Category: Reviews – Concerts

Paul Dukas’s Sonata the climax of John Chen’s monumental Waikanae piano recital

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Waikanae Music Society presents
John Chen (piano)

Music by Handel, Chopin and Dukas

HANDEL – Keyboard Suite No.8 in F minor HWV 433
CHOPIN – Piano Sonata No.2 in B-flat Minor Op.35
DUKAS – Piano Sonata in E-flat Minor (1900)

Memorial Hall, Waikanae.

Sunday 22nd April, 2018

April has been a bumper month for piano recitals in the Wellington region, this being the third I’ve attended and reviewed in as many weeks. What’s astonished me about each of them has been their utter distinctiveness, with not a single recurring piece between the three, and a sense of adventure very much to the fore in each instance, in terms of the repertoire and its presentation.

Firstly, Michael Houstoun’s Lower Hutt recital wrought a well-nigh flawless balance of sensibility between a group of contrasting pieces whose overall qualities enhanced the uniqueness of character demonstrated by each one in turn, to wondrous effect. The following day, Jason Bae’s lunchtime recital at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music’s Adam Concert Room presented a demanding group of virtuoso works, which included a New Zealand premiere alongside three rarely-performed others, all played with finely-honed sensitivity and terrific panache.

And, just last Sunday, a Waikanae audience enjoyed the rich elegance and cumulative power of John Chen’s playing of three works representative of their different eras – baroque, romantic and fin de siècle – to overwhelming effect by the concert’s end. Honours were perhaps divided between the last two pianists regarding  enterprise in terms of rarity, with Bae playing an “off-the beaten track” programme, and Chen giving us a rather more substantial work from a composer, Paul Dukas, whose fame of course largely rests with a single work, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”.

As well, like Houstoun’s, I thought Chen’s programme cleverly worked out, the pianist taking his audience on a kind of grand tour of innovatory keyboard music from three very different eras. Handel, of course, represents the Baroque sensibility at its most winning and attractive, with the choice of the eighth of the composer’s keyboard suites a particularly poignant one, due partly to the “dark” key of F Minor.

Solemn, yet still with a flow expressing both shape and energy, Chen contoured the music’s opening pages with all the colour and variety of tone available on a modern grand piano, a sense of expectation preparing us for the Fugue which followed the Prelude. I liked the pianist’s balancing a sense of fun amid the fugue’s forthright utterances, giving the music its composer’s characteristic “living” quality. The Allemande beguiled us in Chen’s hands firstly with its opening simplicity, and then with its embellishments at each section’s repeat, while the Courante delightfully set its canonic voices in teasing, playful, motion, though still allowing the final Gigue pride of place in conclusive momentum. Here was beautifully pin-pointed playing from Chen, both free-flowing and and angular by turns, the repeats with their inversions of the opening tickling our sensibilities with their delightful “on the other hand” insouciant wryness, the conclusion thrown off with a theatrical touch of elan.

With the Chopin Sonata’s opening, Chen then plunged us into a different world of romantic expression, giving the portentous opening plenty of dramatic weight, but then tempering the wildness of the following allegro, the playing allowing the agitations some shape and coherent utterance, propulsive without becoming hysterical. We got the first movement repeat to underline this balancing act between heart and mind, Chen actually going right back to the Sonata’s beginning, here, instead of merely re-immersing us directly in the turbulent waters of the Allegro, The development continued the pianist’s way of shaping the discourse, the climactic points treated as part of the music’s flow rather than ends of excitement and release in themselves.

Perhaps Chen was commenting in his own wry way on Chopin’s friend and contemporary Robert Schuman’s extraordinary verdict on the Sonata as a whole, calling the work’s movements “four of Chopin’s maddest children” (this from the composer of Kreisleriana!). Here, the music seemed to fit sonata-form like a glove, as justly as had Beethoven’s similar gestures and propulsions in his revolutionary “Pathetique” Sonata’s first movement over a generation earlier. The second movement’s vigorous opening, too, had more of a chunky, almost laconic quality with Chen, rather than seeming to express anything sinister or demonic-sounding in its intent. This seemed far more in keeping with the lyricism of the central section, its beauties resembling tender endearments more readily to my ears than prayer or invocation in times of trouble.

That feeling of relief from oppression belonged more here to the world-famous third movement’s trio sequence, its heavenly beauties realised by Chen with hypnotic focus and powerful simplicity, all the more effective when set against the dark menace of the opening “Funeral March”. The pianist conveyed impressive ceremonial splendour in his playing of the march’s noble melody, as well as grimmer realities with his tolling dotted rhythms and drum-roll trills, though again, everything was as musical as it was graphic, the “madness” not discounted by the playing but kept at bay.

Surely one of the boldest strokes of genius with which to round off a classical work was Chopin’s finale, the part of the work which gave Schumann the most difficulty, in that he couldn’t accept the whirlwind of notes that the former gave us as “music”- vis-a-vis his actual words – “….what we get in the final movement under the title “Finale” seems more like a mockery than any music……and yet, one has to admit, even from this unmelodic and joyless movement a peculiar, frightful spirit touches us, which holds down with an iron fist those who would like to revolt against it, so that we listen as if spellbound  and without complaint to the very end, yet also without praise, for music it is not………” Yet Schumann also had the grace to admit, in the same article, that “perhaps years later, a romantic  grandson will be born and raised, will dust off and play the sonata, and will think to himself, “The man was not so wrong after all.”

John Chen took the music at face-value, perhaps underplaying the romantically-charged impulses generated by the hands in unison by bringing out the delineations of notes with more clarity than usual, but still creating for the poetically-minded a picture of “the wind blowing the leaves across the freshly-dug mound of the hero’s grave”. Had Schumann heard a performance such as this he might well have upped and exclaimed that the music’s time had indeed arrived, and that the “romantic grandson” had already been born and raised, and was here showing us how “right” the composer’s work was already sounding in his hands…….

Having reimagined the relatively familiar, Chen then turned his attentions to a work more heard about than actually played, up until recently the preserve of pianistic legends such as John Ogdon and Marc-Andre Hamelin. This was Paul Dukas’s epic Piano Sonata, grandly-conceived and densely-worked in typically rich, late-Romantic language, a work whose four-movement design and monumental scale actually exceeds half the total duration of the composer’s entire published output (Dukas was notoriously self-critical as a composer).

Though Dukas, unlike some of his contemporaries, was no great pianistic talent, his Sonata remains one of the most significant of French Romantic Piano works. Dedicated to Saint-Saens, and first performed by the renowned French pianist Edouard Reisler in 1901, the work was at once acclaimed by Debussy who wrote a review, stating at the outset that “Monsieur Paul Dukas knows what music is made of : it is not just brilliant sound designed to beguile the ear until it can stand no more… For him it is an endless treasure trove of possible forms and souvenirs with which he can cut his ideas to the measure of his imagination.” Though the music brings to mind something of the profundity of Beethoven, the brilliance of Liszt and the harmonic richness of Franck, it directly reflects Dukas’s own creative ethic, both structure and emotion realised in discursive, though beautifully-sculpted ways, the outcome at once refined and concentrated, leaving the impression of not a single note being wasted.

John Chen began the work steadily and patiently, letting the detailings “unfold”, and giving the impression of the music and musician allowing each to “play” the other, such was his apparent absorption in the sounds and their interaction. Here, the first group of themes gave a dark-browed and troubled impression, while the second calmed the agitations with melting lyricism, here shared in canonic manner between the hands, and there sounded in the bass with deep, rich tones, the contrasting sequences playing out their characters with both volatility and deep reflectiveness, the latter beautifully sustained here by the pianist throughout the movement’s coda.

A chordal melody, reminiscent of Edward MacDowell’s contemporaneous “To a Wild Rose” in feeling, began the slow movement, albeit with a series of delicate chromatic explorations that soon took the music’s textures and tones far above “Woodland Scenes” to what seemed like the firmament overhead…….here, Chen’s fastidious ear for detail brought out a kaleidoscopic world of sensation and impulse, his beautifully-resonant bass-notes opening up the vistas, and his gentle but insistent cross-rhythmed traversals of the terrain having an almost epic Brucknerian quality in places. And, finally, the pianist’s reproducing of the composer’s remotely twinkling “stars in the sky”- like impulse-notes which brought the movement to a close I found simply enthralling.

What an explosion of energy and frenzy accompanied the opening of the Scherzo! – rapid-fire impulses punctuated by whiplash chords! Tumultuous sounds, here brought about by the pianist’s fantastic control of both declamatory utterance and eerily-voiced mutterings. Even greater surprise it was, then, to be confronted with a sudden hiatus in the form of a slow-paced, angular fugue, a trio-like section whose quiet, almost disembodied tones had a disturbing quality of their own akin to that of the eye of a storm, remote, almost alien in relation to their context.

Debussy thought the Sonata’s finale “evokes the kind of beauty comparable to the perfect lines of a mighty architecture, lines that melt and blend with the colours of air and open sky, harmonizing with them completely and forever”. Certainly the grand chords with which the movement began suggested imposing structures, around which were woven meditative-like musings, which eventually gave way to the muscular thrusts that began the anime section. From these swirlings a grand theme emerged, not unlike Franck in heroic mode. John Chen’s energies were remarkable in conjuring up the necessary weight and stamina to realise these epic outpourings. The return of the opening of the theme was a heart-warming moment, which became more energised, with exciting motoric accompaniments, and with various inventive  treatments of it thrown at us to make of what we could – a ferment of excitement! The gradual amplification of these elements generated an echt-romantic glow in Chen’s hands, almost pre-Hollywood in its scale (Debussy’s “lines that melt and blend with the colours of air and open sky”….), before the apotheosis-like climax brought forth the coda, by turns brilliant and monumental in effect. With playing that engaged the the music fully ,the pianist carried his audience with him right to the end, earning, and richly deserving, rapturous acclaim from all sides. Bravo!

 

 

Sasha Cooke’s entrancing Berlioz songs, a bewitching premiere and masterpieces of Debussy and Ravel: thanks to De Waart and the NZSO

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edo de Waart with mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke

Salina Fisher: Tupaia (premiere)
Berlioz: Les nuits d’été, Op. 7
Debussy: La mer
Ravel: Boléro

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 21 April 2018, 7:30 pm

Though this turned out a great concert with an enthusiastic reception of Ravel’s Boléro at the end, I had heard a number of less than excited reactions to the programme beforehand. There’s an ‘attitude’ surrounding Boléro, and not the whole world loves Debussy as much as the music historians generally do. That left Les nuits d’ été, but then there are still a sad few who have inherited an earlier, unregenerate attitude towards Berlioz.

Sasha Cooke will be remembered for her April 2012 concert with the NZSO, singing Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Which I reviewed with very happily, and later that month she sang Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer, in a concert that also included La mer (does Sasha have a psychic connection with the sea?).

Tupaia 
But the programme had begun with a new commission from Salina Fisher, getting in early to celebrate next year’s 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage to New Zealand. Tupaia was the Tahitian with an extraordinary knowledge of Pacific navigation who was persuaded by Joseph Banks to join Cook’s expedition seeking ‘the great southern continent’, and reaching New Zealand (a bit of a let-down).

The composer wrote that her work drew “inspiration from the idea of celestial navigation: the constant and gradual shift in perspective necessary to perceive the ‘rise and fall’ of stars and ultimately to move forward”. It began with that low almost inaudible sound that opens Also sprach Zarathustra, expectant, mysterious, mostly from strings but then with chimes from the high register of the marimba, drums and eventually brass and other instruments. The arrival of alto flute lent a touch of clarity to the sound suggesting clear skies in a starry night.

Though she didn’t succumb to any obvious or hackneyed sea-depicting devices, Fisher’s music rose and fell over its eight minute duration, evoking generally subdued imagery, undefined, unpretentious, though undoubtedly inducing a sense of isolation in an empty ocean.

Les nuits d’ été  
Berlioz’s great cycle of six songs by Théophile Gautier was for me the main and most engrossing work on the programme. Berlioz is my favourite French composer, and I’m not given to ranking people; but aware of the long years when so many critics and music historians determined not to recognise his genius, when I had fallen in love with the Symphonie fantastique at an early age, has made me a rather fervent proselyte. And it has helped feed a consuming francophilia in general.

If I’d found Sasha Cooke’s Mahler songs so enrapturing six years ago, I found each of these melodies, in turn, beautifully articulated, restrained, illuminating so perfectly both the melodies and Berlioz’s subtle and sympathetic orchestrations. Le spectre de la rose ranks as one of the most inspired and moving creations, right up with the most lovely of Schubert and Schumann Lieder (and Berlioz composed his cycle in 1840, Schumann’s year of Lieder: something in the air?). Her modest and undemonstrative singing through its long lines captured the magical sense of Gautier’s poems without artifice or unnecessary emphasis, even in the second, more intense stanza.

And in Sur les lagunes her warm and rich mezzo voice found beautiful engagement, hovering as it does around the lower register, yet rising in passion to match the words of the last lines.

After both Le spectre and Lagunes there was clapping, hesitant perhaps but driven, I felt, not through unawareness of the conventions, but by an overwhelming compulsion; I felt the same.

There’s a kind of recitative element in Absence, immaculate, poignant, this one reveals the lost love that is perhaps at the heart of the entire cycle; Cooke’s slow, aching interpretation with its long pauses was so breath-taking that even the impulse to clap its exquisite performance was stilled.

Au cimitière, rather than a funereal utterance such as one might expect, expresses more complex, varied emotions and here her voice found a more overt spirit; each stanza in turn so individual, interpreting so acutely the sense of the lines. Finally, L’île inconnue, ends the cycle with the most up-beat song, yet again it’s discreet, a model of sympathetic orchestration, characteristic of French orchestral clarity and consideration for the singer, and with keen attention to the audibility of every syllable. Whatever the great strengths of the music of the second half, this music and this singer left Les nuitsd’été for me the best thing of the evening.

La mer is probably, after L’après-midi d’un faune, the most played of Debussy’s orchestral works; and I wonder why we don’t hear all or even parts of Images more often, or Nocturnes.

I had the strange, fleeting impression of a connection between the opening bars of La mer and Salina Fisher’s piece. Even though here were harp and timpani and cellos… capturing dawn over a calm sea; but Debussy employs more overt visual impressions, though I have rarely found it useful or even interesting to seek extra-musical notions to embellish music or assist appreciation of it. Fortunately, this music, and its superbly careful and balanced playing under De Waart needs no props. While not in any way denigrating the orchestral virtuosity of Debussy’s foreign contemporaries, schooled in other musical environments, the traditions passed down through the Paris Conservatoire from Berlioz (not that he taught there), lived through Franck and Lalo, Saint-Saëns and Bizet, D’Indy, Chausson, Fauré…. to Debussy and Ravel.

Clapping again broke out at the end of De l’aube à midi sur la mer: deserved for sure, but did they think at about eight minutes, it was all over?

The performance was beautifully balanced, again orchestral parts integrated so that brass, under perfect control, can be heard so consummately judged in the space, without the engineering that gives a rather dishonest impression of the sound to the record listener.

Finally Boléro. No matter how often one might have heard it – and live performances are not that common – there is something truly hypnotic about its sheer repetitiveness and I have never failed to feel its unique force in a live performance in the concert hall (on record, it’s a quite different matter). Ravel himself remarked that though there was no music in it, “it was a masterpiece”.

Except that there is music in it. It simply takes the most fundamental device in most music – the repetition of a theme, usually several themes, over and over, and generally varied in many ways (ever counted the number of times principal themes in many of Schubert’s works are played, with little change?). With Boléro his tune is varied at every reiteration – through its instrumentation: where is the compositional law forbidding that?

This was paced with perfect discretion, deriving through a steady if imperceptible crescendo along with the bewitching instrumental additions, a riveting performance. There was no doubt, noting the stentorian applause and shouting, that it had again worked its ‘illegitimate’ magic on most of us.

NZSM Orchestra’s “Triple” celebration with the Te Kōkī Trio

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music  presents:
Music by Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy and Lilburn

BRAHMS – Tragic Overture
BEETHOVEN – Concerto for ‘cello, violin and piano with orchestra
DEBUSSY – Nocturnes (excerpts) – 1. Nuages  2.Fetes
LILBURN – Suite for Orchestra (1955)

Te Kōkī Trio : Inbal Megiddo (‘cello), Martin Riseley (violin), Jian Liu (piano)
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Kenneth Young (conductor)

St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace, Wellington

Tuesday, 17th April, 2018

There was palpable excitement among those gathering within the none-too-spacious vistas of  St.Andrew’s-on-The-Terrace Church for the most recent concert given by Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music’s Orchestra with conductor Kenneth Young, most certainly due to the event’s extra attraction in presenting the fabulous Te Kōkī Trio as guest soloists in Beethoven’s wondrous Triple Concerto! – of course, each of the Trio’s soloists are currently heads of their respective instrumental disciplines at the School of Music in any case, which somehow added to the integral splendour and prestige of the occasion.

Under Kenneth Young’s tutorship this orchestra has seemed to me to gradually develop over the years the skills and confidence needed to tackle works from the standard repertoire which I would have considered ambitious to a fault for student players to even attempt, and proceeded to bring them off with considerable elan. True, the students always appear to have heart-warming support from their various tutors in performance, even when the latter are performing as soloists – we noticed, for example how both Inbal Megiddo (‘cello) and Martin Riseley (violin) from Te Kōkī Trio joined the full orchestra after the interval, in the wake of their Beethoven performance – and I feel certain that Jian Liu (piano) would have done the same had there been a keyboard part for him to play! But there were a number of others, whom the programme rightly named, spread across the various disciplines, whose presence in the band would have been empowering, to say the least!

It’s a scenario which seems to augur well for continued first-class performances by New Zealand orchestral musicians in this country, let alone develop the players’ individual instrumental skills for solo and smaller ensemble work. What we’re all waiting for in Wellington, now, is a venue that’s rather more accommodating spacious than St.Andrew’s  for orchestras such as the NZSM ensemble, without resorting to the capacious vistas of the MFC – which can even dwarf both Orchestra Wellington and the NZSO, depending on the numbers required for particular repertoire. So, how far advanced is the Town Hall’s promised earthquake restoration project, again?

This evening we were given an eclectic programme, each piece a challenge for the players in its different way, as befitted the concert’s purpose. First up was the hoary old Tragic Overture, by Brahms, which I confess I wasn’t heart-thumpingly excited about hearing – possibly because I’ve sat through many an “auto-pilot” performance of this music, seeming to amble through its paces with little “edge” given the attack, phrasings or rhythms, “standard fare” at its worst. Happily, Ken Young and his players obviously had no intentions of the music being made to sound anything other than totally enthralling, right from the first note – the attack of those first two chords was electrifying, the ensuing atmosphere charged with expectation, and the focused trajectories of the music that followed leading urgently and surely towards drama and excitement.

Conductor and players brought about this state of things by keeping the focus the whole time on where the music was headed, and then committing themselves to realising those cadence-points with the utmost concentration and urgency. Consequently, the music became the conduit through which all the efforts of the players passed, the result feeling like a kind of “living entity”, instead of merely a well-polished run-through. The passionate urgencies of the string-playing in the first, agitated section were beautifully contrasted by the poised eloquence of the winds during their more lyrical sequences mid-work, the oboist the most prominent of a number of heroes, here. The winds all made characterful and plangent contributions right up to the heart-warming burst of sunshine from the horns that allowed the violas their generously-phrased moment of glory before handing over to the violins.

There was no let-up, no slackening of tensions right up to the end of the piece, with the strings again squaring up to the conflict and matched by the winds’ and brass’s darkly passionate colourings and the timpani’s steady underpinning of the climaxes. If all performances of this work evoked such a spirit among orchestral players, I would happily change my tune regarding the music – here, the piece was made to bristle and boil, its trenchant sounds recreating a living sense of tragedy.

Having been nicely “primed” by these expressive urgencies, we were all the more expectant of the delights that the next piece of music would bring – Beethoven’s warm-hearted Triple Concerto, which brought to the performing platform the three aforementioned soloists from the Te Kōkī Trio. With a grand piano and two other places for string soloists required in front of the orchestra, the auditorium’s capacities were put under some stress, though with the help of the upstairs balcony, everybody seemed to fit in, just! As well they did, because the performance was of an order that will, I believe, give rise to reminiscences of the “Ah! – you should have been there to hear…” variety from among those present, in years to come.

The opening orchestral tutti is, quite simply, for me, one of those “squirming-with-delight” sequences whose ambience evokes a kind of cosmos eminently receptive to human habitation, a state of potential being amply filled by the arrival of the soloists, one at a time, here, all personalities in their own right, and imbued with interactive skills of all kinds. Inbal Megiddo’s ‘cello was the first to “appear”, brightly-and eloquently-voiced and very much at one with Martin Riseley’s violin, both relishing their triplet figurations that prepared the way for the piano. Jian Liu’s playing straight away had a matching, bright-eyed eagerness which readily gravitated to the mode of enthusiastic exchange that characterised most of this movement.

 

To reproduce all of my scribbled notes regarding this performance (I was, I confess, somewhat carried away by the sheer eloquence of the playing from both soloists and orchestra) would be sheer folly, like comparing prosaic mutterings to Shakespearian poetry – so I will confine myself to comments which somehow convey a sense of the whole. I particularly enjoyed Inbal Megiddo’s playing at the top of her range, with Beethoven making sure the instrument could be heard at nearly all times; and both hers and Martin Riseley’s violin-playing created a teasingly entertaining combination of exchange and unanimity in their passagework, with Jian Liu’s bright-toned piano adding both colour and a multi-voiced aspect of character to the discourse. This reached its first-movement apex both at the climax of the “development” section, and towards the end, with a “sighing” three-note descent leading to the coda, the three soloists scurrying through their firstly upward and then downward scales with great alacrity, amid crashing orchestral chords – so exciting!

The slow movement exuded pure romance at the outset, the orchestral strings’ rapt tones preparing the way for the ‘cello’s singing entry – a treasurable moment! The gently undulating piano followed carrying the melody forward, with violin and piano singing in tandem, before the violin was allowed ITS moment – honour was thus satisfied, the orchestra then essaying a dark and mysterious clarinet-led Weber-like sequence, which brought the soloists in singly by way of arpeggiated musings. Of a sudden, the ‘cello seemed to want to go out and play, and it was all on again, via the finale – though on this occasion I thought Inbal Megiddo’s playing more dutiful-sounding than enthusiastic with her introduction, a beginning that didn’t quite for me, launch things with sufficient “gusto”.  It took the orchestra to really set the polonaise-like rhythms on fire, though once the soloists reached their concerted “racy triplet rhythms” passage, punctuated at the end by the orchestra, things found their “stride” with a will, and there was no looking-back!

In fact the playing of the finale from here on generated tremendous momentum, which was thrilling in its own way, though I ought to register my fondness (excuses, excuses!) for the legendary, but much-maligned Karajan-led EMI recording of the 1970s with its starry lineup of Russian soloists, because of the po-faced “schwung” created in parts of that performance’s finale, particularly those minor-key polonaise-dance sequences. Here, by contrast, it was all thrust and counter-thrust, with those racy triplet-rhythms sounding positively dangerous at the performance’s speed, the risk-taking element inextricably tied up with the music’s joyous quality.

As for the helter-skelter coda (or rather, Coda No.1!), we simply gripped the sides of our seats and held on as Martin Riseley’s violin raced forwards, gathering up both ‘cello and piano, and challenging the orchestra to continue the chase, which they did, most excitingly! After various soloistic ups and downs, the piano introduced “Coda No.2”, a return to the polonaise dance rhythm, punctuated by great chordings from the orchestra and a brief frisson of skittery triplets from the soloists, and we were home, to the accompaniment of deservedly rapturous acclaim from all sides!

We all needed the interval to let off some rhapsodic steam in the direction of anybody else who would listen (most of the others were busy doing the same thing!). Once done, we gradually brought our metabolisms back down to normal from fever pitch, and settled back into our seats for the very different musical offerings of the concert’s second half.

The first of Debussy’s Nocturnes, Nuages (Clouds) began as if the sounds were reconstructing New Zealand poet Dennis Glover’s words in music – “detonated clouds in calm confusion lie”, with winds and strings enabling the phrases and textures confidently yet sensitively, the cor anglais mournfully repeating a motif that practically became a mantra for the scene, while the strings wove diaphanous sounds whose intensity varied as if controlled by unseen magic, the horn calling from a kind of fairy-nymph land of promise, and the winds floating their airborne phrases with great surety, a blip or two of no consequence against the steady evocation of timelessness, here beautifully realised by conductor Young and his players.

As for the second piece, Fêtes (Festivals), it straightaway seized our sensibilities by the ears, with the strings’ joyous clarion-call attack, infectious tarantella rhythms featuring excitable winds and  great brass shouts reinforced by timpani, with a spectacular flourish from the harp and percussion re-igniting the music’s thrust in a different direction – all so visceral and scalp-prickling! After we got further excitable exchanges between winds and strings – the latter barely able to contain their growing excitement – the distant procession’s sounds suddenly fell magically upon our ears from the harp and lower strings (Ottorino Respighi surely had this passage in mind when writing the last of his “Pines of Rome” in 1924), the remote brass calls creating magical vistas as the music moved forward, Ken Young controlling his forces like a general, and his troops marshalling their various forces with a will.  Horns shouted a welcome to the oncoming commotion, and the percussive sounds loomed ever closer (cymbals and side-drum splendidly giving voice) as the procession tumultuously passed through the scene and was eventually swallowed up by it, with ambient echoes resounding, and the festival rounding off its celebrations.

Festive sounds of a different kind were then brought into play for the concert’s finale, Douglas Lilburn’s 1955 Suite for Orchestra, a work written for the then Auckland Junior Symphony Orchestra, whose members must have found its playful angularities something of a challenge at the time. Lilburn composed the work while under the spell of the music of his older American contemporary, Aaron Copland, whose influence can be discerned in places, most noticeably in the finale. (Later, after some less-than-positive contact with the American, and an abortive visit to Tanglewood in the United States, to attempt a meeting with him, Lilburn seemed “cured” of any such further inclinations towards homage in that direction!).

In five shortish movements, Lilburn demonstrated the orchestral mastery he was soon to famously turn his back on, and explore what he called his own “total heritage of sound, meaning all sounds, and not just the narrow segment of them, traditional, imported, that we’ve long regarded as being music….” He meant, of course, an electro-acoustic sound-world, and made good his determination, to the bemusement and bewilderment of those who considered he hadn’t yet finished exploring what he had to say in traditional forms. For now, here was a playfulness and ease of expression worthy of any of his off-shore contemporaries, including the strangely deprecatory Copland – the opening Allegro of the Suite squawks with unashamed delight in places at the joy of setting such sounds into play, raucous, assertive, droll, sentimental and skittery, a “like it or not” spirit very much at large.

The Allegretto was a lovely, angular Waltz, the players tossing their pizzicato notes  across the orchestral platform, as strings and winds shared a serenade that had a whiff of “Old Paint” and its like, amid the rhythmic angularities – in places Lilburn’s almost Bartok-like humour of deconstruction came across splendidly, the lower brass adding a droll “Concerto for Orchestra” touch before the end. The brass began the Andante with slow, rising chords, echoed by the winds, as the strings intoned a plaintive melody, one which build to epiphany-like intensities at the end – a lovely, intensely-felt performance!

In complete contrast was the somewhat skeletal opening of the Moderato which followed, bleak winds and angular timpani giving way to a kind of “road music”, Young and his players firmly establishing those ambiences characteristic of their composer, here “at large” in the midst of landscapes he loved. And what fun everybody had with the concluding Vivace, the playing generating an orchestral energy which swept listeners along with dancing feet – a true Antipodean hoe-down! The sudden changes of atmosphere were breathtaking in their short-lived, but powerfully-focused moments of hymn-like serenity amid the riotous festivities, whose concluding shouts made a celebratory conclusion to a memorable concert!

Kapiti and Palmerston North choirs in rewarding performance of Dvořák’s Stabat Mater

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Kapiti Chamber Choir and Renaissance Singers, Palmerston North, with orchestra, conducted by Eric Sidoti
Soloists: Barbara Paterson (soprano), Ellen Barrett (contralto0, Jamie Young (tenor), Simon Christie (bass)

Dvořák: Stabat Mater

St Paul’s Church, Paraparaumu

Sunday 15 April, 2:30 pm

This seems to be the Dvořák year in Wellington, as two days earlier I had heard players from Orchestra Wellington perform two of his chamber works – the String Quintet No 2 and the Serenade for wind instruments, cello and bass. Orchestra Wellington is featuring five of Dvořák’s symphonies in their 2018 season; and RNZ Concert are playing them all this week! Most welcome as we tend to hear little other than the New World Symphony (No 9) and the cello concerto from our orchestras; and from chamber music groups only the familiar American string quartet and the (admittedly gorgeous) mature (No 2 in each case) piano quartet and piano quintet.

The combination of a good local choir and visitors from Palmerston North ensured at least one thing, that the volume of sound was appropriate to the demands of the music. Dvořák’s Stabat Mater is a major choral work, written in the era of great popularity of large choirs and large-scale choral music, a period when over-blown compositions, sometimes inspired more by religious compulsion than musical inspiration, were produced in response to popular demand. This piece cannot be classed with such works, as Dvořák matches his religious convictions with committed, deeply felt music.

Inevitably, amateur choral skills are usually greater than amateur orchestral abilities, and that might have been evident in the orchestral introduction, but it was a small price to pay for the plain advantage of having an orchestra instead of a piano or organ to support a major choral work composed for choir and orchestra. Yet the opening choral passage led by strings, caught the grieving tone sensitively with its descending phrases; though later on balances between strings, woodwinds and brass proved more difficult.

The soloists generally managed their parts well, though in the early stages tenor Jamie Young sounded somewhat stretched; and while soprano Barbara Paterson settled well into some of her later more extended singing, her first entry lacked a certain warmth in its higher register. But she had happier experiences in both vii, ‘Virgo virginium’ and viii, ‘Fac, ut portem Christi mortem’. Bass Simon Christie sounded comfortable right from the start and his contributions always sounded particularly appropriate. Contralto Ellen Barrett, who emerged in part ii, where soloists sang without the choir, sounded as if she believed in her texts and her voice blended warmly with the other soloists.

In ii, for the four soloists (and in later sections that entailed soloists without choir) they grew into their distinct roles, generally supported by well-modulated orchestral accompaniment; these were certainly among the more persuasive, satisfying sections.

The choir returned for iii, the ‘Eia, Mater, fons amoris…’ with its hypnotic repetition of one of the music’s moving, dotted motifs, and it was good to hear Christie again, now with the choir in ‘Fac, ut ardeat cor meum’ (iv).

The tone of the piece changes at section v, as the choir sings a less grieving, consolatory episode in swaying triple time; but I was surprised at the rather excessive sforzando ‘poenas’. Nevertheless, it emerged as a moment of respite from the pervasive sorrowful tone till that point.

The tenor alone sings the steady-paced vi, ‘Fac me vere’ (repeated with choir a great many times) showing more comfortable control of the carefully distinct words in those verses. The choir on its own produced effective, emphatic phrases, with which Young joined.

The choir, again on its own, delivered a restrained and rather charming ‘Virgo virginum’, with bare strings supporting the slow, wide-spaced melody. Then in the only section for duet, Paterson and Young wove their lines together, thoroughly integrated now (in spite of the soprano having to utter lots of multi-syllables). Barnett got her solo turn in the penultimate section, now with sensitive orchestral support, though the composer needn’t have burdened her with such heavy brass; I enjoyed the second verse of this section particularly: ‘Fac me plagis’ with its supportive oboe and other winds.

The last section is in the nature of a lamenting funeral march, with choir shifting abruptly from mf to ff, and finally the familiar theme from the first section returns to bring a more peaceful, even enlivening, mood to its conclusion. So in spite of the hard to deny shortcomings intrinsic to an amateur choir and orchestra, this was a persuasive and satisfying performance that’s a credit to conductor Sidoti and his soloists and of course all the singers and instrumentalists.

Returning to Dvořák performance again; there are so many of his works that ought to be better known, apart from the last two or three symphonies; there are violin and piano concertos, unjustly neglected; there’s the lovely string Serenade; all 16 Slavonic Dances and the Slavonic Rhapsodies, the sparkling Scherzo Capriccioso and bagatelles that include a harmonium part and a variety of other chamber music; five symphonic poems; a Requiem and a Te Deum, and so on….

Admirable, enterprising concert of Dvořák from Orchestra Wellington players

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Players from Orchestra Wellington

Dvořák; Serenade for winds, cello and double bass in D minor, Op 44 (B 77)
Merran Cooke and Louise Cox – oboes, Mark Cookson and Chris Turner – clarinets, Leni Maeckle and Penny Miles – bassoons, Shadley van Wyk, Dominic Groom and Vivian Reid – horns, Brenton Veitch – cello, Paul Altomari – double bass

Dvořák: String Quintet No 2 in G, Op 77 (B 49)
Monique Lapins and Konstanze Artmann – violins, Sophia Acheson – viola, Brenton Veitch – cello, Paul Altomari – double bass

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Friday 13 April, 12:15 pm

Dvořák wrote two serenades: the first, for strings in 1875 and the second, for winds plus cello and bass, in 1878. We heard the latter.

His two serenades occupy a rather special place in music of the Romantic era, the wind one especially, as there had not been a work of comparable charm since Mozart’s 80 years before, and none quite as fine later. Though perhaps not influenced by Dvořák, there were two comparable works within a decade of his Serenade: Gounod’s charming Petite Symphonie approaches it, and Richard Strauss’s Op 7, a prodigious 18-year-old’s remarkable work which really stands on its own feet!

The Wind Serenade
The first impression of the playing was of a bold sound when my feeling of the music is for a somewhat neutral beginning, reflected in its minor key; it’s Moderato, quasi marcia. I wondered whether it would compromise the scope later, for dynamic variety, but that feeling soon evaporated. But what I did miss a little was a warm, easy flowing momentum which the minor mode also seems to suggest. There was a good deal of excellent playing, and early on oboe and bassoon caught my ear particularly.

The second movement is a minuet (the single sheet programme didn’t indicate movements), and I actually spent a little time wondering whether it was a minuet, with its interesting duple time running alongside the minuet rhythm. But there was no alternative of course, and there was, properly, a contrasting trio, much more sprightly, in the middle which might indeed have been in some other dance style. The alternating oboe and clarinet phrases were a delight. This movement had the happy effect of demonstrating the composer’s quite beguiling use of wind instruments,

It was only in the slow movement (Andante con moto) that the absence of flutes struck me, following the instrumentation of the great Mozart Serenade for 13 wind instruments (but not for Strauss who does use flutes); only reeds allowed! But there were some lovely horn ensembles and time to rejoice in the composer’s intuitive handling of all his instruments in turn, even the cello and bass. It’s my favourite movement (when I was young I liked the fast movements best), but I had to admit that when the finale – allegro molto – began, it carried me along in its intended joyful spirit.

Because I did continue to feel a little overwhelmed by the volume of sound produced (I was in the fourth row; a friend seated at the back told me that he had no such experience), I was looking forward to the string quintet, since I usually find strings better adapted to the church acoustic.

String Quintet Op 77
The numbering of Dvořák’s works is confusing as he adopted a very cavalier approach to the matter so that musicologists would be able to justify their time spent in the hilarious task of working out just when and how his compositions were written. He bestowed Op 77 on his second string quintet, though it was a relatively early work, originally with an earlier opus number 18, written in 1875 when he was 34. It is unique in being scored for string quartet plus double bass; the first string quintet (for orthodox instruments) had been his second work, in 1861, aged 19; he gave that Op 1. A third quintet, in E flat, Op 97 was written after the string quartet in F, Op 96, ‘American’, when he was in the United States in 1893.

It’s a lively, imaginative, though underplayed work. Why, when musicians think of Dvořák chamber music, is it always the ‘American’ (used to be called the ‘Nigger’) quartet or the wonderful piano quintet?

I last heard it played by the New Zealand String Quartet and the virtuoso NZSO bassist, Hiroshi Ikematsu, in 2011 at St Mary of the Angels.  It is a delight; it starts from the bottom, bass and cello intoning secretively, then engaging the higher instruments one by one, up to the bright-toned violin of Monique Lapins; ready for the first big theme, naturally bass heavy, to burst out fully formed. It’s entitled Allegro con fuoco.

The performance was full of energy. One normally hears these players, generally briefly, within the symphonic sound mass of Orchestra Wellington, and it was both a revelation and pleasure to hear them as polished chamber musicians too. After the first elaboration of the main theme, Brenton Veitch delivered his energetic yet lyrical account of it before they all took over. In fact, throughout the first movement Veitch’s part was particularly distinctive.

The same thrusting energy appears in the second movement which, though in triple time, is not a minuet but Scherzo, allegro vivace. There’s a distinct change of tempo and tone in the middle, slower and more lyrical and the quintet demonstrated a more meditative quality.

The slow movement is marked Poco andante and its wistful opening theme was not only musically related to its predecessors, but was the first opportunity to hear the quintet’s more legato, lyrical playing. It’s not especially Slavonic in spirit, as I think Dvořák wanted to establish his reputation in conventional western European, let’s say, Germanic, music. His nationalistic music was largely expressed in the Moravian Duets, the Czech Suite, Slavonic Dances, the first set of which, Op 46, were written in the same year as the Quintet; and so on. And the last movement, conventionally Allegro assai, is very driven and full of energy. It can probably be played with even more passion and brio than these players produced.

Coda
This was a performance that achieved two things. The unearthing of some chamber music (if we can stretch the term a bit for the Serenade) that doesn’t get much attention in a string quartet dominated world, and there’s a great deal more of it – quintets, sextets, septets, nonets and so on by many of the great composers (Mozart’s wind serenades of course) and some not so great – just two: Spohr’s Nonet, Berwald’s Septet (we do get plenty of octets by Schubert and Mendelssohn).

And secondly, I am delighted that Orchestra Wellington is moving in this enterprising direction, filling the musical gap I mention, as well as putting themselves before the public more often, letting people know that excellent musicians also inhabit Orchestra Wellington. It’s an initiative that presents worthwhile music instead of (or in addition to) being drawn in the direction of pop, film music and other kinds of cross-over material which I have serious misgivings about.

And it needs to be noted that this concert, very modestly priced, drew the biggest crowd at St Andrew’s that I’ve seen for such a concert for a long time.

 

 

 

 

Jason Bae – an enterprising, exploratory and heroic performer

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music

A recital by Jason Bae

Debussy – Images oubliées
Esa-Pekka Salonen – Dichotomie (NZ Premiere)
Grieg – Ballade Op.24
Medtner – Piano Sonata No.11 Sonata tragica Op.39 No.5

Jason Bae (piano)

Adam Concert Room,
Te Kōkī New Zealand School Of Music,
Victoria University of Wellington

Friday, 13th April 2018

Korean-born NZ-adopted pianist Jason Bae made a welcome return a week ago to the Wellington region for a lunchtime recital at the School of Music’s Adam Concert Room, Victoria University. He brought with him a programme he’s taken to a number of venues around the country, one whose content suggested that there would be no compromises on an artistic level, despite the degree of informality and relaxation often associated with a “lunchtime concert”. This was a programme deserving of serious, five-star attention from start to finish, and received playing that fully realised the “serious” intent of the pianist’s enterprising choice of repertoire.

Bae has already made his mark in the world of piano-playing with many prize-giving performances and awards in various places around the world – according to his web-site, his recent activities include performing recitals in Helsinki, Finland and in Seoul, Korea, as well as currently in New Zealand.  The young pianist is also turning his attention to orchestral conducting, making his New Zealand conducting debut with the Westlake Symphony Orchestra in Auckland. He’s obviously one of those multi-talented musicians who has the aptitude to succeed at whatever he turns his hand to.

Judging from the programme we heard Bae perform at the Music School on Friday, there’s no ‘resting on his laurels”, no trotting out well-consolidated warhorses with which to impress audiences. These pieces required his listeners to come some of the way themselves towards the music, itself extremely varied in content and character, rather than simply let it all “wash over” the sensibilities in a generalised way. Perhaps the best-known of these works, albeit in a roundabout fashion, was that of Debussy’s “Images oubliées” (an earlier work than each of the two, better-known sets of “Images”, but one which, for some reason, wasn’t published in the composer’s lifetime). Recently,  though, there has been some recorded attention given both to Medtner’s solo piano works and to Grieg’s hitherto neglected output outside the “Lyric Pieces”. Certainly the remainder of Bae’s programme indicated there were treasures aplenty awaiting more widespread awareness and approval.

The opening of the Debussy work (Lent) brought forth exquisitely-voiced tones from the young pianist, the sounds resembling some kind of ethereal recitative, accompanied by the softest, most velvety of arpeggiations. This accorded with the composer’s own description of the pieces as “not for brilliantly-lit salons…..but rather, conversations between the piano and oneself”. Bae allowed a beautifully-appointed ebb-and-flow of colours and contours, a kind of nature-benediction in sound, allowing the tones at the end to breathtakingly mingle with the silences.

The second piece “Souvenir du Louvre” bore a close relationship with a movement from the composer’s later “Pour le piano”, a rather more fulsome version of what became the Sarabande from the latter work. Again, the pianist’s evocations were meticulously directed towards detailings of wondrous delicacy, with dialogues throughout sounded between the piano’s different registers, sculpted strength set against liquid movement. Debussy’s original was actually written for Yvonne Lerolle, the girl both Degas and Renoir painted at the piano, and for whom the composer described the piece with the words “slow and solemn, even a bit like an old portrait” (hence the title).

The title of the third piece betrays its inspiration even more candidly than does the later work it (only) occasionally resembles – “Jardins sous la pluie” from “Estampes” with its well-known folk-song quotations. Here it is somewhat teasingly called by the composer “Quelques aspects de ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois'” (Aspects of the song “We will not go to the woods”), with the added afterthought, for the benefit of his young dedicatee, “…because the weather is dreadful”…….Bae’s fleet-fingered playing evoked a game of chase through the woods, by turns lightly-brushed and hard-hitting, with some tolling bells sounding towards the end, the piece then disappearing literally into thin air.

By way of introducing the next work on the programme, Bae spent some time talking with us about his relationship with a composer who’s better known as a conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, after which the pianist performed Salonen’s work for solo piano “Dichotomy”. One of a select few of brilliant contemporary performing musicians who significantly compose, Salonen has a number of important works to his credit, for orchestra, two concerti (piano and violin), and a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus, “Karawane”, which premiered in 2014 in Zurich.

Salonen’s work isn’t exactly “hot off the press”, Dichotomie having received its premiere as far back as 2000, in Los Angeles. The composer wanted a short, encore-type piece as a present for a favourite soloist, Gloria Cheng, but, as he discovered, the material he wrote seemed to take on a life of its own,  and expand to proportions bearing little relation to its actual conception. Jason Bae explained to us, along with his account of a serendipitous encounter with Salonen that led to his espousal of the composer’s work, how the music came to be, its two-movement structure representing a relationship between the two “kinds” of music that Salonen seemed to create almost involuntarily. Thus the first movement of this work, Mechanisme, represented machine-like processes, while the second, Organisme, had a more naturalistic way of developing and extending created material. Salonen wanted to explore how these very different styles might, by dint of juxtaposition, “borrow” qualities from one another which could affect their development.

I confess to being fascinated by what I heard, which is a way of paying tribute to Jason Bae’s playing of it as well. The opening of Mechanisme was indeed motoric and Prokofiev-like, the rhythms growing and developing in dynamically varied ways, with different sequences taking on different and unpredictable characters, variously syncopated, symmetrical or angular. Bae’s playing built to almost frighteningly orchestral levels of volume and intensity, before abruptly adopting flowing, legato phrasing that suggested some kind of counter-impulse had been mysteriously, even covertly activated within the work’s being. It preluded a mercurial section where one sensed the creative process was in a kind of ferment of crisis (the machine, perhaps, trying to be human?), with the musical argument appearing to fragment under scrutiny, almost to the point of stasis. A final counter-burst of incendiary energy, notes swirling and figurations exploding in every direction, left the music almost insensible, with only a few legato-phrased, wider-spaced chords holding the centre, and pronouncing the “new order”.

The following Organisme brought forth shimmering, exploratory textures containing reiterating figurations attempting to secure their tentative foot-and finger-holds in the music’s fabric. I thought it Debussy-like in places in a textured sense, the basic materials gradually coalescing and producing a kind of ambient glow, with beautifully voiced fragments of melody floating by on wings of air. The trajectories were passed from hand to hand, thereby suggesting a kind of osmotic continuity of flow, one which inevitably built up tensions of a kind that saw the tones take on increasingly rhythmic and thrustful expression, becoming tumultuous in the sense of a storm, the pianist sending great arabesques of tone shooting upwards and into the ether. Having resisted the temptation to inhabit “the dark side” the music made a flourish of quiet triumph, and the piece ended enigmatically – all told, an enthralling listening experience, thanks in part to Bae’s brilliant advocacy.

Further explorations were furnished by the pianist with his programming of Edvard Grieg’s rarely-heard Ballade Op.24, in my view one of the composer’s greatest works. It was one of the pieces that the tragically short-lived New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell recorded (as part of an all-Grieg recital disc), but has yet to claim a regular place in the concert repertoire. Though part of this is due to the piece’s technical difficulty, my feeling is that Grieg is still regarded by many people as a “miniaturist”, able to turn out  pretty Scandivavian picture-postcards in the form of his numerous “Lyric Pieces”, but lacking the ability to handle larger forms (despite his magnificent Piano Concerto!). Debussy’s well-known swipe at Grieg (“a pink bonbon filled with snow” was his description of one of the latter’s “Elegiec Melodies”) hasn’t helped the latter’s cause – but less well-known is the remark made by Frederick Delius to Maurice Ravel, that “modern French music is simply Grieg, plus the third act of Tristan”, to which Ravel replied, “That is true – we are always unjust to Grieg.”

Justice was certainly done to Grieg by Jason Bae, here a rather more turbo-charged reading in places than that of Richard Farrell’s poetic soundscapings, one underlining the music’s virtuoso aspect, while giving the more ruminative passages enough space in which to breathe Grieg’s bracing air. The work is basically a theme-and-variations treatment of a Norwegian folk-song melody,  “Den Nordlanske Bondestand” (The Northland Peasantry), and ranges from extremely simple elaborations of the theme to full-scale, almost orchestral outbursts of expression, including some forward-looking, even daring excursions into harmonic conflict, particularly during the work’s final cataclysmic section, before the music suddenly dissolves all such conflicts and returns to the melancholy of the original theme. In general, I thought Bae most successfully brought out the music’s brilliance and sharply-etched contrasts, underlining in places the music’s debt towards and kinship with that of Liszt (Variations 11 and 12 are here particularly overwhelming in an orchestral sense!) but also paying ample tribute to Grieg’s own originality. The pianist’s playing of No.9 allowed the composer’s singular gift for melodic piquancy its full effect, while No.10 here vividly captured the music’s characteristic rustic charm and feeling for grass-roots expressions of energy. In the wake of this performance I’m sure Bae would have garnered in many listeners’ minds fresh respect for Grieg as a composer.

The recital concluded with a work from a figure whose music has only recently received the kind of mainstream espousal needed for it to flourish. Russian-born Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951), a younger contemporary of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, received much the same acclaim as a result of his musical studies in Moscow, but then elected to devote himself entirely to composition rather than pursue a career as a pianist. However (and perhaps not surprisingly) the piano figured in practically all of his major compositions, both prior to and after leaving Russia in 1921. Altogether, Medtner completed fourteen piano sonatas, Jason Bae performing for us the eleventh (which the composer subtitled Sonata Tragica, possibly as a reaction to the aftermath of the Russian Revolution) The sonata, incidentally, was one of a set of pieces separately entitled “Forgotten Melodies” (Second Cycle) by the composer. Those who have a taste for idiosyncratic numbering methods of musical compositions will find much to enjoy in Medtner’s own various enumerations of these works.

None of which is relevant to Jason Bae’s performance of the music, which seemed to me to front up squarely to the piece’s overall character, with its big-boned, declamatory  aspect at the beginning and the war-like march that follows proclaiming a Slavic temperament, with the swirling textures obviously breathing the same air as did Rachmaninov’s music. Bae gave the flowing lyricism which followed plenty of “soul”, allowing the deeper textures to make their mark amid the frequent exchanges between the hands, then gradually building the excitement to almost fever pitch, before strongly arresting the flow of the music with a portentous left-hand, almost fugue-like version of the opening declamation – all very exciting! The pianist’s beautifully wrought filigree finger-work introduced further agitations, the music building inexorably towards a kind of breaking-point (Bae’s left hand performing miracles of transcendent articulation) at the apex of which the sonata’s main theme thundered out at us most resplendently and defiantly! It was music that, in this player’s expert hands, punched well above its own weight, with a bigness of utterance which belied its brief duration!

Very great acclaim greeted the young pianist, at the conclusion of this challenging, and in the event splendidly-achieved presentation of some monumental music.

Thoughtful, enterprising programming from Michael Houstoun performed with conviction and sensitivity

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Hutt Valley Chamber Music presents:
Michael Houstoun at the Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Music by CHOPIN, SATIE and SCHUBERT

CHOPIN – Four Impromptus
SATIE – Three Gymnopedies
SCHUBERT – Piano Sonata in G Major D.894

Michael Houstoun (piano)

Lower Hutt Little Theatre

Thursday, April 12th, 2018

I remember reading somewhere amongst the material advertising this Hutt Valley Chamber Music concert a passage quoting Michael Houstoun as saying he thought the choice of repertoire here had produced “the most perfect recital he had ever put together”. After listening to his strong, deeply considered playing of all three works, I felt bound to concur with his judgement, with each of his choices having some quality that seemed to either complement, disarm or resonate within aspects of the other pieces.

Those items affected most markedly by the juxtapositionings were the recital’s first-half pieces, Houstoun cannily placing each of Satie’s Three Gymnopedies in turn between the four Chopin Impromptus. Not only did this open up the somewhat “moments-per-minute” effect of the Impromptus’ richly-wrought imaginings (the pieces, incidentally, were not composed as a “set”, nor did the composer stipulate any such ordering in performance), but adroitly took the listener away from any superficial feelings of “sameness” between Satie’s delicately-wrought dream-like dances.

It was a masterstroke, really, enabling we in the audience to appreciate each of the seven individual pieces on their own merits, the Satie pieces helping to underlining the uniqueness of each of the very different Chopin works, which in turn gave each of the “Gymnopedies” the chance to refresh our listening-sensibilities in disarmingly different ways.

The overall effect on our reception of the Schubert work which made up the second half was a kind of activation of an open-hearted spirit towards time and space, wrought by the Satie pieces in particular, but also by the freely-ranging traversal of incident characterising parts of the Chopin works. With its long-breathed opening movement, the Schubert Sonata was not an experience to be treated either lightly or with any impatience – and Houstoun’s care for both detail and overall atmosphere throughout the first half had, I think, helped prepare us for the experience of what was to follow.

Beginning with the first Impromptu (Op. 29 in A-flat Major), the pianist got things under way with a whimsically teasing melody sounded over a quiet whirlwind of triplets, leading first to a haunting chromatic “dying fall” sequence like the sighing of the wind, and then to the theme’s excitable but brief ascent, Houstoun easing gracefully into a beautifully weighted chordal middle section before teasing the music back to the opening. In the wake of such frenetic note-spinning, the first of Satie’s “Gymnopedies” took us to “other realms”, the plaintive melody over measured steps drawing us away from “the busy beat of time” and into solitary contemplation.

The following Impromptu (Op.36 in F-sharp Major) warmed and enriched this mood with beautifully crepuscular colourings, and a melody whose decorated contourings led to a Liszt-like passage, almost religious in feeling. Houstoun then beautifully set in motion a quietly-voiced dotted rhythm which gradually  built up both tones and energies, becoming almost warlike, in anticipation of Liszt’s “Funerailles” (which it predated by a decade of years) before disarmingly returning to the opening melody, this time with a triplet accompaniment and swirling decorative impulses. Again I fancied we heard a Lisztian voice (redolent of the Italian Book of “Annees de Pelerinage”) before a couple of emphatic chords finished the piece. The second “Gymnopedie” again allowed our sensibilities some respite, Houstoun’s playing giving the piece’s barely-disturbed stillnesses a hint of human breath, rather than applying a cool, marmoreal finish – a quality which I thought touched on that state we call the “transcendent”, something still living yet elevated to a higher plane – remarkable.

Very much like the previous Impromptu’s F-sharp Major, the third Chopin piece (G-flat Major Op.51) possessed a similar tonal warmth, but rather more fluid movement, Houstoun bringing out the music’s subtleties of light and shade with great surety, and allowing us some almost voluptuous enjoyment of the harmonies at various points.  Such unashamedly indulgent richness of course found its antithesis in the Third Gymnopedie which followed – though, of the three Satie pieces, I’ve always found this one the least “remote”. It’s certainly been the one most often transcribed for different combinations of instruments, including the full orchestra. I thought Houstoun’s reading again imbued the piece with some feeling, even a certain tenderness, despite his own comments in the programme note regarding the music in general as being “definitions of aloneness”.

The fourth of Chopin’s Impromptus is something of a “sport”, being composed much earlier, and published posthumously – as Houstoun remarks in his progamme-note, it scarcely justifies the “Fantasie-Impromptu” title posterity has bestowed on it, but is ironically the most well-known of the four pieces (a flatmate of mine of former times claimed he knew only one classical music “tune” he could play on the piano, it being the melody making up the middle section of the work – admittedly, a tune that’s eminently singable!). Though a mite scornful of the piece on paper, Houstoun gave it as much meticulous attention as he did everything on the programme, capturing the “swirling” character of the outer sections, and playing the famous tune with wonderful eloquence, though I thought the coda’s tricky syncopations almost tripped his fingers up for the merest instant.

So, then, to the Schubert, the first half of the recital having, I felt, primed our sensibilities with plenty of varied expression. I had heard Houstoun play this work at Paekakariki a number of years ago (https://middle-c.org/2011/07/schubert-from-houstoun-at-paekakariki-matching-poesies/), and thought his performance for the most part “truly praiseworthy”, with only some slight reservations bothering me regarding the “stiffness” of some of his phrase-endings during the first movement. This time round I couldn’t say I was bothered by any such quality, the pianist giving the opening chords the spaciousness they needed to fully resound, nicely differentiating major and minor-key utterances, and setting the more animated sections beautifully in motion, allowing the decorative filigree voices plenty of room to fill out their phrases without sounding rushed. As the pianist did actually give us the important first-movement repeat, there were no critical gasps of shock, horror and disbelief from any quarter besmirching the ambiences!

The movement’s development section with its massive minor-key chordings galvanised our sensibilities, as well it ought, Houstoun’s attack here urgent and imposing, though he played the dancing episodes that followed almost defiantly, even cheekily! – the two moods sparred with one another until the onset of those heartbreaking sequences led the music away from the conflict and back to the music’s very opening, by this time seemingly a world away! I thought the pianist’s addressing of the music a shade tougher at the outset, here, stiffened by resolve through conflict, though the movement’s ending featured richly-wrought tones and spacious phrasing which left we listeners in thrall to the range and scope of the music’s journey.

The Andante movement (the description “slow” seems somewhat redundant in the wake of the first movement’s “heavenly length”) was given plenty of light and shade at a tempo which kept things flowing throughout the opening – I found myself thinking while Houstoun was playing that my mother (who was a piano teacher) would have loved what he was doing throughout this sequence in generating a combination of such warmth and clarity. Having charmed our sensibilities thus, Houstoun proceeded to give the music’s central section plenty of real swagger and muscularity at the outset, though still bringing out the lyricism of the minor/major key sequences that followed with real feeling. At its first return Schubert almost cheekily decorates the opening, in places with great finesse, underlining the music’s happiness/anxiety ambivalence, while after a repeat of the agitations, the opening proper reappears, undecorated, but with the melody suddenly taking flight, Houstoun here seeming to surrender to the music in an unguarded moment, giving to the movement’s end some delightfully flowing and lyrical playing, some of the most natural-sounding from him I’ve heard.

That impression continued throughout the Scherzo with its quirkily placed “grace notes”, some flailing about, and others sounding like mere impulses of droll wit. I loved Houstoun’s treatment of these (as I did previously), the pianist taking great care to both “sound” and differentiate their impact on the music, the forthright ones almost abrasive, and the softer ones impish and po-faced in a way that made me chuckle out loud! And what an effect Houstoun’s playing of the Trio wrought – like a sudden sleight-of-hand movement taking the sounds into an almost childlike world of happiness and contentment!

Houstoun launched the finale’s opening with playful-sounding gestures, the composer toying with impulses of energy as if deciding what to do next. Breaking into an infectious jogtrot got the music’s blood pumping, giving rise to those seemingly endless Schubertian sequences, the music modulating freely and joyously. A more sombre theme darkened the music momentarily, Houstoun’s powerful left hand keeping the darkness at bay to almost orchestral effect, before the jog-trot came to the music’s rescue once again, and brought everything back into the sunshine, for the opening sequences to return – Houstoun momentarily brought our hearts into our mouths by turning up the candlepower for the main theme’s sudden upward leap, before settling things back into a state of contentment for the coda’s brief but eloquent farewell.

A profoundly enjoyable and thought-provoking recital – all credit to Michael Houstoun for his inventive programming and his skills as an interpreter in bring his vision to us so successfully.

Engaging recital of obscure, quirky music on saxophone and harp at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Duo Eolienne: Genevieve Davidson (saxophone) and Michelle Velvin (harp)

Music by Debussy, Yusef Lateef, Britten, Bernard Andres, Satie, William Alwyn

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 11 April 12:15 pm

Here was a recital that seemed to fit the space acoustically and offered a range of mostly unfamiliar music that was yet approachable; many of the audience might well be happy to hear these pieces again.

The first piece was by a sixteen-year-old Debussy: Beau soir (beautiful evening). The words of the poem by Paul Bourget were printed and we were left to assume that the score, presumably voice and piano, had been arranged for saxophone and harp. In a shy, gentle triple rhythm it produced a peaceful mood as the poet employs the image of a stream flowing to the sea suggesting life ending in the grave. It worked well for and was played charmingly by both instruments.

Yusef Lateef’s piece, Romance for soprano saxophone and harp, was actually written for these instruments. It was a longer piece, featuring quirky solos: I was able to tell it had finished only when the next piece, Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, for solo oboe (saxophone) began. Its moods varied: evocative, fanciful, imaginative.

Two of Britten’s Six Metamorphoses dealt with Pan and Phaeton. Obviously, the saxophone was well suited to Pan, and the impression of Phaeton who came to grief by riding on the sun’s chariot may well have been an accurate picture of that interesting bit of Greek mythology; they were slight though beautifully crafted pieces.

French composer and harpist Bernard Andrès obviously pursues the classical music rather than popular or jazz tradition. I have the impression that he is a major figure in the contemporary harp fraternity; he wrote a large number of solo harp Preludes and judging by the two he played (nos 12 and 14) owes much to the traditions of Chopin and Debussy. The harp in these Preludes suggested a piano influence, their feet firmly planted on the ground, in music of a formal spirit and shape. The second piece was much livelier than the first.

Satie’s Gnossiennes, Nos 1, 2 and 3, were originally piano pieces but their scoring for saxophone and harp came very close to whatever their classical source was, and these players offered a very convincing case for hearing them in this guise. Though less popular than the Gymnopédies, the Gnossiennes evoke a classical world rather well. There is more variety of melody and texture, and they suggest greater kinship with traditional classical compositional styles and spirits. Satie’s reputation has suffered through being seen, lazily, as little more than an odd-ball, eccentric who was mainly interested in mocking and satirising his contemporaries and the classical tradition. I have long felt that he is a much more important and interesting a composer than that. The plaintive character of the soprano saxophone suited this music; its nuances were a great contribution to the interpretation.

The recital ended with William Alwyn’s Little Suite for Oboe and Harp, obviously an excellent candidate for the switch to soprano sax. Alwyn was, as the programme note said, a rather neglected composer, perhaps because of his fecundity and the multiplicity of genres and styles he adopted. In large part his neglect is that of many composers who chose to remain in the main-stream classical tradition rather than adopt the doctrines of the avant-garde, and who devote themselves to writing for each other and for academic approval rather than for real music lovers.

The three dances were firstly, a Minuet of gentle charm, then a quicker Valse, strongly melodic with a surprise ending, and finally, a fast Jig, with a slower section in the middle and another surprise ending.

This piece in not of Mahlerian scale or moral depth or Boulezian complexity and intellectual bite, but it’s attractive and was played with levity and skill; it suggests that there’s other Alwyn music worth exploring.

So it was an enjoyable, stimulating little recital delivered by two excellent musicians.

Wellington Chamber Orchestra in interesting Alfred Hill exploratory mode

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Wellington Chamber Orchestra conducted by Donald Maurice, with Jian Liu (piano)

Brahms: Tragic Overture, Op.81
Alfred Hill: Piano Concerto in A (New Zealand première)
Richard Strauss: Symphony no.2 in F minor

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday, 8 April 2018, 2.30pm

An adventurous and stimulating programme was chosen by the Wellington Chamber Orchestra for this first concert of 2018.  The works demanded, and received, almost a full symphony orchestra.  Whether the bright acoustic of St. Andrew’s can cope with this number of players, including brass (mercifully this time not in the sanctuary – it was occupied by the piano, and the percussion) is another matter.  A number of rows of seating had been removed front of the church to accommodate the 64 players.

The programme was planned around the linkages between the composer.  The young Alfred Hill, fresh from Wellington, studied in Leipzig from 1887 to 1891, saw Brahms conduct, and heard this early symphony of Richard Strauss.  Hill’s own work was composed when he was 72.  The excellent programme notes not only made these linkages, but also provided other interesting information.  ‘This programme, while having much stylistic similarity, clearly highlights the unique language of each of these three composers…’.  Neither Strauss nor Hill, despite living in a time of much change in musical language, departed much from the Romantic style of their youth.

Brahms’s overture was written in 1880.  Wikipedia calls it ‘…in essence a free-standing symphonic movement…’.  It has much more complexity and variety than most overtures.  There was plenty of life and feeling in this performance.  There were a few shaky notes, but in the main the playing was strong.  Winds were very good, for the most part.  Brahms’s luscious orchestration was given full expression.  The work’s serious themes, at times grand, were given full weight .

Alfred Hill, is a composer claimed by both New Zealand and Australia (he lived in both countries).  A review of Piers Lane’s recording of this concerto in 2016 (Hyperion) says: ‘Alfred Hill’s 1941 concerto has a breezy, sunny disposition, with hardly a dark cloud in the sky…’.  It was written when Hill was in his 70s, and had been largely lost sight of.  Donald Maurice, today’s conductor, has been a champion of Hill’s music, and has recorded (as violist in the Dominion Quartet) many of the composer’s string quartets, which feature the same cheerfulness as the concerto.

Hill named the movements thus: 1. The Question: adagio, allegro moderato; 2. Intermezzo (Fancies): presto; 3. Nocturne (Homage to Chopin): adagio con moto; 4. Finale (Contrasts): allegro.

After a short introductory adagio, the animated allegro arrived.  The questions were between the piano and the orchestra.  The movement became romantic; there were echoes of Rachmaninov.  A lovely oboe melody featured, beautifully played.  A brilliant piano part was expertly performed by Jian Liu.  Although the work must have been new to him, his assurance and subtlety in rendering it were impressive.  The orchestral writing, however, was sometimes rather pedestrian, though for the most part elsewehere, Hill’s orchestration was skilled and appealing.

The second movement’s Fancies were most imaginative.  The music of this short movement was imitative between piano and orchestra.  The third had a romantic, lyrical main theme.  There was piquant writing for percussion and woodwinds.  The gentle piano writing was indeed reminiscent of Chopin in places.

The finale was agitated, yet assured.  A fine bassoon solo was followed by a dramatic, extended piano solo, which I thought included touches of Mendelssohn.  Then we were into a grandiose tutti to end.  The audience gave the players, and particularly the soloist, a great reception.

In contrast with Hill’s age when writing his concerto, Strauss was only 19-20 years old when he wrote his second symphony, which Hill heard performed in Leipzig a few years after its composition.  Its first movement, allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso.  After its intriguing opening, great use was made of  the four horns (perhaps naturally, since the composer’s father was a professional horn player).

This was complex music in places, and it showed in rather more out-of-tune playing in the strings than had been apparent in the earlier works.  Some of the music revealed the presence of Wagner.  The maestoso passages had me expecting to see Siegfried pop out at any moment.  The brass in full flight were somewhat overwhelming, as they played a majestic melody with strong underpinning orchestration; their sound completely covered whatever it was that the woodwinds were playing.  The music was highly rhythmic.

The scherzo: presto movement began on violas; its sprightly character featured gorgeous flutes floating above the strings.  I thought I detected Mendelssohn here, in the characterful figurations.  The lighter mood was overtaken by more ponderous passages, then a repeat of the lighter section arrived; the movement ended with pizzicato.

Marked andante cantabile, the third movement was initially calm and serious, with an oboe solo over broad harmonies, later joined by the other woodwind instruments.  The music was rhapsodic in a solemn manner.  Horns intone, and all instruments develop the theme.  Perhaps it would have sounded more cantabile in a different acoustic from  St. Andrew’s.  It was certainly quite different in character from Tchaikovsky’s famous movement.  There was some choice clarinet and flute playing.  Some of the writing seemed excessive; brevity could have sustained the interest more.

The final movement (allegro assai, molto appassionato) seemed to be rushing somewhere, with its grand march-like theme and chromatic figures.  A lightening of the mood with pizzicato passages was followed by portentous chords, with timpani.  Again, Wagner seemed to raise his head.  This was surely the molto appassionato; it was fast and furious.  Calls from the horns introduced the final bars of the symphony, with some interesting discords among the pomposity and final flourishes.

I would not be rushing to hear this work again, but it is amazing for a 19-20-year-old!.  This was a demanding concert of contrasting but linked works, in the main well played.

 

Rachmaninov’s Vespers richly resound with Inspirare and Mark Stamper at St.Mary of the Angels

Posted on by Peter Mechen

RACHMANINOV – All Night Vigil (Vespers)

Maaike Christie-Beekmann (alto soloist)
Chris McRae (tenor/priest)
Ben Kubiak (bass/deacon)

Inspirare
Lisa Harper-Brown (vocal and language coach)

Mark Stamper (director)

St.Mary of the Angels Church
Boulcott St., Wellington

Saturday, 7th April

Rachmaninov’s somewhat cumbersome title for this work (The Most Important Hymns of the “All Night Vigil”) though literally accurate, epitomises the composer’s characteristic self-effacing attitude to all of his musical undertakings. Fortunately for its deserved popularity, the piece has come to be commonly known as the “Vespers”, pure and simple (in the manner of Monteverdi’s similarly-titled work), however incorrect as a description – in fact Rachmaninov’s work contains settings of hymns from both Vespers and Matins in the Russian Orthodox Divine Service for the Feast of the Resurrection.

Matters of nomenclature apart (and far more importantly), this work provides a listening experience which touches on a number of fronts – aesthetic, visceral, emotional and devotional are words which come instantly to mind – and whose qualities leave little room or option for anything other than through-and-through involvement, especially in a live performance of this quality. I couldn’t help thinking of a similar kind of transportation of delight and wonderment I’d experienced in this same church with the aforementioned “Vespers” of Monteverdi, when performed in 2010 by home-grown forces, authentic instruments and all! Here, my feeling were replicated by a wondrous evocation of devotional intensity from a set of forces recreating a vastly different time and place, if with similarly mesmerising spiritual and emotional force.

For those who think of Rachmaninov’s music as consisting almost wholly of late-romantic throwback gestures belonging to and lamenting the passing of a bygone era, this work would come as a something of a surprise, indicating the extent of the composer’s intrinsic feeling for far older traditions than those of the nineteenth century. In fact the composer’s musical identification with the tradition gives a clue to the individuality of his work as a whole, its aspect of “continuous melody”, the sinuous nature of his themes, and their fervour and volatility. All of these characteristics can be found here interwoven with the actual traditional chant melodies used by the composer in the work, but in a way that results in a seamless exchange between tradition and originality.

The work was written at a time when sacred choral music was enjoying something of a renaissance in Russia – in fact a “New Russian School” of choral composers, including Kastalsky, Gretchaninoff and Chesnokov, inspired by the enthusiasm of the pedagogue and musicologist Stepan Smolensky, had created a new native style of orthodox church-inspired music. The latter had also been Rachmaninov’s tutor at the Moscow Conservatory, and was responsible for introducing him to the beauties of ancient Russian liturgical chant, which inspired the composer to dedicate his Vespers to the memory of Smolensky after completing the work in 1915.

Nine of the fifteen movements in the work are based on actual chant melodies, Rachmaninov drawing from three ancient chant traditions – “Znammemy” (the oldest form), Kiev School and Greek School. For the remaining six, the composer created what he called “conscious counterfeits”, original material based on the style of the existing chants. The text is in “Church Slavonic”, which is the Orthodox Church’s liturgical language. Incredibly the work was finished in the space of two weeks, and performed in 1915 as a benefit concert for war relief. According to my sources, it was performed on a number of further occasions that year, due to its initial success.

Having not heard the work “live” previously, I had recourse to recordings to prepare for this concert, principally to one I’d owned for a number of years, and generally regarded as a “classic” – this was the 1965 Melodiya recording featuring the USSR State Academic Russian Choir directed by Alexander Sveshnikov.  I wondered whether playing my LP repeatedly by way of familiarising myself with the work was going to do my reaction to Wellington’s Inspirare Choir any favours, especially as the Russian recorded performance had several instantly impressive qualities – a marked fervour of utterance expressed by way of an incredible dynamic range and a certain direct “raw” vocal quality which sounded like no other choir I’d heard, along with the deepest and richest sonority I could have imagined, thanks to those incredible Russian bass voices!

Rachmaninov himself made particular reference to these bass sonorities, replying to concerns expressed by the work’s first conductor, Nikolai Danilin, who reportedly told the composer that “such (bass) voices were rare as asparagus at Christmas” – to which Rachmaninov replied that he knew the voices of his countrymen, and that such basses could be found. This exchange was prompted by the fifth of the composer’s settings, one frequently occurring in European church music and known as “Nunc Dimittis”, and here concluding with a slow downward scale finishing on a low pianissimo B-flat. In fact the Inspirare basses at St.Mary’s on Saturday evening gave a creditable account of themselves in this passage, reaching the cavernous depths asked for by the composer, and holding onto their tones tenaciously, if without quite the resonance commanded by my recording’s Russian basses.

For the rest, I thought the performance by the Inspirare choir and the three solo singers truly magnificent, expressing the work’s breadth and depth with a beauty and solidarity of tone that itself paid ample tribute to the quality of the voices involved and the all-embracing direction of Mark Stamper. This was a performance which gave due attention to the ritualistic quality and context of the settings, using two solo voices in turn (deacon and priest) to begin the sequence, and tubular bells to introduce almost every one of the individual movements. And we in the audience were made to feel we shared the same similarly-lit spaces as the voices, which further enhanced the capacities of the performance to draw us into the music.

Besides the sonorous bass voice of Ben Kubiak as the deacon, and  the wondrously plangent tones of tenor Chris McRae, both of whom made various contributions at other places during the work, alto Maaike Christie-Beekman brought to her solos in “Blagoslovi, dushe moya, Gospoda” (Bless the Lord, O My Soul) unwavering, worshipful and warmly-projected tones, confidently mediating the exchanges between the beautiful, wind-blown voices of the women and the deep, almost oceanic undulations from the men.

As for the choir itself, from the very first surge of fervent impulse immediately after the beautifully floated opening “Amin”, with “Priidite Poklonimsya tsarevi nashemu Bogu” (Come, let us worship God, our King), we were drawn into a sense of worshipful communion with the voices, the ebb and flow of their tones gorgeously expressed and finely controlled by Mark Stamper. In the third hymn “Blazhen Muzh” (Blessed in the Man), I loved the growing intensities of the repeated trio of Alleluias, and the radiance of “Slava Otsu I Synu I Svyatomu Dukhu” (Glory to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit) burst out most tellingly at the piece’s climax.

We heard the choir’s basses to telling effect in “Svete tikhyi” (Gladsome Radiance), the hymn introduced by Ben Kubiak’s bass solo, and beginning with high tenor voices, followed by the women, a lovely “layered” effect. The basses then initiated a stunningly low organ-pedal-like note, which then rose to mingle with the other voices  as the solo tenor burst forth fervently with “Poyem Otsa, Syna, I Svyatago Dukha” (We praise the Father, Son and Holy Spirit), Chris McRae’s vibrant timbres having to my ears a touch of authenticity in the context of this work. And how resonantly the choir’s voices held the slowly-devolving lines of the final “Tem zhe mir Tya slavit” (Hence the world glorifies Thee), with the basses making every ounce of breath tell.

Rachmaninov wanted the “Nunc Dimittis” from this work (No.5 – “Nyne Otpushchayeshi”) sung at his own funeral, professing it to be his favourite number from the work. After the tubular bells preluded the hymn, the women’s voices setting up a rocking motion, over which the tenor sang his plaintive melody, in places impassionedly, and to profoundly engaging effect. The basses then began a kind of canonic sequence at “Yezhe yesi utogoval” (Thou hast prepared) which gradually lit up all sections of the choir. After this, the sopranos then beautifully sounded an exposed “Svyet vodtkroveniye” (A light to shine upon…”) before returning, with the rest of the voices, to the rocking motion, and accompanying the tenor throughout his final sequence, the basses making their famous descent to a low B-flat, some actually completing the journey! In experiencing a performance such as this one could hear why Rachmaninov prized the work so much – most sadly his wish to have the work performed at his funeral was unable to be realised.

Sometimes separately performed, the “Ave Maria” (“Bogoroditse Devo, raduisya”) was here floated beautifully into being, the women’s voices effortlessly orbiting in different contrapuntal directions before the rest of the choir opened the choral floodgates and saturated the church with sound. A joyful bell phrase introduced “Slava v vysnikh Bogu” (Glory Be to God), the sopranos decorating the mezzo’s melody with bell-like entries of their own, the sounds gathering into a kind of cascade which dissolved as quickly as it formed, leaving rapt, prayer-like utterances mingling with the ensuing silences.

In the following “Khvalite imya Gospodne” (Praise the Name of the Lord”) I enjoyed the impression of listening to the voices of the Cherubim and Seraphim on high, as below, on earth, the faithful (the remainder of the choir) lift up their hearts with strong, definite statements, punctuating their utterances with Alleluias, the whole concluded by a peaceful, beautifully-rounded and long-breathed cadence. Rather more complex and narrative a structure was “Blagosloven yesi, Gospodi” (Blessed be the Lord), the text an annotated account of Mary Magdalene (unnamed) discovering Jesus’ tomb opened and inhabited by an angel on the first Easter Sunday morning, the music free and spontaneous-sounding, and the performance of both the tenor soloist and the choir filled with voiced wonderment and joy.

“Voskreseniye Khristovo videvshe” (Hymn of the Resurrection) was imbued with a sense of fresh hope, alternated with wonderment and fierce exultation, the performance giving us an abundance of varied intensities, the voices for the most part energetic and thrusting, while in places thoughtful and tremulous. Even more compelling was the following “Velichit dusha moya Gospoda” (Magnificat), which was a miracle of light-and-shade in its performance – the lower voices began the famous prayer  slowly and meditatively, after which the soprano voices here beautifully lifted their tones to the skies describing the “Cherubim and Seraphim-like exultations” with dance-like figurations, enchanting in their effect. Throughout the hymn, these angelic voices alternated with more earth-bound tones, heaven thus seeming to bestow approval to mankind through the Virgin’s prayer – the sequence ended with heavenly voices joining those on earth in quiet, worshipful rapture.

How rich and varied was the “Slavoslovive velikoye” (Gloria in Excelsis) here, with the lower women’s voices beginning the chanting and the soprano voices floating in over the top. The men’s voices continued the prayer at “Sedyai odesnuyu Otsa” (Thou who sits at the right hand of the Father), before the women’s voices took up the chant again after the “Amen”, reaching a lovely point of hiatus at “Budi, Gospodi, milost Tvoya na nas” (Let Thy mercy, O Lord, be upon us), and becoming almost recitative-like over the mesmerising repetitions of “Svyatyi” (Holy), which continued to the end.

Three short hymns brought the work to a close, the first an intense, richly-wrought outpouring, “Dnes spasenye miru” (The Day of Salvation), followed by a questioning bell sequence that seemed to require an answer from the voices! This came with “Voskres iz groba” (Thou didst rise), a serene outpouring of faith and confidence, the singing like a great exhalation of breath, truly depicting the text’s affirming statement “Thou hast given peace to the Universe”, a world drawn by the sopranos’ soaring, steadily-held line and the basses’ deep, rock-bottom tones. Finally,  heralded by an imposing extended bass solo from Ben Kubiak, the women’s voices appropriately took the lead for “Vzbrannoy Voyevode”  (O victorious leader), a Hymn to the Mother of God, the mezzo lines rich and energetic, and the sopranos gleaming, as throughout, richly upholstered by the lower voices, and concluding the whole work with a joyous outpouring of mellifluous tones and tingling energy.

Very, very great credit to all concerned with the venture, to Mark Stamper and his Inspirare singers and cohorts – what a work, and what a performance!