Category: Reviews – Concerts

Admirable performances in Wellington Regional Aria Contest

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Regional Vocal Competitions
(under auspices of Hutt Valley Performing Arts Competitions Society )

Aria Final
Contestants: Clare Hood, Olivia Sheat, Sophie Sparrow, Alexandra Gandionco, Alicia Cadwgan, Joe Hadlow, Will King, Beth Goulstone
Chief piano accompanist: Catherine Norton
Compère: Georgia Jamieson Emms

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 26 August 2018, 7 pm

Once upon a time, aria contests, as a part of a pattern of performing arts competitions, flourished in every city and many smaller towns throughout New Zealand.  There were aria competitions in both Wellington and the Hutt Valley, part of the pattern of competitions that also included instrumental music as well as dance and drama.

My first ‘professional’ contact with music was in my Upper Sixth year at Wellington College, with a casual back-stage role in the instrumental section of the Wellington Competitions Society which, for a fortnight, occupied both the main auditorium and the concert chamber of the Town Hall. Like anyone involved in the performing arts, it gave me a taste for, perhaps infected me with a love of performance generally. And though I never aspired to push my piano and cello playing to a level that might have had me involved in competitions, I was seduced by the atmosphere.

The Wellington Society fell on hard times and was wound up in the 1970s, and many other societies, including several in major cities have disappeared; but the Hutt Valley Competitions Society struggled on, fairly successfully. There is a parent body called PACANZ (Performing Arts Competitions Association of New Zealand), with about 60 ‘performing arts competitions’ and many other societies devoted to particular performing arts. About 24 of them seemed to include music in their range of activities.

The main prize in the Hutt contest was the Evening Post Aria Prize, funded by paper, and as the Post’s music critic, I performed the dual job of presenting the cheque to the winner in the Lower Hutt Little Theatre and then dashing back to the news room to get my review filed by midnight. But shortly after the merger of the Post with The Dominion, the association was ended.

It was wonderful that the newspaper’s role was soon picked up by the Dame Malvina Major Foundation’s sponsorship with a $4000 first prize, which continues. And it’s also a distinct advantage that it now takes place in Wellington City.

Adjudicator Richard Greager chose eight finalists from the 19 entrants who had been performing over the last three days: six women and two men. All the women were sopranos, the two men baritones. It might have made judging easier; it might not have…. The main accompanist was the splendid Catherine Norton, whose acutely judged, often brilliant accompaniments constantly caught the ear.

Four of the contestants had sung in the recent production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo from Eternity Opera; Joe Haddow sang Charon and Pluto in that opera; and he was a semi-finalist in the recent Lexus Song Quest. Last year he sang The Forrester in The Cunning Little Vixen (New Zealand School of Music). Here, he was awarded the Rokfire Cup for the most outstanding competitor, having sung Leporello’s Catalogue Aria from Don Giovanni with stylish wit, and Philip II’s deeply moving lament, ‘Ella giammai m’amo’ from Verdi’s Don Carlo; one of Verdi’s most profound expressions of self-doubt, in grieving, well modulated tones.

Last year Will King and Alexandra Gandionco also had lead parts in the NZSM’s Cunning Little Vixen and both sang in the recent Orfeo: King in the title role, Gandianco as Euridice. This evening King was named winner of the Dame Malvina Major Aria, which comes with the Rosina Buckman Memorial Cup; from his role in this year’s Orfeo, he chose ‘Possente spirto’ for this evening, with beautiful ornamentation and admirable characterisation. Later he sang ‘Hai già vinta la causa’ expressing the Count’s furious determination to get his dues from Susanna before her marriage. It was simply a most accomplished, spirited performance, and there remained little chance that he was not about to be named the contest winner.

Alexandra Gandionco sang the important (male) role of Gold-Spur, The Fox in The Cunning Little Vixen last year, and here she sang ‘O wär ich schon mit dir vereint’ from Fidelio and ‘Je suis encore tout étourdie’ from Massenet’s Manon. Her voice is an attractive, flexible instrument and her demeanour and gestures very comfortable.

Olivia Sheat had principal roles in Eternity Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro last year, while she sang the prominent role of Proserpine in Orfeo this year. In the evening contest she sang the aria ‘Chi cede al furor’ from Handel’s Serse, and The Song to the Moon from Rusalka (in Czech). She is in good control of phrasing, keenly aware of emotions and sense, and with a lively stage presence.

Alicia Cadwgan had sung Susanna in Wanderlust Opera’s send-up, ‘other’ Marriage of Figaro last year, Her arias this evening were ‘The trees on the mountains’ from Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, and the famous aria from Bellini’s Sonnambula – ‘Ah, non credea mirati … ah, non giunge’; warm timbre, a voice comfortable at the top, and an attractive theatrical personality: the Bellini is a taxing aria that demands singular, contrasting emotions and technical talents.

Runner-up in this year’s contest was Sophie Sparrow, and she also won the Patricia Hurley Opera Tours Award. She was another soprano with an attractive voice, a reasonably disciplined top, singing Blonde’s taxing aria, ‘Durch Zärtlichkeit…’ from Die Entführung aus dem Serail and later, the familiar aria from Handel’s Alcina, ‘Tornami a vagheggiar’, emerging as one of the better singers in the coloratura class with her flurries of startling notes.

Soprano Clare Hood, who had the first slot in the evening’s performances, also sang the same Entführing aria, well projected with nice dynamic variety, and then Olympia’s brilliant ‘Doll’s’ aria, from The Tales of Hoffmann. It was a good fit with her voice. And Beth Goulstone chose arias by Mozart and Bizet: ‘Una donna a quindici anni’ from Così fan tutte: Despina’s advice on seduction for the two female victims of the amorous test that is the opera’s concern. And from Les pêcheurs de perles, Leïla’s lovely ‘Comme autrefois’: even voice, expressive tone, good French; it was a very nice aria to end the evening with.

P.S.
The prize announcements at the end caused me to make a mistake about the winner of the Robin Dumbell Memorial Prize for  ‘the young aria entrant with the most potential’. The name I heard and recorded was Cadwgen. I couldn’t hear very accurately, as I was seated near the back, but had no doubt that it was Alicia Cadwgen (not a common name), as recorded in the programme, and who did indeed sing as I recorded above. I had no reason to doubt that Alicia was among the prize winners. 

I am told however that the winner of that prize was in fact Micaela Cadwgen who was not among the eight finalists who sang on Sunday evening. It’s a pity Micaela’s place in the contest had not been specifically mentioned for the benefit of those who were not personally acquainted with the contestants, and would have concluded, even if they had momentary uncertainty about hearing the first name correctly, that it was indeed the singer who took part on the evening. 

I am embarrassed at having been so misled. 

A feature of the contest in the past couple of years has been the engagement of the talented Georgia Jamieson Emms as compère, giving a pithy, knowledgeable precis of each opera, with her own irreverent translation of the words such as in the Catalogue Aria in Don Giovanni, of Despina’s seduction advice to her two virtuous young friends in Così fan tutte and the Count’s furious determination to get his dues from Susanna before her wedding in The Marriage of Figaro.  The contest can use all such enlivening contributions to increase interest.

There has been an interesting shift in the music chosen by contestants: the name Puccini does not appear, and Verdi, only once. Five contestants chose Mozart and Handel appeared twice; otherwise, composers ranged between Monteverdi and Carlisle Floyd 400 hundred years later.

Since I have been hearing the contests since the late 1980s, I have to say that the standard has risen dramatically: there was really no singer who wasn’t really up to good performance level. In any case, it’s a very worthwhile and enjoyable evening’s music, enlivened particularly by the competitive element.

 

Musically satisfying concert of three disparate works, from New Zealand String Quartet

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand String Quartet – “Turning Points”
Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (cello)

Psathas: Abhisheka
Beethoven: String Quartet No 14 in C sharp minor, Op 131
Smetana: String Quartet No 1 in E minor (‘From my life’)

Hunter Council Chamber, Victoria University (Kelburn campus)

Saturday 25 August, 7:30 pm

The New Zealand String Quartet is in the middle of its big annual tour of the country, taking it from Howick and Waiheke Island to Invercargill (though there are curious omissions, inevitably, with a 12-concert tour – absent are Hamilton, Napier, Christchurch, Dunedin…). However, the two in Wellington evidence the high level of musical discernment found in this city.

The Hunter Council Chamber (the university’s beautiful library in earlier times) is a good venue, just the right size, around 120 seats, for such a recital; it was near full. (But parking is a problem, and there’s a very poor bus service).

John Psathas’s Abhisheka is a formidable piece that employs the string quartet in an unusually imaginative way that yet seems perfectly idiomatic; it emerges from silence, with at first a multi-tone wash of sound, till Helene Pohl’s violin comes into focus. Played by musicians for whom Psathas and contemporary New Zealand music is instinctive, it generates a strongly mystical, spiritual atmosphere, moving minimally around a narrow span of notes, with occasional decorative touches that are really intrinsic rather than ornamental. It slowly grows in animation with accelerating, dynamically expanding, almost excitable passages, then stops. Then it resumes in the original, ethereal spirit, that apart from its purely musical character, seems to evoke a remote region of the cosmos. A fine, sympathetic performance of a piece that is not cast in the typical Psathas style or spirit, but that makes one who does not always seek what Psathas describes a caffeinated spirit, rather wish for more in this spirit.

The spiritual shift from Psathas to one of Beethoven’s late quartets demanded some sort of hearing replacement; both utterly different in style, in handling of the medium, and in the expectations of a generation of listeners almost 200 years later. Cellist Rolf Gjelsten introduced Op 131 by dwelling on the fourth movement, Andante ma non troppo e molto cantabile, which is a set of variations like nothing Beethoven’s contemporaries would have heard before.

The first two movements, where the quartet found connection, sympathy between the heavenly spirit of the Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo, and the lively, tripping metre of the Allegro molto vivace that sound like perfectly complementary conceptions.

Then comes the centre-piece, actually two parts. Movement 3, the very brief Allegro moderato that falls away to Andante, an introduction to the centre-piece proper. Movement 4, the Andante ma non troppo, the Variations themselves, begins at a steady walking pace which accelerates, Piu mosso, and continues on through the seven variations that redefine the character of the classical sense of the term. Then the last three movements, fast, slow, fast, roughly speaking, but continuing, no matter how superficially normal or tuneful certain moments were, to create a feeling that still seems radical. And the performance itself reflected a deep seriousness mixed with a delight in life.

Smetana’s first string quartet, inspired by his attempt to create an autobiographical account of his life, was an interesting companion for the Beethoven, and perhaps even the Psathas, each exploring aspects of human difficulty and defeat. Though it opens in a lively manner, full of youthful aspiration, and there are dance motifs in the second movement, and a deeper feeling of optimism flows through the last, the brutal arrival of his deafness motif and its frightening impact on him never fails to shock. The entire piece achieves a feeling of unity, as if each mood or narrative inevitably followed what went before. The foreboding of catastrophe might be restricted to small episodes, but the way the quartet approached it was to sustain the feeling of inevitable tragedy and distress, almost from the very beginning.

Unified by the choice of three superficially disparate works, this was a most thought-provoking and musically satisfying concert.

 

Rachmaninov and Stravinsky – not such strange bedfellows, courtesy of de Waart and the NZSO

Posted on by Peter Mechen

STRAVINSKY – Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920 rev.1947)
Symphony in Three Movements (1945)
RACHMANINOV – Symphony No. 2 in E Minor Op. 27

Edo de Waart (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Friday, August 24th, 2018

What a pleasure it was to be able to read in the programme NZSO Music Director Edo de Waart’s comments about each of the pieces due to be conducted by him in this evening’s concert with the orchestra. His words resonated on a number of fronts, one of them historical as he touched on the NZSO’s special relationship with Igor Stravinsky, who, in 1961 visited New Zealand at the age of 79 as a renowned “guest conductor” of the orchestra. On that occasion the conducting was shared between the composer and his assistant, Robert Craft, the latter directing the orchestra in one of this evening’s works, the Symphony in Three Movements, and Stravinsky himself taking the baton for Apollon Musagete, followed by the Lullaby and Finale of The Firebird.

Equally fascinating (as well as speaking volumes regarding his versatility as a musician and conductor) was de Waart’s recounting of his own history with some of the music, notably the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which he had previously performed many times as oboist/director of the Netherlands Wind Ensemble. To then read of his enthusiasm for Rachmaninov’s music via his comments on the Second Symphony (he conducted all the symphonies on record with the Rotterdam Philharmonic) suggests a sensibility on the conductor’s part which inclines towards the inclusive rather than the drawing of demarcation lines between composers based on judgements wrought from fashion or intellectual snobbery.  In their very different ways both Rachmaninov’s and Stravinsky’s works have undergone such travails over the years courtesy of self-styled “high priests” of opinion regarding artistic merit – one turns with some reassurance to Sibelius’s observation on behalf of his vocation in general, that “no-one ever erected a statue to a critic”, even if there exist a handful of exceptions to that dictum.

In fact, Rachmaninov’s and Stravinsky’s differences as creative artists were never the cause for the degree of disjunction between them promoted in certain circles of musical academia, people who regarded their own judgements as something akin to “holy writ”, and dissenters as somewhat lacking in “proper” faculties (Theodor Adorno, for one, regarded Rachmaninov’s music and people’s enjoyment of the same as “regressive” and in one famous instance even “infantile”!). The composers themselves were surprisingly accepting of one another’s music, Rachmaninov speaking of Firebird and Petrushka as “masterpieces”, and regarding even Le Sacre du Printemps as having “solid musical merits in the form of imaginative harmonies and energetic rhythms” (one can, I think, hear Rachmaninov’s debt to Stravinsky in the pounding rhythms of the first of the former’s Symphonic Dances of 1940).

If Stravinsky’s opinion of Rachmaninov’s music was expressed somewhat more equivocally, it was without rancour or condescension – he spoke in later years of the latter’s earlier pieces as “watercolours”, adding that he then “turned to oils and became a very “old” composer”, but qualifying his judgement with the words “….do not expect me to denigrate him for that.” – an attitude in marked contrast to that of many of Stravinsky’s devotees who saw it as their “duty” to summarily disparage Rachmaninov’s music. The two composers famously became neighbours in Beverley Hills towards the end of Rachmaninov’s life, their social interactions apparently marked not by discussions about music but about agents, managers, copyrights and royalties! (For a more detailed account of this interaction between the two composers, click on the link below, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra Public Relations Office, to an article by commentator Michael Steinberg.)

https://www.sfsymphony.org/Watch-Listen-Learn/Read-Program-Notes/Articles-Interviews/Rachmaninoff-Feature-Oct-2014.aspx

Stravinsky used the title of his work for wind instruments to refer to the original meaning of the word “Symphony”, a “sounding together” – the music derived from a chorale Stravinsky wrote in honour of Debussy, who died in 1918, which gradually developed into what the composer called “a grand chant” using the “objective” tones of wind instruments, as opposed to the “warm, human tone” of strings.  He himself claimed the work lacked any general appeal, containing nothing that resembled his earlier, more popular compositions. Even so, the music at the outset contrasted strident, attention-grabbing wind chords with passages for mellow brass, everything spacious and beautifully al fresco. The mood throughout resembled an enactment of some kind of ritual, not unlike the iconic Le Sacre du Printemps in the intensities generated by the different sections, though with a somewhat loftier, more austere overall effect. At all times, Edo de Waart got playing from his instrumentalists which could only be described as sublime, the ensemble by turns sharply-focused and richly-rounded, the sonorities replete with varied interest and engagement.

The later Symphony in Three Movements seemed to more readily evoke the composer’s past, in the outer sections recalling (once again) the muscularities and acerbities of the aforementioned Le Sacre, as well as using a piano obbligato reminiscent of another of his ballets, Petrushka. The work’s opening sequences resembled in places a circus band that had gone off the rails, with the percussion having great fun! Throughout the movement there seemed an almost “Concerto for Orchestra” aspect, the composer’s writing skilfully interactive while keeping an openness of texture. The piano was given a lot to do, almost like a mediator between sparring elements, each determined to “be themselves”, come what may!  I loved the strings’ articulation of the gentle jog-trot rhythms at the second movement’s beginning, with the harp taking on the obbligato role here, while the winds coloured their sounds for de Waart most exquisitely, relishing their ad lib-like contributions, and creating some magical ambiences together with the strings. The music led the ear innocently enough to the finale’s beginning, at which point what sounded like a jingoistic kind of anarchy unfurled its flag to the strains of pompous fanfares, the composer flying in the face of his own pronouncements regarding music, here (“…music is powerless to express anything except itself…” for example – Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography 1935) by admitting that he was inspired by World War II newsreels of goose-stepping German soldiers, and that the build-up towards the music’s triumphal ending marked the war’s turning-point in favour of the Allied forces. The debate regarding the composer‘s words in relation to his own music continues, meantime……but for now, I’m happy to report that de Waart and the players gave a performance of the whole that bore out the conductor’s description of the music as a ‘glorious work”.

So we came to the concert’s second half, featuring music by a different composer, one whose attitudes and intentions regarding his work (and music in general) are on record as diametrically removed from any Stravinsky-like ideas of music’s “powerless” objectivity as could be. Edo de Waart unequivocally described Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony as “a haunting and deeply moving work”, thereby cutting the Gordion Knot of binding judgement regarding musical styles by treating all of the concert’s individual works entirely on their own merits. It was ironic, therefore, that, his conducting of the Symphony to my ears didn’t seek to invest the work with any particular nationalistic or geographical character of sound other than a kind of echt-European mellowness of utterance – in other words, his was an objective, well-rounded and beautifully-proportioned reading, one which allowed “the notes”, as written by the composer, to speak for themselves.

Which is another way of my saying that the music here wasn’t made to sound any more “Russian” than what the composer had written into the score. While my preference, when listening to this music, is for rather more “temperament” expressed in occasional volatilities and explorations of near-extremities of tone and timbre, I relished de Waart’s obvious love and respect for the music and its composer, and the orchestra’s sensitive, well-rounded and at times brilliant playing.

We heard a beautifully long-breathed opening pair of exhalations which set the work in motion, before a light, lithe allegro moderato swung into action, its phrases beautifully weighted and nuanced. Throughout each succeeding episode de Waart and his players similarly wove layer upon layer of lyrical utterance, both strings and winds shaping their expression next to great rolling crescendi from the brass, capped by scintillating percussion, until the dancing exuberance of the movement’s coda was done.

More excitement was to be had from the scherzo, incisive strings and ringing horns leading the way, de Waart keeping the exuberance seemly, as well as curbing any overt sentimentality in the phrasing of the second theme, apart from a touch of portamento in one of the upward string figures. The brasses got their galloping syncopations excitingly right, the strings reducing things to a whisper before the whiplash entry of the Trio – here, clear and incisive rather than weighty, though the brass resonances rang deeply and richly soon afterwards. What I always think of as the “Rimsky-Korsakov” sequences – those lovely prancing, wind-decorated martial figures! – had plenty of exotic glitter before things accelerated excitingly towards the reprise of the opening, the movement then racing to its suddenly sombre conclusion, its spectral brasses and ghostly whisperings vanishing into the night.

Again, the famous opening of the slow movement, with its “continuous melody” wrought by strings and clarinet, was simply and directly expressed, with exquisitely-judged playing from clarinettist Patrick Barry, matched later by the NZSO strings, and supported by the other wind-players. Nothing was over-wrought, de Waart keeping the heart-on-sleeve emotion of it all within the realms of natural utterance, while encouraging an interactive sound-picture, the wind counterpoints and brass-and timpani climaxes all part of the greater flow. This served to highlight the finale’s joyous release of energies, even if I thought the horns could have been allowed a more exuberant voice in places – still those echoes of the previous movements made their mark amid the festivities, as did the hushed build-up of the ‘bells” sequence towards a sonorous, scalp-tingling panoply of ringing sounds whose effect was all the greater in the context of the conductor’s restraint elsewhere. And though I occasionally craved more raw excitement in places, I relished de Waart’s insistence on clarity of detail at all times, my ears in a constant state of titillation through registering so much that’s normally masked or underplayed.

A thoroughly-deserved burst of acclamation from an appreciative audience greeted conductor and players as the music’s final hammered-out chords flung their energies out to the four corners of the hall – splendid stuff!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting and rewarding St Andrew’s recital from students of stringed instruments

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s Lunchtime concert
String students of the New Zealand School of Music

Music by Beethoven, Shostakovich, Gareth Farr and Wang Xhihao

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 22 August, 12:15 pm

This was one of the usual series of concerts at this time of the year by students of Victoria University’s School of Music (I counted eleven players).

Beethoven came first. Cellist Rebecca Warnes, with the school’s piano tutor Catherine Norton. played the first movement of Beethoven’s third cello sonata, in A major, Op 69. It was a model performance, beginning somewhat quietly, intonation was accurate, with carefully etched tone. It demonstrated Rebecca’s understanding of its emotional character and a style that showed appreciation of the taste of its period.

Violinist Leo Liu, again with Norton at the piano, played Beethoven’s Spring Sonata (Op 24). It’s not an easy piece with which to deal in expressive terms; even though suggestive of Spring (not Beethoven’s name for it) it doesn’t flow easily and Liu’s bowing technique needs perhaps a bit more finesse and emotional colouring, though his intonation was very good.

It’s always interesting to meet players prepared to tackle Shostakovich’s quartets, other than the ubiquitous No 8. The third movement of No 9 in E flat lasts only about four minutes (the first four of the five movements are all of about the same length) but it was enough to hear the way the players (Hayden Nickey, Ellen Murfitt. Zephyr Wills and Emily Paterson) engaged with its enigmatic, somewhat disturbed mood. It gave the composer much trouble: he burned his first attempt and started afresh a couple of years later, in 1964. It was an interesting challenge, intellectually, which the four players met very well.

Then came Gareth Farr’s Te Tai-o-Rehua (The Tasman Sea, a co-commission by Chamber Music New Zealand and the Goldner Quartet), again for string quartet (Claudia Tarrant Matthews, Grace Stainthorpe, Grant Baker and Olivia Wilding). It began low with the violin on the G string, inviting the others to join in turn, very soon becoming markedly compulsive (and, I think, compelling, with its irregular, throbbing note on the viola), dwelling on an insistent Maori-flavoured motif, though that is a risky assertion. It is a demanding work, a task that was undertaken conspicuously by perhaps the most experienced players. It took only a short time for the music to take on a vivid and meaningful character: it certainly had something to say, and the players found ways to express it with considerable confidence. It’s about five years old; Farr’s music just gets ever more interesting and impressive. At about 10 minutes, it was the centre-piece of the concert.

However, it was followed by a ‘Fantasy’ by Wang Xhihao, played by Nick Majic (vioin) and Liam Furey (piano). Though he used the microphone to introduce the piece, Majic’s voice didn’t carry. (I have discovered nothing about Xhihao). The opening did not suggest a particularly radical character, though a genuine musical imagination was evident, with distinct melodic integrity that didn’t strive for any special originality. My scribbled notes suggested a feeling of rather relief that the composer was not subjecting me to the task of unravelling unduly complex and difficult music, such as composition students produced 20 or 30 years ago. A second section was a little brisker, perhaps a bit agitated, but still essentially tonal in character.

So this was an agreeable concert that allowed a number of students to demonstrate talents at various levels of maturity, through music of genuine interest.

 

Two beloved piano quartet masterpieces in glorious performances from NZSO principals plus Diedre Irons

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Chamber Music
Piano Quartet: Vesa-Matti Leppänen (violin), Andrew Thomson (viola), Andrew Joyce (cello)and Diedre Irons (piano)

Dvořák: Piano Quartet No 2 in E flat, Op 87
Brahms: Piano Quartet No 1 in G minor, Op 25

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 19 August, 3 pm

Though Wellington Chamber Music, before it ‘corporatised’ from ‘Society’ to ‘Trust’ and operated in the Ilott Concert Chamber (later, ‘Theatre’), used to come close to filling that 300 seat space, no longer has the pulling power that it once had. However, this recital from three NZSO principals and pianist Diedre Irons drew a somewhat better than average audience, though nowhere near what it deserved.

Perhaps this gives me an excuse to recall my introduction to the society in the 1960s when their concerts were in the admirable Concert Chamber on the first floor of the (pre-earthquake-strengthening, Mark I, in the 1990s) Town Hall. It had some 500-seats and concerts were performed twice, such was their appeal in a city less than half its present size.

Sadly, perhaps, the nature of the venue and the amenities like interval drinks, do contribute to audience appeal, and the Wellington City Council’s dilatoriness in getting the more important cultural facilities like the Town Hall and the St James Theatre in order, fast, is leaving the vaunted ‘Creative Capital’ way behind its bigger rival Auckland; population size need not be the determinant in such things.

These two piano quartets are among the most loved pieces of chamber music: period!

Dvořák Opus 87
Dvořák is a leading composer in the main-stream classical world, yet in much of his music there is a strong folk music element, and from the start the players allowed a peasantish colour to emerge, not to be gentrified by excessive delicacy or finesse. The heart-felt melodies that Dvořák found for the first movement almost play themselves, though a certain seriousness emerges quite soon, a spirit of unease which changes the feeling of unalloyed happiness to something more like the actual human condition.

I felt I was listening to a group of individuals who knew each other extremely well, and indeed they generally sounded as if they had been playing nothing but chamber music together, for years; yet their distinct personalities seemed generally just as important as their aim at perfect ensemble. Diedre Irons’s piano part certainly did not aim at self-effacing restraint, and the music benefitted. One of the nice elements was the way the players allowed phrase ends to fade unobtrusively rather than remaining brightly lit.

The second movement opens with cello and piano, and Andrew Joyce’s cello was almost too beautiful, though Irons’s piano was almost its equal; but then the viola and violin emerged with pretty much the same beauty of tone and deep affection for the music. Again, the music soon took on a slightly more sombre tone, even agitated but just as gorgeous, making me listen to it more attentively than I have before.

The third movement, in gentle triple time, like a Scherzo, was a drowsy comfortable affair that started so unobtrusively but slowly gave way to the boisterous, Dumky-like middle section which made one remember where Dvořák was raised. It was a particularly delightful consortium between all four players.

One could be forgiven for feeling that the last movement, Allegro con moto, began in a slightly more exuberant spirit, a mood that might have delighted me more, 50 years ago, than now. But there remained so much deeply felt music, played with such finesse and splendidly balanced ensemble that to reflect on my teenage tastes is a bit irrelevant. More interesting to note that in my forties I became infatuated with all Dvořák’s chamber music, and I still rejoice in most of it: as well as this quartet, the piano quintet, Op 81, the piano trios and the string quartets Op 96 (of course), 105 and 106….

Brahms Opus 25
It was hard to believe that in the same concert we were then to hear Brahms’s equally wonderful quartet in G minor, Op 25. It started with Diedre Irons piano, almost apologetically: ‘don’t let me interrupt your conversation…’. But once it had our attention (in about 4 seconds) there was a wonderful sense of having persuaded us that the composer knew that he had something important, or at least very beautiful, to say. Leppänen’s violin played its part in a matter-of-fact way, without any fancy finessing of phrases. By the arrival of the arrestingly lovely second theme, with its sort-of rotating quavers, the movement had gripped the attention with its variety of interrelated episodes, one rapturous melody after another and coming peacefully to an end.

In the Intermezzo (or more fully, Intermezzo and Trio) after the tremulous introduction by strings alone, Diedre Irons entered on the piano, giving off a feeling of having waited longingly for her moment to take part in the restrained, exquisite music that Brahms created, thought to reflect his feelings for Clara Schumann.

The contrasting Trio, quicker, less agitated, sounded a shade more optimistic but cautiously so. I’m not sure what its time signature is – it sounds 9/8, triplet quavers within triplet crotchets, and the quartet played with genuine understanding. I loved the way it ended, with its piano-led fluttering into the sky.

Then came the slow movement that grew steadily in growing intensity, again in distinctly varied sections, the second part expressing a sort of march-like, extravert confidence – but never too much, mind! And the Andante con moto too seemed to vaporise into a silence that was intrinsic to the movement’s over-arching character.

Then comes the movement that everyone knows, and that, wrongly, characterises the quartet, Rondo alla zingarese. Like the other movements, it’s divided into very different parts, not all in the carefree Gypsy mood; much as he loved that music, and much as one might think, towards the end, that Brahms was giving into the spirit of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, that will never happen; and the quartet handled the sober or cautious interludes with its unlikely mixture of care as well as a sort of recklessness. Brahms never gives himself over to a simple emotion or an unalloyed cheerfulness; that’s what one expects and wants, and so did these splendid players.

It was a simply wonderful recital. The two performances were the kind that should recall Henry V’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech to his army before Agincourt, and those absent should “think themselves accursed they were not here”.

East and West mingle at Wellington Youth Orchestra Concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Youth Orchestra presents:
LOVE AND FREEDOM

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN – Leonore Overture No.2 Op.72a / Symphony No. 7 in A Major Op. 92
MICHAEL VINTEN – Six Korean Love Poems (arr. Anne French)

Sarah Court  (mezzo-soprano)
Wellington Youth Orchestra
Michael Vinten (conductor)

St.James’ Church, Woburn Road, Lower Hutt

Sunday, 19th August, 2018

A most striking frontispiece on the programme cover (uncredited) for this enterprising concert seemed to alert us to the presence of something out-of-the-ordinary – an illustration something along the lines of those disconcerting front-and-profile images of one and the same person. It wasn’t exactly that, in this case, but the effect certainly caused a double-take on my part, which I presume was the idea! – here, a youthful portrait of Beethoven was set literally cheek-by jowl with a young woman’s image similarly iconic (if somewhat Westernised) in exotic effect.

All that it was signifying was the programme’s setting of a pair of “classic” orchestral pieces next to an almost brand-new New Zealand work, a premiere of sorts, in fact – more about this circumstance below. The venue wasn’t the orchestra’s usual performing-place, with Wellington’s still-recent spate of earthquake activity continuing to exert its toll by putting pressure on performing groups seeking appropriate spaces in which to do their thing, as various buildings normally used for this purpose get ear-marked for “strengthening”, a process which takes time and considerable expense.

Here, it was St.James’ Church in Woburn which served the purpose, a place in which I’d previously heard vocal ensemble music, but not an orchestra. I thought the sound lively (too much so, it seemed to me, in the case of the timpani), and with an audience present to soak up some of the reverberation, allowing plenty of detail to register. Best of all sound-wise was the set of songs, with the singer’s forward placement enabling her superb diction to give the words that inner life which concert situations so often blur or impede in an unhelpful acoustic. The orchestral detail, too, bloomed in those spaces, the sounds working beautifully with the singer to convey the composer’s desired effect.

First up, though, and very properly, was an overture (I invariably think, at a concert’s beginning, of Michael Flanders, of “At the Drop of a Hat” fame in partnership with Donald Swann, telling his audience that they always considered their opening song important, because, as he remarked, “it helps us to get the pitch of the hall”) – and so it was, here, with the very opening chord of Beethoven’s Leonore No.2 Overture (written for the composer’s one and only opera) generating a sound which, thanks to conductor Michael Vinten’s expert direction and the players’ sharpness of response, nicely “defined” the spaces, and set the ambient tone for what was to follow.

The winds had a lovely colour throughout the work’s opening, with supportive work by the horns creating a sense of expectancy, and leading to some strong and sure chording whose aftermath gave rise to the work’s principal melody, the radiance eventually breaking through the darkness – the strings managed their tricky syncopations throughout, while the winds brought forth a lovely “glow” with Leonore’s lover Florestan’s lyrical theme, the exchanges allowed time and elbow-space to phrase their figurations. The ‘cellos enjoyed their playing of the main allegro theme, counterpointed by the winds and leading up to the stormy sequences which preceded the famous trumpet fanfare – here played with breathtaking skill on both occasions by the orchestra’s principal player Vincent Brzozowski. More expert playing from the winds brought back the music’s lyricism and expectancy of light triumphing over darkness, the strings playing the notes with a kind of breathless caution at first before gaining in confidence and activating themselves and one another to cascade outwards in all directions, excitingly sounding the theme in a kind of gabble, and bringing forth the brasses in glorious C Major with an energised, victorious version of Florestan’s “Leonore” tune. Vinten got his players to work up a “real” presto-like tumult here, skin and hair flying and no prisoners taken, a truly joyous conclusion to a well-fought musical campaign.

I was curious enough originally at Michael Vinten’s choice of Korean texts for his song-cycle “Six Korean Love-Poems”, but things became “curiouser and curiouser” when I discovered that the English words from the poems were in fact “transliterations” by the New Zealand poet Anne French – the programme note elaborates further by saying, re the original texts, “Anne has taken their ideas and images and refashioned them, whilst retaining a flavour of the originals”. Any disquiet I might have had regarding such a practice was effectively quashed when remembering that Gustav Mahler’s purportedly translated Chinese texts in his song-cycle “Das Lied von der Erde” were similarly “adapted” by Hans Bethge from material which itself had been in places “expanded” by earlier European sinologists. In fact Mahler himself in places revised Bethge’s wording to fit his musical lines, further distancing his work from the original “letter”, even if retaining the “spirit”. Well, I reasoned, if it was good enough for Gustav Mahler……….

Vinten set French’s versions of these poems during 2015/16 for voice and piano, and they were premiered in Brisbane in 2016 by today’s singer, Sarah Court, and pianist Therese Milanovic. Today’s performance was thus the world premiere of the songs’ orchestral version, and the first time they had been performed in New Zealand in any form. I’m not sure whether the composer’s original intention was to eventually orchestrate them, or whether it became obvious over time that they cried out for orchestral colour and variation – but whatever the case, and, of course, not having heard the voice-and-piano version of the songs, I thought the realisations remarkably “at one” with the texts.

Anne French used verses by poets writing as early as 1560 (Hwang  Chin-i, a sixteenth-century gisaeng, or courtesan, famous for her beauty and intellect), and more recently, Kim So-wol (1903-1934, considered the “founder” of modern Korean poetry, despite his tragically short life) and Han Yong-Un (1879-1944, a Buddhist monk, reformer and poet). Each of the poems in the collection had a different kind of intensity of shade, texture, or colour of utterance, which I thought Vinten’s writing reflected in each case. Thus, the music of the first poem connected with the words’ evocations of natural phenomena, the leaves falling, the scent of flowers, the babble of a stream, all of which were heard in both figurations and their accompanying stillnesses, the vocal line mirroring the “natural dance” of these things. The second song seemed like a series of sighs, with long singing lines and warm, luscious textures, delineating a period of waiting for the arrival of a lover. By contrast, the third poem was a tightly-woven mind-game interaction, quixotic and angular in effect with exotic tinges coloured by percussion in places, and yielding at the end in accordance with the words “softened just a little by love”.

How different the evocations for the following “The sweet briar rose”, diaphanous textures and repeated patternings creating an ethereal effect over which the vocal line rhapsodised, while a flute solo joined in with an exquisite effect of tremulous wonderment – the voice soared, swayed, teased, enticed and reflected, before resigning to waiting, with a brief orchestral postlude for company. The fifth poem was a soliloquy on deprivation following the loved one’s departure, the opening agitated figures supporting the singer’s description of the “treading red and gold leaves under his feet”, almost like a running commentary, with strings and timpani pushing the music forwards. With a memory of a first meeting the music became rhapsodical, and then as the singer voiced a strategy “let my grief kindle my hope”, the sounds threw open the picture, suggesting distance and emptiness spanned by the vocal line’s confident tones. In stark contrast, the final song generated no such comfort or confidence, the piccolo and other winds evoking loneliness and abandonment, the vocal line angry – “Let that name be broken into pieces”, anguished – “Let that name be scattered on the air”, and despairing – “There is no answer to it yet”. The instrumental writing adroitly suggested full, rich textures yet remained curiously open, almost feeling cut adrift, as the sounds evoked that “great space between earth and sky” and generated brief moments of grandeur before dissolving, leaving behind the desolation of a solo violin and dark percussion sounds underpinned by low piano notes as the singer intoned “I call your name in sadness”. A brief frisson of energy accompanied the words “I shall be calling your name all my life”, before a final plaintive statement from the piccolo signalled the end of the piece.

An interval allowed time and space for what we’d heard to settle and take hold within, though the performance had from the outset already begun to carve a niche of enduring memory, thanks to Sarah Court’s rich and varied mezzo tones and her heartfelt rendering of the texts, augmented by an incredibly inventive panoply of orchestral sounds gotten from the players by the composer himself on the podium. I found myself marvelling at the human empathies of those words, poet Anne French triumphantly forging a link here with expressions of feeling one might consider on the face of things intractably rooted to far-removed worlds, mere curiosities from an alien culture – what came through, of course, was a shared and binding humanity, though I wouldn’t have been surprised had the “thought-police” of cultural appropriation gotten wind of the occasion and chimed in at some stage, PC spurs and medallions jangling!

Refreshed, we settled back to listen to what would be made of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the work famously styled by Wagner as “the apotheosis of the dance” (in contrast with the view of one of Beethoven’s contemporaries, Carl Maria von Weber, who remarked on hearing the work that its composer was ‘fit for the madhouse!”).  Michael Vinten seemed to take Wagner at his word regarding his approach to Beethoven’s music, which was athletic and sprightly rather than grand and monumental. The opening chord, though slightly fallible, had considerable “punch”, and though the scales were played tentatively at first, the strings got more of a “swing” as the music went along. Both winds and timpani kept the rhythms sprightly, the timpanist (whose work I always admire) playing a shade too emphatically for me occasionally in this context, though always exciting and reliable (a moment of concerted confusion apart, later in the movement). The allegro stumbled a bit at its outset, but was finally launched, Vinten driving the dotted rhythms at a great rate, the effect somewhat raucous, but also very “Beethoven”, vibrant and unbuttoned!

It was this energy of Beethoven’s writing that was consistently conveyed by the performance, and which I relished, despite the occasional hit-and-miss element with the notes. It’s always seemed to me more important for players in youth and amateur ensembles to be encouraged to “get the rhythms right”, and, past a certain point, let the notes take care of themselves – if the rhythms are strong and confident, then the music will sound right despite any mis-hits, but if the rhythms are untidy, then no amount of correctly-sounded notes are going to be of much use! With brisk speeds and strongly-wrought rhythmic direction,  Vinten seemed to me to be achieving plenty of coherent excitement with these players. There was the occasional mixup, most notably near the first movement’s end with the music emerging from the grinding bass vortices, and some voices coming in a measure too early; but in general, the dance and its irrepressible rhythms triumphed!

The symphony’s most renowned for its “slow” movement, and here, the processional-like figures received well-wrought and full-throated treatment from all concerned, the lower strings especially good at the outset, the cellos eloquent and soulful. The contrasting major sequences  sounded properly easeful, with nicely-articulated canonic work between winds and horn, and the great cascading return to the processional rhythm was impressively managed. The strings held their rhythmic patternings beautifully throughout the fugato, and integrated superbly with the rest of the orchestra at the grand, ceremonial refrain of the hymn-tune – a great moment!

What an orchestral difficulty the scherzo must be to launch! Untidy at the very beginning, the ensemble rallied itself, once again finding the rhythm’s “swing” and managing the whiplash szforzandi with great elan! Vinten kept the Trio moving, encouraging the players to plunge into the full tutti, boots and all – very exciting! – and afterwards, perhaps emboldened by what they’d just achieved, the reprise of the scherzo’s opening was much tidier.

Despite my “connecting” with Vinten’s way of keeping the ensemble rhythmically tight, I still wasn’t prepared for the “Vienna Philharmonic” speed with which the finale began, here! – though occasionally starved of tonal weight, the sounds leapt forwards with each accented downstroke, the players keeping things together as if their lives depended on the outcome! I occasionally thought more weight could have been applied to some phrases, such as the lower strings’ reply to the oft-repeated dotted figure hurled at them by the upper strings – but this was a small point compared with the energy generated by the whole. At the end we certainly felt as though we had been immersed in a kind of maelstrom, the conductor and players sharing with us an accompanying sense of satisfaction at re-emerging with exhaustion and invigoration triumphantly hand-in-hand!

 

 

NZSO triumphs with brilliant Beethoven and Brahms masterpieces

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart, with violinist Augustin Hadelich

Beethoven: Violin concerto in D, Op 61
Brahms: Symphony No 2 in D, Op 73

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 18 August, 7:30 pm

Though this was a very traditional, heart-of-the-classical-world concert which one might have thought would excite neither the aficionados nor the young and innocent in terms of classical music awareness, it was a very near full house – not an every-day experience for the NZSO.

But the fact is that I cannot remember a live performance in Wellington of the Beethoven violin concerto: certainly, a search of Middle C’s archive brings up none. And I had to go back to the NZSO’s Brahms festival in October 2011 to find the last performance of his No 2.

Beethoven Violin Concerto
Though one doesn’t expect a performance of such a familiar concerto to spark excitement, even the orchestral introduction, which was cautious, expectant and dignified, presaged something splendid. It took hold of the audience almost at once, as if the orchestra, as well as audience, knew that they, the orchestra, were harbingers of something special. So the violin’s entry seemed to still the audience immediately, generating the feeling that a definitive, exultant performance was at hand. There is a special kind of silence that takes possession of an audience when faced with something remarkable.

Augustin Hadelich is of German descent, but born in 1984 to a vintner family established in Tuscany. Aged 15, and already a prodigy on both piano and violin, his career was nearly ended in a fire on the family farm. But five years later he had gained entry to the Juilliard School in New York, and won the Indianapolis international Violin Competition.

Hadelich’s playing was marked by calmness, a sense of determination, clear-sightedness. It produced, at the same time, flawless articulation and perfect intonation that almost seemed inconsistent with emotional warmth, and sheer beauty of tone. One expects to enjoy dynamic variety, but what he produced was a sort of flexibility distilled by taste and delicacy, leaving not a hint of indulgence or excess.

One mark of that was in the studied approach with which the cadenza at the end of the first movement began; its emphasis was on the music and its beauties rather than astonishing with tonal brilliance and virtuosity and it cast almost a sense of religious rapture, that was compelling and utterly stilled the audience. Its perfection was almost machine-like if it hadn’t been for the sheer musicality and essential humanity of its expression.

At the movement’s end there was what sounded like some utterly irresistible clapping.

The Larghetto second movement opened in the same spirit of sobriety, stillness that brought the audience once more to a kind of silence that seemed unreal among two thousand people. And the link-passage to the Finale was stripped of the sort of histrionics that its foretelling often brings about in other performances. It was a warning about the astonishing speed and musical force that Hadelich created in this brilliant movement. Its pace scarcely left room to breathe and its remarkable technical demands brought no slackening of pace till the moment when preparation for the Coda arrived, and it led the music through striking modulations, eventually ending, not in any sort of Tchaikovskyan frenzy, but loosening new and sublimely original ideas. And unlike many, he resisted the temptation to bring the spotlight back to himself in the final bars.

It was a performance the like of which I don’t expect to experience, live, ever again.

Paganini’s 24th Caprice was his way of thanking the audience for their immediate, standing ovation (unusual for the reticent Wellington audience), and its incendiary flamboyance and amazing technical embellishments were spell-binding (extraordinarily elaborate left-hand plus right hand pizzicato).

Brahms Second Symphony
Though the first half had created an experience that might have made another major work even after the interval, seem anti-climactic, Brahms second symphony, again in the key of D, survived extremely well. The orchestra expanded from its Beethovenian-numbers to full size, with 16, 14 violins, etc, five horns, but just double woodwinds. If the limelight had not shone much on De Waart in the concerto (and it truly deserved admiration), in the Brahms his unassuming, discreet yet strong and clear presence on the podium inspired the orchestra.

Brahms claimed somewhere that “I have never written anything so sad”; but elsewhere, Brahms is quoted saying it’s “light and carefree, as though written for a young married couple”. Take your pick; I don’t hear anything sad, and suspect that it was Brahmsian irony – opposite to what he felt about it; nor did De Waart seem to feel that way. And one would hardly choose D major to express grief or even melancholy (nor did Beethoven).

Brahms plunges us straight into the music, with no ritual introduction or conspicuous attention to classical forms, though his argument with the Liszts and Wagners was over his belief in the importance of the traditional structures. The performance seemed to draw attention to the endless compounding and modifying of themes, of scraps of themes, with every detail of Brahms’s rich orchestration resulting in a reading that was sympathetic and deeply satisfying.

Though the first movement is Allegro non troppo, there was hardly a strong feeling of speed or liveliness for quite a while. Some of the most beautiful episodes came from horns, sometimes just the principal, Samuel Jacobs; horns in particular seem to define Brahms’s orchestral palette. And there was lovely playing by other winds. The momentum evolved slowly, almost imperceptibly, as the varying facets of its themes and gestures developed organically and a strong feeling of integrity took hold.

The second movement Adagio non troppo (the ‘non troppo’ characterises Brahms’s devotion to the sanguine temperament, the happy medium, rather than emotional extremes) was pensive, expressive, is rarely jocular, and never suggestive of a suppressed Rossini or Offenbach. Yet it became the sort of spirited music that had emerged in the first movement. Both movements seem essential Brahms and one sensed in De Waart a deep sympathy with what Brahms was talking about and feeling.

The movement that might otherwise be the Scherzo, started in a gentle triple time, but very soon a lively 4/8 time, Presto non assai, took over for a short time before a triplet-quaver rhythm brought yet another change of tempo, though not really of mood and musical sense.  The movement’s variety that De Waart handled so deftly was a delight as were interludes by oboes and flutes.

The utter silence before the start of the last movement spoke volumes about the impact this wonderful performance was having on the audience. So as the Allegro con spirito gathered energy, high spirits, and joie de vivre, the full force of the big orchestra seemed to be employed in a spirit of an almost incandescent joy. Beethoven’s Freude in the Ninth Symphony might have found an even truer domicile here at the end of Brahms 2, than in its original incarnation.

This too got an enthusiastic reception from the very large audience.

 

 

 

Katherine McIndoe with brilliant performance of Britten’s Les Illuminations at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s Lunchtime Concerts
Katherine McIndoe (soprano) with Catherine Norton (piano)

Britten: Les Illuminations (I Fanfare, II Villes, III Antique, IV Royauté, V Marine, VI Interlude, VII Being beauteous, VIII Parade, IX Départ)
Copland: Selections from Old American Songs: Long Time Ago, Simple Gifts, The Little Horses
Britten: Selection from Folk Song Arrangements: Dink’s Song

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 15 August, 12:15 pm

Soprano Katherine McIndoe has been at the Guildhall School in London for the past year, though she was last heard, conspicuously, in both the operas staged in the middle of last year by Rhona Fraser’s Days Bay Opera: Tatyana in Eugene Onegin and Guilietta in I Capuleti e i Montecchi.  In Britain she sang at the Aldeburgh Festival last year as a Britten-Piers Young Artist, and was the Governess in The Turn of the Screw and Marcellina in The Marriage of Figaro, and at the Barbican was Sister Catherine in the UK premiere of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (in which another prominent New Zealander, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, had sung in its inaugural production in San Francisco). Currently she is a finalist Australian Singing Competition.

Pianist Catherine Norton preceded McIndoe at the Guildhall by a few years, then as a Britten-Piers Young Artist, but also at the Franz Schubert-Institute for Lieder and Graham Johnson’s Young Songmakers’ Almanac; and she has appeared at the Barbican, LSO St Luke’s and the Oxford Lieder Festival. And she has performed in France, Germany and Northern Ireland and Malta. She is now tutor in vocal accompaniment at Victoria University School of Music.

So this was a significant recital from a highly promising singer with one of the best accompanists in the country.

By far the most important item in the 45 minute recital was Britten’s setting of nine of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. The name needs to be understood in the sense of the practice of decorating manuscripts – throughout the Middle Ages and even into the printing era.

McIndoe sang the cycle, memorised, in very convincing, idiomatic French: accompanied by the piano (instead of the original string orchestra).

Though the nature of the St Andrew’s free lunchtime concerts limits presentation costs, it’s a pity that fuller programmes could not have been offered for a recital like this. They should ideally be printed in both French and English, and several pages would probably be required. There are 42 prose poems in Rimbaud’s collection, written mainly in his youth, during the time of his relationship with Verlaine (ten years older than Rimbaud), which famously involved the latter shooting Rimbaud, though not fatally.

It opens arrestingly and appropriately (or not), with Fanfare which is not one of the poems, but simply the last line from Parade which is the second-to-last song in Britten’s cycle (‘J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’); and it’s a line that is repeated between Marine and Being Beauteous, as well as in Parade itself. It’s everything a fanfare should be, commanding attention, compelling. Then Villes II, wild and staccato, suggesting modern, urban chaos (even in post 1870 Paris), with satanic moments echoing the Ride to the Abyss from Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust.

Though Britten’s settings are by no means influenced by the more radical styles of early 20th century music, they do create a singular, unpredictable, unique feeling, as distinctive musically as are Rimbaud’s poems which were likewise shockingly radical in form and sense. They range, from both voice and piano, across jumpy staccato intervals, sometimes collaborative, sometimes in a sort of conflict. They sometimes present a polished sheen, then a ferocious outburst expressing terror or danger; then a calm episode, a slow waltz rhythm with an adventurous melody with keyboard-spanning intervals.

In Being Beauteous, words seem to struggle against the music, moving from hushed to contorted utterances; and Parade, frenzied, left an impression of violence hardly expressed before in music. I scribbled ‘a sense that nothing before or since has been created like this’. A momentary feeling, and not altogether inaccurate.

Though I was acquainted with Les Illuminations many years ago, I had not paid them close attention and so I found this performance a revelation. With the poems and the song texts in front of me as I wrote, I realised that Britten cherry-picks words from each poem, and a couple of times borrows a bare sentence from other, unidentified poems: for example, there’s a short sentence before Antique, ‘J’ai tendu des cordes à clocher à clocher”, that comes from some scraps labelled Fragments de feuillet 12.

Like most great songs and song cycles, words and music are of equal importance, and together they conjure very particular impressions and sensibilities; the poems were ground-breaking in the 1880s, and Britten’s settings of about a quarter of them made a remarkable impact on musical England in the 1940s (though probably on very small numbers).

One would expect that audience members, when they got home, would have reached for their anthologies of French verse or detoured by the Public Library to borrow a volume of Rimbaud’s verse.

For your amusement… enlightenment… edification, I found this comment on the YouTube recording by Ian Bostridge: “It’s like a madman shouting in the street. Imagine a stranger coming up to you with an intense expression and emphatically saying to you, “I alone hold the key to this passing parade” referring to life in general. Why do we respect madness, which was once considered repulsive, and conflate it with deep insight? When did our civilization become like this? We must wake up, especially now, or we are doomed.”

After that, Copland’s three Old American Songs seemed slightly irrelevant, though performed with distinction, offering vivid contrasts from one to another. And returning to Britten at the end with Dink’s Song, American originated, it was stunningly accompanied by its startling Brittenesque piano part. While the essence of the performance of Les Iluminations rested heavily on both words and music, both singer and pianist provided an immaculate and highly accomplished vehicle for the entire recital.

This was a lunchtime concert to be remembered.

 

Third fine Orchestra Wellington concert, unthemed but with Dvořák 7, a great success

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Orchestra Wellington conducted by Marc Taddei with Michael Houstoun (piano)

Mozart: Piano Concerto No 14 in E flat, K 449
Gao Ping: Wild Cherry Tree
Dvořák: Symphony No 7 in D minor, Op 70

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 11 August 7:30 pm

The third of Orchestra Wellington’s 2018 subscription concerts offered an unusual mix of music: nothing unusual about the theme symphony-Composer, Dvořák, and an unfamiliar Mozart piano concerto, but the premiere of a commissioned piece by a Chinese composer with New Zealand associations, no doubt raised a certain curiosity … or misgivings: that may have explained the slightly less-than-sold-out audience – a rarity for this orchestra these days.

Mozart K 449
The Piano Concerto No 14 is the first of the second set of three (K 449, 450, 451) that Mozart wrote after coming to Vienna in 1782; they are regarded as the beginning of Mozart’s period of greatest creativity. No 14 was the first to be recorded in Mozart’s own notebook listing his compositions, from 9 February 1784.  It is common to marvel at Mozart’s output of masterpieces from that time, especially the piano concertos (but of course much else, including the great operas) in the dozen years from 1784.

I was actually surprised to find that I didn’t know this piece very well and that the one I had expected and knew well, was No 12, one of the earlier group of three written in Vienna. So this proved a delightful re-awakening to a serious, confident, at the same time, very sanguine work, from the hands of just that kind of pianist, with conductor and orchestra who could do it splendid, totally sympathetic justice.

My initial feeling was the orchestra was perhaps a little too stripped back to ‘classical’ dimensions, though the numbers (12, 10, 8, 6, 3 as far as I could see) seemed fine; but it seemed to invite a warmer, richer sound. So the back and forth motifs between piano and orchestra in the first movement and the sonorities generally might have been a little more robust and fully-fleshed. But the orchestra once more revealed its responsiveness to this engrossing music; and I loved Houstoun’s elegant little ornaments, and the overall joyousness that he managed to draw from its E flat tonality.

The Andantino movement has a somewhat reticent air and to keep audience attention might not have been easy, but it happened, with Mozart exploiting his skills at embellishing and varying working its magic, with Houstoun’s lyrically detailed fingering. I loved the way they handled its final, reticent notes and the non-emphatic opening of the Finale, where a typical, characterful melody takes hold, beguilingly, stretching it till the time for the Coda, triplets, brought it quickly to an end.

Wild Cherry Tree
The main piece in the first half was a premiere commissioned by Prof. Jack Richards from Gao Ping, for some years lecturer in music at Canterbury University. Wild Cherry Tree is based on folk tales and impressions from the region where he was born – Sichuan, the province in south-central China, east of Tibet. The vocal parts, presumably in Mandarin, or the Sichuan dialect of Mandarin, were sung by counter-tenor Xiao Ma and bass Roger Wilson. The first thing to record was the size of the orchestra, normal late-Romantic – four horns, though just double woodwinds and trumpets. But the back row could have marked it as a post-serialist juggernaut, with several keyed percussion instruments, a variety of drums, a set of three tuned gongs, claves and certain items whose names escape me. Their noise, dominated initially by timpani and bass drum, was impressive, but it was often refined by sensitively blended woodwinds, as well as the many more subtle percussion items.

The first of the four ‘movements’ was sung by Wilson whose pronunciation was a matter of admiration, though there remained a European timbre that no amount of linguistic virtuosity, with which he is generously equipped, can disguise. Without recourse to the programme notes, I might have been hard-pressed to attribute the sounds to ‘Snow-capped mountains’. But then, scenic or narrative associations of music often escape me and rarely seem relevant in my appreciation of music, particularly of Asian music which seems to be much devoted to landscape and other visual sources. So I found the orchestral episodes elucidated the vocal parts, and as the music passed, its meaning and emotional qualities and made increasing musical sense.

The second part, ‘Scarlet Horse’, seemed to have set itself challenging subject matter: ‘overlapping romantic relationship between past and present, fantasy and reality, with contrasting visual images… roaming the world on a scarlet horse’. If the theme seemed to be a matter of some obscurity, galloping rhythms enlivened it, and the actual sung episodes delivered by Xiao Ma’s counter-tenor offered a musical experience that felt perfectly matched and coherent. The timbre of his voice, of rare purity and beauty worked persuasively to suggest what we have come to associate with Chinese music even though the pentatonic scale did not dominate the soundscape. Later, the two voices duetted, sometimes in passages that were colourful and animated, sometimes in what I took to be wordless episodes.

The counter-tenor alone sang through the third part, ‘Little Flower’, accompanied by percussion, including the small gongs, marimba and high, delicate woodwinds. flutes. Both voices shared the fourth movement, ‘Under the Wild Cherry Tree’, with the two alternating in a sort of dialogue, charmingly, with delicate string playing, alongside tuned percussion.

This was a challenging score in every way, though not in the avant-garde, contemporary western music sense; there was no doubt that the orchestra’s success with it flowed from some serious rehearsal under conductor Taddei along with the orchestra’s high level of musical skill that can easily be unremarked.

Dvořák’s Seventh
It was Dvořák’s 7th symphony from which the concert’s name ‘London’ derived (though oddly, that was mentioned neither in the season brochure nor in the evening’s programme book; however, it had been mentioned in much earlier publicity). It was first performed in London in 1885 (he made nine visits to England between 1884 and 1896). The composer himself regarded it very highly.

With their decision to feature five Dvořák symphonies this year, Taddei and the orchestra have already shown their flair and affection for his music; I hope that audiences have understood how his earlier symphonies, and not just those numbered 1 to 4 which had earlier been excluded from the canon altogether, have been seriously under-exposed as a result of what I feel is the blind popularity of the Ninth. The Fifth and especially the Sixth have been revealed as very fine works, but the last three are more or less on a par, i.e. to be compared with Schumann’s and Brahms’s, and some scholars rate the Seventh as the best; I’m so inclined as well.

This was a beautiful, sensitive performance that explored all the delicate and meditative aspects of this D minor work, a key that for some reason most composers have used to convey sadness, grief, sometimes anger, certainly, seriousness of purpose. (Mozart’s piano concerto no 20 and Brahms’s first piano concerto, the Choral Symphony, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet, Mozart’s Requiem, Franck’s symphony, Bruckner’s ninth, Sibelius’s sixth, Shostakovich’s fifth symphonies…. )

Those characteristics were evident right from the beginning: sombre, with restless, uneasy melodies, but before long these same ideas acquire a feeling of contentment, with passages that are optimistic and almost joyous, and it slowly subsides to end peacefully. The orchestra captured the greatness of the second movement, with its beautiful, near flawless horn passages, and descending themes that expressed a meditative spirit, a mood that for all the composer’s joyful, Slavonic flavoured music, harbours very a deep pensiveness, and the playing here was both meticulous and moving.

There is also a very special character about the Scherzo which, miraculously, combines the jocular, a feeling of contentment with looming sadness. There is a remarkable persistence of mood and musical spirit throughout the work, with a feeling of inevitability as movement follows movement. That seemed especially strong at the end of the vigorous Scherzo and opening of the very deliberate, serious-minded Finale: the two movements, superficially in tempo, far apart but their moods are so satisfyingly complementary.

I think I have recently lamented the way musical taste gets dominated by a single ‘great’ work by a composer, in each genre, and that’s true for Dvořák; for me this fine performance of the Seventh, emphatically put the New World in its place: not above, but simply in the same class of musical inspiration and integrity as the 7th (and the 8th, which we come to in October; not to mention last month’s 6th which used for a long time to be a cherished cassette tape companion in the car).

The programme might have looked a bit lacking a common theme, with a big, pageant-like Chinese work between a Mozart concerto and the Dvořák; but it proved a wonderfully enjoyable evening.

 

Ensemble Zefiro a breath of fresh, tangy air in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
ENSEMBLE ZEFIRO

Alfredo Bernardini , Paolo Grazzi – oboes
Alberto Grazzi, Giorgio Mandolesi – bassoons
Dileno Baldin, Francesco Meucci – horns

HANDEL – Due arie HWV 410,411
Marcia in F Major HWV 346
FASCH – Sonata in G Minor, FWV N:g1
TELEMANN – Ouverture in F Major TWV 55:F9
HAYDN – Parthia in C Major Hob.II.7
MOZART – Divertimento in E-flat, K.252/240a.

Michael Fowler Centre,

Friday 10th August, 2018

I’ve copied out the titles of the pieces as per programme, which accounts for the unusual names for aria (arie), overture (ouverture) and partita (Parthia), the last of which I thought at first was some kind of misprint. But no – there it was – Parthia, an alternative form of “partita”. So as it was something I didn’t know before I thought it was worth committing to review! However I must admit to being a little bemused by something else in the programme, the description of the Greek God Zefiro (whose name the ensemble has adopted) as “tender and Kind”, when I knew the legend of the same God’s jealous petulance which prompted the mean-spirited act of using his powers to blow a discus off course to disrupt a game between Apollo and a young boy, Hyacinth, whom Zefiro fancied – which ploy went horribly wrong when the object hit and killed Hyacinth! – the best-laid plans, etc…….still. there are so many conflicting stories regarding these deities, it’s a case of “pick-and-choose” when it comes to identifying with certain personalities and their traits. (hmmm – I’d better get on with the review, I suppose…….)

I loved the ensemble’s playing, right from the beginning, though I must admit that Handel’s music is one of those phenomena happily available to all and sundry that simply can’t help inducing a sense of well-being and contentment on contact! Here, straightaway, we in the audience (a decently-stocked ground floor at the MFC) were simply buoyed along by the energy, wit and charm of the composer’s seemingly limitless invention, fully realised by the ensemble’s playing. And what made the music even more endearing on this occasion were those characterful “authentic-instrument” sounds, the arrestingly nasal oboes, the throaty bassoons and the fruity (if occasionally asthmatic) horns. The point of the exercise seemed to me to refreshingly differentiate and contrast, rather than blend and smooth over, the different strands, the distinctive voices.  Why, I found myself thinking, as the music went along, would you want to “blend” sounds in a way that negated so much character and individuality, of the kind that was on show here?

Well, as Ecclesiastes says, there’s a time for everything, a time to blend and a time to differentiate (to coin an extremely unpoetic phrase!). It was simply refreshing to encounter an evening’s playing which seemed to proclaim “Vive la difference!” rather than seek to contain, control and smooth out differences in sounds. Not that Ensemble Zefiro couldn’t “blend” when they wanted to – but even when they did no individual strand or timbre disappeared or lost any of its character. It’s a quality I sometimes encounter when playing older orchestral or wind ensemble recordings, on which one hears sounds that are individual to the point of being quite “ornery” at certain moments – afterwards, turning to recordings of almost any 21st-century orchestra one finds oneself at a loss to discern any individual “character” in the actual sound, however skilled the playing might be.

Another quality that the authentic instrumental timbres underlined in the music was its “out-of-doors” aspect, and not only regarding the horns – in the second of the Handel “Arie” (HWV 411) I felt a kind of “spaciousness” about the sounds, a ready evocation of the “al fresco”, to do with, perhaps, a number of things, the players standing in a line accentuating the music’s antiphonal aspect, and the spaciousness of the Michael Fowler Centre, not to mention the horns in particular having “outdoor” associations anyway. But regarding the last point, both oboes and bassoons here took on more of a rustic character than I often associate with them – and in fact, the group’s spokesperson, Alfredo Bernadini, alluded to this “out-of-door” association, ironically when introducing a very different work by the evening’s second composer, Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758).  Bernadini described Fasch’s piece, a Sonata in G Minor for two oboes and bassoon, plus bassoon continuo, as much more “chamber” and intimate in style.

The piece opened with a Largo movement,  the tones sombre and plaintive, and the instrumental timbres expressive and gorgeously fruity. One could hear before long why it was that JS Bach had a high regard for Fasch’s music, with the piece moving steadily and unerringly towards an expressive climax immediately leading to the second movement Allegro. Here was zest and bounce aplenty in the writing, the oboes offering chattering melodic leads and the bassoon delicious stepwise counterpoints. The composer replicated his markings for the following two movements, the second Largo enabling the bassoon to demonstrate its engagingly wheezy lyrical tones, working with its continuo partner in figurations an octave apart, and sounding like a pair of ancient, characterful voices! The Allegro finale really put the onus on one of the bassoons with an insanely virtuosic part, the notes literally flying from his instrument!

Telemann’s music then made an appearance, an “Ouverture in F Major”, a work written along the lines of JS Bach’s Orchestral Suites, consisting of an initial piece also called an “ouverture” followed by a number of French dances – while Bach wrote only four such words for instrumental ensemble, Telemann produced well over a hundred. This particular Ouverture (or “Suite”), for two oboes, two horns and bassoon continuo, was nicknamed “The Hunt”, referring in part, perhaps, to the prominence given the pair of horns in the work.

Certainly the opening piece gave the pair ample opportunity to make their presence felt, mostly by interrupting the more garrulous oboes at every possible opportunity, reminding them that they were still “here”. The Allegro section of the opening was spectacularly marked by the horns with a fanfare-like figure, again keeping a watchful ear on what the oboes and bassoon were doing. Throughout, the bassoon seemed almost an intermediary between the garrulous Montague-like oboes and the volatile Capulet-like horns, calling the ensemble to order when things got outlandish (particularly the occasional hi-jinks from the Capulets!).

Right through the course of the dances, the instrumental detailings gave us great delight, chirpy phrases galore from the oboes and occasional blasts of wind from the horns during both of the Passepied sections, a lovely glow illuminated with horn calls during the Sarabande, fanfares and giggles at the ends of phrases further enlivening the Rigaudon, and a dignified, regal sweep and grandly processional poise accompanying the concluding Le Plaisir. The ensemble certainly gave us “moments per minute” during this varied and entertaining sequence.

An interval later we were taken into the classical world of Haydn and Mozart, necessitating a change of instruments for the oboe- and bassoon-players. Thanks in part to the cheekiness of Haydn’s writing for the ensemble in the first movement of his Parthia in C Major, we didn’t notice as sharply as we might have the change in actual “engagement” of the instrumental sound, the tones smoother and more elegant-sounding in themselves, though here employed by the composer in ear-catching ways with writing whose wit and sparkle recalled  certain of the composer’s piano sonatas. The first of the work’s five movements featured a fanfare-like leading motif being tossed about in gay abandon, and given extra pomposity by the horns, and finishing with an abruptly-turned phrase which left a single low note unashamedly exposed (I involuntarily snorted with laughter, and had to apologise to my companion at the next break in the music!).

A regal and dignified Menuet-and-Trio began with oboes only, before turning to a Trio section with delightfully emphatic horns, all of which preceded an Adagio with a lovely, easeful rhythmic carriage, the oboes rhapsodising, the bassoons gently jog-trotting and the horns contributing answering or “rounding-off” phrases – everything so beautifully and expressively played. Then came ANOTHER Menuet-and-Trio, this time lots of minor-key staccato strutting, completely different in character to the one before. Haydn then rounded off the work with an unbuttoned presto gallop across the fields for all concerned, the bassoons performing miracles of articulation and repeated-note playing, and horns whooping in delight, the piece finishing with a Beethovenish “take that!” gesture!

The Mozart Divertimento K.252/240a in E-flat concluded the programme in style – the ensemble generated an engaging “swing” to the rhythm over which the oboes sounded the melody, the horns and bassoons easefully alternating between chordings and “echo phrases”. The Menuetto was a sprightly dance with gloriously “burbled” horn-writing, exhilaratingly performed, before a rather strange Trio section with a repeated descending figure, here played faster than the main dance, for some reason – it sounded merely as though the players wanted to get it over with so they could get back to the real fun!

Then came, rather unexpectedly, a Polonaise, its rhythm catchy and foot-tapping, like a popular dance number – some lovely antiphonal writing here, which the ensemble coloured nicely with varied dynamics, the horns making much of the rhythm’s syncopations. Presto assai said the finale, and the players responded with energy and wit, finishing with a flourish! We thought the players would by then have “blown themselves out”, but they generously came back for an encore – one, moreover, with a difference, a work entitled “Homage to Haydn” (sitting some way back from the platform as we were, neither my friend nor I could quite make out the announcement of the actual composer’s name).

Beginning with and establishing an infectiously strutting march reminiscent of Haydn’s “Military” Symphony, the music reached what we all thought sounded like a concluding cadence, but then continued, despite one of the bassoonists standing up, bowing, and then leaving the platform and coming down into the auditorium as the others played on. After another sequence had finished, one of the horn players did the same thing, followed a few measures later by the second horn player, leaving the oboists and one of the bassoonists continuing to play! One by one, each oboist finished a phrase, and then stood up and left the platform, with the single bassoonist left – he played a doleful-sounding minor-key cadenza-like passage finishing with a trill, and then stood up, acknowledging our laughter and applause, as did the others who rejoined him.  It was all great fun, and completely in accord with the delight we’d experienced and enjoyed throughout the concert.