Category: Reviews – Concerts

America: NZSO performances of brilliant new violin concerto plus Dvořák in New York and Reich in minimalist heaven

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Fawzi Haimor with Anne Akiko Meyers (violin)

Steve Reich: Three Movements
Mason Bates: Violin Concerto
Dvořák: Symphony No 9 in E minor, Op 95 (‘From the New World’)

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 8 October, 7:30 pm

Once upon a time to have scheduled the New World Symphony would have guaranteed a pretty full house in spite of its being accompanied by unfamiliar music. But sometimes I think that as the years pass, the general public is becoming, not more open and adventurous, and simply ‘well-informed’ in the arts, and music too, but less in all those spheres.

And there are various reasons: slavery to the flat black screen, perhaps the cost of tickets, disagreeable weather outside, but most importantly, the lack of exposure on all popular radio and television channels, to anything but the most vacuous noises and sights of the tawdry, commercialised world of entertainment; and a school curriculum that avoids much real exposure to worthwhile music, or the other arts, including literature.

So there were too many empty seats for what turned out to be a splendid, enjoyable concert and the ‘happy few’ – I mean, really ‘quite a large number’ went pretty wild after each piece.

Steve Reich’s earlier New Zealand appearance
The first piece was a chance to recall the great days of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts (as it was then), in 1990, the first of the two under the direction of Chris Doig. One of the many exciting international visitors was Steve Reich and the Musicians, who played inter alia, Reich’s famous, holocaust-related Different Trains.

Perhaps trains have a special place in Reich’s life, for the piece played on Saturday, Three Movements, has inspired a performance on You Tube, played by the LSO under Michael Tilson Thomas, accompanied entirely by a film by Alessandro Manfredi featuring trains in Switzerland, some speeded up to accompany the outer fast  movements, some slowed for the middle movement. It’s a riveting, infectious experience, for a lover of both trains and music.

Three Movements for Orchestra
So was the NZSO’s performance. Coincidentally or calculatedly, the performance celebrated Reich’s 80th birthday, on 3 October.

The centre stage was occupied by two marimbas, two vibraphones and two pianos, which squeezed the strings to the sides; they were divided into two distinct string orchestras. It starts with marimbas and piano in fast alternating beats, with excitement created by shifting tonalities (accompanied in the You Tube clip as white and red, high-speed Swiss and occasional Deutsche Bahn passenger trains flash through, intensifying the excitement of the music). While the pulse remains steady, the rhythm changes to become more and more difficult to identify as sections of the orchestra handle overlapping harmonies and rhythms.

The middle movement runs at half the speed of the outer movements with vibraphones taking over the main rhythmic work and woodwinds, notably clarinets and oboes (winds are limited to pairs of each, but four horns and triple trumpets and trombones) dominate the colouring. The third movement resumes the speed of the first, but intensifies the experience as both marimbas and vibes and the pianos increase the density, loudness and rhythmic complexity. Reich draws attention to his penchant for rhythmic ambiguity and coins the term ‘canonic mensuration’ to describe the way his motifs appear simultaneously in two or more speeds. Even though it’s not easy to keep track of the pulses, they are undeniably fascinating and compelling.

American conductor Fawzi Haimor electrified the orchestra with gestures that were vivid and lucid; it was an occasion when the orchestra’s international quality and acumen were both in high demand and met the competition with formidable success.

Bates: Violin Concerto
Similar strengths were demanded by the next work by 39 year old Mason Bates who has made an impact in the United States. It was premiered by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin in 2012. Bates is composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Centre in Washington DC, having just completed five years in a similar role with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He followed the violin concerto with one for the cello; his first opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, will premiere at the Santa Fe Opera in 2017.

It looks as if its performances in New Zealand are among the few so far outside the United States, if my Internet browsing reflects the situation. The violin concerto has been recorded by the London Symphony under Slatkin with Anne Akiko Meyers, the soloist in Wellington; and the European premiere was by the Orchestre national de Lyon last year. In the United States it’s been played by orchestras in Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra and others no doubt that don’t appear on my computer screen.

And incidentally, Bates’s website and others highlight the three-city tour by the NZSO.

Bates is travelling the road that was paved by the minimalists, Glass, Reich and Riley, but his palette is rather more eclectic, not adhering to the habits of repetitiveness felt in the early minimalists. Like most younger composers who are more interested in giving audiences a good time than impressing musicologists, he avoids serialist dogma and complex, tuneless music such as his compatriots Morton Feldman or Elliott Carter produced.

I found an interesting observation in an American review of Bates’s music, touching the direction of classical music today:
“… classical music and its audiences love young dynamos who satisfy the urge for innovation while continuing the traditions of the classical canon. Bates presents cutting-edge concerts and writes big pieces for orchestra that are essentially 21st-century tone poems, or musical narratives.”
It’s not irrelevant that he moonlights as a DJ, is deep into electronica, and the sophisticated areas of pop music.

So what does the violin concerto sound like? What are its influences?
Though I didn’t find many distinct echoes of earlier composers, there were glimpses of Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, inter alia, certain of the pulsating passages of his violin concerto; and you can hear sounds that, in a couple of decades from now, will define the time and place of this music. Thinking about violin concerto models, the fast movements of John Corigliano’s ‘Red Violin’ Concerto is not far away.

The piece doesn’t demand a Straussian or Mahlerian sized orchestra: strings numbered 14 first violins down to six basses; there’s a piano and some interesting percussion that I could hear but not see.

Bates and the primitive birds
Then there’s the illustrative aspect. Bates’s own notes describe how he fastened on depicting a chase between two mesozoic animals, of the Jurassic age (around 150 million years ago): the bird-like Archaeopteryx lithographica chasing a compsognathid (Compsognathus longipes) at night. Though I’m really not interested in dinosaurs, it was not hard to be fascinated by the music itself, listening to the contest between the two creatures, through frantic, pulsating, skittering sounds alternating with the violin’s rather gorgeously lyrical, soaring music.

There was, naturally, a very special feel in the violin’s part, since we were privileged to have the commissioner/dedicatee/performer of the premiere playing with the NZSO; they were indeed driven by the combination of Meyers’s intensity and soulfulness, and the elegant, energetic conducting of Haimor. While the orchestral part of the work is full of entertainment and uncluttered virtuosity, the violin was so constantly the centre of attention that it was too easy to miss the delights conspicuous in the orchestra.

The second movement, called ‘Lakebed Memories’, took us from the actual Jurassic age to viewing a mesozoic lakebed, perhaps from the present day, in a series of slow, falling phrases from the violin and semi-glissandi pizzicato from cellos and some curious sounds from percussion, e.g. crotales(?) and glockenspiel(?).

In the middle of the third movement the orchestra gave way entirely to the violinist who raced away with endless oscillating figures representing ‘The Rise of the Birds’, another opportunity for flight, breathless ascents, or peaceful gliding on up-draughts, as the by-now-familiar, beautiful soaring motif comes to dominate until the relatively matter-of-fact ending.

I doubt that the orchestral performance was any less brilliant and convincing that those by the premiering orchestra, Pittsburgh, and others that have played it. It was one of the most attractive and engaging pieces of contemporary music I’ve come across for a while.

The New World Symphony
After the interval, the ‘New World’ Symphony did not feel like a retreat to old-fashioned music, something one knew too well, that had become hackneyed. Though other composers like Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy, of the period when Dvořák wrote it (the 1890s) have now come to dominate, to hear such a vibrant and vivid performance was to be reminded that it was no disgrace to have become more immediately popular than the other composers I mentioned.

The opening, extremely calm with strings and a telling clarinet note, and then a surprising, extra-fortissimo call to attention from Lenny Sakofsky’s hard-sticked timpani and Greg Hill’s horn. To watch conductor Haimor again, in main-stream repertoire (and here, no score), bending to the same emphases and gestures, the balletic movements that galvanised the auditorium in the first half in music of our day, made clear the essentially contemporary nature of the symphony. Every section of the orchestra, now at full strength – 16 first violins down to 8 basses – seemed to be electrified by the call to deliver a message of this kind: breathy, slow and quiet flute, velvety horns, and in the famous Largo tune, cor anglais and then bassoons, in playing that quite eliminated any sense of its being over-familiar.

And the Scherzo movement was alive with variety and subtlety, with scrupulous articulation everywhere. The Finale – con fuoco – further upped the emotional temperature where sudden switches of tempo, dynamics, discretion and brashness, brilliant orchestration and, as the programme note remarks, Dvořák’s unending melodic invention, create one of the most colourful and arousing of orchestral finales. An early experience of the symphony came to mind, hearing, in the late 1950s the opening of the Finale used as a sensational promotional tool in a sampler LP of the ‘new stereophonic recording technique’ , when the breathtaking opening assaulted the ears seemingly from every direction.

Not much has changed.
This concert will go down as one of the real highlights of musical 2016.

Adventures in great music both well-known and unknown, marks strong revival by Cantoris

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Cantoris conducted by Thomas Nikora

Sacred Music by D’Astorga and Mozart
D’Astorga: Stabat Mater
Mozart: Ave Verum Corpus, K 618; and Vesperae Solennes de confessore, K 339

Soloists: Olivia Marshall, Linden Loader, Jamie Young, Will King
Cantica Sacra Instrumental Ensemble of selected musicians

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 2 October, 3 pm

In many ways, an appealing way to design a programme: two of Mozart’s best-loved choral works and one obscure, but as it emerged, beautiful piece by an almost totally unknown composer. Emanuele d’Astorga was born in Sicily in 1680, in perhaps the most fruitful and brilliant decade in the whole history of western classical music – the decade of Vivaldi, Telemann, Rameau, Bach, Handel, Biber, Geminiani, Pachelbel, Domenico Scarlatti (who also divided his time between Italy, Spain, and Portugal; though Astorga lived in Spain at certain times, he lived mainly in Italy, travelled widely too).

Emanuele d’Astorga
Astorga inherited a Spanish barony with estates in Sicily (which was then under Spanish rule); Astorga is a town on the Camino de Santiago about 40km west of Leon in the province of that name. But there’s no evidence of his family’s residence there.

Thomas Nikora introduced the music but either he didn’t use the microphone or it wasn’t working properly for I caught little of it. Though the short account of Astorga’s life suggests that very little is known about him, browsing the internet, and even looking back to old sources such as the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica there is an entry that covers most of what is known today. The best account I’ve seen is a CD booklet note by English choral conductor Robert King accompanying his recording of the Stabat Mater.

D’Astorga’s Stabat Mater
The Stabat Mater was probably written earlier than Pergolesi’s (1736), based purely on stylistic grounds (I can find no confirmation of its first performance in 1713, as offered in the programme notes).

One’s first reaction is a comparison with the very popular Pergolesi work, and the feeling that while Astorga’s is contrapuntally more sophisticated, it hasn’t Pergolesi’s artless poignancy. Nevertheless, the instrumental introduction immediately showed a skilled and imaginative composer, capturing a calm melancholy, in playing that was reassuringly secure, if not blessed with the aching sounds that the best baroque ensembles produce.

Here was an orchestra of nine strings (led by Corrina Connor) plus the chamber organ played by Heather Easting; to find fault would be unhelpful and difficult. The most important thing to stress is the huge difference a competent, instrumental ensemble makes to the persuasiveness and integrity of choral music. Much as I enjoy organ music, it usually fails as a substitute for the instruments prescribed by the composer as choral accompaniment.

The first choral entry was characterised by rising chromatic lines giving signs of a well-rehearsed choir, with soprano Olivia Marshall, right from the first, handling her lines very well, especially in her bright, higher register. The weaving of the separate lines of the choral writing, and their nicely balanced performance, that frequently made it hard to decide where the actual melody was – all parts were of equal interest. The same went for the soloists; soprano, bass, then tenor entered in turn in the ‘O quam tristis’. There were some initial tonal weaknesses, but nothing worth mentioning. An early delight was the soprano-mezzo duet at the start of the charming, triple time ‘Quis est homo’; and later in that section the men had similar opportunity which they exploited splendidly; as did tenor Jamie Young and mezzo Linden Loader in short fugal duets in the ‘Fac me tecum’.

The varied treatment of solo parts were soon comfortable, and continued to be a most attractive feature of the work. Bass Will King was uniformly impressive, his voice flexible over a wide range and relished his final exhibition in the ¾ time ‘Fac me plagis’ to which one can almost dance.

There are moments where one hears touches of Handel, in the final ‘Christe’ – the Amen chorus, or of Vivaldi in some of the rapid quaver figures from the strings; none of that’s very remarkable, since, until the current age of obsession with ‘originality’ there was nothing to be ashamed about in composing in a way that reflected one’s own age and one’s most gifted predecessors. In fact the final chorus whose contributions were charmingly varied, perhaps not in a way that especially illuminated the text, made the music constantly interesting and delightful.

There are records of a few operas by Astorga, but only one act of Dafne survives. However, he also wrote perhaps 170 ‘chamber cantatas’, said to be very attractive. Judging by the great gifts evident revealed in the Stabat Mater, I look forward to their being explored and performed.

Mozart: Ave verum and Vesperae solennes
The second half of the concert was for Mozart: the little masterpiece of his last months, Ave verum corpus, and then the splendidly-named Vesperae solennes de confessore (It always intrigues me to resurrect my knowledge of Latin grammar to explain the varying endings of each word).

The touches of uncertainty in the orchestral introduction of the Ave verum only emphasised the feeling of reverence and awe the musicians might properly have felt as they approached this serene, forgiving, simply beautiful music (I speak not of the religious significance), but there was nothing lacking in the subdued and carefully articulated performance.

The ‘Solemn Vespers’ was Mozart’s last composition for the Salzburg Cathedral before he left for Vienna. However unpleasant was his relationship with the Prince Archbishop, Mozart did not carry his feelings into this wonderful work. The chance of hearing it on a Sunday evening at your local church would have made adherence to the Catholic Church richly rewarding, in fact irresistible, in the years before the liturgical changes of the 20th century.

Again, both orchestra, now joined by a couple of trumpets and percussion, and choir evinced a touch of nervousness which quickly dissipated. It’s not only the beautiful ‘Laudate dominum’ that is memorable, each section (all are based on Psalms) is inspired both by melody and its musical elaboration. The ‘Dixit Dominus’ is a choral piece in triple time, and the singing was lively, and words were often distinct; the four soloists took change in the ‘Confitebor’, with soprano Olivia Marshall prominent, and she was a particular ornament later, in the ‘Laudate Dominum’; but each, particularly tenor Jamie Young, made distinctive contributions. They all conversed attractively in the ‘Beatus Vir’, as the voices formed and reformed the musical patterns, Linden Loader leading at times; and the strings handled their striking phases well. The ‘Laudate pueri’ is characterised by the men’s and women’s voices moving separately, fugally, around a steady almost hypnotic rhythm in common time.

It’s interesting that, in its setting, the ‘Laudate Dominum’ seems not particularly to stand out, but simply takes its place as a moment of calm between more forthright movements; apart from the splendid soprano solo, one of its glories was way in which the last bars fell away to beyond pianissimo at the end. The ‘Magnificat’, the last movement, finally made trumpets and percussion conspicuous, and gave more attention to soloists, sometimes in duet, sometimes separately.

Cantoris has had its vicissitudes over the years, but this concert was a small triumph both on account of the important and great music chosen (too many choirs seek obscure but insignificant music, guided by some ‘theme’) and the evident confidence and energy that Thomas Nikora has injected into it.

 

 

Passage of the Soul – commemorative and reflective beauty at Wellington Cathedral

Posted on by Peter Mechen

PASSAGE OF THE SOUL
Choral Whispers of Eastern Orthodoxy

Baroque Voices
Directed by Pepe Becker

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul,
Molesworth Street, Wellington

Sunday 2nd October, 2016

It was originally intended that “Passage of the Soul”, the name given to a concert of Eastern Orthodox choral music, would take place in the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation of the Theotokos, in Wellington’s Hania Street. For those of us who hadn’t been to the venue the chance to do so represented an additional incentive to attend this Baroque Voices concert, which was evocatively subtitled “Choral Whispers of Eastern Orthodoxy”. As it turned out, circumstances prevented the Hania Street venue’s use, so at short notice the concert was transferred to the Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul in Molesworth Street.

I was able to speak with a couple of group members immediately after the concert had finished, and got the impression from them that it was a kind of swings-and-roundabouts situation regarding the different venues – yes, it would have been more appropriate in some ways to have performed the concert in the Hania Street church, but as it turned out the Molesworth Street Cathedral’s greater seating capacity was actually needed to accommodate the audience numbers who turned up! – and the Cathedral’s renowned acoustic added an extra sonic dimension to the atmosphere created by the beauty of the music and its performance.

The concert was the result of a collaboration between the Baroque Voices Ensemble, and one of its former members,  Dimitrios Theodoridis, who’s currently based in Berlin. While holidaying throughout Europe a couple of years ago he decided to stay put in Berlin for a while, eventually joining a couple of vocal ensembles and regularly performing with them. The death of his mother, Anthula Theodoridis, inspired him to write a work Passage of the Soul, and then to organise a concert in which the work could be performed. With the help of his former colleague, Baroque Voices director Pepe Becker, he was able to put together a sequence of pieces which framed his own work in an appropriate context and arrange for the sequence to be performed.

Theodoridis wanted a predominantly meditative ambience to prevail throughout the concert, so we were requested not to applaud, but let the resonances do their work. He asked us to regard the concert more as a religious service than a “performance”, in order to emphasise the occasion’s commemorative aspect. Aiding and abetting this feeling was the use of incense, which was burned beforehand in the church, and whose redolent flavour straight away elevated one’s expectations to a kind of ritualistic state, completely removed from any dynamic of performance and entertainment.

The “Choral Whispers” of the concert’s subtitle found expression in a number of pieces from different eras, by composers who were unknown to me, names such as Manuel Gazes (15th Century), Parthenios Sgoutas (17th Century), Dobri Hristov (1875-1941) and Frank Desby (1922-92). Though largely meditative, the different pieces evoked whole worlds of varied feeling through different timbres and colours, textures and dynamics.  Those pieces written by the remarkable American-born Frank Desby, who became an authority on Greek plainchant and polyphonic music seemed to express something of the on-going “flavour of interaction” between traditional Byzantine chant and Western polyphony.  Desby’s “Those Baptised into Christ” contrived to my ears to freely float between both traditional simplicity and harmonic enrichment, the whole while preserving a sense of drawing from impulses deeply rooted in the past.

An organ solo (played by Jonathan Berkahn) began the service, accompanying the placement of a commemorative candle in honour of Anthula Theodoridis, a deeply personal moment followed by a very open-hearted, public and demonstrative Alliluia from Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week (where possible Dimitrios Theodoridis rewrote the texts of these hymns and meditations in Greek). He was, he said, heartened by the example of Igor Stravinsky in his setting of the Lord’s prayer, set by the composer in Latin from Old Church Slavonic. Stravinsky most interestingly was attracted by Latin as a medium “not dead but turned to stone, and so monumentalised as to have become immune from all risk of vulgarisation”.

Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov were all represented in this concert (Stravinsky adored Tchaikovsky’s music, as did Rachmaninov!). Theodoridis interestingly reset Tchaikovsky’s Cherubic Hymn to Greek words, but not Rachmaninov’s contribution, an exerpt from his  “Vespers”, which retained its original Church Slavonic. The performances of all three composers’ music were vibrant, tremulous and deeply-wrought. Each was notable for giving the listener a different perspective on its composer to the somewhat Westernised “classical music” mode one usually hears, an outcome, perhaps, of each composer’s interaction with text and as a result “speaking“ with more-than-usual Slavic force in their musical responses.

Of other well-known composers, both John Taverner (1944-2013) and Arvo Pärt were represented by characteristic pieces, Taverner’s beautiful piece “Song for Athene” having the distinction of being performed at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997, though written four years earlier as a tribute by the composer to a young family friend of Greek descent, Athene Hariades, who had been accidentally killed. Here, the exchanges between the “Alleluia” chants and the invocations were varied and haunting, the ensemble making the most of the dramatic key-change from minor to major just before the words “Come, enjoy rewards and crowns I have prepared for you”.

Theodoridis’s own composition reflected his family’s Greek cultural and spiritual heritage, using references to the Greek Orthodox funeral service via a hymn, Eonia I mnimi (Eternal Memory), the theme from which haunted the piece’s conclusion, reiterating the prayer “May her soul rest in peace”. An alto solo (sung by Andrea Cochrane) ran like a thread through the piece, its strand resonating with an awareness of approaching death and the desire to farewell loved ones, before gradually letting go, the soul comforted by the gentle sounds of the handbells and the angelic voices inviting it to “sleep in peace”.

Arvo Pärt’s piece for organ solo “Pari Intervallo”, performed by Jonathan Berkahn immediately after this enabled us to continue our spiritual and emotional trajectories set up by what had gone immediately before, the meditative qualities of the sounds and their resonances allowing our sensibilities what seems like unlimited time and space to explore and be in touch with ourselves. This having been completed and a declaration of faith then made in the form of a 17th Century setting by Parthenios Sgoutas of the Nicean Creed,  we returned to the music of Arvo Pärt to conclude the concert, “O Morgenstern” (Morning Star), appropriately a piece whose tone-clusters and resulting harmonic tensions gave the impression of a soul striving towards the light, seeking a kind of affirmation in the onset of a new day.

The absence of applause provided ample proof of the capacity for listeners to express appreciation, awe and gratitude towards composers and performers alike in silence – at the end we were able to take away and continue to relish in tranquillity those resonances which the performers had so enchantingly crafted and brought alive for us.

Challenging and enterprising concert “Freedom and Captivity” and the like, from Nota Bene

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Nota Bene conducted by Peter Walls
Organ: James Tibbles
NZSM Baroque Ensemble (Samantha Owens – oboe, Fleur Jackson – violin, Grant Baker and Sophie Acheson – violas, Rebecca Warnes and Corrina Connor – cellos)
Percussion: Sam Rich
Kapa haka: Fruen Samoa and Te Whanau Tahi; Kuia: Erina Daniels

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Saturday 1 October, 7:30 pm

This concert was entitled Freedom and Captivity, reflecting, in music and words, on the experience and problems faced in wars, in colonisation, in racism and other forms of oppression. A good example of what might still be to some, an improper mixing of art and politics (recall sport and politics a generation ago).

It is a worthy and fruitful topic which has inspired a lot of music and other arts, which can be discerned in all eras, particularly our own.

While all branches of the arts, especially literature, have always been intimately concerned with politics, and the visual arts only a little less so, music can easily exist, oblivious to politics.

Here, to make the point, music and readings were interspersed, handling many of the trials and tragedies of mankind: war, imprisonment, exile, cruelty, refugees…

Forced migration, from Biblical times
Forced migration has a long history, none more legendary than the expulsion of the Jews from Israel, and Psalm 113 was a fitting way to open the programme, assuming a universal approach to Biblical stories; this was presented in calm plainchant form sung by the women of the choir.

The readings were mixed, some, like the address of Volumnia from Coriolanus perhaps Shakespeare’s most profoundly political play with deep resonance for today, was an unfamiliar (to most) piece. Rebecca Blundell, a good soprano, came very close to capturing the full dramatic force of the mother’s plea to her son to desist from Assad-like killing of his own people.

Though amplification was evidently available, it was either not used or was inadequate and some of this and other readings were missed. An important part of any rehearsal is surely to test levels of audibility.

After the reading from Coriolanus, Arvo Pärt’s De Profundis (Psalm 130) was sung, a less specific but profound account of human persecution, which has been a rich source of inspiration by many composers and writers throughout European history. (A look at the Wikipedia entry on De Profundis is insightful, highly interesting; inter alia, there’s Shostakovich’s use in his song-cycle-like 14th Symphony of Garcia Lorca’s Spanish version of the Psalm, among many other poems dealing with mortality).

Pärt’s complex, tortured De Profundis is set in Latin for men’s choir, percussion and organ and was first performed in Kassel in 1981. His setting is far from the well-known, lucid pieces like Fratres or Spiegel im Spiegel or the Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.  It was a challenge to the choir and indeed it was not altogether defeated; the percussion in the shape of a big bass drum, and the increasingly prominent organ, with some fine bass voices left quite an impression.

The second reading was an extract from a Department of Labour report on the 4500 post-WW2 refugees arriving at Pahiatua, taken from Anne Beaglehole’s study, Refugee New Zealand: A Nation’s Response to Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Jenny Gould’s voice, with its normal New Zealand character, was well adapted to the subject. I guess the message was: for a population about a third of today’s, we took about six times the number of refugees in a year.

David Morriss is a more experienced speaker and his reading from magistrate John Gorst’s important, almost classic account of the wars in the Waikato: The Maori King; or, the story of our quarrel with the natives of New Zealand of 1864 was an interesting revelation of tolerant balance. It reported, in a tone that was distinctly critical of Government handling of the causes and course of the wars, on refugees from Maori villages near Auckland. It too was extracted from Anne Beaglehole’s Refugee New Zealand.

Virginia Earle read with unpretentious simplicity a touching, imaginative piece from Short Stories by Young Refugees in New Zealand (2008). (It was taken from a collection of such material edited by Fiona Kidman and Jeff Thomas).

It struck me at about this point that dimmer lighting would have been in the interest of the small-scale dramas told in both words and music.

There were two further readings, in the second half. First, Martin Luther King’s famous speech of 23 August 1963 urging pacifism, tolerance, turning-the-other-cheek, in the face of White abuse. Ray Coats, from the pulpit, made a splendid oratorical impact.

James Bertram: poet, journalist, scholar
Poet and university English lecturer, James Bertram was a 1930s correspondent in China and wartime prisoner in Japan; With admirable clarity and almost excess ‘expression’, John Chote read Bertram’s poem Home Thoughts from Abroad – Tokyo working party 1945 offered another view of displacement, alienation, violence and inhumanity.

(I reflect gratefully on Bertram’s lectures throughout my university years: he was one of the few who could make enlivening references to music, and all the arts, while discussing, for example, Milton; charismatic perhaps not, but a wondrously elegant and articulate lecturer with a phenomenal flair for springing a telling and picturesque quotation on his happy students).
Apologies for that self-indulgence.

After Oxford, (as a Rhodes Scholar, and where he was one of the James McNeish’s Peacocks – Dance of the Peacocks, with Dan Davin, Geoffrey Cox, Ian Milner and John Mulgan) Bertram was a journalist on an Oxford scholarship to China and Japan from 1936, and he became deeply involved in China in the war years: he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1941 and was lucky to survive. After the war he returned to Japan as adviser to the New Zealand delegation to the Far Eastern Commission; and this was the source of his poem. He came to the English Department of Victoria University College in 1947.

To return to the music, which was just as varied.
Samuel Sebastian Wesley was a grandson of hymn-writer Charles Wesley whose brother was Methodist Church founder John Wesley. A respected composer in his day, his work, The Wilderness, pitched a quartet of voices against the full choir, demonstrating how the weaknesses of individual voices are obscured when singing en masse. But though I tried to be open-minded I did not find the performance revelatory or the music other than rather insipid.

An excerpt from an opera-in-progress, Kia tu tonu; Tohu tells us by Gillian Karawe Whitehead on Parihaka was semi-staged. But its dramatic impact could only be guessed at from an excerpt where there was no chance for an audience to understand the thrust of the story or to form an impression of characters. Just who was who in the crowd in front of us eluded me, as did the significance of spreading the choir members around the side aisles and the rear of the church, or Thomas Nikora in the gallery.

And one can only form a view of the musical force of a large-scale work like this from a fuller performance where it’s possible to hear things twice, and in the proper context.

Mendelssohn’s late-in-life motet on the Nunc Dimittis (Herr, nun lässet du), proved an interesting and attractive find, employing again a quartet of soloists contrasted with the full choir; it might have been conventional, both musically and liturgically, but this performance did it justice.

If that was almost Mendelssohn’s last work, the next was said to be Bach’s first known cantata, Aus der Tiefe, rufe dich (BWV 131), the German version of De Profundis, written at Mühlhausen; though I have been under the impression that Christ lag in Todes Banden (BWV 4) also written in Mühlhausen, where he worked immediately before his first major position at Weimar, was his first cantata. Anyway, now in the company of a baroque oboe, prominent right at the start, this was an interesting performance revealing an already mature composer, with recognisable Bachian melodic characteristics and harmonic finger-prints. The second movement gave bass David Morriss a rewarding opportunity in a typical Bach arioso. A peaceful aria and chorale, Meine Seele wartet auf, in triple time, gave tenor Patrick Geddes, in good voice, solo exposure nicely accompanied by cello. This movement was particularly charming as the choir, very quietly and unobtrusively beneath the solo voice, sang a reflective text lamenting the poet’s sins. The cantata ended with a beautifully balanced chorus with alternate fast and slow passages, with more attractive oboe exposure.

After that, the Spirituals from Tippett’s A Child of our Time, seemed perhaps uncalled for. I confess to remaining rather indifferent to even these examples of Tippett arrangements and will refrain from comment; in any case it started to seem a long concert.

And I suppose it was inevitable that the most famous composition involving an exiled people, ‘Va pensiero’ from Nabucco, would be included. Given the size of the choir, they did justice to this great heavyweight chorus describing the horrible experiences of a nation, experiences suffered today by a different population, oppressed now by the victims of 2500 years before.

So there had been enough unusual and rewarding music, touching on many of the crises that proliferate today. In fact, director Peter Walls and the choir are to be congratulated for their courage in presenting material that might be troubling for some, bringing the light of humanity to some of today’s most intractable problems.

 

Mature performances by undergraduate NZSM guitar students at St Andrew’s

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

St Andrew’s lunchtime concerts

Classical guitar students of the New Zealand School of Music
Dylan Solomon, Olivia Fetherston, Joel Baldwin, Rameka Tamaki, Amber Madriaga

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday 28 September, 12:15 pm

This student recital was a showcase for an honours student (Solomon) set beside four first and second year students. The test for the audience might have been to have asked them to identify the levels of accomplishment of each, without knowing their place in the academic hierarchy. Without denigrating the splendid playing of Solomon, I was often surprised at both the skill and the interpretive insights displayed by the undergraduate students.

Because soprano saxophonist Kim Hunter had a conflicting engagement, Solomon substituted for the planned piece for saxophone and guitar by Giulianni, a solo guitar piece by James Mountain, Four Fountains, and the Gigue from Bach’s Lute Suite in C minor (BWV 997).

James Mountain is an Australian composer/guitarist, and this piece was inspired by Len Lye’s Four Fountains, a central installation at the Len Lye Centre in the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.

He began with such unobtrusive hand movements at the top of the strings, that I thought he was perhaps tuning in an unusual way. But it soon became clear that we were in flight and the ethereal sounds seemed to confirm the sense of a Len Lye creation. I have not yet got to see the new Len Lye gallery so I’ll satisfy myself with an extract from the gallery’s website:

“The new Len Lye Centre opened in July 2015 with an audience favourite: the gentle swaying Fountain, a bundle of rotating stainless-steel rods that twist, flex and shimmer. Among the earliest of Lye’s ‘tangible motion sculptures’, Fountain became a work he returned to throughout the 1960s and 1970s with numerous variations in collections around the world.

“Performing alongside three earlier versions of Fountain, a new member of this family of works arrived in 2015 with the 8-metre tall version – Fountain IV – engineered by the Len Lye Foundation based on Lye’s detailed design drawings and notes.”

Having made this connection, I would rather like to hear the piece again. There were two parts: the first an ethereal, spectral melody in a gently swaying motion; the second, more corporeal, with faster, rolling chords, yet still enigmatic and hypnotic with an endlessly repeated note in the centre of the surrounding sounds.

Solomon’s second piece was the Gigue from Bach’s Lute Suite in C minor. The authenticity of the lute suites and other pieces for the lute is a subject that the layman might well avoid. At one end of the controversy is the lack of evidence that Bach wrote any suites specifically for the lute, and that the so-called lute suites (BWV 995 – 1000), are arrangements of music written for other instruments. The water is muddied by transcriptions of, for example, Bach’s solo violin sonatas and partitas being entitled (by Hopkinson Smith for example) as ‘lute sonatas and partitas’.

It was a rather moderato version of a gigue which is often presented as a quicker dance, but then all the dances that came to be employed by composers over the centuries were treated in individual ways, without the focus primarily on dancing. The way this went was very attractive.

A couple of weeks earlier I’d attended the concert in the Adam Concert Room at Victoria University where Marek Pasieczny himself played; here, first-year student Olivia Fetherston played his Little Sonata of 2011; she reported that it was based to some extent on pieces by Hindemith and Schubert, though I didn’t recognise anything very reminiscent of the styles of either composer. It’s a carefully written work which does not, as the name suggests, outlive the interest of its material; it called for the player to give much attention to dynamics, vibrato, subtle tempo changes, interesting sequences of chords that are always an engaging aspect of the instrument’s resources, and flashes of flamenco-like strumming in the last movement. All played with impressive accuracy and sensitivity.

Joel Baldwin played three of Lilburn’s Canzonas. Though I’ve heard them played on guitar before, I had not heard the one presented as No 1 which is based on Sings Harry; perhaps it’s a changed sequence adopted for the guitar arrangements. The usual No 1 is that composed as incidental music, as were two of the others, for Ngaio Marsh’s famous Shakespeare productions for the Canterbury University College Drama Society: this one for Hamlet, and Joel played that second. I didn’t catch the origin of the third one – either for Marsh’s Othello, or for Maria Dronke’s reading of Rilke’s famous The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Rilke. They lie very well for the guitar, but are deceptively hard to capture, given Lilburnian elusiveness and reticence; and it’s no disgrace not to have mastered every subtlety. He followed with the Fugue from Bach’s solo violin sonata in G minor, BWV 1001, one of those transcribed via a lute arrangement. His playing was fluent and managed to find the outlines of the fugal workings clearly.

Rameka Tamaki played two contemporary pieces, the first by Cuban composer Leo Brouwer and the second by eminent French composer Roland Dyens. With Brouwer’s Danza del Altiplano Tamaki showed a surprisingly comfortable familiarity, as if he’d lived on the Altiplano (the high plateau straddling Bolivia, Peru and Chile) rather than Cuba. There was an instinctive feel for the rhythm and his fingering was agile; he seemed to rejoice in the nasal sound created by strumming close to the bridge.

Dyens’s famous Tango en Skaï, has cropped up in school of music recitals a few times over the years. For a young first year student, Rameka Tamaki exhibited an air of confidence and considerable virtuosity in the varied demands on each hand. Perhaps it’s a kind of send-up of the Argentinian tango and the playing commanded the complex rhythms and flourishes with seeming ease.

Finally Amber Madriaga. First she played the pair of minuets from Bach’s solo violin partita in E minor, BWV 1006, the first of which is a gentle piece, very exposed for a violinist though not that hard simply to play the notes and the same goes for the guitarist. The second minuet, a little more subdued in spirit, is usually played at the same tempo, but she emphasised its meditative character by slowing further; a satisfying performance.

I recalled Madriaga’s name from her participation in the university’s Young Musicians Programme in 2012 where she played the Tango en Skaï. Here she played, instead, Dyens’s Fuoco (from his Libra sonatina), a furiously virtuosic piece that was, perhaps, not technically perfect, but nevertheless exemplifying the admirable level of accomplishment that the school of music is achieving, specifically in guitar.

 

 

 

High drama, pastoral beauty and symphonic grandeur from the WCO with Michael Vinten

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Orchestra presents:

MOZART – Overture “Don Giovanni” K.527
MAHLER – Seven Early Songs / Symphonic Movement “Blumine”
BEETHOVEN – Symphony No.3 “Eroica” Op.55

Maaike Christie-Beekman (soprano)
Wellington Chamber Orchestra
Michael Vinten (conductor)

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

Sunday, 25th September, 2016

It’s always fascinating to encounter the efforts of musicians who aren’t full-time professional players literally throwing themselves wholeheartedly at music that’s challenging and difficult, however well-known it might seem. I can claim to having had some limited but nevertheless exhilarating experience as such a player in an amateur orchestra, in another life! – what a pleasure it was, that of being able to listen “from the inside” to various pieces which I thought I knew well until the chance of actually taking part in performances of them came my way. As far as my own appreciation of music and music-listening went, these opportunities were revelatory, and at times challenging – I found myself more and more concerned with looking for answers to the question a friend once posed to me in regard to the quality of a music performance I’d attended: – “What do you mean, “It was good”?”

The above paragraph seemed to type itself, to my surprise, as soon as I began thinking about the recent WCO concert I’d gone to, drawn by the prospect of hearing a “live Eroica”! Wondering whether there would be anybody the least bit interested in my somewhat “small dreams of a scorpion” orchestral-playing experiences, I was sorely tempted at first to draw a veil over my musings and begin again. However, as I’d recently struggled with a couple of my reviewing assignations regarding how to even begin various articles, I thought I wouldn’t on this occasion spurn a spontaneous outpouring – something obviously deep and even perhaps Freudian or Jungian may well have been behind it all, which may well further reveal itself as the review continues…….so, be warned, Middle C reader!

The Mahler Songs offered on the programme had different attractions, not the least of which was the pleasure of listening to Maaike Christie-Beekman’s singing, which I’ve very much enjoyed in the past. Another significant aspect was that the accompaniments for all seven songs were orchestrations by the concert’s conductor, Michael Vinten –  I would imagine that they had been performed previously, else we would have been told that these were “world premiere performances”. While not having a comprehensive knowledge of the composer’s vocal output I recall being delighted by encountering at some stage a recording of a Mahler recital by Janet Baker (with piano accompaniment), and was hoping that some of the songs I enjoyed on that occasion might be served up once again in their newly-minted orchestral guise. What a remarkable phenomenon the late twentieth-century rise of the music of Mahler has been! – and in the process, the once-frequently-cited and off-putting “heaviness” of the composer’s musical language, in terms of both texture and duration, has gradually become less and less of a difficulty for concert-goers as his work becomes more frequently performed.

Apropos to these versions of the songs was the presence on the podium of the man responsible for the orchestrations, Michael Vinten.  I’ve greatly admired his conducting at various times, as I have  his work over the years as Wellingon Chorus Master for the New Zealand Opera. He’s taken a number of productions for the company on national tours, and I remember with particular pleasure his direction of a “Cosi fan tutti” in the Wellington Opera House a number of years ago, a  work I was delighted to hear him conduct again in 2013 for Days Bay Opera in Wellington. Purely by chance I happened to be speaking to a WCO orchestra player a couple of days before this present concert,  whose response to my enquiry as to how things were going was that “we were being really pushed hard by the conductor!” So with this in mind, I rolled up to St.Andrew’s church on Wellington’s The Terrace, expecting plenty of fireworks of the “thrills -and-spills” variety, but hoping that the “pushed hard” result wouldn’t crowd out the musicality this ensemble had often shown they were capable of.

The concert began with Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” Overture – right from the beginning Michael Vinten directed the players how he meant to go on, insisting on sharply-accentuated, abrupt chordings, swift, impulsive accompaniments and swirling, agitated lines which, ensemble-wise, spun in and out of control. The musicians bent their backs to the task of getting their fingers around the notes, while the strings tried valiantly to listen to one another to integrate their ensemble and establish the “gait” of the music, with the winds occasionally shining through like beacons throwing out guiding light in the midst of a storm. At the reprise of the opening allegro, things had settled in together more consistently, though the agitated sequences, with their tricky syncopations, meant that the players couldn’t relax for a moment. The unfamiliar “concert ending” involved a return to these energetic gestures, which, given the music’s subject matter, gave rise to the thought that there simply seemed no rest here for the wicked and virtuous alike!

But there was relief at hand, in the shape and form of a number of songs of great and distinctive beauty. The young Mahler wrote several of them as a planned cycle as early as 1880, while in thrall to the charms of a local girl, but as the romance waned so did the composer’s inspiration, so that the cycle was never finished. Others were written for a performance of Tirso de Molina’s play “Don Juan” and another, “Hans und Grete”, found its way into the Ländler movement of the composer’s First Symphony. Eventually five of them became Book One of his collection “Lieder und Gesang”, published in 1892, the remaining two being recycled by the composer in his cantata “Das Klagende Lied” – in fact, throughout much of Mahler’s output there exist these kinds of thematic connections between his songs and larger works which greatly enriched his creativity.

Soprano Maaike Christie-Beekman, who I’d heard, incidentally, in that aforemetioned Days Bay performance of “Cosi” conducted by Vinten, brought a rich and variegated tonal palette and a gift for characterisation to these songs which vividly brought out their qualities in every instance. As for the orchestrations, I thought they were miraculously-wrought, readily persuading us that it was the composer’s own voice we were hearing. Mahler’s ready identification with the theme of despair over lost love redolently coloured both “Im Lenz” (In Spring) and “Winterlied” (Winter Song), each of which contained beautiful and atmospheric evocations of nature; while in contrast “Hans und Grete” captured a very Germanic fairy-tale feeling, with some energetic and abandoned whoops of joy fron the singer at each verse’s end. The players did ample justice throughout to their conductor’s orchestral re-imaginings and to his direction of them – the final song, “Frühlingsmorgen” (Spring Morning) featured a rolling, lyrical carpet of orchestral sound on which the voice was able to sail, supported by atmospheric wind interjections, enjoining the sleeper to “….get up!  The sun has risen!”, and giving tongue to naturalistic ambiences such as birdsong at the end. It was, I thought, all a great success, and received by the audience with all due appreciation.

As a kind of adjunct to the songs, we heard the orchestral movement “Blumine”, a piece Mahler composed originally for his First Symphony, before deciding to take it out (it’s every so often re-instated in performances of the Symphony as a kind of “completist” exercise by orchestras and conductors, even though it’s generally agreed that Mahler’s decision to dispense with it was the appropriate one). Here it was given a securely-voiced, beautifully-focused and nicely-played performance, featuring several exposed orchestral solos, not the least of them being the trumpet solo (accurately and atmospherically played by Donald Holborow), with the oboe occasionally prominent as well, to haunting effect.

After the interval came the “Eroica” – and we were instantly galvanised by Michael Vinten’s opening relentlessly driving beat, which immediately brought to my mind that famous quote often attributed to conductor Arturo Toscanini, who, when asked whether he thought of Napoleon Bonaparte when conducting the symphony’s opening movement, retorted impatiently, “Is not-a Napoleon! Is not-a Eroica! Is allegro con brio!”. Here, it sounded to me more like “allegro con furioso!”, an effect which was admittedly exacerbated by the strings’ difficulties in keeping their ensemble sufficiently together whenever the music splintered into separate running figurations. It struck me that Vinten had possibly made things more difficult for his players by dividing his first and second violins to left and right of the orchestra, in aid of their lines’ antiphonal effect. The sections themselves held together, but at that speed and across those vistas, things often came unstuck between them, ensemble-wise.

No such difficulties were experienced by the winds who often steadied the ensemble, as it were, after certain sequences, especially those calling for syncopated dovetailings among the string bodies. While admiring Vinten’s attitude that Beethoven’s published metronome markings were “more-or-less viable”, I felt that he was trying to impose a performance ethic onto an ensemble which simply couldn’t deal with his demands, and therefore required some compromise so as to produce a more musical result. I’d felt something of the same about aspects of Vince Hardaker’s conducting of the WCO in the ensemble’s performance, earlier in the year, of Schubert’s “Great” C Major Symphony.

I realise there’s been something of a fresh, authentic-spirited breeze blowing through all aspects of traditional performance practices in classical music over the last forty years or so. It’s revamped and rehabilitated what we’ve come to call “period performance” styles, and has often involved some none-too-gentle “cleansing” of what are considered by the purists to be inauthentic traditions tacked on by succeeding generations. But it’s sometimes seemed to me that some of the more extreme attempts to “recreate the original” and cast aside all spurious accumulations have resulted in something that’s simply too literal-sounding to be real and properly “alive”, to the point where the actual baby seems to have been thrown out with the bath water.

This review isn’t really an appropriate forum to further expound my own feelings on the topic (the above paragraph just “slipped out” – sorry!), as I merely wanted to pose the question regarding what conductor and orchestra did in order to try and realise in concert both the Mozart and Beethoven items on the programme – how musical was the result? Regarding the first movement of the “Eroica” I thought the conductor put the ensemble (especially the strings) under too much pressure, however laudable in principle were his ideas. Certain passages in the music rang out splendidly, and the instrumental detailing in places was most effective,  the appearance of the “theme from nowhere” on strings and wind straight after those big, tromping chords mid-movement, the famous “false horn” solo (“Damn that horn! – he’s come in too early!” a listener at the first performance supposedly exclaimed!), and the trumpet-led climax (which, very properly, was broken off halfway through, as Beethoven intended – a number of my “older” recordings of the symphony have the trumpet continuing right through!). But the music’s grandeur, for me, was in places compromised by the players’ struggles to keep the ensemble together at the conductor’s extreme, Toscanini-like “allegro con brio”!

The famous “Funeral March” movement fared better, the oboe solo near the beginning striking a proper lament-like quality, supported later by the chorus of winds and strings with more breathing-space in which to phrase the music – though the fugal section gave the strings more ensemble problems (again, I think they found it difficult to actually hear one another when trying to keep together). However, the winds sounded resplendent in places, with the clarinet really singing out! And the concluding, halting and grief-stricken sequences towards the movement’s end were realised with great feeling. Likewise, the Scherzo conveyed, in places, plenty of energetic character, the oboe solo alert, and the “tutti” sequences working well, as did the quick-fire strings-and-winds exchanges, even if the quieter, strings-only passages again had some precarious moments. However, if anything about the performance was truly “heroic” it was the playing of the three horns in the trio – the somewhat crude expression “they nailed it!” was nevertheless truly apposite on this occasion!

Beethoven gives his musicians mountain after mountain to climb in this work, the finale being no exception. There’s an arresting initial flourish, a teasing bass-figure, and a triplet variation (again, I thought Vinten’s tempi just that bit too urgent for his strings to be able to keep it together) leading to that heart-warming “Prometheus” theme on the oboe, taken at a fair old lick, but effectively keeping up the music’s momentum. The minor-key, Hungarian-like dance variation had colour and bite, and the ensemble pulled the strands of the fugue together at the end with gusto, allowing the oboe-led winds to lead the way into the great poco andante section, giving the horns another chance to shine with their judiciously-placed detailing.

Most interestingly, Michael Vinten took the movement’s  coda, marked presto, at a pace that allowed the players to get around their phrasings and fill out their tones – he had outlined in a programme note his investigations of the tempo markings, and considered that the music was well-nigh unplayable if the score’s metronome indications were followed. Believing that a misprint had occurred, he took the passage at a speed which sounded to me eminently musical, not the helter-skelter that we sometimes get from performances which sound as though the players are trying to make sure they catch the last bus home.

Such exacting beasts, these symphonies! But wonderful to hear them played, and experience both thrills and spills in their realisation. I can’t recall who it was who said Beethoven’s music always seemed greater than it could be played (for me that idea could apply to all great music), but hearing it “live” is always, as was the case here, an occasion for plenty of excitement and enjoyment!

Annual Wellington Aria Contest final showcases some fine talent

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Wellington Regional Vocal Competitions: Final
(Hutt Valley Performing Arts Competition Society)

Adjudicator: Martin Snell
Finalists: Laura Loach, Elyse Hemara, Emily Mwila, Sophie Sparrow, Frederick Jones, Pasquale Orchard, Olivia Sheat, Joe Haddow
Accompanists: Catherine Norton and Mark Dorrell
Commentator: Georgia Jamieson Emms

St Andrew’s on The Terrace

Sunday 18 September, 7:30 pm

This year eighteen singers entered for the annual aria contest (it used to be the Hutt Valley Aria, when there was also a Wellington-based contest, run by the Wellington Competitions Society which died in the 1970s).

Some names were more familiar to me than others. I had only recalled Laura Loach in a smaller role in last year’s Gondoliers from Wellington G&S Light Opera, but couldn’t recall her voice. Her first aria was ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca in which her large voice emerged both accurately but perhaps with rather more ferocity than pathos. Her second piece was Agathe’s beautiful ‘Leise, leise fromme Weise’ from Der Freischütz; it calls for quite marked contrasts, as it moves from the recitative-like ‘Wie nahte mir der Schlummer’, to the aria proper. Her voice was under nice control, even and subdued, then preparing a good contrast as the intensity builds to the big tune from the overture: ‘All meine Pulse schlagen, Und das Herz wallt ungestüm…’ which I thought was really fine.

Elyse Hemara’s first aria was one of Massenet’s loveliest from his little known Hérodiade, ‘Il est doux, il est bon’, that one only hears in anthologies by the likes of Kiri and Angela Gheorghiu. Intonation was a bit shaky to begin, but as she gained confidence there was sensitivity, and a sense that she meant what she was saying. Here she was in a quite different sort of role, having heard her as Lady Billows in the excerpt from Albert Herring a couple of weeks ago; but just as comvincing.

Like Massenet’s Hérodiade, I Vespri siciliani is not one of Verdi’s best known operas, but Elena’s fifth act aria, ‘Mercé, dilette amiche’, known as the ‘Bolero’, stands out in a somewhat laborious, if essentially Verdian score. Elyse, now in a rich deep purple dress, hinting at Roman aristocracy, shone in this bravura aria (no matter the missing top note), supported by Mark Dorrell’s scintillating piano.

I’d been impressed by Emily Mwila who sang Zerlina in both casts of Eternity Opera’s Don Giovanni: made for her. I was impressed that she’d tackle the only pre-Mozart aria in the Finals and she succeeded in expressing dignified grief in Handel’s Giulio Cesare (‘Piangero’); slightly desperate in the faster middle section, with accurate bravura flourishes.

For her second item, Emily also departed from the Italian repertory to which almost all the other finalists confined themselves: ‘Je veux vivre’, or the Waltz Song as it used to be called, from Roméo et Juliette. I admired Emily’s taste in dress, a subdued brocaded yellow. With teen-aged delirium she almost danced through her excitement at attending the ball where she’ll meet Romeo for the first time. Fully in command of her technique, it confirmed her radiant soubrette flair.

For the last year or so Georgia Jamieson Emms has introduced each item with amusing and pertinent remarks and sometimes a flippant precis of an opera plot which have added richly to the audience’s enjoyment. Her remarks about obscure works were particularly engaging.

I hadn’t come across the fourth finalist, Sophie Sparrow, before. Accompanied with colour and subtlety by Catherine Norton, she unearthed an aria from Mozart’s youthful La finta giardiniera, which I seem to recall, inconsequentially, as an opera in which Malvina Major had a principal role in the late 1980s. It was at La Monnaie, the national opera in Brussels, when her career was seriously taking off. ‘Gema la tortorella’ is sung by one Sandrina, the name assumed by the ‘fake gardener’. In truth, as Georgina hinted, it’s one of the more absurd opera plots, but contains lovely music; I wondered whether Miss Sparrow had picked an aria about a bird (a dove) deliberately (better known of course is Antonia’s aria in The Tales of Hoffmann ‘Elle a fui, la tourterelle’, and perhaps Stephano’s ‘Que fais-tu, blanche tourterelle?’ from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette). A fine bird simulation, with high staccato notes.

Her second choice was from an American opera that has become reasonably well known in the United States: Douglas Moore’s 1956 work, Baby Doe (not a nice story). It revealed a voice under very good control, again much of it lying high yet comfortably within her range, without becoming attenuated.

Sophie Sparrow was placed as runner-up by adjudicator Martin Snell.

Frederick Jones has a tenor voice of considerable purity and emotional range. I’ve come across him at the Opera School in Whanganui and in a couple of productions (Il Corsaro from the NZSM in 2013 and Der Rosenkavalier from Opera at Days Bay). He stuck to arias that exploited both his command of major tenor roles as well as strongly contrasted emotions : great happiness in the case of Alfredo in La traviata, and despair at becoming victim of a stupid masculine honour code in the case of Lensky in Eugene Onegin.

That he wore a dinner suit for both, in contrast to all the other singers who sought to match dress with the roles, clearly did him no harm. His voice was refined and polished and created, with limited hand or facial gestures, the emotion of each aria. Even so, it seemed to me that Alfredo’s words ‘bollenti spiriti’ lacked much real ecstasy. Lensky’s aria however, was full of helpless grief.

Jones was awarded the main prize, the $4000 Dame Malvina Major Foundation Wellington Aria Prize.

Pasquale Orchard has sung in at least a couple of G&S Light Opera’s productions; and she also reached for Der Freischütz, this time the aria from Agathe’s cousin Ännchen, ‘Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen’, her effort to relieve Agathe’s anxiety about Max’s chances in the shooting contest. She was in cheerful peasant gear, a green top and pink apron and she sang with even tone, investing it with a similar spirit.

Pasquale also sang Norina’s spunky aria from Don Pasquale (no pun intended). ‘Quel guardo il cavalieri’. Though she sang excellently, her voice showed more brilliance and accuracy than beauty in her high register.

Pasquale Orchard won the Rokfire prize for the most outstanding singer overall (strangely, a prize that seemed not to be mentioned in the programme).

She and the next singer, Olivia Sheat, had sung together as Frasquita and Mercedes in the Card Scene from Carmen at the NZSM opera excerpts concert 10 days ago.

Olivia Sheat’s first item was from Peter Grimes: the Embroidery Aria where Ellen sees the jersey that she had embroidered for Grimes’s apprentice who is presumed drowned. With every sign of natural dramatic talent, she captured the vein of confusion and enigmatic concern that invest not just this episode but the whole opera; her choice was no doubt a mark of her training at the New Zealand School of Music.

For her second aria Olivia also drew on Faust, with Marguérite’s Jewel Song, in which, with slightly excessive gestures, she displayed a well-supported voice in growing wonderment and susceptibility to the combined forces of avarice and passion.

Finally, Joseph Haddow, who was winner of the Robin Dumbell Memorial Cup for the young aria entrant with most potential, sang first ‘Ah, per sempre io ti perdei’ from I Puritani, and then the Catalogue aria from Don Giovanni.

I’d heard him a couple of weeks before singing Mozart’s Figaro in the School of Music’s concert of opera scenes. His is a well-founded baritone, a warm voice with a resonant quality, that handled the bravura aspect of the Bellini’s belcanto role well.

And the final offering of the evening, Leporello’s list of the Count’s conquests, is one of the most quintessential and well known arias. Though he didn’t hold the famous ‘catalogue’ in his hands, the hands and facial gestures, with even a touch of cynical sleeziness at the end were the marks of an instinctive singer.

So, as with every occasion when gifted young singers (and classical musicians in general) perform, one feels deep uneasiness at the ever-increasing numbers of fine young artists facing a steadily declining market, in a society that is led by a purportedly educated class that is largely unlettered and uncultivated in fields that separate the civilised from the barbarians.

In addition to the occasional reference in the above notes, I have to remark on the very supportive and artistically appropriate accompaniments from both Catherine Norton and Mark Dorrell.

It may be unorthodox to mention singers that I felt were a bit unlucky not to be named, either those among the Finalists or other entrants whom I’ve heard singing recently. Jamie Henare, heard as Leporello in Don Giovanni last month; Emily Mwila (Zerlina in the same production of Don Giovanni, as well as in the school of music’s recent ‘Scenes from opera’).

Moments in Time – Diedre Irons’ tribute to Judith Clark

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music
Institute of Registered Music Teachers in New Zealand (IRMT)

Judith Clark Memorial Piano Series
Second Recital – Diedre Irons

HAYDN – Sonata Hob.XVI:52 in E-flat Major
DEBUSSY – Suite Bergamasque
LISZT – Sonata in B Minor S.178

Adam Concert Room, NZSM Campus, Victoria University

Sunday, 18th September, 2016

It’s sometimes difficult to imagine Diedre Irons as ever having had another “life” as a person and performing musician, so very much has she become part and parcel of this country’s musical fabric, especially of late in the Wellington region. Now in retirement from her position as Head of Piano Studies at Studies at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, a position she held from 2003 to 2012, she regularly appears in concert, mostly as a chamber musician, but occasionally as a soloist with orchestra, and on the recital platform.

Her career as a performing musician and as a teacher extends from her upbringing in Winnipeg, Canada, through her piano performance studies with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, her subsequent invitation by Serkin to join the Curtis faculty at the conclusion of her studies, and her concertising throughout Canada and the United States as a chamber musician and soloist. She came to New Zealand in 1977, working firstly at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch until 2003, and then in Wellington at the NZSM.

Irons has always sought to put the music before the performer (for this reason she avoided the “piano competition circuit” as a young pianist), though she would, I think, consider the honours that have come her way as much a validation of music as a profession as of her own achievements. She was awarded an MBE for services to music in 1989, and in 2007 she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music (honoris causa) from Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada ‘in recognition of outstanding contributions in the world of music through superlative achievement as a talented, dedicated and passionate pianist.”

Having been a successor to Judith Clark in the position of Head of Piano Studies at the NZSM, Irons seemed an appropriate choice by dint of that circumstance alone for inclusion as a performer in this series dedicated to the former’s memory, quite apart from her eminence as an executant and interpreter. While on this subject I have to say that I was both thrilled at the choice of artists for the recital “lineup” and somewhat disappointed that an additional place in this stellar gallery of pianists wasn’t found for one of Clark’s most brilliant pupils, Emma Sayers, whose recent return to the recital platform after a long absence was noted and welcomed by Middle C (search “Emma Sayers”)

Such additional conjectures aside, here, then, was Diedre Irons standing before us in the Adam Concert Room, about to present what seemed, on paper, something of a dream recital, consisting of three of the most delectable works in the piano repertoire – Haydn’s final Piano Sonata, Debussy’s beloved “Suite Bergamasque”, and Liszt’s era-defining masterpiece, the B-Minor Piano Sonata. Though presented here most satisfyingly in that order I couldn’t help thinking that each of the three works also represented a different life-stage – Debussy’s youthful, delectable Suite (whose on-going popularity he came to resent in later years), Liszt’s towering, fully-fledged testament to Romanticism in art, conceived in his virtuoso prime, and Haydn’s last and arguably greatest keyboard work, perhaps not dating from his final years but representing a kind of testament of creative endeavour in a particular genre.

“Ages of man” idea or not, Irons simply plunged into the world of each work on its own terms, her music-making as is always the case bristling with characterful connection to the sounds wrought from diverse worlds .  Straightaway, the excitement came with the way she played the first chord of the Haydn Sonata – we were instantly saturated in the warm glow of what seemed at the time like the mother of all E-flat chords, one which instantly anticipated all of those Beethovenian resonances (the “Eroica” Symphony and Variations, the “Emperor” Concerto, and the Fourth Piano Sonata among others), but then, without further ado, took our sensibilities on a truly unique Haydnesque journey – the strength of the pianist’s of flourishes contrasted so tellingly with those playful/wistful sequences that left one open-mouthed at the composer’s seemingly boundless invention, even when following conventions such as the “music-box” mode of the movement’s second theme.

Always a particular delight of Irons’ playing for me has been her all-pervading spontaneity, fuelling an approach which seems to imbue the themes, textures and rhythms of whatever she plays with the feeling of “on-the-spot” creation on the part of both composer and performer – and when that composer, as here, is Haydn, then the “making it up as one goes along” sense of discourse is more than usually heightened. Of course, there are powerful overall creative forces at work behind the scenes, both compositionally and interpretatively, but these were here given such immediacy and theatricality, that we were caught up with the feeling of being present at some kind of fresh exposé, and able to renew our own responses to the music in the process.

I don’t wish to try the reader’s patience by giving a blow-by-blow account of my impressions of Irons’ playing of every phrase (though if I were a piano student I would ponder her sounding of practically every single note, not to produce an imitative effect, but to reflect on her making each phrase, each impulse, each episode “live” in relation to the character of the moment and the effect of the same on the whole….). For my own part I relished her own enjoyment of sequences such as Haydn’s outlandish modulations throughout the movement’s second half – both the reintroduction, in a remote key, of the “music box” sequence, and the harmonic wanderings which led to a disconcerting “luftpause” just before the payoff – what a guy!

In the slow movement, Irons’ filling out of a markedly vocal line seemed to me beautifully shaped and moulded, the “strummed” chords giving the music a minstrel-like, almost bardic character – like a good storyteller would with words, she made us hang upon every one of the composer’s notes. I’d never before noticed quite so strongly how the music seemed to anticipate (again!) Beethoven, in particular his “Tempest” Sonata, with firstly stentorian bass sounds and then distant, echoing resonances at the end.

Irons was certainly one for the teasing repeated-note opening of the finale, and the answering scamperings and somersaultings – she timed the music’s pauses to perfection, setting circumspection against an engaging headstrong energy, keeping us on the edges of our seats with the precarious dancings and unpredictable volatilities of the music, and then transfixing us with the eloquence of the mid-movement declamations, before returning us to the indefatigable energies that whirled the music to its joyous conclusion.

After this, the opening of Debussy’s “Suite Bergamasque” seemed even more rich and expansive than was usual, partly due to Irons’ bringing out the music’s amplitude, giving our imaginations so much space in which to range around and about. The succeeding episode made a wistful contrast with the strength and purpose of the opening, while newly-sounded distant echoes fetched up by Irons like new impulses from an old remembrance led to a resplendent return of the opening, each upward surge of tone presenting us with something rich and memorable.

The following Menuet questioned rather than danced its way forwards, its whimsical enquiries gentle rather than insistent, the music’s ambience seemingly intent on gathering up every fragment of tone as it proceeded, the playing emphasising the resonances as strongly as the music’s stately pulsings – what a rich and redolent world of dream-like impressions! Irons alternated rich chordings with glittering flourishes, before gathering up the threads and returning to the music’s processional aspect, gradually allowing the tones and textures to grow in girth and expectation – and then, with an adroitly-placed cadence dissolved the music in wraith-like fashion.

As I’m presently ham-fistedly learning to play “Clair de lune” myself I’m not able to give a dispassionate opinion of Irons’ interpretation, except to say that her playing of the opening’s return after all the central swirling agitations had a lovely “spent” quality which I found very moving, as I did the half-completed reminiscences of the swirling music at the end – too precious to be revisited, but merely acknowledged and then let go. I thought the whole movement jewel-like in its beauty, here, but also “owned”, as one might recall a memory of a lost love or youthful impulse.

Very rarely do I find myself at odds with anything Irons does at the keyboard – so it was a surprise that, in places during the concluding “Passepied”, I found myself wanting more sense of forward momentum, in places, however delicious and insouciant she sometimes made the dance rhythms sound. In line with her playing of the rest of the suite she seemed to me to realise the music more as a memory than a here-and-now experience, and I wondered if her view of the music was, in fact a little too valedictory in certain places, missing a certain impish delight in momentum for its own sake. I was, come to think of it, reminded by her playing here of the conducting style of Sir John Barbirolli (one of my musical heroes), who realised all the music he directed with great warmth and love and care for detail, to the point where, at certain times for the listener, the trees might seem to obscure the sense of a greater forest……..of course, all of this is subjective and valid unto oneself alone (a friend sitting alongside me, for example, was entranced by it all without reservation). At the end we were grateful to Irons for taking us so very unequivocally and magically into her own realm of enchantment.

Having said all of this, what does one then write about the performance of the Liszt Sonata which followed? Afraid of generalising my impressions of it all I scribbled a number of things down as the music’s journey unfolded, which, when reading back, brought forcibly forward the sense of something realised in direct, unreserved, and wholehearted terms – though anybody familiar with Irons’ playing over the years could have written the above, possibly without even attending the concert! But again, from the outset, we felt ourselves thrust into the music’s seething, pulsating body, those portentous bass notes and the alternating descending figures serving notice of the composer’s  intention to explore even the darkest and most forbidding places on this musical journey.

As is well known, Liszt’s scheme with this music was to announce his basic material in no uncertain terms at the work’s beginning before spreading before us an incredible panoply of characterised sequences all of which were derived from these opening motifs. Irons played these basic motifs with richly-focused eloquence, giving them enough room to expand and resonate without compromising their dramatic or theatrical qualities. Then as the motifs were reiterated in their transformed state, each one extending the composer’s range and scope of vision over the widest possible span, she took to these far-flung variants and fleshed them out with the kind of committed advocacy that made Liszt’s grand design come alive, relating and contrasting the disparate thematic elements within a convincing and satisfying whole.

Whatever the prevailing character of the sequence Irons was playing, she was its committed advocate – how beautifully, for instance, she realised the alchemic transformation of the ominous repeated note theme of the opening into what was perhaps the work’s loveliest lyrical melody, complete with what seemed like a nightingale’s song rounding off each declamation. Against this, the volatility of her plunge into the agitations which followed was breathtaking, edge-of-the-seat stuff, designed to give the precarious, hair-raising effect of living dangerously and courting imminent ruin, a process arrested only by the onset of those massive, orchestrally-conceived chords to which she brought all of her strength and amplitude, to monumental effect.

For those who like to think of the work as a manifestation of the Faust legend, the sequence which immediately followed the above could be construed as the scene in the garden between Faust and Gretchen (or Marguerite, if one is thinking of Gounod, of course!).  Irons relished the beautiful lyricism of the recitatives between the lovers, set against the underlying sardonic comments from the watching Mephistopheles, the whole sequence so operatic and theatrical, and yet drawn with such on-going inevitability and over-riding sense of Fate as to heighten one’s sense of tragedy, however much one relishes this brief respite! So when Irons returned to the great chordal theme which seemed to span the work’s structure at that point like a vast, dominating crossbeam, we were alerted as to the transitory nature of youth and beauty and their associated delights, and reminded of the omnipresence of a greater, more resounding and inevitable state of things.

What a task for the pianist, controlling and regulating the ebb and flow of such a resounding and far-reaching musical structure! For here was a reprise of the opening suddenly stealing in and activating a fugue, one which in Iron’s hands gathered momentum and tightened its grip on the music almost to the point of frenzy – a couple of dropped notes and a slight hiatus at one point in the discourse after the fugal lines revert to chordal figurations in the discourse mattered not a whit amid the excitement and tumult generated by her playing! Those transformed motifs having then reappeared and spent their energies, the music’s course was all but run, Irons conveying its exhaustion, desperation, tremulousness, and resignation, as all of the music’s human endeavour seemed to be mocked by Fate (in the person of the Prince of Darkness?) with the return of the work’s sombre opening. But then, those beautiful, chordal pin-pricks of light at the end were played by Irons with such tremulous hope and longing, that one felt salvation of sorts might be possible after all!

Forgive all of these words! – far more important was that sense of something rich and wonderful having been given to us by Diedre Irons’ radiant and heartfelt playing!

 

Three wonderful concerts on the day for Mozart and Brahms string quintets

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Monique Lapins violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello) and James Dunham (viola)
(Chamber Music New Zealand)

Quintessence Mini Festival – 17 September
Concert 2:
Mozart: String Quintet No 5 in D, K 593
Brahms: String Quintet No 1 in F, Op 88

Michael Fowler Centre

Saturday 17 September, 3 pm 

A series of concerts, like this on Saturday, probably hasn’t been heard in Wellington since 1988 when the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts (as it was originally called) presented members of the Australia Ensemble (six of them), playing all six (not just the four we hear this weekend) of Mozart’s string quintets, plus Brahms’s two string sextets and his string quintet Op 111. It was sponsored by the Turnovsky Endowment Trust, at three concerts on separate evenings in the (then) State Opera House.

That marvellous occasion, in the second of the “REAL” international festivals that began in Wellington in 1986, remains vividly in memory. Just to refresh any skeptics: that was the year Nureyev featured at the Gala opening, when Rostropovich played with the NZSO, at one of three concerts conducted by both Rostropovich and Maxim Shostakovich; with concerts by Franz Bruggen’s Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century; Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain; the young Kronos Quartet. And there were daily concerts both at lunchtime and in the early evening by the best New Zealand musicians.

That festival, and the two, even better, run by Chris Doig in 1990 and 1992, which included Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Salome, and plenty of other great classical music, established a brilliant standard that matched the best overseas festivals. That high standard was maintained till about the end of the 1990s; since then the so-called festivals have been dominated by eviscerated, ephemeral spectacle and bizarre, popular-but-forgettable performances.

I was able to get to only the 3pm concert, the second one, with the penultimate Mozart quintet, in D, K 593, plus Brahms’s Op 88. (Missing from this series were Nos 1 and 2, K 174 of 1773 and K 405 of 1787).

It was perhaps too much to expect a very big audience, but the numbers were no disgrace.

Mozart’s D major quintet
Writers about the piece, including Frances Moore in the programme, fasten on the idea of a conversation between the cello and other instruments, a good way to describe much of what goes on in concerted music, and especially reflects the character of the Mozart in D major.

The opening Larghetto, led by Rolf Gjelsten’s cello, did lend a calmly meditative spirit that became rather more sprightly, even witty, later in the first movement, and while its mood is less weighty than the last quintet, K 614, it becomes musically complex and absorbing. The prevailing spirit of this quintet is gentle and beguiling and though the cello does indeed announce a philosophical, profoundly contemplative tone that might be expected to be maintained, it pursues a different path; its contrapuntal character is so subtle that it can virtually escape notice. The first movement is interesting in the way the Larghetto returns at the end.

In a quintet there is an inevitable tendency to listen for ways in which the extra viola (in some cases a cello) enriches the texture. One seeks for hints of favouritism for the first viola, here played by guest violist, James Dunham, but I wondered whether other ears might claim to, or really did, discern any superiority by one over the other, but although the two often had quite different melodic or harmonic roles, they were just as often affording each other support and comfort; their contributions were complementary even though Gillian Ansell’s instrument often seemed to be the dominant party.

The feeling of intimacy was most evident in the Adagio which, through its sheer beauty, came close to reflecting on life’s pains and disappointments. The players seemed sometimes to prolong the ‘rests’ between phrases reminding us that we cannot escape from the nature of humanity.

I often find myself reflecting on what was happening in the world as music was being written. Here, we could contemplate Mozart having learned of the French Revolution a few months before and the death in February 1790 of Emperor Joseph II who had been supportive of the arts: things that were bringing about profound economic and social changes, not just in France, but also in Austria and throughout Europe; as well as to Mozart’s well-being.

The Menuetto, with its joyous spirit, banishes any temptation to contemplate the wider world; the Trio offers each instrument opportunities for solos, typically, repeated, rising arpeggios. The same almost carefree spirit reigns in early pages of the Finale with the descending, chromatic flavoured scales that are like a mirror image of the rising arpeggios in the Minuet. But its real interest lies in the sophisticated counterpoint that arises after a couple of minutes, in what might be called the development part of the movement leading to a fugal passage where the chromatic scales rise and fall for a while, creating a delightful, relatively complex succession of references to earlier material.

The quintet created a wonderful sense of delight throughout, and the concluding phase continued to be elusive as fresh witty interventions by each of the instruments, individually and leap-frogging each other.

It seemed as if Mozart, and the five players understood it utterly, had held back proof of his genius till the very last page of this deceptively cheerful and straightforward quintet.

Brahms’s string quintet in F major
Brahms’s string quintets follow the same model as Mozart’s – doubling the viola rather than the cello as did Boccherini’s and Schubert’s only one (scholars note that Brahms didn’t come to the string quintet till some years after successful string quartets and sextets).

Op 88 was written at Brahms’s beloved summer retreat at Bad Ischl (near Salzburg) in 1882, almost a century after Mozart’s last year. Rolf Gjelsten spoke before the performance, mainly about the unusual second movement which combines the character of a slow movement and a scherzo, but he also managed to make amusing (I think, as I couldn’t hear it all) remarks about erotic qualities to be found in the sarabande which he’d written nearly 30 years earlier – Brahms’s enigmatic private life stimulates a lot of such speculation and anecdote.

The two violists changed places here, with Gillian Ansell at the right end of the group and James Dunham behind her, to the left.

The first viola really emerges only in the swaying, second theme almost waltz-like – perhaps ‘ländler’ would be more accurate, and I soon realise that Brahms is not intending listeners to be striving to pick up individual players and to spot possible details of iffy balance or soloistic flights, generally the obsession of people in the trade I pursue, a tendency that I usually try to avoid. The ensemble achieved admirable clarity and a lively feeling for rhythms and dynamic undulations.

The interesting second movement did repay attention through its several phases, with violins and occasionally the cello becoming more prominent, as the sarabande gives way to a gavotte rhythm and then reverts after a distinct pause. The two violas are supplied with phrases where they play in sort of duet, but these are unimportant details in music where Brahms had other ambitions and expectations from his listeners. Experts note the way the music moves from the starting key of C sharp minor to close in A major. It does create a meandering shape which doesn’t make it easy to follow, apart from simply allowing it to penetrate subliminally. More clarity arrives with the third movement which proceeds in a normal fashion and brings the quintet to a conventional close.

Brahms esteemed this quintet very highly, perhaps on account of the unusual structure of the second movement, but just as likely on account of the relationships between the parts of the first movement and the interplay of the instruments, that hardly follows conventional patterns in any of the three movements.

I regretted being unable to get to either of the other concerts to hear the other two Mozart quintets and the second Brahms quintet.

Perhaps we must await the arrival of a knowledgeable festival director with mature artistic tastes to revive Wellington’s wonderful festivals of the Chris Doig years to include music like this again.

Quintessence on show via youth and experience at Michael Fowler Centre

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents
QUINTESSENCE

String Quintets by Mozart and Brahms
(with Salina Fisher (b.1993) – Tōrino: echoes on pūtōrino improvisations by Rob Thorne)

The Pettman Players
The New Zealand String Quartet
James Dunham (viola)

Concert One: MOZART – String Quintets: No.3 in C Major K.515 / No.6 in E-flat Major K.614
The Pettman Players:
Shauno Isomura, Benedict Lim (violins), Julie Park, Caroline Norman (violas), Martin Roberts (‘cello)

Concert Two:
MOZART – String Quintet No 5 in D Major K.593 / BRAHMS – String Quintet No.1 in F Major Op.88 (“Spring”)

Concert Three:
MOZART – String Quintet No.4 in G Minor K.516 / SALINA FISHER – String Quartet Tōrino: echoes on pūtōrino improvisations by Rob Thorne / BRAHMS – String Quintet No.2 in G Major Op.111

The New Zealand String Quartet:
Helene Pohl, Monique Lapins (violins), Gillian Ansell (viola), Rolf Gjelsten (‘cello)
with James Dunham (viola)

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Saturday, 17th September, 2016
(Concerts 1 and 3 reviewed below)

What a lovely idea,  arranging a day of performances of quintets for strings, and then giving the arrangement the name “quintessence” – and I must confess to not previously knowing the origin of the term in classical and medieval philosophy, of the “fifth” element or essence, a substance said to comprise the makeup of the celestial bodies, no less! In relation to Chamber Music New Zealand’s event, Quintessence was having both the New Zealand String Quartet join forces with the eminent American violist, James Dunham in concert, as well as a talented youth ensemble, The Pettman Players, whose members were associated either currently or formerly with the Pettman National Junior Academy of Music, an organisation based both in Auckland and in Christchurch.

Over the course of  a single day, Wellington concertgoers were able to hear in the morning the Pettmans in two of Mozart’s String Quintets (No.3 in C Major K.515, and No.6 in E-flat Major K.614), and then luxuriate in both an afternoon and an evening concert given by the New Zealand String Quartet with guest violist James Dunham. Each of these latter concerts featured a Mozart Quintet (No.5 in D Major K.593 in the afternoon, and No.4 in G Minor K.516 in the evening) along with a String Quintet by Brahms (No.1 in F Major Op.88 “Spring” in the afternoon, and No.2 in G Major Op.111, in the evening). As well, the evening concert contained a Chamber Music New Zealand commissioned work by local composer Salina Fisher, Tōrino: echoes on pūtōrino improvisations by Rob Thorne.

I wasn’t able to attend all three concerts, but I managed to get to the first and third of them, relishing the opportunity to enjoy (and nonchalantly compare) the playing of two different ensembles.  I was, naturally enough, prepared to make allowances for the youthful aspect of the Players, as my understanding was that the musicians would all currently be students at the Pettman Academy, either in Christchurch or in Auckland. While the programme notes tell us that the ensemble consisted of both present and past members of the academy, we weren’t told who was specifically who in that respect. No matter, as the playing of the group members was of such a uniformly high standard it wasn’t really relevant as to who was up to which stage in his or her studies – this was music-making of a remarkably accomplished level as regards both individual and ensemble skills, these players able to realise the beauties and intricacies of the music with great aplomb and sensitivity.

The group opened their concert with the C Major Quintet K.515, one of the grandest of Mozart’s chamber works, and beginning with an extended dialogue between violin and ‘cello, the exchanges fluent and focused. Both players had finely-spun tonal qualities, the first violin, Shauno Isamura, able to beautifully “inflect” his line even at speed, the figurations handled with a deftness whose detailing seemed rich and full. As for the cellist, Martin Roberts, his responses to his leader were at once whole-hearted and finely graded to match the volinist’s declamations. Throughout, the teamwork of the ensemble was exemplary, the violas’ passages in thirds having a rich, velvety sound, the players (Julie Park and Caroline Norman) taking great care with one another’s sound-worlds so as to make their dovetailings coherent.

Though a long work, the C Major Quintet’s sequences seemed to fly by under these players’ fingers – I thought their corporate command of nuance and phrasing, especially so in the transition passages which so often depend on split-second timing, was astonishingly good. The Minuet engaged us from the start with its characterful sequences, a rising figure dominating the opening measures, while a Trio diverted our sensibilities with a leap of a seventh and a chromatic swerve – the players gave the chromatic figure plenty of “misterioso” by way of contrast with the physicality elsewhere. A hymn-like Andante featured heartfelt exchanges between the first violin and the first viola, everything distinctively and strongly focused, every note and associated phrase given its due. Then, the finale’s high spirits rounded the work off in a suitably celebratory fashion, the players relishing the occasional accents and beautifully colouring the moments of modulatory exploration before bringing it all to a joyous conclusion.

I knew the E-flat Major Quintet well, as it was a work featured on my very first recording of these pieces. To my intense pleasure these players took a no-holds-barred approach to the music, the two violas bringing out the hunting-horn character of the opening with terrific elan, then richly and excitingly interacting with the ‘cello through both energetic and more subtly-nuanced passages. The playing certainly brought out the music’s orchestral quality, no more so than at the movement’s end where the violins add their fanfares to the galloping rhythms of the lower strings – most exhilarating!

The Andante featured some lovely work by the pair of violins in tandem, a rare and brief moment of not-quite-matching intonation at the beginning of one of the melody’s variants apart – it detracted not a whit from the sense of easeful communion between the players, and the beauties of their shared phrasings. Again in the Minuet there were lovely cascading thirds from the “violin duo” (second violinist Benedict Lim matching his leader all the way in refinement and in energy) for us to relish, and a sense of the players’ delight in sweeping the dance steps along during the Trio. The finale’s Haydn-ish bustle carried everything before it in these players’ hands, Mozart’s fugal writing engendering a real sense of fun and freedom, the lines brilliantly nuanced by the players and brought together at the end with tremendous verve. What a tribute to Edith Salzmann, the artistic Director of the Pettman Academy, to have fostered and encouraged such talent as we witnessed here with these young players!

Back again to the MFC in the evening, this time for a more varied programme of Mozart and Brahms with the New Zealand String Quartet and violist James Dunham, and a newly-commissioned work for string quartet from New Zealand composer Selina Fisher. A measure of the quality of the Pettman Academy Group’s playing earlier in the day was that we weren’t made to feeli n the evening that “here, at last, was the real thing” with these adult performers – it was, instead, a different kind of musical experience, the players of the NZSQ reflecting their own by now familiar performing ethos of one of the country’s finest music ensembles.

Beginning with Mozart’s G Minor Quintet K.516, the music immediately took on a dark, theatrical “Don Giovanni-like” aspect, heightened by the “layered” sonorities of firstly three instruments, then including two more, making for a dramatic “burgeoning” of the tones and textures. I thought violist James Dunham’s playing most interesting, his tones more assertive than what I’ve been accustomed to with Gillian Ansell’s playing, his playing “tighter” and for me far less easeful. The music here certainly lent itself to dark, terse statements of intent throughout, concluding with some heartfelt downward sighs colouring the mood of the coda.

Again, with the Menuetto,  the mood remained terse and sombre, wonderfully downwardly spiralling runs meeting great sforzandi – dramatic stuff! The players relaxed into the trio, the two violas enjoying a moment of concerted lyricism, the surrounding ambiences easeful and grateful for some respite! Mozart anticipates Beethoven in the Adagio’s opening, music of such a rarefied state, almost above human emotion – the players made just as much of the movement’s contrasting sequences, a running accompaniment ushering in a descending major-key figure. And then there was the finale’s beginning, a heavy-footed trudge through stricken cadences, the two violins bearing the expressive burden , and keeping us guessing as to outcomes, before dancing into the sunniness of G major. We delighted in the players’ teamwork throughout the contrasting episodes, the hints of gypsy-like music adding touches of temperament to the Elysian happiness of it all.

Salina Fisher’s newly-commissioned work for Chamber Music New Zealand was then given by the NZSQ – this was an exploration by the composer of the similarities between the traditional Maori instrument the pūtōrino (similar to a trumpet or a flute in its function) and string instruments, particularly in its ability to equate with the human voice in terms of pitch, vocal timbres and different registers.  The instrument itself can produce deep mournful voices , male in character, and the more female, lighter, more erie and agile voice – as well, a more breathy sound can be produced by blowing across the instrument’s opening. Salina Fisher’s work was an exploration of these effects, inspired by the work of the pūtōrino’s foremost present exponent, Rob Thorne, who’s taken up the mantle of guardian of this taonga from legendary figures of the past such as Hirini Melbourne and Richard Nunns.

Quintessence ended with a work by Brahms, a revelation to me! – my experiences of these works by Brahms haven’t been altogether positive in the past, to the effect that I was disappointed that this series of Quintets didn’t include all six works by Mozart and have done with it! Well, I must have either been listening to the wrong recordings, or been in a peculiar frame of mind when encountering these works in the past, and specifically this G Major Quintet. The NZSQ with their visiting colleague James Dunham made the work such a life-enhancing experience for me, I listened open-mouthed right through the work and forgot to take any notes on the performance!

Thinking about how I had regarded this music on previous (and long-distant) hearings, I fished up from my memory unflattering terms like “opaque”, “weighty”, “academic”, and “self-consciously contrapuntal”. As I listened to the playing, those epithets dropped away, one by one, like scales falling from my eyes so that for the first time I could clearly see.  Right from the joyous opening, in which I could hear bells pealing and activating the surrounding ambiences (not unlike the beginning of Schumann’s great “Rhenish” Symphony) I was transfixed on several counts, by the beauty of the opening ‘cello solo and the duetting violas making their response, by the rapt sequences in the music’s development, and the reawakening of energies ,and the light and shade of the different levels of intensity right up to the music’s coda (so reminiscent of the Second Piano Concerto). The Adagio began with deep, melancholic footsteps, but varied its gait throughout between introspection and full-blooded feeling, while the mischievous Scherzo, marked Un poco Allegretto, gave one the impression of the composer chuckling to himself over the music’s enigmatic textures.

The finale certainly gave the impression of “going somewhere”, at times sounding a bit like a mystery adventure (again I thought there were parallels with the Second Piano Concerto),  with quasi-Hungarian impulses in its gait and Viennese café gestures in its mood! Hugo Wolf once wrote that “Brahms can’t exult!”, but he too may have heard performances which didn’t do the music sufficient justice as to its character and general attitude – I thought the players built up throughout the movement a terrific sense of energy, dashing and vibrant in its abandonment! It was music-making which carried all before it and throughout the final bars most appropriately brought out the joyousness of the work  – a case, as far as I was concerned, of a composer certainly having the last laugh, one which I couldn’t begrudge him in the face of such resplendent writing!