baroque Voices) and instrumentalists (Academia Sanctae Mariae) – see the review at https://middle-c.org/2010/08/resplendent-monteverdi-at-st-mary-of-the-angels/  A quote from that review equally applies to what I heard just the previous evening (incidentally, with a few of the same singers and instrumentalists who performed the work in 2010) – one that remarked upon “virtuoso singers and players with a brilliant command of all the instruments and techniques”.

Tudor Consort director Michael Stewart chose not to use the Antiphons included by Oliver in his performance  (antiphons are texts, sung or spoken, used in conjunction with Psalms (quotations from the Old Testament) to rejuvenate the meanings of the latter in a more “Christian” sense). Monteverdi pairs each Psalm with a Motet, the latter termed  “sacred concertos” intended more as a contrast to, rather than an expansion of the Psalms – the wonderful verses Nigra sum and Pulchra est, for example, both being texts from the Biblical “Song of Solomon” – though the Psalm Lauda Jerusalem, is followed by a Sonata sopra Sancta Maria. Such differences between performances serve to indicate (here, admittedly, in a relatively minor way) how arguments might have developed regarding what ought/ought not to be included in the Vespers, and which have continued over the years since the work’s new-found world-wide popularity. Like all great music, it remains a work in progress rather than a museum piece!!

Long before the first note of the work was sounded, the atmosphere in the church was burgeoning and vibrant, the venue having almost filled up half-an-hour before the starting-time – amazing! If ever one wanted an indication that the city’s receptiveness towards and appetite for the performing arts was demonstrative and urgent, this all seemed as propitious a sign as any. To enthusiastic applause the musicians at last appeared to take their positions, the work beginning with tenor John Beaglehole’s ringing entreaty of the Almighty  – the opening of Psalm 70, with the words  “Deus, in adjutorium,meum intende” ( O God, make haste to deliver me!)  – followed immediately by the choir’s equally sonorous “Domine,  adadjuvandum me festina”!  (O Lord, make haste to help me!) accompanied by a fanfare-like orchestral panoply that its composer had previously used to begin his opera La favola d’Orfeo, a melody whose impact holds fast to its theatrical and emotional glory here as much as elsewhere.

What an amazing roller-coaster ride Monteverdi gives both his musicians and his listeners! Time and space obviously precludes a detailed description of the entire performance, so a modicum of description will serve to illustrate – suffice to say that Michael Stewart’s consistently vital direction infused his singers and instrumentalists with an infectious sense of joy and purpose throughout even the most complex figurations and deeply-felt sonorities realised by the presentation. And, as much to the work’s sense of the momentous and ceremonial, we were drawn into its rather more personal and intimate moments by the singing’s and playing’s beauties, evident in particular during those various “sacred concerto”  motets.

Beginning with that solo-voiced declamation, and those answering fanfares and choral entreaties came the first psalm setting, “Dixit Dominus”,  with its six-part choir combining steady sonorities in places (Sede a dextris meis – “Sit at my right hand”) with exciting rapid-note and -phrase emphases (Donec ponam inimicos – “Until I make  your enemies your footstool”). Sopranos Anna Sedcole and Erin King  voiced beautiful exchanges and adroit teamwork (Virgam virtutis tua emittet Dominus ex Sion – “The Lord shall send out the rod of thy strength from Zion”), while the choir’s different voice strands created great excitement with Dominus a dextris tuis confregit in die ira sua reges (“The Lord at thy right hand shall destroy kings in the day of his wrath”), the whole, with its interspersed contrasts between tonal beauty and physical excitement enticingly preparing us for what was to follow further.

An unfortunate audience sneeze briefly interrupted (but fortunately didn’t impede) the beginning of the beauteous Nigra Sum one of two excerpts from the “Song of Solomon” – texts used here in both cases for motets intended to be “antiphon substitutes” in a Vespers Service.  Here, tenor soloist Richard Taylor Taylor relished the delicious word-painting describing a black woman’s beauty, and the music’s animation at the King’s response to her charms, concluding with a gracefully-delivered final Tempus putationes advenit (“The hour of pruning is at hand”).Though the texts of this and Pulchra Es seem almost to border on the erotic, there was at this time in certain quasi-sacred works something of a sensual view of the soul of the Mother of God in line with being a spiritual kind of “Bride for the Church” – a similar attitude voicing this somewhat elevated kind of eroticism in relation to Mary appears also in the Psalm Audi Coelum later in the Vespers.

The ensuing Psalm Laudate Pueri Dominum was suitably adorned by warm and fluid texturings from the outset, individual voices  introducing separate strands beautifully cohering into descriptions of “the rising and the setting of the sun” (A solis ortu usque ad occasum) and of transformations of peoples lives – the men’s voices proclaiming Suscians a terra inopem (“He raises the simple from the dust”) and joining with the women’s voices to simply proclaim Ut collocet cum cum principibus (“That he may set him with princes”) – so beautiful! I enjoyed also (as did the singers) the “happy ending” of the phrase concerning the “barren woman” as becoming  matrem filiorum latantem  (“A joyful mother of children!”).

While not effacing my memory of Pepe Becker’s and Jayne Tankersley’s voices in 2010 with the erotic charge of their “Pulchra Es”, sopranos Anna Sedcole and Erin King here blended and intertwined their voices with echoes of the same, if with a notch or two’s gentler suggestiveness. In “Duo Seraphim”  it was the turn of the “Three Tenors” to shine, with Phillip Collins’ and Richard Taylor’s voices both floating their individual lines and negotiating their repeated-note phrases with confidence, joined by Philip Roderick at Tres sunt, qui testimonium  (“There are three who bear witness”) to reaffirm the Trinity. The ten-part double-choir forces of the succeeding “Nisi Dominus” gave us great, rolling sound- trajectories at the beginning, with energies aplenty enlivening both  Vanum est vobis ante lucem surgere (“It is vain for you to rise before dawn”)  and the rapid-fire triplet passages at Sicut sagitta in manu potentis (“As arrows in the hands of the mighty”), followed by a grand and rolling “Gloria” with a blazoned “Amen”.

The second half brought us an exquisite setting of the Psalm Audi Caelum, tenor Phillip Collins  pouring  whole draughts of feeling into the opening words Audi verba mea plena desidero et perfuse gaudio (“Hear my words full of longing and pervaded by joy”) – and straightaway beginning a paean of fulsome praise of the Virgin Mary as a woman, again enthusiastically blurring any boundaries dividing secular worship from  sacred devotion, the text somewhat coming to its senses as the declamations continued! Throughout, the echoed responses of the distantly-placed Philip Roderick seemed to exert a charged, “time-standing still” effect on the scene giving rise to a kind of magical wonderment of being.

“Lauda Jerusalem” which followed was guaranteed to break such a spell with gusto! – the singers seemingly to “melt” the bar-lines and fuse the irresistible trajectories of the  music into a kind of unstoppable flow! A stately and solemn Gloria at the end brought us to an equally conclusive and undisputed “Amen”, From these unbridled energies we were able to rest on what seemed like the immutable structures of the hymn “Sancta Maria”, the sopranos resembling snow-capped mountain peaks rising from the plethora of forests, ravines and plateaus suggested by the variegated instrumentql forces in their tireless, priestlike task of constant accompaniments of the “same-but-different” choral repetitions of the prayer.

In what seemed like no time at all we had left the mountaintops and were gazing at a star whose light spanned a vast ocean – Monteverdi’s first three verses of the hymn Ave Maris Stella (Hail, Star of the Sea) praise the Mother of God, rename Eve, the first woman, with the word “Ave”, and petition her with putting wrongs to right, light to darkness and bad to good. Each verse was followed by a different instrumental scoring with the aforementioned three choral (all delightful), the next three with solo voices (all characterful – soprano Rebecca Stanton, alto Maaike Christie-Beekman and bass Frazer MacDiarmid) and with a return to the choir for the last one. And with that we came to the Magnificat, the equivalent of a skyful of stars!

Monteverdi included two setting of the Magnificat in the 1610 Vespers publication, the first seven-voice part one being that used here. The twelve sections each feature a vocal line, either solo or with other voices, sometimes silent and at other times joining the instruments in the elaborations – the clear, long tones of the chants are thus festooned with what must have seemed like “music of the spheres” to Monteverdi’s musicians and listeners – as one critic put it, “dazzling variety married to simple unity” – as if it were the “Maris Stella” of the piece,  the steady light to which all else seems drawn. I enjoyed the vigour of Matthew Painter’s and Joshua Jamieson’s  Quia fecit (“For he that is mighty”), as I did the evocative echo-play between Phillip Collins and Philip Roderick against the women’s beautiful “Gloria”  – but found myself equally touched by two well-remembered voices from that 2010 Vespers, soprano Pepe Becker’s and alto Andrea Cochrane’s blending beautifully and indeed appropriately at Esurientes implevit bonis (“He hath filled the hungry with good things”).It was an apt metaphor for the musical feast to which we were being treated.

Such works as these Vespers stay in the memory as do lights which keep us from darkness  – what can one say, except to express boundless gratitude to the composer and his work’s devoted performers!

 

NZTrio – “fantastique” here in Wellington in every way

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZTrio presents “Fantastique”
Music by Turina, Shostakovich, Chen Yi, Psathas and Franck

JOAQUÍN TURINA – Circulo (1936)
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Trio No. 1 in C Minor (1923)
CHEN YI – Tibetan Tunes (2007)
JOHN PSATHAS – Angelus (2025)
CESAR FRANCK – Piano Trio No. 1in F-sharp Minor (1841)

NZTrio – Amalia Hall (violin) / Callum Hall (‘cello) / Somi Kim (piano)

St.Andrew’s on-The-Terrace, Wellington
Saturday, 30th August, 2025

To my surprise I discovered my last encounter with the justly-vaunted NZTrio took place no less than seven years previously – though the Covid pandemic can be held responsible for numerous  cancellations, dislocations and reorganisations of music presentations over time, such a biblical duration of estrangement in this case hardly seemed likely! On further investigation I found I had actually been “gazumphed” on a handful of occasions by my fellow-reviewers who’d obviously snaffled the Trio’s more recent Wellington appearances for their own delectation!

Now, here in 2025 I realise this is not the same NZTrio I had seen and heard perform in 2018 – in fact, not even slightly! These are three different musicians whose qualities have naturally realigned my expectations, but whose performance has predictably given rise to a “vive la difference” reaction, and particularly as I had already encountered both Amalia Hall and Somi Kim as concerto soloists in concert to spectacular effect.

To enrich matters even further, the group had a “guest” cellist on this occasion, one who’s currently filling in for the recently-appointed Matthias Balzat – apparently the Trio are using “guest” cellists in different programmes throughout the year, of which Callum Hall (who happens to be Amalia Hall’s brother) is one for this Fantastique programme. Whether this arrangement will continue in future seasons, or the Trio will eventually “secure” Balzat’s occupancy of the cellist’s chair remains to be seen!

Described as “a programme of contrasts”  this Fantastique presentation certainly filled the bill, with a positively global range of evocations! Joachim Turina’s music is slowly finding its way back into concert programmes of all kinds, my memory being of a recent performance in Wellington of the once-popular and colourful Danzas fantásticas, and of not-so recent but still-remembered occasional outings for the composer’s second Piano Trio. Tonight’s work was new to me, and a joyful surprise – a brilliant evocation of an Andalusian day, whose title, Circulo, suggests the metaphorical “circle” of a regular world-wide phenomenon of progression from dawn through midday to dusk – there are, of course, “no words to make the sun roll east”, as New Zealand poet ARD Fairburn once wrote….

The music appropriately began with Amanecer (Dawn), with darkly and deeply pondering cello and piano exchanges, from which grew an opening melody on the cello – the violin took it further, and with the piano’s full-blooded support united with the ‘cello in a soulful string unison utterance! How beautifully the NZTrio players then nudged the growing light of day forwards, colouring the changes beautifully with alternating harmonies and reaching a point where the music was liberated into the morning’s fullnesses! Here the violin and ‘cello soared upwards as the piano cascaded light-and-sound energies in all directions, the music conveying an irresistible sense of joyous delight at the day’s promise amid pending excitement, then breaking off exultantly at the top of the music’s concluding phrase!

The second movement, Mediodia (Midday). plunged us into the world of flamenco trajectories and sonorities, with flailing pizzicati from the strings and crunching rhythms from the piano dramatically riveting the listeners’ attentions, see-sawing throughout the movement  from pizzicato to arco and from jagged accents to sultry lines – the flamenco rhythms gathered themselves for a final sequence of exuberant swashbuckling gesturings before grandly tipping over and into the work’s final Crepúsculo (Dusk) movement, redolent with feelings of spent energies and relaxed release, the music gradually and beautifully surrendering its buoyancies and high spirits to the oncoming night and its mysteries – gorgeous string  playing from Amalia Hall and Callum Hall, with sonorous support from Somi Kim’s piano here, redolent with a nostalgic sense of farewell – with such playing it was easy for me to fall madly in love with this work.

As promised each item brought with it a markedly different sense of “place”, with Dmitri Shostakovich’s youthful Piano Trio in C Minor bringing a new world to view. The marked contrasts within the piece itself were somewhat accentuated by the seventeen year-old composer’s somewhat agitated state when the work was written, of having fallen in love and subsequently dedicating the work to the object of his affections  – she eventually married someone else having left her indelible mark on this music’s wildly passionate character! Adding to the music’s character are the pronounced influences of Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Glazunov, the last-named  Shostakovich’s composition teacher at the Petrograd Conservatory. Despite its juvenile aspects the music readily hints at a number of the composer’s lifelong traits, such as his love of grotesquerie in various forms – sudden changes of mood through contrasting dynamics, timbres and trajectories, His occasional employment as a cinema pianist also shows through –  I read an account of Shostakovich actually rehearsing his part in the work with others as an accompaniment to some films he was playing for!

The piece had almost everything its instrumentalists could want as regards satisfying and involving display of all kinds – trenchantly-involving lines, lyrical display, brilliant and quixotic passages of teamwork, and in certain places near-fulsome virtuosity – both Amalia Hall’s violin and Callum Hall’s ‘cello caught the heart-on-sleeve melancholy of the opening exchanges, but were equally at home with the skitterish contrasting episodes which boiled over in places, the players appearing to relish the “sparring” aspects of the sequences – as for pianist Somi Kim, her playing delivered in spadefuls every variation of mood, from the deep, full throated utterances of the opening, through the more gently-lyrical Rachmaninovian sequences to the all-out virtuosic sweep of the work’s more coruscating moments! Another tidbit of information I picked up from elsewhere was that the final section of the work had at some stage been lost, so that the piece’s last 16 bars in the work as published (not until after the composer’s death) were apparently “added” by one of Shostakovich‘s pupils (Boris Tischenko).

Next came music by Chinese-born American-based composer Chen Yi, a work called “Tibetan Tunes”, one which I’d previously heard twelve years ago, when it was played by the “old” NZ Trio at a memorable “China meets New Zealand in music” concert held at Victoria University of Wellington.  Chinese-born Chen Yi, now living in the United States was trained as a classical violinist, but was inspired by her contact during the Cultural Revolution with Chinese folk music to take up further studies of her folk music heritage. She moved to the US in 1986 to continue her musical studies at Columbia University, and at present is Distinguished Professor of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri/Kansas City.

Her two-movement work Tibetan Tunes, written in 2007 for the New Pacific Trio and premiered by them the same year was inspired firstly by a Tibetan folk melody “Du Mu” which is the name of a god of Tibetan Buddhism, one which the composer here wished  to depict “in a serene mood”. I remember thinking at my previous hearing of the work how evocative of something “elsewhere” was the writing for the instruments – as it was here, the violin’s harmonic-like held notes contrasting with the rhapsodic, folkish cello tune while the piano’s echoed the exchanges with decorative roulades. After some gentle, widely-spaced canonic gesturings, the strings joined in unison to celebrate the god’s all-encompassing equanimity, and afterwards reflecting individually, leaving the piano with the last word.

The second piece, “Dui Xie” had its genesis in ensembled folk-music featuring bowed and plucked strings and bamboo flutes – dance-like from the beginning, and altogether livelier than the opening work, the strings sang a melody and its variants over the piano’s rhythms, the cello’s lines having a particularly folkish kind of portamento character in places – charmingly old-fashioned! This excitingly changed to exciting string pizzicati and driving piano figurations, before the opening returned bringing  expressive, recitative-like harmonics – amazing playing from Amalia Hall – along with piano ostinati, sustained trills from the strings and a climactic mid-air finish!

Appropriately one of the concert’s stopover places was Aotearoa New Zealand,  represented here by a work from John Psathas, a piece with the name Angelus and freshly commissioned from the NZTrio itself. It’s actually in part derived from an earlier work for ‘cello and piano called “Halo”, one whose final movement Psathas reworked for NZTrio – these are the composer’s comments at the time of writing the complete work: –

I created this piece around the time of my mother’s death, something I’ve always found it difficult to write about.

The pre-recorded sounds in this piece are very subtle, and in a live performance it should not be visible to the audience how and when these sounds are beginning and ending.

The ‘circle on the head of an angel’ is a good metaphor for these extra sounds; they are like an audio ‘halo’ around the live sounds. They should be quiet enough that the listener isn’t sure if they are hearing them or not, almost like it’s an invisible processing of the natural piano sound.

They are supposed to represent the presence of a spirit from ‘the other side of life’ – for me it is the presence of my mother’s spirit in the room. For you or anyone listening, it could be anyone in your life or mind or heart.

The last movement is really about (the memory of) conflict between child and parent. This conflict is fuelled by strong emotions, mostly love, and is often powerfully dramatic. The way our anger and conflict can be shaped by love within our closest relationships.

The last LH idea in the piano is a way to end with a question, and also a representation of the infinite, and also a dissolving of the physical (the live instrument sound) into the spiritual (the invisible audio halo). I love this ending very much – it is like music from beyond life. (John Psathas)

From the piece’s abrupt beginning the music grabs the listener with its insistent driving rhythms, the syncopations activating exhilarating criss-cross rhythmic thrusts and tugs, with pizzicato violin set against arco cello set against running piano, the intensities rising and falling as the violin’s sul ponticello tones rasp and sting, with the strings  descending into the depths, the tremolandi tones intensifying, and the piano sounding doom-laden pronouncements. As the ambiences descend further the composer’s “audio halo” sounds as if from another world, eerily activating a harmonics response from the strings, a strange and wondrous dialogue of connection of sounds floating through space.

Out of the exchanges come impulses of urgency, the energies pushing all ways, upwards, downwards and forwards simultaneously, the piano elaborating on an ever-ascending chorale-like theme which leads to an impassioned kind of recitative from the strings, additionally “whipped up” by swirling piano figures – the resonant sonic wave emanating from the sudden climax of this cornucopian all-together is almost heart-stoppingly allowed to run its course until a gentle piano ostinato emerges, registering first a violin then a cello tremolando response – and, as the piano continues to gently rhapsodise and the strings murmur their assent, the sonic halo reappears, transfixing our riveted sensibilities into an indefinite silence…..what an experience!

I was looking forward to the César Franck Piano Trio at the programme’s end, fascinated at its Op.1 place in this composer’s output and marvelling upon further investigation at there actually being two other similar works sharing the same Opus number! These works were praised by both Mendelssohn and Liszt, the latter generously organising further performances throughout Germany – but Franck’s early years and works were blighted by his difficult relationship with a dominant father, resulting in eventual estrangement and the young man going his own way, pursuing the career of an organist and only returning to chamber and symphonic works in his maturity. As someone who loves masterpieces such as the Violin Sonata and the Piano Quintet, this Op.1 Trio was for me fascinating in sounding occasional pre-echoes of the inspiration that would eventually flower to produce those resounding achievements of Franck’s later years.

A stepwise piano figure opened the work, joined by cello and violin elaborating on a soulful theme, with the exchanges intensifying the interaction – out of a sudden pause came a charming second theme, the instruments then building the triplet rhythms up with gusto, Somi Kim’s piano pounding out the trajectories  as Amalia Hall’s violin passionately sang the melody, with Callum Hall’s ‘cello-tremolandi filling out the quasi-orchestral textures with urgently upward-rushing figures! These vigorous peregrinations wound the exchanges down through major-minor key shifts to a crashing,almost apoplectic-making concluding chord!

An allegro molto movement followed, the piano tapping out a repeated note triplet rhythm and the strings urging along a kind of horseback-ride melody – splendid stuff, with the strings adding skitterish figurations for exciting effect! – the trio section did well with simple means, a downward-rushing scale in canon between piano and strings, varying this effectively with the strings ascending against the piano’s descent! A return to the triplet scherzo music had the solo strings varying the  mix with pizzicato repetitions of the horseback music, almost to sinister effect in places – this led to an unexpectedly resounding plunge, attacca, into the work’s finale – a stirring transition which worked splendidly, so that, almost before we knew what was happening, the Allegro Maestoso was on its way, complete with  great pianistic flourishes and gesturings from Somi Kim.

Easeful, lyrical and whole-hearted playing from Amalia Hall’s violin and Callum Hall’s ‘cello engaged our interest through contrasting minor-key episodes and some singular, almost honky-tonk modulations – the young Franck determined to flaunt his wares! – that done, the players raced into what felt like the movement’s coda, at the conclusion of which , the unexpected pause before the final flourish caught us out, as it would have done many audiences before, bursting in as we did, with premature applause! –  followed, of course, by subsequent laughter and giggles all around at the combination of our eagerness and the youthful composer’s largesse! All in all –  Fantastique! – just as promised!

STROMA – a quarter-century of recreated effervescence in heaven and earth!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STROMA – Heaven and Earth – a celebration of 25 years of bold new music

Works by Leila Adu-Gilmore, Olivier Messiaen, Gemma Peacocke, John Rimmer,
Sofia Gubaidulina and Michael Norris

OLIVIER MESSIAEN – Louange à l’immortalite de Jesus (1941)
Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Gabriela Glapska (piano)
LEILA ADU-GILMORE – Heaven is Life (2025) (premiere)
Julia Broom (violin), Nicholas Hancox (viola). Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
JOHN RIMMER – When Sea Meets Sky 2 (1975)
Hamish McKeich (conductor), Bridget Douglas (flute), Patrick Hayes
(clarinet), Lenny Sakofsky (percussion), Gabriela Glapska (piano),
Julia Broom (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
MICHAEL NORRIS – The Spaces in Between (2025)
Gabriela Glapska (piano), Anna van der Zee (violin) Ken Ichinose (cello)
SOFIA GUBAIDULINA – Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeit (1980) (Garden of Joy and
Sorrow)
Bridget Douglas (flute) / Michelle Velvin (harp) Nicholas Hancox ( viola)
GEMMA PEACOCKE – Sky-fields (2020)
Bridget Douglas (flute), Gabriela Glapska (piano) Ken Ichinose (cello)
Thomas Guldborg (percussion)

Public Trust Hall, Wellington,

Wednesday, 27th August, 2025

This was a red-letter concert for Wellington’s contemporary music ensemble Stroma, being the 25th anniversary (almost to the day) of the ensemble’s very first concert on the 18th of August, 2000. Michael Norris, one of the founders of the fledgling group (and a co-director of the present Stroma Ensemble) welcomed us all warmly,  outlining for us something of the flavour of the group’s genesis and current raison d’etre, including the evening’s inclusion of both home-grown and off-shore works, and the presence of at least one premiere (see below).

The concert this evening actually began with an excerpt from a larger work by Olivier Messiaen – which I’ll describe at the end of this review, and instead give pride of place to the palpable excitement generated by the evening’s premiere, second on the programme. This was  New Zealand composer Leila Adu-Gilmore’s Heaven is Life, a work which has its genesis in the composer’s reaction to present-day global strife and civil unrest in the wake of travelling in India and encountering a community of Tibetan Buddhist nuns at Karma Chokor Dechen Nunnery in Rumtek, Sikkim, India, a group of women, in the composer’s words, “caring for others, garnering respect, and sought out more and more for practices previously performed by men”. Adu-Gilmore was particularly moved by the nuns’ chanting for hours both morning and evening, in ceremonies for the local community, and decided to record the ritual, from which she eventually picked a short, self-contained chant with the title Green Tara, the community’s conceptualisation of a “Mother Earth”, a being whose wisdom and compassion would help those in their time of need. She then composed a string trio whose gesturings and tones would complement the nuns’ voices, intending to blend the recording of the material within the Trio’s performance. The result is this performance, dedicated to the nuns and young children in their care at Karma Chokor Dechen Nunnery, in Rumtek, Sikkim, India.

The performance here created a truly singular effect with the nuns’ voices intermeshed with the instruments in a parallel expressions of invocation, sharing through common cause a heightened sense of a process centred on the life-force –  for the nuns the focus was “Green Tara”, while from the standpoint of the composer and musicians the resulting instrumental sounds made for a kind of connective recognition. This was most marked, oddly, when the chanting voices stopped, leaving the stringed instruments in possession of those “acquired” connections, and charged with conveying their retrospective essence to us! The shift from meditative lines and impulses to dance-like gesturings in the trio’s music indicated something of that inclination to further communicate something of a “Heaven is Life” feeling for the here and now…..

John Rimmer’s Where Sea Meets Sky 2 is a “twin” manifestation for acoustic instruments of a previous electroacoustic piece of the same name. and which was inspired by a flight across the Tasman. The piece was an “outgrowth” of the electronic piece for the composer in that the acoustic version did things that the electronic version didn’t do, though without one superseding the other.

The work had an arresting beginning – a loud chord bolstered by tremolando notes from winds and piano, but allowed to die away, followed by a sliver of percussion and deep piano chords, stimulating string-timbres, and winds hanging on to ever-diminishing tones. The piece’s evocations had a constant state of flux, with the instruments’ variations between spectral irruptions and sustained tones adding to the atmosphere – for instance,  we heard percussion scintillations with a gong-stroke, then strings playing disembodied held notes as winds sounded single-note irruptions and piano adding to the ambiences with brief treble impulses – the instruments particularly crowded in their impulses throughout the music’s middle section, creating a constantly interactive cornucopian sound picture to the point of near frenzy, before slowly dissipating, gradually favouring longer-held tones (clarinet and flute solos remaining in the memory), augmented by wide-ranging “dampened” piano notes and gradually receding percussion – all reflecting its composer’s particular sensitivity towards ambient detail.

Michael Norris, himself contributed a thoughtful (and entertaining) spoken preface to his recent (2025) and intensely visceral composition “The Spaces in Between”, a work which here put us in touch with the music’s subject-matter in no uncertain terms – I confess to always enjoying Norris’s readiness in his music I’ve heard for employing direct and often graphic (though invariably intuitive-sounding) stimuli – two pieces in particular I remember which demonstrated for me this power of  illustrative evocation are, firstly a 2018 performance of Claro, written for full orchestra, (described as :”an exercise of expressivity out of abstractiveness”) , and (when reviewing the disc in 2023) a recording featuring an epic string quartet work Exitus, one containing a number of raw musical depictions of different cultures’ conceptualisations of afterlife.

Here, I particularly enjoyed Norris’s succinct descriptive phrase  “rocks can bend” words which he attributed to his father, and which sums up the effect of forces constantly at work in our own Earth’s particular geosphere, in direct relation to which is the composer’s own sonic realisation of the interplay of these forces – “The Spaces in Between”. Norris quoted both Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s Rashmirathi at the beginning of his programme note about the music, firstly (Ovid) “the shifting story of the world”, and then (Ramdhari Singh) “everything is born from me, everything returns to me”.  The music’s evocation therefore deals with a transitory world, where the idea of terra firma is in fact one subject to “inexorable flux”.

To entrust the depiction of such forces at work to the seemingly economical contingent of a piano trio seemed a boldly ambitious scheme, but the musicians here seemed to readily transcend any such physical limitations with the energy and focus of their evocations throughout, with firm, constant-sounding beginnings from the piano playing fifths and the strings establishing a palpably “present” state of being.  As the strings began “pulling” gradually at the tones and patternings of the notes, suggesting inexorable pressures, the piano intensified its patterned fifths into a rapid ostinato, the strings’ intensities deepening, with “bending” of their notes, indicating the elemental nature of forces at work. The ostinato fifths galvanised into more rapidly-repeated note-patterns as the irresistible forces exerted their effect – the strings played both held and repeated notes against the piano’s constant arpeggiations and tremolandi depicting the ferment within and the evident disruptions without, the music’s key-changes further dramatizing the processes. The tones suddenly took on a soaring kind of aspect whose strands melted down to meet the irruptions from below, with a single-note “centre” that turned into a warmish chord slowly spreading through the sounds’ harmonic world, the piano’s fifth transformed into octave-sounds, everything slightly “smudged” in effect, or “fractured”, a quality that felt to the listener like a recast or remoulded state of being – as if one’s own sense of existence had been reshaped,  and a new order prevailed – again I found myself thinking of TS Eliot’s description of “an eternal action, an eternal patience”.

Sofia Gubaidulina  who died earlier this year at the age of ninety-three was notable for her work’s “purity of sound” and her love for “ecstatic incantation”. Growing up in Soviet Russia in a predominantly atheist household, she maintained an unquenchable personal religious faith which found its way into her music despite official disapproval (she took heart from the quiet support of Shostakovich at the time), and was admitted to the Union of Soviet composers in 1961.Inspired by her contemporaries, Alfred Schnittke, Arvo Part and Valentin Silvestrov, she looked beyond her Russianness to 20tth century modernism in general, and developed a reputation for incorporating theological ideas in her concert music, famously Introitus (1978) and Offertorium (1980), besides numerous other works since then.

Her 1980 work Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeit (Garden of Joy and Sorrow) was inspired directly by two literary works. One was a biography of a legendary Armenian storyteller/singer Sayat-Nova, written by the Russian writer Iv Oganov, and the other a set of verses by the modern German poet Francisco Tanzer – the two works encapsulate Gubaidulina’s creative philosophy in the merging of their different influences, Oganov’s intense and rapturous personalisation of the garden’s flowering here finding a kind of sublimated detachment of feeling in Tanzer’s wry reasonings – Gubaidulina’s score directs that the original German text of the poet’s words be read aloud – a good thing the programme notes gave us some of Oganov’s sentences as well! – “the peal of the singing garden grew”, and “the lotus was set aflame by music” – those thoughts enabled us to experience even more directly the composer’s  own progressions in her music  from bright, visceral colourations to their “true endings”.

This engagingly ambient work for flute, harp and viola began with a kind of “awakening” duet between flute and harp, the sounds gradually coalescing into consciousness via encouraging breaths of tone from the flute and bent glissando tone-gulps (almost sitar-like) from the harp, followed by eerily beautiful fanfare-harmonics from the viola, two different sonic worlds gradually effecting a meeting. The viola darkened its tones, flute and harp tremulously acclaimed its presence, and the “trialogues” began – beautifully arpeggiated exchanges, firstly flute-and-harp, and then viola-and-harp, the latter “preparing” the strings for a bone-dry ostinato to accompany the like-minded viola. How resonant was the following sequence, the three instruments building blocks of effervescing phrases, until the flute’s spectacular downward-cascading tumble! And what a journey we were taken upon by the composer’s  “ecstatic flowering” versions of the music’s bright major aspects – such a joyous and uplifting flute solo on the piece’s “central plateau” which was then set against those“darker intervals” of minor seconds and thirds which then grew out of the crevices and cracks of the aftermath’s rather more rueful continuance!  A  meditative viola solo took us back to the work’s beginning with those nostalgic viola arpeggio harmonics, sitar-like harp glissando-notes and envoi-like flute notes – how interesting to then have the human voice making a contribution to what the music expresses, which we got from violist Nicholas Hancox at the end…….

Originally from Hamilton, Gemma Peacocke studied firstly at Victoria University and the  New Zealand School of Music before moving to the United States in 2014  where she  worked with various ensembles, including her co-founded Kinds of Kings Collective, often in projects with a sociopolitical focus on under-heard voices.   Sky Fields, a 2020 work (which for some reason got into the programme listed as a 2025 composition), concluded the concert with a kind of visionary series of vignettes, introduced  and re-emphasised, often with compelling, attention-grabbing urgency, by the ensemble’s delivery of “blips” – unpredictably-placed but redolently hopeful irruptions of energy  whose sequence suggested a kind of life-dance which Peacocke characterised in her programme-note with the words “even when we can’t see it  there is hope”. The composer drew her title from a sequence in J.R.Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” series of books when one of the characters in the third book Return of the King refers to the promise of the coming day, though hidden in the darkness, already opening in the eastern mountains’ Sky-Fields.

The ”blips” which began the piece could be said to “clear the air” for both performers and the audience, a kind of “sky-washing” of sonic textures in preparation for something new and original – the toccata-like togetherness of the opening trajectories initiated by the “blips” combined irruptive energies, such as the flute’s explosive interjections, with more delicate, patient intertwinings. There was a feeling of the textures being airborne rather than earth-bound, with even the bowed marimba notes seeming to arise from out of the earth and take flight – it all brought a cumulative kind of momentum to the music, heading towards the “what happens next” pause before the second movement…

Again, the blips! – the flute gave us what sounded like birdsong, a summons of sorts to the cello singing with the piano and the flute and marimba dancing, then all coming together on a “shared “ note, commented on by the piano and irradiated by a sparkling cymbal roll. Movement Three then blended the sounds beautifully, the lines “floating’ between the instruments and their different timbral characteristics and punctuating things with a nudged phrase or occasional “blip”, the intensities of exchange growing, resulting in a kind of concerted recitative point, the gestures ‘displaying” to the others in turn, each almost vying for attention!

The toccata trajectories rebegan, the interactive energies ranging from ghostly murmurings to sudden ghoul-like cries – and then, out of the silence came a new kind of awakening, a fifth movement with a more relaxed pace, and the lines a quiet radiance that suggested a growing towards surety – more “blips” and other irruptions refocused the players, occasional reminiscences of things like the flute’s bird song calls helping to reinforce a “coming together” – as the music reached a dance-like stage a robustly upward concerted call finished the piece!

I thought I’d finish the review on a kind of retrospective “where it all began” note in relation to the concert, particularly as the work from which this movement was taken has long been regarded as something unique in musical history. For its composer it represented  “a leap into an invisible paradise”.  Unlike his contemporaries, French composer Olivier Messiaen did not want to eradicate the old world or fix his gaze totally on the thereafter – instead he saw Paradise in daily life, in the words of Alex Ross, its “happenstance epiphanies”. In a way, Stroma’s collective modernist instincts seemed, like the contents of this evening’s programme, inclusive rather than rigorously “avant-garde” in a pure sense. Which is why I felt that Messiaen’s excerpt from what probably became the most famous of all his works, the “Quartet for the End of Time” was a more-than-appropriate way to begin this anniversary concert. And while I haven’t mentioned above the playing of any of the musicians by name in any of the other items (trusting in an acceptance of a certain standard excellence of quality on everybody’s part throughout the evening) I can’t help but comment on the rapt beauties of both Vesa-Matti Leppänen’s and Gabriela Glapska’s playing of their respective instruments throughout the work’s final piece, Louange à l’immortalite de Jesus. Time certainly seemed to stand still throughout this tribute to the composer, the circumstances, the occasion, the musicians involved past and present, and to music in general as an on-going living entity. And to Stroma? Messiaen was saying in his music, “Que tu vives pour toujours”.  Agreed.

 

Ghost Trio’s St.Andrew’s concert haunts the memory

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music presents:
Ghost Trio –
TAKEMITSU, BEETHOVEN, DOWNIE and SHOSTAKOVICH

The Ghost Trio – Monique Lapins (violin), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
Gabriela Glapska (piano)

TAKEMITSU – Between Tides (1993)
BEETHOVEN – Piano Trio in D Major Op.70 No.1 “Ghost”
GLEN DOWNIE – Sonata da chiesa (2024)
SHOSTAKOVICH – Piano Trio No.2 in E Minor Op. 67 No.2

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Te Aro, Wellington
Sunday 17th August, 2025

Review for “Middle C” by Peter Mechen

“What’s in a name?” could well have been the unspoken phrase hovering about St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace on Sunday afternoon prior to the opening of Wellington Chamber Music’s most recent presentation, whose first item was, as per the written programme supposed to be Beethoven’s D Major Piano Trio Op,70 No.1, better known as the “Ghost”, due to its haunting second movement, ripe for association with  famous theatrical “ghosts” such as those that occur in Shakespeare – Hamlet or Macbeth coming most readily to mind. And here, on the performers’ platform was scheduled  none other than an eponymously-named trio of musicians to open the concert by “playing their song”. What happened instead, of course, is now history, with the musicians themselves deciding that Beethoven’s somewhat overwhelming string of “ghostly” scenarios could result in tidal waves of resonance that would swamp the gentle undulations of the work by Tōru Takemitsu due to follow.

So, in the minds of listeners who knew the Beethoven, and would have prepared themselves for that tumultuous opening salvo of energised sounds, the surprise intervention by Takemitsu’s  “Between Tides” would have seemed like the proverbial sea-change into something rich and strange! – here were delicacies of sound evoked by lightly astringent piano harmonies, answered by string phrases whose solo lines variously trailed into their own silences, or intertwined, Ravel-like in places, briefly touching on their own worlds before returning to the piano’s sway, and awaiting the next version of exchange..

A world of  chameleon-like pursuit was the result, every wave of impulse bringing its own variant of the same life-force. I was reminded while listening of human breath when still, and of surrendering to impulses not necessarily my own – also of the infinite variety of the experience  from one’s imagination  either from the harmonics or tremolandi played by the strings or the free-ranging spaces between piano notes, contrasted with assertive unison utterances that give further musical food for contemplation. It’s a piece I found throughout to be “in waiting” in general terms, though its tensions occasionally bubble up and almost right over – its ending is satisfying enigmatic, leaving one with the idea of, in TS Eliot’s words, “an eternal action, an eternal patience” ……

Having been suitably dispersed by the action of tides, our sensibilities were gathered in once again with a vengeance by the promised Beethoven! I was at last allowed the delayed indulgence of pointing out an obvious kind of coincidence, correlation or conjunction with what seemed like paradigmatic “ownership” of this music by the ensemble – right from the very first whirlwind ascending phrases there was, I felt, a “this is what we do” feeling of full-blooded identification! The intensities of this work are concentrated, throwing together both heroism and turmoil throughout the opening movement,  with as much sprung intensity in the hushed exchanges of the second subject as in the flamboyant opening unison – how “breathing as one” they sounded, here, throughout these contrasting episodes, and how much they relished the concerted singing passages in the development as the more vigorous “horse-and-rider” episodes leading to the recapitulation – such an invigorating journey!

Cello and violin are vibrato-less at the slow movement’s beginning, the piano interspersing with suitably ghostly eloquence, extended by the ‘cello and violin who together voice the feeling of some kind of other-worldly presence, though leading us towards some consolation amid the gloom. The music’s central section begins darkly, the cello leading the way, contrasting agitated and desolate-sounding lines, suggesting personal sorrow, loneliness and frustration in the music’s explorations, the players leaving us with a single repeated enigmatic note over which to ponder at the end.

How resilient the mind that can produce such a finale after so downcast a mood! Here, like with the first movement, was a “tour de force” of ensemble playing, with absolutely brilliant pianism from Gabriela Glapska, and equally stunning dovetailing of their concerted passages from Monique Lapins and Ken Ichinose. The “questioning” aspect of the opening theme led to all kinds of suspensions and adroit manoeuvrings of both the whimsical and helter-skelter variety, leaving us all breathlessly invigorated at the end, and somewhat gob-smacked at both the individual and concerted virtuosity of the players!

Glen Downie’s was a new name for me, as was the work, Sonata da Chiesa, a piece written this year for the Ghost Trio to take on tour. The music takes its name (literally, “Church Sonata”) from baroque times, and was inspired by music written by Vivaldi for the ‘cello. In a programme note Downie talks about the music “breaking away” from its original inspiration (characterised by ruins of “worn material”) and attempting to rebuild anew from the “surviving stone”. A specific inspiration for the piece was a UK building, the Christchurch Priory, originally a Norman building, but containing layers wrought by different eras in the building’s history, a quality Downie intended his piece to replicate as “a uniform expressivity”

In four movements, the piece began with piano arpeggios, and attention-grabbing violin notes, the latter reverting to a sombre exploration of the piano figurations, whose buildup suggests an architectural quality, with a dancing violin astringency supplying outward detail and reaching a climax as the cello supports the structure with an ostinato-like figure.

Beginning with a rushing piano figure, the second movement highlights strings pinging , burning and slashing, with the piano’s chords structurally resonating at first at first, then exchanging spiky figurations with the strings. The more resonant-sounding piano notes beautifully morph into pregnant-like water-droplet notes, as the cello and violin play “out of the air” pizzicato harmonics – the piano finishes as it began, with agitatedly mobile figurations.

Sostenuto-like cello chords begin the third movement, here backed by limpid piano sounds – the violin. something of a decorative, outwardly-defining constant force, plays more tortured figures as the cello muses with the piano – what lovely, long-held notes! – the violin again sounds acerbic, and we hear the “clash of seconds” that the players had demonstrated beforehand, which then gradually resolve – very architectural, solidly-based timbres and tones – from meditative to grand and imposing!. The violin “grows” a lighter, more evanescent outward texture, as the music for cello and piano goes deeper, more inward, the players digging into their tones with rolling figurations – very ‘cello-centred! The violin remains a more quixotic-flavoured  figure, here, its tones  pointilistic in effect, with harmonics and pizzicati, and in places almost pentatonic-sounding!

The fourth movement has a very pointillistic beginning – knockabout notes from the strings, pizzicato and arco, and the piano very punch-line in effect! The strings leave  floating legato lines avove the piano’s cryptic staccato comments – the movement is very short!

I’m left with an impression of a structure in the music’s bones, but I would like to hear it again, being able to relate parts more readily to the whole – there would have been many connective references I didn’t place in context first time round, and am keen to explore that connective tissue aspect of the work relating to architecture and to the ravages of time on any kind of structure given such status by my experience and imagination!

Its engagement with the listener was all brought off with the greatest of aplomb and confidence by the players!

The concert concluded with Dmitri Shostakovich’s deeply personal 1944 Piano Trio in E Minor, composed in memory of the composer’s friend Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky who had died in February that year of a heart attack at the age of forty-one. As with many “documented” incidents on Shostakovich’s life, accounts differ as to when the composer began work on the Trio (principally whether it was before or after hearing the news of Sollertinsky’s death, the latter event even presenting in one account as a rumoured NKVD (Russian Secret Police) murder rather than a heart attack) – however, a certain consensuality (as with the present programme’s notes on the music) places the first movement as all but completed when Shostakovich received the news.

The work’s been represented variously as a requiem, either for one man or for the millions of Russians who perished during the war, as a protest against the anti-Semitism rife in the Soviet Union culminating in the Nazi atrocities committed against Russian Jews in the death camps of the time, and as an indictment of the Soviet System in general under the iron-fisted Stalin, whose censorship of the composer’s music reached its nadir at this time, causing the Trio to be banned from public performance in1948 as “decadent “ and “formalist”. Not until the dictator’s death in 1953 did the work begin to gradually return to favour

It’s now celebrated as one of the greatest of Shostakovich’s works, and part of an enviable “piano trio” tradition in Russia alone  – Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Arensky, Borodin, Taneyev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui and Rachmaninov all helped “pave the way” for the younger composer, whose own writing, however, eschewed the prevalent quasi-orchestral textures of the Romantic piano trio, choosing instead a sparser, more transparent sound-picture, not without force and impact, but with a bleaker, and less “cushioned” effect. Shostakovich had always professed an admiration for Jewish music, delighting in what he called its “multifaceted” quality  – appearing to be happy when in fact it is expressing tragedy (a quality shared by Mahler’s music) – and this ambiguity of expression comes to the fore in the Trio’s finale, a veritable Todtentanz with macabre associations, more of which below. The work as a whole gravitates from being the composer’s grief for his friend’s death to a catalyst for his feelings regarding the other tragedies whose impact were weighing increasingly heavily on his existence.

What, then, of this performance? In a word, gripping, from its very first intensely spectral harmonic note intoned hauntingly by cellist Ken Ichinose almost at the top of the instrument’s range and soaring above the violin’s conventionally-voiced though similarly elegiac tones and the piano’s basso profundo utterances – the spell’s intensity was palpable, the instrumentation a play of parallel states of being, dream floating alongside consciousness, and both far above deeper and darker reality – within  the same being, or with three different beings cast adrift?  Briefly, the cello “comes back to earth”, joining the violin in a steady single-note rhythm, exchanging single-note-accompanying and melodic roles as the momentums continue with both tempi and intensities building,  the music swinging into a dark-browed and determined jogtrot mode! The musicians seem gripped by the music’s compulsions, pizzicato exchanges, trenchant piano chordings, slashing single-note string utterances, all suggesting some kind of search for a way through, with Monique Lapins’s violin-playing in particular, in places incredibly exploratory!

If respite was sought, it was not to be found in the second movement – Allegro con brio, the music proclaimed, with violin and cello flexing muscle and expiating energies, and further driven along by the piano’s pounding chords and trumpeting arpeggiations.  What began as a high-spirited fun dance seemed to get more obsessive and trenchant, descending into repetitions of groaning drone-like tones trapped in their own vortices – a trio-like section almost promised the dance-theme some breathing-space, but the wildness soon returned, pianist Gabriela Glapska’s seemingly endless energies spearheading the music’s drive towards a breathless concluding flourish! Whew!

But then! – bleakly spaced-out piano chords seemed to slice the ambiences pitilessly  into shards, with first the violinist and then the ‘cellist picking up from the fragments a tragic, elegiac theme – a Passacaglia, with violin and cello continuing to play variants of the theme over the piano’s repeated sequences. The sense of desolation grew with the instruments’ gradual descent into depths of sorrow, the mood at its darkest  suddenly interrupted by the piano beginning an insistent, hypnotic rhythm ,and introducing the Mahlerian irony of a Yiddish-like dance, one whose themes the composer would repeatedly use in his later music (Shostakovich later described them as dances of death and despair, perhaps mindful of accounts he had heard of atrocities such as Jewish prisoners in the “death camps” made to dance on their own graves by their Nazi captors before being executed).

I found this music extraordinary, even almost hallucinatory jn places, thanks to what seemed like the three performers’ total and unstinted immersion in its composer’s world. The build-up to the music’s ironic interplay of humour and savagery in the finale was overwhelming, with the gradual evaporation of that nightmarish scenario right at the work’s end leaving one utterly drained and aghast at what one had just been told.

Even among what must surely seem for Wellington Chamber Music over recent times like a plethora of outstanding performances, this one by the superb Ghost Trio had, I thought, something uniquely special to return to in one’s memory and relish anew.