Category: Reviews – Concerts

Music in evocative spaces – Diedre Irons at Wellington Cathedral

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul presents:
EVOCATIONS – Piano Recital Series at the Cathedral

Diedre Irons (piano)

BEETHOVEN – Piano Sonata No.23 in F Minor Op.57 “Appassionata”
SCHUBERT – Moments Musicaux 1-6 D.780
CHOPIN – Ballade No.1 in G Minor, Op.23

Wellington Cathedral, Molesworth St., Wgtn

Friday 17th October, 2014

“Piano music in a vast space” read the heading on the programme sheet which we were given at the concert – and it certainly was that! In fact, I had wondered beforehand regarding the efficacy of performing a piano recital at all in such an environment, and certainly in respect of some of the repertoire – the “Appassionata?…..how on earth?….all those notes!……

As well, I remembered reading about some wag coming up to a young composer whose new work was being performed in some cavernous place like London’s Royal Albert Hall, clapping him on the back and saying, “Well done! – most new works these days are heard only once – but at least getting your work played in here means…..” To be honest, it was a bit like that in Wellington Cathedral for Diedre Irons’ masterly performance of one of Beethoven’s most titanic works – we were able to hear – and hear – and hear……

To a newcomer to Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, the experience of the recital in the Cathedral would have, in places, been enchanting, an awakening of hitherto unsuspected ghost-voices, perhaps those of the work’s interpreters down the years, come to the concert to add their particular tones to those of the “live” pianist’s activations. The work’s very opening had that same haunted acoustic quality, as did much of the slow movement’s theme and variations. In fact, by a process of gradation our ears attuned themselves to the gradually agglomerating sounds, coping with this state of things better than with the sudden and precipitate dynamic contrasts whose inherent violence was made thunderous in those reverberant spaces.

Quicker passages soon became jumbled on a superficial level, though even there, Beethoven’s direct harmonic style of writing meant that there was often a kind of cumulative harmonic effect set up, making for resplendent cadences! Nowhere was this more so than in the final pages of the work’s coda, where the F Minor harmonies cascaded towards us with the force of a dam breaking apart and flooding us with sound.

As for the performance, I was freshly riveted by Diedre Irons’ dark, brooding and big-boned approach to the music throughout the first movement. From the start she set out to use what seemed to be in theory an intractable acoustic to its best advantage – creating a halo of resonance around the misterioso-like opening, then evoking the thunder-gods from the cavernous spaces with black, implacable piano tones. One still noticed a wealth of detail from the gentler sequences, like patches of mountain flower between the imposing crags – details were not so much obscured by the reverberation as elongated and amplified, the result being a plethora of revisited tones and figurations, all contributing to what seemed like an ever-burgeoning effect.

It was a performance constantly awash with harmonies, oceanic rather than granite-like – in a sense it was a kind of reversal in effect of Liszt’s renowned piano transcriptions of the composer’s symphonies for solo piano, an amplification rather than a reduction. The pianist made the most of the richness of sound in the gentler major-key sequences, with gorgeously orchestral left-handed murmurings beneath the arpeggio-like melody. The lovely right-hand trills here sounded like rippling cascades, the playing unhesitatingly picturesque and pastoral-like, creating whole worlds in between the outbursts of fierce energy and dark purpose.

Just before the first movement’s coda, the pianist took her time with the emphatic, tumbling figurations, allowing the reference to the contemporaneous Fifth Symphony to clearly make its effect, before the concluding section exploded urgently and excitingly, but quickly running its course and returning to a kind of brooding, unsatisfied state of things. No time was wasted before the second movement began, the theme rich and alive, the tones not sculpted, but beautifully sung, the melody given all kinds of dynamic shadings and emphases. The “alternating chords” variation was nicely shaped, while the sweetness of the figurations of the following section became something so gratefully, almost sacramentally grasped at the end – heart-warming playing!

Only the final variation seemed to suffer from the reverberations, the playfulness apparent but the detail often lost in the swirl of tones – one had to listen first-time to the notes and not reflect on them, because the acoustic often got in first again with the echo-effect! At the climax everything properly “peaked”, and then was so easefully “knitted back” to the opening theme, the playing very Schubertian, I thought, in the way that the pianist made the bass theme “talk” with the treble – such a sense of inter-connectedness! After this, the finale was a molten whirl, though Diedre Irons’ incisive touch allowed plenty of thematic detail to get through, even if the middle voices tended to be swamped by the sound-torrents.

I liked the pianist’s reliance on strength and momentum rather than speed, the phrasings spaced out within the music’s pulsing, giving the notes plenty of space and emphasis, but keeping the focus taut, making for an incredible cumulative effect – understandably in the present context, the final repeat was not taken, the pianist instead resolutely driving the music towards the presto coda. Here it seemed the very elements were at work, the swirling figurations of the treble furiously sweeping up and down over the sonorous, clanging bell-like grandeur of the lower tones, strong and implacable. And what a release those final arpeggiated figures achieved here, the stuff of molten power and implacable presence.

Great programming, here, with the next piece! – I often think of Schubert as being a kind of foil to Beethoven, the former’s music seeming to say to the latter’s, “Yes, but you might also look at things this way…..”. Completely different to the “Appassionata” in scope and mood, Schubert’s work “Six Moment Musicaux” amply demonstrates an alternative way of treating and and presenting thematic material. Those bold, angular yodelling figures at the very beginning of the opening C Major piece are handled by their composer with a droll, occasionally quirky touch that largely maintains the music’s individual character – as opposed to Beethoven’s assiduous hammering-out and moulding of his themes. As for the performance, there could have been an entirely different pianist at work, here, in the Schubert – much of the opening was played by Diedre Irons in a spontaneous-sounding recitative-like manner, everything coloured and shaped by her playfulness and lightness of touch.

The piece’s “trio” section saw ease and grace kept to the fore, the “echoing” calls floated with utter nonchalance across what I’ve always previously thought of as crepuscular landscapes – here the playing seemed to suggest morning hues and gentle country sports, the various fanfare-like figurations far less laden and more contented in character. The Andantino worked beautifully, here, the ambience both supporting the pianist’s legato phrasing and enhancing her subtle weightings and colorings. And the Hungarian-like third-movement’s limpid, dance-like motions were enchanting, particularly the smile on the music’s face at the change to the major just before the end.

I did think the acoustic all but defeated the busy detailings in the Moderato which followed, though the piece’s middle section established its Janus-faced character strongly, particularly the furrowed-brow minor-key sequence. As for the stormy Allegro Vivace, Irons “went for it”, filling the Cathedral’s spaces with sound and fury with broad brush-strokes of agitated tones. Compensating for these tempestuous outbursts was the final Allegretto, a proper envoy-like piece, rather like “The Poet Speaks” in Schumann’s “Kinderscenen”, here most eloquently phrased and sounded, but also in places drawing parallels of figuration with Schubert’s great B-flat Sonata’s first movement.

This hour-long recital (all too brief a time!) was concluded with some Chopin, his Ballade No.1 in G Minor – fascinating to be able to experience the work almost cheek-by-jowl with the “Appassionata”, albeit wryly and fancifully separated by the Schubert. As big-boned and demonstrative in places as was the Beethoven sonata, Chopin’s piece seemed here to revel in its romantic associations with literature and history, the music bringing out Diedre Irons’ natural story-telling instincts as surely as the Beethoven had demonstrated the expressive power of her organic thinking. Her performance recalled for me her stunning playing of Liszt’s first Mephisto Waltz in the Ilott Theatre in 2004, shortly after she first came to Wellington to live.

Right from the declamatory opening one was drawn into the composer’s world of drama and spectacle – the opening melody so beautifully buoyed along by the left hand’s colourings and dynamic impulses, occasionally illuminated by flourishings that still managed to glint amid the laden acoustic – somehow, the pianist contrived to “float” details rather than allow them to submerge, an example being the repeated-octave note towards the melody’s end – enchanting! Though the more vigorous passages often got caught up in their own reverberations, the drive and focus of the initial phrases carried our receptivities through – again Irons used the weight of sound to hers and the music’s best advantage in places, opening up the throttle in places where the music’s harmonies had follow-through, and creating powerful results.

At the end I found myself thinking that it had all worked better than I thought it would, though I couldn’t help making a kind of “list” of pieces whose qualities would, I thought be beautifully enhanced by the cathedral’s ambience – parts of Messiaen’s “Vingt Regards sure l’enfant Jésus” for instance, or the B Minor Prelude and Fugue from Book One of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” – thanks, however, to Diedre Irons’ marvellous playing, we got what we were given, literally with bells on! – a truly memorable experience.

PS. – Jian Liu is giving the next piano recital at the Cathedral on Friday 14th November

Borodin Quartet in Wellington – Old-World elegance, universal beauty

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Chamber Music New Zealand presents:
THE BORODIN QUARTET

MYASKOVSKY – String Quartet No.13 Op.86
SHOSTAKOVICH – String Quartet No.11 in F Minor Op.122
BEETHOVEN – String Quartet in B-flat Op.130

Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Thursday 16th October, 2014

Mention the name “Borodin Quartet” and the average classical music-lover’s eyes will either take on a dreamy, far-away look as if contemplating whole histories of music-making in every prestigious place imaginable, or else flash with sudden excitement at the prospect of encountering this world-renowned group’s playing. Last week in Wellington, chamber-music enthusiasts had the chance to indulge in either or both reactions, as the Borodins (their 2014 lineup of players, of course) gave a concert in the city as part of a Chamber Music New Zealand tour.

The group was formed in 1945, though with a different name, the Moscow Conservatoire Quartet (all of its members then and since, have been graduates of the Moscow Conservatory) – interestingly, the first ‘cellist of the group was none other than Mstislav Rostropovich, though he left shortly afterwards to concentrate on his solo career, his place being taken by Valentin Berlinsky, the group’s ‘cellist for the next sixty-two years!.

In 1955 the group adopted its present name, in homage to the composer Alexander Borodin. Since then the quartet’s personnel has changed entirely and repeatedly, with violinist Ruben Agharonian (the present leader) and violist Igor Naidin joining in 1996, ‘cellist Vladimir Baishin in 2007 and violinist Sergey Lomovsky the most recently recruited member, in 2011. This was the quartet’s sixth visit to New Zealand, the first (with four different players) being in 1965, and the most recent prior to this present one being in 2010.

The ensemble first encountered its great compatriot Dmitri Shostakovich in 1946 – though Shostakovich’s favourite quartet remained the Beethoven Quartet (who premiered all but two of his fifteen quartets) the Borodins also worked with the composer on each of the individual works, giving their interpretations a unique flavour and insight. The Quartet actually recorded two complete cycles, the first at the time when only thirteen quartets had been written by the composer, and the second following the latter’s death in 1975.

On tour this time round the group brought the Eleventh String Quartet, written just after the composer’s Thirteenth Symphony had been lambasted and banned by the Soviet authorities, on account of its controversial subject-matter, the setting of texts by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The Eleventh Quartet is, by comparison an essentially “private” work, made up of seven shortish, continuously-played movements. Though not as powerfully-projected a work as some of its fellows, the music throughout cast its own darkly-fscinating spell in the Borodins’ hands.

Beginning with a melancholic, somewhat elegiac opening, the music quickly and sure-footedly moved through its various sequences. There were ironic exchanges between an obsessively repeated figure and upwardly-mocking glissandi, which were abruptly interrupted by explosive, and energetic outbursts producing the most amazingly resonant chord-dissonances. Everything was suddenly whirled away by molto-perpetuo violin figures which did their best to ignore shouts of disquiet from the other strings – the composer ironically gave this section the tiltle “Humoreske”!

Perhaps the “dark heart” of the work came with the “Elegy” section, where Shostakovich quoted the Funeral March from the “Eroica”, a section of the work written to commemorate the death a year before of the Beethoven Quartet’s ‘cellist, Vassily Shirinsky. After this, an epilogue quoted from material heard right at the opening of the quartet, by now, seeming a world away. As performed this evening by the Borodins, the work was, in places very much a memorable “Fled is that music? – do I wake or sleep?” kind of listening experience.

The Shostakovich quartet had been preceded on the program by a work from Nikolay Myaskovsky, born in Poland to Russian parents in 1881. I’d not heard a lot of his music, with the exception of his Symphony No.21, dedicated to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and recorded with the orchestra by Morton Gould.  Myaskovsky’s String Quartet No.13 Op.86 was his very last work to be published, and was in fact dedicated to the same Beethoven Quartet that had championed Shostakovich’s music.

The music actually won the composer a posthumous Stalin Prize, in marked contrast to the reception a few years earlier accorded his 26th Symphony, denounced by the infamous “Zhdanov decree” in 1948 (along with fellow-composers Shostakovich and Prokofiev), for “formalist tendencies” – i.e. music “inaccessible to the people”.  But I thought it was interesting that a friend I talked with during the concert’s interval found the Myaskovsky work “bland and ordinary”. I must record that, after some discussion, we begged to differ on that point!

Certainly in comparison with the Shostakovich work, Myaskovsky’s music wasn’t difficult or challenging – instead, it was evocative, colourful, energetic, and quixotic, in places even volatile in its unexpected changes of metre and contrasts of mood. The quartet’s opening made me think of Pasternak and his “Doctor Zhivago”, a vein of melancholy informing the music that the Borodins kept taut and sharply-focused, never allowing over-indulgence of tone or phrasing. The “presto fantastic” of the second movement was very much that – urgent and unsettled, interchanging dotted rhythms with whirling triplets, before precipitously plunging into a dark, slow waltz, like a kind of lament – we were kept on the edges of our “listening-seats” throughout by the composer’s quixotic sensibilities and the deftness of the Borodins’ playing.

The richly-melodic Andante which began the slow movement brought an unashamedly nostalgic ambience to the fore, the music’s development reiterating the same themes but with different voices and different kinds of emphasis – very lovely. The finale’s emphatic opening “bounce” introduced the first of many sequences, all too rapidly “crowding-in” to do full justice to in print, but tossed off with great élan by the musicians, complete with a wonderful “surprise” ending.

So, with two very different “Russian” evocations behind us, each fascinating in its own individual way, we squared up after the interval to the Borodins’ playing of one of the “great” Beethoven quartets. This was Op.130 in B-flat, which the New Zealand String Quartet had “spoiled” us with in concert a couple of years ago by playing the composer’s original ending to the work, the astounding “Grosse Fugue”. We had to content ourselves here with Beethoven’s revised ending, a substitute finale whose cheerful and disconcerting garrulity the Borodins were able to temporarily reconcile me to.

And the Quartet’s performance of the remainder of the work brought handsome rewards.  Throughout the concert one noticed how the players had the knack of creating tension and focus without apparent external effort – it all seemed to be coming from the instruments rather than from the players’ use of them, to a disconcerting degree, in places, though the sounds certainly conveyed all that the music carried. If less involving on a visceral level than, say, the playing of the NZSQ, the Borodins made up for this with their surety of application of musical values.

So, the first movement of Op.130 was poised, balanced and aristocratic, making the following Presto movement more spectral and agitated than usual, the triplet section dispatched with astonishing virtuosity, and the reprise of the opening like a devil pursuing and snapping at a pair of heels! The Andante con moto had an incredible lightness of utterance, seeming to rise above its usual bucolic ambience, instead enjoying the lightest and most sensitive of touches.

The Quartet played the German Dance (Alla danza tedesca) with the same swiftness of movement and lightness of touch, the violin’s central running figurations briefly evoking the fairground before returning to the lyrical atmosphere of the first part – everything easeful and without a trace of heaviness. As for the exquisite Cavatina, its “hymn to life” aspect in the composer’s gallery of human impulse touched our hearts, the syncopated melody appearing to float freely during the piece’s almost hallucinatory middle section, before returning to earth and anchoring our spirits safely once more.

As for the finale, the problem with the music  is obviously mine, as the group lavished as much care on its droll jog-trot rhythms as anywhere else in the whole work. In all, it was “old school” music-making of the highest order – and the players rewarded our extended appreciation of their efforts with a short transcription of a Tchaikovsky song, performed obviously to the manner born, for our delight.

 

Alexa Thomson – possibility and accomplishment on the viola

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St. Andrews-on-the-Terrace Lunchtime Concert Series:

Alexa Thomson, Viola
Rafaella Garlick-Grice, Piano

Brahms – Sonata for Viola and Piano in F minor, Op.120
Bartok – Moderato, from Viola Concerto, Sz.120, BB 128
Paganini (arr.Primrose) – La Campanella

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

Wednesday 15th October 2014

 This concert was an Honours music degree recital for Alexa Thomson, and St.Andrew’s church was a most suitable venue for this scale of performance. The Brahms Sonata is, of course, one of the lynchpins of the violist’s repertoire, and it was a good vehicle for Alexa’s artistic phrasing and warmth of tone which was entirely free of the edgy, nasal quality that can often detract from the upper register of a viola. The balance of piano and viola was excellent, obviously benefitting from Rafaella’s wide experience in such collaborative roles, and together the players very effectively captured the many contrasting moods of the opening Allegro appassionato.

They did likewise in a beautifully wistful reading of the following Andante and a very gracious Allegretto. The demanding Vivace finale was very polished and technically competent, and rounded off a thoughtful and musical performance of this iconic work. For my part, I would have preferred a reading with less gentility, more overt passion and Romanticism, and a wider exploration of the dynamic range that Brahms’ rich idioms can offer so many opportunities for; but a more subdued approach obviously sat  very comfortably with the players.

Next was the opening Moderato movement from Bartok’s concerto, a work that, for me, offers some pretty challenging listening, given its unforgiving dissonance and aggressive, angular writing in places. But the duo attacked it with impressive technical skill, and highlighted well its widely contrasting moods, be they angry or lyrical. This was a more passionate reading than the Brahms, and the movement definitely benefitted from that.

La Campanella is an unashamedly show-off piece in Paganini’s very recognisable style, and like its many stablemates it is very demanding technically. Both players had all the fireworks thoroughly sorted out, with Alexa pulling off the brutal double stopping with considerable flair. There was good contrast between the widely varying moods of the piece, with the musical phrasing of the more lyrical sections punctuating the frenetic interludes very effectively. The work closed with a great flourish that had the audience expressing their appreciation most enthusiastically.

The programme notes stated that “Alexa really aspires to have a solo career” but she came across to me, and others I spoke to, as a gentle soul, with a refinement more suited to chamber or orchestral roles. For a solo career, I think she needs to find that element of the bruiser that is, I feel, essential to tackle this intractable instrument. It was never designed to go under the human chin, and in a solo situation calls more for a cellist mentality than that of an “alto violinist”. Nevertheless, this very demanding programme was most professionally pulled off, and Gillian Ansell must be a very proud teacher.

Illuminating the Bard – sonnets for a 450th birthday

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Sonnet Lumiere – light on Shakespeare, man of mystery

Jane Oakshott and Richard Rastall
of Trio Literati

Soprano Pepe Becker
Lutenist Don King

Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul, Lady Chapel

Sunday 12th October 2014

This performance was a celebration of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the 450th anniversary of his birth. By happy chance the two actors were in New Zealand during the 50th anniversary celebrations of Wellington’s Cathedral of St. Paul, and as part of those, they had devised a programme to “perform from Shakespeare’s sonnets and other works with sidelights on his mysterious life, some original pronunciation and a few surprises”. There were 16 sonnets in all, grouped according to The Arts, The Seasons of Life and Love, Beauty, and Love.

These brackets were punctuated with extracts from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, and Hamlet and interspersed with some favourite songs and lute music that lent a most appropriate Elizabethan flavour to the hour. The choice of venue was just perfect for this scale of performance, with the exquisite Gothic timber structure of  diocesan architect Frederick de Jersey Clere (1856-1952) providing a most sympathetic ambience. Coupled with Ray Henwood’s quite wonderful one-man Shakespeare programme in the Lady Chapel in August, Wellington has been extraordinarily fortunate in recent offerings from the Bard.

The sonnets and extracts from Shakespeare’s plays were given a most dramatic and engaging delivery, using just a few key props to enhance them. These two experienced actors had judged the scale and acoustics of the chapel with consummate skill, drawing the audience into an intimate yet vivid experience of each piece. Likewise the lute projected warmly and clearly into the space, with a clean crisp delivery underpinned by a truly sympathetic musicianship.

Pepe Becker’s stylistic idioms were entirely appropriate, and her love of this Elizabethan music very apparent,  but her voice could be almost too penetrating at times. No doubt most listeners would have been familiar with the words of the well known songs selected, but the diction was sometimes a struggle to discern. That said, the duo with Don King proved a most rewarding contribution to the programme.

The first musical item was a lute setting of the anonymous air Greensleeves, which was gently and beautifully played by Don King, and served to establish the whole performance very firmly in its time. The next was a duo setting by Robert Johnson (c1583-1633) of Ariel’s song Full Fathom Five from The Tempest. The duo drew us deftly into the world of a composer and lutenist  of the late Tudor and early Jacobean eras, who worked with Shakespeare and provided music for some of his later plays.

There followed an anonymous setting of the Willow Song that set the scene for the gravediggers’ discussion about “Is she to be buried in Christian burial?” from Hamlet. The actors’ humble rustic accents sat wonderfully with their undisguised distaste for the  ecclesiastical privileges enjoyed by the nobility.

Three sonnets on Beauty followed, then one of the “surprises” billed in the programme. It was Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, in sonnet form, about something that has long puzzled many people – Shakespeare’s bequest of his second best bed to his wife Anne Hathaway. It is such a gem, that I must include it here in full:

Anne Hathaway

by Carol Ann Duffy from The World’s Wife (1999)

‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed …’
(from Shakespeare’s will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where we would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

The next songs were Where the bee sucks, again set by Robert Johnson, and Thomas Morley’s O mistress mine, both bracketed with six sonnets on Love. Again the lute and voice gave a faithful delivery of these lovely numbers to round off the duo contribution.

Don King’s final item was a lute setting of Will Kemp’s Jig in which he very aptly set the scene for the Envoi “If we shadows have offended” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These rounded out a quite delightful hour of wit, sorrow, song, verse and prose, put together in a most rewarding marriage of music and drama. The Lady Chapel was virtually full, and I’d wager that all headed home with that indefinable glow that is the gift of true artistry.

 

 

 

Orchestral spectaculars from the NZSO – and a 2015 sneak-preview

Posted on by Peter Mechen

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra presents:

JANÁČEK – Sinfonietta
BRETT DEAN – Trumpet Concerto
MUSORGSKY (orch. Ravel) – Pictures at an Exhibition

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)
Dima Slobodeniouk (conductor)
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

Michael Fowler Wellington

Friday 10th October, 2014

I thought it happy and appropriate that the second half of the NZSO “Bold Worlds” Wellington concert on Friday of last week was prefaced by several of the principal players telling us something about the 2015 orchestral season (details of which had just been released), and specifically what each of them was particularly looking forward to taking part in.

So we were able to hear concertmaster Vesa-Matti Leppänen telling us about the various 2015 concerts involving violinists, including reappearances by Hilary Hahn, Baiba Skride and Anthony Marwood, plus a concert featuring the first appearance of Janine Jansen with the orchestra. Vesa-Matti also talked about Sibelius’s Four Legends, conducted, naturally, by Pietari Inkinen – and mentioned that he would also, at some stage, be revisiting Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending”.

Principal flute Bridget Douglas then took over, expressing her delight at having played all the Beethoven Symphonies, and at the prospect of taking part, with pianist Freddy Kempf, in performances of all five piano concertos next year. She told us about us about her scheduled performance of the Ibert Flute Concerto with the 2015 National Youth Orchestra, along with a new work by the orchestra’s composer-in-residence, Salina Fisher. She also mentioned the return of Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, with the Mahler Fifth Symphony, as another highlight.

Then it was the turn of Principal Trombone Dave Bremner to wax enthusiastic about his favourites from the coming season, naturally enough focusing upon his eagerly-awaited partnership with the world-famous trombone virtuoso Christian Lindberg, the latter conducting Jan Sandström’s Double Trombone Concerto “Echoes of Eternity”, Bremner citing the exercise as “proof that men CAN multi-task”, then afterwards drawing our attention to the orchestra’s centenary tribute to the work of Douglas Lilburn, via his Second Symphony.

Having suitably whetted our appetites for the coming season the players returned to their places to await the arrival of guest conductor Dima Slobodeniouk. How fitting it was that, having told us about some of the orchestral highlights of the coming year, the players then pulled out all of the orchestral stops in giving us terrific performances of two favourite orchestral showpieces and a spectacular new concerto for trumpet and orchestra, the latter with one of the world’s great soloists, Håkan Hardenberger!

First on the  evening’s program was Leos Janáček’s grandly festive and excitingly virtuosic Sinfonietta, a work that’s as exciting to watch being performed as to hear, thanks to the writing for brass choir which begins and ends the music, and which is often delivered by players placed either antiphonally or (as here) in a group separated from the remainder of the orchestra. Janáček began writing music for a gymnastics festival at Brno, in his native Moravia, intending to compose a number of fanfares to mark the occasion – but his imagination gradually took charge of the original idea, and he found himself overwhelmed by a mixture of patriotic fervour (the work was dedicated to the Czechoslovak Armed Forces) and parochial feelings (apart from the opening fanfares, each section of the work celebrates a landmark in the town of Brno).

Also informing the music is the composer’s incredible native exuberance, additionally fuelled by his late-in-life infatuation with a married woman, Kamila Stosslova, almost 30 years his junior – many of his important works come from the period of his “idealized” relationship with Kamilla, who was obviously a kind of “Beatrice” to the composer’s “Dante”, an archetypal Muse.

All of this would have gone for very little had the performance by the orchestra, directed by their striking current guest conductor, Dima Slobodeniouk (a name which led me to make wild and inaccurate first-guesses as to his nationality, which was Russian!) faltered or hung fire in any way. Placed in the gallery at the rear of the main orchestra, the brass consort began the work, pinning back our ears with some fantastic playing, bringing out that hint of barbaric splendour which, alas, is sometimes smoothed over in performance. This all took place in tandem with Larry Reese’s thrilling, on-the-spot timpani contributions, the sounds ringing around the proverbial rafters most excitingly and satisfyingly.

The rest of the work brought in the main body of the orchestra, each movement vividly characterized by instrumentation which, in Janáček’s characteristic way, often exploited the extremities of tonal and timbal characteristics of the groups – thus the treble instruments of the orchestra often shrieked and squealed most excitingly, while the lower reaches menacingly loured and rumbled. Performances which don’t bring out this sense of striving to push of the sounds in certain places simply don’t do the composer or his music justice – and thankfully, Dima Slobodeniouk seemed to understand and readily engage Janáček’s particular demons in that respect.

So, in the second movement (The Castle at Brno), the strings joyously chirruped their vigorous figurations over brasses that muttered and rumbled, in between sequences of great lyrical beauty. Similarly demonstrative was the fourth movement (appropriately titled “The Street”) with its festive trumpet-calls, invoking all kinds of responses from the rest of the orchestra, involving gruff, big-boned bass strings dancing heavy-footedly and orchestral bells ringing out almost in alarm at the summons. I liked, too, the boyish “tumble-down” orchestral phrases, winds squawking in roguish pleasure at the unseemliness of it all, energy and laughter paramount.

These two movements were such a marked contrast to the third, middle movement (evocatively called “The Queen’s Monastery”). At the beginning all was melancholy, the tuba mournfully intoning a pedal-note over which the strings and then the winds sang what seemed like a lament, broken only by extraordinary flourishes from the winds in a handful of places – when questioned about these by a worried flute-player, the composer apparently emphasized that the irruptions need to sound “like the wind”. But the most marked contrast came with the music’s middle sequence, the pent-up energies firstly hinted at by the brass, and then, after a brief restatement of the opening by the strings, suddenly unleashed, to the alarm of the strings and the orchestral bells – what larks were here! – riotous goings-on amongst the brasses, with whooping horns, bumptious heavy brass and scintillating trumpets making the most of their “moments”, despite the frightened squawks of the winds!

A gentler, more folksy beginning to the final movement from winds and strings gradually built in strength and tension towards the great moment when the brass at the rear, summonsed by a clarion call and a cymbal crash, rejoined the orchestra with the work’s opening fanfares, this time underpinned by whole-orchestral counterpoints. I confess that I did want the conductor to broaden the music slightly as it drove towards its resplendent final chords, but he chose, just as excitingly, to maintain the momentum until the very final peroration – what a noise, and what an overwhelming effect! Even the somewhat ungrateful acoustic of the MFC was activated, shaken and stirred by all of this, with the players’ efforts and their conductor’s magisterial direction receiving justly-deserved acclaim.

Straight after Janáček’s far-flung ambiences, our ears were freshly-syringed by the opening of Brett Dean’s Trumpet Concerto, an evocation, it seemed, of huge machinery being activated piece-by-piece, begun by woodblocks and metallic scintillations, and building through an enormous crescendo, a cavernous bass line underneath the more superficial figurations suggesting some kind of gigantic ship being launched. Having activated his orchestral forces, the composer introduced the trumpet, played here by Håkan Hardenberger, by repute one of the world’s best on the instrument. He was the “superhero” of the composer’s conception, his music brooking no interference, and very much “in charge” of things until his downfall, delineated by the dying flight aspect of the lines at the movement’s end.

The second movement, given the title “Soliloquy”, presented a more meditative mood, the “draining away” of energy and colour reminding me of some of Salvador Dali’s paintings of melting objects. The trumpet played long lines trying to stem the downward flow, but was itself caught in the torpor of it all – all seemed decay and disillusionment. The trumpeter’s attempts to energize his world – last-ditch attempts at rallying fanfares – seemed to fall on deaf ears, as the orchestral basses take up the chromatic downward figurations. All the soloist seemed to be able to do was salute the passing of things, and wait for some kind of redemptive force to appear.

It came with a muted trumpet call which seemed to awaken a distant response in kind from within the orchestra, one which grew in detail and resonance – rather like the opening of Respighi’s “Appian Way” sequence from “The Pines of Rome” the voices were distant and representing mere possibility at first, remaining muted and disembodied, but with impulse and ambience beginning to mushroom into something. As the interactive dialogue between trumpet and orchestra began to flourish and establish itself, a distant march-like rhythm suddenly began, beautifully “placed” by the composer from with the existing textures. This quickly took on a course of its own, set in opposition to the trumpet and orchestral discourses, the music building up to an incredible climax, most theatrically brought to an unexpected close by a stratospheric note from the trumpet and a dismissive whip-lash phrase played by the solo violin – what an ending!

We need an interval to doubly realign our ears after those two works! – In that respect the “sneak preview” of the 2015 season was doubly welcome, as it helped “close off” what had been before, in preparation for Ravel’s take on Musorgsky’s tribute to the work of one of his dearest friends. It’s a work that’s too well-known to have to comment on each section, here, but the “pictures” and their interspersed “promenades” were again notable for their sharply-etched characterizations, the conductor seeming to me to pay particular attention to the nuancing of the string lines in places, to the point where the textures exhibited all kinds of characterful fibres, enough to remind one of human speech – one of the composer’s obsessions, of course.

My only criticism of the conductor was that he seemed to elongate many of the pauses between the pictures, breaking the continuum of the voyage. Yes, the pictures are self-contained – but Musorgsky himself abruptly “butted-together” pairs of them, sometimes incongruously, as one would experience when disparate pictures in galleries are hung next to one another. The composer also “filled in” some of the pauses between the pictures by the use of “promenades” music derived from the work’s very opening, a melody that changes in mood and feeling in relation to different parts of the gallery. Elsewhere, pictures aren’t linked by anything except silence – and I found the silences in some cases stretched by the conductor so far as to take us away from the experience. A pity, because I found myself having to re-establish myself in the gallery a number of times instead of simply being taken from picture to picture, in what should have been a sequence of unbroken enchantment.

But as for the orchestral playing – well, it was of a vividness and impact that meant that one was very quickly returned and imbued with the pictorial and emotive force of whatever music was being performed – it was the best possible advertisement the orchestra could have devised for its up-and-coming programme next year. And I do hope to encounter both conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger again in concert, before too long. It was wonderful to experience an evening of music-making so distinctive and engaging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soloists add distinction to NZSM Orchestra concert

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī NZ School of Music presents:
FROM GENEVA TO KNOXVILLE

BRAHMS – Tragic Overture
TCHAIKOVSKY – Violin Concerto in D
BARBER – Knoxville: Summer of 1915
BARTOK – Dance Suite

Xin (James) Jin (violin)
Amelia Berry (soprano)
New Zealand School of Music Orchestra
Kenneth Young (conductor)
Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill St., Wellington

Thursday October 2nd, 2014

In the wake of a couple of crackingly good recent concerts given by the NZSM Orchestra and its intrepid conductor, Kenneth Young, I found myself eagerly looking forward to this particular evening’s presentation. The programme followed the orchestra’s policy of mixing the familiar (Brahms, Tchaikovsky) with the less-frequently performed (Barber, Bartok), the repertoire obviously designed to present the student musicians with a wide range of technical and stylistic challenges.

For a number of reasons, it seemed a nicely-balanced choice of items. The documented love-hate relationship between Brahms and Tchaikovsky as personalities gave the concert’s first half an extra frisson of contrasted expression. Then, the excitement and exhilaration of difference continued throughout the second half by a shift of focus twentieth-century-wards, with Barber and Bartok.

The prospect of hearing an exciting young soloist  Xin (James) Jin play a popular work like the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto would have drawn many people to the concert; and while Samuel Barber’s music (apart from his ubiquitous Adagio) wouldn’t have perhaps quickened pulses in the same way, the presence of ANOTHER soloist (soprano Amelia Berry) would, I’m sure, have been enticing – a singer or instrumentalist performing with an orchestra has a theatricality which is always of interest, in addition to whatever it is they’re performing.

Well, as it turned out, the concert was fabulous in parts – and interestingly enough the “soloist-and-orchestra” sequences stole the show! The concerto got one of the most exciting performances of the solo part I’ve ever heard from Xin Jin, while soprano Amelia Berry’s rendition of Barber’s achingly nostalgic setting of childhood memories “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” touched our hearts in a completely different way.

Neither performance was perfect in all respects – in the concerto, the orchestral support for the soloist was heartwarming in the lyrical passages, but didn’t really ignite in some of the more vigorous “brandy-on-the-breath” parts of the finale. In the Barber work the unfortunately overbearing acoustic of the venue meant that Amelia Berry’s words were often hard to decipher, the very “up-front” tones of the orchestral playing working against vocal clarity, gorgeous though her singing “sounded” throughout.

As for the two other works on the programme, the playing was in places spectacularly fiery, but again, thanks in part to the acoustic, had an uncomfortable “unrelieved” quality – I found the Bartok, in particular, hard going in places for this reason, the orchestral sound too confrontational for comfort, to my ears. A pity that both of this orchestra’s recent concert venues, the Cathedral and St.Andrew’s Church, are simply too “tight” – both acoustically and physically! – to accommodate orchestral performance easily,  and full-on works like the Bartok Dance Suite exacerbated the problem.

The experience reinforced my feelings of frustration and anxiety regarding the present non-availability of the Town Hall for orchestral concerts of this kind. These musicians’ efforts deserve far better than having merely makeshift venues in which to perform, in short, places in which they can be heard to their best advantage, instead of being compromised.

So it was that I found the performances hard to accurately judge in some aspects – for example I found the central section of the Brahms “Tragic” Overture too insistent-sounding, missing that sense of quiet, stricken numbness, an almost spectral tread of growing unease which swings like a pendulum between despair and dignity, and which provides a contrast with the outer parts of the work. I did think that Ken Young pushed it along dangerously quickly as well – the results were certainly tense and knife-edged, but any “inner” reflection of tragedy wasn’t brought out, and the music for me lost some expressive breadth as a result.

The acoustic wasn’t so much of a problem in the Tchaikovsky work, as the composer’s orchestral writing is relatively lean in any case, allowing his soloist’s tones to readily come through – although Young and the orchestra certainly took pains to facilitate this quality throughout most expertly. I thought the first two movements brilliantly successful, the excitement generated by all concerned towards the end of the first movement positively scalp-prickling, and deserving the spontaneous burst of applause at the movement’s end!

We got some beautiful solo playing in the slow movement from both the violinist and the accompanying wind players – but when it came to the last movement, I thought Xin Lin’s astonishingly expressive energies and spontaneous irruptions weren’t sufficiently matched by the orchestra, though I did appreciate Ed Allen’s horn-playing in the “Russian Dance” sections. Somehow the whiplash timing of the orchestral interjections didn’t come off with enough élan, and that cumulative tutti just before the soloist’s final entry unfortunately hung fire – it’s all rhythm and timing, the players needing to throw themselves at the notes and be damned to the consequences! Still, the response of the audience to it all (and particularly to the soloist) was rapturous at the end, and deservedly so.

The Barber work, “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” is something of a concert rarity, here – I know Leontyne Price’s recording, but had never before heard the work live. It’s a setting of passages from author James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family”, depicting a small boy’s recollection of summer evenings at home with the family. Barber described his work as a “lyrical rhapsody” and dedicated the music to his own father, who was ill at the time the piece was being written. It was premiered in Boston in 1948 by the singer Eleanor Steber.

I caught some beautifully vocalized sequences from the soprano, almost all in the quieter passages – the opening descriptions of people sitting on their porches, rocking gently, the gentle depiction of the night as “one blue dew”, and the very wind-blown Elgarian orchestral passages  during which the singer describes the family spreading quilts and lying under the stars. We clearly heard the heart-rending “May God bless my people”, and, at the return of the lullaby the comforting “Sleep, soft, smiling, draws me to her”.

Throughout the rest I registered the music’s emotions but couldn’t hear what was being sung – Amelia Berry’s voice, sweet and bright as it was, simply couldn’t couldn’t free itself from the orchestral fabric whenever the dynamics increased. We needed those words! – they would have fitted onto a single program page, avoiding any kind of disruptive turn-over – or else they could have been projected onto a screen. It would have increased our enjoyment of the performance hugely, even though the general nostalgic mood of the piece was movingly caught and held by soloist, conductor and players.

Bartok it was, to finish, and it certainly made an impact! The orchestral playing in places was some of the best of the evening – just as well, because when projected outwards with any kind of force it was a pretty unrelenting sound-picture! The first piece had more of a droll aspect, dark, galumphing rhythms alternating with big, blowzy textures, reminiscent of the “drunken peasant” depictions in the same composer’s “Hungarian Sketches”. The infamous second movement, with its laser-beam brass glissandi, nearly lifted the cathedral’s roof, an onslaught relieved only temporarily by the harp in conjunction with strings and winds. I liked the “Hungarian hoe-down” aspect of the third movement, and appreciated the respite afforded our sensibilities by the “molto tranquillo” fourth movement, with its nicely-realised exotic, almost Iberian atmospheres.

But golly! – what a riot of a finale! As I’ve said, it was almost too much in places, though undeniably exciting, the rhythms, textures and colours changing without warning, the overall mood of the piece capricious and volatile. It left us a bit winded, I think, everything in the sound-picture a bit claustrophobic in effect, but still exhilarating, in between gasps! There was no doubting the commitment and skill of the players, spurred on by Ken Young’s boundless energies – perhaps it wasn’t the most elegant finish to a concert, but the sounds were those which stirred the blood most satisfyingly. In all, great stuff from the NZSM Orchestra!

Youth and experience: organ-playing at St John’s, Willis St.

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Organ Recital at St. John’s Church

Bach: Toccata in D minor BWV 565
Couperin: Selections from one of his Masses
Franck: Chorale no.3, in A minor
Moritz Deutsch: nos. 9-12 from Twelve Preludes on Old Synagogue Melodies
Mozart: Adagio and Allegro for a Mechanical Clock, K.594 (arr. D. Halliday)
Bach: Prelude and Fugue in B minor BWV 544

Chelsea Whitfield and Dianne Halliday (organists)

St. John’s Church, Willis St., Wellington

Sunday 28 September 2014

It was interesting to be treated to a recital by two female organists, one a young student, the other long-experienced and highly expert.  However, the latter is currently a student too, working towards a doctorate (Doctor of Musical Arts) at Victoria University.

In St. John’s Church, with its fine wooden architecture, both external and internal, sits a splendid organ which needs some money spent on it to keep it in good playing order.  The series of recitals is one of the ways in which  the church is trying to meet that need.  It is a Lewis organ: Lewis and Company was an important firm of organ builders founded by Thomas Christopher Lewis (1833-1915), one of the leading English organ builders of late 19th century.

The organ, perhaps demonstrating its need of some restoration work, was a little out of tune in places on Sunday.

Chelsea Whitfield is an organ student at the New Zealand School of Music, but began learning the organ at 15.  She played first the well-known Bach Toccata in D minor.  It was probably nerves that accounted for quite a number of ‘fluffs’ in this piece – playing something so well-known compounds the difficulty, and also playing an instrument with which she would not be so familiar (she plays mainly at St. Paul’s Cathedral).  Of course, every organ is different in ways far more profound than is true of any other instrument, and it can take time to get to know a new one.  She chose a very suitable registration, nevertheless.

François Couperin’s Pièces d’orgue consistantes en deux messes (Pieces for Organ Consisting of Two Masses), were written around 1689–1690 when the composer was 21.  The pieces chosen from the first Mass, written for parish churches (many of which have splendid organs, of which I have recently had first-hand experience) gave variety of tempi, mood, and registrations.  There was a little blurring of notes on the flutes early on, i.e. they were not cleanly fingered.  But this was a rare aberration in Chelsea’s performance of the attractive music.  It was good to hear the different colours of the organ, as described in the titles of the pieces: ‘Recit de Chromhorne’, ‘Dialogue sur Le Trompette du G. C. [Grand Choir?] et sur la Montre’, the latter being the French name for Diapason.

Chelsea seemed very at home in this repertoire, and also in the Franck Chorale that followed.  This composer is not my favourite, but the Chorale was a brilliant piece well played – an exciting and highly competent performance.  The gradual build-up of volume and the selection of bright-sounding stops kept the work out of the mire into which Franck’s Chorales can fall.  There was plenty of contrast, and many tricky passages and turns were well mastered.  It was a fine rendition.

Dianne Halliday’s first pieces were something new to me, and I suspect to the rest of the audience too.  As I discovered in France, and as Dianne described, synagogues in some European countries have had organs for a long time, and music was written specifically for them.  Moritz Deutsch lived from 1818 to 1892, in Germany.  The first two of the pieces was written for the festival of Rosh Hashanah, and the next two for Yom Kippur, both festivals taking places around this time of year, as Dianne explained (in a voice projected so as to be easily heard, despite not using a microphone).

The first was rather ‘square’, with an improvisational feel to it; the second prelude brighter and without that improvisational character.  No.11 was solid, rather like a church chorale, but with some interesting chord progressions.  Nos.11 and 12 both began in the bass, on pedals.  No.12 was very bright, with contrasts.

Dianne’s arrangement of Mozart’s piece for an even more mechanical instrument than the pipe organ (in reality a minute pipe organ mechanically operated) had its delights.  The charming adagio was followed by a fast allegro with lots of trills.  The use of a 2-foot stop perhaps equated to the high tones of the tiny pipes of the original, and made for a brilliant, almost bird-like tonal quality.  The last section was quiet on flutes, and without the bright top.

Playing Bach was a great way to end the recital.  What ample interest Bach built into his organ music!  In his company both Franck and Mozart seem dull (no reflection on the arranger of the latter’s piece!)  Bach’s progressions, counterpoint and cadences promote a mood of certainty and cheerfulness – yes, even in a work written in a minor key.  The complexities of the fugue held no fears for Dianne Halliday’s capable technique.  Some of the harmonic modulations would be astonishing even if Franck had written them.

While organ recitals never attract a large audience (except the free ones that were held in Wellington Town Hall, of happy memory), there was a respectable number present to take in the diversity and interest of the programme and its performers.

Tests of character – Wellington Chamber Music recital from Ludwig Treviranus

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Chamber Music 2014 presents
Ludwig Treviranus (piano)

PAUL SCHRAMM – Nine Preludes
MAURICE RAVEL – Miroirs (Reflections)
SERGE PROKOFIEV – Three Pieces from “Romeo and Juliet”
MODEST MUSORGSKY – Pictures at an Exhibition

Wellington Chamber Music Concerts 2014
St Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace, Wellington

Sunday 28th September

Midway through pianist Ludwig Treviranus’s recent St.Andrew’s recital I was ready to tell anybody who would listen that this was shaping up to be a concert in a thousand – the Paul Schramm Preludes represented for me a major pianistic discovery, and I’d never heard parts of Ravel’s Miroirs played better by anybody, in concert or on record.

Of course, I needed at that stage to bear in mind one of the exchanges in Carl Sandburg’s anecdotal poem The People, Yes – the one where the city slicker asks the farmer, “Lived here all your life?” and the farmer replies “Not yit!” – that there was, at the half-way point, still a lot of musical  water still to pass under the pianistic bridge, and that I had better, like Carl Sandburg’s farmer, remain circumspect until all had run its course.

As it turned out, I thought the young pianist wasn’t able to recapture the “first fine careless rapture” of those first-half items after the interval – in  contrast to the elegance, finely-wrought detailing, deep evocation and well-tempered exuberance of the Schramm and Ravel items, neither the  Prokofiev “Romeo and Juliet” pieces nor Musorgsky’s epic traversal of an intense friendship, “Pictures at an Exhibition” seemed to my ears  sufficiently “owned” by Treviranus, despite some wonderful moments in each of the works.

So, I thought it was very much a “concert of two halves”, with the pianist seeming to give his all right from the start, and then, faced with the  complexities of the programme’s second half, perhaps running out of steam a little. It appeared also as though the post-interval items were  here prepared less thoroughly and meticulously than were the Schramm and Ravel works. The Musorgsky in particular lacked surety in places –  not only were there a number of finger-slips and lapses of memory but some of the sequences weren’t focused, weren’t “held” with enough through-line to fully transport us into the world of the particular impressions of time, place and the composer wanted to convey.

I was somewhat surprised that “Pictures” didn’t have the whole of the second half to itself, as it’s of reasonably “stand-alone” length and has a wide range of expression, needing nothing to act as either filler or foil. Generous though Treviranus was in giving us the scenes from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet, I thought their back-to-back positioning with “Pictures” actually detracted from our concentration and focus upon the latter. It’s a work that, I think, cries out for “stand-alone” placement in any concert, especially as it’s really a kind of ritual, with an inevitability of advancement shared by all great works of art. Part tragedy, part celebration, it’s a unique amalgam of descriptions and emotions, gathered together by the circumstance of one individual’s painful and debilitating loss of a friend.

Enough! – various pianists of my acquaintance have testified as to their own love of excess when young, armed with energy to burn, with generosity of nature, and with oceanfuls of delectable, mouth-watering repertoire to play and enjoy. As the conductor Sir John Barbirolli once said, referring to ‘cellist Jacqueline du Pre’s whole-hearted, super-charged music-making – which he loved, but which some critics found too fulsomely expressed: “When you’re young  you should have an excess of everything!” Sir John adding, “you have to have something which you can pare off and refine as you grow older….”

So – there we were at St.Andrew’s Church, in the company of the personable Ludwig Treviranus, smilingly welcoming us to the recital and telling  us his thoughts about each group of pieces he was about to play. This was all very much of a piece with his music-making, delivered as if it  were the most natural thing in the world to do. Particularly interesting to hear about was his discovery and advocacy of the Paul Schramm  Preludes, a project derived from his involvement with a collection of New Zealand piano pieces in a volume “Living Echoes – The First 150  Years of Piano Music from New Zealand”, researched and edited by Wellington teacher Gillian Bibby.

Paul Schramm, along with his wife, Diny, arrived in New Zealand in the late 1930s as refugee émigrés from Germany. Making their home in the  capital, they brought considerable musical skills to Wellington, Paul as a performer and Diny as a teacher – activities which the war years all but curtailed, treated as they were like aliens by the establishment for the duration. Paul left New Zealand for Australia after the war, where he died  in 1953;  but Diny remained in Wellington and continued to teach here for many years afterwards.

Schramm’s Nine Preludes reflected his own musical tastes, influenced as the writing was by Prokofiev, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, and  Scriabin. It seems the pieces were conceived as a set of nine, or perhaps even ten, though “Number One”  was missing when the original discovery of the music was made in the Alexander Turnbull archives. A later search turned up another Prelude – perhaps the missing one, perhaps another altogether – so that today we got the original number of pieces, whatever the origins of the first of the set.

Though derivative in style and content, each of the pieces, with Ludwig Treviranus’s vividly-projected and sharply-focused advocacy, sparkled with the glint of rediscovery and impinged their essences upon the memory. Analysis of each piece and its performance  would fill a book, so I’ll content myself with remarking on a couple of the pieces and their juxtapositionings. First came the the imposing and  impressively-wrought “Biblical rhetoric” of the writing in the opening Prelude “On the Death of a Great Man: FD Roosevelt 12th April 1945”,  complete with echoes of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. It was a piece whose direct appeal to the emotions contrasted immediately with the  following “Satyr’s Dance”, a mischievous, spikily-harmonised part-waltz-part-scherzo, the pianist making the most of the interplay between  massive, Prokofiev-like momentums and Ravelian delicacies.

I particularly liked the “Ritual Dance of a Javanese Warrior”, a dark-hearted waltz flecked with glinting colours, cruel in its “snapping” figurations  and remorseless harmonies, its effect made all the greater in retrospect through being followed by “Hommage a Scriabine”, with its  shimmering textures and insinuating modulations. Perhaps along with the Debussy-like “Glittering Thirds” it’s the most unashamedly imitative,  as Schramm’s titles, of course, do readily suggest. I admit I did wonder about Treviranus’s performance of the Seventh Prelude, “Distortion of a Viennese  Waltz”, though, as Schramm’s original subtitle for the piece (quoted in the programme) was “arrogantly performed by a German General Staff  Officer”. As played here, I thought the pianist largely ignored this directive – the performance was far too musically sympathetic and lilting in  manner to evoke any kind of arrogance or brutality!

From these marvellous pieces we went on to Ravel’s “Miroirs”, where more pianistic riches awaited our ears! – Treviranus brought out almost  everything one could wish for in the music – the opening of “Noctuelles” (Night Moths) all impulse and feathery excitement, the textures wrought of magic, and the subsequent evocations of night sublimely realised, the darkness suggestive rather than sinister. “Oiseaux tristes” featured a different kind of ambience, the pianist able to tellingly “place” the birds’ calls in the silences, stressing the solitariness of the listener’s experience.

But I thought the performance’s most sublime moments were in the following “Une barque sur l’ocean” (A boat on the ocean)  – Treviranus conjured from his piano some of the most beguiling keyboard sounds imaginable, the playing suggesting as readily the oceanic depths as the surface play of light and air on the waves, everything – even the glissando – gorgeously “touched in”. He brought out Ravel’s utterly seductive interplay of melody and figuration in a finely-activated liquid flow, and with almost lump-in-throat delicacy as the ship passed by, leaving only impressions on the memory.

That same delicacy of utterance and feeling for atmosphere was evident in the final piece of the set as well – “La Valée des cloches” (Valley of the Bells). Pianist Robert Casadesus was quoted in the programme notes as having been told by Ravel that “the piece was inspired by midday bells in Paris”. However,  the music has never seemed that way to my ears – nor, I think to those of Ludwig Treviranus, judging by the almost crepuscular ambience he wove with and around the sounds. These bells were more nostalgic and dreamlike than real, middle-of-the-day angelus-bells, activated by deft stroke-making on the part of the pianist, the oscillations continuing to enchant the imagination’s ear long after the actual sounds had ceased. I thought it simply lovely playing.

No, I hadn’t forgotten the jester and his morning song (Alborada del gracioso)! – we got some exciting playing from Treviranus, just missing, I thought, the last ounce of rhythmic “swagger” through a shade too quick a tempo, but still capturing plenty of thrust and volatility of the opening, and enabling a great flourish at the end of the first section. But the expressif en recit of the middle section was where I would have liked a more marked contrast with the livelier outer sequences, a freer, deeper, canto-jondo-like feeling of a singer caught and held by some deep emotion, interrupted by the physicalities which come back at the piece’s end. But I realise that I’m quibbling, here – it really was marvellous playing!

Still, after these stellar feats of re-creation, I sensed that the pianist had begun to tire, and his focus lose its edge. Prokofiev’s famous “Montagues and Capulets” sequence from the “Romeo and Juliet” ballet certainly strutted its stuff with real menace, arrogance and swagger, and the ghostly ambience of the trio section was well-caught, as the disguised Romeo and his friends sneaked into the Capulets’ Ball. But the impish fun of “The Young Juliet” needed a lighter touch throughout to REALLY scintillate, and the opening “Folk Dance” had some untidy figurations in-between the episodes of young-braves’-bravado from both of the warring families.

Following this came Musorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” – and there were moments from Treviranus of brilliance and rapt insight into a unique world of contrasted expression. These were flung, teased and dragged across the surface of a creative canvas with great panache – the opening picture, Gnomus, for one, gave off a gorgeously volatile and unashamedly malicious aspect, one whose acerbities set “The Old Castle” into rich, darkly-lit relief. I also thought “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle” a pair of vividly characterized gentlemen, one assertive and overbearing, the other wheedling and pathetic. And, as a double-whammy kind of crowning conclusion to the work, the witch Baba Yaga’s wild rides were savagely and outlandishly celebrated, her music spectacularly disintegrating against the bulwarks of “The Great Gate at Kiev” with its pomp, splendor and introspective moments of ritualistic piety.

However, it was, I thought, for the pianist, still a work in progress – a number of uncertainties inhibited the kind of breathtaking identification with the music that had characterized Treviranus’s earlier playing of “Miroirs” and the Schramm pieces. Just to take one example – I’m certain he will, in time, delve more deeply into and relish the stillness that marks the transition from those stark, remorseless structures of “Catacombs” to the mystical revelations of “Cum mortuis in lingua mortua” – the place where the composer was, for a few moments, reunited in quiet ecstasy with the spirit of his dead friend, Victor Hartmann, the artist of the “Pictures”.

Of course, Musorgsky’s tragedy was that, even while celebrating his friend’s memory he was on a downward path to an alcohol-soaked oblivion which put a premature end to his own life and creative career – sobering (sic) thoughts indeed, and especially with which to conclude this celebration of a major pianistic talent here in Wellington.

 

SMP Ensemble – Sound Barrel a “lucky dip” for this listener!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

SMP Ensemble presents:
SOUND BARREL

Music by:
CHRIS CREE BROWN, HIROYUKI YAMAMOTO,
JASON POST, GIACINTO SCELSI,
BEN GAUNT
Graphic Scores by:
TOM JENSEN, LYELL CRESSWELL,
SCILLA McQUEEN

Special guest artist:
KANA KOTERA (euphonium)

SMP Ensemble:
Karlo Margetic, Richard Robeshawe, Reuben Jellyman
Cordelia Black, Tabea Squire, Sam Vennell
Chris Wratt, Anton Killin, Jason Post

Adam Concert Room,
Victoria University of Wellington

Friday 26th September 2014

That enterprising and congenitally provocative performing group, the SMP Ensemble presented a characteristic program for our delight and fascination at the Adam Concert Room last Friday evening.

Every piece on the program brought its own specific amalgam of spontaneity and thoughtfulness to bear on both the recreative process and the audience’s receptivity – a kind of “expect the unexpected” ethos whose attendant challenges, bewilderments and satisfactions truly “spiced up” the evening’s music.

I must admit to a certain level of self-generated bravado in writing these words, gobsmacked as I was by the effect of some of the sounds that I heard, experienced and watched being made throughout the evening. Particularly thought-provoking were the items featuring graphic scores, each of which was displayed clearly and spaciously (excellent and audience-friendly visual displays were a feature of the concert), giving us some unique insights, both cerebral and instinctive, regarding that mysterious, often nebulously wrought “womb of interactivity” that exists between composer and performer – and, of course, by extrapolation, each listener.

It was very much a case for me of being faced with music for which I had relatively little previous reference in terms of being able to make judgements and draw conclusions based on what I saw and heard. I found myself going back to points of revisiting of my own “formative responses” to sounds, well before my current ostensible crop of expectations relating to conventional classical music. I was reminded, again and again, by what I heard the SMP players do, of my first encounters with things that were world-enlarging, both in terms of timbre and colour and texture, but also in terms of structure and organization and juxtapositioning.

In short, I was “undone” to a large extent by the concert, and this is a record of the ensuing impressions I received from the music while in that partly delightful, partly precarious state.

The concert began with a piece by UK composer Ben Gaunt, one whose basic idea interestingly “resonated” within me – that of “Sympathetic Strings”, ambiences created by material that resonates as a consequence of other materials being “played” – of course stringed instruments do have this very particular on-going quality, whether intentional or incidental. Gaunt carried this idea over to having sounds generated by performers whose creative imaginations “resonate” as a result of what they hear other performers do. The performance was directed by Jason Post, whose own music was to make an appearance in the concert’s second half.

The Ensemble’s formation at the beginning visually expressed a kind of Newtonian “action” and “reaction” process, with clarinet, double bass and violin to the right of the performing area, and an accordion, violin and percussion set antiphonally to the left. The music began with beautifully-floated, nocturnal-like lines from clarinet, double bass and violin, occasionally punctuated by irruptions from the left, as if worlds were colliding and rubbing along each other’s edges. Of a sudden all hell seemed to break loose, in particular from Karlo Margetic’s clarinet, which seemed to be expressing some kind of musical apoplexy, a process which led to the player actually collapsing and having to be revived by a violinist – was this a mere theatrical touch, or an organic consequence of the “sympathetic” pressures brought to bear on the performer by the music?

Christchurch composer Chris Cree Brown’s “Sound Barrel” gave its name to the concert, but amply characterized the music we heard, scored for euphonium and fixed media playback. We were first introduced to the guest soloist, Japanese-born Kana Kotera, obviously a virtuoso of her instrument, judging by the timbal and coloristic command she was able to exert upon the euphonium’s sounds, ranging from cavernous, tuba-like grunts and galumphings to honeyed-tone croonings. “Elephantine Dreams” could as well have been the piece’s title, as the fixed media playback gave a definite “narrative” context for the soloist to muse upon Quixotic-like adventures, alternating between the fantastical and the extremely visceral.

Poet and composer Cilla McQueen’s work “Rain” added a graphic visual element to the evening’s proceedings, the ensemble “playing” two of the composer’s semi-abstracted “graphic scores” – works of art in themselves, of course! It was a colourful assemblage of instruments indeed! – a ukulele played with a painted stick, a double-bass, bongo drums played with sticks that had soft felt heads, a violin and an accordion – and some kind of tube with a piece of chain attached. The composer/artist’s  second score had a more recognizable kind of contouring, in the shape of a fern frond about to unfold. More obviously rhythmic at the piece’s beginning than was  the first realization, this piece seemed to me more ritualistically or ceremonially conceived than the first one – perhaps a more public as opposed to a previous private acknowledgement of the psychology of weather. Instruments such as a gong advanced a feeling that the second graphic score invited a more structured and kinetic approach to the composer’s own inspiration

Wellington is currently playing host to composer Hiroyuki Yamamoto, from Japan, here on a three-month composer residency – his piece “Ginkgo biloba”, written for solo euphonium set the player a number of technical challenges and difficulties, designed to show off the particular qualities of the instrument, and the virtuosity of the player. Beginning with a kind of definitive euphonium statement of declaration, Kana Kotera seemed to “own the work” – she adroitly moved from her opening “calling card” mode to the piece’s “real” business, setting sostenuto lines against staccato impulses, the music’s momentum gradually building, the animation increasing and the ratio of introspection diminishing.

Some of the composer’s explanations I understood – microtones and multiphonics, for example – but “half-valve” defeated me! – I assumed it was some kind of “shortening” technique used to alter pitch and timbre, and would have been used by the soloist as part of the extraordinary array of speech-like intonations throughout the piece, in which mouthing and tonguing would have had a significant part to play. Her timbral and coloristic capabilities on the instrument were in fact astonishing, the potentialities she unlocked for expression fulfilling almost to excess the prescription expressed by the composer that the sounds needed the kind of inherent ambiguity which suggested and demonstrated their basic instability.

More graphics accompanied Lyell Cresswell’s “Body Music” – appropriately dedicated to Jack Body (who was present at the concert) at the time of his fiftieth birthday (how time flies!) – here were great flourishes of exuberance, the sounds fluid and dynamic, the liquidity of the textures advanced by the use of a celeste. I took from it a kind of celebration of human physicality and impulse, the music shaping form and characterizing movement in sound. The actual graphic score appropriately displayed a human shape packed tightly with notes, a depiction of a truly musical being!

Giacinto Scelsi’s 1976 work “Maknongan” brought back Kana Kotera, eager to explore with her euphonium the Italian composer’s refined, somewhat austere world of limited notes inflected with microtones. Called by one commentator “the most focused and abstract work Scelsi ever composed”, the piece was also one of  the composer’s very last works. The euphonium’s rich sound seemed to me to “humanize” the composer’s characteristic austerities (well, as with the ones I’d previously heard, anyway!), the soloist furthering the process by employing a stylish hat with a paper rose in the hat-band as a kind of “mute” for the instrument! As these things often do, the mere sight of the hat performing this function enhanced the aural effect!

The work, true to the composer’s style, revolved around a single note, the music’s explorations of associated notes (octave-plus-one leaps, various microtonal “shifts”  and numerous timbal contrasts) creating a kind of centre for the work upon which we listeners could focus. As with any sound, constant repetition alone gradually changes the ambient receptivity – this, together with the numerous variants, aural and visual, made for a kind of  micro-journeying of transformation within the piece’s surprisingly short span. The piece was written for “any bass instrument”, thereby inviting further conjecture regarding what kind of sound-world a string bass, for instance, would create – all very intriguing!

More work for Kana Kotera and her trusty euphonium, with Jason Post’s “yatsar”, a work for the instrument and electronics. The composer alerted us to the meaning of “yatsar”, a Hebrew word for fashioning or shaping, as would a potter fashion a vessel from clay, which is, of course, a well-known biblical metaphor for God’s creation of man. This idea was expressed by breath to begin with, the player blowing tonelessly through the interment, while the electronically-contrived ambience suggested pulsations of rhythmic movement amid a kind of “white noise”. The euphonium’s notes seemed to my ears to be recorded as well as played “live” – whether or not “looped” I wasn’t sure. I imagined that the interaction between “real” acoustical sounds and the electronic ambiences might have represented a kind of relationship between creator and the fashioned object.

What to make of Tom Jensen’s “What is it?” which followed, a piece for solo violin played by Tabea Squire? – perhaps the rhetoric of the title is its own best description, given the composer’s own quasi-nihilistic notes regarding (a) the initial creative urge, (b) the self-characterised “chaos” of mind from whence the impulse sprung, © the resulting graphic score, (d) the title-question which arose from the score, and (e) the doubt as to the actuality of that same question (and by extrapolation, every previous step in the process)! And was the work a suitably portentous, grandly-conceived, groaning-under-its-own-weight, aesthetically convoluted series of existential sound-structures, unerring in its progress towards self-annihilation? – after all, JS Bach’s Chaconne from his D MInor Partita, a work also for solo violin, was able to create a whole universe of structured sounds and potentialities.

Perhaps, in direct opposition to Bach’s “order in the midst of chaos” sublimities, Tom Jensen took us on a journey via Tabea Squire’s violin, into the dark heart of disorder – the “toneless tones” of the opening section was almost an “all is vanity” exposition of sounds left to cohere in the minds of the listener, with no direction from the composer as to how this “ought” to be. The sotto voce middle section brought to ear wraith-like voices, whose conflagrations of approximate pitch suggested an order and structure on the edge of day-to-day conventions, the occasional irruptions of tone like flint-sparks in the darkness. This all seemed to intensify in a concluding section whose “do I wake or sleep” disembodied ghostings had, I felt, taken me into the throes of my subconscious – an extraordinary evocation.

It needed John Adams to come to my rescue at the concert’s end, by way of a work called “American Standard” – a deconstructionist approach to popular American music forms. This was the first movement of that work, a March, called “John Philip Sousa” but with none of the celebrated March King’s wonderful tunes and swaggering rhythms – instead, the composer instructs that the musicians employ “a plodding pulse, with no melody or harmony”, in fact the inverse of what Sousa would have intended. The program note quoted Adams as saying that the piece sounded “like the retreat from battle of a badly-wounded army”. So it was a kind of subversion of original intent (like all good parodies, of course), this one being particularly disconcerting in effect, due to its dour, non-celebratory aspect, and its brief displays of angst (the occasional groan/shriek).

As TS Eliot observed, “not with a bang, but with a whimper” came the concert to its end – extraordinary stuff, and definitely not for the faint-hearted in places! I thought the playing used a kind of “unvarnished” quality to an engagingly spontaneous effect. Also effectively managed were the technical aspects of the presentation – I thought the screening of the graphic scores was a marvellous thing to do, indicative of the ensemble’s willingness to put itself out there and communicate its stuff – food for thought for all of us!

 

 

 

 

 

NZSM Classical Guitar students square up to a challenging recital

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New Zealand School of Music presents:
NZSM Classical Guitar Students

Lunchtime Concert Series
Old St.Paul’s, Wellington.

 Tuesday September 23rd, 2014

This brief concert was a welcome opportunity to hear again the talents of the NZSM Classical Guitar students under the tutelage of director Dr. Jane Curry. The full ensemble consisted of fifteen players, of whom four were guest members from the School’s pre-tertiary programme. The recital comprised a wide variety of works that spanned the “Golden Age” of Elizabethan lute music, the Baroque, and the 19th and 20th centuries.

The initial work, for full ensemble, was Three Distractions by Richard Charlton (b.1955). The first two short numbers involved lots of complex, irregular and syncopated rhythms, while the third was  marked by angular atonal writing with many percussive effects. It was a challenging piece, where the complexities were well handled and the integration of the large ensemble was excellent.

Then followed two duo numbers, firstly The Flatt Pavan and Galliard by John Johnson (1550-1594) who was one of the fathers of the “Golden Age” of English lute music. The characteristic graceful Elizabethan writing was well balanced by George Wills and Jake Church, with musical phrasing and good dynamic variation. The following Jongo for Two Guitars (1989) by Brazilian composer Paulo Bellinati was a total contrast where rhythmic complexities and clever percussive effects were also very effectively realized.

The bracket was completed by a duo version of Manuel da Falla’s unmistakable Spanish Dance which was given a very competent reading, though the quietest dynamics tended to disappear in the church’s acoustic, and some slightly untidy passagework popped up occasionally between the two players.

The next bracket comprised works for guitar quartet, with players Royden Smith, Dylan Solomon, Amber Madriaga and Christopher Beernink. The first work was Toccata by Leo Brouwer (b.1939), a Cuban player-composer who often combines “traditional forms with energetic, rhythmic flare resembling Cuban folk and street music. Brower’s compositional style is unique, consisting of a multitude of different sounds, techniques and cultures.” (programme notes). The Toccata was certainly busy with all of these, yet it somehow failed to grasp me in an integrated experience  that engaged the ear and led one on a musical journey. Its technical challenges were certainly met head on by the quartet, but some essential dimension seemed to have eluded the composer’s pen.

The next work was a transcription for guitar quartet of the opening sinfonia from Bach’s Cantata BWV 29 Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir. Bach himself wrote three versions of this movement – the first for solo violin (in BVW 1006), then the cantata sinfonia scored for orchestra, and finally a transcription for solo lute (BVW 1006a). I have not heard this last, but I felt that this guitar version was simply not able to do justice to the wonderful contrapuntal writing. Its very life blood derives from the gutsy, incisive attack and timbre offered by bow, reed or trumpet, and the guitar can simply not produce this.

There may well be merit in pedagogic versions that test the technical capacities of players (which were very adequately demonstrated here), but it does not sit comfortably in a concert programme. However, this particular recital was serving as an assessed element of the university course, so the parameters are somewhat different.

Spin by Andrew York (b.1958) was next on the programme. It was a work that challenged the players with tricky rhythms shifting between 7/8, 3/4 and 4/4, and with complex busy writing, all of which they handled with technical aplomb. I felt however that the intricacies of Spin would have been given greater shape and meaning by a wider dynamic range and more thoughtful phrasing.

The final work in the programme was Folguedo by Afro-Brazilian guitarist/composer Celso Machado (b.1953). Scored for guitar orchestra, it was billed as “a gem of a piece [in] the canon of large guitar ensemble repertoire”. It proved to be just that: the first of the two movements was immediately attractive, featuring a guitar solo introduction which then blossomed into ensemble writing that was presented with pleasing balance and dynamics. The second movement involved a considerable complexity of rhythms, textures, interweaving lines and harmonies, which were all handled pretty competently. Once again I felt that the challenge of the technical demands tended to be uppermost in the performers’ minds, whereas a greater exploration of the dynamic possibilities would have considerably enriched the music.

But having said that, the work was presented with a verve and enthusiasm that was shared by all the ensembles heard in this recital, a feature which has marked all the concerts I have heard from this tertiary programme. The Old St. Paul’s venue offered a very suitable acoustic and ambience which further enhanced the privilege Wellington audiences enjoy from hearing the fruits of this excellent NZSM endeavour.